Podcast appearances and mentions of chris i'm

TO READ TRANSCRIPT SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGEIn episode 3 of the new Awaken The Possibilities Podcast, Host Terry Wildemann interviews Brian Kelly Host on " From Fitness Training to Business Automation Doing Work That You Love”. Awaken the Possibilities Podcast features successful entrepreneurs and intuitive leaders who offer insights on how to attract success in business and life._____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ABOUT Chris ThompsonChris Thompson has worked as a lawyer, economist, Oriental scholar, national campaigner, director of think-tanks in Scotland and the USA, and as an advisor to companies. He is an international speaker, and has published many articles. Today Chris focuses on helping people and organizations understand and address the deeper root causes of their problems, with a view to building a world that reflects our potential to be, one day, the most intelligent species on this small planet. He is also psychotherapist, mentor, writer, and course leader. He lives in Catalunya, and spends as much time as possible in the mountains._____________________________________________________________________________________________________________About Terry Wildemann:Terry Wildemann is the owner of Intuitive Leadership® and a Business and Resilience Accelerator, Speaker and Certified Executive Coach.Terry's specialty is working with tired, unhealthy, close-to-burned-out entrepreneurs and professionals and helps them leap off the stress hamster wheel. They evolve into unstoppable stress resilient intuitive leaders and practical business mystics. Terry’s timely message guides clients and students to integrate intuition, stress resilience, positive communications and leadership with grounded business systems to achieve success by positively serving and influencing others. Her leadership experience includes owning a manufacturing company, image consulting company, leadership and holistic education center.Terry is a best selling author of The Enchanted Boardroom: Evolve Into An Unstoppable Intuitive Leader. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________TRANSCRIPTwelcome everyone to wake in the possibilities podcast I'm your host Jerry will demand and I'm thrilled to be here today with that fabulous fabulous gas Chris Thompson and before we get in there I want to wish all of you a phenomenal twenty twenty this is our first podcast for the year and it's exciting to have someone like Chris with us because he's going to be sharing some very different but very clear and wonderful insight to help us get our twenty twenty two where we wanted to be here a little bit about Chris Chris has worked as a lawyer and economist a Synology S. which I'm gonna ask you to explain a little bit because I don't think a lot of people really know what that is and more recently as a psychotherapist course leader writer and director of think tanks in Scotland and New Mexico welcome to the show Chris I'm so glad that you're next Duterte spice to the show what are the challenges hello this is someone who studies tried background news in the sixties degree in Chinese and economics and after a short spell working in a bank bank of England I decided to go back overall I was persuaded to go back to the university and I did it in the development of scientific Chinese you don't know what that means it means the vocabulary in Chinese for the science chemistry cemex so that's what I did so in that sense I must've excellent eventually cool as I have an admin I wouldn't have anybody on any of my shows this is my third the cashier who it had anything to do with China or the study of China and here we are I'm really glad to hear that because it makes it very clear thank you so much so when things are gonna be talking about today is the customer so when you say the cosmos Chris can you tell us what you mean about that well it's just another word is you know all of the universe %HESITATION it is the Greek word for the universe because most of the exploding K. %HESITATION and it's used interchangeably quite often many scientists using your member call center or if you years ago did it be TV series on the coast so scientists are quite accustomed to using but when I use the term all right tends to mean something more than the physical okay so I tend to be more than the same sorry so if the universe has a spiritual dimension mentions that sort of thing being by the coast lawsuits both physical and non physical it's both material and spiritual that's my understanding knowing that this is a show about business and about life how do you connect your work with the customer and business well it's an interesting question I'm going to have to think on my feet as I am so stupid with this is not a solution for okay so business is business the business has to make money make a profit and all that okay apart from that business is like everything else it's it's it's it's choose your own lives in the world talk to %HESITATION and in a way it has to recognize the rules what do I mean %HESITATION when I go back to what I just said about the cost most this material and spiritual aspects I do believe very strongly that recalls most influences all over in more ways than we than we can imagine I'm not just talking about the fact that cosmic rays the surface of the planet I'm not just talking about the fact that we rely on the song for every a light fix I'm talking about more than that and I'm not talking specifics it seems like strong I don't just mean okay I really do mean that we are children of course I'm in no way reflect the cost look often in some way deep says we resemble it cost us and that means this is a strange thing to say because most resembles us of course if that's not it mmhm I agree of course that that that's a big discussion will spend a year in the day just talking but looking all I'm saying is it's a bit like %HESITATION climate change okay so to be fair to business most companies of walking up to the fact what the climate is changing dangerous Celeste narrow on everyone's agenda taken tying is finally happened so playing that change may be the most issue over time %HESITATION and that's a recognition that our actions have consequences okay %HESITATION and if you apply that to business I'm I'm stating the obvious it's mostly the old businesses actions have consequences I don't know why these people opposed to good business because they know that they are very similar with that you don't have to tell there are many people and businesses still really haven't crossed everything they do has consequences not just on the people who work cells not just on their customers on the whole world or in the case of very big business excell that's good news the case of Google for example Facebook equally all over but it's a place to any regardless of the solders regardless of age it has consequences okay so when I use the term because moss and I'm kind of extrapolating the bruising we do affects the cost okay and that balances back on those that reflects and all I'm saying to you more aware we are thanks the universe is reflexive flex back almost %HESITATION I sing the mole or useful and our lives will be I do like to preach we have come across as preaching but I do believe that stupid so knowing that %HESITATION and climate change it is a huge huge huge topic %HESITATION knowing and I'm gonna play devil's advocate here %HESITATION especially rather because Mrs concerning climate change how much of this yes we have contributed yes we have we are conscious point is based on the things that we have done but how much of it also is a natural evolution of our earth warming and we are contributing to it there's no doubt about it but how much of it isn't also a natural cycle and how does that play in with the cost not the short answer is no one really knows question do people to separate the effect we are having with human race problem natural cycles okay people who don't like to accept my gyms they tend to adopt the owner of the regardless of that regardless of the site sure it's still very clear that you know we're making a big impact on the planet yeah it's not just the client meeting I did research on this you're also and I discover something called life support system it's a technical term hello H. one minute including water biodiversity seems like yeah %HESITATION and it was almost all the finalists life support systems all of are you serious decline I just to complete last I just to complete the sentence them soonest applying cost if you let because of what I'm even again you even activities of the long ago normal daily activities this is this isn't about we even being is doing something special for her to destroy the planet this is our normal daily life courses so if you drive a car cause some problems if you fly in a plane to go to the courts if you have your conditioning prism central heating you're going to cause some problems okay individual level it's not very much of course it's not mmhm but as a collective level use very large but that's not to say you that's not to say we consult well it's not to say that people will suddenly give up your car was totally give up flying for air conditioning they want a new one but at least there was widespread recognition something big has to change got it so I'm curious Chris is your director of a think tank in Scotland and in New Mexico you tell us more about the thing tankless that was a long time ago so the first the first one was in school and it was set up about twenty years ago trying to moment when Scotland regained some self control %HESITATION so the Scottish parliament reopened after three hundred years that was in nineteen ninety nine this call delusion so some of us were repatriated to stop it's a bit like the system in the U. S. each state has its own %HESITATION quite apart from the federal power %HESITATION and because a this was being set top box and you all of this being said someone said we ought to think so we can think about the ideas for the speech grandmotherly in economics and business and health care and education %HESITATION and I was recruited I was had turned over to London to go under your direct turning it lasted a few years and coincided with my travel and I ended up doing more or less the same in a little place called Santa Fe New Mexico in about two thousand to two thousand three but the idea just in case you wonder think tankers ways you do blue sky thinking you have the luxury luxury we'll be able to sing as widely as deeply as possible okay about the big issues of the day yeah I'm curious in this think tank and this is about you know the shows about awakening the possibility one of the things that I talk about is more businesses are sung because they don't see what's underneath the iceberg you know the only to the top of the iceberg %HESITATION the bottom part of the iceberg is basically you know from the neck down okay it's it's our consciousness it's our energy we don't listen to our bodies the aches and the pains that are going on we're all we're you know we're from here up this is what seen above the water %HESITATION this is the practical technological stuff so in these think tanks do they include the bottom part of the iceberg or is it just from the head up I'll give an example of an answer is yes give an example so at that time one of the most buzz words which was still very fresh in the top twenty what is sustainable development or sustainable economic cross okay thank and to be fair your business is trying to move in that direction we set up something called call social responsibility you can do USA school business social responsibility this is same lighting okay okay however I would look it was no surprise that in many cases ended up books to keep exposed okay how do you plan to treat do you recycle your waste this kind we sure enough there's nothing wrong with and and the thing is better than nothing yeah okay but as you imply that woman who tended to ignore the big six we didn't use deep we were really causing why their private jets like this five repeat themselves three hundred times more than their lowest paid employees and things like that I would state or worse to Bruce subjects off limits subjects this certainly couldn't be discussed one was called campaign finance this call can be refinements in the states and other countries right okay see you soon as soon as another group it's in this context was tracks going to pay as little tax as possible which was strange which was strange because the very same company a source of themselves as good corporate citizens okay and yet you and I both know the concept is contribute to society and yet these good corporate citizens in quotation marks we're doing the best to avoid paying so it was a lot to contradictions yes to summarize your %HESITATION prompted me to respond a lot of stuff been niece the surface of the ice grow we simply not being addressed and to some extent but still she yeah I was just gonna say that was my next question %HESITATION do you think it's still trailing you just confirm that and I do believe it's true I think sometimes %HESITATION we want to do the right thing yet other things get in the way of are doing the right thing and they can truly %HESITATION compromise where it is we want to go and it makes me sad because when it comes to integrity and authenticity it's really important that we take here the people who are in our world both in their business and our lives and often times all the things you talk about that's not what they're doing %HESITATION and it makes me sad because to me that's not leadership the poor leadership so let's get back to leadership for a moment making the possibilities you've done an awful lot I know you're going to be doing I'm very excited to announce someone else on the video that Chris is going my my faculty members for our intuitive leadership university which will be launching this spring and it's very exciting he's going to be participating in the leadership with the score for those of you who aren't sure what that is all about %HESITATION we are opening the intuitive leadership university and it's going to have to be different schools leadership within the school the business business school and a life with them full and Chris will be doing some courses in the leadership within school so I'm very very excited about that so Chris as you look at leadership in the world now making a possibilities in the course of that you're gonna be delivering to the university can you tell us what the bottom line for excuse to you in leadership in connection with the cost most in connection with business the connection with humanity and what we leaders need to truly be looking at to be able to influence the world to influence and I don't like to see the world we influence the people who are part of who crossed our attack how how do we do that what is it what you know what is a golden nugget that weakens the possibility okay I'll have to summarize two things okay two things bring %HESITATION I'm very impressed influenced by the W. Jing bye bye the dollar judging by does that %HESITATION %HESITATION and there's even a book called the joke leadership you can buy a book called I think the %HESITATION also stolen hi %HESITATION I mention that because a journalist leader leads wrong both the front and the back he he %HESITATION she leads from the front in the sense that he leads by example so it's almost leader does not expect people to do things that he does not so he he takes a course okay so if for example he wants to the company the changes involved in mental he will be the first to start practicing that and these are my so leading from the front or leading by example okay leading from the front look at me look what type do you most of what I see not that that's a phrase that that kind of user who could use but also leading from the back this long strange history contradiction when I say leading from the back I will be pushing people okay %HESITATION what what what I need is a kind of invisible leadership %HESITATION where you act as a catalyst you know we would wear your sessions automatically stimulates people %HESITATION to behave well your presence brings out the best and that's what I need okay so it is a strange combination China lodging the strange combination over leading from the front leading by example and leading quiet almost invisible from the back okay so the %HESITATION so that your presence is almost enough to stimulate people to do their best that's what I'm trying to go there so I'm I'm not the I would say that the main %HESITATION if the child we could lead to someone who's able to lead from the front and the back this evening one of the phrases that are used commonly when describing the university is we teach leaders how to integrate the practical tactical logical with the emotional be energetically spiritually into it D. bat definitely fit with that rate does it not well by coincidence I've been asked to write a short book ebook by someone you may know that Stephen %HESITATION %HESITATION anyway since you talked clearly show which is effectively a concise of the book I wrote five years ago on intelligence right the last relative to what you just said big cost one of the main themes of this short book is that intelligence is about hello it's about all aspects of the human being not just not just applying not just the emotion not just the intuition not just physical but not just the spiritual aspect it's about all of these elements %HESITATION and the faculty I mean it's strange I'm just going to finish the special and okay but your mind is amazing the one of the main seat is to be able to work on the whole of ourselves rather than just on our %HESITATION exactly and that's what the university is all about having you as a faculty member it's absolutely heart warming and having Dr Hobbs is that also as a faculty member I mean it it that's what this is about leadership at the cutting edge as far as I'm concerned the cutting edge of leadership it's really creating leaders that are completely %HESITATION that they get it that is its whole leadership it's not just what's up here and it's really important that we do that in this day and age that we use all of our guests all ever since all of our tools everything that we have at our disposal to be able to influence upcoming generations S. that they can be because the world is changing and we need to provide the %HESITATION the army perhaps to be able to lead in ways that we can really really make a positive difference in the world well Chris I just want to thank you so much for being here today because every time I talk with you it just gets better and better battery I get more and more excited about having you on board and %HESITATION can I didn't share with folks that a I'm in coral gables Florida you can tell from the %HESITATION foliage in the back I'm a micro game of office and Chris you're in Spain that's correct in Houston right now well I'm in the nose of northeast office Estonian okay %HESITATION and the capital as you may know it's possible I'm in the car right right one to knees right next to the central and hold on just as you're talking an airplane decided to go over a lot of back and helicopter %HESITATION there we go %HESITATION %HESITATION Kay and I you know it's a catch twenty two when you come out here and I love being out here on %HESITATION I'm I DO with all the greenery behind us I kept putting my green screen up and kept falling so that to me was the signal from the universe get yourself outside in the fresh air into this wonderful interview with Chris outside so you have to put up with things like hi captors going overhead she %HESITATION so where were we when I %HESITATION when knowledge after decided to distract this you were we were talking about the importance of the whole process being cold okay and bringing the whole of your soul to your to your life and your work and I was thinking we need to work there used to be terms S. like renaissance man all of the chivalrous knight and these will describe someone who is well rounded they want a well rounded you so they've they've they've they were physically call mentally all emotionally intelligent they were spiritually and bonds they were kind of tunes they will also work to stick because the same people whose waters %HESITATION were expected to write poetry you can use it so I mean you really find that we will be seeing about a you know a specialization I often look at animals for sources of inspiration and she described and the animal that comes to me that %HESITATION it's what you're talking about is the unicorn it's a %HESITATION and here's why in next we've been logo for the program is the unicorn so you're not actually brought me here and here's the reason why first of all they're very mystical magical animal and this you know corn is a winged unicorn if you look at the logo it's a winged unicorn and why wouldn't you know point because many unicorn have four hooks on the ground it is very grounded and you can see what is happening at eye level you can see all around it when it flies up in the air you can see things from thirty thousand feet above so it has the perspective of being able to see a ground level see above and with that fantastic unicorn being part of the horn itself being part of the %HESITATION using it as a gift it's got a mystical quality that a lot of what %HESITATION %HESITATION %HESITATION what did she %HESITATION yeah but the name of the author if you read the book the corporate mystic %HESITATION that should should name is right here and actually his book is what influenced me to open my leadership center in two thousand one from two thousand one to two thousand nine if there's this mystical quality and indeed you do become the mystic and I call them the integrated unicorns because they can really fit it fits everything that you're talking about that land yes %HESITATION I I I like good morning in his two best we believe very much in having their heads in the clouds there's feet deep in the mud mmhm so they're fully grown goods and foodie in the heavens at the same time absolutely and so many of our but one of things I find with a lot of spiritual teachers who come to me their heads are in the clouds but their feet are also up there with them this brings and the thing is they don't want to bring your feet down because when we do when we bring your feet down they end up having to really steal the due and realize that they are human and may need to look at they don't need to do anything but it's the best feeling in a very different way and background in this can be very uncomfortable for them on the other hand we have people who are very practical practical and logical that are grounded but are very %HESITATION concerned and tend to poo poo going up into the spirit of the mountains and understand bad is as important as the practical practical a lot about that do you see that it's very interesting Terry because just recently started doing she'd grown get the local teacher not far from where I live and the other day he showed us an exercise which is designed to do exactly so the purpose of the exercise it used to be very very grounded and very much in the heavens at the same time it's a wonderful feeling is meant when you're that present because you truly are present you feel the clothes on your back you feel the jury on your body you you see very very clearly you see the colors different you are so integrated when you do that and if the image the powerful leader who can really influence only people to where they want to be because they see things that others don't taking Chris I want to thank you so very much for being here with us today and are there any parting words that you would like to share with the a week in the possibilities idea it's nice to see the green wings your I'm sitting here with heavy snow assigned well I will be in the cold not by Friday hi I'm enjoying it and appreciating it and believe it or not it has been a bit cool here and it was it's really %HESITATION if you're in the people watching it is quite comical when it's %HESITATION in the low sixties here watching people walking down the street with their faces covered because the with it all so it's all perspective so thank you again Chris this has been a lot of fun but a lot of insight into %HESITATION it and being an integrated leader working with the customers and understanding how all of that fits in our world thank you to our audience who was listening today and we look forward to seeing you again next time this is Terry will demand of intuitive leadership you can go to intuitive leadership dot com and find out all of our all about our university and upcoming events and Chris how can our audience thank you well we can find we Chris I'm Michael Chris Thompson don't block responding to and headed south Thompson with a P. C. O. T. H. O. M. S. I'm glad I asked one have an amazing amazing we stand next time See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Denne uken snakker Egilie, Elias, Damal og Shakil om hudpleie, hvordan kultur påvirker mat, snus, the booty warrior, historie og mye mer!!!!

We have the pleasure of speaking with Chris Moreland, the chief diversity and inclusion advocate at Vizient. He explains why he puts inclusion first and talks about the top three things most companies are getting wrong when it comes to D&I.Connect with Chris on LinkedIn!https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisjmoreland/Connect with us!https://linktr.ee/livingcorporateTRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach.Ade: It's Ade.Zach: So listen, y'all, we gonna get straight to it this time, 'cause we have a really special guest. I'm really excited. Today we have the opportunity--we had the opportunity rather to sit down and speak with Chris Moreland. He's the chief inclusion and diversity advocate at Vizient Incorporated, based out of Dallas, Texas, and I'm just gonna read a little bit of his profile so we can kind of talk about what we're talking about today. Known for possessing a contagious regard for winning, a bias for action and a healthy disrespect for insurmountable challenges. A street-smart C-level leader with a diverse industry background, an indispensable partner for innovative organizations, people development, and building teams. Chris is best known for leading organizations through change, developing innovative solutions, and deciphering ambiguity. He established a track record of performance and execution at Fortune 500 icons like Vizient, Microsoft, Expedia, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, and Mobil, okay? So this person that we got to speak to today, he and I had an amazing conversation about inclusion and diversity, and in the conversation that you're gonna hear, you'll hear why he puts inclusion first, but we're really excited and want y'all to hear the whole interview, and so we don't want to make it too long by, you know, adding to it, so--Ade: We're gonna keep it short and sweet.Zach: That's right, we're gonna keep it short and sweet. So unfortunately, Ade, no Favorite Things this week.Ade: Nope, but we have an amazing, amazing, amazing interview, so it's good.Zach: It's dope. And after the interview, you know, we'll wrap from there, but the next week we've got a B-Side, and it's me and Ade talking about the interview, talking about D&I, and, you know, having fun. Hopefully y'all laugh. Maybe y'all will cry. Maybe you'll laugh and cry at the same time. I don't know. We'll see. Maybe. [strange noise]Ade: What was that noise? [laughs]Zach: It was like a [strange noise]. It was a shrug. That's, like, a shrug if I was to put a noise to it. [again]Ade: I'm gonna pass on your sound effects skills once again.Zach: Man, my sound effects skills are fire, but that's okay. In fact, you know what? Hold on. JJ, go ahead and give me some air horns, one time for ya head top, for Chris Moreland, 'cause he gave us a fire interview. [imitating air horns] Let's go. [JJ drops 'em] I'm giving him the air horns before we even get to the interview. That's how fire the interview was. What's up?Ade: Look, I don't disagree. Shout-out to Chris. Amazing conversation.Zach: Shout-out to Chris.Ade: You on the other hand are a walking dad joke store.Zach: Yo, I really feel like--so watching that movie Us, I really feel as if that character that ya mans was playing was really just me in, like, five years with no beard, but that's me.Ade: Like, Winston Duke's character?Zach: Yes, I feel like that's me.Ade: I have not heard great reviews, so you probably should not--Zach: No, first of all, Us is fire, and we can talk about that later.Ade: Well, not--you know what? Yes, let's close this out.Zach: So shout-out to Chris, shout-out to Vizient, and yo, shout-out to him being the chief storyteller at Storyteller's Consulting. He's gonna talk a little bit about that in the interview as well, and we'll make sure we have all of this information in the podcast notes, but look, until next week, it's been Zach.Ade: And this has been Ade.Zach: Y'all check out this interview. Peace.Ade: Peace.Zach: And we're back. And so as we shared before the break, we have Chris Moreland on the show. Chris, welcome to the show, man. How are you doing?Chris: I'm fantastic. Thanks so much, Zach.Zach: For those of us who don't know you, would you mind sharing a bit about yourself and how you got into your field?Chris: Absolutely. Well, my name is Chris Moreland. I reside in Dallas, Texas, and I am now the chief inclusion and diversity advocate at Vizient. Vizient is basically a supply chain company that does GPO for health care systems. We do about 100--maybe 105, 110 billion dollars worth of hospital spend on an annual basis.Zach: That's awesome. You know, I guess for me--so let me just say as a quick aside, and this isn't even in my questions, but I just wanted to say it--it's really inspiring to see a person of color, and frankly a black man, in such a position of influence, and I'm just really excited to have you here. So I probably should've said that at the beginning. I don't really care. This is our show. I just want to tell you that I'm happy that you're here.Chris: It's good to be here. It's good to be here.Zach: Absolutely. So look, let's get into it. So I'm on this app, right, called Fishbowl, and it's an anonymous posting app for consultants. Every now and then diversity and inclusion comes up, and most are disillusioned by the topic because it's being seen as a lot of talk and very little walk. So what do you think are some of the top three things most companies are getting wrong when they talk about diversity and inclusion?Chris: Right. That's a really good question, Zach, and it's not a simple answer, but I'll try to simplify the answer. There are several things that companies are not getting right, and if you--if you look at the most recent research, I think it points to some very important things that I think, going forward, we really need to focus on. The first thing is that most companies tend to put diversity and inclusion into the bucket of human resources as though it is part of a function which is different than the function of marketing, which is different than the function of, you know, research and development, which would be different than the function of sales. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes, by putting it specifically in a function. The second thing that I think goes wrong often times with the way companies approach diversity and inclusion is around--they use education as a way of changing behaviors, and we can talk about this a lot more later, but education has been proven now as being the least credible way of changing a human being's behavior, okay? And then the third piece, which I think a lot of people get wrong as far as diversity and inclusion, is how they think about diversity and inclusion relative to accountability. It's one thing to talk about it, but it's a whole 'nother thing when no one ultimately is accountable for the changes that they would like to make relative to diversity and inclusion.Zach: Expound upon that a bit more if you could.Chris: Absolutely. So the first piece around which function generally owns diversity and inclusion, and that being human resources. The reason why that normally doesn't vet out very well for companies is that the organization then feels like their [?] human resource officer is ultimately responsible for diversity and inclusion, and that's an error. Diversity and inclusion should be part of every function. It should be part of the culture of the organization. It should not be quarantined off into a specific function, because it should flow just like values, just like goals, just like culture. It should be part of the way we do business. It should be used as an enabler, not as a functionally-constrained part of an organization. You know, the second piece, which points education--education, as you know, is something that people try to use to make different decisions and result in different behaviors, but as you know if you've ever gone to church, if you've ever seen students in school, education doesn't necessarily mean that once a person knows what they should do, knows the right thing to do, understands the impact of certain actions, that they are going to then adopt those habits, those practices. Each of us go to church every Sunday, and we--depending upon what denomination you may be part of, but you can see the same church crowd that sits in the pews on Sunday, they go out and cut each other off in traffic immediately following the service in some cases, and so it's--you know, it's a bad way of thinking that "I'm going to change the behavior by telling you the right thing to do." And in the last piece, which is what I call just accountability, is that, you know, again, if it's in HR, a lot of times HR feels accountable solely, but no one else in the organization feels as though they have any accountability. They feel as though it has been quarantined off and thus there is a function that is accountable for it, but that is the only function that ultimately becomes accountable for it in that instance, so yeah.Zach: Man, that's incredible. When you and I first met, we talked about diversity and inclusion, and you told me--you said, "Zach, you know, a lot of times people get those letters--the order of those letters wrong, and they should be putting inclusion first." So let me ask you this - what does inclusion really mean practically, and how can companies actualize inclusion in the workplace?Chris: Right. So inclusion, in my title and at least at Vizient, we actually put that word in front of diversity, because inclusion has more to do with the actions that you are taking. Inclusion has to do with "Who's in the conversation? Is the conversation being had? Does everyone's perspective, opinions, and backgrounds matter? Is there value seen in my difference?" Not "Am I different?" Diversity, which really comes from a Latin root word meaning "divertere," or "to divert, to separate." It's the differences between us. It's pretty much meaningless in any organization unless you have the inclusion part first, and the inclusion means that I see you, I see your differences, and I see the value in those differences, and ultimately I don't want to move forward with any decision, with any strategy, with any proposal, until I get all different sides of this idea understood and heard, because understanding that when I am inclusive I actually get a much better outcome. It should always precede diversity. Diversity by itself is pretty meaningless unless it is preceded by inclusion.Zach: Yeah. No, absolutely, and so I'm curious - what methods have you seen that are effective when it comes to organizations really leaning into the inclusion piece of their I&D strategy?Chris: Right. That's a great question, because there is a--there is a huge difference. It's like night and day when it comes to organizations and effectiveness of those organizations when you do lead with inclusion. A couple of practices. One, there is--there are very few human beings that I've met thus far who are openly and consciously biased. In other words, open and conscious bias means that I see you, I see your differences, and I am absolutely just going to deliberately exclude those differences from my decisions, from my thoughts, from my practices, from my campaigns and everything else. When I lead with inclusion, what it does is it says I understand that I have this subconscious, this subliminal, this unconscious ability or need or desire to assimilate with those things that look similar to me, and we all have this in our personalities. We all want to assimilate with like things. We want to be around people who look like us, act like us, talk like us, have the same backgrounds as us, because it makes us more comfortable, and there's nothing wrong with that, but in order to actively have an inclusive culture, you have to understand that it's an uphill battle. It goes against our natural tendencies, and so when organizations actually adopt a truly inclusive culture, it doesn't start with just education, making people aware of the subconscious knack to go away from things that are not like you. It actually does more than that. It goes to creating an understanding of what those differences are and why and how those differences can and should be used to create greater value. I'm not talking about, in this case, educating you on unconscious bias. I think you may remember more recently in the news Starbucks had a situation with one of their restaurants, and they shut their stores down for an entire half-day, and what they did was they focused on educating people on unconscious bias. So there was a training that was done around unconscious bias, and the net effect of that training based on all research is that it had a shelf life of about 90 minutes.Zach: 90 min--an hour and a half?!Chris: 90--an hour and a half. It had a shelf life of 90 minutes, but then our natural, innate tendencies go back to exactly the way we were before we were exposed to that education and training. And so the good thing is that they at least acknowledged that there needed to be something done. The bad thing is that they're using the same tools that we used in 1962, in this country, in order to make civil rights the rights of everyone, and you can see, you know, 50 some odd years later, the outcomes are the same. It's because the techniques and the practices are the same. A lot of it is education, and then the second piece to that is legislation. So when you educate and legislate, you believe that, "Oh, things are going to change." They don't change. These are behavioral tendencies that we have to tap into in order to try and counteract things and make people's behaviors actually change.Zach: Well, see, it's interesting that you say that because--in terms of the historical lens by which you're looking through to discuss inclusion and diversity and facilitating change, because I don't necessarily know if I--if I see a lot of the historical narrative being engaged when we talk about effective methods and approaches to really driving inclusion and diversity, and often times, in my experience, these programs rarely even engage the subject of race explicitly, even to the point where they may create, like, different points of diversity. Like, diversity of thought, diversity of education, and yes, I'm not saying that those points don't exist, Chris, but historically, like, those points, they're strongly interwoven with the intersection of gender and ethnicity, right? But I don't know if I necessarily 1. see a lot of invoking of history when we talk about education and effective methods moving forward in the future, and I don't know if I see a lot of--in fact, sometimes I hear diversity of thought or diversity of education or diversity of background really used as replacements for diversity of race and intersection between--intersectionality of gender and race. Have you seen that? And if you kind of see where I'm coming from, why do you think that is?Chris: Yeah. So let me answer both questions pretty quickly, and then I'll get into a little detail. So the answer is yes and yes. Yes, I have seen it happen. Yes, it is very, very frustrating, and yes, I do understand why it is happening the way that it is happening, because--first let's go back to the terms of diversity and inclusion and why most people tend to use the word diversity preceding the word inclusion. It is because it is a lot easier for me to point out all of the differences between, you know, the 7.5 billion people that are in this world. I can tell you there are differences for all of us, and we should all be aware of and appreciative of all of those differences, but let's think about that at a neurological level, because that's where change happens. It happens at a neurological level. So Zach, if you walk into a room, and a person who walks into a room--and you're originally from where, Texas?Zach: Yes.Chris: Okay, so you're originally from Texas. So you walk into a room, and then right next to you a straight Caucasian male walks into the room, and his background just happens to not be from Texas. Let's say he's from L.A., okay? So he has diversity of experience. You have diversity of race. You both walk into the same room, and you're both seen by a group of executives that are sitting around the table that you're about to engage. Sitting around that table, what do you physically think the reaction will be of your presence versus your male straight white counterpart's presence who just happens to be from L.A.? Both having diversity, you know, based on just them walking into the room. And again, the audience--let's say the audience is full of Texans, okay? So if you--go ahead. Please answer that question, and then I can go on.Zach: [laughs] Yeah, I think--I think that if it's all Texans and they are, let's say, all white men, I think they're gonna gravitate and presume that the white--my white counterpart is the more senior, more competent authority in the space.Chris: Exactly. There are a certain set of assumptions that go into your brain, in other people's brains, the second you or I walk into a room. The second you or I walk into a bus, the second you or I walk into an elevator. And again, I do not blame the neuroscience behind the minds of the individuals who make assumptions as soon as you or I walk into a room, but it is very different when I used the word diversity talking about race versus when I use the word diversity and I talk about a person's background or a person's education, because certain people have certain assumptions that are attributed to their physical being. They can't help it. You can't help what I think about when I look at you as you walk into a room. You have no control over that. It's just like the white straight male from L.A. cannot help what I may think about him when he walks into the room, but some of these assumptions, some of these thoughts, some of these implicit biases are nothing--they have nothing to do with who's standing in front of you, okay? So I think--going back to your question, I think a lot of times--in the field of diversity and inclusion we've now migrated away from the cornerstone of diversity and inclusion, which had everything to do with gender and race, and we've migrated now to diversity of thought, diversity of background, diversity of experience, diversity of a lot of different things, and I'm not saying any of those things are wrong, but I am saying that neurologically, when I think about the word diversity, the reason why I believe we have to go back to the cornerstone of diversity, which has everything to do with gender and race, because of that reaction when you walked into the room with your white male counterpart. Until I can get this country and individuals in corporate America past the fact that they have no control over that implicit bias associated with that initial impression, then I cannot move forward and start thinking about other forms of diversity because there is an implicit association associated with just your physical presence that, quite frankly, has a stereotype associated with it, and it has a whole set of thoughts and assumptions associated with just your physical presence, which is where I think the work needs to be done, which is where I think we need to start building from.Zach: So you've made mention about making authentic connections and those neuropathic pathways. I'd love to hear more about that. When we first spoke, like, you talked about that. I'd love to hear more about that, because as you and I know, the real change happens at the executive level. So one, please expound a little bit about those pathways and those genuine, like, connections, and then what methods have you seen be effective in driving that sort of openness to be connected outside of one's comfort zone at, like, the top and highest of levels?Chris: Wow. So big question. [both laugh] I'm gonna start with three words, and then I'm gonna dive into each of those words just briefly so I can uncover some of what you've asked. The first word I want to talk about is a word called covering. The second word, or words, I want to talk about is safe place, and then the third word that I want to talk to you about is change and change management, okay? And these are all different, but they're all connected. So covering, let's start off with that. The reason why men and women who look like you and I, who work in corporate America, spend a large percentage of their time covering is because we understand that there are certain stigmas associated with our physical presence and there's no getting around it. The reason why you or I might not necessarily be as open to talk about some of our childhood experiences in the corporate setting is because we do not feel as though they are appropriate, and so we hide them, we cover them. Covering is an actual term that was coined back in the mid-'60s by a sociologist who talked about stigmas associated with all different types of people, and we all have them, you know? Straight white men also have the habits of covering, but they are a lot deeper when it comes to some of the underrepresented races in this country. So if you're either foreign background or of a heritage that puts you into a category as far as being called brown of some sort or shade in this country, you spend a lot of your physical energy covering, covering up who you authentically are, because you do not feel as though it's appropriate. You do not feel that you will have a good opportunity to assimilate unless you cover. And covering goes across the board. It's everything from how you groom yourself to, you know, as you're getting older, some of us, you know, color the gray hairs that may be popping out of our heads, and others of us cover even things like our bodies. Our bodies are a lot of times covered. There's a--the first billionaire female in this country made a billion dollars by covering women. It's the woman who started the SPANX brand in this country. The first billionaire woman under 40, I believe it is. SPANX. SPANX is nothing more than us having an openly bias toward a thinner physical person, and thus SPANX helps us do that, and so we like to cover the fact that we are not necessarily of a certain physicality, and we hide that through things like SPANX. So covering is where a lot of this starts. Go ahead. You have a question.Zach: I was gonna say--you were talking about SPANX. You know, it kind of reminds me of the first black--the first black female billionaire, Madam C.J. Walker, right?Chris: Absolutely, absolutely.Zach: Right? With selling perms and relaxers, right? Like, that was--I think that kind of falls into the bucket of covering. Please continue though. This is amazing.Chris: Yeah. No, you've hit something that is extremely important. I wasn't gonna talk about it because a lot of us suffer from this, but the reason why weaves, the reasons why straight hair, the reason why the European look for African-Americans in this country has been such a phenomenon and has made so many millionaires and billionaires in this country, is because of this thing called covering. When we view something as being the way that we need to better assimilate, we spend our entire lives trying to fit that image, trying to mold ourselves into the image of what we want to assimilate into. We bleach our skin. We straighten our hair. We change the way our body is shaped, all with an effort to cover who we actually are. So a lot of this starts with the idea of [or phenomenon?] called covering. Let me move to the second piece, which is safe space. Safe space is what your executive leaders at every major corporation in this country need to create in order for other people not to feel the need to cover. A safe space is basically an environment or a culture where inclusion is part of what they just do. Inclusion means that I am going to allow you to show up and be your authentic self because I think there is so much value in that. "Chris, I want you to come to work. I want you to dress, act like, be like, you know, fashion yourself after who you really are versus who you believe we want you to be, because we see value in that. We see and understand the value of your differences. We want to know who you are really, and through that story we're actually going to use it to create a better organization, a better company, a better culture." So the idea of creating a safe space can only be done when senior leaders see and understand the influence that they have on an organization and in a culture. If you've ever been in an organization where you felt like there were certain things you can't do, you can't say, certain ways that you just can't act--and not because they're inappropriate, but just because the leader, who creates the culture, has already deemed certain things as being inappropriate, and if you've been in any corporation in this country you know, depending upon which company you're a part of, there's certain things that are just not allowed, and those certain things often times are usually authentic parts of who you are. They're not abusive. They're not distasteful. They're just part of who you naturally are. One key example is my administrative assistant, who for the longest time had been wearing hair pieces and weaves and wigs and everything else, and she had been working for me for about two years, and she called me one weekend in almost a panic, and I answered the phone and I said, "What's going on? What's happening?" And she just happens to be African-American, and she said, "Chris, I'm going to text you a picture of me, and I want you to let me know if it's okay." I said, "Okay," and I thought it was--I thought it had more to do with clothing that she was wearing. She texted me a picture of her wearing her natural hair.Zach: Oh, wow.Chris: Wearing her natural hair, and she said, "Is it okay if I show up to work on Monday without my wigs?" And I said to her--and I'm not gonna use her name 'cause I don't want to embarrass her on this podcast, but I said, "Oh, my God." I said, "You look beautiful." I said, "You look like my sister. You look like my daughter. You look like my mother. You look like my friend. You look like the person who is my partner at work, and I love your authentic self." I said, "Do not ever feel like you have to cover who you are to show up at work." She says, "Well, I just wasn't sure if it was appropriate," and I told her--I said, "You are beautiful as you are. Please show up just like the picture has you," and again, all she did was allow her hair to be natural, and it was just curly, a little kinky, but it was the cutest, most beautiful picture I have ever seen, and since time she has worn her natural hair every day of the week.Zach: That's beautiful, yeah.Chris: Exactly. I could not make this story up. So as a senior leader, your job, your accountability, is to create a safe space so that people who are different can actually show up as themselves. The third piece that I would talk to you a little bit about is called accountability or change management, and when I say change management/accountability, what that to me says is that's, again, the job of the senior leaders in the organization, and that has more to do with if they show up as what I call Pepsi perfect, then they have already set the standard. If they do not or are not willing to show any humility or vulnerability, then no one else will feel like they can make mistakes or be vulnerable. They set the stage, the culture, for the organization and how the organization is going to evolve, and when they believe that they have to be perfect or show up perfect or set requirements such that there can be no mistakes, then you get very unauthentic, unengaged people showing up. The last piece of your question was methodology, and "Chris, how do you think we can use--what methodology have you used to try to create this environment of safety, this culture of inclusion and the ability for people to show up authentically?" And I'll tell you, it starts at the neurological level, and that is it has everything to do with your ability to articulate who you really are, and I call that story-telling. And the reason why I call it story-telling is because there is actually a neuroscience change that happens in your brain when you hear a person's story. When you take the time to understand a person's background, when you take the time to understand what has gotten a person to where they are in life, you change yourself. The reason why you change is for two things actually. One, the reason you change is because your brain doesn't know the difference between an experience and a story. So if I tell you a--if I tell you about a story, it is the same thing as if you were to experience it yourself. If I talked to you about my story of growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, and basically having to take two buses and a train to get to school every day and some of the experiences that I had going through, you know, high school and college, after I finished my story, Zach, you will neurologically change, because your body--your brain doesn't know the difference between my story and you actually experiencing some of that yourself, and so you get this flood of hormones that go through your body which actually change the neuro-receptors in your brain and make--because your brain has this thing called plasticity, you actually change. You feel different about me, and the reason why you feel different about me is because you see a part of you in me. Because it may be a completely different experience that I had in high school or college or even in the work environment, but as I tell you my story, you see yourself in me, and it brings you and I together. And it's not just you and I, it's me and the CEO. It's me and the chief marketing officer. It's me and the chief operating officer. So as opposed to that person or those people relying heavily on what they physically see when I walk into the room, when I tell them my story and I learn their stories, they can no longer look at me the same way because they have neurologically changed. We have created relationship where was none before.Zach: Wow.Chris: Yeah.Zach: [both laugh] Hold on. You know what I like about you, Chris? Well, I like a lot of things about you, but I like the way that you be--you be hitting, like--you be hitting [?] bars, and then you'll be like, "Yeah." Like, "That was fire and I know it. React to that." [both laugh] No, no, no. There's so much there, and I think--first of all, we're probably gonna--we're definitely gonna have to have a part two to this podcast because I want to get deeper. At the same time I don't want us to go have a two-hour podcast, but I do want to follow-up on something. So then when you're talking about creating these--like, sharing these stories and making these connections, you know, what are ways that black and brown professionals coming into an organization can facilitate that in a way that manages up? Like, what are ways that they could do that and help move the needle forward in their favor? What are ways that they could--they could share their stories and create those connections that would support and help them in their careers?Chris: God, that's a great question. So I'm gonna use a term which is based on education, which I told you at first that education does not necessarily change you, but I want to use this term from education 'cause you can start using it and applying it in your day-to-day. And it's a whole study and science around this thing called emotional intelligence, okay? So emotional intelligence, a quick definition of what it is - it's just your ability to take everything that's going on today in your life, Zach, everything that happened, you know, this morning--you know, you, you know, getting out of bed at a certain time, having to, you know, get certain things done, worrying about certain other things that probably lingered from the weekend--your ability to take all of those things that are just clawing and drawing at your attention and put them to the background and focus on Chris during this podcast. Your ability to do that is the quick definition of what emotional intelligence is. It's all of our ability to take everything that's going on in our lives and put it as a backdrop and to be present and able to listen to and serve the person who is sitting in front of us. So taking ourselves and putting ourselves secondary to another human being, but how does emotional intelligence actually help us as we're trying to create these inclusive organizations, to your point or your question, "How do we manage up?" We do it by being emotionally intelligent, and I'll give you a little bit more definition about how that application actually works at work. First of all and foremost, emotional intelligence is the best-correlated skill set to career advancement that there is. Let me pause and say that one more time. Emotional intelligence has the greatest correlation to career advancement than anything else. It is higher than IQ. You may get a job because of a high IQ. You get promoted because of a high EQ, and in this case EQ is emotional intelligence. And so how does that show up and how does that work? It works like this. As you get into an organization--and let's just say that you are different from an ethnicity or from a race-based perspective--first of all, all eyes are on you, and you probably know that if you've been employed by any of the major Fortune 1500 companies in this country, and because all eyes are on you, you get a lot of exposure that you had not even really anticipated or asked for, but the way you manage that from an emotional intelligence perspective is that you spend all of your time trying to find out and figure out what is going on with other individuals and people around you. One of the first things I did when I came to Vizient seven years ago--this is the truth--is that I went up to the CEO--first of all, I didn't take the job until I got a chance to meet the CEO, and I made that a prerequisite before I even came to the organization because I knew that the CEO creates the culture, and I wanted to figure out exactly what type of culture he had created. The first meeting that I had with him, the first thing that we talked about was his dress, the way he dressed, and the reason why we talked about the way he dressed is because he dressed the way I had always wanted to dress. It was very colorful. He had--you know, custom jeans on. He had designer shoes on. I mean, even to this day I can't afford everything that he wore, but it was so well put together that our first conversation was around his dress. I then wanted to understand how did he progress through the organization, so we had a really long conversation about the fact that he started out as an analyst, you know, 30 something odd years ago and then eventually was promoted up through the ranks of CEO. I found out about his wife and her background and the fact that she started out as a CPA. I also had many, many conversations with him about his son. He only has one son, and his son at the time was just about to enter college, and he had an incredible attraction to African art. I also found out that he spent a lot of time in New Mexico, and the reason why he spent a lot of time in New Mexico is because 1. it gave him a chance to get away from Texas, and 2. he was able to basically walk down the street and people really not know who he was or what he did. So he could kind of not have to be a CEO for those periods of time where he got a chance to get away. The reason why I tell you this story is because I immersed myself in understanding who he is, how he thought, how he worked, what was important to him, what his likes were and what his dislikes were, and as I did that, as I immersed in his life, he then paid the same respect to me. He paid the same respect to me, because he began asking questions about me and my story and what brought me to where I was in my career, in my life, in my work and everything else, and we built a very strong relationship. I'm gonna pause on that word relationship, because a lot of times the things that hold us back in corporate America, especially if we show up either from a gender difference or from an ethnicity difference, is that we don't take the time to form those relationships, and they have to be formed very selflessly. Very purposefully but very selflessly. You cannot walk into a relationship and expect a person to just automatically, you know, ask you about your family or your spouse or your education or anything else like that, even though that's a big part of your story. You have to first start out by asking them about themselves. I always tell people when they're about to go to an interview or if they're about to, you know, have a first conversation with another human being, and I tell them, "Use the 80/20 rule," and the 80/20 rule says that you should only talk 20% of the time, because when you're talking, you're not listening. When you're talking, you're not able to hear the story of the other person who is in front of you, who emotional intelligence tells you should be the center of your attention for that interaction. Does that make sense?Zach: It does make sense. For sure, for sure. So let me ask you this, because I'd like to get, you know, your prediction. Based on your expertise as an I&D subject matter expert, like, what is the future of I&D if it stays its current course?Chris: Yeah. I will tell you if it stays its current course--we've seen the current course trajectory for inclusion and diversity over the last 50+ years. We still have the same representation of minorities in CEO positions and board director positions and females in CEO positions and board director positions that we've had for the last, you know, 30+ years. That course has not changed. We have the same make-up as far as individuals who are moving into C-level jobs. We've got the same make-up that we've had, you know, for the last 35, 40+ years. That trajectory has already been put in place, and it continues to be there even though the demographics of this country have completely changed. As a matter of fact, if you're under the age of 18 right now, the majority in this country have actually become the minority and the minority have become the majority, but it doesn't mean--because the numbers are there, it doesn't mean that there will be change in organizations and corporations and boards of directors and people making key decisions. If you look across the world, we see where that phenomena has happened in other countries, where the minorities in a country are actually still in powerful positions over the majority of people who actually happen to be part of the organization or the countries, because they have not changed. They have not understood how to change the mindsets and really tap into the value of the vast majority of people who actually inhabit the place that they're at geographically. So the current trajectory has already proven out that it will remain the way it is, and the bad side, the down side of that trajectory, is that we don't have the ability to tap into one of our greatest resources, which is the true, rich diversity of people that walk into organizations every day, that walk into churches every day, that walk past you down the streets every day.Zach: Hm. That's a heavy--that's heavy, but this has been a great discussion, Chris, and, you know, before we wrap up, I'd like to know - are there any other projects that you're working on?Chris: Yes. Yeah, so the one--the latest project that is just unfolding at the conclusion here of 2018 has been a small I'll just call it boutique consulting firm that I just decided I'm going to create, because I don't see the current trajectory changing, and I said, "You know what? At the end of the day, one person can make a difference if they just figure it out and start doing it in a very meaningful way," and so I just started a small firm called Storytellers Consulting, and Storytellers Consulting has a lot to do with what we just discussed on this podcast, and that is teaching executives how to tell their stories and how to bring the stories out of the people who they work with and how to create inclusive cultures and how to create safe spaces and how to evolve organizations into becoming more inclusive. If there is nothing that is done at the neurological level, change will not happen, period. So here's my final thought on how change happens and why I know for sure this is true. So January. January is the most important month of the year for a lot of people, because they make a lot of promises to themselves. Most of us--most of us make promises like, "I'm going to lose that 10, 15, 20 pounds that has burdening me for the last, you know, 15 years of my life." That resolution lasts 'til about February 15th. I always give people right up 'til about Valentine's Day, and then the behaviors go back to what they used to be, right? And the reason why the behaviors go back to what they used to be is because change management requires for people to actually change neurologically, and the only way that that happens--let's call it for the sake of losing weight--the only way that you're gonna physically be able to lose weight and keep it off is if something triggers you to know that my behavior has to change or else there's either a consequence or else I see the benefit so much that I'm not gonna go back to my bad habits, and for a lot of people, those changes happen only when you get burdened with something like--something bad is gonna happen to you if you don't lose weight. Like, you get a call from the doc and they tell you the consequence of you not losing the weight. So short of that--because most people are not faced with that--short of that, we've got to change neurologically, which means that in order for me to physically make sure that you're going to stick to your commitments, I've got to explain to you in a way that makes so much sense that you are not gonna go back to your bad habits regardless of the temptation. The reason why this is so important is because, again, for most of us, we get off the diets by February 15th, and the reason being is because we've done nothing to convince ourselves that we have to be on that diet or we have to change our way of living. In diversity and inclusion, that neuroscience change starts with creating a relationship. The same exact thing would happen if you were to--as opposed to telling someone else that you're gonna lose a whole bunch of weight, if you signed up and created, let's say, a partnership with someone and said, "You know what? For the next year, you and I, three times a week, are gonna meet at the gym. We're gonna go together. I'm gonna hold you accountable, you're gonna hold me accountable, and we are going to change our lives together." When there is that partnership, that relationship, that neurological change inside of your head, inside of your body, it has a lot better of an opportunity of sticking, and so that's exactly what we want to do with Storytellers Consulting. That's exactly what we want to do when it comes to change management just in general across the country.Zach: This has been a phenomenal conversation. I just--I really appreciate it, Chris. Before we let you go--I know you just shared some--first of all, you've been dropping sauce this entire conversation, but do you have any final thoughts or shout-outs?Chris: Yeah. I guess the final thought or shout-out I have is 1. I really want to just let people know that one, there is no criticism associated with, you know, where we are today in this--in this country relative to diversity and inclusion. I do not feel like it is anyone's fault. I don't want anyone to, you know, hear this podcast and believe that, Zach, you or I are saying that there are so many social injustices going on in this country that, you know, this is just a throwaway or there is someone to truly blame for everything. That is not the message whatsoever. The message is that most of our current existence, most of our decisions, most of our behaviors, they are so subconscious, unconscious, subliminal, that we're not even aware of it a lot of times, and so all we're doing, all we're saying, all we're advocating for is for people to actually do things that are more consciously driven, and when you do things that are more consciously driven and there's a motivation and a methodology for you to do that, then we can actually make change, and that is exactly what we're advocating for, is that we just really think about this from a historical perspective, realizing certain things have just not been that effective, you know? The legislation that we did back in the '60s and, you know, all of the affirmative action pushes that we've done through the '70s and '80s, you know, as great as they've been, you know, to make people feel better, they really have not necessarily touched on the--on the real metrics associated with businesses and corporations in this country, and our organizations are missing out on an incredible opportunity to tap into what is now going to become the majority population in this country. And so again, my shout-out [?] to take a very introspective look and approach at what are we personally doing right now to build relationships that actually go beyond our racial differences, go beyond our gender differences and create true, meaningful, authentic relationships with other human beings by getting to know them at a neurological level. A lot of times, that is done through stories and through the art of storytelling.Zach: Chris, we definitely appreciate you being on the Living Corporate podcast today, and we consider you a friend of the show, and we hope to have you back, man.Chris: Thank you so much, man. It has been a pleasure and a gift and a blessing. Thank you.Zach: Amen, man. Peace.Chris: Amen. All righty, be well.

GUEST BIO: Chris has worked as a lead developer on some of the largest web projects and is currently a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft.  He is also the author of several JavaScript books and the Developer Evangelism book as well as being a regular presenter at conferences. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil’s guest on today’s show is Chris Heilmann.  Over the years, has worked as an HTML and web developer on some of the largest web projects. He has worked for netdecisions, Agilisys, Yahoo UK and Mozilla. Today, he is a Senior Program Manager Developer and Evangelist, at Microsoft. Chris is also an author who has written mainly about JavaScript. But, he is best known for his Developer Evangelism book and for his conference speaking. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.00) – So Chris, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Chris starts off by explaining that he did not take the normal route into an IT career. He did not go to university. His IT journey started with him writing games for the Commodore 64 and other early computers. After leaving school, he became a journalist and newscaster. In 1986, he discovered the internet and was immediately hooked. Fairly quickly, he was able to bring his two passions of tech and journalism together. Almost immediately, Chris could see the internet was going to help him and his colleagues to easily publish on a worldwide. He says that he was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. (2.25) - So, presumably your background in journalism has helped you in terms of other things you have done. For example, writing your books and public speaking. Chris agrees, he says his journalism skills were a great help when he started blogging. He found that his experience of writing for radio translated particularly well when writing for an online audience. When writing for the radio you have to ensure that every sentence makes perfect sense. Usually, people are doing other things while listening to the radio, for example, driving. So, they cannot focus 100% on what you are saying. The clearer you are the more likely you are to keep their attention and really get through to them. It is the same when people are reading your stuff online. You rarely have their full attention. We all tend to skim through things, so every sentence has to clearly make its point. This ability to make a point effectively and hold the attention of the audience has also been very useful when it comes to public speaking. His work as a journalist also helped Chris to adapt his message to suit the audience. (3.14) – Can you please share a unique career tip with the I.T. career audience? Chris says that being flexible is vital. He has moved to several different countries to pursue his career. If you are willing and able to be flexible there are a lot of opportunities available in the IT world. For example, You need to be prepared to work at strange hours sometimes. Doing so opens up the opportunity to collaborate with people from across the world. Being flexible enables you to put yourself in the right place at the right time, more often. Chris also thinks it is important to be prepared to physically travel so that you can work with others from across the world. Even though we have the internet you tend to get far more done when you spend time working with people face to face. (5.05) – Can you tell us what your worst career moment was? And what you learned from that experience. For Chris, his worse career moment was when the UK office of a company he was working for was shut. When that happened, basically, all of the talented people they had pulled together over 10 years were scattered to the winds. The team he was working with was very talented and worked quickly. They achieved more than the Silicon Valley team did in far less time. Yet, they still closed the office and asked everyone to move to the USA. Some people went and just stayed with the firm for the 2 years they neede for the visa. Then, naturally, they left for better offers. Chris felt that this action showed an incredible lack of insight on the part of the company. It led to all of that talent being lost just because they were geographically in the wrong place. Plus, naturally, a lot of the people were bitter. Many left in anger, which is a bad idea, especially in IT. Even today, it is quite a small world. Chris says that the best approach is to take the high ground. Don’t bad mouth the company to others. The chances are you are going to come across these people again, in the future. (7.00) – Phil asks Chris about their best career moment was. Chris has had lots of great moments. He really enjoys the fact that a small change on the front end can make such a huge positive difference for users. It is also nice when you build up your reputation to the point where finding a new job becomes almost automatic. Chris also gets pleasure from seeing the careers of others he has worked with flourish. (9.18) – Can you tell us what excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers? The fact that computers are taking over more is something that really excites Chris. This is despite the fact that AI is set to cut into the amount of work that will be available for him. Currently, he sees too many security issues slipping through the net because the code has been written by people who are basically bored with their job. In the future, much of that boring work will be done by computers. AI machines will be great at finding and fixing malicious code and debugging. They will be far faster at it than humans are. This will free developers up to become even more creative and innovative. However, for this to happen quickly the industry needs more data scientists. We need people who can see the patterns and teach machines to recognize them too. He points out that a lot of code has been written already. It is just that much of it has not been shared yet. The open source movement is helping to sort that out. As a result we are now moving forward at a far faster rate. Chris is also excited by the fact that new roles are constantly being created within the IT industry. There are dozens of exciting and interesting jobs that simply did not exist a few years ago. (12.20) – What drew you to a career in IT? Chris explains that he has always loved computers, so when he saw the chance to make working with them a part of his daily life he lept at it. He was also drawn to the sector because he realized he would be able to help people to overcome their fear of working with computers. His work on the front end was helping people to tap into this new technology and achieve more, something he really enjoyed doing. (12.51) – What is the best career advice you have ever received? That was – don’t forget to network within your company, especially when you first join. Get to know the people and their problems. Help others and do everything you can to get departments to talk to each other. Get to know other communicators within that business. Doing all of this helps you to understand your company and find your place within it. Taking this approach ensures that you will always have a backup plan. If your fantastic boss suddenly leaves and your new one is awful, you will be able to quickly move to another job. Plus, when you play a role in getting something difficult fixed you are going to quickly be seen as a valuable employee. So, staying there long-term becomes a viable option. Provided, of course, that is what you want to do. (14.31) – If you were to begin your IT career again, right now, what would you do? Nowadays, having a proper IT degree is a good thing. Chris knows that he was lucky to end up working in the IT field without a relevant degree. He says that the degree he would take now would be data science. Chris also thinks he would start out by working for smaller startups. He says that this enables you to focus on one project and see it through. This hones your skills and helps you to learn how to turn what you are working on into a success. He also says that he would not go into gaming. It is really hard to become successful in that field now. Nowadays, there is a huge pool or pre-done stuff you can draw upon to get things done quickly. You no longer need to know how to code everything from scratch. So, Chris would also focus on maximizing the potential of this. He would familiarize himself with the various components and frameworks that are available and learn how to use them to get things done fast. (16.49) – What are you currently focusing on in your career? Right now, Chris’ main objective is to move up and start building a team again. He wants to have team members who can replicate what he is doing right now, so he can focus on working with just a few clients. (17.48) – What is the number one non-technical skill that has helped you the most in your IT career? Chris finds that he uses his communication skills a lot. It is important to know how to talk to people. It also helps you to recognize when not to pursue something. Just because you have identified the perfect solution does not mean that you should insist on developing it right there and then. Sometimes you have to think of the needs of the project, chunk up your knowledge and put together something that works for now, to move things forward. Then, perhaps circle back later to push your idea and get it implemented.[[ (18.59) – Phil asks Chris to share a final piece of career advice with the audience. Make sure you stay interested in the job you are doing. Don’t do a boring job or one that you do not like, just for the money. If you do that, you are setting yourself up for failure. You have to find something that challenges you as well. If you are hiring people, always hire someone who is better than you. When you do, you open up the opportunity for you to delegate to them. They get to develop and you are freed up to do something else. In time, they become able to replace you, by which point you will be ready to move on, anyway. You should not be afraid of the people that work for you. BEST MOMENTS: (3.57) CHRIS – “Being flexible in your time and being flexible to actually work across the world is something that a lot of people still have problems with. IT is not a 9 to 5 job." (9.26) CHRIS – "I'm actually very excited that computers are taking over more and more." (9.54) CHRIS – "We should not be bored by writing software. Computers should actually be good enough to write most of the code for themselves." (13.00) CHRIS – “When you join a new company network inside the company." (16.47) CHRIS – "We are reusing 90% of the time what other people have been doing." CONTACT CHRIS: Twitter: https://twitter.com/codepo8 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianheilmann/ Website: https://christianheilmann.com/

In this episode of Building Infinite Red, we talk about the importance of education and experience when starting out in software development and how things change when you move from making your products to running your business. From books and online resources to bootcamps and higher education programs, Jamon, Ken, and Todd share their stories, insights, and opinions for every level of professional. Show Links & Resources Lambda School Austin Allred on Twitter Epicodus Airtable Episode Transcript TODD WERTH: Today's topic is education. I actually don't recall what this topic's about. Ken, do you recall? KEN MILLER: Yeah. Well, it's this question that kind of comes up periodically about developers and CS degrees and that kind of thing. I think there was a Twitter thread a little while back in Jamon's feed, because Jamon's feed is the only feed that matters. TODD: That's a fact. Yeah. KEN: Yeah, do you remember who that was, Jamon? JAMON HOLMGREN: Yeah. The question was, "I have 10 years experience developing sites, but I have no formal education. What are your thoughts on experience versus education? Been thinking of getting a front end development tech degree from Treehouse, but I'm not sure if it's worth the time and money." Yeah. That is a question that does come up fairy regularly. KEN: For that specific question, I think the answer is no, it's probably not worth it, right? If you have 10 years of experience, and you're going to go take basically a practical degree, don't bother. JAMON: Right. KEN: But there are definitely nice things about getting a real CS degree, but getting a job is not necessarily the best reason to do it. JAMON: Right. KEN: If that make sense. TODD: I would totally agree with that. Well, just to start out, the three of us, Jamon nor I have finished college, nor do we have any CS degrees. I learned to program on my own when I was a child, probably started when I was 12. And then I started programming professionally when I was about 24, and then I learned basically on the job. Ken went to Harvard and got a CS degree there. Jamon, you are similar to me, right? JAMON: I was pretty similar to you, yeah. TODD: Yeah. So what I usually tell people, A, now, when I'm hiring people and I'm not representative of everyone, so it's quite a bit different, I do a cursory glance of their resume, maybe. That's less relevant to me than what they can do. In my opinion, developers is a portfolio job, which means the work you've done is hugely more important than any kind of education. Now, obviously if you do have a CS degree, I do find people want CS degrees, they understand some concepts that you maybe don't use day-to-day, and when they do come up, they have a much better understanding of that. Sometimes it's easier to teach them new ideas, because they have the analogy in their mind already. So it's definitely worth it. I would say, my short answer and I'd love to expand on this further in this podcast, but my short answer is you need to learn what you need to learn in order to produce work product, which means develop software, develop websites, develop apps. And everyone has a different way of learning. For some people, school is the best way. For me, school always bored the hell out of me to be honest, and it wasn't the best way for me, but there's no exact right way for everyone. It's just however it works best for you. JAMON: Yeah. And I think that part of this is how much access and opportunity you have, because certainly college is one fairly proven path toward gaining an opportunity to access the job market, to get enough skills that you're hireable out of the gate, and then to access the job market and actually get a little bit of exposure, whether it's through an internship or something like that. So that plays into this as well, if your dad was a software engineer or something, and he has contacts that you can talk to and maybe get some opportunities, then maybe you don't need that, maybe you don't need to go down that road. But there are few other factors here as well. Some of them are personal goals, like what type of programming, like Todd was saying, what type of programming you want to do, how much debt you're willing to take on, how much you can take on. And then also, in some cases, very specific cases, the prestige of the university can be a factor because it certainly opens doors for Ken that Todd and I don't have. TODD: I do want to interject real quick before you jump in, Ken. Going to university has many, many benefits that have nothing to do with getting a job, and those are a super valuable if you have the opportunity. They're worth it. But specifically about a job is what I was talking about. KEN: As a life experience, college is great. If you have the opportunity, you should probably do it. Getting a job as a programmer per se is not a good reason to go to college in my opinion. Now, if what you want to do is get a job at Google, or one of the places that is well-known for preferring CS graduates, especially from elite schools, then you should do that, you absolutely should do that. You're going to have a much, much, much harder time doing that. But also, more to the point, Google has I think fairly reasonable case for it in certain ways, because they are actually dealing with the high level intense CS concepts more than your typical programmer job. TODD: Correct. KEN: Now, I think where the problem comes in the market is that if Goggle does it, then we should do the same thing and then we'll be successful like Google. And the vast majority of companies out there do not need that. And I can also definitely tell you, from my own experience, from the people that I've watched, is that getting a CS degree, they're teaching you the fundamentals of how computers work. In Harvard's case especially. They're very much on the theory stuff. But even a more typical CS degree is very much about the background, the hopefully unchanging fundamentals, and not so much how do you design a build system. Todd? TODD: Yeah. I want to rant a little about a CS degree. CS, I'm sure all of you know is computer science. It is really that, it's computer science. Scientists don't make things. They discover things, and they ponder about things. For example, a physicist and a chemist may work together to make some sort of new alloy, but they're not going to design an airplane. That's what engineers do. If you get a computer science degree, you learn the science of computers. You could actually get a computer science degree, and correct me if I'm wrong Ken, and not learn to program at all. KEN: That would be pretty rare. You do have to know some programming in order to do a lot of the things that they teach you- TODD: But you could do like abstract programming that doesn't actually work. Like, say you're developing an algorithm. It's not- KEN: Yeah. I would say that would be pretty atypical, but there's definitely classes that don't require a lot of coding. TODD: I'm exaggerating to make a point. KEN: Some of it is straight up math. Yeah. TODD: Right, which is different than engineering. KEN: Well, and a good engineer should understand the science obviously. Yeah. JAMON: And I think one of the things to know is that, in my career certainly, and I'd like to hear from both you, Todd and Ken, I haven't noticed a huge market difference between the software engineers that I work with that have degrees, versus those that do not. I often don't know which of them have degrees and which do not. It's not always a strong correlation between their ... or it hasn't been a strong correlation in my career with performance. I think there's some characteristics that are positives for people that come from a CS degree background versus others who maybe come from a bootcamp background, or Todd and myself maybe learned out of a book basically and experience, but in my experience it's not something that is ... there may be differences, but they're not significant. TODD: I think it depends on the situation. When you teach people you notice it more. For experienced people, people who have a decade under their belt, no, there's no different. For new people, someone who comes out of school with a CS degree will understand concepts, and I think it's easier to teach them to be honest, in that way. Real quick, I personally started ... well, I started programming privately, but that was just me programming games and that kind of stuff, stuff I enjoyed personally. But professionally, I started building software. So I started out as a builder, a maker, over the years formed myself into an engineer, and then during that, got interested in the CS stuff and learned that stuff too. So I got to the same result, just in a different path. KEN: That's totally true. You can absolutely learn all this stuff on your own later if you're that kind of person. I think what the reliance on CS degrees doesn't really take into account, is that 90% of programming out there is essentially business automation, for a loose definition of business, but it's basically business automation. I mean, yes, okay, there's sort of a sector on high performance computing, or scientific simulations. Honestly, the one that in some ways benefits the most from formal education, believe it or not, is games, because there you need the linear algebra and the harder math, and your performance constraint in ways that mean you're more likely to be coming up with novel algorithms than you are in your typical business program. Jamon? JAMON: It's surprising how rare it is to encounter those types of situations in typical applications, like mobile applications and web. You just don't really run into it. KEN: Right. So, the kind of people who are going to excel at your, like I said, very typical business automation, style programming, user interface design, et cetera, et cetera, are actually going to be people who sometimes were not computer people before, because they're going to have more connection and empathy with the target users. And that ends up making more of a difference to the success of software projects in many cases than your facility with the computer itself. TODD: Yeah. Let me give you a real example from myself, because I started out very practical, and then later got interested in the CS concepts and stuff. Just purely for my own interest and stuff, and that did help to a point in my engineering career, but I did a project circa 2001 or something like that, and we would display, as a website, and we would display a map for the user, and they click somewhere else on the map and we had to calculate, based on the pixel difference between where we knew they were and where they clicked, the difference in direction and distance from the original spot. Now, this required spherical geometry, and the earth actually is not a sphere. It's a little bit like a football actually, to a slight extent. In this case, someone who had a more CS background may have jumped into this easier. I actually had books on my shelf, like college algebra, and college geometry and stuff like that, and I would review these things. And I learned how to do it. It was a successful project and it was very fun, but that's an example because I came from a practical place I had to look that up. Now, on the flip side, I've worked with people with PhDs in computer science, and no offense, bless their hearts, but they would work for two weeks and accomplish literally nothing. And then you'd ask them, "Was that done?" They were like, "I didn't know it was urgent." Well, it was an hour task. That's two weeks ago. And I think they're on a different academic time, because they spent so many years in school, it's just a difference. KEN: Which is, again, not to denigrate the usefulness of them. They're just useful in very specific circumstances and not as general programmers. Jamon? JAMON: I kind of see it as, to use an analogy, like when you're lifting weights, if you lift weights in a way that is very functional, they call it functional, where it's almost like you're lifting a box or ... yes, Todd? TODD: Jamon, for our listeners who may not be familiar with this concept, can you explain what lifting weights is? JAMON: It is this theoretical thing that supposedly some people do. TODD: Can you do it inside of your own home? JAMON: I do now. I built a gym actually. But yes, you lift weights for health. And one of the ideas is that you do this sort of functional strength, where it's something that actually builds up the muscles for lifting boxes, and carrying children, and moving things. So it's very much like you're doing those types of movements, but just with heavier weights. It just makes you stronger in those ways. And then there's other things where you're isolating specific muscles in a way that you would never really do in a day-to-day basis. And university can sometimes be more like that, where you are exercising those muscles, you are making them stronger, but you're not doing it in a way that necessarily replicates what you do in real life. And I think both are necessary. If you just do functional strength training, it will get you so far, but you won't ever hit certain muscles because, like we talked about intense performance or whatever, you might not actually be using those aspects of your brain in a day-to-day basis. But they are good to have for when you need them. So I think that's a decent analogy of what we're talking about here. I think that one of the criticisms that I've had of some of the higher education programs, is that they don't do particularly great job of replicating the real world of what people will actually be doing once they actually get into the job market. You can create a binary tree algorithm, but can you move this button over four pixels to the right? Which is often your first task when you get to work. TODD: Yeah. And I would say that it really depends on the person. In an idea world, if money is no constraint, time is no constraint, yeah, of course I would love to go to university and stuff. But on the flip side, I'm a very practical person and I like to build things, I like to make things. So maybe I went for a few years, but maybe if I would have went that route I wouldn't liked it as much. I would have preferred to just jump in and start getting things done. I think for me ideally was 18, I started doing it, actually doing it for three or four years, and then go to university for maybe two years, and enjoy learning all the concepts I didn't learn. That would have probably been pretty cool for me. JAMON: I realized we're kind of leaning more heavily on the criticism side of this, but one of the criticisms of universities is that they optimize for rewards, like extrinsic rewards. Like, I got this degree, I got this piece of paper, or I did what was necessary to get an A. Where learning to accomplish something to actually expand your mind is a little bit of a different thing. When I started my business I needed to build a website, I had a website to build, and I didn't know how to do it. For me, when I was learning from a book, it was very, very applicable. Like, okay, in order to make a menu, I need to know how to do these things, and it was very, very applicable. Very, very directly applicable. KEN: Well, I'm going to make the positive case ... TODD: Please. KEN: ... for going in and doing it. One is, fair or not, it does open doors. TODD: Correct. KEN: Especially if you're in a good program, but even if you're not, it is used as a hiring filter in a lot of places. I think it's wrong but it's true. That's the very practical sort of level. But to be honest, there's definitely things that I learned there that can save you trouble. I mean, I think they said that what makes a 10x programmer is that they know what not to program. So for example, even the theory class. The theory, computability theory, computational complexity, these sorts of things are more valuable than you might think in certain ways. For example, you're at your start-up. Your boss says, "I want the optimal route to plan on this map. I want to be 100% guaranteed the best route." And you can say, "That's the traveling salesman problem, and it's actually a known hard problem," for example. And it's the kind of thing where it can steer you away from harder problems and towards easier problems. And in engineering frequently what you want to do, you're like, "Let's find a good heuristic instead of trying to solve this optimally." JAMON: It may not give you the answer, but it will give you a framework around the problems that are out there, and the classes of problems that are out there. KEN: Yeah. TODD: Yeah. And I really appreciate that from people who have a higher education than myself. While people were talking, I was thinking of this story. I interviewed for this job, and this guy was asking me technical questions, as they do, and he was a young guy at the time. I was probably 34, he was probably 10 years younger than that or more. And he asked me a question. I don't remember what it was the exact question, but basically he wanted me to accomplish a task, and what he was looking for is how I would technically approach this problem. But I've been an engineer for a long time, and I know what's really important, and I know it makes a 10 times engineer, which is often not actually programing that. So I started off by challenging the fact that he even needed this at all. And logically, he didn't, and he couldn't really explain why he would, so I gave him additional other options that would make this application or this software work much better. Not the answer that he was looking for. But it was the real answer. I used to say a saying all the time. I don't say it much anymore, which is, "There is no code as fast as no code." So in this case, I was just removing his entire problem from him. KEN: I would say it can help you avoid reinventing certain wheels, which might mean that you don't get some amazing solution, because you weren't ignorant enough to know that it couldn't be done. Everyone loves those stories, but 99% of the time that's not how the story goes. And in fact, to the point, I don't know if we're ready to segue into the business conversation we probably we will in a minute, but none of us have any business education. And I'm starting to wonder if it would be worth it to go get like an EMBA or something, so that we're not reinventing so many wheels. I don't know if we're ready for that conversation yet. Jamon, you wanted to say one more thing? JAMON: I have a bunch of other things to say, but I'll intersperse them here. I think that one of the things ... well, Todd actually alluded to this earlier, but the network that you get from going to university for four years with often some of the same people throughout, you get to know them, you do projects together, they have opportunities. A lot of them go on to be quite successful. And being connected to those people in that way is something that lasts for a lifetime. And that's definitely something that should not be undervalued. That's a big advantage, that's something that I did not have. In fact, the only way for me to access a network like that was through ... well, I shouldn't say the only way, but the way that I accessed a network like that was through open source later. TODD: It's true. There's a lot of overeducated crappy engineers doing very well out there. It's true. KEN: It is true. TODD: I mean, it is really true. CHRIS: I was just going to add too, it's fascinating when we have this conversation today. It seems like it's been increasingly becoming more popular to question whether to go to school, or rely upon the tool. So what is it about today that allows us to even question the path forward, that maybe we weren't able to in the past? KEN: We're going to queue that clip from Silicon Valley now. TODD: Yeah. I think it has nothing to do with our particular industry, or development, or any of that stuff. I think it's just because the cost of university education is so extreme right now, that you naturally have to question if it's worth such a huge burden. It wasn't that way for me in the early '90s. I could work and pay for my own college at that time, which I did. That's not possible these days. JAMON: I'm going to agree and disagree with Todd there. I think the cost is definitely a factor, but I also think that this industry is a big factor in that we don't have ... my brother-in-law is a mechanical engineer. He couldn't just go and start mechanical engineering. He can't go out there and just do that. TODD: He could. It's just governed by law. JAMON: Yeah. You have to be a licensed engineer. It's a very- TODD: But there's no reason he couldn't do that if it wasn't for laws. JAMON: There may be a path to becoming a mechanical engineer that doesn't involve university, but it's very hard. I at least know of an architect that did it without going to university and getting a degree. But that is something ... we have a lot of these professional, professions actually have degrees that sort of ... they're barriers to entry. And in order to get through that, the accepted path is to go through universities. Ours does not have that. We can start building websites, or building whatever, just by convincing someone to pay us to do that. KEN: I think there's two points actually. One is part of the disconnect between mechanical engineers and software engineers is that when mechanical engineers fail, people die. JAMON: That's true. KEN: In many cases. That's sometimes true for software engineers too, but it's more true with mechanical engineers. And as a result- JAMON: My brother-in-law works at a plant where if he screws up, there will be hydrogen peroxide blowing miles high in the air. KEN: Yeah. So the stakes are often higher. JAMON: Yes. KEN: But also, if you want to be a serious chemical engineer, there's a lot of capital requirements for any of the things that you're doing, apart from the safety concerns, and that's very real. You're not just going to work on your own because you can't get them, whereas the capital requirements for being a software engineer are extraordinarily low. The access to education materials is extraordinarily high. And you can just try in almost literally anything that you can find out there for education material, you can try with a $500 computer. So there's so many things about the technology world that are in many ways unprecedented, and that's why you're seeing this massive sea change in the economy as it starts to take over more and more of it. And one of our missions here is to help more people in more places be part of that. So getting the message out that although CS degrees are helpful if you have the opportunity, go ahead and do it if it interests you, but it's not necessary if you just want to be part of this. JAMON: Yeah. And one of the things that is very apparent, is that there's a lot more resources available now online for learning. You don't have to go to college to get the education because it's often on YouTube, or you can look through GitHub. There's all these resources, there's online courses. These are things that are very valuable, and they're self-driven. When I first started wanting to learn Objective-C and building iOS apps, I bought an iPad 2 and I went to iTunes U and started watching the Stanford courses on there, and following along with those. So I was able to basically watch Stanford lectures for free, and follow along, and do what they were doing. That was tremendously valuable to me. And all of those resources are very interesting. What's very interesting also is that very few people actually take advantage of this. Everybody with an internet connection essentially has access to these, to the same thing I did. TODD: Which is pretty much everyone in the United States at least. JAMON: Right. And yet, it's a very tiny fracture of a percent that actually take advantage of that. TODD: Well, I would like to, for those of you who have this question and don't have a lot of opportunity for various reasons to go to university, I would give you my kind of recommendation. I forget who said this, I'm not going to attribute it to anyone because I don't remember who it was, but if you want to be a writer, write. If you want to be a poet, write poetry. When you've written a million words, you're a writer. When you've written 100,000 words, you're a writer. You have to write. You'd be amazed how many people want to do something and actually don't do it. In our industry, it's very possible to be a very successful software engineer by just doing it. But even, we mentioned mechanical engineering which does have some legal constraints for sure. But I don't know if anyone's ever seen the movie October Sky. It was in the late '90s. It was about a NASA engineer called Homer Hicksam (Homer Hickam) I think. He was a son of a coal miner and he loved rocket engineering. And he just did it, and he did it, and he did it, and he did it, and eventually without ever having an education, he did it for NASA, and he was a very famous and successful engineer at NASA. So, I don't recommend that route for such things, but it is possible. And I don't care who you are, or what profession you're in, if you just spend a crap load of time doing it, you're going to rise above everyone else. Another great story I have, I read this book. It was about this guy who was really into etymology. Entomology, not etymology which is the study of the origins of words. Entomology, which is the study of insects. He came from a very poor family, and he was in Alabama, and he got into the University of Alabama for biology. I believe he got a scholarship because he couldn't afford it, but the day one he showed up, he went to the head of the biology, the college or probably ... I don't know what it was, but wherever the college of biology is. Ken will correct me. This shows my education here. Anyways, he went up to the head and he said, "For the last two years I've been cataloging the ants of Alabama." And no one had ever done this. So on day one he was put in charge of something very important at the university because of this, simply because he just did it. He didn't ask permission. He just did it. So if you want to become a developer, regardless if you have the opportunity to go to school or not, you just have to start developing. Get into open source, publish stuff, start creating your portfolio and just do it. I'm not going to recommend this at all, but if you dropped out of high school at 16 and started programming and put a lot of work into it, by the time you're 18, 19, you're going to have a high paying job. That's a fact. Don't do that, kids, but- JAMON: Yeah. If Cedric's listening to this, stay in school. TODD: But you totally could do this, but it does require a lot of ... a lot of times people go to the university and those kind of paths because they don't have the kind of internal- KEN: And by the way, if you're that person, you probably already know. TODD: I don't necessarily think so, because- KEN: I mean, if it's flowing out of you so much that you just can't stop doing it basically, that's usually the kind of person who makes it that way. TODD: I agree, but I think- JAMON: Well, that was me at that age for sure. TODD: I think a lot of those people don't know that it's possible, because they don't have an example of it being possible. JAMON: That's exactly right, and that was actually me at that age. At 16 I was coding every day. Every day I would go home and that's what I would do. I mean, I'd do homework on the bus. I didn't do it at home. I coded at home. But I had no role models that were programmers. Well, I had one but he worked in San Francisco and he had been to college, and I thought that was the path. So I didn't really have that sense. And I was doing some pretty complex games and stuff, and figuring things out on my own because I didn't have internet at that time. TODD: Yeah. Well, back in my day I had a book budget, because the only way to learn was from books. There was nothing online, because there wasn't online. I had a book budget where hopefully I could buy a book every couple of months, add to my collection. But anyways, if you get nothing else and you're aspiring to be a developer, I give you permission just to do it. JAMON: Another option is code bootcamps. We actually have at least one, maybe a few others that have been to bootcamps here at Infinite Red, and we found them to be quite valuable for getting people up to speed on frameworks, on languages, on sort of the technical skills, and just getting the familiarization and understanding that they can learn these things. Often it doesn't teach them everything, but it gets them the confidence that they need to move forward with it. I think bootcamps are definitely an option, and there's many good ones. We've worked with Epicodus here in Portland, and there's others as well. KEN: They're especially helpful I think for people who have some kind of technical or quantitative background but just need to learn to code. JAMON: Right. KEN: Per se. Yeah. JAMON: Yeah. It's a good way if you're switching to a second career, or something like that. Another one that I'm actually a really big fan of is Austen Allred's Lambda University. Now, this one's got a really unique model. It's a little more intense than a bootcamp I think. It's a fairly solid higher education option. They have a lot of success stories coming from it. But one of the really unique things that Austen's doing there is they do not charge tuition upfront. Essentially they will take a percentage of your income if you make above, I think it's $60,000 or something a year. Once you get a job that's above $60,000 a year, they'll take 17% of it for up to two years, and there's a cap. Like, $30,000 or something. TODD: That's amazing. I love that. JAMON: Yeah. And if you never get a job in that range, then you never pay it back. The debt is forgiven. TODD: That's a really cool idea. I love that. JAMON: Yeah. Yeah. It really is great. And apparently the financial model's been working for his university. It's an online one so it's very accessible and they're actually finding that they have a much more diverse student body because of the fact that someone who doesn't have a lot of means, doesn't have a lot of support, they can go to school online, they don't have to pay anything upfront. They're even good about trying to support them financially during the time that they're in the university. It's a really great model. I'm a big fan. Lambda School or Lambda University I think it's called. TODD: We'll put that in the show notes. JAMON: Yeah. And Austen's doing a good job with that. He also, if you follow him on Twitter, he's got some really great thoughts on education. I like what he tweets about. TODD: Yeah. I guess in summary there's many ways to get there. If you are a maker, like I always was ... even when I was a kid I constantly made things, I think my path might be an interesting idea. If you have the means to go to university, by all means do it for sure. If it's going to be a huge financial burden, I would definitely give it some serious thought before incurring that burden. CHRIS: I'm curious how you approach education "Once you make it." What does it look like on a daily basis to learn new things, be challenged by new things, or even challenge the people that you work with as well? JAMON: All you need to do is listen to this podcast religiously. TODD: It sounds ridiculous but it's absolutely true. Continuing education. That's a good one. Truthfully, for a software engineer, if you can't teach yourself every day, you're going to have trouble because whatever you knew last year ... I've been doing this for 22 years and I think that number changes every time I say it. I started in '96 so whatever that comes up to. JAMON: We're software engineers. We're not very good at math. TODD: Yes. That's a fact. But you have to learn new stuff. The stuff you worked on two years ago is not what you're working on today. It's constantly learning new stuff. Now, you learn certain patterns and certain ideas that you use over and over again, and you start as you get a lot of experience you start realizing how we're kind of just redoing the same thing over and over for the last 40 years. JAMON: Yeah. Ken, didn't you do an exercise where you learned a whole bunch of languages, and you wrote the same program several times? KEN: Yeah. It was fun. I had fun with it, and then it literally burnt me out of programming for a long time. JAMON: How many did you do? KEN: I got through ... I don't know. 20 or 30. JAMON: Wow. Yeah, so that's what Todd's talking about, is this sort of recurring theme that you see over and over. KEN: Yeah. And after a while it was just like, it was the same approach over, and over, and over, and over. JAMON: It became a lot easier to learn your 20th and 21st and 22nd. Yeah. KEN: Yeah. I always recommend people learn three or four languages, just for their own edification. A lisp, a low level of imperative language, C, C++, even Java, a dynamic language like Ruby or Python. JAMON: And then something like Haskell or Elm or something. KEN: Or actually something like Prolog or Erlang is actually probably more interesting than ... Haskell's great, but more interesting than that because it really makes you think about it in a different way. If you learn those, you can learn anything at that point. JAMON: I think one of the things that really helps me is I have this insatiable curiosity about concepts and computer science. I love reading about it, I'm on Twitter a lot and that's a good place to source new information. You can watch videos. Other people learn in different ways. I know one of our engineers will troll through GitHub. He'll actually jump into a package.json file which we- TODD: I don't know if, "Troll" is the right word, but yeah. JAMON: Well, trolling as in fishing. And he'll look at the dependencies of a particular well known thing, and look at what they use, and then go look at those and see how people code. It's a very cool way to learn. Other people, they'll learn by pairing with other programmers, they'll learn obviously by experience. Some people read books. We have one of our- TODD: Watch videos. JAMON: Yes, watching videos. One of our developers decided to learn ... this is Darin Wilson. He decided to learn Ecto, which is the database layer for Elixir. He decided to learn that by writing a book about it. And apparently that's been quite educational for him. He's learned a ton in teaching. TODD: Yeah. Don't do that, kids. It's a lot of work. That's kind of a lot about software engineering and that kind of stuff, but we're also, on the other side ... and we probably lost all the entrepreneurs by now, so I guess we should do this first. But on the other side is education when it comes to being an entrepreneur, running your own small business, running a larger business, that kind of stuff. JAMON: I learned first I would say by watching my dad. He was a small business owner, so I learned some basics there. I did know quite a few small business owners, and I did talk to them. I would go out to coffee with them or whatever, and just ask them questions. But it was very much a learn as I go type of a situation, learn as I had to. How do you do payroll? I had no idea. I hired a bookkeeper who taught me how to do payroll and did most of it, which was nice. How do you market? I had no idea. That was a whole thing that I had to learn. How do you do sales? I mean, I just plopped myself in front of people and tried to do the best I could, and tried to learn from it. That's probably not the way I would recommend going though. TODD: We did engineer our sales process by the way. JAMON: Once we merged companies, then Todd and I started doing sales together, and we had a much more engineery approach to it. It was good. Actually have a feedback loop, and we would try to build our experience over time. I have read some business books, I've watched some business videos, but for whatever reason software engineering, education has always been more ... I guess got more traction with education on that side. With business stuff that always seems so abstract and not directly applicable. KEN: I'm definitely at a point where I'm feeling like I could use some formal education honestly. The MBA is not what it used to be in terms of guaranteed high paying work. Even elite MBAs are not what they used to be in that regard. But I wouldn't downplay the value of the network building that they bring. But what they can't teach you, what no school could teach you, is what it's like to stare at your bank account and wonder if you're going to make payroll this month and how you handle that. I mean, it might mean that you know a good banker who can help you, but it doesn't teach you what that feels like. It can teach you about negotiation, but it doesn't teach you how to actually sit at a table with somebody who's got a lot more money and power than you. There's a reason that even regular business schools prefer that you go out and work some place for a little while before you go there. And I think that the EMBA route, if you're going for formal education, is probably a pretty good one, because then you have really embedded yourself. You have a very felt experience of what these things are like, so when you go to that negotiation class, or that finance class, or whatever, you get it. It's going to land someplace for you emotionally, that it wouldn't for a kid out of school. JAMON: What's an EMBA? KEN: Executive MBA, meaning a lot of the business schools will offer these programs frequently, nights or weekends, even at a high level, so it's right where you as a person who already runs a business can go and fill in your skillset. TODD: Interesting. KEN: And hobnob with other people like you. Yeah. And they're not cheap. TODD: Yeah, that makes sense especially if they're geared towards executives. My path was way too long. So, if you want to do it fast don't take my path, but this is my third company and I feel like I finally became a business person on my third company. That's a long time, and that wasn't three companies in three years. That was three companies in 15 years. I definitely wouldn't go my route. I think one of the things ... I mean, there's different aspects of business, right? Ken alluded to some of them. Financing, super important. If you're not making money, if you're not negotiating good deals with your vendors, or employees or whatever, if you're not keeping it cashflow where you can pay payroll, you're sunk, so that's very important. The other thing is, your management and leadership skills. As you grow, you're going to have a team, so that's very important. That's not something you super easily learned from a book. I think even things like accounting theory ... Ken, I don't know if you want me to share this story. Well, I'll just say it and we can cut it if you don't want it. This is kind of a funny story. When Ken and I first started this business, this was my third, but this was Ken's first business. And we were going over our accounting and he was telling me all about accounting theory, and he knew it very well, but I don't remember what it was, but it was something like I said, "We should get our P&L," and you had no idea what that was. It's a profit and loss report. KEN: I don't think that that was what it was. I don't think that's what it was. I don't remember what it was, because I knew what a P&L is. TODD: Maybe it was AR, account receivable? It was something very basic. KEN: Well, we had a long running argument about cash verus accrual accounting as I recall. TODD: Right. So regardless of what it was, and I don't mean to insult Ken whatsoever, but that's actually not uncommon. My wife's an accountant and she was trained at university for that and then she worked as a corporate accountant for a long time and worked her way up to a fairly high level. The day-to-day, just like in programming, you learn the concepts but once you hit the real world, the real world's so much different than anything. And I think that's true with a lot of ... KEN: I'll go into that. I was like, "I think we should do accrual accounting," and Todd's like, "I don't think so." I'm like, "Well, no. I really want to be able to ..." the benefit of accrual accounting is that you can see profit versus cashflow and it sort of gives you more information, but it's way more work, way more work. And if you haven't done it, you don't know that, so we are still a cash accounting. JAMON: Yes. TODD: Is it more work, Ken? KEN: What, accrual? TODD: Yeah. KEN: Much. TODD: Is it way more work? KEN: Much, much, much more work. Yeah. And that's something I don't really like very much. JAMON: One of the things I did well when I started my business was I forced myself to do a monthly budget. And I was doing this for my personal life too, so I just used the same skills I had there to do a budget for the business, which was much easier because I wasn't buying diapers there generally. There wasn't quite as many transactions- TODD: There's a joke in there somewhere. JAMON: Yes. There weren't as many transactions and stuff. But it was actually really great because I was able to keep a very close eye on where we were in a cash basis obviously, and then I did have accounts receivable system that I could look at to see what kind of money would be coming and do some forecasting and stuff. We've carried that forward to some extent here at Infinite Red doing the budgeting. We got away from it for a little while, but we're going to be going back and do it because it has been very helpful, even though you in some way feel like you're doing kind of double entry. TODD: Yeah. I think, gosh, business education and experience, you really have to have both. You have to study in some form, and you have to have experience. It's really challenging to be honest, compared to something more straightforward like becoming a designer or an engineer, just because it's very nebulous and very human oriented for sure. JAMON: And there's so many ways to do a business right, and there's many, many, many more ways to do it wrong. If you just follow a formula, that's not necessarily going to work. There's a lot of variables in business. TODD: And people tend to do things the way that they're comfortable with, or the way they're familiar with. It's kind of funny. My wife, she's actually a small business person now, but she's an accountant by trade as I mentioned. In accounting, they use spreadsheets to a ridiculous amount. And when I say ridiculous amount I mean they're super familiar with spreadsheets, very advanced spreadsheets, so if there is a task, they throw a spreadsheet at it. Now, as a programmer, my first thought was database. So, my first company, I did my accounting like a database, which probably wasn't great but it's what I understood. And that's what people do, they apply. So my wife Heather and I, sometimes I've went there and said, "That's cool, but you know, if we use a database this will be much easier." And I set her up with a great product called Airtable, and she switched from a spreadsheet for that particular thing to the database, and she loves it. And then looking at some of her spreadsheets, for example, as a programmer, if I needed a particular report for finances, I would assume I'd make a report and I would use a system to make a report and stuff. But for her it's super common to extract data from multiple sources, stick it into a pre-made spreadsheet and have the spreadsheet be the report. This is what accountants do all day. It seems more manual, but it's actually faster and more convenient. So as a person who's not educated, maybe not educated in starting a small business, or taking a long route like we do, you'll find that you're doing things that you know how to do. It may not be right, but you kind of get them done. And it's good to look, at some point, when you have time, to look how the professionals do it, so you can do it more efficiently. KEN: Well, and I want to piggyback on that, which is that one of the harder things that we've learned is to do some things manually, that there's real value in doing things manually and personally, and not trying to automate it. Like Todd says, when we think we need a report, the first we're going to go like, "Hm. We should write a report so we don't have to do it ourselves over and over again." Wrong. Wrong, unless you're- JAMON: We need the education- KEN: Unless you're Ford, unless you're a massive company that has already a very dialed in process, automating as a small company is sometimes counterproductive. Not only does it take a long time, a big time upfront, but then you are locked in and can't change it. You can, but now all changes are expensive. And two, there's real value to human eyes going and looking at the stuff and compiling it. And that was very hard for me to learn because, like a lot of people, I got into computers because I'm lazy, and I wanted the computer to do all the work for me. But there's no substitute for human eyes on the problem, in many cases. TODD: It's funny, because we're all engineers and designers, the way we do reports at work is we have an artificial intelligence chat bot in Slack that produces the reports for us. That's such an us way of doing things, it's hilarious. JAMON: If it's okay, before we wrap up here, I'm going to bring this back to universities for a second. I think this is actually a really important thing to get across to people who are considering that path. If your state offers ... here in Washington State it's called Running Start, but essentially the ability to go into a small community college that's nearby your high school, and get your first two years done for free. The K-12 system actually pays for your college, for the first two years. That's really helpful, and there's really no reason not to do that. That's a great way to get started. Secondly, if you are going to go to a university, unless it's something like Harvard, or maybe Stanford, you should really avoid private universities, especially for-profit universities. Those are really terrible. You really don't want to go that direction. KEN: Well, I want to draw a very clear distinction between private and for-profit. JAMON: Yes, of course. KEN: There's a lot of very good private schools. If you can afford them, go for it. A lot of them are really great, great education. for-profit schools completely different. JAMON: Todd and Ken, I'm not sure if you know this, but one of the things that ... well, you do know this. One of the things that for-profit universities do is they prey on disadvantaged students and stuff. They'll go and sign them up. And they actually did that at my school and I was actually signed up and accepted to one of these universities, which would have been an incredibly expensive education. I'm not sure what the quality would have been, but very, very expensive. And I backed out, but for a while I was thinking this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to go to this university for a computer science degree. And you just need to stay clear of them. It's not worth it. They're often predatory, they're just bad. TODD: Not to be confused. One thing I want to do mention is ... sorry to interject, Jamon. The Code Academies are for-profit also, but those- JAMON: Yeah. That's much different though. TODD: That's different. KEN: Yeah. We're not going to mention any of the names of the for-profit universities, because we don't want to get sued, but ... JAMON: They're bad, yes. KEN: They're bad. JAMON: But there're a lot of really great state universities they can go to. A really great way to go is to do ... your Running Start type program for two years and then go for the next two years at a state university and you can get a degree. And it's honestly relatively inexpensive. CHRIS: One of the things that I would love to add, regardless of what you do, whether you're an engineer, or a designer, or a founder of a company, one of the best ways to learn is actually to teach what you know to other people. TODD: Good point. CHRIS: So that when you don't understand something, you're going to dive in to learn it so that you can explain it to someone else, and that's where oftentimes I found that theory and practical knowledge combine and multiply. TODD: I think that's fantastic. I would totally agree. I've taught a handful of programmers throughout my career, from nothing into professionals, and nothing teaches you like teaching. It was a big boon. As for business education, we talked about that as a combination of education, however you get that, and experience. But if you want to be an entrepreneur, there is absolutely no excuse. Today is Tuesday when we're recording this. You can go down right no, go to Costco if you don't have a Costco card go to Walmart, buy bottled waters. They're really cheap. You're going to get 24 pack, whatever, for whatever it is. So basically you're paying pennies for each bottle. Go down to the beach, or wherever in your local town where people hang out, and sit there and sell bottled waters for about 30 minutes. KEN: Until someone calls the police on you for not doing it with a permit. TODD: Correct. That's why the time thing. But you can sell. When someone's out running, or they're with their kids at the park, you can sell one of those bottled waters for $2. You bought it for 15 cents, you sold it for $2. Congratulations. You are now a business person. And it just goes up for there, and the truth is, a lot of people who want to start a business, they really want to want to start a business, they don't actually want to start a business. So I always recommend to people, do the bottled water test. If that's very unpalatable to you, you're probably not ready. Doesn't mean you won't be ready, but you're probably not ready to start that small business yet. Little advice from your uncle Todd. JAMON: I don't think I would ever go to the beach and sell bottled water unless I had to. KEN: I don't think I would do that either. TODD: People like really successful in sales people and stuff like say Mark Cuban, he did this kind of stuff. But from a young age he was a business man and his job was to find things that he'd get for X and sell for a multiple of X. And he would do anything. He would go door to door. KEN: If you're already a programmer or designer, go get yourself an LLC and put your shingle out as a one person consulting firm. It's not the same quite as business, but it gives you a little bit of a flavor for it. It takes you down that road a little bit. That was certainly what did it for me. TODD: Don't work for free. KEN: Yeah. Don't work for free. TODD: Whatever you do, don't work for free. Everyone will try to get you to work for free. Don't do it. No free bottles of water. KEN: That's a whole another conversation. TODD: Except for the cop who's arresting you for permits. KEN: Yeah. TODD: Give him a few- KEN: What if I just slipped you one of these bad boys, officer? TODD: This fine, fine water could be yours. KEN: On that note, thanks for listening everybody. JAMON: See you next time. TODD: Yes, thank you. This was Todd, and this is Jamon. No, that's not Jamon. This is Jamon- JAMON: Thank you. This ... KEN: I had a great stopping point, and Todd just had to keep talking. You just had to keep talking. TODD: Ken, I'm not the kind of person who has to have the last word. KEN: Yes, you are. TODD: I'm really not. That's funny. I'm going to stop recording.

In this episode we are talking about our remote work tools that enable our distributed team across the world to collaborate, design, and build software. Throughout the episode, Todd, Ken, and Jamon touch on their favorite tools—from Slack, Zoom, and Google Sheets—why they chose them, and the ways they have added custom features to really make the remote experience special. Show Links & Resources Slack Zoom G Suite BlueJeans Screenhero RealtimeBoard InVision Trello Airtable Shush Dropbox Bigscreen VR Taking the Pain Out of Video Conferences by Ken Miller Episode Transcript CHRIS MARTIN: The topic at hand today is remote tools, and all of the different ways that you have built a remote company. Where do you even start when you're thinking about what tools to pick when you're going remote? KEN MILLER: This is Ken Miller, by the way. It happened very organically for us. To be honest, I don't know that we could've done this company this way before Slack. Because the tools that came before, Hipchat and IRC and Yammer, even though I worked there. Sorry, Yam-fam. They just didn't quite do it. Right? They didn't quite create the online atmosphere that we need to work the way that we do. Does that sound accurate to you, Todd? I feel like once we found Slack, we were like, "Holy crap, this is epic!" TODD WERTH: I think there's a few alternatives. Hipchat, at the time, wasn't good enough. There were a few alternatives we investigated. I would like to mention at the beginning of this ... This is Todd Werth, by the way. I would like to mention at the beginning, I imagine that a lot of companies in this podcast will need to be paying us an advertising fee. Like Slack. JAMON HOLMGREN: We actually adopted Slack before we were remote. We had ... I think we were using Google Hangouts or something. Or whatever of the myriad Google chats there are out there. They have like 12 apps. We were using something else in person, and then we started using Slack organically right when it first came out. TODD: Sorry about that noise you all heard. That was me throwing up a little bit in my mouth when you said "Google Hangouts". (laughter) KEN: We'll talk about video-chat in a minute. JAMON: By the way, this is Jamon Holmgren. It was ... Initially, we jumped onboard. They did a really good job marketing themselves. We had used Hipchat a little bit, but it just wasn't what we expected. We started using Slack. That was in early 2014, I think it was? I don't think it's a coincidence that within a year and a half we ended up going remote. I think that was one of the enabling tools. We got used to it in the office, but it enabled remote work. TODD: To talk about chat apps or chat services is important, but on a more general standpoint, I would say how you approach it is actually try 'em and do it. A lot of companies seem to just use whatever is available and not look for optimum solutions. If trying three or four different chat systems is too onerous for you, that's probably the wrong attitude, in my opinion. KEN: You think, "don't settle". Don't assume that the first thing that you try is the only thing, and then conclude that remote isn't gonna work because the tool that you tried sucks. JAMON: We tried a lot of tools at ClearSight, before the merger. We tried ... I can't even name them all, to be honest. Part of it is because I like ... I'm a gadget guy, I like to try new things and see how it goes. There was actually a lot of skepticism around Slack because they're just yet another tool that they had to log into and pay attention to. "We already had the email, so do we really need this." It was kinda funny, when I went back and looked at our inner-company email, just tracked ... I think I used the "everyone@clearsightstudio.com" or something email address to track how often we were using it for company communications. It just dropped off a cliff after Slack. The amount of email, the volume of email that was flying around went way, way, way down. In fact, I remember we used to send GIFs in the email threads, and stuff. There were elements of the culture that we have today in Slack going on in email threads. Slack was just so much more well-suited to that. That actually came about very organically. We had tried a bunch of different things. We tried Slack, and it just picked up steam, picked up steam, picked up steam. TODD: I don't ... I'm not even exaggerating, I don't believe I've ever sent an email to anyone at Infinite Red internally. I don't think so. KEN: Unless it's a forward from someone external. TODD: Correct. I think there's people on our team who probably don't check their email very often because they don't have a lot of -- KEN: Yeah, if you don't do sales or any kind of external outreach -- TODD: Yeah. That was a sticking point a few times, when people were sending out the emails, and we had to ... They were wondering why people weren't responding, it's because the variety of people never check their email. JAMON: It is funny, because email does still, it is still a tool that we use for remote communication with outside clients, especially people first coming to us. But as soon as we can, we get them onto Slack because we've found that that level of communication is the least friction, it's very seamless. Slack is definitely featuring very centrally in our remote-tool story, for sure. TODD: Rather than just ... I'm sure a lot of people out there use Slack. If you don't, give it a try. But rather than just gushing on Slack, I do wanna say that the important part here is we did go through a lot of different chat services. You have to give 'em some time. At first, for example ... We do love Slack, but at first it didn't seem that different. There wasn't a bullet list that's like, "Oh, this has feature X", it was a bunch of little, subtle things that made it work especially well for us. KEN: Part of the meta-point there, is you have to treat your tools really seriously. Right? Google and Amazon and all these big companies, any well-funded start-up, whatever, they're gonna lavish a lot of attention on making an office that works for them. Right? TODD: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: They're gonna create an office environment very thoughtfully. I've been to a lot of these offices. A lot of them are very thoughtfully considered. Right? They're designed to create a certain atmosphere. For example, I was at the Square offices once. Huge, cavernous room designed to create a sense of energy. That's the open-office mantra, that sense of energy. They had these little cubicle ... nicely designed cubicle things where you could go if you wanted quiet. Clearly, noise was the default. That architecture creates a culture. At least it reinforces a culture. As a remote company, your tools are your architecture. You either need to buy them from people who design them in a way that works for you, and Slack seems to work for a lot of people, or you build things that work for you, or you create norms about how they're used that do the same thing. We've done some things on Slack, we've done some things on Zoom, to create that sense of being together. Todd? TODD: I would like to add emphasis to what Ken just said. Imagine a time that someone puts into an office: architecture, the layout, the furniture. Rearranging it multiple times, placing stuff. Now think about the time that companies you've worked for put into remote tools. Anyone out there with their hands up saying they spent about 30 minutes on their remote tools -- KEN: Ever! TODD: Yeah. It's not surprising that one is superior to other in those organizations. I would pile on, like Ken said, and take the same amount of effort and consideration of your tools as a remote company as you did with everything else in the physical space if you're a commuter company. CHRIS: I'm interested, too, because as you're talking, you're talking about the difference between physical architecture and the architecture of your tools that allow you to do remote work, and if everyone's using Slack, and it looks and functions the same way, what brings the sense of uniqueness to a company that's using the same tools? TODD: Me. Just me being around makes everything unique, wonderful, and amazing. To answer the real question, you have to take Slack ... One of the great things about Slack, 'cause it's highly customizable, you can add plug-ins, you can add all sorts of integrations. We're gonna talk about other tools than Slack. They literally just pay us a crapload of money just to talk about this. JAMON: I wish. KEN: I wish. TODD: You don't take the vanilla. The point of a tool like that is you take it and you make it your own. JAMON: I did see someone tweeting about switching remote companies. They quit one company and they got hired by another. They did mention, actually, how similar it was. You go into the same place; you sit down at the same chair; you have the same computer in front of you; you log in to a different Slack, and you start working. Right? There is some level of consistency there. In a way, that's a very good thing. You can be comfortable very, very, very soon. There are plenty of things to learn about a new company without having to also learn new office layout, new office norms, policies about who can put their lunch in the fridge and who can't. I don't know what else. It's been so long since I've been in an office, I don't even know. I think there is some level of normalcy there because people do use similar tools. Like Todd said, you can customize Slack to work the way that your company needs to, and you can customize other tools as well. Since we're programmers, since our team has a lot of programming capability on it, we do actually build a lot of glue code in the scripts and things that will help tie all the tools together. KEN: In most organizations that have adopted chat tools, whether it's Slack or something else, they are usually billed as an internal supplement replacement for email. It is great at that, don't get me wrong, but I think something that gets lost in the way people talk about in the way we communicate now is that ... Let me tell a little story. I used to be a big fan of Roger Ebert. Rest in peace. Brilliant writer, right? Super enthusiastic. He was very critical of the way people write online. Very critical of things like emojis and emoticons. I think, while I respect him a lot, I think he completely missed the point on that. The point of that is, although, yes, we type to communicate online, it's not really writing. Not in the way our English teachers taught us. Right? It's typed speech, really. Right? It's a register of communication that's closer to the way that we talk than it is to the way that we would write if we're writing an essay or a blog post. One of the things that I really like about, Slack for example, is the rich way that you can communicate without it looking junky. It doesn't look like something awful or 4chan or some of the other really junky-looking message boards that have that level of expressiveness. It gives you the level of expressiveness so that you can substitute for the lack of facial expressions and body-language, but it's not writing. You don't write ... you don't type into Slack the same way you do. It's much closer to the way that you talk. For a remote organization, where we're not on Zoom all the time, although we are a lot, it's super important that you have that level of human expressiveness in your medium, in the medium that you're using to replace spoken word. TODD: Three comments. One: Zoom is the video conferencing tool we use, and we'll talk about that in a second. Two: I don't spend much time on 4chan, Ken, so I'll take your word on that one. (laughter) Three: just to give an example, talking about customization and you might be asking yourself, "Okay, Todd, I've used Slack. I've used chat. What're you talking about?" Just give you a few flavors. The simplest is creating your own channels that have some sort of cultural significance to your organization. One of ours is called "Rollcall", where we ... It's the digital equivalency of walking in and out of the office. "I'm here this morning." "I'm gonna go get my car worked on." "I'm back." It's not just status, it's also ... not just whether you're working or not, but it's a way to communicate basic, little life things in a short way. We have another one called "Kudos", where we give kudos to people. Which, at first, I thought, probably, wouldn't take off, but it actually did. It's where you give kudos to people for things that they did well, and I'm really shocked how many people give kudos and how many people respond. That's obviously just using the base tool and choosing what content to put on there, and how to organize. There's other things, too. Obviously there's things like code-repository integration, a code bug-reporting integration. We integrate with other companies' Slacks. They have a Slack channel, we have a Slack channel, and they connect so that we can do that with our clients. All the way to we have a custom Bot we wrote for Slack. Her name is Ava. She does a variety of internal processes for us. She's kind of ... In the old days, you'd have a database and you'd have a Windows app written to connect your database for your company, you'd do things in there. We have a lot of internet SaaS-tools. And then we have Ava that integrates a lot of them together. JAMON: Todd, can you give an example of something that Ava does for us? TODD: Yes. There's some basic things that a chatbot might do. For instance, you might wanna ask her where Jamon is, and she'll tell you the information she knows about Jamon. It's a lot of operational stuff. For instance, our Project Manager, Jed, has to produce weekly reports for clients. Ava produces those for him. Stuff like that. Stuff that you would normally do, like I said, in the old days, in a desktop app personally. JAMON: Todd came up with Ava quite a while ago, actually. It was sort of a toy to start with, just playing around with it. He had some ideas where it might go, but over time we've actually invested more and more resources into this internal chatbot and it's proven to be quite valuable. It's saved a lot of time, reduced the amount of overhead that we have to have tracking things because it's able to do a lot of process things. KEN: So far, she has not escaped and murdered us. (laughter) TODD: Not so far. I'm working on that. JAMON: That's a win. TODD: There's some tiny things. She's just a way for us, if we need to program something that we have a sticking point like, here's a very simple thing that took me five minutes to ruin. We do a lot of things on Mondays, and constantly wanna know what last Monday was, or Monday three weeks ago. You can literally just say, "Ava, what was Monday two weeks ago," and she'll tell you. That's a very tiny thing. Generating project PDFs or generating project reports is a bigger thing, obviously. JAMON: Another tool we use to communicate, non-verbally in Slack, is "Reactions". Someone'll post something and we react to it. I think this is pretty common in Slack teams and this is something that Slack did a good job of coming up with a cool idea. Usually you think of up-voting and down-voting, but when you have the whole range of emojis, including custom ones and animated ones and things like that, it can be a very cool thing. One interesting example of this: we have an integration with ... Ken, what's the service we use for Chain React tickets? KEN: Zapier. JAMON: Zavier. Zapier, yeah, and it connects with Eventbrite, and that basically will post any time someone buys a ticket to Chain React, which is our React Native conference, of course, happening in Portland in July. You should buy a ticket. (laughter) We get a notification, and it pops in there, says who's coming. When we're getting down there ... We were getting down to the last few advanced workshops that were available, someone started putting a number emoji underneath it. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, like that. You can see then, at a glance, how many were left. It was very cool how we were all collaborating on that. When someone would buy the advanced workshop, Kevin VanGelder, who's our resident Windows guy, he would put a little Windows emoji on there because that's part of the advanced workshop. It was just a cool way to communicate and collaborate without even using words. TODD: I think the important part of using reactions or emojis or Slack Responses ... Reactions, if you're not familiar, Slack is ... It's simply, someone posts a message, and instead of responding to it, you can post a little image on it, like heart, or a thumbs up, or a vote-up, or whatever. Slack Response is an automatic system that, when you say X, it outputs Y into it. One Slack Response that Jamon hates is that when you say "I'm not a big fan", it posts this picture of this really, really small fan. It's hilarious. I love it. (laughter) JAMON: Really hilarious. TODD: Every time someone put ... We had some that we had to remove, 'cause they just came up too much. Every time you'd say "founders" it would show the Three Stooges, which is "Accurate", but... KEN: It was "founders' meeting". TODD: Oh, whatever. KEN: But still, yeah. TODD: It was accurate but a little too much noise. The point is, it's very important. We've probably added a huge number of Slack Responses, a huge number of our own emojis, and the emojis you can use for Responses. A lot of them have become very cultural. Just to give you a few examples: my cat, Calle, that's short for Calle Berry, I took a picture of her paw. And, of course, cats, if you just do the front part of their paw, it looks like they have four fingers instead of five because their fifth one's back further. We came with this emoji and this thing where, if someone does a really great job, they get a "high-four", instead of high-five, and that's Calle's Response. JAMON: I didn't actually know that was Calle's paw. TODD: Oh, yeah, that's Calle's paw. JAMON: That's cool. TODD: So that's a cultural thing that I created one day, and it just kinda stuck. It became a "high-four"; it is an Infinite Red thing, you get a "high-four". We have other things like that, too, that are very specific to our culture, where you have to explain to people who come in what that means. I would definitely customize it, make it fun. We don't worry too much if clients see it. We're not doing anything inappropriate. At first, there was discussion, "Is it professional if they accidentally trigger one of the Slack Responses?" "No, but does that really matter?" "No," in my opinion. KEN: It depends on the Response. (laughter) TODD: Of course. KEN: There were some that were a little over the line and that, without context, could be a little startling. We removed those. TODD: Yeah, that's true. KEN: But for the most part, yeah, just something that's quirky. Hopefully, we all have clients that, at least the people who are in the Slack room are able to appreciate that. TODD: Another one that's totally part of our culture is, there was this early picture of me looking into the camera with a stern face. That became the "shame" emoji. That's been used ever since. Every time someone wants to throw shame upon someone, my face is there. I don't know if that's good or bad. JAMON: There's another one that's quite disturbing, of you, Todd. TODD: Oh! When you say yes "yis", Y, I, S, yes that is disturbing. JAMON: "Yis dream." TODD: You have to work here to ... KEN: You had to be there. KEN: Some of the things that came from my experience at Yammer, where a lot of the company was run internally on Yammer, there's a couple of really big advantages to that. Especially, at an all-remote company, where the vast majority of conversations happen there. One is that there's very much less pressure to include people in meetings just because, just in case they might have something to say about it. Because if you've having a conversation in Slack, you just pull 'em in. Right? After the fact, and they can catch up. But the other was, there was an ethos at Yammer that was, there was this pat question which was, "Why is this private?" "Why did you make this group private?" "Why is this in a private chat?" Making closed conversations justify themselves, rather than being the default. Particularly when we invite other people into Slack, I notice there's a little period of training, where people will instinctively start DMing, 'cause it's like "Well, I need to ask Ken this question." Say we brought our bookkeeper in, right? They would ask me 'cause I was the contact. I'm like, "Ask this question in Finance." Right? "Ask this question in the Finance channel." Which happens to be one of the private ones, for a variety of fairly obvious reasons. By asking in the channel, then the other people who might be interested can just observe. That's one of the ways that you compensate for the lack of that serendipitous, overheard conversation that people are so fond of in a office. CHRIS: In Episode Two, we talked about the philosophy of remote work. Todd, you actually made a comment that was really interesting to me. You said, "When the leadership uses the remote tools, they immediately get better." Why do you think that's the case? TODD: Human nature. I'll answer your question with a little story. I worked for company ... This is circa 1999. I don't know. I didn't work for 'em; they were a client of ours. For many, many years they were very much a Microsoft shop. They had no interest in testing anything on other platforms like Mac or whatever. We worked for them for nine years, something like that. So this is all through the 2000s. It was frustrating for people who wanted to produce websites that were universal. If someone opened 'em on a Mac, it would actually look good and not look horrible. One day, one of the VPs who was above the software group bought an iPad. I think, about a year later, he bought a MacBook. Once he had that iPad, all of a sudden, it'd become very important that things look good on his iPad, which is funny and horrible at the same time. It is just human nature. If you use something, it's much more front of mind than if you don't. Even the best of people suffer this. If you have a mixed company, meaning you're part remote, part commuter, one of those groups is gonna be a second-class citizen. Period. If 10 people are in a meeting, and eight are remote and two are in the office, the two in the office are gonna be the second-class citizens. More often, it's the vice versa, right? Getting everyone on the same page gets rid of second-class citizens. If you wanna make the best remote environment, either getting the majority or getting the people who have more power in the remote situation will increase your tools' quality big time. JAMON: That's for sure. We've seen that internally at Infinite Red, as well. When we use the tools, which we do, leadership team is probably the heaviest user of the remote tools in a lot of ways. There are situations where they're just not good enough, and we make sure that they get changed, for sure. Zoom is a good ... Zoom, the video chat, video call system, is really an interesting one because it has worked the best for us in terms of video calls. We've used a whole bunch of them. We've used everything from Google Hangouts, Skype, Appear.in, which is pretty decent. Pretty frictionless, actually. I like Appear.in for how fast it is to jump into it, but the quality is still a little bit sub-optimal. A few others as well. The nice thing about Zoom is that it allows you to put everybody into a grid pattern. It has a gallery view, which is really cool because then you feel like you're having a meeting and not doing a presentation. That's something that came out of us doing sales calls and internal meetings where we kinda felt like, "I don't wanna be the person on the big screen," right? Feel like your giving a presentation. "I wanna feel like this is a meeting with everybody in an equal place." It makes people feel more comfortable. That was a situation where we were using the tools for various things and found the one that, I think, has worked the best 'cause, as a leadership team, we needed it. TODD: Yes, as far as video chat or video calls ... We actually need a name for that. What do you say if ... It's not really video chatting. JAMON: Video conferencing? TODD: I don't like ... KEN: It's not exactly "conferencing". TODD: I don't like the term. JAMON: Video meeting? KEN: Video meeting. TODD: Yeah, there needs to be a term for that. We need to coin a term for that, at least internally. CHRIS: Zooming. TODD: Zooming. Well that's ... That's not tool-specific. KEN: Slack as a tool is much stickier, in the long term, probably, than Zoom is. At the moment, Zoom is, by far, in our experience, the best quality. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: But that could change. Slack ... there's a lot we've invested in customizing and it would be harder, but ... Although, we have invested some in Zoom, which we can talk about a bit. TODD: I would say Zoom is our favorite for our situation. One of our clients is BlueJeans.net, which is not really a competitor, but they do video conferencing. BlueJeans is really great for many things. One thing is they do every platform well. KEN: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yep. TODD: Which, Zoom, and a lot of the other ones don't necessarily do. Now, we're all mostly on Macs, and it works really well on that, so that works out well. Also, BlueJeans.net has a lot of additional features. Where we basically just need video conferencing; Zoom is so superior. Google Hangouts is horrible. Please, please stop using Google Hangouts. KEN: Don't use Skype. Don't use Google Hangouts. TODD: Well, Skype -- KEN: Skype has gotten better, but -- TODD: Skype's quality is great, but it does a max of six people. We have 26 people. KEN: I disagree that they're quality is great. TODD: I was being ni -- KEN: Even domestically, I've had problems with it. (laughter) JAMON: We have Microsoft people listening. TODD: I was being nice, Ken. JAMON: It crashes a lot on Mac. KEN: The point is, here, you should demand rock-solid video 99% of the time. TODD: Yeah. KEN: If that's not what you're getting, look at another tool. JAMON: This extends to the internet bandwidth that you have available at your place of work, too. Some people that were really scraping by on 20Mb or something connections, and it was impacting video quality, and -- TODD: On what tool? KEN: No, their connection. JAMON: Their internet connection, yeah. That was something that we, overtime, got everybody to upgrade to faster and faster internet. I think that was a success for, pretty much, everybody. They have pretty acceptable internet, now, at this point. TODD: Some aren't as much. We have a person who's a nomad and travels around. We have someone who's in extremely rural Canada, up above Toronto, Tor-on-toe, I'm told is the proper way to say that. Zoom does very well in bandwidth, so the people that do have limited bandwidth, that works very well. We actually have meetings, 26 people in Zoom, which before would have been crazy. Skype limits you to six, which I'm not sure how useful that is for most meetings, but good for you, Skype. KEN: The only thing it's not so great on is battery-life, if you're using a mobile device. JAMON: It sort of trades CPU time for bandwidth. KEN: It does, yeah. JAMON: One of the things that Zoom doesn't do, that we've sort of built a system on top of, is permanent conference rooms. We've found this to be very useful to say, "Hey, let's jump into this 'conference room A', or 'conference room B'." We have better names for it. We name them after rooms in the boardgame Clue. TODD: Trademark Milton Bradley. (laughter) JAMON: There's a billiard room, there's a conservatory, there's a study, kitchen, et cetera. We have different uses for those different rooms. Some are for sales calls; some are for ... One is called Kitchen, which we use for the kitchen table, it's basically where people just jump in there, and work together in relative quiet. It's a cool little concept. We actually built an online, like a website, as well as a desktop app that shows a Clue board with the different rooms that light up when people are in them, and then it puts avatars of who's in that room, including guests, which is very cool because I can go in there and say, "Hey, look! Chris and Todd are having a meeting over there. I'm gonna jump in and see what's going on." I can just click in there, and it opens a Zoom window, and I'm in their meeting. TODD: For example, currently, Chris, Jamon, Ken and I are in Study. We have Kevin and Ryan in Library, and we have Jed in the Billiard Room by himself. I'm not sure what that's about. Maybe playing a little pool. KEN: This goes back to the notion of tools as architecture. Consider the experience of being in an office, and you want a meeting. You say, "Hey, let's meet in Fisherman's Wharf." I was in an office where they named things after San Francisco neighborhoods. "Let's meet in Fisherman's Wharf." Everybody, after they've been oriented into the office, knows where that is and they just go. That's it, right? That's the experience, right? Furthermore, if you wanna know where somebody is, you walk around the building, look into the rooms, and see that so-and-so is in Fisherman's Wharf, so they're in a meeting, they're busy. Now let's look at what it's like to be remote, without a tool like this. "Where's the meeting? Okay, I gotta ask somebody. Oh, okay. Oh, did someone start the meeting? Oh, no, no, okay, somebody needs to start the meeting. Alright, gimme a second, I'm gonna start the meeting. Here's the Zoom URL." TODD: Oh, God! KEN: "Okay, you gotta invite somebody." "Do you remember the Zoom URL?" "I don't remember the Zoom URL." "Okay, hang on. Okay, I got it. Here you go." That's the UX, right now. JAMON: Yes. KEN: Of the base ... TODD: Oh, jeez. KEN: ... video conferencing tool, and it's no wonder people hate that! JAMON: Yep. KEN: Right? TODD: Can you imagine? KEN: Yeah. It turns out ... We've had to increase the number of rooms over the years, right? But how many do we have now? Eight? TODD: Eight. KEN: So we have eight rooms now? TODD: Eight current rooms. KEN: That's pretty much fine. TODD: Mm-hmm (affirmative). For a team our size, that works well. JAMON: We usually don't fill all of ... I think, yesterday, I looked in there and there were six in use, which was kind of a anomaly, but ... KEN: In an office, we can keep adding those as long as we need to. JAMON: That's right. KEN: This is a case where I think we've created something that is actually better than what people who have an office have. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Right? Because you can, just at a glance, see where people are. Nobody has to even tell you what room they're in. They just say, "Hey, we're meeting." You go look at the Clue board, and you see where the people that you're meeting with are, and you join the room. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: It's just one more little piece of constant friction that we've eliminated. I love it. I think it's a fantastic tool. TODD: Yeah, I keep the Clue desktop app open all day long while I'm at work. It's also cool to see the little avatars and stuff. Makes me feel like I'm at work. When we first started, you did have to push ... This is a very common interaction. "Hey, Todd, I need your help with X." And I'm like, "Let's have a meeting" or "Let's jump in Zoom" or whatever. "Which one?" "I'm already there. I joined a room as soon as you said it." "Which one?" "Open Clue. (laughter) Look for my name. Click on it." JAMON: Yeah. TODD: That only took a few weeks, to be honest, of constantly just needling that to the point where, when someone says, "Hey, I wanna jump in a room," they look and they see where you jumped in. KEN: That brings back the importance of having the leadership on the tool. TODD: Yes. JAMON: That's right. This tool actually came out of a side-project. I think Gant and AJ, two of our engineers, came up with the idea and built a prototype, and put it out there. It was ... I remember being, initially, a little bit skeptical that it'd be useful and it's turned out to be a really key part of our remote experience. TODD: That's actually an important point. No one asked anyone to make that tool. No one asked for permission to make that tool. They made it. They turned it on. Now, we've had tools that people've made. For instance, my tool Ava, which, now, is very useful, originally was Dolores, which is from HBO's great TV show, "Westworld". Dolores never caught on. She didn't do enough important stuff, and so she just kinda died. Later I resurrected her as Ava, which is from the movie "Ex Machina". Excellent movie, by the way. KEN: It's still kind of a disturbing allusion, though. TODD: It is, but it's ... It's a great movie. And then the next movie he did, which was "Annihilation", was fantastic as well. Anyways, not important, obviously. The point is, no one needs to ask for permission. They can make tools. They do. They put 'em out there, and they live or die based on whether or not they're actually used. We do sunset things that just never really took off. CHRIS: You're mentioning a lot of tools that enable remote work, that enable productive work. What are some tools that you're thinking about or are in place that help with focus and eliminating distractions? 'Cause sometimes, people new to these environments can look at these tools going, "Man there's so many distractions. How do I work?" JAMON: I actually think that's one of the biggest benefits of working remotely, which is kind of counter-intuitive. You think, "Oh, there's so many distractions when you're working remotely." Actually, you can turn off Slack. You can turn your screen to "do not disturb". You can shut off Zoom. You can turn off you're email. You can close all of those applications and just have the app that you're doing the work in, you're writing a blog post, you're writing code, you can just have that open. You can turn on a "do not disturb" mode in Slack that'll actually tell people that you're currently away. If you use the tools that are available, remote work can actually be much better, because what happens in an office? Someone can't get a hold of you on email or Slack, so what do they do? They hop up and they walk over to your office, and they're like, "Hey, did you get my email?" (laughter) "Okay, I will check my email, eventually, here. Is this really important?" One of the things that we do is ... This is kind of funny, but we'll actually say "I'm going offline for three hours, 'cause I'm gonna focus on this thing. If it's really important, text me." Our phone numbers are there, right? Nobody's gonna text you, 'cause that just feels like a complete intrusion. Right? KEN: It does happen. Like, if it's a genuine emergency. JAMON: It does happen if it's like an emergency. But that is so rare. That is awesome, because you're adding a ton of friction, but you're still giving them some way to get to you. I think that's a good property of remote work, that you can actually focus more in those situations than you can in an office. TODD: Yeah, try to turn off all the noise in an open-concept office. Good luck! KEN: Yeah, an office is distracting by default. You have to use technology to get some focus. I can't think of any tool that we use just for focus. Right? It's about human habits around how they use the tools that are already there. TODD: I think there are some, Ken. I don't personally use them. KEN: Yeah, yeah. I mean there are things, but there's nothing we use as a company. TODD: No, but there are people here that use, for one thing, they'll use the various timer apps that tell them to stand up, or if they set a timer for focus -- KEN: I've used the Pomodoro timer. TODD: Yeah, there are things. What's cool about remote work as opposed to depressing cubicle work (laughter), is you can set up the environment -- KEN: Soul-crushing commute work. (laughter) TODD: Soul-crushing commute work, SCCW, I like it. In those situations, you have to go to the lowest common denominator. If 50% of the people are very productive and get focused with music, and 50 can't at all, you're gonna have no music. When you're sitting in your own environment, whatever that environment is, whether it's your home, or a café, or co-working space, or whatever it is that you've chosen to be most efficient in, when you're sitting in that environment, you can control and make it perfect for you to be able to focus. Personally, if I'm doing design work or visual work, I play music. It gets me in the groove. If I'm programming, I cannot have any music. Or if I do have music, it can't have any lyrics in it. That's a focus thing. I tend to like to work more in the dark, strangely. I love light and I live in a very sunny place, and a very sunny house, but I have noticed that I tend to get more in the zone in dark and often late at night, for me personally. CHRIS: I'm the same way, Todd. I have to fake my brain into thinking it's late at night by closing all the blinds and turning the lights off. And it actually helps productivity. TODD: Yeah, that's interesting. I used to have this problem at every company I worked at. Even, say, I shared a room with four other people. One office, and four. I would wanna have all the lights off and have a desk lamp so I could see. No one liked this. Having the fluorescent lights on ... I didn't take cyanide, but I do believe I shopped online for cyanide, just saying. (laughter) KEN: So this is in your browser history, now, forever, man. (laughter) There's a FBI file on you. TODD: Oh, there's been a FBI file. Come on. If you don't have a FBI file on you, what are you doing with your life? (laughter) JAMON: At the old ClearSight office, we had some fluorescent lights, and one by one they would burn out. Nobody would tell the maintenance guy because they just liked that they were burning out. (laughter) Eventually it got quite dark in there and everybody, they just wouldn't even turn on the light. TODD: I would like to make a confession. I have purposely broke some lights in offices. KEN: "True Confessions with Todd Werth." (laughter) TODD: You don't want true ones. No, that actually -- CHRIS: That's Season Two of the podcast. (laughter) TODD: That actually is very true. Sometimes you just have to ... KEN: Civil disobedience? TODD: Yes, I like the way you phrased that. Makes things more noble and less selfish. (laughter) KEN: Yeah, right. Guerilla productivity. JAMON: We have some other tools to talk about, too, right? TODD: Oh, yeah, we have other tools to talk about. JAMON: Should we talk about some of them, or ... TODD: Yes. KEN: But enough about Todd. (laughter) TODD: I'll be here all week. Do not eat the veal. JAMON: One of the tools that has been really helpful for us is Google Sheets. Obviously, that's the spreadsheet program in Google Apps. We ... We're having trouble ... Again, this is pre-merger. We're having trouble figuring out how to schedule people. It was just a real pain. Eventually, my Project Manager at the time, came up with a system that involved sticky notes on a board that were, across the top were weeks, and down the left side were the names of people. We could just put sticky notes. My wife went out and bought a whole bunch of different colored sticky notes. We'd put the same project as the same color across the board. You could, at a glance, see who was working on the same project. You could see how long it was going to be, as far as number of weeks, and every week we'd move 'em over to the left and add another column. That eventually migrated onto Google Sheets, 'cause, of course, that doesn't work so well when you're remote. The collaboration tools on Google Sheets are extremely good. It's very, very responsive to having multiple people on it. When we do our Friday scheduling meeting for the next week, and beyond, we'll all pull open the sheet, and we look at it, and we can all update it ... If we see something that's wrong, we can update it. We can change colors of the backgrounds. It's worked really well for, now, two and a half years. I think that's a remote tool that has actually been quite useful for us for quite some time. Not only does it give us forward-looking data, but it also gives us backward-looking. We can look at previous years and see what projects were we working on at the time, who was working on what, all the way throughout. It's been a very cool tool. We're just repurposing Google Sheets to use as a scheduling tool. TODD: Another tool we used to use ... Jeez, I can't remember what it's called. What was the [inaudible 00:43:17] tool we used to use? JAMON: Screenhero. KEN: Screenhero? TODD: Screenhero, yes, of course. I remember when Screenhero was ... It was eventually bought by Slack and is being integrated into Slack. We used to use that a lot, but truthfully, the tools in Zoom for screensharing stuff became superior and so I think almost everyone pairs with each other Zooming. TODD: Another tool we use is RealtimeBoard, which is a sticky board analogist tool; the designers -- KEN: Designers love it. TODD: The designers used it a lot, but we also use it in leadership and the developers, I think, are starting to look into it. It's great for brainstorming. It's a real-time tool, kinda like Google Docs or Google Sheets, where everyone can use it at the same time, and you see everyone using it. That's been really great. The designers use the heck out of InVision, which is a wonderful tool for showing designs, getting notes, and collaborating with clients, collaborating with the rest of the team, and that kind of stuff. Another tool we use for project management a lot is Trello. If you're not familiar, with it, it's a great project management tool. It's a Kanban board, if you're familiar with those. Not only do we use Trello, we also integrated ... Ava connects to Trello, produces reports from ... Ava connects to Airtable, which is another interesting mix between a database and a spreadsheet. We use Airtable and Trello. Those are some other tools we use. KEN: Something to mention, also, is that between Slack and Zoom we have some redundancy, because Zoom has rudimentary chat and Slack has video conferencing. It's not as good as Zoom's, but it's there, and we already have it. For example, when Slack is down, we have Zoom channels that we can all do basic communication in. That provides a certain amount of resiliency for the work environment, and that's very helpful. TODD: Yeah, it does go down every so often. It's funny because our company comes to a screeching halt when Slack goes down. KEN: Yeah, and that's a valid criticism, I think, of remote working. We do have the redundancy so that people can at least, basically, keep going. TODD: We all know now, if Slack's down ... It was, actually yesterday, coincidentally. JAMON: Yeah. TODD: If Slack is down, we go into Zoom chat. That took a while to get people ... It's funny 'cause we don't use email and stuff, and we use that so much. We could jump into a meeting. We've done that in the past, before we had this redundancy we would just jump into a meeting room and kinda like, "Hey, what do we do?" It was like the lights went out and everyone was confused at what to do. It's actually kind of amusing if you think about that. A bunch of virtual people wandering around in the dark wondering what to do. JAMON: We have a lot of redundancy of internet connection. Someone might be having internet issues, but not everybody is having internet issues. That's a pretty big deal. I remember the office internet would stop working and, even though we were all in the same place, yes we could collaborate, no we couldn't work 'cause we couldn't access -- KEN: Couldn't get to GitHub, can't get to... JAMON: ... Dropbox, whatever. Which, we do use GitHub, we use Dropbox. There's a little tool that I use that, I would say, about a third of the company also uses. We're on video calls a lot. When you're on a video call, sometimes it's nice to have a cough button: you hit a button and it mutes you for just a second, so you can cough or whatever. This one's called Shush. It's a Mac app. You can buy it for three bucks or something. It turns your function key into a mute button, so you just hit that button and it will mute you for a short amount of time. Or you can double-tap it and it turns into a push to talk button, which is nice when you're in a big group. TODD: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I don't use Shush, because I use a hardware version of that. I have quite a lot of audio equipment and video stuff. Pretty sure, in the remote podcast, we talked about the importance of having good equipment and spending a little money on good equipment. You cheap managers out there, stop doing that; you're horrible people. (laughter) JAMON: Also the background of your video call is really important. That was actually something Todd really emphasized when we first started. I will point out that he has the messiest background of all of us, right now. TODD: Well, to be clear, I have two cameras. One is a wide angle which I use for the team so I can move around and stuff; and I have a tighter angle I use for clients, in which case, what's behind me is very specifically chosen to be a background, and I keep that incredibly clean. JAMON: I just say that to tweak Todd, because he's the biggest champion of having a good background. TODD: Yes. Jamon's horizon, right now, is extremely tilted, and it's been driving me crazy the whole time, but I'll get over it. (laughter) KEN: I know. I can't unsee that. TODD: In my 46 years on this planet, I've learned not to mention that, even though I really, really want him to straighten his camera. KEN: It doesn't help, Jamon, you've still got a vertical line that is -- TODD: I'll tell you a funny story about backgrounds. Poor Ken. Ken had this very nice ... I don't know what it was. What was it, Ken? KEN: It's a bookcase, right, (laughter) but it's IKEA furniture, so it looks -- TODD: It's IKEA? KEN: It looks like a dresser. Yeah. TODD: This whole time it was IKEA? We thought it was important. We felt bad for making fun of it. 'Cause it looks like a dresser. It was right behind him, and it looked like Ken was sitting in bed (laughter) with his dresser behind him. KEN: Yes, reinforcing every stereotype about remote workers. (laughter) TODD: Right. We kept on bugging him, and he said, "It's a really nice bookcase." I didn't realize it was IKEA. KEN: I didn't say it was a really nice bookcase. I said it was a bookcase. (laughter) TODD: It looked like a dresser. JAMON: It really did, in fact. KEN: That's because it's IKEA furniture, so it's looks like that. TODD: I guess the point is, how things appear is more important than what they actually are. This is something a lot of people aren't familiar with. We have different people with different levels of quality of what they produce as far as visually or audio. I think the general takeaway is take some time. You are almost doing a mini-television broadcast, and you wanna be ... I wouldn't say the word "professional", because it's not stuffy, it's fine if you're wearing your tie-dye and your shorts, but you should make it a pleasant experience for the viewers. KEN: Yeah. You should look inviting, and it should look intentional. TODD: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: And kept. JAMON: We have some other tips for remote video meetings that, I think, are on a blog post that we created. Was that you, Ken, that wrote that post? KEN: Yeah. We could do a whole podcast, frankly, on how to have a good video meeting. JAMON: We can link to that in the show notes. KEN: We can link to that for now. TODD: That is a podcast I wanna do. I do wanna point out to the audience who can't see us now, we're recording this for your listening pleasure, and I put pleasure in quotation marks 'cause I don't wanna oversell it. But, we are actually on Zoom, so we can see each other. Jamon, thankfully moved his camera so we can't see the horizon any more, which is crooked, but right over his left shoulder is a door-line that's incredibly crooked. I appreciate the effort, Jamon, but come on. Have some dignity. JAMON: I will point out that I'm moving out of this rental in a week because I had a house fire, Todd. (laughter) TODD: Oh, jeez. You can't pull a house fire out every time there's a criticism. KEN: The only thing in my background is my Harvard diploma (laughter) because it's all that anyone cares about. JAMON: Yes, exactly. Over my shoulder, I'm thinking about putting my not-Harvard diploma. KEN: "Narvard". JAMON: It'll just say, "Not Harvard." TODD: Sometimes we just invite Ken's Harvard diploma, instead of Ken, to meetings. (laughter) KEN: Yeah, I just put it in frame and then I walk out. (laughter) I'm like, "I'm just the janitor." CHRIS: I do have one final question, as we bring this episode to a close: Is there any tool that you use outside of remote work or in your daily life that you wish existed as a remote tool. KEN: Blow torch. (laughter) CHRIS: Elon's got that for ya. TODD: Not a tool, completely, but here's something ... I have ideas for tools that'd be cool in the future. We have the concept of "kitchen table". This is a real quick story; please, bear with me. The three of us ... I don't know if Ken was, but there was multiple of us of the company who were speaking at a conference in Paris. We rented a large Airbnb apartment in Paris, and a bunch of us were staying there. It had a very large kitchen table. When we weren't doing stuff individually, we'd all sit around the kitchen table, and we'd work together. We would just sit there, like you would at a library in a university or something like that, and work. We wanted to recreate that in ... virtually. The simple solution is we dedicated one of our Zoom rooms, the "Kitchen", to the "kitchen table" and you can't use that for anything else. If you just wanna be around people, but you're working, you're not really saying anything, as if you're in a library ... I guess we should do the library, but whatever ... you'd go in the kitchen table and just be around people. Sometimes people say things and have little conversations, like you would in an office, but typically you're just sitting there working together. That's cool. It's missing a few features which I'd love to see. For one is, if you're not ... Say there was a group of people working in an open office, and they're in the center and you're on the perimeter of the office. You see them working together there, the "kitchen table", now we have that, with our tool, we can see who's in the "kitchen table" and they're there. Great. But you can also, even if you're far away and they're dim enough ... not dim, but the volume's low enough that it's not disturbing, you can still hear them, and sometimes you'll pick up on little words that may interest you. They'll mention a project you're on, or they'll mention a personal interest that you're interested in or whatever, and you can choose then to go walk over and join them, because of that kind of low-noise but informational thing you're getting by being in the perimeter. I would love to somehow integrate that into our tool, where you could have a low-murmur of people in the background of the meetings that you're not in, and listen for things that might be interesting, something like that. KEN: I don't really know how to think about that question. TODD: I find it very interesting that none of us can really come up with a tool that we wish we had. That's a fantastic answer. KEN: I mean ... JAMON: I think there's probably tools that, eventually, we'll get that will be like, "How did we live without this?" But I don't ... I can't think of one. KEN: I can imagine in the future, basically a VR setup. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes. KEN: If VR gets to the point where it feels natural; it's comfortable to wear the equipment, it's not a burden just to have the stuff on your head, and the resolution is to the point where you could have a virtual monitor in space, and you can have that feeling of actually being next to people. Then you could, in theory, have the best of both worlds, where you can drop out and leave the space if you want to. You can also be in the space and be available for that. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: I think that would be pretty nice, but ... JAMON: There is a tool out there that's ... I think they're, maybe, in beta right now. It's called Bigscreen VR, it's by a guy that I know, Darshan Shankar, who's on Twitter. I met him on Twitter. He's doing this Bigscreen VR system. It's very much what you described, Ken. Right now, it's only on Windows, and of course the VR headsets are still evolving. But apparently the new Oculus Go or Oculus Now, or something, is apparently quite good -- KEN: Yeah, they're getting better. JAMON: It's also likely, they said that within the next year, that it'll come to Mac 'cause they're working on it. KEN: I think another threshold, though, is the quote-unquote "retina" threshold, to where the resolution of the headsets is such that you can't, in terms of resolution, anyway, you can't tell the difference between that and something that you're looking at. JAMON: Yep. KEN: You could actually make a projected display without any compromise. JAMON: Yes. TODD: I agree, in the future that's gonna be wonderful. I do have some current ideas on how to add spacial stuff to our tools to give us proximity information of each other, virtually. Kind of what you would get if you were in a VR situation, but without having VR. Anyways, there's some interesting things there. KEN: Yeah, we've talked about making an ambient audio device, something like that, that can just sit there and ... Kind of like "kitchen table", but without the video. There's a bunch of things we've talked about, but not of them are things that exist today. They're just things that we've thought about creating or ... yeah.

In this episode of Building Infinite Red, we are talking about clients and some of the assumptions that often need to be challenged when creating software. Throughout the episode, Todd, Ken, and Jamon touch on the importance of knowing who your audience is, what they value, and how your ideas will meet their needs. Show Links Dropzones App Release by Mark Rickert A Dark Room by Amir Rajan Uncommon Sense by Derek Sivers Episode Transcript CHRIS MARTIN: Today we are talking about clients. It's an important topic and one that pretty much every business owner inevitably gets asked a variety of questions. The question that we could start with is: what's your favorite moment in working with clients? JAMON HOLMGREN: You would think it would be when you launch their app or their site, or something like that, but I often find that actually to be a little bit anti-climactic 'cause there's so much going on. There's usually already plans in place for a version 1.1. It's not usually like everybody gather around the big green button and then the founder pushes the button, and it goes live. Although a little side note, Mark Rickert, who is one of our developers has released an app to the app store while in free fall during a skydive. That is true. We can link to it and there's a YouTube video of it. But that's not usually how it works. KEN MILLER: It wasn't a client app I don't think. I think it was one of his apps, but still. JAMON: That was a pretty cool way to do it. But no, you would think that would be the most exciting time. The exciting time is usually during design, for me, because I feel like you start getting a lot of enthusiasm, the energy. A lot of those things start coming out during the design process. And when we get a chance to use our design process—some clients will come to us with something already designed, others will come to us who need design. When they're going through the design process, it's really exciting, you can see a lot of the possibilities. The development side of things is also fun, but a little slower moving. TODD: I agree with Jamon on the design side. Once we get through the product development and start getting into design, probably past the wireframing and into some more concrete examples, it's pretty fun to see the client get really excited. Especially if it's a situation where they show people who are interested in their product, or their stakeholders and investors, or whomever, and they had a good reaction to it. I would add the second most fun time with clients is once there is a beta or an alpha available for their beta testers. And again, they send it to them and they use words like "blown away," or something like, that's awesome. I'm not gonna lie and say, that's always what happens, but those two times I think are the most fun to me. CHRIS: One of the things that Jamon wrote in Slack that was interesting is: what are some common assumptions that clients bring to the process that have to be corrected? TODD: I don't know if there's anything that's common or consistent across clients. There are some things that come up. I would say, depending on the experience level of the client with software product development, we may have a little to a lot of teaching to do. And that's one of the things we like to do is teach. I find it particularly fun when our start-up clients are newer, they're not on their series B or something. Because there is a lot of moments that you can help them and give them kind of golden information. Both from our personal experience running start-ups, but also we work with a lot of start-ups. So we've been through this before. There are some misconceptions about software. Not necessarily from our clients, but from people who weren't a good fit for us. For example, it's very common in the world at large, to believe software is orders of magnitude cheaper than it really is. People also get very used to the quality that they see in apps like Facebook or Gmail, or these kind of things. And they think they can spend less than a car to get those things. When you're in our industry of course, that doesn't seem super logical, but from their perspective it makes sense. An app costs nothing, or $1.99. JAMON: Right. TODD: Or $4.99, so of course something like that seems cheap. What they don't know, of course, is Facebook has tens of thousands of employees. JAMON: Yeah. TODD: And even a smaller app, let's not chose Facebook, which is huge. But like Instagram, for example. And not what it is now, but what it originally was, probably cost half a million to make. JAMON: Yeah, I think I saw that they put $250,000 into their MVP originally. And it's a very simple app when you look at it, compared to a lot of apps out there. I think that's definitely something that, as Todd said, it's not necessarily the clients who end up being good fits for us. But usually we get calls from everybody, all kinds of people. KEN: Well, even those prices are reflective of just how far software has come in terms of developer productivity. JAMON: Right. KEN: Because half a million dollars doesn't even get you a house in the Bay area. And the people building your house, most of them are being paid 20, 30, 40 dollars an hour and not $200 an hour, or $100 an hour. The Bay area is full of software engineers being paid $150,000 a year and up, many that are way higher than that. And you can still build software for half a million dollars, which is actually is pretty impressive when you think about that in terms of it's inputs. JAMON: Another interesting thing that the clients don't necessarily realize when they come to us is the impact that the design process can have on their product. Usually you're thinking of design as making it look pretty, making it look nice. But there's a whole lot more that goes into that. The visual design aspect of design is usually, maybe, the last 30%, something like that. It's not the bulk of the design work. But there's a lot of value that can be added there. You can avoid expensive mistakes during design by spending the time upfront to really learn as much as you can about your core customers and the features that are necessary. Because software is expensive, so you wanna build as little of it as possible until you really know the direction that you need to go. TODD: Yeah, and I wanna be clear. You can make, for instance, a mobile app for $100,000 to $200,000. It's not a half a million. But something that's larger could be millions as well. Just wanna make that note on that price there. JAMON: I think another misconception that some clients might have when they come into it, is they don't understand necessarily all of the breadth of things that need to happen to make an app. We've had people come to us and want to build an app, but they don't necessarily realize that they also need a server and they need some sort of cloud connectivity. They might need offline support. They might need access to certain APIs for GPS or whatever. And beyond that, how to get through the app store. And how to get through Google Play. What is a compelling app store listing? What does that look like? You know, what screenshots are important? And one of the most successful apps that I've ever been involved with, which is called A Dark Room by my friend Amir Rajan, he actually only has one screenshot on the app store, and it's a very uninspiring one. But he has millions of downloads. It's just, he hit it right on the head. TODD: You know which store is incredibly hard to get through? IKEA. (laughter) Just saying. KEN: It's true. TODD: We've mentioned before in this podcast, but it's worth repeating, design is not how things look. Design is how things work. And through the very first part of our design process is product discovery. And that's even before how things work. That's what product is you want to make at all. Since we work with a lot of start-ups, we also sometimes coach them, if they need it on coming up with a customer acquisition plan and a revenue plan, which their investors, prospective investors that they pitch to, will definitely ask them about, having pitched to them myself. So design is very important and it's also one of the most difficult things that we mentioned in a previous podcast was getting from zero to one. Product discovery and design really help our clients get from zero to one. JAMON: And they're starting a business, you know, it's not just building an app. They're starting a business, or they're continuing a business that they already have. And there's a lot that goes into building a business for sure. I think that's one of the things that, maybe some friends of mine who might message me and say, "hey Jamon, I've got this app idea, it's a billion dollar idea." (laughter) "Promise not to go off and rip me off. I wanna tell you it." And it's fine, you know, the ideas are a very necessary part of this, they're a spark. They're really important. But the execution side of things involves designing and building the app, which we can do. We're really great at it, we've done it a lot of times. But also, the business side of things. There's no one right answer to how to build a business. You can see that with many different business models. And that's the tough part. Now, it can be very rewarding though, the whole journey and it's been really fun to watch our clients build business models that are sustainable and come back as they grow, as they succeed, they find new opportunities and they come back to us and say, "hey Infinite Red, we need some new features. We need a new app. We need to rebuild the app for maybe a different purpose." Those things are very fun to see. TODD: Ken, you had a great thing about ideas, when people have an idea for a business. You've talked about a lot and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. KEN: Oh, and how they're not usually worth the paper that they're written on. (laughter) TODD: Yes. KEN: Where this came from was that, like back in the days of the dotcom boom, when everybody and their brother had some amazing idea. I would be at a social dinner with somebody and they would be like, they'd whip out an NDA and be like, I wanna talk to you about this idea I have and I need you to sign this NDA. And I'm like, "No. I'm not gonna sign your NDA." Ideas, per se, are not worth very much. Right? A high level idea, per se, is not worth very much. Like my idea's like, "hey, I have an amazing idea. What if you took a car, then you made it fly?" Right? And people will be like, "that's an amazing idea." Now, how are you actually gonna do that? And so it's kinda like, just because I have this amazing idea, "oh what if you made cars fly," doesn't mean that when somebody goes and actually makes cars fly that I have any right to that idea. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: Right? Because the high level idea by itself, although cool, doesn't actually get you there. It's the millions and millions of other good ideas that follow that, that really make something work. Jamon, do you wanna tell the dating with music, I could tell you wanna tell the dating with music story. JAMON: That's exactly what I was gonna interject. So Derek Sivers, who founded CD Baby, he has a YouTube video, it's very short. We can link to it in the show notes. Essentially it's talking about ideas versus execution. And the general premise is sort of this, that he met with a friend of a friend, and they were having lunch. And this guy had this billion dollar idea. And he says, okay, what's this great idea that you have? And the guy kind of leans over, very intense, and says, dating with music. (laughter) And Derek's like, is there anything else? (laughter) Is this ... He's like, no, dating with music dude. And it was ... he's like, okay, this idea is worth maybe the price of a lunch. Right? Like, the execution of it is the multiplier, you know, you can have a multiplier ... a great idea, not execute it at all, is really not worth much. A bad idea, executed really well is also not worth all that much. But a really good idea executed really well, is a multiplier that becomes your billion dollar idea. I don't think it necessarily tells the whole story, you know, that particular anecdote because there's also timing and other things like that. KEN: Well and that idea isn't even a multiplier idea. That's like a hint at a maybe multiplier idea. Right? JAMON: Yes. TODD: He was just being nice to the guy. KEN: He was being nice, right. So it's kind of like, when I say there's a chain of ideas, the first germ of the idea is the kind of idea that someone might get when high. Kind of like, "hey man, what if it was like dating, but with music. Yeah." (laughter) Right? That's exactly a high person's idea. I would almost bet money that that was a high idea. But anyway. The next thing is like, oh well you get people to put in their music that they like and we match people up. That's starting to be an actual idea. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Right? That's starting to be like, what's the actual hook. And even that, there's still, like well how does it work? What's the UX? What's the viral engine around that? JAMON: Yeah. KEN: It's not just programming. Like, we're all programmers historically, so we're gonna tend to see all of the stuff that's gonna go behind that. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: Really, it's the product development of design that, or really, what's important. And a lot of the details that matter, are sometimes the ones that are not obviously to your competitors. TODD: Almost always. KEN: Almost always. So this idea that your super secret idea is gonna make everything work is, frankly, BS. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: You have to keep having those good ideas over and over and over again. Every techy who's been in Silicon Valley, or a similar environment, and around the sorts of people who have these sorts of ideas, every single one has a story of being approached by somebody who's saying, "hey I've got this great idea. I'm gonna get you in on the ground floor with it. But I just need somebody to make it." JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: And we'll split it 50/50. Young techies fall for this. Very quickly you learn, uh, no. You'd better have a lot more than that for that to be a 50/50 bargain. TODD: I'm not even joking when I say that in San Francisco at least 50% of your Uber drivers will pitch an idea to you on your ride. JAMON: We got pitched in an Uber, us three. We were in an Uber not that long ago and we got pitched on an idea. And I think that it's kind of interesting because the apps that do tend to be more successful that we're involved with, they're often not big ideas. They're good ideas, they're not like huge ideas. They're existing companies that have a need that their customer base has kind of expressed, they can see it's fairly obvious. And they come to us and they say, hey we need really good execution. And that's what we're good at. They've identified the need. Have a lot of the infrastructure already in place. They already know how they're gonna monetize it. They already know how it's gonna impact their business. They just need a really great app. And that's where we really plug in. Now it has been kind of interesting to watch start-ups where they don't have that in place and how they develop that. And where they go with that. It's much more risky. A lot of them do fail. And one of the things that I've heard from some of those clients sometimes is, "Jamon, why aren't you so excited about my idea?" Now I'm not trying not to come across excited, I am excited about their idea. It's just that I've seen so many of these where there's certain other parts of the business that they lack. From my standpoint, if I was in the business of picking winners and losers, I'd probably be doing my own start-up, right? But, honestly, there's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of variables. And not all of them are in your control. So I think it's been really cool to see the ones that do succeed. See how they piece it all together. I have a lot of respect for them, it's a difficult thing, but it's very rewarding. And then, of course, the companies that come in, like, we just started a project recently, this week actually I think. And they are an established company, they have a very big user base. A lot of people have heard of them, but they need a much better app. And they need a better app experience. And that's really where you see the clients that really shine. KEN: There may be a few people listening who are kind of mentally going like, "hmm, is that me?" What I would say is, if you think it's you, it might be. (laughter) If you wanna know, like I wanna do this thing. And I don't program and I'm not a designer, like, I don't know how to make these things and I don't really wanna be that person. If the idea isn't what's important, then what is important? What do I bring to the table that is gonna help me succeed and help a company like Infinite Red, or even just an individual programmer who I happen to find? What am I bringing to the table that will help beyond the big idea? And there's really two things. And they're big ones. And you need at least one. And preferably two. And one is, access to capital. Not just building this, not just paying us to build this. But all the marketing and everything else. Right? You're gonna need money. And you're not gonna want to be in a position where when you run out, it just dies. You need to have a plan for that. That's number one. Number two, is access to audience. If you have one of those, in good form, then you can usually get the other one. Having both is ideal. But those are the two things, those are the things that the makers that you're coming to work with, don't necessarily have. And so, if you wanna know what you can be busting your hump to be doing right now, it's getting those things. And then, if you have those and you come to somebody with your big idea and you want them to turn it into something real, you actually have something to offer. JAMON: One of the things that I think Ken and Todd bring to this conversation that I don't necessarily bring to the conversation is I haven't been on the other side. I've been a consultant for a very long time, so I see our side of it. But both Ken and Todd have worked for start-ups, probably who have used consultants. And seen the ones that have succeeded. Ken you worked at Yammer and there was an acquisition that Microsoft made there. And so it was a successful exit. And then of course there are some other start-ups that you and Todd have worked at that failed. That's something that I, maybe, don't necessarily bring that perspective to. But the consultant's side of it for sure, I see all kinds. I see all kinds of start-ups that rise and fall. TODD: I hope no one takes this as a reason not to try, for sure. I would recommend to focus on your customer acquisition strategy and your revenue strategy. You have to remember Zappos when it came out, and if you're not familiar with Zappos, it was a large company and eventually hired by Amazon, and they sell shoes. KEN: Acquired, not hired. TODD: Sorry, acquired, not hired. They sell shoes, which is probably the second oldest profession in the world. (laughter) So, obviously not a new idea. Hey, I have an idea, I'm gonna sell shoes. And you're like, horse shoes? Space shoes? No, shoes, like you put on your feet. But they had some innovation ideas inside there. Mainly extreme customer sport, and the big one was, buy five pair of shoes, send back four. Good ideas, but once again, there's a series of little ideas, like how do we allow them to buy five pairs of shoes and send back four and still make money? There's a hundred and fifty ideas in there, maybe a thousand ideas in there that matter. So it's hard to be an A-list actor, right? But if no one tried, we'd have none. So you can succeed. We get a lot of clients and sometimes their very obvious that they'll see just because they have a lot of experience or they just really understand. But we have people who don't know what they don't know. And don't know what they know yet, and that's fine too. Those people may succeed also. KEN: The number one problem that we see is under capitalization. Over capitalization can be a problem too, incidentally. If you raise too much money all at once then it can lead you to be too profligate. I've definitely seen that at start-ups. JAMON: It's way harder to say no. KEN: Yeah, that's a problem with venture capital backed companies that have just seen a bunch of interest all at once and then they have issues with that. But, under capitalization is definitely a much bigger problem because it means that every single decision you make, you're terrified. TODD: If your problem is over capitalization, please send an email to hello@infinite.red. KEN: We can help you with that problem. TODD: Today's episode is brought to you by, too much money. KEN: I'm actually being serious. (laughter) I mean, we're joking. But I'm also serious. Like, we actually know how to make your money go farther. JAMON: Yeah, and I agree with that. And we can also help with saying no. I think that that's actually one of the things that's probably surprising about working with us, is often we are pushing for not adding features. TODD: This is sounding like a commercial this time. KEN: Yeah, I'm sorry, but we're not the only ones. I'm just saying that experienced people will tell you no. And you need that if you've got a lot of money. JAMON: I think that's an important port, you look at some consultants and their not necessarily pulling in that direction, but we want people to succeed 'cause obviously that looks good on a portfolio. It's a benefit to us. One of the things we've always said, and we tell customers this, if we finish your project early, and don't spend all of your money, I'm sure you're gonna come up with more ideas. You know? It's not like we're gonna miss out. It's never been the case. If we finish a project early, the founders aren't just pocketing the rest of the money and going home. What they're gonna do is say, what about 1.1, let's get on the schedule. Let's move. There's always something else. 'Cause during the process of building an app you learn so much. And there's always more ideas. KEN: I've never seen a software project where at the end people were like, phew, I'm sure glad that everything that we could possibly think of was in that. (laughter) Like, that has never ever, ever, happened. TODD: You never know. There was that app where you just said "Yo" to people. Yo. JAMON: Yeah, didn't they raise a whole bunch of money to add more stuff? KEN: And what happened to that app? TODD: I don't wanna rant about VC. Some VC's ... not all. Some are great. Another thing, going back to your original question Chris, which we've been talking a lot about, is, common things that customers or clients may not understand. Another one is just the pure complexity of software. It's hard to understand because it's not in the real world. You can't hold it. In your house, if you ever owned a house and had work done on the house, you'll know that doing something in your living room is relatively cheap. Doing something in your bathroom is extremely expensive. Doing something in your kitchen is extremely expensive. The reason why a tiny room like the bathroom is so much more expensive than a huge room, say like, your living room. Is because the bathroom has tons of different contraptions in it. Lots of different moving parts. Lots of different things can go wrong, from your sinks to your plumbing, fans, lighting, that kind of stuff. So the number of pieces matters a lot to cost. Because software is virtual and because we can fairly easily throw on pieces. Software tends to be an order of magnitude, or more, complex than any other physical machine. A bathroom, even a car engine, is less complex than software is. KEN: It's compensated for somewhat by the fact that our tools are also more powerful. TODD: Yes. KEN: I mean, there's countervailing things there, but your point about the complexity is right. If you run out of lot when you're building a house, then your contractor says, hey we can't build there, your lot ends there. There's no such constraints for software and that makes it easy for things to get kind of hairy. TODD: If you completely disregard our part in the complexity, meaning we have to build all the moving pieces and test them and make sure that they coordinate together. Even disregarding that, sometimes people are shocked at how much they have to think about, and they're not building it all. If you just said, I wanna login screen, for example. Every app has that. That's simple. Right? The number of questions that you could be asked by someone like us, to someone who's less experienced will be shocking. And they won't have the answers to it. And each one could be thought of. Now of course we always give people common things that they should do, or whatever. But if you were to really think through the whole thing, just that one screen is way more complex than anyone imagines. JAMON: Recognizing our experience, the fact that we've done hundreds of apps and encountered so many different scenarios, I think is important for working with a company like ours. I think back, in prior years, there have been some projects that haven't gone as well. And one of the common traits of those projects is that the person I'm working with, they feel like they kind of know it all, because they do have a pretty big picture of it, and they want to put their vision down into software. It often comes with blind spots of, what are you missing here? So having a high degree of trust and communication between the two parties is one of the hallmarks of a successful project. We certainly respect what the founders bring because they have the vision, a lot of the times they have a much closer relationship with their potential users than we do. KEN: Absolutely. JAMON: We're not trying to impose our view of what that might be. But we can often bring things, like Todd was saying about the login screen. Like, you didn't think of this aspect like what happens if you forget your password, or if you don't have access to your email or something. TODD: Or you're on a plane, or Facebook changed the rules and half the users can't login. That kind of stuff. JAMON: Exactly. TODD: Another thing too, is we sometimes experience this when we get designs outside of our company. Now, a lot of designers are great, but they're never have been trained in, or have experience in software design. Our designers are classically trained designers. They can do all the normal things people think of designs, but they chose to specialize in software and website design. So, sometimes when we get an outside design, we never used to do this, but we kind of now require it. The bare minimum is we'll do a half week of design review. And we did one recently. And from a cursory look at their design, it looked like they had everything. Looked good, seemed to make sense. The design looked fine. But after a half week of a couple of our designers reviewing it, they went through in great detail and produced a map of the whole app and how everything interacts with each other. And the flows and the different actors, different type of users. That kind of stuff. JAMON: There were dozens of screens, right Todd? Like dozens. TODD: There were a lot of screens, and probably half of them weren't in the original design at all. JAMON: It was striking 'cause you could see the outline of the screen, it was empty and there's a title of whatever that screen was supposed to be. TODD: So that's an example of, even at the design part, where you have to factor in all these different scenarios that you may not have thought about. And how the user would experience it if those scenarios happen. And also make a business decision whether or not you're gonna address some of those scenarios. Sometimes you don't because it's a very small minority of your users, edge case as we call it. And it's just not worth ... the ROI and something like that would be poor. So that's something too, where it's just half the app is really missing. JAMON: And that's where, I think having that high degree of trust is really important because then our spidery senses are saying, hey, there's something missing here. Let's spend the time up front, I know you wanna get started right now, but let's spend the time up front to map this out and see if everything is here. CHRIS: I'm actually curious when someone comes to you with an idea, how do you know when to start challenging the idea? And when to write the idea off? KEN: I wouldn't say that there's very many ideas that we would write off. Because lord knows if we knew which ideas were going to succeed in this business, we would be billionaires already. And frankly, the people who are billionaires don't even necessarily know. There is a healthy degree of luck in terms of like, who ends up on which gravy train. But, that said, there's always gonna be a variety of factors that go into whether something is successful. Some of them are universal. And some of them are highly specific. And it's a little bit of a judgment call on which is which, however. We think that things like software quality and good UX, these sorts of things, are basically universal. Like that humans are humans. In those regards, we are going to push for what we think is right. When it comes to the intimate understanding of the customer, the end customer, right, the people that these start-ups are trying to attract. That's where we defer to them. We're always looking for clients who clearly have that intimate understanding of their customer. And this sort of leads into another point, which is that, someone on their team, whether it's the founder, if they're the only ones. Or someone on their team, had better really have that intimate knowledge. And they're gonna have a full time job working with us. Basically. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Right? And that's also something that I think people have not understood. It's kinda like, hey, here you go make the software and I will dip in periodically. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Uh-uh (negative). No. Yeah, you gotta be really committed because you're the one who really understands that like, so we're gonna be working with you to go after this. And we need you, obviously. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Not just to write the checks, but also to tell us who this person is and what they're really gonna need. And sometimes our idea of a universal solution won't work for something specific. But that tension is really important. We're always fighting for those sort of universal values, but we're also listening to hear what specific values are and the ways that they might override universal value. TODD: Yeah, and there's not one right answer and one right design to solve any particular problem. I would pile on with Ken, the people coming to us, the founders or the department heads or whomever they are, coming to us. They really wanna understand the end user and be able to articulate that to us. And over time we learn them too. And some industries have very strong cultures that you have to be within, and if you don't speak that cultural language it instantly turns off those people. It's not just culture, but for example, we did a project for a company called PRO-TREAD, which does training for truckers. I don't know if they're the largest, but if they're not, they're probably closest to the largest in the country. And this traditionally was done if you had a trucking company, you would set up computers in the corner and then when that driver was by their home base, they would sit at that boring computer and do the forced training that they're required to do by law. Not fun. No one wants to do it. The people at the company don't wanna pay for it. Truck drivers don't wanna do it. Of course it does increase safety and stuff, so it's important to do, but it's just human nature not wanna do something that's, you know. JAMON: And I believe, Todd, that PRO-TREAD was one of the first to even computerize it. Before that is was paper tests and in classrooms. So they were kind of moving that direction already. Now this was another iteration of their platform. TODD: Correct. And this is a great example of an idea because it's simple, everyone understands it and it's obvious. Truck drivers spend a lot of time in the sleeper cabs of their trucks. At truck stops and whatnot on the side of the road and stuff. So, obviously making the training mobile was important because the training materials being on a tablet or an iPad was important. Making it not so painful for the person, so that it's not ... If you're the manager telling the drivers that they have to take this testing, getting 50% less push back because it's not as painful is a big deal to you. And also, they do need to not just get through the training material, they do need to understand it and internalize it. It actually does help, even though no one wants to do it. So the basic requirements was, it has to be mobile, it has to work inside of a sleeper cab on the side of I-80. And it still needs to maintain their already high level of guaranteeing that people actually pick up the information, and they had a variety of ways to make sure that happened. And also, be more engaging and not as painful. That was the directive to our designers. JAMON: I believe that when they first came to us they sort of envisioned the app looking basically like their web version and no real changes other than that. And we talked to them, this was a situation where we had a great rapport with the owner of PRO-TREAD and we're able to talk with him and explain where design could really add a lot of value to a touch interface. TODD: Yeah, so we actually did re-design it, not just to make it more mobile appropriate, let's say. But to really push those goals they had. Now, designers and us and them now understood the goals. I just stated them. Fairly straight forward, the goals. However, we can take those goals and we can design to those goals for sure, but we probably don't know truck drivers as well as our client PRO-TREAD does. So them having been in this industry for a very long time, really understood the nuances that would make meeting these goals through design possible. Having them really understand their users, having us really understand how to solve problems. Us having the problems be both simple, straightforward and well defined, that was a successful project and although maybe not as exciting as Uber for gerbils. Because gerbils have to get around too, and no one likes to walk. JAMON: Well gerbils do, actually, don't they? TODD: They kind of do, yeah. And they like tubes. So maybe be like Elon Musk's ... JAMON: Hyper loop. TODD: The hyper loop for gerbils. JAMON: For gerbils. TODD: Yeah, so that's a very exciting, so if we had a client came and said we want a hyper loop for gerbils and we respond, "of course. Who doesn't?" But it's just funny, but teaching truck drivers important lessons is more fulfilling when you know, when it rolls out, there's gonna be tons of men and women out there on the road having a slightly less painful day because of something worked on. And probably saving some lives. It's not as sexy, but it is very satisfying in my opinion. JAMON: Yeah, I totally agree. I actually have five uncles who are truck drivers. Very strong truck driving kind of familial influence. And maybe one or two of them might actually listen to my podcast here. So, hi uncles. (laughter) But what I think is kind of cool about this is I do know truck drivers. I didn't get a chance to work on that project myself, but there's totally a personal connection there. I understand what they go through and the types of things that they care about. TODD: I only have one brother and he owns a shipping company and he has lots of truck drivers, so I'm going to trump your four uncles. (laughter) JAMON: Let's have them fight. They're all six foot four. TODD: Although in the past he did drive, so, but anyways. Yeah. Ken, how about you buddy? JAMON: Any truck drivers there at Harvard? TODD: Aww, pick on the Harvard kid. KEN: No, I don't know any truck drivers. (laughter) You got me. TODD: Today, brought to you buy Captain Obvious. You can cut that, that was a bad joke.

Chris: Yeah, yeah we're rolling. Yeah? Kat: Is there enough light? Okay, no that was already on. I think I'm becoming addicted to light. Chris: You've got it down. All right. Kat: Okay, we're live already. Chris: Yeah ... what? Kat: What, mother fucker- I get ... Chris: You're gonna have to redo it. Kat: I can't redo it. I'd have to- Chris: [crosstalk 00:00:30] Oh, no. No, that one's done. Yeah that's- Kat: This is live. We're already live. What you're saying is being heard. What I'm saying is being heard. Chris: That is so funny. Kat: I think people have heard it before. What's up? Chris: Yes, it's working. Kat: We are technological geniuses. Chris: We just did have it take off a certain [crosstalk 00:00:50]. Kat: We've made ... They didn't do much. Hey, I managed to get the internet working for a second and a half. Chris: Oh my God. Kat: Can we kick this off by telling people the quotes of the day, Chris? Chris: All right we can share this. Yeah, all right. Kat: So should I tell them one from the other day or is it gonna off our buyers? Chris: No, no, no, we share. We're truly authentic [crosstalk 00:01:08] Kat: We're here for authenticity. We are literally about to fu- ... We are about to launch. Am I allowed to swear? Chris: No. Kat: No? Chris: No swearing. Kat: Okay, sorry. We are literally about to launch our supplement. We get to that in a moment but first I'd like to tell you three very informative and important quotes that I've been noting down. Chris just ... This is a man who, when you meet him or you see him, even online, you'll see that he is one of the most genuine good guys in the world. Kat: He is the nicest man in the world. He's one of my closest friends. I love him to death, he is the nicest, sweetest, person. Would never hurt anything and yet he just comes out and then he seems very like ... Wow, that was quite rude. Chris: Sorry, that is true. Kat: So the other day we're like "What should we call our livestream for our prelaunch live stream which shoots on Friday?" And I'm like thinking of creative titles cause I'm awesome at that and he's like, "Can we just call it-" Chris: Headlines are key. Kat: "This is why you're fat and we're not." And I'm like, "Wow." Chris: Because within context as well, we were talking about ... Kat: Please explain. [crosstalk 00:02:12] Chris: How we used to do diets before we used to be massive carbophobes and then over lunch we were talking about how we're just been loving eating carbs but doing it the right way. And how much better in shape we are now. And it's just- Kat: Well this leads me into the next quote which i that well ... Chris: Yeah, nicely done. Kat: Which is that we set up the lighting, and I'm like "Damn, that lighting's good." And Chris goes "Damn, it's good." And he goes, "Or is it just cause we look so good?" I'm just like "Wow, just be matter-of-fact about it." Oh, do you need to share that to your page? Do you need to share that to your personal page? Chris: Yeah. I can, with you. Kat: Okay, so we are ... oh and what was the third quote? Chris: What was the third one? Kat: Damn it, there was another really good one from just a second ago. So there was the one about "This is why you're fat and we're not." There was "Is this lighting really good or it just cause we look really good?" And then there was another one that just happened just then and it was so funny. I nearly wrote it down and then I was like "No, there's no way I would forget that." It will come back to us divinely. Chris: Not sure. Kat: Welcome, welcome, welcome to the show. Chris: We've got some big news. Kat: We have huge news, I think we're not even allowing ourselves to be ... Chris: So exciting. Kat: As excited as we are. I know I think we're not letting ourselves be as excited as we really could or should be about this. I think we're excited and we're like this is a big deal, and I'm just like "No, but do you understand what a big deal it is?" Chris: This is a big deal. This is a really big deal. Kat: Two plus years in the making? Chris: It's even longer. Kat: I think it's three years [crosstalk 00:03:49] ... Chris: We can put this dick ends downs. Kat: I think it's like pre ... dick- really? We started to formulate this before time began in our souls. Chris: Yeah, exactly. Kat: That's how good we are. I got to the quote book, the intelligence was coming through divinely from generations before but in a physical human sense, maybe three years. Chris: [00:04:07] Particularly there's star dust in there. Kat: Well it's actually ... Yes. And gold dust. You get a little piece of my soul. That's some powerful stuff. Look what I've created. Chris: That's really funny. Don't worry about the lighting. We're good. Kat: Yeah, we're good. We're good with the lighting. So we might be a little bit excited. We might be coming across as a little bit extra hysterical than normal, but it is such a huge deal. And welcome, welcome, welcome to everybody. I'm so happy and grateful that you're here with us. Kat: Hello over on our business page and hello on our personal page, and hello wherever else you are. I am either going to talk excitedly in a hilarious or just randomly crazy way for now, or I'm going to just stop and let Chris present with deep profound wisdom. Chris: I'll chime in as well. Oh, always. Kat: All the things. But let's just quickly say ... Okay, Lisa just summed up the whole entire situation. Chris: Wee. Kat: He says, "Wee." That's exactly right. We have an amazing founding deal. Chris: Founding special. Kat: But we're not going to tell you about that now, because we've got too many other exciting things to say. Chris: Yeah, we've got some more important news. Kat: Okay, I'm done. Chris: Okay. Kat: For now. Chris: Well we haven't decided on everything at this moment. So we need to do this together. So this is actually like ... Kat: Co-creation. Chris: Exactly. We all need to come together right now and actually sort this out. Kat: Yeah. So just stop what you're doing, put it down. Chris: Because this is literally the only time you are ever going to get this special at this product, this price, ever. Kat: Ever. Obviously if you've been following Kat for any time and even myself, you'll know that we want to celebrate. Actually, you know what's really interesting? This little bit random, I actually went through the ... See, Kat you're looking gorgeous. Chris: Yeah, I'm all right as well. Kat: No, I think that's definitely for you, sorry. Not me. Oh, thank you. I'm going to take that. I'm taking it from here. Thanks, Lonny. Chris: Kat, how high can you go. Random segue, we actually just reviewed the ... With my other coaching business, reviewed what the key parts of what the most accessible coaches are doing right now. What was ... What have they done? There was two things that was actually really interesting. Chris: One was how long they've been in the programme and why they're succeeding. So it's a common factor, and two, was they always jumped on the programme as fast as possible. Kat: Of course. Fast action takers. Chris: I know, but it was actually really interesting for me to actually see it. Kat: Oh, it was actual research. Chris: Yeah, we actually went through everything. Kat: That's gold. I say that all the time. Chris: The most successful people. No, it's legit. Kat: Oh, hello. Yeah. Chris: Yeah, well, exactly. Fair enough. Kat: We literally became business partners over cauliflower. Chris: Cauliflower and chicken? Kat: I could have make that some more exciting. Well, there was one. But it was a two-second decision, wasn't it? Chris: Yeah, it was. Kat: It was. Oh, then you came around and we talked about it the next day again, but it had already obviously ... Really we're just joking around nothing. We did a hilarious life show together. Chris: Yeah. Kat: But that is so true, and I say that all the time when I'm working with high level badass entrepreneurs and creators. I always say, "I want to work with the people who say 'yes' straight away." Because that's like me, and those are the people who get awesome freaking results. So we're really here today not just to ... With such excitement and gratitude and passion launch our product, finally. Kat: But we're also here ... There it is. We're also here to really honour those people who already know that they want one of our ... Oh, look at Ryan. You couldn't have product placed him any better than the hat. Ryan says, "Is this the one I tried last year at your place? It tasted amazing." I think my second one did have vodka in it. All right, just hold the final ... Let's save the shenanigans part of what you can do with this for later. Kat: Let's just talk pure. In fact, it was very healthy in the process of my training. But yes. So we didn't even prepare that little bit of testimonial earlier at all from Ryan who says it tastes amazing. It tastes freaking amazing. Okay, I'm getting distracted again. Continue on. Chris: Okay. There's a few things that we've all got to sort out right now. One, when you actually have to get onboard these founders special. Two, we're going to share with you actually how much of a discount that you're going to get and that's a lifetime discount as well. So we're going to make this as much of a no brainer as possible. Kat: Oh, I just remembered the other quote. Chris: Oh, what was the other quote? Kat: It was I said to you, "Is that really sneaky?" And you said, "Yeah." I really like it. Chris: Okay, just kind of side note, that was ingenious business strategy that we actually did when you just said we ... Kat: Because I'm a ninja. As I proved to you earlier. Chris: We share that later. We share that later. Keep business strategies coming down on this as well. It's all working. So two things we're going to work out. One, when you actually have to get on board by, because this can only last so long and we're going to have to cut it right now. So this, it's actually going to be pretty limited. Because we can only take so many people on board. Kat: Yeah. Chris: Two, the discount you get, which is a lifetime discount. And you know what? Three, we actually just added in. Sorry, for the first 100. First 100? Kat: Oh, I thought it was going to be 50. You're seriously pulling this up for 100 people? Chris: I want to be really nice, because I wore my give shirt today. Because I want to give. Kat: Oh, I want to cut it off really. I like to make people jump on board or work for it. Chris: No, we'll do 100, because there's a lot of ... Yeah, okay. No. Kat: All right, that means I have a point saved for later to make a decision about something. Chris: All right. You got one brownie for later. One video for later. Kat: I'll get to be in charge of something later. Chris: First hundred people that are going to be coming on board, you're going to get a copy of my book, "Craving the Truth", which is actually the book where I show you how to be able to get into the best shape of your life, and how to not do it by doing depriving diets, which we have right here. Tada. Kat: There it is. Fabulous book. Chris: So you'll get a copy of "Craving the Truth" as well coming on board in this, but we can only do that for the first hundred. Kat: For free. Extra fast action, take a bonus. On top of the crazy discount. Oh, wait. Do we make them pay full price if they're getting a book? Chris: I don't want to have to make them pay full price. Kat: All right. Why not? I was just trying to be funny. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's fine, because my lighting's fabulous. Chris: Yeah. You look good, life is good. So if you want a copy of the book for free, where I give you the diets. We talk work outs. We talk actually what Kat and I are doing. You're going to have to get on board really quick as well, but also, lifetime discount. Can we tell them how much the discount is? Kat: No, make them work for it. Send a love heart shower. Chris: Oh, yeah, I love how you do this. Kat: A load of love hearts, and we're just going to tell them the office straight away. Just like that? Chris: Melissa. Kat: Hi. Chris: Thanks, Mel, appreciate that. Kat: Yeah, there you go. Chris: It's a great pull. Kat: Let's. So we just give ... Whoa, you guys loving the love heart shower. Thank you. Chris: Whoa. Kat: Do you want a comment something hilarious or just comment get on with it already? Chris: Let's have best comment. I will just give you a copy of the book straight away. Kat: I can't talk through this offer, because I'm going to get too giggly and excited like a little kid at Christmas, and I'm not going to get the details right. I'm trying very hard to restrain myself here, but I'm so excited. So Chris is going to tell you the deal with it. It's literally more crazy than what we thought we were going to do. We dropped down an extra ... We actually dropped down an additional ... Chris: No, let's prepare for lunch. Kat: Over an additional 20 percent on what was already the reduced founding members price. Chris: Yeah, it was. Kat: Wait, did you just say they get to lock it in for life? Chris: Yeah, it's lifetime. Kat: I thought we were just giving that for the first month. Chris: Lifetime. This is exactly. Kat: What? Chris: When you get on board, but here's the thing. When you get on board, you get it for life. If you ever leave. Kat: You're out. Chris: Never get it again. Kat: We're never talking to you again. Chris: No. We'll talk to you, but you just want to get the discount again as well. Kat: If you buy us a drink. Chris: You've got to ... You actually get the discount for life. Kat: Yeah, that makes sense. Chris: That's a bit of a no brainer. Kat: That is a no brainer. Couple of no brainers. I'll eat anything that tastes delicious, especially if it helps me look that pretty. Thank you. Chris: Oh, that's really sweet. Kat: That's all the alignment. I'm reverse ageing. When you ordered this product, you will reverse age from between two and five years in the first 10 days. Chris: We can't say that. Kat: Hashtag disclaimer. I just it. Chris: The FDA does not agree with that at all. Kat: Shut up. Chris: I have to be legitimate with this stuff. Kat: I mean it. I mean it, because I decided, and I get what I decide. Can we just bring the mindset side into it? It's fine. When you sign up I'll get you a special training for free on the reverse ageing. How's that for a bonus? Chris: All right. Kat: Oh, let's have that in as a top 100 bonus. I will do a training on how I reverse age for free for the first 100 people, and I'm not kidding. Chris: I'll buy that. Kat: Look at this skin. I'm nearly 50. Chris: That's very funny. Kat: Well I'm 38. I'm nearly 39. But I'm reverse ageing at the speed of light. Everybody knows that. Chris: No, actually ... This gets really good. What we haven't actually said as well is if you get on board this offer today, you will be able to join the tribe. So what we're starting in part is our private tribe, yeah. Kat: Oh, yeah. We're getting to our programme. Chris: It's going to be a little bit ... It's probably something we should talk about right now as well. Kat: Wait, do we actually? No, this is for real now. I'm not pretending. Are we actually giving them that? Chris: Yeah, they get a private group. It's already set up. Kat: Oh, of course. Yes, all right, fine. Onward then. Chris: This is stupid. Kat: Okay, I'm done. I'm done with my talking. I've got the entertainment, and now Chris is going to tell you the deal. The deal is about to drop. We are going to give you a link. You're going to click it, you're going to buy, and you're going to have a glass of water to celebrate, since you don't have the product yet. I'm waiting. Chris: Well you do have to wait. Kat: But we'll drink something in your honour. Chris: You do have to wait. So let's break this on down. Number one, first 100 people, I'll give you a copy of the book and I'll send it straight to you. Number two, you get the discount for life, and it's over 40 percent the discount as well. So that's a bit of a no brainer as well. Kat: We want to make it crazy no brainer for sure, legitimately of course. Chris: Yeah, I know. Three, you get access into ... whilst you have your membership, whilst you're getting this each month sent to you, you have access into the tribe, which is where Kat and I are going to be sharing with you what we do with our food, with our diets, with our training. I'm going to be in there giving you as well, because I've got literally 12 months worth of training, nutrition and lifestyle coaching ready to rock 'n' roll for you. Chris: So you'll get access into that private community where it's members only in there, and then ... Kat: That's got content from both of us, which is combining over 30 years of experience and knowledge and application and results. If you can, have some brain power. Chris: We literally needed a team member to go through how much content we had. Kat: It was several staff members who had to go through that and have been doing it for nine months. Chris: I feel so sorry for Jess actually. Kat: And Mim, shout out to Mim. And Jess too. Chris: And Mim. Yeah, sorry, too. Bingo. Kat: And shout out to Ash and Bron as well who've had so much to do with this launch and does so much work on that. Chris: I wish they were here. I got a notification on my page. Kat: I just was reading it over actually. Really. Chris: Okay, awesome. So you get the book. You get 40 percent discount and that's for life. You get access into the tribe as well. Now what we're going to do ... Kat: We were going to ... Sorry. I know I'm just terrible at cutting you off. I'm the worst at that. But we were going to charge for the tribe. We were going to do it as a separate. Chris: No, we are going to charge for the tribe. Kat: Yeah, but we were going to make it like you would pay a bit extra to get the coaching platform, as well as the product, and then it would be extra, extra for people who just wanted the coaching, which is basically means stupid people, because why would you not buy this? Then we decide to give it for free. Chris: So if we actually boil this down right now. Kat: Yeah. Chris: What the offer is is the super food blend will actually be recommended retail for $97. The tribe, our coaching community that's private for members only, that's actually priced at $50 a month for that. So obviously that's $150 a month, but if you get on board now, can we say it? Kat: Let's just do it. We've dragged it out long enough. They've been waiting and wanting. Chris: If you get on board now, you will get everything, which is sent to you each and every month, and your monthly membership into the tribe, and it's only going to be for $59. So we're cutting off $90 every month, and that's a life time discount going into it. So literally, there's a massive discount. So that's something like ... It's a gigantic discount. Kat: Whatever it is. Chris: First 100 people, I'll send you a copy of the book for free. Kat: And you'll get my reverse ... And you'll get my training on reverse ageing if you're in the first 100 people as well, which is completely serious. Chris: All right, Ricky. So Ricky asked a really good question. Can you consume it if pregnant? Now with supplements, you do technically have to say and you'll see on the back here, "Caution, if pregnant or nursing or taking medication, consult your health care practitioner before use." Kat: It's required to say that. Chris: My Lauren, wife, she has been pregnant with two children whilst taking this and my daughters have this as well. So when they ask for chocolate, they're actually asking for this bad boy. Kat: Yeah, I give this to my kids as well. Who are young as you know. It's required to say that. It's required to obviously that you've got to consult with your medical adviser that. Chris: Yeah, good question. Kat: I would take it. Lauren took it, etc. I just want to also clarify, really we had it locked in that launch offer ... That the retail price, the price that we will be selling it at. It's not just like what we're saying is retail. We will be selling it at $97. We were going to do the founding members offered at I think $79. That was locked in, and that was decided. Even up until last Friday. Kat: We did the pre-launch video and had some fun with that on Friday. You might have jumped on on that. Oh, we were supposed to notify people. I will send them a link after this, yeah. Chris: Yeah, we'll send them. Kat: I can't even remember why we decided to drop it down so much more. I think we just ... We get so excited. We are so proud of this and so excited and it's been so much work and blood and sweat and tears that's gone into this on Chris' behalf. I really just want to honour him. He's an amazing business partner and friend, and the work that he's put in. Literally travelling the Earth to create pharmaceutical great product in the world. Kat: It is literally the most exceptional formulation that you could come up with. Digestive health, probiotics, all this good stuff, but then also, working together with somebody that you're obviously good friends with, that's not automatically enough to make a great business partnership as I know a lot of people know. Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Kat: So it's just been amazing to have a shared vision for something that we're both so excited to bring to life. It's been a little painstaking at times to get to where we're already, but like any amazing vision brought to life, you've got to be willing to go through those periods where it's things are going slow than you want or you thought something was just going to work, and then it didn't. Kat: So it's been quite the journey, and it's been one that's been heavily supported by the people we just mentioned and shouted out earlier as well. So there's a lot that's going into this and it really is. It's such a big deal. It's something that we know that we're going to take for life, be proud of for life. We really trust and belief that when you start to take this, firstly, the taste of it is incredible. It just tastes amazing. It's chocolate flavoured greens powder. It's flavoured naturally with cacao. Kat: It tastes incredible. Every single person who tried it is like, "Holy crap, where can I get this? I want to take this forever." So we know you're going to love the taste, but the benefits and the health side of it, the brain power side of it. The mineral focus side of it. The fact that you're just getting all these good things covered for yourself and your family in one hit. We know that you're going to be part of this for life as well. Kat: So this is something that for long haul it's not just business on the side of our respective empires that we already have. We really see it as a vision for the community that we want to build of like-minded individuals, like us, like you who are committed to being about us in every aspect of life. In business we brain function, and looking and feeling hot AF as well of course. Kelly says can you use it if diabetic. Chris: Yeah, you can. It actually says on here "diabetic safe". Where did I actually have to say that? Here. Last bullet point. No, extras. No extra added sugar. It is diabetic safe. It is only flavoured with stevia. So you only use the really good stuff. Please post the ingredients out. Yeah, Angela if you click the link that you'll get access to ... Kat: We could give the link. Chris: I will give you the link. If you click the link, you'll get access to the page which has the full ingredients on there for you. So you can actually read this rather than me sticking this up to the camera. It's still not being readable as well. Now, what we also have done is we put a 60-day guarantee on this. So we want you to taste it. Kat: That's how confident we are. Chris: We want you to use it. Exactly. That's how much we ... We're a little bit cocky when it comes to this. Because we know it's that good. We've been using it for that. Angela, you're absolutely welcome. So we want you to get your hands off it ... On it. When you get your hands on it, and you start using it, you'll see. You'll actually notice the difference as well. So what you want to be able to do is number one, it's not about supplements. Chris: Now let's just talk right now. I want to jump in and talk about ... Yeah, sorry, go. Kat: Should I give the link or should we give them preparation that I'm going to give you the link, because we are doing this first hundred thing. Chris: Oh. Kat: Let's tell you what we want to tell you, so that you're paying attention, and then we're going to drop the link. Chris: Okay, let's do that. Kat: Yeah. Chris: We'll jam real quick, and then we'll give you the link so that you can get access to all this stuff right now. So I want it in my mouth right now. Kat: All right. Well, it's a sensory experience, and you can tap into the collective energy. That's right here in this space and place. Here is some we prepared earlier. Chris: Jaya, can you put your email below and I will literally send you a copy of my book, because that was the best comment so far. Kat: Comment of 2018 award. We're adding that to our book of hilarious quote. But we will drink some in honour of everybody. You can tap into our collective energy. Chris: Right, cheers. So I'll answer Theo's question. So this is what we're doing. Because we're doing the very first batch, for all of our members with this super food blend, it's going to take between three to four weeks for everyone to get there. So that's why we're doing this founders special. So we want everybody to come on board. Now, and this is what I want to say and this is why it's so important. Kat: Yeah. Chris: It's not about supplement. Kat: That's why we're doing a huge discount. Chris: It's not about the supplements. Jaya, thank you so much. Can someone remind me to send Jaya a copy of that? Kat: Yes, I'll email you right now. Chris: Or just ... perfect. It's not about supplements, okay? So why are we actually talking right now? Why are we starting a health and fitness company? Why are we wanting to help you with this stuff? It's because you want to be able to look, feel, and function great. You want to be a part of the one percent of the one percent. You want to look great. You want to feel great. You actually want to perform really well, and that's not just the body performing on a biochemical level. It's how your brain performing as well, and you're actually enjoying it. Chris: How do we actually do this? It's not just by taking a supplement. Supplement's the cherry on the top, and we're going to be the first people that now run a supplement company to tell you it's not abut the supplements. This is why we're doing the tribe. So we help you, we show you, we teach you. We're giving you actually what's needed when it comes to, what to eat, how to eat, how to set up your lifestyle. What about when it comes to your work outs? When it comes to your movement as well. Chris: So especially when I break it down in the book, I show you the actual workouts and there's a yang and a yin philosophy. So like a yang, this is going to be a white training. A yin, it's going to be a walking. It's going to be your saunas, your ice punch pools, your meditations, all these kind of things. Kat: Yoga. Chris: Yoga. All these things we need to be able to put together. So it's a holistic approach to giving you exactly what you need. That's why when I first ... One of the reasons, our first conversation, we're like, "Hang on, there's a lot of 'supplement companies' out there and they're doing sometimes great products, sometimes crappy products. Let's not even go down that path." What's missing right now? No one's giving you both. No one's giving you here's the great ... Literally world best formulations, raw products, and manufacturing process. Kat: And taste. Chris: And taste. Which is kind of the most ... It's not technically the most important thing. But it's the most important in the sense that you're not going to take it if it doesn't taste amazing. It tastes so good that you just ... You want to have more. You just want more. I was crying when mine ran out. My samples that I had at home. Kat: Yeah, I had to get more for Kat. Chris: I had to have a massage to get over it. Kat: And a meditation, and some prayer. Some prayer. Then I may have harassed him over what's happened. I literally once was tapping in from every city around the world going, "So can you send some to New York? How about Florida? How about Texas? How about LA?" Chris: I tried to send it to her in two different cities. Kat: But I kept moving too quickly. Chris: And it kept missing. Kat: Come in San Diego, take me around. Chris: Obviously what I want to get across to make sure that we do this right is while we're doing the tribe is so literally Kat and I can give you what's needed to be able to make sure that you look, feel and function the way that you want. It is literally like that. Then when you want to put the cherry on top, when you want to perform. Because this is the thing and I talk about this. Chris: Number one, that our food quality that get isn't as good as it should be. You're not getting all the nutrients. You're not getting everything that you really need at the end of the day to be performing your best. We have high stress levels in our modern lifestyle. We have a lot of chemicals in our environment that help us become toxic. So we want to be able to become un-toxic. We want to be able to get rid of that stuff. Chris: So this is why we started with literally a greens formulation. But it's not a greens formulation. This is ... Kat: So much more. Chris: A super veggie type antioxidant blend. It's got a fruit antioxidant blend. It's got digestion support, and it's got a probiotic blend in here as well. So this is why we want to try and you come at this, because the thing at the end of the day is I don't want you to have a covered or room full of supplements. You want a handful of things, and that's what we're going to be doing, Kat and I together. We're going to be coming together. Kat: There would be new products. Chris: And are really doing a few products that give you the biggest bang for your bucks. So you can actually get on with your life. Because what I don't like is trying to do so many different things, that when we have more important things to do, I don't want to be worrying about my diet, or my work outs, or I'm not looking as I good as I feel like I should be. Or all that kind of shit. Chris: I'm a dad. I am running businesses. I want to be able to enjoy life. I want to be able to have us come together and just have fun. I don't want to be absolutely hating life because I'm doing a dive. Kat: You want to look and feel your best and be your best, and be fitting everything in but doing it just with ease and flow as well. We both, this is another thing. We've both done the hustle life before. I love the word hustle by the way. For me that means something powerful and flow based, but what I mean is we've both done business and life and fitness in way where it was kind of burning yourself out or pushing beyond a healthy limit and that's nothing I look back on and regret, because it made me into who I am now. Kat: But at this point in my life, and for both of us as well, it gets to be about having it all whilst operating at a level of excellence. Feeling your best, looking your best, being at your best, and having it jus be flow and ease. So there's already so many things that each of us do and support our communities to do that create that just through lifestyle and the way we choose to live our lives and live according to our values and so on. Kat: This just takes it to that next level. It's about enhancing a way of life. So that's again another reason why we've created the tribe to go with this to support you with the education, the information, and the empowerment, to get the results that you need. So we will be giving you the nutritional information literally over 30 years or at least over 25 years of combined experience between us. Chris: Over 24 years. Kat: At a really high level as well, where both of us really dedicated our money and our time to learning and studying with the best people in the world, and that's how we met. Through classes around the world. We're bringing you the most cutting edge, real nutrition information, hormone information, fat loss information, digestions, stress management, sexual energy and libido as well. All ties in together. Sleep quality. Kat: Mindset, of course, right? The ins and outs of the trainings side of it as well as the nutrition side of it, and we're teaching from a standpoint of full life in a way that feels amazing. It's not a freaking diet. It's not a quick fix. It's not do this for six weeks or 12 weeks. We're bringing to you our combined experience of well over two decades, and where we can look back and go, "We did all that crazy stuff and maybe you did as well." Kat: It is what it is. Now we actually have a way of living where we get to look and feel and function at a standard of excellence 24/7 always. It's just how it is. We don't sacrifice anything in order to look our best and feel our best. We know that you don't have to as well. So this is not come on board, our magical diet that's going to fix you, and then you're left floundering afterwards, rebounding back. Kat: This is make some small simple adjustments that are going to immediately feel amazing for you. You're going to be immediately be elevated internally and in your energy and your emotions, and even dare I say spiritually, because of course it heightens everything. You're going to see those physical shifts and changes as well. I get asked all the time. I know Chris gets asked all the time, "How we can be such busy, successful entrepreneurs both with our own families and small children, and still get to have ... be in great shape and be legitimately healthy and brimming with energy, and have the energy to do all those things?" Kat: That's so easy. We let it be so easy. It's such a small amount of time or energy that creates such a massive return on that. So everything that this is about. Like Chris said, it's not just a supplement. It's you get this amazing supplement and you get everything that since ... Yes, hold it up. Everything that's inside of us that we've taken all this time and effort and working with literally tens of thousands of clients between us over the past, decade plus, in order to just know what works for life. Kat: So I said at the start of this that I feel like I can't fully express what a big deal it is, and I feel like maybe I'm now starting to express what a big deal it is. But should we? Do you want to add something there or should we give them this link? Chris: I think we should give them the link. Kat: I don't know why I feel nervous. So hang on. Chris: It's good. Kat: Should we give them the link to the Facebook group as well or we just give them this link? Chris: No. Kat: No. Chris: The what? Kat: No, the one from the other day I meant. All right. We'll figure that out later. Chris: Oh, no, give them that link. Kat: Okay, so now, are you ready? Are you excited? Are you eager? Are you going to send me another love heart shower? Are you ready to click by pull out your credit card, get it at the ready, and here's what you're going to do. In about 19.5 seconds or however long it takes me to stop talking, I'm going to ... Which could be 19.5 years. I'm going to put this thing into the comments here. Kat: You are going to click the link. You are going to grab your credit card. You're going to run to the back of the room, and you're going to purchase this product. Chris: All right, hang on. Kat: Hang on. You're only supposed to say three things. That's what I'm telling from this stage, wait. Get your credit card, click the link, buy the product, be in our top 100, get Chris' book for free. For being a fast action taker badass, just like we are, you know your life is going to change for life, and you get a free book as well. It is amazing. And you get my free training on reverse ageing. Chris: I'm really excited for that. Kat: Me too. Yeah. I'll give you the link. I'm ready. This is it. This is it. This is the moment of truth. Chris: They just want us to getting it taken out really quick. I would literally be ... Kat: Yeah, I'd be running to the back of the room or to wherever your credit card is. Chris: Oh, God. Oh, shit. Just happened. Kat: We just? Did we just break the internet. Boom, boom, boom. Okay, I feel like we needed to prepare the drummer as a roll sound. I could have played when I did that. I actually feel like I need to take a breath. Chris: Oh, that's good. Oxygen's really good as well. To set fire. Kat: Can I just add that to quotes? Quotes from Chris. Oxygen is really good for you. Okay, what else are we going to say? Chris: Oh. Kat: Oh, did you tell them to comment there? Or are they just saying how it is over there for the fun of it? How did that just start happening? Chris: I don't know. Kat: Is it because they clicked this? Chris: I have no idea. Kat: What happens? Chris: Yes, it is. Kat: Oh. Chris: Oh, we can see everyone coming through on this one. Kat: We can see who's signing up. Chris: Going up. Kat: Go, go, go, go, go. Oh, we can see all the notification. Chris: I didn't ... This is ... Kat: Tamara's in. Michelle clicked the link. Sarah clicked the link. Chris: That's really funny. Kat: Come on, keep going. All right, and oh, when is this? Ooh, Thalika. She's on it. Just on it. Chris: Laura. Kat: All right. This is so exciting. Chris: This is so fun. Can I share? This is more exciting. I remember when I did my very first online fitness launch. Kat: Laura can't click. Chris: I had the PayPal app on my phone. And when I did the launch, it was like my PayPal app on my phone make a little ding noise. Or no, like a payment would have gone through. This is more exciting because it's a hell of a lot more people coming through. Kat: Sage says, "I can't click." You might have to try different device, because people are definitely clicking. And it's working. So how's this, though? It is so exciting. Last night I was out with a friend, and she's like, "So, what are you doing tomorrow? I'm like, "Oh, yeah. I'm doing whatever and whatever." Then I'm like, "Oh, and I'm just launching a supplement company with my friend Chris till 11:45. Kat: It's like, "Wow, this is huge." That would be huge. We're just quickly launching a supplement company that we're going to take. Angela says, "I can't click on iPad." What can we do about that if people can't click on some devices? Do you have it? Because this is the mo ... Do you have a different link? A longer one? Chris: Can you comment back then or? Kat: No. Chris: PM them? Kat: Do we have a different version of that link? Chris: No. Kat: No, I don't know what to do about that. Ash and Bronwyn, are you on? Chris: What's your problem? The request to the group. Theo. Did you click the link Theo, that Kat has just given you? Kat: Okay, one second. We tested this 1600 times. We will not be swayed. I'm clicking it now. Chris: It's definitely working. We're seeing people still coming through. Kat: Okay, so when I click that, it goes me to Facebook messenger. Chris: Don't worry, Theo. We'll get your link. IPhone can, iPad can't. Kat: It's taking me to Facebook messenger when I click it. Is that right? Chris: Yeah. Kat: Then where is the link that they're going to get that message to them? Chris: The link to ... Yeah. So we'll send you to Facebook messenger, and then Bronwyn said type it in. Kat: Then you've got to press get started. Chris: Then I should maybe put zero admin. Yeah, see, there you go. Kat: Okay. So when you ... We thought we tested it all, whatever. So when you click it, it's going to take you to Facebook messenger. It may not work on the iPad. Then it's going to ... Then you're going to click get started, and then it's going to start, "This is MBB Bot. The My Body Blend's Messenger System." Chris: Oh, my God. Kat: It will say it in that voice. Then it will say, "Do you really want access to a secret launch of Super Food Blend?" It will say it in that voice. Then you'll press "hell yes," which I'm doing now. Hell yes, I just did it. Now it says, "Awesome Katrina, click the prelaunch of verboten below to get our one-time only freelance offer for ..." Okay, I feel that we're being repetitive. For our brand new Super Food Blend. Kat: Plus, if you think there's anyone else who might need to know. I mean why would you take him in unless you want them in the top 100? So now I'm clicking that link, wait for it. Shana says, "Get started." I see you guys on it, just on it. Chris: It's really cool how I can see you from one and then comes through to the other one. Kat: This is a genius. Chris: Theo, you figured that out, great job. Kat: This is a genius strategy. I just got through the sales page. Chris: Can't believe this works. Kat: Right here, live, on this live stream. There it is. Chris: So this is only for the private launch. So obviously once this gets closed down, you're not going to get ... Kat: Take it out. You can't get in on this deal again. Chris: Yeah, you can't get access to this, because we can't keep this up forever. Kat: So talk them through what are they going to receive once they then signup and purchase. Chris: Cool. Kat: Because just a reminder that the product is going to come. Explain all that. Chris: Yeah. So obviously the founders special with what we're doing today is we're doing our very first batch, and you're going to be a part of this. So it's going to take three to four weeks for you to get your actual first Super Food Blend delivered. We're going to be sending it straight to you, but that's why we also have the MBB tribe. So the tribe is going to be where Kat and I are going to be in there making sure that you get access to what's going to be the right meal plan, the right workouts. Chris: I'm going to be in there doing live streams, answering your questions. Kat's going to be talking about anti-aging. Plus, if you get in first 100, which honestly it might be taken up already. I don't know, you're going to have to just get on board. Kat: Just go, go, go. Chris: I'm going to give you a copy of "Craving the Truth". That's going to break down literally what you need to be doing with your meals, with your workouts and lifestyle, and what we're also going to be doing is this special that you get access to today is for life. If you stay on board with this, that means you get this lifetime discount. Chris: So normally Super Food Blend. This has got the RLP of $97 just for one. The actual tribe, that sells for $50 a month. That's $150, but you get access to it today for only $59. So that's a massive discount. I don't know percentage was, what it is, because I'm horrible at math and that's okay. Melissa. Yay, got my confirmation email. So there we go. Kat: Yay, celebrate. Chris: It's coming through already. So that's fantastic. So we want to make sure that everybody come on board because we've got a couple wait up our sleeve. Like tomorrow I'm going to be jumping on board doing a live show, walking you through how we actually get the right meal plan, because what we start with, this is a little bit of secret sauces, how I kick start fat loss is what I do is we do a 14-day metabolic restart. Chris: So what we do is actually in the first 14 days we actually get your body to learn to burn body fat. Now most people are trying to talk about how do I speed up my metabolism? That's actually the wrong question I believe, because let's think about the analogy of driving a car. People are saying, "How do I speed up my metabolism?" They're just thinking about, "How can I drive my car faster?" But what if your car is actually heading in the wrong direction? Chris: So you just say, "Going in the wrong direction faster." So what we got to do first is make sure that you go in the right direction, which is how do you get your body to actually tap into body fat stores, how do you actually burn body fat for fuel. Then we talk about actually speeding our fat loss. But what we do is once we actually get your body tapping into body fat stores effectively, then we actually start talking about stress. Chris: So what the biggest problem is to me people are stressed. They've got too high cortisol levels. They started throwing other things like testosterone, pregnenolone, all these ... Actually, let's not go down the whole monogram, because that's going to be too complicated right now. But what we're going to do is we turn your body into actually being able to burn body fat for fuel first, then we talk about actually being able to lower stress. Chris: So what you'll find is most people when first getting the guides and plans I'm going to be sending through to you, think it's too easy and there's not enough. But you'll find that your body will actually be able to lose weight faster, because we're doing things easier. Because what's the biggest problem so many people fall into and I know we've done it before is you decide that you're going to lose weight. So what do you do? Chris: You cut your foods down, you ramp up your workout. Kat: Do some drastic random stuff. Chris: You do more, more, more, more, more, and then what happens when you hit the plateau? Because you will hit hit the plateau. Kat: What happens is you crack it and eat a freaking container of cookies. Chris: Yeah, exactly. Kat: If you're a woman. Chris: If you're a man as well. Kat: I never did this. Chris: I did. Kat: Okay. Chris: That's the big problem. So you wind up crack it, and you start binge eating, and then you feel guilty, and that's bad. So mentally that's bad. Or you actually have to start eating less and less and less, because you're trying to get to that deficit. So what we do is we say, "Let's actually do a bottoms up approach." So let's start from the bottom and we actually build your food, so you'll see that we actually increase your food intake. So you're actually eating more and losing weight, because the whole just eat less move more scenario, it's a myth. Kat: Boring. Chris: I wrote a freaking book about the myth of it, and it's not fun at all. Kat: Yeah. I just love everything you said. I love how you're just on a ... Did this stuff just comes out of you because you're so passionate about it and you know it so well? Chris: I know I did it wrong for so long. Kat: It is what we live and breathe. It is just ... I think you can see your passion coming through right, and you're just going to continue to get so much more of that and all of our knowledge and learning and support and accountability through being part of this tribe. So originally we will ... completely keep them two separate products. The coaching platform versus the product. Kat: Then we're like, "No, of course we're going to honour the people who buy this amazing thing, and really are committed to change their lives, not just to taking a supplement." The thing is I don't know. There's so many more things that I probably could say. But I think we've kind of covered the best of it, and we're just so excited to welcome you. We can see people ... Thank you and it says thank you. Kat: We can see people over on ... So we've got Chris. My friend here and Chris' friend here. Chris' friend is hooked up to the My Body Blend's page. So that's where you go when you click the link, you'll go to the Facebook messenger of the My Body Blend's page which is our joint business page. You'll then follow the prompts there, and you'll jump on to the sales page that way. So we can see people's responses that are coming up on his phone, which is super cool. Kat: So this is ... It's just huge. It's the bringing to life of something that's been several years in the making in the physical sense. 10 plus years of friendship in the making, decades of learning and knowledge in the making, something I always wanted to do. Something I know Chris always wanted to do, and what an incredible thing to be able to do this with somebody who you have such a close friend in your life, but who you know is also going to deliver the level of support and empowerment for your tribe, that you would do yourself. Kat: That's just such a huge big deal when being in business is somebody else to know that their work ethic and how they shop and their level of passion and commitment to change people's lives is the same. So this is the beginning of an amazing journey for you. If you are joining us, how long will we be keeping the founders special open for? Chris: I only wanted to do ... Kat: We had a little fight about it. Chris: Yeah. That's all right. We're allowed. But what about if we do for just 24 hours? Kat: What? Chris: No, we don't do it in 24 hours. Come on, I'm not the queen of scarcity. I'm making people move fast, but I feel like we could give them. But it doesn't matter, because you would just click and buy it now anyway, otherwise you would have been in the top 100, and you'd be a crazy person. Kat: Well how long do we let this video run for then? Because we have to take this video down. Chris: I feel like I don't know what the answer is that I'm supposed to say now. I feel like we didn't rehearse this properly. That is because we didn't rehearse it. Kat: We didn't. Chris: Yeah. I didn't really walked in and be like, "Let's do it with the camera on." Kat: Let's just turn the camera on and see what happens, apart from running down funny quotes. Chris: What do you want to say to them? Kat: Did you see that I've written down your quotes over here? I've saved it. I've written down the three quotes so far from Chris if you missed the quotes earlier. The quotes were this. He wanted to call our live show "this is why you're fat and we're not". That was one of my quotes of the year from Chris. Another one is that really sneaky? Me asking about a little Ninja trick. He's like, "Yeah." Chris: We just don't cover a really good Facebook ad strategy. Kat: That is good. Chris, that lighting is so good, Kat. Wait, no, it's just because we look so fabulous. That's my personal favourite. Chris: I'm so happy with that. Kat: Well, I think this is it. Chris: All right. We're going to get busy. Kat: Okay, is this? This is? Chris: Yeah, I know. I just saw these already gotten on board. Kat: I didn't ... See, that didn't happen for me. But if you have any issues or concerns at all, or anything doesn't work for you, maybe test it on a different device. Some people did say it doesn't. Didn't work on iPad. I'm not sure why that would be, but it's definitely working for me on my laptop. It's working on the phone. Of course you compare either of us. Or the My Body Blend's page as well, which is probably the best place to go, because then you'll get supported by our team as well and get answer as quickly as possible. Kat: Seeing infomercial broker, I feel like we got so much gold content. You know what's going to happen now. My team will chop up this live stream, get some clips out of it, caption them up, and we'll just be promoting and having a hilarious time. Shouldn't business and life just get to be fun as well? So that's part of our philosophy and part of what we're here to show you. Chris: You're not having fun, you don't enjoy the life. Kat: You can bet your bottom dollar we're going to be having all sorts of shenanigans in that group once you're in there. Because it's how it should be. That's how it gets to be. All right. Chris: Oh, good. Theo got ... Kat: Oh, you're on. Perfect, Theo. Chris: Confirmation done. Kat: Yay, I'm so excited. Chris: All right, awesome. So we've actually got to get to work, because we've got a lot of members. Kat: Just casually launched a supplement company on a Monday morning in Bali. All right, we're going to go hangout with our members. We're going to see what's up. We're going to see you on the inside, click the link, do the thing, be in the thing. We'll see you in the thing. We love you. Chris: Ciao. Kat: Bye.

In this episode of Building Infinite Red, we are talking about cultivating and nurturing community, specifically what goes into forming a healthy community, such as setting boundaries, avoiding neglect, and not taking your community for granted. Episode Transcript CHRIS MARTIN: One of the things that has impressed me with Infinite Red has been the value placed on cultivating and nurturing community. So to start, from your individual perspectives, why is community important to you? JAMON HOLMGREN: I think it's important because that's sort of how we met. We were all part of a Ruby Community, we were contributing to the open source within that community, and we were collaborating on some things. So from the very beginning, it was like, the community itself was kind of the fun part. I mean the technology was fun too, you know, don't get me wrong, but community was such a great part. It allowed for some opportunities including the ability for me to meet Ken and Todd and then of course, eventually get to know them. And so, we saw the value of community right from the very beginning, even before Infinite Red came to be. TODD WERTH: I would agree with everything that Jamon said. Obviously, it's how we met each other. Open source community, speaking at conferences, which is a community event. I met a lot of my, I would call friends through such communities. But more than that it's a way for us to be part of something that's bigger than ourselves, bigger than our little company here and associate ourselves with like-minded people. And I tend to choose communities and hopefully I'm building communities of people that I respect and feel good associating myself with. CHRIS: How would you define community? Because community is one of those words that, we all use the word but do we all mean the same thing when it comes to using the word? TODD: I don't know what the definition of community is. Ken will know exactly I'm sure but to me it's just people who've decided to group up together around a particular ideal, a particular subject, a particular interest. I guess I could sum it up for myself, when I need something or want to express something, this group of people is the first people I want to express that to or ask for help from. KEN MILLER: It's a tough thing to define right? It's one of those sort of squishy concepts, you kind of know when you see it. But trying to pin it down to what exactly is community, what isn't community is pretty hard. For us, community has largely been centered around open source. That is a very particular kind of community. But I'd say it's narrower than that too, right? It's not like we're talking to Linux developers, we're talking to people who have similar professional experiences to us. And that has always been the case. Like you kind of flock to people who can kind of understand your pain. And so, for us, contributing back to the community in the form of sharing insight, in the form of sharing code has always been about saying, "Hey, you know what? We feel your pain, let's make it better together." JAMON: And one of the unique things about the community that we have been a part of is, it's never been about location. There's a community here in Vancouver, Washington. There's a larger community in the Portland metro area. And we're certainly a part of that. I go to meet ups, I go to events here in Portland. And they're good. And you do get to meet people and you have a commonality of location and also to a great degree, interest or technology or whatever it is that you're centered around in a meet up. But our community hasn't been about that, with the Infinite Red origin story. Ken and Todd, did know each other because of location, but it had already become remote before that. I remember when I first started building some open source, one of the people that kind of quickly became a part of my little community there was a guy that actually still works for us here, Mark Rickert. He started contributing and he was over on the East Coast and I believe, South Carolina at that time. And he came in and contributed and we had a lot of great conversations and bonded on some things. There are a lot of interests that were similar at that time. And it was really great because the community could be centered around something other than just location, which I think is something maybe a little bit more new in the past. TODD: It was kind of interesting. So you asked that question, which is difficult to answer, but as we talk more, which is a great thing about conversation, new things are coming to my mind. Community can mean very different things and we all belong to many different communities. One is around physical things. Jamon meant some location, but it could be, you belong to a community of men over six foot four, and you have your own, I'm speaking about Jamon here (laughter), you have your own problems and when you discuss things, there's a camaraderie that comes from a shared experience of a real thing. JAMON: Hash tag, tall people problems. TODD: Yes, a lot of communities, they've grown from a seed of an idea or an ideal and that's probably more common in a lot of the communities we, well, most of the communities, from a professional standpoint, that we either contribute to or belong to or even, in some cases, create are around ideas and shared interest and that kind of stuff. CHRIS: In what ways have you intentionally grown community? You've talked a little bit about open source projects, but what are some of the other ways that you have done that? TODD: We use a product called Community Miracle Grow. JAMON: It works great. One of the things that occurred to me, I think it was, I don't know, a year and a half ago or something like that, was that we had this community. It had already kind of come to be, but there wasn't really a standard place for them to congregate. There were people who were kind of fans of our open source work, who understood what we were doing. They were interested in our conference. We created a Slack team. Slack of course, being the chat system that we use and we created a community version of the Infinite Red Slack. So people could sign up at community.infinite.red. They could go in there. There were different channels that kind of group people based on what they were interested in. Of course, there were some that were more popular, the Chain React channel, the Ignite channel, which is our open source React Native, boilerplate CLI system and also just React Native in general. We pushed the community just to see if there's interest. And there was a lot of interest and we are able to also do some things like, people had some questions about Ignite. In this Ignite CLI, it actually directs you to our Slack channel and we have gotten to know some of those people and also have been able to lean on some of our community members to answer questions and diagnose issues. And things like that. TODD: It's totally off topic. But I love how effortlessly Jamon inserts plugs first off into the podcast. It's inspiring. (laughter) JAMON: My Twitter handle is @jamonholmgren. (laughter) TODD: Well done. KEN: That was not quite as smooth, but I still like it. JAMON: Once you edit it, it will be smooth. CHRIS: One thing that is interesting is, how to you view Twitter in terms of community building as well? KEN: Double-edged sword. Well, actually like the handle is a double-edged sword to a double-edged sword. JAMON: Twitter is an interesting one. KEN: Yeah. Twitter is an interesting place. TODD: I, personally, don't have an answer to that. Back when I used to promote my own personal brand, I used Twitter a lot and that seemed straightforward to me. But I got to a point, this being my third and final company, hopefully, for my life, where I'm much more interested in promoting Infinite Red than myself, and I have not figure out how to do that. I think Jamon does it much better so he probably has lots more interesting to say. KEN: Jamon does it by being genuine, is the thing, right, he's just there, he's being genuine. He's not shy about promoting stuff that we're doing, but he's also not a spam feed. JAMON: Yeah. If I am spamming something like I have been this podcast, to be honest, I will kind of acknowledge that upfront. Like, "Hey, I was spamming this. It was just released. Give me a break." I'll back off after a bit. I enjoy Twitter. It's opened up a lot of opportunities for us. Twitter's been a platform for us and it's been good. I love showing off my team's work and I had a one of my team message me the other day and said, "I love how you're always promoting your team. Telling other people about what your team's doing." That was someone on our team. I feel like there's a lot of really great work being done and nobody wants to talk about it at Infinite Red. So I guess have to because I want people to know what we're doing. It's very cool. You know, this podcast in a way sort of came out of Twitter in some ways. It initially started with my friend, Kyle Shevlin. He and I were chatting a little bit and I was kind of lamenting that, "I don't do much code anymore, so I don't have a lot to talk about when it comes to answering questions on Twitter or kind of talking about various things." He was like, "Well, what about the business stuff that you're doing? That's interesting to people." He was just like, "You have a lot talk about." And so, I put out a tweet saying, "Hey, if you have a business question, if you have anything. You know, I've learned a lot in the amount of time that I've spent doing this." And I got a really good response. A lot of people asking questions. It was really cool. And then the best part about it was that I could bring it back to Todd and Ken and show them the tweet and they would monologue for a bit or dialogue for a bit. And we would go back and forth and at the end of that, we would have something really interesting to say. And I could put that out there. It had my name on it, but I try to be careful about always tagging Ken and Todd in the tweets and saying, "this is kind of a amalgam of all of our responses." And it worked really well and then once we kind of you had that experience then we said, "Well. you know what? We do have a lot to say. And so, since we have a lot to say, why don't we actually say it in a little different medium." I mean that's this podcast. So Twitter has been very influential in a lot of ways and some ways, responsible for this podcast. But definitely a shout out to my friend, Kyle Shevlin for sparking that idea. KEN: Jamon is like my Twitter agent. (laughter) Like I have more followers because Jamon has like quoted me than from anything I've ever actually tweeted myself. JAMON: Ken's a pretty private person and he has a lot of incredibly insightful things to say that will forever die in a Slack channel somewhere, if I don't go out there and say it. (laughter) So. Yeah. I can't help myself. KEN: Honestly, I feel very lucky to be co-founders with Jamon. TODD: Yeah. I agree with that. JAMON: Awww, thank you. KEN: Because you'll go out and do that kind of thing and it's just totally natural for him. It's not like we're pulling teeth to make him do it but it means that it gives us the kick in the behind that we need in order to get out there and talk to people. TODD: I agree. CHRIS: I think what's interesting though is as you're talking though, Jamon's one type of person that you would need in community. Ken, you're obviously the other type. And then there's Todd, who's the jokester that that brings the lightness and levity to the community so it's like, I guess community makes sense in this context with the different personalities. KEN: I was seriously hoping that you're going to say, "Well, nobody really needs Todd." CHRIS: Well, Todd has feelings. And so, we want to make sure that we acknowledge those. KEN: It's not true. We totally need Todd. But Todd...it would have been amusing. (laughter) JAMON: In that context. Leave the jokes to the professional. KEN: Leave the jokes to the jokester. JAMON: But one thing I want to say before Todd jumps in here, is Todd is the sort of you know, he keeps things light and stuff like that but he always has very strong convictions, very strong things that drive who he is and that comes out in our community very much so. That's a very core piece to our community that I appreciate about Todd. TODD: So I want to clarify a few things. A, Todd does not have feelings. (laughter) No, I'm just kidding. You know, it's interesting because I'm a very outgoing introvert, which is funny. And I have no shame whatsoever, but for some reason, I don't promote as much as I used to in the past. I don't know why. I'm glad we have Jamon to do that. This is inside baseball so maybe not very interesting to people but ... JAMON: Todd, you were pretty good about promoting Infinite Red before I joined. TODD: That's true. JAMON: Infinite Red from our perspective. Because we were kind of first to the RubyMotion scene. I think Todd and Ken came in a little later, but they quickly kind of grew like a plague all the way throughout. (laughter) Okay, that's the wrong analogy. KEN: No, keep that. JAMON: They grew very quickly throughout. And it was a very intentional thing now that I know Ken and Todd, I know it was intentional. It wasn't just a happenstance. TODD: I guess this podcast is lot about us. I always feel weird talking about just our perspectives and stuff but Jamon's comment about us, growing like a plague is true. And I think one of the things that I've learned being a ... So I started out pretty shy, introverted person, but one of the things I learned is don't wait for people to invite you to communities, invite yourself, wedge yourself in every ... And just keep on wedging and until a point where they're like, "Was Todd ever not here? I don't remember." Even though I was one of the last people to join, I feel like I was always there just because of shamelessly, endlessly, relentlessly wedging myself into every every situation. KEN: Well, we live in a world where, for a lot of things you don't really have to ask for permission. You want to make a library, make a library, publish it. You want to make a newsletter, make the newsletter, start publishing it and invite people to join it. I think for a large stretch of my career, I would kind of sit around thinking, "Well, I'm not sure if I'm the right one to do this." There's this sort of, I guess it's kind of an imposter syndrome. It's kind of just the shyness, just the laziness to a certain degree. And what we found was like, if you just show up, and you start you know sharing what you have, sooner or later you're going to find people who are interested and that's what's happened. JAMON: And I think there are a lot of people on our team that are more like Ken than Todd and I. You know, Todd and I don't have imposter syndrome in that same way. (laughter) We tend to be maybe a little over confident in some ways. But our team is probably a little more, at least many on our team are more like Ken. But it's great because they add so much value and we can kind of bring them in to the community through their association with Infinite Red and the things that were doing. That is a way of building a community, is to bring people along with you and kind of promote and show them that ... Show other people that they do belong. TODD: I agree that Ken represents a lot of people in our community, in the development community. Not necessarily the designer community. We talk a lot about developers but we also have designers and stuff. You know, I'm 46 years old I've been doing everything in this industry for now, 20 some years and I have evolved a lot over time. The truth is I'm never going to be invited to the country club. Never gonna happen. Just reality. My attitude always been, "Fine, I'll just buy it someday." (laughter) You know that's obviously just kind of a metaphor, but the point is: invitation is overrated. That's all I'm saying. KEN: I was always a very shy kid. I have a six-year-old daughter and there was something that I have observed about her because she's actually kind of different from me. It's a bit of social skills that seems to come naturally to her that I am a little envious of, but it represents what we're talking about here. So I remember there is an occasion where we are at a playground and they had one of those tires swings, where the tire is horizontal and it's got like three chains that support it so you could kind of go in every direction. And there was some kids there, who were playing on it and they were, I don't know three, four years older than her. There were calling over to their parents to come and push them, the parents were like talking and ignoring them. And so Luna just comes up and starts pushing them. Doesn't ask. She just starts pushing them and the kids are like, "Oh, okay." And they invited her to come up on the swing with her after that because she didn't ... She just did it. But she did it in a way that was like, "Hey, I'm gonna help them." Or she didn't ask to help them, she just helped them and maybe that doesn't work in every circumstance but it seems like it's going to work in a lot of circumstances, where if that's how you introduce yourself to people, they're going to trust you in a way that they wouldn't otherwise. TODD: So that brings up a great point. One of the things for instance at our conference, Chain React. One of my kind of high GAFOs or one of the things I cared about a lot, was to actively try to include everyone in the conference in the conference. A lot of conferences I see is just a small group of cool kids and the rest of people sitting in the corner and inspecting potted plants, myself included. So since I was part of creating a conference how do we minimize the cool kids and maximize the majority. And so when we're building community, the people like Ken‘s daughter, don't need our help. They'll just naturally join and be part of it and that's wonderful. But I gave a lot of thought on how to get the rest of the people because you could go to a conference and you could have the worst presentations, the worst content in the world, but if you are actually included in a way that you naturally aren't, you're going to go away loving that experience. And so, that's actually one of my personal goals in life is how to bring that experience that the cool kids get naturally to the majority of people. KEN: Well, and I think the most advance version of that is to enlist the cool kids as social instigators. Take their natural social skills because that's usually what that is, right? And have them come and bring everybody else along on the fun and games. JAMON: I read an article a little while ago, where a grade school student was kind of bullied and sort of kind of ostracized at her school. And she ended up moving to a new school and someone said, "Hey, come sit with me." at the cafeteria. And it was one of the cool kids. And she ended up making an organization that promotes come sit with me and basically go out and find these kids that seem ostracized, that nobody likes, whatever and just invite them to come sit with you at the cafeteria because it can change lives. And I actually sent that over to my son just saying, "Hey, you know ... " Because kind of ... He's looked up to at his school and he's a very kindhearted person. And he really liked the article too. And I think that that was something that he can do at his school. That's definitely something that we still, as adults, there's still that dynamic of come into the group. So we really cared about that with Chain React and that definitely came across I think. TODD: And our Slack community and some other communities. The great thing about out community is whether it's a developer community, the designer community, we belong to the open source community. We tend to be, I think more than the average human being, we tend to be a nicer group of people. I don't know if that's true, but it just seems that way. When recruiting a team, I invite people over to the table. That's how, this is going to sound horrible if our team's listening and they're not all that way. But I always look for people who are underappreciated in all aspects of life. And it makes for such a fantastic team because those type of people tend to be more appreciative, they think more about others. I love our band of misfits that we call Infinite Red. And we've got a variety of different misfits and I highly recommend finding people who don't naturally walk up to the tire swing. CHRIS: I'm interested too, with that philosophy of the band of misfits: How does building this greater Infinite Red Community impact the internal culture of the team? JAMON: I think internally people didn't totally get why we were doing it because it did seem like a lot of time that we had to spend doing it. We had to be out there answering questions and fielding requests for help and things like that. And we're still kind of figuring out what our role is with that; I think we've gotten a little better at that. Also the community is starting to become more self-sustaining, where there are people who are answering questions who are not Infinite Red people. But we've also made some really good friends there. And I think that the Infinite Red team has benefited from the community in that way. We don't get full participation from everybody. We get some people, you know, Kevin, Steve and some others who are a lot more active in the Infinite Red community Slack especially. And that's okay. We're not expecting everybody to be kind of the social butterflies, but we do get a lot of value from that. I think people see that. And they also see, I think Chain React probably had a bigger impact than the Slack community in a lot of ways. Almost everybody was there and they got a chance to see how we are regarded in the community and how they're sort of looked up to as Infinite Red employees. They're a great team so I think they should be. CHRIS: What do people or even companies get wrong with building communities? JAMON: I know that one thing that definitely comes in is neglect. Communities will die if you don't continually spend time making sure that you're paying attention to them, making sure that you're keeping the core principles alive. Things like that. So neglect is a really big one and you are sort of signing up for an obligation at that point. You need to make sure that you adequately pay attention to what's going on. Now, I have other communities that I've started and still maintain outside of Infinite Red for personal interests and things like that. One has 4,000 members. It's kind of an interesting one. And that community, we started it, grew very quickly and then it sort of became more self-sustaining in a way, which lends itself to maybe taking it for granted that it will continue to just kind of keep rolling right along. But luckily I was able to get together a really great group of core moderators that all have very similar goals, although very very different backgrounds. And that was really great way to handle that because they all, at different times, have time to make sure that the community is going strong. So neglect is very much a big one. Make sure that you don't neglect the community. TODD: I haven't done as much as Jamon, for sure, but it seems a very challenging endeavor. So if I'm a listener and I want to create a community. I'm going to run into lots of problems, I imagine. What are similar kinds of problems you've run into Jamon? Were you able to solve them? Are they still problems? That sort of thing. JAMON: In some communities, and actually in many communities, there's like dynamic that happens where people will try to find the edges. They will try to find what the moderators will allow and what they won't. Often what they do is not explicitly against the rules. Like if it is, it's easy. You just delete the comment, you let him know, whatever. Often what they're doing can be kind of sort of defended as being within the rules, but is still a toxic behavior, when it comes down to it. It will turn into something that's much worse. And usually moderators are under moderating. That's usually the way that people deal with it. They under moderate. You know you don't want to stifle people, you don't want to get calls of censorship and things like that, but really you should probably moderate more than you are and it's a really key aspect of maintaining a community. I've found that that's definitely the case. Early on in this other community, there was someone who was sort of misbehaving and I posted a very strong response to them and told them if they did it again that they were going to be banned. And it was helpful because it kind of set the boundary. This is what we're not going to, we're not going to allow this. It has been good because from that point on the group sort of started self-policing in a way. They kind of understood where the boundaries were. KEN: This topic of boundaries is super important. Another place that shows up particularly with anything open source or any other kind of content that you're maintaining, is an incredible sense of entitlement that you'll run into. And the burnout that can create in your team or the people who are working on that software with you. People will be like, you know, "This sucks." Like, "Why haven't you fixed my bug?" Like, "I submitted it months ago. You people are amateurs." Kind of like, "This is free. You paid us nothing for this." Keeping a healthy boundary about that and figuring out how to be responsive to the community without being a pushover is really important, if you're going to have a long-term software project or any other kind of thing that falls in that category of kind of collaborative content. JAMON: Yes. I agree with that a hundred percent. CHRIS: What are some other characteristics of a thriving community? So you've talked a little bit about moderation. You've talked about boundaries and policing, entitlement. And so, what else is there? KEN: One thing that isn't probably obvious if you've never done it, is how much promotion it actually requires. And you want to do it in a way that's consistent with the rest of your values but you have to put the word out and it's not going to happen on its own. That was definitely a sort of a stumbling block I had around open source, in particular or blogs or any of these things. Like, you have to tell people. It can feel really uncomfortable to a lot of kind of maker types. It feels weird that you have to convince people to let you give them stuff for free. But you totally do. You absolutely do. It's really important and finding the right, "Here it comes. Here comes." You got to find the right balance. (laughter) Finding the right balance is really hard. I think we're getting pretty good at it, but it's a non-optional part of this kind of work. JAMON: Well, because it's not really free, right? Because you only have so much room in your Slack sidebar for another Slack team. You only have so much mind share available for various things. And also people have been bitten in the past, where they've join communities that have either died, have been toxic or are just so noisy that you can't keep up. It just sucks all your time. KEN: Yeah, well, any of these things. Whether it's you're trying a new library. It requires some time and effort on your part. And you have to know that you're not going to get sucked into it. I mean there's probably this question in the back of a lot of people's minds kind of like, "Why on Earth do you do all of this? If it has all of these challenges and nobody pays you for it, like, why is it worthwhile?" Todd, you want to answer that? TODD: No, I want to say a bad joke. KEN: Okay. Go ahead and say a bad joke. TODD: I don't know if you're aware of this, but the Hoover Corporation is actually working on a vacuum cleaner that sucked time, never mind, I did that wrong. (laughter) KEN: You're right. That is a bad joke. TODD: I gave the punchline in the joke. KEN: You're right. That's a terrible joke. TODD: The project team was ... Eventually, they gave up on the project because it was too much of a time suck. I just messed that up. (laughter) KEN: I think we have to keep that in. TODD: Let me do it again. I don't know if you guys know this, but the Hoover Corporation was working on a temporal vacuum cleaner, but they eventually gave up on the project because it was too much of a time suck. CHRIS: I think I liked the failed joke attempt better. KEN: I like the failed joke better. Yeah. TODD: Well, yeah. Because that makes me the joke. KEN: I mean okay, so let's address the elephant in the room. Is there promotional value for us in terms of the rest of our services? Absolutely. Almost any attention especially if you know, basically positive attention is going to be good for us. It's a really expensive way of getting that attention. JAMON: It is. KEN: Let me be clear about that. If that's the only reason you're going to do it, go buy Google ads. Seriously. Like, don't do it. If it didn't have any promotional value, I don't think as a business person, you know, me, as the person who looks at the finances that I could justify the amount that we spend on it. If that was our only goal with that. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: So we have to do it partly because it's just who we are. JAMON: Absolutely. It gives us an audience and it gives us the ability to ... Like I did when I promoted this podcast there. If you join the community, by the way, I'm going to insert one of these seamless advertisements. If you join the community at community.infinite.red, your get access to things before the public does. We actually will go in there and and announce things and say, "Hey, you know, come check this out." And we get early feedback and stuff that way. It's really cool, but it also gives us an audience. So we had you know 2,000 people that I could "@channel." (laughter) And yes, I did it and we put enough money and time into the community that I didn't feel bad about doing it once in awhile, once in a blue moon. And I said, "@channel you know, we have a new podcast and go check it out." So that's definitely the promotional value, the built-in audience that we have that we've already built a rapport with because we have put in the time to actually show them who we are and they buy into that already. There's a lot of value there. KEN: It's a great source of folks that we already know or are sort of somewhat aligned with our values to go and find freelancers and that sort of thing. So we'll frequently get people just emailing us saying, "Hey, can we work with you?" And we usually don't have openings. So it was like, "Hey, you know, we don't have openings right now, but if you go hang out here that's usually where we go first." JAMON: Yes. KEN: We've gotten a lot of great contributors that way. JAMON: We have. KEN: Hopefully that's win-win for everybody. CHRIS: I'm still a little curious about this idea of, should every company build a community around their products, employees, and way of thinking? KEN: Not necessarily. JAMON: Wouldn't you say that one would kind of arise naturally though? KEN: Maybe. There's probably something to be said that, if you don't intentionally create the community, you're going to get a community whether you like it or not and it may or may not be aligned with what you're trying to do. But there's so many different kinds of companies out there that some of them are going to make more sense that way, some of them are going to get less sense that way. For us, given how collaborative what we do is, it makes perfect sense but there is plenty of companies that are just like us that don't cultivate that. So it's kind of up to you but this how we did it. This is how it works for us. And I think there's going to be people who resonate with it. CHRIS: Putting on your future facing hat, in what ways would you like to see the Infinite Red Community grow and mature? TODD: Upwards. (laughter) Oh, you didn't say direction, you said ways. Sorry. JAMON: I think from my standpoint, I'd like to see a little more deeper interaction beyond the more active channels. Something that's a little more beyond that. We have some ideas. We're not ready to announce anything yet but if you go to the community, you'll get first access. (laughter) I'm just relentless, aren't I? (laughter) But the deeper interactions, the more value, the better connection between everybody. I think that there's going to be more of that coming. We are going to continue to invest in the community in a way that is very meaningful. Keep an eye out for that. It's already pretty awesome, but we have some ways to make the directions deeper. I'm not looking for numbers. Like we have 2,000, I think almost 2,100 people in there right now. I'm not necessarily just looking for 100,000 people. What I want is for those connections to be more meaningful. TODD: It's not just our Slack community. I would consider our React Native Newsletter, which we have about 10,000 subscribers to be part of our community, the people who interact with us on open source. We have a variety of open source projects to be part of our community and of course, the listeners to this podcast is also part of our growing community. Community is a big umbrella, I think. JAMON: There are some things that we still need to work on with the community, for sure, but I think we do this probably better than a lot of people, a lot of companies. TODD: Ken's absolutely right. If you're doing community for promotion, good on you. Probably not the highest ROI. It's like general branding. You can't put a number on it but I think clearly from a business standpoint, it has its values and ways that we can't quantify or articulate. It's not for everyone. I think every company should find things that they can do to help the world and their business, but for us, it dovetails well with our culture.