Podcasts about fog creek

Ben Kamens is the CEO of Spring Science creating AI tools built just for scientists - starting with the world's best high-content image analysis suite. Ben worked at Fog Creek then was engineer number one at Khan Acadamy and now he's turned his considerable focus towards solving the computationally intense (and at one point, impossible) problems of cellular biology!https://www.springscience.com

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on September 8th, 2023.This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai(00:43): Bun v1.0.0Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37434117&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(02:32): Maybe Rust isn't a good tool for massively concurrent, userspace softwareOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37435515&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:28): Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years laterOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37433186&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:16): Procreate DreamsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37434918&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:42): Flexport is rescinding a bunch of signed offer lettersOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37433681&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:12): FTC judge decides Intuit's ‘free' TurboTax ads misled consumersOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37437311&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:42): Bees struggle to find flowers because of air pollutionOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37434381&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:44): Decoded: GNU Coreutils (2018)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37439535&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(14:25): NYPD spent millions to contract with firm banned by Meta for fake profilesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37431962&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(16:04): Safety inspector fired for finding 'too many defects'Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37437764&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

Besides the fear many startup founders and big fortune 500 organization leaders share of having their business negatively chronicled in the next "based on true events" docu-series (fictionalized or not), there's good reason for C-suite executives and people leaders to do all they can to build culture and create an inclusive environment for all employees: It's great for business. Yep, turns out that investing in culture pays dividends when done right. And as Peter Drucker said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” If you're not prioritizing culture as much as you are investing in other strategic initiatives, you're not setting yourself — or your business — up for success.  In this episode, Splash's Chief People Officer, Liz Hall, details her deep experience building world-class company cultures for organizations like Fog Creek, Stack Overflow, Trello, and now Splash. RESOURCESExplore our Internal Events Toolkit: https://bit.ly/39hiVUHWatch "The Alchemy of Employee Engagement": https://bit.ly/3Nxuy85See open roles at Splash: https://splashthat.com/careersCONNECT WITH USFollow Splash on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/3237551/Connect with Liz Hall: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-hall-8939551b/Connect with Camille White-Stern: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camille-white-stern-7987b893/ 

Join the team as they talk with long time friend and Chief People Officer, Liz Hall. Liz has led teams at Fog Creek, Trello and most recently Splash

Jason Rosoff is the guest of this episode. We start the interview with the pattern “Personalized relationships for co-creation” from the Cloud Native Transformations repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/organization-culture/personalized-relationships-for-co-creation). Jason explains the difference between a complex and complicated problem and how psychological safety plays an essential role in innovation. He shares some examples of how some companies constraint the physical environment of their offices to create space for people to talk and share their ideas. During the interview, Jason explains how relationships can play an essential role for information to travel across a network, how organisations can enable it, and how managers and executives can read weak signals latent in their organisations. Jason recommends the following resources: Radical Candor from Kim Scott Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter from Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown “You are not so smart” podcast (https://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/)  Jason Rosoff (@jasonrr) has a passion for building products and teams that scale. He believes teaching people to be better leaders is at the core of building anything great. As co-founder and CEO of Radical Candor, LLC, Jason helps teams at companies large and small build the best relationships of their careers and achieve amazing results. Prior to Radical Candor, Jason spent seven years scaling Khan Academy from four people to hundreds as both chief people officer and chief product officer. Working in partnership with The Gates Foundation and Google, he helped Khan Academy improve educational outcomes for more than 100-million students and teachers worldwide. Previously, Jason was a product leader at Fog Creek where he helped build the teams that created StackOverflow and Trello. Early in his career, Jason led engineering operations at a white-label producer of photo books for Apple. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in management from New York University.

BGBS 071: Maurice Cherry | Creative Strategist | The Restorative Power of Play Maurice Cherry is the creative strategist for CodeSandbox, an online code editor tailored for web applications. Prior to this, he served principal and creative director at Lunch, an award-winning multidisciplinary studio he created in 2008 that helps creative brands craft messages and tell stories for their targeted audiences, including fostering relationships with underrepresented communities. Past clients and collaborators included Facebook, Mailchimp, Vox Media, NIKE, Mediabistro, Site5, SitePoint, and The City of Atlanta. Maurice is a pioneering digital creator who is most well-known for Revision Path™, an award-winning podcast which is the first podcast to be added to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Other projects of Maurice's include the Black Weblog Awards, 28 Days of the Web, The Year of Tea, and the design anthology RECOGNIZE. Maurice's projects and overall design work and advocacy have been recognized by Apple, Adobe, NPR, Lifehacker, Design Observer, Entrepreneur, AIGA, the Columbia Journalism Review, Forbes, Fast Company, and many other print and digital outlets. Maurice is also an educator, and has built curricula and taught courses on web design, web development, email marketing, WordPress, and podcasting for thousands of students over the past ten years. Maurice is the 2018 recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary from AIGA, Creative Loafing Atlanta's 2018 Influentials in the fields of business and technology, was named as one of GDUSA's “People to Watch” in 2018, and was included in the 2018 edition of The Root 100 (#60), their annual list of the most influential African-Americans ages 25 to 45. In previous years, Maurice was awarded as one of Atlanta's “Power 30 Under 30″ in the field of Science and Technology by the Apex Society. He was also selected as one of HP's “50 Tech Tastemakers” in conjunction with Black Web 2.0, and was profiled by Atlanta Tribune as one of 2014's Young Professionals. He is also a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Maurice holds a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Morehouse College and a Master's degree in telecommunications management from Keller Graduate School of Management. In this episode, you'll learn... As a creative on the web, it's beneficial to stay fluid and agile enough to go where the market goes. It's detrimental to focus on only one specialty because the industry changes so quickly that it may become obsolete. When done correctly, brands can put forth an image that is discordant with people's initial perception of them, through storytelling in marketing. This can draw in an entirely new audience based on the brand's "personality." Podcasting is not as easy as it looks. Everything is deliberate, and a lot of care goes into each episode. Quotes [8:10] It almost is a detriment to be kind of a specialist, because your specialty may end up getting absorbed or may become obsolescent or something like that. So you kind of have to stay fluid and kind of see where different trends are going and see how you can fit in there. [12:45] Brands may try to put forth an image of who they are or who they want to be. And that may not even mesh with how people are thinking about them…but it makes people remember them in a way that perhaps people may not think of, and so they may gain a whole new level of audience just based off of that kind of storytelling and interaction that draws them in to who they are as a brand and what they sort of represent in terms of company values. [1:00:43] I think people will look at the 400 episodes of revision path and just see a monolithic set of people. But I mean, there's so much diversity within the people that I have interviewed, whether it's age diversity, whether it's what they do in the industry, years of experience, there's men, there's women, there's trans folk, there's folks in the US and the Caribbean, throughout Europe, throughout Africa, throughout Asia and Australia. They're everywhere. The thing that sort of ties them all together is they're practicing designers, or they're practicing techies, or they're doing something creative on the web that is worthy of kind of falling into line with everything that I'm doing with revision paths. [1:04:53] I just turned 40 this year. And there's still a lot of things about myself that I feel like I've managed to still keep a very playful spirit and still be able to kind of tap into the restorative power of play, even into the work that I do. I mean, even what I'm doing with creative strategy, it's kind of playing at work a little bit. I get to really dive into myself and come up with inspiring things that we can do and fantastic campaigns that we can execute. Resources Podcast: Revision Path LinkedIn: Maurice Cherry Twitter: @mauricecherry Have a Brand Problem? We can help. Book your no-obligation, 15-minute Wildstory Brand Clarity Call now.  Learn about our Brand Audit and Strategy process Identify if you need a new logo or just a refresh Determine if your business has a branding problem See examples of our work and get relevant case studies See if branding is holding your business back and can help you get to the next level Book Your FREE Brand Clarity Call   Podcast Transcript Maurice Cherry 0:02 And I started doing these long form interviews, maybe about 1500 to 2000 words or so. But it just took so long to put together. I was doing it by myself. And it was someone that actually was a reader of revision path, who one day wrote me and said that she was a fan of revision path as you would really like to be on revision path, but wanted to record a podcast because she had a podcast that she was doing in Chicago. At the time. I'm like, yeah, we can record that's fine. thinking to myself, I have no recording equipment. So we ended up recording our interview, the very first episode of revision path on my mobile phone in a restaurant. Terrible quality. I still keep the episode out. I mean, it's somewhat listable, I guess, I don't know. But that was kind of where the genesis of the podcast started. Marc Gutman 0:54 podcasting from Boulder, Colorado. This is the Baby Got Back story Podcast, where we dive into the story behind the story of today's most inspiring storytellers, creators and entrepreneurs. I like backstories and I cannot lie. I am your host, Marc Gutman, Marc Gutman, and on today's episode of Baby got backstory, we are talking with Maurice cherry, the award winning podcaster, creative strategist, and designer. And before we get into this episode, I feel so lucky that I get to talk to people. And I get to talk to people on this show. And I get to talk to people on this show, and share it with you, the audience. I truly, truly, truly thank you and appreciate you. If you like this show, and want to show your like an appreciation for me or the show, please head over to Apple podcasts or Spotify and give us a five star review and rating. Ratings really do matter. Apple and Spotify use these ratings as part of the algorithm that determines ratings on third charts. And we're human. We like likes and follows and ratings too. So thank you for your reviews. I do appreciate it. Today's guest is Maurice cherri, creative strategist, designer and host of the award winning podcast revision path. past clients and collaborators included Facebook, MailChimp, Vox media nyck Media Bistro site five sitepoint in the city of Atlanta. Maria is a pioneering digital creator, who is most well known for revision path and award winning podcast, which is the first podcast to be added to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Other projects of maurices include the black weblog awards 28 days of the web, the year of t in the design anthology recognize Murray says projects and overall design work and advocacy have been recognized by Apple, Adobe NPR, life hacker design observer entrepreneur, the AI GA, the Columbia Journalism Review, Forbes Fast Company in many other print and digital outlets. He says the 2018 recipient of the Steven Heller prize for cultural commentary from the AI GA, creative loafing Atlanta's 2018 influentials in the fields of business and technology was named one of GED USA people to watch in 2018. It was included in the 2018 edition of the route 100. He was number 60 and their annual list of the most influential African Americans ages 25 to 45. In previous years, Maurice was awarded one of Atlanta's power 30 under 30 in the field of science and technology by the apex society. He was also selected as one of HPS 50 tech tastemakers in conjunction with black web to Dotto. It was profiled by Atlanta Tribune is one of 2014 young professionals. He is also a member of the International Academy of digital arts and sciences. And this is his story. I am here with Maurice cherry who is a creative strategist, designer and podcaster. You may know him from his very popular podcast revision path, and that's because they just recorded their 400th episode which is a major, major milestone Marie's Welcome to the baby. Got back History podcast. Maurice Cherry 5:01 Thank you so much for having me, Mark, this is great. Marc Gutman 5:04 That's so great to have you here. Why don't we just hop right into it? I mean, you, you have this varied what I'd call a hybrid background of creative strategist designer podcaster. Like, how did that come to be like, like, how do you make that all work in today's environment? Maurice Cherry 5:24 You know, I'm kind of still trying to figure that out myself. I'm lucky to be able to kind of remain a bit fluid and hybrid in some sorts as it relates to my skill set, which allows me to kind of go where the market goes, but I mean, my background, I have a undergraduate degree in mathematics. my graduate degree is in telecommunications, management's. I've worked in media, I've worked in web, I've worked with nonprofits, I've worked with tech startups, I've had my own business for nine years. So I've done a little bit of everything and a lot of different places. And I've had the opportunity to work with everyone from, you know, startup founders and entrepreneurs to like, captains of industry at fortune 100 companies. So I've kind of been a little all over the place. And like I said, being able to remain fluid has helped me as things have changed in the market. I mean, I started off working for companies here, I'm in Atlanta, Georgia, I started off working for companies here and then quit the last place I was working out, which was at&t and working as a senior web designer, started my own studio did that for nine years, sort of wound that down and then jump back into working for places design working for tech startups. And just kind of going from there. Yeah, and Marc Gutman 6:40 you use that word, fluid and fluidity. And you know, the old way of doing things used to be very specialized used to be very siloed not not bouncing between disciplines. Why do you think it's important to to be fluid in in your skill set in your career? What advantage is that given you, Maurice Cherry 7:01 um, for me, the advantage that it's given is being able to have the perspective to see where commonalities lie, as the market, or as you really the industry sort of changes. I mean, when I first came about on the web, you were either a web designer, a web developer, or a webmaster, like those are kind of the three particular titles that you had. And now you've got all different types of product designers and UX designers and things like that, despite the fact that there are new titles and the way that things have changed. There's still some sort of common threads between a lot of these different types of titles. And even as companies have come along and introduced new types of technology into the world, which therefore mean that there are new types of people that work on these things. Like, there's conversation designers, there's mixed reality designers like you know, a couple of weeks ago, I was first introduced to the metaverse, which sounds like something you'd hear in like a 90s sci fi afternoon kids show her something. So there's so many Tell that to say that the market and the industry changes so much, it almost is a detriment to be kind of a specialist, because your specialty may end up getting, you know, absorbed or may become obsolescent or something like that. So you kind of have to stay fluid and kind of see where different trends are going and see how you can fit in there. Marc Gutman 8:29 Yeah, and I want to be a part of the metaverse like that sounds awesome. I don't even know what that is. But I want to like tell people that I am part of the metaverse or that I work in the metaverse, that'd be great. And it's really interesting because the person that introduced us, Douglas Davis, who is appeared on this show, he was talking about something really, really similar in his conversation, his interview, which was a lot of what we're doing today hasn't been invented yet. Right? And we're kind of in this next wave of, of that. And so he gave the example back when he was starting out, like no one had really invented, like how to build web pages and websites. And so it was real time, right? And then we started to grow up in no one had invented how to be an expert on Twitter when Twitter first came out, we all just kind of did it, you know. And now you know, what I'm hearing you say is that business is again, moving technology is moving so fast. And it's you know, they're intertwined, right Business and Technology and it's moving so quickly, that you have to be fluid that you have to be nimble, and you have to be kind of you can't be an expert at anything, if anything because it's moving so fast, but what you probably can be is a really good thinker and a really good strategist in order to bring all these disciplines together. Did I didn't get that right. Maurice Cherry 9:52 Yeah, that's pretty accurate. I mean, the the beauty of my particular title of being a creative strategist Is that no matter what business that I'm put in, I'm still able to kind of function because what I do, but one of the top one of the things that I'm sort of tasked to do is kind of be a company's in house creative experts. So I'm working across teams to discover opportunities for storytelling. I'm working maybe with a marketing team on campaigns, I'm working with a sales team on ways that they can reach new audiences. So I can kind of be very flexible, you know, no matter what sort of business that I'm putting in, which is pretty good. Marc Gutman 10:31 Yeah. And that sounds like awesome, like, I hear you talk. And I'm like, wow, I want to be a creative strategist, you know, how, you know? How does that show up in business? are more and more businesses recognizing the need for it? And what really is the the, the impetus for bringing on a creative strategist? Like why? Why do they say like, hey, Maria, we need you to come in and help us out. Maurice Cherry 10:55 In my experience has mostly been when it's boiled down to needing help with storytelling, or with some sort of brand awareness or brand campaign strategy tends to be tied. In my experience, that strategy has tended to be tied to branding fairly easily. So say, at the past few places that I've worked at, I've done a lot of sort of brand centric work with what they're doing in order to take the story of what their business is, and what it is that they're trying to sort of put forth to their customers. And then really kind of, I don't know, tell that in a way that their audience would find compelling or that potential audiences may find compelling. And that could be video, that could be a podcast, that could be a really well done marketing campaign. It could be a drip campaign of newsletters, it could be a series of white papers, it can really sort of manifest in a number of different ways, depending on who we're trying to reach and what the story is that we're trying to tell. Marc Gutman 11:51 Yeah. And so as I think about it, I mean, I get excited about this idea of creative strategist and working at a brand level across departments, because that's typically where we run into problems, right, is that this type of initiative is siloed, into the marketing department into the creative department. And so having that influence across departments is really, you know, what I see is the magic of this type of work. But when you were, in your experience, when you look at this, what do brands that get this right? Like, what do they do? What are you seeing them do to get this this type of work? Right? Maurice Cherry 12:31 One thing I'm seeing is that they're doing a lot of listening, they're listening to their audience there, whether that's through social media, or through any sort of, you know, other channel or back channel, they're listening to what their audience is telling them. Oftentimes, brands may try to put forth an image of who they are or who they want to be. And then that may not even mesh with how, you know, people are thinking about them. Sometimes that works to a brand's advantage. Sometimes it doesn't. I think we've mostly seen this on social media, where you see brands like, Oh, God, what's a good brand that that's kind of subversive stay comes. The stake of his brand, for example, is weirdly stoic and philosophic. On Twitter, which you would not associate with a brand of like frozen meat products, like, why are they so deep right now, I don't understand this. But it makes people remember them in a way that perhaps, you know, people may not think of steak gums. And so they may gain a whole new level of audience just based off of that kind of storytelling and interaction that draws them in to like, who they are as a brand, and what they sort of represent in terms of company values. And such, I certainly thinks that as social media has grown as that and and as more people have tapped into social media, they're kind of starting to hold brands accountable a lot for the causes that they find the people that they hire, a number of companies get taken the task for these sorts of things that have nothing to do with their actual product at all. But if you're hiring someone who might be unknown abuser, for example, that's going to look bad on the brand. Or if you know your your company is funding a politician that might be taken away, or might be funding voting rights or something well taken away voting rights or something like that. These are the kinds of things that people are now keyed into. And they're looking at brands to kind of be these while they're there. They're wanting to make sure that the brands that they support with their dollars are also kind of, you know, in accordance with their values as well. Marc Gutman 14:37 Absolutely. And it's, it's crazy and amazing at the same time to me, I mean, I love the amount of power that consumers have on brands at the same time. Everybody has a voice right? And so how can brands even navigate all this? pressure and criticism to be something Different, right? You can't You can't please everybody all of the time, like, where do you see the challenges for brands in this new landscape? Maurice Cherry 15:09 I mean, I think the biggest challenge that happens is just making sure that you are being consistent with your voice. Often times I've seen brands try to like adopt a certain kind of you know, cheeky haha Twitter voice or whatever, that may be completely discordant with how they treat employees or, or you know how they treat customers or something like that. This is particularly the case I've seen with a lot of tech startups that try to like get in on certain little you know, punny things that are happening. But then something hits the verge where they mistreated a number of employees or something like that. And it's like, oh, you can't be you can't be cheeky and sarcastic on Twitter, and then you're treating your employees like crap, you know, behind the scenes. So I think love just trying to be consistent throughout everything that you're doing is one thing that that companies should think about as they kind of navigate the space, I would, I would also say, you know, it helps to just be agile and nimble, because sometimes these you know, if a certain catastrophe befalls a brand, sometimes it happens completely out of the blue for something they don't even know about. So, for example, say, a company has a particular actor or actress as a spokesperson. And this actor or actress did something on Instagram. Well, the first thing people are going to do, yes, they're going to take that particular actor or actress to task, but then they're also going to take the company to task and think, Oh, well, is this the kind of person that you want speaking for your product? And now it's like, oh, now we have to kind of go into crisis mode, and figure out how do we either distance ourselves from this? Or say, Yes, we are a part of what it is that this actor actress is about, here's what we're doing, as a company or as a brand to support them. So it's, it's tricky, but you have to kind of be, you know, pretty nimble to these sorts of things, because they can happen really out of the blue. Marc Gutman 17:08 Yeah, and there's a lot going on. And so, you know, it really lays out the, you know, the the framework for why a company might need a creative strategist. Yeah, there. It's not just this omni directional unit, or is it? I mean, I guess it'd be one directional conversation. It's not a one way conversation, right, this massive dialogue, and there's comments and insights and, and opinions, ping pong all over from every direction, and to really have someone at a higher level thinking like, how are we going to manage this conversation as something that is no longer a luxury for brands, but really a necessity? Maurice Cherry 17:44 Yeah, there's a lot of thought that has to go into so many things, the imagery that you use the hashtags that you use, the colors that you're using, all of that ends up sort of falling under the purview, usually of creative strategist. And I will say, you know, a lot of advertising firms employ creative strategist as well. So they know fully kind of what it means to have someone that's really thinking about the brand from like this 360 view, but also from this bird's eye view of being able to zoom out and really see all parts of where a particular campaign or something may touch, and realize those sort of points where something may go wrong, or maybe misconstrued and try to figure out a way to kind of circumvent that or fix that issue, you know, so it doesn't occur. Marc Gutman 18:29 Yeah. And so switching gears a little bit, you mentioned that you're in Atlanta. Now. Is that where you grew up? Maurice Cherry 18:35 No, I grew up originally in Selma, Alabama. But I've been here in Atlanta now for a little over 20 years. Now. I came here in 1999. So I've been here for what that's 21 years or something like that. I've been here longer than I've been in Alabama. Marc Gutman 18:56 Well, looking back to Alabama, assuming that you were there when you know, Murray was a young Murray's, like eight years old and you're hanging out. And were you there in Selma when you were eight? Maurice Cherry 19:06 Yeah, yeah, I grew up there. went to elementary, middle and high school there. Cool. Cool. So Marc Gutman 19:11 eight year old Morrison, did he think he was going to be a creative strategist? Maurice Cherry 19:18 I'm pretty sure eight year old Mario had no idea what a creative strategist was. I think eight year old Mario is probably either wanted to be a firefighter. I have an uncle, that's a fire chief. Or probably a writer. Probably one of those two is when I probably wanted to be at that age. Marc Gutman 19:37 Then I was gonna ask, but a writer might fill in this answer. So did you have a tendency towards either creativity or strategy or both? or What were you into at that age and as you started to matriculate through through the years and sama Maurice Cherry 19:54 Oh my god, eight years old. I really was into writing. I mean, that sounds like such an old hobby for a kid but I had been writing probably since around, let's see eight years old. What's that like, second grade, second, third grade, something like that. I have been writing since first grade like stories and also drawing along with them. I have an older brother, he's four years older. And he's really like, the super visual creative in the family, he paints he draws he sculpts. I mean, he's, he's a fantastic artist. And I remember growing up wanting to be like him, but I could not draw, I could do like little stick figures or whatever. I would say my work was very abstract at that age when I look back on it now. But I would draw that I would write these stories that would correspond with the drawings. And I remember, my teachers would give us this sheet of paper where it's like, blank on top, and then there's ruled lines on the bottom. And so you draw whatever top the picture or what have you. And then you write your story. Down below, I remember doing a lot of those, I have a whole, like binder full of those in my storage unit from when I was a kid, like just doing a ton of writing and drawing and exploring, I guess, I mean, trying to explore my creativity in that rather limited space. I mean, Soma is a is a very small town in South Central Alabama, most people know about it from the civil rights movement. I can tell you growing up there as a kid, I mean, it's the country, it's not super fun. Like, there's not, there's no, you know, big amusement parks, or movie theaters and things like that, that you would, you know, kind of hang out and do stuff with as a kid. So it was very much, you having to kind of find your own entertainment, maybe you're hanging out with other kids, maybe you're at home. A lot of people would be in church, because almost a big church town is like 100 plus churches there. So that's usually kind of what you were doing. You were trying to find something to do. Maybe watch TV, let's see eight years old that I haven't intended. I probably had an intent though back then also. So I was most likely playing Super Mario Brothers or pro wrestling. Probably pro wrestling, I was probably star man in pro wrestling back then. Marc Gutman 22:17 Good, good hobby, good hobby. And you mentioned that you know, you were creative with words, your brother visually creative. Were your parents creative? Did they instill this in your Where'd that come from? Maurice Cherry 22:32 Um, no, they're not creative at all. Let me let me take them. I mean, I think you know, as I think parents have to be creative to some capacity, just dealing with children, but they weren't in particularly creative fields. My dad at the time, was an engineer at GE, working on plastics. And my mom was working at the local community college as a lab assistant in the biology department. So they were very much like in the sciences kind of feel. So not a lot of, you know, creativity there, I would imagine, but I did have the opportunity at times to maybe go like with my dad to work or maybe go up my mom to work and like, see where they work and like, see the machines and see the lab equipment and all that sort of stuff, at least get interested in it like, like, know that this is like a possibility for me, perhaps but no one say anything creative. Like we don't think like someone doesn't have any, at least not to my recollection, any art museums or, or anything like that, where you would go and like be overwhelmed with visual creative inspiration. At that age, maybe probably when I was a little older, I certainly remember getting a lot of visual and creative inspiration from magazines. So I think probably when I was maybe about 10, or 11 or so I remember us getting maybe I had to be old enough that maybe I was a teenager at this point. But we would get subscriptions to like zillions magazine, which was Consumer Reports. They had this like kids vertical that they called zillions. And I remember we would get vive magazine and source the source magazine and stuff like that. So I'm gonna get visual inspiration from magazines a lot. Growing up, Marc Gutman 24:18 what an awesome like, sub brand for kids zillions like Maurice Cherry 24:23 yeah, I don't know, if they do that anymore. It was it was like they were teaching kids how to be like, responsible consumers. So they would like for example, talk about fruit juice and say how most fruit juice is not made of actual juice. If you check the labels, it's actually more you know, it's actually water and sugar and all this sort of stuff. So they were kind of like teaching you how to, you know, be a good consumer as a kid. It was like, it was like a kid's magazine about money, which was very interesting. Marc Gutman 24:52 That's so cool. I love it. And as you got older and as you got into high school was this creative like writing And in this creative outlet, was that still coming out of you? Or what were your interests at that time? Maurice Cherry 25:06 It was, I mean, I was all over the place for people that knew me in high school, I was all over the place I was writing. Let's see, I think I was in eighth grade or so. And I started taking college English courses in writing. So I was like, always writing something writing poems and like, getting published and stuff. But also right around seventh or eighth grade, I discovered music. And I discovered why once I discovered music, we had a band in middle school. And I wanted to join the band because the band could get out of sixth and seventh period. And I'm like, Well, I want to get out of 67 period. How do I make that happen? And they had like this open session where you, you know, go to the band room and you choose the instrument like, I remember going in and the band director, Mr. Ruffin would say, like, you know, you choose the instrument and turn the instrument will choose you like you just pick the one that you think you'll do best on it. I really wanted to play trumpet. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna play trumpet, but the mouthpiece was just too small. I just couldn't get the right on the shore. And then my band director switched me over to trombone. And that was like a match made in heaven. That was perfect. So I played music, from seventh grade all the way through high school, all the way through college, all throughout my 20s. I played trombone, in marching bands, and jazz bands and like, house bands, at clubs and all sorts of stuff. So in high school, I was doing music, I was writing. Also just doing class, I was kept in the math club. I was sort of all over the place in high school, doing a lot of different things. I was really though getting more into music, because I'm with the marching band. My band director also allowed me to kind of try my hand at composing. So I would like listen to songs like mostly songs from video games, I would listen to songs like say the fanfare from Final Fantasy when you beat an enemy. And I would say, Okay, how can I turn this into like four parts for trombone. So that means me sitting down on my keyboard, and like, dissecting out each part, and then go into my section, and then we practice it. And then we take it to the game, and we play it at the game and stuff like that. So I got a chance to really sort of cut my teeth with doing a bit of like arranging and composing there. And then my band director also introduced me to so much good music, mostly, like Earth, Wind and Fire. And he was a big Earth Wind and Fire fan. So he introduced me to like their whole catalogue at the time. And we were also playing some popular songs from off the radio. See, this was 95. So we were playing. Like, this is how we do it. For montell Jordan, water runs dry boys to man that might have been 96. But like, we were playing like radio hits, but then also playing like these, you know, well known songs from like the 70s and 80s from Earth, Wind and Fire and stuff. So I was I was all over the place in high school. I really was like, I was always doing something different mostly with the band, though. I think most people knew me for that. But also, I was just like, in class and making A's and you know, it was I, I really enjoyed high school. I enjoy high school a lot. Marc Gutman 28:23 Yeah, and are you still skilled and playing the trombone. Maurice Cherry 28:29 I haven't played the trombone and over 10 years, so I don't know, I would imagine, it's probably just like picking up, you know, like riding a bike, I would suppose because the trombone, unlike other brass instruments has no keys. And so it's just one long, interconnected tube. And it's there's only seven positions to the trombone are not marked either. So you have to know them just by memory. And you have to get the note right really by ear. So like this a lot of like active listening as you're playing. And because you're sort of like varying the length of air in this long tube as you're playing. You don't have a lot of room for error. But you also have a lot of room for improvisation, because you can easily slide in between notes without having to exactly know, the right fingering to get there, you can just get there based on how it sounds. And so like even doing something as simple as the chromatic scale, which you know, takes into account all the flats and sharps, you're just going up and down the slide. And so if you hit an F, then you know, if I need to get down to a flat, I just keep sliding down until I get there. So you sort of in your mind, you know, kind of the connective tissue between the notes that you have to reach. So I say like trombone is easy to pick up but hard to master. Because you have to be thinking about all of that while you're playing. So sad. Marc Gutman 29:49 I thought you would be the first guest that we would have on the Baby Got Back story podcast that would break out the trombone and it doesn't sound like you have one within arm's reach right now. I'll give you I'll give you a pass on that. But Maurice Cherry 30:02 I saw I saw my trombone when I was 30. Because I was like, I'm gonna hang it up because I really wanted to focus on, like, at the time, like, focus on my career and on tech and stuff, and I couldn't be playing, you know, like pickup songs and stuff like that, like I was a session musician for a while about 20s. Like, it's it's fun until it's not, you know, like, it's just not stable. And I don't know, I wonder what I wonder who I would have been if I kept up with it, though. Yeah, I still have kind of in the back of my mind. Like when all this tech stuff is said and done. To start my own Afro Cuban jazz, big bands. That may still happen. Like when I turned 50 maybe I'll I'll make that happen. I don't know. But it's in the cards. Marc Gutman 30:49 The future vision and you know, who knows, maybe we can get a crowdfunding campaign going for Murray's here to get them a new trombone? It's Yeah, seems like you should, you should be playing the trumpet, trombone, and you shouldn't be, shouldn't be selling your trombone. But as you were growing up in so many getting into high school, what do you think you were going to do? I mean, I see that you went to Morehouse, and I'm sure your parents were very proud. Where are they? What were their hopes and dreams for you? And what did you think you were going to do with your life as you were starting to get a little older, and, you know, into high school and looking into college? Maurice Cherry 31:24 So I, this is so interesting, and I don't know if this will make your viewers angry or not, or jealous, I don't know. But like, I was not thinking about, the only thing I was really thinking about at that age was getting out of Selma. That was like, my number one. Main imperative is like, get out of this town. This is a small town, I mean, to kind of give you some context with this. I mean, I came about in the generation right after, like civil rights movement, Bloody Sunday, all that sort of stuff. And so the city itself already has this, like, deep, like, just ghost of history about it everywhere that you go. I mean, Selma itself is a very haunted town, like there's a number of haunted houses and things of that nature, but like to live that close to history, and then also be so detached from the rest of the world is a very eerie feeling. I think about that, in hindsight, you know, growing up, like I really did not know, much of the world outside of Selma, until I left. And I think about well, who would I have been if I stayed there? Like I probably would have, you know, I don't know that a pastor or something. I don't know, who knows. But it's such a small, insular type of community. And it's very easy to like stay in that and never change and never go anywhere and never experienced anything new. For me, the main thing I wanted to do was just get out of Selma. So the reason I say this is because I didn't really have a plan as to what I wanted to do. My plan was just how do I get out of here? What what way do I make that happen? I don't care what the way is, it just has to happen. And so in seventh grade, I remember being part of the, I think it was called the Duke talent identification program, or tip for short. And what they will do is they will take like, high achieving middle schoolers, and you would spend a weekend at Duke University. And then they would also give you an opportunity to take one of the like, standardized tests early being the LSAT, or the a CT. So seventh grade, I took the a CT, and I scored a 30 on it. Now, I think the AC T goes up to a 36. So 30 out of 36 was very good that I think that's like analog to maybe like a high 1400 or low 1500. On the SSAT like it's pretty good. So when I took that in seventh grade, that pretty much wrote my ticket to any school that I wanted to go to. I didn't think at all about like, Oh, I'm really want to go to these colleges, so I have to apply or I really wanted colleges were coming to me. I didn't have to do it. And I don't mean to sound like a bragging sort of way. But I mean, you know, my mom wanted she tell you to like colleges, were contacting us left and right, sending us all sorts of materials. And I was really for me to just think, Oh, well, where do I want to go. And I didn't want to stay in Alabama. Because again, my thing was like I wanted to get out of Selma, but really, I just wanted to get out of like the state and experience something new. But my mom was very much like you know, wherever you go, I'm not getting on a plane. So you have to go somewhere close. Like you have to be still in the south because I'm not getting on a plane. I'm not taking a bus anywhere. It has to be fairly close. And Morehouse ended up being the choice because they came to me on my senior awards day and presented me with two full scholarships, which was more than any other The school had presented me with at the time and I mean, like every major school in Alabama and presented it was like a full ride or something. But I didn't want to go to like, no, no shade to the University of Alabama. I don't want to go to the University of Alabama. I didn't want to go to Auburn. I didn't want to go to Alabama State, no snow shade. The Alabama State. I didn't want to go there. But Morehouse came and Morehouse has this big reputation. And people are like, Oh, well, Martin Luther King went to Morehouse. And, you know, I should go to Morehouse. And I'm like, you know what, I should go to Morehouse. I want to go to Morehouse. And part of the reason of going was one, I knew that was a quick ticket out of out of Selma, but that also, and I think anyone who grew up in the south, probably in the 80s, and 90s, that wasn't near a big city, came to Atlanta at some point, like, there was a field trip to Six Flags, it was all your your class, they were on sa t we're going to Six Flags like everything was going to Six Flags. So there were always all these trips to Atlanta. And Atlanta was always sort of the destination, I think for a lot of us because it was the nearest really big city. Plus around that time. I mean, Atlanta in the 90s was a magical place. I mean, yes, you have the Olympics, but you also had freakness. So you've got like this combination of all this electricity happening in the city. And it was just the place like Atlanta was just the place to be. And so I'm thinking, well, if I can go to Atlanta, and it's a free ride, and I don't have to pay it, my parents will have to pay. Yeah, we'll do it. Let's do Atlanta. And so Morehouse ended up being the choice for me. I didn't even apply to Morehouse, they came to me. And, and the rest is history. Marc Gutman 36:44 A common question I get all the time is Mark, can you help me with our brand? Yes, we help companies solve branding problems. And the first step would be to schedule a no obligation brand clarity call, we'll link to that in the show notes, or head over to wildstorm comm and send us an email, we'll get you booked right away. So whether you're just getting started with a new business, or whether you've done some work and need a refresh, or whether you're a brand that's high performing and wants to stay there, we can help. After you book, your brand clarity call, you'll learn about our brand audit strategy process will identify if you need a new logo or just a refresh, will determine if your business has a branding problem. And you'll see examples of our work and get relevant case studies. We'll also see if branding is holding your business back and can help you get to the next level. So what are you waiting for, build the brand you've always dreamed of. Again, we'll link to that in the show notes. or head over to wildstorm comm and send us an email. Now back to the show. All I could think about when you were talking about music in Atlanta in the 90s was salt and pepper. So that's what it triggered for me. But so you went to Morehouse and sounds like you know, first and foremost, you're like a lot of young people. You're like, I just want to go someplace, I just want to change my life. I just want to start my life, you know, and kind of figure things out. When you got to Morehouse, what did you think you were going to do with with yourself? Maurice Cherry 38:30 Oh, my goodness, you know, I'm gonna be completely honest with you, Mark, I had no plans in college. I'm telling you that back then I didn't plan anything. I was such a easy going go with the flow kind of person to kind of give you a sense of that. I graduated from high school in late May of 1999. And then two weeks later, I packed up moved everything and went somewhere else because the the program that I was a part of for my scholarship, had a summer program is called project space. So I was at Morehouse in June of 99. Like, it was such a magical feeling. I'm like I'm in this big city, by myself. No one can tell me what to do. I could do whatever I want. But of course, it's still like within the confines of college and you have to kind of be, you know, aware of your surroundings. Morehouse is in that it's not in the best neighborhood. I mean, certainly back then it was it was not that great. It's probably better now. But back then it was a pretty rough neighborhood that the school was in so they really wanted to make sure that we stayed on campus where it was safe and not venture out into the neighborhood. But we could easily like catch a bus to the train station and like, go to all parts of the city where the train would go and so you know, the city kind of ended up being like our oyster but when I got there, I mean, I had no plans. I was in the summer program. And we were taking oh my goodness, we were taking like calculus two courses and we were taking care computer programming courses and Spelman, the program that we had on the head of cohort at Spelman College, which is the all female college that's across the street from Morehouse, which is all male college. And so we will take classes together with the girls from Spelman, we would hang out together. But mostly everything we did was kind of in and around. And on campus, like there wasn't a lot of off campus kind of stuff. Except for the people who were from Atlanta who could, you know, like, they could like get in their car, like take us somewhere, like take it to the grocery store or something like that. But they were they really highly discouraged us from going out and about in the city. And then once the school year started proper, I mean, I was just trying everything that I could like I was meeting new people that were into different things that was sort of my first real deep introduction to like anime, and trans music. Was that Morehouse, I was, like I mentioned, I was also still playing trombone. Just like discovering different things and different people, honestly, I mean, I'm just coming from Alabama, just being like this country bumpkin. Like now I'm all of a sudden, meeting all these people from the Caribbean, and from other parts of the country, and like, you know, them being really proud of where they're from, and their culture and everything like that. And so, just getting introduced to so many different things at once made it really, really hard to like, focus, like, I'll be honest, I almost almost flunked out. Freshman year, like first semester was, I was lost in the sauce. As I was going out to the clubs, I was hanging out late. I was getting back to the dorm room 234 in the morning for and then like sleeping for a few hours and then have an eight o'clock, Cal three class like I was reckless. I was so reckless freshman year, and it caught up to me to the point where I ended up getting evicted from my dorm. I was homeless for a slight bit like about a week or two, and then ended up getting placed into another dorm. And then that ended up being like a weird kind of situation, because the rd was kind of a creepy, like kind of a creepy guy, and got moved to another dorm. And then that was weird because my roommate in that dorm clearly had been suffering physical abuse from his roommate, and was very like, I don't know, very jumpy, like, anytime I will come around. And he's like, oh, like, don't you know, don't look at me that way, don't you know or something like that. So freshman year was a lot, at least the first half of freshman year was a lot. During that time. One thing I would say that was like, the stabilizing force outside of my classes was that I had joined a website and started working for them. So there was a website called college club calm. I don't know if people remember college club. And it was sort of like a precursor to Facebook. And basically, every college had their own campus on college club. And you could upload pictures. Every person had like a college club email, and they had this number that you could call that would read your email to you over the phone. There was live chat. I mean, comms club was lit. I mean, they ended up going bankrupt. for good reason. I think at one point, they were giving away like $10,000 a week to people, they were really just like that early, calm money was coming in. But I worked for college club as a campus representative first at Morehouse, and then for the entire Atlanta University Center. So I had three or four other people under me. And we had devised the system. Why am I telling this might be illegal actually know what comes out of the system? Well, that's fine. So we had devised a system where we basically would get paid from college club for every account that was created after every photo that we uploaded. So one of my good friends, good good friends, Chris wrote this macro that would allow us to basically just like dump a bunch of photos into a folder, and they would automatically get uploaded to college club. And so we would get, you know, money for that. And then he also came up with this other macro that will automatically create accounts. So we had these cameras, we have these huge Sony mavica cameras that actually were so big, you had to put a floppy disk in it for storage, like three and a quarter floppy disk. And we would go and take pictures and swap out the disk. And then at the end of the night, we would dump everything into this Network Folder. We run the macro, the macro would upload the stuff from the Network Folder, we would literally be making money while we slept. I mean I was making at that point. roughly about $4,000 a month. Marc Gutman 44:46 Pretty good for a college kid. Maurice Cherry 44:48 This is this is my This was my, like second half of freshman year and I mean, we did not know how to act with that with that much money we were just doing just spending money on just the dumbest stupid shit just like, go to Linux and like, you know, buy a whole bunch of people's stuff in the food court or just buying like extravagant clothes. And so I mean, in hindsight, just dumb, dumb stuff. But at the time, you know, you're 19 was 19 then trying to think now I was 18 and I was 18 then, and just like have money hand over fist. It was it was ridiculous. Um, eventually college club ended up going bankrupt. And so that job didn't last too long. But for the time that we had it, it was great. And so yeah, I didn't really have ambition. My freshman year, I was too busy having fun. Like, we would go out to the strip and take pictures and like, and then I mean, I guess I kind of have to set the scene here. I mean, so the Atlanta University Center is six colleges. It's Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clark, Atlanta University, Morris Brown College, they entered the interdenominational theological center and Morehouse School of Medicine. So like six schools, all together and like this one huge meta campus. And now the schools kind of have their own like, sort of divisions like Spellman, for example, has a huge wall around and it's basically like fort Spellman. But the other colleges, you can easily walk between and through and everything like that. And so the connective kind of tissue between the main colleges is this long brick thoroughfare called the strip. And it's basically just for walking. So like, you know, cars were coming up and down, it was just, you could walk, there were benches, there were booths, all sort of stuff. So you could hang out all day on the strip, and like, people watch, then walk down to seagulls and like, get some wings and then go sit on the bench and listen to some music and then go to the bookstore, go to the library, like everything was just connected in this big, almost like a marketplace. And then on Fridays, at the very end of the strip at Spelman, they would open their gates and you could go into Spelman to their lower courtyard that they called lower manly, and they had market Friday, and they would be DJs. there and dance. I mean, it was so much fun, that you didn't think about class, like class was almost like, why would I go to class, but I could just hang out on the strip all day, you know. So that was very easy. That first year as a freshman and you have money to it was very easy to just get completely sidetracked. And I completely fell deep into all of that. Well, Marc Gutman 47:37 and as we know, Time marches on. And it sounds like you know, had a very similar experience. I went crazy my freshman year and pulled it together primarily because my parents told me I had no choice. It was gonna be big trouble if I didn't. But Time marches on, and you get through Morehouse and like, how did you start a career in creativity and strategy Maurice Cherry 48:00 that really kind of came about almost as a almost as circumstance. So and I'll try to fast forward through, like past like post college on but so I graduated from Morehouse, I didn't have anything lined up like I'm to be completely honest. When I graduated, I had no plans whatsoever, partially because our scholarship program, they pulled the funding from it in 2001, because of 911. So they pulled funding from that and funding went to which was then created the Homeland Security Department. So we didn't have funding to kind of continue out what we thought the end result of our internships and stuff was going to be so with my scholarship program, basically, I would intern for two years for NASA. And then after that, we would get placed at a NASA facility. So in my mind, I'm like, as long as I keep Baba 3.0 I got a job at NASA. So that's all I have to do. jr came along and completely dashed all of that. And so by the time I graduated, I had nothing lined up. I was working at the Woodruff Arts Center, selling tickets to the symphony, and to the art museum into the theater, just like you know, selling old patriots tickets and stuff like that. And they took away the calculator at my station because I had a math degree, which was kind of degrading but whatever. Did that for a little while, left that job, worked at autotrader. Like, as a dealer concierge is basically just like a glorified customer service rep. Did that for a while, quit that job. And then on a whim, I found in the back of our local weekly newspaper, creative loafing. I found a listing to become an electronic media specialist for the state of Georgia, applied for it on a whim, got the job. I worked for there for about a year and a half left went to at&t as a junior designer. What worked my way up to being a senior designer left there in 2008. After Obama got elected, I started my own studio. I did my studio for nine years. And I would say that was kind of the genesis of this whole creative strategy career. Because even though I had my studio where I was doing web design and graphic design and email marketing and stuff like that, I really was able to branch out and do a lot of other creative stuff like I was able to do. Like DNI consulting for tech companies, like I did that for Vox media. For a while I did that with Netflix for a short period of time, did a lot of writing still, like I was still writing during that time. So I wrote four sight points. And for psych five, and I wrote for media B's show for a while I taught classes at the Bri and at Savannah College of Art and Design, I did a lot of different stuff in the studio. And so because I was doing all these different things, like I was gaining all this knowledge and other parts of the, you know, the business and the really in other parts of the industry, and was able to really kind of bring it all together. So by the time I Wow, my studio down in 2017, I knew that there was more that I wanted to do that I couldn't accomplish and sort of the current state that the studio was in. Also the market was changing, like, bespoke web design was sort of going out as more people started to use kind of drag and drop options like a Squarespace or Wix or something like that. So it made more sense for me to kind of phase out of that market and get more into the actual like, strategy portion of it. Because now there are these tools that allow me that allow people to do the things they would pay a designer to do. But the tools don't really give you the strategy behind why you would use certain things or something like that. And so I tried to kind of brand myself more in this strategy route. As I wind my studio down, um, at the end of 2017, I started at a tech startup, or there's a tech company at that time called Fog Creek software as starting, they're just kind of doing content marketing and getting a sense of the business and what they were doing. As I stayed there, they switched over to become the startup called glitch. And then as they were growing, and they look, we're looking to me, as someone that sort of had this thought leadership that was built up to this point, I was able to then kind of come in on a strategy aspect, and then help out with, you know, bizdev opportunities or partnerships or, you know, things of that nature. And so that really kind of set the stage for me to take all of the cumulative knowledge that I gained throughout my studio time and even the time prior to that working for companies and use that to kind of be this this sort of creative thought leadership at a company that needed it at the time. Marc Gutman 52:44 And when did revision path come about? Like how did you get into podcasting? Because it 400 episodes, I'm guessing you were a bit of an early adopter? Maurice Cherry 52:55 Yeah. So I started podcasting, initially in 2005. So I have old shows that will never see the light of day. I have old old shows from back then. And Atlanta, to its credit actually had a very vibrant podcasting. Community back then we had this thing called the Georgia Podcast Network that was put on by this couple rusty and Amber. And I mean, that was big for maybe about five or six years, there were meetups and things of that nature. And it was mostly Georgia, but also included like South Carolina, Tennessee, kind of like that tri state area. So I have been doing podcasting for a while but never really looked at it as a viable thing, then it was sort of this first wave of podcasting. Because, really, it wasn't something that caught on then like people were more so starting to latch on to video. During that time, it wasn't about, oh, we're gonna listen to this podcast. And even then what podcast were normally was just stuff that was on the radio that they didn't put out as an mp3. So like, The New York Times, NPR, etc, would have these little shows. And that's how you sort of picked up on like maybe a radio show that you've missed, you can subscribe to the podcast, which is really just that day is episode that they downloaded and made into an mp3 or whatever. I first started doing revision path in 2013. And at that time, it wasn't a podcast, it was gonna be just an online magazine. I wanted to do something which showcased what black designers and developers were doing in the field like peers of mine, etc. to kind of counteract what I wasn't seeing in design media. And I started doing these long form interviews, maybe about 1500 to 2000 words or so. But it just took so long to put together I was doing it by myself. And it was someone that actually was a reader of revision path is woman named Raquel Rodriguez, who one day wrote me and said that she was a fan of revision paths. She would really like to be on revision path, but wanted to record a podcast. Because she had a podcast that she was doing in Chicago, and at the time, I'm like, yeah, we can record that's fine thinking to myself, I have no recording equipment. So we ended up recording our interview, the very first episode of revision path on my mobile phone, in a restaurant. Terrible quality. I still keep the episode out. I mean, it's somewhat listable, I guess, I don't know. But, uh, that was kind of where the genesis of the podcast started. And then as I continue to keep doing revision path throughout 2013, I would give guests the option to either record, or we could do like the long form interview. So I sort of alternated. And then when 2014 came around, and it was a full year of revision path, I just decided it's just easier to do the podcast, so switched over to becoming a podcast in March of 2014, officially, but when we launched, we still had about, I say, about 15 episodes prior that we had done. So we launched with a pretty big catalog already. So technically, we launched that like, Episode 16. But we have been recording since episode one. Back in June of 2013. Marc Gutman 56:11 Yeah, and as you mentioned, you just recorded your 400th episode, you've been doing this for a while. I'm terrible at math, but it sounds like about eight years or something like that, which is a long time. Like I'm, I think you're gonna be Episode 71 for the baby backstory podcast, and I can tell you, I mean, it's been difficult it you know, sometimes I hear, I hear 71. And I'm like, Ah, that's not that much. But there is a lot of energy, a lot of effort and a lot of time that's gone into it, like 400 episodes, do you ever think like, enough's enough? Are you just gonna keep keep recording? Maurice Cherry 56:48 I mean, at this point, I'm going to keep recording. As we're talking, I've already got episodes recorded through 405. And then I've got five more in the queue. So we're up to like, 409, I think, technically, I, you know, I'll be honest, there's really no shortage of people for me to have on the show, I've got a running potential guests list in the 1000s of people that I could have on the show. And then, of course, folks recommend others, I've started to bring back old guests on the show, just to kind of see what their, their updates have been since they first came on the show, you know, like, so it's been fun to kind of chart that journey, in some ways. And then honestly, as the industry has changed, what the show has really allowed me to do is keep up. Because I mean, at this point, I'm not really a practicing designer anymore. Like I'm not, you know, in Photoshop, or sketch or figma, or whatever. But being able to talk to so many practitioners still keeps me up to date with what's going on, and what are the new technologies? And what are folks talking about? What are folks passionate about? It keeps me up to date with, with that sort of stuff. And also just being able to introduce design still to a whole new generation of people that may not have known that there were people in design who looked like them. People who think like, Oh, I'm just alone in this by myself, and then they can look and see no, you're not, there's like 400 other people here that you're in this thing with? So I don't I personally don't see it stopping anytime soon. I mean, we're still, you know, you know, knock on wood, getting funding and able to keep things going. So I'll keep it going for as long as the industry will have me. Marc Gutman 58:34 Yeah, let's talk about that really quickly. You know, you mentioned that revision path is really this outlet to showcase those those folks who typically aren't showcased and to show people that, hey, there's other people like them out there. Like when you think about revision path, like what's the one thing you want people to know, like, really now about what you're doing with this podcast? Hmm, Maurice Cherry 59:00 that's a good question. I mean, I think, off the top of my head, I would want people to know that this is not easy. And I think people will look at what I'm doing and think that it's pretty easy. And it's not, I mean, I think that might be the case for most podcasters. But for me, in particular, like I've had to continually work and try new things to get to a system that I know works with me and my team, like and it's bulletproof. It's a time to get there, that wasn't just something that I was able to kind of pull out from, you know, from scratch, and it was something I had to build myself. I had to find the right tools to pull in to make sure all of this work. So it's really about that. I would say for any podcast, it's really about building systems that allow you to be able to do this work. I don't necessarily want to say at scale because I think honestly, the the production level that we're doing is not really changed that much over the years. But it's refined to the point where I can take long breaks between interviews and not get burned out from this. And I'd say yeah, like, it's not easy. People will look at me and will look at me and look at the show and think that it's easy like oh, is, it just seems so easy for you to get people to come on the show. I'm like, no, it's still, it. Honestly, it's still a challenge sometimes to get people to come on the show. Just making sure that everything sort of flows regularly. Like, even though we have our system down, that could still be one thing and that system that could cause it all to, you know, tumble like a house of cards or something. So definitely, that it's it's not easy that it's a lot of thought that goes into it. I think people will look at the 400 episodes of revision path and just see like a monolithic set of people. But I mean, there's so much diversity within the people that I have interviewed, whether it's age diversity, whether it's what they do in the industry, years of experience, as men, there's women, there's trans folk, there's folks in the US and the Caribbean, throughout Europe, throughout Africa, throughout Asia and Australia. Like they're, they're everywhere, the thing that sort of ties them all together, is you know, they're practicing designers, or they're practicing techies, or they're doing something creative on the web that is worthy of kind of falling into line with everything that I'm doing with revision paths. So yeah, I would say that's probably the the main thing I think now as the show has started to, I don't want to say become mainstream, I'd say the older that the show gets. I've seen the more people maybe not understand what it is. And I tell people right off the bat, that revision path is a design podcast granted, I do have developers on the show, I have had software engineers on the show. Just lately, like I was talking

Glitch, a platform that makes it easy for anyone to create or remix a web app, has seen over five million apps created by users. You can read more about how it works here. If you want to learn a little about how it works with Docker, check out this piece here.If you want to know more about the shared history of Stack and Glitch, you can read up on it here. TLDR; Glitch was born out of Fog Creek software and counts Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor as founders. Glimmer is a new web magazine from the folks at Glitch. It focuses on creators and makers, with a special emphasis on unearthing the human stories of people building today's software.While you're here, don't forget to take 15-20 minutes and share your opinions in our 2020 Developer Survey. Whether Stack Overflow helped you during your journey as a programmer or not, we want to hear from everyone who codes. Some fun background for younger listeners: Geocities - a popular platform for building and hosting a personal website and linking it with others that share similar themes. BetaBeat - a website launched by The NY Observer that covered the SIlicon Alley tech scene. It was how Ben first met Anil, Joel, and many others. HerokuDockerIf you have comments, questions, or suggestions, please send us an email at podcast@stackoverflow.comToday's episode is brought to you by Refinitiv. Unlock new possibilities with consistent, high-value market data from Refinitiv. Try the Refinitiv Eikon Data API for the largest breadth and depth of data and community tools with native Python support. Check out refinitiv.com/stackpodcast to try the Eikon Data API today. Refinitiv. Data is just the beginning.

Glitch, a platform that makes it easy for anyone to create or remix a web app, has seen over five million apps created by users. You can read more about how it works here. If you want to learn a little about how it works with Docker, check out this piece here.If you want to know more about the shared history of Stack and Glitch, you can read up on it here. TLDR; Glitch was born out of Fog Creek software and counts Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor as founders. Glimmer is a new web magazine from the folks at Glitch. It focuses on creators and makers, with a special emphasis on unearthing the human stories of people building today's software.While you're here, don't forget to take 15-20 minutes and share your opinions in our 2020 Developer Survey. Whether Stack Overflow helped you during your journey as a programmer or not, we want to hear from everyone who codes. Some fun background for younger listeners: Geocities - a popular platform for building and hosting a personal website and linking it with others that share similar themes. BetaBeat - a website launched by The NY Observer that covered the SIlicon Alley tech scene. It was how Ben first met Anil, Joel, and many others. HerokuDockerIf you have comments, questions, or suggestions, please send us an email at podcast@stackoverflow.comToday’s episode is brought to you by Refinitiv. Unlock new possibilities with consistent, high-value market data from Refinitiv. Try the Refinitiv Eikon Data API for the largest breadth and depth of data and community tools with native Python support. Check out refinitiv.com/stackpodcast to try the Eikon Data API today. Refinitiv. Data is just the beginning.

Today I’m chatting with Kristen Habacht. Kristen is one of the most successful salespeople I’ve ever met. From joining the sales team at Fog Creek, to basically building the sales department from scratch at Trello, and now killing it in her current role as global head of EDR sales at Atlassian - Kirsten has seen and been successful at every stage of sales in a company’s lifecycle. In this episode, Kristen shares her advice on what founders *need* to know about a broad range of sales topics. Including enterprise sales tips, how and when to hire your first sales reps, and the positives (and negatives) of a freemium plan. You can find Kristen on Twitter or LinkedIn. And don't forget - the Sales for Founders course opens for enrollment on the 10th of December! If you’re interested in checking it out, don’t wait 'til then - sign up for the earlybird waitlist at salesforfounders.com today, and on the 3rd of December I’ll be sending out the only discounts I’ll ever give on the course - and spending an hour video chatting and answering your questions about the course, and sales or growth more generally! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sales-for-founders/message

Anil Dash has been in tech for a long time. He’s a vocal advocate for inclusion and humane tech, writes amazing blog posts (and tweets!), and is now the CEO of Fog Creek. He shares how he navigated his impressive career in tech and how he builds kindness and community into his company's products. Show Links Digital Ocean (sponsor) MongoDB (sponsor) Heroku (sponsor) TwilioQuest (sponsor) Fog Creek Software Glitch StackOverflow Anil Dash's blog Trello Codeland Conf Codeland 2019

It’s the very first episode of No, You Go! Jenn, Katel, and Sara get together to talk about the itch to get out of a professional rut and start something new—whether that’s changing jobs, launching a company, building a side gig, or maybe even…idk….starting a podcast? > Fuck it, let’s just do it. Let’s be unapologetic women asking to do work, and to be paid fairly for it. > —Becca Gurney, co-founder, Design Choice Read on for more of what we covered, and read the full transcript for all the, like, verbatim quotes, you know? Show notes First, we tell the story of how No, You Go got started: Sara has an idea, but forgets that Austin Kleon already wrote a book called Show Your Work and narrowly avoids totally ripping him off. Jenn shares what it’s like to trade a thousand side projects for some stability—and, oh yeah, one super-cool baby. Katel opens up about how working at home alone can get, well, lonely—and asks us to join her “awesome after-school kickass club.” We all fully embrace the athleisure lifestyle. Next, we kick off the show—and 2018—by hearing how four women who made big changes last year knew it was time for something new: Becca Gurney, co-founder of Design Choice, tells us how the pay gap in the AIGA Design Census plus the 2016 election turned her from freelance designer to outspoken advocate for equality in design. Jenn Schiffer, community engineer for Fog Creek’s Glitch platform, shares how fear kept her stuck in a rut and not doing her best work—until an opportunity to build community for other engineers brought her life back. Lara Hogan, co-founder of Where With All, describes how meeting her now-business-partner led her away from managing engineering teams and toward building a consulting business. Mina Markham, senior front-end architect at Slack (and creator of the famed Pantsuit design system used by the Hillary Clinton campaign), describes trusting her gut to guide her through three new jobs and three cross-country moves in just three years. Also in this episode Archie’s hair, Cheryl Blossom’s lips, and why Riverdale is our favorite CW teen drama Shout outs to Call Your Girlfriend and Shine Theory Jenn’s rad formula for speaking fees post from the Nerdary California Style Sheets forever Lara Hogan’s Donut Manifesto Our endless devotion to Olivia Pope wine glasses Final tips from designer and educator Sam Kapila Many thanks to The Diaphone for the use of their song, Maths, in our theme music! _This episode is brought to you by Codepen—a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. Build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases, and find inspiration. _ Transcript JENN LUKAS: This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by CodePen: a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. It’s like a big virtual sandbox where you can build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases, and find inspiration. Your profile on CodePen is like your front-end development portfolio. Learn more and create your first Pen at codepen.io. That’s c-o-d-e-p-e-n dot i-o. JL: Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. KATEL LEDÛ: I’m Katel LeDû. SARA WACHTER-BOETTCHER: And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. KL: In today’s inaugural episode of No, You Go, we’re talking about the itch to get out of a rut and start something new. First up, we’ll talk about how No, You Go came to be. Then we’ll listen in as a bunch of badass women tell us how they knew it was time for a change in 2017—and how they made it happen. Also on the agenda: our favorite CW teen drama, the politics of donuts, and breaking out the Olivia Pope wine glasses. [Clink] [Musical intro] How it all began [1:10] SWB: One day, I was actually out for a run with Katel. We were up in this really pretty park and it was the middle of all and we were crunching through the leaves, kind of miserably running some—some 10K distance so that we could justify donuts. And I started telling Katel that I had this podcast idea that was all about: how do you go from kind of doing the work, whatever your job is, to being able to kind of like show your work. Like, speak about it or write about it, or something. Like, how do you go from being somebody who’s kind of more heads-down to being more of that like active or visible member of your professional community? JL: Yeah! KL: Yeah! SWB: And I was like, I had this working title, like “Show Your Work” or something like that. And we were like, that sounds like a fun idea. You know, I just had a book come out in the fall and I was really interested in kind of helping other people understand what that process looks like. A lot of people ask me questions because they don’t necessarily know. JL: Me included. KL: And me! SWB: Yeah! Well, and that’s one of the things that we started to want to talk about, is like: how does that whole thing work? And that’s, you know, just one example, right? I mean, it’s not just writing a book, it’s also like, how do you go from working in a field to like, teaching other people how to do it and leading classes. Those kinds of questions. So, I really wanted to start talking about that more, and Katel was the publisher of one of my books, and so I thought she would be like an ideal person to talk about that with. KL: And I thought that was a great idea. I think “Show Your Work” was actually an awesome name for a show—we should do that also. JL: Let’s get this one off the ground first! KL: All right, okay. So, yeah, I am the CEO of A Book Apart and published one of Sara’s books—it’s amazing. And I moved to Philly about two years ago after living in DC for most of my life, and Sara and I became besties really quickly because we had a lot in common. Namely, loving slash hating running and hating running to love donuts, even more. So, one night we were all sitting actually at Jenn’s house, and we were drinking wine and watching Riverdale as we do—we’d all gotten together and [that’s] another thing that we loved and had in common. And we brought it up to Jenn and she got really excited. JL: To be fair, Sara’s giving me that look like, “I’m not quite sure I’m sold on the Riverdale.” SWB: No! I was just thinking, can we have a sidebar about Archie’s hair for a second? JL: Mhmm, Archie’s hair. KL: And now, did you know Sara’s really into Riverdale? JL: Ooh! Did you catch up? SWB: I am super caught up. And Archie’s hair is still ridiculous. And I’m pretty sure that Cheryl Blossom’s lip liner gets bigger and bigger every single episode. JL: It’s awesome. SWB: It’s gonna be her entire face soon. KL: It’s so good. Maybe that’s what I need to do, is just go big with the liner. JL: I love it. You know, I forget, Katel, if you told me this—I always had a problem with Archie’s hair but then, you brought up that like, it helps if you remember that it’s a comic book and then it makes the extreme-ness of his hair a little bit more acceptable. KL: Right, it’s like, it makes the TV show juicy, or like, pulpy? I mean… “juicy” is maybe not the right word, but you know what I mean! SWB: No, no, no, let’s stick with juicy. JL: No, I do know what you mean! And you know, sometimes we just have to watch an episode of Riverdale after a long day. SWB: For professional reasons. JL: But for me, it was super awesome because I just had a child ten months ago, yes indeed. And so, with a child and I’m back working full time—I work as an engineering manager and UI architect down at Urban Outfitters. And sometimes, my lovely friends will come over after my child goes to sleep and we’ll watch Riverdale and talk shop. Which is awesome, ’cause you start to feel a little bit alienated to some extent, from your previous life and you have this awesome new life going one. But then you like, miss parts of your old, so it was really nice to have my friends come to me so that I could keep trying to figure out how to make this balance work. And maybe balance isn’t even the right word, but to like figure out how I can keep doing things that I love along with the new things I love. So, it was super awesome. [5:00] SWB: Yeah, something Jenn has not quite mentioned, is just how much stuff she used to do in terms of like, speaking and side projects, constantly. Like, when I first met Jenn, every other week, I swear it was like, “Oh, I just started this podcast called Ladies In Tech,” or “Oh, I’m working on this web series called Cook Inside the Box, where we make recipes off the back of boxes.” And it was so cool to see her doing all this stuff, and like a lot of people, it’s really hard to do all of that stuff when you have really little kids and a lot of kind of, responsibilities at work. But what we want to talk about, is, how do we make space for some of that and kind of integrate it into our lives no matter what other stuff is going on. JL: That’s what was so nice about talking with you two, is figuring out how that can work. And I know you’ve both been amazing soundbars for me. And I feel very lucky to have both of you in my life and I think that is a lot about what we’re basing this podcast on. It’s like, how we can be stronger together with people who support us and figuring out how to do these things. Even if you’re working with new—and I mean, using a stretch here of calling it a constraint—but, we’re used to like, how we work with constraints. And this is just a new, different part of my life, and it’s really nice to be able to talk to y’all about how that works. KL: This also feels like just a really awesome after school kick-ass club that I’m super excited about. And I feel like, sometimes, you know I don’t have kids and you know that’s a really tough thing to figure into your life when you’re going from, you know, not having them to having them and a career and everything. And I think even for someone who doesn’t have them, it’s like, you’re still trying to manage a bunch of different things and figure out how to like, stay excited, and go outside and like, meet with people and hang out not you know, become a total hermit like I like to do. JL: Oh my god, going outside is so hard sometimes. KL: Exactly! SWB: But I think, this really speaks to the way that I think the idea for the podcast evolved. When we started talking about it with Jenn, what we realized is that, for a lot of us who, you know, consider ourselves ambitious and sort of really interested in our careers but also kind of non-traditional about it. Like not necessarily interested in only ever working at one single company and a lot of us, you know, work in consulting or small companies or we take on side gigs. You can sometimes end up feeling like you don’t have colleagues. And I think that that’s something I’ve heard a lot from—particularly from women the past couple of years. That they were looking for places where they could connect with other people who got their work, even if they weren’t traditional colleagues. And I really look at that as a big piece of what we’re doing here, is kind of taking the place of having that sort of peer group that you maybe used to have at an office. But if you work in lots of non-traditional settings, you don’t have that anymore. JL: And even when you do work in that, sometimes its you know, you still have a variety of interests. So as you said, I used to do a lot of side projects and that’s totally different than my full time job. So, I think, as we were all sitting on the couch and we were getting more and more excited, that’s sort of where the name of this show came to be. Right? SWB: Yeah, I think one of the things that was really funny about that, was that—so, I was sitting there as Jenn and Katel were kind of going back and forth, like, getting more and more excited and hyped about the show. And all of a sudden, they’re talking over each other and Katel—always the gracious one—is like, “no, you go,” and waits for Jenn. And Jenn goes, “that should be the name of the podcast.” And she kind of laughs and I’m like, wait, stop, no that is the name of the podcast now. So, that’s how we named the podcast and started thinking a lot more about you know, what kind of things we’d cover and where we’d go with it. So, kind of getting outside of that, just the idea of showing your work—although that’s part of it—but more thinking about, what are all the different ways or paths that people take to satisfy their ambition or satisfy their need to, you know, create stuff in the world. And how could we go about highlighting those and helping other people see the different kinds of ways their lives might look. And giving people a little more support along the way as they figure out what that looks like for them. JL: I think also, you know, we’ll talk about challenges of being ambitious. I think there’s a lot of things that all people, but especially for us as women, that we always have to balance, right? Being too abrasive versus being too nice and how we manage that in this world—to achieve some of the things that we’re trying to set out to do. SWB: I was thinking about, one of the other podcasts I really like, Call Your Girlfriend—the hosts on that show talk about shine theory. And for them, shine theory is this idea, like, I don’t shine if you don’t. So, the idea is you’re going to have you know, like, you want the smartest and most accomplished women by your side because actually everybody’s better when your friends are successful, too. And I think about that a lot when I think about this show because I’ve got some like, pretty accomplished women by my side working on it. And I think that that is an incredible way to look at how do we, you know, how do we navigate our lives, and how do we think about ambition. [10:00] Because we’re always looking toward these other people that we totally respect and that we can learn so much from, and they’re looking right back at us. And I think it creates this environment where we can be really supportive of each other and also get a little bit more comfortable kind of like, celebrating that ambitious side of ourselves and not pretending it’s not there. Which I think is often what women are expected to do. KL: Yeah, this actually tied back to, Sara, what you were saying a little bit earlier, about you know, having colleagues and we all work in kind of, I think, different setups these days. It’s not necessarily like, Sara and I don’t even go into an office most days, and we have meetings sort of from wherever. And even though you know, we’re all friends and we have—our professions and our careers are kind of intertwined because we work in the same field or area— we don’t work together physically. But we talk and speak and write about similar things and I think we have passions about the same things. And especially in terms of trying to lift other folks up and finding ways to actually do that. We all work in different setups these days and you know, a lot of us—Sara and I included don’t even necessarily go into offices everyday, but I think it’s really important to feel like you have some kind of camaraderie. Some kind of network that you’re able to rely on in your work and obviously outside of that work. For me, it’s been so critical because I literally work by myself in my home and I have—I work with a lot of team members that are just distributed. So for me to have folks that I can see regularly and talk about things that are related to the work I do is so important. I think I was really missing that from going from a big company like National Geographic to a company that was a small startup. That was a huge shock, that was a big change. You know, working with fifty people a day and then all of a sudden being by myself. So this has been incredibly important. I think being able to extend that and hopefully share that and build a community around that is super exciting. JL: Totally. SWB: Yeah, like I remember when I quit my last real job, which was in 2011, I was working at an agency. And I went from an agency to freelancing and consulting in doing content strategy and UX work. And at first, I will tell you I did not have this kind of network. I was mostly feeling really kind of alone in my work. And I would work on a project and get in with the team on that project but they weren’t really ever my team. And so over the years I’ve certainly like built up this collection of you know, like, really cool people who get what I do and who are just there for me. And that network has made all the difference. I don’t think that I would still be consulting, much less speaking and writing books and stuff like that, if I had not built that kind of community. And that’s something I want more people to experience because I think that it’s one of the only things that can kind of help keep you sane and happy. KL: I feel like the dream used to be work from home, and like work for yourself and you know, be your own bossa and sort of be the master of your own time. And it’s great, it has so much—it gives you a lot of freedom and there’s a lot of flexibility but it’s also very lonely a lot of the time and you know, I think you need to find something that actually helps you get through those lonely times. JL: Yeah. SWB: Yeah, like I want the yoga pants, but I also want the like, deep personal friendships. KL: Right! SWB: That come with seeing people really regularly. And so, you know, it’s how do we make a life for ourselves that kind of can bring us both. JL: I got news for you: athleisure. Is my office wear. SWB: Trust me, I have gone full force into the athleisure lifestyle and I am not looking back. So one thing that I do think about, though, in this whole conversation about kind of finding that community and helping to help others, you know, figure out what their path is, is that Jenn, Katel, and I—we really come from relatively similar backgrounds. You know, like we’re similar age and we’re all based in Philly, and we’re all white ladies with professional jobs. Having a lot in common is really good, but we do know that that could be a pretty limited view of what it’s like to work as a woman. In fact, it would be incredibly limited. So one thing that’s really important to us and that we want to do on this show is make sure that we’re bringing in people with a lot of different experiences and different backgrounds. And make sure that we are getting things from perspectives that the three of us would never have. [Musical interlude] JL: You know, speaking of hearing from other voices, I think it’s time we get into our main segment. But before we do, we are so excited to tell you about the sponsor who’s making this very first episode of No, You Go possible: Codepen. CodePen is a powerful tool that allows designers and developers to write code—like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—directly in a browser and see the results as you build. Whether you’re new to front-end code or been writing it for years, it’s the perfect place to learn front-end programming languages, show off what you create, build test cases, get help on tricky problems—and find inspiration. Whenever I have a new idea and I want to get right to making it happen, you know, I don’t want to have to deal with setting up the environment or setting up hosting or build tools, I just go right to CodePen and start building. I can share that code with others on my team and see what they think about it, and then we can go from there. CodePen has so many cool things to explore—like CodePen PRO and Projects, where you can explore tons of awesome Pens. Get inspired and learn from others, and share with them at the same time. Sign up and get started by visiting codepen.io/hello. [Musical interlude] We introduce the badass lady brigade [15:30] JL: So how do we know when it’s time for something new? SWB: That’s a question we asked a bunch of women who had made big changes in 2017—job changes, life changes, that kind of thing. To get us started, let’s hear from one of our favorites. BECCA GURNEY: This is Becca Gurney, half of Design Choice, a graphic design studio in Washington, DC, where we have the aim of empowering women to lead, to get paid, and to be awesome. Our central mission and idea is that we almost make the conscious choice to pay women fairly for the work that they do, and before you can pay them you have to choose them to do the work. So for the four years leading up to this one, I had been freelancing, and I had just fallen into freelancing. I didn’t choose it, I didn’t really go out and take a risk and say hey, this is what I want to do. It was there and I did it, and I just kept doing it. But I had been feeling really unfulfilled and pretty aimless in it. I wasn’t doing great work. I was just doing work, and there was no real point to it. It was awesome that I could make my own schedule and I could go home to make jam whenever I wanted, because I was feeling jammy. But I didn’t think of myself as successful or empowered. And then the election happened, and I didn’t feel successful or empowered. And I was looking around at the leaders in our industry, which is mostly dudes, and I didn’t feel successful or empowered. The AIGA Census data came out and women in my area at my level are being paid $20,000 less a year than men. And so hey, I don’t feel successful or empowered. And the moments that sparked any sort of a feeling that felt good were the moments that I was with women, talking about being fucking unapologetic women. And how could I do that through design and Stacey Maloney was in a bunch of those conversations, and we said, “Fuck it, let’s just do it; let’s be unapologetic women asking to do work and to be paid fairly for it.” And we started Design Choice. JL: How awesome. SWB: I love so much about this. Fucking unapologetic women. I think we qualify, right? JL: I hope so. KL: I think so. Let’s get there if not [laughs]. SWB: Katel, how do you know Becca? KL: We got to be friends when I was in DC. I started working at a coworking space to try to get a little more face time with other human beings when I started this solo thing. And she was just awesome. We became friends really quickly, and we sort of went through some growing pains at this particular coworking space because of management that was not empowering and didn’t make us feel confident about working there, and we moved to a different one. We shared an office. We just really became good friends and got to know each other. Becca is one of those people who, you know that if she says something, that she’s going to do something, she’s gonna do it. She just shows up and she’s such a rock star. I hate using that word, but she is, she absolutely is. She’s creative and amazing and when I listened to this recording that she sent, I almost teared up because I was thinking, oh my gosh, I have felt so similarly—that feeling of like, you’re doing all these things that you’re supposed to be doing, you’re making the money, you’re going to the meetups, you’re doing all the things, but you don’t feel empowered and you don’t feel successful. And like, what is that? And trying to pull all of that apart and get at the root of why, and figure out what you’re going to do to change that, is huge. It’s so huge. And the fact that she came out of that and created this agency, and it isn’t just helping her feel successful and empowered, but also doing really fucking amazing work for companies that should be employing women, is just so rad. SWB: Yeah, I love this idea of her saying that this company is explicitly about hiring women and paying women fairly. And that’s really built into the fabric of it, and she’s not afraid to talk about it that way. Because I think about it in terms of how I spent my own year. [20:00] I think something that I did in 2017 is get comfortable with the idea that my work simply was political—that I couldn’t really create an artificial boundary between the things that I care about professionally, talking about a user’s experience of a piece of software or a website, and the things that I care about personally, which is basically all social justice issues. And so that really came out when I wrote my most recent book. It’s called Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, and essentially I am really taking a direct look at this tech industry that I have been part of for a long time, and highlighting some of the ways it’s gone really wrong for people who are often the most vulnerable or the most marginalized. You know, it was hard but I think I got to a place where I was no longer afraid of saying that out loud, and saying that in front of important people who, in the past, I would have been worried wouldn’t have wanted to hire me for consulting. And now, I’m thinking, okay, I need to find a way to make this an organic and natural part of what I do, because I can’t really live with myself otherwise. KL: Yeah, I think you’re totally right, and that whole unapologetic thing—I feel like there’s so much to unpack there, and something we’re grappling with it every day in everything we do. And I know for me it’s kind of like, you tear a little bit away and you’re like, okay, I made some progress. And then you’re like, but wait, is this fitting in in the right space? So I feel like hopefully, if we do enough of these, we’re really going to get in deep in terms of how people are doing that. JL: Becca wasn’t the only one feeling frustration. Let’s hear another story from Jenn Schiffer. JENN SCHIFFER: At the end of 2016, I was feeling really stuck in a rut. I wanted to do good work, but I didn’t feel like I was in a position to do that. I knew I was going to leave, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and I was afraid to make any changes. But then I was very lucky and very fortunate because Fog Creek approached me about doing community engineering for their new product, Glitch.com. And so I’ve been there ever since, and it’s been great, and I feel like I’m doing my best work, and I’m making an impact. And so I’m hoping in 2018 to keep that momentum going. JL: Oh, Jenn Schiffer. She’s is constantly always saying such smart things, and I think that’s one of the reasons that I really just enjoy everything she does. I didn’t meet Jenn in person until a couple of years ago, but I started following Jenn a while ago because she was posting a lot of awesome humor-filled development posts, which was something quite unique, and she had a really great voice. SWB: You mean she trolled dev bros on Twitter? [Laughter] JL: It was the California Style Sheets post a couple of years ago, which is one of my favorites still, and I think it was awesome and it showed a lot of things, because, yes, being written by a woman, I think a lot of people thought, it must not be humor, it must be serious. And that was—ugh—sigh-worthy. But Jenn was awesome, and I followed that, and was lucky enough to have her on the podcast I used to run, with Val Head, Ladies In Tech, where we’d talk about public speaking and Jenn was a guest on our show. We were lucky to have her. She’s done a lot of awesome things. One of the things I love about Jenn is if there’s a gap or something that she wants, she makes it happen. She was living in North Jersey I believe, and working for the NBA at the time, and there was not a meetup and I think she went into the city for them. And so she decided to start her own North Jersey meetup. And so instead of saying, there’s nothing here around me, she started her own. And I think that’s such an important thing that we can do in this industry. And you can see it now, that she is starting something new again. And I think one of the things that she’s always done is helping people learn. A talk she gave recently she had this great quote: “We don’t learn alone.” And I think that’s true in this industry, but also in many industries where we are just better together and we learn more when we’re around each other. KL: You really feel like she’s bringing you along in the learning, when she’s speaking about—when she’s giving a talk or doing a demo or whatever. SWB: I think that’s one of the cool things about this new role that she has. She went from a role where she was doing a lot of programming to a role where she’s the community engineer. That means that she’s doing a lot more of that educational piece, and helping people make use of this tool Glitch, which is from Fog Creek. And what’s really great about it is that it’s a way to not just do the heads down work, but to be doing the showing your work and sharing of things, and making these things more accessible for people. And particularly making these kinds of tools in tech feel accessible to all kinds of folks, right? I think that’s a big piece of how Glitch has positioned itself on purpose, and that’s in no small part to people like Jenn, who are making it feel like a tool that anyone can pick up and use—and not a tool that only super elite programmers from one very particular background can pick up and use. [25:00] And so I love that about her, and I hope that continues to be a really good move for her, because that was an exciting “something new” that happened last year. Something Jenn talked about though, which I think is something that all of us can relate to, is that feeling of frustration, burnout, being bored, or just not feeling like you have space to do your best work. That’s something I’ve certainly felt. I’ve felt it at different points over my career, but certainly when I last quit my job, one of the big reasons is that I was working an ungodly number of hours. I was the last one in the office every night. I literally set the alarm leaving the office every day for like a year straight. And I simultaneously felt like I couldn’t get my head above water. I was trying to do so much, and it didn’t feel like I could go anywhere. One of the ways that I got out of that was quitting my job, but it wasn’t just quitting the job. It was also getting a new outlook to my work. One of the reasons that I quit my job was so that I could write my first book, which was like my first real effort to give my community some of my expertise and knowledge. And that was a really helpful reframe for me to get me out of that rut. And so I’m curious, have you guys had experiences where you feel like you’ve gotten burnt out or frustrated, and how did you move past them? JL: When I left my last full-time job to start consulting, I at the time was doing a lot of public speaking. I was away more than I was home, and I really loved it. That’s really what gave me the courage to quit my full-time job and start something new. There was something I really loved, I knew what I loved, and it was less being frustrated with anything I was currently doing, and more me seeing something that I really loved doing, and figuring out how I could make that happen. I really loved my job at the time, I was a development director at Happy Cog. But I had been doing it for six years. And it was definitely something I loved, but again, six years is a long time, especially in the tech field. And there was this new thing that I loved a lot. Being able to travel and meet people and teach was something that was super important to me, and for me to be able to full commit to that, it almost forced me—or gave me that boost that I needed—to quit my job at the time and go out consulting and have this freedom to do this thing. So, for me the driver was something I really loved and wanting to do, versus being burnt out or frustrated at a current job. SWB: Totally. I loved what you said about, it wasn’t that there was something wrong with what you were doing. Sometimes I think we get stuck in a rut because we’re like, well, I like the stuff that I’m currently doing. But for me at least, part of being happy does really come down to growth or evolution in what I’m doing. So it’s not a matter of me hating anything that came before necessarily, but I want to bring something new into the fold. New people and new experiences. I want something else to kind of keep it interesting. I want to keep it interesting, and if I’m feeling too steady all the time, then I think I’m bored. So I love this idea that it’s like, okay, is there something out there that you’re really excited about, or that you want to be good at that you’re not yet good at that can really drive us to change things up. KL: I’m gonna be real honest here and say that I’m currently burnt out, and I’ve been struggling with that I think for like the last year. SWB: Weird, how could 2017 burn someone out. How is that possible? [Laughter] KL: Yeah, exactly, It’s like, can you just be burnt out just from being burnt out? And I think I’ve worked through a lot of it, not that it’s something—I think at one point I thought, okay, like, this is something else I need to check off my list, getting through burnout. Which is not how it happens and not how you heal from it. It shocked me into realizing that I needed to make some changes in how I approached my scheduling and, you know, my work. But I think sort of related to what you’re talking about, not necessarily saying I need a different job or I need to change career paths. It’s like, before ABA, I would go to work, you do your job. That’s the thing, it’s this packaged thing. And now it’s not like that. A Book Apart is not like that. Granted I’ve been doing it for years, but it just—you start to think, okay, there’s nothing outside of it. Even though there’s lots of stuff outside of it, and I think I just needed to look for it. This is part of it. I think I’m starting to feel a lot less burnt out. I think I also got really confused—or not confused, I got worried, because I started to think that burnout is just fatigue, and it’s not necessarily just fatigue. It could just be you need a fresh take or a new project or whatever. [30:00] SWB: Yeah, and I think it definitely says a lot. The key to fixing burnout is not always necessarily career change, but sometimes it’s just like, perspective shift and remembering all the other things that you love. You know, people talk about work-life balance, and I always really struggle with that conversation, because work is really important to me, and it’s so intertwined with so many pieces of my life. So I don’t look at it as, work is over here and life is over there. But at the same time, I’ve lived the life where work was consuming me: “Oh, I’m writing this email at 11:30pm.” You know, when you stop seeing any distinction between those different parts of yourself, I think it can be really easy to get so sucked into work, that when things aren’t going well at work, it means that things are not going well for you. So it’s like, if work goes through a rough patch, your whole life sucks, because there’s nothing else there. KL: Right, it’s such a big part of what you do and who you are. And it’s something I never really paused to think about, moving from my twenties to thirties to forties, is that, like, that’s an ongoing thing. It’s an evolution. You don’t just figure it out and then it’s done. SWB: The kind of work that I do evolves all the time, so of course the relationship I have to my work has to evolve all the time to.. That’s only natural. KL: Right. SWB: I think it’s hard sometimes to remember that, because you think, “Oh, well, this used to work for me.” Well guess what, this doesn’t work for me anymore. I am in my mid-thirties now, and my needs are a little bit different. And there are things that I’m not willing to put up with anymore—thank god. JL: Yes. [Laughter] KL: Right. And you can be unapologetic about it. JL: Yeah, and along with being unapologetic, sometimes you really need to trust your gut. Let’s hear from Mina Markham about trusting her gut. MINA MARKHAM: To channel Olivia Pope, it all comes down to a gut feeling with me. When I’m presented with some new opportunity, I kind of do a gut check and see, is this something that I will regret not doing. And if the answer is yes, then I know what I have to do. I have to go ahead and make that change. That’s probably the only thing that can explain how I’ve had so much change in my life the past few years. I’ve had three jobs in three years, all of which required me to pack up my life and move to a new city and basically start over. Each time came with their own instances of doubt or of terror or sometimes just full-on panic, but none of which I have any regrets about doing. So I have learned to trust my gut, trust my instincts to know when it’s time for me to go ahead and make that leap. JL: Oh, Olivia Pope. Inspires me too, but I’ll get to that later. It just inspires me so much when people have the ability to follow their gut, especially when it involves moving. Sara, you’ve moved a ton. SWB: Yeah, I’ve moved a lot of times, and I’ve moved across the country, but I still don’t think I’ve moved as much as Mina Markham has. KL: Yeah, if you’re not familiar with her, Mina was at IBM in Austin at the beginning of those three years she talked about. Then she moved to Brooklyn to work on the Hillary campaign. Now she’s a senior front-end engineer at Slack. So that’s a lot of choices, and a lot of change. And I think trusting your gut becomes really vital in all that. I also think it’s how you get to a place where you actually know what it’s going to look like to have regrets or to not have regrets, and you become okay with it. You kind of can envision it a little bit more. It becomes a cycle that starts to repeat itself, which, that’s how you gain more and more trust in your gut. SWB: What she said reminded me of this column I read a couple of years ago. It’s an advice column called Dear Sugar that Cheryl Strayed used to run. She wrote a response to somebody who asked, like, I’m thinking about having kids, I’m in my late thirties or forty-ish or something like that, and I don’t know if I should, but I think I might regret it. And this person felt like having kids because they thought they might regret not having kids was a bad idea. Now, I don’t have kids. I’m not planning to have kids. But this column really stuck with me, because the way she responded to it, she was like, you know, thinking about your future self and what you might regret is one of the only ways that you can kind of make sense of choices. And she was like, this is actually a really healthy way to look at, like, is this something that I’m going to wish I had done later on? Once you do make a decision, then you have to think of it as other lives that you chose not to lead. I think she called it “the ghost ship that did not carry me.” So it’s like this other ship that you could have been on, but you didn’t take. [35:00] And that would have been this other thing, and you can wave at it from the shore, but it’s not yours. So I think about that a lot when it comes to choices, whether it’s those big life choices, or the smaller day-to-day work choices: what are the ships that I’m choosing to be on? And as long as I’m thinking about where my gut is, and I’m thinking about what is going to be a positive thing for future me, I usually feel pretty good about it. JL: I think this is another habit thing, where the more you get used to making these decisions and being okay with them, the stronger you probably feel being like, this is okay and I’m going to go for this. SWB: Yeah, totally. I think that it’s hard at first to know what does trusting your gut even mean, right? And so I think about, how do I know that I’m trusting my gut? You know, if I start doing something where it’s like, “Ugh, I should really take this project on,” or, “I should really speak at this conference,” and then every time I go to, like, write the email that would be the saying yes email, I get knotted up and I don’t do it, I’ve started to slow down and say, wait a second, why am I sort of hemming and hawing about saying yes to that email? And usually it’s because I have some kind of reservation or misgiving. Versus there are times when people ask me to do something or I am presented with opportunities, and my heart is immediately in it. Now, sometimes I have to say no to those things too, because they don’t fit for one reason or another, but knowing that immediate response of opening yourself up to whatever’s in front of you, versus pushing it away, that means something. And it’s worth taking the time to figure out what your body’s telling you, where that’s coming from. And I think that’s the very beginning of trusting your gut. JL: And sometimes it’s not just about making a decision by yourself. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to find someone else to help you decide what’s next in your life. SWB: Let’s hear from Lara Hogan. Lara is an engineering leader who some of you may have heard of, because it seems like she’s everywhere these days. She was a VP at Kickstarter, and before that she was a senior manager at Etsy, but she’s up to something new, too. Let’s hear about it. LARA HOGAN: How did I know it was time to start something new? In part, it was meeting Deepa, my business partner. She’s just incredible, and with her by my side, I feel like I can do anything. And I also knew that this was the time once I realized, working full-time at a company, I have to do a lot of things all of the time [laughs] that may of course just not be what I want to specialize in. But it occurred to me that as a consultant, I could do the things that I really, really love all of the time, and bring that help and support to a lot of different companies. And that’s just really intriguing to me. SWB: Okay, first of all, I want a Deepa. [Laughter] KL: Yes. SWB: So, Deepa Subramaniam is Lara’s business partner, and they founded this company called Wherewithall, that is doing consulting work on product teams and engineering teams. But most importantly, me and Katel actually had dinner with them a couple of weeks back. And watching them interact with each other and talk about their work, and the way their faces just light up. It’s so great to seem them coming together and creating this thing that they clearly are really passionate about on the work side, but also just as partners. They really make sense and they get one another. I thought that was so great to see. I’ve mostly worked in different kinds of consulting arrangements. Sometimes, me and somebody else will partner up on a project or teach a workshop together, but I’ve never had that kind of long-term, we-are-business-partners thing set up. And I think it goes back to what we said earlier, around how we sometimes have to make our own colleagues. It’s like they’ve literally created a business that allows them to have that kind of collegial relationship. And I think that that’s really powerful and something that’s kind of scary for a lot of us to do—to, you know, make such a firm commitment. But it’s great when it works, right? KL: Yeah, it’s like you wish, you know, and sort of dream about finding your soul mates in your life partner and your best friends. And I feel like it’s becoming a lot more, you know, that this happens with work now, and it’s just really cool. Like, you can work on projects where you’re like, these are the kind of people I want to work with all the time. And then you know what that looks like. JL: Yeah, and I think it’s amazing. But there’s also like, half- and quarter-way points, too, right? So, I think, as you mentioned before, we don’t necessarily traditionally work on the same types of things, but I love both of you, so having chances to work with you is great. And I just remember, like Sara and I, when we were both doing a lot of public speaking, we would go out to happy hour or we would go out to dinner and we would just talk about public speaking things. And even though Sara and I would be talking about completely different things, the business of public speaking was something that we could both talk to and learn from each other. And talk about how we were doing things, how we were organizing, how we were charging. How we were going to do logistics of things—and having someone I could talk to about that was, like, totally priceless for me. [40:00] SWB: Yes! You know, I think that there’s a lot of pressure in culture at large and definitely within the tech industry, to kind of not talk about some of this stuff. For example, don’t talk about how much you charge for things and how much you make off of things. And I know that that can be a touchy and sensitive discussion but I really think that only benefits the people who have the most power. And that’s so problematic. That tends to disproportionately affect women and it tends to disproportionately affect people of color, and particularly disproportionately affects people who are women of color. And so I’m really a big proponent of having as many open and honest conversations about topics like compensation as possible. Because I really think that the fact that we haven’t had enough of those is part of the reason that we hear things like Becca’s statement earlier on, where she talked about the AIGA survey. Which is a designer’s survey showing that women at her level were making $20,000 less than men. It’s certainly not the only reason, but part of the reason that continues to go on unchecked, is because we’re encouraged not to talk about it. So I’m gonna fuckin’ talk about it. JL: Yeah, I wrote a post in, I don’t know, 2015? 2014?—“A Formula for Charging Speaker Fees”—and it’s about… SWB: Oh yeah! KL: It was great! JL: And it’s still, I mean, it’s probably the most visited blog post on the Nerdery. And I mean, that site hasn’t been updated in over a year, but we still get traffic from that post especially. People looking for how to charge, how do I put numbers around something, and so I was thrilled that people are still finding value in that. Because, for me, it was really valuable to talk about it. SWB: So that’s the kind of thing, I think, if you feel sort of isolated—and it’s not just about money, really—but if you feel isolated in your field, or if you feel like you don’t know who you can trust, then you can never really get to a place where you have the confidence to then have that conversation with the people the really matter. KL: Or if you’re just starting out. SWB: Totally. KL: That’s a whole group of people who—like, I wouldn’t even know where to start if I was doing it for the first time and I just had no idea. If I had no idea what to base it off of. So if I found a resource that was helpful like that, it would be so valuable. SWB: Yeah and I think, you know, especially since things like money conversations—it’s like if you try to have one and you’re not that confident about it and you don’t really have any context. If you get pushback, it’s really easy to believe that you’re getting pushback because you were asking for too much. And you don’t have a frame of reference. So, anyway, I think building those relationships to give you more context and get more insight and feedback and, just like you have someone to bounce everything off of—it’s so valuable. I’m really happy to hear people like Deepa and Lara are teaming up because I think that the more of these kinds of powerful relationships between people that exist out there, the stronger any industry is going to be. JL: Completely, yeah. I think that finding advocates in your peers and finding that partnership is so important and valuable. SWB: A lot of the folks we talked to—they were kind of moving from working at a company to starting their own thing. Or otherwise kind of shifting gears in that more consultative way. Jenn, you went from consulting to going back in-house and then you had a baby, so you had kind of different sort of year with a lot of new stuff. But I’m curious: what did that look like for you and what made that work for you at this moment in your life? JL: You bring up a good point, Sara. I think a lot of times, we often say like, “oh i’m starting something new,” and it’s always about quitting your job. And I did that, as I mentioned before. SWB: Quitting your job can be great, let’s not lie about that. But it’s not always great. And it’s not always what you want. JL: And it was what I wanted for a really long time. And I think one of the hardest things for me, because of the vision that comes along with that—the freedom, the working from home, the yoga pants, the ability to do anything you want, essentially, is awesome. And then for me to recognize, you know, what was also awesome, was going back to a full time job. I started consulting for Anthropologie and I worked onsite a couple days a week and I was really enjoying it. I enjoyed the work I was doing, I enjoyed being in-house again, and I really enjoyed working on product as opposed—it was a different change from agency life. And I thought that that was such a nice change—and there was part of me that was really hesitant to go back full time. And, they’d offered the full time work, I still wasn’t sure, and I think part of it was just because I thought what I was supposed to do, was stay consulting. You know, I’d already quit my job—why would I ever go back!? [45:00] And then, I realized for me, that the full time job gave me a lot of stability, in that, in order to try new things such as: BABY. [Laughter] JL: For me, I always like to have at least one or two maybe, super stable things in my life when I try something new. When I first quit my job, I had a very stable relationship—now with my husband, also stable friendships, a lot of stable colleagues, that were really allowing me to try something new. Now I had again, this stability, that was like, ok, I feel pretty great—maybe I’ll go and try this new-fangled baby thing that I hear people talk about. And it was really great to have the support of the people that I work with, also, at the time, figuring out things like maternity leave, figuring out how to make the balance before I went on maternity leave. And so, going back for me, was like a little bit of a hard move but something that I knew was right for me at the time. And something that I really wanted to see through. Will I be full-time forever, I’m not sure! But for right now, I’m enjoying a lot about it. SWB: Yeah, I think that when people start a business or move to doing consulting or something like that, that’s often this sense of like, if they ever change course from that, I think it gets perceived—or there’s a fear that it’ll be perceived—as failure in some way. Or like taking a step backwards. And of course, life’s not really like that, right? There are times when something makes a lot of sense and times when it doesn’t. And I think that’s part of the thing I’m really interested in exploring more in this show. How do we figure out the next steps that are right for us, that allow us to continue to grow. And to try not to buy into some of those bullshit stories about what it means to be successful. For example, none of us have a goal of being tech company founders who go out and get a bunch of venture capital so that we can be the next unicorn company worth a billion dollars. I mean, I guess having a billion dollars sounds—no, I’m sorry, having a billion dollars actually sounds awful. It sounds truly terrible. Because I look at the people who are making that their kind of dream they’re chasing—and I think, would I be happier? I don’t think so. Would I be creating a better world? Probably not. What is really the draw of that except for the idea that it’s what a picture of what success looks like. And I think what I’m hoping we can do here is really talk about of different types of success. JL: Yeah, it’s like, when is the right time for you to do these options that we have. And you know, we’re so lucky that we have options, especially in the tech field where you have a lot of abilities to work agency, to work product, to go consulting. Lots of different options. So I think it’s as you said, not a one size fits all and not always a one size fits all for this time frame forever. SWB: So I know that having a baby was a big new thing, but I also know something that you told me when you were still kind of getting embedded in that job was that it was—and I think you mentioned it a little. You said it was a chance to work on product, which you hadn’t done before. And it you were telling me a lot about some of the challenges of working at scale at this big e-commerce company and all this stuff that was a little bit new. And I’m curious, do you feel like—not only did you create this stability for your but have you also been growing professionally in this new job? JL: Yeah, sure. I think one of the things that was really neat, as you mentioned—working not only at CSS architecture at scale, but also taking on management responsibilities. So consulting, I managed myself, and sometimes some other members of teams. But generally now I’m in a position where I have direct reports. I’m working more in the engineering team and helping people with their career paths again, is really interesting to me and definitely a new challenge. Managing is hard. SWB: People! You know? KL: People are wonderful, and hard, and wonderful, and hard. JL: Exactly. So it’s rewarding in a whole new way and challenging in a whole new way. I haven’t managed since before I was consulting, so it was fun to take that on again. But also just something completely new—it’s nice to see that at this point in my career, these different kind of challenges. But that said, focusing a lot on both the management and the architecture also sort of left this gap where I wasn’t doing as many of the things I was doing before with side projects. So trying to figure out—it’s again, facing this sort of similar thing as I had before, where I’m not burnt out on what I’m doing—there’s just something I love and I miss doing that also. So how do I also get this thing that I love in my life somehow. But not at the same scale as before. Because like I mentioned, it’s that balance. And it all comes down to scale again. Where, I don’t want to quit and got consulting and go travel all over the place again all of the time because I want to be home with some level of stability. But I want new projects also, so talking to both of you was really neat because then the idea of starting something new with this podcast came up. And this, for me, is so exciting, because it acts as an outlet to do a lot of things I loved doing in side projects while still maintaining a lot of this new stability that I found in my life. Fuck Yeah of the Week [50:15] SWB: You know when your friend gets an awesome new job, or publishes an amazing article, or finally pays off their student loans, and you’re so excited that you keep texting them in just like all caps and the fire emoji over and over again? Well, that’s the next segment here, it’s called the Fuck Yeah of the Week—and it’s where we share the people and the things that we think you all should be celebrating. Think of it as the podcast form of the 100 emoji. So Jenn, who is our very first Fuck Yeah of the Week? JL: Well, Sara, I’m gonna go ahead and say, it’s US! Fuck Yeah, Us! KL: Fuck Yeah, YES! JL: You know, I think sometimes you gotta take those moments and celebrate yourself, and I think we should be celebrating ourselves for getting this thing up and running! Here we are, we’ve talked about this idea, and now we are actually in the room recording it, ladies—we’re doing it! SWB: Yeah! JL: It’s awesome. SWB: You know, earlier we heard from Lara Hogan about her, you know, new business and all of that. But this reminds me so much of something that she started writing about years ago. She has a whole site about this—it’s Lara Hogan’s donut site, I don’t know what it’s called. But basically, what she does, is she celebrates every career achievement with a donut. And she started doing it because she realized that whenever something cool was happening, like she was getting a promotion, or she was accepted to give a talk somewhere, she would go, “ok, great,” and then move on to the next thing. And she wasn’t giving herself permission to celebrate that. So she started saying, “ok, every time something major happens, I’m gettin’ myself a donut.” And she takes a picture of it and she puts it on this website. And I think that that’s wonderful, because every time she has a new donut thing to celebrate, I’m like, “hell yeah, get that donut!” JL: Yeah! SWB: And I love that we’re able to do that for ourselves, too, because, yeah, I think we’re often taught to keep looking forward or don’t let yourself have too much of the limelight. And, I hope that anybody who’s listening to this can kind of give themselves a fuck yeah, too, for the things that they’re accomplishing. KL: Definitely, it’s so exciting to see how far Lara’s Tao of Donuts, essentially, has spread. Because you see other people taking photos, you know, of their donuts that they’ve gotten after speaking for the first time, or you know, doing a big demo. And that’s so cool, because you know it ties back to this thing that she, talked about, and that’s super cool. I hope that we see lots more photos of donuts, or your celebration. JL: Our second fuck yeah are these Olivia Pope wine glasses that we are drinking out of today. The Olivia Pope wine glass has always been, for me, my special donut moment. You know, on that show Scandal, when she drinks, and it just was like, “wow, where do I get a glass to just drown my sorrows or celebrate my joys.” Like, that is the glass that holds everything. They sell them at Crate & Barrel. Crate & Barrel is not one of our sponsors, but they could be. KL: They could be. [Laughter] SWB: Are you listening, Crate & Barrel? JL: But! I love these glasses because I take them out when I need to like, either, like, pause and be like, this is life right now, and this is just my moment to just like, take it all in. Be it good, be it bad. But like, here’s just a moment to pause and be like, “Fuck yeah, I got these glasses, and in this case, I got these friends, and I’ve got this wine, and I’ve got this podcast, so, it’s pretty good.” SWB: You know, if you haven’t seen an Olivia Pope wine glass, first off, it’s going to be in the show notes, but if you Google “Olivia Pope wine glass,” you know exactly—immediately—what we’re talking about. KL: It’ll be on our Instagram. SWB: But what’s really key about the Olivia Pope wine glass, is that it’s got a big glass, but it’s also on this long, really slender stem. It’s like a big-deal wine glass. It’s not just like, “Oh I’m having a quick glass of wine.” It’s very much like, “I am having wine now, period.” And, I like that because it does—it kind of creates that space, right? Like, you were saying, Jenn, it’s not just like that you’re going to pour yourself a quick glass. It’s that you’re pausing and taking a moment and you’re allowing yourself to have that bit of joy. And I think that that’s really important, even though, normally I don’t trust myself to use the Olivia Pope wine glass on the regular, but I want them to exist in the world. JL: That’s why I have six of them. [Laughter] KL: They’re great, because they have presence, yet they’re elegant. SWB: So, just like us? JL: Mhmm. SWB: That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. No, You Go is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia. Our theme music is by Philly’s own The Diaphone, from a song called Maths. In this episode, you heard Becca Gurney, Jenn Schiffer, Mina Markham and Lara Hogan. We’ll be back next week with Episode 2. [55:00] KL: Until then, we leave you with this advice from Sam Kapila, a designer and educator who’s always up to something new: SAM KAPILA: I know it’s time to start something new when I’m a little bit scared….the good sort of scared that inspires me to want to explore something new in a project, or in a job, or scared in a way that you might surprise yourself. It’s also important to start something new when you can’t stop thinking about a certain idea, and it keeps you up at night. It’s in your 3am journal on your bedside, and it’s something that you just can’t wait to start doing and be really proud of. And I think, any time you can be proud of something you are doing, that’s definitely time to start something new.

Today's episode is a real scream. Recorded in a haunted house, this week's host is longtime podcast friend Anil Dash, joined by Fog Creek's Jenn Schiffer, Stack Overflow engineering manager Matt Sherman, news editor Ilana Yitzhaki, and executive producer Kaitlin Pike. Special guest is Leon Young of Cogniss.

Today's episode is a real scream. Recorded in a haunted house, this week's host is longtime podcast friend Anil Dash, joined by Fog Creek's Jenn Schiffer, Stack Overflow engineering manager Matt Sherman, news editor Ilana Yitzhaki, and executive producer Kaitlin Pike. Special guest is Leon Young of Cogniss.

Building a community for developers: this week Paul and Gina talk to Jenn Schiffer, community engineer at Fog Creek’s Glitch, a platform for developers to write, share, and remix code that is, in Jenn’s words, helping to “lower the barriers for developers to build great things.” Topics discussed include development frameworks, how coding is taught, cultures of harassment online and in the tech world, and the (sort of mindblowing!) way a bloomin’ onion is made.

As a founding member of several successful companies (Fog Creek, Trello) in the software development space, you could say that Joel Spolsky knows a bit about developers. On his popular online forum, Stack Overflow, developers ask more than 8,000 questions a day to a community of roughly 40 million developers who visit the site every month. Joel talks about software developers with a reverence normally reserved for philosophers: "Every day, developers get a chance to make a decision that's going to impact the world," he says. But with that power comes great responsibility, and managers have an important role to play in helping developers consider unintended consequences and use their power for good.

This week I talk with Michael Pryor of Trello. We talk about learning to code from computer magazines, working in a grocery store freezer, co-founding Fog Creek 17 years ago, coming up with the Trello concept, getting acquired for a huge sum of money, what it’s like working at a public company and so many other things.

Michael Pryor is the co-founder of Trello, the collaboration tool used by millions to organize and prioritize projects using boards, lists, and cards. He's also the co-founder of Fog Creek Software for Project Management; he currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters. #PeakPerformers, Michael shares about @Trello on #TheEntrepYou today! Click To Tweet Show  Notes: If you were stranded on a desert island, what three items would you want to have with you? Snorkel fins as I'm not such a great swimmer, a dog to keep me company and a guitar which would take me a long time to learn. What is the Unique Selling Proposition of Trello? Persons were using sticky notes on their walls. Historically we had built a lot of tools for a much more structured project management and we were thinking about how easy it was for people to use these sticky notes. It helps them organize their thoughts. There is something about being able to see it in front of your face. We tried to map that. It's not like a digital sticky note but it is taking that metaphor into the software world. You create these boards, you put your digital sticky notes, you organize them into lists so people can see where you are, where you were and where you are going. It basically gives you a map for what you're working on. Did you know this would have been a winner? We spent a lot of time building software tools for other developers and this was one of the first tools we build where we wanted to build something for a much wider and broader audience. It was a big bat for us. We thought of building a software that 100 million people can use and it seemed ridiculous at the time. Now we've had 20 million people signed up to use Trello. At the time, we put it out there and we launched it Tech Crunch Disrupt. We told people about it at the competition that we came in second. The huge spike in sign-ups came from that. Those who knew us at the time weren't very technical in nature. People were writing blogs on how they use Trello to plan their wedding, run their marketing campaign and recruit people for their teams. These are examples that we hadn't thought of before-hand but were perfect examples of all the different ways that you could use this application. Persons were writing these blog posts on their own without us asking them to. That's when it started to click that we're on to something here. These people are so excited about what we are doing that they are willing to market to their own channels and tell their friends and the people that follow them about this product without us even getting involved. That's 20 million people have been word of mouth. What were the thoughts that went through your mind during the competition, recognizing you did not come in first place? This was about 5 or 6 years ago. We had a different story than just being at the completion. We had been making software and had a software company for 10 years before that and this was one of the products that we made. We were funding the development of Trello through the sales of some of the other products we were selling, unrelated to Trello. We weren't in a typical scenario where we had to win the competition in order to get the funds to continue the company. This happened much later in our lifecycle of our software development career. Trello and Stack Overflow were joint ventures with Fog Creek. Those super successful and well know products came much later in our history. We took a lot of the lessons learnt over the first decade and applied them. We made many different software products over the years. Some were the right product at the wrong time, or the right product marketed to the wrong people or the right idea but built in the wrong way. There were a lot of failures along the way. What seemed like an over-night success was actually a really long journey. What were some of the lessons learnt? If you've ever heard of Log Me In or Go To My PC,

On this week's episode, Jenn Schiffer - aka jennmoneydollars - talks to us about joining Fog Creek as the company's new Community Engineer. She'll be focused on their brand new community, Glitch, which launched today. The gang also listens to Joel rant a lot about a shack he owns.

On this week's episode, Jenn Schiffer - aka jennmoneydollars - talks to us about joining Fog Creek as the company's new Community Engineer. She'll be focused on their brand new community, Glitch, which launched today. The gang also listens to Joel rant a lot about a shack he owns.

In this week’s podcast, Anil Dash - new CEO of Fog Creek and old friend of ours - stops by, as does Dr. Dave Robinson for our new segment, Dr Dave’s Data Desk with Dr. Dave Robinson. Because alliteration. And this week’s Stack Overflow Constitution question has the potential to destroy us all: Is it pronounced GIF with a hard G /ɡif/ or GIF with a J /jif/?

In this week's podcast, Anil Dash - new CEO of Fog Creek and old friend of ours - stops by, as does Dr. Dave Robinson for our new segment, Dr Dave's Data Desk with Dr. Dave Robinson. Because alliteration. And this week's Stack Overflow Constitution question has the potential to destroy us all: Is it pronounced GIF with a hard G /ɡif/ or GIF with a J /jif/?

What is a web app? This episode won't go there, but Daniel X Moore and Pirijan Ketheswaran from Fog Creek describe how they created a development environment for web applications called HyperDev. Read more »

Trello CEO and Fog Creek Software Co-Founder Michael Pryor talks with Intercom's Des Traynor about how to build and scale a mass-market software product. Their chat covers the ways Fog Creek’s previous products informed Trello, prioritizing feature requests for a product with diverse use cases, the importance of pricing for value, and more.

Justin and Jason discuss why they like recording discussion shows on Friday afternoons, PayPal dispute resolutions, Jason's friend who lost his business and is now teaching himself how to code, how to determine whether your programmers are lazy, how Fog Creek compensates their developers, why Treehouse is eliminating managers, how to inspire developers to hit deadlines, using the minmax algorithm as a game strategy, why there's so much hate for Soylent, Bitcoin and Tesla, why Justin only bought 0.01 Bitcoin and 1 share of TSLA, a method for identifying asymmetric investments, why Jason thinks Soylent haters are thinking about it all wrong, why Justin is worried about GMOs and why Jason just can't seem to get worried about it, some Christmas present ideas for Colby - like a programmable quadcopter, an heirloom chemistry set or maybe some synthetic biology, how coaching Colby's 4th grade math team is going and how the Catalyst kids are about to start programming their own games, a La Critique of CastFeedValidator and JustAddContent, the first 3D commercial game powered by asm.js, a map of the best medical prices, the new science show Futurescape with James Woods, the Neurogrid analog computer that can simulate one-million neurons using only 5 watts of power, the new SciFi show Almost Human, the British show The Wong Mans, the awesome video show This Week in Engineering, how Google has started caching email images, and how a 6,000-page report on CIA torture has been suppressed for 1 year by the Obama administration.

I spoke at the StackOverflow conference in San Francisco and Seattle this week (long week, let me tell you) and I got the opportunity to sit down with Jeff Atwood from CodingHorror and Joel Spolsky from Joel on Software, along with the man, the legend, Rory Blyth. The audio also appeared on the StackOverflow podcast in part, but here's the raw video from our backstage ramblings.Warning: extreme ramblosity ahead!Joel explains his Duct Tape Programmer post. Apparently DevDays is a duct tape conference, and this section of the recording is a duct tape podcast. Some discussion of the ubiquity of mobile code. Also, if you are nostalgic for the era “when development was hard”, the consensus is that you should be doing mobile development today on iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, or Symbian. Rory elaborates on his experience with (and effusive opinions on) iPhone development to date. Is coding in Objective-C best accompanied by a flux capacitor, New Coke, and Max Headroom? Also, his excitement for MonoTouch. Joel and Scott put on their amateur language designer hats and have a spirited discussion of type inference and Fog Creek’s in-house DSL, Wasabi. Scott covers some of the highlights of new and shiny features coming in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE, the C# 4.0 language, and the ASP.NET MVC 2.0 web framework.

Download the MP3. While some entrepreneurs fret over new business ideas, Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software focuses on hiring the best and brightest for his New York City-based software company, and then figures out how to make a profit with the products they create. He bootstrapped his company to profitability and built a loyal following of fans along the way. While Joel developed Fog Creek's first product called FogBugz that tracks bugs, he let his 2005 summer interns develop their own product called Copilot that has already hit the market. Joel's out to prove he can put capital to work, scale his business, and maybe even revolutionize venture capital along the way. Update: Joel returned for a second interview on Venture Voiceover three years later in 2009.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: When I think of real world analogies to this, like supporting a painter or a ceramicist or like glass making that’s kind of handmade, usually those things are more expensive than the Walmart equivalent. But in software, it’s kind of inverse, where the subscription to Microsoft 365 is going to cost you a lot more than your indie text editor. 00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark Grannigan. Hey Adam, and joined today by Perjean of Kinopio. Howdy. And Peron as knowledge workers and people who sit in front of computers all day long, I think it’s really important to have something physical, get out, move around, do exercise. What do you like to do for that? 00:00:54 - Speaker 1: Well, these days I run, but before COVID, I used to box. We used to go to Gleeson’s boxing gym, which if you ever seen like a cameo or clip of like a boxing gym on TV or movies, you’ve probably seen it. It was a pretty great place to let out steam, but mostly it was a cardio workout where you train and occasionally you’d spar, which was kind of like a very high stress situation, which makes other situations seem less high stress, which is kind of good in its own way. 00:01:21 - Speaker 2: That’s interesting. I remember seeing, maybe it was in the classic surfer documentary that they said one of the reasons surfers are known for being so kind of chill and low key is that when you go up against these incredible primal forces of nature. Than regular human stuff, the volume seems very turned down by comparison. Would you compare the, yeah, I guess, sparring with other humans, even though it’s not like a real fight in the sense that you’re going to get hurt is having some of that quality. 00:01:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I forget who said it. Maybe it was Mike Tyson or something, but there’s this like really famous boxing quote, which is like, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. It’s a life lesson in a way, and I think it applies to a lot more than just boxing. 00:02:02 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I had a colleague who was doing that for a little while, but his wrist got sore enough. Maybe he was doing it wrong or something, but he ended up basically not being able to type for a week. Ouch. Obviously, as a creator, your hands are second only maybe to your eyes and your brain as being key tools. Do you worry about that at all or do you have any sense of like I’m sort of taking my delicate crafting tools? Using them to pummel a bag of sand or another person. 00:02:30 - Speaker 1: I think there’s something to be said for making your delicate tools a little more durable, but I think for me, actually, like things like yoga stress my wrist a lot more than boxing did. And I think it’s just like different things might stress out different people in different places. And I think like trying all the different types of physical activity and going with what works for you is, it kind of makes sense to do, even though it’s kind of a slog to figure it out. 00:02:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when it comes to fitness, and I definitely became a huge believer in the importance of doing something physical, both for the change of pace, but also really because it’s so important for maintaining our health earlier in my life as a kind of tech person. And I think one of the things that’s important is just to find something you enjoy. Some people love running, I do. Many people just cannot stand it. Others like lifting weights, others like riding their bike, others like boxing, climbing, but whatever it is, if the activity itself is enjoyable, not just the result of enhancing your strength and flexibility and endurance and general health and well-being, metabolic well-being maybe, then you’re likely to do it. And if you’re likely to do it, then that’s sustainable over the long term. 00:03:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. If you don’t enjoy it, you’re not gonna stick with it, right? 00:03:43 - Speaker 2: And so maybe you could tell us a little about your background. You’ve worked at some pretty interesting companies. 00:03:48 - Speaker 1: Sure, so most recently, before working on Canopio, I was working at Fog Creek, which eventually became Glitch, which is a web development tool similar to Hiroku’s web development tool once upon a time, and I was the co-creator of Glitch and did its original design and the editor and stuff like that. I think nowadays things are very different, so the glitch you see now is very different than the glitch of 3 years ago. 00:04:12 - Speaker 2: When you first mentioned that to me, it made perfect sense. The visual style of Glitch, at least as I remember it from a few years back, very much matches what you’re doing now, and I wouldn’t have made that connection, but then you mentioned it, and it instantly made sense. 00:04:26 - Speaker 1: I feel like, yeah, Canopo is kind of an evolution of some of the ideas that I had when I built that interface. 00:04:31 - Speaker 2: And Fog Creek also is interesting to note for maybe some of the younger folks in the audience. I always like to pull my technology graybeard card here, but one of their principals, Joel Sppoolsky, was really the one who I think defined modern blogging, and we’d probably find His style to be nothing special today, but this idea of a software engineer or a company founder who writes pretty humanistic blog posts about ways of doing things and you know, experiences and whether it’s technology or hiring or something like that. I think he really kicked all that off, and that’s in addition to, I don’t know exactly what the structure is there, but somehow the fog Creek nexus of people produced trello, stack overflow, later stack exchange, and Glitch, which is quite a run. So, yeah, it must have been interesting to be part of that little sphere. 00:05:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Fog Creek was interesting cause like it was this kind of technology innovator and it was wild working so close to that. So for the first two years of me working at Fog Creek, we shared an office with Trello, so like, I got to see how that sausage was made as well. But also like Fog Creek had a lot of failures too. There was like a thing that was called. I think it was co-pilot where like you could do screen taking over and this was way before other solutions existed. It had kiln, which is like GitHub before GitHub, but based on materials, nobody used it. And yeah, it was just like wild seeing like so many ideas come from this place and Glitch was one of those ideas that just happened to be successful and how those things got incubated, you know, it was pretty unique experience. 00:06:04 - Speaker 3: And didn’t they write a whole programming language? Is that still a thing over there? 00:06:09 - Speaker 1: Well, yeah, so before I started, I don’t remember the details, but basically they couldn’t get what they wanted with like the existing .NET compiler or whatever the Microsoft stack was at the time. So they wrote their own programming language called Wasabi, I want to say it was called. That’s right. And they pulled it away while I was there, a really talented developer basically was part of writing it and then also part of migrating the code base away from it and it was like a really Contentious idea at the time, cause they were trying to do something they couldn’t do conventionally. 00:06:44 - Speaker 2: Well, that is key to being a technology innovator though is you have to take a lot of swings, you got to try a lot of things, and that also implies a lot of failures, and the failures will be more or less forgotten to time and then you’re known for your successes. So, yeah, very interesting firm. And I also understand your educational background is a little different from the conventional computer science path that a lot of folks in the technology world took. 00:07:08 - Speaker 1: Right, yeah, my degrees are in technically biology and urban planning, so I think I might approach things from a slightly different place. 00:07:17 - Speaker 2: And if you’re interested in urban planning, certainly check out our episode with Devon Zugle about cities. We haven’t done a biology episode yet, but I’m not ruling that out. 00:07:27 - Speaker 1: I’m definitely not the one for that. I was really bad at school. 00:07:31 - Speaker 2: And did you find that that different kind of education has fed into the work that you do now, or did you feel that that was more like something you were interested in, but didn’t end up leading to your career or feeding into how you approach your work today? 00:07:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say like kind of the inverse of what you’d expect, doing a grad degree and urban planning in general. The main thing I learned was like how to spot bullshit because like you read a lot of academic papers, you have a lot of professors, I don’t really do anything. There’s a lot of like authority gained by being a professor and How can I put this, didn’t really match the reality of what they were capable of. And also urban planning was really interesting. This might be really, really hot take, but the urban planning department was always kind of like mad at or like kind of had an inferiority complex with the architecture department. And I took a lot of architecture courses and like the professors in urban planning like really got on my case about that a lot. And so that kind of disillusioned me on the whole profession and the whole idea of graduate studies as like this kind of I don’t know, I think I held it in some sort of reverence, and I definitely don’t do that anymore. I respect speaking plainly more than like, saying a lot, I guess. 00:08:49 - Speaker 2: So I guess the big takeaway there was the academic world didn’t seem like a good fit for you less because of the specific fields, but more because of all of the petty rivalries or status games that frankly exist everywhere, but maybe they take on a different character in the academic world. 00:09:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of pettiness. That was not something I expected. 00:09:12 - Speaker 2: And then why don’t you tell us about Canopyo. 00:09:15 - Speaker 1: Sure, so Canopo is, well, it’s kind of hard to describe, but it’s like a thinking tool, you know, you could do mind mapping, whiteboarding, note taking, all that sort of thing, but it’s a spatial canvas where the core interaction is clicking, writing down a thought, clicking somewhere else, writing a new thought, and eventually connecting ideas together with lines and with groupings and kind of getting to new ideas or solving problems both personally or professionally or like together with a group collaboratively. So it’s like a thinking canvas. 00:09:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and certainly folks in the audience will probably immediately recognize that description as being very similar in a lot of ways to Muse. You could potentially describe our tools as competitors, although I feel like when you’re so early in a space trying to I guess convince the world that it’s worth thinking with computers in the first place and that we need new kinds of tools to do that, and that the spatial canvas is one that’s kind of under explored at the moment. From that perspective, I consider us very much allies in the sense that we’re trying to Bring people on board with this model or prove that it can work. But part of what I like is on one hand, what you’re doing is incredibly similar in terms of the core aim and this very basic idea of kind of the spatial canvas, but at the same time, stylistically, it’s completely different. You’re on the web. You’ve got collaboration as a core interaction, less about the tablet, the inking, I don’t know, PDFs are necessarily a big part of it. So there’s the core idea is the same, but you’re exploring a very different branch in the tree, so that makes us, I think, have a natural affinity. 00:10:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I also think, correct me if I’m wrong, but the way we kind of arrived at the very different takes that Muse and Canopo have are very different in the sense of, I started with like a core interaction, just trying to make it fun, and that came from an observation that when I was working as I worked as a designer and a developer, but when I was working as a designer, I’d often like write out notes or little thoughts inside of a larger sketch document to myself. 00:11:13 - Speaker 2: And here by sketch you mean uppercase S sketch the sketch the app. 00:11:16 - Speaker 1: OK. Yeah, just kind of trying to like make ideas and mockups make sense to me or like write down the goals and rationale for things and kind of after leaving Glitch thinking about like, how can I kind of make that a thing that other people could do cause like you’d have to know sketch, which is kind of a weird design tool to take advantage of that kind of thinking and something built around that idea just kind of turned into Canopio. Canopo kind of started from me experimenting based on my own experiences using Sketch, the app. And writing with the text tool notes to myself while doing mockups and kind of trying to bring that experience with the advantages of being able to write anywhere on a page in a more approachable way to more people, as opposed to my impression of Muse is that it started a little bit more academically or rigorously. I don’t know what the right term is, but it feels pre-planned or well thought out and well fleshed out before, at least from the outside looking in. 00:12:12 - Speaker 2: Well, I’m glad we’ve got you fooled. Joking a little bit there. Obviously it did come from pretty deep research, but yeah, you’re right, our origin story was more about tablet, tablet and stylus form factor, where do we do our best thinking as well as kind of gestures and the touch screen as being something more intimate and trying to think about what it would take to get a sketchbook or a whiteboard into a digital space, and then maybe one of the missing things is, yeah, being able to use your hands or more directly interact with the ideas. But I think in a way we have arrived at something similar. Text has become a bigger and bigger focus for us. We have these text blocks in beta now we have sort of big plans for that. And so we’ll see where that goes. But I think that idea of text and visual thinking together or written thinking and visual thinking together has become sort of core to our idea. So in the end I think we all organically develop towards a vision, right? 00:13:06 - Speaker 1: Totally. I mean, I think it’s interesting that we both kind of met in the middle, as you say, but you started more as like image oriented and I started more as text oriented. And then I guess people want all the things. I think that’s kind of the story that also guides the evolution of both these products. 00:13:25 - Speaker 2: Probably the way I’d put it is symbolic representation of thought and visual representation of thought both have their place. Computers have always been great at the former, but not at the latter, but then often you do have these more visual oriented environments, something like sketch or Photoshop or whatever, but then text is a trying experience to bring in there. And one thing that always struck me when you look at as part of our user research a few years back, we went through a bunch of photos of whiteboards, just to kind of get a sense of like, OK, when people are using this analog tool, how are they expressing themselves visually? And I was always struck by, like, how much text is up there. It really is at least 50% text in the sense of handwritten text or occasionally a printout that’s been like magneted to it, even though it’s combined with, OK, you wrote the text in columns or you color coded one, or you have a little annotation on the side, so there’s a lot of information that’s contained in the spatial positioning or how things are color coded or where they’re placed on the board, but in the end, the core atoms are often snippets of text. 00:14:31 - Speaker 1: So I used to write a lot of specs and you know, documents and stuff as you do in a large company, and I noticed, I think one of the things that kind of defines like, is it a pleasant experience to work for or with someone versus not is can they kind of share their ideas? Can they get their thoughts out? And I think learning to write is like learning to think and Traditionally we have like linear writing tools and they kind of require a high level of like practice and skill to write well, but the great thing about whiteboarding and spatial writing in general is, I think it takes a lot of that pressure away. Like I don’t have to necessarily have a lead in sentence. I don’t necessarily have to think about how prose flows, it just, here’s an idea, here’s another idea, maybe like lines or some other visual connects some, and yeah, I think it just sort of lowers the bar to communication. 00:15:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. The free form, just get it out, get started, approach versus the dreaded blanking cursor on the start of the blank page and where do I begin? I think that’s a big part of what you can offer with these more sketchy and certainly more spatial tools. So today’s topic is building in public, and I think this is something, another similarity in our approaches, again, not maybe purposeful, but sort of people with similar mindsets working on similar problems often arrive at similar solutions. And so I think I became aware of your work through these short demo videos you post Twitter, here is some new feature, and here’s how it works, and you can watch this little 5 or 12th interaction and even without having the full context for what the tool is, you see this and it’s, you know, videos are fun, but it doesn’t demand too much of your Time, Canopia certainly has a very interesting visual style, and you see that and you see a few of these and you start to get a sense for what it’s about and it’s quite fun. So tell me what you do there and how you arrived at that, I guess, approach to kind of sharing what you’re working on. 00:16:29 - Speaker 1: Sure, so the way I share things online kind of evolved organically. I was thinking about it for a while and the great thing about Canopo and drawing tools and spatial tools in general is that they’re very visceral. They kind of video really well because there’s animation, there’s movement, and a lot of the features I was building kind of also involved movement, which meant conveying what something does easier with video. The cadence I got into was like build a feature and then make a short video and kind of talk about it, like short tweet length blurb and share it and kind of do that in small iterations and that kind of paralleled how I shipped updates to the product. My priority was sort of, I wanted to integrate marketing into my process. I’m just one person building the tools, so I don’t really have like a separate marketing department. And so just do the work or do the programming work and then do the marketing work or the communications work of here’s what I built, here’s what I did, and then keep that cycle going and hopefully end up somewhere good is basically my plan. And so the tweets are a reflection of that, like, every tweet usually coincides with a push to master to production. 00:17:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, we’ve arrived at a similar thing as well, which is the short demos, which are pretty informal. We did find that for the tablet, it’s pretty important to show the hands, and so we film kind of external to the device that works well, but yeah, being short, having some kind of little textual description of what it is. But not trying to explain everything. It’s not a product manual. It’s not a full top down. It’s just some little snippet of interaction in this product and for existing users there’s a chance to find out about something that’s coming out soon or has come out that they can try maybe a feature they’ve been waiting for they would like to try because it looks useful or interesting. But then also for the folks who are not current users of the product, if they do come across it through a retweet or Twitter’s algorithm, somehow organically or magically surfacing it to them, and then maybe they see that a few times and they start to get intrigued, and they think, what is this weird looking out? Maybe I want to check it out. 00:18:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh yeah, I guess I should have also mentioned this before, look my process. Maybe I’ll take this again or maybe this will be fine, but The process for me making these videos is I used the inbuilt Mac screenshot video tool Command shift 5. I record myself doing the things, and then I’ll trim the back and the front edges in quick time, also already on the Mac, and then convert it with handbrake to MP4 format and then throw it on the web. It’s a very like quick streamlined kind of system I’ve got going. I’ve gotten really good at command shift fiving. 00:19:13 - Speaker 2: Indeed, and certainly being a one person shop, it’s important that you not get too hung up on the production, but I also think even for, you know, our team who has a few more people than that, we’re still small, but I find that if it’s sort of quick and low ceremony to do this, then you’re much more likely to do it often and even be able to show, sometimes we show some work in progress and we update a week later and you can see that stuff has changed, even just, you know, minor visual design details. If you can make it more just fun and quick and low ceremony, then you get these steady stream of it, which I think fits better with the building in public thing, right? I guess we should stop and define that a little bit, cause I think there are some different definitions, but to briefly like kind of look at the far extreme, you could take something like Apple, who does these huge product releases, all this fanfare, and they keep everything totally secret up until the moment when it comes out. And you know, that obviously works for them. There’s lots of companies that do things that way, but I think of the building in public approach you’re using and that we do and plenty of other folks as well as being more of a bite size, taking folks along on the journey, and there’s plenty of products, even games and things that I follow, largely through Twitter that I actually probably will never use the product to play the game or whatever, but I just like their little videos. I like their sharing their work, cause I like creative process, I like seeing makers do their thing, and if they have an interesting visual flair or what have you, it can be like a source of inspiration, I guess. 00:20:43 - Speaker 1: My theory slash hot take is that the kind of classic way of doing big product releases very much tied to a time where when you really software was on a box, so you kind of had to make sure people knew about this was a new hot box to buy because there’s only like one a year or something. In our case, we’re not necessarily constrained by that old world. I think with social media and stuff, I think there’s just more of an emphasis on frequency and having that ongoing conversation with people. Cause we can like a release for us is relatively easy compared to shipping a box with a CD in it. 00:21:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, now I guess if we were to define building in public, we sort of already talked about sharing work in progress, short product demo videos, kind of bite size micro videos, but taking a step back from that, Mark, I’d be curious to hear for you what that term evokes. 00:21:36 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, certainly the core is sharing what you’re doing along the way. Often there’s this element of engagement with the community where you’re getting feedback, you’re getting ideas, you’re getting reactions and using that to influence more or less how you’re proceeding with the project. I also think there’s something to sort of priming the social distribution mechanism, to build on your point earlier about a box versus a continuous release. It’s not just a matter of the release mechanism. It’s about how people find out about software. It used to be whatever PC magazine who had 12 issues a year or something. You need to punch through the editorial calendar so you get on there, whereas now will find out about it through their friends and through influencers on YouTube and stuff. And it takes a long time to get that flywheel going, because you need to have several revolutions of it before people find out from people who find out from people, and you get the exponential growth to go up. I think that’s a big aspect of it as well. 00:22:31 - Speaker 2: One term sometimes used by marketers that I’ve worked with is a drumbeat, a marketing drumbeat, and I think what they mean by that, if I can decode it, is sort of similar to a rhythm in a song. In general, what makes music pleasing for humans, I think, and engaging is essentially sort of it’s repetition. It’s not just one pleasing note or a few pleasing notes and then it’s over, it’s that it has this kind of repeating, but then with variations thing and then you can be drawn into that almost, yeah, like a story or a journey or something like that. And so yeah, I think increasingly it’s not that you find out about a product through, yeah, that big review in PC Magazine like you said, and then you decide to buy it and you go to the store and you buy it, or you don’t decide to do that and you never think about it again, and instead it’s more it comes on your awareness through all these aggregators. And social media networks that we operate in nowadays, and you think, oh, that’s kind of cool, and you start to follow it just out of curiosity, and then maybe it builds some kind of mindshare with you, and then either you come across a problem that you think, oh, I need a solution to this. Oh, actually that weird little indie company I’ve been following on Twitter, actually that might be just the thing for this, or just at some point you just get curious enough, you’re like, yeah, I got a little time, I want to check this thing out. It seems cool. 00:23:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the phrase marketing drumbeat. When I heard you say that, I was picturing like, you know, the Viking person kind of drumming the beat and everybody’s like rowing the or in unison to it. And to me, I think like from the point of view of a marketer, it’s sort of like we’re rowing every day, you know, this constant rhythm. And it’s like a lot of hard work because the seas are choppy, but if we row enough, long enough to the beat, we’ll arrive on the shore or something, but it’s kind of part of that, like the journey is part of it. Yeah that’s my interpretation. 00:24:20 - Speaker 2: Another interesting thing here is you mentioned that sort of the sharing of work in progress, let’s call it marketing, maybe storytelling is a term I like a little better since it doesn’t have some of that historic baggage, but explaining and sharing what you’re doing, particularly if you do this build in public approach where it’s not about the big bang but rather a continuous stream of here’s what I’m up to kind of updates. Now, for you as a solo creator, you have the full called vision of any particular feature or thing you’re doing in your mind. And so then you need to translate it to kind of speak to the outside world through a little video or something like that. We’re in a position where sometimes the person kind of making a little demo video is also the same person that worked on the feature or kind of was the driver for it, but other times it’s quite different. So I’ve often been in the position where I’m the one to make a screenshot or a demo video or add a handbook entry, but I actually don’t, you know, I was working on other things and I wasn’t following closely the feature development, and I need to really sit down and kind of mind meld with the person who had that, so I can understand what’s special about this, why do we do it? Why is this here, why now, that sort of thing. And I wonder, there’s probably a big benefit to not having to do that mental handoff in the sense of, you know, you don’t have to take the time. But I think there’s also pros to it sometimes, which is the process of getting the product owner, let’s say, to explain what they’re doing to me, and then I try to make a demo about it and I say, well, what I really want to show is X and Y, but that doesn’t work because of this missing feature or this bug or this strange behavior, and then that actually can feed back into how the product is made, or we just get CRISper in our thinking because of that handoff. 00:26:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in my case, it kind of definitely requires some diligence. Actually, sometimes while making the screencast, I’ll notice that something’s off or like my explanation of the feature is kind of hard to convey, and I’ll actually just like, hold on a second, maybe I’ll go back and update the thing that I just built. So I can explain it better or that it kind of makes more sense. So I feel like the process kind of does have like a little mini cycle unto itself, where if something isn’t easy to explain, then maybe that means the thing that I built just doesn’t make sense or needs a bit of refinement to get it to that last 10th. 00:26:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, a few reactions here. One is I really agree about this idea of the importance of the mental model. Often when you can’t explain something, it’s because you don’t understand it or you’ve basically misconceived the world and therefore you’re having this impedance mismatch when you go to try to explain it. So that’s very viable. Also, there’s this idea of how do you convince a lot of people of a new idea? Well, the answer is one person at a time, so you might as well start with your business partner first, or, you know. rubber duck or whatever, because you’re going to work out some of the kinks that way. And relatedly, I think building public has this element of sharpening the tool. I come back to this example of teaching hospitals a lot where when you’re in this environment of teaching and critique and different levels of expertise and familiarity, it brings out the best in you and it forces you to step up your game. And I think working in public has that same dynamic. 00:27:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I also noticed from having a joby job back in the day that one of the main reasons that like a feature would suck when it was built is because the brief or the spec was like just flawed fundamentally, like maybe there’s an assumption that was wrong or whatever. And the great thing about building in public is if you’re doing it like really on the bleeding edge where you’re saying, I’m thinking of doing X, where I might not tweet that it might be in the forums or on the Canopbio discourse, but That kind of has like a correcting mechanism or it kind of forces me to be clear, and which also kind of chops off scope in a lot of cases. So I totally agree with you on that. 00:28:05 - Speaker 2: So basically explaining things is another kind of tool for thought. 00:28:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, totally. It’s the tool for thought. 00:28:13 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and another variant here is doing residence testing with the community where you emit a bunch of different frequencies, each frequency, it’s a different way to think about or explain your product and a subset of those resonate back and then you know that you can iterate towards those ideas and phrases in your future marketing. 00:28:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m not sure if it’s similar to, like, I don’t know if you’ve heard the term paving the cow paths, which is like a landscape architecture term where you know, if people are walking weirdly through your park, then you just kind of pave that as the path, because that’s where people want to go and using words that people are using to describe your own thing back at them, I think it’s really effective. 00:28:51 - Speaker 2: And the other elements of building in public, you know, here we’re talking about demoing product features. I think when I first encountered the term, it’s in the bootstrapper in the hacker communities, it seems to be a lot of sharing your revenue growth, and I think some of that is a pushback to the conventional wisdom of business is you don’t really share numbers unless they’re really impressive. If you’re a public company that’s reporting your $100 million in quarter 3, that’s one thing, but if you’re a a developer or two people and you’re making a moderately successful product, you don’t share that you’re making 5000, 10,000 a month or whatever the number is. You have end users or end customers, and so a lot of the folks, I think even the indie hackers site has some capabilities built in where you can even connect to the stripe API and it builds a dashboard for you where you can see the exact numbers. And there’s some interesting debate about that in the community because there are people who are maybe less scrupulous would be the right way to put it, but when they see revenue growth of a particular product, that’s motivation to basically create a clone and try to grab some of that revenue for themselves, so that’s not great. But it does seem to be this culture of we share this as a chance to have your own milestones and sort of accountability from an outside community. I think is also especially helpful when you’re just one person, you don’t have investors or whatever, but then also it’s a chance to support others when people do reach their milestone that they set out. Oh, I’ve reached 100 customers, that was my goal for the year and everyone can cheer them on and be supportive, and it’s sort of a small business culture. I think that’s quite interesting. It’s different from the building public we’re talking about here, but I still think it’s an interesting one. 00:30:27 - Speaker 3: I actually think they’re more related than you might initially think. I think a lot of the impetus is signaling. So if you go back to when we first started to see this with small software businesses at a time it wasn’t really understood that an individual person can make a lot of money online with a really niche weird software business. And so being able to do that and share it was a very interesting signal. It had a lot of novelty value and it showed that you were a surprisingly accomplished software entrepreneur. Well, now we know that’s much more feasible and there’s tons of these businesses, and it’s still hard to do, but it’s not novel or unique. And I think in many ways it has become outweighed by this clone risk that you mentioned. But I also think a lot of the product building in public is about signaling to your community and your potential community that you have good taste and you get it, because this is not the case with most pieces of software and software firms, you know, that’s just the reality. But if you can do the hard work of putting together not only a really good product, but a piece of media that concisely shows that, that causes people to correctly adjust their priors a lot on the quality of your work. I think as software people were often uncomfortable with this idea of signaling and marketing and information uncertainty, but the reality is there it’s a huge place, most of it isn’t very good, and so you have to do a lot of work towards helping people understand that your product and your company is in fact good and this is gonna be one way to do it. 00:31:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this is something I think about a lot. I don’t share numbers personally yet, but my thinking is more along the lines of How can I put this? Well, there’s two things, I guess. The first is that I kind of feel weird that people are like analyzing whether a thing is good by how much money it makes when they can just like look at it and like, is it good? But I guess I could see how that would be like human nature. The other side to it is like, If the number is too low, does it have the reverse effect? And if the number is too high, are you seeing a sort of like sell out or like, oh, you’re not like an indie hacker anymore, now you’ve like made it, you’re not one of us. So maybe I’m a pessimist, but I only kind of see the negatives in that case. 00:32:35 - Speaker 3: I tend to agree on the financial numbers side, and I think most people have, which is why we don’t see them very much anymore. But yeah, and I think there’s still interesting signaling value on the product itself. 00:32:45 - Speaker 2: Another spin on that that I like for individuals is just talking about their transition from either being full-time employed or a contractor and then the kind of percentage of their sort of life earning needs which are covered by their product or their business that they’re trying to get started versus a more conventional source of income. And I think we’ve all made that. Transition or anyone that’s tried to go off and do their own thing, whether it’s being indie or even as a freelancer or starting a business, you know, I certainly went through that lots of kind of, you know, moonlighting, I guess is the the term for it, because you end up working on it at night. But yeah, when I started my first business, there was a good long period of kind of working on it on the side while I worked my day job, and then trying to do the calculation of, OK, do I have enough saved up? I’m not quite earning enough from my side gig yet, but I know if I can focus on that, I think I can get it across the line in 6 months or a year. If I cut down the basics in life, can I make it there? It’s this really huge and important life transition and honestly a pretty intimidating, even scary one for a lot of people. I think that approach of sharing. Of I’ve reached personal break even where I’ve made the full transition, you know, I’ve basically like finished my last client project and from here forward I can be full time on this product that I’m working on. That sort of thing I think is really good. Pure, I don’t know what the word for it is not quite role modeling, but a chance to exactly said mark show that you can do it, and it’s not about the number and whether it’s low or high, it’s about. Starting something from scratch, and being able to take that very hard road that takes you to that basic sustainability. 00:34:25 - Speaker 1: Would you be more interested in like that hearing that story from the perspective of, I’ve made it, here’s the things that I did, or I’m in the struggle right now and it sucks. It doesn’t end on a happy note cause it’s pending, right? 00:34:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s interesting. I think that hearing from inside the struggle, and this I think does connect to the build in public, you’re not getting the finished and polished story where you can go back and kind of like adjust the little details probably subconsciously to make it all add up and end in that happy ending. But instead that you get the raw unfinished thoughts that may be even conflicting day to day. I think of a good example of this, an incredible log of sort of creative process is the book The Making of Prince of Persia, where the author of this absolutely now iconic and classic video game, the Prince of Persia, had been keeping personal daily journals the whole time, and it’s a wild roller coaster, and he is questioning every month, is this worth my Time is the video game industry a dead end? Should I even be doing this? And in hindsight, you look back and you go, not only did this make this person’s career, but you know, if you’re someone that grew up with gaming in that era, you think of this as just a seminal thing. How could he have been questioning that he was doing something worthwhile? But of course any artist, any creator, you got your struggles, anything worth doing has its struggles, and being able to see that kind of in real time, if that’s the right word for it, is a really powerful thing. 00:35:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Jordan Meckner, right? 00:35:54 - Speaker 3: That sounds right, yeah. 00:35:55 - Speaker 2: That’s the 10 wow, what a legend. 00:35:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, folks, if you haven’t read this book, you have to, it’s absolutely incredible, and it’s almost totally unique as far as I know in terms of having the actual day to day source materials, just incredibly valuable. To your original question, I think there’s two dimensions here. One is, do you see all the details day to day, which could be either because you have basically a journal, which is quite rare, or because you’re just talking about on Twitter as it happens, which is more common, and then there’s the question of who do you hear from, and you can get all kinds of weird selection bias depending on if you only hear the success stories. So for both of those reasons, I think it’s interesting to hear it as it happens, which of course is congruent with our choice of building a public podcast episode. 00:36:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s definitely rare, which I also agree kind of makes it more valuable. 00:36:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly that’s part of what we do here in this podcast. I wanted to document our thinking almost as a sort of journal for my own purposes later on. And I think in maybe in some of the early episodes, I’m thinking of where we talked about like our partnership model, which is a bit unique and you know has certain risks to it, and I think we basically left it with, well, we’re hopeful this is going to work, but it’s got all these risks, no one really knows. Let’s check back in 3 years, maybe we did that episode a year and a half ago, so, you know, we’re not too far away from, you know, checking in and being able to. retrospect, and I can only imagine that some of the things that we talked about early on later on, I’ll be able to look back either years from now or even sooner than that and go, ah, this whole idea we had, it sounded nice at the time, it made sense, but it actually didn’t work, you know, in the laboratory of the world where you put your ideas to the test, not all of them are going to stand up. 00:37:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I want to check out that book. The part of it that really kind of sounds like it resonates with me is a sort of emotional struggle. I’m kind of an emo guy. Like you don’t necessarily hear that side of it. I think there’s numbers and if the numbers are good, then there’s posturing, but you’re in the middle and I’m not so sure in real time is very interesting to me. 00:37:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, posturing is one thing that I have sort of a personal cringe from and when I have been inside companies where it seems like maybe this is more old school business advice, maybe this is changing now and being more honest and human and authentic and vulnerable is hopefully becoming more in fashion because those are things I’m more interested in, but I don’t know, man, posturing, life’s too short, you know. 00:38:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, this does remind me of the issue of individuals versus small companies versus large companies. I think we’ve mostly been talking realistically about individual creators and entrepreneurs and very small ventures like Muse in terms of number of staff. I think actually a big advantage for these people, these individuals and small firms, I think it becomes much harder to have a really open, transparent working in public process when you’re a large company. It’s not impossible, but there are all kinds of dynamics working against you, and we need to go into all the reasons, but basically. It’s because a firm has this incredibly valuable capital, you know, goodwill that you’re potentially playing with. And so you could burn that down, or people could be very jealous of it, or it could be hard to get access to it, to basically be able to publish under the company’s name and so on and so forth. So for all these reasons, it’s potentially a unique advantage that small ventures have. 00:39:12 - Speaker 1: I think the bigger the company, the more it’s seen as like this is a high risk thing with low reward and like nobody wants to be the first mover on that kind of initiative. 00:39:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, do you think the personality element of it is really important. We do talk about brands as having personalities. Yeah, there’s certainly big brands that are playful and fun, and there’s others that are sleek and futuristic, and there’s others that are maybe emotional and rustic, for example, but those are pretty I don’t wanna say manufactured exactly, but they don’t really come from any one human or small set of humans other than maybe the founders. The founders had a particular set of personality traits and that created the beginning of the brand, culture or the brand personality, but then you go on 10 years, 20 years, the company is big, and all of that gets, I don’t know, homogenized or more distant. Yeah, and maybe that’s as it should be actually, as you get bigger, you should be kind of more accessible, less. Peculiar, maybe one way to put it, whereas when you’re at a small scale, yeah, bringing your own personality into the brand, the business, you are the company, right? And that’s true even at uses company size, but certainly for a one person shop like you have, that is there, how do you think about personality as being part of the work you’re doing? 00:40:32 - Speaker 1: I think it’s a big part of it. I think it’s one of those things that set us apart from other companies that kind of have to compete on these are featured checklists, these are like, you know, enterprise ready things. There are more choices in software, it’s becoming less of a commodity and like, There are markets that are already kind of evolved in this direction, like to do lists and stuff where you’re not choosing the thing that has all the features because you don’t need the features, you’re choosing the tool that resonates with you, and it’s kind of like buying a camera or buying like a good where there’s a low end version, a high-end version, and lots of variations in between choosing based on vibes. 00:41:09 - Speaker 1: Exactly. I think there’s like a floor of capabilities you need, but beyond that, it’s sort of like which tool makes me feel the best. To use and, you know, to tell people about and all the rest of that. 00:41:21 - Speaker 3: Yeah, totally, we’ve talked about this on the podcast before on how creative work is this incredibly difficult, emotional, highly unnatural endeavor, and you need the right encouragement and inducement, and environment, and if you’re working with a tool that makes you feel, you know, inspired and motivated, that’s a huge deal. It’s actually worth something. It’s not just cosmetic in the negative sense, right? It’s really valuable. 00:41:43 - Speaker 2: I think we usually cite the substance of style. A classic Virginia Postrell book talking about that, and I think it came out around the time of Steve Jobs had taken over Apple, and she was arguing why the new IMAX coming in colors you could choose rather than just having the one beige box, which is what computers have basically always been up until that point, was actually a pretty big deal. The whole thesis of the book boils down to We want to say that aesthetic doesn’t matter and it’s about function, but the thing that’s missing there is we’re humans and we care about how things feel and how they look and how they smell and sound, and we actually are more productive and more effective at whatever it is we’re trying to do if we just like the vibe of the thing itself. 00:42:25 - Speaker 1: I think that’s really connected to the idea of we’re selling consumer software more than we’re selling for business software in that when you’re selling to people, the same people giving you money are the people using the product. With corporate or enterprise software, you have a corporate buyer buying it on behalf of other people and they’ll never use it for themselves. So there’s a different calculus that goes on there where it’s like, I don’t really care how Jira is to use because it checks all the boxes and I won’t get fired for buying it. 00:42:54 - Speaker 2: And that’s certainly why we wanted to stay focused on the individual buyer in the early days of the company, and there may be a future, you know, business team product or something like that, but I wanted to make sure we were so far along that the core product could be very personal and emotive, and it serves the user’s needs and the user and the person that’s parting with the money or the same person, which is a really good way to make sure those things stay completely in sync or it gets much harder when the buyer and the user are different people. 00:43:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there’s this metal layer where you’re designing a company and if you do a really good job, you’ve kind of designed everyone’s incentives and motivations to take you to the same direction, same place. 00:43:35 - Speaker 2: There’s also some software industry dynamics here when you talk about the bigger you get, the more kind of generic it needs to be or should be, and the smaller anicier you are, the more you can be sort of weird, and then you’ll be a beacon for the people that also like that same kind of weird and that if there’s a lot of different choice out there from different weird things that have different angles and you can find the one that really suits you. But I think a lot of folks still think of software as being kind of the world that say Microsoft. Built, which is a single player who’s going to dominate and consolidate an entire market. So there can only be one word processor. Basically there can only be one spreadsheet, there can only be one photo editing tool because one sort of the file format, I call it network effects, but switching costs, probably a better word for it, and then that implies several other things, which is you need really huge scale. That your R&D cost becomes kind of a footnote or much smaller compared to because it’s split among such a large audience, essentially the whole world. And then you get into this niche indie software and there can be way more variety. It’s OK if there’s 50 spatial canvases because they all serve a unique niche, uh have a unique vibe or are made by different creators with just different kind of basic aims and in different communities. But that also means that the R&D cost is not averaged among so many people, so that may affect kind of pricing elements, but it also means that maybe there’s this element of almost the patronage, we’ve talked about this a bit before, Kickstarter or Patreon, or something like Steam Early Access, which is in many cases, you want to see the work of this creator come to fruition. You want to see this product exist in the world because you want to use it, but coming back. To that vibe thing, you just want more stuff in the world that is like this and almost implies, you know, in the same way you would through patronage support an artist, a painter or a musician or something you want more of their stuff in the world. It’s less of a practical calculus and more of a, hey, I’m willing to part with a little money to have this thing exist. 00:45:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s actually also interesting because when I think of real world analogies to this, like supporting a painter or ceramicist or like glass making that’s kind of handmade, usually those things are more expensive than the Walmart equivalent, but in software it’s kind of inverse where the subscription to Microsoft 365 is going to cost you a lot more than your indie text editor or something like that. I’m not entirely sure why that is, but I think part of it is like the way we perceive how much things should cost with software, just it being like this thing that’s floating out in the ether, measured only in kilobytes and megabytes, if that, yeah, it’s kind of hard to put your hands around it in a way where you can value it the same way you value physical good. 00:46:32 - Speaker 3: Speaking of purchasing software, if you think about what you might be buying, the bundle is probably bigger than you would originally think. So, yes, you’re buying something to move numbers around in a spreadsheet, OK? You’re buying the sense of putting your thumb on the scale in favor of this creator and the way you see the world existing in the future. Another thing I think you’re buying is sort of an aesthetic tool to signal to your friends and your community. I’ve seen this a lot with things like notion and other supposedly personal productivity tools. There’s a whole ecosystem around basically sharing what you’re doing in this very aesthetic and outward facing way of just like to do lists and calendars and things that seem very mundane and personal, but being able to show that you have a sense of taste and aesthetic is actually very valued by people. And so I think that’s an emerging and important aspect of the bucket of things that you’re buying. 00:47:26 - Speaker 2: I wonder if that point is almost the buyer or the other side of the building public for the creator, which is they’re showing how they use a tool, but they’re really showing how they live their life, and I think we’re all much more curious than maybe we realize or we want to admit about Yeah, how do people juggle their calendars? I don’t know. I spent probably 15 years in my adult life trying to find the right combination of managing my time and not say that I have it perfectly sorted out, but I had a lot of false starts and made a lot of mistakes and so on. Like, what do other people do? Same thing for to do this, the same thing for personal retrospectives or how to think about big decisions or all that sort of thing, just a screenshot of someone’s Maybe color coded to do this doesn’t necessarily give you the whole picture, but it gives you a surprising glimpse into it, maybe like seeing their living room behind them in zoom or something like that, and you just get some little snippets, you know, the guitar there, the book on the shelf, the cat going by, you have a little insight into their life and maybe we’re all curious for that. 00:48:31 - Speaker 3: And critically, you’re not going to share that to do list if it’s really ugly in the same way that you’re not going to do a YouTube video by your living room, it’s terrible, right? And I love the idea of building public as well as buying public or live in public, you know, it’s a great mirror image. 00:48:47 - Speaker 1: Especially when it feels like there’s a default option for everything, like you buy your iPhone, you have your standard issue calendar and your standard issue, you know, notes app and whatever, and I think showing that you use other things or that you’ve thought through or thought hard about, maybe I’m different, maybe I don’t fit into this one box that Apple incorporated or Google Incorporated has kind of ordained for all of us to be in. 00:49:12 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me in the same way that people, you know, they don’t want to just wear, I don’t know, Levi’s jeans every day or something, right? They want to show that they have some other aesthetic taste. 00:49:21 - Speaker 2: I’m actually reminded of people sharing their phone home screenshots, and then, you know, that’s going to be defined by almost the diff against the standard thing, and that includes the operating system default installed apps, but also maybe things that just kind of everyone has. OK, your, I don’t know, WhatsApp, for example, is basically the de facto messaging app here in Europe, and so you see a screenshot of a European’s home screen and WhatsApp being on there, there’s not much to comment on. But you see some new encrypted messaging app, or you see some, yeah, weird to do list thing, or you see something else that has an unusual icon and you don’t recognize, and then you wanna, again, what is that? Why did you come to that? Why did you choose that over all these other choices? That exists in the market, and then that in turn can be a point of pride, maybe for the person sharing. They’ve spent some time curating a set of software tools that serve them in their lives, and maybe they found some that have interesting vibe, interesting aesthetic, a unique take on the problem. And then it’s also for the person that’s inquiring, it’s a glimpse into their life again, and I think we’re all curious for that. 00:50:27 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this critically circles back to the idea of social distribution. So the original idea of social media was you’re following your small group of friends and you’re finding out whatever what Adam had for dinner or something. But the modern reality of social media is that a huge amount of the traffic is professionals, basically people whose essentially full-time job is having and demonstrating good taste on YouTube and Instagram and TikTok or whatever, and it’s a critical marketing channel for anything consumer, which I think increasingly is going to include consumer software, and if your products can’t participate in that, it’s a huge problem and conversely, if your product is very well suited for that, it’s potentially hugely helpful. And yeah, I feel like people are still really under rotated on how important things like YouTube channels and subreddits are for marketing and distributing consumer software, and the software, I think really needs to support that and be natives to those mediums if it’s gonna have a good chance. 00:51:24 - Speaker 1: That’s a good tip for me. I don’t do enough for Redditing just cause I hate the interface, but I’ve definitely feel a lot of great success stories from that. 00:51:32 - Speaker 3: OK, so there’s a little bit of cety here because I think very early on, as certainly you are in mostly still muses, you have to push up it yourself. You have to be the one to go and post on Twitter and Reddit, but the end game is you have people who’s like literal full-time job it is to make amazing videos about your software. Now this exists for things like Notion or Rome or whatever, right? But your software has to be amenable to that and worthy of such third party distribution. 00:52:01 - Speaker 1: What do you think makes software amenable to that? Because this is something I’ve been curious about myself where like a couple people have done YouTube videos on Canopio, but like compared to the avalanche of notion hacks and Rome hacks and the rest, yeah, it’s like a drop in the bucket. 00:52:17 - Speaker 2: Well, for sure, there is a bootstrapping effect happening there, which is that if your job is, you’re a content creator, you’re an independent content creator, you post product tips and reviews on YouTube, things that other people are already interested in are what are going to get you the views and the views ultimately translate into your financial results. So once something is already popular on people’s mind, and so yeah, the notion tips and tricks, for example, and I can almost tell when something has tipped over that. Line, maybe obsidian did that in this last 6 or 12 months, where you start seeing fewer of the, for example, what Muse has had plenty of, which is basically a review, assuming the audience has not seen this product before. Hey, I found this awesome product, let me show it to you. But then when you tip over into a certain level of, I don’t know what, renowned or just enough people have it or have heard of it or use it, then it’s to their benefit to essentially Give you tips or tricks or do things, and that’s the ultimate position to be in, right, is if other people are marketing your products for you because it benefits them, they’re not doing it for you, they’re doing it for their own brand. I think of like the ultimate in this is when the social media companies got their little icons to appear on every single billboard and flyer and you know, the little. Twitter icon, the Instagram icon, the Facebook icon, when those started to show up, I don’t know, 12 or 15 years ago, and I thought, wow, that’s amazing. They’re having every other company do their marketing for them. Apple, of course, is amazing for that. We are square in that. You go to our homepage and there’s a giant picture of an iPad, you know, we’re basically constantly doing beautiful product shots of their products for them. That’s because when it’s a thing that people already have and use, then, you know, it’s to our benefit. I mean, obviously we’re on that platform, which is a little different, but it’s to our benefit to talk about or be associated with something that people are already connected to. 00:54:16 - Speaker 3: Perhaps I can synthesize a little bit here and answer your original question. I think there are 3 things that really helped this dynamic kick off, aside from the obvious one, like if you’re already big, people are more inclined to do it. One is this aesthetic sense, which I think is really important. A second is end user customizability and extensibility, because if the things that you can do in your app are limited to what the 5 people working at the company had already preconceived, it’s just not that much to talk about on YouTube videos, right? Whereas with something like Notion, it’s incredibly configurable and extensible. You can turn it into whatever you want, even within the world of calendars, there’s all kinds of different calendars you can make. And the third is having a way to make a living on the product. So an example of something that combines all three is something like Shopify, right? It’s very extensible. Obviously you can make a living, has a great aesthetic sense, and sure enough, there’s an incredible ecosystem. There’s many big businesses that are just like Shopify extensions, and you’re probably not gonna be like at that third pillar in a consumer app, but I think you can and do need to have the first two to really hit a big and again something like Notion or Rome has both of those. 00:55:22 - Speaker 2: I also point out that software companies getting this kind of called influencer marketing or something like that is pretty new. I think that the hardware devices, what I usually think of as gadget lust, is way further along than that. So for example, I think of some of these really big channels like MK BHD who’s a YouTuber, does these amazingly well produced videos, many, many millions of subscribers,