Podcasts about pivoting

On this episode of TGIF with Courtney, host Courtney Stone connects with special guest Olivia Crane to discuss her journey of creating a thriving online marketing company.Join the Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/tgifwithcourtney/Connect with Olivia Crane: https://amplifiedsocial.ca/  Episode Resources:Amplified Social | https://amplifiedsocial.ca/

Remember when we couldn't eat birthday cake with our friends because of a pandemic? I remember. So does Karen and her (at the time) 6 year old son, who's heartbreaking virtual birthday realization prompted Karen Hetz to start a cake box company to bring birthday cake to children all across America. Throughout her journey of creating a business prompted by a gap in the market of the time, Karen has had to delicately balance everything from how to price her boxes to fit the market, and how to pivot when the gap in the market wasn't a need anymore. Episode 121 of the Moments with an MEO podcast is about pricing and pivoting, and what a new business owner can expect to ponder in both of these issues. Karen and I discuss: Starting a Covid-inspired business and how she got into and out of 2020 with a strong business connecting people together. Pricing your new product or service to fit your niche and budget restrictions. That lull in sales you can expect when you pivot and change your mission or message. Kids in STEM and how baking and cooking in general strengthens their skills and brain.Enjoy today's conversation? Don't forget to write a review and check out the links below: Karen: WebsiteInstagramBritt: InstagramWebsite

Want to go zero-waste without having to change up your grooming routine drastically? Look no further than the reusable Leaf Razor - a sustainable and aesthetic alternative to disposable razors. Go to https://www.scoopmarketplace.com/products/leaf-razor?_pos=1&_sid=49c00341c&_ss=r (https://www.scoopmarketplace.com/products/leaf-razor?_pos=1&_sid=49c00341c&_ss=r) to find out more.

Reunited and it feels so good! It's safe to say that it's been a stressful couple of weeks with the twins pending graduation, the end of the school year and all the activities that come with it, and now the plot twist no one saw coming--no water in the Dubrow household. It's been a sh*t show...literally. But have no fear because Liz Astrof is here and her hilarity is in full force in this episode. Join Heather and Liz as they discuss their life,the ever-evolving struggles of raising kids, and how they both have had to unexpectedly and forcibly pivot. Plus, Liz opens up about the unfortunate cancellation of her critically acclaimed show and the new efforts to #SavePivoting. Oh, and consider yourself warned: it's physically impossible to not laugh or smile uncontrollably during this episode. Please support the show by checking out our sponsors! Airmed: Just visit airmedcarenetwork.com/heather today and get up to a $60 gift card with code HEATHER BelliWelli: go to www.belliwelli.com and use code HEATHER30 to unlock a 30% discount Consult Beaute: VISIT CONSULTBEAUTE.com and enjoy 25% off your purchase by using coupon code HEATHER25 GuruNanda: Register now at GuruNanda.com/win to win a $500 Walmart gift card and receive $3.00 off each bottle purchased exclusively at Walmart

“Teaching is one of the most underrated yet the most critical jobs on this planet.” As we continue the journey through Child's Month, the conversation would not be complete without the perspective of a teacher. Today, fantastic author and dynamic teacher, Lisa McLean, is joining me today to talk about transitioning seasons and stepping into your passion and purpose. Lisa is on a mission to transform the educational landscape. She's focused on supporting parents by providing a quality learning experience for their children and creating quality children's books to complement their learning experiences. In this conversation, Lisa shares how she landed in the world of teaching and discovered she loved it, why she is still passionate about working with children over 20 years later, how she found her heart passion in writing, what it's like to navigate becoming an empty nester while taking on a caregiver role for her mother, and more. Enjoy the epic! Highlights How Lisa found her passion for teaching Why Lisa fought the pull to teach for a long time Embracing a continuous learning mindset The big realization Lisa made as her son neared the end of high school How Lisa re-connected with her heart's passion Lisa's first book: from class project to publication The inspiration behind Lisa's writing Lisa's writing process Pivoting in the pandemic Building new relationships with aging parents Making room for self-care while being a caregiver and dealing with anxiety Dispelling the shame around mental health difficulties Faith as an anchor through difficult times Mentioned in this episode Lisa McLean's Website https://www.iamlisamclean.com/ Lisa McLean on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lisamcleanpublications/ Lisa McLean on Twitter https://twitter.com/LisaNMac Lisa McLean on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/LisaMcLeanPublications   Want more insights about living an intentionally balanced life? Balanced Lady Boss Website http://www.balancedladyboss.com/ Stacey Hines on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/iamstaceyhines/ Balanced Lady Boss Community on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/balanced-lady-boss/ Stacey Hines on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn8qEvzMHlDR9SuROLfRAAw

Jen Price fell in love with craft beer during her college summer internships in Boulder, Colorado. In her free time, Jen began educating herself on the craft beer scene. She opened Atlanta Beer Boutique, which included a tasting room and tasting classes, and even started writing a book. When the pandemic had other ideas, Jen pivoted her expertise and launched a second beer-focused business, Crafted for Action.

On this episode of Virtual Coffee, I chatted with Ryan, the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Simpls. Simpls is located in the Twin Cities, Minnesota area, and they deliver homemade, sustainable foods made with local ingredients. They are definitely a market differentiator, and Ryan dives into their journey and the pivots they had to make since their launch in 2014. Be sure to check out Simpls, and happy listening! Simpls' Instagram ----more---- ☕️ Instagram & Facebook: @virtualcoffeepodcast ☕️ Email: virtualcoffeepodcast@gmail.com  ☕️ Linktree ----more---- ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Don't forget to leave a rating & review for Virtual Coffee! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ----more---- Music: Blippy Trance by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5759-blippy-trance License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Chris switched from Trello over to Linear for product management and talks about prioritizing backlogs. Steph shares and discusses a tweet from Curtis Einsmann that super resonated with the work she's doing right now: "In software engineering, rabbit holes are inevitable. You will research libraries and not use them. You'll write code just to delete it. This isn't a waste; sometimes, you need to go down a few wrong paths to get to the right one." This episode is brought to you by BuildPulse (https://buildpulse.io/bikeshed). Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. Linear (https://linear.app/) Curtis Einsmann Tweet (https://twitter.com/curtiseinsmann/status/1521451508943843329) Louie Bacaj Tweet (https://twitter.com/LBacaj/status/1478241322637033474?s=20) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: AD: Flaky tests take the joy out of programming. You push up some code, wait for the tests to run, and the build fails because of a test that has nothing to do with your change. So you click rebuild and you wait. Again. And you hope you're lucky enough to get a passing build this time. Flaky tests slow everyone down, break your flow and make things downright miserable. In a perfect world, tests would only break if there's a legitimate problem that would impact production. They'd fail immediately and consistently, not intermittently. But the world's not perfect, and flaky tests will happen, and you don't have time to fix them all today. So how do you know where to start? BuildPulse automatically detects and tracks your team's flaky tests. Better still, it pinpoints the ones that are disrupting your team the most. With this list of top offenders, you'll know exactly where to focus your effort for maximum impact on making your builds more stable. In fact, the team at Codecademy was able to identify their flakiest tests with BuildPulse in just a few days. By focusing on those tests first, they reduced their flaky builds by more than 68% in less than a month! And you can do the same because BuildPulse integrates with the tools you're already using. It supports all the major CI systems, including CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and others. And it analyzes test results for all popular test frameworks and programming languages, like RSpec, Jest, Go, pytest, PHPUnit, and more. So stop letting flaky tests slow you down. Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. To learn more, visit buildpulse.io/bikeshed. That's buildpulse.io/bikeshed. CHRIS: Good morning, and welcome to Tech Talk with Steph and Chris. Today at the top of the hour, it's tech traffic hits. STEPH: Ooh, tech traffic. [laughs] I like that statement. CHRIS: Yeah. The Git lanes are clogged up with...I don't know. I got nothing. STEPH: [laughs] Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, hey, Chris, what's new in your world? CHRIS: What's new in my world? Actually, I have a specific new thing that I can share, which is, as of the past week, I would say, switched from Trello over to Linear for product management. It's been great. It was a super straightforward transfer. They actually had an importer. We lost some of the comment threads on the Trello cards. But that was easy enough to like each Linear ticket has a link back to Trello. So it's easy enough to keep the continuity. But yeah, we're in a whole new world, a system actually built for maintaining a product backlog, and, man, it shows. Trello was a bunch of lists and cards and stuff that you could link between, which was cool. But Linear is just much more purpose-built and already very, very nice. And we're very happy with the switch. STEPH: I feel like you came in real casual with that news, but that is big news, that you did a switch. [laughter] CHRIS: How are you going to bury the lead like that? You switched project management...[laughter] I actually didn't think it was...I'm excited about it but low-key excited, which is weird because I do like productivity and task management software. So you would think I would be really excited about this. But I've also tried enough of them historically to know that that's never going to be the thing that actually makes or breaks your team's productivity. It can make things worse, but it can't make you great. That's the thing that I believe. And so it's a wonderful piece of software. I'm very excited about it but -- STEPH: Ooh, I like that. It can make you worse, but it doesn't make you great. That's so true, yeah, where it causes pain. Well, and it does make sense. You've been complaining a bit about the whole login with Trello and how that's been frustrating. But I haven't even heard of Linear. That's just...that's, I mean, you're just doing what you do where you bring that new-new. I haven't heard of Linear before. CHRIS: I try to live on the cutting edge. Actually, I deeply try to not live on the cutting edge at this point in my life. That early adopter wave, no, no, no, that's not for me anymore. But I've known a few folks who've moved to Linear. And everyone that I've spoken to who has moved to it has been like, "Yeah, it's been great." I've not heard anything negative. And I've heard or experienced negative things about every other product management tool out there. And so, it seemed like an easy thing. And it was a low-cost enough switch in terms of opportunity costs or the like, it took the effort of someone on our team moving those cards over and setting up the new system and training, but it was relatively straightforward. And yeah, we're super happy with it. And it feels different now. I feel like I can see the work in a different way which is interesting. I think we had brought in a Chrome extension for Trello. I think it's like Hello Epics or something like that that allows...it abuses the card linking functionality in Trello and repurchases that feature as an epic management thing. But it's quarter-baked is how I would describe it, or it's clearly built on top of existing things that were not intended to be used exactly in that way. So it does a great job. Hello Epics does a great job of trying to make something like parent-child list management stuff happen in Trello. But it's always going feel like an afterthought, a secondary feature, something that's bolted on. Whereas in Linear, it's like, no, no, we absolutely have the idea of projects, of course, and you can see burndown charts and things. And the thing that I do want to be careful about is not leaning too much into management. Linear has the idea of cycles or sprints, as many other folks think of them, or iterations or whatever you want to call them. But we've largely not been working in that mode. We've just continued to work through the next up list; that's it. The next up list should be prioritized and well defined at the top and roughly in priority order. So just pick up the next card and work on it. And we just do that every single day. And now we're in a piece of software that has the idea of cycles, and I'm like, oh, this is vaguely interesting. Do we want to do that? Oh, but if you're going to do that, you probably do some estimation, right? And I was like, oh no, now we're into a place that's...okay, I have feelings. I got to decide how to approach that. And so, I am intrigued. And I wonder if we could just say like ten carts that's how many come into a cycle, and that's it. And we use the loosest heuristics possible to define how we structure a cycle so that we don't fall into the trap of, oh, what's our roadmap going to look like six months from now? JK, what's anything going to look like six months from now? That's not a knowable fact. STEPH: I was just thinking where you said that you're moving into sprints or cycles, and then there's that push, well, now you got to estimate. And I just thought, do you? Do you have to estimate? [laughs] CHRIS: We need a burndown chart through 2024, and it must be meticulously accurate down to the hour. STEPH: I think meticulously wrong is how that goes. [laughs] CHRIS: Which is the best kind of wrong. If you're going to be wrong, be meticulous about it. STEPH: Be thorough about it. [laughs] Yeah, the team that I'm on right now, we have our bi-weekly planning, and we go through the board, and we pull stuff in. But there's never a discussion about estimation. And I hadn't really appreciated that until just now. How we don't think about how long is this going to take? We just talked about, well, what's in-flight? And how much work do people still have going on? And then here's the list of things we can pull in. But there's always a list that you can go back to. Like, it's very...we pull in the minimum and knowing that if we run out of work, there's another place to go where there's stuff that's organized. And I just love that cadence, that idea of like, let's not try to make guesses about the future; let's just have it lined up and ready for us to go when we're ready to pull it in. Although I know, that's also coming from a very developer's perspective, and there are product managers who are trying to communicate as to when features are going to get out into the world. So I get that there's a balance, but I still have strong feelings and hesitations around estimating work. CHRIS: Well, I feel like there is a balance there. And so many things in history are like, well, this is an overcorrection against that, and that's an overcorrection against this. And the idea that we can estimate our work that far out into the future that's just obviously false to me based on every project I've ever worked on that has tried to do it. And it has always failed without question. But critically, there is the necessity to sync up work and like, oh, marketing needs to plan the launch of this feature, and it's a critical one. What's it going to look like? When's it going to be ready? You know, we're trying to go for an event, it's not just know...we developers never estimate anything past the immediate moment where like, that's not acceptable. We got to find a middle ground here. But where that middle ground is, is interesting. And so, just operating in the sort of we do work as it comes up is the easiest thing because no one's lying about anything at that point. But sometimes you got to make some guesses and make some estimations. And then it gets into the murky area of I believe with 75% confidence that in three weeks, we will have this feature ready. But to be clear, I said with 75% confidence that means one-quarter of the time; we will not be there at that date. What does that mean? What does that failure mode look like? Let's talk about that. And can you have honest, open, transparent, useful conversations there? That's the space that it becomes more subtle if you need to do that. STEPH: You're reminding me of a conversation that I had with someone where they shared with me some very aggressive team goals. And it was a very friendly conversation. And they're like, "How do you feel about aggressive goals?" And I was like, "Well, it depends. How do you feel about aggressive failure?" Because then once I know where you stand there, then we can talk about aggressive goals. Now, if we're being aggressive, but then we fail to achieve that, and it's one of those, okay, we didn't meet the goal that we'd expected, but everything is fine, and it's not a big deal, then I am okay. Sure, let's shoot for the stars. But if it's one of those, we are communicating these goals to the outside world, and it's going to become incredibly important that we meet these goals, and if we don't, then things are going to go on fire, people are going to be in trouble, and it's just going to be awful, then let's not set aggressive goals. Let's not box ourselves into a space where we are setting ourselves up to fail or feel pain in a meaningful way. I agree that estimations are important, especially in terms of you need to collaborate with other departments, and then also just to provide some sense of where the product is headed and when things may be released. I think estimations then just become problematic when they do become definite, and they're based on so many unknowns, and then when I don't know is not an answer. So if someone asked, "What's your estimate for this?" And the very honest real answer is I don't know, like, we haven't done this type of work before, or these are all the unknowns, and then someone's like, "Well, let's just put an estimation of like two weeks on it," and they just sort of try to force-fit it into being what they want, then that's where it starts to just feel incredibly problematic. CHRIS: Yeah, estimation is a very murky area that we could spend entire episodes talking about, and in fact, I think we have a handful of times. So with that, Linear has been great. We're going to see just how much or how little estimation we actually want to do. But it's been a very nice addition to the toolset. And I'll let you know as we deepen our usage of it what the experience is like, but that's the main thing that's new in my world. What's new in your world? STEPH: Well, before we bounce over to my world, you said something that has intrigued me that has also made me start reflecting on some of the ways that I like to work. And you'd mentioned that you have this prioritized backlog that people are pulling tickets from. And I don't know exactly if there's a planning session or how that looks, but I have recognized that when I am working with a team, and we don't have any planning session, if everybody is just pulling from this backlog, that's being prioritized by someone on the team, that I find that a bit overwhelming. Because the types of work being done can vary so drastically that I find I'm less able to help my colleagues or my teammates because I don't have the context for what they're working on. It surprises me. I'm like, oh, I didn't even know we're working on that feature, or I don't have the context for what's the problem that we're trying to solve here. And it makes it just a lot harder to review and then have conversations with them. And I get overwhelmed in that environment. And I've recognized that about myself based on previous projects that were more similar to that versus if I'm on a project where the team does get together every so often, even if it's high level to be like, hey, here's the theme of the tickets that we're working on, or here's just some of the stuff, then I feel much more prepared for the work that is coming in and to be able to context switch and review. And yeah, so I've kind of learned that about myself. I'm curious, are you similar, or how does that work for you? CHRIS: I'm definitely similar. And I think probably the team is closer to what you're describing. So we do have a planning session every week, just a quick 30-minute scan through the backlog, look at the things that are coming up and also the larger themes. Previously, Epics and Trello now projects and Linear. But talking about what are the bigger pieces of work that we're moving on, and then what are the individual tickets associated with that that we'll be expecting to work on in the next week? And just making sure that everyone has broad clarity around what that feature set is. Also, we're a very small team at this point. Still, we're four people total, but one of the developers is on a break for a couple of weeks this summer. And so there are really only three of us that are driving on the code. And so, with three of us working on the projects, we try very intentionally to have significant overlap between the various...like, we don't want any one person to own any portion of things at this point. And so we're doing a good amount of pairing to cross-pollinate and make sure everyone's...not everyone's aware of everything, but at least one other person is sufficiently aware of everything between the three of us. And I think that's been working well. I don't think we have any major gaps, save for the way that we're doing our mobile architecture that's largely managed by one of the developers on the team and a contractor that we're working with to help do a lot of the implementation. That's a known we chose to silo that thing. We've accepted the cost of that for now. And architecturally, the rest of us are aware of it, but we're not like in the Swift code writing anything because I don't know how to write Swift at this point. I'd love to learn it. I hear good things about the language. [12:26] So yeah, I think conceptually very similar to what you're describing of still want to have people be able to review. Like, I don't want to put up a PR and people be like, I don't know, that looks like code, I guess. I'm not sure what it does. Like, I want it to be very...I want us all to be roughly on the same page, and thus far, we are. As the team grows, that will become trickier to maintain because there are just inherently probably more things that are moving, more different feature areas and surface area that we're tackling in any given week, or there are different ways to approach that. I know you've talked about having a limited number of themes for a given cycle, so that's an idea that can pop up. But that's something that we'll figure out as we get further. I think I'm happy with where we're at right now, so yeah, that's the story there. STEPH: Okay, cool. Yeah, all of that resonates with me, and thinking about it a little more deeply in this moment, I'm realizing I think something you said helped me put this together where when I'm reviewing someone's change, I'm not necessarily just looking to see does your code work? I'm going to trust you that your code works. I may have thoughts about design and other things, but I really want to understand more what's the change to the product that we're making? What's the goal that we're looking to achieve? How are we measuring this? And so if I don't have that context, that's what contributes to that feeling of like, hard context switching of not just context switching, but now I have to level myself up to then understand the problem that's being solved by this. Versus had I known some of the themes going into that particular cycle or sprint, I would have felt far more prepared for that review session versus having to then dig through all the data and/or tickets or talk to someone. Well, switching back to what's going on in my world, I have a particular tweet that I want to share, and it's one that Joël Quenneville brought to my attention. And it just resonates so much with all the type of work that I'm doing right now. So I'm going to read the tweet, and then we'll link to it in the show notes as well. But it's from Curtis Einsmann, and Curtis wrote: "In software engineering, rabbit holes are inevitable. You will research libraries and not use them. You'll write code just to delete it. This isn't a waste; sometimes, you need to go down a few wrong paths to get to the right one." And that describes all the work that I'm doing right now. It's a lot of exploratory, a lot of data-driven work, and finding ways that we can reduce the time that it takes to run RSpec on CI. And it also ties in nicely to one of the things that I think we talked about last week, where we discovered that a number of files have a high runtime variance. And I've really dug into the data there to understand, okay, is it always specific files that have these high runtime variants? Are there any obvious contributions to what's causing this? Are we making real network calls that then could sometimes take a long time to return? And the result is there's nothing obvious. They're giant files. The number of SQL commands that are being run for each file varies drastically. They're all high, but it's still very different. There's no single fact about these files that has really been like, yes, this is what's causing these files to have such a runtime variance. And so while I've been in the data, I'm documenting it, and I'm making a list and putting it all together in a ticket so at least it's there to look at later. But I'm going to move on. It's one of those I would love to know what's causing this. I would love to address it because it would put us in an ideal state for how we're distributing tests, which would have a significant impact on our runtime. But it also feels a little bit like chasing my tail because I'm worried, like with some of the other experiments that we've done in the past where we've addressed tentpoles, that as soon as you address the issue for one or two files, then other files start having the same problem. And you're just going to continue to chase and chase, and I don't want to be in that. So upfront, this was one of those; hey, let's look at the data. If there's something obvious, let's address it; if not, move on. So I'm at that point today where I'm wrapping up all of that data, and then I'm going to move on, move on to the next thing. CHRIS: There's deep truth in that tweet that you shared at the start of this segment. The idea like if we knew the work that we had to do at the front, yeah, we would just do that, but often, we don't. And so, being able to not treat it as a failure when something doesn't work out is, I think, so critical. I think to expand on the idea just a tiny bit, the idea of the scientific method, failure is totally an option and is part of science. I remember watching MythBusters, and Adam Savage is just kind of like, "Failure is always an option," and highlighting that as part of it. Like, it's an outcome. You've learned something. You have a new data point. You can take that and then carry it forward with you. But it's rough in the moment. And so, I do think that this is a worthwhile thing to meditate on. And it's something that I've had to revisit a handful of times in my career of just like, man, I feel like I've just been spinning my tires all week. I'm like, we know what we want to get done, but just each approach I take isn't working for one reason or another. And then, finally, you get to the end. And then you've got this paragraph-long summary of all the things that didn't work in your PR and one-line change sort of thing. And those are painful, but they're part of the game. Like, that is unavoidable. I have not found a way to just know how to do the work upfront always. I would love that. I would sign up for whatever seminar was selling that. I wouldn't. I would know that that seminar is a lie, actually. But broadly, I'm intrigued by the idea if someone were selling that, I'd be like, well, I mean, pitch me on it. Tell me why I should believe you; I don't, just to be clear. But yeah. STEPH: This project has really helped me embrace always setting a goal or a question upfront about what I'm wanting to achieve or what I'm looking to answer because a number of times while Joël and I have been spelunking through data...And then so originally, with the saga, we started out with why doesn't our math match reality? We understand that if these tests are distributed perfectly across the CPUs, then that should cut the runtime in half. But yet, we weren't seeing that even though we had addressed the tentpoles. So we dug into understanding why. And the answer is because they're not perfectly distributed, and it's because of the runtime variance. And that was a critical moment to look back and say, "Did we achieve the goal?" Yes, we identified the problem. But once you see a problem, it's just so easy to dig in and keep going. It's like, well, now I want to know what's causing these files to have a runtime variance. But it's one of those we achieved our goal. We acknowledged upfront that we wanted to at least understand why. Let's make a second decision, do we keep going? And I'm at that point where, frankly, I probably dug in a little more than I should because I'm stubborn. But I'm recognizing that now's the time to back away and then go back and move on to the next high-priority item, which is converting for funsies; I'll share. The next thing is converting Test::Unit test over to RSpec because we have, I think, around 25 tests that are written in Test::Unit. And we want to move them over to RSpec because that particular just step in the build process takes a good three to four minutes. And part of that is just booting up Rails and then running the tests very fast. And we're underutilizing the machine that's running them because it's only 25 tests, but there are 86 CPUs to run it. So we'd really like to combine those 25 tests with the rest of the RSpec suite and drop that step. So then that should add minimal time to the overall build but then should take us down at least a couple of minutes. And then also makes it easier to manage and help folks so that way, there's one consistent testing framework that's in use versus having to manage some of these older tests. CHRIS: It's funny; I think it was just two episodes back where we talked about why RSpec, and I think both of us were just like, well yeah. But I mean, if there are tests and another, like, it's fine, you just leave them with the exception that if there's like 2% of our tests are in Test::Unit, and everything else is in RSpec, yeah, maybe that that conversion efforts seem totally worth it. But again, I think as you're describing that, what I'm hearing is just like the scientific method, just being somewhat structured in the approach to what's the hypothesis? And what's the procedure we're going to use to determine if that hypothesis is true or false? And then what do we do? And then what are the results? And then you just do that on loop. But being not just sort of exploring. Sometimes you have to be on exploratory mode. But I definitely find that that tiny bit of rigor of just like, wait, okay, before I actually do anything, what do I think is going on here? What's my guess? And then, okay, if that guess were true, what would I be able to observe in the world? Okay, here we go. And just that tiny bit of structure is so...it sometimes feels highly formal to go into that mode and be like, no, no, no, let me take a step back. Let me write down my thoughts. I'm going to have a little checklist and do the thing. But I've never regretted doing it. I will say that. I have deeply regretted not doing it. I feel like I should make a list of things that fit that structure. I've never regretted committing in Git ever. That's been great. I've always been able to unwind it, but I've never been able to not unwind it or the opposite. I've regretted not committing. I have not regretted committing. I have regretted not writing out my hypothesis or approach. I have not regretted doing it. And so, yeah, this feels like it falls firmly in that category of like, it's worth just a tiny bit of structure. There's a reason it is the scientific method. STEPH: Yeah, I agree. I've not regretted documenting upfront what it is I look to achieve and how I think I'm going to answer the question. That has been immensely helpful. Because then I also forget, like, two weeks ago, I'll be like, wasn't there a question around why this was happening, and I need to understand? And all of that was so context-heavy that as soon as I'm out of the thick of it, I completely forget it. So if I care about it deeply or if I want to be able to revisit it, then I need to document it for myself. It's given me a lot of empathy for people who do more scientific research around, oh my gosh, like, you have to document everything you do and then still be able to prove it five years from now or however long. I'm just throwing out numbers. And it needs to be organized enough that someone, if they do question your research that, then you have it there. My research documents would not withstand scrutiny at this point because they are still just more personal notes. But yes, it's given me a lot of empathy and respect for people who do run very serious research, experiments, and trials, and then have to be able to prove it to the world. Pivoting just a bit, there's a particular topic that resonated with both you and I; in fact, it's a particular tweet. And, Louie, I do apologize if I mispronounce your last name, but Louie Bacaj. And we'll include a link in the show notes to the tweet, but Louis shared, "I managed multiple engineering teams before quitting tech. Now that I quit, I can speak freely. Here are 12 things your manager may not be telling you, but I know for a fact will help you." So there are a number of interesting discussions and comments that are in this thread. The one thing in particular that really caught my attention is number 10, and it's "Advocate for junior developers." So they said that their friend reminded them that just because you don't have 10-plus years of experience does not mean that they won't be good. Without junior engineers on the team, no one will grow. Help others grow; you'll grow too. And that's the part that I love so much is that without junior engineers on the team, no one will grow because that was very thought-provoking for me. It's something that I find that I agree with deeply, but I hadn't really considered why I agree with that so much. So I'm excited to dive into that topic with you. And then, as a second topic to go along with that is, can juniors start with a remote team? I think that's one of the other questions when you and I were chatting about this. And I'm intrigued to hear your thoughts. CHRIS: A bunch of stuff there. Starting with the tweet, I love elements of this. Some of it feels like it's intentionally somewhat provocative. So like, without junior engineers on the team, no one will grow. That feels maybe a little bit past the bar because I think we can technically grow, and we can build things and whatnot. But I think what feels deeply true to me is truly help others grow; you'll grow too. The act of mentoring, of guiding, of training, of helping someone on their journey will inherently help you grow and, I think, change the way that you think about the work. I think the beginner mind, the earlier in the career folks coming into a codebase, they will see things fundamentally differently in a really useful way. It's possible that along your career, you've just internalized things. You've been like, yeah, no, that was weird. But then I smashed my head against it for a while, and now I understand this thing. And it just makes sense to me. But it's like, that thing actually doesn't make sense. You have warped your mind to match the thing, not, quote, unquote, "come to understand it." This is sounding too judgmental to people who've been in the industry for a while, but I found this of myself. Or I can just take for granted things that took a long time to adapt my head to, and if anything, maybe I should have pushed back a little more. And so, I find that junior engineers can be a really fantastic lens for the complexity of a project. Like, the world is truly a complex place, and that's just true. But our job as software engineers is to tame that complexity and manage it. And so, I love the mindset that can come or the conversations that can come out of that. And it's much like test-driven development is a pressure on the complexity of your code, having junior engineers join the team and needing to explain how all of the different features work, and what the overall architecture is, and the message passing under this and that, it's a really useful conversation to have. And so that "Help others grow; you'll grow too" feels deeply, deeply true to me. STEPH: Yeah, I couldn't agree more in regards to how juniors really help our team and especially, as you mentioned, with complexity and ¬having those conversations. Some of the other things that have come to mind for me as well around the importance of having junior developers on your team...and maybe it's not specifically they're junior developers but that you just have a variety of experience on your team. It's going to help you lean into a culture of learning because you have people that are at different stages of their career. And so you want an environment where people can learn together, that they can fail together, and they can be public about it. And having people that are at different stages of their career will lead, well, at least ideally, it'll lead to more pair programming. It's going to lead to more productive code reviews because then people can ask more questions around why did you choose this, or why are you doing that? Versus if everybody is at the same level, then they may just intuitively have reasons that they think someone did something. But it takes someone that's a bit new to say, "Hey, why did you choose this?" or to bring up some other ideas or ways that they could pursue it. They may bring in new ideas for, like, why has the team always done something this way? Let's think about new ways that we could do this. Or maybe this is really unfriendly, the way that we're doing this, not just for junior people but for people that are new to the team. And then there's typically less knowledge siloing because then you're going to want to pair the newer folks with the more experienced folks. So that way, you don't have this more senior developer who's then off in a corner working by themselves. And it's going to improve your communication skills. There's just...I realized I'm just rambling because I feel like there are so many benefits that go along with having a variety of people on your team, especially in terms of experience. And that just leads to such a better learning environment and, ultimately, better software and better products. And yet, I find that so many companies won't embrace people that are newer to software. They always want the senior developers. They want the 10x-er or whatever those are. They want the people that have many, many years of experience. And there's so much value that comes from mentoring the next group of developers. And it's incredibly frustrating to me that one, companies often aren't open to it. But honestly, more than that, as long as you're upfront and honest about like, hey, this is the team that we need right now to build what we're looking to build, I can get past that; I can understand that. But please don't then mislead people and say that you're a junior-friendly team, and then not be prepared. I feel like some teams will go so far as to say, "Yes, we are junior-friendly," and they may even tweak their interview process to where it is a bit more junior-friendly. But then, by the time that person joins the team, they're really not prepared. They don't have an onboarding plan. They don't have a mentorship plan. And then they fail that person because that person has worked hard to get there. And they've worked hard to bring that person onto the team, but then they don't have a plan from there. And I've seen it too many times. And it just frustrates me so much because it puts that junior person in such a vulnerable state where they really have to be an incredible self-advocate to then overcome those hurdles from a lack of preparation on that company's part. Okay, I think that's my event. I'm sure I could vent about this a lot more, but I will cut it off there. That's the heart of it. CHRIS: I do think, like, with anything else, it's something that we have to be intentional about. And so what you're saying of like, yeah, we're a junior-friendly company, but then you're just hiring folks, trying to find folks that may work at a slightly lower pay grade, and that's what that means to you. So like, no, no, that's not what this is. This needs to be something different. We need to have a structure and an organization that can support folks at different points in their career. But it's interesting to me to think about the sort of why of it. And the earlier part of this conversation, we talked about some of the benefits that can come organizationally from it, and I do sincerely believe in that. But I also believe that it is fundamentally one of the best ways to find really talented people early on in their career and be in a position to hire them where maybe later on in their career, that just wouldn't happen naturally. And I've seen this play out in a number of organizations. I went to Northeastern University for my college, and Northeastern is famous for the co-op program. Northeastern sounds really fancy. Now I learned that they have like a 7% acceptance rate for college applications right now, which is wildly low. When I went to Northeastern, it was not so fancy. So just in case anyone's hearing that and they're like, "Oh, Northeastern, wow." I'm not that fancy. [laughs] But they did have the co-op then, and they still have it now. And the co-op really is a differentiating thing. You do three six-month rotations. And it is this fundamental differentiator in terms of when you're graduating. Particularly, I was in mechanical engineering. I came out, and I actually knew what that meant in the world. And I'd used Outlook, and I knew what a water cooler was and how to talk near one because that's a critical thing to learn in the world. And really transformative experience for me. But also, a thing that I observed was many of my friends ended up working at companies that they had co-opted for. I'm one of those people. I would say more than 50% of my friends ended up with a position at a company that they had done a co-op rotation with. And it really worked out fantastically. That organization and the individual got to try things out, experience. And then, I ended up staying at that company for a number of years, and it was a wonderful experience. But I don't know that I would have ended up there otherwise. That's not necessarily the way that would have played out. And similarly like, thoughtbot has the apprenticeship. And I have seen so many wonderful developers start at that very early point in their career. And there was this wonderful structure around them joining the thoughtbot team, intentional, structured, supported. And then those folks went on to be some of the most talented developers that I've ever worked with at a wonderfully talented organization. And so the story of like, you should do this, organizations. This is a thing that you should invest in for yourself, not just for the individual, like, for both. Everybody wins in this case, in my mind. I will say, though, in terms of transparency, I currently manage a team of three developers. And we hired very intentionally for senior folks this early on in where we're at. And that was an intentional choice because I do believe that if you're going to be hiring more junior developers, that needs to be something that you do very intentionally, that you have a support structure in place, that you're able to invest the time in where they're at and make sure we have sort of... I think a larger team makes more sense to bring juniors into broadly. That's the thing that I'm saying out loud that I'm like, I should push on that a little bit. Is that true? Do I really believe that? But I think so, my actions obviously point to it. But it is an interesting trade-off space of how do you think about that? My hope is that as we grow as an organization, that we would then very intentionally start hiring folks in a more junior, mid-level to junior and be very intentional about how we support them, bring them into the organization, et cetera. I do believe it is a win-win situation for everyone when done with intention and with focus. STEPH: That's such an interesting bit that you just said because I very much appreciate when companies recognize do we have the bandwidth to support someone that's more junior? Because at thoughtbot, we go through periods where we don't have our apprenticeship that's open because we recognize we're not in a place that we can support someone. And we don't want to bring someone in unless we can help them be successful. I very much admire that and appreciate that about companies when they can perform that self-assessment. I am so intrigued. You'd mentioned being a smaller team. So you more intentionally hire senior developers. And I think that also makes sense because then you need to build up who's going to be in that mentorship pool? Because then people could leave, people could take vacations, and so then you need to have that support system in place. But yeah, I don't know what that then perfect balance is. It's like, okay, so then as soon as you have like five people available to mentor or interested in mentorship, it's like, then do you start bringing in the conversation of like, let's bring in someone that we can help build up and help them be successful and join our team? And I don't know what that magical number is. I do think it's important for teams to reflect to say, "Can we take on someone that's junior?" All the benefits of having someone that's junior. And then just being very honest and then having a plan for once that junior person does arrive. What does their career path look like while they've joined that team, and who's going to be that person that's going to help them level up? So not only make that choice upfront of yes, we are bringing someone on but let's also think about like the first six months of their work here at the company and what that's going to look like. It feels like an important step that a lot of companies fail to do. And I think that's why there are so many articles that then are like, hey, if you're a junior dev, here's all the things that you should do to be the best junior dev. That's fabulous. And we're constantly shoring up junior devs to be like, hey, here's all the things that you need to be great at. But we don't have as many conversations around; hey, here's all the things that your manager or the rest of your team should be great at to then support you equally as you are also doing your best to meet them. Like, they need to meet you halfway. And I'm not completely unsympathetic to the plight; I understand. It's often where I've seen with teams the more senior developers that have very strong mentorship communication skills are then also the teammates that get pulled into all the meetings and all the different projects, so then they are less available to be that mentor. And then that's how this often fails. So I don't think anybody is going into this intentionally, but yet, it's what happens for when someone is new and joining a team, and it hasn't been determined the next six months what that person's onboarding and career path looks like. Circling back just a bit, there's the question around, can juniors start with a remote team? I can go first. And I'm going to say unequivocally yes. There's no reason a junior can't start with a remote team. Because all the things that I feel strongly about come down to how is your team going to plan for this person? And how are they going to support this person? And all the benefits that you get from being in an office with a team, I think those do exist. And frankly, for someone like myself, it can be easier to establish a bond with someone that you get to see each day, get to see in person. You can walk up to their desk and can say, "Hey, I've got a question for you." But I think all those benefits just need to be transferred into a remote-friendly way. So I think it does ratchet up how intentional you have to be with your team and then onboarding a junior developer. But I absolutely think it's doable, and we should do it. CHRIS: You went with unequivocally yes as your answer. I'm going to go with a qualified maybe as my answer. I want this to be true, and I think it can be true. But I think it takes all the more intentionality than even what we've been describing. To shift the question around a little bit, what does remote work mean? It doesn't just mean we're doing the work, but we're separate. I think remote work inherently is at its best when we also are largely async first. And so that means more structured writing. The nature of the conversation tends to be more well-formed in each interaction. So it's like I read a big document, and then I pass it over to you. And at your leisure, you respond to it with a bunch of notes, and then it comes back to me. And I think that mode of interaction, while absolutely wonderful and something that I love, I think it fits really well when you're a little bit further on in your career when you understand things a little bit better. And I think the dance of conversation is more useful earlier on and so forth. And so, for someone who's newer to a team, I think having the ability to ask a quick question over and over is really useful to someone who's early on in their career. And remote, again, I think it's at its best when it's async. And those two are sort of at odds. And so it's that mild tension that gives me pause of like, something that I think that makes remote work great I do think is at least a hurdle that you would have to get over in supporting someone who's a little bit newer. Because I want to be deeply present for someone who's newer to their journey so that they can ask a lot of questions so that I am available to be interrupted regularly. I loved at thoughtbot sitting next to someone and being their mentor and being like, yeah, anytime you want, just tap on my desk. If I got my headphones on, that doesn't mean I'm ignoring you; it means I just need to make the sounds go away for a minute because that's the only way my brain will work. But feel free to just tap on my desk or whatever and grab my attention for a moment. And I'm available for that. That's an intentional choice. That's breaking up my continuity of the day, but we're choosing that for a reason. I think that's just a little harder to do in a remote context and all the more so if we're saying, hey, we're going to try this async thing where we write structured documents, and we communicate in these larger, more well-formed, communicates back and forth. But I do believe it can be done. I think it should be done. I just think it's all the harder for all of those reasons. STEPH: I agree that definitely makes it harder. But I'm going to push a little bit and say that when you mentioned being deeply present, I think we can be deeply present with someone and be remote. We can reduce the async requirements. So if you are someone that is more senior or more accustomed to the team, you can fall back to more of those async ways to communicate. But if someone is new, and needs more mentorship, then let's just set up time where we're going to literally hang out for a couple of hours each day or whatever pairing environment works best for them because pairing can also be exhausting. But hey, we're going to have a check-in each day; maybe we close out each day and touchpoint. And feel free to still message me and interrupt me. Like, you're going to just heighten your availability, even though it is remote. And be aware, like, hey, this person could message me at more times, and I'm okay with that. I have opted into this form of communication. So I think we just take that mindset of, hey, there's this person next to me, and I'm their mentor to like, hey, they're not next to me, but I'm still their mentor, and I'm still here for them. So I agree that it's harder. I think it falls on us and the team and the mentors to change ourselves versus saying to juniors, "Hey, sorry, it's remote. That's not going to work for you." It totally works for them. It's us, the mentors, that need to figure out how to make it work. I will say being on that mentor side that then not being able to see someone so if they are next to me, I can pick up on body language and facial expressions, and I can tell when somebody's stuck. And I can see that they're frustrated, or I can see that now's a good time for me to just be like, "Hey, how's it going? What are you working on? Or do you need help with something?" And I don't have that insight when I'm away. So there are real challenges like that that I don't know how to address. I have gone the obnoxious route [laughs] where I just message people, and I'm like, "Hey, how's it going? How's it going? How's it going?" And I try not to do that too much. But I haven't found a better way to manage that other than to constantly check in because I do have less feedback from that person that I'm working with unless they are just incredibly open about sharing when they're stuck. But typically, when you're newer to a team or newer to a career, you're going to be less willing to share when you're stuck. But yeah, there are some real challenges, but I still think it's something for us to figure out. Because otherwise, if we cut off access for remote teams to junior folks, I mean, that's where we're headed. There are so many companies and jobs that are headed remote that not being junior friendly and being remote in my mind is just not an option. It's something that we need to figure out. And it's hard, but we need to figure it out. CHRIS: Yeah, 100% on we need to figure that out and that that's on us as the people managing and structuring and bringing folks into teams. I think my stance would be like, let's just be clear that this is hard. It takes effort to make sure that we've provided a structure in which someone newer to a team can be successful. It takes all the more effort to do so in a remote context, I think. And it's that recognition that I think is critical. Because if we go into this with the wrong mindset, it's like, oh yeah, it's great. We got this new person on the team. And yeah, they should be ready to go in like two weeks, right? It's like, no, no, this is a different thing. We need to be very clear about it. This is going to require that we have someone who is able to work with them and support them in this. And that means that that person's output will likely be a little bit reduced for the period of time that we're talking about. But we're playing a long game here. Let's make sure we're clear on that. This is intentional. And let's be clear, the world of hiring and software right now it's not like super easy. There aren't way more software developers than there are jobs; at least, that's been my experience. So this is something absolutely worth investing in for just core business reasons and also good for people. So hey, it's a win-win. Let's do it. Let's figure it out. But also, let's be clear that it's going to be a little tricky along the way. So, you know, let's be intentional about that. But yeah, obviously do it, got to do it. STEPH: Wait, so I feel like we might have circled back to unequivocally yes. [laughs] Have we gotten there, or are you still on the fence? CHRIS: I was unequivocally yes from the beginning, but I couched it in, but...yeah, I said other things. You're right. I have now come around; let's say to unequivocally yes. STEPH: [laughs] Cool. I don't want to feel like I'm forcing you to agree with me. [laughs] But I mean, we just so rarely disagree. So we've either got to identify this as something that we disagree on, which would be one of those rare occasions like beer and Pop-Tarts. CHRIS: A watershed moment. Beer and Pop-Tarts. STEPH: Yeah, those are the only two so far. [laughter] CHRIS: Not together also. I just want to go on record beer and Pop-Tarts; I don't think would be...anyway. STEPH: Ooh, I don't know. It could work. It could work. CHRIS: Well, there's another thing we disagree on. STEPH: I would not turn it down. If I was eating a Pop-Tart, and you're like, "Hey, you want a beer?" I'd be like, "Sure," vice versa. I'm drinking a beer. "Hey, you want a Pop-Tart?" "Totally." CHRIS: Okay. Well yeah, if I'm making bad decisions, I'm obviously going to chain them together, but that doesn't mean that they're a good decision. It's just a chain of bad decisions. STEPH: I feel like one true thing I know about you is that when you make a decision, you're going to lean into it. So like, this is why you are all about if you're going to have a Pop-Tart, you're going to have the highest sugary junk content Pop-Tart possible. So it makes sense to me. CHRIS: It's the Mountain Dew theorem, yeah. STEPH: I didn't know this had a theorem. The Mountain Dew theorem? CHRIS: No, that's just my name. Well, yeah, if I'm going to drink soda, I'm going to drink Mountain Dew, the nonsense nuclear option of soda. So yeah, I guess you're describing me, although as you say it back to me, I suddenly feel very, like, oh God, is this who I am as a person? [laughs] And I'm not going to say you're wrong. I'm just going to spend a little while thinking about some stuff. STEPH: I mean, you embrace it. I think that's lovely. You know what you want. It's like, all right, let's do this. Let's go all in. CHRIS: Thank you for finding a wonderfully positive way to frame it here at the end. But I think on that note, should we wrap up? STEPH: Let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

As we grow within our businesses, we may see a pivot in clients, services, or even industry! I certainly did when I pivoted from being a photographer to being an educator! In today's episode, I'm sharing 5 lessons I learned by pivoting in my business, plus join me as I highlight my entrepreneurship journey! Called to Both is brought to you by Joy Michelle, mom of two and multi-passionate entrepreneur who's on a mission to help others find balance between the worlds of motherhood and business. Called to Both is the podcast for women who have big business ambitions and also want to be intentional and present moms. At Called to Both, we truly don't believe you have to choose between these two worlds tugging at your heart You can be Called to Both. You can stay up to date with the Called to Both Podcast by subscribing on Apple Podcast App, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player! You can review show notes and transcript at joymichelle.co/12 Mentioned in this Episode: My First Youtube Video Photoboss Facebook Group Called to Both Facebook Group

Robert Sikes is a returning guest on our show! Be sure to check out his first appearance on Boundless Body Radio on episode 107, entitled Becoming A Savage! I was also fortunate enough to be hoisted on his fantastic podcast, The Keto Savage Podcast, back on June 7, 2021, titled Pivoting, Mindset, and Living a Life Fulfilled. Robert Sikes is a natural ketogenic bodybuilder, podcast host, author and entrepreneur, as well as the CEO and founder of Keto Savage, a health and fitness company that offers coaching, training and nutrition for athletes and bodybuilders. He is also CEO and founder of Keto Brick, a company that produces ketogenic meal replacement bars for efficient nutrition with the highest quality ingredients. Sikes holds first-in-class titles from his bodybuilding competitions within the OCB and WNBF federations, and lives in Northwest Arkansas with his wife Crystal. His latest book, Ketogenic Bodybuilding: A Natural Athlete's Guide to Competitive Savagery, is the culmination of all he has learned through his bodybuilding endeavors and client coaching practice.Find Robert at-https://ketosavage.com/https://www.ketobrick.com/Ketogenic Bodybuilding: A Natural Athlete's Guide to Competitive SavageryFind Boundless Body at-myboundlessbody.comBook a session with us here! 

In this episode, we talk with Orson Francescone of The Financial Times about building community through strategic events and investing in a digital-first event approach. Francescone has worked in the B2B media and events industry for more than 15 years. He has led global conference and exhibitions businesses for Euromoney Institutional Investor, and Haymarket Media Group. Since November 2019, he has been managing director of FT Live, the global event business of the Financial Times.  Throughout his career, Francescone has specialized in enabling publishers to monetize their content and drive high-margin revenues via all event formats, from conferences to awards ceremonies to large-scale exhibitions and trade shows and, more recently, digital events. He has launched some of the world's most successful and award-winning events, including Gastech, the Festival of Work, and, more recently, The Global Boardroom. Here's what you'll hear about in this conversation:  Building community through strategic events Pivoting event strategy throughout the pandemic Executing a webinar with 6,000 registrations in just five days Supporting a team while shifting from in-person to virtual events Investing in a digital-first approach to events

In this episode of Print Buying #UKvUSA, Deborah Corn and Matthew Parker discuss the paper shortage and how printers can turn delays into service offerings that help customers continue their marketing and communications. Mentioned in Today's Episode: Deborah Corn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborahcorn Print Media Centr: https://printmediacentr.com Project Peacock: projectpeacock.printmediacentr.com/ Matthew Parker on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/profitableprintrelationships/ Profitable Print Relationships: https://profitableprintrelationships.com Matthew's Photographyhttps://www.theworldofmattparker.com https://www.instagram.com/theworldofmattparker/ https://twitter.com/theworldofmattp

In this episode, you will learn how how to change your relationship with failure and when to pivot along your path to finding your purpose aligned with your strengths.  Impactful Moments of the Show:  4:00MM: Scott's background as a Service Warfare Officer, in business school, and 10 years in the construction industry. 6:00MM: fell into Gallup's Strength Finders and turned the idea into coffee mugs. 12:00MM: 10X vets, Academy fund (short term real estate) 14:00MM: Changing your relationship to failure and knowing when to pivot in life. 17:00MM: What made him decide to change his environment.  20:00MM: First endeavor with coaching college students that had him realize what he didn't want to do. 22:00MM: Keeping the vision and being open to shifting the strategy. 25:00MM: Number one question to ask yourself before deciding to pivot.  27:00MM: Scott's pandemic see-through  Fan Bag failure.  30:00MM: ONE LAST #GOLDENGRENADE Learn more about 10X VETs and everything else Scott is doing here: https://sabmgroup.com/  Show Sponsor: STZY Socks: Visit https://stzysocks.com/?ref=PDVtkVFG7yLWb and use code: avn for an additional 20% OFF all purchases.

Alyse Killeen is the founding Managing Partner of Bitcoin VC firm Stillmark. In BTC since 2013, Alyse is the Past President of the BitGive Foundation, Bitcoin's first 501(c)(3) non-profit. The San Francisco Bay Area native also mentors at Silicon Valley's Plug and Play Tech Center, Alchemist Accelerator, and NYFTL by the Partnership Fund for NYC and Springboard Enterprises. Reach out to Alyse at https://www.stillmark.com/  REFERRAL LINKS: Coin Stories is powered by BITCOIN 2023, which will be the BIGGEST BITCOIN EVENT IN HISTORY held in April 2023. If you missed Bitcoin 2022, make sure to head to the  @Bitcoin Magazine  page to find videos and highlights of all the biggest events and panels. You can get an early bird pass for Bitcoin 2023 at a steep discount if you head to: https://b.tc/conference/2023  *** Okcoin is on a mission to make crypto investing and trading easily accessible to anyone around the world. We are building the next generation of tools to help onboard the investors and traders who have been on the fence about crypto. Okcoin is a globally licensed exchange with offices in San Francisco, Miami, Malta, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. We are a collective of global citizens with a common passion to help decentralize finance and level the economic playing field for everyone around the world. Visit https://www.okcoin.com/natalie for $50 in Bitcoin when you sign up. *** With iTrustCapital, you can actually invest in crypto without worrying about taxes, or fees. iTrustCapital allows their clients to invest in crypto through an individual retirement account, or an IRA. IRAs are tax sheltered accounts, which means all your crypto trading is tax-free and can even grow tax-free over time. The best part is that it's totally free to open an account, and there are no hidden fees. You don't need to pay any monthly subscription or membership fees either. If you open and fund an account, you will get a $100 funding bonus added to your account. To learn more, click the link below and open a free account to learn more. https://itrust.capital/nataliebrunell  *** Fold is the best Bitcoin rewards debit card and shopping app in the world! Earn Bitcoin on everything you purchase with the Fold's Bitcoin cashback debit card and spin the Daily Wheel to earn free Bitcoin. Head to https://www.foldapp.com/natalie for 5,000 free sats! #bitcoin #cryptocurrency #inflation   Timecodes: 00:00 Promo codes 01:59 Growing up in SF Bay Area 04:35 Childhood dreams: science, research & statistics 05:25 Studying psychology 06:04 Interest in health, first responders 07:09 Traumatic stress response 08:27 Finding peace in health 10:17 Pivoting to venture capital 12:26 How does VC work? 14:54 Valuating companies 17:31 Where does the capital come from? 19:29 Learning about Bitcoin early on 23:02 Financial inclusion 24:36 Dignity and freedom through commerce 25:30 iTrustCapital break 26:18 Fold app break 26:51 Building Bitcoin VC firm Stillmark  29:47 Token investing 32:41 Investment growth in BTC space 35:13 Taro integrating fiat with Bitcoin over Lightning Network 37:19 Stablecoins vs. Bitcoin adoption and growth 38:57 Institutions coming into Bitcoin 40:37 Economic environment and BTC price 43:01 Bitcoin not on Stillmark's balance sheet 44:50 Pink Frog Games (Candy Crush) utilizing Bitcoin & Lightning 48:11 Backing decision makers, supporting founders 50:59 Advice for a young Alyse getting into VC 52:26 Bitcoin in the future 52:59 Pitches don't have to be perfect

If you are an entrepreneur, if you are using social media, if you are wanting to start a business or you're deep in your own business, this episode is going to be for you because today's guest is an expert in marketing and entrepreneurship.   In today's episode, I am talking to Cass Britton an incredible serial entrepreneur with experience in scaling businesses to 7 figures! She has transformed simple artists to savvy entrepreneurs, using her business background and savage attitude toward life to inspire entrepreneurs to shatter glass ceilings and take their businesses to the dream level.   During our conversation, Cass shares her journey starting from ground zero after her social media accounters were shut down, why competitive sports has inspired her own go-getter attitude,   why collaboration is the key to success, and why you need to lean into your fear.    In this episode we cover:   Cass shares more about herself and her new business [5:05] Pivoting after losing her entire social media accounts [13:42] Lessons from starting at ground zero [23:07] Tips for scaling your own social media from scratch [30:16] The strategy behind collaboration [36:28] The best advice for leveling up your business [39:06]   Connect with Cass:   https://www.instagram.com/_cassandrabritton/   https://www.instagram.com/the.business.savage/    Connect with me: Apply for 1:1 coaching here IG: https://www.instagram.com/aylafreda/ Website: https://aylasorochuk.com/

A few weeks ago we wrapped up enrollment for our 2022 Spring Cohort. The enrollment season for this cohort specifically was different than any other enrollment season or launch we've ever experienced!Earlier this year, we decided to ditch the traditional "launch" process that you're likely familiar with if you're in the online business world and try something new. This meant stop doing webinars so often, stop having only one open cart week, stop having such a long launch runway filled with mini events and do what we know best - which is sell. ALL. THE. TIME.Essentially this meant, that people could enroll for the cohort at any time - they didn't have to wait until open cart week. We started calling it the "enrollment period" and thinking about it terms of a school or college - everyone enrolls on a different date, but they all have the same first day. Pivoting to this style allowed for much more conversation with leads on an ongoing basis.We have LOVED incorporating new ways of getting people into GUIDE Culture and during this specific enrollment cycle, we found a way to marry the two.In mid-March, Macy felt a pull to host a webinar aka masterclass aka proper sales presentation for this cohort enrollment specifically.We've hosted many webinars in our time - some have went great, others didn't perform like we'd hoped - but this one was filled with a completely different mindset and produced much different results.In this episode, Macy breaks down all the juice! What we learned, new things we tried, what we'll do different, what we'll keep doing and, of course, the results

Life never presents us with a linear path to success. Often, the journey is marred with failures, obstacles, setbacks, challenges, and detours. It's what we do in the face of the inevitable that determines the level of satisfaction and fulfillment in our lives. My guest today is a Master Bladesmith (in fact, he was able to achieve that status younger than anyone else in history), and the founder of Josh Smith Knives and Montana Knife Company. Today, Josh and I talk about his personal journey from forging knives in his teens, to working as lineman thinking he was making the right move for his family, then back to where it all started as we works to build the next great knife company from the ground up. We cover paying attention to the little things, the mixed emotions of starting a company, developing a powerful team culture, and finding confidence when you don't have any experience.   SHOW HIGHLIGHTS:   Knife making as a kid A little bit of early luck Its good to have influence from a variety of men Transitioning from hand made to “production” knives Pivoting to keep providing for the family Business can skyrocket when you go all in Factors for fast growth and success You have to act or you lose credibility Its great to be able to give back Being responsible when pursuing your dream A lot of men lack a vision for the future Support at home is extremely important You have to have confidence in yourself   Want maximum health, wealth, relationships, and abundance in your life? Sign up for our free course, 30 Days to Battle Ready ⠀ Download the NEW Order of Man Twelve-Week Battle Planner App and maximize your week.

Episode 120 / Lisa Suzanne, sports romance author, joins us to talk about how a pivot to writing shorter sports romance books, banking them, and releasing rapidly took her career to a new level. We also talk about how she brands her series as well as using cliffhangers to keep readers coming back to a series. Show notes: How Lisa shifted from pantsing to plotting her books The importance of trope in branding Banking books and Lisa's release schedule How Lisa brands the covers of her books to create a recognizable look Writing interconnected series Tips on writing cliffhangers The value of persistence Come over and say hi to Jami and Sara in the WIKT Facebook group! You can find show notes and links at wishidknownforwriters.com. Links: Lisa's website The Big List of Craft and marketing books mentioned on WIKT podcast episodes Jami's Launch Plan Sara's Book Release Timeline Checklist Jami's books Sara's books Resources from the Author and Reader Community to Help Ukrainans

Haley wanted a career that was more flexible (and fulfilling). However, she was fearful a career pivot would jeopardize the experience and success she had gained over the past decade as a marketing executive. Learn how Haley made a career change to something that aligned with her priorities without derailing her career trajectory.    What you'll learn  How to know when it's time to leave your long-term career (even if it's going well!) The importance of giving yourself permission to get out of your career comfort zone How to align each phase of your life with your career The benefits of taking small steps toward your ideal career  Why you need a personal board of advisors   Have career change questions or want to make an introduction? Email scott@happentoyourcareer.com    Free Resources What career fits you? Join our free 8 Day Mini Course to figure it out!  Career Change Guide - Learn how high-performers discover their ideal career and find meaningful, well-paid work without starting over.   Related Episodes Should I Quit My Job? How to Know It's Time (Spotify / Apple Podcast)  Changing Careers (When You Don't Know Your Next Job Title) (Spotify / Apple Podcast)

Big News: I'm making a pivot. Have you ever experienced a pivot; realizing that what you're currently doing isn't exactly what you want to do? Today, my mentor and good friend Jen Casey joins the conversation on how to start over.. and over.. and over! Stick around for a farewell (for now) message & an update on what's next! Connect with Jen Casey IG: @heyjencasey www.heyjencasey.com CEO Psyche Podcast, available on all major platforms: https://www.heyjencasey.com/podcast/ Connect with Davina IG: @davinafaust Support Big Sister Body Talks IG: @bigsisterbodytalks Thank you to onoffmusic on Fiverr for the Big Sister Body Talks Podcast theme song! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/turning-pain-into-power/support

In today's episode, I'm talking with Neil McFarland and Matthew Ryan from First Light Games, a game studio based in London, UK. The founders started the company a few years ago, to work on free-to-play games for mobile, but last year, decided to pivot to web3 gaming. In this episode, we talk about the funding models that the founders have used in web3, what the challenges our in getting the tokenomics right, and how to build a core team in web3 gaming.

Beverly Hills, CA dentist Vivian Roknian, DMD, may be new to the LANAP family, but she's primed for success.  Here she explains how she grew to be interested in lasers, and how she plans to pivot her practice from “living and dying by the scalpel” to saving teeth and implants instead.  Plus, for Women's Health Week, she discusses how her own dietary restriction led to a special interest in the connection between nutrition and oral health for her patients.

In this episode, I speak with Doug Utberg on the topic of dealing with change, discipline, scaling rapidly and infinite perseverance.★ Doug's Bio: ★ My career began with 20 years of progressive leadership experience in corporate Finance and Technology. I attained a Master of Business Administration (MBA) alongside my wife while both of us were working full-time. I served in the Marine Corps Reserve while in college and at the beginning of my career. During this time, I engaged in a continual string of ‘side hustle' entrepreneurial ventures.Throughout my career, I at the forefront of influencing and implementing a consistent string of value and profit positive business decisionsThe thing that differentiates me in my current work is that I deliver guaranteed bottom-line results and use the financial resources I create to invest in my community. There are thousands of consultants and resourcing firms who fail to produce real value for their clients. I have seen the lack of results and exorbitant fees firsthand and decided to create a better way.Connect with Doug:https://www.terminalvalue.biz/

When your business is facing upcoming changes in the business cycle, it is important to change your way of thinking to be strategically prepared for the next phase. Catch our newest TrendsTalk episode with ITR Economics Senior Forecaster Connar Lokar to learn more.

Are you making a deposit into your confidence bucket every day?!  Lindsey welcomes Kacia Fitzgerald for an exciting conversation about listening to your instincts, and the up's and down's of creating your own unique path to success.      Kacia is a multi-passionate entrepreneur, speaker, and podcaster who's on a mission to help women unapologetically share their voice and message with the world.      She is the host of the top rated podcast EmpowerHER with over 4 million downloads the first 3 years, has a global community of 2.6K personal growth obsessed women, founder of two podcast courses that help women launch or grow their own podcasts, and the host of in person women empowerment events.      Kacia explains how self-confidence is absolutely key in your journey to success, using her analogy of a "confidence bucket", and the importance of depositing something into it everyday. Whether it's running a mile, drinking your daily water intake, or even saying no to something that's hindering your success. Every deposit counts, even the little ones, and they all add up to big things!      Follow Kacia on Instagram HERE.   Follow Kacia on Facebook HERE.    Follow Kacia on TikTok HERE.   Follow Kacia on LinkedIn HERE

Pivoting in your personal training career can be tough to navigate, especially when deciding the best time to train outside of being an employee at a corporate gym. In this “NASM-CPT Podcast,” host, and NASM Master Instructor, Rick Richey details seven objectives to consider before making the move, as well as shares several different experiences he encountered as he transitioned his training independently and further established his own personal brand in fitness training. The most trusted name in fitness is now expanding into the wellness world. Become an NASM Certified Wellness Coach and you'll be able to guide and motivate clients to make lasting changes through mental and emotional well-being, recovery, and more. https://bit.ly/37XFTzq

Hear more from Jen Hewett on aligning her business with her personal values, the willingness to pivot and make big career changes, resisting the hustle mindset and prioritizing care, slow and consistent growth over time as the key to her success, and navigating the worlds of licensing and book publishing.   Astropad Studio — Podcast sponsor, the ultimate iPad app for artists that turns your iPad into a drawing tablet for your Mac or PC. Start your 30-day free trial of Astropad Studio today via THIS LINK just for Beyond the Studio listeners! Plus, save 10% on your first year when you enter the promo code BEYOND at checkout.   *Please note: Promo code is only valid at astropad.com (not on the App Store)   beyondthe.studio   Listener Spotlight @beyondthestudio    Intro and Ad Music by: Suahn Branding by: David Colson

Do you have problems with pivoting, changes, or adjustments in your business? Let me help you. Pivoting and changes can stop some processes. Other times it can catapult us to another level. Fully equipped. Let me break this down some more. Pivoting 101! #problemswithpivoting #problemswithchanges #wellequipped Proverbs 3:6 In all your ways acknowledge him, and… Continue reading Do You Have Problems With Pivoting, Changes, Or Adjustments In Your Business? Let Me Help You. | Episode 178

Ram started his running a decade back. Starting with a local marathon, he scaled his journey to running marathons across the country and internationally. His pivotal moment came when he decided to give triathlons a try. Like all adult-onset swimmers, he overcame his trepidation for water and mastered the pool and open water. His first Ironman was in April 2022 in Woodlands, Texas. We get behind the scenes on his incredible fitness journey that lead to the first Ironman finish. 0:00 Intro and background 4:11 Flashback, where it all started 7:52 The first marathon 13:05 Scaling 15:01 Learning from early mistakes in training 20:36 Dealing with Injury 22:37 Pivoting into ultras and triathlons 25:13 Mastering swimming 30:35 Is endurance sport purely physical 32:02 Overcoming the swim handicap 34:00 How to train for a Triathlon 40:00 What next on the horizon 41:51 The Fun Q&A round 47:14 Wrap up message

In this episode I interview Alice G Patterson who pivoted out of wedding photography and into specialized branding photography! Alice shares how she was able to shift from seasonal work to having a steady income. Also, if you're a business owner, you'll want to hear how Alice as created the perfect way to show off your business and brand through her empowering brand shoots. Connect with Alice: https://www.lovingmycompany.com https://www.agpphoto.com https://www.instagram.com/lovingmycompany You can always connect with me on IG @drjenforstner

    In this episode, you'll discover…    The key trait to win at work and win at home (1:54) As an entrepreneur, what would you have done differently at the start of your company (2:50) How do you set boundaries to give yourself time to focus on things other than work (10:02) When did you know you needed to hand over your story for a greater story (15:25) Josh's Four Pillars of Success (19:34)   Josh Holstein's Bio:   Josh Holstein is the Founder & CEO of CellARide, an award-winning Midwest technology firm, considered one of the pioneers of the automotive marketing technology space. CellARide began over 10 years ago when Josh wanted to simply “text a car” for information without the awkward conversation. Since then, Josh has grown CellARide from a simple idea to a high-growth company garnering national attention. Company growth was catalyzed by investment twice from Capital Innovators, a Top 10 technology accelerator, and sustained through many partnerships and contracts with Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Fiat Chrysler and the National Safety Council, among others. Josh graduated from Missouri State University Bachelor's Degree in Computer Information Systems. After graduation, he fulfilled a dream of his by becoming an officer with the Springfield Police Department. Following a distinguished tenure in law enforcement, Josh shifted his focus to entrepreneurship and created a software-as-a-service platform poised to disrupt the automotive marketing industry. This platform evolved into CellARide. Through CellARide's My Car Recall product, Josh's background in technology development and public service come together with the same goal of keeping people safe by increasing automotive recall completion rates. More than anything, Josh values time spent with his wife, Maria, and their two children. He takes pride in being a husband and father, making a point to strike a balance between the demands of running a company and raising a family. What's Next?  Are you crushing it at work but struggling at home? If you want to learn how to win at home, then go to https://CoryMCarlson.com/subscribe and download your free copy of “10 Ways To Win At Home.” If you're looking for a resource to help you with these times when your work is now in your home, check out my book Win At Home First on Amazon. Forbes Magazine rated it one of 7 books everyone on your team should read.

In this deeply personal and relatable story, I welcome Jennifer Robertson to the podcast this week - who gets open and honest with us about her journey of navigating surrogacy and feeling like she constantly needed to pivot on her journey to conceive - and what the emotional hurdles were to getting there.Jennifer is a Fertility Coach and now… mum of two who was a Type A ‘get shit done' personality whose life was consumed for seven years by trying to conceive. Her journey included IVF, surrogacy, heartbreaking miscarriages and a surprise natural pregnancy. She lives on the Gold Coast in Australia (a fellow Aussie!) with her two little miracles, Luca and Sophie.Tune in to hear more about Jen's story, and you can learn more here:Website: https://www.jenniferrobertson.co/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msjenniferrobertson/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClikGpEjoBP-_OOIiktaZDA?view_as=subscriber

Today, Bridget chats with Deepti Sharma- Serial Entrepreneur. Deepti's career centers on her passions- food, community and advocacy. She is unafraid to pivot to figure out a new solution to make less than ideal circumstances work- both at home and in her career. And you know what's most inspiring? Deepti continues to chase her dreams. She always knew that she wanted to have a greater impact in her community so she ran for City Council in New York City last year. I hope we all seek a bit of inspiration from Deepti. Becoming a mom really can open new paths and opportunities for us. Links Referenced in the Episode:NeighborSchools Blog- Don't have time to listen? Read the blog with highlights from Foodtoeat- Check out Deepti's amazing start-up, Foodtoeat! Here's a video that explains how Deepti and Foodtoeat pivoted their mission during COVID.

Rich Kleiman is a Sports Manager, Businessman, and Co-Founder of Thirty Five Ventures. Pivoting from a music management career into sports management and using every good connection he's made along the way to build much more, Kleiman explains not only the importance of networking but how you're definitely doing it wrong. From managing Mark Ronson to Kevin Durant to establishing business with Jay-Z, Kleiman seems untouchable when it comes to making lasting connections with people and getting in front of them in the first place. Wondering what it means to make an actual connection instead of just checking the boxes you think are necessary for networking? Not sure where to even start in reaching out to people? You might want to give this one a listen.Youtube Link to This EpisodeRich's Twitter -  https://mobile.twitter.com/richkleimanThirty-Five Ventures - https://www.thirtyfiveventures.com/The Boardroom - https://boardroom.tv/

Chris came up with a mnemonic device: Fn-Delete – for when he really wants to delete something and is also thinking about password complexity requirements, which leads to an exciting discussion around security theater. Steph talks about the upcoming RailsConf and the not-in-person option for virtual attendees. She also gives a shoutout to the Ruby Weekly newsletter for being awesome. NIST Password Standards (https://specopssoft.com/blog/nist-password-standards/) 3 ActiveRecord Mistakes That Slow Down Rails Apps: Count, Where and Present (https://www.speedshop.co/2019/01/10/three-activerecord-mistakes.html) Difference between count, length and size in an association with ActiveRecord (https://bhserna.com/count-size-length-active-record.html) Ruby Weekly (https://rubyweekly.com/) Railsconf 2022 (https://railsconf.org/) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So hey, Chris, happy Friday. You know, each time I do that, I can't resist the urge to say happy Friday, but then I realize people aren't listening on a Friday. So happy day to anyone that's listening. What's new in your world, friend? CHRIS: I'm going to be honest; you threw me for a loop there. [laughs] I think it was the most recent episode where we talked about my very specific...[laughs] it's a lovely Friday, that's true. There's sun and clouds. Those are true things. But yeah, what's new in my world? [laughs] I can do this. I can focus. I got this. Actually, I have one thing. So this is going to be, I'm going to say vaguely selfish, but I have this thing that I've been trying to commit into my brain for a long time, and I just can't get it to stick. So today, I came up with like a mnemonic device for it. And I'm going to share it on The Bike Shed because maybe it'll be useful for other people. And then hopefully, in quote, unquote, "teaching it," I will deeply learn it. So the thing that happens in my world is occasionally, I want to delete a URL from Chrome's autocomplete. To be more specific, because it's easier for people to run away with that idea, it's The Weather Channel. I do not like weather.com. I try to type weather often, and I just want Google to show me the little, very quick pop-up thing there. I don't want any ads. I don't want to deal with that. But somehow, often, weather.com ends up in my results. I somehow accidentally click on it. It just gets auto-populated, and then that's the first thing that happens whenever I type weather into the Omnibox in Chrome. And I get unhappy, and I deal with it for a while, then eventually I'm like, you know what? I'm deleting it. I'm getting it out of there. And then I try and remember whatever magical key combination it is that allows you to delete an entry from the drop-down list there. And I know it's a weird combination of like, Command-Shift-Alt-Delete, Backspace, something. And every single time, it's the same. I'm like, I know it's weird, but let me try this one. How about that one? How about that one? I feel like I try every possible combination. It's like when you try and plug in a USB drive, and you're like, well, it's this way. No, it's the other way. Well, there are only two options, and I've already tried two things. How can I not have gotten it yet? But I got it now. Okay, so on a Mac specifically, the key sequence is Shift-Function-Delete. So the way I'm going to remember this is Function is abbreviated on the keyboard as Fn. So that can be like I'm swearing, like, I'm very angry about this. And then Shift is the way to uppercase something like you're shouting. So I just really need to Fn-Delete this. So that's how I'm going to remember it. Now I've shared it with everyone else, and hopefully, some other folks can get utility out of that. But really, I hope that I remember it now that I've tried to boil it down to a memorable thing. STEPH: [laughs] It's definitely memorable. I'm now going to remember just that I need to Fn-Delete this. And I'm not going to remember what it all is tied to. [laughs] CHRIS: That is the power of a mnemonic device. Yeah. STEPH: Like, I know this is useful in some way, but I can't remember what it is. But yeah, that's wonderful. I love it. That's something that I haven't had to do in a long time, and I hadn't thought about. I need to do that more. Because you're right, especially changing projects or things like that, there are just some URLs that I don't need cached anymore; I don't want auto-completed. So yeah, okay. I just need to Fn-Delete it. I'll remember it. Here we go. I'm speaking this into the universe, so it'll be true. CHRIS: Just Fn-Delete it. STEPH: Your bit about the USB and always getting it wrong, you get it 50-50 [laughs] by getting it wrong, resonates so deeply with me and my capability with directions where I am just terrible whether I have to go right or left. My inner compass is going to get it wrong. And I've even tried to trick myself where I'm like, okay, I know I'm always wrong. So what if I do the opposite of what Stephanie would do? And it's still somehow wrong. [laughs] CHRIS: Somehow, your brain compensates and is like, oh, I know that we're going to do that. So let's...yeah, it's amazing the way these things happen. STEPH: Yep. I don't understand it. I've tried to trick the software, but I haven't figured out the right way. I should probably just learn and get better at directions. But here we are. Here we are. CHRIS: You just loosely referred to the software, but I think you're referring to the Steph software when you say that. STEPH: Yes. Oh yeah, Steph software totally. You got it. [laughs] CHRIS: Gotcha. Cool. Glad that I checked in on that because that's great. But shifting gears to something a little bit deeper in the technical space, this past week, we've been thinking about passwords within our organization at Sagewell. And we're trying to decide what we want to do. We had an initial card that came through and actually got most of the way to implemented to dial up our password strictness requirements. And as I saw that come through, I was like, oh, wait, actually, I would love to talk about this. And so we had the work that was coming through the PR that had been opened was a pretty traditional set of let's introduce some requirements on our passwords for complexity, so let's make it longer. We're going from; I think six was the default that Devise shipped with, so we're increasing that to, I think it was eight. And then let's say that it needs a number, and a special character, and an uppercase letter or something like that. I've recently read the NIST rules, so the National Institute of Standards and Technology, I think, is what they are. But they're the ones who define a set of rules around this or guidelines. But I think they are...I don't know if they are laws or what at this point. But they tell you, "This is what you should and shouldn't do." And I know that the password complexity stuff is on the don't do that list these days. So I was like, this is interesting, and then I wanted to follow through. Interestingly, right now, I've got the Trello boards up for The Bike Shed right now. But as a result, I can't look at the linked Trello card that is on the workboards because they're in different accounts. And Trello really has made my life more difficult than I wanted. But I'm going to pull this up elsewhere. So let's see. So NIST stuff, just to talk through that, we can include a link in the show notes to a nice summary. But what are the NIST password requirements? Eight character minimum, that's great. Change passwords only if there is evidence of a compromise. Screen new passwords against a list of known compromised passwords. That's a really interesting one. Skip password hints, limit the number of failed authentication attempts. These all sound great to me. The maximum password length should be at least 64 characters, so don't constrain how much someone can put in. If they want to have a very long password, let them go for it. Don't have any sort of required rotation. Allow copy and pasting or functionality that allows for password managers. And allow the use of all printable ASCII characters as well as all Unicode characters, including emojis. And that one really caught my attention. I was like, that sounds fun. I wish I could look at all the passwords in our database. I obviously can't because they're salted and encrypted, and hashed, and all those sorts of things where I'm like, I wonder if anybody's using emojis. I'm pretty sure we would just support it. But I'm kind of intrigued. STEPH: You said something in that list that caught my attention, and I just want to see if I heard it correctly. So you said only offer change password if compromised? Does that mean I can't just change my password if I want to? CHRIS: Sorry. Yeah, I think the phrasing here might be a little bit odd. So it's essentially a different way to phrase this requirement is don't require rotation of passwords every six or whatever months. Forgotten password that's still a reasonable thing to have in your application, probably a necessity in most applications. But don't auto-rotate passwords, so don't say, "Your password has expired after six months." STEPH: Got it. Okay, cool. That makes sense. Then the emojis, oh no, it's like, I mean, I use a password manager now, and thanks to several years ago where he shamed me into using one. Thank you. That was great. [laughs] CHRIS: I hope it was friendly shame, but yeah. STEPH: Yes, it was friendly; kind shame if that sounds like a weird sentence to say. But yes, it was a very positive change. And I can't go back now that I have a password manager in my life. Because yeah, now I'm thinking like, if I had emojis, I'd be like, oh great, now I have to think about how I was feeling at the time that then I introduced a new password. Was I happy? Was I angry? Is it a poop emoji? Is unicorn? What is it? [laughs] So that feels complicated and novel. You also mentioned on that list that going for more complexity in terms of you have to have uppercase; you have to have a particular symbol, things like that are not on the recommended list. And I didn't know that. I'm so accustomed to that being requirements for passwords and the idea of how we create something that is secure and less easy to guess or to essentially hack. So I'm curious about that one if you know any more details about it as to why that's not the standard anymore. CHRIS: Yeah, I think I have some ideas around it. My understanding is mostly that introducing the password complexity requirements while intended to prevent people from using very common things like names or their user name or things like that, it's like, no, no, no, you can't because we've now constrained the system in that way. It tends in practice to lead to people having a variety of passwords that they forget all the time, and then they're using the forgotten password flow more often. And it basically, for human and behavior reasons, increases the threat surface area because it means that they're not able to use...say someone has a password scheme in mind where it's like, well, my passwords are, you know, it's this common base, and then some number of things specific to the site. It's like, oh no, no, we require three special characters, so it's like they can't do their thing. And now they have to write it down on a Post-it Note because they're not going to remember it otherwise. Or there are a variety of ways in which those complexity requirements lead to behavior that's actually less useful. STEPH: Okay, so it's the Post-it Note threat vector that we have to be worried about. [laughs] CHRIS: Which is a very real threat factor. STEPH: I believe it. [laughs] Yes, I know people that keep lists of passwords on paper near their desk. [laughs] This is a thing. CHRIS: Yep, yep, yep. The other thing that's interesting is, as you think about it, password complexity requirements technically reduce the overall combinatoric space that the passwords can exist in. Because imagine that you're a password hacker, and you're like, I have no idea what this password is. All I have is an encrypted hashed salted value, and I'm trying to crack it. And so you know the algorithm, you know how many passes, you know potentially the salt because often that is available. I think it has to be available now that I think about that out loud. But so you've got all these pieces, and you're like, I don't know, now it's time to guess. So what's a good guess of a password? And so if you know the minimum number of characters is eight and, the maximum is 12 because that actually happens on a lot of systems, that's actually not a huge combinatoric space. And then if you say, oh, and it has to have a number, and it has to have an uppercase letter, and it has to have a special character, you're just reducing the number of possible options in that space. And so, although this is more like a mathematical thing, but in my mind, I'm like, yeah, wait, that actually makes things less secure because now there are fewer passwords to check because they don't meet the complexity requirements. So you don't even have to try them if you're trying to brute-force crack a password. STEPH: Yeah, you make a really good point that I hadn't really thought about because I've definitely seen those sites that, yeah, constrain you in terms of like, has to have a minimum, has to have a maximum, and I hadn't really considered the fact that they are constraining it and then reducing the values that it could be. I am curious, though, because then it doesn't feel right to have no limit in terms of, like, you don't want people then just spamming your sign up and then putting something awful in there that has a ridiculous length. So do you have any thoughts on that and providing some sort of length requirement or length maximum? CHRIS: Yeah, I think the idea is don't prevent someone who wants to put in a long passphrase, like, let them do that. But there is, the NIST guidelines specifically say 64 characters. Devise out of the box is 128, I believe. I don't think we tweaked that, and that's what we're at right now. So you can write an old-style tweet and that can be your password if that's what you want to do. But there is an upper limit to that. So there is a reasonable upper limit, but it should be very permissive to anyone who's like, I want to crank it up. STEPH: Cool. Cool. Yeah, I just wanted to validate that; yeah, having an upper bound is still important. CHRIS: Yeah, definitely. Important...it's more for implementation and our database having a reasonable size and those sorts of things. Although at the end of the day, the thing that we saw is the encrypted password. So I don't know if bcrypt would run slower on a giant body of text versus a couple of characters; that might be the impact. So it would be speed as opposed to storage space because you always end up with a fixed-length hash of the same length, as far as I understand it. But yeah, it's interesting little trade-offs like that where the complexity requirements do a good job of forcing people to not use very obvious things like password. Password does not fit nearly any complexity requirements. But we're going to try and deal with that in a different way. We don't want to try and prevent you from using password by saying you must use an uppercase letter and a special character and things that make real passwords harder as well. But it is an interesting trade-off because, technically, you're making the crackability easier. So it gets into the human and the technical and the interplay between them. Thinking about it somewhat differently as well, there's all this stuff about you should salt your passwords, then you should hash them. You should run them through a good password hashing algorithm. So we're using bcrypt right now because I believe that's the default that Devise ships with. I've heard good things about Argon2; I think is the name of the new cool kid on the block in terms of password hashing. That whole world is very interesting to me, but at the end of the day, we can just go with Devise's defaults, and I'll feel pretty good about that and have a reasonable cost factor. Those all seem like smart things. But then, as we start to think about the complexity requirements and especially as we start to interact with an audience like Sagewell's demographics where we're working with seniors who are perhaps less tech native, less familiar, we want to reduce the complexity there in terms of them thinking of and remembering their passwords. And so, rather than having those complexity requirements, which I think can do a good job but still make stuff harder, and how do you communicate the failure modes, et cetera, et cetera, we're switching it. And the things that we're introducing are we have increased the minimum length, so we're up to eight characters now, which is NIST's low-end recommended, so it's between 8 and 128 characters. We are capturing anytime a I forgot password reset attempt happens and the outcome of it. So we're storing those now in the database, and we're showing them to the admins. So our admin team can see if password reset attempts have happened and if they were successful. That feels like good information to keep around. Technically, we could get it from the logs, but that's deeply hidden away and only really accessible to the developers. So we're now surfacing that information because it feels like a particularly pertinent thing for us. We've introduced Rack::Attack. So we're throttling those attempts, and if someone tries to just brute force through that credential stuffing, as the terminology goes, we will lock them out so either based on IP address or the account that they're trying to log into. We also have Devise's lockable module enabled. So if someone tries to log in a bunch of times and fails, their account will go into a locked state, and then an admin can unlock it. But it gives us a little more control there. So a bunch of those are already in place. The new one, this is the one that I'm most excited about, is we're going to introduce Have I Been Pwned? And so, they have an API. We can hit it. It's a really interesting model as to how do we ask if a password has been compromised without giving them the password? And it turns out there's this fun sort of cryptographic handshake thing that happens. K-anonymity is apparently the mechanism or the underpinning technology or idea. Anyway, it's super cool; I'm excited to build it. It's going to be fun. But the idea there is rather than saying, "Don't use a password that might not be secure," it's, "Hey, we actually definitively know that your password has been cracked and is available in plaintext on the internet, so we're not going to let you use that one." STEPH: And that's part of the signup flow as to where you would catch that? CHRIS: So we're going to introduce on both signup and sign-in because a password can be compromised after a user signs up for our system. So we want to have it at any point. Obviously, we do not keep their plaintext password, so we can't do this retroactively. We can only do it at the point in time that they are either signing up or signing in because that's when we do have access to the password. We otherwise throw it away and keep only the hashed value. But we'll probably introduce it at both points. And the interesting thing is communicating this failure mode is really tricky. Like, "Hey, your password is cracked, not like here, not on our site, no, we're fine. Well, you should probably change your password. So here's what it means, there's actually this database that's called Have I Been Pwned? Don't worry; it's good, though. It's P-W-N-E-D. But that's fine." That's too many words to put on a page. I can't even say it here in a podcast. And so what we're likely to do initially is instrument it such that our admin team will get a notification and can see that a user's password has been compromised. At that point, we will reach out to them and then, using the magic of human conversation, try and actually communicate that and help them understand the ramifications, what they should do, et cetera. Longer-term, we may find a way to build up an FAQ page that describes it and then say, "Feel free to reach out if you have questions." But we want to start with the higher touch approach, so that's where we're at. STEPH: I love it. I love that you dove into how to explain this to people as well because I was just thinking, like, this is complicated, and you're going to freak people out in panic. But you want them to take action but not panic. Well, I don't know, maybe they should panic a little bit. [laughs] CHRIS: They should panic just the right amount. STEPH: Right.[laughs] So I like the starting with the more manual process of reaching out to people because then you can find out more, like, how did people react to this? What kind of questions did they ask? And then collect that data and then turn that into an FAQ page. Just, well done. CHRIS: We haven't quite done it yet. But I am very happy with the collection of ideas that we've come to here. We have a security firm that we're working with as well. And so I had my weekly meeting with them, and I was like, "Oh yeah, we also thought about passwords a bunch, and here's what we came up with." And I was very happy that they were like, "Yeah, that sounds like a good set." I was like, "Cool. All right, I feel good." I'm very happy that we're getting to do this. And there's an interesting sort of interplay between security theater and real security. And security theater, just to explain the phrase if anyone's unfamiliar with it, is things that look like security, so, you know, big green lock up in the top-left corner of the URL bar. That actually doesn't mean anything historically or now. But it really looks like it's very secure, right? Or password complexity requirements make you think, oh, this must be a very secure site. But for reasons, that actually doesn't necessarily prove that at all. And so we tried to find the balance of what are the things that obviously demonstrate our considerations around security to the user? At the end of the day, what are the things that actually will help protect our users? That's what I really care about. But occasionally, you got to play the security theater game. Every other financial institution on the internet kind of looks and feels a certain way in how they deal with passwords. And so will a user look at our seemingly laxer requirements or laxer approach to passwords and judge us for that and consider us less secure despite the fact that behind the scenes look at all the fun stuff we're doing for you? But it's an interesting question and interesting trade-off that we're going to have to spend time with. We may end up with the complexity requirements despite the fact that I would really rather we didn't. But it may be the sort of thing that there is not a good way to communicate the thought and decision-making process that led us to where we're at and the other things that we're doing. And so we're like, fine, we just got to put them in and try and do a great job and make that as usable of an experience as possible because usability is, I think, one of the things that suffers there. You didn't do one of the things on the list, or like, it's green for each of the ones that you did, but it's red for the one that you didn't. And your password and your password confirmation don't match, and you can't paste...it's very easy to make this wildly complex for users. STEPH: Security theater is a phrase that I don't think I've used, but the way you're describing it, I really like. And I have a solution for you: underneath the password where you have "We don't partake in security theater, and we don't have all the other fancy requirements that you may have seen floating around the internet and here's why," and then just drop a link to the episode. And, you know, people can come here and listen. It'll totally be great. It won't annoy anyone at all. [laughs] CHRIS: And it'll start, and they'll hear me yelling about Fn-Delete that weather.com URL. [laughter] STEPH: Okay, maybe fast forward then to the part about -- CHRIS: Drop them to the timestamp. That makes sense. Yep. Yep. STEPH: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. [laughs] CHRIS: I like it. I think that's what we should do, yeah. Most features on the app should have a link to a Bike Shed episode. That feels true. STEPH: Excellent Easter egg. I'm into it. But yeah, I like all the thoughtfulness that y'all have put into this because I haven't had to think about passwords in this level of detail. And then also, yeah, switching over to when things start to change and start to move away, you're right; there's still that we need to help people then become comfortable with this new way and let them know that this is just as secure if not more secure. But then there's already been that standard that has been set for your expectations, and then how do you help people along that path? So yeah, seems like y'all have a lot of really great thoughtfulness going into it. CHRIS: Well, thank you. Yeah, it's frankly been a lot of fun. I really like thinking in this space. It's a fun sort of almost hobby that happens to align very well with my profession sort of thing. Actually, oh, I have one other idea that we're not going to do, but this is something that I've had in the back of my mind for a long time. So when we use bcrypt or Devise uses bcrypt under the hood, one of the things that it configures is the cost factor, which I believe is just the number of times that the password plus the salts and whatnot is run through the bcrypt algorithm. The idea there is you want it to be computationally difficult, and so by doing it multiple times, you increase that difficulty. But what I'd love is instead of thinking of it in terms of an arbitrary cost factor which I think is 12, like, I don't know what 12 means. I want to know it, in terms of dollars, how much would it cost to, like dollars and cents, to crack a password. Because, in theory, you can distribute this across any number of EC2 instances that you spin up. The idea of cracking a password that's a very map-reducible type problem. So let's assume that you can infinitely scale up compute on-demand; how much would it cost in dollars to break this password? And I feel like there's an answer. Like, I want that number to be like a million dollars. But as EC2 costs go down over time, I want to hold that line. I want to be like, a million dollars is the line that we want to have. And so, as EC2 prices go down, we need to increase our bcrypt cost factor over time to adjust for that and maintain the million dollar per password cracking sort of high bar. That's the dream. Swapping out the cost factor is actually really difficult. I've looked into it, and you have to like double encrypt and do weird stuff. So for a bunch of reasons, I haven't done this, but I just like that idea. Let's pin this to $1 value. And then, from there, decisions naturally flow out of it. But it's so much more of a real thing. A million dollars, I know what that means; 12, I don't know what 12 means. STEPH: A million-dollar password, I like it. I feel like -- CHRIS: We named the episode. STEPH: I was going to say that's a perfect title, A Million-Dollar Password. [laughs] CHRIS: A Million-Dollar Password. But with that wonderful episode naming cap there, I think I'm done rambling about passwords. What's up in your world, Steph? STEPH: One of the things that I've been chatting with folks lately is RailsConf is coming up; it's May 17 through the 19th. And it's been sort of like that casual conversation of like, "Hey, are you going? Are you going? Who's going? It's going to be great." And as people have asked like, "Are you going?" And I'm always like, "No, I'm not going." But then I popped on to the RailsConf website today because I was just curious. I wanted to see the schedule and the talks that are being given. And I keep forgetting that there's the in-person version, but there's also the home edition. And I was like, oh, I could go, I could do this. [laughs] And I just forget that that is something that is just more common now for conferences where you can attend them virtually, and that is just really neat. So I started looking a little more closely at the talks. And I'm really excited because we have a number of thoughtboters that are giving a talk at RailsConf this year. So there's a talk being given by Fernando Perales that's called Open the Gate a Little: Strategies to Protect and Share Data. There's also a talk being given by Joël Quenneville: Your Test Suite is Making Too Many Database Calls. I'm very excited; just that one is near and dear to my heart, given the current client experiences that I'm having. And then there's another one from someone who just joined thoughtbot, Christopher "Aji" Slater, Your TDD Treasure Map. So we'll be sure to include a link to those for anyone that's curious. But it's a stellar lineup. I mean, I'm always impressed with RailsConf talks. But this one, in particular, has me very excited. Do you have any plans for RailsConf? Do you typically wait for them to come out later and then watch them, or what's your MO? CHRIS: Historically, I've tended to watch the conference recordings after the fact. I went one year. I actually met Christopher "Aji" Slater at that very RailsConf that I went to, and I believe Joël Quenneville was speaking at that one. So lots of everything old is new again. But yeah, I think I'll probably catch it after the fact in this case. I'd love to go back in person at some point because I really do like the in-person thing. I'm thrilled that there is the remote option as well. But for me personally, the hallway track and hanging out and meeting folks is a very exciting part. So that's probably the mode that I would go with in the future. But I think, for now, I'm probably just going to watch some talks as they come out. STEPH: Yeah, that's typically what I've done in the past, too, is I kind of wait for things to come out, and then I go through and make a list of the ones that I want to watch, and then, you know, I can make popcorn at home. It's delightful. I can just get cozy and have an evening of RailsConf talks. That's what normal people do on Friday nights, right? That's totally normal. [laughs] CHRIS: I mean, yeah, maybe not the popcorn part. STEPH: No popcorn? CHRIS: But not that I'm opposed to popcorn just —- STEPH: Brussels sprouts? What do you need? [laughs] CHRIS: Yeah, Brussels sprouts, that's what it is. Just sitting there eating handfuls of Brussels sprouts watching Ruby conference talks. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: I do love Brussels sprouts, just to throw it out there. I don't want it to be out in the ether that I don't like them. I got an air fryer, and so I can air fry Brussels sprouts. And they're delicious. I mean, I like them regardless. But that is a really fantastic way to cook them at home. So I'm a big fan. STEPH: All right, I'm moving you into the category of fancy friends, fancy friends with an air fryer. CHRIS: I wasn't already in your category of fancy friends? STEPH: [laughs] I didn't think you'd take it that way. I'm sorry to break it to you. [laughter] CHRIS: I'm actually a little hurt that I'm now in the category of fancy friends. It makes a lot of sense that I wasn't there before. So I'll just deal with...yeah, it's fine. I'm fine. STEPH: It's a weird rubric that I'm running over here. Pivoting away quickly, so I don't have to explain the categorization for fancy friends, I saw something in the Ruby Weekly Newsletter that had just come out. And it's one of those that I see surface every so often, and I feel like it's a nice reminder because I know it's something that even I tend to forget. And so I thought it'd be fun just to resurface it here. And then, we can also provide a link to the wonderful blog post that's written by Benito Serna. And it's the difference between count, length, and size and an association with ActiveRecord. So for folks that would love a refresher, so count, that's a method that's always going to perform a SQL count query. So even if the collection has already been loaded, then calling count is always going to execute a database query. So this is the one that's just like, watch out, avoid it. You're always going to hit your database when you use this one. And then next is length. And so, length loads the whole collection into memory and then returns that length to the number of items in that collection. If the collection has been loaded, then it's not going to issue a database call. And then it's just still going to use...it's going to delegate to that Ruby length method and let you know how many records are in that collection. So that one is a little bit better because then that way, if it's already loaded, at least you're not going to have a database call. And then next is the size method, which is just the one that's more highly recommended that you use because this one does have a nice safety net that is built-in because first, it's going to check if we need to perform a database call, if the records have been loaded or not. So if the collection has not been loaded, so we haven't executed a database query and stored the result, then size is going to perform a database query. Specifically, it's using that SQL count under the hood. And if the collection has been loaded, then a database call is not issued, and then going to use the Ruby length method to then return the number of records. So it just helps you prevent unnecessary database calls. And it's the reason that that one is recommended over using count, which is going to always issue a call. And then also to avoid length where you can because it's going to load the whole collection into memory, and we want to avoid that. So it was a nice refresher. I'll be sure to include a link in the show notes. But yeah, I find that I myself often forget about the difference in count and size. And so if I'm just in the console and I just want to know something, that I still reach for count. It is still a default for mine. But then, if I'm writing production code, then I will be more considered as to which one I'm using. CHRIS: I feel like this is one of those that I've struggled to lock into my head, but as you're describing it right now, I think I've got, again, another mnemonic device that we can lock on to. So I know that SQL uses the keyword count, so count that's SQL definitely. Length I know that because I use that on other stuff. And so it's size that is different and therefore special. That all seems good. Cool, locking that in my brain along with Fn-Delete. I have two things that are now firmly locked in. So you were just mentioning being in the console and working with this. And one of the things that I've noticed a lot with folks that are newer to ActiveRecord and the idea of relations and the fact that they're lazy, is that that concept is very hard to grasp when working in a console because at the console, they don't seem lazy. The minute you type out user.where some clause, and the minute you type that and hit enter in the console, Ruby is going to do its normal thing, which is like, okay, cool, I want to...I forget what it is that IRB or any of the REPLs are going to do, but it's either inspect or to_s or something like that. But it's looking for a representation that it can display in the console. And ActiveRecord relations will typically say like, "Oh, cool, you need the records now because you want to show it like an array because that's what inspect is doing under the hood." So at the console, it looks like ActiveRecord is eager and will evaluate the query the minute you type it, but that's not true. And this is a critical thing that if you can think about it in that way and the fact that ActiveRecord relations are lazy and then take advantage of it, you can chain queries, you can build them up, you can break that apart. You can compose them together. There's really magical stuff that falls out of that. But it's interesting because sort of like a Heisenberg where the minute you go to look at it in the REPL, it's like, oh, it is not lazy; it is eager. It evaluates it the minute I type the query. But that's not true; that's actually the REPL tricking you. I will often just throw a semicolon at the end of it because I'm like, I don't want to see all that noise. Just give me the relation. I want the relation, not the results of executing that query. So if you tack a semicolon at the end of the line, that tells Ruby not to print the thing, and then you're good to go from there. STEPH: That's a great pro-tip. Yeah, I've forgotten about the semicolon. And I haven't been using that in my workflow as much. So I'm so glad you mentioned that. Yeah, I'm sure that's part of the thing that's added to my confusion around this, too, or something that has just taken me a while to lock it in as to which approach I want to use for when I'm querying data or for when I need to get a particular count, or length, or size. And by using all three, I'm just confusing myself more. So I should really just stick to using size. There's also a fabulous article by Nate Berkopec that's titled Three ActiveRecord Mistakes That Slow Down Rails Apps. And he does a fabulous job of also talking about the differences of when to use size and then some of the benefits of when you might use count. The short version is that you can use count if you truly don't care about using any of those records. Like, you're not going to do anything with them. You don't need to load them, like; you truly just want to get a count. Then sure, because then you're issuing a database query, but then you're not going to then, in a view, very soon issue another database query to collect those records again. So he has some really great examples, and I'll be sure to include a link to his article as well. Speaking of Ruby tidbits and kind of how this particular article about count, length, and size came across my view earlier today, Ruby Weekly is a wonderful newsletter. And I feel like I don't know if I've given them a shout-out. They do a wonderful job. So if you haven't yet checked out Ruby Weekly, I highly recommend it. There are just always really great, interesting articles either about stuff that's a little bit more like cutting edge or things that are being released with newer versions, or they might be just really helpful tips around something that someone learned, like the difference between count, length, and size, and I really enjoy it. So I'll also be sure to include a link in the show notes for anyone that wants to check that out. They also do something that I really appreciate where when you go to their website, you have the option to subscribe, but I am terrible about subscribing to stuff. So you can still click and check out the latest issue, which I really appreciate because then, that way, I don't feel obligated to subscribe, but I can still see the content. CHRIS: Oh yeah. Ruby Weekly is fantastic. In fact, I think Peter Cooper is the person behind it, or Cooperpress as the company goes. And there is a whole slew of newsletters that they produce. So there's JavaScript Weekly, there's Ruby Weekly, there's Node Weekly, Golang Weekly, React Status, Postgres Weekly. There's a whole bunch of them. They're all equally fantastic, the same level of curation and intentional content and all those wonderful things. So I'm a big fan. I'm subscribed to a handful of them. And just because I can't go an episode without mentioning inbox zero, if you are the sort of person that likes to defend the pristine nature of your email inbox, I highly recommend Feedbin and their ability to set up a special email address that you can use to then turn it into an RSS feed because that's magical. Actually, these ones might already have an RSS feed under the hood. But yeah, RSS is still alive. It's still out there. I love it. It's great. And that ends my thoughts on that matter. STEPH: I have what I feel is a developer confession. I don't think I really appreciate RSS feeds. I know they're out there in the ether, and people love them. And I just have no emotion, no opinion attached to them. So one day, I think I need to enjoy the enrichment that is RSS feeds, or maybe I'll hate it. Who knows? I'm reserving judgment. Either way, I don't think I will. [laughs] But I don't want to box future Stephanie in. CHRIS: Gotta maintain that freedom. STEPH: On that note, shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeee!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Elder Dario Palmer takes us through Exodus 14 to teach us some faith lessons.

Self Doubt, Crying, Snot running down your face... Starting a small business is PAINFUL. The combination of constant questioning, pain, and a lot of imposter syndrome is the perfect recipe for entrepreneurship. Too many people try, fail, give up, and chalk it up to "no one can be successful."On the flip side, the ability to take risks, pivot, learn from mistakes, and authentically show up allows you to create the business that you've always dreamed of. If you can work through the very real struggles of small business startup, you can absolutely be successful.In this episode of the All Things Private Practice Podcast, I talk with a good friend and visionary in the private practice coaching field, Allison Puryear. Allison is the owner and founder of Abundance Practice Building, helping more than 10,000 therapists start and grow their businesses throughout the country.Allison and I talk about:Her journey from Georgia to Seattle to Asheville and her struggles along the wayHer creation of Abundance Practice Building — from a small idea to a household nameHow showing up authentically attracts your ideal clientsThe concept of abundance: there's enough to go aroundHow it's OK to struggle with small business startup... and how to work through the struggleWays to combat imposter syndrome so you don't convince yourself that reaching your goals isn't possible

Today Vida, Trevor and Ken sit down to talk about body positivity. Being big, not being big, healthy versus unhealthy. Sometimes the 2 things can get confused. It can be tough to tell the difference but sometimes you're not supposed to be able to tell the difference, and thats how they get ya! Pivoting between other online phenomena movements that control the online conversations, the Sharks use this episode to really dig in to what is and isn't healthy about todays lifestyles. This is Part 1 of a two-part episode. Part 2 is free to all paid subscribers over at www.patreon.com/posts/65588299. Become a paid subscriber for $5/month over at patreon.com/champagnesharks and get access to the entire archive of subscriber-only episodes, the Discord voice and chat server for patrons, detailed show notes for certain episodes, and our newsletter. Co-produced & edited by Aaron C. Schroeder / Pierced Ears Recording Co, Seattle WA (www.piercedearsrec.com). Opening theme composed by T. Beaulieu. Closing theme composed by Dustfingaz (https://www.youtube.com/user/TheRazhu_)

Are you questioning everything you're doing or a new passion you're wanting to pursue? Maybe you're questioning if you should continue doing what you've been doing! In today's episode we're talking about this place we get to where we lose joy and fulfillment in what we are doing with our business or in our lives, so we feel lost and unmotivated. We start looking at other things and quitting what we've always done just to find out that the next thing also becomes unfulfilling. Is that you right now? Are you thinking the grass is greener on the other side? Listen in to get tips on how to navigate through this season and how to really know if it's time to let something go and pursue something new or if something else is causing you to feel this way.    xoxo,   Jeannet    Connect with Jeannet:   Private Coaching:  Do you need life, mindset, or business coaching? Whether you need help overcoming a business block or clarity around launching your business or you want to work on your mindset and set up routines to reach your life goals, private coaching can help you.  Fill out this application to get started:    https://forms.gle/KXDN2PxNbYWEWGtH8 Subscribe to my newsletter for awesome tips to live your best life:  https://www.jeannetsacks.com/newsletter Join my Free Facebook Community Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/fearlessandunleashed Wellness Group:  Need help reaching your health and fitness goals and would love to be a part of my online wellness group? RSVP your spot for the upcoming group and I will email you the details to get started. Join my virtual Wellness group: https://www.jeannetsacks.com/wellness Mindset Course:  Start by creating a strong foundation that will help you reach your goals by working on your mindset - the most important tool you have. Join Mindset For Wellness and  Success Course: https://www.jeannetsacks.com/mindsetforwellnessandsuccess Instagram: @JeannetSacks   Website: https://www.JeannetSacks.com  

It's often easy to feel like we've "failed" when we have to make a decision to pivot from one goal to another, via any reason. On this 15MF I bring Sarah Reed back on the show again to talk about some recent pivots she's made in her career goals and how she did it.  From going to school to become a certified Health Coach, and doing so while becoming a first time Mom, and since then having a second child, she's had to change up her approach with how she aims to help others in the healthy food world.  We uncover how we can make pivots between things easier on ourselves, how making that change doesn't mean we failed at something, and how sometimes a refocus is what we need!  FOLLOW THE SHOW: @wydhpod FOLLOW SARAH: @plantbasednarrative FOLLOW ROSS: @whosrosstheisen

In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Molson Hart, founder and CEO of Viahart, an educational toy company. He is also co-founder of Edison, an intellectual property-focused litigation financing firm. Hart has gained some visibility as a prominent seller on Amazon, with strong opinions on the company both positive and negative. First, Razib asks Hart about Amazon's role in the American economy, and how it compares and contrasts with Walmart. Unlike many who have negative experiences with the company, Hart's attitude seems to be that consumers and producers both need to accept the reality of Amazon's behemoth position in the American marketplace. It's not going anywhere, so the question is how to control it, not kill it. If Amazon has brought supply-chain scale to the US economy, America's partnership with China has taken the concept of scale to a whole new level. Razib asks about Hart's experience as a businessman in China ten years ago in the border area between Manchuria and North Korea. Hart recounts several major things he learned about the contrast between the US and China. For example, while Americans focus on fairness and rule of law, the Chinese have no such expectations and are very pragmatic (“don't argue, pay the bribe!”). Second, the Chinese plan fast and make immediate decisions, and then pivot rapidly off mistakes, while Americans tend to over plan. Though China in the early 2010s was very corrupt, Hart feels the last decade has seen a shift away from those practices. Another thing that has changed over the last decade has been an awareness that American and Chinese supply chains need to become decoupled to some extent due to both geopolitical and economic considerations. The COVID-19 interruptions in particular have made many Americans aware of how entangled how our own production processes are with China. But changing the current economic relationships may not be so easy. In the mid-2010's Hart shifted some of his purchasing to Vietnam. Though the Vietnamese are hungrier and cheaper, they naturally lack the scale, efficiency and specialization of their Chinese competitors. Hart also observes that it is clear that the Chinese workers are among the hardest working and most skilled in the world, so they will not be easy to replace. His contacts in the Pacific Rim believe that only India would ever be able to truly substitute for China because of its size and diversity. Hart notes that one peculiarity of China is that it operates as a large market economy that is culturally less aware of the US than other Asian trading partners. In particular, Chinese English fluency is much lower than that of Indian and Vietnamese. Hart wonders if this state might never change given that the Chinese society and economy are just large enough that they can ignore America more than smaller and less developed nations. Pivoting back to the US, Razib and Hart discuss the “easy money” policies that have dominated American economic policies over the last few years. Hart argues that the ability of Americans to take on debt enables bad policies, from foreign policy adventures to bailouts of firms that should be allowed to fail. Additionally, he argues that inflation reduces the value of American money and the appeal of investing in US “cash” as the safest investment.  They end the discussion with Hart's bullishness on East Asian economies, despite the demographic and political headwinds. He also believes that the US has a bright future, but we need to accept that we'll never have 1990's hyperpower again.

Today on The Travel Agent Podcast, Lori talks about what led to her amazing facebook group The Resorts of the Riviera Maya and the new venture she is launching in May. Membership Waitlist: https://lori-gold.mykajabi.com/waitlist For more about Lori Gold read her bio below.   If you are looking for a more immersive experiential FAM that allows time for meaningful relationship building, gathering high-quality content, and a solid marketing strategy to increase your sales, Apply to The TAP FAM to South Africa TODAY! https://TheTravelAgentPodcast.com/famtrips  If you like the podcast, you'll LOVE our Amazing Travel Agent Facebook Community: Join here: https://www.ttapgroup.com/       Lori Gold Bio: Lori Gold is a Canadian travel advisor of 15 years. She specializes in family travel and focuses on the Riviera Maya area of Mexico. She moved from Toronto to Playa del Carmen in 2016 and loves exploring her backyard, discovering new hotels and unique excursions. In 2020 Lori started the facebook group “The Resorts of the Riviera Maya” for travel advisors. It now has 12,500 members and is the go-to spot for up to date information, photos and everything to do with the hotels, tours and excursions in the Cancun/Riviera Maya area. Lori does masterclasses for travel advisor all about the destination and is launching her membership “Mexperts!” in May, 2022.   Membership Waitlist: https://lori-gold.mykajabi.com/waitlist  

When should you pivot your startup? Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his experiences with Abbot - the chatbot designed to work within Slack. Phil talks about starting with Abbot focused on ChatOps, where Abbot would help with automation around the deployment of applications. And while there were some customers, it wasn't enough. The pivot was to customer support that also depends on tools like Slack. The conversation digs into focusing on understanding where customers have challenges and learning to solve them, rather than trying to offer a platform for everything!

On the season 2 finale (episode 40) of Worth the Weight, Cookie Miller is joined by one of her clients (and dear friend) Whitney Charles to discuss her weight loss journey. Tune in as they discuss Whitney's ongoing transition, her biggest wins so far and what led her to make the decision to change her life. Hear her inspirational story and her advice to others who are thinking about joining the SFS program. SUBSCRIBE HERE: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgpkEyCasGBSqs8RGRqXYjU6GvHy-tk9z FOLLOW US! INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/worththeweightpodcast/ FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/worththeweightpodcast/ LISTEN to #worththeweightpodcast HERE: APPLE PODCAST: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/worth-the-weight/id1466077246 SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/2MdgvNXxYDT22eZbhpvlUV STITCHER: https://www.stitcher.com/show/worth-the-weight GOOGLE: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy9iODEzNzAwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/cookiemiller/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/cookiemiller/support

Our favorite thing to do in The Flipped Lifestyle Community is celebrate a member's success! And in this week's Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we have an amazing success story! It takes a long time to become an overnight success and persistence to reach your online goals.  Ben started his journey in the community 5 years ago, and he has steadily grown his online business. He recently reached an amazing milestone! On this week's show you will learn how Flipped Lifestyle Community Member Ben Landers built his online business from scratch and had his first 6-figure year! That's over $100,000 in a single year online! WOW! Listen in and learn how he did it (while working full-time and raising kids), and how you could too! In today's episode you'll learn: How to launch your membership with no content Pivoting your business ideas is okay How to raise your prices and get more members How to outsource tasks so you can scale The best action steps to become successful We would love to have you as a member of The Flipped Lifestyle Community!  We believe you have God-given talents and experiences you can use to start an online business!  All you need is 100 people to pay you $50/m online to make $5,000/m, $60,000/y!  Let us help you start a membership of your own.  We offer a FREE Basic Membership to give you the tools and resources you need to find your online business idea and get started. Click here to learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/free

In this Episode, We Talk About: Finding your power to pivot, and how it can help you achieve more of what you want in life. How to get unstuck and out of ruts. Turning mental energy into physical energy. Cultivating courage, clarity, practice, and motion. Resources + Links:   Download our FREE Goal Getter Bundle HERE   Follow The Freedom Parents on Instagram | @thefreedomparents Subscribe to the Youtube Channel | The Freedom Parents YOUTUBE   Find more resources on our website | thefreedomparents.com   Order The Freedom Parents book on Amazon The Freedom Parents by Samantha & Harold Prestenbach Connect with Samantha on Instagram | @samantha_prestenbach Show Notes: Did you know you have your own superpower? Today, we are sharing our five key power to pivots: the superpower you can use to start living the life you want! We'll discuss what the power of the pivot is, what it can do for you, how to channel your energy to take action, and more! How can you create more clarity in your life? What causes people to get stuck? Why do we need to let go of perfection? The answer to all of these questions all lies in the power to pivot. Learn how you can go from stuck to success just by tapping into your secret superpower! 00:00 How do you cultivate your power to pivot? 02:40 What is the meaning of “pivot”? 03:20 What does the power to pivot look like? 07:45 How can you get unstuck? 09:15 Finding your pivot partner. 11:10 How do we turn mental energy into physical energy? 14:35 What causes people to get stuck? 17:45 Who and what should we conform to? 20:35 What is the significance of surrounding yourself with the right people? 22:25 How do you take your power to pivot back? 25:35 How does confusion pivot to clarity? 28:35 Why is finding clarity and purpose so important to achieving success? 31:40 Pivoting perfection into practice. 34:00 How do daily activity goals help you accomplish your goals? 39:15 How can you pivot into taking action?

Peter Kell is one of the dominant VSL marketers, and the VSL Advertising Lead at Mindvalley. He managed to drive revenue from a brand of a standing start of 0 all the way to 40 million in 12 months, before exiting and moving on to the next adventure. Peter's mission is to help ecommerce marketers and affiliate marketers hit multiple 7-figure months, and today he will share all his best-kept secrets to succeed using the power of VSL. All this and much more, up next. Bullet points (00:04) Intro (02:00) The start as an entrepreneur (05:47) Learning the hard way (08:35) Finding a mentor to learn media buying (10:21) Pivoting toward ecommerce and VSL (13:45) The three things that take to crush VSL on Facebook (15:44) Long VSL on Facebook (17:32) The formula to make a VSL (21:53) The visual components of a VSL (24:51) Where to find VSL now (26:48) Current projects and a million a day (29:35) Best traffic sources for ecommerce (33:24) Native and the two big ideas of VSL (34:27) Authority and working with celebrities (38:06) Getting started (41:51) Testing different videos (45:38) Where to find out more (46:33) Rapid fire question round (46:46) If you ever had to start again, how would you make your money? (47:03) What is the most common or biggest mistake that leaders make? (47:28) Who is a great leader (alive or dead) and why? (48:09) How do you hire top talent? (50:15) What is one of your proudest moments? (51:03) What is one interesting fact about you that not many people would know? (51:47) What daily routines do you have (morning or evening) that have helped make you successful? (53:11) What book (or books) changed your mindset or life? (56:56) What is the most exciting question you spend your time thinking about? (58:56) What advice would you give your younger self? (59:11) What was your biggest challenge starting in business and how did you overcome it? (59:48) What unusual or underrated food or drink should more people try out? (01:00:17) What makes you happiest?

Amy had a solid Amazon business. It was growing and expanding, as is the dream for all our businesses. But guess what? She didn't enjoy it anymore. Nothing was wrong, it just didn't light her up like it once did. So – time for a change. That's what this episode is all about - reigniting your handmade business passion. And what we can learn from the journey Amy took to discover what was next for her. Spoiler alert! It wasn't a smooth jump from one thing to another. But it was definitely worth it. Her passion and energy is back! We get into: How Amy started and scaled two successful businesses in e-commerce over 10 years The transition out of both businesses in search of something new. https://giftbizunwrapped.com/episodes/gasparaflora (Pivoting) to something that https://giftbizunwrapped.com/episodes/building-a-business (brings you joy) and allows you to bring out your talent How to know if this kind of change and https://giftbizunwrapped.com/episodes/affirmations (transformation) is right for you. Listen in to hear what gets her out of bed in the morning now and Amy's new life as a furniture artist, thrift-a-holic & mom of two. Resources Mentioned https://giftbizunwrapped.com/episodes/mommyincome (Ep 191 - Why Amazon Over eBay) https://giftbizunwrapped.com/bash (Save your seat for the next FREE Gift Biz Bash)! Amy's Contact Links http://weedpatchstudio.com/ (Website) | https://www.instagram.com/weedpatch_studio/ (Instagram) Join Our FREE Gift Biz Breeze Facebook Community https://www.facebook.com/groups/GiftBizBreeze (Become a Member of Gift Biz Breeze) If you found value in this podcast, make sure to subscribe so you automatically get the next episode downloaded for your convenience. Click on your preferred platform below to get started. Also, if you'd like to do me a huge favor - please leave a review. It helps other creators like you find the show and build their businesses too. You can do so right here: https://ratethispodcast.com/giftbizunwrapped (Rate This Podcast) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gift-biz-unwrapped/id986323267 (Apple Podcasts) | https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5naWZ0Yml6dW53cmFwcGVkLmNvbS9mZWVkL3BvZGNhc3Q=&inf_contact_key=f00b9b282a6156da6dc2e642eb167c2f680f8914173f9191b1c0223e68310bb1 (Google Podcasts) | https://open.spotify.com/show/380HmeoVquMHRzOepaoF0s (Spotify) Thank you so much! Sue Know someone who needs to hear this episode? Click a button below to share it!

We've learned about the rewards of investing in self-storage, but what about the risks? In this episode, Kris Bennett breaks down the opportunities and obstacles in the self-storage space. He is a Self-Storage Managing Partner at Passiveinvesting.com with 14 years of experience in the real estate industry. From raising capital to finding deals, listen in if you want must-have knowledge and actionable advice before dipping your toes into self-storage.   [00:01 - 02:42] Pivoting to Self-Storage Kris almost gave up on real estate Here's how he found his way back The reason they shifted their focus to self-storage   [02:43 - 07:44] Raising Capital from the General Public Funding through CrowdStreet Find out how they partnered with the platform The advantages and disadvantages of financing this way   [07:45 - 13:44] The Cons of Self-Storage Kris talks about the misconceptions about self-storage The challenges in doing smaller deals Setting expectations with investors and attracting capital   [13:45 - 15:42] Closing Segment Here's what Kris and his team are curious about right now in the real estate space Kris recommends these books Reach out to Kris!  Links Below Final Words Tweetable Quotes “If investors are educated on their own… If they educate themselves on all of those options, the investable universe of what I can't invest in and what real estate looks like, what's the risk-return trade-off, then they will understand okay, storage is a great bet.” - Kris Bennett   “Set big goals because those are the things worth going after.” - Kris Bennett -----------------------------------------------------------------------------   Connect with Kris at kris@passiveinvesting.com and follow him on LinkedIn if you want to learn more about self-storage.  Resources Mentioned:   What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence by Stephen A. Schwarzman The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results by Garry Keller and Jay Papasan The Millionaire Real Estate Agent: It's Not About the Money It's About Being the Best You Can Be by Gary Keller, Dave Jenks, and Jay Papasan Connect with me: I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.   Facebook LinkedIn   Like, subscribe, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or whatever platform you listen on.  Thank you for tuning in! Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com   Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:   Kris Bennett  00:00 You have to set up investor expectations. If you're raising capital from investors, we've run into this issue in the past, I've run into this issue in the past where you set expectations, you send them an OM of what you're going to do for your syndication docs or whatever, hey, we're going to go out and find 10 deals and we're going to give you this return or whatever, then the market shifts and now returns are lower than now you're stuck, right? So you have to set investor expectations. Guys, you're jumping into this business. Storage is wonderful, but 10% return cash on cash, your one is probably not going to happen unless you find a needle in a haystack. A massive haystack. Right? So it's probably not going to happen.   Intro  00:33 Welcome to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate Show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big.     Sam Wilson  00:45 Kris Bennett buys self-storage facilities in growing markets and business-friendly states. He resides in Charlotte, North Carolina. Kris, welcome to the show.   Kris Bennett  00:54 Thanks, man. Appreciate you having me on.   Sam Wilson  00:56 Hey, man, pleasure's mine. Same three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show: In 90 seconds or less, where do you start? Where are you now? And how did you get there?   Kris Bennett  01:02 That is a great question, Sam. So I started in real estate in 2007. Right before the Great Recession, if anybody remembers that time, it was pretty rough. We thought we're all going to be rich. I was in my real estate licensing class and going to become a residential broker. And obviously, the world changed, over the next two years actually soured me on real estate. I was doing foreclosure work. So when people think about like banks and all that foreclosing on folks, well, how do they do that? Well, they contact agents and have them go evict people. And so that's what I was doing. And it was not fun whatsoever. I was single at the time, no family, had I had a family, had kids, I would have just cried my heart out every day. So that was really tough. Decided to go to school and get away from real estate as far as I could. Coincidentally, the only way the only job I could find my first summer in college was at a real estate investment firm, a private equity firm in Chapel Hill. And I had no idea what he was doing. But he hired me on to do some underwriting and whatnot. It opened my eyes to the fact that you can buy massive commercial real estate, he was doing apartments but the idea is you can raise capital to buy these large buildings and make money doing it and my eyes like bugged out, right? So one, I hadn't seen that many zeros before my life, and then another was that oh my gosh, this is how you do it. So the light bulb went on. To make a long story short, I graduated, worked at a family office in Raleigh, North Carolina doing multifamily acquisitions. We pivoted to storage arrays the storage fund on CrowdStreet, That fund is doing really well. They're I think on fund two or three at this point. So connected with passiveinvesting.com. About a year ago, I know one of the principals for a number of years before he got just got into real estate investing, and kept that relationship going. And that's where we are now, leading the storage arm of passiveinvesting.com. And did you ask where are we going with that as well? Or was that the answer to everything there?   Sam Wilson  02:41 I don't know, man, that was great a summary.  It went to a lot of places, but I love it. No, that's good. That's really, really interesting. So back up a little bit when you said CrowdStreet and just kind of define how you guys interface on that front. What was that story there?   Kris Bennett  02:43 Okay, good.  Yeah, sure. So what the firm I was with is called 10 Federal, if people want to look it up, it's called 10 Federal, 1-0 federal.com. When I started, there was their director of acquisitions, which is a fancy title for bird dog. So in other words, go find deals from brokers or owners. And so that's what I was doing mostly in the Carolinas, this is about 2016. So multifamily properties in the Carolinas, I made a bunch of phone calls, talk to a bunch of brokers, underwrite a bunch of properties, I was doing all of that work, and just couldn't make the numbers work on stuff. So just kind of summarizing here, we had a couple of deals in a contract that fell out, etc. So we decided to pivot to self-storage. And the reason being is that the guys I was working for had a little bit of experience within storage, and they were building some small facilities for themselves using SBA financing. And we can talk about what that is, if you want to, but SBA financing. It's a small, meaning 15,000 square feet or less, so think maybe 150 to 200 units or less. That is small in self-storage. And since they had that experience, great. Okay, so we know how to do it right financing and whatnot, and kind of like what to look for when we need to raise capital. Okay, well, we're not that good at that. So let's go ahead and partner up with CrowdStreet. And this is again, 2016-2017. So 2017, really for the storage fund. And so we were able to do so, put together the offering memorandum and all the organizational docs behind it all and basically put it on CrowdStreet on their website and raise capital through that platform. And I'm sure their terms and conditions and whatnot have changed. But obviously you paid him some money, just pay this money to be able to do that-- almost knocked over my tea here. And it was successful. So the goal was to raise about 10 million bucks, I think we raised pretty darn close to that for our very first fund put out, you know, that was put out there for the public to see, and criticize, and invest with, and get on board with so that was a lot of fun. That was a successful raise and deployment of that capital.   Sam Wilson  04:42 How many deals did you guys do before you launched with CrowdSreet?   Kris Bennett  04:46 Oh, man, within the firm at 10 Federal at the time, between apartments and storage, man, I can't remember, maybe 10 to 15 something like that. Maybe I'm overcounting that, I can't remember exactly. And so that was all, like mostly with five real five or six close investors who obviously were repeat investors who would take down those deals with us.    Sam Wilson  05:09 So was the approximate, I'm getting to something here. What were the approximate assets under management at that point? You know, when you guys went to CrowdStreet?   Kris Bennett  05:16 I think it was, so we had apartments, mostly, I want to say the total value was maybe two to 300 million. Okay. I can't remember, so the larger....    Sam Wilson  05:26 The reason I asked that is just because it's people think about that, as I think about, you know, the thrust of the show is how to scale. And I think about maybe at some point in the future, maybe I'd like to partner with a CrowdStreet, a realty mogul. No more of that. Yeah. Yeah. Where do you have to be in order to do that? And obviously, you have a significant track record, two or $300 million in assets under management, not a small amount of real estate to own. So just as people hear that, and go, Oh, hey, that'd be cool someday, that gives them kind of a marker as to where you need to be.    Kris Bennett  05:53 Yeah, yeah, exactly.    Sam Wilson  05:55 What were some of the things that you liked and didn't like about partnering with CrowdStreet? And again, I'm going somewhere with this.   Kris Bennett  06:01 Oh, sure. They were actually, really so if I... So that was 2017. So that's about five years ago. So they have new people in place, and all this stuff, and new processes and new vetting procedures and everything. So people have to realize that as well. So I'm talking a little bit half a decade ago about what we're doing. So at the time, I think the pricing was a little bit steep. And people have to realize that how they had it structured at that time, they had what they call investor rooms, and whatnot. And so basically, each investor that comes in through your portal, they will go to a website, essentially set up for them that gave him all the statistics and capabilities to invest and vet the deal and all that kind of stuff. And that would cost you money based upon the number of investors. There was an upfront fee to get started, you know, there's a number of things. So it is expensive. And now what I'd say be one of the downsides or cons to it.. The great, the upside was they were great to work with, very easy to work with. They kind of held your hand through the process, You send them, you know, financials and your underwriting and all these other things. So they're kind of looking over your shoulder to make sure that, hey, you're not fudging the numbers here or something like that. And that you're not making a mistake, obviously, within your projections, because they have to put it out there. But they help you kind of make it look professional, and good and presentation worthy to their investors. So again, it was a long time ago, their logo and colors have changed back then it was like red and something else. So it's been a while. But it's a bit pricey. But I think if you're trying to raise capital from the general public without registering your securities, it's a great way to do it, and kind of offload some of that work to someone else.   Sam Wilson  07:28 Right. And I don't think any of those things that you've just said have changed too terribly much, just on the cost of capital side of things.    Kris Bennett  07:36 Yeah.   Sam Wilson  07:36 It's more expensive capital to get a hold of, but again, like you said, you get to offload some of that administrative burden and bring...   Kris Bennett  07:43  Absolutely, yeah.   Sam Wilson  07:45 So that's fantastic. I love that. You know, we bring, we've had several people come on the show, obviously, you know, 500 something episodes, and talk about self-storage. And we always hear about the pros of self-storage. What do you think are some of the cons of being in self-storage?   Kris Bennett  07:59 Oh, right now, the biggest one is the amount of competition to purchase deals, and the high prices and low cap rates as a result. So people, they look at the high level, the way they like the pros, like you said, and we could talk about that, or whatever. But you know, all and storage is great. Let's get into it. And you have coaches and people out there that people can, you know, pay to help them find deals, and you can follow different podcasts, et cetera, to help you figure out how to find a deal and close on a deal, which is all great. That's all the mechanics of it. But you don't realize that, bro, these are expensive assets. This is not like picking up bird nests off the ground or something like that. Right? This is very difficult to do. And I don't think people realize that is one of the cons. There's so much capital piling into self-storage. Right now, the misconception is that oh, as interest rates go up, prices will come down. Mathematically yes, that should be the case. But because there's so much demand and so much capital out there that's flowing into self-storage, prices are staying high, they're not coming down just yet. We might see it come down later this year, depends on really where interest rates go. But right now that's not the case. Another con is the fragmented ownership and the mom and pop type ownership is great. But mom and pops, if you're looking for smaller deals, which I've done that in the past, if you're looking for smaller deals, when I say small, I'm saying maybe 20,000 square feet plus or minus somewhere in there, then they don't have good record keeping. They're sometimes difficult to deal with. When they send you, I've done deals with a guy literally sent a photo of a unit mix that he drew by hand because he didn't have records to send me the unit mix. Right? So you have to be ready to deal with that kind of stuff. And when you go to if you're using the bank for financing, the bank is going to want to see some sort of financial history there. Sometimes mom and pops keep all their businesses commingled into one P&L, and you got to figure out what the heck is that he's got a car business, a storage business, and he's got some single-family rentals. And it all comes into here and he's telling me it's this but I can't think... So you're gonna be scratching your head with those kinds of deals. If you go to institutional, larger deals. You don't have that problem but smaller deals, you could run into that problem. The other side of it is because the pro is it's an inflation hedge. I'm sure some people have heard that now rates are going up. So you can raise your rental rates/ Well, you can, but let's say you raise your rental rates on all your tenants 10 bucks every month. Someone's gonna get mad and move out, you're gonna make... You can't just raise rates, like every month, that's not, it doesn't work that way. Maybe once every six months? Yeah. Once every month? No, that doesn't work that way. Conversely, or the opposite of that is when rates come down, you're susceptible to that as well. So if the market is lowering rates for 10 by 10s, you know, within a three-mile radius of your facility, you are either you're going to be the highest because you're the best, you know, Class A really nice facility, you can kind of lead the market. But if you're not that, then you're probably in a race to the bottom right. So that's something that you have to think about. If you're battling REITs and whatnot, it can become a race to the bottom, where they're now renting a 10 by 10, for 50 bucks. And if you do the same thing, you're gonna go broke, you know, so there's things to think about the reverse of the pros are sometimes can also be cons.   Sam Wilson  10:56 Right. And I like that thanks for taking the time to break down some of the barriers or the obstacles in the industry. But I think also inside of those obstacles, that's what creates opportunity. Yeah. You mean, you guys have found a way to kind of work around all of those moving pieces and say, Okay, we still see opportunity, here are some things to be certainly aware of.   Kris Bennett  11:15 You have to set up investor expectations. If you're raising capital from investors, we've run into this issue in the past, I've run into this issue in the past where you set expectations, you send them an OM of what you're going to do for your syndication docs or whatever, hey, we're going to go out and find 10 deals and we're going to give you this return or whatever, then the market shifts and now returns are lower than now you're stuck, right? So you have to set investor expectations. Guys, you're jumping into this business. Storage is wonderful, but 10% return cash on cash, your one is probably not going to happen unless you find a needle in a haystack. A massive haystack. Right? So it's probably not going to happen. So you have to set those expectations and where we're at in the market right now. This is a tough business to be in. But there are opportunities, and there's reasons why so much capital is jumping into self-storage, There's got to be a little discipline in what you're going after.   Sam Wilson  12:02 When you set those expectations for investors, I don't care how you set it, if you say hey, look, you know, like you said, it's a tough business, you know, you're not gonna get a 10% cash on cash return. How do you attract capital?   Kris Bennett  12:12 Well, where else are you gonna go? So investors need to look at the universe of investments, right? If they like the stock market, they like bonds, they like whatever, and I'm not negative on any of that stuff. A lot of real estate investors, Oh, don't put your mind stop. No, no, I think people can make a lot of money in the stock market. So if you'd like stocks you'd like, whatever, that's fine. If you're looking at real estate, okay, what's the investable universe of real estate, you have multifamily, retail, office, industrial, etc. Okay, well, we're all the returns there for the risk that I'm taking on? Risk and return. Not just both, if it's high return, there's got to be high risk somewhere, even if it's not immediately disclosed or fully understood. Okay. So if you will go back and look at REIT returns over the last 20 years, you can find that data on REIT.com. And download it, anybody can do that. And you can see returns for publicly-traded REITs all the different sectors, data centers, multifamily, etc. And you can compare year over year and kind of do an analysis, self-storage has one of the best returns of all property types. So what does that mean? Higher returns at some point will push more investors into that asset class driving down returns because there is less risk. That's why bonds return so little because there's very little risk associated with bonds, whereas cryptocurrency has a very high potential return, but very high risk and a lot of volatility and swings in the market. So if investors are educated on their own, I'm not saying they're not dumb or whatever, but I'm saying if they educate themselves on all of those options, the investable universe of what I can't invest in, and what real estate looks like, what's the risk-return tradeoff, then they will understand okay, storage is a great bet.   Sam Wilson  13:45 Love it. Absolutely love it. Kris, what is something you are curious about right now?   Kris Bennett  13:50 How to find more deals really right now. So while I'm working on that, we're doing a couple of things a source off-market deals, working with a couple of brokers to do that for us. And then I picked up a book I'm reading through so I can't recommend it yet. But it's actually been very good so far on helping me understand, you know, what I should do as far as just staying in front of people networking and those sorts of things. So that's what I'm trying to work on at this moment.   Sam Wilson  14:12 Got it, and that was my next question for you. What do you read now? So if you have another book that you want to recommend that you might have been reading or just finished reading.   Kris Bennett  14:20 Yeah, I finished Stephen Schwarzman's book, I have it over there, "What It Takes." I listened to audiobooks and so that was a really good one. I actually liked his story and the tips he gives at the very end. I think one of them always stands out to me is to, I'm just summarizing here, but to basically dream big dreams, set big goals, those are the things you should go after. And I really liked Gary Keller as well. "The One Thing" and "The Millionaire Real Estate [Agent]," those are great books. He focuses more on single-family there or just units of multifamily and that kind of thing, but the concept is still the same. And I really like Gary Keller's stuff. So those two things go together, set big goals, because those are the things worth going after, so.   Sam Wilson  14:58 Love it. Kris, if our listeners want to get in touch with you or learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?   Kris Bennett  15:02 They can find me on LinkedIn. Just search Kris. Kris with a K. K-R-I-S Bennett. Kris Bennett on LinkedIn. They could also send me an email. I may not respond right away. K-R-I-S @ passiveinvesting.com   Sam Wilson  15:13 Thank you, Kris for your time. Have a great rest your day.    Kris Bennett  15:15 Awesome. Thanks, Sam. Appreciate it.    Sam Wilson  15:16 Hey, thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate Podcast. If you can do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever platform it is you use to listen, if you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories so appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.

Pivoting from multifamily to hotels after COVID with Mike Stohler and Alex Kingman.Join our multifamily investing community for in-depth courses and live networking with like-minded apartment investors at https://www.thetribeoftitans.infoLink to subscribe to YouTube channel: https://tinyurl.com/SubYouTubeDiaryPo...Follow us on:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DiaryAptInv/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/diary_of_an...----Mike Stohler is a former commercial airline pilot, Navy veteran and co-founder at Gateway Private Equity Group, a real estate investment firm whose portfolio has included hotels, multifamily, and residential properties. Between apartment complexes, houses, and hotels, Mike has owned or operated over 1300 units. Seeking value-add opportunities and higher returns, Mike pivoted from multi-family to hotels and now focuses exclusively in this niche.Learn more about him:Website: www.gatewaype.comRicher Geek Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-richer-geek/id1463986967----Alex is a full-time professional real estate investor with 4+ years of experience in the industry. She has an extensive background in business, investing, sales, and marketing, spanning over 9 years. Before going full-time into real estate, Alex was one of the top 15 salespersons in the country selling Airstream travel trailers, grossing over $5MM in sales for the company. In her free time she enjoys songwriting, reading, doing almost any outdoor activity, practicing jiu jitsu, and hanging out with her family and friends.@alexkingman