Podcasts about slackbot

On today's Heavy Networking, we'll discuss building a Slackbot wired to an AI and trained on your own organization's knowledge. The potential use cases for network operations are fascinating, and today's guest, Kyler Middleton is here to explain the finer details on how to do it and point us to free resources created so that... Read more »

On today's Heavy Networking, we'll discuss building a Slackbot wired to an AI and trained on your own organization's knowledge. The potential use cases for network operations are fascinating, and today's guest, Kyler Middleton is here to explain the finer details on how to do it and point us to free resources created so that... Read more »

On today's Heavy Networking, we'll discuss building a Slackbot wired to an AI and trained on your own organization's knowledge. The potential use cases for network operations are fascinating, and today's guest, Kyler Middleton is here to explain the finer details on how to do it and point us to free resources created so that... Read more »

After 8 years designing at Meta, George Kedenburg III pulled a 180 and joined Humane as a design lead. So this conversation is a deep dive into designing AI products and how the role of product designer evolves in an AI-native company:How to become a creative problem solverHow George navigates ambiguity at HumaneWhy there's no such thing as an edge case with AIWhat George learned while using AI to learn PythonHow AI is reshaping the landscape for software designWhy George created a Slackbot to prototype his ideasWhy designing AI products is a bit like designing a kitchena lot morePushing past the pixelsThe real value of design is being able to look at an ambiguous situation and understand what you should explore.Rectangles so happen to be the most common way to express that value. But the real skill is creative problem solving.Working at a company like Humane forces designers to contribute design thinking beyond the pixels.Prompt design > prompt engineeringIf the AI model is a chef, then you're responsible for designing the kitchen.You don't know what the user will order, so it's a lot of trial and error to ensure you have the right data on hand at the right moments.It's no different than thinking through drop-off in an onboarding flow. Which is why George views working with these models as “prompt design” rather than “prompt engineering”There are no AI edge casesWhen you're prototyping AI products, your prototypes don't “break” or “fall over” like they do in Figma. That's because the boundaries of what exists in the prototype become much blurrier.Instead of designing contained flows, you're laying a foundation and allowing the model to extrapolate out from there. There are no more hard edges.George mentions Claude Artifacts as an example of someone putting the pieces together in the right order

Brought to you by TogetherLetters & Edgewise! In this episode:  Facebook, Instagram, and Threads were all down Red Sea cables have been damaged, disrupting internet traffic Google Pauses Gemini's Image Generator After It Was Accused of Being Racist Against White People Impressive Capacity and Extended Lifespan – Scientists Have Invented Recyclable “Water Batteries” That Won't Catch Fire Peering through Lenovo's transparent laptop into a sci-fi future Moon Lander Is Lying on Its Side but Still Functional, Officials Say Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora: “Jobs Are Going to Be Lost” Spotify HiFi is still MIA after three years, and now so is my subscription Google cut a deal with Reddit for AI training data Reddit files to list IPO on NYSE under the ticker RDDT Weird and Wacky:  Lawyers who voided Elon Musk's pay as excessive want $6 billion fee A former Gizmodo writer changed his name to ‘Slackbot' and stayed undetected for months Tech Rec: Sanjay - Prompter by Elgato  Adam - Elgato Key Light Air Find us here: sanjayparekh.com & adamjwalker.comTech Talk Y'all is a proud production of Edgewise.Media. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/techtalkyall/message

MLOps podcast #193 with Pierre Salvy, Head of Engineering at Cambrium, LLM in Material Production co-hosted by Stephen Batifol. // Abstract Delve into the world of proteins, genetic engineering, and the intersection of AI and biotech. Pierre explains how his company is using advanced models to design proteins with specific properties, even creating a vegan collagen for cosmetics. By harnessing the potential of AI, they aim to revolutionize sustainability, uncovering a future of lab-grown meats, molecular cheese, and less harmful plastics, confronting regulatory barriers and decoding the syntax and grammar of proteins. // Bio Head of Engineering at Cambrium, a biotech company utilising genAI to design sustainable protein biomaterials for the future. Pierre spent the last decade researching ways to make computers calculate better biological systems. This is a critical step to engineering more sustainable ways to make the products we use every day, which is their mission at Cambrium. // MLOps Jobs board https://mlops.pallet.xyz/jobs // MLOps Swag/Merch https://mlops-community.myshopify.com/ // Related Links Website: cambrium.bio --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ------------- Join our slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/ Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/ Connect with Stephen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-batifol/ Connect with Pierre on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/psalvy/ Timestamps: [00:00] Pierre's preferred coffee [00:10] Takeaways [05:10] Please like, share, and subscribe to our MLOps channels! [05:25] Weights and Biases ad [07:52] Ski story [09:54] Pierre's career trajectory [13:35] From employee #2 to hiring a team [14:42] From employee #2 to head of engineering [15:50] Uncomfortable things to say essential for growth and effectiveness [18:27] From biotech to engineering [21:10] LLMs at Cambrium [24:26] Slackbot [25:43] Quick and Easy Solutions [26:47] Products created at Cambrium [31:56] Impact of EU Regulation on Cambrium [35:39] 2nd Biotech Winter [36:35] Cost of error vs service not working [38:00] Protein Synthesis and Mutations [40:03] Large-Scale System Engineering Challenges [43:28] Expensive Factors in Experiments [44:39] LLMs vs Protein Models [47:03] Protein Design with LLMs [49:43] Eco-Friendly Product Vision [53:28] Space glue [54:00] Wrap up

On this episode of Ruby for All, Andrew and Julie are joined by guest, Josh Goldberg, who's an Open Source Developer and former mentor of Julie. In today's conversation, Andrew, Julie, and Josh discuss the benefits of having a good manager and how to establish trust in a manager-employee relationship. There's also a conversation on the importance of feedback and the different ways people like to receive it, as well as the importance of personal connections in the workplace, and tips for keeping track of people's preferences and goals.  Hit download to learn more now! [00:02:49] We start with Josh telling us a story about a former manager and the importance of a manager helping employees understand their strengths and weaknesses.[00:03:47] We hear some advice that Josh received that benefited him such as focusing on areas of growth that will benefit both the employee and the company. [00:04:28] What is a dependency injection and what are some benefits with it?[00:06:52] Julie, Andrew, Josh have a conversation about establishing trust as a manager with the people that you manage. They mention the value of a manger being authentic, advocating for employees, and adapting their communication style to fit individual employees' preferences. [00:10:01] If you're establishing a new relationship with a new manager, Josh gives us some steps on what to do.  He mentions a great book, Checklist Manifesto, and being a big checklist person. [00:11:58] Andrew discusses the importance of feedback from managers and the different ways people like to receive it. [00:12:32] Are you familiar with the concept of the “double down sandwich” or “feedback sandwich?” Josh explains and there's a conversation on being praised and recognized by managers, and Andrew touches on using Slackbot, and Know Your Team at Podia.[00:16:19] Some other good practices for manager managing relationships are discussed and Josh talks about using a Notion database table of everyone he talks to and to keep track of different things, and Andrew uses Obsidian for his database.[00:20:17] Julie shares that her manager writes notes and keeps track of their conversations for their one-on-ones, and she writes quarterly goals. She also mentions the acronym SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound) in relation to setting goals.[00:21:39] The topic of how to handle disagreements or problems with team members and managers in the workplace is discussed. [00:24:49] Julie, Andrew, and Josh talk about the importance of communication and advocating for oneself, and the need for managers to provide resources and support for employees to improve and learn new skills.Panelists:Andrew MasonJulie J.Guest:Josh GoldbergSponsors:HoneybadgerAvo Admin for RailsLinks:Andrew Mason TwitterAndrew Mason WebsiteJulie J. TwitterJulie J. WebsiteJosh Goldberg WebsiteJosh Goldberg TwitterLearning TypeScript: Enhance Your Web Development Skills Using Type-Safe JavaScript by Josh GoldbergDependency injectionThe Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul GawandeKnow Your TeamNotionObsidian

Jack Roehrig, Technology Evangelist at Uptycs, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud for a conversation about security awareness, ChatGPT, and more. Jack describes some of the recent developments at Uptycs, which leads to fascinating insights about the paradox of scaling engineering teams large and small. Jack also shares how his prior experience working with AskJeeves.com has informed his perspective on ChatGPT and its potential threat to Google. Jack and Corey also discuss the evolution of Reddit, and the nuances of developing security awareness trainings that are approachable and effective.About JackJack has been passionate about (obsessed with) information security and privacy since he was a child. Attending 2600 meetings before reaching his teenage years, and DEF CON conferences shortly after, he quickly turned an obsession into a career. He began his first professional, full-time information-security role at the world's first internet privacy company; focusing on direct-to-consumer privacy. After working the startup scene in the 90's, Jack realized that true growth required a renaissance education. He enrolled in college, completing almost six years of coursework in a two-year period. Studying a variety of disciplines, before focusing on obtaining his two computer science degrees. University taught humility, and empathy. These were key to pursuing and achieving a career as a CSO lasting over ten years. Jack primarily focuses his efforts on mentoring his peers (as well as them mentoring him), advising young companies (especially in the information security and privacy space), and investing in businesses that he believes are both innovative, and ethical.Links Referenced: Uptycs: https://www.uptycs.com/ jack@jackroehrig.com: mailto:jack@jackroehrig.com jroehrig@uptycs.com: mailto:jroehrig@uptycs.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey:  LANs of the late 90's and early 2000's were a magical place to learn about computers, hang out with your friends, and do cool stuff like share files, run websites & game servers, and occasionally bring the whole thing down with some ill-conceived software or network configuration. That's not how things are done anymore, but what if we could have a 90's style LAN experience along with the best parts of the 21st century internet? (Most of which are very hard to find these days.) Tailscale thinks we can, and I'm inclined to agree. With Tailscale I can use trusted identity providers like Google, or Okta, or GitHub to authenticate users, and automatically generate & rotate keys to authenticate devices I've added to my network. I can also share access to those devices with friends and teammates, or tag devices to give my team broader access. And that's the magic of it, your data is protected by the simple yet powerful social dynamics of small groups that you trust. Try now - it's free forever for personal use. I've been using it for almost two years personally, and am moderately annoyed that they haven't attempted to charge me for what's become an absolutely-essential-to-my-workflow service.Corey: Kentik provides Cloud and NetOps teams with complete visibility into hybrid and multi-cloud networks. Ensure an amazing customer experience, reduce cloud and network costs, and optimize performance at scale — from internet to data center to container to cloud. Learn how you can get control of complex cloud networks at www.kentik.com, and see why companies like Zoom, Twitch, New Relic, Box, Ebay, Viasat, GoDaddy, booking.com, and many, many more choose Kentik as their network observability platform. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted episode is brought to us by our friends at Uptycs and they have once again subjected Jack Roehrig, Technology Evangelist, to the slings, arrows, and other various implements of misfortune that I like to hurl at people. Jack, thanks for coming back. Brave of you.Jack: I am brave [laugh]. Thanks for having me. Honestly, it was a blast last time and I'm looking forward to having fun this time, too.Corey: It's been a month or two, ish. Basically, the passing of time is one of those things that is challenging for me to wrap my head around in this era. What have you folks been up to? What's changed since the last time we've spoken? What's coming out of Uptycs? What's new? What's exciting? Or what's old with a new and exciting description?Jack: Well, we've GA'ed our agentless architecture scanning system. So, this is one of the reasons why I joined Uptycs that was so fascinating to me is they had kind of nailed XDR. And I love the acronyms: XDR and CNAPP is what we're going with right now. You know, and we have to use these acronyms so that people can understand what we do without me speaking for hours about it. But in short, our agentless system looks at the current resting risk state of production environment without the need to deploy agents, you know, as we talked about last time.And then the XDR piece, that's the thing that you get to justify the extra money on once you go to your CTO or whoever your boss is and show them all that risk that you've uncovered with our agentless piece. It's something I've done in the past with technologies that were similar, but Uptycs is continuously improving, our anomaly detection is getting better, our threat intel team is getting better. I looked at our engineering team the other day. I think we have over 300 engineers or over 250 at least. That's a lot.Corey: It's always wild for folks who work in small shops to imagine what that number of engineers could possibly be working on. Then you go and look at some of the bigger shops and you talk to them and you hear about all the different ways their stuff is built and how they all integrate together and you come away, on some level, surprised that they're able to work with that few engineers. So, it feels like there's a different perspective on scale. And no one has it right, but it is easy, I think, in the layperson's mindset to hear that a company like Twitter, for example, before it got destroyed, had 5000 engineers. And, “What are they all doing?” And, “Well, I can see where that question comes from and the answer is complicated and nuanced, which means that no one is going to want to hear it if it doesn't fit into a tweet itself.” But once you get into the space, you start realizing that everything is way more complicated than it looks.Jack: It is. Yeah. You know, it's interesting that you mention that about Twitter. I used to work for a company called Interactive Corporation. And Interactive Corporation is an internet conglomerate that owns a lot of those things that are at the corners of the internet that not many people know about. And also, like, the entire online dating space. So, I mean, it was a blast working there, but at one point in my career, I got heavily involved in M&A. And I was given the nickname Jack the RIFer. RIF standing for Reduction In Force.Corey: Oof.Jack: So, Jack the RIFer was—yeah [laugh] I know, right?Corey: It's like Buzzsaw Ted. Like, when you bring in the CEO with the nickname of Buzzsaw in there, it's like, “Hmm, I wonder who's going to hire a lot of extra people?” Not so much.Jack: [laugh]. Right? It's like, hey, they said they were sending, “Jack out to hang out with us,” you know, in whatever country we're based out of. And I go out there and I would drink them under the table. And I'd find out the dirty secrets, you know.We would be buying these companies because they would need optimized. But it would be amazing to me to see some of these companies that were massive and they produced what I thought was so little, and then to go on to analyze everybody's job and see that they were also intimately necessary.Corey: Yeah. And the question then becomes, if you were to redesign what that company did from scratch. Which again, is sort of an architectural canard; it was the easiest thing in the world to do is to design an architecture from scratch on a whiteboard with almost an arbitrary number of constraints. The problem is that most companies grow organically and in order to get to that idealized architecture, you've got to turn everything off and rebuild it from scratch. The problem is getting to something that's better without taking 18 months of downtime while you rebuild everything. Most companies cannot and will not sustain that.Jack: Right. And there's another way of looking at it, too, which is something that's been kind of a thought experiment for me for a long time. One of the companies that I worked with back at IC was Ask Jeeves. Remember Ask Jeeves?Corey: Oh, yes. That was sort of the closest thing we had at the time to natural language search.Jack: Right. That was the whole selling point. But I don't believe we actually did any natural language processing back then [laugh]. So, back in those days, it was just a search index. And if you wanted to redefine search right now and you wanted to find something that was like truly a great search engine, what would you do differently?If you look at the space right now with ChatGPT and with Google, and there's all this talk about, well, ChatGPT is the next Google killer. And then people, like, “Well, Google has Lambda.” What are they worried about ChatGPT for? And then you've got the folks at Google who are saying, “ChatGPT is going to destroy us,” and the folks in Google who are saying, “ChatGPT's got nothing on us.” So, if I had to go and do it all over from scratch for search, it wouldn't have anything to do with ChatGPT. I would go back and make a directed, cyclical graph and I would use node weight assignments based on outbound links. Which is exactly what Google was with the original PageRank algorithm, right [laugh]?Corey: I've heard this described as almost a vector database in various terms depending upon what it is that—how it is you're structuring this and what it looks like. It's beyond my ken personally, but I do see that there's an awful lot of hype around ChatGPT these days, and I am finding myself getting professionally—how do I put it—annoyed by most of it. I think that's probably the best way to frame it.Jack: Isn't it annoying?Corey: It is because it's—people ask, “Oh, are you worried that it's going to take over what you do?” And my answer is, “No. I'm worried it's going to make my job harder more than anything else.” Because back when I was a terrible student, great, write an essay on this thing, or write a paper on this. It needs to be five pages long.And I would write what I thought was a decent coverage of it and it turned out to be a page-and-a-half. And oh, great. What I need now is a whole bunch of filler fluff that winds up taking up space and word count but doesn't actually get us to anywhere—Jack: [laugh].Corey: —that is meaningful or useful. And it feels like that is what GPT excels at. If I worked in corporate PR for a lot of these companies, I would worry because it takes an announcement that fits in a tweet—again, another reference to that ailing social network—and then it turns it into an arbitrary length number of pages. And it's frustrating for me just because that's a lot more nonsense I have to sift through in order to get the actual, viable answer to whatever it is I'm going for here.Jack: Well, look at that viable answer. That's a really interesting point you're making. That fluff, right, when you're writing that essay. Yeah, that one-and-a-half pages out. That's gold. That one-and-a-half pages, that's the shit. That's the stuff you want, right? That's the good shit [laugh]. Excuse my French. But ChatGPT is what's going to give you that filler, right? The GPT-3 dataset, I believe, was [laugh] I think it was—there's a lot of Reddit question-and-answers that were used to train it. And it was trained, I believe—the data that it was trained with ceased to be recent in 2021, right? It's already over a year old. So, if your teacher asked you to write a very contemporary essay, ChatGPT might not be able to help you out much. But I don't think that that kind of gets the whole thing because you just said filler, right? You can get it to write that extra three-and-a-half pages from that five pages you're required to write. Well, hey, teachers shouldn't be demanding that you write five pages anyways. I once heard, a friend of mine arguing about one presidential candidate saying, “This presidential candidate speaks at a third-grade level.” And the other person said, “Well, your presidential candidate speaks at a fourth-grade level.” And I said, “I wish I could convey presidential ideas at a level that a third or a fourth grader could understand” You know? Right?Corey: On some level, it's actually not a terrible thing because if you can only convey a concept at an extremely advanced reading level, then how well do you understand—it felt for a long time like that was the problem with AI itself and machine-learning and the rest. The only value I saw was when certain large companies would trot out someone who was themselves deep into the space and their first language was obviously math and they spoke with a heavy math accent through everything that they had to say. And at the end of it, I didn't feel like I understood what they were talking about any better than I had at the start. And in time, it took things like ChatGPT to say, “Oh, this is awesome.” People made fun of the Hot Dog/Not A Hot Dog App, but that made it understandable and accessible to people. And I really think that step is not given nearly enough credit.Jack: Yeah. That's a good point. And it's funny, you mentioned that because I started off talking about search and redefining search, and I think I use the word digraph for—you know, directed gra—that's like a stupid math concept; nobody understands what that is. I learned that in discrete mathematics a million years ago in college, right? I mean, I'm one of the few people that remembers it because I worked in search for so long.Corey: Is that the same thing is a directed acyclic graph, or am I thinking of something else?Jack: Ah you're—that's, you know, close. A directed acyclic graph has no cycles. So, that means you'll never go around in a loop. But of course, if you're just mapping links from one website to another website, A can link from B, which can then link back to A, so that creates a cycle, right? So, an acyclic graph is something that doesn't have that cycle capability in it.Corey: Got it. Yeah. Obviously, my higher math is somewhat limited. It turns out that cloud economics doesn't generally tend to go too far past basic arithmetic. But don't tell them. That's the secret of cloud economics.Jack: I think that's most everything, I mean, even in search nowadays. People aren't familiar with graph theory. I'll tell you what people are familiar with. They're familiar with Google. And they're familiar with going to Google and Googling for something, and when you Google for something, you typically want results that are recent.And if you're going to write an essay, you typically don't care because only the best teachers out there who might not be tricked by ChatGPT—honestly, they probably would be, but the best teachers are the ones that are going to be writing the syllabi that require the recency. Almost nobody's going to be writing syllabi that requires essay recency. They're going to reuse the same syllabus they've been using for ten years.Corey: And even that is an interesting question there because if we talk about the results people want from search, you're right, I have to imagine the majority of cases absolutely care about recency. But I can think of a tremendous number of counterexamples where I have been looking for things explicitly and I do not want recent results, sometimes explicitly. Other times because no, I'm looking for something that was talked about heavily in the 1960s and not a lot since. I don't want to basically turn up a bunch of SEO garbage that trawled it from who knows where. I want to turn up some of the stuff that was digitized and then put forward. And that can be a deceptively challenging problem in its own right.Jack: Well, if you're looking for stuff has been digitized, you could use archive.org or one of the web archive projects. But if you look into the web archive community, you will notice that they're very secretive about their data set. I think one of the best archive internet search indices that I know of is in Portugal. It's a Portuguese project.I can't recall the name of it. But yeah, there's a Portuguese project that is probably like the axiomatic standard or like the ultimate prototype of how internet archiving should be done. Search nowadays, though, when you say things like, “I want explicitly to get this result,” search does not want to show you explicitly what you want. Search wants to show you whatever is going to generate them the most advertising revenue. And I remember back in the early search engine marketing days, back in the algorithmic trading days of search engine marketing keywords, you could spend $4 on an ad for flowers and if you typed the word flowers into Google, you just—I mean, it was just ad city.You typed the word rehabilitation clinic into Google, advertisements everywhere, right? And then you could type certain other things into Google and you would receive a curated list. These things are obvious things that are identified as flaws in the secrecy of the PageRank algorithm, but I always thought it was interesting because ChatGPT takes care of a lot of the stuff that you don't want to be recent, right? It provides this whole other end to this idea that we've been trained not to use search for, right?So, I was reviewing a contract the other day. I had this virtual assistant and English is not her first language. And she and I red-lined this contract for four hours. It was brutal because I kept on having to Google—for lack of a better word—I had to Google all these different terms to try and make sense of it. Two days later, I'm playing around with ChatGPT and I start typing some very abstract commands to it and I swear to you, it generated that same contract I was red-lining. Verbatim. I was able to get into generating multiple [laugh] clauses in the contract. And by changing the wording in ChatGPT to save, “Create it, you know, more plaintiff-friendly,” [laugh] that contract all of a sudden, was red-lined in a way that I wanted it to be [laugh].Corey: This is a fascinating example of this because I'm married to a corporate attorney who does this for a living, and talking to her and other folks in her orbit, the problem they have with it is that it works to a point, on a limited basis, but it then veers very quickly into terms that are nonsensical, terms that would absolutely not pass muster, but sound like something a lawyer would write. And realistically, it feels like what we've built is basically the distillation of a loud, overconfident white guy in tech because—Jack: Yes.Corey: —they don't know exactly what they're talking about, but by God is it confident when it says it.Jack: [laugh]. Yes. You hit the nail on that. Ah, thank you. Thank you.Corey: And there's as an easy way to prove this is pick any topic in the world in which you are either an expert or damn close to it or know more than the average bear about and ask ChatGPT to explain that to you. And then notice all the things that glosses over or what it gets subtly wrong or is outright wrong about, but it doesn't ever call that out. It just says it with the same confident air of a failing interview candidate who gets nine out of ten questions absolutely right, but the one they don't know they bluff on, and at that point, you realize you can't trust them because you never know if they're bluffing or they genuinely know the answer.Jack: Wow, that is a great analogy. I love that. You know, I mentioned earlier that the—I believe the part of the big portion of the GPT-3 training data was based on Reddit questions and answers. And now you can't categorize Reddit into a single community, of course; that would be just as bad as the way Reddit categories [laugh] our community, but Reddit did have a problem a wh—I remember, there was the Ellen Pao debacle for Reddit. And I don't know if it was so much of a debacle if it was more of a scapegoat situation, but—Corey: I'm very much left with a sense that it's the scapegoat. But still, continue.Jack: Yeah, we're adults. We know what happened here, right? Ellen Pao is somebody who is going through some very difficult times in her career. She's hired to be a martyr. They had a community called fatpeoplehate, right?I mean, like, Reddit had become a bizarre place. I used Reddit when I was younger and it didn't have subreddits. It was mostly about programming. It was more like Hacker News. And then I remember all these people went to Hacker News, and a bunch of them stayed at Reddit and there was this weird limbo of, like, the super pretentious people over at Hacker News.And then Reddit started to just get weirder and weirder. And then you just described ChatGPT in a way that just struck me as so Reddit, you know? It's like some guy mansplaining some answer. It starts off good and then it's overconfidently continues to state nonsensical things.Corey: Oh yeah, I was a moderator of the legal advice and personal finance subreddits for years, and—Jack: No way. Were you really?Corey: Oh, absolutely. Those corners were relatively reasonable. And like, “Well, wait a minute, you're not a lawyer. You're correct and I'm also not a financial advisor.” However, in both of those scenarios, what people were really asking for was, “How do I be a functional adult in society?”In high school curricula in the United States, we insist that people go through four years of English literature class, but we don't ever sit down and tell them how to file their taxes or how to navigate large transactions that are going to be the sort of thing that you encounter in adulthood: buying a car, signing a lease. And it's more or less yeah, at some point, you wind up seeing someone with a circumstance that yeah, talk to a lawyer. Don't take advice on the internet for this. But other times, it's no, “You cannot sue a dog. You have to learn to interact with people as a grown-up. Here's how to approach that.” And that manifests as legal questions or finance questions, but it all comes down to I have been left on prepared for the world I live in by the school system. How do I wind up addressing these things? And that is what I really enjoyed.Jack: That's just prolifically, prolifically sound. I'm almost speechless. You're a hundred percent correct. I remember those two subreddits. It always amazes me when I talk to my friends about finances.I'm not a financial person. I mean, I'm an investor, right, I'm a private equity investor. And I was on a call with a young CEO that I've been advising for while. He runs a security awareness training company, and he's like, you know, you've made 39% off of your investment three months. And I said, “I haven't made anything off of my investment.”I bought a safe and, you know—it's like, this is conversion equity. And I'm sitting here thinking, like, I don't know any of the stuff. And I'm like, I talk to my buddies in the—you know, that are financial planners and I ask them about finances, and it's—that's also interesting to me because financial planning is really just about when are you going to buy a car? When are you going to buy a house? When are you going to retire? And what are the things, the securities, the companies, what should you do with your money rather than store it under your mattress?And I didn't really think about money being stored under a mattress until the first time I went to Eastern Europe where I am now. I'm in Hungary right now. And first time I went to Eastern Europe, I think I was in Belgrade in Serbia. And my uncle at the time, he was talking about how he kept all of his money in cash in a bank account. In Serbian Dinar.And Serbian Dinar had already gone through hyperinflation, like, ten years prior. Or no, it went through hyperinflation in 1996. So, it was not—it hadn't been that long [laugh]. And he was asking me for financial advice. And here I am, I'm like, you know, in my early-20s.And I'm like, I don't know what you should do with your money, but don't put it under your mattress. And that's the kind of data that Reddit—that ChatGPT seems to have been trained on, this GPT-3 data, it seems like a lot of [laugh] Redditors, specifically Redditors sub-2001. I haven't used Reddit very much in the last half a decade or so.Corey: Yeah, I mean, I still use it in a variety of different ways, but I got out of both of those cases, primarily due to both time constraints, as well as my circumstances changed to a point where the things I spent my time thinking about in a personal finance sense, no longer applied to an awful lot of folk because the common wisdom is aimed at folks who are generally on a something that resembles a recurring salary where they can calculate in a certain percentage raises, in most cases, for the rest of their life, plan for other things. But when I started the company, a lot of the financial best practices changed significantly. And what makes sense for me to do becomes actively harmful for folks who are not in similar situations. And I just became further and further attenuated from the way that you generally want to give common case advice. So, it wasn't particularly useful at that point anymore.Jack: Very. Yeah, that's very well put. I went through a similar thing. I watched Reddit quite a bit through the Ellen Pao thing because I thought it was a very interesting lesson in business and in social engineering in general, right? And we saw this huge community, this huge community of people, and some of these people were ridiculously toxic.And you saw a lot of groupthink, you saw a lot of manipulation. There was a lot of heavy-handed moderation, there was a lot of too-late moderation. And then Ellen Pao comes in and I'm, like, who the heck is Ellen Pao? Oh, Ellen Pao is this person who has some corporate scandal going on. Oh, Ellen Pao is a scapegoat.And here we are, watching a community being socially engineered, right, into hating the CEO who's just going to be let go or step down anyways. And now they ha—their conversations have been used to train intelligence, which is being used to socially engineer people [laugh] into [crosstalk 00:22:13].Corey: I mean you just listed something else that's been top-of-mind for me lately, where it is time once again here at The Duckbill Group for us to go through our annual security awareness training. And our previous vendor has not been terrific, so I start looking to see what else is available in that space. And I see that the world basically divides into two factions when it comes to this. The first is something that is designed to check the compliance boxes at big companies. And some of the advice that those things give is actively harmful as in, when I've used things like that in the past, I would have an addenda that I would send out to the team. “Yeah, ignore this part and this part and this part because it does not work for us.”And there are other things that start trying to surface it all the time as it becomes a constant awareness thing, which makes sense, but it also doesn't necessarily check any contractual boxes. So it's, isn't there something in between that makes sense? I found one company that offered a Slackbot that did this, which sounded interesting. The problem is it was the most condescendingly rude and infuriatingly slow experience that I've had. It demanded itself a whole bunch of permissions to the Slack workspace just to try it out, so I had to spin up a false Slack workspace for testing just to see what happens, and it was, start to finish, the sort of thing that I would not inflict upon my team. So, the hell with it and I moved over to other stuff now. And I'm still looking, but it's the sort of thing where I almost feel like, this is something ChatGPT could have built and cool, give me something that sounds confident, but it's often wrong. Go.Jack: [laugh]. Yeah, Uptycs actually is—we have something called a Otto M8—spelled O-T-T-O space M and then the number eight—and I personally think that's the cutest name ever for Slackbot. I don't have a picture of him to show you, but I would personally give him a bit of a makeover. He's a little nerdy for my likes. But he's got—it's one of those Slackbots.And I'm a huge compliance geek. I was a CISO for over a decade and I know exactly what you mean with that security awareness training and ticking those boxes because I was the guy who wrote the boxes that needed to be ticked because I wrote those control frameworks. And I'm not a CISO anymore because I've already subjected myself to an absolute living hell for long enough, at least for now [laugh]. So, I quit the CISO world.Corey: Oh yeah.Jack: Yeah.Corey: And so, much of it also assumes certain things like I've had people reach out to me trying to shill whatever it is they've built in this space. And okay, great. The problem is that they've built something that is aligned at engineers and developers. Go, here you go. And that's awesome, but we are really an engineering-first company.Yes, most people here have an engineering background and we build some internal tooling, but we don't need an entire curriculum on how to secure the tools that we're building as web interfaces and public-facing SaaS because that's not what we do. Not to mention, what am I supposed to do with the accountants in the sales folks and the marketing staff that wind up working on a lot of these things that need to also go through training? Do I want to sit here and teach them about SQL injection attacks? No, Jack. I do not want to teach them that.Jack: No you don't.Corey: I want them to not plug random USB things into the work laptop and to use a password manager. I'm not here trying to turn them into security engineers.Jack: I used to give a presentation and I onboarded every single employee personally for security. And in the presentation, I would talk about password security. And I would have all these complex passwords up. But, like, “You know what? Let me just show you what a hacker does.”And I'd go and load up dhash and I'd type in my old email address. And oh, there's my password, right? And then I would—I copied the cryptographic hash from dhash and I'd paste that into Google. And I'd be like, “And that's how you crack passwords.” Is you Google the cryptographic hash, the insecure cryptographic hash and hope somebody else has already cracked it.But yeah, it's interesting. The security awareness training is absolutely something that's supposed to be guided for the very fundamental everyman employee. It should not be something entirely technical. I worked at a company where—and I love this, by the way; this is one of the best things I've ever read on Slack—and it was not a message that I was privy to. I had to have the IT team pull the Slack logs so that I could read these direct communications. But it was from one—I think it was the controller to the Vice President of accounting, and the VP of accounting says how could I have done this after all of those phishing emails that Jack sent [laugh]?Corey: Oh God, the phishing emails drives me up a wall, too. It's you're basically training your staff not to trust you and waste their time and playing gotcha. It really creates an adversarial culture. I refuse to do that stuff, too.Jack: My phishing emails are fun, all right? I did one where I pretended that I installed a camera in the break room refrigerator, and I said, we've had a problem with food theft out of the Oakland refrigerator and so I've we've installed this webcam. Log into the sketchy website with your username and password. And I got, like, a 14% phish rate. I've used this campaign at multinational companies.I used to travel around the world and I'd grab a mic at the offices that wanted me to speak there and I'd put the mic real close to my head and I say, “Why did you guys click on the link to the Oakland refrigerator?” [laugh]. I said, “You're in Stockholm for God's sake.” Like, it works. Phishing campaigns work.They just don't work if they're dumb, honestly. There's a lot of things that do work in the security awareness space. One of the biggest problems with security awareness is that people seem to think that there's some minimum amount of time an employee should have to spend on security awareness training, which is just—Corey: Right. Like, for example, here in California, we're required to spend two hours on harassment training every so often—I think it's every two years—and—Jack: Every two years. Yes.Corey: —at least for managerial staff. And it's great, but that leads to things such as, “Oh, we're not going to give you a transcript if you can read the video more effectively. You have to listen to it and make sure it takes enough time.” And it's maddening to me just because that is how the law is written. And yes, it's important to obey the law, don't get me wrong, but at the same time, it just feels like it's an intentional time suck.Jack: It is. It is an intentional time suck. I think what happens is a lot of people find ways to game the system. Look, when I did security awareness training, my controls, the way I worded them, didn't require people to take any training whatsoever. The phishing emails themselves satisfied it completely.I worded that into my control framework. I still held the trainings, they still made people take them seriously. And then if we have a—you know, if somebody got phished horrifically, and let's say wired $2 million to Hong Kong—you know who I'm talking about, all right, person who might is probably not listening to this, thankfully—but [laugh] she did. And I know she didn't complete my awareness training. I know she never took any of it.She also wired $2 million to Hong Kong. Well, we never got that money back. But we sure did spend a lot of executive time trying to. I spent a lot of time on the phone, getting passed around from department to department at the FBI. Obviously, the FBI couldn't help us.It was wired from Mexico to Hong Kong. Like the FBI doesn't have anything to do with it. You know, bless them for taking their time to humor me because I needed to humor my CEO. But, you know, I use those awareness training things as a way to enforce the Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct requiring disciplinary action for people who didn't follow the security awareness training.If you had taken the 15 minutes of awareness training that I had asked people to do—I mean, I told them to do it; it was the Code of Conduct; they had to—then there would be no disciplinary action for accidentally wiring that money. But people are pretty darn diligent on not doing things like that. It's just a select few that seems to be the ones that get repeatedly—Corey: And then you have the group conversations. One person screws something up and then you wind up with the emails to everyone. And then you have the people who are basically doing the right thing thinking they're being singled out. And—ugh, management is hard, people is hard, but it feels like a lot of these things could be a lot less hard.Jack: You know, I don't think management is hard. I think management is about empathy. And management is really about just positive reinforce—you know what management is? This is going to sound real pretentious. Management's kind of like raising a kid, you know? You want to have a really well-adjusted kid? Every time that kid says, “Hey, Dad,” answer. [crosstalk 00:30:28]—Corey: Yeah, that's a good—that's a good approach.Jack: I mean, just be there. Be clear, consistent, let them know what to expect. People loved my security program at the places that I've implemented it because it was very clear, it was concise, it was easy to understand, and I was very approachable. If anybody had a security concern and they came to me about it, they would [laugh] not get any shame. They certainly wouldn't get ignored.I don't care if they were reporting the same email I had had reported to me 50 times that day. I would personally thank them. And, you know what I learned? I learned that from raising a kid, you know? It was interesting because it was like, the kid I was raising, when he would ask me a question, I would give him the same answer every time in the same tone. He'd be like, “Hey, Jack, can I have a piece of candy?” Like, “No, your mom says you can't have any candy today.” They'd be like, “Oh, okay.” “Can I have a piece of candy?” And I would be like, “No, your mom says you can't have any candy today.” “Can I have a piece of candy, Jack?” I said, “No. Your mom says he can't have any candy.” And I'd just be like a broken record.And he immediately wouldn't ask me for a piece of candy six different times. And I realized the reason why he was asking me for a piece of candy six different times is because he would get a different response the sixth time or the third time or the second time. It was the inconsistency. Providing consistency and predictability in the workforce is key to management and it's key to keeping things safe and secure.Corey: I think there's a lot of truth to that. I really want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to talk to me about think topics ranging from GPT and ethics to parenting. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Jack: I'm jack@jackroehrig.com, and I'm also jroehrig@uptycs.com. My last name is spelled—heh, no, I'm kidding. It's a J-A-C-K-R-O-E-H-R-I-G dot com. So yeah, hit me up. You will get a response from me.Corey: Excellent. And I will of course include links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Jack: Likewise.Corey: This promoted guest episode has been brought to us by our friends at Uptycs, featuring Jack Roehrig, Technology Evangelist at same. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment ghostwritten for you by ChatGPT so it has absolutely no content worth reading.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

About EmilyEmily Ruppe is a Solutions Engineer at Jeli.io whose greatest accomplishment was once being referred to as “the Bob Ross of incident reviews.” Previously Emily has written hundreds of status posts, incident timelines and analyses at SendGrid, and was a founding member of the Incident Command team at Twilio. She's written on human centered incident management and facilitating incident reviews. Emily believes the most important thing in both life and incidents is having enough snacks.Links Referenced: Jeli.io: https://jeli.io Twitter: https://twitter.com/themortalemily Howie Guide: https://www.jeli.io/howie/welcome TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Logicworks. Getting to the cloud is challenging enough for many places, especially maintaining security, resiliency, cost control, agility, etc, etc, etc. Things break, configurations drift, technology advances, and organizations, frankly, need to evolve. How can you get to the cloud faster and ensure you have the right team in place to maintain success over time? Day 2 matters. Work with a partner who gets it - Logicworks combines the cloud expertise and platform automation to customize solutions to meet your unique requirements. Get started by chatting with a cloud specialist today at snark.cloud/logicworks. That's snark.cloud/logicworksCorey: Cloud native just means you've got more components or microservices than anyone (even a mythical 10x engineer) can keep track of. With OpsLevel, you can build a catalog in minutes and forget needing that mythical 10x engineer. Now, you'll have a 10x service catalog to accompany your 10x service count. Visit OpsLevel.com to learn how easy it is to build and manage your service catalog. Connect to your git provider and you're off to the races with service import, repo ownership, tech docs, and more. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is Emily Ruppe, who's a solutions engineer over at Jeli.io, but her entire career has generally focused around incident management. So, I sort of view her as being my eternal nemesis, just because I like to cause problems by and large and then I make incidents for other people to wind up solving. Emily, thank you for joining me and agreeing to suffer my slings and arrows here.Emily: Yeah. Hey, I like causing problems too. I am a solutions engineer, but sometimes we like to call ourselves problems engineers. So.Corey: Yeah, I'm a problems architect is generally how I tend to view it. But doing the work, ah, one wonders. So, you are a Jeli, where as of this recording, you've been for a year now. And before that, you spent some time over at Twilio slash SendGrid—spoiler, it's kind of the same company, given the way acquisitions tend to work and all. And—Emily: Now, it is.Corey: Yeah. Oh, yeah. You were there during the acquisition.Emily: Mm-hm. Yes, they acquired me and that's why they bought SendGrid.Corey: Indeed. It's a good reason to acquire a company. That one person I want to bring in. Absolutely. So, you started with email and then effectively continued in that general direction, given the Twilio now has eaten that business whole. And that's where I started my career.The one thing I've learned about email systems is that they love to cause problems because it's either completely invisible and no one knows, or suddenly an email didn't go through and everyone's screaming at you. And there's no upside, only down. So, let me ask the obvious question I suspect I know the answer to here. What made you decide to get into incident management?Emily: [laugh]. Well, I joined SendGrid actually, I've, I love mess. I run towards problems. I'm someone who really enjoys that. My ADHD, I hyperfocus, incidents are like that perfect environment of just, like, all of the problems are laying themselves out right in front of you, the distraction is the focus. It's kind of a wonderful place where I really enjoy the flow of that.But I've started in customer support. I've been in technical support and customer—I used to work at the Apple Store, I worked at the Genius Bar for a long time, moved into technical support over the phone, and whenever things broke really bad, I really enjoyed that process and kind of getting involved in incidents. And I came, I was one of two weekend support people at SendGrid, came in during a time of change and growth. And everyone knows that growth, usually exponential growth, usually happens very smoothly and nothing breaks during that time. So… no, there was a lot of incidents.And because I was on the weekend, one of the only people on the weekend, I kind of had to very quickly find my way and learn when do I escalate this. How do I make the determination that this is something that is an incident? And you know, is this worth paging engineers that are on their weekend? And getting involved in incidents and being kind of a core communication between our customers and engineers.Corey: For those who might not have been involved in sufficiently scaled-out environments, that sounds counterintuitive, but one of the things that you learn—very often the hard way—has been that as you continue down the path of building a site out and scaling it, it stops being an issue relatively quickly of, “Is the site up or down?” And instead becomes a question of, “How up is it?” So, it's it doesn't sound obvious until you've lived it, but declaring what is an incident versus what isn't an incident is incredibly nuanced and it's not the sort of thing that lends itself to casual solutions. Because every time a customer gets an error, we should open an incident on that. Well, I've worked at companies that throw dozens of 500 errors every second at their scale. You will never hire enough people to solve that if you do an incident process on even 10% of them.Emily: Yeah. So, I mean, it actually became something that when you join Twilio, they have you create a project using Twilio's API to earn your track jacket, essentially. It's kind of like an onboarding thing. And as they absorbed SendGrid, we all did that onboarding process. And mine was a number for support people to text and it would ask them six questions and if they answered yes to more than two of them, it would text back, “Okay, maybe you should escalate this.”And the questions were pretty simple of, “Can emails be sent?” [laugh]. Can customers log into their website? Are you able to view this particular part of the website? Because it is—with email in particular, at SendGrid in particular—the bulk of it is the email API. So, like, the site being up or down was the easiest type of incident, the easiest thing to flex on because that's so much easier to see.Being able to determine, like, what percentage or what level, like, how many emails are not processing? Are they getting stuck or is this, like, the correct amount of things that should be bouncing because of IP reput—there's, like, a thousand different things. We had kind of this visualization of this mail pipeline that was just a mess of all of these different pipes kind of connected together. And mail could get stuck in a lot of different places, so it was a lot of spending time trying to find that and segwayed into project management. I was a QA for a little while doing QA work.Became a project manager and learned a lot about imposing process because you're supposed to and that sometimes imposing process on teams that are working well can actually destroy them [laugh]. So, I learned a lot of interesting things about process the hard way. And during all of that time that I was doing project management, I kind of accidentally started owning the incident response process because a lot of people left, I had been a part of the incident analysis group as well, and so I kind of became the sole owner of that. And when Twilio purchase SendGrid, I found out they were creating an incident commander team and I just reached out and said, “Here's all of SendGrids incident response stuff. We just created a new Slackbot, I just retrained the entire team on how to talk to each other and recognize when something might be an incident. Please don't rewrite all of this to be Twillio's response process.”And Terry, the person who was putting together that team said, “Excellent. You're going to be [laugh] welcome to Twilio Incident Command. This is your problem and it's a lot worse than you thought because here's all the rest of it.” So yeah, it was really interesting experience coming into technically the same company, but an entirely different company and finding out—like, really trying to learn and understand all of the differences, and you know, the different problems, the different organizational history, the, like, fascia that has been built up between some of these parts of the organization to understand why things are the way that they are within process. It's very interesting.And I kind of get to do it now as my job. I get to learn about the full organizational subtext of [laugh] all of these different companies to understand how incident response works, how incident analysis works, and maybe some of the whys. Like, what are the places where there was a very bad incident, so we put in very specific, very strange process pieces in order to navigate that, or teams that are difficult to work with, so we've built up interesting process around them. So yeah.Corey: It feels like that can almost become ossified if you're not careful because you wind up with a release process that's two thousand steps long, and each one of them is there to wind up avoiding a specific type of failure that had happened previously. And this gets into a world where, in so many cases, there needs to be a level of dynamism to how you wind up going about your work. It feels almost like companies have this idealized vision of the future where if they can distill every task that happens within the company down to a series of inputs and responses—scripts almost—you can either wind up replacing your staff with a bunch of folks who just work from a runbook and cost way less money or computers in the ultimate sense of things. But that's been teased for generations now and I have a very hard time seeing a path where you're ever going to be able to replace the contextually informed level of human judgment that, honestly, has fixed every incident I've ever seen.Emily: Yeah. The problem comes down to in my opinion, the fact that humans wrote this code, people with specific context and specific understanding of how the thing needs to work in a specific way and the shortcomings and limitations they have for the libraries they're using or the different things are trying to integrate in, a human being is who's writing the code. Code is not being written by computers, it's being written by people who have understanding and subtext. And so, when you have that code written and then maybe that person leaves or that person joins a different team and they focus and priorities on something else, there is still human subtests that exists within the services that have been written. We have it call in this specific way and timeout in this specific amount of time because when we were writing it, there was this ancient service that we had to integrate with.Like, there's always just these little pieces of we had to do things because we were people trying to make connections with lines of code. We're trying to connect a bunch of things to do some sort of task, and we have a human understanding of how to get from A to B, and probably if A computer wrote this code, it would work in an entirely different way, so in order to debug a problem, the humans usually need some sort of context, like, why did we do this the way that we did this? And I think it's a really interesting thing that we're finding that it is very hard to replace humans around computers, even though intellectually we think, like, this is all computers. But it's not. It's people convincing computers to do things that maybe they shouldn't necessarily be doing. Sometimes they're things that computers shouldn't be doing, maybe, but a lot of the times, it's kind of a miracle [laugh] that any of these things continue to work on it on a given basis. And I think that it's very interesting when we, I think, we think that we can take people out of it.Corey: The problem I keep running into though, the more I think about this and the more I see it out there is I don't think that it necessarily did incident management any favors when it was originally cast as the idea of blamelessness and blameless postmortems. Just because it seems an awful lot to me like the people who are the most advocate champions of approaching things from a blameless perspective and having a blameless culture are the people who would otherwise have been blamed themselves. So, it really kind of feels on some broader level, like, “Oh, was this entire movement really just about being self-serving so that people don't themselves get in trouble?” Because if you're not going to blame no one, you're going to blame me instead. I think that, on some level, set up a framing that was not usually helpful for folks with only a limited understanding of what the incident lifecycle looks like.Emily: Mmm. Yeah, I think we've evolved, right? I think, from the blameless, I think there was good intentions there, but I think that we actually missed the really big part of that boat that a lot of folks glossed over because then, as it is now, it's a little bit harder to sell. When we're talking about being blameless, we have to talk about circumventing blame in order to get people to talk candidly about their experiences. And really, it's less about blaming someone and what they've done because we as humans blame—there's a great Brené Brown talk that she gives, I think it's a TED talk about blame and how we as humans cannot physically avoid blaming, placing blame on things.It's about understanding where that's coming from, and working through it that is actually how we grow. And I think that we're starting to kind of shift into this more blame-aware culture. But I think the hard pill to swallow about blamelessness is that we actually need to talk about the way that this stuff makes us feel as people. Like feelings, like emotions [laugh]. Talk about emotions during a technical incident review is not really an easy thing to get some tech executives to swallow.Or even engineers. There's a lot of engineers who are just kind of like, “Why do you care about how I felt about this problem?” But in reality, you can't measure emotions as easily as you can measure Mean Time to Resolution. But Mean Time to Resolution is impacted really heavily by, like, were we freaking out? Did we feel like we had absolutely no idea what we were trying to solve, or did we understand this problem, and we were confident that we could solve it; we just couldn't find the specific place where this bug was happening. All of that is really interesting and important context about how we work together and how our processes work for us, but it's hard because we have to talk about our feelings.Corey: I think that you're onto something here because I look back at the key outages that really define my perspective on things over the course of my career, and most of the early ones were beset by a sense of panic of am I going to get fired for this? Because at the time, I was firmly convinced that well, root cause is me. I am the person that did the thing that blew up production. And while I am certainly not blameless in some of those things, I was never setting out with an intent to wind up tiering things down. So, it was not that I was a bad actor subverting internal controls because, in many companies, you don't need that level of rigor.This was a combination of factors that made it easy or possible to wind up tiering things down when I did not mean to. So, there were absolutely systemic issues there. But I still remember that rising tide of panic. Like, should I be focused on getting the site backup or updating my resume? Which of these is going to be the better longer-term outcome? And now that I've been in this industry long enough and I've seen enough of these, it's, you almost don't feel the blood pressure rise anymore when you wind up having something gets panicky. But it takes time and nuance to get there.Emily: Yeah. Well, and it's also, in order to best understand how you got in that situation, like, were you willing to tell people that you were absolutely panicked? Would you have felt comfortable, like, if someone was saying like, “Okay, so what happened? How did—walk me through what you were experiencing?” Would you have said like, “I was scared out of my goddamn mind?”Were you absolutely panicking or did you feel like you had some, like, grasping at some straws? Like, where were you? Because uncovering that for the person who is experiencing that in the issue, in the incident can help understand, what resources did they feel like they knew where to go to. Or where did they go to? Like, what resource did they decide in the middle of this panicked haze to grasp for? Is that something that we should start using as, “Hey, if it's your first time on call, this is a great thing to pull into,” because that's where instinctively you went?Like, there's so much that we can learn from the people who are experiencing [laugh] this massive amount of panic during the incident. But sometimes we will, if we're being quote-unquote, “Blameless,” gloss over your entire, like, your involvement in that entirely. Because we don't want to blame Corey for this thing happening. Instead, we'll say, “An engineer made a decision and that's fine. We'll move past that.” But there's so much wealth of information there.Corey: Well, I wound up in postmortems later when I ran teams, I said, “Okay, so an engineer made a mistake.” It's like, “Well, hang on. There's always more to it than that”—Emily: Uh-huh.Corey: —“Because we don't hire malicious people and the people we have are competent for their role.” So, that goes a bit beyond that. We will never get into a scenario people do not make mistakes in a variety of different ways. So, that's not a helpful framing, it's a question of what—if they made a mistake, sure, what was it that brought them to that place because that's where it gets really interesting. The problem is when you're trying to figure out in a business context why a customer is super upset—if they're a major partner, for example—and there's a sense of, “All right, we're looking for a sacrificial lamb or someone that we can blame for this because we tend to think in relatively straight lines.”And in those scenarios, often, a nuanced understanding of the systemic failure modes within your organization that might wind up being useful in the mid to long-term are not helpful for the crisis there. So, trying to stuff too much into a given incident response might be a symptom there. I'm thinking of one or two incidents in the course of my later career that really had that stink to them, for lack of a better term. What's your take on the idea?Emily: I've been in a lot of incidents where it's the desire to be able to point and say a person made this mistake is high, it's definitely something that the, “organization”—and I put the organization in quotes there—and say technical leadership, or maybe PR or the comms team said like, “We're going to say, like, a person made this mistake,” when in reality, I mean, nine times out of ten, calling it a mistake is hindsight, right? Usually people—sometimes we know that we make a mistake and it's the recovery from that, that is response. But a lot of times we are making an informed decision, you know? An engineer has the information that they have available to them at the time and they're making an informed decision, and oh, no [laugh], it does not go as we planned, things in the system that we didn't fully understand are coexisting, it's a perfect storm of these events in order to lead to impact to this important customer.For me, I've been customer-facing for a very long time and I feel like from my observation, customers tend to—like if you say, like, “This person did something wrong,” versus, “We learned more about how the system works together and we understand how these kind of different pieces and mechanisms within our system are not necessarily single points of failure, but points at which they interact that we didn't understand could cause impact before, and now we have a better understanding of how our system works and we're making some changes to some pieces,” I feel like personally, as someone who has had to say that kind of stuff to customers a thousand times, saying, “It was a person who did this thing,” it shows so much less understanding of the event and understanding of the system than actually talking through the different components and different kind of contributing factors that were wrong. So, I feel like there's a lot of growth that we as an industry can could go from blaming things on an intern to actually saying, “No, we invested time and understanding how a single person could perform these actions that would lead to this impact, and now we have a deeper understanding of our system,” is in my opinion, builds a little bit more confidence from the customer side.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. I'm not going to dance around the problem. Your. Engineers. Are. Burned. Out. They're tired from pagers waking them up at 2 am for something that could have waited until after their morning coffee. They're fed up with relying on two or three different “monitoring tools” that still require them to manually trudge through logs to decipher what might be wrong. Simply put, there's a better way. Observability tools like Honeycomb show you the patterns and outliers of how users experience your code in complex and unpredictable environments so you can spend less time firefighting and more time innovating. It's great for your business, great for your engineers, and, most importantly, great for your customers. Try FREE today at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. That's honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud.Corey: I think so much of this is—I mean, it gets back to your question to me that I sort of dodged was I willing to talk about how my emotional state in these moments? And yeah, I was visibly sweating and very nervous and I've always been relatively okay with calling out the fact that I'm not in a great place at the moment, and I'm panicking. And it wasn't helped in some cases by, in those early days, the CEO of the company standing over my shoulder, coming down from the upstairs building to know what was going on, and everything had broken. And in that case, I was only coming in to do mop-up I wasn't one of the factors contributing to this, at least not by a primary or secondary degree, and it still was incredibly stress-inducing. So, from that perspective, it feels odd.But you also talk about ‘we,' in the sense of as an industry, as a culture, and the rest. I'm going to push back on that a little bit because there are still companies today in the closing days of 2022 that are extraordinarily far behind where many of us are at the companies we work for. And they're still stuck in the relative Dark Ages technically, were, “Well, are VMs okay, or should we stay on bare metal?” Is still the era that they're in, let alone cloud, let alone containerization, let alone infrastructure as code, et cetera, et cetera. I'm unconvinced that they have meaningfully progressed on the interpersonal aspects of incident management when they've been effectively frozen in amber from a technical basis.Emily: Mmm, I don't think that's fair [laugh].Corey: No. Excellent. Let's talk about that.Emily: [laugh]. I think just because an organization is still, like, maybe in DCs and using hardware and maybe hasn't advanced so thoroughly within the technical aspect of things, that doesn't necessarily mean that they haven't adopted new—Corey: Ah, very fair. Let me add one point of clarification, then, on this because what I'm talking about here is the fact there are companies who are that far behind on a technical basis, they are not necessarily one and the same, too—Emily: Correct.Corey: Because you're using older technology, that means your processes are stuck in the past, too.Emily: Right.Corey: But rather, just as there are companies that are anxious on the technology basis, there are also companies who will be 20 years behind in learnings—Emily: Yes.Corey: —compared to how the more progressive folks have already internalized some of these things ages ago. Blamelessness is still in the future for them. They haven't gotten there yet.Emily: I mean, yeah, there's still places that are doing root cause analysis, that are doing the five whys. And I think that we're doing our best [laugh]. I mean, I think it really takes—that's a cultural change. A lot of the actual change in approach of incident analysis and incident response is a cultural change. And I can speak from firsthand experience that that's really hard to do, especially from the inside it's very hard to do.So luckily, with the role that I'm in now at Jeli.io, I get to kind of support those folks who are trying to champion a change like that internally. And right now, my perspective is just trying to generate as much material for those folks to send internally, to say like, “Hey, there's a better way. Hey, there's a different approach for this that can maybe get us around these things that are difficult.” I do think that there's this tendency—and I've used this analogy before—is for us to think that our junk drawers are better than somebody else's junk drawers.I see an organization as just a junk drawer, a drawer full of weird odds and ends and spilled glue and, like, a broken box of tacks. And when you pull out somebody else's junk drawer, you're like, “This is a mess. This is an absolute mess. How can anyone live like this?” But when you pull out your own junk drawer, like, I know there are 17 rubber bands in this drawer, somehow. I am going to just completely rifle through this drawer until I find those things that I know are in here.Just a difference of knowing where our mess is, knowing where the bodies are buried, or the skeletons are in each closet, whatever analogy works best. But I think that some organizations have this thought process that—by organizations, I mean, executive leadership organizations are not an entity with an opinion, they're made up of a bunch of individuals doing [laugh] the work that they need to do—but they think that their problems are harder or more unique than at other organizations. And so, it's a lot harder to kind of help them see that, yes, there is a very unique situation, the way that your people work together with their technology is unique to every single different organization, but it's not that those problems cannot be solved in new and different ways. Just because we've always done something in this way does not mean that is the way that is serving us the best in this moment. So, we can experiment and we can make some changes.Especially with process, especially with the human aspect of things of how we talk to each other during incidents and how we communicate externally during incidents. Those aren't hard-coded. We don't have to do a bunch of code reviews and make sure it's working with existing integrations to be able to make those changes. We can experiment with that kind of stuff and I really would like to try to encourage folks to do that even though it seems scary because incidents are… [unintelligible 00:24:33] people think they're scary. They're not. They're [unintelligible 00:24:35].Corey: They seem to be. For a lot of folks, they are. Let's not be too dismissive on that.Emily: But we were both talking about panic [laugh] and the panic that we have felt during incidents. And I don't want to dismiss that and say that it's not real. But I also think that we feel that way because we're worried about how we're going to be judged for our involvement in them. We're panicking because, “Oh no, we have contributed to this in some way, and the fact that I don't know what to do, or the fact that I did something is going to reflect poorly on me, or maybe I'm going to get fired.” And I think that the panic associated with incidents also very often has to do with the environment in which you are experiencing that incident and how that is going to be accepted and discussed. Are you going to be blamed regardless of how, quote-unquote, “Blameless,” your organization is?Corey: I wish there was a better awareness of a lot of these things, but I don't think that we are at a point yet where we're there.Emily: No.Corey: How does this map what you do, day-to-day over at Jeli.io?Emily: It is what I do every single day. So, I mean, I do a ton of different things. We're a very small startup, so I'm doing a lot, but the main thing that I'm doing is working with our customers to tackle these hurdles within each of their organizations. Our customers vary from very small organizations to very, very large organizations, and working with them to find how to make movement, how to sell this internally, sell this idea of let's talk about our incidents a little bit differently, let's maybe dial back some of the hard-coded automation that we're doing around response and change that to speaking to each other, as opposed to, we need 11 emails sent automatically upon the creation of an incident that will automatically map to these three PagerDuty schedules, and a lot more of it can be us working through the issue together and then talking about it afterwards, not just in reference to the root cause, but in how we interfaced: how did it go, how did response work, as well as how did we solve the problem of the technical problem that occurred?So, I kind of pinch myself. I feel very lucky that I get to work with a lot of different companies to understand these human aspects and the technical aspects of how to do these experiments and make some change within organizations to help make incidents easier. That's the whole feeling, right? We were talking about the panic. It doesn't need to be as hard as it feels, sometimes. And I think that it can be easier than we let ourselves think.Corey: That's a good way of framing it. It just feels on so many levels like this is one of the hardest areas to build a company in because you're not really talking about fixing technical, broken systems out there. You're talking about solving people problems. And I have some software that solves your people problems, I'm not sure if that's ever been true.Emily: Yeah, it's not the software that's going to solve the people problems. It's building the skills. A lot of what we do is we have software that helps you immensely in the analysis process and build out a story as opposed to just building out a timeline, trying to tell, kind of, the narrative of the incident because that's what works. Like anthropologically, we've been conveying information through folklore, through tales, telling tales of things that happened in order to help teach people lessons is kind of how we've—oral history has worked for [laugh] thousands of years. And we aren't better than that just because we have technology, so it's really about helping people uncover those things by using the technology we have: pulling in Slack transcripts, and PagerDuty alerts, and Zoom transcripts, and all of this different information that we have available to us, and help people tell that story and convey that story to the folks that were involved in it, as well as other peoples in your organization who might have similar things come up in the future.And that's how we learn. That's how we teach. But that's what we learn. I feel like there's a big difference—I'm understanding, there's a big difference between being taught something and learning something because you usually have to earn that knowledge when you learn it. You can be taught something a thousand times and then you've learned that once.And so, we're trying to use those moments that we actually learn it where we earn that hard-earned information through an incident and tell those stories and convey that, and our team—the solutions team—is in there, helping people build these skills, teaching people how to talk to each other [laugh] and really find out this information during incidents, not after them.Corey: I really want to thank you for being as generous with your time as you have been. And if people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Emily: Oh. I was going to say Twitter, but… [laugh].Corey: Yeah, that's a big open question these days, isn't it? Assuming it's still there by the time this episode airs, it might be a few days between now and then. Where should they find you on Twitter, with a big asterisk next to it?Emily: It's at @themortalemily. Which, I started this by saying I like mess and I'm someone who loves incidents, so I'll be on Twitter [laugh].Corey: We're there to watch it all burn.Emily: Oh, I feel terrible saying that. Actually, if any Twitter engineers are listening to this, someone is found that the TLS certificate is going to expire at the end of this year. Please check Twitter for where that TLS certificate lives so that you all can renew that. Also, Jeli.io, we have a blog that a lot of us write, our solutions team, we—and honestly a lot of us, we tend to hire folks who have a lot of experience in incident response and analysis.I've never been a solutions engineer before in my life, but I've done a lot of incident response. So, we put up a lot of stuff and our goal is to build resources that are available to folks who are trying to make these changes happen, who are in those organizations where they're still doing five whys, and RCAs, and are trying to convince people to experiment and change. We have our Howie Guide, which is available for free. It's ‘How We Got Here' which is, like, a full, free incident analysis guide and a lot of cool blogs and stuff there. So, if you can't find me on Twitter, we're writing… things… there [laugh].Corey: We will, of course, put links to all of that in the [show notes 00:30:46]. Thank you so much for your time today. It's appreciated.Emily: Thank you, Corey. This was great.Corey: Emily Ruppe, solutions engineer at Jeli.io. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment talking about how we've gotten it wrong and it is always someone's fault.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Today was an experiment. You are the subject. Even when tent is low, the poles raise up high. Higher, even, than a monitor above its table. Prestige keepers / signature keepers / tragedies abound. I remembered you, but left myself behind. If you rub a rodent in the belly, does a dolphin attack? Shownotes are no longer for you. They are my domain. I am shadow. Are you in or out? Do your best, Slackbot will decide.

Read by Amy Landon, Brittany Pressley, Cary Hite, Dani Martineck, Joshua Kane, MacLeod Andrews, Neil Hellegers, Neil Shah, Nicole Lewis, Sean Patrick Hopkins and Sophie Amoss. Is it still WFH when you're now just binary code? Whilst working on a spreadsheet for a New York based PR firm, Gerald has his consciousness uploaded into his company's Slack channel. He posts for help, but his colleagues assume it's an elaborate joke to exploit the new working-from-home policy, and now that Gerald's productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from...wherever he says he is. Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists co-worker Pradeep to care for his body and Slackbot, the service's AI assistant, to help him navigate his new digital reality. But when Slackbot discovers a world (and an empty body) outside the app, will it hijack a ride into the 'real' world? Meanwhile, Gerald's co-workers are scrambling to stem a company PR catastrophe like no other, their CEO suspects someone is sabotaging his office furniture, and if Gerald gets to work from home all the time, why can't everyone? Hilarious, irreverent and wholly original, Several People Are Typing is the perfect remedy for any idle fingers waiting to doomscroll: a satire of both the virtual office and contemporary life and a perfect antidote to the way we live #now.

0:30: Is Slackbot Passive-Aggressive?5:00: The Circle Chat13:00 Amanda Batula On Her Body, Social Media, And Hiding At The Gym (The Dipp)16:00: Cheugy Talk 22:00: Finally, An Entire Museum Dedicated To The Video Of Kim Cattrall Scatting (Vice)

The Minard System in R, ggplot2 wizardry, a slackbot created with plumber and googleCouldRunner Episode Links This week's curator: Tony Elhabr (@TonyElHabr (https://twitter.com/tonyelhabr)) "The Minard System" in R (http://minard.schochastics.net/) A guide to creating a Slackbot that sends weekly updates via plumber, googleCloudRunner and Cloud Run (https://code.markedmondson.me/googleCloudRunner/articles/usecase-slackbot-google-analytics.html) ggplot2 Wizardry: My Favorite Tricks and secrets for Beautiful Plots in R, Cédric Scherer (https://www.cedricscherer.com/slides/useR2021.pdf) Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2021-W13 (https://rweekly.org/2021-W13.html) Supplemental Resources DataViz History Series: Edward Tufte, Charles Minard, Napoleon and the Russian Campaign of 1812 - Part 2 (https://datavizblog.com/2013/05/18/dataviz-history-edward-tufte-charles-minard-napoleon-and-the-russian-campaign-of-1812-part-2) and Part 5 (https://datavizblog.com/2013/05/26/dataviz-history-charles-minards-flow-map-of-napoleons-russian-campaign-of-1812-part-5) {ggplot2} Wizardry recorded talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHvEXYtnOo) from UseR Oslo meetup (25 March 2021) Introducing googleCouldRunnner - serverless R on Google Could Platform (https://code.markedmondson.me/googleCloudRunner-intro/)

0:00 Special Acoustic Caulk and manual laber3:22 The Jigsaw Puzzle Theory of Business6:10 Async.dev Slackbot update9:00 Can you charge for an unfinished project?10:44 Niching a Time Tracker Coaching Service22:28 What's next for Async.dev and Meeting Place?24:54 Talking to Sign Printers update30:25 Clipping Microconf Recap35:17 Effective Time Design38:07 Automated video editing45:44 Delegating to machines vs. humans48:51 AI is coming to take all our jobs unless you're a coach49:38 When does it make sense to hire humans?

This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community. The memo below was sent to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of Slack, on July 31st, 2013. It had been a little under seven months since development began and was two weeks before the launch of Slack’s ‘Preview Release’. "When you want something really bad, you will put up with a lot of flaws. But if you do not yet know you want something, your tolerance will be much lower." Read the full memo here - https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d

With all of us settling in to remote work, who better to learn from than Ultranauts, an innovative remote-first company. Ultranauts provides onshore quality engineering using a neurodiverse team (75% of its employees are on the autism spectrum), which enables the company to outperform both IBM and CapGemini. I speak with the company's co-founder and CEO, Rajesh Anandan (an old friend via Unreasonable) and SVP Quality & Strategy Nicole Radziwill. We discuss the company's origins from Rajesh's time at UNICEF, how Nicole first received her autism spectrum diagnosis in college, and Ultranaut's innovative "biodex" Slackbot for creating "user manuals" for every employee. http://ultranauts.co/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajeshanandan/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoleradziwill/

Join me as I continue a series called Whiteboard Confessional with a look at the time Slackbot caused a company to experience a severity one incident which knocked their systems offline in an embarrassingly public way. Have a listen to learn how a nifty feature in Slack caused the issue, how things were working fine for four years before this problem reared its ugly head, why that’s a common occurrence, what you can do to avoid a similar fate, how this whole story should give you pause about hopping on the ChatOps bandwagon, what CloudTrail’s actual purpose is, and more.

Slack wants to be the new operating system for teams, something it has made clear on more than one occasion, including in its recent S-1 filing. To accomplish that goal, it put together an in-house $80 million venture fund in 2015 to invest in third-party developers building on top of its platform. Weeks ahead of its direct listing on The New York Stock Exchange, it continues to put that money to work. Troops is the latest to land additional capital from the enterprise giant.

Brendon Murphy, CTO of Kajabi, talks about his company's experience with Dataclips [1]. Instead of requiring developers to connect to their database, everyone in the company is able to generate analytics on-the-fly, and they even democratize the information via a Slackbot. Their marketing team is able to get real-time feedback on their campaigns through Lita.io [2] The advantage of using Dataclips dovetails with their preference for using Heroku in general. While they could build their own wrapper to communicate with Postgres, or even manage their own infrastructure, they've found that the financial and operational costs are simply not worth it. By offloading this vital work, they free themselves up to focus on building features for their users. Brendon concludes by talking about Postgres, and why it's the right choice for his team. It can act as a NoSQL document store via its JSONB data type, serve as a key-value store obviating the need for Redis, and comes with strict type assurances reducing the need for checks in the software layer. He also mentions add-ons provided by Heroku, such as PGBouncer [3], along with his feature request for how Heroku can better serve Kajabi's large data needs. Links from this episode Sharing Query Results with Dataclips Lita.io chat bot Heroku buildpack: pgbouncer

Behold the Samsung Galaxy Fold: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/21/18233917/samsung-galaxy-fold-price-features-consumer-worth-buying-editorial And the Huawei Mate X: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18239374/huawei-mate-x-foldable-phone-samsung-galaxy-fold-design-mwc-2019 Lex enjoys the Endless Jeopardy Twitter account: https://twitter.com/endlessjeopardy Here's your big battery phone now buy it you cowards: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/2/26/18241117/energizer-power-max-p18k-pop-huge-battery-phone-mwc-2019 Our thanks also to Postmates, your personal food delivery, grocery delivery, whatever-you-can-think-of delivery service. Get the Postmates app on iOS (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/postmates-food-delivery/id512393983?mt=8) or Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.postmates.android) and use the code REBOUND for one hundred dollars of free delivery credit for your first SEVEN days! And our thanks to Robinhood, an investing app that lets you buy and sell stocks, ETFS, options, and cryptos, all commission-free. Robinhood is giving listeners of the Rebound a FREE stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help build your portfolio! Sign up at REBOUND .robinhood.com (http://rebound.robinhood.com).

Bree Groff is CEO of NOBL Collective, a global change agency that helps quickly-growing startups or huge legacy organizations seeking to grow or scale to negotiate change. NOBL does not provide the strategy, or the brand work. Instead, it looks at decision-making, communication, meeting patterns and day to day interactions—the company's culture—and collaborates closely with the company to steer the “human side of things,” embed the capacity for change and the feeling that change is productive and energizing, and help its clients get good at change—which is a critical competitive advantage—all without losing their “core.” In this interview, Bree talks the “critical mass” for companies . . . when the number of employees requires new ways of doing things. She references Dunbar's number, which is a rough measure of the upper limit of loose relationships a person can maintain . . . and still remember people's names. Organizations reaching certain sizes often need to develop new ways of working in order to “move to the next level.” How do you change large corporate cultures? Bree has found that, if you can effect behavioral and mindset changes at the individual level—even with very large organizations—and by repeating this enough times, change the organization to what it wants to become—more agile, more digital, more collaborative, more authentic, more engaged . . . and ultimately, more profitable. Meeting-heavy company cultures tend to have a lot of ad hoc status meetings. Bree feels meetings should be intentional, with a “strong cadence around what you're talking about with what frequency.” NOBL published Team Tempo, http://www.blurb.com/bookshare/app/index.html?bookId=7693002#, a guide to effective meetings. Bree recommends companies consider quarterly team retrospective meetings to evaluate the company's internal environment and strategic sensing meetings, where teams discuss customer, industry, and technology changes that may impact the company. How a decision is made can have a major impact on decision quality . . . and acceptance. After numerous client queries of, “How do I make a decision?”, NOBL developed a “Decider app,” available as a Slackbot at thedecider.app/slack or as a web version at https://thedecider.app/. This tool asks a series of short questions and then recommends and defines the decision-making process that best fits the circumstances, highlighting the process's advantages and disadvantages. The decision-making methods include: autocratic, avoidant, consensus, consent, consultative, delegation, democratic, or stochastic. Bree can be reached on her company website at https://nobl.io/, on LinkedIn at /in/bree-groff-94281136/

Today’s question: Today’s question comes from Ruben. I’m working on a Slackbot that guides startups through finding product market fit. Some of my early adopters are asking for a done-for-you service that simply does the marketing tasks we recommend. I know this isn’t scalable - what should I do? Jake’s answer: A done-for-you service is when the service provider is taking care of the entire service for you. For example, we use a done-for-you service that creates our podcasts and all of the ancillary marketing materials that go with it. You can do this for nearly any service. In this case, the solution you’ve built may be great, but people are busy and will need a done-for-you service to implement the tools you’ve provided to them. The Case for Ignoring Your Customers The first route you can go is to ignore their feedback and focus on the software. I would only choose this route if you really don’t want to have a service-based business. This doesn’t get you out of customer service - SaaS companies have just as much, if not more, customer service than service-based businesses. Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Your Customers If you don’t want to do it because you aren’t passionate about it, then that’s not a good enough reason to ignore their needs. If there are parts of a service-based business you don’t like, then you can hire people to fill in the gaps. The route I would recommend is to have a couple of different plans that can accommodate your customer requests. Give them the option to use it as you’ve built it and give them the option to have a done-for-you service. If the done-for-you option ends up working out, then you can automate parts of the process, but in the beginning, keep it simple. Be sure to charge enough to make it worth it to you. The third option would be to change the entire business over to the done-for-you service. even if you choose this option, you should go with option two work The done-for-you option is how I’ve seen a lot of startups scale up quickly without raising capital. They are able to make a lot more money upfront and then put it back into the business to grow the SaaS side. That way you aren’t forced to go down the path of raising funds. Ask Your Own Question Got questions about startups and/or startup culture? We’ve got answers. Head over to LaunchChat.io and record your own question to have it featured on the show. Stay in Touch Ask your own question Follow Jake Twitter Check out Jake’s articles Medium Jake’s personal site Check out Launchpeer Follow Launchpeer on Twitter

This edition reviews our internship program. we get the scoop from our marketing intern, Gabby R. about her summer at DO, working in a startup, and all other tips and tricks of navigating intern life, in a high growth company. Interviewed by: Michelle See (Marketing Automation Manager)Hollie Haggans (Global Partnerships)Learn more about our startup program: do.co/hatchMusic: 'Nice' by The Carters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome back! We’re pumped to have you here for Season 2. Here to kick us off is Neha Gandhi, the COO and editor-in-chief of Girlboss, a new publication “for women redefining success on their own terms.” Sounds about right to us. Neha told us all about her start in journalism, what it’s like to manage teams of mostly women, and how group texts with her friends keep her grounded (you’ll LOVE the rosebud and thorn analogy, promise). > First of all, maybe it’s ok to be selfish and put yourself first, and put your career first at times. But also, ambition is not a dirty word. That said, none of us feel ambitious all the time, and none of us have exactly the same idea of what success looks like. > —Neha Gandhi, editor-in-chief and COO, Girlboss Plus: Having good and bad managers, being good and bad managers, and what we’re doing to cut noninclusive and ableist language from the show. Y’all ready? Link love If you enjoy our convo about manager-ing, check this advice column from The Cut about being a better manager by being vulnerable with your team. Get more on Neha’s background with this interview, and follow her on Twitter for more on pop culture, politics, and the media industry. To hear from speakers like Paola Mendoza and Janet Mock, register for the Girlboss Rally livestream on April 28. For more on the topic of gratefulness and negotiating, check out this advice on how to negotiate when you’re being promoted. And if you’re interested in learning more about inclusive language—and maybe tweaking some of your own habits—check out this list of ableist words and the Conscious Style Guide. Use Slack at work? See if you can get your company to customize Slackbot to nudge your team when they use noninclusive language. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they  want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _ Transcript Katel LeDû Shopify builds products that help entrepreneurs around the world start and grow their businesses. Starting from a few people obsessed with personal growth, Shopify is now a team of 3,000 folks working in offices and remote teams across the globe. They’re growing quickly and building an international team that will define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to find out what they’re working on. [Music fades in, plays for nine seconds, fades out]. [0:32] Jenn Lukas Welcome to Season 2 of No, You Go: the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. KL I’m Katel LeDû. Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and I’m so excited here for our first episode of Season 2 because we have so much good stuff in store. We are kicking things off today by sharing an awesome interview with Girlboss editor-in-chief and COO Neha Gandhi. She talks to us about building a career in publishing through a dramatically changing landscape, how to redefine success for ourselves, and why talking about money is so difficult. She also talks a lot about what it’s like to grow as a manager. And, actually, can we start there today? KL Yeah, I feel like that—listening to her talk brought up so many sort of thoughts and memories about, you know, just my career as it’s gone so far, and how I’ve had good managers and bad managers, and I feel like having both of those things has helped me grow as a manager, like when I became one for the first time. It was a really sort of frankly awkward situation because I was working in a team of people and I was most of those people’s peers and some of those people’s junior. Like I, you know, I was sort of at a level below and all of a sudden I was their manager. And it was really—a really interesting shift because I had to kind of like not just learn how to manage the team and make them feel like I was there, you know, doing the job well. It wasn’t just awkward, it was also really challenging because I was learning how to be a manager and that in and of itself is like: how do you run processes? How do you manage workflows? How do you, you know, keep things running? But then how do you also you know get the people on the team to feel like you’re there doing the right job, you’re the right person for the job, and you have their best interests in mind. And, for me, I think going directly from being, you know, sort of working with those people at—at the exact same level to being a manager was like … I realized that the more I included them in the process of like me getting up to speed, the more investment they would have in the team succeeding and like moving forward. JL That’s so neat, because [sighs] there’s so many parts to being a manager. So many things to learn and constantly learn even once you’ve been a manager for awhile. But to then also feel you have to prove yourself because you didn’t come into the role as a manager. You transitioned to the role of a manager. It just puts on a whole new layer of things to consider when, you know, trying to really rock your job as a manager. [3:11] KL And especially when you’re, you know, either at a job or a company where there’s either a super strict or defined management style. Like if it’s extremely hierarchical or, I don’t know, not a lot of room for growth. So it’s like not as clear when people become managers or not. Or it’s loosely defined and you’re kind of like trying to figure that out. I think it’s—it’s so hard to identify when you’re a good manager, or when you’re, you know, not being good at that. SWB I remember I first became a manager—I was in my twenties and I was working at an agency and I went from being sort of like the only person doing content strategy and web writing related stuff to taking on sort of like this broader strategic role and bringing in somebody who I managed who was a writer. And then all of a sudden from there I went from having this one direct report to having a team of six staff and two interns who reported to me. And I became a director at the company which meant, you know, at this agency of like 40 people and meant that I reported directly to the owners and I was in all of the senior management meetings, and … there was no advice or guidance about what I was supposed to be doing. And not only that, there wasn’t anybody to take over a lot of the client work that I was responsible [mm hmm mm hmm] … and as a result, I was really overwhelmed and I had these people reporting to me who were great, but I didn’t feel like I was there enough for, and I wasn’t sure how to be there for them. And, you know, about half of them I really felt like I was an appropriate person to be their manager. And the other half felt like, they need a team. And I, you know, like my boss, the owner, was basically like, “We need them to roll up into somebody’s team and, like, you’re it!” [Chuckles] And like that’s not a good reason to have somebody report to you. And—but it created this scenario where, you know, like how was I going to guide and support them if I wasn’t totally sure that I really should be their manager in the first place? [KL Totally] And, you know, what—what I remember most about that experience was that I felt like the most important thing I could do in that moment, given what was available to me, was that I needed to advocate for the people on my team to the other senior managers and to the owners of the company because it was such a like weird transitional time. That was really important and I spent a lot of time there. But, you know, as a result, like I think—I think I did good at that. I did a lot of that. But what I think I did really bad at was being there for them individually, right? So like being able to hold one-on-ones with them and hear about the work that they were struggling with, where they wanted to grow, the sort of individual piece of it. And part of it was that I didn’t have time. I mean I really didn’t have time. But another big part of it was that I didn’t really know how to do that. And that’s like the biggest thing that if I—if I were going to manage a traditional team again, I would want to learn to get better at. JL I can relate so much to what you’re saying. I manage a team now. At Urban, I’m an Engineering Manager. And I … also have always struggled with how do I be a manager and also be an engineer? And I’ve talked to so many other engineering managers that have the same struggle of trying to find that, you know, balance. I’m always trying to find a balance somewhere. And so one of the things I did—I had talked to my manager about some of the stress I was having because I was feeling like I wasn’t doing—I thought I was doing a good job, but I didn’t think I was doing a great job in that I was having a real struggle going from, ok, in the morning, maybe I’d have a touch base, and then later I’d have to go to a meeting about, you know, design specs, and then maybe the next day I’d have another touch base with another direct report. And it was just really hard for me to constantly do the context switching. And so I started instituting Manager Monday, and Manager Monday is where basically I’d come in on Mondays and I’d hold all my touch bases with my direct reports on Mondays. It varies with my direct reports based on how often they want to meet and discuss. So some people I have biweekly touch bases with, some people I have every month, every three weeks, it just depends on the desires of my direct report. And I’ve just now scheduled them all on Monday. Which means: I come in Monday, and that is my focus. I’m going to focus on the management roles of, you know, my job. And it’s really helped me because then I don’t have to context switch back and forth. I come in on Monday, I say, “This is what I’m here for today.” So if other questions get asked, my calendar’s essentially all booked the entire day with management meetings or I block off time to, you know, just work on other things that are directly manager-related. And that has just I feel helped my relationships with my direct reports and my workload so much because I really feel like I can always be there on that day and be in the headspace for it. And like it doesn’t always work, you know, sometimes I’m out, sometimes the direct report is out, sometimes something comes up that I’ll have to move it to like, oh no, Manager Tuesday which doesn’t sound nearly as good [someone else laughs] but you know then it’s like a one off. [8:18] KL That’s so great. I think that’s something that I struggle with, you know, running a business that—I work with all freelancers, all remote folks, you know. This is no one’s full-time job, which has, I think, made it difficult sometimes to have everyone feel like they’re part of, you know, a singular team. And they don’t necessarily need to, but I’ve looked for ways to try to make that happen as much as it’s comfortable and possible for people. But I think that’s been so important because everyone—when you feel like you’re, you know, kind of cruising towards the same goal it’s—it just helps a lot. So. And it’s really beneficial for me because it makes me feel like I’m not just [chuckling] like out there, you know, on my own. JL Yeah, at Urban we had combined engineering teams. So we had a engineering team at Anthropologie and an engineering team at Urban Outfitters and we’re now combined under one team, starting about a year and a half ago. And one of the things that was interesting there was you took two teams and now we’re meshing them together it’s not like—you have to build a new culture! Because all of a sudden you just have a whole new team of people. And so we started a Urban Education and Culture Club where we tried to come up with activities for people to sort of get together and learn from each other and meet each other. And it sort of expanded to the whole building, so not just engineers but other people that are working on the websites and some [?]. And we use a Trello board to manage some of this [laughing]. So what we do is like drop things in like, “Topics People Wanna Learn,” or maybe people want to have, you know, a clicks watching party we did one time. Or, you know, a bowling happy hour. And just ways that we can get together and sort of sometimes it’s … you don’t want to force culture, but sometimes you do have to shape it. And like, you know, help build relationships by having planned activities. Things don’t just happen naturally. You don’t put 200 people in a building and be like, “Ok! Now everyone know each other and be friends.” So I think it’s ok to force a little activities on people—but things that help people learn to grow with each other. [10:19] KL And ultimately that—I think that helps people learn how to work with each other too [mm hmm]. Can I steal that? A Culture Club Apart or something? JL I love it. KL Great [all laugh]. SWB I mean I—I like thinking about how we build cultures and how we shape cultures because I think, you know, in—in industries like tech, oftentimes it’s like people substitute perks for culture [mm hmm]. So it’s like, “Oh we have free beer and ping pong.” Or whatever, right? Like there’s the stereotypes and often that’s like literally what they have and it’s like that is not a culture. [Mm hmm] And sometimes that can create really problematic cultures because it’s like, you know, you get super alcohol-centered or you end up with a culture that’s super male driven, and you don’t really have activities that women feel comfortable participating in, or lots of problems. But I think the big underlying thing is that those perks are not culture. Like culture is something you have to create and foster and [mm hmm] like facilitate and then over time you have to sustain it and all of that is work. And I think that work is super important, it’s not talked about enough, and oftentimes it’s like super devalued. Right? It’s like, that’s the office mom’s job as opposed to a fundamental part of having a workplace that is healthy and, therefore, also productive. JL During my one-on-ones with direct reports we’ll come up with goals and talk about, you know, things and that very often is technical related but sometimes it’s more about building the sharing community of our group. So one of my direct reports wanted to start basically like a code sharing thing which didn’t have to do directly and necessarily with the work we were doing on Urban but any technical problems. So we have something instead of a round table, we call it the dev square table. So we brought the dev square table where we could just look at different pieces of code, either for Urban or outside of the company and, you know, talk about it and share it with each other. So sort of a show and tell for code. Which is really neat because it just gave us a chance to just sit around and—and talk—talk code with each other, which was awesome. Another that we’ve done there was developer’s cinema lunch which then another one of my direct reports, when I went on maternity leave, took over and made it sort of… we’d bring popcorn and it ended up moving outside of lunch. So, don’t worry, we weren’t just eating popcorn for lunch [laughs]. But it was really neat. You know she sort of took what I had and enhanced it by having, basically, we’d watch a video and then discuss it. Talk about like things that we learned in the video. And it just gave us more of a chance to really learn and grow from each other. So it’s really neat, I feel like, to work—to help just outsource it. So it doesn’t become like an office mom thing, but you’re working with the whole team, for the whole team to take part of growing that culture. [12:48] SWB You know, speaking of building culture, that’s definitely something that I thought was really interesting in Neha’s interview. When she joined Girl Boss, it was just a fledgling startup organization and she’s really trying to build that out and figure out what that culture should be there. And so why don’t we go ahead and listen to that interview? KL [Music fades in] Yeah let’s do it. [Music ramps up, plays alone for four seconds, fades out.] KL If you visited us at noyougoshow.com, then you know it’s our hub online. And we use WordPress to run it, because it gives us the freedom and flexibility to share our voices, our way. Make your site your own when you build it with WordPress. No need to do any coding or design, and the WordPress customer support team is there 24/7 to help you get your site working smoothly. And plans start at just four dollars per month. Start building your website today. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new plan purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off your brand-new website [music fades in and out]. KL Neha Gandhi is the editor-in-chief and chief operating officer of Girlboss, one of our favorite magazines and communities. She’s been building a career in publishing for over a decade, navigating the editorial world at publications like People, Harper’s Bazaar, Seventeen Magazine, and Refinery29. Excuse us while we brush the stars from our eyes. Neha, we are so excited to talk to you. Welcome to No, You Go. Neha Gandhi Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here. KL Awesome. You’ve had an exciting career in publishing so far, one I’m sure that has been a ton of work. Can you tell us a little bit about your path? NG So I graduated from college a little uncertain all through college about what would I really wanted to do. I think I found my path really through a process of elimination more than anything else. “Oh, I worked at a congressman’s office. Maybe that’s not for me.” “Management consulting: not for me. This non-profit: not for me.” So then I ended up interning at People Magazine one summer right before I graduated and loved it. Except that when I graduated I was like, “Oh I have this one amazing internship, surely I can get a job!” So I was looking for a magazine job and the competition was fierce. Everyone else who was applying for these jobs had had, you know, 10 different editorial internships over the course of four years in college and I had been doing a lot of different things that I, now looking back, really appreciated, but at the time was like, “Oh. I’m not going to be able to find a job.” So I didn’t find a job right out of school. [15:22] NG [Continued] I moved to New York for an internship that paid minimum wage at InStyle. And I’m really grateful for that opportunity. I learned how to fact check, I sat with the copy editors, and I, you know, developed an attention to detail and was able to work on some really cool pages, and do some research. And then I moved over to Meredith which I was a freelance editorial assistant and I got the opportunity to do the job … as like maternity fill-in for the senior fashion and beauty editor. And I think that that was just a great opportunity that came my way probably because they didn’t have the money to really bring on someone for maternity cover. But it really taught me the value of saying, “Oh, yeah, that’s an opportunity. I will absolutely do it. Do I know how to do that job? Definitely not. Do I think I can figure out in the fly? Probably.” So I got to do that and that was where I learned to properly assign, how to edit, how to think about an editorial calendar, and I learned about publishing on the web for the first time there. So that was great and when she came back, they were like, “You know, you probably want to move on and find another job because you don’t really want to go back to that freelance editorial assistant role that you came in for.” So I did. I moved over to Harper’s Bazaar and I started out as an editorial assistant there and then was the online editor there and I, you know, got to sort of help with research, I got to assist, I got to work on the website, which at that time involved a twice a month refresh that, you know, was me adapting some stories from the magazine, taking them down to the 14th floor in the Hearst Tower on like CD-ROM and having them like hard code the website twice a month. So it was a really [chuckles] different time [someone else chuckles] for internet publishing [yeah] but that was great. I learned, you know, everything I know about having proper work ethic and how magazines are run I learned at Bazaar. Well and from there our managing editor at Bazaar went over to Seventeen and he brought me over with him after a couple of months and I got to be the associate lifestyle editor there, and then I took over some of the entertainment pages, and then eventually took over the website, and I was at Seventeen probably for four years, and that was a lot of fun as well, and that was the first time I really had my own pages, and got to contribute in a very different and I got to conceive of ideas, and put them through the entire process, and write stories, and edit stories, and fact check, and all of that good stuff. Um it’s where I became a real editor. And then after that I moved to Refinery29 and I was there for about six years. And I, honestly, just loved the website. I was a big fan of the brand. God, I got to be the deputy editor there, the executive editor there, I got to grow that editorial team from probably eight people to over a hundred, and then I moved into a role as VP of editorial strategy, and got to sort of bridge the divide between editorial, and marketing, and content strategy, and product, and then eventually moved into a role as the SVP of content strategy and innovation, where I really got to dig into analytics and data and think about how do we use the signals—the many, many signals that we get from this audience—to make the best possible work that we can? Things that allow us to grow as a business and be as strategic as possible without ever … sacrificing the quality of the work, and of the brand. And that was really fun. And I probably could’ve stayed there forever because, you know, you stay somewhere for six years in publishing years that feels like three or four lifetimes. I ultimately ended up leaving to take the job that I’m in now at Girlboss because it felt like a big adventure. I met Sophia, the founder of Girlboss, she wrote the book Girlboss in 2014, probably last January, and she and I met over drinks at the hotel she was staying at, and she really talked to me about her vision for what we could build here. We wanted to make less content but really go deep with it and have a lot of purpose and just really add value to this woman’s life. And I got so excited about that. I sort of couldn’t stop thinking about it, which I think is always a good sign when you’re thinking about a new job or making a move. [20:00] NG [Continued] So we had that conversation for a few months and then I finally, officially, accepted in April and I started here in July and we’ve just been sort of … head down trying to get this thing off the ground, and really delivering the promise of what Girlboss can be. SWB So one of the things that really came out as you were sort of going through that story and that trajectory was this sort of shift in thinking that happened along the way, at some point, which is like from this idea of online publishing being somehow like sort of the second-rate piece of it to being something that was really fascinating to you. And I’m curious, like, how did that shift happen for you or what made that shift happen for you, where you saw sort of a big potential for your career to be doing something interesting that was online focused and like online explicitly? NG I think some of that started when I was at Seventeen, partially because the internet changed and because publishing changed, and editors-in-chief and publishers were much more willing to sort of, you know, start thinking about the internet not as a thing that’s going to cannibalize your newsstand sales but as a thing where you can talk to your audience, and you can tell meaningful stories, and you can potentially even make money. That sounds so ridiculous saying that out loud right now but that was really a concern. That was the concern for most magazine publishers in the early 2000s. You know, “That’s never going to be a place where we make money, the internet. So we want to protect all of our hard work from sort of just being given away for free over there.” But that thinking started to shift and at Seventeen I really saw the power of that and especially talking to a teenage audience, you want to be on the internet. You want to be there with them on their social platforms, you want to be tweeting at them, and that was where we got to do really fun programs like I would, you know, live tweet “Glee,” and “Pretty Little Liars,” and all the shows that teenagers were watching then, and then I would take the tweets that our audience was um sharing back, and I would create more storytelling out of it. And that was so much fun, and that felt like what storytelling on the internet could be, suddenly I saw the power of that in a whole new way. So I really credit Seventeen and the editor in chief at the time, Ann Shoket, as well as Julie Hochheiser, who was overseeing the website when I started there because these are people who really were able to understand what could the internet be for this audience, and how do we really maximize its potential? So that was really fun but there was also a part of it that was … it was easier to get a more senior job if you make a shift to the internet. And I don’t know that that’s true today because the business models have changed so much and I think, you know, publishing is a tough place to be these days. But in 2010 I knew like in a very sort of like cut and dry way that if I wanted that deputy editor title, I was going to get it much faster moving to a place that was a startup like Refinery that was internet only, rather than waiting to get there at a print magazine. [23:09] KL So there’s probably not a lot that’s like quote/unquote “typical” about, you know, your day to day but can you—can you just tell us a little bit about what, you know, what you might do in a typical day? NG It’s so fun working at a startup at this stage because what that is changes everyday, and what I try to do for myself is um we have a weekly team stand up, 10am on Mondays, where everyone goes through and says their one priority for the week, and I think at a startup at this stage that’s really hard, and at first we got some pushback that was like, “I can’t pick just one thing. I have a hundred things on my list. Like I could [chuckles] no sooner, you know, choose a star in the heavens.” But that has shifted a little bit and having that meeting has really forced people to prioritize and say, “Ok, it’s Monday today, and what’s the one thing that I need to do in order to feel like I’ve really accomplished something meaningful by Friday?” So that’s how we really think about our time here. So every week is probably different but we set that priority on Monday for each of us and, you know, right now my priority is really thinking about the Girl Boss rally which is coming up on April 28th and we actually moments ago just sold out of our last ticket. So um I’m really excited. We’re going to have a full house and just amazing speakers but that’s really where I’m laser focused right now. So I have meetings with the team. I do a one-on-one for an hour every week with each of my direct reports, and I have an incredible art director, an incredible editorial director, an incredible head of audience, and then an editorial assistant who report to me, and I’ll have their own direct reports, as well as I always do a team meeting with all of those three team leads, and then make sure that I have time with my partner on the revenue side, Alison Wyatt, who’s our incredible CRO and president, to connect probably twice a week. So those are the standing things that happen every week and then I really try to think about how can I make sure that the rest of what I’m doing this week is less about checking things off my to-do list and like dealing with small stuff, obviously important stuff comes up all the time, but it’s less about sort of that like tactical like just check mark work and more about driving toward that priority that I set at the beginning of the week. And I think that that sets me up to be much more successful. KL Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, we all occasionally have bad days. If you are ever having a bad day, is—what’s something that you do to kind of work like work through that and get back on track? [25:39] NG I have been forcing myself, and this is the advice I give to everyone on my team as well: if you’re having a bad day, if you’re feeling frustrated, and especially if that frustration is about to manifest itself as a snippy email, or as like some form of written communication that maybe you’re not going to feel great about later, take a step back. Like actually physically stand up, take three deep breaths, and if you still feel that way, like you’re just unsettled, or you don’t have an answer, get up, leave the office right now and we work here in Silver Lake at this beautiful space at Sunset Junction. We have like this like—I don’t know, I just moved to California six months ago so I’m still blown away by the natural beauty of everything here. But we have this beautiful space and a basketball court, and I’m like, take advantage of that, right? And I try to do this myself: stand up, go for a walk outside for at least five minutes, but that really does help me because I think that mental reset of like: stand up, go outside, see the sun shining, get some fresh air, and like just like clear your mind for a second. Like that really helps because I think a lot of those like mental tricks, like I need the like physical trick to trigger a reset for me. SWB [Chuckles] I was just thinking about how, like, one of the ways that I know that I need to take a moment [KL laughs] is I can hear myself like kind of angry typing. So if I’m writing an email [laughter] and it’s like CLACK, CLACK, CLACK, CLACK, CLACK really aggressively, I’m like, “Hmm, I’m going to take a moment on that one.” But I was just, you know, I was just talking with a friend like in one of our many backchannel conversations where she was trying to like write back a reply to somebody. Some guy had like, you know, kind of sent her a really passive aggressive email and she’s like, “How do I respond to this and make him know blah blah blah?” I’m like, “What are you trying to get out of that interaction?” And just taking that moment and thinking like, “What am I trying to get out of sending this angry email? Am I just wanting to like tell this person that I think they’re an idiot? Is that actually going to be productive for anybody? Is anybody going to get anything out of that? Or, you know, am I trying to resolve a situation? Like could I just not reply to them ever? Like what are my options here?” And I think that like it kind of helps me at least get out of my feelings a little bit and um breathe and—and then think long and hard about whether I actually want to send that response or whatever it is that’s giving me a tough time. NG That’s so right. I feel like so often in those moments where you’ve gotten some kind of communication over whatever medium that has like triggered that like rising heart rate reaction, it’s so often it’s about, like, I just need to write back or I need to say something in order to feel like I won this conversation. Like, “You have said something wrong, and you have to know it.” But it’s like, actually, you don’t. And we’re all adults and we’re, you know, senior in our careers at this point and like we should be setting different kinds of examples. But it’s so much easier said than done. KL Yeah. It totally is. So we talk about ambition a lot on the show and sometimes we hear sentiments like, “Does this even apply to me?” Or “I don’t see myself as a quote/unquote “successful” person.” We read an interview where you mentioned something similar for Girlboss that defining a girlboss as someone who “gives herself permission to define success on her terms and change that definition whenever she damn well pleases.” We love that. What would you say to that listener who’s not really sure that they, you know, necessarily qualify as ambitious? [29:08] NG Well, first of all I would say: take a step back and, like, how are you defining ambitious? Because I don’t feel ambitious every day. But I do want to make sure that we’re having a conversation about ambition that doesn’t like set it aside as a taboo or demonize it in any way because I think it’s wonderful to be ambitious, and I think there are still sort of social stigmas that come alongside being an ambitious woman, alongside being seen as too aggressive or too difficult or too focused or selfish. And I think that like I do want to change those conversations and say, first of all, maybe it’s ok to be selfish and put yourself first, and put your career first at times. But also, ambition is not a dirty word. That said, none of us feel ambitious all the time, and none of us have exactly the same idea of what success looks like. So how do we have different conversations and get out of this space where we’re putting ourself in—ourselves in boxes. Where we’re saying, “This is an ambitious person and she looks like this. This is an unambitious person and she looks like this, and I have to be one of these people,” where we should be having much more nuanced conversations about, “This is what good looks like for me right now in my life where I am.” And maybe that is about relentlessly pursuing a career goal, maybe that’s about in my personal life, maybe that’s about caring for a parent, or caring for a partner, or for a child, maybe that is about thinking about my mental health in a different way, and really caring for my body. It’s probably some combination of all of those things but like where you’re pulling each of those levers in different ways like that’s your ultimate definition of success where you are right now. And like how do we create spaces for women to honor that, right? Because I don’t think it’s about giving them permission. You don’t need me to give you permission to do anything. You can do whatever the hell you want to but how do we create a space … and start conversations that remind you of that? KL I love that. I wish you could see how furiously I’m nodding my head [chuckling] along. NG [Laughs] Aw! Thank you. KL I think, you know, one of the things that we’ve talked about on the show and, you know, I think is at the forefront of a lot of our minds is just talking about money because it’s so hard, and for women it’s made to feel shameful. And I think it’s really exciting and heartening to see more conversations happening around pay equity and, you know, salary negotiation, and just learning how to talk about it. What do you feel—like what are Girlboss readers looking for most when it comes to money talk? And like what have you found? [31:58] NG So we try to cover money from every angle, whether that is talking about the basics of how to save, whether that’s talking about how do you actually do the research you need to do to figure out what your quote/unquote “market value” is? How do we have more honest conversations about debt? About things that are really hard? And things that are holding us back? Those sort of deep seeded like dark things that like keep you up night when you think about money because I think money anxiety is very real for so many women and men in this generation and we want to address that. But we also want to talk about things, like, something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is just the relationship with money and self doubt, and thinking about … promotions. Like how do you negotiate for a raise? How do you negotiate for a raise when, say, you were offered a promotion but you weren’t offered more money to go with it? I’ve been on both sides of that table, and this is something I write about in my Girlboss email this week that goes out on Thursday, but I’ve been someone who’s had to manage a team and has had to cut budgets and say, “Ok. You can have—I fought for a promotion for you but I can’t get you more money now.” And that’s really tough and I’ve seen different reactions to it but I’ve also been on the other side. I think, you know, when I was younger and, you know, an associate editor, I was definitely at a place where the publishing industry was struggling. We had so many layoffs in 2008. I mean so many industries were struggling at that time. And there was this was sense of like, “You just need to be grateful that you have a job, and don’t ask for more, and maybe you can absorb the job of the person we laid off next to you but you should be appreciative of that.” And that idea of like, “You should be appreciative,” is really tough. I think that that’s something I really struggle with because so often my internal monologue is about gratitude. I don’t want to seem ungrateful for the thing I’ve already been given. So I couldn’t ask for more. I couldn’t counter your perfectly good offer with something that I actually really think I deserve because I don’t want to seem like I’m not already grateful for what I’m being offered. And I think that that’s really tough. There is a place for gratitude in all of our lives, and I think that it fuels us and it makes us better people, but I think when you think about negotiating this fear of seeming ungrateful I think it’s really … troubling. I think it’s something that on a personal level I know holds me back, and I think I see it for many women. How do you have like a really clear, unemotional conversation about what you need and deserve when you’re worried that the reaction you’re going to get is emotional? JL I think it’s so interesting to think about this, you know, idea of grateful—like of being grateful and I can totally relate to a lot of what you were saying. And I think about when I was younger in my career having those same feelings and I think the way it’s leveled out for me is I’ve been more grateful to myself. So I’ve been really grateful about the experiences that I had and I felt more I think confident and grateful for what I can bring as well. So I think that’s helped me with that balance. NG Oh I love that! That’s such a nice way to think of it. JL I was thinking about it as you said it. I was like, “Oh yeah,” I was like, “That,” I—like—hearing you say that it just like resonated so much in me that I realized like I think that’s part of like how I’ve grown over the years and like realizing like a balance between that. [35:33] SWB You know this is something that I think is tough, though for—for a lot of people, particularly women, and particularly sort of earlier in their careers because there’s so much sort of like—there’s so much about our culture that will tell women that they—they kind of like should be grateful for the opportunity to finally get a chance to do something and it encourages them to sort of not necessarily see themselves as somebody who deserves to be there. And sort of like bringing value that is important for the organization. And I think it’s easier, you know, like looking back for me now, being in my thirties and kind of like having, you know, feeling like I’ve done a fair amount that, I can say like, “No, what I do matters. I’m very good at what I do. And I absolutely, you know, want to be paid fairly for it, and feel comfortable advocating for that because of that confidence.” I think it’s hard when you’re—when you’re getting started. And I’m curious, Neha, do you have any—any advice that you give people who are earlier in their careers about sort of like where to find some of that confidence without—without necessarily having as many years to back it up? NG I make a point of, every time I hire someone, I like to put aside a little bit—and I’m giving away my tricks here—but [chuckles] to put aside a little bit of money inside of my budget to give someone room to negotiate because I think it’s really important, especially in entry-level roles, that if someone tries to negotiate they’re not immediately shot down. And even a little bit goes a really long way in that regard but the people who don’t end up negotiating are asking for anything and just end up accepting the offer. I usually go back to them and say, “Hey, let’s talk about this at your six month. But like I had a little bit of money that like I had put aside so that you could negotiate for like a little bit more and you didn’t ask for anything. Like I would encourage you to always ask.” Which maybe is, you know, unorthodox advice for a hiring manager, but I do think it’s important because talking and dealing in specifics in real scenarios is what really lets us think about how you would do something differently and how you can improve. SWB I feel so conflicted about that because on the one hand I’m like, “Yeah! Learn to negotiate! Like it’s a really helpful skill. It is a skill that, you know, I think women, in particularly, aren’t—aren’t really taught as much about. And then on the other hand a part of me is also like … it’s—it’s true that women are not necessarily, at least in a lot of environments, they’re not taken the same way as men when they do try to negotiate or when they do, you know like, if women go into work environments and behave in the way that would be totally acceptable for a man to behave, they are not necessarily treated in the same way. And so I always worry about sort of like setting the expectation that we should be teaching women to do at work is the same thing that has worked for men. And so I always feel a little bit like, “Huh, what if work were just more transparent? Like what if we—we were coming to that conversation differently altogether?” [38:40] NG You should leverage the traits that are yours, but what I’m talking about here in terms of like negotiating, like, we’re not at a place yet where we have true transparency in terms of what we pay people. And we do know that there is a gap in terms of wages that is largely, not entirely, but like significantly contributed to by the fact that women are less likely to negotiate especially as they move further up the ranks. So what I’m trying to do is give advice based on what has worked for me in the industry that I’m in, and I think that there are other industries where it is much harder to ask for more, and where it’s, you know, even commonplace for there to be some level of retribution if you negotiate. And I think that that’s very different. But I think I can comfortably say if you work in media and you’re seeing retribution for negotiating, that’s a real red flag. Not—most organizations in this industry are not like that and so if you’re coming up against someone who is going to behave that way, that’s a red flag for other bad behaviors that are going to be coming down the pike. SWB I love that because I think we talk about that a lot on the show that like how somebody treats you in an initial interaction should tell you a lot about what you can expect in the future and if what they’re doing is a red flag up front then, like, maybe you don’t want to be there at all. NG Yeah. KL I like—when I think about, you know, just the conversations around money and managing it, and—and just everything that you’ve been talking about, that—to me that is a—a very small part of what I consider my mental load, and sort of something that I carry around that I think is, you know, we talk about all these areas and it’s like I think as women we sort of, at a baseline, carry a much heavier load, and I—I would love for you to talk a little bit about that because I know that you touch on the idea of mental load and kind of just how we manage that. I mean, how do you manage it? And how do you feel like a good, productive conversation can happen around that? NG I think I will preface this by saying I don’t have any of the answers but this is something that I think about so often, it’s something that me and my closest friends talk about all the time, and many of them have kids so I think that the conversation about emotional labor and about mental load becomes much more exacerbated when there is the care of another human being happening. But I—I think about it—I mean I actually think part of mental load is how much time I spend thinking about mental load so, I don’t know, say what you will about that but like [all laugh] … you know I am so I’m married, I’ve been married for a couple of years now to someone who I really see as a true partner. It’s someone who, you know, when I was offered this job in LA, said, “Yeah, let’s take the leap. I’m going to work remotely at my job and we’re going to make this move across the country to support your career,” and I think that that’s partnership, and I recognize that there are going to be moments where we make choices to prioritize in my career, as well as other moments where we make choices to prioritize his career and I think that that’s exactly right for me, and I hope for more women. But … I think I still worry about like what—like what’s really—what’s equal? When you think about like introducing like the care of a child into a marriage, into a home, when both parties are working? Because I think that some of this is personality based, some of this how we’re socially conditioned, and some of this is what society like expects from us, right? But I am the project manager of our lives and I think that’s not to say that my husband doesn’t contribute often but, you know, I am the one who loves making lists and loves, you know, if you’re going on vacation you book the hotels, you do the pieces that like allow you to feel like real structure around the experience and that’s, again, it’s not a ding, right? Because like we could have a great vacation that had probably a little bit less structure to it and still be really happy but if that’s my default state how are we ever going to live in a place where I’m not the one who’s always doing that? And taking up just a larger part of like what is required to keep a home and a family in order while also, you know, I had big ambitions about my career, and about sort of how I want to continue to grow from here, about the things I want to accomplish, and that … feels terrifying to me, truthfully. Like thinking about how to really balance what my ambitions are in a professional sense with what I think good could look like at home and this feels like such a … old conversation. Where like I feel like we haven’t made that much progress in a lot of ways. And, you know, in some ways we’ve made a lot of progress but in other ways I don’t—I don’t know what the solutions are here but it’s something I think about all the time and it’s something that my husband and I talk about a lot pretty openly and I think that that’s part of the solution, right? How do you have really honest conversations about the things that … scare you? [43:58] SWB Ugh! I love that! KL I know [crosstalk and laughter] — JL This is so real [laughs]. I like can’t—[laughing] I like can’t even. I’m just I am currently—and it’s funny—the reason I was able to make it today is because we have a snow day here and my husband is currently watching our one-year-old son downstairs so I could be on this podcast [chuckles]. So I’m just like, I’m like yessing everything that you said and just like wow! [NG chuckles] I’m like —yes! [Chuckles] One hundred percent! You are speaking exactly what I have thought so many times. So thank you for articulating that so well. SWB I mean like literally the three of us on the podcast on our, like, sort of private backchannel Slack, right, we’re talking about podcast stuff. We just had a long conversation about this very topic, of sort of like being the project manager in our relationships. And we all have partners who are … partners. They’re real partners. And like I made a joke, they’re not like … guys who come home from work, sit on the couch, and like wait for you to have dinner on the table. Like they’re very much active participants in—in all of these different parts of life, but at the same time it is one of those things where you look at it and you go, like, “Oh yeah, who makes all of the hotel reservations?” Or who’s the one who figured out like, you know, what the dentist appointment schedule was or whatever those kinds of things are. And I think—I think you’re right. It’s like that—it’s like that figuring out, like, how do you balance those things? And how do you talk about about them? And how do, you know, hopefully over time shift them in ways that feel good for everybody involved? And not feel like, you know, it’s this constant source of tension. [45:32] JL Well I think it’s being honest too. So I think it’s really important, you know, as you were describing to know that that’s sort of how you manage your life, or those are the things that are in it, and I think if you know that then at least you can have an honest [KL yeah] conversation about it. NG That’s so true and it’s so hard. It’s I mean even in like great relationships where there’s open communication and trust like it’s hard to say the things that really scare you. KL It totally is. [chuckles] It really is. So [sighs] when we talk about this it—it really makes me think about, you know, learning to ask for help and we talk about asking for help and just kind of being ok with that. Who do you ask for help? NG I ask so many people for help. I think first and foremost I ask Sophia, our CEO here, for help when I feel uncertain about how to solve for something, or how to like I think it’s such a fun thing to be at the startup scrappy stage of, you know, we started out with ten people when I got here, maybe even eight, and now we’re 17 people and we’ve, you know, we’ve more than doubled and that’s so exciting and then I have amazing friends, and I think there is something so special about having community that I’m really sort of acutely aware of right now because when you move across the country you really see—most of my community is in New York still. The women that I talk to all the time now it’s on a text thread rather than over a meal or over breakfast or coffee or a drink. Or at least not as often. But I think having just even like that text thread of—I have a circle of friends who we just sort of like free and direct discourse just like spill all of our updates and our questions and our rants. And that’s amazing. And that’s a place where I feel I can turn for help. And I have another circle of friends where it’s something similar, but we do like a Friday text thread of like a rosebud and thorn, you know? Something that like you—you’re really excited about as well as something that’s like blossoming and something that’s hard. And that structure is really nice and it feels a little silly to say it out loud that my friends and I communicate in this way but when, you know, life priorities and distance separate you, it’s so nice to know that you’re just sort of staying close to people, and able to find a framework in which you can talk about like the really real stuff. KL Oh my god. SWB The rosebud and the thorn is something that— JL I love that! SWB Like I’ll be thinking about that [NG laughs] for awhile— KL That’s so great. JL That’s so great! [48:02] SWB So, Neha, before we wrap up, is there anything happening at Girlboss that you really want our listeners to know about? NG The most important, exciting thing that we have upcoming is the Girlboss Rally in LA on April 28th. We are—we unfortunately just sold out of tickets today but you can go to girlbossrally.com and you can get digital access, you can get all of the video, and see all of these amazing speakers from Bozoma St. John to Gwyneth Paltrow to Janet Mock to Paola Mendoza to Sarah Sophie Flicker to Jen Gotch, just like really incredible women that I’m so excited to gather together, to really pick their brains and get inspiration, but also follow that inspiration up with real, actionable advice so that we can all learn something from people who have done incredible things. SWB Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. NG Thank you for having me— KL Yeah, thank you. NG This was really fun [music fades in, fades out]. JL So for new listeners, joining us on Season 2, something that we love to do at the end of the show is end with our Fuck Yeah of the Week, which is where we look at something that makes us say, “Hey, fuck yeah!” Hey, Sara, what’s this week’s Fuck Yeah? SWB This week we are saying, “Fuck yeah,” to building more inclusive language into our vocabularies. So, so often when we were recording the podcast during our first season, we would just be chatting along, and suddenly, you know, I might say something like, “Hey, guys!” And one of the things we talked about was how “guys” can feel alienating to people who, you know, aren’t guys. And it’s such a common thing that is said—I mean it’s said so often in all kinds of contexts, and some people don’t mind it, some women don’t mind it, some really do. And what we decided is like for our podcast because we want to make sure people feel welcome listening to it that we just cut that stuff out. And that’s a hard habit to break. JL It’s so hard! We all say it quite often. I say, “Hey guys,” a bunch and it’s also hard to be like, “Hey, do you know you just said ‘hey guys’?” to your friend because you don’t want to constantly correct someone, either. But because we’re all working on this, it’s something that, you know, we—we’ve tried to get more comfortable being like, “Oh! You just said that.” And I think it’s really helpful to do that, especially in a place where, you know, I trust both of you and I know that you know when I say things I don’t—I’m never trying to be noninclusive. And so something one day we were recording and I was saying something, I think I was explaining a Fuck Yeah, and I said, “Yeah, I’m going to go tab-crazy about this.” And I kept talking and talking and then I hear Sara sort of breathe and she’s like, “Hey, Jenn?” And I was like, “Oh no!” And, you know, she had brought up that I had said crazy and—and crazy can also be one of those words that I’m trying to move away from. And I hadn’t really thought too much about that and I think, again, because it’s something that’s so in my vocabulary right now. I’m crazy about that! But, you know, there’s plenty of times where, you know, I’ve used “crazy” to describe things and I was like, “Oh, why would I not say that?” was my initial reaction. And I think I got a little bit defensive at first. I didn’t say that, but just inside I felt like, “Oh no, you know, like why wouldn’t I say this?” And then Sara suggested instead using “tab wild.” And the thing about it was “wild” is such a more exciting word than crazy that this vocab swap was like super awesome! I was like, “Oh yeah, wild! Let’s go wild!” Like you know, like I wouldn’t want to be like, [sings] “Let’s go wild! Let’s get nuts.” But [laughs] you know swapping wild for crazy just sounded so much better, so it’s where I began to be more open to the idea, if switching things in my vocabulary means that, you know, the world is my oyster. [51:41] KL Yeah. I think it’s like—it’s just that—it’s figuring out what—what do you actually mean and is there a really good word that you can use instead that’s not ableist or that is more inclusive? And I think just being able to pay attention to that and, like you said, Jenn, feeling like we’re in a group of people that we know we can practice this more is so important and there’s nothing quite like hearing yourself recorded over and over again [laughter] to realize that it’s something you need to be more aware of, and pay attention to, and I love that we’re doing this. SWB I mean it becomes like a default filler word, sometimes, you know? KL Absolutely. SWB And I think like for me I remember a few years ago when I was editing a magazine I was really uncomfortable with like the singular “they.” Like saying, “they” as a singular person instead of “he” or “she,” and I just didn’t like it. I didn’t like it. And I can understand feeling that way about pretty much any kind of language change, because it feels uncomfortable at first like, nobody likes change, everybody likes things how they are, right? [Laughing] Honestly, that’s—that’s—people are creatures of habit. So if you have a habit to say things a certain way or see things a certain way, at first you can bristle. And it took me longer than I want to admit to get comfortable with the singular “they.” By the time we had Stevie on last season, who is non-binary and uses “they” as their pronoun, I was on board for sure [mm hmm] but just hearing them talk about it too reminded me like, “Oh yeah, like this really matters for people.” And if it matters for people, then it matters for me on the show. I want to model that behavior out to the world. [53:19] JL And as you mentioned, I mean we are lucky, we have editing, we can look through this. I would, you know, I would never step someone in a large group or crowd and be like, “Hey, actually! You just said this.” But I think it’s, you know, pulling someone maybe aside after. If I notice someone at work is saying something a lot then maybe I want to be like, “Oh, just so you know,” or you know I’m in a Slack group for design systems and they have one of the automatic things that if someone writes “Hey guys” it’ll have a Slack message popup that says, “We use inclusive language language here. How about something like ’Hey, folks?’” And I like something like that because the message is written really friendly and it’s not like pointing out anyone’s wrongdoings, it’s just, “Oh here’s something you probably didn’t consider. Let’s all start considering this more.” SWB And I think it also it also all depends on context, situation, language, the severity of something, like I think there are definitely times where in a group setting if somebody says something egregious [KL yeah] it might be important to call them out publicly because it might be important to publicly state, “This is not acceptable here.” [Mm hmm] And other times it’s like there’s a slip and they just need a quiet nudge and—and I think it really depends. But I think when it comes to doing, you know, if you’re going to put a podcast out into the world, and if you’re going to say like, “Yeah, this is a feminist podcast,” then like fuckin’ live it. So we have to make sure that we’re really thinking about that carefully and—and, you know, continuing to get better, and I definitely think of this as something that like we have not fixed. It’s a thing that we are aware of, and working on, and like figuring out … what else is out there? Like what other stuff is out there that we haven’t realized yet, you know, could be alienating some people and what are we going to do about it? KL Yeah, so that’s we’re really excited because we thought we would add a new segment to the show, and we’re calling it Vocab Swap. So we’re going to keep tabs on how we’re sort of doing with this over the season, and we’re going to look for new ways um to learn how we can just expand our inclusive, and just practice it a lot more, and find new ways to—to do that. SWB Yeah! So I think for our very first Vocab Swaps we’re really talking about “guys” and “crazy” and taking note when those words are coming out of our mouths and thinking about why we’re using them, and whether they are appropriate, and who they might be hurting. KL And that’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Neha Gandhi for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Your support helps us spread the word. And don’t miss our new biweekly newsletter, “I Love That”! Head to noyougoshow.com/ilovethat to sign up. See you all next week! [Music fades in, plays for 30 seconds, fades out to end.]

Ben Jackson, formally of VICE Media and The NYT, talks about the importance of employee onboarding and his new company For the Win. Ben Jackson has been designing and building consumer-facing products for 20 years. Before founding For the Win, Ben worked as Director of Mobile at VICE Media and iOS Lead at The New York Times. He’s written about design, technology, and psychology for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and WIRED, among others. Ben studied Computer Science and Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. In today's episode we discuss the importance of employee onboarding, Ben's new company, "For the Win," his Slackbot and "Harold and the Purple Crayon."   Contact Links: LinkedIn Twitter https://ftw.nyc/ https://twitter.com/ftwnyc https://instagr.am/ftwdotnyc https://fb.me/ftwnyc http://meetup.com/ftwnyc Show Notes: The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done The First Time Manager The Effective Manager Manager Tools Podcast Team of Teams  Practical Service Design

An interview with Marcel Pociot, creator of BotMan and co-founder of Beyond Code. Marcel on Twitter API Doc generator BotMan BeyondCode Laravel Notification Channels Marcel's Laracon EU talk Night Night Baby | Träum Süss BotMan slack invite Editing sponsored by Larajobs Transcription sponsored by GoTranscript.com [music] Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to the Laravel podcast, today we're talking to Marcel Pociot, the founder of BotMan, the framework agnostic PHP chatbot package. Try saying that two times, 10 times fast. Stay tuned. [music] Welcome back to the Laravel podcast. This is season three where we're doing interviews. It's the people you know—getting to know aspects of them you never understood. Or it's also finding some people who you probably have used their tools or you've seen them but you don't actually, necessarily know who they are. Those names who you've been putting in GitHub require or to Composer require for ages but never actually known who the person is. The guy we have in front of us today, I'm actually curious to see what his entire history of working with Laravel is, but the current most present one that's going on right now is connecting Laravel to chatbots and slackbots, and all that kind of stuff, and this is called BotMan but there's a lot more going on here. First of all, we start with the point where I massacre somebody's name and then we move on to the next point where I ask that person to say their name correctly and then introduce themselves a little bit. Marcel Pociot, that's close, not perfect. He's still smiling, so I didn't massacre it too badly. Can you tell us-- and I'm probably ending up calling you just Marcel through this podcast. Marcel Pociot: Yes, that's fine. Matt Stauffer: That's because it is easier for me to say. Thank You. Can you tell us a little bit about-- just real quick, you don't have to tell us your whole life story, I'll ask those questions but—who are you? What are you doing? What are you about? What's BotMan? What is your new company? Just give us the basics of what should we know about you. Marcel Pociot: Okay. Yes, my name is Marcel Pociot. I think that's at least the German pronunciation. I co-founded a company in December last year. Matt Stauffer: Congratulations. Marcel Pociot: Thank you. Very fresh still. I think you're one of the first people that I actually tell this in person that's not from my family- Matt Stauffer: I got the insider track then. [laughter] Marcel Pociot: -and friends because the website isn't finished yet. Yes. I think I'm quite around in the Laravel community for a bit. Matt Stauffer: You've been working-- I've known you just generally in the Laravel community, but you're one of those people where I know that I've known you but I don't even know how we originally connected. Now, you mentioned that we spoke together at a conference so that it may have been it, but do you have any early claim to fame in the Laravel community? Were there any packages that you did earlier on it that were more popular or is it just that you've been around for a while that you're known? Do you know? Marcel Pociot: Well, I did a few. There is one, I think it's called teamwork, for some user/team association package. Matt Stauffer: I remember that. Marcel Pociot: But they're all a bit older. Matt Stauffer: Where did first start using Laravel? Marcel Pociot: Two and a half years ago, I think. I wasn't doing that much PHP back in the days, at least not with frameworks. At the companies I work with, they were using self-built frameworks which are usually crap. You do this once in your lifetime and never again. Well, I ended up at companies that did it all the time. At one point, we decided that we'd built a SaaS application and we were looking for framework to use. This is pretty much the story I tell everyone when they ask me how I got into Laravel. My boss was really into Zend because of the whole Zend ecosystem, with the Zend Studio and the Zend server. I looked into the Zend framework, I think it was two. I gave it a week, I gave it really my best shot. I even bought a book and to gave it a try. In the meantime, I looked around for other frameworks and discovered Laravel. What I did with Zend framework in a week, I did with Laravel in an hour in the evening on the couch. This was the main motivation to use Laravel then. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Okay. I do remember that one of the things that, originally I saw, is that you were doing the Laravel notifications thing. Did you help co-manage that? Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: Or manage or- Marcel Pociot: With Mohamed and Freek, yes. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Cool. Got it. Stepping back for a second, it's so funny because I try not to go too deep in my own ethnological and linguistic curiosities in the podcasts because nobody else isn't quite as interested as I am, so one of the things I actually ask myself before we were on a call is how was your English so good, we went to that little bit but I must admit that based on your name, it's sounds French to me, but I know that you live in Germany. Are you French origin living in Germany or I'm I just totally? Marcel Pociot: No. I hear that a lot. I think it's also because of my first name. People try to pronounce it French, like Marcel Pociot or something like that. Matt Stauffer: That's exactly what I expected you to say when you first told me, yes. Marcel Pociot: As far as I can tell, the name-- we can't trace it back that much. I think it's just two generations and it's from Eastern Europe, so that's pretty much all I can say. Matt Stauffer: Okay, but you're German, you live in-- where do you live in Germany? Marcel Pociot: Near Dusseldorf, which is near Cologne so, yes. Matt Stauffer: I took a little bit of German in high school and college and probably forgot the majority of it, but just enough that I can read a couple of German story books to my kids and to try to get a little bit of German heritage in for them. My sister was in a little bookstore, a local bookstore and found this-- what's it called? It's like sweet dreams or something like that - Träumt Suss? Marcel Pociot: Susse Träume? Matt Stauffer: Anyway, it's this cute little blue book so I read it to my son over and over and over again, and my pronunciation was really bad at day one, but over time I got good at it. Then at some point, my wife found the exact same book in English and so now, with both of my kids, I read them both of the books back and forth, but my daughter is understanding enough English right now that when I read the German version to her she's like, "Wait a minute, I don't understand this one". She gets mad at me [laughs] because she prefers the English version. Anyway, cool. I do remember there was another big one, the API documentation generator, tell me a little bit about that project. Marcel Pociot: Well, it's a tool that you can pull into your Laravel application and it will basically just reads the routes that you define, so you can call it and give it the prefix of the routes that you want documentation for and will scan the routes and create this Stripe like documentation. So that you have the documentation on the left and then code examples how you can interact with the API on the right, and it does it by just pausing the routes and then reading the documentation of the code. Matt Stauffer: Is it its own thing or is generating like one of the preexisting styles? You know what I mean? Because I've never got to use it, but we are always looking for API documentation generators. Marcel Pociot: It's a theme that's called slate, so it's using this. Matt Stauffer: Cool. Very cool. I'll put links in the show notes. But the main two that I see associated with your name right now are the API doc generator and then, of course, BotMan, which we'll talk about in a minute. Those are the things and then we've got your company. Let's real quick talk about what is BotMan, where did it come from and then also, what's your company and then we're going to dig into the back story. BotMan, what is BotMan? What does it do and where did it come from? Marcel Pociot: Okay, I'll start with where it came from. It was really just coincidence. Late 2016, Slack announced that they now have a new HTTP based API, it's called event API. Basically, before that when you wanted to react to Slack events, like new messages, you had to connect through web sockets and the new API was basically just webhooks. Whenever a new action appears-- yes. Well, I mean, if you have a large Slack team it will blast a lot of events to your server. When I heard that Slack announced this API, I just thought that it would be cool to have a PHP API that wraps around it and have an elegant API around it, it's sort of what Laravel is all about, then apply this to Slack. Then I did this, I open sourced it. It was called just SlackBot at the time. It lay around there for three or four months, I didn't do anything with it and then, I came up with the idea that it might be cool to connect multiple services to it, not just Slack, but also Telegram and Facebook Messenger. That's the main thing with BotMan. It's one of the only-- maybe it's the only —PHP library that actually allows you to connect to multiple messenger services. Matt Stauffer: Yes. If it not the only, it's the only one that matters. That's what I think. [laughs] Marcel Pociot: It allows you to connect to these services with one API and reuse your code. Matt Stauffer: One of the hardest things for people to think about, chatbots— everyone hears "Chatbot is the cool new thing", whatever and often, it's really difficult to understand in what context would I actually want to use this, what are some--? Some of the simplest ones we've seen are, "Oh well, when I hook into a CodeShip integration, something that already exists but, what are some of the-- either in your personal use of it or in seeing other people use it, what are some of the most compelling uses of chatbots? Whether it's in Slack or Telegram, or whatever else that you've seen to help people's imagination get started a little. Marcel Pociot: Yes, I think the problem is that people always associate chatbots with these super artificial intelligence systems that understand whatever the user wants. In my opinion, it's just a different interface for your application. It's a conversational interface for your application and what I've seen that was built with BotMan, a lot is like websites, for example, for insurance companies. On their website, they have this chat bubble, that you know maybe from Intercom, and what it does is it guides you through the website. When you click on a button, the chatbot opens and asks you a question related to the action that you triggered when you clicked on the button. That's one-use case and I think- Matt Stauffer: I want to stop you for a second. When I think of a chatbot, what I think about is something that allows someone to use a preexisting chat system, like Facebook Messenger or something else, to interact with their backend API. What you're describing sounds like an entirely manual process where you just used webhooks to hook in your app, right? Am I missing what you're talking about? Marcel Pociot: No. That's also possible. With BotMan, it is the web drivers, so you can just connect it to your own API and then you send the message from your user to your own API and reply back. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Got it. Marcel Pociot: But in the end, that's what happens with Telegram or Facebook too. Yes. Matt Stauffer: So really, anything that has to do with sending and receiving messages to your user in a chat-like format. Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. Matt Stauffer: Regardless of which chat format they're usbing. Okay. I think the on page one is just so clear of an example. Everyone has used a website with Intercom on it or one of Intercom's competitors at some point. I get that one. I think that's super compelling. I'm happy to know that if I need to build that, still reach for BotMan, that's cool. I wouldn't have known that until you said that. Have you seen people use-- I think the hard thing for me is that when I think about Telegram or when I think about Facebook Messenger, I very infrequently think about interacting with someone who has enough money to have an API. I think of my friends. I'm sending a message to my friend, my friend messages me back. Have you seen or heard of really compelling use cases where people are using traditional chats systems, outside of Slack? We'll talk about Slack in a second, but has anybody done anything interesting that you know of with Telegram or Messenger or are those little more aspirational at this point? Marcel Pociot: Messenger is used a lot for more marketing kind of services. For example, TechCrunch has this, well, it's a chatbot where you can-- when you sign up you can register for different topics from their RSS feeds. Matt Stauffer: Intere-- wow. Marcel Pociot: Then you get- Matt Stauffer: They are using it to publish information out and people are subscribing. Marcel Pociot: Yes, every evening-- so you can select topics and then the time. Every evening, I get the top 10 stories from TechCrunch into the Messenger. Matt Stauffer: You just blew my mind. My son just started a podcast www.stauffersonscience.com, and I have a whole bunch of people who I grew up with, who are completely un-computer savvy and they're all saying, "How do I subscribe to a podcast?", I'm like, "Oh Gosh, how am I going to handle this?". I could build a little light Laravel or Lumen app that subscribes to the RSS feed of the podcast and allows people to enter their-- authenticate their Messenger information and pushes every new episode to their Messenger inbox. Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. Matt Stauffer: Holy crap, you just blew my mind. That's amazing. That is so cool, that's so clever. That opens up so many things for people to subscribe because everybody, all your non-tech savvy friends, your mom, your grandma, all of them, they all have Facebook which means they all have Messenger. Marcel Pociot: Yes. I think even more like the younger generation because they don't have MacBooks or laptops, they just have smartphone and use Messenger to communicate. Matt Stauffer: Do you know-- I'm sorry I'm just going into the weeds here, but I am so fascinated. If somebody doesn't use Messenger and they send something to a Messenger authenticated thing, does it show up on the web interface in their little messages thing in Facebook website? Marcel Pociot: You mean if they don't use the Messenger application? Matt Stauffer: Like if somebody doesn't have an iPhone but they go to facebook.com on their browser every day, can they do Messenger interactions using the little- Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: Okay, so it's the same thing as Facebook. Man, I need to pause for a moment, this is so cool. Okay, broadcasting makes a ton of sense. Broadcasting information, this—in some ways, you have some of the value but a lot more configurability of like an RSS feed through a multiple-medium subscription. That makes a ton of sense and I get that now. Marcel Pociot: Plus, I think. maybe this will change over time, but right now the click rates are much higher because it's not that overused as e-mail newsletters. For example, with the TechCrunch- Matt Stauffer: They feel more personal too? Marcel Pociot: Yes. It feels-- even though you know that you're not actually talking to someone at the company, it feels like you're interacting with the company, well, with its brand. The whole market taking thing is really popular on Facebook, also for artists, they have chatbots that you can ask, "where's the next concert?", and the user feels like they are talking to, I don't know, Beyoncé, whatever. Matt Stauffer: Interesting. I was just going to ask about questions. That one right there would feel like a little bit of natural language processing. If you can do some of that then you can have like ask questions of our whatever bot, or whatever, and that makes sense too. You imagine that you are working for some big company, like an insurance company maybe, and they say, "You want to ask us a question? Here, hook up to our messenger bot and you can ask--" blah, blah, blah. The messenger bot parses out using some basic natural language processing. So, the messenger bot is basically BotMan hooked in your API. The API, your Laravel app takes the questions tries to process them, tries to look up an answer and then sends the message back to that person. So that BotMan would be the interface layer in between. Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. Matt Stauffer: Okay, that makes sense. Slack makes the most sense for our context. I think we're all sitting and using cycle work every day, and it seems like Slack is adding more and more things you can do every time. Buttons at the bottom and stuff like that. What is the most interesting thing that you have built or seen built with Slack integrations on BotMan? Marcel Pociot: It's also interesting because Slack got-- I think they moved away from the term chatbots a while ago, and I think they just called it application. They even integrated like forms that open up, like select boxes, drop downs. I haven't seen that many slackbots using BotMan. There's one, I forgot the name who built it, but he built a slack game, it's like a dice rolling game, it's called Liar's dice. Matt Stauffer: I, obviously, could talk about BotMan the whole time. But this isn't actually about BotMan, this is about you. BotMan is amazing, there's all sorts of interesting stuff. You also have given-- do you know if your Laravel EU talk is online? I didn't actually watch those. Marcel Pociot: Yes, it's online. Matt Stauffer: Okay, great. I'll put a link up to your BotMan talk which is called From zero to multi-platform Chatbot with BotMan. I'll put the link up to that one as well. Let's move on to you. The first place I always start with everybody is, when did you first get interested in computers? Or when did you first get access to a computer? What did your original kind of exposure to computers? Marcel Pociot: I think the first memory that I have from a computer was, I was sitting, I might be like 6 or 7, sitting in the living room with my father, and I don't remember what kind of computer it was. But we had a book with games, so if you wanted to play a game that was the source code of the game in the book. Matt Stauffer: Was it BASIC? Marcel Pociot: Yes, it was. You had to type it in and then you got the game. What I remember, maybe that's also the reason why I remembered it is, my father was sitting there and typing everything in, and I just came at the power adapter and the whole thing crashed. [laughter] He was frustrated. Matt Stauffer: Yes, I believe it. I assume that was like one of those black and green old-- those boxes. Very cool. Marcel Pociot: This is the first memory of sitting in front of a computer. Matt Stauffer: I try not to call at people's ages too much, but I think that you're around my age, around 33, is that right? Marcel Pociot: Yes. 32 and in April 33. Matt Stauffer: We're almost exactly the same age. In our generation it was not all that common, at least in the US, I don't know about Germany, for people to have a home computer when we were that young. Since your father was the one doing this. Was your father-- was he a geek or is he a programmer? Marcel Pociot: Not at all, no. He was always interested in it, but well not so much that he really wanted to write more code than there was in the book. [laughs] Matt Stauffer: At what point did your interaction with the computer go from pulling out the plug from your dad typing in BASIC program to you creating things on your own? Marcel Pociot: I think it was-- in school we had, at the programming class, we wrote Turbo Pascal. Matt Stauffer: Wait, what age of school are you talking about? Marcel Pociot: I think this is seventh grade, so I must have been like 12, 13. Matt Stauffer: You had programming class when you were 13 years old? Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: That's fascinating. When I was in seventh grade, we had typing class and I- Marcel Pociot: With typewriters or--? Matt Stauffer: They were on Macs, but they were old Macs and we'd all sit around and I would finish the Mavis Beacon thing in five minutes and then I'd go try to learn Applescript and write programs that would infect all the other computers in the network and shut them all down at the same time without the teacher noticing, but there's no formal programming education even in high school. The best we had was an engineering class where the teacher would let us go hack around and stuff, but certainly, nothing formal. So, you learned Turbo Pascal in seventh grade? Marcel Pociot: Yes, pretty much and then- Matt Stauffer: How did that go? Marcel Pociot: Well, I think we moved quite fast from there to Delphi where also-- in the class, there were a handful of people that were always very fast with all the tasks and, just as you said, had a lot of time. We developed like a Trojan, a Trojan Horse [laughter] to open the CD trays from the other computers and stuff like that. Matt Stauffer: Exactly. That's exactly what I was trying to do. That's awesome. Okay, early on you were deep in the computers, you were writing code, you were hacking at it. When did you first get into the web? Marcel Pociot: I don't really remember what age I was, but it was like the Geocities sites. All this crappy-- Matt Stauffer: Yes, man. I still remember, mine was MA slash 1984. My first two letters in my name and then the birth year. [laughter] What was your first Geocities site, you remember? Marcel Pociot: No, I just remember that I had this cool hacker name. Matt Stauffer: What? Like 1337 speak?? Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: One, three, three, seven, four, four, whatever. Marcel Pociot: It was Delta2K, I don't know. Matt Stauffer: Nice. Marcel Pociot: It sounded cool. Matt Stauffer: Yes, of course, with 2k especially. Okay, it's funny because it seems like I'm either picking people to interview who are old head PHP dorks or there's something consistent about folks who are helping lead in our community that a lot of us are from similar generation. I'm curious to see where that goes, but-- you were doing that, you were playing around with it at the side, what did you study? Did you study that in university or--? Marcel Pociot: No. Here in Germany after you finish school, you can either go to a university or you can do training. You go to a company and then you have three years at the company and besides working at the company, you also go to school. Matt Stauffer: Is it a school provided by the government or provided by the company? Marcel Pociot: No, it's just a public school for learning the- Matt Stauffer: For that specific career? Marcel Pociot: -specific profession. Yes. Matt Stauffer: Got it, okay. Marcel Pociot: I did that to become a software engineer and I ended up in a company in Bochum, here in Germany, and- Matt Stauffer: I don't even know how to spell that. I'll put that down on the show notes [laughs]. Okay, cool. Marcel Pociot: Yes, that's what I did. I wasn't that much into liking school that much back in the days. So pretty early on, I decided to skip the school part and rather work five days a week, so that I can hack on some code. That's what I did and then just did the tasks on my own and learned from them on my own. Matt Stauffer: Got it. You have a pretty straight line from being a little kid watching your dad enter QBASIC programs in. Through learning in school and doing your own Geocities stuff, to being a software engineer and going straight in the industry. Have you at any point felt like, "Oh my gosh, this is not what I want to do"? Or is it just been pretty clear since early on- Marcel Pociot: Yes, it's been really clear since early on. Matt Stauffer: - "I'm a programmer, this is my thing"? Marcel Pociot: That's always what I wanted to do. It's always a bit funny when I talk to people that don't really know what they want to do with their lives and what direction they want to go because it was always really clear for me that I want to go to that direction. Matt Stauffer: Interesting. If you today-- and I know that you just started your own company in December, so hopefully this is really fresh in your head. If you today were to be able to pick exactly what you were doing day to day, if your company was successful in exactly all the ways you want it to be, what would you be doing with your time? Marcel Pociot: Right now, I would say I would still love to write code. I heard that you talked about this also with a few other people, what to do when you're 40 or 50 years old. Well, right now, I would say that I hope that I still want to write code at that time Matt Stauffer: If you found yourself in a situation where your company just-- and we will talk about you company in a second, but you just took off and it's going really well. You decide to hire five people and all the sudden, you're spending all your time doing administrative work. At that point, you think you might say, "I gotta fix this, I got to get back into the code"? Is that your sense of it right now? Marcel Pociot: Right now, it is, yes, but I'm just so refreshed and I'm really just coming from a lead developer role. Matt Stauffer: Yes. Okay. All right. Tell me about your company. You went right into that internship, what's your work history look like? You don't have to tell me every company, but what kind of stuff you've been doing. Have you been working primarily for software firms or have you've been working for non-software companies as a software programmer? Marcel Pociot: No. I just worked for agencies, like web agencies. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Marcel Pociot: The first one was very small, four people when I started there which was very cool because I got to do everything. I had to talk to customers and the clients. We had-- it was very small so we had to do things like setting up e-mail accounts for them. They called if they couldn't set up the email account on their mobile phone. Then they would come in with their phone and stuff like that. Yes, the second company was also a bigger agency but still an agency, where I did-- At the first one, I did PHP and then I got a lot into Appcelerator Titanium. Matt Stauffer: That's why I thought you'd done Titanium. Let's talk about Titanium for a second. Titanium, I feel like was one of the first used JavaScript to write multi-platform apps. How is it different and similar from something like Ionic? Marcel Pociot: The main difference is that while Ionic is just html that gets executed on the phone in the browser, or in the web view, Titanium used the JavaScript code that you wrote and they had proxies for the native languages for java or Objective C. Then the JavaScript code would call the native proxy objects that would then execute native code. When you wanted [crosstalk]- Matt Stauffer: It is more of like a predecessor of React Native. Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. It's like- Matt Stauffer: Okay. Got it. Is it still around? Marcel Pociot: It is. The company got acquired and they still develop it but the time Facebook announced React Native, the community just ran away and went to Facebook, yes. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Okay. I'm sorry, I interrupted. You were doing that at that company and then--? Continue. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Titanium was also my main motivation to work on open source in the first place. I haven't done that before and I started developing Titanium modules. Just small user interfaces- Matt Stauffer: Like packages. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Right. User interface libraries to share and I put them open source and I think I did Titanium for, maybe, one and a half years. Mostly Titanium and then also some Java and Objective C to work on some native modules. During that time, I got bit away from PHP because also, at the time, there was no Composer. The whole ecosystem wasn't as stable as it is right now. Matt Stauffer: Yes. What brought you back? Marcel Pociot: Well, I think it was just a client project. [laughs] Matt Stauffer: Okay. Did they say PHP or it was a web and you had to pick and you just pick PHP because you knew it? Marcel Pociot: Yes, because I knew it and also because of React Native. When React Native was announced, Titanium just pretty much died. Matt Stauffer: Yes. But that was pretty recently, right? Marcel Pociot: Well-- Matt Stauffer: Like a year [crosstalk] Marcel Pociot: No. Native is more around more than a year, I think. Matt Stauffer: Is that real? I believe you, I don't actually know. Okay. Yes, let's say, it may be as long time as 2015 but-- because a lot of times when I hear people talk about "I stepped away from PHP--", blah, blah, blah, "and I finally came back", and they are in the Laravel community. A lot of them came back right around the time when Laravel 4 came out. Maybe I just got the timeline on that wrong in my head. When did Laravel 4 come out? Marcel Pociot: When I started working with their Laravel, 5 came out. I think I worked with 4 for about a month. Matt Stauffer: That is what I was expecting then. Okay. Marcel Pociot: Yes. We started this SaaS product at our company and we chose to use Laravel 5 because-- I think the main reason was the form requests, which just blew my mind. I thought they were super cool to validate stuff and then we decided to pick up, there Laravel 5 during the development with the beta, there was no good decision. Matt Stauffer: I didn't say and it was also bad decision. Marcel Pociot: We had to fix several things every day and at some point we just pinned the dependency to one specific commit, so we knew, “okay, this is working” Matt Stauffer: And you built against that commit until you released it until and then deal with all the fixes at once. Marcel Pociot: And then it stays that way for a long time Matt Stauffer: It's funny. This timeline does line up here is what I have seen, as four came out in 2013, five came out in 2015 and React Native was announced probably at some point in 2015. So you were deep in titanium, you were off in that world and interestingly you were doing a lot of other mobile stuff. You talked about getting into Java, getting into objective C a little bit it, so it was both Titanium, which is JavaScript but then also the adapter worlds, which means you got to know a little bit of Java from Android, a little objective C for Apple and then you all of a sudden come and jump back into PHP and it was Laravel 5, things were modern and Composer all that kind of stuff, were you still working for that same consultancy at that point? Marcel Pociot: Yes, must have been sort of at the same time that I switched jobs, yes. And I didn't do that-- I always did PHP in the afternoon on the couch Matt Stauffer: Got it. It was still always like your fun time favorite language because I know a lot of people would say they left, they're like "oh well, I got tired of PHP I left for rails, I got tired of PHP and I left for .NET or whatever, so you still had a soft spot in your heart for PHP the whole time. Marcel Pociot: Yes right, but not with the framework at the time. Matt Stauffer: You ever rolled your own? You said your company rolled their own, Marcel Pociot: Yes, of course. Matt Stauffer: Does it have a name? Marcel Pociot: No, it didn't really have a name, no. Matt Stauffer: Never got that far? Marcel Pociot: No. Matt Stauffer: Okay. You got a pretty classic story here, obviously everyone's different but a lot of us left at some point a lot of us came back at some point but it's interesting for the amount of impact you have made with BotMan you came up to Laravel pretty recently and BotMan isn't really a Laravel framework either. I feel like it was tied to Laravel at some point, is it basically just a PHP framework that does it even have a Laravel convenience layer on top of it right now? Marcel Pociot: Yes it does. It is framework agnostic but there's a piece that's called BotMan Studio which is basically a blank Laravel 5.5 installation with some additional BotMan service provider and additional commands, a Tinker page to play around with it but it's not tied to Laravel. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Okay we've caught up, you switched consultancies, you got in Laravel 5, you built BotMan, you talked about how you built BotMan so let's talk about your company. We chatted on and off about it but let's pretend that we haven't chatted at all. In December you formed your own company, you went out on your own. Tell me about it, what's your motivation, what's your goal, what's your desire; what made you want to get out of working for other consultancies and start your own thing and what is your own thing? Marcel Pociot: Okay. I'm not doing this alone, I'm doing this with a former colleague, he has been a freelancer for a year now already and already a year ago when he left the company, we were already thinking about doing something on our own and I think the main motivation was- when we started this SaaS application at our company, we thought about turning it into its own company, which they eventually did. I ended up sitting in a new office with my now business partner and the CEO from this new company and we basically sat together for 2 years, just the two of us working on the product and we just knew that the CEO back at the time was a sales person and- how can I put it, a sales person as the CEO of a software product is difficult. This was like the main motivation because we had a different idea of the product, the way we wanted to get with it and it didn't turn out into that direction so we thought that, well if we do something on our own, we can give it our best shot. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Is it a similar product to what you originally planned but since it didn't go the way you originally planned you're going to go build, are you doing product work then? Marcel Pociot: Right now the company is called Beyond Code and we are, it's sort of a split. We have, on the one hand, we do projects, project work mostly we try to do it for Chatbots obviously. Matt Stauffer: Your consultancy that builds Chatbots for people as a part of what you're doing. Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. On the other hand, we have BotMan as the library and we want to focus around building a whole product ecosystem around it so that it becomes easier for people to pick it up and use it like analytics, bot building systems. Matt Stauffer: So Beyond Code GMBH, what does that stand for by the way? I've never known that. GMBH. I assume it means limited liability corporation but the Germany version. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: Let's test my German. Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung. Marcel Pociot: Yes, that's quite good. Matt Stauffer: All right. I did okay. All right. Beyond Code is a consultancy that builds primarily applications that have Chatbots on them and also uses the finances that come from that to further build the ecosystem around BotMan which is a PHP framework agnostic library to make it easy to build the type of applications that Beyond Code is building for people. Right? Marcel Pociot: Right. Exactly. Matt Stauffer: It makes sense. It's like that, not quite, like the Discourse model where like hey, there's a free or then Wordpress model. There's a free piece of software, there's also the way to pay us to do it, the money that you pay us to do it makes the free piece software better. Everything fits and everything else. Okay. That totally makes sense. All right, that's going forward. A success for the next couple years of your life would mean that the work that you're doing or consultancy work, the work you're doing for clients basically allows you to make BotMan better, is that the general? Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: You mentioned analytics, you mention understanding what's going on. Are there any other big next goals or features or things that you want that you feel like you can share with us that aren't the secret sauce? Marcel Pociot: No. Not that I can share them. No. Matt Stauffer: Okay, cool. But you've got big plans, it's not just sitting where it is, it is something you want to grow. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: Okay, that's cool. I think that the ability to compellingly get someone excited about the possibilities with a Chatbot obviously is going to be a big part of your doing. I'm glad we had the opportunity for that. Like I said, I'm literally going to get off this call and go see how fast I can hack together something to send that one woman who went church with me growing up. Facebook Messenger notifications when my son's podcast goes out. I'm super geeked about that. Okay, let's see. What else, what do you do in your free time? One of the things is that you have such a straight line through programming that I think that I want to know more about what is not programming you. What motivates you? I know you've got a family, I know you've got one kid? Marcel Pociot: Yes, one kid. Matt Stauffer: One kid. How old is your kid? Marcel Pociot: Four. Matt Stauffer: Four. Okay. Obviously spending time with your family is significant but whether with your family or on your own, what do you do outside of coding? What motivates you? What excites you? What do you do when you're away from the computer? Marcel Pociot: I think I have to re-calibrate myself a bit because when I was working at the consultancy, what I was doing in the afternoon was BotMan and now I'm doing this during the day job. Matt Stauffer: Actually I got to stop you for a second. You keep mentioning the afternoon as your free time, what does your schedule look like? Marcel Pociot: It's mostly nine to five. Matt Stauffer: When you say in the afternoon, do you mean after five? Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. Sorry, in the evening. Matt Stauffer: In the evening. Got it. Okay. What you mean is basically your free time, hacking time in your old job you're doing consultancy during the day and then BotMan stuff at night but now the BotMan is your day job. How do you reorient? Marcel Pociot: Yes, I still have to figure that out myself. I'm not that much of like a sports person or anything. I think really my main motivation was to program still. Matt Stauffer: You just love coding. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Well and other than that it's mostly, beside my family of course, playing some video games but- yes. Matt Stauffer: Yes. I'm not a gamer but I gotta ask what kind of games are, I don't even know what questions gamers ask, is it a PC or console that the question they would ask what game you are into? Marcel Pociot: No, it is console but also it's funny and also a bit sad that I just realized that I'm getting old because I'm no longer good at these games. I no longer can play these games longer. I have always liked these big games that pull you in like big RPGs but now with a kid, I don't really have the time to do that. Matt Stauffer: You don't have much time. Marcel Pociot: I don't want to play for five consecutive hours and if I come back after a few days, I don't want an hour to find out where was I or what I'm supposed to do. Matt Stauffer: That's why I loved Nintendo, that's one of many reasons why I love Nintendo. Because for people with families, Nintendo is good. A, because there's games that you can play with your kids, and also user interfaces you can play with the kids, but B, there's games that are like you can dip in and out. Marcel Pociot: Yes, you can just pick them up and then play for half an hour and then your're done. Matt Stauffer: Even Zelda as an extremely immersive game. You can still pick it up for 20 minutes here or there. Marcel Pociot: That is also too big for me. Matt Stauffer: Zelda is. I mean I can understand it. I've played more video games when I played through-- I'm not done with Zelda, but I played more video games when I first got the Switch and Zelda than I have in years. And even so, it was 20 minutes here and there. Because of the Switch, I just put it down and it just pauses it, but I hear you. Super Mario Odyssey is pretty small. And of course, Mario Kart I play with my son nearly every day. Marcel Pociot: Yes, [laughs] me too, yes. Matt Stauffer: Nice. Marcel Pociot: So now we have this rule that we play every other day. [laughter]. Matt Stauffer: Yes, yes. Every night became a problem, so I was like, "You need to get off." The good thing is my son is super, super active. I was a lazy kid, I didn't want to do anything, I just wanted to sit around. My kid, if I let him, we would be outside running around every day, I don't don't have any problems. Marcel Pociot: Yes, my son too. Yes, when I came home from work, usually the first thing that he would tell me was, "Okay, you can leave your shoes on, we go out and play some soccer." [laughter] Matt Stauffer: I love it, that's very cool. Yes, I think my biggest bummer about the neighborhood we live in right now is that-- the best thing about it is the houses are really close and everybody gets to know each other very well, so he's got tons of friends. But the bummer is the yards are so small that there's nowhere for us to play without getting in the car and driving somewhere. Like, play soccer or baseball or something like that. But what we end up doing is just running around in the house like crazy people anyway. Marcel Pociot: [laughs]. Matt Stauffer: It's his favorite game right now. Marcel Pociot: We have people living underneath so we can't do this all the time. Matt Stauffer: My son's favorite game right now is turn on some music really loud, some really hype pop music or something like that, and then run around and chase each other and throw bouncy balls at each other or try to tickle each other or something like that while the music plays really loud. I'm like, "Okay." Marcel Pociot: [laughs]. Yes, haven't done that in a while. Matt Stauffer: What keeps you from getting stuck when you're coding? Or what tools do you use, or what book or what languages. How do you keep either on a single problem, or on a single framework, or single language? What broadens your perspectives? Whether it's in the programming world, like some other programming language, or whether it's something about your family or your life. What helps you keep your brain out of just the really narrow focus of, "I work in one language, one package, all day long." What gives you inspiration? Marcel Pociot: Recently, when we had in mind that we're going to start the company, I focused a lot on the organizational things and on how to get this even up and running. During that time I was not that much focused on code, or on frameworks, or anything else, because it also meant for me just to get out of the comfort zone and start a company, and not have the safety as an employee. What I'm trying to tell is that, during this time, I sort of stepped away from being too close to the coding world a bit, and now I'm just catching up again. But I think it's mostly just talking to other people and exchanging with my business partner, things like that. It's not that I use other languages and look into them specifically to see new things, so it's not that I really have the plan on how to broaden my view. I don't know, I think it just happens this way. And if I'm stuck at a specific problem, I just try to go out for a bit and [chuckle] step away from the code. Matt Stauffer: Yes. All right. I feel like I promised every time that I'm not going to say I could talk for hours and then I do it every time anyway. Oh well, I failed, I did it. Marcel Pociot: [laughs]. Matt Stauffer: We are nearing time, so I don't want to start anything new and big. Are there any other big parts of you, your life, your motivation or your work that you feel like we haven't got a chance to cover? Marcel Pociot: No, I think we covered the important parts, most of all, yes. Matt Stauffer: Okay, I like it. What's your favorite candy? Marcel Pociot: Candy? [laughs]. After the whole Christmas candy mess-- we set ourselves as a family goal to not eat any candy for a week. Matt Stauffer: I like that. Marcel Pociot: My son is doing great. Matt Stauffer: [laughs]. He's doing better than you, huh? Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. [laughter] Marcel Pociot: I cheated but he doesn't know. Matt Stauffer: All right. Well, hopefully, he doesn't listen to this. Marcel Pociot: Well, he doesn't understand English. So-- Matt Stauffer: There you go, that's the way to do it. Reveal your secrets in the other language. Marcel Pociot: [laughs]. Yes. Marcel Pociot: But other than that-- favorite candy-- I'm mostly into some sour candy. Matt Stauffer: Like what? Marcel Pociot: Skittles in sour, they're pretty good. Matt Stauffer: Really? Skittle Sour-- I had no idea. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: All right, Skittle Sour, favorite candy. Marcel Pociot: How about you? Matt Stauffer: I ask this question to people all the time and I don't know if I know the answer. The first thing that came to my mind was Snickers. I think that I like candies with chocolate, and I think if it's chocolate plus some things that rounded it out, those are high in my list. I mean I really like Almond Joys, and Mounds as well. But I think Snickers is probably my top one. Marcel Pociot: We all like bread with Nutella, but is it really candy? Matt Stauffer: Yes, but I mean, it's basically candy. Marcel Pociot: Yes. [laughs]. Yes. Matt Stauffer: Yes. It's funny, my wife likes to put Nutella on sweet things. I'm like, "No, no, no, the Nutella is the sweet, I want it on bread or toast.", just plain piece of multi-grain bread, put some Nutella on top of it, good to go. Marcel Pociot: And peanut butter, and then you basically have Snickers. Matt Stauffer: Wait, do you put peanut butter and Nutella on the same thing? Marcel Pociot: Sure. That's literally Snickers, right? Matt Stauffer: Oh my god [whispers]. I had never thought of that. Alright last story and then I got to let you go. My dad worked for a German company when I was growing up, and he was the president of the US distributor of a German-based company. So he would fly over to Germany pretty frequently, and he would bring Levi's jeans and peanut butter to Germany, because it was hard for them to get, and he'd bring back German chocolate and Nutella, because it was hard for us to get. You can get Nutella in the grocery stores now, but back then you couldn't. And so, every time dad came home, we would get Nutella and we tried to keep these couple of jars of Nutella to last until the next time he went to Germany. Marcel Pociot: Okay. Next time I see you, can you get some Nutella? Matt Stauffer: Yes, I mean, we've got a lot of Nutella here, so you have to pick something up to trade with. Marcel Pociot: But not the German one. [laughs]. Matt Stauffer: Yes, it's true, it's true. All right, Marcel, this was a ton of fun talking to you. Thanks for taking some time. Thank you for BotMan, I'm seriously going to go distribute my son's podcasts using it. So you can expect me to bother you with requests for help sometime soon. Marcel Pociot: No problem. Thank you for inviting me. Matt Stauffer: How can people follow you? And, I guess, go start BotMan. What is following after you look like? Marcel Pociot: Well I think the easiest way to connect with me is on Twitter. Matt Stauffer: All right. I'll make sure your handle is linked to the show notes. Marcel Pociot: Okay. Or, if people want to talk about BotMan, I have the Slack team of BotMan where you can join, I think we're nearly 500 people in there. Matt Stauffer: All right, we'll link that in the show notes too. Got it. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: Cool. All right, well thanks for your time, was a pleasure talking to you. Until next time everyone. See you later. Marcel Pociot: Bye.

On this episode, our very own chatbot expert, Daniel Pritchett, joins Mo and Ben to discuss chat as a service. While there is a lot of hype around chatbots recently, these engineers decode chat as a platform and engage in all kinds of fun along the way. Listen in to hear about the implicit increases in efficiency, knowledge sharing, and time savings that can come with chatbots. Also, look out for Daniel’s talk at Southeast Ruby in October and his upcoming book! ##Things Mentioned Github’s hubot Astro Mail Crowdfire Slackbot Facebook Messenger Memtech Memtech's Elvis Bot IFTTT (If This Then That) Heroku ChatOps Jira Jenkins ELIZA Zork Microsoft Bot Framework For more information, check out our website at clearfunction.com. Follow us on Twitter at @clearfunction.

In this episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast Dave Kimura, Eric Berry, and Charles Max Wood discuss chatbots with Jamie Wright. Jamie will be speaking at Ruby Dev Summit in October. [01:25] Jamie Wright introduction Jamie is a professional nerd and independent contractor. He's been coding for 20 years mostly in Ruby. He's starting to get into Elixir. One of his first projects was a text adventure game, which got him started with conversational UI's. He saw Hubot on Campfire. He started tweaking that. He made a timetracking bot that used Freshbooks and Harvest. Then Slack came out and he created Tatsu. [05:00] Tatsu features You can schedule it and it'll ask automated questions. He's working on having it integrate with github, Harvest, Google Calendar, etc. If there's a blocker, you should be able to create private conversations with the people who are blocked and add that to the standup. When you sign up it adds a video link into your slack. Eric thinks this is pretty clever. In Slack, the default action people should take when a bot is installed should be to DM the person who installed it. [08:50] What it takes to write a bot and the challenges involved Writing bots is "fun as hell." Chatbots suck. We have the opportunity to improve an entire piece of the industry. Many bots are command based bots. You say something and it responds. Conversational UI's are really hard because they don't have any context or shared understanding of the world. [12:18] Chatbot libraries - Getting Started Every large company is working on one. There are also lots of natural language processing services that you can use as well. Before you start, you need to know your use case. Where will your users be? What services do you want to provide? At work? Probably slack. Among friends? Facebook Node has botkit. It's the most popular chatbot platform in the world. Start with botkit, use the examples, then come back to Ruby. Dave brings up building a chatbot for Slack that connected to VersionOne. Data retrieval bots are another great place to start. From there, you start answering the question of where things go. [18:51] The panel's experience with chatbots Tatsu has been around for about 2 years and has existed pre-Slack. Eric uses a Slackbot to get information about users who cancel or decline messages. Chuck has done automatic posting to Slack with Zapier. Chuck also mentions serverless with AWS Lambda. Chatbots are a lot like webapps. They're text in, text out and process things in very similar ways. Dave also brings up SMS bots as well with Twilio. Jamie has thought about creating a web based standup bot for when Slack is down. Slack is a single point of failure for your bot if that's where it lives. Slack gives you a lot of UI elements that you don't get in SMS. [24:51] Do you wish that Slack were more like IRC From an end-user perspective, no. But Jamie does wish they'd revisit threading replies and separating conversations in the same channel. It only took a handful of developers to build Slack. [27:20] What gems do you use in Ruby? slack-ruby-client by dblock slack-ruby-bot by dblock eventmachine [29:30] Does Slack push to an endpoint? or do you poll Slack? You can call an api endpoint on Slack that gives you a websocket endpoint. The events API sends webhook events to your server. It's easier to program against, but it can be slower. It may also be restricted on certain API's [30:55] Github Fantasy League Based on a Peepcode video with Aaron Patterson. You got a score based on your activity in Github. Jamie recorded videos for a talk at Codemash. It never actually became a thing, but it was a fun idea. Jamie got into Ruby by going to a Ruby Koans talk by Jim Weirich. Jamie's links github.com/jwright twitter.com/jwright brilliantfantastic.com This is what we put into the chat room after the Dr. Who reference... Picks Eric Rollbar Dave Mattermost Chuck Zoho CRM Jamie Digit

In this episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast Dave Kimura, Eric Berry, and Charles Max Wood discuss chatbots with Jamie Wright. Jamie will be speaking at Ruby Dev Summit in October. [01:25] Jamie Wright introduction Jamie is a professional nerd and independent contractor. He's been coding for 20 years mostly in Ruby. He's starting to get into Elixir. One of his first projects was a text adventure game, which got him started with conversational UI's. He saw Hubot on Campfire. He started tweaking that. He made a timetracking bot that used Freshbooks and Harvest. Then Slack came out and he created Tatsu. [05:00] Tatsu features You can schedule it and it'll ask automated questions. He's working on having it integrate with github, Harvest, Google Calendar, etc. If there's a blocker, you should be able to create private conversations with the people who are blocked and add that to the standup. When you sign up it adds a video link into your slack. Eric thinks this is pretty clever. In Slack, the default action people should take when a bot is installed should be to DM the person who installed it. [08:50] What it takes to write a bot and the challenges involved Writing bots is "fun as hell." Chatbots suck. We have the opportunity to improve an entire piece of the industry. Many bots are command based bots. You say something and it responds. Conversational UI's are really hard because they don't have any context or shared understanding of the world. [12:18] Chatbot libraries - Getting Started Every large company is working on one. There are also lots of natural language processing services that you can use as well. Before you start, you need to know your use case. Where will your users be? What services do you want to provide? At work? Probably slack. Among friends? Facebook Node has botkit. It's the most popular chatbot platform in the world. Start with botkit, use the examples, then come back to Ruby. Dave brings up building a chatbot for Slack that connected to VersionOne. Data retrieval bots are another great place to start. From there, you start answering the question of where things go. [18:51] The panel's experience with chatbots Tatsu has been around for about 2 years and has existed pre-Slack. Eric uses a Slackbot to get information about users who cancel or decline messages. Chuck has done automatic posting to Slack with Zapier. Chuck also mentions serverless with AWS Lambda. Chatbots are a lot like webapps. They're text in, text out and process things in very similar ways. Dave also brings up SMS bots as well with Twilio. Jamie has thought about creating a web based standup bot for when Slack is down. Slack is a single point of failure for your bot if that's where it lives. Slack gives you a lot of UI elements that you don't get in SMS. [24:51] Do you wish that Slack were more like IRC From an end-user perspective, no. But Jamie does wish they'd revisit threading replies and separating conversations in the same channel. It only took a handful of developers to build Slack. [27:20] What gems do you use in Ruby? slack-ruby-client by dblock slack-ruby-bot by dblock eventmachine [29:30] Does Slack push to an endpoint? or do you poll Slack? You can call an api endpoint on Slack that gives you a websocket endpoint. The events API sends webhook events to your server. It's easier to program against, but it can be slower. It may also be restricted on certain API's [30:55] Github Fantasy League Based on a Peepcode video with Aaron Patterson. You got a score based on your activity in Github. Jamie recorded videos for a talk at Codemash. It never actually became a thing, but it was a fun idea. Jamie got into Ruby by going to a Ruby Koans talk by Jim Weirich. Jamie's links github.com/jwright twitter.com/jwright brilliantfantastic.com This is what we put into the chat room after the Dr. Who reference... Picks Eric Rollbar Dave Mattermost Chuck Zoho CRM Jamie Digit

In this episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast Dave Kimura, Eric Berry, and Charles Max Wood discuss chatbots with Jamie Wright. Jamie will be speaking at Ruby Dev Summit in October. [01:25] Jamie Wright introduction Jamie is a professional nerd and independent contractor. He's been coding for 20 years mostly in Ruby. He's starting to get into Elixir. One of his first projects was a text adventure game, which got him started with conversational UI's. He saw Hubot on Campfire. He started tweaking that. He made a timetracking bot that used Freshbooks and Harvest. Then Slack came out and he created Tatsu. [05:00] Tatsu features You can schedule it and it'll ask automated questions. He's working on having it integrate with github, Harvest, Google Calendar, etc. If there's a blocker, you should be able to create private conversations with the people who are blocked and add that to the standup. When you sign up it adds a video link into your slack. Eric thinks this is pretty clever. In Slack, the default action people should take when a bot is installed should be to DM the person who installed it. [08:50] What it takes to write a bot and the challenges involved Writing bots is "fun as hell." Chatbots suck. We have the opportunity to improve an entire piece of the industry. Many bots are command based bots. You say something and it responds. Conversational UI's are really hard because they don't have any context or shared understanding of the world. [12:18] Chatbot libraries - Getting Started Every large company is working on one. There are also lots of natural language processing services that you can use as well. Before you start, you need to know your use case. Where will your users be? What services do you want to provide? At work? Probably slack. Among friends? Facebook Node has botkit. It's the most popular chatbot platform in the world. Start with botkit, use the examples, then come back to Ruby. Dave brings up building a chatbot for Slack that connected to VersionOne. Data retrieval bots are another great place to start. From there, you start answering the question of where things go. [18:51] The panel's experience with chatbots Tatsu has been around for about 2 years and has existed pre-Slack. Eric uses a Slackbot to get information about users who cancel or decline messages. Chuck has done automatic posting to Slack with Zapier. Chuck also mentions serverless with AWS Lambda. Chatbots are a lot like webapps. They're text in, text out and process things in very similar ways. Dave also brings up SMS bots as well with Twilio. Jamie has thought about creating a web based standup bot for when Slack is down. Slack is a single point of failure for your bot if that's where it lives. Slack gives you a lot of UI elements that you don't get in SMS. [24:51] Do you wish that Slack were more like IRC From an end-user perspective, no. But Jamie does wish they'd revisit threading replies and separating conversations in the same channel. It only took a handful of developers to build Slack. [27:20] What gems do you use in Ruby? slack-ruby-client by dblock slack-ruby-bot by dblock eventmachine [29:30] Does Slack push to an endpoint? or do you poll Slack? You can call an api endpoint on Slack that gives you a websocket endpoint. The events API sends webhook events to your server. It's easier to program against, but it can be slower. It may also be restricted on certain API's [30:55] Github Fantasy League Based on a Peepcode video with Aaron Patterson. You got a score based on your activity in Github. Jamie recorded videos for a talk at Codemash. It never actually became a thing, but it was a fun idea. Jamie got into Ruby by going to a Ruby Koans talk by Jim Weirich. Jamie's links github.com/jwright twitter.com/jwright brilliantfantastic.com This is what we put into the chat room after the Dr. Who reference... Picks Eric Rollbar Dave Mattermost Chuck Zoho CRM Jamie Digit

In Greek Mythology, the Gods cursed Sisyphus to spend eternity rolling a large boulder to the top of a mountain, where it would fall back of its own weight. In DevOps, we're forever rolling boulders uphill. We're making deploys faster, cheaper, smoother, and quicker. And once the boulder reaches the mountain top, the engineers rearchitect the application and the the process begins again. At Upside Travel, Slack is our central command hub. We run our full operations through Slack ChatOps. Engineers request code reviews, product managers examine tickets, and the Slack-integrated NOC works slack-alerted events. We also manage our full continuous integration and deployment process through a custom Slackbot named, aptly, for the DevOps Greek hero, Sisyphus. Sisyphus's simple promote command hides a complex dance of builds, tests, promotion, deployment and management. Upside combines Github, CircleCI, Artifactory, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes and AWS to deploy code from nothing to something in 3 minutes and it takes deployment/promotion 100% away from DevOps and Engineering to place the power into the hands of Product Managers.

Scott Britton is the co-founder of Troops. Troops is the first Slackbot for Sales Teams that makes it easy to use CRM data and configure workflow to do your job. They've raised $9.6m to date.   In this episode you'll learn: [01:10] What can Troops help you with? [03:10] Which sales model they use at Troops? [04:30] How did they adapt the bottom-up model over the top-down one? [05:08] Ideal model to sell Software? [07:02] How to execute that on the marketing side? [08:23] How to execute that on the sales side? [09:47] How did Scott switch from relying on cold email to focusing on inbound? [12:25] How to optimize the middle of the funnel and how to convert leads to users? [14:17] How to execute efficient demo on-boarding strategy? [16:30] How to deal with going back and forth with engineering? [17:26] Questions they use for their customer feedback log [19:10] How do you go from 1 user to building a company when you have a target account identified? [22:00] How to make your sales process contingent upon creation of value? Find Scott here: troops.ai Email Scott Britton: scott@troops.ai Scott on Twitter Brought to you by Experiment 27. Find us on Youtube here. If you've enjoyed the episode, please subscribe to the Digital Agency Marketing Podcast on iTunes and leave us a review for the show. Take part in the CONTEST we put together to celebrate the launch of this podcast. It's a contest where you can't lose. You will get something, it's just a matter of how much stuff you'll actually win. Click here to enter.  Just for entering you will get a surprise everyone else has to pay for. You can't lose!

Time-Stamped Notes 00:22 – Speedback 00:24 – Allows you to write anonymous feedback through Slack 01:25 – Nick and Ari created their own internal Slackbot 02:06 – “We are automating what our managers call policing.” – Nick 02:45 – Nick wants to automate all the things possible to make scaling up easier 03:02 – Ari outlines the process of VAs setting up tasks 03:20 – Whatever can be automatically assigned, will be automatically assigned. 03:37 – Errors produced 03:52 – “Our managers have to chase up people who didn’t correctly assign a project to a time entry.” – Nick 04:08 – Internal automation saves the business time and money 04:18 – Keatext 04:20 – Takes all customer service information and uses text analysis to break it down and make sense of it 05:20 – Make a separate email address for customer problems 05:35 – Keatext will help you identify where your biggest problems are as a business and attack them 05:50 – New book coming out shortly with a Thunderclap campaign 06:00 – Subscribe to the OAO Newsletter 06:20 – Nick travelling to London for business For more info on Less Doing, LessDoing, visit us at: www.lessdoing.com

Storytelling has been around since humans have been in existence. Ancient hunters used storytelling, depicted through drawings on cave walls, to share information about food opportunities to their neighbors. Fast forward approximately 10,000 years, and storytelling takes on a new form – poets reciting stories through spoken word. At the turn of the 5th Century, stories began appearing in the form of small-batch books. In the 1500s, William Shakespeare figured out how to use storytelling to appeal to the head and the heart by tapping into intellect and emotion. It's no surprise this ancient form of communication is also extremely valuable in marketing and branding. Robert Wallace, partner and executive VP of marketing at Tallwave, says it's one of the only way brands, particularly those operating in commoditized markets, can capture the hearts and minds of customers. Robert, who also serves as the president of the Phoenix chapter of TiE, has more than 15 years' experience working with fast-growth companies and startups on building their marketing and branding strategies. In the late 1990s he worked with Airwalk International, which he labeled as a very large startup, developing new media marketing strategies. So the art of storytelling has reigned king throughout his career. Though storytelling has been a big component of marketing and branding for decades, Robert says it's one of the things many startup founders and even established businesses overlook. Not Just a Pretty Face Branding is more than great logo and polished look. While those elements are important, they're a small sliver of the overall brand. “If that's your view of what branding is, then you probably think it's a little superfluous to worry about it early on in your startup,” Robert said. “Instead you're focused on your product, and there's value to that. You should focus on your product. But we're going to see more, as various product categories become more commoditized, you no longer have to be novel to be successful.” As a result, companies need to shift their focus to developing a solid brand, but that brand needs go deeper than nice visuals, it needs to win over the minds and hearts of customers. “The biggest mistake a lot of startups make is they think branding is just a logo, or pretty pictures, or a tagline,” Robert said. “It's really about communicating your position in the marketplace, and that is incredibly important for any business.” This is particularly true for different categories of business in which competition is high – there will always be leadership company in peoples' minds. To be in that position or at least be in the running for holding that position in the minds of your customers, the branding and marketing needs to be thought of from the beginning. “Take a company like Slack. At the end of the day, it's a messaging app…not necessarily a terribly novel concept,” he said. “They have, however, injected personality, a great look and feel, great messaging and micro-copy throughout the site. Not to mention the Slackbot. Those were all conscious decisions that the Slack team made before or while they developed the product.” “Only certain companies are going to win, and win the hearts and minds of people and hold that position whether they have the best product or not. Those things aren't often considered early on with a lot of startups.” Robert also cautioned not to decouple branding and product, and marketing and product. They need to be developed in tandem and should be a company-wide function, not just a function of the marketing team. Developing Your Brand As Simon Sinek says, “It starts with why.” Why does your company exist? Knowing your purpose and communicating that to not just potential customers, but also your employees and other company stakeholders is incredibly important. They need to know why you exist. “With the internet, and this nearly infinite amount of information about companies now…it's no longer just about a valuable product,” Robert said. “A lot of people want to know what a company stands for and why they're doing what they're doing. That is starting to factor more and more into the buying decision.” Don't get stuck on figuring out how to tell the perfect story. Instead Robert suggests focusing on the process of understanding who you serve, what pain points they have that you are trying to solve, who else is trying to solve the problem, and why you're better and different. This, in essence, is why your company exists, and these things need to be thought about from the beginning. Of course voice and tone also needs to be consistent throughout the product experience too. To nail this, Robert suggests voiceandtone.com and playing “Apples to Apples” – something he leads startups through in his storytelling workshops. “Sort through the word cards and get down to eight, at the most, voice and tone words," he said. “This should be based on the value of your company and what you think your value proposition is and what your purpose is. Once you've got those eight, the really difficult part is to create ‘but not' statements.” For example, if one of your voice and tone words is “intelligent”, you might say something like “we want to sound intelligent, but not arrogant. From there you can sketch out the words you should and shouldn't use in your marketing copy. “The brand isn't just a marketing function, it's the entire promise you are making to your customers,” Robert said. The Art of Storytelling To further integrate storytelling into your brand, think back to the basic story structure taught in grade school. It has a protagonist or hero, an antagonist (the person trying to get in the way of the hero), and a challenge or series of challenges that protagonist has to overcome. There's a turning point and finally the resolution or outcome. “You have a customer with a certain pain point, and there are reasons why they have that, and that's why your is going company exists – to help that hero achieve their end outcome. It's basic storytelling 101,” Robert said. For startups, particularly tech startups, trying to differentiate themselves, the art of storytelling will prove more and more imperative. And this needs to be thought about from the beginning. This is in essence why your company exists. “This should be at the core of your business strategy not just your product or marketing strategy,” he said. Biz Hack: Several years ago MailChimp made public its Voice and Tone guide. The guide helps MailChimp employees write in a consistent voice, and provides a roadmap for adapting their tone based on various situations. It covers how certain emails, landing pages, Twitter and Facebook posts, and even press releases should convey messages. It's a great tool for determining your brand's voice, tone and overall personality. Next week I'm in The Lab with Jerrod Bailey, partner and vice president of business development at Tallwave. We talk all things acquisition and how entrepreneurs can start building their sales and marketing stack even before they launch. Be sure to tune in! Until then, have a prosperous week.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think every platform kind of has this tipping point where you start to see like, hey, this feature, this product is getting a lot of traction, and people building on any platform should realize they are doing R&D for the primary platform at all times. Every feature you release, every experience you have is an opportunity for the original platform to be like, hey, that’s a great idea. 00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. But this podcast isn’t about me use the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Adam Wulf. 00:00:43 - Speaker 2: Hey, everyone. And joined today by Joe Watkin. 00:00:47 - Speaker 1: Hey folks, great to be here. 00:00:49 - Speaker 2: And Joe, you have an interesting background with creative tools including GitHub and Abstract, you’ve had your own startup doing calendar slackbots and other calendaring things, but before we talk about all that, I’m very interested in your side project ballot share. Can you tell us about that? 00:01:06 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah. Ballot share is a is a labor of love. It’s much less of a business than a fun project, and it really just centers around helping people get more information when they’re about to vote. And so, People usually want to vote for one or two things when they hit a ballot, but it’s all of the minutia stuff that people don’t really have a really good sense of what to vote for or who to vote for on really local issues, but those are the stuff that really, you know, impacts them. And so Ballot share is just a site where you can see who’s endorsed things all the way down the ballot to like your local city ballot initiatives. And you can also create your own endorsement around things that you think are important and share that with friends. So the most common use case we see is people say, oh, like I have a friend who’s really plugged into education, so maybe I could ask them who to vote for for the school board president. And so they send you their endorsement and you kind of see it in a grid where you can kind of compare all of the endorsements that you want to compare. It was built for the last election cycle and we’re hoping to revive it again for the midterms. 00:02:14 - Speaker 2: I really like that idea of a sort of using your trust network if that’s the right way to put it. Maybe we get some of this implicitly, you know, there’s people I follow usually like substack where they do political analysis and to some extent I’m sort of trusting if I’ve come to trust that their analysis is good in some cases it’s that I’m reading their analysis and better understanding the issue, but in some cases it’s that I go, OK, this person. Seems to be pro this thing and I basically trust them, so therefore, I’m gonna kind of outsource that decision a little bit, especially for, as you said, all these finer details and local things that maybe you can’t deeply research each and every item. So it feels like it’s naturally what people do anyways. So as a tool to help you kind of reach that. 00:02:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. A lot of people end up making like Excel sheets and then sending them around. And it’s actually kind of funny, we noticed that it’s not just wanting to know who endorsed it, it’s who is against certain things. So when you see like, hey, this group is against it, you’re like, that’s surprising, why? And sometimes it takes like, hey, of the 10 ballot initiatives, 6 seem like everyone is in agreement, but then like maybe 3 are kind of like up in the air. And so you, those are the ones that you personally investigate. So it kind of just puts more time to the ones that you think are actually worth the the decision to make sure you get it right. 00:03:36 - Speaker 2: And tell us a little bit about your background. 00:03:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’ve done a lot of work in the tech space, but it’s not always specifically on the tech side. So my background is I came into tech via sales actually. So I was hired at GitHub as one of the first technical minded sales people, and GitHub was a very weird beast where there were no managers and you kind of like had to understand how to do a pull request to like even do anything in the company. So, I originally did Git Up sales, focused on the enterprise clients, but switched over to BD at GitHub, maybe my 2nd or 3rd year, as just a hugely undervalued piece of the business. 00:04:16 - Speaker 2: And I’ll briefly unpack that BD stands for business development, which I think itself is probably not a super well, in my experience, it’s not even a super well understood title slash function, so maybe you want to briefly describe what that is. 00:04:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. BD means so many different things. It’s kind of funny. I think a lot of startups tend to use BD as just another name for sales directly, like generating revenue and talking to customers. At GitHub, it was a little bit of a catch-all, so I was running sales partnerships where we partner with companies like Ubico and get more people using two-factor keys, but it was also partnering on the technical side. So working with companies to maybe build a plug-in, and specifically my charge was everyone who’s using the API helping them do their job better. And at the time it was mostly just like a ragtag group of maybe a couple 100 people using the GitHub API. They had a very open, very public permissionless API at the time, so people just, a lot of researchers, a lot of students, but then like a handful of companies who are trying to build a business. So my job was a little bit more. Focused on getting that group of people to be more successful, and the sales partnerships happened, they were just much less of a focus, and it was a small team, we maybe had 6 people max, so we kind of did a lot with a little. 00:05:40 - Speaker 2: And you had the same title at Abstract, if I’m not mistaken. Tell us about that experience. 00:05:44 - Speaker 1: Indeed, yeah, Abstract is a funny company. They do version control for design files, and BD at that company was much more around product partnerships and mergers and acquisitions work, M&A work. And so we didn’t do any kind of like sales partnerships. We specifically focused on anything that would help the product be a little bit better, and then kind of fielding the requests and inbound we were getting from interested parties around M&A work. And so that ended up being a lot of work when we got acquired by Adobe, but it was a pretty fun ride as well. 00:06:19 - Speaker 2: And it seems to me version control is by definition part of a tool chain, part of a stack, so those partnerships and integrations are crucial because that is the whole sort of reason for existence for the tool, and I assume there’s the technical integration, but then making those business partnerships where you’re doing something together, maybe that’s co-marketing, but maybe it’s also you’re trying to serve the same set of customers together even though you’re two different companies making two different products just from the outside it seems to me like that would be a crucial function. 00:06:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s definitely an important one. In both GitHub and the, you know, abstract case, these are part of a stack like you mentioned. People are considering entire tool chains, and so we’ve got to work nice with everyone and also try to help the group itself be better cause I think there is this constant struggle in the sass world of, you see companies who want to go single suite and company offer everything under the sun, like an Atlassian or Salesforce is another one of those. 00:07:16 - Speaker 2: Microsoft is the absolute king of this, right? You sign one contract, and you get a whole suite of mostly mediocre products, but it’s OK because they fit together and, you know, you could kind of buy one time and everything you need in the software world is kind of taken care of. 00:07:34 - Speaker 1: 100%. And then you see the opposite swing where it’s all best to breed, where it’s, hey, I really care about getting the best tool for this, even if it costs more. And we see companies swing between the two quite often. So whether it’s cost related or maybe it’s, you know, new leadership, it’s like, hey, we really care about developers, let’s break out of this like low cost tooling and now give them like stuff that they want to use. So in both cases in Abstract and GitHub we were kind of managing in the breast of breed world where we were working with partners who are, you know, all trying to serve similar and shared customers. 00:08:08 - Speaker 3: And an abstracts case, if I understand right, the design files are mostly probably opaque binary to some degree, and so they would not fit very well in a git style version control, and so that’s where the abstract steps in for that really special case of potentially very large, very binary. Difficult to diff files, is that right? 00:08:31 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, absolutely. I love talking about this cause it’s like real deep and kind of amazing that as you exactly said the Git is more suited for plain text files and You know, there are things like LFS and Git that, you know, have pointers and allow big binary files to be version controlled, but it’s really hard. And so this is exactly what Abstract it, is that they saw Sketch was market leader, but they couldn’t solve this one piece around versioning because of these big binary blobs, and so they created an ingenious solution that actually did use Git on the back end and stored this enormous corpus of design information. And was able to kind of parse through the binary and pick up changes. So, at the time it was revolutionary, you know, there was literally nothing else that did this. And so they built a very strong business on that kind of like breakthrough in being able to take a workflow that worked with developers and apply it in the design world and give designers just like a huge amount of new workflow capability. You know, they could do branches, they could do merger requests, a lot of the same things that developers have used. 00:09:40 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that opens up so much more freedom. I’ve worked with designers running up against this exact same problem, probably, well, long time ago now, over 15 years ago, but it was, it was exactly this problem of there’s one blessed Photoshop file and if that gets messed up or there’s the classic version 1 version 2, version 2 final. Nightmare. 00:10:06 - Speaker 1: Final final, yeah, absolutely. I mean this is now obviated by all the web tools like a figma that, you know, are building versioning, just like a Google doc, you know, saving every stroke, but at the time when everything is desktop based, like, these are intractable problems, so it’s kind of interesting to see how The world moves into a different medium that solves it, but then introduces other problems, like now you’ve got multi-user collaboration real time, and that’s like, you know, a big headache, but also like a huge opportunity, so there’s always something fun to be worked on. 00:10:37 - Speaker 2: I believe that the developer workflow that is Encoded through Git and GitHub, which is a more asynchronous and the merger quest as a bundle and being able to look at diss. Obviously that whole thing is way out of reach for the vast majority of people in the world. But I do think a version of that probably can and should be part of almost every kind of creative tool, certainly for design tools, again, as you say, we do see that in the real time collab and the figmas and sketches of the world. I think you see this, one reason why Google Docs is really popular with writers is they have a really good versioning system or good versioning relative to the writing tools still. Pretty basic compared to what developers are used to, but where you can see new changes when you come to a document, you can look at a history, and critically, you can choose which changes to merge or reject, or have a comment this thread that is based on a change, right? That’s one of the biggest, I think, powerful abstractions in the mental model for something like Git, which is based ultimately on patches, which is you can talk about a diff as its own thing separate from the resulting code. And so that results in poll requests and then essentially code reviews and discussions around that. And I think probably most creative tools and fields could benefit from that, but the way those tools work for developers, it’s just way too heavyweight and complicated for most people. So, stay tuned. I can switch actually has some research tracks going on this, so I hope you’ll see some essays on the topic soon. And then I think you heard that time zones are one of the easiest and most fun things to do in programming, which is why you’ve worked on several calendar products as your own startups. Tell us a bit about that. 00:12:19 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, my latest venture was called Eventbot, and it was a Slackbot that provided a calendar, basically behind every single Slack channel. And this is my 4th real calendar startup, and I’m just a glutton for punishment here. I think that In general, I like the calendar space because I think it’s interesting to build tools around how we use our time. Like I think if you can make that slightly optimized for people, it has a huge ripple effect. But I do think it is a brutal industry that where businesses are, you know, sitting in a large graveyard of failed to ups, so I’m not ignorant of how crazy that world is, but it was a fun project. I think we saw slack growing at a tremendous rate, you know, I’ve seen a lot of different approaches in the calendar world and me and my co-founder really saw like, hey, we could build this. tool that provides a really important niche within Slack, and, you know, maybe it can grow bigger than we think and we can, you know, put it into other areas, but we just sunset eventbot after 5 years of growth. It’s been a fun ride, but I do think that the business itself wasn’t able to sustain the amount of work required to keep it going. Like as you said, time zones are crazy. Little known fact, there are thousands of time zones, not even just the familiar ones. There are many Cities that choose not to obey daylight savings times, laws that are passed on a monthly basis that change how you have to calendar. So that part of the business is super boring and extremely frustrating for developers who have to try to keep up and make sure that they’re current. 00:13:58 - Speaker 3: I think calendaring is really interesting because there’s a built-in moat for any new business, and if you can swim across the moat and build a business, then to some extent you’re safe, but it’s so easy to just drown in the middle of the moat with all of the complexity of time zones and recurrence rules and invitations and It’s just a nightmare of Minutia that just drags you down by the heels. 00:14:33 - Speaker 2: That’s right. Well, I forgot you spent 5 years of your life working on Fantastic Cal. I did pretty successful kind of gooey calendar, so you’re very familiar with the pain there. 00:14:42 - Speaker 3: Yeah, my first startup was also a web calendar back pre-G Google calendar days, and I’ve made some pretty fantastic slash horrible decisions in learning that, just kind of walking in naively into the problem space and making choices that I instantly regret. Lots of bullet wounds and scars in that space. 00:15:06 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there’s lots of strange edge cases in the calendar world, you know, being able to even have a consensus of what is now, what time is today, like, these are things that when you’re talking to users across the globe that the internet affords us, have just so many edge cases that we have to deal with, but Yeah, I do agree that I think building on another person’s platform has a ton of benefits, and we used a lot of them when we were building a bot, you know, primarily distribution was huge. We were early on in this slack marketplace, and so when we were building, we were finding users coming to us, which, you know, as a business that solves a major, major problem, just getting people to care or even know you exist. And in previous startups, you know, you have sales motions, you’ve got marketing efforts, and here you kind of at least, if you can solve that piece, you can focus more of the efforts on product, on delivering unique interesting value to customers. But like you said, there’s lots of kind of catch-22s in that bargain. But in the beginning days for us, we found it to be extremely valuable. We started with a free product that was truly broken. Like, I was super surprised when people had used eventbot to begin with. We had a calendar product where you could create a start date and time for a meeting, but you couldn’t create an end date and time. We launched it without that feature because we were not even sure what we were building, and we got some really, really gracious folks who were like, oh, I wanted a calendar built for Slack. You should build this. And we use, you know, the community who was adopting a free broken product to help us improve it and actually put an end time, and then subsequently actually really improved the product, but it was a blessing to kind of get user traction, even at the early days. 00:16:54 - Speaker 2: And I was sorry to see it shutting down because I’d been a user earlier on, but I was impressed by your, I guess it was an email or Slack message. I can’t remember where I basically described, hey, you know, we’re sunsetting this product. Sorry about that. Here’s exactly what customers can expect, and I think how to gracefully. Set of product which you know guess what does happen in the technology industry and there’s lots of ways to do it that I think are not very conscientious of the needs and even feelings of those end users and customers and there’s ways to do it that are more graceful seems like seems like you manage the latter. 00:17:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I think I’m probably like you all have been on the other end of that, where you get an email saying like, hey, this service is shutting down, and you’re kind of like, uh, like the world is worse off, and we at least wanted to make that pain a little bit less, so, you know, we started making all the features free, so people can kind of export data. We gave customers months and months of notice so that they kind of knew, but in the end, You know, we realize that we’re stewards of other people’s data, right? And so if we’re going to be cutting our service, then we don’t want people to feel like, hey, I made this investment and now I don’t have my information anymore. 00:18:04 - Speaker 2: And on top of everything we talked about, somehow you managed to be a teacher inside of all of this. I don’t know where you find the time. 00:18:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, neither do I, actually, it’s kind of funny. Teaching is something I stumbled into 2012. Actually, while I was building a different calendar startup called Calico, way back in the day, I ran out of money, and I started to, you know, think about what I could teach, and I just graduated Berkeley’s grad school, so I was like, well, you know, let me go back and Try to teach something I know, which was, I just learned how to code, so I taught an intro to code course. And, you know, at the time, intro to coding and boot camps were like all the rage, so it was a pretty well received course. So I’ve now taught two courses at Berkeley for 10 years. I’ve taught an intro to code course for non-technical people. Which is really like a primer into how not to sound stupid in front of developers. 00:19:02 - Speaker 2: I think that’s the, that’s the primary reason I think people take my course, that is to say, people that want to, they work with technical people adjacent to them, maybe similar to like a sales role, for example, and they want to be able to speak the language and interact and kind of reason better about that, not necessarily get a career as a software developer themselves. 00:19:20 - Speaker 1: 100%, yeah. I think the largest percentage of people who take the course are people who want to transition into product management, and they’re working, you know, day to day with engineers and they want to understand real life expectations, like, how does this code work and what are the restraints and constraints that I have on my job. It’s a super useful course that we’ve got fine tuned to make it be very practical, which is not often the case for courses in academic institutions, but, you know, we we try pretty hard. And then the second course I teach is sales for startups, where, you know, I believe that sales is just an incredibly powerful skill, whether you are, you know, at the startup phase and a founder trying to sell people on the company, on the vision, and, you know, the funding, or you’re selling to customers and trying to get them to make a purchase, so. The two courses I teach are really intended for folks to have an ability to do something in the startup world. You’re either building something or you are selling something. But if you wanted to join a startup, I’m hoping that, you know, you take some of these courses and you feel like, hey, I can join this world of startups, I don’t need to necessarily go to a big company and try to like find a niche. So yeah, it’s been fun. I definitely enjoy it. There’s a long story of like how I feel teaching, especially these past few years where it’s been, you know, much harder, remote. I think every semester we’ve had a fire, an active shooter, smoke, virus pandemic, like, it’s been a crazy past 5 years, but in general it it gives me a lot of joy. I think something that I don’t think I can replace anymore in my life. It’s a really fun thing I get to do. 00:21:00 - Speaker 3: I think those are really interesting courses because you’re teaching kind of each side of the company about the other side of the company. You’re teaching the non-technical folk. Here’s kind of the problems and the struggles that they have, and here’s how that side of the technical people function, and then also helping teach the technical people. By the way, this is what sales looks like. This is why the other side of the company is a lot harder than just Sitting behind a desk and telling you what to do with a product sheet and timeline. 00:21:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. I think it gives the other side a little bit more respect for these roles and what they do and what they bring to the companies. It’s also a lot of fun to teach. 00:21:36 - Speaker 3: Building that empathy within a team, I think is so important when you have an extremely small team in a startup, so that everyone knows the importance of everyone else’s role and responsibility, and you end up, I think, just so much more efficient than a brilliant engineer who doesn’t understand sales and customer needs, or someone who’s really in touch with the customer, but has no idea how long it takes to build particular features. 00:22:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it creates better entrepreneurs as well. Once you start to realize, like, hey, if I have to look at this idea through the sales lens before I start, like, is this a good idea? Does this have legs, you know, on the technical side, on the business side, channel, marketing, like all of those things are really great to think through early on. So hopefully I catch people while they’re still, you know, in school and kind of incubating things. And I’ve gotten really great letter, you know, this is off topic a bit, but I continued to teach now for a decade because I get these incredible emails where they’re like, 5 years later, someone will be like, hey, I just realized that like, I learned this thing that I’m using, like, in my job. I learned it in your class, like, awesome job, thanks for, you know, helping me out, or I’ll get people being like, I have an interview next week at this company, like, I think I know what these depth tools means, but like, can we chat about it? And I’m like, this is amazing, this is a different level of impact. So it gives you a lot of satisfaction on a long term basis. 00:22:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s really rewarding. 00:23:01 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is building on platforms, and especially building a business on a platform. And we have some interesting collective experience here in this group, Joe, you’ve been on the kind of platform provider side at GitHub, you’ve been on the platform, let’s say, consumer or developer side at Eventpot or building on the Slack platform. Obviously, Wulf, you’ve been on the various Apple platforms in different forms for a decade, more than that. So, I thought it would be a good chance to compare some war stories here and understand better what it means, what sort of trade-offs you’re making when you do build for a platform. But as always, I like to start with a definitions, I’d love to hear from you, Joe, and then maybe from you, Wulf, when you think platform, what does that mean to you? What are some that you think of as maybe good or bad examples, and what does that mean for a business? 00:23:54 - Speaker 3: When I think of platform, I think of A company with existing customers that wants to let other companies have access to those customers. And somehow takes money from both sides. And so it it ends up being most good for the platform provider. And then secondarily good for the companies that get access to those customers. 00:24:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that the customer focal point, I think it’s probably the best starting point because, you know, whether it’s a product or some sort of just customer relationship, that’s the value that they can bring to other ecosystem partners who want to see an opportunity, and I’ve talked to a lot of larger companies that are considering just creating an API itself, like that is a starting point. And part of the reason they do it is, you know, a product can only fill maybe 80 85% of any customer’s needs, but there’s always gonna be those edge case requirements that might not be in the company’s best interest to build, but you still want your customers to be happy. And so I think an ecosystem provides the ability to have happier customers while maybe ceding some part of the pie or the product portfolio to a third party. 00:25:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and ironically I think in seeing that to a third party, you almost Entrench yourself to your customers, because now the customers to leave your platform have to leave not only you, but also all of these other extra companies that are building on your platform. So it’s a lot more difficult for me to walk away from Google, because Google is everywhere and everything integrates with Google. Yeah. And similarly for Apple, it’s really hard to leave Apple because of the iPhone and the Mac, and the App Store, and the TV and the, you know, etc. etc. 00:25:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it really creates a second network effect, in addition to whatever product, you know, pull you have primarily, it adds an entirely different layer of, you know, wanting to stay, and, you know, there’s lots of times where maybe the primary product is, you know, maybe lacking, but the ecosystem is super strong, and so it keeps people engaged and helps people really feel like, oh, I can’t leave, where else can I get these very customized ecosystem tools, and it’s hard to build. Once it’s built, it’s a machine. 00:26:14 - Speaker 2: The platform play is one that, you know, investors love as a holy grail of money printing machine, you know, Microsoft in their glory days, the Windows glory days was probably one of the most prime examples of this, maybe even to your point, Wulf, where it’s not necessarily that people loved Windows, the operating system, or would have chosen that above other choices available in the market. It’s just when all the programs you need run on it, of course. You’re gonna use that, and then, of course, that’s also a nice circular thing where if you’re a developer, you, of course, want to build for where your customers are. And when I think of platforms, obviously operating systems like Windows, iOS, Mac come to mind. The web is sort of a more open, loose collection of technologies that does represent a platform. And then maybe some more recent examples that are maybe more specialized might be something like Shopify or WordPress, right? Building a WordPress plugin or building a Shopify app, there’s actually quite a lot of possibility there, especially for a small developer within that ecosystem, and you can find customers that you would not be able to find if you were building something standalone. 00:27:22 - Speaker 3: Almost makes me think there’s a Maybe a gradient between an application that has plug-ins and a platform that has apps like WordPress is an interesting example where it is a platform, but it’s also just an app that I can install on a server and kind of do my own thing with. 00:27:41 - Speaker 1: I think you are onto something where there is a spectrum of how the integration happens, you know, there’s platforms where you don’t need to even know who’s using the platform. It’s just you provide the surface area and other people can build on top, or there’s something that’s deeply integrated where it’s like, you know, in the user interface. We saw this at GitHub where we had a lot of people who used Chrome extensions that like injected UI into the screen and It was weird for us to consider, like, are they plug-in partners because they don’t really talk to us, but they are in our customers' eyes, so we have to care about that, but I do agree there is a spectrum there. 00:28:20 - Speaker 2: Well maybe that’s a good chance for some storytelling here. So yeah, GitHub, you helped build out the marketplace. What was the drive for that and what was that experience like? What did you learn on the platform creator side of the equation, I guess. 00:28:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the GitHub Marketplace was a multi-year kind of dream of mine, and uh to be honest, I think it’s because working at GitHub made you really see how undervalued, underestimated developer tools were as a broader category, and this is 2010. In terms of context. So we saw that people were using developer tools like GitHub, but we knew that we were going to be a best of breed company. We were going against the like single suite approaches. And so, to really shine in a best of breed, you need a lot of breed, like you need a lot of people. You want to let a 1 1000 flowers bloom in that space. And devtools were a difficult thing to grow. And so, in general, they get a marketplace was kind of like a long term intention of how do we grow the DevTools space with the position and kind of responsibility that we have as being on the version control side, which is a very base layer for a lot of developer tools. So we were building a platform that really intended to help developer tools blossom. And take away, you know, some of the parts that they really didn’t want to do, which was sales and marketing. So, we can definitely talk a little bit more about how that happened. It took a couple of years internally to get some buy-in and then externally to build the trust, but it was a really fun project which now, you know, get up marketplace is thriving and booming, so I look back pretty fondly as like, ah, cool, we helped do that. That’s a pretty nice feeling. 00:30:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, one thing I’m really curious about is That step from 0 people on the marketplace to 1 person on the marketplace, right? Just getting that very first use case and that very first business to buy in and get going, to start things off. What was that like and what was the process to kind of maybe find that business or make sure that you had enough there for them to integrate with? What was the minimum viable product, so to speak, of A platform. 00:30:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s a really good question because we started by having an API that people were already using, so people were able to get information in and out of the GitHub system. It wasn’t super well loved in terms of resources, but we had people using it, and there were businesses that were created, they were just very, very small. And so that the primary example when people think about the GetUp ecosystem is a CI tool, a continuous integration tool like Travis or Circle. And for folks who are not familiar with what CI tools do, they basically do a check on your code. So they are looking at your code to see if there’s any errors, does it pass the test that your own developers have written, and it just gives you back like a hey, pass or fail. And so those tools existed in the market and used our API, but they were basically totally separate entities. People would come to GitHub, buy GitHub subscription. Use it, and then go to these independent websites directly, you know, find them, hope, and look for a logo that said, hey, integrates with GitHub, and be like, OK, great, like, maybe I can also use this in addition to my version control software. And so, my first V1 was really to create something very lightweight. At GitHub that allowed some traction and kind of proof of value to exist, to kind of build towards this marketplace ideal. And so our V1 was really simple and it’s kind of embarrassing, but we just did a simple static page. It was like GitHub.com/sh apps or app directory. There was a bunch of users who had apps, so we had to change the URL, but the original static web page was just a single page where we just hot linked out to every single tool that we knew that was reputable enough to be recommended, but also integrated with GitHub directly. And it was an important first step that I kind of didn’t really appreciate at the time. It was just mostly like, hey, how do I make progress? Well, this seems like a good way. But it accomplished two big things. One, it gave direct traffic to these providers. So, you know, Travis CI, Circle CI are common ones. They were starting to get a lot of traffic. You know, GitHub at the time was a top 10 website in the world by traffic. And so us redirecting even. In a small sliver was able to give them, it’s a huge boost for devs who, you know, are looking for CI tools. They’re like, well, why don’t I start here at this GitHub app page and then go out. So we were getting a lot of goodwill by those companies who are getting free traffic and likely, you know, a lot more revenue from it. But it also served the purpose internally, where we had, you know, lots of management to convinced that it’s worth building a bigger marketplace, because now we can see how many people click through. We actually requested from the folks who are on that static page, like, hey, could you send us a report at the end of the year on like, how many people bought subscriptions through you? We’d love to know cause we’re gonna put in a referral link, so we wanna know how much it converts. So it was twofold. It was really helpful from the inside to kind of validate like, will people click, like, and if so, which partners will they click on, like which ones do they not care about? And on the external side, we gave people almost a full year where, you know, we just drove traffic. It was also just a really good time. Once you start driving traffic to people, then they start wanting to talk to you more. They’re like, hey, can we be higher up on this marketplace, and what are the rules and what can we do to help? Do you guys talk to your sales teams about us? I guess that’s a third benefit I kind of failed to mention is our sales teams loved it. They used it in like every sales pitch. They pull up the page and they’d say, hey, listen, you’re not just buying a single best of breed tool, you’re buying into a network of tools. And showing them this kind of wide world that existed. So, it was a good use case for a lot of people and really low lift. We’re talking just a flat HTML page with some links and icons, so it was great. 00:34:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that points to one of the first big benefits that comes to mind for me with building on a platform, and that’s distribution. And that could come in the form of direct traffic driving, but it could also come in the form of, I don’t know, you’re making a plugin or an extension to a thing the customer already knows and you benefit from the fact that they’re already a user or a customer of X where X is GitHub, and so you say, OK, so this works with a product I’m already using, and so it’s easier for me to imagine how that plugin or app or integration fits into my life. So, just by itself, you’re already benefiting from that, but then there’s the additional huge distribution benefit of having some kind of a marketplace or an app store, even this static site you mentioned, where you have really direct distribution channel right out of the box. 00:35:26 - Speaker 3: That story is really a perfect summary of how I think about two-sided markets and platforms like that, where GitHub was already extremely valuable to the developer, just as source code repository. But then adding in those extra partners, it becomes exponentially more valuable for those developers and exponentially more valuable for those partners, where it’s really a multiplying effect. When you bring in those extra companies, those third parties, make it so much more valuable than just the product alone, and it’s even much more valuable than me going to GitHub and then me going to Travis, but having that integration makes both of those. More than twice as valuable when they actually integrate and talk to each other. 00:36:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was definitely good timing for the developers themselves. We had a lot of devs come to us, run these big, you know, annual conferences that could have at the time. They’d say, hey, like, I want to build this business, but like, nobody in our team wants to do sales. We’re like, OK, we totally understand that. Like, we as a company of dev tools, like, as developers, we understand not Wanting to take care of this business, let us help you with that piece, and at least make that a lot easier. And then you focus on building the best developer tool and trying out something. So, I do think that you’re right. It helps multiply efforts. And then if you have an app store, it attracts more people to want to start a developer tool or at the time, you know, a plug-in. And so it creates a bit of a flywheel in terms of creating more people in the ecosystem, which attracts more people to the ecosystem and really. Making the whole better bit stronger. 00:37:09 - Speaker 2: And maybe if I can offer a similar origin story from my own experience, maybe just a few years before you were working on the GitHub Marketplace there, Joe, I was working on the Hiroku add-on system. Oh yeah. And this is basically a way that you can, yeah, you have the same storefront, you can provision services of different kinds, databases, logging and things people need for their apps through this little store. And the way we bootstrapped that was, we went out and did well business development. One of my colleagues did a great job identifying some three really good examples of this would be an incredibly useful service, and it shows the kind of shape of Of the overall add-on system we would picture, and one of those was New Relic, which is analytics, one of them was SendGrid, which helps you send emails, both things that a lot of apps need, and the third one’s actually escaping me right now, but it was like a good sampling. And we worked with them directly to do the integration. We didn’t have any kind of provider API we just kind of sat down with our developers and figured out how to plug it together, and from that, that served two purposes. One, we could see some patterns on what we should actually do in terms of making the API for more broad use, but second, now getting new people on board, we can point to the. Businesses that were already reasonably successful in their own right, people could picture other developers or businesses could picture, oh yeah, I can see why Sendrid and Hiroku or a new relic and Hiroku working together. That’s exactly as you said, Wulf, greater than the sum of its parts saying I want in on that, and then that’s the bootstrapping point and you go forward from there. 00:38:43 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Kauna’s add-ons were a big inspiration for what we were doing at GetUp, to be honest. I think we saw the ability for customers to like point click, and then add things to their bill that, you know, wasn’t previously there, but went through a different, you know, procurement model and added on to an existing subscription, like that was just a beautiful. Way to integrate that on a sales side but also on a technical ability just to know like, hey, these things are all gonna work together. I don’t have to worry about compatibility and stitching versions together. It was really nice. 00:39:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s great to hear. Now that probably does also point to one of the risks or downsides of being on a platform, which is potentially the platform owner owning the customer relationship, which there’s a lot of value in that, whether that’s the billing or just the sense of the trust kind of goes there, you know, maybe. Amazon for its third party sellers is a good example. When you buy something from Amazon, you’re really trusting Amazon and you’re paying Amazon and you think of them as the provider even though maybe the vast majority of stuff on Amazon’s site actually comes from third party sellers. And so overall, you have a power dynamic between the people making the platform and the individual developers that is pretty asymmetric, and there’s certainly a lot of historical examples in the tech industry, I think of Facebook and Zynga as being a pretty famous one, but also Twitter, they at one point early on were more of a platform thing. They had an API and building Twitter bots and Twitter clients and things, and at some point they decided, you know, we actually don’t really want to be a platform, we want more control. We want to be a product, we want more control over the end user experience. They bought Tweety, which is one of the bigger clients, and they basically overnight essentially made their API not very valuable, and they’re explicitly telling their business partners to go take a hike. 00:40:37 - Speaker 3: The risk of being on someone else’s platform should not be downplayed, because Whoever is running the platform has a favorite, and their favorite is very likely their own customers. And so if their customers in that business model need to take a left turn or right turn, they’re gonna do that. They’re not gonna consult you. And so it’s very easy to be building on a platform and then suddenly realize that you’ve been left in the dust, either explicitly cut out like as in the case of Twitter. Or there’s uncountable numbers of Apple Sherlocking other apps and kind of saying thank you, that’s a great idea. I will build that instead and taking all of the market share for themselves for particularly successful apps. 00:41:27 - Speaker 2: And I think it is tough for platform creators because they do have to balance things that can and should be platform features that are built in first class things because they’re useful to everyone and so forth versus things that are in that extended. Ecosystem. The term Sherlock, of course, is interesting because that was basically a search app, I think, for Mac, and at one point, Apple comes along with Spotlight and makes it so that that app is now sort of a feature of the platform. And I think sometimes that sort of thing can be overrated, that, you know, the built-in feature in a platform can be kind of like a really simple stripped down version. And then you can, an app that does a similar thing, but a much more sophisticated version or targets a different audience or something like that, there’s still possibility there. But you’re basically always at risk for that. Yeah. Joe working on GitHub, did you have any places where you had to balance that, like, gosh, this should really be kind of a feature of the platform, but we actually we have this pretty important developer and we don’t wanna screw them over. 00:42:31 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I think every platform. Kind of has this tipping point where you start to see like, hey, this feature, this product is getting a lot of traction, and people building on any platform should realize they are doing R&D for the primary platform at all times. Every feature you release, every experience you have is an opportunity for the original platform to be like, hey, that’s a great idea. And yeah, GitHub we had this exact same thing where We were just a year into creating our app directories, so we got a lot of internal buy-in around, hey, this ecosystem is important, but we noticed that issues, GitHub issues specifically was a feature that was left behind in a lot of the development we did on the platform, so it hadn’t gotten a lot of upgrades it needed, and specifically, there is a way to view issues in a combo board that people really wanted and were flocking to these external providers. I mentioned some of the providers were plug-ins. These plug-ins were Chrome extensions that injected information onto the screens, and we had lots of big customers say like, hey, we love this feature, but we can’t have people injecting into our employees' browsers. Like, that is dangerous, and we don’t want to continue doing it. So we want you to build it. And so that was one of those moments where GitHub realized like, hey, we’re gonna have to build something in this space, it’s hugely important to all of our customers. And I’d like to say that we did a great job, but I’d truthfully say we did an OK job of letting our ecosystem partners know that this was coming. Basically, when it was halfway realized on an engineering front, we reached out to that team and said, listen, I’m just telling you now, we’re going down this path, we’re gonna build something. And of course it wasn’t the months of advance notice that they would like, but it was at least some heads up. And I think this is part of what The responsibility is for platforms that are trying to really encourage growth, is that you kind of have to take communications and transparency as a really important value. So for us that meant just telling them this existed, this is the feature set, because it allows ecosystem partners. To adjust. It doesn’t have to be the death of their business, and in in our case it wasn’t. The ecosystem partner that we told was like, OK, thanks, we’re gonna create communications just for this new release, so that we can talk to our customers and say, listen, this is a good thing, we’re happy. And it allows them to adjust their roadmap. Now if they’re gonna make more investments for the next couple of months or years, they can now say, hey, this base product might be taken, but what advanced features can we do? And that’s exactly what this provider did. They created a ton of new premium features that we knew we were never going to build. Like that was a full-on project management suite, and we couldn’t, I didn’t want to build that. We just needed to have some of the visualization stuff taken care of. So they created a fully thriving business, they ended up getting acquired down the road, but that heads up has a lot of value in terms of just goodwill, honesty, and then just better investment and resource allocation. 00:45:43 - Speaker 3: Makes me think that, especially early on in a platform’s lifetime. A lot of the Businesses and players on that platform are not necessarily building businesses, they’re building features. And so then it’s easy for them to get kind of obliterated by the platform maturing and implementing those features, as opposed to what you just described where it was someone who had a business. They were project management business, and they happened to also implement this feature. And so when GitHub kind of pulled the rug out and stole that feature from them, Well, they still had a viable business and so that, yes, of course, things changed. But they were able to continue adding value on top of the platform. 00:46:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I’d say for us, those early days when we were trying to create this ecosystem and eventually the marketplace, a lot of it is rides on goodwill and people seeing that you can create a business, that it won’t just be, you know, outsourced R&D that just gets gobbled up. So having some kind of shining lights and Good examples where like, hey, we did something that was in our ecosystem, but also that provider is saying good things about us, like, that’s a really strong signal that makes people feel like, oh, I can spend the time and build something on this. So in the early days, transparency is so critical, and I will say the other thing we did was, we were really human about it, so we started doing these in-person meetups with our ecosystems. So we got to know them personally, they got to know each other, so that kind of glue was really helpful when we were doing something like this, cause they knew us as people, not just like the other end of an email address, so I think Also, you know, as many other things comes down to like human relations, and I think this is just a piece of that. I’ve been on the other side, you know, on the slack side, and maybe it hasn’t gone as well, but there’s definitely moments where that human side is just critical. 00:47:41 - Speaker 2: Well, maybe that’s a good transition to talking about event pot and your experience building on the Slack platform. So Slack’s a good example of something that was an incredibly successful product. It had reached kind of market saturation, even certainly among certain kinds of power user and technically oriented Silicon Valley teams, and they came along with not just an API but a marketplace and a way to essentially build a pretty full featured app on that platform. Did you start with the idea for the business and then think maybe we should build it on this platform, or was it actually the other way around is seeing this new platform rising you saw as a business opportunity and then thought about what to build on it? 00:48:21 - Speaker 1: For us, it was definitely more seeing the platform exist and do very well, and then just having the context of having so many calendar startups, you know, behind me realize like, hey, I can put these two things together and maybe create something unique here. There’s always these moments where I would go home for like Christmas. I’m from the East Coast, I’m originally from New York, but I’d go home for Christmas and be like, oh man, I’m like in slack all day, and like, you know, people my age working at other companies would be like, what’s slack? I’d be like, wow, the difference between me in the valley and like people in slack overload between like 10 different slack workspaces and then coming to the east coast and having to explain what it is. I was like, wow, there’s still a lot of opportunity left here. So I think that was a good prompt for like, hm, if we’re gonna build a business, this might be a good place to go. And so that we started down that path and realized this was an area that was overlooked and highly, highly valuable. At the time there was like some basic integrations for calendars that Slack themselves had built. This was an interesting tactic as well. They were seeding their own ecosystem by creating their own plug-ins, so they created a plug-in for Outlook and a really bad plug-in for Google Calendar, among many other tools that they built for, but they did these things as a way to Cover the kind of product needs that their customers would have until the third party themselves built that tool, and I think that was a really interesting thing to see. I also had a lot of, to be honest, a lot of GitHub employees went to Slack, and so they would be like, hey, like this is going really well, this business is is booming, and so that’s not gonna say that that didn’t affect a little bit of my, you know, choice of where to build. 00:50:05 - Speaker 2: On the point of a platform creator making their own apps. Obviously Apple does that, Microsoft does that, game consoles do that, but we did a bit of that at Eroku, and it was partially the seating, as you said, where we would see there was just something needed, that was pretty foundational, and in some cases we would go find entrepreneurs we who that we thought would be qualified and essentially talk them into to start. maybe the first Redd add on was kind of done that way, but in many cases we would build ourselves, but trying to use the discipline of we don’t get any privileged access, we’re working through the same API as everyone else, that team is a The business unit would be a strong way to put it, but we kind of try to envision them as a little in-house company that is on the platform and then learn from that. What are the frustrations, what are the pain points, what are the ways that this is not a good experience for the developer. So, in doing so, we serve both those purposes, kind of plugging a hole, but also dog fooding our own platform. 00:51:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I know that on the slack team they did this where they built the calendar integrations and then regularly sent usage reports to those companies being like, here’s how many people are using it, like, is this worth it now? Is it worth it now? And I think, you know, eventually it works, but it takes a while sometimes. 00:51:23 - Speaker 2: Now you spoke about trying to be a good communicator and be human and all that sort of thing and when you were on the platform creator side of the equation, being on the other side of that, how do you think Slack did or what was your experience like? 00:51:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think Slack had a lot of great things that they did, and overall were very net positive as an ecosystem and platform creator. They were able to allow a lot of businesses to thrive, but I mean like all companies, it’s not all great and they had some missteps. I think for us specifically we experienced, you know, this exact kind of like encroachment into our space that every kind of platform creator. Fears. So we were building a lot of features, especially around the Google Calendar product, and kind of unbeknownst to us, Slack had been working on their own second Google calendar integration. I think I remember this very vividly cause we actually were invited to speak at their conference. It was called Slack Connect, and I did my panel and it was great, and then later that day they unveiled this calendar integration that Really, really was a bit of a gut punch to us. I think these are times where, you know, you wish communication were a little bit more open and trust was built up, you know, we know that we are one of many. At the time there was probably 4 or 500 apps in their Slack directory. So we knew that we weren’t, you know, the only folks there, but These are the moments where having a little bit of goodwill goes a long way, cause we saw, you know, our installs dropped huge percentage, and customers were reconsidering cause they were like, well, maybe I don’t need eventbot. So it kind of put us on our heels, and it took us a very long time to readjust our roadmap to figure it out. I mean, we’re a team of two at the time, so you can imagine like, If you are changing any investment in roadmap, like, you can only do a couple of features at a time. It’s really hard to do, to be resourced and strap right there. So, it was tough. I do think Slack has gotten a lot better. Their ecosystem team has done a really great job now of literally creating a combo board of features they are building, and they’re pretty public about this, so they are at least giving folks a heads up into spaces they will go. They also do this for infrastructure, you know, hey, to be on the slack platform, you’re gonna have to have this technical back end, and so they’ve given people a lot of notice that these things are gonna change. We had an incredible experience with people finding us organically, and then being able to take that interest and create products around it. But I think it’s always been a challenge to see further than a couple of months or 6 months down in the road map, because you don’t know what Slack is gonna do. They’re under deep competition with Microsoft Teams, and so you kind of are hoping that like, hey, I hope my niche isn’t too interesting to them, that they want to take it over, but interesting enough that they think that we’re valuable and want to like help us out on the sales side. There’s a fine line there, but Overall, I think that they did a pretty good job of allowing entire businesses to form, and many of them, you know, have now been acquired and have spun out to very large things. I was just talking to the folks who ran Disco, which was acquired by CultureAmp. And then Troops, which I think was maybe the largest Salesforce add-on, got acquired by Salesforce directly. And so there have been definitely some strong successes that came out of that, and Slack was smart about it. They even had a fund, I think that’s probably one of the more unique things I saw. They created a venture fund attached to their ecosystem, so they would definitely try to be financially aligned with their ecosystem as much as they could. 00:55:04 - Speaker 3: I’m curious about your experience. Building on Slack, but also building a Google calendar. It almost strikes me as building on two platforms at once, to some degree. One very stable, it’s been around a long time. Google Calendar is probably not gonna like shift underneath you. But do you see that being very common? Maybe in the GitHub world as well, or in other interactions you had with creators on Slack where they had feet in multiple platforms, and if any one of them changed. Then they were in a tough spot. Does that increase the risk, or do you think in that case, well, Google Calendar is stable enough, it really didn’t increase your risk. The momentum of slack and the dynamic nature of that platform is really where all the risk was anyway. 00:55:49 - Speaker 1: Oh no, I think you’re right, it dramatically increases the risk. You’re, you know, toxing your ability to keep up and even just to do maintenance and keep it running, like you have lots of risk of it blowing up from either side of the connection. I will say that it’s actually pretty common in a lot of the bigger ecosystems to have these kind of two-sided integrations. They’re essentially just like really beefed up zappier plug-ins, like this could be, you know, something you could automate, but like, here’s a tool that does it. We actually took out a lot of that risk, because what we did is we integrated with Slack directly via their API. But then when we integrated with every other calendar, we used the dot ICS kind of Cal format, which is an international standard that almost every calendar can integrate with. So we kind of intentionally didn’t go the even deeper route with Google Calendar, knowing that it was going to be much more difficult to like maintain and increase, and customers every year would give us these like top requests, and that was probably one of their biggest requests is I want it auto populating. Instead of like, hey, you just have to connect this ICS calendar and it’ll populate in under an hour. So we kind of took the customer dissatisfaction to give ourselves a little bit more breathing room. But yeah, it’s a really good point that those two sided integrations can be a gold mine if you find a really good niche and build it out, but it’s a risk that, you know, either side ends up saying that’s a great idea, we’re gonna do it. 00:57:20 - Speaker 2: And coming back to what I mentioned in the beginning, which is sort of the technical side of a platform to build on, and the business side, called the distribution aspect or the partnership aspect. I’m curious for the case of building eventpot. How much was Slack’s API and the technical infrastructure and the fact that maybe you don’t need to worry about user identity or you have a bunch of existing kind of UI concepts like channels, for example, that your users already know and you can skip forward to some unique value that you’re providing versus, you know, making basic login pages or onboarding flows, how much was the value in that versus Either one, you’re in their marketplace and people just search there and find you, or even just that they Google Slack group calendar and they find you. 00:58:08 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we ran a lot of those ads too, very successfully in the beginning, but the ability to not have to deal with common overhead for us was a really big boon to creating our company. Knowing that we didn’t have to worry about maintaining user databases and Keeping track of like every workspace and all the details that essentially Slack takes care of because that’s their products, bread and butter. We could essentially use that and bootstrap off of that. So it saved us countless hours of time, and also I think for a lot of our customers, some of them are, you know, very big businesses, they would have really deep requirements if we even wanted to build that for ourselves. So, knowing that Slack like has the resources and has the kind of edge cases filled out, great, it allows us to focus on much more. Unique value adds on top. And I think also channels as a concept was new to people. I mean, they understood threads of email, and then when you move to a channel-based kind of topic discussion forum, they didn’t know how to react and so it allows you to take that space where it’s not defined on what it should work like, and then add to what it could work like. As an example, a lot of people had a Happy hour type slack channel that they would just use for happy hours. And so we would say, oh, we can create a calendar behind that, and every channel gets its own calendar, so everyone can create their own events that live inside of that channel. And so we started pushing the boundaries of what people thought a channel was. It wasn’t just chat, it’s also a calendar, and we introduced a visual calendar system in our second year, where you could see a visual calendar of that channel’s activity. So people were like, oh great, every Monday morning I know exactly what’s going on for the rest of this week as it relates to this topic. So I do think that Slack’s kind of basics gave us the jumping off point to build some really cool stuff. Even if we wanted to build it, we wouldn’t have been able to recreate it, but seeing that it was there, it gave us just, you know, nice constraints to create some innovative stuff. 01:00:16 - Speaker 2: And certainly our experience on news and well you probably also can speak to this for other apps and companies you’ve been a part of, but, you know, the Apple platforms at this point, particularly the iOS, is just one of the most filled out in the w