Podcasts about wildbit

Our guest for this episode is Garrett Dimon. Garrett is a developer, author, conference speaker and multi time business owner. With some partners, he's recently formed a company called “Very Good Software” where they own and operate several SaaS apps. Garrett Dimon is a seasoned software developer and entrepreneur with a passion for front-end development and Ruby on Rails. His journey began in 1998, experimenting with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript before earning a Computer Science degree from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2000. Over the next eight years, he honed his skills in front-end development and information architecture through consulting roles with organizations of all sizes. During this time, he also shared his expertise through a column on front-end design and development for Digital Web Magazine.In 2008, Garrett started his entrepreneurial journey and launched Sifter, a bug and issue tracking application built with Rails, which he ran until its successful sale in 2016. His experience building and selling Sifter inspired him to write and self-publish Starting and Sustaining, a book about building and running SaaS applications. After Sifter, Garrett took some time off from entrepreneurship and joined Wildbit and then egghead. Eventually he went back on his own independent consulting where he helped clients Fireside.fm and Flipper. Little did he know that later on, he'd become part owner of these companies. In the fall of 2024 the one time business seller became the buyer. He, John Nunemaker, and Kris Priemer are operating Very Good Software, where fireside.rm and Flipper are core products. Links:GarrettDimon.comBlueSkyFireside.fmFlipperVery Good SoftwareBooksRecent podcast appearances:Taking Over Fireside with John Nunemaker & Garrett DimonMaster of Generators (with Garrett Dimon) | Dead Code

David Allen learned of Natalie Nagele through Adam Grant, and promptly scheduled this fascinating interview with her. Natalie and her husband Chris co-founded a software company called Wildbit. Their tagline is, "We're more than a company. We're a family." They have fun company retreats, a four-day work week, and smooth, collaborative teamwork among their globally distributed group. How do they do it? Start with every new employee receiving a copy of Getting Things Done. Listen to find out Natalie's advice on productivity, sharing GTD with coworkers and family, and more. Wildbit's company site: https://wildbit.com/ And her Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/natalienagele

Here's the recap...In today's episode, I chatted with Natalie Nagele, an OG of remote-work. Natalie is the CEO & Co-founder @ Wildbit. We spoke about how companies should be thinking about engaging their in-office vs remote employees. Whether to do hybrid events where some people are in person and others are virtual, or separating engagement opportunities by cohort, or doing virtual only. We also spoke about different types of virtual team fun you can implement and how often you should do so. Finally, we discussed how proximity bias may impact promotions & career trajectory for hybrid teams. For a full transcript click here. For more information about the show click here. We'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts of the show - feedback@leadingfromafar.com

About AmyAmy (she/her) has spent the better part of the last 15 years in the tech start-up world, starting off as a front-end software engineer before transitioning into leadership. She has built and led teams across the software and product development spectrum, including web and mobile development, QA, operations and infrastructure, customer support, and IT.These days, Amy is building the software engineering team at EdTech startup, Unicycle, and challenging the archetype of what a tech leader should be. She strives to be a real-life success story for other leaders who believe that safe, welcoming, and equitable environments can exist in tech. Links: Unicycle: https://www.unicycle.co AmyChanta: https://twitter.com/AmyChanta 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 Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: Writing ad copy to fit into a 30 second slot is hard, but if anyone can do it the folks at Quali can. Just like their Torque infrastructure automation platform can deliver complex application environments anytime, anywhere, in just seconds instead of hours, days or weeks. Visit Qtorque.io today and learn how you can spin up application environments in about the same amount of time it took you to listen to this ad.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A famous quote was once uttered by Irena Dunn who said, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Now, apparently at some point, people just, you know, looked at the fish without a bicycle thing, thought, “That was overwrought. We can do a startup and MVP it. Why do two wheels? We're going to go with one.”And I assume that's the origin story of Unicycle. My guest today is Amy Chantasirivisal who is the Director of Engineering at Unicycle. Amy, thank you for putting up with that incredibly tortured opening. But that's okay; we torture metaphors to death here.Amy: [laugh]. Thank you for having me. That was a great intro.Corey: So, you are, at the time of this recording at least, a relatively new hire to Unicycle, which to my understanding is a relatively new company. What do you folks do over there?Amy: Yes, so Unicycle is not even a year old, so a company born out of the pandemic. But we are building a product to reimagine what the digital classroom looks like. The product itself was thought up right during a time during the pandemic when it became very clear how much students and teachers are struggling with converting their experience into online platforms. And so we are trying to just bring better workflows, more efficiency into that. And right now we're starting with email, but we'll be expanding to other things in the future.Corey: I am absolutely the wrong person to ask about a lot of this stuff, just because my academic background, tortured doesn't really begin to cover it. I handle academia about as well as I handled working for other people. My academic and professional careers before I started this place were basically a patchwork of nonsense and trying to pretend I was something other than I was. You, on the other hand, have very much been someone who's legitimate as far as what you do and how you do it. Before Unicycle, you were the Director of Engineering at Wildbit, which is a name I keep hearing about and a bunch of odd places. What did you do there?Amy: [laugh]. I will have to follow up and ask what the odd places are but—so I was leading a team there of engineers that were fully distributed across the US and also in Europe. And we were building an email product called Postmark, which some of your listeners might use, and then also a couple of other smaller things like People-First Jobs and Beanstalk—not AWS's Beanstalk, but a developer repository and workflow tool.Corey: Forget my listeners for a minute; I use Postmark. That's where I keep seeing you on the invoices because it's different branding. As someone who has The Duckbill Group, but also the Last Week in AWS things, it's the brand confusion problem is very real. That does it. Sorry. Thank you for collapsing the waveform on that one. And of course, before that you were at PagerDuty, which is a company that most folks in the ops space are aware of, founded to combat the engineer's true enemy: sleep.Amy: Absolutely. It's the product that engineers love to hate, but also can't live without, to some degree. Or maybe they want to live without it, but uh… [laugh] are not able to.Corey: So, I have a standing policy on this show of not talking to folks who are not wildly over-represented—as I am—and effectively disregarding the awesome stuff that they've done professionally in favor of instead talking about, “Wow, what's it like not to be a white guy in the room? I can't even imagine such a thing. It sounds hard.” However, in your case, an awful lot of the work you have done and are most proud of centers around DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Tell me about that.Amy: Absolutely. I would say that it's the work that I've spent my time focusing on in recent years, but also that I'm still learning, right, and as someone who is Asian American, and also from a middle-class socioeconomic background, I have a bunch of privileges that I still have to unpack and that show up in the way that I work every day, as well. And so just acknowledging that, you know, while I spend a lot of time on DEI, still have just barely scratched the surface on it, really, in the grand scheme of things. But what I will say is that, you know, I've been really fortunate in my career in that I started in tech 15 or so years ago, and I started at a time when it wasn't super hard for someone who has no CS degree to actually get into some sort of coding job. And so I fell into my first role; I was building HTML and CSS landing pages for a marketing team, for an ISP that was based in San Francisco.So, I was cobbling together a bunch of technical skills, and I got better and better. And then I reached this point in my career where I didn't really have a lot of mentors, and so I was like, “I don't know what's next for me.” But then I am also frustrated that it is so hard for our team to get things done. And so I took it upon myself to figure out Scrum and project management type of stuff for my team, and then made the jump into people management from there. So, people management and leadership through project management.But when I look back on my career, I think about, “Oh, if I had a mentor, would that still have been my fate? Would I have continued down this track of becoming a very senior technical person and just doing that for my whole career?” Because letting go of the code was definitely a hard, hard thing. And I was lucky enough that I really did enjoy the people and the process side of all of this. And so [laugh] this relates to DEI in the fact that there's research and everything that backs this up, but that women and women of color generally tend to get less mentorship overall and get less actionable feedback about their job performance.And you think about how that potentially compounds over time, over the course of someone's career and that may be one of the reasons why women and people of color get pushed out of tech because they're not getting the support that they need, potentially. They're not getting feedback, they're not being advocated for in meetings, and then there's also all the stuff that you can add on around microaggressions, or just aggressions period, potentially, depending on the culture of the team that you're working on. And so all of those things compounded are the types of things that I think about now when I reflect on my own career and the types of teams that I want to be building in the future.Corey: Back when I was stumbling my way through piecing my career together. I mean, as mentioned, I don't have a degree; I don't have a high school diploma, as it turns out, and—that was a surprise when I discovered midway through my 20s that the school I had graduated from wasn't accredited—but I would tell stories, and I found ways to weasel my way through and I gave a talk right around 2015 or 2016, about, “Weasel Your Way to the Top: How to Handle a Job Interview,” and looking back, I would never give that talk again. I canceled it as soon as someone pointed out something that was only obvious in hindsight, that the talk was built out of things that had worked for me. And it's easy to sit here and say that, well, I had to work for what I have; none of this was handed to me. And there's an element of truth to that, except for the part where there was nothing fighting against me as I went.There was not this headwind of a presumed need for me to have to prove myself; I am presumed competent. I sometimes say that as a white guy in tech, my failure mode is a board seat and a book deal, and it's not that far from wrong. It takes, I guess, a lot of listening and a lot of interaction with folks from wildly different backgrounds before you start to see some of these things. It takes time. So, if you're listening to this, and you aren't necessarily convinced that this might be real or whatnot, talk less, listen more. There are a lot of stories out there in the world that I think that it's not my place to tell but listen. That's how I approach it.What's interesting about your pathway into management is it's almost the exact opposite of mine, where I was craving novelty, and okay, I wanted to try and managing a team of people. Years later, in hindsight—I'm not a good manager and I know that about myself, and I explicitly go out of my way these days to avoid managing people wherever possible, for a variety of reasons, but at the time, I didn't know. I didn't know that. I wanted to see how it went.First, I had to disabuse myself of this notion that, oh, management is a promotion. It's not. It's an orthogonal skill.Amy: Yes.Corey: The thing I really learning—management or not—now, is that the higher in the hierarchy you rise, if you want to view it that way, the less hands-on work you do, which means everything that you are responsible for that—and oh, you are responsible—isn't something you can jump in and do yourself. You can only impact the outcome via influence. And that was a hard lesson to learn.Amy: Right. And there are some schools of thought, though, where you can affect the outcome by control. And that's not what I'm about. I think I'm more aligned with what you're saying in terms of, it's really the influence and the ability to clear the way for people who are smarter than you to do the things that they need to do. Just get out of their way, and remove the roadblocks, and just help give them what they need. That's really, sort of like, my overall approach. But I know that there are some folks out there who lead the opposite way of, “It's my way, and I'm going to dictate how things should be done, and really you're here to take and follow orders.”Corey: It's always fun interviewing people to manage teams. “So, why do you want to be a manager?” It's, “Oh, I want to tell people what to do.” And I have to say that as an interviewer, there is nothing that takes the pressure off nearly as well as a perfectly wrong answer. And, yes, that at least to my world, is a perfectly wrong answer to this. There aren't that many pass-fail questions, but you can fail any question if you try hard enough.Amy: [laugh]. Oh, gosh, yeah, it's true. But also, at the same time, I would say that there are organizations that are built that way. Because—all it takes is the one person who wants to tell people what to do, and then they start a company, and then they hire other people who want to tell people what to do. And so there are ways where organizations like that exist and come into being even today, I would say.Corey: The question that I have for you about engineering leadership is, back when I was an engineer, and thinking, all right, it's time for me to go ahead and try being a manager—let's be clear, I joke about it, but the actual reason I wanted to try my hand at management was that I found people problems more interesting than computer problems at that point. I still do, but these days, especially when it comes to, you know, cloud services marketing and such, yeah, generally, the technical problems are, in fact, people problems at their core. But talking to my manager friends of how do I go and transition from being an engineer into being a manager, the universal response I got at the time was, “Ehh, I don't know.” Every person I knew who'd had made that transition was in the right place at the right time, and quote-unquote, “Got lucky.”Amy: Absolutely.Corey: And then once they had management on their resume, then they could go and transition back to being an IC and then to management again. But it's that initial breakthrough that becomes a challenge.Amy: Absolutely. And I fell into it as well. I mean, I got into it, partially for selfish reasons because I was, an IC, I was doing development work, and I was frustrated, and I had teammates who were coming to me and they were frustrated about how hard it was for us to get our work done, or the friction involved in shipping code. And so I took it upon myself to say, “I think I see a pattern about why this is happening, and so I will try to solve this problem for the team.” And so that's where the Agile and Scrum thing come in, and the project management side.And then, when I was at this company—this was One Kings Lane; this was, like, the heyday of flash sales websites and stuff like that, so it was kind of a rocket ship at that time—and because we were also growing so fast and I was interviewing folks as well, I just fell into this management role of, “Well, if I'm interviewing these people, then I guess I should be [laugh] managing them, too.” And that happens for so many people, similar stories of getting into management. And I think that's where it starts to go wrong for a lot of organizations because, like you said, it's not an up-leveling; it's a changing of your role, and it requires training and learning and figuring out how to be effective as a manager. And a lot of people just stumble their way through it and make a lot of mistakes—myself included—through that process.And that becomes really troubling knowing that you can make these really big mistakes, but these mistakes that you make don't affect just yourself. It's the careers of the people that you manage as well and sort of where they're headed in their lives. And so it's troubling to think that most leaders that are out there today have not received any sort of training on how to be a good manager and how to be effective as a manager.Corey: I would agree with that wholeheartedly. It seems that in many cases, companies take the best engineer that they have on their team and promote them to manager. It's brilliant in some respects in just how short-sighted it is. You are taking a great engineer and trading them for a junior and unproven manager, and hoping for the best. And there is no training on any of these things, at least—Amy: Right.Corey: —not the companies that I ever worked at. Of course, there are ways you can learn to be a better manager; there are people who specialize in exactly this. There are companies that do exactly this. But tech has this weird thing where it just tries to solve itself from first principles rather than believing for a minute that someone might possibly have prior experience that could be useful for these things. And—Amy: Absolutely.Corey: —that was a challenge. I had a lot of terrible managers before I entered management myself, and I figured, ah, I'll do the naive thing and I'm just going to manage based upon doing the exact opposite of what those terrible managers all did. And I got surprisingly far with it, on some level. But you don't see the whole picture when you're an individual contributor who's writing code—crappy in my case—most of the time, and then only seeing the aspects of your manager that they allow you to see. They don't share—if they're any good—the constraints that they have to deal with, that they're managing expectations around the team, conflicting priorities, strategic objectives, et cetera because it's not something that gets shown to folks. So—Amy: Absolutely.Corey: —if you bias for that, in my experience you become an empathetic manager to the people on your team, but completely ineffective at managing laterally or upwards.Amy: Mm-hm, absolutely. And you know, I'm exploring this idea of further. Being at a very small company, I think allows me to do that. And exploring this idea of, does it have to be that way? Can you be transparent about what the constraints are as a leader while still caring for your team and supporting them in the ways that they need and helping them grow their careers and just being open about one of the challenges that you have in building the company?And I don't know, I feel like I have some things to prove there, but I think it's possible to achieve some sort of balance there, something better or more beyond just what exists now of having that entire leadership layer typically be very opaque and just very unclear why certain decisions are made.Corey: The hard part that extends that these to me beyond that is it's difficult to get meaningful feedback, on some level, when you're suddenly thrust into that position. I also, in hindsight, realize that an awful lot of those terrible managers that I had weren't nearly as terrible as I thought they were. I will say that being on the other side of that divide definitely breeds empathy. Now that I'm the co-owner of The Duckbill Group, and we're building out a leadership team and the rest, hiring managers of managers is starting to be the sort of thing that I have to think about.It's effectively, how do I avoid inadvertently doing end-runs around people? And oh, I'm just going to completely undermine a manager by reaching out to one of their team and retasking them on something because obviously whatever I have in mind is much more important. What could they possibly be working on that's better than the Twitter shitpost I'm borrowing them to help out with? Yeah, you learn a lot by getting it wrong, and there becomes a power imbalance that even if you try your best to ignore it—which you should not—I assure you, the person who has less power in that relationship cannot set that aside. Even when I have worked with people I consider close friends, that friendship gained some distance during the duration of their employment because there has to be that professional level of separation. It's a hard thing to learn.Amy: It's a very hard line to walk in terms of recognizing the power that you have over someone's career and the power over, you know, making decisions for them and for the team and for the company, and still being empathetic towards their personal needs. And if they're going through a tough time, but then you also know from a business perspective that X, Y, or Z needs to happen, and how do you push but not push too hard, and try to balance needs of people who are humans and have things that happen and go on sometimes, and the fact that we work in a capitalist society and we still need to make money to make the business run. And that's definitely one of the hardest things to learn, and I am still learning. I definitely don't have that figured out, but I err on the side of, let's listen to what people are saying because ultimately, I'm not going to be the one to write the code. I haven't done that in years, and also I would probably suck at it now. And so it behooves leaders to listen to the people who were doing the work and to try, to the best of their abilities in whatever role whether that's exec-level leadership or mid-level… sort of like, middle management type of stuff to do what is in your power to help set them up to succeed.Corey: I want to get back a little bit to the idea of building diverse teams. It's something that you spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on. I do too. It's one of those areas where it's almost fraught to talk about it because I don't want to sound like I'm breaking my arm by patting myself on the back here. I certainly have a hell of a lot to learn, and mostly—and I'm ashamed to admit this—I very often learn only by really putting my foot in it sometimes. And it's painful, but that is, I think, a necessary prerequisite for growth. From your perspective, what is the most challenging part of building diverse teams?Amy: I think it's that piece that you said of making the mistakes or just putting yourself in a position where you are going to be uncomfortable. And I think that a lot of organizations that I've been in talk about DEI on a very surface level in terms of, “Oh, well, you know, we want to have more candidates from diverse backgrounds in our pipelines for hiring,” and things like that. But then not really just thinking about, but how do we work as a team in a way that potentially makes retention of those folks a lot harder? And for myself, I would say that when I was earlier on in all of this in my learning, I would say that I was able to kickstart my learning by thinking about my own identity, the fact that I was often the only Asian person on my team, the only woman on my team, and then more recently, the only mom on my team. And that has happened to me so many times in my career. More often than not.And so being able to draw on those experiences and those feelings of oh, okay, no one wants to hear about my kid because everyone else is, you know, busy going out to drink or something on the weekends. And like that feeling of, you know, that not belonging, and feeling of feeling excluded from things, and then thinking about how then this might manifest for folks with different identities for myself. And then going there and learning about it, listening, doing more listening than talking, and yeah, and that's, that's really just been the hardest part of just removing myself from that equation and just listening to the experiences of other people. And it's uncomfortable. And I think a lot of people are—you have to be in the right mindset, I guess, to be uncomfortable; you have to be willing to accept that you will be uncomfortable. And I think a lot of folks maybe are not ready to do that on a personal level.Corey: The thing that galls me the most is I do try on these things, and I get it wrong a fair bit. And my mistakes I find personally embarrassing, and I strive not to repeat them. But then I look around the industry—and let's be clear, a lot of this is filtered through the unhealthy amount of time I spend on Twitter—but it seems that I'm trying and I'm failing and attempting to do better as I go, and then I see people who are just, “Nope. Not at all. In fact, we're not just going to lean into bias, we're going to build a startup around it.”And I look at this and it's at some level hard to reconcile the fact that… at first, that I'm doing badly at all, which is the easy cop-out of, “Oh, well, if that is considered acceptable on some level, then I certainly don't even have to try,” which I think is a fallacy. But further it's—I have to step beyond myself on that and just, I cannot fathom how discouraging that must be, particularly to people who are early in their careers because it looks like it's just a normal thing that everyone thinks and does that just someone got a little too loud with it. And it's abhorrent. And if people are listening to this and thinking that is somehow just entrenched, and normalized, and everyone secretly thinks that… no. I assure you it is not something that is acceptable, even in the quote-unquote, “Private white dude who started companies” gathering holes. Yeah, people articulating sentiments like that suddenly find themselves not welcome there anymore, at least in every one of those types of environments I've ever found myself in.Amy: Yeah, the landscape is shifting. It's slow, but it is shifting. And, myself on Twitter, like, I do a lot of rant-y stuff too sometimes, but despite all of that, I feel like I am ultimately an optimist because I have to be. Otherwise, I would have left tech already because every time I am faced with a job search for myself, I'm like, “Should I—is this it? Am I done in tech? Do I want to go do something else? Am I going to finally go open that bakery that I've always wanted to open?” [laugh].And so… I have to be an optimist. And I see that—even in the most recent job search I've done—have seen so many new founders and new CEOs, really, with this mindset of, “We want to build a diverse team, but we're also doing it—and we're using diversity as a foundation for what we want to build; it's part of our decision-making process and this is how we're going to hold ourselves accountable to it.” And so it is shifting, and while there are those bad actors out there still, I'm seeing a lot of good in the industry now. And so that's why I stick around; that's why I'm still here.Corey: I want to actually call something out as concrete here because it's easy for me to fall into the trope of just saying vague things. I'll be specific about something, give us a good example. We've done a decent job, I think, of hiring a diverse team, but—and this is a problem that I see spread across an awful lot of companies—as you look at the leadership team, it gets a lot wider and a lot more male. And that is an inherent challenge. In our particular case, my business partner is someone who I've been close friends with for a decade.I would not be able to start a business with someone I didn't have that kind of relationship with just because your values have to be aligned or there's trouble down the road. And beyond that, it winds up rapidly, on some level, turning into what appears to be a selection bias. When you're trying to hire senior leaders, for example, there's a prerequisite to being a senior leader, which is embodied in the word senior, which implies tenure of having spent a fair bit of time in an industry that is remarkably unfriendly in a lot of different ways to a lot of different people. So, there's a prerequisite of being willing to tolerate the shit for as long as it takes to get to that level of seniority, rather than realizing at any point as any of us can, there are easier jobs that don't have this toxicity inherent to them and I'll go do that instead. So, there's a tenure question; there's a survivorship bias question.And I don't have the answers to any of this, but it's something that I'm seeing, and it's one of those once you see it, you can't unsee it any more moments. At least for me.Amy: Yeah, absolutely.Corey: Please tell me I'm not the only person who see [laugh]—who is encountering these problems. Like, “Wow, you just sound terrible.” Which might very well be a fair rejoinder here. I'm just trying to wrap my head around how to think about this properly.Amy: Yeah. I mean, this is why I was saying that I am very optimistic about [laugh] new companies that are coming—like, up-and-coming these days, new startups, primarily, because you're right that a lot of people just end up quitting tech before they get to that point of experience and seniority, to get into leadership. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of bias and discrimination that happens at those leadership levels, too, but I will say that, you know, it's both of those things. There are also more things on top of that. But this is why I'm like, so excited to see people from diverse backgrounds as founders of new companies and why I think that being able to be in a position to potentially either help fund, or advocate, or sponsor, or amplify those types of orgs, I think is where the future is that because ultimately, I think a lot of the established companies that are out there these days, it's going to be really hard for them to walk back on what their leadership team looks like now, especially if it is a sizable leadership team and they're all white men.Corey: Yeah. I'm going to choose to believe we say sizable leadership team that it's also not—we're talking about the horizontal scaling that happens to some of us, especially during a pandemic as we continue to grow into our seats. You're right, it's a problem as well, where you can cut a bit of slack in some cases to small teams. It's, “Okay, we don't have any Black employees, but we're three people,” is a lot more understandable-slash-relatable than, “We haven't hired any Black people yet and we're 3000 people.” One of those is acceptable—or at least understandable, if not acceptable—the other is just completely egregious.Amy: Yes. And I think then the question that you have to ask if you're looking at, you know, a three-person company, or [laugh] I guess, like in my case, I was looking at the seven-person company, is that, “Okay. There are currently no Black people on your team. And why is that?” And then, “What are you doing to change that? And how are you going to make sure that you're holding ourselves accountable to it?”Because I think it's easy to say, “Oh, you know, the first couple of hires were people we just worked with in the past, and they just happened to, you know, look like us and whatnot.” And then you blink becau—and you do that a handful of times, and you blink, and then suddenly you have a team of 25 and there are no people of color on your team. And maybe you have, like, one woman on the team or something. And you're like, “Huh. That's strange. I guess we should think about this and figure out what we can do.”And then I think what ends up happening at that point is that there are so many already established behaviors, and cultural norms, and things like that, that have organically grown within a team that are potentially not welcoming towards people from different backgrounds who have different backgrounds. So, you go and attempt to hire someone who is different, and they come in, and they're just sort of like, “This is how you work? I don't feel like I belong here.” And then they don't stay, and then they leave. And then people sit there and scratch their heads like, “Oh, what did we do wrong?” And, “I don't get it.”And so there's this conversation, I think, in the industry of like, “Oh, it's a pipeline problem, and if we were just able to hire a lot of people from diverse backgrounds, the problem is solved.” Which really isn't the case because once people are there and at your company, are they getting promoted at the same rate as white men? Are they staying with the company for as long? And who's in leadership? And how are you working to break down the biases that you may have?All those sorts of things, I think, generally are not considered as part of all of this DEI work. Especially when, in my experience in startups, the operational side of all that is so immature a lot of the times, just not well developed that deeper thought process and reflection doesn't really happen.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: I do my best to have these conversations in public as frequently as is practical for me to do, just because I admit, I get things wrong. I say things that are wrong and I'm doing a fair bit of learning in public around an awful lot of that. Because frankly, I can withstand the heat, if it comes down to someone on Twitter gets incredibly incensed by something I've said on this podcast, for example. Because it isn't coming from a place of ill intent when someone accuses me of being ableist or expressing bias. My response is generally to suppress the initial instinctive flash of defensiveness and listen and ask.And that is, even if I don't necessarily agree with what they're saying after reflection, I have to appreciate on some level the risk-taking inherent in calling someone out who is in my position where, if I were a trash fire, I could use the platform to turn it into, “All right. Now, let's go hound the person that called me out.” No. I don't do that, full stop. If I'm going to harass people, it's going to be—not people, despite what the Supreme Court might tell us—but it's going to be a $2 trillion company—one in particular—because that's who I am and that's how I roll.Whenever I get a DM—which I leave open because I have the privilege to do that—from folks who are early career who are not wildly over-represented, I just have to stop and marvel for a minute at the level of risk-taking inherent to that because there is risk to that. For me, when I DM people, the only risk I feel like I'm running at any given point is, “Are they going to think that I'm bothering them? Oh, the hell with it. I'm adorable. They'll love me.” And the fact that I'm usually right is completely irrelevant to that. There's just that sense of I don't really risk a damn thing in the grand scheme of things compared to the risk that many people are taking just living who they are.Amy: Yeah. And someone DMs you and you suppress that initial sort of defensiveness: I would say that that is an underrated skill. [laugh].Corey: Well, a DM is a privilege, too. A call in—Amy: Yes.Corey: —is deeply appreciated; no one owes it to me. I often will get people calling me out on Twitter and I generally stop and think about that; I have a very close circle of friends who I trust to be objective on these things, and I'll ask them, “Did I get this wrong?” And very often the answer is yes. And, “Well, I thought the joke was funny and I spent time building it.” “Yeah, but if people hear a joke I'm making and feel bad about it, then is it really that good of a joke or should I try harder?” It's a process, and I look back at who I was ten years ago and I feel a sense of shame. And I believe that if anyone these days doesn't, either they were effectively a saint, or they haven't grown.Amy: Yes.Corey: And that's my personal philosophy on this stuff, anyway.Amy: Yeah, absolutely. And that growth is so important. And part of that growth really is being able to suppress your desire to make it about you, [laugh] right? That initial, “Oh, I did something bad,” or, “I'm a horrible person because I said this thing,” right? It's not about you, there's, like, the impact that you had on someone else.And I've been giving this some thought recently, and I—you know, I also similarly have a group of trusted friends who I often talk about these things with, and you know, we always kind of check ourselves in terms of, did we mess something up? Did we, you know, put our foot in our mouths? Stuff like that. And think what it really comes down to is being able to say, “Maybe I did something wrong and I need to suppress that desire to become defensive and put up walls and guard and protect myself from feeling vulnerable, in order to actually learn and grow from this experience.”Corey: It's hard to do, but it's required because I—Amy: Extremely, yes.Corey: —used to worry about, “Ohh, what if I get quote-unquote, ‘canceled?'” well, I've done a little digging into this and every notable instance of this I can find is when someone is called out for something crappy, they get defensive, and they double-down and triple-down and quadruple-down, and they keep digging a hole nice and deep to the point where no one with a soul can really be on their side of this issue, and now they have a problem. I have never gotten to that point because let's be honest with you, there are remarkably few things I care that passionately about that I'm going to pick those fights publicly. The ones that I do, I am very much on the other side [laugh] of those issues. That has not been a realistic concern.I used to warn every person here before I hired them—to get this back to engineering management—that there was a risk that I could have a bad tweet and we don't have a company anymore. I don't give that warning anymore because I no longer believe that it's true.Amy: Mm-hm. Mm-hm. I also wonder about, in general, because of the world that we live in, and our history with white supremacy and oppression and all those things, I also wonder if this skill of being able to self-reflect and be uncomfortable and manage your own reaction and your emotions, I wonder if that's just a thing that white people generally haven't had a lot of practice for because of the inherent privileges that are afforded to white people. I wonder if a lot of this just stems from the fact that white people get to navigate this world and not get called out, and thus don't have this opportunity to exercise this skill of holding on to that and listening more than talking.Corey: Absolutely agree. And it gets piled on by a lot of folks, for example—I'll continue to use myself as an example in this case—I live in San Francisco. I would argue that I'm probably not, “In tech,” quote-unquote, the way that I once was, but I'm close enough that there's no discernible difference. And my social circle is as well. Back before I entered tech, I did a bunch of interesting jobs, telemarketing to pay the bills, I was a recruiter for a while, I worked construction a couple of summers.These days, everyone that I engage with for meaningful periods of time is more or less fairly tech adjacent. It really turns into a one-sided perspective. And I can sit here and talk about what folks who are not living in the tech bubble should be doing or how they should think about this, but it's incredibly condescending, it's incredibly short-sighted, and fails to appreciate a very different lived experience. And I can remind myself of this now, but that lack of diversity and experience is absolutely something where it feels like the tech bubble, especially for those folks in this bubble who look a lot like me, it is easy to fall into a pattern of viewing ourselves as the modern aristocracy where we deserve the nice things that we have, and the rest. And that's a toxic pattern. It takes vigilance to avoid it. I'm not saying I get it right all the time, by a landslide, but ugh, the perils of not doing that are awful.Amy: Agreed. And it shows up, you know, getting back to the engineering manager and leadership and org building piece of things, that shows up even in the way that we talk about career development and career ladders, for those of us in tech, and software engineering specifically for me, where we've kind of like come up with all these matrices of job levels, and competencies, all that, and humans just are so vastly different. Every person is an individual, and yet we talked about career ladders and how to advance your career in this two-dimensional matrix. And, like, how does that actually work, right?And I've seen some good career ladders that account for a larger variety of competencies than just, “Can you code?” And, “What are your system design skills?” And, “Do you understand distributed systems?” And so on and so forth, but I think a lot gets left behind and gets left on the table when it comes to thinking about the fact that when you get a group of people together working on some sort of common cause or a product, that there's so much more to the dynamic than just the writing of the code. It's how do you work with each other? How do you support each other? How do you communicate with each other? And then all my glue work—that is what I call it—like, the glue work that goes into a successful team and building products, a lot of that is just not captured in the way that we talk about career development for folks. And it's just incredibly two-dimensional, I think.Corey: One last question that I have for you before we wrap the episode here is, you spend a lot of time focusing on this, and I have some answers, but I'm very interested to hear yours instead because I assure you, the world hears enough from me and people who look like me, what is the biggest mistake that you see companies making in their attempts to build diverse teams?Amy: I would say that there's two major things. One is that there have been a lot of orgs in my own past that think about diversity, equity, inclusion as a program and not a mindset that everyone should be embracing. And that manifests itself into, sort of like, this secondary problem of stopping at the D part of D, E, and I. That's the whole, “We're going to hire a bunch of people from different backgrounds and then just we're going to stop with that because we've solved the problem.” But by not adopting that mindset of the equity, the inclusion, and also the welcoming and the belonging piece of things internally, then anyone that you hire who comes in from those marginalized or minority backgrounds is not going to want to stay long-term because they don't feel like they fit in, they don't feel like they belong.And so, it becomes this revolving door of you hire in people and then those people leave after some amount of time because they're not getting what they need out of either the role or for themselves personally in terms of just emotional support, even. And so I would say that's the problem that I see is not a numbers game—although the metrics and the numbers help hold you accountable—but the metrics and the numbers are not the end goal. The end goal is really around the mindset that you have in building the org and the way that people behave. And the way that you work together is really core to that.Corey: What I tend to see on the other side is the early intake funnels. People will reach out to me sometimes, “Hey, do you know any diverse speakers we can hire to do a speaking engagement here?” It doesn't… work that way. There's a lot more to it than that. It is not about finding people who check boxes, it is not about quote-unquote, “Diversity hires.”It's about—at least in my experience—structuring job ads, for example, in ways that are not coded—unconsciously in most cases, but ehh—that are going to resonate towards folks who are in certain cultures and not in others. It's about being more equitable. It's about understanding that not everyone is going to come across in a job interview as the most confident person in the room. Part of the talk that I gave on how to handle job interviews, there was a strong section in it on salary negotiation. Well, turns out when I do it, I'm an aggressive hard-charger and they like that, whereas if someone who is not male does that, well, in that case, they look like they're being difficult and argumentative and pushy and rising above their station. It was awful.One of the topics I'm most proud of was the redone version of that talk that I gave with a friend, Sonia Gupta, who has since left tech because of how shitty it is, and that was a much better talk. She was a former attorney who had spent time negotiating in much higher-stakes situations.Amy: Yeah.Corey: And it was terrific to see during the deconstruction and rebuilding of that talk, just how much of my own unconscious bias had crept in. It's, again, I look back at the early version of those talks and I'm honestly ashamed. It wasn't from ill will, but it's always impact over intent as far as how this has potentially made things worse. It's, if nothing else, if I don't say the right things when I should speak up, that's not great, but I always prefer that to saying things that are actively harmful. So—Amy: Absolutely.Corey: —it's hard. I deserve no sympathy for this, to be clear. It is incumbent upon all of us because again, as mentioned, my failure mode is a non-issue in the world compared to the failure mode for folks for against whom the deck has been stacked unfairly for a very long time. At least, that's how I see it.Amy: Right. And that's why I think that it's important for folks who are in positions of power to really reflect on—even operationally, right, you were mentioning your job ads, and how to structure that to include more inclusive language, and just doing that for everything, really, in the way that you work. How do decisions get made? And by whom? And why? How do you structure things like compensation? Even, like, how do you do project planning, right?Even in my own reflections, now when I think back towards Scrum and Agile and all of that, I think that the base foundation of all of that was like was good, but then ultimately the implementation of how that works at most companies is problematic in a lot of ways as well. And then to just be able to reflect and really think about all of your processes or policies—all of that—and bring that lens of equity, really, equity and inclusion to those things, and to really dig deep and think about how those things might manifest and affect people from different backgrounds in different ways.Corey: So, before we wrap, something that I think you… are something of an empathetic party on is when I see companies in the space who are doing significant DE&I initiatives, it seems like it's all flash; it feels like it's all sizzle, no steak to appropriate a phrase from the country of Texas. Is that something that you see, too?Amy: I do think that it is pretty common, and I think it's because that's… that's the easy route. That's the easy way to do it because the vanity metrics, and the photo of the team that is so diverse, and all these things that show up on a marketing website. I mean, there—it's, like, a signal for someone, potentially, who might be considering a job at your company, but ultimately the hard work that I feel like is not happening is really in that whole reflecting on the way you do business, reflecting on the way that you work. That is the hard work and it requires a leadership team to prioritize it, and to make time for it, and to make it really a core principle of the way that you build an org., and it doesn't happen enough, by far, in my opinion.Corey: It feels like it's an old trope of the company that makes a $100,000 donation and then spends $10 million dollars telling the world about it, on some level. It's about, “Oh, look at us, we're doing good things,” as opposed to buckling down and doing the work. Then the actual work falls to folks who are themselves not overrepresented as unpaid emotional labor, and then when the company still struggles with diversity issues, those people catch the blame. It's frustrating.Amy: Yeah. And as an organization, if you have the money to donate somewhere, that's great, but it can't just stop at that. And a lot of companies will just stop at that because it's the optics of, “Oh, well, we spent x millions of dollars and we've helped out this nonprofit or this charity or whatnot.” Which is great that you're able to do that, but that can't be it because then ultimately, what you have internally and within your own company doesn't improve for people from those backgrounds.Corey: I want to thank you for taking so much time to chat with me about these things. Some of these topics are challenging to talk about and finding the right forum can be difficult, and I'm just deeply appreciative that you were able to clear enough time to have that chat with me today.Amy: Yeah, thank you for having me. I mean, I think it's important for us to recognize, even between the two of us that, I mean, obviously, you as a white man have benefited a lot in this space, and then even myself as, you know, that model minority whole thing, but growing up very adjacent to white people and just being ingrained in that culture and raised in that culture, you know, that we have those privileges and there's still parts of the conversation, I think, that are not captured by [laugh] by the two of us are the nuances as well, and so just recognizing that. And it's just a learning process. And I think that everyone could benefit from just realizing that you'll never know everything. And there's always going to be something to learn in all of this. And yes, it is hard, but it's something that is worthwhile to strive for.Corey: Most things worthwhile are. If people want to learn more about who you are, how you think about these things, potentially consider working with you, et cetera. Where can they find you?Amy: So, I am on Twitter. I am the queen of very, very long threads, I should just start a blog or something, but I have not. But in any case, I'm on Twitter. I am AmyChanta, so @A-M-Y-C-H-A-N-T-A.Our website is unicycle.co, if you're thinking about applying for a role, and working with me, that would be awesome. Or just, you know, reach out. I'd also just love to network with anyone, even if there's not an open position now. I just, you know, build that relationship and maybe there will be in the future. Or if not at Unicycle, then somewhere else.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:48:13]. Thank you so much, once again. I appreciate your time.Amy: Thanks for having me.Corey: Amy Chantasirivisal, Director of Engineering at Unicycle. 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 a comment pointing out that it's not about making an MVP of a bicycle that turns into a unicycle so much as it is work-life balance.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.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The one where Ted interviews Justine from Wildbit about:The evolution and importance of email marketingPeople first cultureHow a 4 day work week works at WildbitWeird eating habits and listening to podcasts in the showerSign up for the Marketing News Canada e-newsletter at www.marketingnewscanada.com.Thanks to our sponsor Jelly Academy. Jelly Academy has been helping professionals, students and teams across Canada acquire the skills, knowledge and micro certifications they need to jump into a new digital marketing role, get that promotion, and amplify their current marketing roles. Learn more about Jelly Academy's 6 Week online bootcamp here: https://jellyacademy.ca/digital-marketing-6-week-programFollow Marketing News Canada:Twitter - twitter.com/MarketingNewsC2Facebook - facebook.com/MarketingNewsCanadaLinkedIn - linkedin.com/company/marketing-news-canadaYouTube - youtube.com/channel/UCM8sS33Jyj0xwbnBtRqJdNwWebsite - marketingnewscanada.comFollow Ted Lau: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ballisticarts/Website - https://www.ballisticarts.com/Follow Justine Jordan: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinejordan/Website - https://wildbit.com/Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Wildbit's Head of Marketing Justine Jordan explains why hiring is a marketing problem, what she learned in her latest hiring experiment, and how the company functions with four day workweeks.

What does the future of work look like? What would happen if work was less about businesses and what they need to grow, and more about people and what we need to live meaningful lives? And what would happen in a world where we didn't actually need to work? This episode dives into the world of people-first business and the post-work economy with Wildbit co-founder Natalie Nagele, looking at what happens when people come before profits, and purpose means more than productivity. This podcast is produced by Buffer, an affordable and intuitive social media marketing software used by over 160,000 small businesses to build their brand on social media.

One challenge that's proven to be a hot-button issue in the HR world recently is the question of whether or not an employee's location should dictate their salary. The location-based compensation model suggests that where an employee lives should influence their salary, while the location-agnostic model takes the opposite approach. In this episode, Rhys sits down with Leia Rollag, Head of People at Wildbit. Recently, Leia spearheaded the company's move to location-agnostic pay—a strategy that ensures all employees will be compensated based on the quality of their work, not on where they live. Leia shares her take on the location-agnostic compensation model and how it can help to level the playing field in remote workplaces.

About EricEric Dynowski, Managing Partner and Chief Solutions Officer at Deft, has been developing software, designing global infrastructures, and managing large technology installations for over 20 years. His background in complex infrastructure design and integration has helped him reduce customer budgets by millions.Links: Deft: https://www.deft.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: You could build you go ahead and build your own coding and mapping notification system, but it takes time, and it sucks! Alternately, consider Courier, who is sponsoring this episode. They make it easy. You can call a single send API for all of your notifications and channels. You can control the complexity around routing, retries, and deliverability and simplify your notification sequences with automation rules. Visit courier.com today and get started for free. If you wind up talking to them, tell them I sent you and watch them wince—because everyone does when you bring up my name. Thats the glorious part of being me. Once again, you could build your own notification system but why on god's flat earth would you do that? Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. For a while I've been talking about how I started The Duckbill Group as a highly niche, highly focused consultancy aimed at one very expensive problem—the AWS bill—and that's all we do. We don't do implementation; we simply do the thing that it says on the tin. And it turns out that you can get fairly good at the problem like that in not a tremendous amount of time.And today's promoted episode of Screaming in the Cloud. My guest is Eric Dynowski, Chief Solutions Officer and Partner at Deft, which is a consulting company that is almost inverted, in the sense that they do an awful lot of stuff. And we're going to argue about it now. Eric, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.Eric: Great to be here, Corey. Can't wait to dig in. [laugh].Corey: So, when I started this place back almost five years ago now, I was coming out of an engineering career that I found deeply unsatisfying. I had a bunch of working with computers skill sets, and I wanted to apply them to something that I could use as an independent consultant—because who would ever build a team or a company out of this?—that I could wind up doing repeatedly, so I could, you know, make money, not have a boss, and ideally work less than 80 hours a week. And fixing the AWS bill was the first one I tried; it turned out that, yeah, there is, in fact, an awful lot of expensive business problem hidden in there. And that's what I've been focusing on ever since. I get the distinct impression that your story doesn't quite sound like that one.Eric: Well, it's a little bit like that one, in the sense that I was once an engineer and a technician doing things, and had the crazy idea to go off and start a company that consulted and helped people with their technology needs. And maybe we're a little bit alike in the sense that we also have a very singular focused offering—I'm going to tease you a little bit here, Corey—is that we do one thing: we provide technology solutions for our customers. But probably what you are getting at is, “Well, that's a really broad statement, Eric, what is a technology solution?”Corey: It is. And the reason I did this is because my marketing budget was 50 bucks. So, I wanted something that the Rolodex effect is what I was after, where when someone says at a party to someone else, “Well, I have a problem: my AWS bill.” I want the answer to be, “Hey, I have someone for you to talk to.” You don't generally tend to see that with more broad statements around positioning most of the time.Eric: Sure. Sure.Corey: I also felt like if I was going to be, all right, I'm the best cloud architect advisor ever. Great, now I'm competing against folks like you and the giant consultancies that are in every country. And honestly, those folks have better airport ads than I'm going to be able to put up, at least at the time. Now, I have a platypus for a mascot. So, one wonders whether that would still hold true. You took a very different approach and have done fantastically—Eric: Yeah.Corey: —well with it.Eric: Yeah, I mean, maybe a little bit of history here is helpful. When I started my company, which was Turing Group back in 2013, we did actually focus pretty tightly just on AWS, and that's all we did. We wanted to help customers get in AWS, fix their problems in AWS, scale in AWS, manage their costs, all these sorts of things. And along the way, we had customers coming back to us saying, “We love you guys. You're doing great in [laugh] AWS, but I have other needs too.”And I started saying, “Well, I know a guy over there that does that.” And, “I've got a good friend over here at this company that does it.” And, you know, we're referring back and forth. And kind of parallel to that, one of my business partners who is running a company called Server Central was having the exact inverse problem. And, you know, they were providing managed services within the data center, managed networking capability, things of that nature, you know, helping customers build out an infrastructure to operate at scale, where it's like, “Oh, we need 1000 servers, and we need them really inexpensive, and we have to be able to manage them at scale.”And they were crushing it, doing a great job except his customer start getting back to him saying, “Love what you guys are doing. We're also using AWS, and we want some help with that.” And so, he would pick up the phone and call me and say, “Eric, can you guys help here?” And in some sense, we were competitors. I wanted to move everybody out of the data center into the cloud.And he wanted to move everyone out of the cloud back into the data center or keep them in the data center. And it was like, “Okay, this is weird, but we both have the same problem.” And so we went out to lunch and started this conversation of like, “Well, what if we weren't competitors?” [laugh].Corey: “Maybe there's alignment here.” Yeah. I think Ben Franklin once said that three moves is as good as a fire when it comes to cleaning out old cruft. And migrations are like that. I do want to call out that since I make a frequent practice of saying that multi-cloud as a best practice is foolish, I want to be clear that is in the absence of other constraints.If you're building something new, you probably should pick a provider and go all-in. I don't care which one you do—you might; I don't—but beyond that, at a significant point of scale, when a company says, “All right, we're in one provider—or a data center—and we're going to move to a cloud or other clouds.” Generally, they're correct. They have context that I don't when I'm speaking in the general case. I am not anti-multi-cloud; I am anti-multi-cloud when it is foolish and when it's badly done. Just to set my bias out there and, ideally, avoid getting some letters.Eric: You know, I tend not to disagree with that in the right context as well. When we were doing just AWS only, I think I would have argued that multi-cloud, yeah, there's no place for it. If you're going multi-cloud, you're giving up on all of the greatness that a single public cloud has to offer. You know, and by the greatness, I mean, the proprietary services they offer, and the APIs, and things like SNS and SQS and Route 53, all of those things that you could build into your application and just start using them without having to build all the infrastructure to run it. And so I would agree with you, I think, in that sense.But I wish the world were that simple and I wish the companies that we worked with operated in a nice, clean, unambiguous context. But the more you dig in, I think you realize that when you start dealing with a company, maybe, that has 20,000 employees and offices all across the country, and 25 years of legacy applications—or maybe a vision for the future that just is so massive that it requires a different point of view—and this is really where we engage. And it's interesting that you mentioned about the context, and usually, if a customer approaches us and says, “We want to go multi-cloud,” the first thing we do is put the brakes on and get away from the discussion around multi-cloud and move straight into, “What are you trying to accomplish here?” And navigate that conversation before it turns into—you know, let's not start with the solution type of discussion.Corey: Part of the problem, it seems, that when you start talking to folks about these things, especially in some vendor corners, an awful lot of self-interest that winds up informing the answers that immediately come from it, where it's, “Oh, yeah, you want to go multi-cloud.” And you scratch underneath the surface and the reason is that if you go all-in on one provider, they have nothing left to sell you, in some cases. Other times, it's by a cloud provider themselves pushing multi-cloud strongly because they know that if you go all-in on one provider, it will absolutely not be them. So, the hard part is finding someone who can serve as a trusted advisor. And I mean that in the actual sense of a person, not the crappy AWS service that tells you everything's fine when it isn't. That's ‘Plausible Advisor' at best. Let's be clear here.Eric: Well, come on. If it wasn't for Trusted Advisor, we wouldn't have a market for all the third-party analysis tools [laugh] and people like you to help us manage our costs.Corey: Believe me, if I thought a tool could solve the problem, I would have built it years ago. Tried, turned out it didn't, and well, here we are. You position what you do at Deft as starting from an advisory perspective. You're not pushing a particular product, you're not pushing any particular vendors that I'm aware of, you have a partner list that is not a single vendor, what a concept. So, it's clear that you're doing something that goes one of two ways.Either it is, yeah, we'll take money from anyone who will pay us, or alternately you're approaching it from a thoughtful perspective of trying to figure out what's going on with the customer. Based upon our conversations, I'm going to go ahead and guess it's that one.Eric: It definitely is the latter, Corey. We've certainly had many customers approach us over the years and ask for things that are a bad fit. And a bad fit might be, they're asking for technology experience we don't have. If someone came to us and said, “We want you guys to be Oracle DBAs because you do technology,” our answer is very likely going to be no. Could we learn to be Oracle DBAs? Yeah, we probably could. Do we want to probably not? Maybe?Corey: There are some very qualified Oracle DBAs out in the world, and it's—Eric: There's—Corey: —great.Eric: —there's places for people to specialize. And I think one of our virtues is to know and recognize where we belong and where we don't belong. And the good thing is, not only have we sort of built up our own partner list in terms of technology partners, strategic partners, but we also have our own internal list of referral partners where we know that something's out of our wheelhouse, and I got another company and another team here that I know can crush it and help them out. There's other areas of work that we just don't get into. If you want to outsource your IT and have a company that's going to help you figure out why your printer is not working, definitely not us.You're going to be wasting your money with a firm like us. Or maybe you want to partner in a way that isn't going to take the best advantage of the capabilities that we have, meaning you just want to take advantage of us in a halfway manner, and you want to keep an internal team and the two teams are up against one another and fighting about stuff constantly. We need to have good strong trust between our two companies and our partnerships. And so if we feel like there isn't an opportunity for that, we might walk away from it as well.So, it's not a case of everything that walks in front of us, here's a proposal. [laugh]. We definitely do some opportunity vetting and analysis. We ask a lot of questions upfront about how our customers work, what their internal teams are like, what their expectations of us are, what they want in that relationship. Is it transactional or is it strategic? We're interested in the strategic partnerships with our customers.Corey: I think this is something that is not well understood by a lot of the fly-by-night folks, for lack of a better term. I don't mean to sound disparaging, but the folks who don't seem to understand that long-term reputation is important. I mean, both of our consulting companies, although radically different in focus, have pages on our site where we list reference customers. In fact, there's some overlap between our customers. And as we look at this, you aren't allowed to put a customer logo up if they're going to take umbrage to you doing it, first off. And secondly, you don't want to put a customer logo up if people are going to ask them about their experience with you, and the response is, “Oh, they were crap.” At some point, no, let's not do that.Eric: [laugh]. That's right.Corey: The only way to get there is to deliver on an engagement in such a way that the response is, “That was great. Would you do it again?” “Can I?” And the idea of excitement of delivering an outcome where people who you've worked with become some of your biggest advocates, that's how I always viewed the proper way of building a business.Eric: Yeah. Now, I'd ask you, in terms of when you guys are providing advice to your customers about AWS spend, or someone approaches you, obviously, you're probably first thinking, “Okay, well, how much AWS spend do you have in a month and is this worth my time?” But there's probably another element of evaluation that you must do in terms of is this a good customer for us, and can we do the right thing for them? What are pieces that you guys think about?Corey: Oh, absolutely. As a general rule, we do a lot of AWS contract negotiation. And that is, if you have an AWS offer in front of you for committing to something, come talk to us; it's fun. That's half of our engagements today. The other half are cost optimization projects, and generally speaking, we aren't going to be able to effectively deliver return on investment for much less than about a million bucks a month in spend.So, I do at some point want to explore how to help people who are not already paying a king's ransom to AWS every month, but that is down the road. The next step is a conversation. It's a, “So great, you want to optimize your AWS bill.” And then my favorite is the—I get the quote-unquote, “Dumb question.” “Why? Why do you care? Why is this an actual problem other than it looks like a phone number and your CFO has some questions, what is the actual concern?”Very often, we'll find that it's not that you're spending too much on cloud, in many cases, it's that it's not understood what it's doing. “Okay, the bill is 20% higher this month. Is that new normal? Is that something that's going to inform our planning and we do adjust our expectations for what this is going to cost to run this? Is it just a mistake that someone left up?” The same questions would have arisen if the bill were 20% lower, except somehow it never is.Eric: Right, right. You know what's interesting about that, Corey is, too, also I think that you tend to tease AWS from time to time. And also I think the work you do would not be in Amazon's interest, right? They want customers to spend more money on their infrastructure and their services and their capabilities, and you're helping customers spend less. But what's interesting about that is that we're one of the few managed service partners in the country.And I don't know how much you know about that program, and what it takes to get into that program and to maintain the certification in that program. It's like a three-day audit; there's 500 control items that we have to go through. In fact, it was that program that took our business to the next level. It was that program and its rigor that took what we were doing and actually matured it and turned it into what I would consider a respectable world-class operation. But one of the interesting aspects of that audit is that there's several control items in there that ask us to show Amazon that we are taking steps to manage our customers' costs on AWS and reduce spend. And it's interesting that Amazon is the one pushing that on us and instilling that requirement as we support our customers in Amazon.Corey: It's counterintuitive, but this is one of those areas where there's no one on the other side of this issue. Of course, Amazon wants customers to spend more money with Amazon—I swear the company spends half its time lying awake at night worrying someone who isn't them is making money somewhere, at least that's how it feels some days. But they want that spend to be intelligent. They don't want the narrative to be that the cloud is just as expensive a bunch of nonsense. If there's a bunch of instances that are sitting there idle, they will advise you—if they're on top of the game—to turn them off because that is the goal. They want it to be—Eric: That's how they deliver on their promise. Right.Corey: Well, yeah. Pandemic aside, with most of our customers, what we notice a year after an engagement is that they're in fact spending more than they were when we started. But it's more efficient; it's growth that's tying into this. It becomes a component of cost of goods sold where, “Yeah, we're doing more business, so it costs us more to fulfill that business; we're perfectly happy,” is generally the response to that. And I think that everyone with a vision that extends beyond this quarter's numbers is likely to start to get into that, on some level.Eric: Right.Corey: One thing I do want to ask you is—relevant to what you just said—one thing that we do at The Duckbill Group explicitly is we have no partners, full stop. And the reason behind that is because with what we're doing around billing, and money, and contract negotiation, and the rest, as soon as we have a partner, it suddenly gives rise to a bunch of real or perceived conflicts of interest. And in this particular niche, it makes an awful lot of sense not to do that. Now, if you're in any other arena, where you're in—“Oh, you're in security, for example. Oh, we have no partners with any vendors,” the answer question becomes, “Well, what's wrong with you? What, there's no one willing to trust you? Do you think somehow you're better than all these other people?” It's the wrong answer. So, my question for you is, how do you evaluate whether you should partner with a particular company or not?Eric: Sure. Great question. Deft's reason for existence—when we think about ourselves, we reframe it as our purpose—is to deliver on the promise of technology. And if you unpack that statement a little bit is like, “Well, what the heck is the promise of technology? What does that even mean?”And what we get down to is that technology itself doesn't make any kind of promises. That router you just bought, it doesn't promise really anything; that EC2 instance you just booted in AWS doesn't really ultimately, at the end of the day, promise anything. It's incapable of making promises, but people are. And what we promise is that we can wrangle that technology, we can configure it, we can set it up in a particular kind of way, we can bring in the right components into the solution, and deliver on a promise of, “Yes, you can scale to 100 million users,” or, “Yes, you can reduce latency and improve the customer experience for your customers.” It's all about the people, and that's what we have the most of.And that's the best thing that we have in our house.s we have an inventory of highly qualified, talented, empathetic, compassionate, excited people. So, when we start thinking about our partners and who we want to partner with, what we take into consideration is what technology, tools, and capabilities do our people need to have in their toolbox, such that when we start working with our customers crafting that promise and that solution, we've got the right things at hand and at the right time. And then the second piece of it is, does the partner align well with us in terms of our vision? And in some sense, keeping us relatively technology-neutral, in the same sense that you're trying to stay neutral from that billing perspective and making sure that you're looking out and advocating for your customers first.So, when we're thinking about our partners as well, it's not that, oh, well, we want to build our whole business on top of AWS, or Azure, or in our data center. And those are the on—you know, we try to remove dogma from the picture in that sense, and try to probably be dogmatic mostly about the customer and what it is that they're trying to achieve, and being honest with them. So, it's more of a, “Hey, let's scan the horizon. Let's listen to our customers, let's understand what problems they're trying to solve, what challenges they have today. Let's evaluate the technology options on the table across the world.” Our partner might be [unintelligible 00:18:36], it might be VM, or it might be Amazon, it might be a small little company somewhere that does a niche service. But our job is to come together with all of those things and present a cohesive solution.Corey: And it's clearly working. You were the Turing Group and you wound up partnering with—you said your business partner—who was over at Server Central, which I'm just guessing from the name and assuming I hadn't paid attention to the industry for a while, sounds like it might not be fully cloud-focused, on some level, given the name. What did they do? And why was merging the right answer?Eric: Yeah. I mean, it's funny that you bring that up. Server Central. Wow, a server; who's talking about servers anymore, right? It's containers and virtualization and—Corey: But they've got to run somewhere.Eric: That's right. Serverless applications. Like, hmm, is this the right name? And I think it speaks to the 20-year heritage that Server Central has had and how they built their business. And they do and did, and we do have a cloud focus that's not related to the public cloud.We have a significant number of customers that operate on private clouds that we've built for them and manage for them, for various reasons. Some are legit and some maybe not so legit and mostly about how they feel about something. And some of them are technically driven. And after we brought the companies together, we realized that hey, you know what, we have a lot of brand equity and history and Server Central and we have to respect that. Turing Group had its own set of brand equity in the market that we had established and promoted a certain kind of ideology and thinking.And so for a short period of time, we were a little bit unsure of how are we going to bring this together in any kind of cohesive fashion? And it actually went out into the world for about a year as Server Central Turing Group. And I think my tongue twisted as I said it, [laugh]. It's a lot of words and it mostly just confuses people and makes them scratch their head. And so we went off on a journey to figure out what our reimagined new company is going to look like with all the combined services and capabilities that we have.And that's how we arrived at Deft and the idea that's how we want to engage with our customers; that's what we want our solutions to be like; that's what we want the experience in working with us to be. And we want to remove the friction and anxiety that technology can bring. It reminds me of when I was starting my first company. I spent a lot of time sort of navel-gazing, saying, “What do I like about this, and why am I doing this?” And went back to my early days as an engineer, and at the core of it was a really simple idea and it was the idea that when I helped somebody with a technology problem, they were elated. They thought it was magic. They thought it was black magic.They didn't understand how I took this goofy, strange, cryptic thing and made it do what they wanted, and I did it quickly and I did it deftly. And there was joy and they were happy and I loved that; I loved that response. I loved knowing that I helped fix this mysterious problem for somebody that just didn't even know where to begin. And I did it time and time again and it helped me grow my career. And when we started the first company, it was sort of like, I want to continue that feeling.I want to create that feeling for our customers where they feel like maybe they're stuck with some crazy complex technology problem, and because I happen to have the innate skill for understanding these things and figuring these things out and I have a team that can do it, we can create that same feeling for our customers. And we want to continue doing that today.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense. Corey: I do want to point out that, at least in my mind, there's always a little bit of, I guess, we call it technical elitism, on some level, where, “Oh, someone is working through a partner. They must be a company that's stuck in the past.” But a glance at companies that you're working with, make it very clear that's not the case. I mean, Ars Technica, New Relic, Wildbit. You've got some companies that are very forward-looking, and by no definition are these companies that don't understand cloud or understand how the internet works. It's something that I think is not fully understood among a subset of the industry that, in many cases, having a third-party partner, in many cases winds up helping you go faster, further.Eric: Yeah. It might be cliche to say—oftentimes, in cliches, there's a little bit of truth—which is, focus on what you're good at, and focus on what you're best at, and focus on your core products. And with a lot of these technology companies where you might read on the surface that, “Oh, yeah, they're a smart bunch over there. Why do they need a partner?” Technology is complicated. The stack is deep.Whether you're talking about deployment pipelines, or should I use a fiber connection on this or should I use copper? Or should we have jumbo frames enabled? Or should we be using API Gateway and Lambda functions for this? I just listed a broad range of technologies and things that solve different problems. And these customers have their own products that they have to put out into the world; those products need to be meaningful and thoughtful and aligned with their customers.And because that technology stack is complex and deep, it creates an opportunity for companies like ours—for partners—to step in, and grab a piece of that complexity, and manage it, and handle it, and help a customer with it to create the space for them to create the most excellent product. And so even though they are technology companies because you're managing this big wrangling layered technologies, abstractions, and—well, even when we talk about containerization, right, and running a small application, there's seven layers before you get to the CPU. [laugh]. And within that seven layers, there's I don't know how many lines of code, and there's how many hidden assumptions and configuration files, and you name it. And there's areas of that entire stack that we're really good at and customers derive value from that.Corey: One area that you've been relatively active within is the hybrid universe. My talking point on that has generally looked a lot like the snarky take of, “Well, you have a company in a data center today, and they're going to go all-in on the cloud. And it turns out halfway through that it's hard to move some workloads. There is no AWS/400 and they have a mainframe.” So, what are they going to do? They give up halfway, plant a flag, declare victory, and now we're hybrid as a best practice. That is not entirely accurate, but there's an element of accuracy in some cases to it.Eric: Yeah.Corey: But I don't get the sense that's how you see it. I'm left with a strong impression that it's a very intentional choice for some of your customers, that in some cases, workloads that are live in data centers, were at one point living in a cloud provider. Talk to me about that.Eric: Yeah, I like to think of it not as, like, a binary situation. And something that exists on degrees, and often times has a lot to do with the lifecycle of a product or company and the scale of a company. And we touched on this earlier in our conversation, which is that if someone approached us—maybe a startup or a smaller company—trying to migrate off of half-dozen servers and move into the public cloud, and they approached us and said, “Yeah, we need to be hybrid for this thing,” I would probably question that and I would question it really hard, and say, “Really, what are you going after here? You're going to give up a lot if you choose to go hybrid, and you won't really take advantage of some of the amazing opportunities that a full-on single cloud solution has to offer.” On the flip side, we've seen companies that started like that, were a hundred percent in public cloud on a single provider, everything's working fine.There was no issues whatsoever, except the bill, or maybe a fear of what the bill could be. And this is something that happens at scale. There's just a point where the public cloud just doesn't make sense anymore, even despite those benefits. And for the bottom line and in terms of the margins and your cost of revenue, giving up some of those additional benefits that allow you to grow and scale is worth it. And if you look at the technology landscape, there's a reason Facebook's not in AWS. [laugh].There's a reason a lot of these larger technology companies where we have hundreds of millions of users or bazillions of petabytes of data, that move out and get out of there. I mean, look at Dropbox right? [laugh]. Is Dropbox storing all their data in the public cloud? Not really, and they are a public cloud in a sense on their own, right?Corey: Yeah, they did just launch a 34-petabyte data warehouse for analytics on AWS, and they've made a bunch of big—Eric: Yeah, yeah. I mean—Corey: —deals out of that, but the core storage workload, yeah, that does not economically make sense, given their access patterns and how they have built that offering. So yeah, that is a very well understood, very specific, very niche workload. Yeah, that does not belong in AWS.Eric: We've even gone as far as launching our own multi-petabyte managed object storage solution, it's totally S3 compatible. It works identically to the way S3 works, but we have customers that actually can do better on our platform, either because we can provide lower latency, we can provide custom contracts that aren't just purely pay as you go; there's all kinds of different options that we can give our customers that are more custom and tailored to their needs that you're going to get from, “Here's your API keys have fun.” [laugh]. And so there's still a market for that stuff and there's still a need for that stuff.Corey: There really is.Eric: So, the answer is it depends, Corey. [laugh].Corey: It seems to be the answer to any nuanced question. So, if people want to learn more about what you're doing at Deft, and potentially whether it might help them with some of the challenges they're facing, where can they find you?Eric: Easy. deft.com, D-E-F-T dot com. Great, short four-letter domain name that you wouldn't believe what we had to go through to get. [laugh].Corey: I can only imagine. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Eric: You're welcome, Corey.Corey: Eric Dynowski, Chief Solutions Officer and Partner at Deft. 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 hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me that no, customers should in fact go all-in on your third-rate cloud.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.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Product-led content can be an essential part of your marketing strategy if you're looking to build trustworthy and long-term relationships with your clients. And it's the best way to present your product without coming off like a sales pitch. However, if you want to create high-quality product-led content, you'll not only need a top-notch writer, you'll also need someone who knows your product.In this episode of Content Logistics, Fio Dossetto, the Editorial Lead at Wildbit, joins our host, Camille Trent, to discuss the secrets behind crafting product-led content. Fio starts by giving a pretty interesting explanation about what product-led content is and how it can benefit businesses.She also talks about SEO as part of content marketing and explains why companies should optimize their content. As she says, it is not necessary to create a lot of new content; you can use articles you already have and optimize them.You create product-led content to help customers solve a particular problem. So, this type of content is not just about optimization and keywords. Remember, behind every piece of content is a human being, so let your customers feel that.

Natalie Nagele, CEO of Wilbit, joins us to discuss building a successful people-first company with a 3o hour workweek. Speaking from her own experiences, as a leading people-first employer, we talk about how you can measure your success as an entrepreneur, how to stay guided by your purpose throughout your entrepreneurial journey, and what it takes to stay committed to your business.  Three things you will learn from this episode:  Why you should think of your business as a tool rather than an end in itself. Whether you should pay yourself as a founder or reinvest to build towards a great exit. How to avoid burnout by setting the optimum pace for the growth of your business.   About our Guest: Natalie Nagele is the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit. Her priority is creating a happy and positive work culture at Wildbit and the world. This stems from her core belief that businesses are tools designed to create a better world for people everywhere.On today's episode:  Measuring your entrepreneurial journey in decades. - 03:10 How slow growth changed our entrepreneurial vision. - 06:43 Should you service yourself or your business? (the beginning of a people-first philosophy) -09:48 You don't have to choose between building a lifestyle business or a unicorn business. - 10:16 How important is fundraising to your success as an entrepreneur? (the answer may surprise you). - 12:55 How do you know if your business is moving at the right pace? - 16:01 The cost of doing more than you planned for in your business. - 22:34  A good question to ask yourself instead of comparing yourself to others. -  26:04 Don't copy, steal: entrepreneurship vs. being a copycat. - 26:52  Should founders pay themselves, or should you reinvest everything in your business? - 29:03 Living your best life BEFORE you sell your business. - 30:03 The trouble with the concept of the entrepreneurial legacy. - 32:22  Check out these companies with People First Jobs. - 36:04 Lesson #1: Using moments of tension as opportunities. - 39:25  Lesson #2: Pay yourself well. - 41:32  Lesson #3: How you impact who you interact with. - 42:49 Key Takeaways:  Entrepreneurs should look at and evaluate their lives in decades because it takes a decade to build and scale.  Building your business outside trend bubbles can make you stand out and not stick to the trends. When your business plateaus, it is crucial to reevaluate what you are doing and why you are doing it. It is an excellent opportunity to evaluate what your long-term goals are.  It is becoming much easier to start a business and gain traction, especially in terms of cost.  Entrepreneurship is not about fundraising. It is about building value for customers and finding ways to do that in which you are making more than you spend. Frequent change in your business makes you lose out on so much momentum. You must set priorities and stick to them instead of measuring yourself against others.  Hero worship is ultimately going to fail you. You are better off measuring against yourself than you measure yourself against others.  As an entrepreneur, you have to keep assessing how your company fits within who you are and what your goals are in life.  Paying yourself as a founder secures your commitment to building a meaningful business. It ensures that you would not leave your business behind for ‘the next big thing.'  Paying yourself well is the best way to keep yourself engaged in your business.  Building a people-first company while providing a good life to your family: [31:27] “I tell the team this all the time: if this business gets harder, and I make less money, it does not make sense. Which it doesn't, like why would I do that? And that's Ok. But I'm not torturing my team, and I do that while simultaneously providing 30 hour work weeks. I'm not embarrassed to say that out loud because I believe you can equally do both things: you can build a people-first company while also providing wealth for your family.”  How do you think building a people-first company would improve your life balance as an entrepreneur? Tell us in the comments, and don't forget to say hello if you would like to share your entrepreneurship story on our podcast. Connect with Natalie Nagele: LinkedIn: @natalie-nagele Twitter: @natalienagele People First Jobs: https://peoplefirstjobs.com/  Wildbit: https://wildbit.com/  Connect with A.J.Lawrence: Website: ajlawrence.com Email: aj@b8fpodcast.com  Instagram: @ajlawrence LinkedIn: A.J. Lawrence Twitter: @ajlawrence Medium: @a.j.lawrence Follow Beyond 8 Figures: Website:  Beyond8Figures.com Twitter:  @beyond8figures  Facebook: Beyond 8 Figures Instagram:@b8fpodcast Email: team@b8fpodcast.com

This past series we focused on telling stories of bets gone wrong and the ones that went right, while pulling out the things product leaders from Forbes, Hubspot, Wildbit wish they’d known along the way.  While you heard from leaders across the country, we prompted listeners to ask themselves, what big bets are you taking -- or what big bets should you be?  As we wrap the series, we’re asking that question again, this time to our newest member of the better product show: Meghan Pfeifer. Take a listen to hear her answer while getting a sneak peek at our next Better Product series. 

In this talk from Tugboat Institute Gathering of Teams 2021, Natalie Nagele, Co-founder and CEO of software development company Wildbit, shares an innovative idea that has transformed her Evergreen® company: We can actually work a lot less.

Just a few days into the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, Wildbit's Natalie Nagele and Balsamiq's Peldi spoke at BoS Europe Online about how even fully remote companies who have been doing asynchronized work for decades have had to change their ways of working when the pandemic hit. For more great talks and insights, sign up for the BoS newsletter at businessofsoftware.org/update --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/business-of-software/message

Bryon Jacob is a family man with 4 kids, from ages 11 down. With a young startup and family, his hobbies has suffered some, but during the pandemic, he was able to pick back up music, specifically playing the keyboard. He's an avid reader, mostly sci-fi and loves to play strategy board games. His family and he tend to play games like Puerto Rico and Ticket to Ride, which is simple enough for his 6 year old to compete. He and his co-founders have created a massive, open community for data. Users can sign up for free, bring their data catalogue, and analyze any data outside of that. In doing so, they have seen traction of nearly a million users in the eco-system, along with enterprise users with a private, internal data eco-system - all based in the cloud, and fully integrated. This is the creation story of data.world. Sponsors * Grindology ( https://grindology.com/ ) * Morgan Page Game Dev ( https://morganpage.teachable.com/ ) * Wildbit ( https://wildbit.com/ ) * KIMO ( https://kimo.ai/ ) Links * Website: https://data.world/ * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryon/ Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts ( https://ratethispodcast.com/codestory ) Amazing tools we use: * This podcast is hosted on RedCircle ( https://redcircle.com/ ) , a FREE platform for podcasts and brands to scale their message. * Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast ( https://squadcast.fm/?ref=noahlabhart ). * Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain ( https://clipgain.io/?utm_campaign=clipgain&utm_medium=episode&utm_source=codestory ) , sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE * If you want an amazing publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people – use Transistor.fm ( https://transistor.fm/?via=code-story ) Credits: Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts ( https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/code-story/id1466861744 ) , Spotify ( https://open.spotify.com/show/0f5HGQ2EPd63H83gqAifXp ) , Pocket Casts ( https://pca.st/Z1k7 ) , Google Play ( https://play.google.com/music/listen?pcampaignid=MKT-na-all-co-pr-mu-pod-16&t=Code_Story&view=%2Fps%2FIcdmshauh7jgmkjmh6iu3wd4oya ) , Breaker ( https://www.breaker.audio/code-story ) , Youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgjZsiUDp-oKY_ffHc5AUpQ ) , or the podcasting app of your choice. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Natalie Nagele is the co-founder of Wildbit, the company behind Postmark, Beanstalk, People-First Jobs and more. Wildbit has just turned 20 years old, so Natalie knows exactly what it takes to grow and scale successful bootstrapped businesses. In this episode we talk about how to build a business you don't hate, how to find work that fulfils you, and what you can do to find deep work.

You can grow a profitable company while prioritizing people. Sometimes that means killing off a product.  At least that’s what Natalie Nagele, Co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, believes. And for the past 20 years of building products, this bet made early on remains true. Wildbit is behind popular products, like Beanstalk and Postmark.  In this conversation, Natalie shares how they decided to kill off a profitable product, why passion is the key to success, and how above all else, culture drives innovation.

We all know the adage, “go big or go home.” The same rings true in the product world, where it’s full of big bets.  What bets were made? How were they decided? What turns some products into household names while others fail? That’s what our Big Bets in Product series will cover.  You’re going to hear from product leaders from well-known brands like Hubspot, Slack, Wildbit, Abstract, and Forbes.  As you consider the series, ask yourself, what big bets are you taking -- or what big bets should you be?  Join the series by joining our community of product leaders at betterproduct.community.

Find us: Head to our community page to register & join the MindfulCommerce community as an expert, brand or merchantInstagram: @mindfulcommerceFacebook @MindfulCommerceContact Us - info@mindfulcommerce.ioWhere to find Gavin Ballard:Gavin Ballard - TwitterGavin Ballard - WebsiteWhere to find Disco Labs:Disco Labs - WebsiteLinks Mentioned in Episode:Disco Labs - Carbon ReportShopifyShopify BFCM - Black Friday Cyber Monday 2020StripeStripe ClimateWildbitDigitalOceanWho Gives A CrapThankyouBrooklinenGCP - Google Cloud PlatformAWS - Amazon Web ServicesSponsor:Shownotes: Krissie Leyland  0:00Hello, and welcome to the mindful commerce podcast, a place where we talk to ecommerce brands, ecommerce service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. Today, we are talking to Gavin from disco labs who make things possible on Shopify plus through custom development. They're a team with deep platform knowledge and world class expertise on Shopify Plus, and have a list of happy clients. Gavin and his team have worked with brands like Who Gives a Crap, a sustainable toilet roll brand–who I've mentioned a few times within the community–and they've worked with big brands such as Harper Collins. So hi, Gavin, how are you? Would you like to add anything to your introduction?Gavin Ballard  0:45I'm very well, thank you. Happy to be here. Thank you, you nailed the introduction. That was a goodbreakdown of who we are and what we do. If listeners can't tell from the accent, we're based down here in Melbourne, Australia.Krissie Leyland  0:59Great. And so could you tell us a bit about what how you ended up in the Shopify space?Gavin Ballard  1:06Yeah, sure. My background is as a software engineer, so that's always been something that I've been quite interested in. Then quite a few years ago, I got involved in Shopify, just building a site out for a friend who who wanted to sell something online. That was nearly 10 years ago, I think, or maybe it is 10 years ago now. A few years later, after that, I was thrust into into freelancing. A couple of friends and I had moved overseas to start a company that didn't work out that well so I needed to pay the bills somehow, and just started freelancing in the Shopify arena. It just grew from there started out doing all of the standard stuff that you do on Shopify: theme builds design, setting up stores, etc... but because my background is in that software engineering, I eventually decided to focus on the apps & integration space, and we have sort of grown out the agency around that.Krissie Leyland  2:01Okay, so like, the apps integration space. So what do you do, there then? Like, what does that mean?Gavin Ballard  2:09Yeah, so what we tend to do is work with (these days they tend to be) larger merchants who are using Shopify and they have something they need to get done-whether it's connect Shopify to an external system, like a warehousing platform or something like that, or they want to offer their customers a new experience or something to improve the way that they sell things to those customers. (We work with them when) there's nothing off-the-shelf that does it-there's nothing in the Shopify app store, or their platform doesn't have an integration, or the merchant has these really funky, bespoke needs. So we step in there, and we work with a merchant to work out exactly what they need to get done to solve their problem, and then build the software to do that. We try to do that in a way that's really, because we're very much focused on Shopify and Shopify Plus, compatible with the platform and working with it rather than hacky workarounds or anything like that.Krissie Leyland  3:13Nice. So whatever your clients need, you can tweak things and make it custom to what they need, which is really good, obviously.Gavin Ballard  3:23Yeah and because we're just focused on the back end of the app, the thing is that we also work quite a lot with other agencies who are more focused on the front end of things (so design and theme development and things like that).Krissie Leyland  3:39That's cool,that's quite unique then, because I don't often see that people just focus on the back end, I guess. It's more popular as a Shopify agency to kind of niche into marketing or development. So yeah, that's cool.Gavin Ballard  3:56Yeah, it's a niche, but it is quite a large niche with the way that Shopify is growing at the moment. It's keeping us busy, so that's a good thing.Krissie Leyland  4:07Yeah, I can imagine a lot of partners coming to you. Like, "Can you do this super techie bit? I can't do it." So that's good. Rich, do you want to ask a question?Rich Bunker  4:19Well let me jump into the environmental footprint side of things... What do you believe is your role as an ecommerce service provider to improve the ecommerce world in terms of sustainability and social impact?Gavin Ballard  4:34I mean, I always am hesitant because I don't want to be seen to be preaching or anything like that... but ever since I started the business, I've always thought that the way that we actually do things is just as important as what we're doing. If you look at our company's mission statement, we have this dual purpose: One of which is to basically be the best in the world at building software for ecommerce merchants, but that's kind of our external mission. Then the internal one is to be building the company that we want to work for. I think that it would be really difficult today, in 2021, to say that you want to be working at a company that isn't being quite conscious of the the society we live in, the planet that we we live on and not be keeping that in mind so that we can do what we can to make that better. So that's why I say, that our role is being part of the society that we live in. We wouldn't exist without everyone else on the planet. I think it's just about being a good corporate citizen. That's my personal view and I think being public about that is meant for the people that we work with, internally at the company, to share that that goal, that value.Rich Bunker  6:05It's great and it's about being a good example, as well.Gavin Ballard  6:10Again, I am very conscious that I don't feel like my place, or our place in the company is to be preaching and making other people feel like, "Hey, this is what we're saying you should be doing" but I think it's more about leading by example, and trying to talk about it as much as possible.Krissie Leyland  6:27Yeah... Acknowledging it and building awareness around it. What do you think are the biggest issues in ecommerce when it comes to sustainability?Gavin Ballard  6:40Well, I think probably the thing that is on top of everyone's mind is climate change and carbon impact. Those two certainly have been a big part of where our focus has been in terms of our environmental footprint and what we think we can measure and improve quite significantly. Then, from a merchant perspective–given that a big part of your job as a merchant is often selling physical goods that need to be shipped across the world and that good itself is probably made of parts that have been shipped from everywhere else in the world–that's certainly a big factor when it comes to ecommerce: what that carbon impact is and how sustainable that is longer term.Rich Bunker  7:36How do you communicate that  message? Do you communicate that to your clients, when you sort of have initial meetings or do you just communicate it through your own community?Gavin Ballard  7:51We've started becoming a lot more public about this sort of stuff in the past year, I would say. Even though we're not a merchant that's shipping stuff around the globe, we do have an impact, like every business does. So, there was a decision made at the start of last year that we wanted to become a carbon-neutral business. Towards the end of last year, we we hit that goal. Part of our success criteria that we defined at the start of last year was that "We're going to do this, but we're also going to have a report about our carbon impact and give us a baseline to measure against in future years." In having that report, it makes sense to make that public. Not only as an accountability measure for ourselves internally, but also to hopefully, show other people that it's very possible to do it. It's not that expensive, it's not that difficult and it's not that time consuming. I think we have definitely started to think about part of our contribution is actually becoming a carbon neutral business ourselves. Then another really important part of it is just talking about it and that tweaks. If us publishing a carbon report means that one other agency says, "Oh, we should do that, too!" then in a way, we've kind of doubled our impact with just publishing what we're doing. So yeah, we're definitely keen to talk about it more. I don't think it's necessarily something that a lot of merchants will look for but it can be a nice thing to put on the pitch deck. I think it'll become more and more of a factor as time goes on.Krissie Leyland  9:42Definitely, I totally agree. Love that. More people need to follow in your footsteps. What inspired you to do it? What was it that kind of kicked it off for you?Gavin Ballard  9:52So we have a company retreat every year. I was just mentioning to you off-air that we're about to have our next one next week but we we had one at the start of last year or the end of the year before... back when you could actually gather and meet with people... It was an idea that I'd sort of brought to the table to say, "Well, what about becoming a carbon neutral business?" Then as a company, we decided that would be one of our company goals for 2020. Once we set that, I said, "Well, that's part of my accountability and my KPIs as a CEO: to get that sort of stuff done." So I pushed to make sure that we did that. Despite the weird year that 2020 was, it was quite a good one for people in ecommerce, relative to a lot of other people in society. So, it seemed silly to think that we should abandon those goals. So yeah, it was a community discussion and setting that. Part of the process of putting the carbon record together and the research that we did for that, certainly reassured me that it was probably a good decision to stick with it and to actually do the carbon record.Rich Bunker  11:26It's an amazing report. I commend you on that. Did you do all the research in house, get an outside agency to help you or was it all just hours of internet searches?Gavin Ballard  11:40It was driven internally. This goes back to the earlier question about the inspiration for it, but part of that has been seeing other companies do this. Probably the biggest, the most useful examples of what drove our carbon record structure and what we were looking at were: firstly, a company called Wildbit, which is a software company based based in the US. I think they align very closely with us in terms of values. They're completely outside of the Shopify space, but they build software products. Then Basecamp, as well was another. Both of those companies published a blog post that was basically going through "this is what we did to estimate our carbon impact, this is why we did it and this is what we did with that information." So we took those as a starting framework, customised a bit for our industry & our business. We did research through a couple of books we looked at: going through things like Apple's environmental pages to work out what the impact of our physical goods were, and things like that. Then doing some general research on ways to calculate carbon impact, especially for software businesses where you're hosting stuff in the cloud. That was the inspiration. Then we definitely used them as a starting framework to build it out but there was a fair bit of original research done, as well. I know there are businesses in helping companies put these things together, but for a small business like ours, I think it can be less work than people may think it is.Rich Bunker  13:39If you don't have a huge infrastructure of hardware, services and personnel, you can probably dial it down quite quickly to what the exposes are and it's the difficulty of calculating it.Gavin Ballard  13:55We are a small company so I think that it's certainly a lot easier for us than for a massive company with multiple office where you can't easily survey everyone to find out what electricity provider they use at home and that sort of stuff. But I think that it's important for us to do it while we're small because it is easier to do it. As soon as you start doing it, because then it just becomes ingrained and part of the business. We certainly have plans to grow in the next few years but hopefully, as we do that we can grow the carbon report with that.Krissie Leyland  14:28So if another supply agency was interested in doing the same thing, would you like give them six steps? Would your current report kind of provide those steps for them to take as well?Gavin Ballard  14:45If someone wants to do it, I would absolutely jump on a call with them and work through it... Give them our spreadsheets. Absolutely. That's part of the reason that we we published it. I think for an agency or a software company that is similar to ours, taking out that carbon report as a starting point would be quite valuable because the similar emissions profile. You know, for our type of business, really the the biggest impact that we have is cloud hosting and then close after that it's office space–including home offices for us as well. So, I think they're going to be similar sort of environmental impacts for any businesses similar to ours.Rich Bunker  15:37Excellent.Krissie Leyland  15:38Should we ask for more details on the cloud?Rich Bunker  15:40Yeah, definitely. It's something close to our heart, because we've engaged in that process of trying to find the better cloud hosting service. But you know, that's using renewables and even just better services. In general, how do you go about that and what do you perceive as the best renewable hosting services out there?Gavin Ballard  16:04It is tricky. I was surprised when I started digging into it. There are platforms that are carbon neutral and there are kind of different ratings. There are some that are carbon neutral because they're doing offsets while there are others that are carbon neutral because they're they're actually powered by renewables, and they know that they're powered by renewables. Then, there's the the dirty ones that don't report on it. Even for one particular provider that can change depending on what region you're hosting things in. So AWS, Amazon's cloud hosting, for example, depending on where you're actually hosting your servers will change whether you're using carbon neutral hosting or not. It actually surprised me a little bit that was difficult to tell. Sometimes you just don't know because you don't actually get a report on that. For example, we use a provider called DigitalOcean, as well as AWS and Google. They don't necessarily tell you for sure whether you actually hosted on carbon neutral stuff or not, so we try to do the research. At the end of the day, we didn't know for sure so we just went with the assumption that they weren't when we were calculating our impact and our missions. Then the bigger players like Amazon, Google, Microsoft are good at publishing that sort of stuff. It's certainly better than the smaller providers. So that is one of the advantages of going with a larger provider in that sense.Krissie Leyland  17:45I actually asked DigitalOcean the question and they just sent me to a forum where someone else was asking the same question. It said, "Some of our some of our service centers are using renewables, but not all of them." So it's like, alright, we're not gonna know for sure then, are we?Gavin Ballard  18:10I think I must have been going through that exact same thread at some point.Krissie Leyland  18:14Yeah, probably.Rich Bunker  18:16I guess there's an element of "better, best and the BEST" isn't there? You know, if you're on a journey to change your infrastructure up a bit, choosing a better service that has some renewables is better than not doing anything.Krissie Leyland  18:32For sure. I think there are offerings now, which clearly, optimal or they have optimised that. This isn't a paid advertisement or anything but yeah, Google's JCP, their cloud platform is 100% carbon neutral. A lot of that is from actual renewable energy, rather than just offsetting. In the research that I've done, they're probably either the best at it, or they're the best at talking about it.Rich Bunker  19:12It's not new, but it's getting to be more in demand that people want to know that information. So I think some of the smaller players, who aren't even thinking about it, will probably realise that that's a potential and bigger customer base. Then they can market to them or maybe they already are renewable and aren't telling people.Krissie Leyland  19:32Yeah! People just might not even realise that they're actually doing good and need to talk about it. So, shall we move on to talk about Shopify? We're not sponsored by Shopify, I obviously talk about it a lot. How is Shopify good in terms of carbon neutrality?Gavin Ballard  19:55This is gonna sound like I am sponsored by Shopify, but I'm in not. Obviously, we're big, big fans because all of our money and livelihoods depend on Shopify but in terms of their commitment, I think that they're probably one of the biggest, best larger companies going around. Maybe this is just my bias but I think they're very cognizant of the climate impact they had themselves, and then also that their merchants have. In 2018, they started a sustainability fund. That's at least 5 million a year to invest in carbon technologies and then another million on top of that to focus on investing in weird or underfunded ways to look at sequestering carbon, going forward. They're putting that money in.  They're on Google cloud platforms or their hosting, they're carbon neutral and then there is their operations. Like I said, this is definitely sounding like a Shopify ad, but they've done the work to calculate the carbon impact of their operations. They're carbon neutral there as well with both renewable energy and offsets. So, I think in terms of them looking at their own business, they've done a really good job, and they're clearly caring about it. And then they've done some things to make it a lot easier for merchants to think about that as well. They have an official offset app, which you can install into your app store and it will calculate your shipping emissions and automatically bill you for that. I think they say it's between half a cent to 10 cents per order they'll take a clip of and put that towards offsetting. Their payment providers short pay. If you purchase something with short pay, then the shipping for that product is offset as well. They're definitely very aware of it and I think they're doing more than a lot of large companies are.Krissie Leyland  22:21Yeah, we definitely don't see the other platforms talking about this. You know, they definitely haven't got a fund for sustainability. One thing that I loved about what Shopify did recently was offsetting Black Friday, Cyber Monday shipping, and I just thought that was genius. You can see it on their BFCM globe. You know what I'm talking about, don't you, Gavin?Gavin Ballard  22:46Yes, yes.Krissie Leyland  22:48I just I loved it. I was like, "Look, it's like they show each order... But then they're like we've offset these billions of orders!" They offset the shipping and it's great. I love Shopify.Gavin Ballard  23:01I think that's really impressive and, you know, it's a it's probably a bit of a marketing thing for them as well. But at the end of the day, it's good that that sort of stuff has become good marketing.Krissie Leyland  23:14Yeah, true.Rich Bunker  23:15It would be nice to be in a place where offsetting is the norm and everyone's chasing being carbon neutral.Krissie Leyland  23:26Yeah, I think one of the things I like about the Shopify approach as well–that I think also goes for Stripe, the payment provider behind Shopify or short pay, who is another company that I think is very impressive in the climate arena– is that they're very much focused not only on the offsetting stuff, which is good and wonderful but also actually looking at getting to negative carbon. As well as taking carbon out of the atmosphere with sequestration and things like that. So they're impressive in leading the way.Rich Bunker  24:12I think, going back to the carbon offsetting for any company looking to have less of an impact, that is a good place for them to start. Then, like you've done your carbon report, you've got a plan to reduce your carbon. So it's a good place to start. Then, as long as you've got a way forward to reduce it, and that's even better.Gavin Ballard  24:33You definitely need that baseline, right? You don't really know where your biggest impact is and what you can actually do to address that.Krissie Leyland  24:45So on a normal day, what do you and your team do to ensure you keep your footprint down to a minimum?Gavin Ballard  25:00A lot of it is being conscious. We were in the process of addressing what we've done, or what we identified in our carbon report. So, we're looking at moving more and more of our hosting over to other platforms. In a new project, we'll make sure that we're setting that up on something that is carbon neutral. Because we're working from home so much still, I think that'll be a long term thing for us even though here in Australia, COVID has thankfully not had as much of an impact as it would have elsewhere. We are able to go back into our offices, while I think a lot of other people are really lacking the flexibility. But that then means that we need to look at things like longer term such as people using that the houses as offices. So, "What's the electricity that's powering that office", "How are their houses are heated?" and things like that. There's a renewable energy supply here in Melbourne that we helped by sending out a way to get started with or how to swap over to them. They that had a promotion so we were just promoting them within the company to try and encourage people to swap of over. Again, it wasn't like we were saying, "You have to do this to work here." I think that's a very personal decision, that sort of stuff. But we're just promoting those sorts of things and then making choices about where we work and how we work. We moved office recently. While this wasn't the only factor, the fact that the office–which was close to public transport–provided good facilities for cyclists and things like that was certainly a factor in that decision as well. I think there were a couple of things that we're sort of looking at on a day to day level, but hopefully we're going to bring our overall carbon footprint, numbers down in 2021.Krissie Leyland  27:03Nice. At the moment, I don't have a high impact at the moment because I'm just at home working.Rich Bunker  27:13So as a developer yourself–and thinking about Shopify, in particular, and its massive app platform–again, you don't want to sound preachy, but do you think that other app developers should be looking towards promoting what hosting services they're on? We've had discussions with them.Krissie Leyland  27:37They didn't even think about it.Rich Bunker  27:40Or they're like, "We have to be hosted on 'x' platform." So we don't know what they do. So are there any quick wins or things that you'd advise other developers to do?Gavin Ballard  27:54It is difficult because, at the end of the day, there's probably other priorities around that. But I mean, one thing that I would say is really advantageous for a Shopify app developer, specifically, is that if you're hosting your apps on Google Cloud Platform, you're on the same platform as Shopify. So, you're gonna have much lower latency when you're calling their API, which is definitely something to think about when you're picking a host. I don't think we're at the point yet where merchants are really using that as a factor, or they're not asking the question of their app providers: "Hey, are you carbon neutral?" I think it might be a nice thing to do. I could say, of all the app stores in the world, the Shopify Apps are potentially being one that has a little badge or something for carbon neutral providers, but I don't think we're there yet. I just don't think it's top of mind for a lot of merchants when they're looking at their stores. It would be good to change that, though. I think that that could be something that app developers are doing. If they do happen to be carbon neutral, they should promote that fact. As soon as one app developer starts promoting it, then it might get in the minds of others. Again, a lot of it is promoting it and making sure others are aware of it. Rich Bunker  29:17Definitely, communicating it.Krissie Leyland  29:20Put that in our framework, Rich.Rich Bunker  29:21We could. Krissie Leyland  29:24Just ask if they're using renewable energy or not.Rich Bunker  29:27Yeah, I guess it depends on the merchant as well. You know, if they're a merchant that keeps stainability close to their heart, then they're gonna ask those questions. But if it's not that close to the heart or if they perceive it as an expensive thing to do then they're not going to ask. But if it's easily identifiable on the Shopify platform, then that'd be a great place to start.Krissie Leyland  29:53So if the Google Cloud Platform is the same as Shopify, that means that it will call the API quicker, and that means that app will be quicker, right?Gavin Ballard  30:10Yeah. It's probably a small difference but if all other things were enabled, then that's a good hard technical reason to choose it above and beyond the carbon neutral element. So, if people need a way to justify it to their boss, that's a good starting point.Krissie Leyland  30:30Oh, I love that. I'm going to put that in the framework. Does that also mean that the store will load quicker because you know, if you've got tones of apps, it slows it down, right? So if your app is known to not slow down the lowest speed, then that's a good thing!Gavin Ballard  30:53I mean, I'm a massive fan of app developers taking a bit more responsibility for store performance so anything you can do to improve performance is worth it in my view.Rich Bunker  31:07I guess that leads us a bit onto the next question, really, which is about ways to build a store or development in Shopify in a low impact way, as well as hosting on the Google Cloud Platform would probably be one of those things.Gavin Ballard  31:28Again, I think if you're a merchant and you're faced with to two apps, and making a choice between them,... at the end of the day, you're probably going to be focused on the one that's going to serve the needs of your customers better. So you're going to be more focused on the functionality, what specific features it has, and how many reviews it has, rather than "Is it's hosted on Google versus something else?" But for merchants that are more conscious about it, or for merchants who are serving a customer base that is really conscious about it, it pays ask. I think that if an app developer is getting that question during the sales process, even if it's just one in 50 times, then it's going to get them thinking about it. Maybe they see the value and then maybe it flips one person or one developer over. So, asking that question is something that merchants can do. Even if they're not hosted on a neutral platform and you you still use them, at least you've asked a question, and they're thinking about it. Beyond that, this is definitely where I get into the territory of how merchants work incredibly hard to build their businesses. There's a lot of things that they need to think about so I don't want to be suggesting that we just add one more thing on top of the list. Obviously, the choice of what type of business you're running, the product you're selling, where you're shipping to and from... it all has a bigger impact than almost anything else on things like carbon emissions like where you're sourcing your stuff. I'm sure that you've spoken to merchants about this, or with notions about this a lot. That's definitely going to be a big impact: the type of business you have and where you're sourcing from into.Krissie Leyland  33:35We have talked about that quite a lot but we don't have a solution.Rich Bunker  33:41The solution is communication and an education: making people aware so that they're gonna ask the questions. Hopefully, that'll ignite the developers and agencies to be more.Krissie Leyland  33:56Yeah and for the shipping, say for example, if a shopper's at checkout and they have the option between: next day delivery or wait a few days, but if you wait a few days, it's better for the planet because it's being shipped by–Rich Bunker  34:16–road or rail. Yeah, especially in larger countries like I guess Australia and America where next day delivery would sometimes mean the delivery jumping on a flight.Krissie Leyland  34:27Just being mindful of how your choices can help. But as a merchant building that checkout experience to help consumers to be more mindful... do you need this to be next day delivery because it costs the planet this and just helping them to think as well as a consumer?Gavin Ballard  34:47If you've got multiple items in an order, shipping them out individually... If there's going to be a couple of days difference between when you can fulfil them or if you could just wait an extra day or two and get them all in one parcel would be better. Some of the packaging waste that you say from large retailers is pretty ridiculous–and it's all done in the name of automation, obviously–but when you order a toothbrush and it rocks up in a 1m x 1m package. That's an exaggeration but I've certainly seen situations where it's not that different to that. Rich Bunker  34:48No, we've definitely seen that... tons of packaging and an item that comes that's really packaged ready to go.Krissie Leyland  35:23Say, if you have a physical store as well, could the packaging be ready to be just shipped as it is? You know, you don't need to put it in another box.Rich Bunker  35:58That's really for package designers or product designers but I just think if those guys could think in a more sustainable way: we're gonna make this product and we're going to put it in this box. Is that box capable of big shipping the product in it? Krissie Leyland  36:15Be innovative in that way because it's changing and ecommerce is growing. At the moment especially, it's more popular than physical stores. Anyway, that was a slight tangent. Sorry, but if there's tech that can solve that, like an app maybe that's at checkout that can say, "Have you thought about the cost of this?"Gavin Ballard  36:44It was interesting, because as part of the research for this podcast, I was looking through the offset app that Shopify publishes, which does that. A really common feature request, which I don't think I've gotten around to yet, is providing a really easy way to communicate what they're doing to customers. So, from a merchant perspective, they may be happy to pay that extra amount but if they can't tell customers that that's what they're doing, or make customers feel good about their purchasing decisions, then that's the missing link. I think this is definitely the theme of what we've been talking about a lot today is: doing the work is obviously the most important thing to offset or reduce, but very important also is talking about it and making sure that people know about it, because that's how you keep pushing the boulder up the hill, inch by inch.Krissie Leyland  37:51When you talk more, you'll all find the gaps and then maybe come up with an idea together to fill that gap and make it better, I think.Gavin Ballard  38:01Mhm, absolutely.Rich Bunker  38:06Krissie's looking at my like it's my question time...Krissie Leyland  38:10Well, I was just thinking we could talk more about the projects that you've done as a team with conscious brands. How do you usually work with clients? In particular, those that are conscious and sustainable?Gavin Ballard  38:27Look, at the end of the day, we really like working with social, socially conscious brands. Especially if you're working ecommerce in an agency, some days, you find yourself thinking, "we are helping people buy more stuff and is that necessarily what the world needs right now?" So it's nice when you're working with a client, and you're actually saying what they're doing with what they're selling. Who Gives a Crap is a fantastic example of that. Thankyou is another brand that we have worked with previously. Working with those clients makes you feel good about what you do every now and again, which is nice. Even the brands that you maybe wouldn't necessarily think off the top of your head are super socially conscious, I guess. So, Brooklinen is a big client of ours and they sell linen, bedding and things like that, in the States. You might not necessarily think of them as a socially conscious thing but they've gone to quite a bit of effort and expense on their end to set up their return system to make sure that anything that's returned goes to a local donation centre rather than getting shipped all the way back across the country just get thrown out in their warehouse. We built the returns management app that helps facilitate that for them. So you know, those sorts of things are really nice to work, especially when you're working with large merchants. You build this one app for them, and you can see how how much waste you're saving or the impact that you having. One of our projects with with Thankyou actually, was to build a custom app that let people pay what they want for a particular book, which was the history of Thank you, the company and where they wanted to go. Obviously, it was essentially a donation type product. Every single dollar that went through that, was going straight to Thankyou's projects. Those sorts of things are always really nice to, to work on and for. But also, I said at the start that we don't necessarily treat working with those clients super differently to working with any other client because at the end of the day, the merchant is always the hero. It has to be what they care about, and what they want to do–that's what is most important for us as an agency. It's nice when they're doing they want to do things that are nice, but there's no way that we can come in and shift a company that doesn't already want to do something good. We can't shift them into doing that. At the end of the day, everything has to come from the merchant themselves when you're in a service business.Rich Bunker  41:46Just jumping back to how the shipping and returns part of ecommerce is massive. The fact that you've helped a company try and eliminate or reduce their return costs is a double win, isn't it? You know, financially, for the environment and all. So that's really amazing, to be honest.Krissie Leyland  42:08Yeah, I was just taking that all in about Brooklinen as well. I just thought that's genius. So say for example, the customer bought an item and there in Manchester, would they donate that potential return to somewhere more local?Gavin Ballard  42:32A lot of bedding stuff, if you returned it, would just get thrown out because they couldn't resell it. So rather than doing that, they've worked with charities, that have hubs around the country, that will make sure that they get to them, rather than just going in the trash or shipped back to a warehouse where it will get thrown out. From the customer perspective, it's the same as any other return. They will get their return label, go and take it to the post office. But instead of getting shipped rom Tennessee, all the way back to New York where it came from, it'll go to a local Tennessee charity or return centre where it all get distributed properly. It's probably a win for Brooklinen as well, not having to deal with all of that coming back when they're just gonna throw it away. Just being a bit more thoughtful about it means that it's a win win.Krissie Leyland  43:45It's great for the planet and it's a social impact, as well. I really like that. It's the start of the year, so let's look ahead. What will you be doing differently in 2021, in terms of your carbon footprint.Gavin Ballard  44:11The first thing was that literally four or five days ago, we signed up for a program called Stripe Climate. So this is Stripe, the business I was talking about before, who handles all of the payment processing for one of our products. So we process a fair amount of money through them every year and they've just made it very, very easy to flick a switch to get the percentage of the revenue that you're pushing through Stripe to climate projects. So, we've we've done that and it's been operating for a few days and that's quite nice to think that it's a very low effort way for us to do it–to make an impact. That was first project for 2021. I think the other big thing for us will be moving all of our hosting to carbon neutral stuff this year. It will take a while because we have a lot of apps that we host, and it does take time to move them. I'd like to think they we're at least 80% of the way there by the end of the year, and that'll be probably the biggest way for us to reduce our footprint from from 2020. We'll continue to do our offsetting at the end of this year. So anything we do create will be offsetting and probably just trying to get a bit more sophisticated about how we're calculating our hosting missions and things like that. Then, I could happily put the spreadsheet for our carbon calculations for any other agency that wanted to do that. Maybe even potentially wrapping that up and making a little public tool that people can just plug in to the common things that you do when you're a creative or digital agency: just get a number and then a link straight to an offset provider and just make it a very low effort, low brain way to do that. That was really, for something like Stripe Climate, which is committing not-insignificant amount of money to that every year but they just made it so easy and so obvious that it really became a no brainer. If we could do something like that for agencies, that would be really exciting.Krissie Leyland  46:47That's incredible. Please definitely do that.Gavin Ballard  46:54Fingers crossed. It's a it's a busy year, but of all the things that we shipped in 2020, the carbon record was, though not a traditional bit of software that's out in the world, definitely one of the things that I'm proud of us doing this company.Krissie Leyland  47:17Nice. Thank you. How will you further support merchants to be more conscious of what they're doing?Gavin Ballard  47:27Well, I'm going to appear on this podcast and convince everyone else! ...Again, it comes down to that promotion. In terms of how when we're engaged by a merchant, it's not really our place to be changing their business model, how they ship things, or what product they're selling or anything like that. It's about, just making sure that they're aware of the things like the offset app from Shopify. For the right type of merchant, have them think about how if you offset all your shipping, you may be paying money for that but let's have a look and see what it does to the conversion rate, if you're publicly promoting the fact that this is something you're doing. Try to help merchants think about that a bit more holistically. And again, just letting them know, there's a thing that we've done. You don't need to do that but if it's something that you want to do, then we're very happy to help you out with that.Krissie Leyland  48:36Yeah and give them some examples for example, the Brooklinen case study.Gavin Ballard  48:43Again, I think it's something that we're very bad at as a business: talking about the stuff that we've done. We have worked with a lot of large merchants on interesting projects and we justreally lacked doing that. We jump straight onto the next big projects that are exciting, but then forget to write up in detail what we actually did for everyone else. So.... terrible marketing strategy. I should really get better at that this year.Krissie Leyland  49:12Well, you can pass it on to Kollectify! We do content.Rich Bunker  49:17So finally, if you had one message to Shopify experts and merchants listening to this podcast and hoping to improve their own business in terms of how they can have a positive impact on 2021, what would it be?Gavin Ballard  49:30I think my first message would probably be 2021 can't be as bad as 2020, right? So anything you do is probably going to have a more positive impact. I think, given what we've been talking about the most in this interview has been around the carbon report. The best thing that you could do is just start by estimating your impact. Doesn't have to be necessarily to then go out and offset it. It doesn't need to be something that's done in a huge level of granularity or anything like that. Just find a baseline and have some idea of like, where your biggest impact or where your imprint is. That's something that most businesses would be able to sit down and work out in a couple of hours with a bit of research on the internet. Doing that would be a really interesting way to start thinking about it and thinking about ways to reduce and potentially offset down the track. If you just go into it with a bit of curiosity about what is our footprint, where are the big things, then I think that'll at least put you in a position to really be able to do something about that.Krissie Leyland  50:53Perfect answer. So Gavin, where can people find you if they'd like to chat more about custom Shopify development or your carbon report?Gavin Ballard  51:04For me personally, Twitter is probably the best place for me. I am just @gavinballard and if you'd like to learn a bit more about Disco Labs as a company, or read the carbon report them were at www.discolabs.com.Krissie Leyland  51:19Thank you! One more question: What made you choose the name Disco Labs? Gavin Ballard  51:25I wish there was a great answer to this question but in all honesty, it is purely domain name availability. We just needed to name a business and looked at some .coms and that happened to be available. Yeah, there's nothing deeper to it than that.Krissie Leyland  51:51I thought you liked discoing or something?Gavin Ballard  51:56I don't mind the disco, but not too much in 2020 or 2021...Rich Bunker  52:05Remote discos! Krissie Leyland  52:06Yeah, on your own!Rich Bunker  52:07Zoom disco. There's probably a niche software isn't there?Gavin Ballard  52:21I don't think anyone wants to spend any more time on Zoom than they have to, at the moment. Krissie Leyland  52:25No thanks! Oh, wait... we're on it right now. Thank you Zoom! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Natalie Nagele came to the states in 1989 as a Jewish refugee from Russia. She watched her parents go from nothing and utilizing furniture from trash, to building big businesses and supporting their family. She met Chris, her husband when she was 18. And they have been working together ever since, as he is the co-founder of their business. They have 2 kids together, and love to travel - specifically to the Caribbean, since it is a quick flight from Philly (and of course, its warm). Despite that, she would love to live in Italy one day. Their company started off as a remote consulting company, but launched their first product in 2003 - and they were immediately hooked. In 2009, they stopped doing client work and focused solely on products. And haven't looked back in 20 years. This is the creation story of Wildbit. Sponsors Unidragon ( https://unidragon.com/ ) Wyld Gallery ( https://wyld.gallery/ ) Links * Website: https://wildbit.com/ * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-nagele-b9aa42/ Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts ( https://ratethispodcast.com/codestory ) Amazing tools we use: * If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm ( https://transistor.fm/?via=code-story ) * Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast ( https://squadcast.fm/?ref=noahlabhart ). * Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain ( https://clipgain.io/?utm_campaign=clipgain&utm_medium=episode&utm_source=codestory ) , sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE Credits: Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts ( https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/code-story/id1466861744 ) , Spotify ( https://open.spotify.com/show/0f5HGQ2EPd63H83gqAifXp ) , Pocket Casts ( https://pca.st/Z1k7 ) , Google Play ( https://play.google.com/music/listen?pcampaignid=MKT-na-all-co-pr-mu-pod-16&t=Code_Story&view=%2Fps%2FIcdmshauh7jgmkjmh6iu3wd4oya ) , Breaker ( https://www.breaker.audio/code-story ) , Youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgjZsiUDp-oKY_ffHc5AUpQ ) , or the podcasting app of your choice. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Davit Buniatyan is originally from Armenia. He completed his high school years there, until he was 17, when he started to pursue his undergrad in the UK at UCL. He entered into his college years, excited about animation from seeing Pixar movies. He learned all about 3d models, graphics and rendering - but then found out there was no course or curriculum specially for animation. So he switched to comp sci, which ended up being perfect. He is into swimming, tennis and shotokan - which is traditional Japanese karate. Along with these, he's been playing chess since he was 5 years old, and is an avid fan of the show Queen's Gambit on Netflix. When he started in on his PHD at Princeton, he started working with large data sets to recreate neural networks. In doing so, he realized how much computational power was required to learn from even a small - large scale data set. With this, he set out to build a tool to make companies more efficient at learning from their data. This is the creation story of Activeloop. Sponsors Podcorn ( https://podcorn.com/ ) Wildbit ( https://wildbit.com/ ) Shape & Foster ( https://www.shapeandfoster.com/ ) Wing ( http://joinwing.info/code ) Links * Website: https://www.activeloop.ai/ * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbuniatyan/ Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts ( https://ratethispodcast.com/codestory ) Amazing tools we use: * If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm ( https://transistor.fm/?via=code-story ) * Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast ( https://squadcast.fm/?ref=noahlabhart ). * Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain ( https://clipgain.io/?utm_campaign=clipgain&utm_medium=episode&utm_source=codestory ) , sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE Credits: Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts ( https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/code-story/id1466861744 ) , Spotify ( https://open.spotify.com/show/0f5HGQ2EPd63H83gqAifXp ) , Pocket Casts ( https://pca.st/Z1k7 ) , Google Play ( https://play.google.com/music/listen?pcampaignid=MKT-na-all-co-pr-mu-pod-16&t=Code_Story&view=%2Fps%2FIcdmshauh7jgmkjmh6iu3wd4oya ) , Breaker ( https://www.breaker.audio/code-story ) , Youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgjZsiUDp-oKY_ffHc5AUpQ ) , or the podcasting app of your choice. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Sophy Lee was born in China, but grew up in a lot of countries and places. She grew up in Australia, lived all over Texas, and went to Harvard for undergrad, studying economics. She is an avid bike racer, mainly on the road, and a triathlete. The combination of living in difference places, school, and racing lead her into the tech world. In fact, she moved to San Francisco to race - though he had taught herself to program post college and had an idea brewing in her head on how to become a better engineer in San Fran. Sophy has been working on her current product for 6.5 years, starting at a different company formerly known as Shuttle. The product was built originally to map out a trip from point a to b, and have a driver give a protected ride to a child. Four years ago, her current company acquired the product, at which point she joined as CTO to lead the Technology & Information Security team. This is the creation story of HopSkipDrive. Sponsors Shape & Foster ( https://www.shapeandfoster.com/ ) Wildbit ( https://wildbit.com/ ) Links * https://www.hopskipdrive.com/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophylee Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts ( https://ratethispodcast.com/codestory ) Amazing tools we use: * If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm ( https://transistor.fm/?via=code-story ) * Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast ( https://squadcast.fm/?ref=noahlabhart ). * Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain ( https://clipgain.io/?utm_campaign=clipgain&utm_medium=episode&utm_source=codestory ) , sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE Credits: Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts ( https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/code-story/id1466861744 ) , Spotify ( https://open.spotify.com/show/0f5HGQ2EPd63H83gqAifXp ) , Pocket Casts ( https://pca.st/Z1k7 ) , Google Play ( https://play.google.com/music/listen?pcampaignid=MKT-na-all-co-pr-mu-pod-16&t=Code_Story&view=%2Fps%2FIcdmshauh7jgmkjmh6iu3wd4oya ) , Breaker ( https://www.breaker.audio/code-story ) , Youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgjZsiUDp-oKY_ffHc5AUpQ ) , or the podcasting app of your choice. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This is the first episode released under the new name of the show, Make Things That Matter! If you're curious, listen to ep29 for more on the rebranding.For the transcript and full episode notes/resources, go to: https://bit.ly/3nwvyfXAnd if you have a moment, I’d love it if you could give me a little feedback via this SurveyMonkey link. (It only takes one minute.)Click here to directly email Andrew your questions, comments, and feedback! He reads everything that is sent in (click 'Allow' if you get a popup): connect@makethingsthatmatter.comYou can submit your own audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/andrewskotzkoIf you enjoy the podcast, please consider subscribing and leaving a rating/review. It really helps!

En esta sexta llamada del podcast de Data Stand-Up Jesús conversa con David Rey, Chief Data Officer en Idealista, una organización nacida hace hace 18 años y que ya en el año 2015 decidió dar al dato el papel que hoy tiene para ellos como herramienta al servicio del cliente, de otras empresas, de grandes fondos de inversión y, por supuesto, de su propio negocio. Así nació su división Idealista Data con el objetivo de poner al alcance de cualquier profesional del sector información estructurada, ordenada y en tiempo real.En septiembre de 2020 el fondo sueco EQT ha firmado un acuerdo con Apax Partners para comprar sus acciones en Idealista por un importe que valora la compañía en 1.321 millones de euros. Jesús Encinar, fundador y presidente de Idealista, mantiene su participación y seguirá liderando la empresa junto con su equipo. Esta operación es la mayor venta de un portal de Internet creado y gestionado en España.David inició sus estudios en la Universidad de Oviedo donde estudió Ingeniería Superior Informática y ha complementado su formacion con distintos programas de master y un MBA en el Instituto de Empresa. Actualmente se ha embarcado en un Doctorado en Economía.A nivel profesional ha tenido la oportunidad de compaginar periodos de trabajo por cuenta ajena con otros en los que ha puesto en marcha proyectos propios. Cajastur (actual Liberbank), Vodafone, Orange, External Test, Scoremind, Neometrics, Wildbit, Equifax han sido las organizaciones en las que ha desarrollado su actividad además de realizar labores de consultoría también durante 2006-2010. Como ha manifestado en alguna entrevista: "Nuestro secreto es trabajar con un conjunto de datos cada vez mejor, que explotamos de forma interna y externa".

Wildbit’s team is behind Beanstalk, Postmark, and other brilliant software known for removing common pain points in developers’ processes. With 28 team members across five countries (15 cities) working on multi-million dollar products, Natalie’s proving that you can grow a profitable business while focusing on shorter work days, an enjoyable work-from-anywhere environment, and staying small. Links to learn more about Natalie Nagele:Wildbit Wildbit Twitter Wildbit LinkedIn Natalie’s Twitter Natalie’s LinkedIn Follow us:twitter.com/wistia Subscribe:wistia.com/series/talking-too-loud Love what you heard? Leave us a review!Relevant LinksIn an effort to help folks looking to find companies with a healthy approach to work, Natalie’s team launched People-First Jobs, which is a curated list of companies looking for motivated people with similar values. Take a look!

It's been approximately four months since Justine Jordan took on the role of Head of Marketing for Wildbit. In this week's episode, I challenged her to describe those formative weeks. I wanted to know how she worked, questions she asked, and did she have to compromise her beliefs? The result is an insight into how she immersed herself in the role and how she rejects short-term tactics in favor of long-term, brand-building activities. We covered: The benefits of building relationships to get the job you want Why and how you should build a trust bank Learn to shut up and listen more How marketers really can be customer first How patience can be a real strength in marketing Justine’s number one tip for uncovering pain points Why you have got to talk to people Read psychology books to better understand how humans work The definition of design thinking Resources: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dunbar Drive by Daniel Pink MozCon Indie Hackers The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier Zag by Marty Neumeier Brand flip by Marty Neumeier Litmus Wildbit Postmark Seth Godin’s Marketing Secrets to Launching a New Business Edward Neuraumont - How to Stop Marketing With Your Ego Guillame Caban - How to Find the Right Growth Channels

Ed reintroduces himself, Steve shares his experience of making it to the front page of Hacker News, and we discuss Quaderno's 5-hour work day and Wildbit's 4-day work week.Links:Ed's home on the web.Quaderno's job page.Wildbit's 4-day work week.Discuss these topics and more on the Bootstrapped discussion forum. 

Ed reintroduces himself, Steve shares his experience of making it to the front page of Hacker News, and we discuss Quaderno’s 5-hour work day and Wildbit’s 4-day work week. Links: Ed’s home on the web. Quaderno’s job page. Wildbit’s 4-day work week. Discuss these topics and more on the Bootstrapped discussion forum. The post #145: The Hacker News front page experience, 5-hour workdays and 4-day workweeks appeared first on Bootstrapped.fm.

In today’s episode, we sit down with Natalie Nagale from Wildbit to discuss the importance of team retreats, how they use a people-first perspective to structure their offsite experiences, and the ways Wildbit is supporting workers in connecting with like-minded companies in other industries.

I want you to meet someone who I have huge respect for: Natalie Nagele. Not only has Natalie been working in the SaaS and software space since her late teens, but she’s been courageous enough to experiment with optimizing her team. …even if it means asking them to work less. She is the CEO of WildBit, a tech company with 3 big products: Beanstalk: Code revision and deployment software Postmark: Transactional email service Conveyor: Task management for software teams I had the pleasure of interviewing Natalie on the latest episode of the Escape Velocity Show, and you can tell that she truly loves her team. In fact, she loves them so much that she’s willing to try anything to make their lives better. She saw a boost in productivity by moving them to a 4-day work week, she onboards all her staff by giving them 2 books she swears by, and she’s experimented with many different productivity apps. Her team is largely remote but she’s managed to make that their strength, not a weakness. Listening to her experiences is like spying on a test lab training the perfect SaaS team. If you’ve ever wanted to build a deeply loyal remote team, then you’ll get a lot out of this interview, so check it out. I’m grateful for Natalie’s willingness to share her biggest lessons from 16 years in the tech industry. In this interview, she talks about: - Why “If you build it they will come” is a bad strategy - Learning how to pay yourself

In this episode, we’ll be providing tips on how to make the switch from working at an office to working from home easier. Stay tuned for the following weeks to hear the individual episodes of our referenced guests.  Referenced Guests: Rian van der Merwe, Wildbit’s Head of Product Twitter: www.twitter.com/RianVDM  LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rianvdm  Website: www.wildbit.com  Cait Wilson, Research Manager at YouGov LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/caitwilson Website: today.yougov.com/  Henrik Mattsson, CEO of Lookback Twitter: www.twitter.com/IamHenrikM LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/henrik-mattsson Website: lookback.io  Steve Mast, President & Chief Innovation Officer at Delvinia Twitter: www.twitter.com/stevemast LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stevemast Website: www.delvinia.com Find Jamin Online: Email: jamin@happymr.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazilTwitter: www.twitter.com/jaminbrazil  Find Chueyee Online: Email: chueyee@happymr.comLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/chueyeeyangTwitter: www.twitter.com/chueyee15  Find Us Online:  Twitter: www.twitter.com/happymrxp LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/happymarketresearch Facebook: www.facebook.com/happymrxp Website: www.happymr.com  Music:  “Clap Along” by Auditionauti: https://audionautix.com Epidemic Sound: https://www.epidemicsound.com/ “Breathe” by Shane Ivers: https://www.silvermansound.com  This Episode’s Sponsor:  This episode is brought to you by SurveyMonkey. Almost everyone has taken its surveys, but did you know that SurveyMonkey offers complete solutions for market researchers? In addition to flexible surveys, their global Audience panel, and research services, SurveyMonkey just launched a fast and easy way to collect market feedback, with 7 new Expert Solutions for concept and creative testing. With built-in, customizable methodology, AI-Powered Insights, and industry benchmarking, you can get feedback on your ideas from your target market–in a presentation-ready format, by the way–in as little as an hour.  For more information on SurveyMonkey Market Research Solutions, visit surveymonkey.com/market-research. Mention the Happy Market Research Podcast to the SurveyMonkey sales team before June 30th, for a discount off of your first project. [00:00:03] Jamin: Thanks for tuning in! You’re listening to the Happy Market Research podcast, I'm Jamin Brazil, the show’s host. I’m joined by our Executive Producer, Chueyee Yang. Chueyee, how are you?  [00:00:12] Chueyee: I’m doing pretty okay considering what's been going on in the world. I actually worked outside for a little bit in my backyard and it was honestly the best decision I've made all week it was so refreshing. In this episode, we’ll be providing tips on how to make the switch from working at an office to working from home easier. Stay tuned for the following weeks to hear the individual episodes of our referenced guests. A quick warning, there are curse words that are un-beeped on this episode. You can find a beeped version of this episode on our website.  [00:00:52] Jamin: Support for Happy Market Research comes from SurveyMonkey. Almost everyone has taken its surveys, but did you know that SurveyMonkey offers complete solutions for market researchers? In addition to flexible surveys, their global Audience panel, and research services, SurveyMonkey just launched a fast and easy way to collect market feedback, with 7 new Expert Solutions for concept and creative testing. With built-in, customizable methodology, AI-Powered Insights, and industry benchmarking, you can get feedback on your ideas from your target market–in a presentation-ready format, by the way–in as little as an hour. For more information on SurveyMonkey Market Research Solutions, visit surveymonkey.com/market-research, that's surveymonkey dot com slash market dash research. Mention the Happy Market Research Podcast to the SurveyMonkey sales team before June 30th,

This week, Spark is coming to you from five different locations across Toronto, none of which is the CBC building! Like many people all over the world this week, we're working from home. Remote work is something we've talked about a lot on Spark over the past decade, but we've never done anything like this! We recognize that many people aren't able to work remotely, and we'll be addressing that too. But for people who can—and should—be working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, we're going to explore the best ways to do this, using current technology. + Natalie Nagele is the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, a Philadelphia-based software company, whose employees have been working remotely for 20 years, and which recently switched to a four-day workweek. Natalie explains how this works for Wildbit, and what other managers can learn from her experience. + Shawn D. Long, Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Communication at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, U.S. He's an expert in organizational communications, and he's studied how office politics plays out in virtual offices.

This week we have Natalie Nagele - CEO and Co-Founder of Wildbit. Natalie is striving to prove that you can grow your business whilst ensuring developers aren't spending time in the weeds of process, infrastructure, and communication. Their products and customers allow them to do the best work of their lives - design, code, and ship brilliant software, Recorded at Business of Software Conference USA 2017 in Boston, MA. To listen to more BoS Talks, go to https://businessofsoftware.org/videos. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/business-of-software/message

After years of fighting tooth and nail for it, the labor movement in America finally won the battle for the 40-hour work week. Workers were no longer expected to work day and night without fair compensation. It was a victory that changed the way we think about work, and the modern work week was born.  That was nearly 80 years ago, and since then there hasn’t been much of a discussion about whether or not, with the rise of next-generation technology, it’s still a valuable guide rail for the majority of workers. But, business leaders are beginning to look critically at whether the traditional work week is worth maintaining with all the new technology available to keep employees engaged, and the results have been satisfying. On this episode of Productivity Confidential, we talk to Natalie Nagele, cofounder of Wildbit, about her mission to institute a 32-hour work week in her company and why sometimes the best thing you can do for a company’s success is telling employees to stop working so hard.

My guest today is Rian van der Merwe, speaker, writer and responsible for Product at Postmark, which is part of Wildbit. Wildbit is an 18-year-old technology company whose software centers around taking the pain out of the development process and is used by over 100,000 companies globally. Prior to joining Wildbit, Rian has served senior product roles at top firms including eBay, Naspers, Jive Software, HealthSparq. Additionally, he is the creator and actively contributes to Elezea, a blog, and a newsletter for people who create technology products. Find Rian Online: LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rianvdm  Twitter: www.twitter.com/RianVDM  Website: www.wildbit.com  Find Jamin Online: Email: jamin@happymr.com  LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil Twitter: www.twitter.com/jaminbrazil  Find Us Online:  Twitter: www.twitter.com/happymrxp  LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/happymarketresearch  Facebook: www.facebook.com/happymrxp  Website: www.happymr.com  This Episode’s Sponsor:  This episode is brought to you by HubUx. HubUx reduces project management costs by 90%. Think of HubUx as your personal AI project manager, taking care of all your recruitment and interview coordination needs in the background. The platform connects you with the right providers and sample based on your research and project needs. For more information, please visit HubUx.com. [00:00] On Episode 233, I'm interviewing Rian van der Merwe, responsible for product at Postmark, but first a word from our sponsor. [00:10] This episode is brought to you by HubUx.  HubUx is a productivity tool for qualitative research.  It creates a seamless workflow across your tools and team.  Originally, came up with the idea as I was listening to research professionals in both the quant and qual space complain about and articulate the pain, I guess more succinctly, around managing qualitative research.  The one big problem with qualitative is it’s synchronous in nature, and it requires 100% of the attention of the respondent. This creates a big barrier, and, I believe, a tremendous opportunity inside of the marketplace.  So what we do is we take the tools that you use; we integrate them into a work flow so that, ultimately, you enter in your project details, that is, who it is that you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them, whether it’s a focus group, in-person, or virtual or IDI’s or ethnos; and we connect you to those right people in the times that you want to have those conversations or connections – Push-Button Qualitative Insights, HubUx.  If you have any questions, reach out to me directly. I would appreciate it. Jamin@HubUx.com    [01:35] Hi, I'm Jamin Brazil and you're listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast. My guest today is Rian van der Merwe, a speaker, writer and responsible for product at Postmark, which is part of Wildbit. Rian, thank you very much for joining me on the Happy Market Research Podcast today. [01:54] Thanks, Jamin. Good to talk to you again after about a decade.  [01:58] It has literally been a decade since I've seen your face. I have been following you on social. You had a book release a couple of years ago, which got a lot of publicity, and I just ordered a copy of it, another copy of that actually. Lost my other one. Before we jump into that, I'd like to start a little bit with your background. Tell us about your parents and how they have informed your career.  [02:22] Sure. So, I grew up in South Africa. I live in Portland now, but I've lived in a bunch of places up to this point. So, I grew up in a little town called Stellenbosch, which is about 45 minutes outside of Cape Town. It's in wine country. I've lived in many places and I still believe that's the most beautiful town in the world. And I don't think that's even remotely biased. We should put a photo in the show notes so people can decide. So I grew up there, went to school there,

On this week's episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we talk with Natalie Nagele, Co-founder and CEO of Wildbit about how she and her co-founder and husband, Chris Nagele have run the company for the past nearly 19 years and have created both an effective and calm environment. During those 19 years, Natalie and Chris have built a lot of products and have shut down many of them. The ones that have stood the test of time have often been SaaS. Currently the company maintains Postmark, Beanstalk and Conveyor. Wildbit currently employs 30 people who are spread between 6 countries. Natalie's main goal throughout all this time has been to keep the company a sane place to work. She has never taken VC funding and has never imposed high growth, or unsustainable goals for the company. At the start of the year, however, Natalie and Chris introduced The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) to help the company become more effective and productive. So far the experience has been great and they are already seeing great results. It has made them far more effective and aligned, especially as they operate a four day work week. At SaaStock we also implemented EOS at the start of the year, so this is as much a rundown of how it works as it is an exchange of notes and advice on how to make it better. Listen on to hear: How Natalie has assured the company has been around for nearly 19 years How they rolled out EOS One area in which EOS has already had a massive impact in Wildbit Natalie is one of many diverse voices we will hear from at SaaStock in Dublin this October. While we will have plenty of stories of high growth and stellar metrics, we will also feature the other, equally as effective ways do SaaS - by growing slowly and sustainably. Joining her on 5 separate tracks will be 150 speakers representing a variety of company stages and verticals. Grab a ticket now at the best possible price.

Working 60, 70, 80+ hours in America has become the norm for too many teams. Yet it seems impossible to get everything done in only 40 hours. Not for the employees of Wildbit. This week’s guest shifted her organization to a 32-hour, 4-day work week. Over a year into it, they’re seeing more positive results than they could have imagined. Natalie Nagele is the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, the company behind Postmark, Beanstalk and Conveyor. With 29 team members across 5 countries working on multi-million dollar products for developers, she’s proving that you can grow an extremely profitable business while focusing on shorter work days, an enjoyable work-from-anywhere environment, and staying small. Natalie and I talk about why her company moved to a 4 day, 32 hour work week. She shares how she introduced it and managed the transition, the surprising impact it had on the people and the company, and how you might translate this practice if you work in a larger organization. Read the related blog article: Make a 32-hour Work Week Work For Your Team Join the Modern Manager community (www.mamieks.com/join) to get Natalie’s overview of the 4-day work week which includes a description of their paid time off plan. Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.   KEY TAKEAWAYS: We started with only working 40 hours per week and truly limiting our hours on weekends and evenings before moving to a 32 hour work week. Agree on a hypothesis about the impact or why you’re making the shift to a shorter work week e.g. We believe we can accomplish the same amount of work with greater focus and increase the quality of work by having more time to rejuvinate outside of work.  To make this work, you need to be extremely intentional about what work to do and how to do it. You need to change the mindset, processes, and priorities, not simply cut hours. Experiment with changing your communication methods. Cancel all standing meetings to see which ones you really need. Turn off Slack for 1 week or have everyone turn off all notifications to see how it enables people to focus better.  Position the shift as an experiment which you can measure. Check in on it weekly - how people are feeling, what might need to shift, etc. After 1 year of the 32 hour work week, Natalie’s team had increased the quality and quantity of their work! 4 days isn’t the answer for every team or every person. It could be 6 days of 5 hours of work per day.  For know

Natalie is the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, the 18-year old bootstrapped software company behind Beanstalk, Postmark, and Conveyor. With 30 employees, 100,000+ customers, and millions in revenue, Natalie’s focus at the company is on culture and team happiness.

Working 60, 70, 80+ hours in America has become the norm for too many teams. Yet it seems impossible to get everything done in only 40 hours. Not for the employees of Wildbit. This week’s guest shifted her organization to a 32-hour, 4-day work week. Over a year into it, they’re seeing more positive results than they could have imagined. Natalie Nagele is the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, the company behind Postmark, Beanstalk and Conveyor. With 29 team members across 5 countries working on multi-million dollar products for developers, she’s proving that you can grow an extremely profitable business while focusing on shorter work days, an enjoyable work-from-anywhere environment, and staying small. Natalie and I talk about why her company moved to a 4 day, 32 hour work week. She shares how she introduced it and managed the transition, the surprising impact it had on the people and the company, and how you might translate this practice if you work in a larger organization. Read the related blog article: Make a 32-hour Work Week Work For Your Team Join the Modern Manager community (www.mamieks.com/join) to get Natalie’s overview of the 4-day work week which includes a description of their paid time off plan. Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.   KEY TAKEAWAYS: We started with only working 40 hours per week and truly limiting our hours on weekends and evenings before moving to a 32 hour work week. Agree on a hypothesis about the impact or why you’re making the shift to a shorter work week e.g. We believe we can accomplish the same amount of work with greater focus and increase the quality of work by having more time to rejuvinate outside of work.  To make this work, you need to be extremely intentional about what work to do and how to do it. You need to change the mindset, processes, and priorities, not simply cut hours. Experiment with changing your communication methods. Cancel all standing meetings to see which ones you really need. Turn off Slack for 1 week or have everyone turn off all notifications to see how it enables people to focus better.  Position the shift as an experiment which you can measure. Check in on it weekly - how people are feeling, what might need to shift, etc. After 1 year of the 32 hour work week, Natalie’s team had increased the quality and quantity of their work! 4 days isn’t the answer for every team or every person. It could be 6 days of 5 hours of work per day.  For knowledge workers, especially, it’s a managers job to help identify what a reasonable amount of high value work looks like so that we can move away from “hours in the office” as a sign of productivity. For larger corporations where you can’t change the workweek structure, look for opportunities to create flexibility in the work week by having each person deliver a specific set of tasks or value - if I get XYZ done, it’s been a solid week and you can go home early. KEEP UP WITH NATALIE Website: https://wildbit.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-nagele-b9aa42/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/natalienagele

Having previously developed Postmark as well as Beanstalk, entrepreneur Natalie Nagele (@natalienagele) joins me for a light-hearted, honest and open conversation about the process of building Wildbit, a fully self-funded, hybrid software company. In this episode, we mention: Deep work Leadership in business Loneliness in remote work Hard work vs. Smart work Fundraising and profitability Meditation and mental clarity Building a meaningful business Remote work, in the early days Values, and their constant evolution Productivity software that can do more harm than good Timeline: (04:57) What is Wildbit? How did it start off? (09:32) Pioneering remote work: Pros and Cons (17:24) Slack, and anxiety: the effects of micro-managing expectations (22:58) Remote work: how big of an issue is loneliness? (26:17) Which should you do: work hard or smart? (32:13) Fundraising, VC control, and Profits (37:01) Meditation: Natalie's practice, and company culture (43:50) How is writing therapeutic?  (46:47) How procrastination obstructs your mental space (50:11) 'Trillion Dolar Coach', and the lost secret of leadership (55:50) Technological innovation: what is next?  Please support us by subscribing and leaving a rating + review on Apple Podcasts. You can also help spread the word by sharing this episode with friends and family!    

“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” —Charles Darwin I've never quite understood the 40 hour workweek.  Have you?  I mean, if you can get your work done in half of the time...why do you need to sit there until the clock runs out?  Production is production, isn't it? This is just ONE of the issues we discuss with my AWESOME guest, Natalie Nagele, on this week's Leadership Happy Hour.  Natalie is what all leaders should be; a life-long learner.  She is doing things really good but she still wants to do it better so she can "enable life" for her team.  I know you're going to dig Natalie as much as I do! CHEERS! More on Natalie... Natalie is the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, the company behind Postmark, Beanstalk and Conveyor. With 29 team members across 5 countries working on multi-million dollar products for developers, she’s proving that you can grow an extremely profitable business while focusing on shorter work days, an enjoyable work-from-anywhere environment, and staying small. Useful background information on Wildbit’s culture and leadership: Wildbit’s company values: Under “The rules that shape the how we work and live” on the home page

Flexible working arrangements are the new craze. Employees want to work from home or coffee shops on their time. Employers want to embrace flexibility and yet get the work done too. Beyond flexible working, arrangements are the notion of working less than 40 hours in a week. I found Natalie Nagele, co-founder of Wildbit. They are a digital agency that has embraced the idea of a standard 32 hours work week. We talk about flexible working arrangements and how they came to fit the work into four days of work. Discover the keys to flexible working arrangements in this interview with Natalie. Get the show notes for Beyond Flexible Working Arrangements- The Power of a 32-Hour Work Week with Natalie Nagele Click to Tweet: Listening to an amazing episode on Leaders in the Trenches featuring Natalie Nagele with your host @GeneHammett https://www.genehammett.com/440 #Flexibleworkingarrangements #Leadership #GHepisode440 #LITTepisodes #Podcasts Give Leaders in the Trenches a review on iTunes!

The Head of Product at Wildbit, Rian van der Merwe has spent his career being crazy busy – and he’s had enough of it. He joined us to talk about slowing down to speed up, making sure your team(s) are productive, and managing yourself to provide the most value to everyone around you. Quote of the [...] Read more » The post Crazy Busy Product People – Rian van der Merwe on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

We’re joined again today by Natalie Nagele, co-founder of Wildbit, and a presenter at Release Notes 2019. Today we continue the conversation we started last week and talk about the importance of having a group of peers to compare notes with, Wildbit’s transition from contracting to products, and how taking care of your employees and […]

We’re joined today by Natalie Nagele, co-founder of Wildbit, and a presenter at Release Notes 2019. We talk about how Natalie got her start in entrepreneurship, how her role at Wildbit has changed as the company has grown, the difference between “businesspeople” and “entrepreneurs”, and how hiring one of those “businesspeople” has helped fill a […]

Natalie Nagele (@natalienagele) is not a fan of following "the rules" when it comes to building her company. In the 18 years since she and her husband Chris started Wildbit, not only have they grown it into a profitable operation that employees over 30 people, but they've done it their way: with remote a team, 32-hour work weeks, numerous product launches, and an obsessive focus on the happiness of their customers and employees. In this episode, Natalie and I dive deep into what's she's learned running a tech business for almost two decades, including why she thinks you should learn from others' experiences but not their advice.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/090-natalie-nagele-of-wildbit

Natalie is the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, the company behind Postmark, Beanstalk and Conveyor. We discuss: Two opposites which have built a “legal” business [1:35] Growth strategies: why small is more powerful [3:03] Core elements of how to take care of your core business relationships [8:45] How to become comfortable with saying “no” [10:13] How to carve out time for deep strategic thinking [12:28] The importance for your brain to have space to think [15:10] The beast lives for us and not the other way around [16:36] Turning around things when you hit the wall [21:00] With 29 team members across 5 countries working on multimillion-dollar products for developers, she’s proving that you can grow an extremely profitable business while focusing on shorter work days, an enjoyable work-from-anywhere environment, and staying small. Learn more about Natalie at Twitter (https://twitter.com/natalienagele) . Brief Description of Gift a free month of Wildbit’s transactional email delivery service, Postmark URL for Free Gift Drop an email to natalie@wildbit.com Facebook Twitter LinkedIn 1Shares

Natalie Nagele, CEO at Wildbit, shares how a 32-hour work week has helped her company minimize busy work, gain focus, and prioritize high-impact work. Get the latest updates from the show at www.thisisproductmanagement.com.

Natalie Nagele is the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, a successful software company that started in the year 2000. Natalie has a unique outlook on the way we work and she likes to do things differently. At Wildbit, they work a 32 hour work week over 4 days. Then they take 3 days to clear their heads and reconnect with home. Natalie wants us to rethink what's truly important in our lives and how we can honor those things in the way we work. She shares a thought-provoking message that has the power to change lives.To find out more about Natalie Nagele and her work, simply visit wildbit.comYou can find Natalie on Twitter as @natalienagele See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/the-unmistakable-creative-podcast.

Natalie Nagele is the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, a successful software company that started in the year 2000. Natalie has a unique outlook on the way we work and she likes to do things differently. At Wildbit, they work a 32 hour work week over 4 days. Then they take 3 days to clear their heads and reconnect with home. Natalie wants us to rethink what's truly important in our lives and how we can honor those things in the way we work. She shares a thought-provoking message that has the power to change lives.To find out more about Natalie Nagele and her work, simply visit wildbit.comYou can find Natalie on Twitter as @natalienagele See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Natalie Nagele, Co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, discusses product updates, operating with more meaning and purpose, user research, bootstrap vs VC funding, and experiments in productivity (like a 4-day work week, turning off Slack, and strategies for remote work). Wildbit Natalie on Giant Robots Ep #66 Conveyor Deep Work- Cal Newport Natalie on Twitter See open positions at thoughtbot! Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!

For more info, visit: https://blog.outbackteambuilding.com/podcast-company-retreats-bring-big-benefits-for-the-small-remote-software-company-wildbit The benefits of company retreats are well-known. Not only do retreats get employees out of the everyday monotony of office life, but they also serve as a great way to team build with your colleagues. But what about the advantages for a small group that works remotely? For Wildbit, a Philadelphia-based software company at which more than half of their 30 employees work from around the world, they are twofold. In our latest episode of Outback Talks: The Employee Engagement Podcast, we speak with Wildbit co-founder and CEO Natalie Nagele about the role that retreats play at the company, as well as the complex yet considerate thought process that goes into planning these trips.

Listen to Natalie Nagele, Co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, discuss how she views and manages the "HR" role as CEO of a small company.

To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit, go to LinkedIn.com/HACK. What if you could run a successful software company with your significant other, have you are your team of 30 people work just 32 hours per week, build houses on the side, and be a loving and caring parent? Natalie Nagele has done just that. For the past 14 years, she has been the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit. Wildbit is the parent software company of Beanstalk, Postmark, Conveyor, and Deploybot which they sold in 2017. Wildbit builds software that enables developers to get out of the weeds and focus on what they do best -- which is to design, code, and ship brilliant software. In this conversation we discuss: - Why focusing on your team is more vital than focusing on your products - How to solve really big pain points for a really small audience - Making space to enable your team to get into deep work Now, let's hack... Natalie Nagele.

As co-founder and CEO, Natalie leads the direction, culture, and team happiness for Wildbit, makers of Beanstalk, Postmark and Conveyor. With 28 team members across 5 countries (15 cities) working on multi-million dollar products for developers, she's proving that you can grow an extremely profitable business while focusing on shorter work days, an enjoyable work-from-anywhere environment, and staying small. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hablaremos sobre realidad virtual con Wildbit Studios, el equipo detrás del desarrollo de CoolpaintrVR para ps4. Destacaremos algunos puntos históricos de los videojuegos relacionándolos con la realidad virtual mientras hablamos del trabajo que desempeña Wildbit Studios. SÍGUENOS @galaxiaOculta Alejandro Arroyo @AlexArroyoDuque Javier Larrea @jlarreagarcia Alberto Pérez Bermejo @pixeliko Fernando de Rada @Fer_Rada Música: - Trailer CoolpaintrVR - Metal Gear Solid - Introduction - Sword Art Online - Swordland - The Evil Within - Clair De Lune (Claude Debussy) . .

Hablaremos sobre realidad virtual con Wildbit Studios, el equipo detrás del desarrollo de CoolpaintrVR para ps4. Destacaremos algunos puntos históricos de los videojuegos relacionándolos con la realidad virtual mientras hablamos del trabajo que desempeña Wildbit Studios. SÍGUENOS @galaxiaOculta Alejandro Arroyo @AlexArroyoDuque Javier Larrea @jlarreagarcia Alberto Pérez Bermejo @pixeliko Fernando de Rada @Fer_Rada Música: - Trailer CoolpaintrVR - Metal Gear Solid - Introduction - Sword Art Online - Swordland - The Evil Within - Clair De Lune (Claude Debussy) . .

Sherry interviews Natalie Nagele of Wildbit, about her origin story as a young entrepreneurial woman in the tech space. They talk about the strong qualities she learned from her immigrant parents and the dynamics of working with your spouse. Want more content like this? Check out our book. The post Episode 178: Founder Origin Stories: Natalie Nagele appeared first on ZenFounder.

Sherry interviews Natalie Nagele of Wildbit, about her origin story as a young entrepreneurial woman in the tech space. They talk about the strong qualities she learned from her immigrant parents and the dynamics of working with your spouse. Want more content like this? Check out our book.

In this interview I speak with Garrett Dimon about starting a Saas company as a solo founder and working as a developer and marketer at Wildbit. Garrett first got the idea for his product while working as a software consultant. Garrett realized that there was no standard way for small teams to track bugs. Garret realizes that the flexibility and fast pace of small development teams also made their bug tracking pretty inconsistent. He decided to solve the problem himself by creating his own bug tracker Sifter. After developing and marketing the product on his own, Garret was eventually able to sell his company and get back to development. Along the way he learned many lessons about product development and marketing. One of the main take aways is that you need to give yourself enough time to find a really important problem to solve. Garrett knew exactly what to build before he started due to his large amount of experience in the industry. Garret now works at WildBit where he func

In this episode we're joined by Natalie Nagele from Wildbit to talk about starting a business vs. consulting, employees with side hustles, how to pick conferences to attend, and yes, GDPR.

In this episode we’re joined by Natalie Nagele from Wildbit to talk about starting a business vs. consulting, employees with side hustles, how to pick conferences to attend, and yes, GDPR. Thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. Sign up today and get $20 off. Discuss this episode in the forums >>   The post #104 – I Don’t Want To Talk About GDPR The Whole Time w/ Natalie Nagele from Wildbit appeared first on Bootstrapped.fm.

What comes first, the product or the team? Without any doubt, the team is #1 priority for Natalie Nagele, co-founder and CEO of Wildbit. We discuss their strategy around multiple SaaS products, how they became a product agnostic team, and how they juggle resources while staying focused and productive. Podcast feed: subscribe to http://simplecast.fm/podcasts/1441/rss in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play Music. Show Notes Wildbit — Natalie's company Beanstalk, Postmark, Conveyor, Deploybot (acquired) — Wildbit's products JD Graffam, Serial Acquirer of SaaS Apps — an interview with JD Graffam by Garrett Dimon (his former product Sifter now also belongs to JD) Slack, Jira, Basecamp, Confluence — communication and project management tools used by Wildbit Pigeonbot — a tool that sends email from Slack Experimenting with a 4-day work week, 4-day work week update — articles on how Wildbit adopted a shorter work week Follow Natalie on Twitter: @natalienagele Today's Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Balsamiq. A Balsamiq customer recently called it “the only wireframing tool that doesn’t make me feel stupid”. Try the new web app free for 30 days at balsamiq.cloud — you’ll be productive in no time! Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here. Leave a Review Reviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here's how.

Back in the early 2000s, Wildbit was an agency building Flash websites for Philly nightclubs. Then, in 2007, they launched their first product, Beanstalk. Two years later, they quit doing consulting. Natalie Nagele takes us through their story!

Natalie Nagele guest is the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, a bootstrapped software company that builds web apps to help software developers collaborate better. The Show Notes Wildbit Beanstalk DeployBot PostMark Why we shut down a product that was $75,000/year profitable 37Signals Basecamp Getting Real book Chris on Twitter Natalie on Twitter Omer on Twitter Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to the podcast Leave a rating and review Follow Omer on Twitter Need help with your SaaS? Join SaaS Club Plus: our membership and community for new and early-stage SaaS founders. Join and get training & support. Join SaaS Club Launch: a 12-week group coaching program to help you get your SaaS from zero to your first $10K revenue. Apply for SaaS Club Accelerate: If you'd like to work directly with Omer 1:1, then request a free strategy session.

Natalie Nagele guest is the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, a bootstrapped software company that builds web apps to help software developers collaborate better.The Show NotesWildbitBeanstalkDeployBotPostMarkWhy we shut down a product that was $75,000/year profitable37SignalsBasecampGetting Real bookChris on TwitterNatalie on TwitterOmer on TwitterEnjoyed this episode?Subscribe to the podcastLeave a rating and reviewFollow Omer on TwitterNeed help with your SaaS?Join SaaS Club Plus: our membership and community for new and early-stage SaaS founders. Join and get training & support.Join SaaS Club Launch: a 12-week group coaching program to help you get your SaaS from zero to your first $10K revenue.Apply for SaaS Club Accelerate: If you'd like to work directly with Omer 1:1, then request a free strategy session.

Big companies like Ikea and Salesforce trust Postmark to deliver millions of emails every day, and today their product manager will tell us how they use smart project plans, rapid prototyping, and user testing to keep things running like clockwork. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Part 2 of Andrey and Ian's conversation with Garret Dimon.

Part 2 of Andrey and Ian’s conversation with Garret Dimon. Thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. Sign up today and get $20 off. The post #86: Garrett Dimon (Part 2) – Founder of Sifter, Currently at Wildbit appeared first on Bootstrapped.fm.

Part 1 of Andrey and Ian's conversation with Garret Dimon.

Part 1 of Andrey and Ian’s conversation with Garrett Dimon. Garrett’s Website Sifter Wildbit Starting & Sustaining Thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. Sign up today and get $20 off. Discuss this episode in the forums   The post #85: Garrett Dimon (Part 1) – Founder of Sifter, Currently at Wildbit appeared first on Bootstrapped.fm.

Today we talk with Natalie Nagel Co-founder and CEO of Wildbit. Wildbit is known for it's popular products Beanstalk, Postmark and Deploybot. We talk about productivity and how they've built it into the culture at Wildbit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Natalie and I talk about bootstrapping, learning that marketing is a necessary part of growing a software company, and the transitions that led Wildbit to be a family-focused company. We touched on the benefits and challenges of running a multi-product company, the inspiration for the various products, and the difficulties of hanging in there as a business gets older and the responsibilities grow and change. Special Guest: Natalie Nagele.

This week, I chat with Natalie Nagele, co-founder of Wildbit, makers of Beanstalk, Postmark and Deploybot. https://founderchats.com/founder-chats-natalie-nagele-wildbit-cbe18201f04d

In this of episode of Giant Robots, Ben speaks with Natalie Nagele and Ilya Sabanin about Wildbit, Beanstalk, and work flow. Wildbit Beanstalk Ilya Sabanin's Twitter Natalie Nagele's Twitter

Adam talks with Chris Nagele, Founder of Wildbit about his 11 year journey of building Wildbit and ultimately some awesome web products like Beanstalk, Postmark, and Newsberry.

Adam talks with Chris Nagele, Founder of Wildbit about his 11 year journey of building Wildbit and ultimately some awesome web products like Beanstalk, Postmark, and Newsberry.