Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

In this second conversation in this Mini Incubator Series, Dawn Delatte and Jordyn Bonds interview Ashley Sheble, the Founder of AvidFirst, about her experiences and progress in thoughtbot's Incubator Program, which aims to help founders like Ashley turn an idea into a viable product. The trio talks about Ashley's experiences and progress in the program. She emphasizes the significance of user research and interviews in shaping product strategy and understanding customer needs. She also highlights the need to narrow their focus to specific customer segments to build a product that resonates with a particular group. Additionally, they discuss the complexities of the FinTech industry and how regulatory considerations are an integral part of their product development process. As they gain more insights, they are transitioning into the prototyping and testing phase to validate their product concepts and messaging. Just catching up? Listen to Part I of the Mini Incubator Series. Follow Ashley Sheble on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on X or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: DAWN: Hello, everyone. I'm Dawn Delatte. I am a Managing Director here at thoughtbot. And I'm filling in for Lindsey. And I'm super excited to be here and chat with Ashley and Jordyn about how the incubator is going so far. If you are tuning in, you're probably familiar with thoughtbot, but just in case you're not, we are a product design and development consultancy who works with people and products across the entire product lifecycle to make your team and product a success. We are currently running our second incubator session. If you're not familiar with it, we've got a ton of content from our first session that you can check out, or you can follow along in this one. But our incubator program is an eight-week program that we take a founder through to validate or invalidate their new product ideas through lots of market research, customer discovery, interviews, and such. And then, we come out with a product plan that helps set them on the right path forward. In the last update, we introduced our incubator founder, who's with us again today. In this session, we'll be talking with Ashley and Jordyn about digging deep into research and plenty of interviews and, you know, what they're learning and what the process is like so far. So, I'm excited to get started. How about y'all kick us off with some introductions? Jordyn? JORDYN: I'm Jordyn Bonds. I'm the Director of Product Strategy at thoughtbot on Dawn's team, the Ignite team at thoughtbot. I'm a two-time startup founder myself. I've worked with a couple of other early-stage startups, so all about the zero-to-one startup journey over here. ASHLEY: And I'm Ashley Sheble. I am the Founder of AvidFirst, and I am the second incubator founder. And working with Jordyn and team and thoughtbot to really accelerate the mission of our company, which is focused on simplifying college saving and spending. DAWN: Ashley, why don't you recap a little bit for us what's happened since the last time? ASHLEY: Yeah, I'd love to. So, the past three weeks have been really just getting into the weeds on user interviews, talking with different stakeholders as it relates to the problem we're looking to solve. And what we're finding are some key themes. And so, really trying to aggregate the data, focus in on those key themes, and find out where we can really pull at some of those strings to start creating some solutions that are meaningful and specific. One of the primary trends that we're seeing is just lack of awareness around some of the resources and tools available to people as it relates to saving for college; 529s, for example, are a really great tool. And most people, 70%, aren't aware of them. And so, if you've never heard of them, you're in great company. So, just really looking at high-level trends, getting more specific on even more granular trends, and trying to pull everything together and create a product that's meaningful. And again, it circles back to our overarching mission of simplifying college saving and spending. DAWN: Nice. Is there something that has come up either in the process or, you know, from interviews that has been your big sort of aha or eureka moment? ASHLEY: I feel like there's an aha moment pretty much every day. And sometimes the aha moments are like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. We're really on to something. And then, sometimes the aha moments are like, wow, we're really off course, and we have no idea what this means and what do we do with it. And so, it's kind of this up-and-down experience, like we talked about last time we chatted. But it is exciting at the same time because no matter what aha moment, all of it means something. And it helps us make forward progress in the right direction versus making forward progress and then hitting a roadblock and realizing, okay, that's as far as we can go, and now we have to start all over. The team has been really good about helping me make sense of some of these findings that we are uncovering and piecing together some solutions that really address some of these aha moments, both shocking and positive. DAWN: It's really great to hear you articulate that from a founder perspective and someone who, you know, isn't doing this sort of day-to-day product and development thing because, you know, that's a really common experience for us is hearing what's going well and what's not going well and sort of pivoting. But yeah, it's good to hear that directly from you. So, y'all have been doing a ton of research and a ton of talking to people. Jordyn, tell us how you feel about user research. I know that term, in particular, has some interesting [chuckles] connotations, but dig into that. JORDYN: Yeah. Well, we kind of talked about this a little bit this week, and I think research is really broad and vague. And so, just talking about research often doesn't feel super sort of actionable to people. User research is really about once you have a product and market and you have users, how they're using your product or not using it, right? So that's user research. But I find that people often talk about this sort of higher-level strategic research that we're engaged in right now using the same term. And it leads people astray because they think that you need a prototype or you need an app to be able to do user research, which you do. But that's not really the kind of research that we're engaged in yet. Right now, we're doing customer discovery. And that involves researching and interviewing a ton of different personas, some of whom might end up being our customers, some of whom are interested stakeholders or partners. It's a really wide-ranging kind of cast of characters. And the truth is, we don't know who these people are to us yet, right? So, it's really just sort of interviewing [laughs]. It's a hard thing to kind of characterize. I would love to hear, Ashley, like, how you're finding it. But, like, from where I sit, it really isn't about walking people through an interface yet. It's way more just asking folks about their life and their work and how they're doing things now, I think, is a really critical component. Like what you're trying to do with these interviews is find out what are the true pain points that people have, not what they think you want to hear, but what the pain points are that they already have and that they are already trying to solve in certain ways and how they're solving them. And it requires a lot of just high-level questions and then closing your mouth and listening. But it's a very different thing, I think, than user research. But often, in product land, we kind of just use user research as this blanket term, but it really is a bunch of different kinds of things. ASHLEY: Yeah, I would add to what Jordyn is saying, and the use of research, it's really interesting to just hear people's experience and their own background. And we always try to preface, like, there is no right or wrong answer. We just want to hear about the way you're thinking about something or the way you're currently doing something, not how you hypothetically would do something. Because, I don't know, think about your own life, and you think about the way you would do something. It's probably about ten times better than the way you actually do something. When I get asked like, "Well, how many times a day do you set time to just decompress?" In my mind, I'm like, "Oh, probably, like, five times a day." When in reality, that's never. It's a never. So, if somebody were, like, you know, asking me for user research, you know, "Would you use this thing to decompress?" I'd be like, "Sure." But I wouldn't. I would not use it because I just don't make the time for something like that. So, the point is, is not asking people hypothetically how they would do something but how they're actually doing something now and then using that insight to build around. And then, beyond just that customer journey, the stakeholder journey. And when you think about building a solution, there are more people involved than just the end user. There are so many different parties that play into a certain product, especially as you think about FinTech or you think about a large segment like the education segment. There are a lot of players, and you have to look at the way each player is looking at a problem and understand how those all tie together. And sometimes that's super obvious, and sometimes it's not obvious at all. And so, thankfully, having a team that has a different lens in the way we're interpreting data allows us to get to a solution faster. DAWN: Yeah, I like that. Again, it's great to hear you articulating that. And I think we have this old article about not using terms like user research. I think it focuses a little bit more on user testing because that implies the idea of testing a user. But we're not testing people; we're testing our concepts. I think that we use the word usability test as a way to sort of delineate a little bit better. Here's the purpose of this test. We're actually testing the product versus, you know, having a conversation. When you throw in words like interview or even customer, customer could be presumptive in some ways. But it's difficult to sort of tell people what you're doing when you're like, I'm just having a lot of conversations this week [laughs], just meeting, meeting a lot of people and listening. Meeting and listening, I guess, is the activity [laughs]. So, why is that stuff important? And can there be too much of it? What is this process like, and why are y'all doing it? JORDYN: It's so funny to have internalized the sort of value of doing this kind of work so thoroughly that sometimes I even have...I'm like, how else do you know what's going on out there? I mean, that's ultimately the purpose of it is that you really don't know how people are living and working until you ask them or, even better, watch them live and work if you can. And what's really critical is that that changes over time. We're all constantly changing our behavior in response to new trends, new tools we might adopt, right? And the research at this level, this high level of, like, how are you living and working, really can never end for that reason, right? Like, the classic example in sort of software product land is when Netflix really started to invest in online streaming and gradually sunset its DVD-by-mail service. And they did it right at the peak of that service. And so, people were like, this is really wild. Why are they doing this? This is so successful. Why would they, like, stop doing this thing that's really successful? But they had been talking to their customers, their end users. They had been, as you said, Dawn, more than talking to them, listening to them. And they were looking at the trends. And they were like, there's no future in this. There's a future in online streaming, and we need to get ahead of that future. And we need to dominate that opportunity because we're in a position to do so. And it takes a lot of listening, synthesizing, and then risk-taking. But it doesn't feel like a risk when you've been listening to your customers, I guess, is, like, why this research is so important. When you know something about the market because there is no daylight between you and how folks are living and what they're doing out there, it doesn't feel very risky. You have, like, complete certainty about what's happening out there because you know. Because you're talking to people. You have relationships with them. It's not merely about some...and when we say research, I don't want it to sound, like, sort of cold and, like, purely numbers-driven. This is, like, we're having warm, engaging, you know, human conversations with human beings, like, all day, every day. But because of that, we have a really good sense of what's going on out there. And the decisions we make, they feel inevitable or something. You start to see an opportunity out there that just feels obvious. And it's a funny thing to watch that kind of once everybody on the team is aligned around that reality that we're hearing and the sort of inevitability of, like, what you need. You start to get kind of panicked because you're like, who else is seeing this? This is so obvious to us. And you start to kind of be like, who else is it obvious to? But, you know, sadly, I don't know what the right word is here, but, like, it's hard work. This work of listening it is not very scalable work. You can do some things to operationalize it for sure, but it takes time to engage with humans, to synthesize what you've heard, to share it with your team, to stay on the same page about it. It's not super scalable work, straight up. But it is the most valuable work that you could possibly be doing. So, it's okay that it's not scalable. But yeah, you start to identify these real market insights. And then you kind of have this minute of, like, who else is seeing this? Because this looks really clear to us, right? [laughs] ASHLEY: And it's interesting because the last time we chatted here a couple of weeks ago, Lindsey was like, "I'm sure you'll be in a different spot next week. And, you know, you'll be thinking about something different than you are right now." And, in my head, I was like, probably not. I've done a lot of research. It'll probably be the same. And she was right. It's very different from where we were a couple of weeks ago, and the way we're thinking about taking a certain path and circling back to having these conversations that are so critical and really shape the way you're thinking about problems from so many different directions. And so, I thought that was funny that she was right. DAWN: Lindsey is always right. JORDYN: Another ingredient here that I think is really important that becomes clear when you start doing this work but is a hard thing to describe...and I would kind of love to hear how Ashley has been thinking about this. But if you're not hearing a pattern, if you're out there doing the interviewing and it's just a million different descriptions of reality, that is the surest sign that you are not focused on a small enough addressable group of people. You haven't narrowed into a group of people who are the same. And that's really the only way to build a product is to find a group of people who are the same. Make something for them that they love, and then think about where you can go from there. You can't please all of the people all of the time, but you can't please all the people at once, right? You're not going to be able to build a product that does that. And I would say, like, even later, you're not, you know, there's like...it just...it totally dilutes your focus. So, if you are out there doing a bunch of interviewing, a bunch of research, and you're just hearing a bunch of different voices, and it sounds like there's no signal there, it's just that you haven't sufficiently narrowed. So, one of the things we've been doing over the last couple of weeks is really trying to figure out who exactly has the pain point the most that is addressable, in the sense that it's a group of people who are similar, similar enough that we can build a product for them, that is going to work for all of them, and we can speak about it in a way that resonates for them? And it feels kind of impossible. And it also kind of feels, I don't know, a little bit like cheating. Like, it feels opposite of how I think founders think about making products. It's like, you want to build a thing that appeals to a lot of people. That's the drive, and that is absolutely the correct long-term drive, right? And it feels a little bit about sort of throw the game by choosing the people. It feels a little bit like you're like, well, of course, we can make something for a group of people if we've already pre-selected who they are, but it's like, yeah, exactly, that's a lot easier [laughs]. So, anyway, I didn't want to move on without sort of mentioning that that focus on a persona is really, really critical. Yes, we're doing a ton of research, or we're talking to a ton of different people. But in each of those categories, we're really trying to figure out who are addressable niches to start? ASHLEY: Yeah, and I think just getting as specific as possible, like Jordyn has said, has been...in my mind, I was thinking, we don't want to do that because then that really limits the amount of people we can help or the amount of people who could really benefit from a solution. But the good news is that once you solve a problem for a group of people, you can expand upon that and use the learnings from that solution and build something that can help more and more people. Because initially, I was like, "No, we don't want to do that. That's crazy." And she was right. DAWN: Jordyn is another one of those people that's always right [laughs]. Mostly right. Okay, so you're using what you're finding and hearing in these conversations to help guide, you know, your focus, but especially the space that y'all are operating in, FinTech, in particular, is a very complex space. And so, there's all sorts of other dynamics that have to come into your strategy and direction for the product. So, how are y'all navigating which dynamics to focus on outside of what you're discovering in these conversations, you know, whether that be infrastructure, regulatory things, like, you know, all of those complexities? ASHLEY: Yeah, I would say, right now, we're focusing on infrastructure. And that will inform the regulatory piece because there are so many nuances in the space as it relates to what type of product you're building for whom and where. And so, once that is more crystallized, the regulatory pieces can be plugged in. And you're right; it's super complex. And we want to make sure that we're being extremely compliant in every possible way. And so, that is highest priority. But I think, too, to try to boil the ocean with all the different nuances when maybe we're not as crystal clear on the infrastructure would be, I don't know, waste of time is the wrong phrase, but I think it would not be the most efficient use of time. I think getting that infrastructure and then nailing down the regulatory piece around the infrastructure is the best path that we're thinking. JORDYN: Yeah, I would just add here that this space is really complex. And the image that's kind of emerged most recently is of a giant puzzle we're putting together. There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle. It's not a thousand-piece puzzle, but it feels close [laughs]. But where we're starting out is where you start with any puzzle, which is the corner pieces. Like, what are the cornerstones of what we're doing? And figuring out what those are, always centered in what the value proposition is to customers, right? We need to know what their incentives are, what they need and want. That's the cornerstone. And then the feasibility and the infrastructure and, you know, regulatory are the blanks we fill in sort of from there. But without demand, none of that stuff would matter, right? It's a really hard thing because you start to think about...and we talk about this stuff all the time; I want to call out. It's not, like, we're strictly disciplined about we're not talking about that right now. Like, it comes up all the time. And we're sharing what we're learning and what we're seeing out there. We're looking at other products that have, you know, come onto the market recently, like, long-time players in the FinTech space. We're looking at all of that stuff, what they've done, what they've built, and how. We're thinking and talking about those things, but those decisions are not as important as making sure that we're as close to the customer as we can. That's the cornerstone pieces. Our customers and our partners, what are their motivations? What do they need? And then, once we have those corner pieces, then we fill in the puzzle. It's a big, complex puzzle, but you always have to start with something of value. If you're not bringing something of value to those folks, none of this other stuff really matters. DAWN: This is making me wonder if there are people out there who start their puzzles in the middle [laughs]. JORDYN: Guilty as charged [laughs]. DAWN: I meant more [inaudible 18:57]. I didn't mean metaphorically. We know that happens [laughter], unfortunately. JORDYN: Yes, no, I have absolutely been that person personally, you know, and it can be really distracting. The feasibility puzzle is very interesting, and it feels inevitable. Like, you're going to have to solve those problems. The problem is that you don't know which of them is going to matter right now. So, solving those problems now, like Ashley said, it's sort of a waste of time. You might end up solving them eventually, right? But you need to figure out the strategic path forward. And so, yeah, it's tough. I have an engineering background. I love solving complex puzzles. It's very tempting to go do that right now, and it feels much more tangible. Like, okay, we can go read the regulations. We can, like, look at what the infrastructure can do right now. Let's go solve that problem. But it would be just a colossal waste of time to go off in that direction right now. And we don't yet know fully what the value proposition is for whom. Like, that is the gem at the heart of this. I want to acknowledge that there are software efforts out there where the core value really is in a technical innovation. But I would still argue that the timing of bringing that technical innovation to market has as much to do with the market. We can see this over and over again with tons of technologies that were developed years or decades ago, but the market was not at a place where it needed that thing yet. And I really say needed; wanted is a different thing, right? You need to get to a place where the need is red hot. So, it's tough. The puzzle is fascinating. It's very distracting. We end up talking about it a lot, but we have to, like, bring ourselves back to the stakeholders. DAWN: To wrap things up, now that y'all have sort of deepened your understanding of things, what can you expect from the process going forward? What should we expect to sort of hear about next time we meet? JORDYN: We're actually already edging into this, and it's fun to watch how this process happens. When you start to hear something repeatable, you inevitably move into prototyping because you start to have a real shared understanding of what it is you need to put in front of people. We're just now, I would say, like, today, getting to the place where we're confident that we need to be testing messaging in particular. We've heard enough things that we need to start testing. Like, are we talking about the problems in the way that, you know, customers and our partners are talking about them? And we need to start trying that language out and then seeing how it resonates. That's the first piece of testing. We're already starting to conceive of workflows, like a prototype concept. It's so fascinating how, again, it's just always is a consequence of alignment and insight. You don't have to plan it. It emerges. As soon as you've started to put the pieces together a little bit, it's just very natural that, as a group, you start talking about how you might address this problem. You can tell when we've gotten there because we are aligned. In the same way that you're hearing the same thing from the customer, you start to see the same solution because it's clear what is needed. So, we're really moving into that. I want to make it clear, like, we don't stop interviewing. We don't stop talking to folks. But the sort of how specific we are with what we're asking and what we're showing people changes a little bit. That's really just starting to happen now. And I'm sure we'll have a lot more to say about that next time [laughs]. ASHLEY: Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. I'll say the value of the team is incredible. I can't stress that enough. Just this morning, I came to our morning sync and was like, "Listen, I learned this thing. I think it's over. We're done." And Jordyn and team were like, "No, this is actually a really great thing." And, you know, I'm just like, they're going to give up. They're going to shut it down. They're going to say, "No, we don't want to work with you." And they're like, "This is great news." And so, just the diversity of perspective is so different, and it's really great to have that. Because sometimes you can get focused on something in such a linear way that you're like, there's no way out of this thing. And you kind of miss the forest for the trees, so... JORDYN: I'm glad you brought that moment up. I was hoping we would talk about it during this live session because it was one of those moments where you were like, "I have some really bad news. I learned something. This is very sad." And you kind of talked about it a minute. I had a sort of unbridled glee [laughs]. I was like, oh, awesome, because we knew enough to know there was, like, we were missing something. There are a bunch of solutions in the market that look very different than what we were considering. And we were like, why? There's got to be a good reason. These people are not dumb. The market they're seeing is not different from the market we're seeing. So, like, why have they made a different call? And this piece of information, you know, Ashley showed up and was like, "Hey, I learned something, here it is." And I was like, "That's the piece of information. Great." So, now we actually can make a plan. We are still sort of convinced of the value that we were driving toward. And now we just have an added understanding of what it will take to get there. Good. Now we know what it'll take. It's really terrible to have an idea of the value prop that you want to pursue and not have any idea of how would it get there. But now we actually really did feel like a piece of a puzzle falling into place. And it was hilarious because Ashely was, like, very grim, and then I was like, "Oh," I was like, "Great." [laughs] ASHLEY: I was like -- JORDYN: Ashley was like, "Wait, what?" [laughs] It was very funny. ASHLEY: Yeah, it was great. I was like, I hope the rest of my day is this good, so... [laughter] DAWN: Well, I'm sorry to say, Ashley, but you can't get rid of us that easily [laughter]. Thank you both for chatting with me today. If y'all want to stay updated, you can follow along on LinkedIn or YouTube. We do these live streams every two weeks. We also share incubator news and updates on our blog, so thoughtbot.com/blog. You can always go to the incubator site to understand a little bit more about the program. That's thoughtbot.com/incubator. Send us your questions if you have them. And you can always attend the lives, comment on the threads, send us an email. We love to hear from y'all. Thank you for tuning in AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.Special Guests: Ashley Sheble, Dawn Delatte, and Jordyn Bonds.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Lindsey Christensen is back as the Marketing Lead at thoughtbot! She's joined by guests Jordyn Bonds, the Director of Product Strategy at thoughtbot, and Ashley Sheble, a founder currently participating in thoughtbot's eight-week startup incubator, to discuss the multifaceted journey of entrepreneurship. thoughtbot's Incubator Program aims to help founders like Ashley turn an idea into a viable product. They're currently at the stage of validating assumptions about the problem space and target market. Jordyn introduces a new concept: a project roadmap visualization that includes an "emotions workstream." This is designed to help founders anticipate and navigate the emotional rollercoaster often associated with the early stages of startup development. Ashley finds the roadmap valuable, especially as it challenges her to examine her ideas from multiple perspectives. She appreciates the one-on-one support from the Incubator team, which complements her own expertise. She also speaks to the liberating aspect of acknowledging emotions in the startup journey, which is especially pertinent for female founders who often face additional challenges like lack of funding. Jordyn emphasizes the importance of early and continuous customer engagement for product validation and innovation. She encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to talk to potential customers as soon as possible to iterate and learn from these interactions. Jordan and Ashley stress that embracing the logical and emotional aspects of entrepreneurship leads to more effective and grounded decision-making. Follow Ashley Sheble on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on X or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: LINDSEY: All right, we are live. So, thank you for joining us today. So, we've got a new founder that's going through thoughtbot's startup incubator. And we're going to be checking in with her as she goes through the program, learning what she learns, learning about the process. Quick reminder: thoughtbot is a development and design company. We help founders and existing companies create, launch, and improve amazing products and their teams. And one way we do that is through our startup incubator. The incubator is an eight-week program. And our second session just kicked off, which we're going to be talking about a whole lot today. So, I'm excited to introduce you to the founder that's going through that process, as well as our fearless leader of the incubator program, Jordyn, I myself, Lindsey Christensen. I'm the Marketing Lead here at thoughtbot. I'll be asking lots of questions. But if you also have questions, please enter them in the chat, and we'll get to those as well. Before we get to Ashley, I'm going to start off with Jordyn. For those who may not be familiar with you, can you tell us who you are and what you're doing? JORDYN: I am Jordyn Bonds. And I am the Director of Product Strategy on thoughtbot's, Ignite team, which is the team that is kind of experimenting with this incubator, shall we say. And I am a two-time startup founder myself. I've worked at other early-stage startups as initial head of product. Long ago, I spent ten years as a software engineer. So, that's my distant background. And I live in Boston. LINDSEY: Oh, we got our first comment. Someone says, "Thanks for sharing your experience." Thank you. Welcome. Love that. Keep the comments and questions coming. Okay. And now for our latest guest of honor. Ashley, can you introduce yourself to the audience? A little bit about you and maybe even about your journey to bring you here today. ASHLEY: Yeah, absolutely. So, hi, everybody. My name is Ashley Sheble. I'm currently based in Houston, Texas. I have about 15 years of experience in sales and operations roles. And I have two kids. I've got one who started third grade yesterday and one who started her senior year of high school yesterday, which is crazy. Time really flies by. But the reason why that's relevant for this conversation is because I have attended so many college tours over the past few years and started learning about just how expensive higher education has become. I had no idea that a public four-year in-state school could cost $100,000 plus for just four years. And then, you start looking at out-of-state and private schools, and that number doubles, which is crazy to me. So, after I got through that initial sticker shock, I was like, how is this possible? Like, now I understand why the student debt crisis is happening. And became really passionate about learning more about it and trying to figure out ways that I could help. Because obviously, the solutions and tools we have today to help people prepare for the education they or their children or family members need or want just aren't working. So, became really excited about that and working with thoughtbot as their second founder to explore this further. LINDSEY: Amazing. So, Ashley, fighting the good fight. Student debt, I know, a topic near and dear to many people who are dealing with this. You mentioned your kid's journey to college is what started the idea. Let's dig into that a little bit more. How are you approaching the challenge, the problems that you see? Or maybe, like, how long it's been that you've been kind of playing around with this idea. ASHLEY: Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm in a graduate school program and have used this as an opportunity to really explore different ways to attack problems. I became really interested in innovation and entrepreneurship at grad school and began just doing research, learning about ways to solve really big, complex problems, and found that technology could really be an interesting way to approach the student debt problem differently than what's been done before. It's an industry that has largely lacked innovation, and have been working with professors and experts just to think about ways to apply technology to this really complicated problem to provide a more simple solution for people who just want to pay for school. LINDSEY: And this is your first time being a founder. Is that right? ASHLEY: It is. So, thank goodness for thoughtbot being my partner here because I'm not a technical person, meaning I don't develop software. I'm not a software designer, and knew that that was going to be a critical piece of developing a solution. And so, I'm grateful for the opportunity to work with Jordyn and her team. LINDSEY: Have you, like, always thought you would, at some point, start your own thing? You know, have you always been entrepreneurial? ASHLEY: Yeah, I think so. I can tell you my first business started in third grade. I launched my babysitting venture and marketed my services all over the neighborhood and church, and wherever would allow me to hang up a flyer, and had a pretty steady book of business, if you will. And in hindsight, I really cannot believe that parents allowed a 10-year-old to babysit their kids. You know, maybe in the '90s there were fewer questions–definitely less legal restrictions around age. LINDSEY: The '90s were wild. ASHLEY: The '90s were wild, yeah. Maybe I just seemed mature and responsible. I don't know. I don't know. LINDSEY: Amazing. All right. Jordyn, so Ashley submitted for the thoughtbot incubator. What stood out to you in that application? And why did she seem like, you know, the right fit to go through the program? JORDYN: Yeah, Ashley's application was just totally...it had that combination of prepared, done her homework, done the work to present the story well, but also clearly had a passion and a connection to the problem space. It wasn't just, like, a purely academic exercise for her, and just came prepared–really gave thoughtful answers in the application. There's a number of interviews that happened during the application process. She showed up with bells on and asked really good questions, which is something we always look for from founders as well. And she just knocked it out of the park. ASHLEY: Thank you. LINDSEY: And why was maybe where she is in her business or product journey a good fit for the incubator? JORDYN: Great question. So, we sit at a really special moment, which is usually founders are coming to us, well, hopefully, founders are coming to us pre-product. So, they have not built a thing yet. They're basically at that moment where they've identified an opportunity. They've given it lots of thought, done a ton of research, maybe started talking to people about it. But they're not sure how to take an idea, an opportunity, and what happens between that moment and innovation, actually a plan for a product, a strategic plan for product, and the ability to execute on that. There's a big gap there in understanding, especially for first-time founders. It certainly was a gap for me as a [laughs] first-time founder. That's the ideal candidate for us. That said, we do have folks coming to the incubator who are interested in executing, like, a strategic pivot. Maybe they've found that the first thing they did was just, like, a market flop, and they basically want to do the programming. They're sort of starting over. Maybe they have a little bit...they're basically like, "Hey, we disqualified one idea. [laughs] We would like to come up with some other options." Those folks are also a good fit. And that is exactly the moment that Ashley is at. She's done a lot of great research so far–has a really interesting idea, interesting take on an interesting problem, but could really benefit from the programming of turning that into technical innovation. LINDSEY: Which leads me back to you, Ashley. Can you tell us a little bit about your pre-thoughtbot research, like, both, like, how you approached it and maybe even some things that you learned that have helped you with your early direction? ASHLEY: Yeah, absolutely. So, initially, just did a lot of industry research, just general population research, and then became a little bit more focused on solving problems for families in the U.S. right now. So, narrowing down that market scope. And then, our focus right now is drilling into: how can we serve parents, students at each phase of their journey as parents or students, making sure that we are adding value as we're creating a service to help attack saving for college in a really effective way that is easy to do and is also going to help somebody be financially prepared to pay for a really expensive price tag without having to rely on student loans? And so, we're doing a lot of focused research right now, building on what I did in grad school with professors and mentors and experts there, but being more focused and intentional around understanding each phase of the customer journey. So, whether you're a new parent, maybe a parent of kids that are a little older, or a parent of kids that are about to go to college or in college, how are we providing value at each stage of that journey? And so, we're really focusing in with customer interviews, understanding the pain points, and understanding what value is lacking as we think about building something that people want and like to use. LINDSEY: In that early research, is there anything you learned or, like, positive signals you got as you were talking to people where it gave you a motivation to keep going, like, there is a good idea here to follow? ASHLEY: Yeah, there have been some ideas that we're finding are just absolutely terrible, and they're just not going to work, which is good to know now before we spend a lot of time chasing something that's not going to be helpful. And also really finding some interesting patterns among conversations. We're digging in a little more where, initially, we thought, oh, nobody cares about that, or, oh, that's not a big deal. That's not a pain point, but actually, it is. So, Jordyn, with her experience as a founder in prior experiences she's been able to use what she learned that maybe went well or didn't go as well as she had hoped and apply that learning to what we're doing together on this particular project. And so, that's super valuable, helps me avoid some rookie mistakes, and definitely prevents us from wasting a lot of time and resources that probably would have been wasted otherwise. LINDSEY: Jordyn, can you tell me a little bit more about the kickoff, where we are? Because this is early, early days, where, you know, maybe a week in. You know, what does that initial kickoff with the founder look like? What are you doing? JORDYN: Yeah. So, the first few days are really spent...we as a team on the thoughtbot side need to get to the place where we know everything the founder knows to date. So, it's very intense, a lot of, like, resource sharing, research sharing, conversations, a lot of elliptical conversations where Ashley will tell us something, we'll all go off and do some digging and some research, and come back and be like, ask her some questions, where she's like, [laughs] "If you recall, I said that to you," you know. But, basically, it's one of those sort of processes where you don't know what you don't know. You start to understand. You come back, you ask questions, you dig. And the process is really about figuring out: where are the holes? So, Ashley has done a ton of really great work. She is but one person who has had divided attention. So, there are some places where we have some assumptions, all of us as individuals, and Ashley, specifically as a founder, has some assumptions about this problem space that we haven't validated yet. We haven't validated or invalidated. That's really what we're looking for. It's like, is this hunch correct, incorrect? How do we know? So, we're really in those first few days are listening for those assumptions, for those untested assumptions. There's a ton of stuff in there where she's just like, I know the answer to this already. Here's what I know, and here's how I know it. Great, cool, validated, got it. But there's this other set of things that really then becomes the focus of the subsequent weeks of work. And often, we find what those assumptions center around are early adopter market characteristics. There's the big vision, right? Which we don't doubt. Basically like, we do not disagree that paying for college is a huge problem. The student debt crisis is huge. There's a million ways to go about addressing that problem. How are we going to, from where we are right now, lay a pathway where we build value upon value? We find something valuable to give the market where it is right now, where we are right now, and then we build from that. And so, you know, there's assumptions about who needs this, who wants this, who's struggling to pay for college, who's having no problem at all paying for college. But what we're trying to do is sort of zoom in on that group of folks, very tiny, specific group of folks who are having this problem the most acutely in a way that we are best situated to address. That's the magic we're trying to do. So, it's really those early days are about listening to what Ashley knows, going out into the market, doing some research, follow-up research, but then really trying to come up with an early adopter hypothesis. And then immediately, as quickly as possible, interviewing as many of those people as we can so that we can validate or invalidate the assumptions we have about them. So, that's really the phase that we just started. Like, today and yesterday, we just started interviewing. We have our first sort of hypothesis about...Ashley mentioned the journey of, like, beginning of child's life. Maybe, as a parent, I have aspirations for this child to go to college. Where do I start saving? You know, that end of the journey all the way to I am actively paying for a college education right now. Where in that journey are the pain points? And can we focus specifically on a particular group of people at a particular moment in that journey in order to provide maximum value right now and then expand from there? So, we're doing a bunch of interviewing. I had a customer persona interview right before coming to this. You immediately start learning. There's just no substitute for it. The thing I tell founders constantly and I just sound like an absolute broken record, but you got to talk to people. You got to start talking to them now. You got to keep talking to them. You got to think hard and creatively about what you're hearing and who they are. And that's really the work that we're doing together right now. LINDSEY: Exciting. [crosstalk 15:04] Ashley, I was going to say how is this kickoff then for you? ASHLEY: Really good. One thing Lindsey and team have brought to the table, especially thinking about me working as a solo founder, is just around the fact that everybody has different perspectives. And we all have different expertise and different experiences that we're bringing to the table. So, the way that I've been thinking about a problem could be 180 from the way Jordyn's thinking about it or some other folks on our team. And it's really interesting to have to really test a lot of these assumptions. I'm like, oh yeah, everybody thinks this way. Oh yeah, everybody does this. And it turns out I'm the only one, or maybe only a couple of us in the group are aligning with that perspective. And so, it has been so valuable as a solo founder to have a team of people researching the same problem from a different perspective. So, I just wanted to add that. LINDSEY: No, that's a great one. And that is sometimes challenging, I think, for the founders. I don't know if you're finding this when you're just getting started. But as you go through the process, things that you have maybe held to be true or facts you end up finding out are assumptions, or maybe assumptions that are false. Which also reminds me of Jordyn: you were telling me something very interesting that you're doing during this incubator, which is founder emotions mapping. JORDYN: [laughs] Yeah. LINDSEY: What is this? JORDYN: Yeah, we've got this project roadmap visualization. It's a Gantt chart. Y'all, it is a Gantt chart. And it basically just lays out, broadly speaking, what we're going to do together on what timeline. It helps us, together, visualize where we're going, where we are, and what we need to do in between so that we don't lose sight of that. And this time, it was the first time that we added...we had this sort of insight that we should add an emotions workstream [laughs] because so much of the early stage is just an emotional rollercoaster because you are learning so much so fast. And if you're lucky and you immediately go into innovation, delivery, learning more, scaling, right? It's this very fast loop. And it's not just that you're learning stuff about your market really quickly. You're learning stuff about yourself and about the work. The learning curve is just really steep. And we had realized that you end up going through this cycle of emotions that's pretty predictable [chuckles], and that's great, right? We want founders to know that their emotions...not only are their emotions, like, totally valid, we wanted to welcome them in a little bit more than we have in the past. So, we added this little emotions work stream that was basically just like, hey, first week, first few days of kickoff, you're going to feel like a million bucks. You're like, yes, I know some stuff. I finally got a team working on this with me. To the moon, right? Like, you got this, like, very optimistic, exuberant kind [laughs] of attitude. Immediately, you start hearing perspectives you hadn't heard before in your problem space. You start uncovering contrary evidence. We start talking to people. Immediately, you start to learn things that you didn't know you didn't know, right? So, up until this moment, you've just had some blinders on, and you're like, the path is clear, and it is amazing. I'm just going to motor my way to success. And our process is about really taking those blinders off and figuring out what is actually around me on this road? Are there words of attackers coming at me from the sides? Like, I need to know those things, right? But what happens is you start to know what you don't know. And so, there's this dip. You start off very optimistic, and then you have a week or two of declining mood where you're mortified. You learn that you had some assumptions that are not valid. There's some other risks and things lying out there in the market. It's truly mortifying. Maybe you learn about a competitor you didn't know about because you just weren't searching the right words, or whatever it is, right? That moment a lot of founders are just like, the moment I discovered my first real competitor, and I had, like, a panic attack, right? That happened to me. But then you start to make a plan around those things, okay, cool. Like, maybe we need to differentiate ourselves. Maybe there is some more information we need to figure out about how to go after this, et cetera. And you start that slow climb of dealing with the new information that you have, right? And filling in those gaps [inaudible 19:22]. Then you start to climb out of the hole, right? You're like, okay, we got a plan. I got a team. We're doing the work. Awesome. You learn new, really exciting things. And then you end up back on that, like, high where you're like, this is so awesome. We have the best idea. And now we know everything there is to know. But no, no, you've just reached a new plateau [laughs]. And there are more things to be learned and more things...So, it's this really predictable cycle, and that's fine. That's good. You wouldn't be here if you didn't care about the problem space, right? If you weren't passionate about it. And so, we really wanted to actually call that out this time and make space for it and put it on the map. Hey, we might be feeling this way right now, just heads up. That's okay. We're going to be feeling really great in a week. And then, the week after that, we're going to be feeling [laughs] like garbage again. It's okay. Because knowing that really makes you feel. And it took me a long time as a first-time founder to realize that, like, my moment-to-moment emotional experience is...I need to make space for it. It is what it is. But it is not the story of my business. And it's a thing you just kind of have to learn after going through a bunch of those cycles. But, like, part of what we're trying to do with the incubator is help founders not fall in those potholes, not make the rookie mistakes, as Ashley put it. And one of those rookie mistakes is thinking that the first time you identify a direct competitor, everything that you've been working toward for the last year is useless, and you should quit, and everyone thinks you're a fool, and, like, whatever crazy narrative you [laughs] have going on in your mind [laughs]. We're kind of here to be like, it's okay. This is to be expected: onward and upward. The hard work continues. So yeah, it's very fun. At some point, we will publish a little version of this visualization with our little cycle of feelings on the bottom. But it reminds us to make space for them in the conversation when we are doing those check-ins. Like, here we are on this roadmap, and here's where our feelings may or may not be. ASHLEY: Her recap for day one is spot on. I left that conversation; I walked out of my office and told my husband, I said, "Listen, we're going to solve the student debt crisis. We're going to." And he was like, "Really? Okay." And I was like, "Yeah, we are." And then, like, two days later, I was like, "No, we are not going to be effective at this." And then, the next day, I was like, "No, I fixed it. We fixed it. It's fine." So, being able to reference that chart is really helpful and validating for me as a person to be like: I should be feeling like this; yes, I do. Perfect, you know, I'm right on track. And I think, too, as a founder, and especially as a female founder, you are expected to just keep it together. Maybe that's a self-imposed belief. But when you think about the fact that female CEOs only have about 2% of the venture capital funding, it's like, you know, why would I ever raise a red flag for myself by letting my emotions be part of the conversation or letting my emotions even have a place in the business I'm building? And so, for her to say, "Listen, no, that's a really important part of this journey; we need to talk about it and make space for it," is really liberating. And I think, too, just when you think about what has happened with the pandemic and all the awareness around mental health and behavioral health, and making sure that we're making time for managing emotions has been more important than ever. We see the research that if you don't manage those emotions, they're going to manage you. So, find a productive way to do it. Work with your team and find support in a way that works for you or a productive way to just kind of get some stress out without having to just internalize everything because that never works out. So, it's been really great to have her be able to bring that as part of our conversation and our project plan and make sure that it's a relevant piece. LINDSEY: Very well said. And I'm so glad you did bring up that point about being women founders, and, you know, having more of a, you know, an uphill battle and feeling that emotions are a sign of weakness or a sign that you don't know what you're doing. We have more impostor syndrome because of these outside factors like lack of funding, you know, lack of support. So, it's really great for you to share that and hopefully inspire others. In fact, we got a comment: "Ashley, your drive and ambition to solve a huge issue in our country is so inspiring." Thank you -- ASHLEY: Oh, thank you. LINDSEY: For adding that comment, folks who are following along. So, it sounds like, for you, the emotion mapping is a positive experience, where it's helping you kind of ground yourself as, even these early days, some assumptions are being challenged, or you're seeing some challenges in the business idea. ASHLEY: Oh yeah, absolutely. Circling back to the thoughtbot team, couldn't do this without them in a really tactical and effective way. Because they have the experience and the skills that I don't have, and us working together on this same problem has been incredible. LINDSEY: How did you come to get connected with the incubator and thoughtbot and submitting that application? ASHLEY: Yeah. So, I'm part of the Harvard Innovation Lab, which is the innovation program at Harvard for all the students. And somebody was talking about this incubator program, and there are a lot of incubator programs out there. And so, initially, I thought, oh okay, well, this will be just, like, all the others and probably not what I'm looking for. But I did some research and looked at the website and read more about the program and thought, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I've been looking for and didn't know existed because it is that one-on-one support, and most incubator or accelerator programs you're one of many companies going through the process. And so, the feedback I have from others who have gone through similar paths is it's great, and it's nice to have a cohort. But at the same time, you're largely figuring things out for yourself, which I was doing anyway. So, I was like, well, what value is that going to bring? This is a one-on-one experience. There's a team dedicated to working on this solution, problem, et cetera with me. And I'm just so thankful that there are software developers and designers that are interested in helping me tackle this challenge also. So, that was really exciting to have other people also excited about the same problem but able to bring different skill sets to the table to actually bring this to life. LINDSEY: Oh, that's great. Thanks for sharing. All right, so nearing the end of our chat here. Jordyn, what is next? I think we're going to check back in in a couple of weeks. What might those weeks include? JORDYN: Well, as I mentioned, we really began customer interviewing...I say customer, and this is really...often, it means a lot of things. It means interviewing people who might be users, people who might be customers, people who might be partners in what we're building. And we are just going to learn so much so quickly. We're going to invalidate a lot of things. We're going to come up with new ideas. So like, we will be different humans with a different perspective on the world in two weeks, which is really exciting. But really, so this effort is really about learning how to have your audience lead you. And it isn't about just listening to your audience. So, when they say like, "Make the button blue," you're like, "Okay, blue button, you got it." It's like actually hearing about their lives and their pain points and then innovating. They're not software developers, your audience typically, so they aren't solving this problem themselves. It's up to you to translate what you're hearing into something innovative. I think a standard metaphor here or example–I guess it's more like a case study—is, like, the famous Ford quote that, like, if he had pulled people and asked them what they wanted, they would have said faster horses, not a car, right? So, it's like, you got to look at the landscape, look at what's possible, maybe new things are possible technically, right? And so, we can solve this problem better, a problem that we know humans have, which is paying for college, or, in Ford's case, getting from point A to point B quickly. So, it's really our job to listen and let what we're hearing from the audience be our guide, but not just, like, sort of take dictation, right? And that's where the skill and having done this lots of times comes in. So, that's what we're going to be doing in the next two weeks. We're going to be listening very closely, iterating on the questions that we're asking and who we're asking them to. And out of that will emerge the strategically sound innovation path, and it never fails to work. I cannot stress enough that if you talk to [laughs] people and you listen to them, opportunities become very clear. So, if any of you out there are nursing an idea that you've been nursing for a while, and you're like, I'm not ready to talk to people about it; I need to think about it longer, nope. Talk to people about it today, please. Will you screw that conversation up? Yep. But the sooner you have it, the sooner you'll screw it up and learn from it. The longer you wait, the more your assumptions build, and then it gets very tense and very wrong. And you could really think yourself off into, like, a very weird place. So, I encourage you all to do your research; talk to people about what you're thinking, what you're working on, the people for whom it matters. And that is what we are going to be doing for the next two weeks, and then is what Ashley is going to be doing for the rest of the life of this company because you never stop. It's not a thing. You don't do, like, a customer research sprint, and then you stop. If you stop doing that, you stop innovating, and then other people in the market overtake you. Sorry, I feel passionate about this issue [laughs]. LINDSEY: No, that's good. That's a quick pitch at the end here for everyone to apply to the next session incubator. Start getting the idea and the research you've been doing together. This could be you. So, hope you'll join us again in two weeks as we catch up. And yeah, as Jordyn said, things are going to be...there'll be so many insights in that amount of time. I almost started laughing after I asked, like, what will happen in two weeks? Because I know it's going to be so different, you know, day to day you all are doing so much work, learning so much. So, I'm really excited to learn about that. So, stay tuned with us here in two weeks. We'll also be posting updates to the thoughtbot blog: thoughtbot.com/blog. And just really looking forward to following along with your journey, Ashley. Thank you so much for joining and sharing today. ASHLEY: Yeah, thank you for having me. LINDSEY: Jordyn, thank you as always. JORDYN: Of course. LINDSEY: And thank you, audience. Everyone have a fantastic day. Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.Special Guests: Ashley Sheble and Jordyn Bonds.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Victoria is joined by guest co-host Joe Ferris, CTO at thoughtbot, and Seif Lotfy, the CTO and Co-Founder of Axiom. Seif discusses the journey, challenges, and strategies behind his data analytics and observability platform. Seif, who has a background in robotics and was a 2008 Sony AIBO robotic soccer world champion, shares that Axiom pivoted from being a Datadog competitor to focusing on logs and event data. The company even built its own logs database to provide a cost-effective solution for large-scale analytics. Seif is driven by his passion for his team and the invaluable feedback from the community, emphasizing that sales validate the effectiveness of a product. The conversation also delves into Axiom's shift in focus towards developers to address their need for better and more affordable observability tools. On the business front, Seif reveals the company's challenges in scaling across multiple domains without compromising its core offerings. He discusses the importance of internal values like moving with urgency and high velocity to guide the company's future. Furthermore, he touches on the challenges and strategies of open-sourcing projects and advises avoiding platforms like Reddit and Hacker News to maintain focus. Axiom Follow Axiom on LinkedIn, X, GitHub, or Discord. Follow Seif Lotfy on LinkedIn or X. Visit his website at seif.codes. Follow thoughtbot on X or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido, and with me today is Seif Lotfy, CTO and Co-Founder of Axiom, the best home for your event data. Seif, thank you for joining me. SEIF: Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me. This is awesome. I love the name of the podcast, given that I used to compete in robotics. VICTORIA: What? All right, we're going to have to talk about that. And I also want to introduce a guest co-host today. Since we're talking about cloud, and observability, and data, I invited Joe Ferris, thoughtbot CTO and Director of Development of our platform engineering team, Mission Control. Welcome, Joe. How are you? JOE: Good, thanks. Good to be back again. VICTORIA: Okay. I am excited to talk to you all about observability. But I need to go back to Seif's comment on competing with robots. Can you tell me a little bit more about what robots you've built in the past? SEIF: I didn't build robots; I used to program them. Remember the Sony AIBOs, where Sony made these dog robots? And we would make them compete. There was an international competition where we made them play soccer, and they had to be completely autonomous. They only communicate via Bluetooth or via wireless protocols. And you only have the camera as your sensor as well as...a chest sensor throws the ball near you, and then yeah, you make them play football against each other, four versus four with a goalkeeper and everything. Just look it up: RoboCup AIBO. Look it up on YouTube. And I...2008 world champion with the German team. VICTORIA: That sounds incredible. What kind of crowds are you drawing out for a robot soccer match? Is that a lot of people involved with that? SEIF: You would be surprised how big the RoboCup competition is. It's ridiculous. VICTORIA: I want to go. I'm ready. I want to, like, I'll look it up and find out when the next one is. SEIF: No more Sony robots but other robots. Now, there's two-legged robots. So, they make them play as two-legged robots, much slower than four-legged robots, but works. VICTORIA: Wait. So, the robots you were playing soccer with had four legs they were running around on? SEIF: Yeah, they were dogs [laughter]. VICTORIA: That's awesome. SEIF: We all get the same robot. It's just a competition on software, right? On a software level. And some other competitions within the RoboCup actually use...you build your own robot and stuff like that. But this one was...it's called the Standard League, where we all have a robot, and we have to program it. JOE: And the standard robot was a dog. SEIF: Yeah, I think back then...we're talking...it's been a long time. I think it started in 2001 or something. I think the competition started in 2001 or 2002. And I compete from 2006 to 2008. Robots back then were just, you know, simple. VICTORIA: Robots today are way too complicated [laughs]. SEIF: Even AI is more complicated. VICTORIA: That's right. Yeah, everything has gotten a lot more complicated [laughs]. I'm so curious how you went from being a world-champion robot dog soccer player [laughs] programmer [laughs] to where you are today with Axiom. Can you tell me a little bit more about your journey? SEIF: The journey is interesting because it came from open source. I used to do open source on the side a lot–part of the GNOME Project. That's where I met Neil and the rest of my team, Mikkel Kamstrup, the whole crowd, basically. We worked on GNOME. We worked on Ubuntu. Like, most of them were working professionally on it. I was working for another company, but we worked on the same project. We ended up at Xamarin, which was bought by Microsoft. And then we ended up doing Axiom. But we've been around each other professionally since 2009, most of us. It's like a little family. But how we ended up exactly in observability, I think it's just trying to fix pain points in my life. VICTORIA: Yeah, I was reading through the docs on Axiom. And there's an interesting point you make about organizations having to choose between how much data they have and how much they want to spend on it. So, maybe you can tell me a little bit more about that pain point and what you really found in the early stages that you wanted to solve. SEIF: So, the early stages of what we wanted to solve we were mainly dealing with...so, the early, early stage, we were actually trying to be a Datadog competitor, where we were going to be self-hosted. Eventually, we focused on logs because we found out that's what was a big problem for most people, just event data, not just metric but generally event data, so logs, traces, et cetera. We built out our own logs database completely from scratch. And one of the things we stumbled upon was; basically, you have three things when it comes to logging, which is low cost, low latency, and large scale. That's what everybody wants. But you can't get all three of them; you can only get two of them. And we opted...like, we chose large scale and low cost. And when it comes to latency, we say it should be just fast enough, right? And that's where we focused on, and this is how we started building it. And with that, this is how we managed to stand out by just having way lower cost than anybody else in the industry and dealing with large scale. VICTORIA: That's really interesting. And how did you approach making the ingestion pipeline for masses amount of data more efficient? SEIF: Just make it coordination-free as possible, right? And get rid of Kafka because Kafka just, you know, drains your...it's where you throw in money. Like maintaining Kafka...it's like back then Elasticsearch, right? Elasticsearch was the biggest part of your infrastructure that would cost money. Now, it's also Kafka. So, we found a way to have our own internal way of queueing things without having to rely on Kafka. As I said, we wrote everything from scratch to make it work. Like, every now and then, I think that we can spin this out of the company and make it a new product. But now, eyes on the prize, right? JOE: It's interesting to hear that somebody who spent so much time in the open-source community ended up rolling their own solution to so many problems. Do you feel like you had some lessons learned from open source that led you to reject solutions like Kafka, or how did that journey go? SEIF: I don't think I'm rejecting Kafka. The problem is how Kafka is built, right? Kafka is still...you have to set up all these servers. They have to communicate, et cetera, etcetera. They didn't build it in a way where it's stateless, and that's what we're trying to go to. We're trying to make things as stateless as possible. So, Kafka was never built for the cloud-native era. And you can't really rely on SQS or something like that because it won't deal with this high throughput. So, that's why I said, like, we will sacrifice some latency, but at least the cost is low. So, if messages show after half a second or a second, I'm good. It doesn't have to be real-time for me. So, I had to write a couple of these things. But also, it doesn't mean that we reject open source. Like, we actually do like open source. We open-source a couple of libraries. We contribute back to open source, right? We needed a solution back then for that problem, and we couldn't find any. And maybe one day, open source will have, right? JOE: Yeah. I was going to ask if you considered open-sourcing any of your high latency, high throughput solutions. SEIF: Not high latency. You make it sound bad. JOE: [laughs] SEIF: You make it sound bad. It's, like, fast enough, right? I'm not going to compete on milliseconds because, also, I'm competing with ClickHouse. I don't want to compete with ClickHouse. ClickHouse is low latency and large scale, right? But then the cost is, you know, off the charts a bit sometimes. I'm going the other route. Like, you know, it's fast enough. Like, how, you know, if it's under two, three seconds, everybody's happy, right? If the results come within two, three seconds, everybody is happy. If you're going to build a real-time trading system on top of it, I'll strongly advise against that. But if you're building, you know, you're looking at dashboards, you're more in the observability field, yeah, we're good. VICTORIA: Yeah, I'm curious what you found, like, which customer personas that market really resonated with. Like, is there a particular, like, industry type where you're noticing they really want to lower their cost, and they're okay with this just fast enough latency? SEIF: Honestly, with the current recession, everybody is okay with giving up some of the speed to reduce the money because I think it's not linear reduction. It's more exponential reduction at this point, right? You give up a second, and you're saving 30%. You give up two seconds, all of a sudden, you're saving 80%. So, I'd say in the beginning, everybody thought they need everything to be very, very fast. And now they're realizing, you know, with limitations you have around your budget and spending, you're like, okay, I'm okay with the speed. And, again, we're not slow. I'm just saying people realize they don't need everything under a second. They're okay with waiting for two seconds. VICTORIA: That totally resonates with me. And I'm curious if you can add maybe a non-technical or a real-life example of, like, how this impacts the operations of a company or organization, like, if you can give us, like, a business-y example of how this impacts how people work. SEIF: I don't know how, like, how do people work on that? Nothing changed, really. They're still doing the, like...really nothing because...and that aspect is you run a query, and, again, as I said, you're not getting the result in a second. You're just waiting two seconds or three seconds, and it's there. So, nothing really changed. I think people can wait three seconds. And we're still like–when I say this, we're still faster than most others. We're just not as fast as people who are trying to compete on a millisecond level. VICTORIA: Yeah, that's okay. Maybe I'll take it back even, like, a step further, right? Like, our audience is really sometimes just founders who almost have no formal technical training or background. So, when we talk about observability, sometimes people who work in DevOps and operations all understand it and kind of know why it's important [laughs] and what we're talking about. So, maybe you could, like, go back to -- SEIF: Oh, if you're asking about new types of people who've been using it -- VICTORIA: Yeah. Like, if you're going to explain to, like, a non-technical founder, like, why your product is important, or, like, how people in their organization might use it, what would you say? SEIF: Oh, okay, if you put it like that. It's more of if you have data, timestamp data, and you want to run analytics on top of it, so that could be transactions, that could be web vitals, rather than count every time somebody visits, you have a timestamp. So, you can count, like, how many visitors visited the website and what, you know, all these kinds of things. That's where you want to use something like Axiom. That's outside the DevOps space, of course. And in DevOps space, there's so many other things you use Axiom for, but that's outside the DevOps space. And we actually...we implemented as zero-config integration with Vercel that kind of went viral. And we were, for a while, the number one enterprise for self-integration because so many people were using it. So, Vercel users are usually not necessarily writing the most complex backends, but a lot of things are happening on the front-end side of things. And we would be giving them dashboards, automated dashboards about, you know, latencies, and how long a request took, and how long the response took, and the content type, and the status codes, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a huge user base around that. VICTORIA: I like that. And it's something, for me, you know, as a managing director of our platform engineering team, I want to talk more to founders about. It's great that you put this product and this app out into the world. But how do you know that people are actually using it? How do you know that people, like, maybe, are they all quitting after the first day and not coming back to your app? Or maybe, like, the page isn't loading or, like, it's not working as they expected it to. And, like, if you don't have anything observing what users are doing in your app, then it's going to be hard to show that you're getting any traction and know where you need to go in and make corrections and adjust. SEIF: We have two ways of doing this. Right now, internally, we use our own tools to see, like, who is sending us data. We have a deployment that's monitoring production deployment. And we're just, you know, seeing how people are using it, how much data they're sending every day, who stopped sending data, who spiked in sending data sets, et cetera. But we're using Mixpanel, and Dominic, our Head of Product, implemented a couple of key metrics to that for that specifically. So, we know, like, what's the average time until somebody starts going from building its own queries with the builder to writing APL, or how long it takes them from, you know, running two queries to five queries. And, you know, we just start measuring these things now. And it's been going...we've been growing healthy around that. So, we tend to measure user interaction, but also, we tend to measure how much data is being sent. Because let's keep in mind, usually, people go in and check for things if there's a problem. So, if there's no problem, the user won't interact with us much unless there's a notification that kicks off. We also just check, like, how much data is being sent to us the whole time. VICTORIA: That makes sense. Like, you can't just rely on, like, well, if it was broken, they would write a [chuckles], like, a question or something. So, how do you get those metrics and that data around their interactions? So, that's really interesting. So, I wonder if we can go back and talk about, you know, we already mentioned a little bit about, like, the early days of Axiom and how you got started. Was there anything that you found in the early discovery process that was surprising and made you pivot strategy? SEIF: A couple of things. Basically, people don't really care about the tech as much as they care [inaudible 12:51] and the packaging, so that's something that we had to learn. And number two, continuous feedback. Continuous feedback changed the way we worked completely, right? And, you know, after that, we had a Slack channel, then we opened a Discord channel. And, like, this continuous feedback coming in just helps with iterating, helps us with prioritizing, et cetera. And that changed the way we actually developed product. VICTORIA: You use Slack and Discord? SEIF: No. No Slack anymore. We had a community Slack. We had a community [inaudible 13:19] Slack. Now, there's no community Slack. We only have a community Discord. And the community Slack is...sorry, internally, we use Slack, but there's a community Discord for the community. JOE: But how do you keep that staffed? Is it, like, everybody is in the Discord during working hours? Is it somebody's job to watch out for community questions? SEIF: I think everybody gets involved now just...and you can see it. If you go on our Discord, you will just see it. Just everyone just gets involved. I think just people are passionate about what they're doing. At least most people are involved on Discord, right? Because there's, like, Discord the help sections, and people are just asking questions and other people answering. And now, we reached a point where people in the community start answering the questions for other people in the community. So, that's how we see it's starting to become a healthy community, et cetera. But that is one of my favorite things: when I see somebody from the community answering somebody else, that's a highlight for me. Actually, we hired somebody from that community because they were so active. JOE: Yeah, I think one of the biggest signs that a product is healthy is when there's a healthy ecosystem building up around it. SEIF: Yeah, and Discord reminds me of the old days of open sources like IRC, just with memes now. But because all of us come from the old IRC days, being on Discord and chatting around, et cetera, et cetera, just gives us this momentum back, gave us this momentum back, whereas Slack always felt a bit too businessy to me. JOE: Slack is like IRC with emoji. Discord is IRC with memes. SEIF: I would say Slack reminds me somehow of MSN Messenger, right? JOE: I feel like there's a huge slam on MSN Messenger here. SEIF: [laughs] What do you guys use internally, Slack or? I think you're using Slack, right? Or Teams. Don't tell me you're using Teams. JOE: No, we're using Slack. SEIF: Okay, good, because I shit talk. Like, there is this, I’ll sh*t talk here–when I start talking about Teams, so...I remember that one thing Google did once, and that failed miserably. JOE: Google still has, like, seven active chat products. SEIF: Like, I think every department or every, like, group of engineers just uses one of them internally. I'm not sure. Never got to that point. But hey, who am I to judge? VICTORIA: I just feel like I end up using all of them, and then I'm just rotating between different tabs all day long. You maybe talked me into using Discord. I feel like I've been resisting it, but you got me with the memes. SEIF: Yeah, it's definitely worth it. It's more entertaining. More noise, but more entertaining. You feel it's alive, whereas Slack is...also because there's no, like, history is forever. So, you always go back, and you're like, oh my God, what the hell is this? VICTORIA: Yeah, I have, like, all of them. I'll do anything. SEIF: They should be using Axiom in the background. Just send data to Axiom; we can keep your chat history. VICTORIA: Yeah, maybe. I'm so curious because, you know, you mentioned something about how you realized that it didn't matter really how cool the tech was if the product packaging wasn't also appealing to people. Because you seem really excited about what you've built. So, I'm curious, so just tell us a little bit more about how you went about trying to, like, promote this thing you built. Or was, like, the continuous feedback really early on, or how did that all kind of come together? SEIF: The continuous feedback helped us with performance, but actually getting people to sign up and pay money it started early on. But with Vercel, it kind of skyrocketed, right? And that's mostly because we went with the whole zero-config approach where it's just literally two clicks. And all of a sudden, Vercel is sending your data to Axiom, and that's it. We will create [inaudible 16:33]. And we worked very closely with Vercel to do this, to make this happen, which was awesome. Like, yeah, hats off to them. They were fantastic. And just two clicks, three clicks away, and all of a sudden, we created Axiom organization for you, the data set for you. And then we're sending it...and the data from Vercel is being forwarded to it. I think that packaging was so simple that it made people try it out quickly. And then, the experience of actually using Axiom was sticky, so they continued using it. And then the price was so low because we give 500 gigs for free, right? You send us 500 gigs a month of logs for free, and we don't care. And you can start off here with one terabyte for 25 bucks. So, people just start signing up. Now, before that, it was five terabytes a month for $99, and then we changed the plan. But yeah, it was cheap enough, so people just start sending us more and more and more data eventually. They weren't thinking...we changed the way people start thinking of “what am I going to send to Axiom” or “what am I going to send to my logs provider or log storage?” To how much more can I send? And I think that's what we wanted to reach. We wanted people to think, how much more can I send? JOE: You mentioned latency and cost. I'm curious about...the other big challenge we've seen with observability platforms, including logs, is cardinality of labels. Was there anything you had to sacrifice upfront in terms of cardinality to manage either cost or volume? SEIF: No, not really. Because the way we designed it was that we should be able to deal with high cardinality from scratch, right? I mean, there's open-source ways of doing, like, if you look at how, like, a column store, if you look at a column store and every dimension is its own column, it's just that becomes, like, you can limit on the amount of columns you're creating, but you should never limit on the amount of different values in a column could be. So, if you're having something like stat tags, right? Let's say hosting, like, hostname should be a column, but then the different hostnames you have, we never limit that. So, the cardinality on a value is something that is unlimited for us, and we don't really see it in cost. It doesn't really hit us on cost. It reflects a bit on compression if you get into technical details of that because, you know, high cardinality means a lot of different data. So, compression is harder, but it's not repetitive. But then if you look at, you know, oh, I want to send a lot of different types of fields, not values with fields, so you have hostname, and latency, and whatnot, et cetera, et cetera, yeah, that's where limitation starts because then they have...it's like you're going to a wide range of...and a wider dimension. But even that, we, yeah, we can deal with thousands at this point. And we realize, like, most people will not need more than three or four. It's like a Postgres table. You don't need more than 3,000 to 4000 columns; else, you know, you're doing a lot. JOE: I think it's actually pretty compelling in terms of cost, though. Like, that's one of the things we've had to be most careful about in terms of containing cost for metrics and logs is, a lot of providers will...they'll either charge you based on the number of unique metric combinations or the performance suffers greatly. Like, we've used a lot of Prometheus-based solutions. And so, when we're working with developers, even though they don't need more than, you know, a few dozen metric combinations most of the time, it's hard for people to think of what they need upfront. It's much easier after you deploy it to be able to query your data and slice it retroactively based on what you're seeing. SEIF: That's the detail. When you say we're using Prometheus, a lot of the metrics tools out there are using, just like Prometheus, are using the Gorilla data structure. And the real data structure was never designed to deal with high cardinality labels. So, basically, to put it in a simple way, every combination of tags you send for metrics is its own file on disk. That's, like, the very simple way of explaining this. And then, when you're trying to search through everything, right? And you have a lot of these combinations. I actually have to get all these files from this conversion back together, you know, and then they're chunked, et cetera. So, it's a problem. Generally, how metrics are doing it...most metrics products are using it, even VictoriaMetrics, et cetera. What they're doing is they're using either the Prometheus TSDB data structure, which is based on Gorilla. Influx was doing the same thing. They pivoted to using more and more like the ones we use, and Honeycomb uses, right? So, we might not be as fast on metrics side as these highly optimized. But then when it comes to high [inaudible 20:49], once we start dealing with high cardinality, we will be faster than those solutions. And that's on a very technical level. JOE: That's pretty cool. I realize we're getting pretty technical here. Maybe it's worth defining cardinality for the audience. SEIF: Defining cardinality to the...I mean, we just did that, right? JOE: What do you think, Victoria? Do you know what cardinality is now? [laughs] VICTORIA: All right. Now I'm like, do I know? I was like, I think I know what it means. Cardinality is, like, let's say you have a piece of data like an event or a transaction. SEIF: It's like the distinct count on a property that gives you the cardinality of a property. VICTORIA: Right. It's like how many pieces of information you have about that one event, basically, yeah. JOE: But with some traditional metrics stores, it's easy to make mistakes. For example, you could have unbounded cardinality by including response time as one of the labels -- SEIF: Tags. JOE: And then it's just going to -- SEIF: Oh, no, no. Let me give you a better one. I put in timestamp at some point in my life. JOE: Yeah, I feel like everybody has done that one. [laughter] SEIF: I've put a system timestamp at some point in my life. There was the actual timestamp, and there was a system timestamp that I would put because I wanted to know when the...because I couldn't control the timestamp, and the only timestamp I had was a system timestamp. I would always add the actual timestamp of when that event actually happened into a metric, and yeah, that did not scale. MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at tbot.io/entrepreneurs. VICTORIA: Yeah. I wonder if you could maybe share, like, a story about when it's gone wrong, and you've suddenly charged a lot of money [laughs] just to get information about what's happening in the system. Any, like, personal experiences with observability that kind of informed what you did with Axiom? SEIF: Oof, I have a very bad one, like, a very, very bad one. I used to work for a company. We had to deploy Elasticsearch on Windows Servers, and it was US-East-1. So, just a combination of Elasticsearch back in 2013, 2014 together with Azure and Windows Server was not a good idea. So, you see where this is going, right? JOE: I see where it's going. SEIF: Eventually, we had, like, we get all these problems because we used Elasticsearch and Kibana as our, you know, observability platform to measure everything around the product we were building. And funny enough, it cost us more than actually maintaining the infrastructure of the product. But not just that, it also kept me up longer because most of the downtimes I would get were not because of the product going down. It's because my Elasticsearch cluster started going down, and there's reasons for that. Because back then, Microsoft Azure thought that it's okay for any VM to lose connection with the rest of the VMs for 30 seconds per day. And then, all of a sudden, you have Elasticsearch with a split-brain problem. And there was a phase where I started getting alerted so much that back then, my partner threatened to leave me. So I bought a...what I think was a shock bracelet or a shock collar via Bluetooth, and I connected it to phone for any notification. And I bought that off Alibaba, by the way. And I would charge it at night, put it on my wrist, and go to sleep. And then, when alert happens, it will fully discharge the battery on me every time. JOE: Okay, I have to admit, I did not see where that was going. SEIF: Yeah, did that for a while; definitely did not save my relationship either. But eventually, that was the point where, you know, we started looking into other observability tools like Datadog, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's where the actual journey began, where we moved away from Elasticsearch and Kibana to look for something, okay, that we don't have to maintain ourselves and we can use, et cetera. So, it's not about the costs as much; it was just pain. VICTORIA: Yeah, pain is a real pain point, actual physical [chuckles] and emotional pain point [laughter]. What, like, motivates you to keep going with Axiom and to keep, like, the wind in your sails to keep working on it? SEIF: There's a couple of things. I love working with my team. So, honestly, I just wake up, and I compliment my team. I just love working with them. They're a lot of fun to work with. And they challenge me, and I challenge them back. And I upset them a lot. And they can't upset me, but I upset them. But I love working with them, and I love working with that team. And the other thing is getting, like, having this constant feedback from customers just makes you want to do more and, you know, close sales, et cetera. It's interesting, like, how I'm a very technical person, and I'm more interested in sales because sales means your product works, the product, the technical parts, et cetera. Because if technically it's not working, you can't build a product on top of it. And if you're not selling it, then what's the point? You only sell when the product is good, more or less, unless you're Oracle. VICTORIA: I had someone ask me about Oracle recently, actually. They're like, "Are you considering going back to it?" And I'm maybe a little allergic to it from having a federal consulting background [laughs]. But maybe they'll come back around. I don't know. We'll see. SEIF: Did you sell your soul back then? VICTORIA: You know, I feel like I just grew up in a place where that's what everyone did was all. SEIF: It was Oracle, IBM, or HP back in the day. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, basically, when you're working on applications that were built in, like, the '80s, Oracle was, like, this hot, new database technology [laughs] that they just got five years ago. So, that's just, yeah, interesting. SEIF: Although, from a database perspective, they did a lot of the innovations. A lot of first innovations could have come from Oracle. From a technical perspective, they're ridiculous. I'm not sure from a product perspective how good they are. But I know their sales team is so big, so huge. They don't care about the product anymore. They can still sell. VICTORIA: I think, you know, everything in tech is cyclical. So, you know, if they have the right strategy and they're making some interesting changes over there, there's always a chance [laughs]. Certain use cases, I mean, I think that's the interesting point about working in technology is that you know, every company is a tech company. And so, there's just a lot of different types of people, personas, and use cases for different types of products. So, I wonder, you know, you kind of mentioned earlier that, like, everyone is interested in Axiom. But, you know, I don't know, are you narrowing the market? Or, like, how are you trying to kind of focus your messaging and your sales for Axiom? SEIF: I'm trying to focus on developers. So, we're really trying to focus on developers because the experience around observability is crap. It's stupid expensive. Sorry for being straightforward, right? And that's what we're trying to change. And we're targeting developers mainly. We want developers to like us. And we'll find all these different types of developers who are using it, and that's the interesting thing. And because of them, we start adding more and more features, like, you know, we added tracing, and now that enables, like, billions of events pushed through for, you know, again, for almost no money, again, $25 a month for a terabyte of data. And we're doing this with metrics next. And that's just to address the developers who have been giving us feedback and the market demand. I will sum it up, again, like, the experience is crap, and it's stupid expensive. I think that's the [inaudible 28:07] of observability is just that's how I would sum it up. VICTORIA: If you could go back in time and talk to yourself when you were still a developer, now that you're CTO, what advice would you give yourself? JOE: Besides avoiding shock collars. VICTORIA: [laughs] Yes. SEIF: Get people's feedback quickly so you know you're on the right track. I think that's very, very, very, very important. Don't just work in the dark, or don't go too long into stealth mode because, eventually, people catch up. Also, ship when you're 80% ready because 100% is too late. I think it's the same thing here. JOE: Ship often and early. SEIF: Yeah, even if it's not fully ready, it's still feedback. VICTORIA: Ship often and early and talk to people [laughs]. Just, do you feel like, as a developer, did you have the skills you needed to be able to get the most out of those feedback and out of those conversations you were having with people around your product? SEIF: I still don't think I'm good enough. You're just constantly learning, right? I just accepted I'm part of a team, and I have my contributions. But as an individual, I still don't think I know enough. I think there's more I need to learn at this point. VICTORIA: I wonder, what questions do you have for me or Joe? SEIF: How did you start your podcast, and why the name? VICTORIA: Oh, man, I hope I can answer. So, the podcast was started...I think it's, like, we're actually about to be at our 500th Episode. So, I've only been a host for the last year. Maybe Joe even knows more than I do. But what I recall is that one person at thoughtbot thought it would be a great idea to start a podcast, and then they did it. And it seems like the whole company is obsessed with robots. I'm not really sure where that came from. There used to be a tiny robot in the office, is what I remember. And people started using that as, like, the mascot. And then, yeah, that's it, that's the whole thing. SEIF: Was the robot doing anything useful or just being cute? JOE: It was just cute, and it's hard to make a robot cute. SEIF: Was it a real robot, or was it like a -- JOE: No, there was, at one point, a toy robot. The name...I actually forget the origin–origin of the name, but the name Giant Robots comes from our blog. So, we named the podcast the same as the blog: Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots. SEIF: Yes, it's called transformers. VICTORIA: Yeah, I like it. It's, I mean, now I feel like -- SEIF: [laughs] VICTORIA: We got to get more, like, robot dogs involved [laughs] in the podcast. SEIF: Like, I wanted to add one thing when we talked about, you know, what gets me going. And I want to mention that I have a six-month-old son now. He definitely adds a lot of motivation for me to wake up in the morning and work. But he also makes me wake up regardless if I want to or not. VICTORIA: Yeah, you said you had invented an alarm clock that never turns off. Never snoozes [laughs]. SEIF: Yes, absolutely. VICTORIA: I have the same thing, but it's my dog. But he does snooze, actually. He'll just, like, get tired and go back to sleep [laughs]. SEIF: Oh, I have a question. Do dogs have a Tamagotchi phase? Because, like, my son, the first three months was like a Tamagotchi. It was easy to read him. VICTORIA: Oh yeah, uh-huh. SEIF: Noisy but easy. VICTORIA: Yes, yes. SEIF: Now, it's just like, yeah, I don't know, like, the last month he has opinions at six months. I think it's because I raised him in Europe. I should take him back to the Middle East [laughs]. No opinions. VICTORIA: No, dogs totally have, like, a communication style, you know, I pretty much know what he, I mean, I can read his mind, obviously [laughs]. SEIF: Sure, but that's when they grow a bit. But what when they were very...when the dog was very young? VICTORIA: Yeah, they, I mean, they also learn, like, your stuff, too. So, they, like, learn how to get you to do stuff or, like, I know she'll feed me if I'm sitting here [laughs]. SEIF: And how much is one dog year, seven years? VICTORIA: Seven years. SEIF: Seven years? VICTORIA: Yeah, seven years? SEIF: Yeah. So, basically, in one year, like, three months, he's already...in one month, he's, you know, seven months old. He's like, yeah. VICTORIA: Yeah. In a year, they're, like, teenagers. And then, in two years, they're, like, full adults. SEIF: Yeah. So, the first month is basically going through the first six months of a human being. So yeah, you pass...the first two days or three days are the Tamagotchi phase that I'm talking about. VICTORIA: [chuckles] I read this book, and it was, like, to understand dogs, it's like, they're just like humans that are trying to, like, maximize the number of positive experiences that they have. So, like, if you think about that framing around all your interactions about, like, maybe you're trying to get your son to do something, you can be like, okay, how do I, like, I don't know, train him that good things happen when he does the things I want him to do? [laughs] That's kind of maybe manipulative but effective. So, you're not learning baby sign language? You're just, like, going off facial expressions? SEIF: I started. I know how Mama looks like. I know how Dada looks like. I know how more looks like, slowly. And he already does this thing that I know that when he's uncomfortable, he starts opening and closing his hands. And when he's completely uncomfortable and basically that he needs to go sleep, he starts pulling his own hair. VICTORIA: [laughs] I do the same thing [laughs]. SEIF: You pull your own hair when you go to sleep? I don't have that. I don't have hair. VICTORIA: I think I do start, like, touching my head though, yeah [inaudible 33:04]. SEIF: Azure took the last bit of hair I had! Went away with Azure, Elasticsearch, and the shock collar. VICTORIA: [laughs] SEIF: I have none of them left. Absolutely nothing. I should sue Elasticsearch for this shit. VICTORIA: [laughs] Let me know how that goes. Maybe there's more people who could join your lawsuit, you know, with a class action. SEIF: [laughs] Yeah. Well, one thing I wanted to also just highlight is, right now, one of the things that also makes the company move forward is we realized that in a single domain, we proved ourselves very valuable to specific companies, right? So, that was a big, big thing, milestone for us. And now we're trying to move into a handful of domains and see which one of those work out the best for us. Does that make sense? VICTORIA: Yeah. And I'm curious: what are the biggest challenges or hurdles that you associate with that? SEIF: At this point, you don't want just feedback. You want constructive criticism. Like, you want to work with people who will criticize the applic...and you iterate with them based on this criticism, right? They're just not happy about you and trying to create design partners. So, for us, it was very important to have these small design partners who can work with us to actually prove ourselves as valuable in a single domain. Right now, we need to find a way to scale this across several domains. And how do you do that without sacrificing? Like, how do you open into other domains without sacrificing the original domain you came from? So, there's a lot of things [inaudible 34:28]. And we are in the middle of this. Honestly, I Forrest Gumped my way through half of this, right? Like, I didn't know what I was doing. I had ideas. I think it's more of luck at this point. And I had luck. No, we did work. We did work a lot. We did sleepless nights and everything. But I think, in the last three years, we became more mature and started thinking more about product. And as I said, like, our CEO, Neil, and Dominic, our head of product, are putting everything behind being a product-led organization, not just a tech-led organization. VICTORIA: That's super interesting. I love to hear that that's the way you're thinking about it. JOE: I was just curious what other domains you're looking at pushing into if you can say. SEIF: So, we are going to start moving into ETL a bit more. We're trying to see how we can fit in specific ML scenarios. I can't say more about the other, though. JOE: Do you think you'll take the same approaches in terms of value proposition, like, low cost, good enough latency? SEIF: Yes, that's definitely one thing. But there's also...so, this is the values we're bringing to the customer. But also, now, our internal values are different. Now it's more of move with urgency and high velocity, as we said before, right? Think big, work small. The values in terms of values we're going to take to the customers it's the same ones. And maybe we'll add some more, but it's still going to be low-cost and large-scale. And, internally, we're just becoming more, excuse my French, agile. I hate that word so much. Should be good with Scrum. VICTORIA: It's painful, but everyone knows what you're talking about [laughs], you know, like -- SEIF: See, I have opinions here about Scrum. I think Scrum should be only used in terms of iceScrum [inaudible 36:04], or something like that. VICTORIA: Oh no [laughter]. Well, it's a Rugby term, right? Like, that's where it should probably stay. SEIF: I did not know it's a rugby term. VICTORIA: Yeah, so it should stay there, but -- SEIF: Yes [laughs]. VICTORIA: Yeah, I think it's interesting. Yeah, I like the being flexible. I like the just, like, continuous feedback and how you all have set up to, like, talk with your customers. Because you mentioned earlier that, like, you might open source some of your projects. And I'm just curious, like, what goes into that decision for you when you're going to do that? Like, what makes you think this project would be good for open source or when you think, actually, we need to, like, keep it? SEIF: So, we open source libraries, right? We actually do that already. And some other big organizations use our libraries; even our competitors use our libraries, that we do. The whole product itself or at least a big part of the product, like database, I'm not sure we're going to open source that, at least not anytime soon. And if we open source, it's going to be at a point where the value-add it brings is nothing compared to how well our product is, right? So, if we can replace whatever's at the back with...the storage engine we have in the back with something else and the product doesn't get affected, that's when we open source it. VICTORIA: That's interesting. That makes sense to me. But yeah, thank you for clarifying that. I just wanted to make sure to circle back. Since you have this big history in open source, yeah, I'm curious if you see... SEIF: Burning me out? VICTORIA: Burning you out, yeah [laughter]. Oh, that's a good question. Yeah, like, because, you know, we're about to be in October here. Do you have any advice or strategies as a maintainer for not getting burned out during the next couple of weeks besides, like, hide in a cave and without internet access [laughs]? SEIF: Stay away from Reddit and Hacker News. That's my goal for October now because I'm always afraid of getting too attached to an idea, or too motivated, or excited by an idea that I drift away from what I am actually supposed to be doing. VICTORIA: Last question is, is there anything else you would like to promote? SEIF: Yeah, check out our website; I think it's at axiom.co. Check it out. Sign up. And comment on Discord and talk to me. I don't bite, sometimes grumpy, but that's just because of lack of sleep in the morning. But, you know, around midday, I'm good. And if you're ever in Berlin and you want to hang out, I'm more than willing to hang out. VICTORIA: Whoo, that's awesome. Yeah, Berlin is great. I was there a couple of years ago but no plans to go back anytime soon, but maybe I'll keep that in mind. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you could find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. And this podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.Special Guests: Joe Ferris and Seif Lotfy.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? 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Hosts Will Larry and Victoria Guido talk with Lonni Kieffer, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at SmartCert. SmartCert's mission is to digitize and streamline the certificate transfer process in supply chains, mainly focusing on the aerospace industry. Lonni shares insights into the challenges of managing change within traditional industries, the importance of building a solid foundation of leadership and core values, and SmartCert's strategies for customer success and self-service. Lonni also shares the history of the company's growth and its focus on vendor accountability and internal processes to increase supply chain efficiency. SmartCert's platform offers features like document verification and digital signatures to facilitate accessible communication among teams. She discusses the role of their partner company, TechFabric, in building their MVP and how they've grown their internal team. She also highlights 2024 as a pivotal year for SmartCert, aiming for a global impact within the next five years. Regarding advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, Lonni emphasizes the importance of grit, flexibility, and a strong belief in one's mission. She also talks about the value of relationships in business growth and the critical role of sleep for effective functioning and decision-making. SmartCert TechFabric Follow SmartCert on LinkedIn or X. Follow Lonni Kieffer on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on X or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Lonni Kieffer, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at SmartCert, a universal cloud-based platform that simplifies every aspect of cert transfer. Lonni, thank you for joining me. LONNI: Thanks so much for having me. I love what you guys do. And I'm excited to contribute to the conversation. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Well, we like to warm up a little bit first before we dive into business topics. Anything exciting going on in your world, Will or Lonni? LONNI: I'll let Will start. WILL: It's funny because, with three small kids, I think we're finally starting to find our rhythm and our routine, so that's kind of exciting. I know it sounds boring, but when you have three small kids, routine, I feel like, is everything. We're starting to find that because a couple of weeks ago, my son had surgery. So, it threw all of our routines off and everything, and trying to help him get better and heal and everything. But now he's doing good. He's back running around, having fun. So yeah, getting back to that normal life it's exciting, and we're looking forward to it. LONNI: That makes so much sense. And I'm glad you mentioned kids because [laughs] I was also going to talk about my three kids and the fact that I am headed down to a family weekend tomorrow to join two-thirds of my daughters for a fun activity. It usually involves some fun meals, grocery shopping to fill [laughs] small college dorm refrigerators. But the challenge that I have then...Will, you have the young ones, and I have the older ones that are definitely going to keep me on my toes. I don't know that I can keep up with college life so much. So, usually, this is really fun but also really exhausting [laughs]. WILL: I promise you, they're looking forward to it, so don't underestimate what you're doing [laughs]. LONNI: [chuckles] Yes, for sure. VICTORIA: I'm going to feel bad with my update [laughs]. It's like, oh, I'm surfing. I think I was in a surf film yesterday on accident, which was pretty funny. And then I'm going to surf this afternoon and climb. Which you're talking about being on a routine and I just...I can't seem to get my routine of when I'm surfing or when I'm climbing figured out to the point where I just keep, like, exhausting myself trying to do both [laughs]. But that's what's going on in my world. But I am not quite on the kids and baby train yet. But it does sound fun. It sounds...it encompasses a lot. And then you get to just experience a different time of their life compared to what you're going through. WILL: Yeah, don't feel bad talking about something else, and fun. Like, today, I signed up for a kickball league in my area. So, I'm looking forward to it. So, I have those activities also. That's a must, I feel. LONNI: That's so true, any kind of outdoor time. Even just reading about all the statistics now about direct sunlight, I think it's so incredibly important to weave that into the day. So, Victoria, I give you mad props for having a full agenda of those [laughs] activities. VICTORIA: That's good. I'm glad to hear you're having some fun, too, Will and Lonni, getting out there, getting outside in the sunshine while it's still here. Yeah, I appreciate that. So, I'm curious...you know, that's what humans do best, right? Like humans, we're supposed to be outside. We're supposed to be, like, enjoying the sunshine. We're not supposed to be managing paperwork every day [laughs]. So, could you tell me a little bit more about SmartCert and the mission behind the company? LONNI: For sure. The paperwork side is truly sad. I was having a discussion with a customer yesterday, and they still receive 90% of the product certs as paper from their vendors. And if you imagine not only the time that it takes to use paper these days [laughs] but the cost associated with that, I think there's some painful statistics around the fact that companies spend on average almost $500 a day on paper and toner. And, you know, our goal started three years ago when the founder, Lyndon Lattie, who had spent 20 years in manufacturing and distribution in aerospace, finally decided to quit his perfectly good job and really work on alleviating a lot of the bottlenecks and hurdles that's really prevalent in supply chains. Every little nut and bolt that goes into an aircraft requires a lot of documentation that provides traceability to acknowledge that these parts meet the standards that the industry holds that we all have confidence in. So, when there isn't a paper trail or documents go missing, things get very expensive and chaotic. And what we're trying to do is really remove paper [laughs], the physical part of it, from the equation and use the cloud to not only receive documents from suppliers but store them and send them on to customers. So, we're not only speeding things up, but we're also checking the box on sustainability and helping a fairly antiquated industry move forward with innovation and technology. WILL: I love that idea because I'm the type of person that I don't use journals or things like that or paper to-do lists because I lose them all. And I like to think I'm a fairly responsible person, and I still lose them all. I love having it on my phone because I know exactly where it's at. 9.9 times out of 10, I have my phone with me. So, when I think of an idea, I have it; I can do something on it. In your experience, I don't know if you have this number or if you can estimate how often does paper certifications go missing, do you think? LONNI: We're talking to some big, big aerospace companies these days, and they have estimated on a daily basis that 80 to 100 shipments have paperwork problems. So, when you think about the sheer volume on a daily basis and the time that it requires to really enable teams to track down paperwork, sometimes you go to your vendor and ask for the documentation, and they have to go back in time because they don't have it. Those delays can halt manufacturing and certainly make a big impact on profitability and just the ability to do business. VICTORIA: Right. And from my background working in the federal government space for a while, I have a sense of just how many rules and regulations a particular product might have applied to it. And thinking about, like, the aerospace where, like, down to the individual bolts and nuts have to have all the specifications and the documentation of, like, the size, and where it came from, and the materials. And if you lose that, then you can't...it's, like, you can't work, or you have to go back to a manufacturer. So, how does SmartCert start to solve that issue? LONNI: One of the big things that we're focused on this year is making it easier to receive documents from suppliers. It's the one place that a lot of companies don't have control over. You could have a strong internal process. You could have a strong process for sending these documents to your customers, but you're still at the mercy of what your suppliers choose to do. Our big focus this year is starting with vendor accountability and starting to be able to compile data around vendor performance with documents but also start to create a more standard receiving process. So, next month, we are launching a new feature where you could take an email or a digital document, even if you do have to scan it in from a supplier and add that all to your shared dashboard. And the idea here is to create a strong internal process instead of being at the mercy of your vendors but also make things work faster once documents are received. Usually, that effort is pretty siloed, where there's one receiving team, the processing and review team. The quality team is waiting for the documents. When you start to give everyone access to documents as they're received, you certainly can see cutting down on the steps and fostering stronger communication among internal teams. So, because you now have a good repository and time and date-stamped information, you can start to see the vendors that are costing you money, have the conversations ahead of contracts. There's a big focus on vendor scorecards and continuous improvement in the industry. So, our goal is to be able to provide that centralized repository where the data comes to life instead of multiple people receiving certs and processing certs. That's one big focus on the receiving side. And then, from an internal perspective, we've built the tools in SmartCert that enable the teams, once the documents are received, to quickly search in the document, make sure that the information is included and accurate. If it is, they can digitally sign and approve it, which is a common next step. If there is information missing, they can reject those certs and kind of maintain the communication within the same platform instead of going into an email and waiting on when to provide updated documents. We're focused on, again, keeping the conversation within one platform. And then, on the customer side, it's the same thing: the traceability, the visibility of sending documents. So many companies are at the mercy of customers losing paperwork or asking them to resend it. And those are the things that we've eliminated by providing dashboard-to-dashboard delivery and that centralized access. So, even if the buyer you work with is on vacation, your certs aren't sitting in an email inbox for the next five days, not being accessible to the rest of the team. So, those kinds of, I think, focuses on efficiency all the way through the process are where we really feel will make a big impact for every company, large and small. WILL: So, I know in the past you started multiple companies, and then about four years ago, you started SmartCert. So, how was the beginning getting traction for SmartCert? And were there any benefits to being a founder in the past that helped you with SmartCert? LONNI: I love that question. My efforts at entrepreneurship certainly help. You know, you recognize that the ball's in your court in every facet of the business, the hats that you have to wear across everything you do and want to accomplish. It helped provide a good foundation. SmartCert certainly is more daunting and bigger than my past experiences. But having a good understanding of the requirements around flexibility, a willingness to figure things out on the fly, and a real confidence in what we're doing and believing in is so important. You know, we are working to convince hundreds of thousands of companies to finally move away from super manual processes. And I think you have to have a lot of confidence and belief in not only what you're doing but the impact that you can make in order for you to keep going. And recognize if you are a new product in a new category, the path to building growth is usually pretty difficult. WILL: If there is someone who is thinking about starting a company, what advice would you give them? Because I know it's not easy to start a company. It's hard, let's just be honest, it's very hard. If you can give someone advice on, "Hey, take that next step, start it," what advice would you give them? LONNI: Well, I think you have to have the grit to get through the bad days. It is an insane roller coaster. But, for me, I think there are so many books and advice, and formulas out there for starting a business. You know, we've read every single book out there. And I think intuition is such a big piece of the potential and success for a business. While formulas and successful companies and what they share and how they did it is really helpful, I think at the end of the day, there may be moments that give you pause because it doesn't align with your intuition. And I think you really have to pay attention to those. So, we spent all of 2022 really working on the SaaS formula. We aligned our website and our conversations to fit those kinds of meetings and conversations. And it turns out because of the people we were talking to and the challenge with change management in this level of transition, the SaaS formula was not successful for us. We made a decision at the end of 2022 to move towards product-led growth, having about 1,000 companies. I hope that'll be next week—our big magic, fun, new milestone. We're really looking to empower the companies who are already participating on the network to drive growth. Many of them are receiving certs from our paying customers and just starting to get familiar with a new way of doing business. But things last year didn't feel right. It was incredibly frustrating to go through those motions and not have the success and metrics that were expected. The piece about intuition and being bold enough and confident enough in why you're doing what you're doing to be able to pivot is crucial. VICTORIA: So, you've talked to...or have over 1,000 customers. I wonder what was anything really surprising to you that you discovered in that process. LONNI: I think for us...and it kind of lends itself to the conversations we were having last year. To us and to our early adopters, SmartCert was a no-brainer. People that were spending eight hours a day were now spending an hour a day on the same work but just doing it much faster, reducing a lot of human error and automating so much of it. So, when we did have the conversations and make, you know, the introductions to the industry and work to build awareness, it was very obvious that change management is a paralyzing [laughs] aspect. And when technology is rearing its ugly head in the requirements for your business, the future of your business, I think for manufacturing and distribution, the timeline for a lot of that movement towards digital documents and working in the cloud was accelerated with COVID, with inflation. And all of a sudden, now there's companies who are leaping ahead and some that are falling behind. And it's now a requirement to prioritize more efficient processes simply because there's less people to do the work. And the companies who are taking advantage of innovation are really maximizing the opportunities to build their business, get more customers, and have more success. WILL: I was looking at your team, and it looks like you brought on the head of technology, I think, in 2022. And so, I think it was you and your co-founder in the very early days. How was it as a founder to build a technical app and going through that process? How was that process for you? LONNI: We were so lucky to partner with a local company in building out the MVP of SmartCert. They had an amazing team. They helped us bring to life a lot of Lyndon's ideas and also had a good background in supply chain. So, I always give props to TechFabric in Gilbert, Arizona, for giving us the opportunity to prove out the model. And that was then enabling us to get the funding and higher Mark who, I will say, every day I don't know how we became so lucky. I think startup life is challenging in and of itself. But he really embraced the mission and the opportunity to rebuild SmartCert from the ground up for the scalability it requires but to also embrace the security aspects that are coming to the industry, those compliance requirements, and working alongside us. He's one of the few, I think, heads of technology that are involved in a lot of conversations with customers. And we are absolutely so lucky to be able to add him to our team and continue to evolve the platform in all the ways it needs to to accommodate what we're trying to achieve. VICTORIA: Thank you for sharing that. I wonder, what does success really look like for you now, or six months from now, maybe even five years from now? LONNI: It'll be three years that we have launched SmartCert in March. And when we think about, you know, what's the first thing to prove when you're a new product in a new market, and it's to prove that people are willing to pay to alleviate the pain. And I think we've done a good job doing that. It's building virality now, you know. As the industry is now expanding its use of SmartCert, more companies are participating. So, we've built a good foundation, which has allowed us to start working with some of the global aerospace companies, distributors, and contract manufacturers, and pilots. We're defining those opportunities now. And I think 2024 will be a really big year for us to expand the features and the usage and adoption not only with additional supply chains but much more fast-paced growth with participating companies so that in five years, we could really look back and say, "We have really supported supply chains all over the world in working smarter, approaching sustainability with the right goals and processes to cut down on paper, and also be able to combat the challenges with labor shortages, apply technology in ways that are going to certainly make sense for them and for the future." VICTORIA: I like that you tie in business goals with, like, big, dreamy goals, like, really reducing our impact on the planet and things like that. Because I think that's...you need to have something to come back to at the end of the day when you're working really hard in a startup like this. LONNI: We had a really fun exercise, an internal exercise. So, our lead investor, TitletownTech, obviously has entrepreneurs in residence that we had the advantage of working with. We went through an exercise of really trying to articulate what is, like, the big, hairy goal? What is our mission? And our tagline is now taking the paper and the work out of paperwork so humans can do what they do best. MID-ROLL AD: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 support from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: tbot.io/devops. WILL: You were talking about the exercise to figure out, like, where your company is going. I want to ask question, like, around your leadership and core values. Like, how important is it for you to set that foundation now for the next couple of years? Because it sounds like that's what you're doing. You're setting that foundation, and I heard you say it a couple of times, foundation. So, how important is it to set that foundation for the growth that you're expecting over the next couple of years? LONNI: When you do have a product-led growth initiative, it means you need to provide as much self-service onboarding, and training tools, and resources as you can to make it easy for companies to move from their free account to a paid account and take advantage of all of the features and the functionality. So, our goals right now are to eliminate hurdles that companies may feel in making the transition. Because we've had so many conversations over the past, I guess, almost three years, we're pretty articulate on being able to help with process changes. What are you doing now? Here's how SmartCert fits in. Are your goals on the supplier side or your internal organization? Is it with customers? And just help walk them down the path of making a transition so it doesn't feel like it's going to require months or years or tons of man-hours that just aren't available as people just try and get through the day. So, from a foundational perspective, customer success is really now sales, marketing support. And those are the tools that I think will help companies have a clear path. We've learned that they really want to make very clear decisions. If I do this, what are the steps? So, we're providing clarity and a lot of good guidance that doesn't require a lot of man-hours on our side to be able to help turn free accounts into paid accounts and continue their expanded use of the platform. VICTORIA: That's very cool. Do you have any questions for me or Will? LONNI: So, you guys have a lot of conversations. I would love to hear what's really stood out in the last month or so. What's kind of resonated with you? Or what did you hear and apply in your life? VICTORIA: I have a couple of answers. I mean, I've had a lot of really amazing guests on the show. It's hard to pick out any few that were really important or had some meaningful takeaways. I really liked Charity Majors when I asked her how the company is doing, and she's like, "Well, we haven't failed yet." [laughs] And just an interesting mentality of very humble and very just open to change and open to seeing, like, what's going to happen next. And also, I think that Irina Nazarova talked about managing products versus managing open-source projects, and how that is different, and how it might influence your business differently, especially as a consulting company. So, I thought that was really interesting. I always love having guests on the show and hearing about why they started what they're doing. And it's just really inspiring to hear people take a chance on an idea that they have, that they feel passionate about, and really put everything behind it. And, you know, most of the time, we're talking to people who have succeeded [chuckles]. A few guests we've had are just getting started in their journey, and it is still kind of unclear. And I really enjoy those conversations as well, where they're just still not really sure if it's going to work. So, that's been a little bit about my experience as a host on the show. WILL: Yeah, I think I was going to go in a similar direction because I love talking to founders because it's just a different...almost like what you said, like, it's okay; go out there. Take that next step. It may hurt. It may be hard. It's not an easy path but go out there. You can do it. And it's not just for starting a company; for me, it's almost everyday life, like the hard things that come my way in life. Like, it's okay; I can do it. So, I think it's very encouraging to hear founders and their mindset when they started companies and after, like, multiple years of where they're at. And, like, yeah, it was hard. It was not easy, but hey, I made it. Like, I'm on the other side of it. And we're doing great, or we're still in there just hanging out. So, I think, for me, it's being resilient. I think that's the big thing. LONNI: I think you nailed it because real talk is survival. And if you aren't honest with yourself, it's not likely you're going to be able to survive. So, I think when you take stock of what you're trying to achieve, the road is super hard, or, like, everyone says, "Everyone would be doing it." But there's a reason, and there's intention there. And there are so many entrepreneurs who have failed over time only to have more intelligence, experience to get it right at some point. So, I don't know that anything is linear these days. We get smarter and certainly savvier around topics that interest us. And if it drives you towards entrepreneurship, I salute you. It makes having three daughters feel like a spa treatment. But I also know that I get excited about the other side of this. But our board reminds me that there's so much of this that feeds my soul. And it's hard to give that up when you do sell the company or move on because you're used to just being involved in all the things and being able to take advantage of the highs and come together during the lows. And that roller coaster is actually what everyone tells me I'm going to miss the most. I don't believe them yet. But [laughs] I think that they're probably right. VICTORIA: I think maybe you'll have a nostalgia for it. But you'll enjoy your peacefulness as well. LONNI: Yeah [laughs]. VICTORIA: Hopefully. [laughs] You have to hope. Yeah, I wonder, you know, speaking about, like, having investors and going around trying to raise money for a product, did you receive any advice or suggestions that, looking back on, you were like, "Actually, that was completely not helpful; I'm glad I didn't take it"? LONNI: There were many companies who declined to participate in conversations because we were not building SmartCert on blockchain. And some of them have come back around and asked, "Are your plans to include it?" And we've always felt not only does that require a huge leap...We're taking an industry from paper to digital, so if you want to layer blockchain on that, you're probably going to go nowhere really fast. Because I don't think there's anyone on this planet who can explain it well or really articulate the benefits when, in fact, you're sending paper in boxes. And, sure, there's the security element to that, but it's not really aligned with what blockchain is meant to do. So, we kind of have a laugh now about those that pushed so hard for we will only fund if this is blockchain-enabled. And we're so glad we didn't do that [laughs]. VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, my understanding for, like, a blockchain, one good use case might be for, like, unique identities or something. Taking the more practical approach, sometimes I think people forget in technology that we're just...the future is here, but it's not evenly distributed. And there is paper being sent in boxes. And sometimes we can make a big impact, which is very simple solutions. But even simple solutions aren't simple to implement and make change happen. So, I'm wondering if you have any advice for founders who are facing a big change management that they're trying to push through. What advice would you give them to kind of start making inroads into that? LONNI: There are companies who make hundreds of millions of dollars helping [laughs] other companies through change management, and it's not lost on me that it's its own business. What we have really come to understand is you need to meet everyone where they're at. The tools that we've built are simple. You learn SmartCert in five minutes. It is how processes change that have been in place since the beginning of time for this company. And I think when it comes down to it, there are plenty of business owners and C-suite executives that can say, "Yes, this makes sense. We're going to do it." But being voluntold as the user who needs to not only learn something new but move out of their comfort zone figure out how to learn while doing your job every day, those are the people that I really think is important to support. They're going to mean the success of the adoption. And they are the ones that deserve the cheerleading. So, with change management, my advice would be is to think about every single person that this affects in the company, understand who is able to realize immediate benefits, whose are maybe more short-term once this is launched or as your customers adopt it. And then who benefits, and how do they benefit for the long-term? Because you sort of need to help them keep their eye on the prize to get through the steps, it's going to require to change the way they show up every day. WILL: So, Victoria asked you about advice that you're glad that you didn't take. Was there any advice that you're like, "Wow, that was the best advice, and I am so glad that we did follow it"? LONNI: Towards the end of last year when, we sort of accepted our fate that standard sales, SaaS sales, was not going to work for us. Lyndon, the founder and one of the members of our board, had a really great conversation around relationships, especially with these antiquated industries. And if you are new technology, the real key to winning business, sort of earning that street cred, being accepted as a thought leader, is to make relationships with people. It is still a person-to-person decision that helped us prioritize attending regional conferences and industry conferences to meet people face to face as often as possible to build the trust and to be able to build the relationships that will help create the confidence in every company we talk to about moving forward but making sure that there's still a human element involved. WILL: I love that advice. Yeah, it's interesting how many companies, I feel like, forget that, is that the people is the reason that your company exists. I don't know where I got it from, but someone told me it's three Ps that, like, what is kind of the foundation for your company. I think it's people, processes, and products. If you can nail those three things, like you will be successful majority of the time. And I thought that was very interesting. LONNI: It's so true. Empowering people and accepting the challenges that they face, being real about what change means for them, being able to, you know, speak their language, and acknowledge what taking on new commitments and new processes means for them is going to be the way to be successful. VICTORIA: And how does your balance feel between your life and your family, that you've mentioned, and working for this company trying to get it off the ground? LONNI: There are times where I'm proud being able to show my daughters that you can do it all, but it's hard to do it all. I'm grateful to work from home because it does enable me to not only work in yoga pants all day but to have time for self-care. So, the endorphins at the gym are survival for me. Being able to find your people...I was so lucky to be a part of StartupAZ, which is a cohort here in Arizona of just about a dozen companies. And we got together on a monthly basis to talk through what's working, what's not working, sort of setting goals for ourselves but also commiserating. Because I feel like being an entrepreneur can feel really isolating. I don't think there's many people that understand what this means on a daily basis. There's certainly a whole new language beyond that with tech founders. And it helped me feel seen in a way that I can't articulate or get from my friends. So, that was really important for me. What I try and be really sensitive to is this is a grind, but I'm doing it on behalf of my family. So, prioritizing time, even if it's, well, you know what? I'm going to drive you to school because that means I get 10 minutes in the car one one-on-one with you. Those are the things that I think if you're going to have less time, find ways to make it more meaningful without screens and phones, and just connect to your people. That's been important to me. There are days that I'm better at it. This week has not been great simply because we have some big deadlines. And I do still try and prioritize things like the gym simply because my brain works so much better with [chuckles] endorphins than without. So, you'll have parental guilt. But if you really remind yourself that you're showing up for the greater good and you're doing it for your people, then your people will still always be in the forefront. WILL: Do you have any foreseeable hurdles coming up with SmartCert? LONNI: This is a big year for us. We, as many tech companies, have worked really hard to extend our runway. The funding [chuckles] world, the milestones, and markers required for a Series A round have all changed a lot since we were funded. And I think the hurdles we face is to demonstrate enough of momentum, great outcomes with our pilots, with these larger companies, to be able to go back to our investors and expand the future with the funding we'll need to continue to scale. So, that's probably a consistent point of view for a lot of tech companies. It's sort of that make-or-break year. But we feel pretty good about it certainly because of the changes we've made to the way we go to market, but also the features we released this year in support of these larger conversations and being able to bring on someone who's going to then have 2,400 of their suppliers join the network. So, there's a lot of potential, but there's also a lot at risk. VICTORIA: Yeah. So, I'm curious how that process was when you decided to pivot and you decided to create some new features to meet what your customers were telling you. How did you go about getting the support you needed to build those features? LONNI: One thing that I think we did okay at, but if I had to look back, I'd say we should have done more of, is talking to the companies represented on SmartCert, certainly our paid customers. But those conversations helped us prioritize the features that would enable them to work smarter, to reduce risk, to be more efficient, to grow in a way that's going to support and embrace technology as it's introduced to the industry. So, when you think back to what can you learn, it should always be the people that are using your product. We have, in this year, created a lot of internal tools so that once you do receive documents, or if you're a manufacturer and you're generating documents, centralizing those for access among teams, and creating a really automated process to send those to customers was the focus. And the conversation now has moved, as I mentioned, to the supplier side. And that's one area where I think we have the greatest opportunity for growth simply because it is the one area of the business you have the least control over. So, we've kind of come full circle with building the tools that make sense for those that are using it now and building a new path to participate on a network or create efficiencies by making standard processes. Even if your suppliers aren't participating on SmartCert, we are going to be launching the ability to take the documents, as I mentioned, and turn them into SmartCerts. That, to me, I think presents the greatest opportunity for us to really build a lot of momentum. VICTORIA: I love that. And so, you have your own team of developers working on this. Are you working with, like, an outsourced team? Or how did you structure the type of technical skills you needed to bring into the team? LONNI: Our partner company that built our MVP, TechFabric, is still connected with us. So, if we have integrations, their team usually assists us with those SmartCert integrations into things like ERPs and just legacy systems that our customers are using. What they helped us with is to kind of provide the ideal candidate framework based on their knowledge of not only where the platform needs to go but the requirements and capabilities it requires, and participated in interviews to help us build our internal team. So, without having leadership in technology, that was a huge win for us to have an advisor and a supporter to be able to have the conversations we weren't qualified to have in order to hire the right people. VICTORIA: Gotcha. That makes sense. And maybe I missed this point earlier. But how did you meet them, or how did you find them? LONNI: Well, the story is a good one. We're based in Gilbert, Arizona. And as we were exploring what the options were, obviously trying to prioritize local relationships and partnerships, we did a Google search and ended up just having great conversations and feeling very fortunate that they were in our backyard and still are a really strong partner. VICTORIA: Oh, that makes sense. And having someone nearby, too, probably helps to just make it all feel a little cozier, so I love that. I love hearing about it and that they've helped you get to a place you want to be with the app. I'm so grateful to hear your story and hear more about what y'all are working on. Is there anything else that you would like to promote? LONNI: It's always fun having these conversations because sometimes you forget, you know, you're stuck in the minutiae of the day-to-day. And I just appreciate being able to tell the story and be reminded of how far we've come. And certainly celebrate and challenge anyone else who's considering a [inaudible 41:24] at this to take it. And if there's any advice that I would want to leave everyone with is to prioritize sleep [laughs] because it's the secret weapon. And I can tell that the days that I don't get enough, I don't think the way that I should. And it's almost like sleep is the new drug. And find any way possible, whether it's white noise, CBD, black-out shades, find your peace because sleep is your friend. WILL: I totally agree with that. [chuckles] VICTORIA: Thank you so much for your time and for being here with us today. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you could find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.Special Guest: Lonni Kieffer.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 support from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: tbot.io/devopsSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

We are thrilled to announce the third session of our new Incubator Program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply to our eight-week program. We'll help you validate your market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence toward an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. We look forward to seeing your application in our inbox! Quincy Larson is the founder of freeCodeCamp.org, which helps people learn to code for free by creating thousands of videos, articles, and interactive coding lessons–all freely available to the public. Quincy shares his journey from transitioning from teaching into software development, how freeCodeCamp was born out of his desire to make educational systems more efficient through coding, and discusses the early challenges of bootstrapping the platform, and how it has now grown into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Quincy and hosts Victoria and Will, discuss the platform's technical architecture, especially their global server distribution and decision to rely on volunteer-led translation efforts rather than machines to ensure both the quality and human touch of their educational content. He also talks about the state of free and low-cost degree programs, the student loan crisis, and the ongoing debate between traditional computer science degrees and coding bootcamps. Free Code Campi Follow Free Code Camp on LinkedIn or X. Follow Quincy Larson on LinkedIn or X. Follow thoughtbot on X or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robot Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Quincy Larson, Host of the freeCodeCamp Podcast, Teacher, and Founder of freecodecamp.org, a community of people around the world who are learning to code together. Quincy, thank you for joining us. QUINCY: Yeah, thanks for having me, Will and Victoria. VICTORIA: Yeah, thank you for being here. So, I understand that you made a big shift personally for yourself from California to Texas. How has that been for your family and for, you know, as a founder who is running a nonprofit? QUINCY: Yeah, things are going great. It was a big move. We had some kids, and it was difficult to find, like, a good place to live in California that didn't cost, like, millions of dollars [laughter]. And so, at least in the San Francisco Bay Area, we were living in East Bay. I grew up here in Texas and Oklahoma. And I was like, well, maybe we could go back to the southwest, and so we did that. And we were able to come back and comfortably purchase a home here in Plano, Texas. We were able to find one that was, like, really close to a really good public school system. And so, every morning, I'm able to walk my kids to school. And I'd say that Texas has been a great change from California, where I lived for seven or eight years over there. And I love California. Texas has a lot of great things about it, too. It is a little bit hotter than California. It doesn't quite have California's Mediterranean climate, but it's been great here. I like it. And I would say if people are thinking about moving to Texas from California, there are definitely some really good spots of Texas that I think they'll feel really comfortable in. WILL: That's awesome, yeah. I'm originally from Louisiana. So, you're bringing back, like, memories of me growing up, always going to Texas and stuff. And I know exactly where Plano is, so that's amazing. How has it been with your kids? Because we were talking, and you said your kid recently started school. How's that been? QUINCY: Yeah, so my daughter started school a couple of years ago, and she just turned eight. And my son he's turning six this weekend. He just started kindergarten. We were having him take classes at the YMCA some pre-school. And he went from doing that for the first few hours of the day, and then we'd pick him up and bring him home and eat lunch with him and everything. And now he's got to go to school from, like, 7:00 a.m. to, like, 3:00 p.m. And he's been freaking out, like, "Why is school so long? Oh my goodness, I'm so tired all the time," [laughs]. So, he didn't realize that school would be as involved a process. He was all excited. But now he's complaining about, like, just the sheer length of school. But meanwhile, my wife and I we're just, like, celebrating because we actually have some time around the house where we can get work done without having kids running around causing chaos [laughs]. So yeah, I think he's adapting. He's making friends. We're doing playdates and stuff, and he's having fun. It's just a transition, you know. But it is nice because before, I would walk my daughter to school, and that was a very quick, 10-minute round trip, and then I'd walk my son to school. And that was, like, an hour round trip because we walked all the way to the YMCA. And I would do that to kind of toughen him up and get him walking a lot. It was a huge chunk of time. And now I can just grab both, one [inaudible 4:04] hand in each hand, and walk them to school, and drop them off, and be done with it and get back to work. So, it's definitely nice having both at the same school. VICTORIA: I love the work-life balance and that you were able to find and live somewhere that's affordable and has enough space for your family. And I wonder if we can draw a connection there between achieving that kind of lifestyle and learning to code, and what the mission of freeCodeCamp is for you, and what that means to people and changing careers. QUINCY: Absolutely. So, my background is in teaching. And I was a teacher and a school director at schools here in the U.S. and over in China. And that involved me being on campus, like working directly with my admin staff, with my instructional staff, and working directly with students. So, working remotely was kind of, like, a foreign concept way back in, like, 2010 or so 2011 when I started my transition into working as a software developer. But being able to work remotely has been a real game changer for me. And also, you can imagine, like, being a developer, you can command much larger compensation, and you have a lot more career options than being a teacher or a school director. So, it's given me a lot of agency in what I wanted to do. Even before, you know, starting freeCodeCamp, when I was working as a software developer and doing freelance work and stuff, I was able to do everything remotely. And that just gave me a ton of flexibility. So, the way that I learned to code personally was I wanted to help our school be more efficient. A lot of our teachers, a lot of our admin they were spending all day kind of chained to their desk entering information into computers for compliance reasons, to be able to produce great reports, to be able to produce attendance reports, immigration documents, all those things. And I just thought, like, is there a way that maybe I could automate some of this? And I didn't know anything about programming. I was about 31 years old. I was just sitting at my desk, and I just started kind of, like, Googling around and learning some very basic programming. And with that, over the course of a few months, I was really able to transform how the school ran. And we, like, won an award. And, like, a whole bunch of the students were, like, having a great time because they were spending so much more time with their teachers. And they were like, "Hey..." like, telling all their friends and family to transfer into the school. So, it was a massive success. And I thought, wow, if one person who doesn't even really know that much about programming can effect such a change with just a little bit of programming skills, imagine what I could do if I actually learned to code properly, so [chuckles] I did that. I spent about nine months going to hackathons every weekend, and reading a lot of books, and using a lot of open courses online, like from MIT, from Stanford, and I kind of taught myself to code for free. And then, I was able to get a job as a developer at a mid-size tech startup in California. And from there, I just learned more and more, and it was amazing. And it was an amazing transformation for me personally. And I thought, well, I want to help other people be able to do this because I know so many people out there would like to be working in a field where they have more conversation, a higher degree of control. They get to do creative work instead of, you know, tedious work. As a developer, you're constantly doing new stuff because code is infinitely reproducible. So, you could always just go back to code you've previously written if you needed to solve the same problem again. So, you're always in this kind of learning mindset. You're always in this problem-solving mindset. And it's really thrilling. It's just great, impactful work. So, I wanted to help more people be able to do that, hence starting a bunch of different projects that people didn't care about and then eventually starting a project that people did care about, which is freeCodeCamp. And since then, just kind of leading this project in trying to help as many people as possible learn to code. WILL: So, I was looking at your website. And I didn't even realize this until I was doing more research for the podcast, but you have over 10,000 tutorials, and they're in different categories. I saw you just recently released one on finance, which I actually bookmarked it because I'm going to go through it and look at it. You help more than a million people every day. So, how was it when you first started out? Like, how was, I guess, you could say, the grind? How was it in those early days? QUINCY: I'm a big advocate of, you know, for work-life balance, but, like, I kind of, like, exclude founders from that. I really do think that if you're trying to get something started, you're going to have to work really hard and probably way beyond what would be reasonable for a person who's getting a salary or working at an existing company if you're trying to get things started. So, I mean, it was, like, 100-hour weeks, maybe 120 some weeks [laughs]. I would sleep and just wake up and get to my desk and try to, like, put out fires, fix the server, improve the codebase, respond to learners in the community who had feedback, deal with support issues. Like, I was basically doing everything myself. And gradually, we were able to, like, build out the team over a long period of time. But really, the first few years was me self-financing everything with just my teacher savings. I spent, like, $150,000 of my own money just trying to keep freeCodeCamp going. For the first couple of years, we got tax-exempt status from the IRS. When that finally happened, I was like, great, like, let's go out and see if we can get some people to donate. So, we started asking people who were using freeCodeCamp if they'd be willing to donate $3 a month and eventually $5 a month, and we were able to support the organization through that. Really, it's just like a grassroots donor-supported effort. And then, we've been able to get some grants from Linux Foundation, and From Google, from Microsoft, from a whole lot of other big tech companies, and from some other nonprofits in the space. But mostly, it's just been, like, individual donors donating $5. And if you get enough people doing that, you get, like, a budget where you can actually pay for, you know, we have more than 100 servers around the world serving freeCodeCamp in, like, six different languages. We have, you know, all these other, like, initiatives. Like, we've got Code Radio, where you can go listen to Lo-fi while you're coding. And there are servers all over the world. And you can change the bit rate to suit whatever data you have and everything. Like, we wanted to just offer a whole lot of different services. We have mobile apps now. We've got an iOS and an Android app for freeCodeCamp. And then, of course, we've got the podcasts. We've got four podcasts: one in English, which I host, and then we've got one in Spanish, one in Portuguese, and one in Chinese. VICTORIA: Yeah, I absolutely want to ask you more about your podcasts. But first, I wanted to hear–can you tell me a little more about the decision to be 501(c)(3) or a nonprofit status? And were you always firm in that decision? Do people question it? And what was the real reasoning and commitment to that formation? QUINCY: I guess I would consider myself an idealist. Like, I genuinely believe that most educational endeavors should be, you know, nonprofit. They should be driven by either governments or by charities. I'm always kind of skeptical when there's, like, some late-night TV commercial, like, "Viewer, we'll help you get our degree," and it's from, like, a private for-profit university, something like that. So, I was like, in education...and I don't think everything in society needs to be that way, but I do think, like, education and, to an extent, healthcare these should be led by charities. Like, you know, the Red Cross, or, like, Doctors Without Borders, or churches, you know, own many of the universities, many of the hospital systems in the United States. I think that's a good thing. I think it's a very good thing that it's not just, you know, private profit-maximizing, market incentive-bound organizations that are doing all the stuff in education and in healthcare. I wanted to try to create something that, like, a lot of other people would see and say, "Oh wow, this charity can actually survive. It can sustain itself without raising a bunch of VC, without going public," or any of those things that a for-profit entity would do. And, again, I just want to emphasize, like, I don't think that iPhones should be made [chuckles] by nonprofits or anything like that. I'm just saying, like, for the purpose of actually educating people, the incentives are not necessarily aligned when you're trying to get money from...especially when you're talking about people that 60% of people on earth live off less than $10 a day. Those people should be spending their money on food. They should be spending their money on shelter. They should be spending their money on family. They should not be spending money on online courses, in my humble opinion. Like, online courses should be freely available to those people. So, to some extent, freeCodeCamp, we want to make sure that everybody everywhere in the world has access to first-rate learning resources on math, programming, computer science, regardless of their ability to pay. So, that's kind of, like, the ideal logical [inaudible 12:19], I guess, of freeCodeCamp. We kind of live that. Like, we're really serious. We will never pay, well, anything on freeCodeCamp. We won't account email gate anything. We are, I guess, absolutist in the sense that we want all of freeCodeCamp's learning resources to be free for everyone. Because of that, it made sense to like, incorporate as a 501 (c)(3) public charity. And so, we're tax-exempt. And people who donate to freeCodeCamp they can, you know, deduct it from their U.S. taxes. If a large company or even a small startup...we've had lots of startups like New Relic, like Retool, we've had Postman, Hostinger, a whole lot of different startups and mid-sized tech companies, Pulumi, Appsmith, they've all given us these grants that we can use to develop courses. So, we can often develop courses incorporating those resources. But that's tax-exempt, right? They can deduct that from their U.S. taxes. So, it's a big incentive for other people to partner with us and for people to donate funds to us. And it allows us to have the interests aligned in the sense that only people who have, you know, free cash flow or who have disposable income those are the people that are supporting freeCodeCamp. For the people that are, you know, single parents or that are taking care of their aging relatives, or are already working two jobs, or are completely unemployed and don't have any funds to speak of that are using the public library computer to access freeCodeCamp, right? Or using freeCodeCamp on a $50 prepaid phone from Walmart or something like that, right? Like those people can still use freeCodeCamp, and we can have the people who do have resources subsidize everyone else. WILL: Wow. I absolutely love that because...and I wish freeCodeCamp was around whenever I was in, like, high school and, you know, the early 2000s because we just didn't have the resources because I grew up in a small town in Louisiana. And this could have been so beneficial to that community because, like you said, we didn't have the resources–someone to teach coding there. There was no developers around that town that I was in. So, I really appreciate that you're doing this for everyone. And I know for me even...so, when I reached out to you, I did it because I was excited because I've used freeCodeCamp so many times, so many times to learn just in my journey to become a senior developer. Like, freeCodeCamp was one of the resources that I used because, one, it was free. But it wasn't...I think sometimes you can get free resources, and it's not great quality almost. Like, it's almost like you're more confused than before. But with freeCodeCamp, it was very, very amazing quality. And it was very clear on what I was learning. Honestly, thank you for helping me grow as a developer, just, honestly, thank you for that. QUINCY: Absolutely, Will. I feel honored to have helped you. And, yes, we want to help all the kids who are growing up in rural Louisiana or...I'm from, you know, Oklahoma City, not, like, the biggest, most prosperous city in the United States. Like, I want to help all of my friends who growing up who were eating meals provided by the state school system or my older friends who are on disability. Like, I want to make sure that they have resources, too. And in the process of doing that, it's a privilege to also serve all the working software engineers like you out there who just need, like, a reference resource or, like, oh, I've heard about Bun JS or Tailwind CSS. Or something like, I'm going to watch this three-hour course where I'm going to learn how to do Flutter. Like, freeCodeCamp has a 37-hour Flutter course. So, we've got, like, all these courses on using OpenAI APIs and things like that, too, right? So, it's not just for beginners, but we definitely want to, like, first and foremost, we want to serve people who we're kind of, like, the resource of last resort for, if you want to think of it that way. Like, only freeCodeCamp can help these people. Sure, they can probably use some other free courses on YouTube. And there are lots of other blogs that publish good tutorials and stuff. But freeCodeCamp is like an organized effort, specifically to help those people in need. And just kind of a side benefit of it is that you know, more established, experienced devs like you also get kind of, like, some benefit out of it as well. WILL: Whenever you were a developer, and you decided to start freeCodeCamp, how many years of experience did you have? And how did you overcome impostor syndrome, not only as a developer but as a founder? Because I feel like just overcoming it as a developer is hard, but you were also, you know, like you said, you know, handling everything for freeCodeCamp. So, how did you do that? And kind of tell us about that experience. QUINCY: Yeah. So, I didn't really know what I was doing. I think most founders probably don't know what they're doing. And I think that's totally fine because you can learn while you're doing. And we live in the United States, which is a country that kind of rewards experimentation and does not punish failure as much as a lot of other cultures does. Even if you try really hard, you're going to learn a tremendous amount, and you're going to try your next project. And that's what I did. I tried...I launched several educational, like, open learning resource-type projects, and none of them made any dent at all [laughs] in the proverbial universe. Like, nobody cared. Like, I would go and, like, I'd be talking to people. And I'd be explaining, like, "Oh, this solves this problem that you have." And you could kind of tell, like, people would sign in one time just to be polite, but then they'd never sign in again. So, it was very tricky to get traction. And I read a bunch of books. And I went to a lot of founder-focused meetups in San Francisco Bay Area. I had, like, moved out to San Francisco, specifically to try to, like, kind of make up for my deficit, the fact that I didn't know anybody because I was from Oklahoma City. I didn't know anybody in tech. And I didn't have, like, a fancy, you know, pedigree from, like, Harvard, or Wharton, or something like that, right? Like, I went to, like, a state university, and I studied English, right? And [chuckles] so, I didn't even have, like, a CS degree or anything like that. So, I definitely felt like an impostor. I just had to kind of, like, power through that and be okay with that. And it's something a little bit easier for me to do because, you know, I'm a White guy with glasses and a beard. And, like, nobody's walking up saying, "Are you sure you're a developer?" Or like, "Are you in marketing?" You know, like, the typical kind of, like, slight that they may say to somebody who doesn't necessarily look like me. And so I didn't have to deal with any of that nonsense, but there was still a lot of just self-doubt that I had to power through. And I think that was a big advantage for me. It was just, like, I was kind of, like, at war with myself and my own confidence. In fact, I found the software development community, and especially the open-source community, to be incredibly uplifting and empowering. And, like, they want to see you win. They want you to sit down and build a really cool project over the weekend and in the hackathon and present it. And, you know, they want you to learn. They know that you know, everybody is going to learn at a different rate and that a lot of people are going to get discouraged and leave tech and just go back to working in whatever field they were working in before. And that's totally cool. But I do feel that they're there to support you and to encourage you. And there are lots of different events. There are lots of different communities. I recently listened to the founder of Women Who Code, who was on this very podcast [laughs], Giant Robots Smashing Into Giant Robots, the greatest podcast name of all time. And, you know, there are people out there that are working very hard to make it easier for folks to get into tech. I think that that has been a huge part. Even before freeCodeCamp, you know, there were Harvard professors–Stanford professors putting their entire coursework for free online. You could go to, like, different tech events around California, for example, where I was when I was learning to code. And there'd just be tons of people that were eager to, like, learn more about you and to welcome you. And there would be, you know, recruiters that would talk to you and say, "Well, you may not be ready yet, but, like, let's talk in six months," right? And so, there was kind of, like, that spirit of you're going to get there. It's just going to take a lot of time. Nobody was telling me, "Oh, learning to code is easy," [chuckles] because it's not easy. There were lots of people that were, like, "Learning to code is hard. But you've got this. Just stick with it. If I could be of help, let me know," people who would pair program with me to help me, like, improve my chops, people who would volunteer to, like, look at my projects and give design feedback, all those kinds of things. And I think you're going to find all those things on the web. You're going to find those things in the open-source community. freeCodeCamp has a forum where people volunteer their time and energy to help build one another up and help one another get unstuck on whatever projects they're working on, give feedback on projects. And so, I think, to a large extent, the very giving nature, I almost want to say, like, selfless nature, of the global software developer community that is what saved me. And that's what enabled me to transition into this field, even as a teacher in his 30s. VICTORIA: It's interesting you say that. Because I feel as someone who hires engineers and developers, I love people who have teaching backgrounds because it means they're five-star communicators [laughs]. And I think that you know, in your job, when you're pairing with other developers, or you're talking to clients, in our case, that communicating what you're working on and how you're thinking about something is, like, 50% of the job [laughs]. For freeCodeCamp, I saw you have 40,000 people have found jobs after completing courses on there. I hope you feel like you've really, like, established some success here already. But what's on the horizon? What are you looking forward to in the next six months or six years with freeCodeCamp? QUINCY: Yeah, I'll be happy to answer that. But I want to emphasize what you just said: communication is, like, half the job. That's something that thoughtbot has gotten really early on. And I'll tell you that thoughtbot Playbook was incredibly helpful for me as a software developer and also early on for freeCodeCamp's team. And I think a lot of teams make use of that open resource. So, thank you for continuing to maintain that and kind of drive home that communication really is...like, meetings are essential [chuckles]. And it's not always just, like, leave me alone and let me go back to my cubicle and code. You know, I like to quote the old joke that, you know, weeks of coding can save you hours of meetings because I really do believe that communication is core. So, to answer your question about where freeCodeCamp is headed in terms of what kind of impact we'd like to have, I feel like we're just getting started. I feel like pretty much every Fortune 500 company wants to become a tech company in some way or another. Everybody is pushing things to the software layer because software is infinitely reproducible. It's so much easier to maintain software or fix things in production. Like, you realize, oh, there's a big problem. Like, we don't have to recall all the cars back to the dealerships to go and open up the hood and fix this, you know, mechanical defect. If we're controlling all these things at the software layer, right? We can potentially just deploy a fix and tell people like, "Hey, version update [chuckles], you know, download this security patch," or whatever, right? So, there are so many different things that you can do with software. I feel like the potential growth of the field of software and the number of software developers that the world will ultimately need...currently, we've got maybe 30 or 40 million developers on earth that are professional paid-to-code people. But I think that number is going to increase dramatically over the next 50 years or so. And I'll go ahead and address the elephant in the room [laughs] because pretty much everybody asks me this question like, "Don't you think that, like, tools like large language models like GPT-4 and things are going to obviate the need for so many developers?" And I think they're going to make individual developers more productive. But if you think about what code is, it's really extremely explicit directions for how to do something, whether you're using, you know, machine code, or you're using a scripting language like Python, or you're using English, and you're talking directly to the computer like you would on Star Trek. Essentially, you have to have a really deep understanding of the problem. And you need to know exactly what needs to be done in exactly what sequence. You may not need to manipulate bytecode like you would back in the '70s. But you are going to need to understand the fundamental problems, and you're going to need to be able to address it. So, I'm optimistic that the number of developers is going to continue to grow. The developers are going to continue to command more and more, I guess, respect in society. And they're going to continue to have more and more agency in what they want to do with their careers and have more and more options and, ultimately, be able to command higher compensation, be able to work remotely if they'd like. Developers will continue to be able to ascend through corporate hierarchies and become, you know, vice presidents or even executives like the CEO, right? If you look at a lot of the big tech companies, the CEO is a developer. And I think that that will continue. And the computer science degrees will continue to be extremely valuable. So, what is freeCodeCamp working on now that we think will further help people? Well, we're working on a free four-year computer science degree, a Bachelor in computer science, and there's also an associate in mathematics that we're developing. And those are going to be a progression of 40 university-level courses that have labs and have a substantial block of lectures that you'll watch. And then, we'll also have final examinations and everything. And we're developing that curriculum. We've got one of the courses live, and we're developing the second one, and eventually, we'll have all 40. It'll take till the 2030s. But we're going to have those. And then, once we have some longitudinal data about graduates and their success rates and everything, we are going to apply for the accreditation process, and we're going to get accredited as a university, right? Like, you can go through that process. Not a lot of organizations do that; not a lot of new universities are coming about in the 2020s. But it is something that can be done. And we've done a great deal of research, talked to a bunch of accreditors, talked to a bunch of university admins who go through the accreditation process. We think we can do it. So, again, very long-term goal. But when you're a 501(c)(3) public charity, you don't have to worry about freeCodeCamp getting acquired or all the things that would traditionally happen with, like, a for-profit company. You have a lot more leeway to plan really far. And you've got, like, this really broad mandate in terms of what you want to accomplish. And even if, you know, creating a university degree program in the 2030s would not be a profitable endeavor that, like, a rational shareholder value-maximizing corporation would embark upon, it is the sort of project that, you know, a charity like freeCodeCamp could do. So, we're going to do it. MID-ROLL AD: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We’ll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. VICTORIA: I think that's great. And, actually, you know, I got my master's in information technology and project management online way back when. So, I really like the availability of modern computer science bachelor's and master's being available at that low price point. And you're able to pursue that with the business structure you put in place. I'm curious to kind of go back to something you said earlier on how widely available it is and how you spread out across all these multiple countries. Were there any technical architecture decisions that you had to make along the way? And how did those decisions end up turning out? QUINCY: Absolutely. So, one of the things we did was we located servers all around the world. We're multi-cloud, and we've got servers in different data centers in, like, Singapore, Europe, Latin America, and we're trying to reduce latency for everybody. Another thing that we've done is, you know, we don't use, like, Google Translate to just translate all our different pages into however many languages are currently available on Google Translate; I think it's, like, more than 100. We actually have a big localization effort that's led primarily by volunteers. We have some staff that oversee some of the translation. And essentially, we have a whole bunch of people working at translate.freecodecamp.org and translating the curriculum, translating the tutorials into major world languages. Most prominently would be Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Ukrainian. Like, all these different world languages, there's, like, a freeCodeCamp version for those, and you can go into the menu, and you can choose it. And it's actually, like, hand-translated by native speakers of that language who are developers. So, that's been another extremely, you know, time-intensive effort by the community. But we believe that, you know, the quality of the translations is really important. And we want that kind of human touch. We don't want kind of weird artifacts and typos that would be associated with machine translation. And we want to make sure that each of the challenges...because they're extremely tersely worded, again, communication is so important. If you go through the freeCodeCamp curriculum, we try to use as few words as absolutely necessary to effectively communicate what the task the learner needs to accomplish is, and we try to, just in time, teach them concepts. We don't want to present them with a big wall of text. Read this 20-page PDF to understand how, you know, CSS, you know, borders work or something like that. No, we're teaching, like, kind of, like, just in time, like, okay, let's write this line of code. Okay, great, the test passed. Let's go to this next one. This test isn't passing. Here is some contextual-specific hints as to why your code is not passing, why you're not able to advance, right? And we do projects [inaudible 30:30] to learn where we break everything down into steps. So, that's a lot of instructions that need to be very carefully translated into these different world languages to truly make freeCodeCamp accessible to everyone, regardless of whether they happen to be fortunate enough to grow up speaking English at a native level, right? I would say that's our main consideration is, like, the localization effort but also just having servers everywhere and doing everything we can to comply with, like, all the different data rules and privacy rules and everything of all these different countries. It's a lot of work, but in my humble opinion, it's worth it. WILL: I had, like, a two-part question because I wanted to loop back around. When you're talking about the free bachelor's program, one, does anything like that exist where you can get a bachelor-level program, and it's free? And then the second part is, how many countries are you in? QUINCY: Yeah, so currently, lots of governments in Europe, for example, will offer free degrees that are kind of subsidized by the state. There may be some other kind of degree equivalent programs that are offered that are subsidized by corporations. For example, if you work at Starbucks, I think you can get a degree from Arizona State University. And that's a great benefit that Starbucks offers to people. Arizona State University, of course, being one of the biggest public universities in the United States in terms of enrollment. As far as free degrees, though, in the United States, there's nothing like that where, like, literally anyone can just go and get a degree for free without needing to enroll, without needing to pay any sort of fees. There are tuition-free programs, but they still charge you fees for, like, taking exams and things like that. What I like to call ultra-low-cost degree providers–there's Western Governors University, and there's University of the People. And both of these are accredited institutions that you can go, and you can get a degree for, you know, $5,000, $10,000, $15,000. And it's a full-blown four-year degree. Now, that is amazing. I applaud those efforts. I've enjoyed talking to the folks at those different schools. I think the next step is to go truly free. There's nothing blocking you at all. You don't have to be banked. You don't have to have a credit card. You don't have to have any money. You can still get this degree. That's what we're chasing. And I think we'll get there, but it's just a lot of work. WILL: So, it's blowing my mind. It's just blowing me away because, like, you know, we talk about the student loan crisis, I would say. The impact if...when—I'm not going to say if—when you do this, the impact that can have on there, have you thought about that? And kind of, if you have, what has been your thoughts around that? QUINCY: Yeah, so there are $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loans in the United States. That's money that individual people, most of whom don't make a ton of money, right? Like, many of those people didn't actually finish the degree that they incurred the debt to pursue. Many of them had to drop out for a variety of different reasons or defer. Maybe they'll eventually finish those degrees. But as you can see from, like, the macroeconomic, educational, like, labor market data, like, having a partial degree doesn't make a big difference in terms of your earning power. You really need to finish the degree to be able to realize the benefits of having spent all that time studying, and a lot of people haven't. So, yes, there are, like, a lot of people out there that went to medical school, for example, and they're working as physicians. And they are going to eventually be able to pay that off because they're doctors, and they're commanding a great compensation, right? And they've got tons of career options. But if you studied English like I did and you incurred a whole lot of student debt, it could take a very long time for you to make enough money as a teacher, or as, like, a grant writer, or working at a newspaper, or something like that. Like, it can take you years to pay it off. And, in the meantime, it's just continuing to accumulate interest in your, you know, you might be a very diligent person who pays their student loan bill every single month, and yet, you could see that amount, the total amount that you owe continuing to grow despite this. That's just the nature of the time value of money and the nature of debt. And I thank my lucky stars that I went to school back in, like, 2000. Like, my tuition was $1,000 a semester, right? I mean, it's incredible. But that was, like, at a state school, like, a public university in the middle of Oklahoma. And it's not, like, a university you've heard of. It's basically, like, the cheapest possible option. I think community colleges can make a huge dent. I always implore people to think more about community colleges. I've talked with so many people on the freeCodeCamp podcast who were able to leverage community colleges and then transition into a, you know, research university, like a state school, and finish up their degree there. But they saved, like, basically half their money because they were paying almost nothing to attend the community college. And in California especially, the community colleges are just ridiculously worth it. Like, you're paying a few hundred dollars a course. I mean, it's just incredible value. So, I think the community college system is going to play a big role. But my hope is that, you know, freeCodeCamp can thrive. And it'll take us years for people to realize because if you go on, like, Google Ads and you try to run a Google Ad for, like, any sort of educational-related topic, anything related to higher education, it's, like, hundreds of dollars per click because there are all these for-profit universities that make a tremendous amount of money from getting people who just came back from serving in the military and getting, like, huge chunks of their GI Bill, or getting, like, all these federal subsidies, any number of things. Or basically just tricking families into paying huge amounts of money when they could have attended a much more sensible public university, you know, a private nonprofit university that doesn't charge an arm and a leg. So, I think that we are going to have an impact. I just want to say that I don't think that this is a panacea. It's going to take many years for freeCodeCamp to be adopted by a whole lot of people. It will take a long time for employers to look at the freeCodeCamp degree and say, "Oh, this is comparable to a computer science degree from..." say, Ohio State, or UT Austin, or something like that, right? Like, it's going to be a long time before we can get that level of buy-in. I don't want anybody listening to say, "Oh, I'd love to get a computer science degree. I'm just going to hold out and get the degree from freeCodeCamp." Like, my humble advice would be: go to a community college, then go to a state school. Get that four-year computer science degree. It is worth its weight in gold. But you don't want to accumulate a lot of debt. Just try to like, minimize your debt in the meantime. And, hopefully, over time, you know, the free model will prove out, and it'll just be a whole bunch of alumni supporting freeCodeCamp. And that's the dream is that, like, you know, Michael Bloomberg gave a billion dollars to Johns Hopkins University, a billion dollars. Like, Johns Hopkins never needs to charge tuition again with a billion dollars. They can just basically operate their institution off the interest from that, right? And lots of institutions...like, Harvard has, I don't know, like, 60-plus billion dollars in their endowment, right? So, the idea would be freeCodeCamp continues to get this, you know, huge alumni network of people who are doing great and who went to freeCodeCamp and who basically donate back in. And then, we can essentially have the deep pockets subsidizing everybody else who's just at the beginning of their careers who don't have a lot of earning power. You know, when I was a teenager, when I was in my 20s, I worked at convenience stores. I worked at Taco Bell. I did all kinds of, like, literally showing up at 6:00 a.m. to mop the grocery store-type jobs, right? And that is not a path to being able to afford an education in 2023. University tuition is out of control. It's, like, ridiculously high. It's grown way faster than inflation for decades. So, what can we do to alleviate that pressure? In my humble opinion, we just need to come up with free options and support ultra-low-cost options that are already out there. VICTORIA: I was going to ask, but you might have already answered this question somewhat. But I get this question a lot for people who are interested in getting into tech, whether they should get a computer science degree or go to a bootcamp. And I think you've mentioned all the positive things about getting a degree. I'm curious if, in your degree program, you would also tailor it more to what people might expect in a modern tech market and industry in their first job. QUINCY: Yeah. So, the way that we're developing our degree program is we essentially did, like, an analysis of the top 20 computer science programs in the United States: Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, all those schools that you would think of as being, like, really good computer science programs. And we basically drew a best-fit line through all their course offerings and looked at all their textbooks and everything that they cover. And, essentially, we're teaching a composite of those top 20 programs. Now, there are some things that, surprisingly, those programs don't offer, such as a course on ethics. It's something like 13% of those degree programs require an ethics course. And I think every developer should take a developer ethics course, or at least some sort of philosophy course to, like, understand what does it mean to be a good person? [laughs] Like, what is, you know, an anti-pattern? What is Blackhat user experiences? [laughs] I'm like, when should I, like, raise my hand during a meeting to say like, "Hey, should we really be doing this?" You know. So, ethics–security courses–I was surprised that not very many of those degree programs offer a course in information security, which I believe should be required. So, I'm kind of editorializing a little bit on top of what the composite says. But I feel very strongly that, you know, our degree program needs to have those courses. But in general, it's just everything that everybody else is teaching. And yes, like, a coding bootcamp...I've written a lot about coding bootcamps. I wrote, like, a Coding Bootcamp Handbook, which you can just Google, like, "Coding bootcamp book" or something like that, probably then you can find it. But, essentially like, those programs are usually private. Even if it's at a big, public university, it's often run by a big, private for-profit bootcamp chain. I don't want to say, like, all bootcamps are a bad deal, but buyer beware [laughs]. Frankly, I don't think that you can learn everything you need to know to be a software engineer within the compressed timelines that a lot of those bootcamps are operating under. There's a reason it takes four years to get a computer science degree because: there's a tremendous amount of math, programming, computer science, engineering knowledge that you need to cultivate. And you can absolutely get a developer job without a computer science degree. I don't have a computer science degree [chuckles], and I worked as a software engineer, right? And I know plenty of people who are doing that that didn't even go to college, right? People who were truckers or people who were doing construction work who just sat down and hit the books really hard and came out the other side being able to work as a software developer. But it is going to be vastly easier for you if you do have a computer science degree. Now, if you're in your 30s, if you've got kids, if you've got a whole lot of other obligations, should you go back to school? Maybe not. And so, it's not cut and dry, like, oh, just drop whatever you're doing and go back to...The situation is going to be nuanced. If you've already got a job working as a developer, should you go back and get a CS degree? Probably not. Maybe you can get your employer to pay for you to go to, like, a CS master's program, for example. There are a lot of really good online master's degree programs. Like, Georgia Tech has a master's in computer science that is very affordable, and it's very good. Georgia Tech is one of the best computer science programs in the United States. So, definitely, like, everybody's situation is going to be different. And there's no blanket advice. I would just be very wary of, like, anybody who's talking to you who wants your money [laughs]. freeCodeCamp will never want your money for anything. Like, we would love to have your donation long after you're a successful developer. You turn around and, like, send the elevator back down by donating to freeCodeCamp. But just be skeptical and, like, do your research and don't buy into, like, the marketing speak about, like, being able to get a job immediately. "Oh, it's easy. Anybody can learn to code." Like, I do believe any sufficiently motivated person can learn to code. But I also believe that it's a process that can take years, especially if you're doing the safe thing and continuing to work your day job while you learn these skills over a much longer period of time. I don't believe learning in a compressed kind of bootcamp...like, if you think about, you know, bootcamp in the military, like, this is, like, you're getting shipped away, and you're doing nothing but, like, learning these skills and everything like that. And I don't think that that's right for programming, personally [laughs]. I think there's a reason why many of these programs have gone from 9 weeks to 12 weeks to 6 months. Some of them might be, like, an entire year now. It's because it's them kind of admitting that, like, oh, there's quite a bit to learn here, and it's going to take some time. And there's diminishing returns to learning a whole bunch of hours in a day. I think you'll make much better gains studying programming 1 hour a day for 365 days than you'll make studying, you know, 8 hours a day for, like, two months or something like that if that makes sense. I'm not sure if the math works out there. But my point is, it's totally fine, and it's actually quite optimal to just work your day job, take care of your kids, spend time with your parents, you know, do all those things, hang out with friends and have a social life, all those things in addition to just having programming be one of those things you're working on in the background with your mornings or your evenings. WILL: Tell us a little bit about your podcast. Yeah, tell us kind of what's the purpose of it and just the history of it. QUINCY: Yeah. Well, I learned from the best. So, I'm a longtime listener of this podcast, of course. My friend, Saron Yitbarek, hosts CodeNewbie, which is an excellent podcast, the Changelog, which is an open-source podcast. I've had a great time interviewing the Changelog hosts and being on their show several times. So, I basically just learned as much as I could, and then I just went out and started interviewing people. And so, I've interviewed a lot of devs. I've interviewed people that are, like, learning to code driving Uber. I've interviewed the founder of Stack Overflow [chuckles], Jeff Atwood. I'm going to interview the founder of Trello in a few weeks when I'm back out in New York City. And I do my interviews in person. I just have my mobile studio. When I'm in San Francisco–when I'm in New York, I just go around and do a bunch of interviews and kind of bank them, and then I edit them myself and publish them. And the goal is just to give people exposure to developers. What are developers thinking? What are developers talking about? What do developers care about? And I try to hit, like, a very broad range of developers, try to talk to as many women as possible and, you know, striving for, like, 50% representation or better on the podcast. And I talk to a lot of people from different countries, although that's a little harder to do when you're recording in person. I may break down and do some over Zencastr, which is a tool we used in the past. I just like the spontaneity and the fun of meeting with people in person. But yeah, it's just like, if you are looking for, like, long-form, some of these are, like, two-and-a-half-hour long discussions, where we really delve into people's backstory and, like, what inspired them to become a developer, what they're learning along the way, how they feel about different aspects of software development. Like, for example, earlier, Will, you mentioned impostor syndrome, which is something I think virtually everybody struggles with in some capacity, you know, the freeCodeCamp podcast, tune in [chuckles] and subscribe. And if you have any feedback for me, I'd love to hear it. I'm still learning. I'm doing my best as a podcast host. And I'm constantly learning about tech as it evolves, as new tools come out, as new practices are pioneered. There's entire new technologies, like large language models, that actually work. And, I mean, we've had those since, like, the '60s, like, language models and stuff, but, like, only recently have they become incredibly impressive, exploring these tools and exploring a lot of the people behind them. VICTORIA: Okay, great. Do you have any questions for me or Will? QUINCY: Yeah. What inspired you all to get involved in tech, in...I don't know if somebody...did somebody at thoughtbot actually approach you and say, "Hey, we want you to run this"? Or was it something where like, "I'd love to run this"? Like, because podcasting is not easy. You're putting yourself out there. You're saying things that are recorded forever [laughs]. And so, if you say something really naive or silly or something like that, that's kind of always there, right? It takes a certain amount of bravery to do this. What got you into hosting this podcast? VICTORIA: For me, I mean, if I go way back before getting into tech, my mom she got her undergraduate degree in horticulture to become a florist, and then realized she couldn't make any money off that and went back to school for computer science. And so, she taught me how to use a computer really early on. And when I was in school, I had started in architecture, and then I wanted to change into business intelligence. But I didn't want to apply to the business school, so I got a degree in economics and a job at the IT help desk. And then from there, I was able to kind of transition into tech as a teacher, which was oddly enough...my first job in tech was training a 400-person program how to do, like, version management, and peer reviews [laughs], and timekeeping. And the reason I got the job is a friend from rock climbing introduced me, and he's like, they're like, "Oh, well, you train people how to rock climb. You can train people how to, like, do this stuff." [laughs] I'm like, oh, okay, that sounds great. But anyways, I worked my way up into project management and ended up getting my masters in IT. And when I came to thoughtbot, I had just moved to California, and I wanted to rebuild my network. I had a big network in D.C., organizing meetups and DevOps D.C., Women Who Code, teaching people, and communicating. And I ran a very small podcast there with a friend. So, when I joined thoughtbot, a podcast was a great way to just meet different people, expand my network, give people something to talk to me about when I go to events [laughs] that's not just, like, let me sell you some DevOps work. For me, it's been really fun to just reach out to people that we admire in the community and hear their story, and a little bit about them, and what advice they have for themselves or for other people. And, usually, that ends up benefiting me as well. So, it's been very fun for me. QUINCY: So, your less conventional path into tech combined with your own experience doing podcasting, it sounds like you were a natural choice for hosting a podcast. VICTORIA: Right. And I think I said before we started the show I didn't realize that it was such a well-loved and long-running podcast [laughs] [inaudible 49:01]. But I think we've really come into our own a little bit with hosting, and it's been super fun to work with Will and Chad on it as well. QUINCY: Awesome. And, Will, what's your story, man? How did you get onto the coveted Giant Robots Smashing into Giant Robots podcast? WILL: I actually went to college for sports medicine, and I was on track to go to med school, but my senior year...which I wish I would have had this conversation with myself a lot earlier, didn't have to do the hard work that I did at undergraduate. But my senior year, I was like, why am I really going to med school? And, honestly, it was more for the money, for the...yeah, more for the money. I just wanted to get paid a lot of money. I was like, yeah, that's not going to sustain me. I need to just pivot. So, I pivoted–started working at some nonprofits. And I ended up losing my job and got another job at Buckle, the clothing store, which was not a great fit for me. It helped me provide, but that's just not who I am. I'm not a fashion icon [laughs]. And then I changed to a travel agency insurance company, which it paid the bills. I wasn't passionate about it at all, and it paid the bills. And I was still struggling from losing my job. It was the first time that I lost my job. And my spouse came to me one day and is like, "All right, we're going to have the serious talk." And we almost flipped roles because that's usually who I am. I'm like, "All right, let's have a real talk. Let's get down to it." But I was just in a bad place. And she was like, "All right, we have to change because we can't keep going down this path." So, she was like, "If you had a choice to do anything, what would you want to do?" And I was like, "Well, probably something with computers and coding because I never had that opportunity when I was growing up because of the small town." And she looked at me, and she's like, "Go sign up right now." And I was like, okay, I'm going to sign up. When you mentioned that you made a transition in your 30s, I was around my 30s when I made the transition into coding. And so, it was a big transition. It was a big pivot for me because I'm having to learn, almost like I'm in college again, which was eight years ago. And so, it was just tough, and it wasn't new. So, that's how I got into coding. How I got on the podcast: I think I was talking to Chad and my direct report. I was just talking to them about challenging myself, and so it was multiple things. But, like, writing blog posts that was actually very challenging to me. I still don't like to write. It's not my favorite thing. Give me math or something like that or science; that's where I feel at home. But whenever, you know, you talk about writing and stuff, I can do it, and I'm decent at it. But it's not something that I feel comfortable in. The same thing with the podcast. The reason why I got on here is because I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and I wanted to grow. And I also wanted to get a chance to talk to people who's making a difference–who's impacting the world. So, like, this conversation today is like, yes, this is why I wanted to be a part of this podcast. So yeah, that's how I got started in tech and on the podcast. QUINCY: Awesome, Will. I'm thrilled that you went ahead and persevered and got into tech. It doesn't sound like it was a straight line, and it rarely is for people. But I'm always excited to meet somebody who learned to code in their 30s who stuck with it and is prospering as a result. So, congratulations to you. WILL: Thank you. VICTORIA: I'm still learning. I haven't quite got [inaudible 52:42] "Hello, worlds," multiple times [laughs]. But I don't really code every day for my job. I just kind of need to know what stuff is to be able to talk to people and in that way as a managing director. So, I appreciate Will bringing that backstory to this episode in particular. What else? Any other final takeaway that you'd like to leave our listeners with? QUINCY: I just want to thank you all for continuing to host this podcast, thoughtbot for operating the excellent Playbook, which, for anybody listening who is unfamiliar with, you should check it out. Again, it's just chock full of institutional wisdom accumulated over the years. And I hope everybody out there who's thinking about taking the plunge and learning coding or software development, or even, like, a semi-technical area of being in the software development process of learning visual design, learning how to do user experience research, any number of the different roles in tech, I hope you'll go for it. And I hope you will be as undaunted as you can. And just know that freeCodeCamp and the freeCodeCamp community we are in your corner. If you need to learn something, there's a very good chance that we have some tutorials written by thoughtful teachers who want people like you to come forward and like, read these resources and use it. There's a saying: like, the thing that programmers want the most is to have their code running in production somewhere. And, as a teacher, the thing you want the most is for you to have students, for you to have learning resources out there that are making a positive difference. So, again, I just count my blessings every day that I'm able to be involved in this community. I hope anyone listening who wants to transition into tech or to become even more technical gets involved in the freeCodeCamp community as well. We welcome you. WILL: Are there any opportunities? I know we talked about donations. So, for one, where can they go if they want to donate? And then also, like, you know, if developers want to get to be a part of the open-source network you have, is that possible? And how can they do that? QUINCY: Absolutely. So, if you want to donate to freeCodeCamp, just go to donate.freecodecamp.org. And you can become, like, a $5 a month donor, if you'd like. If you want to give a larger amount, I've got this article; just Google "How to Donate to freeCodeCamp." And I've written this detailed guide to, like, all the different ways like mailing checks. We had a gentleman who passed away and left a whole lot of money for freeCodeCamp in his will. So, those kinds of legacy gifts are definitely something. We've had people donate stock, like, any number of different things. I will bend over backwards to make sure that we can receive your donation, and we can give you a tax receipt so you can deduct it from your taxes as well if you'd like. And then, for contributing to freeCodeCamp, of course, we're an open-source project, and we welcome your code contributions. We have spent a great deal of time trying to make freeCodeCamp as hospitable as possible for both new developers who want to get involved and more senior developers who just want to do some, like, 20%-time type contributing to open-source projects: contribute.freecodecamp.org. So, again, donate.freecodecamp.org and contribute.freecodecamp.org. Those will take you where you need to go. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Thank you so much again, Quincy, for joining us. And you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you could find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Quincy Larson.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment, but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We’ll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprintSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

We are thrilled to announce the third session of our new Incubator Program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply to our eight-week program. We'll help you validate your market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence toward an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. We look forward to seeing your application in our inbox! Peter Voss is the CEO and Chief Scientist of Aigo.ai, a groundbreaking alternative to conventional chatbots and generative models like ChatGPT. Aigo's chatbot is powered by Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), enabling it to think, learn, and reason much like a human being. It boasts short-term and long-term memory, setting it apart in terms of personalized service and context-awareness. Along with host Chad Pytel, Peter talks about how most chatbots and AI systems today are basic. They can answer questions but can't understand or remember the context. Aigo.ai is different because it's built to think and learn more like humans. It can adapt and get better the more you use it. He also highlights the challenges Aigo.ai faces in securing venture capital, given that its innovative approach doesn't align with current investment models heavily focused on generative or deep learning AI. Peter and Chad agree that while generative AI serves certain functions well, the quest for a system that can think, learn, and reason like a human demands a fundamentally different approach. Aigo.ai Follow Aigo.ai on LinkedIn or YouTube. Follow Peter Voss on LinkedIn. Visit his website: optimal.org/voss.html Follow thoughtbot on X or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Peter Voss, CEO and Chief Scientist at Aigo.ai. Peter, thanks so much for joining me. PETER: Yes, thank you. CHAD: So, tell us a little bit about what Aigo.ai does. You've been working in AI for a long time. And it seems like Aigo is sort of the current culmination of a lot of your 15 years of work, so... PETER: Yes, exactly. So, the quick way to describe our current product is a chatbot with a brain, and the important part is the brain. That basically, for the last 15-plus years, I've been working on the core technology for what's called AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, a system that can think, learn, reason similar to the way humans do. Now, we're not yet at human level with this technology. But it's a lot smarter and a lot more usable than traditional chatbots that don't have a brain. CHAD: I want to dig into this idea a little bit. I think, like a lot of people, I've used just traditional chatbots, particularly like ChatGPT is the latest. I've built some things on top of it. What is the brain that makes it different? Especially if you've used one, what is using Aigo going to be different? PETER: Right. I can give a concrete example of one of our customers then I can talk about the technology. So, one of our big customers is the 1-800-Flowers group of companies, which is Harry & David Popcorn Factory and several others. And wanted to provide a hyper-personalized concierge service for their customers where, you know, the system learns who you buy gifts for, for what occasions, you know, what your relationship is to them, and to basically remember who you are and what you want for each of their 20 million customers. And they tried different technologies out there, you know, all the top brands and so on, and they just couldn't get it off the ground. And the reason is because they really don't learn. And we now have 89% self-service on the things that we've implemented, which is pretty much unheard of for complex conversations. So, why can we do that? The reason is that our system has deep understanding. So, we have deep pausing, deep understanding, but more importantly, that the system remembers. It has short-term memory. It has long-term memory. And it uses that as context. So, you know, when you call back a second time, it'll remember what your previous call was, you know, what your preferences are, and so on. And it can basically use that information, the short and long-term memory, and reason about it. And that is really a step forward. Now, until ChatGPT, which is really very different technology from chatbot technology, I mean, chatbot technology, you're assuming...the kind of thing we're talking about is really augmenting call center, you know, automatic call center calls. There, you need deep integration into the customers' back-end system. You obviously need to know what the latest product availability is, what the customers' outstanding orders are, you know, all sorts of things like, you know, delivery schedules. And we probably have, like, two dozen APIs that connect our system to their various corporate databases and so on. Now, traditional chatbots obviously can do that. You hook up the APIs and do things, and it's, you know, it's a lot of work. But traditional chatbot technology really hasn't really changed much in 30 years. You basically have a categorizer; how can I help you? Basically, try to...what is the intent, intent categorizer? And then once your intent has been identified, you basically have a flowchart-type program that, you know, forces you down a flowchart. And that's what makes them so horrible because it doesn't use context. It doesn't have short-term memory. CHAD: And I just wanted to clarify the product and where you mentioned call center. So, this isn't just...or only text-based chat. This is voice. PETER: Yes. We started off with chat, and we now also have voice, so omnichannel. And the beauty of the system having the brain as well is you can jump from text messaging to a chat on the website to Apple ABC to voice, you know. So, you can basically move from one channel to another seamlessly. You know, so that's against traditional chatbot technology, which is really what everybody is still using. Now, ChatGPT, of course, the fact that it's called ChatGPT sort of makes it a bit confusing. And, I mean, it's phenomenal. The technology is absolutely phenomenal in terms of what it can do, you know, write poems and give you ideas. And the amount of information it's amazing. However, it's really not suited for commercial-grade applications because it hallucinates and it doesn't have memory. CHAD: You can give it some context, but it's basically faking it. You're providing it information every time you start to use it. PETER: Correct. The next time you connect, that memory is gone, you know [crosstalk 05:58] CHAD: Unless you build an application that saves it and then feeds it in again. PETER: Right. Then you basically run out of context we know very quickly. In fact, I just published a white paper about how we can get to human-level AI. And one of the things we did and go over in the paper is we did a benchmark our technology where we fed the system about 300 or 400 facts, simple facts. You know, it might be my sister likes chocolate or, you know, it could be other things like I don't park my car in the garage or [chuckles], you know. It could be just simple facts, a few hundred of those. And then we asked questions about that. Now, ChatGPT scored less than 1% on that because, you know, with an 8K window, it basically just couldn't remember any of this stuff. So, we use -- CHAD: It also doesn't, in my experience...it's basically answering the way it thinks the answer should sound or look. And so, it doesn't actually understand the facts that you give it. PETER: Exactly. CHAD: And so, if you feed it a bunch of things which are similar, it gets really confused because it doesn't actually understand the things. It might answer correctly, but it will, in my experience, just as likely answer incorrectly. PETER: Yeah. So, it's extremely powerful technology for helping search as well if a company has all the documents and they...but the human always has to be in the loop. It just makes way too many mistakes. But it's very useful if it gives you information 8 out of 10 times and saves you a lot of time. And it's relatively easy to detect the other two times where it gives you wrong information. Now, I know in programming, sometimes, it's given me wrong information and ended up taking longer to debug the misinformation it gave me than it would have taken me. But overall, it's still a very, very powerful tool. But it really isn't suitable for, you know, serious chatbot applications that are integrated into back-end system because these need to be signed off by...legal department needs to be happy that it's not going to get the company into trouble. Marketing department needs to sign off on it and customer experience, you know. And a generative system like that, you really can't rely on what it's going to say, and that's apart from security concerns and, you know, the lack of memory and deep understanding. CHAD: Yeah. So, you mentioned generative AI, which is sort of one of the underlying pieces of ChatGPT. In your solutions, are you using any generative solutions? PETER: No, not at all. Well, I can give one example. You know, what 1-800-Flowers do is they have an option to write a poem for your mother's birthday or Mother's Day or something like it. And for that, we will use ChatGPT, or they use ChatGPT for that because that's what it's good at. But, you know, that's really just any other app that you might call up to do something for you, you know, like calling up FedEx to find out where your goods are. Apart from that, our technology...it's a good question you ask because, you know, statistical systems and generative AI now have really dominated the AI scene for the last about 12 years, really sort of since DeepMind started. Because it's been incredibly successful to take masses amounts of data and masses amounts of computing power and, you know, number crunch them and then be able to categorize and identify images and, you know, do all sorts of magical things. But, the approach we use is cognitive AI as opposed to generative. It's a relatively unknown approach, but that's what we've been working on for 15 years. And it starts with the question of what does intelligence require to build a system so that it doesn't use masses amounts of data? It's not the quantity of data that counts. It's the quality of data. And it's important that it can learn incrementally as you go along like humans do and that it can validate what it learns. It can reason about, you know, new information. Does this make sense? Do I need to ask a follow-up question? You know, that kind of thing. So, it's cognitive AI. That's the approach we're using. CHAD: And, obviously, you have a product, and you've productized it. But you said, you know, we've been working on this, or you've been working on this model for a long time. How has it progressed? PETER: Yes, we are now on, depending on how you count, but on the third major version of it that we've started. And really, the progress has been determined by resources really than any technology. You know, it's not that we sort of have a big R&D requirement. It's really more development. But we are a relatively small company. And because we're using such different technology, it's actually been pretty hard to raise VC money. You know, they look at it and, you know, ask you, "What's your training data? How big is your model?" You know, and that kind of thing. CHAD: Oh, so the questions investors or people know to ask aren't relevant. PETER: Correct. And, you know, they bring in the AI experts, and then they say, "Well, what kind of deep learning, machine learning, or generative, or what transformer model are using?" And we say, "Well, we don't." And typically, that's kind of, "Oh okay, well, then it can't possibly work, you know, we don't understand it." So, we just recently launched. You know, with all the excitement of generative AI now recently, with so much money flowing into it, we actually launched a major development effort. Now we want to hire an additional a hundred people to basically crank up the IQ. So, over the years, you know, we're working on two aspects of it: one is to continually crank up the IQ of the system, that it can understand more and more complex situations; it can reason better and be able to handle bigger amounts of data. So, that's sort of the technical part that we've been working on. But then the other side, of course, running a business, a lot of our effort over the last 15 years has gone into making it industrial strength, you know, security, scalability, robustness of the system. Our current technology, our first version, was actually a SaaS model that we deployed behind a customer's firewall. CHAD: Yeah, I noticed that you're targeting more enterprise deployments. PETER: Yeah, that's at the moment because, financially, it makes more sense for us to kind of get off the ground to work with, you know, larger companies where we supply the technology, and it's deployed usually in the cloud but in their own cloud behind their firewall. So, they're very happy with that. You know, they have complete control over their data and reliability, and so on. But we provide the technology and then just licensing it. CHAD: Now, a lot of people are familiar with generative AI, you know, it runs on GPUs and that kind of thing. Does the hardware profile for where you're hosting it look the same as that, or is it different? PETER: No, no, no, it requires much less horsepower. So, I mean, we can run an agent on a five-year-old laptop, you know, and it doesn't...instead of it costing $100 million to train the model, it's like pennies [laughter] to train the model. I mean, we train it during our regression testing, and that we train it several times a day. Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We’ll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. CHAD: So, you mentioned ramping up the IQ is a goal of yours. With a cognitive model, does that mean just teaching it more things? What does it entail? PETER: Yes, there's a little bit of tension between commercial requirements and what you ultimately want for intelligence because a truly intelligent system, you want it to be very autonomous and adaptive and have a wide range of knowledge. Now, for current commercial applications we're doing, you actually don't want the system to learn things by itself or to make up stuff, you know, you want it to be predictable. So, they develop and to ultimately get to full human-level or AGI capability requires a system to be more adaptive–be able to learn things more. So, the one big change we are making to the system right now is natural language understanding or English understanding. And our current commercial version was actually developed through our—we call them AI psychologists, our linguists, and cognitive psychologists—by basically teaching it the rules of English grammar. And we've always known that that's suboptimal. So, with the current version, we are now actually teaching it English from the ground up the way a child might learn a language, so the language itself. So, it can learn any language. So, for commercial applications, that wasn't really a need. But to ultimately get to human level, it needs to be more adaptive, more autonomous, and have a wider range of knowledge than the commercial version. That's basically where our focus is. And, you know, we know what needs to be done, but, you know, it's quite a bit of work. That's why we need to hire about 100 people to deal with all of the different training things. It's largely training the system, you know, but there are also some architectural improvements we need to make on performance and the way the system reasons. CHAD: Well, you used the term Artificial General Intelligence. I understand you're one of the people who coined that term [chuckles] or the person. PETER: Yes. In 2002, I got together with two other people who felt that the time was ripe to get back to the original dream of AI, you know, from 60 years ago, to build thinking machines basically. So, we decided to write a book on the topic to put our ideas out there. And we were looking for a title for the book, and three of us—myself, Ben Goertzel, and Shane Legg, who's actually one of the founders of DeepMind; he was working for me at the time. And we were brainstorming it, and that's what we came up with was AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. CHAD: So, for people who aren't familiar, it's what you were sort of alluding to. You're basically trying to replicate the human brain, the way humans learn, right? That's the basic idea is -- PETER: Yeah, the human cognition really, yeah, human mind, human cognition. That's exactly right. I mean, we want an AI that can think, learn, and reason the way humans do, you know, that it can hit the box and learn a new topic, you know, you can have any kind of conversation. And we really believe we have the technology to do that. We've built quite a number of different prototypes that already show this kind of capability where it can, you know, read Wikipedia, integrate that with existing knowledge, and then have a conversation about it. And if it's not sure about something, it'll ask for clarification and things like that. We really just need to scale it up. And, of course, it's a huge deal for us to eventually get to human-level AI. CHAD: Yeah. How much sort of studying of the brain or cognition do you do in your work, where, you know, sort of going back and saying, "Okay, we want to tackle this thing"? Do you do research into cognition? PETER: Yeah, that's a very interesting question. It really gets to the heart of why I think we haven't made more progress in developing AGI. In fact, another white paper I published recently is "Why Don't We Have AGI Yet?" And, you know, one of the big problems is that statistical AI has been so incredibly successful over the last decade or so that it sucked all of the oxygen out of the air. But to your question, before I started on this project, I actually took off five years to study intelligence because, to me, that's really what cognitive AI approach is all about is you start off by saying, what is intelligence? What does it require? And I studied it from the perspective of philosophy, epistemology, theory of knowledge. You know, what's reality? How do we know anything? CHAD: [laughs] PETER: How can we be sure? You know, really those most fundamental questions. Then how do children learn? What do IQ tests measure? How does our intelligence differ to animal intelligence? What is that magic difference between, you know, evolution? Suddenly, we have this high-level cognition. And the short answer of that is being able to form abstract concepts or concept formation is sort of key, and to have metacognition, to be able to think about your own thinking. So, those are kind of the things I discovered during the five years of study. Obviously, I also looked at what had already been done in the field of AI, as in good old-fashioned AI, and neural networks, and so on. So, this is what brought me together. So, absolutely, as a starting point to say, what is intelligence? Or what are the aspects of intelligence that are really important and core? Now, as far as studying the brain is concerned, I certainly looked at that, but I pretty quickly decided that that wasn't that relevant. It's, you know, you certainly get some ideas. I mean, neural networks, ours is kind of a neural network or knowledge graph, so there's some similarity with that. But the analogy one often gives, which I think is not bad, is, you know, we've had flying machines for 100 years. We are still nowhere near reverse engineering a bird. CHAD: Right. PETER: So, you know, evolution and biology are just very different from designing things and using the materials that we need to use in computers. So, definitely, understanding intelligence, I think, is key to being able to build it. CHAD: Well, in some ways, that is part of the reason why statistical AI has gotten so much attention with that sort of airplane analogy because it's like, maybe we need to not try to replicate human cognition [chuckles]. Maybe we need to just embrace what computers are good at and try to find a different way. PETER: Right, right. But that argument really falls down when you say you are ignoring intelligence, you know, or you're ignoring the kind of intelligence. And we can see how ridiculous the sort of the current...well, I mean, first of all, let me say Sam Altman, and everybody says...well, they say two things: one, we have no idea how these things work, which is not a good thing if you're [chuckles] trying to build something and improve it. And the second thing they say...Demis Hassabis and, you know, everybody says it, "This is not going to get us to human-level AI, to human-level intelligence." They realize that this is the wrong approach. But they also haven't come up with what the right approach is because they are stuck within the statistical big data approach, you know, we need another 100 billion dollars to build even bigger computers with bigger models, you know, but that's really -- CHAD: Right. It might be creating a tool, which has some uses, but it is not actual; I mean, it's not really even actual artificial intelligence -- PETER: Correct. And, I mean, you can sort of see this very easily if...imagine you hired a personal assistant for yourself, a human. And, you know, they come to you, and they know how to use Excel and do QuickBooks or whatever, and a lot of things, so great. They start working with you. But, you know, every now and again, they say something that's completely wrong with full confidence, so that's a problem. Then the second thing is you tell them, "Well, we've just introduced a new product. We shut down this branch here. And, you know, I've got a new partner in the business and a new board member." And the next day, they come in, and they remember nothing of that, you know, [chuckles] that's not very intelligent. CHAD: Right. No, no, it's not. It's possible that there's a way for these two things to use each other, like generating intelligent-sounding, understanding what someone is saying and finding like things to it, and being able to generate meaningful, intelligent language might be useful in a cognitive model. PETER: We obviously thought long and hard about this, especially when, you know, generative AI became so powerful. I mean, it does some amazing things. So, can we combine the technology? And the answer is quite simply no. As I mentioned earlier, we can use generative AI kind of as an API or as a tool or something. You know, so if our system needs to write a poem or something, then yes, you know, these systems can do a good job of it. But the reason you can't really just combine them and kind of build a Frankensteinian kind of [laughs] thing is you really need to have context that you currently have fully integrated. So you can't have two brains, you know, the one brain, which is a read-only brain, and then our brain, our cognitive brain, which basically constantly adapts and uses the context of what it's heard using short-term memory, long-term memory, reasoning, and so on. So, all of those mental mechanisms of deep understanding of context, short-term and long-term memory, reasoning, language generation–they all have to be tightly integrated and work together. And that's basically the approach that we have. Now, like a human to...if you write, you know, "Generate an essay," and you want to have it come up with maybe some ideas, changing the style, for example, you know, it would make sense for our system to use a generative AI system like a tool because humans are good tool users. You know, I wouldn't expect our system to be the world chess champion or Go champion. It can use a chess-playing AI or a Go-playing AI to do that job. CHAD: That's really cool. You mentioned the short-term, long-term memory. If I am using or working on a deployment for Aigo, is that something that I specify, like, oh, this thing where we've collected goes in short term versus long term, or does the system actually do that automatically? PETER: That's the beauty of the system that: it automatically has short and long-term memory. So, really, the only thing that needs to be sort of externally specified is things you don't want to keep in long-term memory, you know, that for some reason, security reasons, or a company gives you a password or whatever. So, then, they need to be tagged. So, we have, like, an ontology that describes all of the different kinds of knowledge that you have. And in the ontology, you can tag certain branches of the ontology or certain nodes in the ontology to say, this should not be remembered, or this should be encrypted or, you know, whatever. But by default, everything that comes into short-term memory is remembered. So, you know, a computer can have photographic memory. CHAD: You know, that is part of why...someone critical of what they've heard might say, "Well, you're just replicating a human brain. How is this going to be better?" And I think that that's where you're just...what you said, like, when we do artificial general intelligence with computers, they all have photographic memory. PETER: Right. Well, in my presentations, when I give talks on this, I have the one slide that actually talks about how AI is superior to humans in as far as getting work done in cognition, and there's actually quite a number of things. So, let me first kind of give one example here. So, imagine you train up one AI to be a PhD-level cancer researcher, you know, it goes through whatever training, and reading, and coaching, and so on. So, you now have this PhD-level cancer researcher. You now make a million copies of that, and you have a million PhD-level cancer researchers chipping away at the problem. Now, I'm sure we would make a lot more progress, and you can now replicate that idea, that same thinking, you know, in energy, pollution, poverty, whatever, I mean, any disease, that kind of approach. So, I mean, that already is one major difference that you make copies of an AI, which you can't of humans. But there are other things. First of all, they are significantly less expensive than humans. Humans are very expensive. So much lower cost. They work 24/7 without breaks, without getting tired. I don't know the best human on how many hours they can concentrate without needing a break, maybe a few hours a day, or six, maybe four hours a day. So, 24/7. Then, they can communicate with each other much better than humans do because they could share information sort of by transferring blocks of data across from one to the other without the ego getting in the way. I mean, you take humans, not very good at sharing information and discoveries. Then they don't have certain distractions that we have like romantic things and kids in schools and, you know. CHAD: Although if you actually do get a full [laughs] AGI, then it might start to have those things [laughs]. PETER: Well, yeah, that's a whole nother topic. But our AIs, we basically build them not to want to have children [laughs] so, you know. And then, of course, things we spoke about, photographic memory. It has instantaneous access to all the information in the world, all the databases, you know, much better than we have, like, if we had a direct connection to the internet and brain, you know, but at a much higher bandwidth than we could ever achieve with our wetware. And then, lastly, they are much better at reasoning than humans are. I mean, our ability to reason is what I call an evolutionary afterthought. We are not actually that good at logical thinking, and AIs can be, you know. CHAD: We like to think we are, though. PETER: [chuckles] Well, you know, compared to animals, yes, definitely. We are significantly better. But realistically, humans are not that good at rational, logical thinking. CHAD: You know, I read something that a lot of decisions are made at a different level than the logical part. And then, the logical part justifies the decision. PETER: Yeah, absolutely. And, in fact, this is why smart people are actually worse at that because they're really good at rationalizations. You know, they can rationalize their weird beliefs and/or their weird behavior or something. That's true. CHAD: You mentioned that your primary customers are enterprises. Who makes up your ideal customer? And if someone was listening who matched that profile and wanted to get in touch with you, what would they look like? PETER: The simplest and most obvious way is if they have call centers of 100 people or more—hundreds, or thousands, tens of thousands even. But the economics from about 100 people in the call center, where we might be able to save them 50% of that, you know, depending on the kind of business. CHAD: And are your solutions typically employed before the actual people, and then they fall back to people in certain circumstances? PETER: Correct. That's exactly right. And, you know, the advantage there is, whatever Aigo already gathers, we then summarize it and pop that to the human operator so that, you know, that the customer -- CHAD: That's great because that's super annoying. PETER: It is. CHAD: [laughs] PETER: It is super annoying and -- CHAD: When you finally get to a person, and it's like, I just spent five minutes providing all this information that you apparently don't have. PETER: Right. Yeah, no, absolutely, that's kind of one of the key things that the AI has that information. It can summarize it and provide it to the live operator. So that would be, you know, the sort of the most obvious use case. But we also have use cases on the go with student assistant, for example, where it's sort of more on an individual basis. You know, imagine your kid just starts at university. It's just overwhelming. It can have a personal personal assistant, you know, that knows all about you in particular. But then also knows about the university, knows its way around, where you get your books, your meals, and, you know, different societies and curriculum and so on. Or diabetes coach, you know, where it can help people with diabetes manage their meals and activities, where it can learn whether you love broccoli, or you're vegetarian, or whatever, and help guide you through that. Internal help desks are another application, of course. CHAD: Yeah. I was going to say even the same thing as at a university when people join a big company, you know, there's an onboarding process. PETER: Exactly. Yeah. CHAD: And there could be things that you're not aware of or don't know where to find. PETER: Internal HR and IT, absolutely, as you say, on onboarding. Those are other applications where our technology is well-suited. And one other category is what we call a co-pilot. So, think of it as Clippy on steroids, you know, where basically you have complex software like, you know, SAP, or Salesforce, or something like that. And you can basically just have Aigo as a front end to it, and you can just talk to it. And it will know where to navigate, what to get, and basically do things, complex things in the software. And software vendors like that idea because people utilize more features of the software than they would otherwise, you know. It can accelerate your learning curve and make it much easier to use the product. So, you know, really, the technology that we have is industry and application-agnostic to a large extent. We're just currently not yet at human level. CHAD: Right. I hope you get there eventually. It'll be certainly exciting when you do. PETER: Yes. Well, we do expect to get there. We just, you know, as I said, we've just launched a project now to raise the additional money we need to hire the people that we need. And we actually believe we are only a few years away from full human-level intelligence or AGI. CHAD: Wow, that's exciting. So, if the solution that you currently have and people want to go along for the journey with you, how can they get in touch with Aigo? PETER: They could contact me directly: peter@aigo.ai. I'm also active on Twitter, LinkedIn. CHAD: Cool. We'll include all of those links in the show notes, which people can find at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions for me, email me at hosts@giantrobots.fm. Find me on Mastodon @cpytel@thoughtbot.social. You can find a complete transcript for this episode as well at giantrobots.fm. Peter, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it and all of the wisdom that you've shared with us today. PETER: Well, thank you. They were good questions. Thank you. CHAD: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening, and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Peter Voss.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment, but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We’ll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. 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We are thrilled to announce the third session of our new Incubator Program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply to our eight-week program. We'll help you validate your market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence toward an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. We look forward to seeing your application in our inbox! __ Co-host Will Larry interviews Stephen Hanson, the Director of Mobile Development at thoughtbot. The two explore the complexities of mobile app development, focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of React Native and Flutter. Stephen, who initially started as a full-stack web developer specializing in Enterprise Java, discusses React Native's cost-effectiveness and the convenience of having a unified codebase for iOS and Android platforms. However, he notes that Flutter might be a more suitable choice for high-performance needs. Both hosts emphasize the nuances of the mobile ecosystem, covering topics like in-app purchases, push notifications, and the strict guidelines set by app stores like Apple's. They agree that a comprehensive understanding of these aspects is crucial for an entire development team, including designers and project managers. Additionally, Stephen shares that the driving force behind his career is the opportunity to create apps that enhance people's lives. Stephen wraps up the discussion by detailing thoughtbot's goals of improving mobile development practices within the company and the broader developer community. __ React Native Flutter Follow Stephen Hanson on LinkedIn. Visit his website: shanson.co. Follow thoughtbot on X or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. And with me today is Stephen Hanson, Director of Mobile Development here at thoughtbot. Stephen, thank you for joining me. STEPHEN: Hi, Will. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. WILL: Yeah. I'm excited to talk about mobile development. But before we get started, tell us a little bit about who Stephen Hanson is: your personal life. STEPHEN: You know this because we often talk about our families when we get together. But I have two young kids, two and four years old. When you say personal life to anybody who has young kids, that's what we're talking about. [laughter] WILL: Yes. STEPHEN: So, they're keeping me busy but in the best way. WILL: Yeah, definitely. And I totally understand that. So, I know we talk about this often, but you like to woodwork. You like to work with your hands like most of us in tech. Like, we think so much with our head and mental that we try to find something to do physically, and yours is woodworking. Tell me a little bit about that. STEPHEN: Yeah. I think it's exactly what you said. I think working on a computer all day, you know, many years ago, I was like, what's something I can do with my hands, right? Something a little more physical. So yeah, fine woodworking has been a hobby of mine for quite a few years. And we were even chatting the other day about, you know, I'm trying to take time during the day to sneak out to the garage for 15 minutes, you know, during my lunch break or whatever to just get that mental reset and just work on something. WILL: Yeah. I know that you built your office that you work out of. I've been wanting to ask you, one, how did you do it? Two, how did you have the confidence to do it [laughter] to make sure that it was going to...how can I say this? I would be afraid that would it still be standing [laughter] after a little bit? [laughs] STEPHEN: Yeah, to be honest, that was definitely a fear. Yeah, I built my office in 2020, you know, COVID hit. All of a sudden, I was working fully remote. And we had another kid on the way. You know, we didn't have space in the house. So, I was like, what am I going to do? [laughs] I was already doing woodworking, but I didn't have any construction or carpentry experience. So, yeah, I definitely had the confidence issue. And I think, you know, I was just like, I don't know, let's just give it a try. [laughter] That's really all I can say. I didn't have the skills yet. But I watched a lot of YouTube and read a lot of [laughs] forums or, you know, just found info wherever I could, so...[laughs] WILL: Yep. And it's still standing today, correct? [laughs] STEPHEN: Correct. Yeah. [laughs] No, I'm just sitting in, like, a pile of rubble right now. [laughter] WILL: That's awesome, yeah. It's kind of like development sometimes for me. Like, you just got to take that leap sometimes, so... STEPHEN: You do, right? It's like, you know, fake it till you make it. [laughter] WILL: Yep. That's awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So, tell us a little bit about how did you get started in development in general? And then, how did you get started in React Native? STEPHEN: Yeah. So, I started out as a full-stack web developer. So, I didn't initially set out and say, "I'm going to build mobile apps," right? And I started out in 2011. I was working in Enterprise Java. I worked for American Airlines for a couple of years, and then I did enterprise consulting. I eventually made my way to, like, Rails and front-end development. And around 2016, 2017, I was freelancing. And eventually, clients started asking me to build mobile apps. [chuckles] WILL: [inaudible 04:16] STEPHEN: And I didn't know how to build mobile apps. So, I did what any web developer would do who doesn't build apps, and I used web technology. So, those first couple of apps that I built were hybrid apps. I used Ionic. And those are, you know, web apps that you package in a Native Wrapper. So, developing these apps, I literally developed them in a browser, right? And they're web apps. [laughs] And that was my first experience building apps. Even if they were web-based, I still had to work with the native app stores and learn, you know, app review guidelines and implement some native functionality, even though it was through, like, the Ionic wrappers. You know, people kind of trash on hybrid apps, and sometimes for good reason. But that wasn't a bad first experience for me or outcome, honestly. The clients were happy. They had apps in the app stores that were working for a pretty reasonable development cost. So yeah, that was my first experience in mobile. The end result isn't something I'd be necessarily proud of today. [laughs] WILL: I think that's all devs. [laughs] STEPHEN: Yeah, you know, [laughter] yeah, I -- WILL: Looking back at their work, yeah. [laughs] STEPHEN: I was talking about that. I could look back to something I built a month ago. [laughs] WILL: Yes. [laughter] STEPHEN: You don't have to go back far. [laughter] WILL: Yeah, so true [laughs]. You started working with the client when you were freelancing. So, how did you go from the hybrid web apps to actually saying, okay, I want to change, and I want to go all in on React Native? STEPHEN: React Native came out around that same time I was building those hybrid apps. So, the hybrid apps were 2016, 2017. React Native came out in 2015. So it was out, but it was still pretty new. And I was really interested in React Native right from the beginning, but I was also a little intimidated by it [chuckles]. So, when those first clients came to me for mobile apps, I didn't feel confident enough to say, "Yes, I can build you a React Native app." But a year or two later, I was working for another client on their Rails app. And I was building an API for their new React Native app. You know, I was really interested in React Native. So I said, "Hey, [chuckles] why don't I help out on the app side, too?" And they were like, "Sure, that sounds great." So that was kind of where I got my foot in the door with React Native. And then more opportunities like that just kept popping up over the next year. So, I got to work on a couple of other React Native apps. And like we talked about, I just started calling myself a React Native developer [laughs]. The rest is history. WILL: Yep. So true. We'll touch more on that later. But what would you say to a client who is trying to figure out if they should build native versus React Native? STEPHEN: There's a few things to consider when making that decision. But I think, usually, what I've seen is it comes down to budget and user experience. The bottom line is React Native is going to be a lot cheaper. You're basically building one app instead of two, right? Most of your code in a React Native app is going to be in JavaScript, and you can reuse all of that code across Android and iOS. If you're building a native app, you're just building two completely separate apps. So, it's just going to be cheaper to build that React Native app, and a lot of times, that's what it comes down to. For most companies, it can be really hard to justify that extra cost of building a completely native app for each platform. But then the question is when we talk about how can you justify the cost? Well, what would justify the cost, right? [laughs] I think probably the biggest trade-off when you build a React Native app versus a purely native app is there is a little bit of a performance penalty by building in React Native versus native. So, I think apps that will need to have a very flashy cutting-edge experience with lots of user-driven animation and effects, you know, when you get into that domain, I think that's where we see pure native starting to make more sense. But most apps and users would never feel that performance penalty of React Native. So, for most apps, that's not really something that enters into the equation. WILL: I want to dig into something you said. You were talking about if you do go native, you usually have to build an iOS and an Android separately. But with React Native, you could do it together. So, for someone who's maybe never done either one of them, can you kind of dig into, like, what does that look like? So, when you say I have to build an iOS and an Android portion versus I can do one codebase for React Native, can you walk us through kind of what that looks like, just a sample feature? STEPHEN: When I say React Native is a single codebase and, you know, native apps, you're building two apps, the way React Native works is you're basically building a React app. So, all of your business logic is going to be in React. And when your React code renders some UI, that gets translated into native UI. But your business logic is still going to be living in that JavaScript React app. So, one, when I say performance penalty, that's what I'm talking about is: there's a little bit of a performance penalty communicating back and forth between your JavaScript thread and the native system thread. But when we talk about one codebase versus two, that's what a React Native app looks like. You basically are working on a React app. It's one codebase with one set of business logic. And when you say, "Show a modal on the screen," that gets translated into a native Android modal or a native iOS modal, but in your code, you're just saying, "Show a modal." [laughs] So, you're just writing that one time. So yeah, a React Native project is just one codebase. Now, one thing that we haven't really touched on is in a React Native app, you do have the ability to drop down into native code. So, you have access to the native Android project and the native iOS project in your React Native app. So, you can write completely native code if you want to. But the appeal of React Native is you don't have to, you know, unless you get into one of those situations where you need to do something native that isn't supported out of the box with React Native or by an existing third-party library, or you want to have a very performant, very interactive part of your app. Maybe there's a reason you want to do that in native. You know, you do have that option in a React Native app of dropping down into that native code level. But to contrast that with a purely native project, you will have two completely separate codebases, one for Android and one for iOS. You'll have a development team for Android and a development team for iOS, you know, typically with different skill sets. The Android project will be Java, Kotlin. And your iOS project is swift. So, just in every sense, you really have two different projects when you're working on a purely native app. WILL: Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So like, for React Native, that show modal is just however many lines to show that one modal, and it does it for iOS and Android. But when you talk about native, you're saying that; however, iOS says to show that modal, you have to do it that way. But then Android, you also have to do it the Android way. And one developer, unless they know both of them, may not be able to handle both for those cases, correct? STEPHEN: Yeah, exactly. React Native abstracts away those underlying platforms. So, you really just need to know React Native for most cases. Though, there's definitely a benefit of knowing the underlying platforms. WILL: Definitely. Especially, like you touched on if you wanted to go into that native portion to add in a feature. You know, for example, I know we both worked on a project where we had a scanning app. And we had to tap into that native portion and React Native in order to get the scanning app to work, correct? STEPHEN: Yeah, that's right. We had to support some barcode scanning devices and hook into those barcode scanning frameworks that were proprietary [chuckles] to those devices. So yeah, we had to build native modules for Android and iOS to support those. WILL: Gotcha. Okay. I want to touch back on something you said earlier about the flashy experiences. You said sometimes you may not see it or whatever, but sometimes, if you want that flashy experience, it's better to go the native route. Can you explain that a little bit more? STEPHEN: So yeah, it's kind of what I was touching on a second ago. You know, in a React Native app, you have the JavaScript thread that is always running and coordinating UI changes with business logic. So, you've got your business logic in JavaScript. You've got the UI in native. And those need to be coordinated to interact. So, that's kind of where that performance penalty can happen. You know, again, most apps and users would never feel this penalty. I've never been, like, using my phone and been like, oh, this is a React Native app; I can feel it, you know. [laughs] It's not something that typically enters the picture for most apps that we work on. But there are certain types of apps that might be more important, you know, highly interactive games or things that just need to have that extra flashiness and interactive flashiness specifically, where it could make sense to build that natively. Another interesting thing in the React Native space is React Native recently re-architected their rendering engine to be written in C++ and be more efficient. So, this performance overhead might be a little bit less of a trade-off. They've re-architected the way that React Native JavaScript talks to the native layer, which might make this even less of an issue going forward. WILL: I looked it up for the podcast. But do you know some of the companies that we probably are familiar with, like they built apps on React Native? Can you name a couple? STEPHEN: Yeah, I was recently looking at this, too. And, you know, the big one is Facebook, right? Facebook built React Native. So, they're the sponsor of that project. So, Facebook and Facebook Messenger, I believe those apps are built with React Native. I don't know if the entire apps are or not [chuckles]. Do you know by chance? [laughs] WILL: React Native on their website says, "Hey, we're going to showcase these apps that they're built in React Native." So, I'm guessing a huge portion of it was built in React Native, so... STEPHEN: Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah, you're right. They're showcasing it there. So yeah, you know, other ones, you know, lots of brands, Shopify, looks like PlayStation. I'm looking at the list now on the React Native website: Pinterest, Flipkart, Discord, Walmart, Tesla, Coinbase, Mercari. Yeah, I mean, it's just a lot of big-name apps built in React Native, including quite a few that we've [laughs] that we've built. [laughter] MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at tbot.io/entrepreneurs. WILL: If I'm absolutely sold on getting that flashy experience, is native the only route to go? STEPHEN: I think until pretty recently, that would have been your option [laughs]. But Flutter has been picking up a little bit of momentum. So, Flutter is developed by Google. And it's kind of a challenger in that React Native space. It kind of has the same write once, run anywhere, you know, philosophy as React Native. You have one codebase. But they tout kind of being a more performant option than React Native. So, it compiles down to native ARM or Intel code, which can give better performance without, you know, not needing that JavaScript bridge kind of handling that communication between the UI and the business logic. WILL: So, when would you use Flutter versus React Native? STEPHEN: I kind of keep going back to, like, you know, we talk about the performance overhead of a React Native app. I don't think that's even on the map for the vast majority of apps. Like, this isn't a performance penalty that you can typically feel. So, looking at Flutter versus React Native, React Native has several advantages. I think the biggest one is it's React. So, every team has React developers already on the team, pretty much nowadays. So, you know, if you've got an organization that says, "Oh, we need to build a mobile app," they probably already have a team of React developers somewhere working on their web app [laughs]. So, there's a big benefit of kind of centralizing their team around that technology. You know, you can have a little bit of cross-pollination between web and mobile, which can be really nice. I think, similarly, it's a lot easier to find and hire React or React Native developers right now than it is to find and hire Flutter developers. So, Flutter is written in Dart, and it has its own front-end framework. So, this isn't necessarily a technology that you're going to have on your existing team. Like, I've never worked with Dart, personally. It's not nearly as common as React developers. You know, that, to me, is going to be a big downside. You know, the talent pool is a lot smaller for Flutter/Dart developers. Also, the ecosystem with Flutter being newer, it's not as established. It doesn't have as large of an ecosystem as React Native. So, for those reasons, I think React Native is still, at least for us, like, it's usually where we would steer a client over Flutter, unless they're in that category of, like, they're really going for something, you know, groundbreaking. And, you know, the choice is either, you know, they've ruled out React Native. They need to get that native performance, and maybe they could achieve that with Flutter, and maybe Flutter would be a good option then. WILL: Okay. You mentioned that—and I agree with you—like, you probably have some React devs on your team somewhere. Most companies does. So, say if I am bought in, I'm going all in on React Native, and I have React web developers on my team. Is that an easy transition for those developers, or what does that transition look like? STEPHEN: Yeah, this is something...I think you and I have talked about this a lot because we both transitioned from React Web to React Native. And, you know, it wasn't all that easy, right? [laughs] WILL: No, it was not [laughter] at all. [laughter] STEPHEN: So yeah, you know, it is a fallacy to say, "Hey, we've got a React team, you know, let's just start tomorrow on building an app, and it'll be smooth sailing. And, you know, no one needs to learn anything, and we'll be good to go," right? [laughs] So, you know, what I always say is a React web developer can successfully work on a React Native app. But I don't think they have the skills yet to lead that initiative because there's just so much to the mobile ecosystem that needs to be learned. And really, you know, my first couple of React Native apps, I wasn't the lead developer. There was somebody on those projects who really knew that space better than I did. And that was really helpful for me to have. How about you? What about your first, like, React Native project? What did that look like? WILL: It was at another company, and the exact words paraphrasing was, "You know React, so you can easily work on React Native." And so, I got on the project. And I really struggled, to be honest with you, because there's a lot of things that I didn't know: in-app purchases, push notifications, how to deal with Apple store, Android store, deploying to those stores. Like all of those things, navigation is totally different than React navigations and routes. It was a lot. It was a lot more than they led on to what it was. Eventually, I caught on. It took me a while. I needed to work with some more senior React Native developers, and I was able to really pick it up. But yeah, it was tough. I'll be honest: I struggled for a while because I went in feeling like I should have known all those things because that's the way it was conveyed to me. Now that I look back on it I was like, there's no way I could have known those things. It's just a different language. So, I had to get in there and learn it. And I even...I'm trying to think I've learned a couple of new languages. But it's almost like learning a new language just with, you know, the, like I mentioned, the in-app purchases, push notifications. It's just totally different. STEPHEN: Yeah, that's been my experience also. I think the challenges weren't, like, coding [laughs] because, you know, building a React Native app is coding in React. The challenges that I faced were, like you said, it's just the mobile ecosystem and learning all the intricacies, the functionality that users have come to expect in mobile apps, you know, like password manager, integration, and background execution modes, and deep linking strategies, all that kind of stuff. You know, if you don't know what questions to ask or what features to be thinking of, it's just really hard. And [laughs] I think it's more than just the developer needing to know that too. I think anytime it comes, you know, down to building an app, the whole team needs to have that mobile background. It's just a completely different platform than building for the web, right? So like, product owners, project managers, designers, developers all need that context so we can be prioritizing the right features and building a UI that matches the patterns that people have come to expect in a mobile app. And then, of course, developing those apps using the, you know, the proper native modules. WILL: Yeah, definitely. And I [chuckles]...you mentioned that it's mostly on, like, the mobile side. I don't know the best way to say that. But, like, I can tell you, when I first got onto the React Native project, there were numerous features that I could implement, and to a certain point to where I had to go that mobile. So, like, I was like, oh yeah, I can learn these new components that's in React Native. Okay, I got it to work. It's finished. You know, my PM would be like, "Well, it's not completely finished because you have to deploy it." And I was like, oh, I have no idea what I'm doing now. Like, I just know [laughs]...I know up to this point. STEPHEN: [laughs] WILL: But anything over that, I'm like, yeah, I have no idea. STEPHEN: Especially with consulting, right? With consulting, you need even more expertise, right? The clients are counting on you to build their app. And that's where, you know, having that deep, deep familiarity where you can say to a client, "This is how we're going to do the deployment process, you know, and I need, you know, X, Y, and Z to help set it up. And here are the deliverables, and here's when we'll have it," that kind of thing. Like, it really takes it up a whole nother notch what you need to know. WILL: Definitely, yeah. Because I think compared to mobile, I feel like web development can almost be like the Wild Wild West. And what I mean by that is, like, there's no rules for you to push out a website in web. Like, you know, you build it. You push it out. It can be out there, you know. Whoever is hosting it, unless you go against their rules, maybe, but their rules are very relaxed and stuff like that. Mobile, there's a totally different set of rules. Because, like, I was laughing not too long ago. There was rumors that Elon Musk was going to remove the blocking feature on Twitter [chuckles]. And it was funny because all the mobile devs they came out. And if you're a mobile dev, you know this. Apple is very strict. STEPHEN: [laughs] WILL: If this is a social media app that you're building, you have to have that blocking feature, which I agree it needs to be there. But it's funny, like, all the mobile devs was like, yeah, that's not going to work. Good luck [chuckles]. Good luck being an app again. STEPHEN: Yeah, [laughs] good luck. WILL: Like, they're going to kick it off. And yeah, they're very big on kicking it off if it doesn't follow those rules and things like that. So yeah, for React Native, you have to learn those rules, or, like I said, they won't approve it. They won't push it out to their store. STEPHEN: Yep, exactly. Yeah. I feel like the new one at every client project; I have to say, "We have to offer a way to delete your account in the app," because [laughs] that's a new one that launched last year, and I think has just started being enforced more recently. Like, all those little gotcha rules, you know, like, if you don't know about that, then you're going to go to submit your app to the stores, and you're going to get rejected every single time. [laughs]. WILL: And they're not shy about rejecting you [laughs]. STEPHEN: Yeah. But I would say, like, a lot of the rules, I'm like, yes, this is amazing that we have these rules, you know. It does help keep the community safer like things like blocking. But then there's the other rules of, like, Apple's like, hey, you've got to use our payment system and pay us 30% of every sale. WILL: Yes [laughs]. STEPHEN: I was, like, you know, there's some evil stuff happening there, too. WILL: I totally agree. And we ran into that issue. We had an app that used Stripe. And we actually had to remove it in order to use in-app purchases because...I forgot the rules around it, but it was essentially for digital content. I think it's what it was. And so, we had to use Apple's in-app purchases. So yeah, I totally agree with you on that. STEPHEN: Yeah. I feel like I've been a part of so many apps where we're, like, reading those rules. And we're like, okay, you know, it's like, we're watching a live stream of birds. WILL: [laughs] STEPHEN: You know, like, the birds aren't digital [laughter], you know. It's like, [laughs] where does this fall in the rule? [laughs] WILL: Yes [laughs]. I've done that, too [laughter]. Yep. It's almost like, you know, I feel like lawyers, okay, like, is this what this rule is, or the law what is written, or does this fall underneath that? So yeah, totally, totally agree. STEPHEN: Yep [laughs]. WILL: So, you've been here a couple of years at thoughtbot. What has been your experience building React Natives here for clients at thoughtbot? STEPHEN: Yeah, yeah. I've been at thoughtbot for about five years now. And I have been building React Native apps that whole time. And, I mean, I started at thoughtbot a little more in the full-stack space, web development, and have transitioned to where I'm mostly only building React Native mobile apps now. It's been a great experience. I think that React Native is really a sweet spot of; we're able to build these apps really efficiently and much less expensively than when we're doing pure native. And the end product is a really good app. So, it's been a great experience, you know, React Native is really...it has a really nice development experience. You know, it's the JavaScript React ecosystem. And we use TypeScript, and we have a really good developer experience with it. And then we're building apps that clients are really happy with and with a good budget. So, I think it's kind of that, you know, like, win-win-win kind of scenario where everybody is happy. And yeah, I don't see it going anywhere. And I think we're going to be building React Native apps for quite a while to come. WILL: Yeah, I totally agree with that. Where do you see React Native and mobile dev going here at thoughtbot in the next six months or even the next year? What are your goals for the mobile team? STEPHEN: We've got a couple of goals. One of them is around kind of what we've talked about with the mobile space in general. This isn't really specific to React Native, but it can be. But, consulting in the mobile space is challenging because there's a lot of mobile-specific domain knowledge that a team really needs to have. So, that's something that we've started looking into is, like, how do we build up our resources internally and then, hopefully, externally as well to help guide us on our projects and ensure that we have, like, you know, we are developing apps consistently and efficiently every time? So, that's something we're looking into is, like resources to help our teams—not just developers, but project managers, designers, and developers—help us navigate the mobile space. Okay, you're going to do push notifications. Here's the library we use. Here's things to think about, and interactions to think about, and iOS-specific functionality that we could support, and Android-specific functionality that we can support. You know, you're going to do deep linking; do you want to use universal links, or do you want to use a different strategy, a scheme-based link? So, basically, building up that set of resources so that our teams are all able to consult and build efficiently and consistently across the board. So, that's kind of goal number one. And then, goal number two is to kind of bring some of that out into the community a little bit more. So, thoughtbot is very well known in the Rails space for all of the open-source content we've put out and blog posts, and courses, and books. I mean, there's just so much on the Rails side that thoughtbot has done. And we're just a little bit less mature on the React Native side in terms of what we've put out there. So, that's kind of the second goal is giving back, helping others kind of do that same thing. I feel like we have developed our practices internally, and we're building some great apps. And it's kind of time to contribute back a little bit more. WILL: Awesome. I'm looking forward to reaching those goals. If you can go back and give yourself advice, what would you tell yourself? STEPHEN: I would maybe say, read the documentation [laughs]. I don't know when I got into mobile; I think I just jumped in. And, you know, we've talked about some of the mobile-specific domain, and not knowing what you don't know, and app review guidelines. I feel like early on, I just responded to challenges as they came up, as opposed to just digging into, you know, Apple's documentation and Android's documentation and just really understanding the underlying operating systems in stores. That's probably a piece of advice. If I could go back, I would just start at the documentation, you know, go to developer.apple.com and read about all of the underlying APIs of StoreKit and, you know, associated domains and all of these sorts of things. Just learn 'em, and then you know 'em. [laughs]. So, maybe that could have saved me some heartache if I just was a little more intentional about, okay, I'm getting into app development. I'm going to set aside some time and just really learn this stuff, as opposed to kind of where I had one foot in the door, one foot out of the door for a while. And I think that kept me from just sitting down and really going deep. WILL: That's really good advice. Just read the documentation. And that's not just Apple. STEPHEN: [laughs] WILL: That's a lot of departments, sections of my life. So, yes, I like that. [laughter] STEPHEN: I actually...that's something I did early in my career. So, I started as an Enterprise Java developer in 2011, and I was using the Spring framework. I downloaded the entire PDF. It was, like, 250 pages, the documentation [laughs]. And I remember just being on, like, airplane flights, and I just read the documentation, just cover to cover. That served me so well. I was, like, the expert, you know [laughs]. I don't always do it, but when I do, I'm like, oh yeah, why didn't I do that sooner? [laughs] WILL: Yeah, totally agree. I like that. What is the wind in your sails? What motivates Stephen? STEPHEN: Like, I think what attracted me to software development is just being able to build stuff, you know, probably the same thing that attracted me to woodworking. So, I think what motivates me is that prospect of, hey, I'm building an app that people are going to use, and it's going to make their life better. So, that's really what gets me up and gets me motivated. It's less so the actual coding, to be honest. It's really the prospect of, like, hey, I'm building something. WILL: Awesome. Yeah. Is there anything that you would like to promote? STEPHEN: If you're interested in building a mobile app, come talk to us. We'd love to build your mobile app. Go to thoughtbot.com/hire-us; I believe hire-us. We would love to talk to you about your mobile project. So, don't hesitate to reach out. We'd love to hear about what you're interested in building. WILL: Awesome. Well, Stephen, it was great to chat with you. It's always great to chat with you about mobile development and just personal life things. So, I really appreciate you being on the podcast today. STEPHEN: Thanks for having me, Will. It was a lot of fun. Always good talking with you. WILL: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have any questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Stephen Hanson.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneursSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Victoria and Will interview Rishi Malik, the Founder of Backstop.it and VP of Engineering at Varo Bank. They talk about Rishi's recent adventure at DEF CON, the renowned annual security conference that he's attended for six years, and describes how it has transformed from a mere learning experience into a thrilling competition for him and his team. The conference = their playground for tackling an array of security challenges and brain-teasing puzzles, with a primary focus on cloud security competitions. They talk about the significance of community in such events and how problem-solving through interaction adds value. Rishi shares his background, tracing his path from firmware development through various tech companies to his current roles in security and engineering management. The vital topic of security in the fintech and banking sector highlights the initial concerns people had when online banking emerged. Rishi navigates through the technical intricacies of security measures, liability protection, and the regulatory framework that safeguards online banking for consumers. He also highlights the evolving landscape, where technological advancements and convenience have bolstered consumer confidence in online banking. Rishi shares his unique approach to leadership and decision-making, and pearls of wisdom for budding engineers starting their careers. His advice revolves around nurturing curiosity and relentlessly seeking to understand the "why" behind systems and processes. __ Backstop.it Follow Backstop.it on X. Varo Bank Follow Varo Bank on Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube, or LinkedIn. Follow Rishi Malik on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on X or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with us today is Rishi Malik, Founder of Backstop.it and VP of Engineering at Varo Bank. Rishi, thank you for joining us. RISHI: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. VICTORIA: Yes, Rishi. I'm so excited to talk with you today about your security background and get into your role at Varo and Backstop IT. But first, I wanted to hear a little bit more about your recent experience attending DEF CON. How was that? RISHI: It was awesome. I do have quite the background in security at this point. And one of the things I started doing early on, as I was getting up to speed and learning more about the security-specific side of things, was beginning to attend DEF CON itself. So, I've now gone six years straight. And it started out as just kind of experiencing the conference and security and meeting folks. But it's progressed to where I now bring a team of people where we go and we compete. We have a good time. But we do get to kind of bring the security side of things into the software engineering and engineering leadership stuff that we all do on a day-to-day basis. VICTORIA: Yeah. And what kind of puzzles do you solve with your team when you attend DEF CON? RISHI: There's definitely a lot of variety there, which I think is part of the fun. So, DEF CON frequently has electronic badges, you know, with random puzzles on there that you have to solve. Some of it are cryptographic. Some of them are kind of random cultural things. Sometimes there's music challenges based around it. Sometimes, it's social and interactive. And you have to go find the right type of badge or the right person behind it to unlock something. So, all of those, you know, typically exist and are a ton of fun. Primarily, in the last few years, we've been focusing more on the cloud CTF. So, in this case, it's our team competing against other teams and really focused on cloud security. So, it's, you know, figuring out vulnerabilities in, you know, specially designed puzzles around AWS and GCP, the application side of things as well, and competing to see how well you can do. Three years ago, the last couple of years, we've not won it, but we've been pretty competitive. And the great thing is the field is expanding as more and more people get into CTF themselves but, more importantly, into cloud infrastructure and cloud knowledge there. So, it's just great to see that expansion and see what people are into, what people are learning, and how challenging some of these things can be. VICTORIA: I love the idea of having a puzzle at a conference where you have to find a specific person to solve it. And yeah, I'm always interested in ways where we can have these events where you're getting together and building community and growing expertise in a field but in a way that makes it fun [laughs] and isn't just life-draining long, like, talks about random stuff. RISHI: [laughs] I think what you're touching on there is crucial. And you said the word community, and, to me, that is, you know, a big part of what DEF CON and, you know, hacking and security culture is. But it is, I think, one of the things that kind of outside of this, we tend to miss it more, you know, specifically, like, focused conferences. It is more about kind of the content, you know, the hallway track is always a thing. But it's less intentional than I personally, at this stage, really prefer, you know. So, I do like those things where it is encouraging interaction. For me, I'd rather go to happy hour with some people who are really well versed in the subject that they're in rather than even necessarily listening to a talk from them on what they're doing. Simply because I think the community aspect, the social aspect, actually gets you more of the information that is more relevant to what you're doing on a day-to-day basis than just consuming it passively. VICTORIA: I agree because consuming it passively or even intentionally remotely, there are things that you didn't even think to think about [laughs] that aren't going to come up just on your own. You have to have another person there who's...Actually, I have a good friend who's co-working with me this week who's at Ticketmaster. And so, just hearing about some of the problems they have and issues there has been entertaining for me. So yeah, I love that about DEF CON, and I love hearing about community stories and fun ways that companies can get a benefit out of coming together and just putting good content out there. RISHI: Absolutely. I think problem-solving is where you get the most value out of it as a company and as a business. VICTORIA: Yeah, maybe that's a good segue to tell me a little bit more about your background and how you came to be where you are today. RISHI: Yeah. For me growing up, I was always that problem-solver type of person. So, I think that's what kind of naturally gravitated me towards tech and, you know, hardware and software engineering. You know, so, for me, I go back quite a while. I'd been doing a lot of development, you know, in the early days of my career. I started out doing firmware development back in the days of large tape libraries, right? So, if you think about, like, big businesses back before cloud was a big thing and even back before SSDs were a thing, you know, it was all spinning disks. It was all tape. And that's kind of the area that I started in. So, I was working on robots that actually move tapes around these giant tape libraries that are, you know, taller than I am that you can walk inside of because they're so big, for big corporations to be able to backup their data on an overnight basis. You have to do that kind of stuff. Then I started going into smaller and smaller companies, into web tech, into startups, then into venture-backed startups. And then, eventually, I started my own company and did that for a while. All of this is really just kind of, you know, software engineering in a nutshell, lots of different languages, lots of different technologies. But really, from the standpoint of, here's a whole bunch of hard problems that need to be solved. Let's figure out how we can do that and how we can make some money by solving some of these problems. That eventually kind of led me down the security path as well and the engineering management side of things, which is what I do now, both at Backstop...is a security consulting business and being VP of Engineering at Varo Bank. WILL: How was your journey? Because you started as an intern in 2003. RISHI: [laughs] WILL: And then, you know, 20 years later. So, how was your journey through all of that? [laughs] RISHI: [laughs] You know, I hadn't actually put it together that it has been 20 years this year until you said that. So, that's awesome. It's been a blast, you know. I can honestly say it's been wildly different than what I imagined 20 years ago and interesting in different ways. I think I'm very fortunate to be able to say that. When I started out as an intern in 2003, technologies were very different. I was doing some intern shifts with the federal government, you know, so the pace was wildly different. And when I think of where technology has come now, and where the industry has gone, and what I get to do on a day-to-day basis, I'm kind of just almost speechless at just how far we've come in 20 years, how easy some things are, how remarkably hard some other things are that should honestly be easy at this point, but just the things that we can do. I'm old enough that I remember cell phones being a thing and then smartphones coming out and playing with them and being like, yeah, this is kind of mediocre. I don't really know why people would want this. And the iPhone coming out and just changing the game and being like, okay, now I get it. You know, to the experience of the internet and, you know, mobile data and everywhere. It's just phenomenal the advances that we've had in the last 20 years. And it makes me excited for the next 20 years to see what we can do as we go forward. VICTORIA: I'm going to take personal offense to someone knowing that technology being too old [laughs], but, yeah, because it really wasn't that long ago. And I think one thing I always think about having a background in civic tech and in financial tech as well is that the future is here; it's just not evenly distributed. So, now, if you're building a new company, of course, the default is to go straight to the cloud. But many companies and organizations that have been around for 60-80 years and using the internet right when it first came out are still in really old technologies that just simply work. And maybe they're not totally sure why, and change is difficult and slow. So, I wonder if you have any experience that you can take from the banking or fintech industry on how to make the most out of modern security and compliance platforms. RISHI: Yeah, you know, I think most people in tech especially...and the gray hairs on me are saying the younger folks in tech especially don't realize just how much older technologies still exist and will exist for quite some time. When you think of banking itself, you know, most of the major companies that you can think of, you know, in the U.S. especially but kind of across the world that are the top tier names of banks, and networks, and stuff like that, still run mainframes. When you swipe your credit card, there's a very good chance that is processed on a mainframe. And that's not a bad thing. But it's just, you know when you talk to younger engineers, it's not something that kind of crosses their mind. They feel like it is old-tech. The bulk of businesses don't actually run on the cloud. Having been through it, I've racked and stacked servers and had to figure out how to physically take hardware across, you know, country borders and things like those lines. And now, when I do want to spin up a server somewhere else, it's just a different AWS region. So, it's remarkably easy, at this point, to solve a lot of those problems. But once you're up and live and you have customers, you know, where downtime is impactful or, you know, the cost of moving to the cloud or modernizing your technology is substantial, things tend to move a lot slower. And I think you see that, especially when it comes to security, because we have more modern movements like DevOps bringing security into it. And with a lot of the, you know, the modern security and compliance platforms that exist, they work very, very well for what they do, especially when you're a startup or your whole tech stack is modernized. The biggest challenges, I think, seem to come in when you have that hybrid aspect of it. You do have some cloud infrastructure you have to secure. You do have some physical data centers you have to secure. You have something that is, you know, on-premise in your office. You have something that is co [inaudible 10:01] somewhere else. Or you also have to deal with stuff like, you know, much less modern tech, you know, when it comes to mainframes and security and kind of being responsible for all of that. And I think that is a big challenge because security is one of those things where it's, you know, if you think of your house, you can have the strongest locks on your door and everything else like that. But if you have one weak point, you have a window that's left open, that's all it takes. And so, it has to be all-inclusive and holistic. And I think that is remarkably hard to do well, even despite where technology has come to these days. WILL: Speaking of securities, I remember when the Internet banking started a couple of years ago. And some of the biggest, I guess, fears were, like, the security around it, the safety. Because, you know, your money, you're putting your money in it, and you can't go to a physical location to talk to anyone or anything. And the more and more you learn about it...at first, I was terrified of it because you couldn't go talk to someone. But the more and more I learned about it, I was like, oh, there's so much security around it. In your role, what does that look like for you? Because you have such a huge impact with people's money. So, how do you overcome that fear that people have? RISHI: There's, I think, a number of steps that kind of go into it. And, you know, in 2023, it's certainly a little bit easier than it used to be. But, you know, very similar, I've had the same questions, you know, and concerns that you're describing. And I remember using one of the first banks that was essentially all digital and kind of wondering, you know, where is my money going? What happens if something goes wrong? And all of those types of things. And so, I think there is kind of a number of different aspects that go into it. One is, you know, obviously, the technical aspects of security, you know, when you put your credit card number in on the internet, you know, is it encrypted? You know, is it over, you know, TLS? What's happening there? You know, how safe and secure is all that kind of thing? You know, at this point, pretty much everyone, at least in the U.S., has been affected by credit card breaches, huge companies like Home Depot and Target that got cards accessed or, you know, just even the smaller companies when you're buying something random from maybe something...a smaller website on the internet. You know, that's all a little bit better now. So, I think what you have there was just kind of a little bit of becoming comfortable with what exists now. The other aspect, though, I think, then comes into, well, what happens when something goes wrong? And I think there's a number of aspects that are super helpful for that. I think the liability aspect of credit card, you know, companies saying, you know, and the banks "You're not liable for a fraudulent transaction," I think that was a very big and important step that really helps with that. And on top of that, then I think when you have stuff like the FDIC, you know, and insurance in the U.S., you know, that is government-backed that says, you know what? Even if this is an online-only digital bank, you're safe. You're protected. The government's got your back in that regard. And we're going to make sure that's covered. At Varo, that's one of the key things that we think about a lot because we are a bank. Now, most FinTechs, actually, aren't banks, right? They partner with other third-party banks to provide their financial services. Whereas at Varo, we are federally regulated. And so, we have the full FDIC protection. We get the benefits of that. But it also means that we deal with the regulation aspects and being able to prove that we are safe and secure and show the regulators that we're doing the right things for our customers. And I think that's huge and important because, obviously, it's safety for customers. But then it changes how you begin to think about how you're designing products, and how you're [inaudible 13:34] them, and, you know, how you're marketing them. Are we making a mobile app that shows that we're safe, and secure, and stable? Or are we doing this [inaudible 13:42] thing of moving too fast and breaking things? When it's people's money, you have to be very, very dialed into that. You still have to be able to move fast, but you have to show the protection and the safety that people have because it is impactful to their lives. And so, I think from the FinTech perspective, that's a shift that's been happening over the last couple of years to continue that. The last thing I'll say, too, is that part of it has just come from technology itself and the comfort there. It used to be that people who were buying, you know, items on the internet were more the exception rather than the rule. And now with Amazon, with Shopify, with all the other stuff that's out there, like, it's much more than a norm. And so, all of that just adds that level of comfort that says, I know I'm doing the right things as a consumer, that I'm protected. If I, you know, do have problems, my bank's got my back. The government is watching out for what's happening and trying to do what they can do to regulate all of that. So, I think all of that has combined to get to that point where we can do much more of our banking online and safely. And I think that's a pretty fantastic thing when it comes to what customers get from that. I am old enough that I remember having to figure out times to get to the bank because they're open nine to five, and, you know, I have to deposit my paycheck. And, you know, I work nine to five, and maybe more hours pass, and I had no idea when I can go get that submitted. And now, when I have to deposit something, I can just take a picture with my phone, and it safely makes it to my account. So, I think the convenience that we have now is really amazing, but it has certainly taken some time. And I think a number of different industry and commercial players kind of come together and make that happen. MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it's time to design, build, and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Liftoff brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we'll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today's new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow today. Get in touch at thoughtbot.com/liftoff. VICTORIA: I appreciate that perspective on approaching security from the user experience of wanting safety. And I'm curious if we can talk in contrast from that experience to the developer experience with security. And how do you, as a new leader in this financial product company, prioritize security and introduce it from a, like, building a safety culture perspective? RISHI: I think you just said that very eloquently. It is a safety culture. And cultural changes are hard. And I think for quite some time in the developer industry, security was either an afterthought or somebody else's problem. You know, it's the security team that has to think about it. It's, you know, and even these days, it's the red team that's going to go, you know, find these answers or whatever I'm shipping as a developer. My only thing to focus on is how fast I can ship, or, you know, what I'm shipping, rather than how secure is what I'm shipping. And so, I think to really be effective at that, it is a cultural shift. You have to think and talk about security from the outset. And you have to bake those processes into how you build product. Those security conversations really do need to start at the design phase. And, you know, thinking about a mobile app for a bank as an example, you know, it starts when you're just thinking about the different screens on a mobile app that people are going to go through. How are people interpreting this? You know, what is the [inaudible 17:23], and the feeling, and the emotions, that we're building towards? You know, is that safe and secure or, you know, is it not? But then it starts getting to the architecture and the design of the systems themselves to say, well, here's how they're going to enter information, here's how we're passing this back and forth. And especially in a world where a lot of software isn't just 100% in-house, but we're calling other partners for that, you know, be it, you know, infrastructure or risk, you know, or compliance, or whatever else it may be, how are we protecting people's data? How are we making sure our third parties are protecting people's data? You know, how are we encrypting it? How are we thinking about their safety all the way through? Again, even all the way down to the individual developer that's writing code, how are we verifying they're writing good, high-quality, secure code? Part of it is training, part of it is culture, part of it is using good tooling around that to be able to make sure and say, when humans make mistakes because we are all human and we all will make mistakes, how are we catching that? What are the layers do we have to make sure that if a mistake does happen, we either catch it before it happens or, you know, we have defense in depth such that that mistake in and of itself isn't enough to cause a, you know, compromise or a problem for our customers? So, I think it starts right from the start. And then, every kind of step along the way for delivering value for customers, also let's add that security and privacy and compliance perspective in there as well. VICTORIA: Yes, I agree. And I don't want to work for a company where if I make a small human mistake, I'm going to potentially cost someone tens or however many thousands of dollars. [laughs] WILL: I have a question around that. How, as a leader, how does that affect you day to day? Because I feel like there's some companies, maybe thoughtbot, maybe other companies, that a decision is not as critical as working as a bank. So, you, as a leader, how do you handle that? RISHI: There's a couple of things I try and consider in any given big or important decision I have to make, the aspects around, like, you know, the context, what the decision is, and that type of stuff. But from a higher level, there's kind of two things I try and keep in mind. And when I say keep in mind, like, when it's a big, impactful decision, I will actually go through the steps of, you know, writing it down or talking this out loud, sometimes by myself, sometimes with others, just, again, to make sure we are actually getting to the meat of it. But the first thing I'm trying to think of is kind of the Amazon idea of one-way versus two-way doors. If we make this decision and this is the wrong decision, what are the ramifications of that? You know, is it super easy to undo and there's very little risk with it? Or is it once we've made this decision or the negative outcome of this decision has happened, is it unfixable to a certain degree? You know, and that is a good reminder in my head to make sure that, you know, A, I am considering it deeply. And that, B, if it is something where the ramifications, you know, are super huge, that you do take the time, and you do the legwork necessary to make sure you're making a good, valid decision, you know, based on the data, based on the risks involved and that there's a deep understanding of the problem there. The second thing I try to think of is our customers. So, at Varo, our customers aren't who most banks target. A lot of banks want you to take all your money, put it in there, and they're going to loan that money out to make their money. And Varo is not that type of bank, and we focus on a pretty different segment of the market. What that means is our customers need their money. They need it safely and reliably, and it needs to be accurate when they have it. And what I mean by that is, you know, frequently, our customers may not have, you know, hundreds or a thousand dollars worth of float in their bank accounts. So, if they're going and they're buying groceries and they can't because there's an error on our side because we're down, and because the transactions haven't settled, then that is very, very impactful to them, you know, as an individual. And I think about that with most of these decisions because being in software and being in engineering I am fortunate enough that I'm not necessarily experiencing the same economic struggles that our customers may have. And so, that reminder helps me to think about it from their perspective. In addition, I also like to try and think of it from the perspective...from my mom, actually, who, you know, she is retired age. She's a teacher. She's non-technical. And so, I think about her because I'd say, okay, when we're making a product or a design decision, how easy is it for her to understand? And my biases when I think about that, really kind of come into focus when I think about how she would interpret things. Because, you know, again, for me, I'm in tech. I think about things, you know, very analytically. And I just have a ton of experience across the industry, which she doesn't have. So, even something as simple as a little bit of copy for a page that makes a ton of sense to me, when I think about how she would interpret it, it's frequently wildly different. And so, all of those things, I think, kind of come together to help make a very strong and informed decision in these types of situations where the negative outcomes really do matter. But you are, you know, as Varo is, you're a startup. And you do need to be able to build more products quickly because our customers have needs that aren't being met by the existing banking industry. And so, we need to provide value to them so that their lives are a bit better. VICTORIA: I love that focus on a specific market segment and their needs and solving for that problem. And we know that if you're at a certain income level, it's more expensive [laughs] because of the overdraft fees and other things that can cause you problems. So, I really appreciate that that's the mission at Varo, and that's who you're focusing on to create a better banking product that makes more sense. I'm curious if there were any surprises and challenges that you could share from that discovery process and finding out, you know, exactly what were those things where your mom was, like, uh, actually, I need something completely different. [laughs] RISHI: Yeah, so, [chuckles] I'm chuckling because, you know, it's not, like, a single kind of time or event. It's, you know, definitely an ongoing process. But, you know, as actually, we were talking, you know, about earlier in terms of being kind of comfortable with doing things digital and online, that in and of itself is something that even in 2023, my mom isn't as comfortable or as confident as, you know, say, maybe the three of us are. As an example, when sending money, you know, kind of like a peer-to-peer basis, like, if I'm sending my mom a little bit of money, or she's sending me something, you're kind of within the family. Things that I would think would be kind of very easy and straightforward actually do cause her a little bit more concern. Okay, I'm entering my debit card number into this so that it can get, you know, the cash transferred into my bank account. You know, again, for me, it didn't even cross my mind, actually, that that would be something uncomfortable. But for my mom, that was something where she actually had some concerns about it and was messaging me. Her kind of personal point of view on that was, I would rather use a credit card for this and get the money on a credit card instead of a debit card because the debit card is linked to a bank account, and the security around that needs to be, you know, much tighter. And so, it made her more uncomfortable entering that on her phone. Whereas even a credit card it would have given her a little bit more peace of mind simply because it wasn't directly tied to her bank account. So, that's just, you know, the most recent example. I mean, honestly, that was earlier today, but it's something I hadn't thought of. And, again, for most of our customers, maybe that's not the case and how they think. But for folks that are at that retirement age, you know, in a world where there are constant barrages of scam, you know, emails, and phone calls, and text messages going around, the concern was definitely there. VICTORIA: That happened to me. Last week, I was on vacation with my family, and we needed to pay my mom for the house we'd rented. And I had to teach her how to use Zelle and set up Zelle. [laughter] It was a week-long process. But we got there, and it works [laughs] now. But yeah, it's interesting what concerns they have. And the funny part about it was that my sister-in-law happens to be, like, a lawyer who prevents class action lawsuits at a major bank. And she reassured us that it was, in fact, secure. [laughs] I think it's interesting thinking about that user experience for security. And I'm curious, again, like, compare again with the developer experience and using security toolings. And I wonder if you had any top recommendations on tools that make the developer experience a little more comfortable and feeling like you're deploying with security in mind. RISHI: That, in particular, is a bit of a hard question to answer. I try and stay away from specific vendors when it comes to that because I think a lot of it is contextual. But I could definitely talk through, like, some of the tools that I use and the way I like to think about it, especially from the developer perspective. I think, first off, consider what aspect of the software development, you know, lifecycle you're in. If you are an engineer writing, you know, mostly application code and dealing with building product and features and stuff like that, start from that angle. I could even take a step back and say security as an industry is very, very wide at this point. There is somebody trying to sell you a tool for basically every step in the SDLC process, and honestly, before and after to [inaudible 26:23]. I would even almost say it's, to some extent, kind of information and vendor overload in a lot of ways. So, I think what's important is to think about what your particular aspect of that is. Again, as an application engineer, or if you're building cloud infrastructure, or if you're an SRE, you know, or a platform team, kind of depending on what you are, your tooling will be different. The concepts are all kind of similar ideas, but how you go about what you build will be different. In general, I like to say, from the app side of things, A, start with considering the code you're writing. And that's a little bit cultural, but it's also kind of more training. Are you writing code with a security mindset? are you designing systems with a security mindset? These aren't things that are typically taught, you know, in school if you go get a CS degree, or even in a lot of companies in terms of the things that you should be thinking about. So, A, start from there. And if you don't feel like you think about, you know, is this design secure? Have we done, you know, threat modeling on it? Are we considering all of the error paths or the negative ways people can break the system? Then, start from that and start going through some of the security training that exists out there. And there's a lot of different aspects or avenues by which you can get that to be able to say, like, okay, I know I'm at least thinking about the code I write with a security mindset, even if you haven't actually changed anything about the code you're writing yet. What I actually think is really helpful for a lot of engineers is to have them try and break things. It's why I like to compete in CTFs, but it's also why I like to have my engineers do the same types of things. Trying to break software is both really insightful from the aspect that you don't get when you're just writing code and shipping it because it's not something you have time to do, but it's also a great way to build up some of the skills that you need to then protect against. And there's a lot of good, you know, cyber ranges out there. There's lots of good, just intentionally vulnerable applications that you can find on GitHub but that you can just run, you know, locally even on your machine and say, okay, now I have a little web app stood up. I know this is vulnerable. What do I do? How do I go and break it? Because then all of a sudden, the code that you're writing you start to think about a little bit differently. It's not just about how am I solving this product problem or this development problem? But it's, how am I doing this in a way that is safe and secure? Again, as an application side of things, you know, just make sure you know the OWASP Top 10 inside and out. Those are the most basic things a lot of engineers miss. And it only takes, again, one miss for it to be critical. So, start reviewing it. And then, you start to think about the tooling aspect of it. People are human. We're going to make mistakes. So, how do we use the power of technology to be able to stop this? You know, and there is static scanning tools. Like, there's a whole bunch of different ones out there. You know, Semgrep is a great one that's open source just to get started with that can help you find the vulnerable code that may exist there. Consider the SQL queries that you're writing, and most importantly, how you're writing them. You know, are you taking user input and just chucking it in there, or are you sanitizing it? When I ask these questions, for a lot of engineers, it's not usually yes or no. It's much more of an, well, I don't know. Because in software, we do a really good job of writing abstraction layers. But that also means, you know, to some extent, there may be a little bit of magic in there, or a lack thereof of magic that you don't necessarily know about. And so, you have to be able to dive into the libraries. You have to know what you're doing to even be able to say something like, oh no, this SQL query is safe from this user input because we have sanitized it. We have, you know, done a prepared statement, whatever it may be. Or, no, actually, we are just doing something here that's been vulnerable, and we didn't realize we were, and so now that's something we have to address. So, I think, like, that aspect in and of itself, which isn't, you know, a crazy ton of things. It's not spending a ton of money on different tools. But it's just internalizing the fact that you start to think a little bit differently. It provides a ton of value. The last thing on that, too, is to be able to say, especially if you're coming from a development side, or even just from a founder or a startup side of things, what are my big risks? What do I need to take care of first? What are the giant holes or flaws? You know, and what is my threat model around that? Obviously, as a bank, you have to care very deeply right from the start. You know, if you're not a bank, if you're not dealing with financial transactions, or PII, or anything like that, there are some things that you can deal with a little bit later. So, you have to know your industry, and you have to know what people are trying to do and the threat models and the threat vectors that can exist based on where you are. WILL: That's amazing. You know, earlier, we talked about you being an engineer for 20 years, different areas, and stuff like that. Do you have any advice for engineers that are starting out right now? And, you know, from probably year one to year, you know, anything under ten years of experience, do you have any advice that you usually give engineers when you're chatting with them? RISHI: The advice I tend to give people who are just starting out is be the type of person that asks, "How does this work?" Or "Why does this work?" And then do the work to figure out the answer. Maybe it is talking to someone; maybe it's diving into the details; maybe it's reading a book in some aspect that you haven't had much exposure to. When I look at my career and when I look at the careers of folks around me and the people that I've seen be most successful, both in engineering but also on the business side, that desire to know why something is the case is I think, one of the biggest things that determines success. And then the ability to answer that question by putting in the right types of work, the right types of scientific method and processes and such, are the other factor. So, to me, that's what I try and get across to people. I say that mostly to junior folks because I think when you're getting started, it's really difficult. There's a ton out there. And we've, again, as software engineers, and hardware engineers, and cloud, and all this kind of stuff, done a pretty good job of building a ton of abstraction layers. All of our abstraction layers [inaudible 32:28] to some degree. You know, so as you start, you know, writing a bunch of code, you start finding a bunch of bugs that you don't necessarily know how to solve and that don't make any sense in the avenue that you've been exposed to. But as soon as you get into the next layer, you understand how that works begin to make a lot more sense. So, I think being comfortable with saying, "I have no idea why this is the case, but I'm going to go find out," makes the biggest difference for people just starting out their career. WILL: I love that advice. Not too long ago, my manager encouraged me to write a blog post on something that I thought that I really knew. And when I started writing that blog post, I was like, oh boy, I have no idea. I know how to do it, but I don't know the why behind it. And so, I was very thankful that he encouraged me to write a blog post on it. Because once you start explaining it to other people, I feel you really have to know the whys. And so, I love that advice. That's really good advice. VICTORIA: Me too. And it makes sense with what we see statistically as well in the DORA research. The DevOps Research Association publishes a survey every year, the State of DevOps Report. And one of the biggest findings I remember from last year's was that the most secure and reliable systems have the most open communication and high trust among the teams. And so, being able to have that curiosity as a junior developer, you need to be in an environment where you can feel comfortable asking questions [laughs], and you can approach different people, and you're encouraged to make those connections and write blog posts like Will was saying. RISHI: Absolutely, absolutely. I think you touched on something very important there as well. The psychological safety really makes a big difference. And I think that's critical for, again, like, folks especially earlier in their career or have recently transitioned to tech, or whatever the case may be. Because asking "Why?" should be something that excites people, and there are companies where that's not necessarily the case, right? Where you asking why, it seems to be viewed as a sign that you don't know something, and therefore, you're not as good as what you should be, you know, the level you should be at or for whatever they expect. But I do think that's the wrong attitude. I think the more people ask why, the more people are able and comfortable to be able to say, "I don't know, but I'm going to go find out," and then being able to be successful with that makes way better systems. It makes way safer and more secure systems. And, honestly, I think it makes humans, in general, better humans because we can do that. VICTORIA: I think that's a great note to start to wrap up on. Is there any questions that you have for me or Will? RISHI: Yeah. I would love to hear from both of you as to what you see; with the experiences that you have and what you do, the biggest impediments or speed bumps are when it comes to developers being able to write and ship secure code. VICTORIA: When we're talking with new clients, it depends on where they are in really the adoption of their product and the maturity of their organization. Some early founders really have no technology experience. They have never managed an IT organization. You know, setting up basic employee account access and IDs is some of the initial steps you have to take to really get to where you can do identity management, and permissions management, and all the things that are really table stakes for security. And then others have some progress, and they have a fair amount of data. And maybe it's in that situation, like you said before, where it's really a trade-off between the cost and benefit of making those changes to a more secure, more best practice in the cloud or in their CI/CD pipeline or wherever it may be. And then, when you're a larger organization, and you have to make the trade-offs between all of that, and how it's impacting your developer experience, and how long are those deployed times now. And you might get fewer rates of errors and fewer rates of security vulnerabilities. But if it's taking three hours for your deployments to go out [laughs] because there's so many people, and there's so many checks to go through, then you have to consider where you can make some cuts and where there might be more efficiencies to be gained. So, it's really interesting. Everyone's on a different point in their journey. And starting with the basics, like you said, I love that you brought up the OWASP Top 10. We've been adopting the CIS Controls and just doing a basic internal security audit ourselves to get more ready and to be in a position where... What I'm familiar with as well from working in federal agencies, consulting, maintaining some of the older security frameworks can be a really high cost, not only in terms of auditing fees but what it impacts to your organization to, like, maintain those things [laughs] and the documentation required. And how do you do that in an agile way, in a way that really focuses on addressing the actual purpose of the requirements over needing to check a box? And how do we replicate that for our clients as well? RISHI: That is super helpful. And I think the checkbox aspect that you just discussed I think is key. It's a difficult position to be in when there are boxes that you have to check and don't necessarily actually add value when it comes to security or compliance or, you know, a decrease in risk for the company. And I think that one of the challenges industry-wide has always been that security and compliance in and of itself tends to move a little bit slower from a blue team or a protection perspective than the rest of the industry. And so, I mean, I can think of, you know, audits that I've been in where, you know, just even the fact that things were cloud-hosted just didn't make sense to the auditors. And it was a struggle to get them to understand that, you know, there is shared responsibility, and this kind of stuff exists, and AWS is taking care of some things, and we're taking care of some other things when they've just been developed with this on-premise kind of mentality. That is one of the big challenges that still exists kind of across the board is making sure that the security work that you're doing adds security value, adds business value. It isn't just checking the box for the sake of checking the box, even when that's sometimes necessary. VICTORIA: I am a pro box checker. RISHI: [laughs] VICTORIA: Like, I'll get the box checked. I'll use Trello and Confluence and any other tool besides Excel to do it, too. We'll make it happen with less pain, but I'd rather not do it [laughs] if we don't have to. RISHI: [laughs] VICTORIA: Let's make it easy. No, I love it. Is there anything else that you want to promote? RISHI: No, I don't think there's anything else I want to promote other than I'm going to go back to what I said just earlier, like, that culture. And if, you know, folks are out there and you have junior engineers, you have engineers that are asking "Why?", you have people that just want to do the right thing and get better, lean into that. Double down on those types of folks. Those are the ones that are going to make big differences in what you do as a business, and do what you can to help them out. I think that is something we don't see enough of in the industry still. And I would love for that to change. VICTORIA: I love that. Thank you so much, Rishi, for joining us. RISHI: Thanks for having me. This was a great conversation. I appreciate the time. VICTORIA: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you could find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Rishi Malik.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: Now that you have funding, it’s time to design, build and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Lift Off brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we’ll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today’s new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow, today. Get in touch at: thoughtbot.com/liftoffSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Amy Spurling is the Founder and CEO of Compt, helping companies build and scale flexible perks, stipends that delight teams. She explains how Compt's approach to benefits aligns with an employee's life stages, and shares insights from data that revealed the vast diversity of vendors utilized by employees. Amy talks about fundraising for Compt, highlighting the gender investment gap and the difficulties faced by female founders. She also shares her personal experiences as a lesbian founder and emphasizes the importance of a diverse workforce. She outlines Compt's mission to provide equitable compensation and foster a broader perspective within companies, the economic miss of not investing in female-founded companies, and the complexities of transitioning into different roles within a startup. Amy's leadership values of balance and belonging are explored, and she shares insights about navigating hurdles like SOC 2 and GDPR compliance. Additionally, they talk about trends in the tech industry, such as AI's use in healthcare and the potential for bias in software, along with data privacy issues. __ Compt.io Follow Compt.io on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or Xr. Follow Amy Spurling on LinkedIn or X. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with us today is Amy Spurling, Founder and CEO of Compt, helping companies build and scale flexible perks, stipends that delight teams. Amy, thank you for joining. AMY: Thanks so much for having me. VICTORIA: Amy, I saw in your LinkedIn background that you have a picture of someone hiking in what looks like a very remote area. So, just to start us off today, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about that. And what's your hobby there? AMY: Sure. I do spend a lot of time backpacking. That picture, I believe, was actually taken in Mongolia a couple of years ago. We spent ten days kind of hiking around in, I mean, everything is backcountry basically in Mongolia. So, spending a lot of time walking around, looking at mountains, is kind of my pastime. WILL: I have a question around backpacking itself. When you say backpacking, what does that mean? Does it mean you only have a backpack, and you're out in the mountains, and you're just enjoying life? AMY: It depends. So, in Mongolia, there were a couple of folks with camels, so carrying the heavy gear for us but still living in tents. My wife and I just did a backpacking trip in the Accursed Mountains in Albania, though, and everything was on our backpack. So, you're carrying a 35-pound pack. It has all your food, your water, your camping gear, and you just go. And you're just kind of living off the land kind of. I mean, you're taking food, so it's not like I'm foraging or hunting but living in the outback. WILL: Wow. What does that do for you just internally, just getting off the grid, enjoying nature? Because I know with tech and everything now, it's kind of hard to do that. But you've done that, I think you said, for ten days. Like, walk us through that experience a little bit. AMY: Some people use yoga, things like that, to go to a zen place, be calm, you know, help quiet their mind. For me, I need to do something active, and that's what I use this for. So getting off away from my phone, away from my laptop—those are not available to me when I'm in the mountains—and just focusing on being very present and listening to the birds, smelling the flowers. You know, pushing myself to where I'm, you know, exerting a lot of energy hiking and just kind of being is just...it's pretty fantastic. VICTORIA: And I'm curious, what brought you to decide to go to Albania to get to that experience? Because that's not a top destination for many people. But -- AMY: It is not. So, we travel a fair amount, and we backpack a fair amount. And the mountains there are honestly some of the most beautiful I've seen anywhere in the world. And so, we're always looking for, where can you get off the grid pretty quickly? Where can you be in the mountains pretty quickly in a way that still has a path so that you're not putting yourself in danger? Unless...I mean, we've done that too. But you want to make sure you have a guide, obviously, if you're going completely no path, no trail kind of camping, too. But it just looked really beautiful. We planned it actually for three years ago and had to cancel because it was May of 2020. And so, we've had this trip kind of on the books and planned for it for a while. VICTORIA: That's awesome. Yeah, I know of Albania because I had a friend who worked there for a few years. And she said the rock climbing there is amazing. And it actually has one of the last wild rivers in Europe. So, it's just a very remote, very interesting place. So, it's funny that you went there [laughs]. I was like, wait, other people also go to Albania. That's awesome. I love the outdoor space. Well, what a great perk or benefit to working to be able to take those vacations and take that time off and spend it in a way that makes you feel refreshed. Tell me more about Compt and your background. What led you to found this company? AMY: Sure. I've been in tech companies for, you know, over 20 years. I've been a CFO, a COO building other people's dreams, so coming in as a primary executive, you know, first funding round type of person, help scale the team, manage finance and HR. And I loved doing that, but I got really frustrated with the lack of tools that I needed to be able to hire people and to retain people. Because the way we compensate people has changed for the last 10, 15 years. And so, ultimately, decided to build a platform to solve my own problem and my own team's problems, and started that getting close to six years ago now. But wanted to build a tech company in a very different way as well. So, in the same way, I take time off, I want my team to take time off. So, we operate on a basis of everyone should be taking their time off. Don't check in while you're out. We'll make sure we're covered. You know, let's build a sustainable business here. And everybody should be working 40 to 45 hours a week, which is definitely not a startup culture or norm. WILL: Yeah. I love that. I was doing some research on Compt. And so, in your words, can you explain to everyone exactly what your company does? AMY: Sure. So, we build lifestyle benefit accounts for companies. And what that means...and the terminology keeps changing, so some people may call them stipends or allowances. But it's really looking at how you pull together employee perks, benefits that will help compete for talent. And right now, retention is kind of the key driver for most companies. How do I keep the people I have really happy? Competitive salaries are obviously table stakes. Health insurance for most industries is table stakes. So, it's, what else are you offering them? You can offer a grab bag of stuff, which a lot of companies try and do, but you get very low utilization. Or you can do something like a stipend or a lifestyle spending account, which is what we build, which allows for complete flexibility so that every employee can do something different. So that even if you're offering wellness, you know, what the three of us think about as wellness is likely very different. I spend a lot of money at REI, like, they are basically, like, as big as my mortgage. I spend so much money there because I want backpacking gear. Wellness for you folks may be a little bit different. And so, allowing for that personalization so everybody can do something that matters to them. VICTORIA: Right. And I love that it comes from a problem you found in your own experience of working with early-stage startups and being on the executive level and finance and building teams from the ground up. So, I'm curious, what lessons did you find in your previous roles that were maybe ten times more important when you started your own company? AMY: I learned so much through all of my prior companies and pulled in the lessons of the things that worked really well but then also the things that it was, like, wow, I would definitely do that different. DEI is very important to us. I knew building a diverse team was going to be a competitive advantage for us. And none of my prior teams really met that mark. You know, most of them were Boston-based, the usual kind of profile of a tech company: 85%-95% White guys, mostly from MIT, you know, very, very talented, but also coached and trained by the same professors for the last 20 years. So, I knew I wanted different perspectives around the table, and that was going to be really key. So, looking at non-traditional backgrounds, especially as we were looking at hiring engineers, for instance, that was really interesting to me because I knew that would be part of our competitive advantage as we started building up this platform that is employee engagement but very much a tax compliance and budgeting tool as well. VICTORIA: I love hearing that. And it's something I've heard from actually thoughtbot's founder, Chad. That is something he wished he invested more in when he first started it. So, I'm curious as to how that's played out from when you started to where you are now. You said, I think, it's been six years, right? AMY: January will be six years, so five and a half-ish, I guess, right now. I mean, it was a stated part of what we were going to do from day one. All of my prior companies wanted that as well. I don't think anybody starts out and says, "Hey, I'd really love a one-note company." No one says that. Everybody thinks that they're doing the right things and hiring the best talent. But what you do is you end up hiring from your network, which usually looks just like you. And when you get to be, you know, 100, 150 people and you're looking around going, wow, we have some gaps here, it's really hard to fill them because who wants to be the first and the only of whatever? You know, I've been the only woman on most management teams. So, for us, it was day one, make it part of the focus and make sure we're really looking for the best talent and casting a very wide net. So, right now, we're sitting at 56% female and 36% people of color, and somewhere around 18%-19% LGBTQIA. So, we're trying to make sure that we're attracting all those amazing perspectives. And they're from people from around the country, which I also think is really important when you're building a tech company. Don't just build in areas where you're in your little tech bubble. If you want to build a product that actually services everyone, you need to have other kind of cultural and country perspectives as well. VICTORIA: Yeah. And that makes perfect sense for what you described earlier for Compt, that it is supposed to be flexible to provide health benefits or wellness benefits to anyone. And there can be a lot of different definitions of that. So, it makes sense that your team reflects the people that you're building for. AMY: Exactly. WILL: Yeah. How does that work? How does Compt accomplish that? Because I know early on I was doing nonprofits and I was a decent leader. But I struggle to get outside of myself, my own bubble if that makes sense. So, like, that was before I had kids. I had no idea what it meant to have kids and just the struggles and everything if you have kids. So, there's so many different things that I've learned over the years that, like, just people have their own struggles. So, how does Compt accomplish the diversity of a company? AMY: So, it's so interesting you mentioned that. I was on a podcast the other day with somebody who was, like, "You know, we didn't really think about our benefits and how important they were." And then, the founder who was the person on the podcast, and he was like, "But then I had kids. And suddenly, I realized, and we had this amazing aha moment." I'm like, well, it's great you had the aha moment. But let's back it up and do this before the founder has children. Sometimes you need to recognize the entire team needs something different and try and support them. My frustration with the tools out there are there are tools that are like, hey, we're a DE&I platform. We will help you with that. You know, we've got a benefit for fertility. We've got a benefit for, you know, elder care. There's all kinds of benefits. These are great benefits, but they're also very, very specific in how they support an employee. And it's very small moment in time, usually. Whereas with something like Compt, where we say, "Hey, we support family," your version of family, having children is very different from my version of family, where I don't have children, but we both have families. And we can both use that stipend in a way that is meaningful for us. What puts the employee back in charge, what matters in their lives, instead of the company trying to read everyone's mind, which is honestly a no-win situation for anyone. So, it just makes it very, very broad. VICTORIA: Yes. And I've been on both sides, obviously, as an employee, but also previously role of VP of Operations. And trying to design benefits packages that are appealing, and competitive, and fair is a challenging task. So -- AMY: It's impossible. It's impossible. [laughs] VICTORIA: Very hard. And I'm curious what you found in the early stages of Compt that was surprising to you in the discovery process building the product. AMY: So, for me, I mean, discovery was I am the buyer for this product. So, I wanted this about five years before I decided to go and build it. And I was talking to other finance and HR professionals going around going, "All right, are you feeling this exact same pain that I'm feeling? Because it is getting completely insurmountable." We were all being pitched all these different platforms and products. Everybody had something they wanted to sell through HR to help attract, and engage and retain talent and all the things, right? But there's no tracking. It's not taxed correctly. And ultimately, no matter what you bring in, maybe 2% to 3% of your team would use it. So, you're spending all this time and energy in putting all this love into wanting to support your team, and then nobody uses the stuff that you bring in because it just doesn't apply to them. And so, I realized, like, my pivotal moment was, all right, none of this is working. I've been waiting five years for somebody to build it. Let's go build something that is completely vendor-agnostic. There's no vendors on this platform by design because everyone ultimately wants something different. And, you know, through that process, we were, of course, pushed by many VCs who said, "Hey, build your marketplace, build your marketplace, you know, that's going to be your moat and your special sauce." And I said, "No, no, no, that's not what we're going to do here because that doesn't solve that problem." And we finally had the data to prove it, which is fantastic. You know, we actually did a sample of 8,700 people on our platform, and we watched them for a year. And said, "How many different vendors are these 8,700 people going to use?" Because that's the marketplace we'd have to build because we have 91% employee engagement. Nobody can beat us in the industry. We've got the highest employee engagement of any platform in our category. So, how many different vendors could 8,700 people use in that time period? Do you guys have any guesses how many they used in that time period to get to that engagement? VICTORIA: Out of 8,700 vendors? AMY: No, 8,700 employees. So, how many different vendors they used in that time period. VICTORIA: Hmm, like, per employee, I could see maybe, like, 10? I don't know. Two? AMY: We saw 27,000 different vendors used across all the employees, so 27,000 different unique vendors. So, on average, every employee wants three unique vendors that no one else is using. VICTORIA: Oh wow. WILL: Wow. VICTORIA: Yeah, okay. [laughter] Right. AMY: So, it's just you can't build that, I mean, you could build that marketplace, but nobody's going to visit that marketplace because nobody wants to scroll through 27,000 things. And so, it just keeps changing. You know, and I saw that even with the woman who started the company with me, you know, when she...we, of course, use Compt internally. And she started using her wellness stipend. You know, at first, she was doing 5Ks. So, she'd register for the race. She'd go train. She'd do all the things. Then she got pregnant and had a baby and started shifting over to prenatal vitamins, to Lamaze classes, to, you know, mommy yoga, things like that. Then once she had the baby, it shifted again. And so, it allows for a company to flow with an employee's lifecycle without having to get into an employee's life stage and, "Hey, what do you need at this moment in time?" Employees can self-direct that, so it makes it easier for employees and a lot easier for companies who are not trying to...we don't want to map out every single moment of our employee's personal life. We shouldn't be involved in that. And so, this is a way to support them but also give them a little space too. WILL: I absolutely love that because that is, yes, that is a flow. Like, before you have kids, it's, like, yes, I can go run these 5Ks; I can do this. When you have kids, it totally changes. Like, okay, what can I do with my kids? So, workout, or that's my away time. So, I love that it's an ebb and flow with the person. And they can pick their own thing, like -- AMY: Right. We're all adults. WILL: Yes. [laughs] AMY: I think I sat there going; why am I dictating someone's health and wellness regimen? I am not qualified for this on any stretch. Like, why am I dictating what somebody's mental health strategy should be? That's terrifying. You're adults. You work with your professionals. We'll support it. WILL: Yes. I remember at one company I worked for; they had this gym that they had, you know, got a deal with. And I was so frustrated because I was like, that's, like, 45 minutes away from my house. AMY: [laughs] Right. WILL: It's a perk, but it means absolutely nothing to me. I can't use it. So yes, yeah. [laughs] AMY: Well, and, like, not everybody wants to work, say...there was, you know, we see a lot of that is there's been a transition over time. COVID really changed that as people couldn't go to gyms, and companies shifted to stipends. But you may not want to work out with your co-workers, and that's okay, too. Like, it's okay to want to do your own thing and be in your own space, which is where we see this kind of decline of the, you know, on-site company gym, which, you know, some people just don't want to do that. VICTORIA: Yeah. So, I love that you stayed true to this problem that you found and you backed it up with data. So, you're like, here's clear data on, say, why those VCs' advice was bad [laughs] about the marketplace. AMY: Ill-informed. They needed data to see otherwise. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, I'm curious about your experience going through fundraising and starting up for Compt with your background as a CFO and how that was for you. AMY: It was...I naively thought it would be easier for me, and maybe it was because I had all this experience raising money as a CFO in all these prior companies. But the reality is that women receive less than 2% of all funding, even though we start 50% of the businesses. And if you look at, you know, Black female founders, they're receiving, like, 0.3, 0.5% of funding. Like, it's just...it's not nice out there. You know, on average, a lot of VCs are looking at 3,000, 4,000, or 5000 different companies a year and investing in 10. And so, the odds of getting funded are very, very low, which means that you're just going to experience a whole lot of unique situations as a female founder. I saw that you folks work with LOLA, which is fantastic. I'm a huge fan of LOLA and kind of what their founders put together. And I've heard some amazing things about the pitches that she's done for VCs and that she's just not shy about what she's building. And I really appreciate that. It's never a fun situation. And it gets easier the later stages because you have more metrics, and data, and all of that. And we ultimately found phenomenal investors that I'm very, very happy to have as part of our journey. But it's definitely...it's not pretty out there is the reality. VICTORIA: Right. And I saw that you either attended or put on an event about the gender investment gap, which I think is what you just referred to there as well. So, I'm curious how that conversation went and if there were any insights about what the industry can do to promote more investment in women and people of color founders. AMY: So, that's actually coming up August 10th, and so that's coming up in a few weeks that we're going to be hosting that. I'm actually part of a small group that is spearheading some legislation in Massachusetts to help change this funding dynamic for female founders, which I'm pretty excited about. And California also has some legislation they're looking at right now. In Mass, we're looking at how fair lending laws can apply to venture capital. There are laws on the books on how capital gets distributed when you look at the banking system. But there's virtually no regulation when you look at venture funding, and there's no accountability, and there's no metrics that anybody is being held to. I don't believe that you know, just because I pitched a VC that they should be funding me, you know, it needs to be part of their thesis and all of those things. But when you see so much disparity in what is happening out there, bias is coming into play. And there needs to be something that helps level that playing field. And so, that's where legislation comes into play and helps change that dynamic. So, pretty excited about the legislation that's before both the Senate and the Mass State House, likely going to be heard this November. So, we're pretty excited about that. Mid-Roll Ad: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. WILL: So, Amy, you're talking a lot about diversity, inclusion, and just biases, and things like that. You're doing a great job with it. Your product is perfect for that because it reaches so many different levels. And I just want to ask you, why are you so passionate about it? Why is this so important to you? AMY: For me, personally, I am a lesbian founder. I am the only, you know, LGBTQ in many of my companies. And I'm always the, I mean, very frequently, the only woman in the boardroom, the only woman on the leadership team. That's not super comfortable, honestly. When you are having to fight for your place at the table, and you see things that could be done differently because you're bringing a different perspective, that, to me, is a missed opportunity for companies and for employees as well who, you know, there's amazing talent out there. If you're only looking at one flavor of talent, you're missing the opportunity to really build a world-class organization. And so, to me, it's both the personal side where I want to work with the best people. I want to work with a lot of different perspectives. I want to work with people who are bringing things to the table that I haven't thought about. But also, making sure that we're creating an environment where those people can feel comfortable as well, and so people don't feel marginalized or tokenized and have the ability to really bring their best selves to work. That's really important to me. It's a reflection of the world around us. It's bringing out the best in all of us. And so, for me, that's the environment I want to create in my own company. And it's also what I want to help companies be able to foster within their companies because I think a lot of companies really do want that. They just don't know how to go about it. They don't have actual tools to support a diverse team. You pay for things for the people you have, and then you hire more people like the people you have. We want to be a tool to help them expand that very organically and make it a lot easier to support a broader perspective of people. VICTORIA: I appreciate that. And it speaks to something you said earlier about 50% of the businesses are started by women. And so, if you're not investing in them, there's a huge market and huge potential and opportunity there that's just not -- AMY: The economic miss is in the trillions, is what's been estimated. Like, it's an absolute economic miss. I mean, you also have the statistics of what female-founded companies do. We tend to be more profitable. We tend to be more capital efficient. We tend to, you know, have better outcomes. It's just so the economics of it are there. It's just trying to get folks to understand where their biases are coming into play and funding things that may be a little outside their comfort zone. VICTORIA: Right. That's going to be a big project to undo all of that. So, each piece that works towards it to break it down, I think, is really important. And it seems like Compt is a great tool for companies to start working towards that, at least in the equity of their benefits, which is -- [laughs] AMY: Exactly. Because, I mean, if people can't use a perk, then it's inequitable compensation. And if you have inequitable compensation, you're already going down that path. You end up with wage gaps, and then you end up with promotion gaps. And all these things feed into each other. So, we're just trying to chip away at one piece of the problem. There's lots of places that this needs to be adjusted and changed over time. But we want to at least chip away at that one piece where this piece of compensation can be equitable and support everyone. WILL: Yeah, I love that. I was looking at your LinkedIn. And it looks like you've been almost, later this year, maybe six years of Compt. What was some of the early traction? Like, how was it in the early days for you? AMY: It was an interesting transition for me, going from CFO and COO over to the CEO role. That was easier in some ways than I thought it was going to be and harder in other ways. You know, on the easy side, I've already done fundraising. I understand how to write a business model, and look at financial plans, and make sure the concept is viable and all the things. But I also am not an engineer. I'm not a product designer. And so needed to make sure we immediately surrounded ourselves with the right talent and the right help to make sure that we could build the right product, pull the things out of my brain that are conceptual but definitely not product design. No one wants me touching product design. I've been barred from all codebases in this company. They don't want me touching anything, with good reason. And so, making sure that we have those right people to build and design the software in a way that functionally makes sense. VICTORIA: I think that is great that...I laughed when you said that you are barred from touching any of the code. [laughs] It's like, you're able to...I think a strong leader recognizes when other people have the expertise and makes space for them to do their best work. I also see that, at the same time, you've been a mentor with the MassChallenge group. And I'm curious if you have a most frequent piece of advice that you give to founders and people starting out building great products. AMY: The biggest piece of advice, I think, is to make sure you're taking care of yourself through this process. It's an exhausting process to build a company. And there's always way more that you should be doing every day than you can possibly get done. And if you just completely absorb yourself in it, you're going to end up burning out. So, making sure that you rest, that you still make time to exercise and to move, and that you spend time with family. All of those things, I think, are really, really important. That's been part of our core tenets. From day one, I said, "No more than 40 to 45 hours a week." It doesn't mean I'm not thinking about this business far more than 45 hours a week, but I'm not going to sit behind a computer that many hours in a week because I will burn out. And if I'm out and I'm reading something, or I'm, you know, going for a walk, I'm going to have moments of inspiration because I can actually have those creative thoughts firing when I'm not just putting out fires. And so, I think that's really, really important for founders to make sure they take that time and allow their brains to clear a little bit so that they can build more efficiently, build faster, and have really good critical reasoning skills. WILL: I love that you not only have the product to, you know, help taking time off, but you also are preaching it per se, like, take time off. Don't work more than 40-45 hours. Like, take care of yourself. So, I love that advice that you're giving is right in the message with your product. So, I love it. AMY: Thank you. I do hammer home with this team. What we build is obviously very, very important to me, but how we build this company is equally important. We spend just as much time thinking about how we're building and designing this company internally as we do about our product because they need to be a virtuous cycle between the two, quite frankly. And so, if they aren't aligned, we're going to fail. WILL: Definitely. Wow. Awesome. What does success look like for you and Compt in the next, you know, six months to a year? AMY: For us, it's really about reaching as many people as possible. So, how do we have an impact on as many lives as possible and help people be able to access this piece of their compensation? What is interesting right now is we're in a really interesting moment. The tech industry is going through...shall we call it an awakening? Where money is tighter. There's been some layoffs. You know, it's just a very different world in tech right now. And everybody's in a little bit of a holding pattern to figure out, okay, what's next? What we're seeing across our portfolio of companies is that there's a lot of industries that are, for the first time, really thinking about how do we retain folks? How do we think about hiring in a new way? So, industries like construction and manufacturing. Industries that never had employee kind of lifestyle benefits or perks they're taking a look at that because unemployment is so, so low. And so, for the first time ever, we have the ability to have an impact on groups that never had access to professional development, to wellness, to things like that. And that's really exciting because you can have such a huge, impactful moment where people have just been without for so long. And so, that's pretty exciting for us. VICTORIA: You're touching upon a topic that I've thought about before, where in the tech industry, we're used to having a lot of benefits and perks and that not every industry is the same way. So, I'm curious; you mentioned construction and some other groups that are looking to adopt more of these benefits because unemployment is so low. I'm curious, like, if there are any patterns or things that you see, like, specific industries that are more interested than others, or what's going on there? AMY: Our portfolio of tech companies are only about...they're less than 40% of our customers, actually. So, a relatively low percentage of our customers come from the tech industry. What we find is that healthcare systems this is really important. As you're thinking about how you're going to retain nursing staff, it is incredibly difficult. And so, we see a lot of movement in the healthcare space. We see a lot of movement, again, across manufacturing and construction, you know, financial services. Pretty much anybody who is struggling to hire and is worried about retaining is trying to figure out what's my strategy? How do I do this in the least expensive way possible but reach everyone? Because those employee engagement metrics are so consistently important to look at. And most platforms and things that you could be doing out there are going to give you a 2% to 3% utilization. So, it's very, very low. You know, wellness is by far the most common use case we see companies putting in place. It's good for employees. It's good for the employer. That's by far the most important or the most common. But we also see things like family, and just more of a whole well-being kind of concept as well, so beyond wellness, so allowing for that broader reach. We're also seeing industries where people are starting to age out. So, we've got five generations at work right now. There's industries where folks have historically stayed forever. You know, you've got the people who have been there 20-30 years. Well, those same industries are now sitting there going, all right, how do I get the next two generations to come in here? Because it's such an old-guard and old approach. We've got to change things up. And so, we're seeing a pretty big cultural shift happen within a lot of these more nascent industries. WILL: Yeah. I can definitely see how that would be tough going from, you know, you said five generations are currently in the workforce? AMY: Yep. WILL: I didn't even think about that. Wow. AMY: Yeah, you got a lot of different parts of the life cycle. You know, think about professional development. Professional development for a 22-year-old is very different from professional development for a 65-year-old. But both are in the workplace, and both want to keep learning. It's just what your needs are and what you need to learn. And how you want to learn is going to be very, very different. WILL: Wow. So true. I love how you're talking about your leadership and just the way you lead. I can just hear it in what you're saying. What are some of your core values that drive you every day? AMY: One of the big ones, and it probably goes back to, you know, I'm sure, birth placement, whatever. I'm an oldest child, all the things that come with being an oldest child. But fairness is a really big one for me. And so, it's thinking about how we apply that as a company, so equitable compensation falls under that. Making sure that we've got a team that is balanced and diverse is really important to me. You know, thinking, you know, our core values are balance and belonging. That runs through absolutely everything that we do and is core and central to it. Because, again, how we build this company is just as important to me as what we're building. And so, making sure that we hold true to those values is critical because we have amazing people, and they need to feel supported as well. VICTORIA: Well, that really comes through in everything that you say and that we've talked about so far today, and I really appreciate that. And I'm curious if you could go back in time to when you first started Compt and tell yourself any piece of advice or information; what would you say? AMY: That piece of advice has changed over time; I will tell you that. The one that is most recent for me is really because we're an HR tech platform, and we service, you know, an entire organization, is really thinking about how you support different industries at different moments in time, the concept of product-market fit. When you're that type of a platform, which there aren't many, there's not many platforms that sit across an entire organization, but compensation is one of them. You need to be thinking about which industries are struggling to hire, which are struggling to retain at this moment in time. And so, I don't think there's one place, like, hey, we have product-market fit, now we can scale. I think that's a misnomer for our part of the HR tech space. And so, it's constant experimentation on go-to-market strategy and constant kind of adjustment as markets ebb and flow over time. WILL: What is some of your biggest hurdles right now or even in the future that you can see coming? AMY: If I had a crystal ball, life would definitely be easier. I'd love to know when this economic cycle is going to shift and, you know when things get a little bit easier for companies. You know, HR leaders and finance leaders are not having the most fun at this moment in time. They're being tasked with making everybody happy but on very small budgets, and so they're really challenged with that. And they're really burnt out, and they're exhausted. So, I'm looking forward to a shift so when people can get back to feeling a little bit physically better. But also, it just helps navigate a market and be better able to support your employees. VICTORIA: I've been thinking about that question recently, what I would tell my past self, and I think it's mostly, like, food related. [laughter] AMY: Ooh, interesting. VICTORIA: Use better vinegars, like, invest in fancier olive oil. [laughs] AMY: So, my new luxury pro-tip is you buy a $7 bunch of eucalyptus at the grocery store, and you tie it above your shower head. I'm not kidding; you will feel like you're at a spa. It costs $7. I learned it because I was at some fancy resort. One of my investors, you know, paid for us to go to a conference that I was not paying for. And I was like, that is genius. You suddenly feel like you are in someplace fancy, and it was seven bucks. It's amazing. WILL: Yes. VICTORIA: That sounds incredible. I'm going to do that. WILL: Same. [laughter] VICTORIA: [inaudible 34:35] buy some. No, it's so good. Do you have any questions for us, Amy? AMY: Yeah. I mean, what trends are you seeing in the market right now? Like, what types of companies are being developed? Where do you see growth happening in the market? VICTORIA: That's probably a better question for me. As a managing director, I spend more time networking and going to events. And it's interesting being in San Diego. There's a big biotech startup here. So, I went to an EvoNexus Demo Day and saw the things that people were using. And there seemed to be a trend of using AI and machine learning to create better health outcomes, whether that's for predictors for which people will respond better to anti-cancer drugs, or, you know, how do we monitor the release of drugs for someone's system who's, you know, going through methadone in therapy. So, it's really interesting. I think that you know, you mentioned that there's not the same amount of money in the tech market, but I think there is still a lot of work being done to solve real problems that people have. So yeah, I'm really curious to see those types of projects and which ones are going to be successful, and how much the AI trend will really fade out. Like, clearly, in some use cases, you can see how beneficial it could be. And other times, it seems like it's kind of just like slapped on there for -- AMY: Agreed. VICTORIA: Marketing purposes, so... AMY: That's really just a database query. It's not AI. [laughs] VICTORIA: Right. [laughs] It's interesting because, you know, I just had lunch with a bunch of other CTOs in San Diego, and we were talking about AI, and some of the inherent risks of it, and the damage it can cause. And I always like to bring it back to, like, there are some people who are already harmed by these trends. And we have to work around that. Like, there is some, you know, greater supposed existential threat with AI that I think is rather unlikely. But if we think about that too much and not focus on the current harm that's being done, then that's, you know, more dangerous than the other one. AMY: Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, there's definitely, I mean, even just with facial recognition and how that's applied and what that's used for. I mean, any software that is built with people has bias. And so, whatever biases they're bringing into it is the bias that's going to exist in the software. And so, there's...we already are starting from, you know, going back to our earlier conversation, if companies are not diverse and not building for really diverse perspectives, they're inherently going to build bias software, whether or not, I mean, I don't think that's anybody's intention. But that's what's going to happen because you just didn't think about things you didn't know. VICTORIA: Right. And, of course, I'm here in Southern California. There's the strikes for the actors and writers' strike happening a few hours north of us. And they were actually, you know, for some actors, signing away their rights to their likeness. AMY: Wow. VICTORIA: And then they could make an AI image and -- AMY: Wow. You could just create an entire movie with somebody's image and dub in a voice, and suddenly you don't need actors. VICTORIA: Right. And it's, of course, more often non-White actors and models who are being replaced. And so, I think that's a very interesting trend that people may not have thought about yet. AMY: Fascinating. VICTORIA: So yeah, I mean, having people on your leadership team who are thinking about these [laughs] different types of issues, like, yeah, I think it's really important. And then also, from, like, a data privacy perspective, all the laws that are coming out and that have come out. And I think that some founders and CTOs are really struggling with how to comply and protect everyone's data that way. AMY: No. It's something we think about a lot because we have the potential to have access to a lot of employee data. We take a very minimalist approach stated, not a big data play. That's not what we're here for. That's not what we're trying to do, this mountain of data on people, and then we'll figure out how to monetize it. We want to build something a little bit different. And so using only data that needs to be used so that we can truly support people with what our actual goal and aim is, rather than having that be a secondary cause. VICTORIA: Yeah. And I wanted to ask you about that actually because you have SOC 2 and GDPR compliance. And it's a topic that I think a lot of founders know that security is important, but it can be a significant investment. So, I'm curious your trade-offs and your timing for when you went for those compliance frameworks. AMY: We went early for it. I mean, so our platform, I mean, we're integrated with payroll platforms. We're touching employee data. So, we went for it early because we knew that it was going to be important, and it's a lot easier to do it before you make a mess than it is after the fact. I've done SOC 2 compliance in two prior companies. It's not fun. It is not my most fun thing that I've ever done. Fortunately, there are geniuses out there who built platforms to make this very, very easy now. We use a platform called Vanta that is absolutely incredible, made it super easy to get SOC 2 compliant, go through our audits, do all the things, so that, at least, is a lot easier. But it was something that we needed the funding to invest in. It's not inexpensive. But we knew that it was going to be critical because people need to feel that their data is secure and that you know what you're doing, and that you're not just kind of flying by the seat of your pants. There's a lot of tech companies that operate on, we'll figure out the tax, or we'll figure out the law. We'll figure out the compliance later. And that's been a stated part of their mission. That's just not the way I'm going to operate. And that doesn't work very well when you're dealing with HR, quite frankly, or finance because we have to comply with laws. So, getting ahead of that early was part of our strategy. VICTORIA: That makes sense. Your finance background making it clear what the legal implications are. [laughs] AMY: Exactly. Like, I'm not messing around with the IRS. Nobody wants to get audited by the IRS. It's not fun. Let's just keep things tax compliant. Chances are you're not going to get audited by the IRS. But if you are a tech company, if you do want to go public, if you do want to be acquired likely from a public company, you have to have these things in order because otherwise, it's coming off your purchase price or your stock price because you've got disclosures you've got to put out there, so little hidden, nasty gotchas. And it can be a six-year lookback period. So, you're like, oh, I'll worry about it later. Six years is a long time. And if you start messing around with that, it gets very, very expensive to clean up. So, just do it right from the beginning. You know, the same way you're doing payroll correctly now, invest a little bit, and it makes it a lot easier. VICTORIA: Yeah, I agree. And I think the tooling that's out there makes it a little bit easier; at least then, you know you have the confidence that your data is protected. Especially if you're a non-technical founder, I can imagine that makes you feel better that things are the way they should be. AMY: Exactly. Somebody has looked at this thing. Somebody is making sure that it's working the way it's supposed to. You know, that definitely helps when you're a non-technical founder, or just not a tax expert, or a legal expert, you know, around these things. It's not even the technical founders that have to worry about it. Data comes in all kinds of forms. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. AMY: This has been a fantastic conversation. I've really enjoyed it. VICTORIA: Well, thank you. WILL: Same. VICTORIA: I've enjoyed it as well. I really appreciate you taking the time. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Amy Spurling.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what’s important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at: url tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Sean O'Connor is the Director of Engineering at Datadog. Datadog is the essential monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. Sean discusses his transition from an individual contributor to management and shares why he chose Datadog, emphasizing the appeal of high-scale problems and the real business nature of the company. They delve into the importance of performance management and observability and cover the cultural and technical challenges Sean faces in managing a diverse, geographically spread team, and discuss the transition at Datadog from a decentralized model to more centralized platforms, the corresponding changes in both technical strategies and people management, and what excites him about Datadog's future, including the integration of security offerings into developers' daily experiences, and the evolution of Kubernetes and internal build and release tooling. __ Datadog Follow Datadog on LinkedIn, Instagram, Youtube, or Twitter. Follow Sean O'Connor on LinkedIn or Twitter. Visit his website at seanoc.com. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with us today is Sean O'Connor. He is the Director of Engineering at Datadog. Datadog is the essential monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. Sean, thank you for joining us. SEAN: Hi, thanks for having me on. VICTORIA: Yeah, I'm super excited to get to talking with you about everything cloud, and DevOps, and engineering. But why don't we first start with just a conversation about what's going on in your life? Is there any exciting personal moment coming up for you soon? SEAN: Yeah, my wife and I are expecting our first kiddo in the next few weeks, so getting us prepared for that as we can and trying to get as much sleep as we can. [laughs] WILL: Get as much sleep as you can now, so...[laughs] I have a question around that. When you first found out that you're going to be a dad, what was your feeling? Because I remember the feeling that I had; it was a mixed reaction of just everything. So, I just wanted to see what was your reaction whenever you found out that you're going to be a dad for the first time. SEAN: Yeah, I was pretty excited. My wife and I had been kind of trying for this for a little while. We're both kind of at the older end for new parents in our late 30s. So, yeah, excited but definitely, I don't know, maybe a certain amount of, I don't know about fear but, you know, maybe just concerned with change and how different life will be, but mostly excitement and happiness. [laughs] WILL: Yeah, I remember the excitement and happiness. But I also remember, like, wait, I don't know exactly what to do in this situation. And what about the situations that I have no idea about and things like that? So, I will tell you, kids are resilient. You're going to do great as a dad. [laughter] SEAN: Yep. Yeah, definitely; I think I feel much more comfortable about the idea of being a parent now than I may have been in my 20s. But yeah, definitely, the idea of being responsible for and raising a whole other human is intimidating. [laughs] VICTORIA: I think the fact that you're worried about it is a good sign [laughs], right? SEAN: I hope so. [laughs] VICTORIA: Like, you understand that it's difficult. You're going to be a great parent just by the fact that you understand it's difficult and there's a lot of work ahead. So, I think I'm really excited for you. And I'm glad we get to talk to you at this point because probably when the episode comes out, you'll be able to listen to it with your new baby in hand. So... WILL: Good. Excited for it. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, love that. Well, great. Well, why don't you tell me a little bit more about your other background, your professional background? What brought you to the role you're into today? SEAN: Yeah. Well, like we mentioned in the beginning; currently, I'm a Director of Engineering at Datadog. I run our computing cloud team. It's responsible for all of our Kubernetes infrastructure, as well as kind of all the tooling for dealing with the cloud providers that we run on and as well as kind of [inaudible 02:54] crypto infrastructure. Within Datadog, I've always been in management roles though I've kind of bounced around. I've been here for about five and a half years. So, before this, I was running a data store infrastructure team. Before that, when I first came in, I was running the APM product team, kind of bounced around between product and infra. And that's kind of, I guess, been a lot of the story of much of my career is wearing lots of different hats and kind of bouncing around between kind of infrastructure-focused roles and product-focused roles. So, before this, I was running the back-end engineering and DevOps teams at Bitly. So, I was there for about five and a half years, started there originally as a software engineer. And before that, a lot of early-stage startups and consulting doing whatever needed doing, and getting to learn about lots of different kind of industries and domains, which is always fun. [laughs] VICTORIA: That's great. So, you had that broad range of experience coming from all different areas of operations in my mind, which is, like, security and infrastructure, and now working your way into a management position. What was the challenge for you in making that switch from being such a strong individual contributor into an effective manager? SEAN: Sure. You know, I think certainly there is a lot of kind of the classic challenges of learning to let go but still staying involved, right? You know, as a manager, if you're working on critical path tasks hands-on yourself, that's probably not a good sign. [laughs] On the other hand, if you come, like, completely divorced from what your team is doing, especially as, like, a team lead level kind of manager, you know, that's not great either. So, figuring that balancing act definitely was a bit tricky for me. Similarly, I think time management and learning to accept that, especially as you get into, like, further steps along in your career that, like, you know, it's not even a question of keeping all the balls in the air, but more figuring out, like, what balls are made out of rubber and which ones are made out of glass, and maybe keeping those ones in the air. [laughs] So, just a lot of those kind of, like, you know, prioritization and figuring out, like, what the right level of involvement and context is, is definitely the eternal learning, I think, for me. [laughs] WILL: I remember whenever I was looking to change jobs, kind of my mindset was I wanted to work at thoughtbot more because of the values. And I wanted to learn and challenge myself and things like that. And it was so much more, but those were some of the main items that I wanted to experience in my next job. So, when you changed, and you went from Bitly to Datadog, what was that thing that made you say, I want to join Datadog? SEAN: Yeah, that was definitely an interesting job search and transition. So, at that point in time, I was living in New York. I was looking to stay in New York. So, I was kind of talking to a bunch of different companies. Both from personal experience and from talking to some friends, I wasn't super interested in looking at, like, working at mostly, like, the super big, you know, Google, Amazon, Meta type of companies. But also, having done, like, super early stage, you know, like, seed, series A type of companies, having played that game, I wasn't in a place in my life to do that either. [laughs] So, I was looking kind of in between that space. So, this would have been in 2018. So, I was talking to a lot of, like, series A and series B-type companies. And most of them were, like, real businesses. [laughs] Like, they may not be profitable yet, but, like, they had a very clear idea of how they would get there and, like, what that would look like. And so, that was pleasant compared to some past points in my career. But a lot of them, you know, I was effectively doing, like, automation of human processes, which is important. It has value. But it means that, like, realistically, this company will never have more than 50 servers. And when I worked at Bitly, I did have a taste for kind of working in those high-scale, high-availability type environments. So, Datadog initially was appealing because it kind of checked all those boxes of, you know, very high-scale problems, high availability needs, a very real business. [laughs] This is before Datadog had gone public. And then, as I started to talk to them and got to know them, I also really liked a lot of kind of the culture and all the people I interacted with. So, it became a very clear choice very quickly as that process moved along. VICTORIA: Yeah, a very real business. Datadog is one of the Gartner's Magic leaders for APM and observability in the industry. And I understand you're also one of the larger SaaS solutions running Kubernetes, right? SEAN: Yep. Yeah, at this point. Five years ago, that story was maybe a little bit different. [laughs] But yeah, no, no, we definitely have a pretty substantial Kubernetes suite that we run everything on top of. And we get the blessings and curses of we get some really cool problems to work on, but there's also a lot of problems that we come across that when we talk to kind of peers in the industry about kind of how they're trying to solve them, they don't have answers yet either. [laughs] So, we get to kind of figure out a lot of that kind of early discovery games. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah. I like how exciting and growing this industry is around kind of your compute and monitoring the performance of your applications. I wonder if you could kind of speak to our audience a little bit, who may not have a big technical background, about just why it's important to think about performance management and observability early on in your application. SEAN: There can be a few pieces there. One of the bigger ones, I think, is thinking about that kind of early and getting used to working with that kind of tooling early in a project or a product. I think it has an analogous effect to, like, thinking about, like, compounding interest in, like, a savings account or investing or something like that. In that, by having those tools available early on and having that visibility available early on, you can really both initially get a lot of value and just kind of understanding kind of what's happening with your system and very quickly troubleshoot problems and make sure things are running efficiently. But then that can help get to a place where you get to that, like, flywheel effect as you're kind of building your product of, as you're able to solve things quickly, that means you have more time to invest in other parts of the product, and so on and so forth. So, yeah, it's one of those things where kind of the earlier you can get started on that, the more that benefit gets amplified over time. And thankfully, with Datadog and other offerings like that now, you can get started with that relatively quickly, right? You're not having to necessarily make the choice of, like, oh, can I justify spending a week, a month, whatever, setting up all my own infrastructure for this, as opposed to, you know, plugging in a credit card and getting going right away? And not necessarily starting with everything from day zero but getting started with something and then being able to build on that definitely can be a worthwhile trade-off. [laughs] VICTORIA: That makes sense. And I'm curious your perspective, Will, as a developer on our Lift Off team, which is really about the services around that time when you want to start taking it really seriously. Like, you've built an app [laughs]. You know it's a viable product, and there's a market for it. And just, like, how you think about observability when you're doing your app building. WILL: The approach I really take is, like, what is the end goal? I'm currently on a project right now that we came in later than normal. We're trying to work through that. SEAN: I haven't come from, you know, that kind of consulting and professional services and support kind of place. I'm curious about, like, what, if any, differences or experiences do you have, like, in that context of, like, how do you use your observability tools or, like, what value they have as opposed to maybe more, like, straight product development? VICTORIA: Right. So, we recently partnered with, you know, our platform engineering team worked with the Lift Off team to create a product from scratch. And we built in observability tools with Prometheus, and Grafana, and Sentry so that the developers could instrument their app and build metrics around the performance in the way they expected the application to work so that when it goes live and meets real users, they're confident their users are able to actually use the app with a general acceptable level of latency and other things that are really key to the functionality of the app. And so, I think that the interesting part was, with the founders who don't have a background in IT operations or application monitoring and performance, it sort of makes sense. But it's still maybe a stretch to really see the full value of that, especially when you're just trying to get the app out the door. SEAN: Nice. VICTORIA: [chuckles] That's my answer. What kind of challenges do you have in your role managing this large team in a very competitive company, running a ton of Kubernetes clusters? [laughs] What's your challenges in your director of engineering role there? SEAN: You know, it's definitely a mix of kind of, like, technical or strategic challenges there, as well as people challenges. On the technical and strategic side, the interesting thing for our team right now is we're in the middle of a very interesting transition. Still, today, the teams at Datadog work in very much a 'You build it, you run it' kind of model, right? So, teams working on user-facing features in addition to, like, you know, designing those features and writing the code for that, they're responsible for deploying that code, offering the services that code runs within, being on call for that, so on and so forth. And until relatively recently, that ownership was very intense to the point where some teams maybe even had their own build and release processes. They were running their own data stores. And, like, that was very valuable for much of our history because that let those teams to be very agile and not have to worry about, like, convincing the entire company to change if they needed to make some kind of change. But as we've grown and as, you know, we've kind of taken on a lot more complexity in our environment from, you know, running across more providers, running across more regions, taking on more of regulatory concerns, to kind of the viability of running everything entirely [inaudible 12:13] for those product teams, it has become much harder. [laughs] You start to see a transition where previously the infrastructure teams were much more acting as subject matter experts and consultants to, now, we're increasingly offering more centralized platforms and offerings that can offload a lot of that kind of complexity and the stuff that isn't the core of what the other product-focused teams are trying to do. And so, as we go through that change, it means internally, a lot of our teams, and how we think about our roles, and how we go about doing our work, changes from, like, a very, you know, traditional reliability type one on one consultation and advising type role to effectively internal product development and internal platform development. So, that's a pretty big both mindset and practice shift. [laughs] So, that's one that we're kind of evolving our way through. And, of course, as what happens to kind of things, like, you still have to do all the old stuff while you're doing the new thing. [laughs] You don't get to just stop and just do the new thing. So, that's been an interesting kind of journey and one that we're always kind of figuring out as we go. That is a lot of kind of what I focus on. You know, people wise, you know, we have an interesting aim of...There's about 40 people in my org. They are spread across EMEA and North America with kind of, let's say, hubs in New York and Paris. So, with that, you know, you have a pretty significant time zone difference and some non-trivial cultural differences. [laughs] And so, you know, making sure that everybody is still able to kind of work efficiently, and communicate effectively, and collaborate effectively, while still working within all those constraints is always an ongoing challenge. [laughs] WILL: Yeah, you mentioned the different cultures, the different types of employees you have, and everyone is not the same. And there's so many cultures, so many...whatever people are going through, you as a leader, how do you navigate through that? Like, how do you constantly challenge yourself to be a better leader, knowing that not everyone can be managed the same way, that there's just so much diversity, probably even in your company among your employees? SEAN: I think a lot of it starts from a place of listening and paying attention to kind of just see where people are happy, where they feel like they have unmet needs. As an example, I moved from that last kind of data store-focused team to this computing cloud team last November. And so, as part of that move, probably for the first two or three months that I was in the role, I wasn't particularly driving much in the way of changes or setting much of a vision beyond what the team already had, just because as the new person coming in, it's usually kind of hard to have a lot of credibility and/or even just have the idea of, like, you know, like you're saying, like, what different people are looking for, or what they need, how they will respond best. I just spend a lot of time just talking to people, getting to know the team, building those relationships, getting to know those people, getting to know those groups. And then, from there, figuring out, you know, both where the kind of the high priority areas where change or investment is needed. But then also figuring out, yeah, kind of based on all that, what's the right way to go about that with the different groups? Because yeah, it's definitely isn't a one size fits all solution. But for me, it's always kind of starting from a place of listening and understanding and using that to develop, I guess, empathy for the people involved and understanding their perspectives and then figuring it out from there. I imagine–I don't know, but I imagine thoughtbot's a pretty distributed company. How do you all kind of think about some of those challenges of just navigating people coming from very different contexts? WILL: Yeah, I was going to ask Victoria that because Victoria is one of the leaders of our team here at thoughtbot. So, Victoria, what are your thoughts on it? VICTORIA: I have also one of the most distributed teams at thoughtbot because we do offer 24/7 support to some clients. And we cover time zones from the Pacific through West Africa. So, we just try to create a lot of opportunities for people to engage, whether it's remotely, especially offering a lot of virtual engagement and social engagement remotely. But then also, offering some in-person, whether it's a company in-person event, or encouraging people to engage with their local community and trying to find conferences, meetups, events that are relevant to us as a business, and a great opportunity for them to go and get some in-person interaction. So, I think then encouraging them to bring those ideas back. And, of course, thoughtbot is known for having just incredible remote async communication happening all the time. It's actually almost a little oppressive to keep up with, to be honest, [laughs] but I love it. There's just a lot of...there's GitHub issues. There's Slack communications. There's, like, open messages. And people are really encouraged to contribute to the conversation and bring up any idea and any problem they're having, and actively add to and modify our company policies and procedures so that we can do the best work with each other and know how to work with each other, and to put out the best products. I think that's key to having that conversation, especially for a company that's as big as Datadog and has so many clients, and has become such a leader in this metrics area. Being able to listen within your company and to your clients is probably going to set you up for success for any, like, tech leadership role [laughs]. I'm curious, what are you most excited about now that you've been in the role for a little while? You've heard from a lot of people within the company. Can you share anything in your direction in the next six months or a year that you're super excited about? SEAN: So, there's usually kind of probably two sides to that question of kind of, like, from a product and business standpoint and from an internal infrastructure standpoint, given that's where my day-to-day focus is. You know, on the product side, one thing that's been definitely interesting to watch in my time at Datadog is we really made the transition from kind of, like, a point solution type product to much more of a platform. For context, when I joined Datadog, I think logs had just gone GA, and APM was in beta, I think. So, we were just starting to figure out, like, how we expand beyond the initial infrastructure metrics product. And, obviously, at this point, now we have a whole, you know, suite of offerings. And so, kind of the opportunities that come with that, as far as both different spaces that we can jump into, and kind of the value that we can provide by having all those different capabilities play together really nicely, is exciting and is cool. Like, you know, one of the things that definitely lit an interesting light bulb for me was talking to some of the folks working on our newer security offerings and them talking about how, obviously, you want to meet, you know, your normal requirements in that space, so being able to provide the visibility that, you know, security teams are looking for there. But also, figuring out how we integrate that information into your developers' everyday experience so that they can have more ownership over that aspect of the systems that they're building and make everybody's job easier and more efficient, right? Instead of having, you know, the nightmare spreadsheet whenever a CVE comes out and having some poor TPM chase half the company to get their libraries updated, you know, being able to make that visible in the product where people are doing their work every day, you know, things like that are always kind of exciting opportunities. On the internal side, we're starting to think about, like, what the next major evolution of our kind of Kubernetes and kind of internal build and release tooling looks like. Today, a lot of kind of how teams interact with our Kubernetes infrastructure is still pretty raw. Like, they're working directly with specific Kubernetes clusters, and they are exposed to all the individual Kubernetes primitives, which is very powerful, but it's also a pretty steep learning curve. [laughs] And for a lot of teams, it ends up meaning that there's lots of, you know, knobs that they have to know what they do. But at the end of the day, like, they're not getting a lot of benefit from that, right? There's more just opportunity for them to accidentally put themselves in a bad place. So, we're starting to figure out, like, higher level abstractions and offerings to simplify how all that for teams look like. So, we're still a bit early days in working through that, but it's exciting to figure out, like, how we can still give teams kind of the flexibility and the power that they need but make those experiences much easier and not have to have them become Kubernetes experts just to deploy a simple process. And, yes, so there's some lots of fun challenges in there. [laughs] Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We’ll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. WILL: I have a question around your experience. So, you've been a developer around 20 years. What has been your experience over that 20 years or about of the growth in this market? Because I can only imagine what the market was, you know, in the early 2000s versus right now because I still remember...I still have nightmares of dial-up, dial tone tu-tu-tu. No one could call you, stuff like that. So, what has been your experience, just seeing the market grow from where you started? SEAN: Sure, yeah. I think probably a lot of the biggest pieces of it are just seeing the extent to which...I want to say it was Cory Doctorow, but I'm not sure who actually originally coined the idea, but the idea that, you know, software is eating the world, right? Like, eventually, to some degree, every company becomes a software company because software ends up becoming involved in pretty much everything that we as a society do. So, definitely seeing the progression of that, I think, over that time period has been striking, you know, especially when I was working in more consulting contexts and working more in companies and industries where like, you know, the tech isn't really the focus but just how much that, you know, from an engineering standpoint, relatively basic software can fundamentally transform those businesses and those industries has definitely been striking. And then, you know, I think from a more individual perspective, seeing as, you know, our tools become more sophisticated and easier to access, just seeing how much of a mixed bag that has become [laughs]. And just kind of the flavor of, like, you know, as more people have more powerful tools, that can be very enabling and gives voice to many people. But it also means that the ability of an individual or a small group to abuse those tools in ways that we're maybe not fully ready to deal with as a society has been interesting to see how that's played out. VICTORIA: Yeah. I think you bring up some really great points there. And it reminds me of one of my favorite quotes is that, like, the future is here—it's just not evenly distributed. [laughs] And so, in some communities that I go to, everyone knows what Kubernetes is; everyone knows what DevOps is. It's kind of, like, old news. [laughs] And then, some people are still just like, "What?" [laughs]. It's interesting to think about that and think about the implications on your last point about just how dangerous the supply chain is in building software and how some of these abstractions and some of these things that just make it so easy to build applications can also introduce a good amount of risk into your product and into your business, right? So, I wonder if you can tell me a little bit more about your perspective on security and DevSecOps and what founders might be thinking about to protect their IP and their client's data in their product. SEAN: That one is interesting and tricky in that, like, we're in a little bit of, like, things are better and worse than they ever have been before [laughs], right? Like, there is a certain level of, I think, baseline knowledge and competency that I think company leaders really just have to have now, part of, like, kind of table stakes, which can definitely be challenging, and that, like, that probably was much less, if even the case, you know, 10-20 years ago in a lot of businesses. As an example, right? Like, obviously, like if it's a tech-focused company, like, that can be a thing. But, like, if you're running a plumbing business with a dozen trucks, let's say, like, 20 years ago, you probably didn't have to think that much about data privacy and data security. But, like, now you're almost certainly using some kind of electronic system to kind of manage all your customer records, and your job scheduling, and all that kind of stuff. So, like, now, that is something that's a primary concern for your business. On the flip side of that, I think there is much better resources, and tools, and practices available out there. I forget the name of the tool now. But I remember recently, I was working with a company on the ISO long string of numbers certifications that you tend to want to do when you're handling certain types of data. There was a tool they were able to work with that basically made it super easy for them to, like, gather all the evidence for that and whatnot, in a way where, like, you know, in the past, you probably just had to hire a compliance person to know what you had to do and how to present that. But now, you could just sign up for a SaaS product. And, like, obviously, it can't just do it for you. Like, it's about making your policies. But it still gave you enough support where if you're, like, bootstrapping a company, like, yeah, you probably don't need to hire a specialist to [inaudible 25:08], which is a huge deal. You know, similarly, a lot of things come much safer by default. When you think about, like, the security on something like an iPhone, or an iPad, or an Android device, like, just out of the box, that's light-years ahead of whatever Windows PC you were going to buy ten years ago. [laughs] And so, that kind of gives you a much better starting place. But some interesting challenges that come with that, right? And that we do now, literally, every person on the planet is walking around with microphones and cameras and all kinds of sensors on them. It's an interesting balance, I think. Similarly, I'm curious how you all think about kind of talking with your clients and your customers about this because I'm sure you all have a non-trivial amount of education to do there. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, definitely. And I think a lot of it comes in when we have clients who are very early founders, and they don't have a CTO or a technical side of their business, and advising them on exactly what you laid out. Like, here's the baseline. Like, here's where you want to start from. We generally use the CIS controls, this internet for internet security. It puts out a really great tool set, too, for some things you were mentioning earlier. Let's figure out how to report and how to identify all of the things that we're supposed to be doing. It could be overwhelming. It's a lot. Like, in my past role as VP of Operations at Pluribus Digital, I was responsible for helping our team continue to meet our...we had three different ISO long number certifications [laughs]. We did a CMMI as well, which has come up a few times in my career. And they give you about a couple of hundreds of controls that you're supposed to meet. It's in very kind of, like, legalese that you have to understand. And that's a pretty big gap to solve for someone who doesn't have the technical experience to start. Like, what you were saying, too, that it's more dangerous and more safer than it has been before. So, if we make choices for those types of clients in very safe, trusted platforms, then they're going to be set up for success and not have to worry about those details as much. And we kind of go forward with confidence that if they are going to have to come up against compliance requirements or local state regulations, which are also...there's more of those every day, and a lot of liability you can face as a founder, especially if you're dealing with, like, health or financial data, in the state of California, for example. [laughs] It puts you at a really big amount of liability that I don't think we've really seen the impact of how bad it can be and will be coming out in the next couple of years now that that law has passed. But that's kind of the approach that we like to think. It's like, you know, there's a minimum we can do that will mitigate a lot of this risk [laughs], so let's do that. Let's do the basics and start off on the right foot here. SEAN: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Yeah, it's definitely something I've come to appreciate, especially doing work in regulated spaces is, when you do reach the point where you do need to have some kind of subject matter expert involved, whether it's somebody in-house or a consultant or an advisor, I've definitely learned that usually, like, the better ones are going to talk to you in terms of, like, what are the risk trade-offs you're making here? And what are the principles that all these detailed controls or guidelines are looking to get at? As opposed to just, like, walking you through the box-checking exercise. In my experience, a really good lawyer or somebody who will talk to you about risk versus just saying whether or not you can do something. [laughs] It has a very similar feeling in my experience. VICTORIA: Yeah, it's a lot about risk. And someone's got to be able to make those trade-off decisions, and it can be really tough, but it's doable. And I think it shouldn't scare people away. And there's lots of people, lots of ways to do it also, which is exciting. So, I think it's a good space to be in and to see it growing and pay attention to. [laughs] It's fun for me to be in a different place where we're given the opportunity to kind of educate or bring people along in a security journey versus having it be a top-down executive-level decision that we need to meet this particular security standard, and that's the way it's going to be. [laughs] Yeah, so that I appreciate. Is there anything that really surprised you in your conversations with Datadog or with other companies around these types of services for, like, platform engineering and observability? Is there anything that surprised you in the discovery process with potential clients for your products? SEAN: I think one of the biggest surprises, or maybe not a surprise but an interesting thing is, to what extent, you know, for us, I don't know if this is still the case, but I think in many places, like, we're probably more often competing against nothing than a competing product. And by that, I mean, especially as you look at some of our more sophisticated products like APM, or profiling, it's not so much that somebody has an existing tool that we're looking to replace; it's much more than this is just not a thing they do today. [laughs] And so, that leads to a very interestingly different conversation that I think, you know, relates to some of what we were saying with security where, you know, I think a non-trivial part of what our sales and technical enablement folks do is effectively education for our customers and potential customers of why they might want to use tools like this, and what kind of value they could get from them. The other one that's been interesting is to see how different customers' attitudes around tools like this have evolved as they've gone through their own migration to the cloud journeys, right? We definitely have a lot of customers that, I think, you know, 5, 10 years ago, when they were running entirely on-prem, using a SaaS product would have been a complete non-starter. But as they move into the cloud, both as they kind of generally get more comfortable with the idea of delegating some of these responsibilities, as well as they start to understand kind of, like, the complexity of the tooling required as their environment gets more complex, the value of a dedicated product like something like Datadog as opposed to, you know, what you kind of get out of the box with the cloud providers or what you might kind of build on your own has definitely been interesting. [laughs] VICTORIA: Is there a common point that you find companies get to where they're like, all right, now, I really need something? Can you say a little bit more about, like, what might be going on in the organization at that time? SEAN: You know, I think there could be a few different paths that companies take to it. Some of it, I think, can come from a place of...I think, especially for kind of larger enterprise customers making a transition like that, they tend to be taking a more holistic look at kind of their distinct practices and seeing what they want to change as they move into the cloud. And often, kind of finding an observability vendor is just kind of, like, part of the checklist there. [laughs] Not to dismiss it, but just, like, that seems to be certainly one path into it. I think for smaller customers, or maybe customers that are more, say, cloud-native, I think it can generally be a mix of either hitting a point where they're kind of done with the overhead of trying to maintain their own infrastructure of, like, trying to run their own ELK stack and, like, build all the tooling on top of that, and keeping that up and running, and the costs associated with that. Or, it's potentially seeing the sophistication of tooling that, like, a dedicated provider can afford to invest that realistically, you're never going to invest in on your own, right? Like, stuff like live profiling is deeply non-trivial to implement. [laughs] I think especially once people get some experience with a product like Datadog, they start thinking about, like, okay, how much value are we actually getting out of doing this on our own versus using a more off-the-shelf product? I don't know if we've been doing it post-COVID. But I remember pre-COVID...so Datadog has a huge presence at re:Invent and the other similar major cloud provider things. And I remember for a few years at re:Invent, you know, we obviously had, like, the giant 60x60 booth in the main expo floor, where we were giving demos and whatnot. But they also would have...AWS would do this, like, I think they call it the interactive hall where companies could have, like, more hands-on booths, and you had, like, a whole spectrum of stuff. And there were, like, some companies just had, like, random, like, RC car setups or Lego tables, just stuff like that. But we actually did a setup where there was a booth of, I think, like, six stations. People would step up, and they would race each other to solve a kind of faux incident using Datadog. The person who would solve it first would win a switch. I think we gave away a huge number of switches as part of that, which at first I was like, wow, that seems expensive. [laughs] But then later, you know, I was mostly working the main booth at that re:Invent. So by the, like, Wednesday and Thursday of re:Invent, I'd have people walking up to the main booth being like, "Hey, so I did the thing over at the Aria. And now I installed Datadog in prod last night, and I have questions." I was like, oh, okay. [laughs] So, I think just, like, the power of, like, getting that hands-on time, and using some of the tools, and understanding the difference there is what kind of gets a lot of people to kind of change their mind there. [laughs] VICTORIA: You'd get me with a switch right now. I kind of want one, but I don't want to buy one. SEAN: [laughs] WILL: Same. [laughs] VICTORIA: Because I know it'll take up all my time. SEAN: Uh-huh. That's fair. [laughs] VICTORIA: But I will try to win one at a conference for sure. I think that's true. And it makes sense that because your product is often going with clients that don't have these practices yet, that as soon as you give them exposure to it, you see what you can do with it, that becomes a very powerful selling tool. Like, this is the value of the product, right? [laughs] SEAN: Yeah, there is also something we see, and I think most of our kind of peers in the industry see is, very often, people come in initially looking for and using a single product, like, you know, infrastructure, metrics, or logs. And then, as they see that and see where that touches other parts of the product, their usage kind of grows and expands over time. I would obviously defer to our earnings calls for exact numbers. But generally speaking, more or less kind of half of our new business is usually expanded usage from existing customers as opposed to new customers coming in. So, I think there's also a lot of just kind of organic discovery and building of trust over time that happens there, which is interesting. VICTORIA: One of my favorite points to make, which is that SRE sounds very technical and, like, this really extreme thing. But to make it sound a little more easier, is that it is how you validate that the user experience is what you expect it to be. [laughs] I wonder if you have any other thoughts you want to add to that, just about, like, SRE and user experience and how that all connects for real business value. SEAN: I think a lot of places where, you know, we've both seen internally ourselves and with customers is, you know; obviously, different companies operate in different models and whatnot. Where people have seen success is where, you know, people with formal SRE titles or team names can kind of be coming in as just kind of another perspective on the various kind of things that teams are trying to drive towards. The places reliability is successfully integrated is when they can kind of make that connection that you were talking about. It's, like, obviously, everybody should go take their vitamins, but, like, what actual value is coming from this, right? Nobody wants to have outages, but, like, to do the work to invest in reliability, often, like, it can be hard to say, like, okay, what's the actual difference between before and after? Having people who can help draw those connections and help weigh those trade-offs, I think, can definitely be super helpful. But it is generally much more effective, I think, in my experience, when it does come from that perspective of, like, what value are we providing? What are we trading off as part of this? As opposed to just, well, you should do this because it's the right thing to do, kind of a moralistic perspective. [laughs] But, I don't know, how do you all kind of end up having that conversation with your customers and clients? VICTORIA: That's exactly it. That's the same. It's starting that conversation about, like, well, what happens when this experience fails, which designers don't necessarily think about? What's, like, the most important paths that you want a user to take through your application that we want to make sure works? And when you tie it all back there, I think then when the developers are understanding how to create those metrics and how to understand user behavior, that's when it becomes really powerful so that they're getting the feedback they need to do the right code, and to make the right changes. Versus just going purely on interviews [laughs] and not necessarily, like, understanding behavior within the app. I think that starts to make it clear. SEAN: Part of that, I think that's been an interesting experience for us is also just some of the conversation there around, like, almost the flip side of, when are you investing potentially too much in that, right? Because, like, especially after a certain point, the cost of additional gains grows exponentially, right? Each one of those nines gets more and more expensive. [laughs] And so, having the conversation of, like, do you actually need that level of reliability, or, like, is that...just like what you're saying. Like, you know, kind of giving some of that context and that pressure of, like, yeah, we can do that, but, like, this is what it's going to cost. Is that what you want to be spending your money on? Kind of things can also be an interesting part of that conversation. VICTORIA: That's a really good point that, you know, you can set goals that are too high [laughs] and not necessary. So, it does take a lot of just understanding about your data and your users to know what are acceptable levels of error. I think the other thing that you can think about, too, like, what could happen, and we've seen it happen with some startups, is that, like, something within the app is deeply broken, but you don't know. And you just think that you're not having user engagement, or that users are signing off, or, like, you know, not opening the app after the first day. So, if you don't have any way to really actively monitor it and you're not spending money on an active development team, you can have some method to just be confident that the app is working and to make your life less miserable [laughs] when you have a smaller team supporting, especially if you're trying to really minimize your overhead for running an application. SEAN: Yep. It's surprisingly hard to know when things are broken sometimes. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yes, and then extremely painful when you find out later [laughs] because that's when it's become a real problem, yeah. I wonder, are there any other questions you have for me or for Will? SEAN: How big of an organization is thoughtbot at this time? VICTORIA: Close to 75 people? We're, yeah, between the Americas and the [inaudible 38:31] region. So, that's where we're at right now, yeah. SEAN: Nice. At that size, like, and I guess it sounds like you're pretty heavily distributed, so maybe some of this doesn't happen as much, but, like, one of the things I definitely remember...so, when I joined Datadog, it was probably about 500 people. And I think we're just under 5,000 now. There are definitely some points where there were surprisingly, like, physical aspects to where it became a problem of just, like, where certain teams didn't fit into a room anymore. [laughs] Like, I had surprise in the changes in that, like, dynamic. I'm curious if you've all kind of run into any kind of, I don't know, similar interesting thresholds or changes as you've kind of grown and evolved. WILL: I will say this, we're about 100, I think, Victoria. VICTORIA: Oh, okay, we're 100 people. I think, you know, I've only been at thoughtbot for just over a year now. And my understanding of the history is that when we were growing before COVID, there's always been a very intentionality about growth. And there was never a goal to get to a huge size or to really grow beyond just, like, a steady, profitable growth. [laughs] So, when we were growing in person, there were new offices being stood up. So, we, you know, maybe started out of New York and Boston and grew to London. And then, there was Texas, and I think a few other ones that started. Then with COVID, the decision was made to go fully remote, and I think that's opened up a lot of opportunities for us. And from my understanding in the previous and the past, is that there's a big shift to be fully remote. It's been challenging, where I think a lot of people miss some of the in-person days, and I'm sure it's definitely lonely working remote all day by yourself. So, you have to really proactively find opportunities to see other people and to engage remotely. But I think also, we hire people from so many different places and so much different talent, and then, also, you know, better informs our products and creates a different, you know, energy within the company that I think is really fun and really exciting for us now. WILL: Yeah, I would agree with that because I think the team that I'm on has about 26 people on the Lift Off team. And we're constantly thinking of new ways to get everyone involved. But as a developer, me myself being remote, I love talking to people. So, I try to be proactive and, like, connect with the people I'm working with and say, "Hey, how can I help you with this?" Let's jump in this room and just work together, chat together, and stuff like that, so... And it has opened the door because the current project that I'm on, I would never have had an opportunity to be on. I think it's based in Utah, and I'm in South Florida. So, there's just no way if we weren't remote that I'd been a part of it. So... SEAN: Nice. And I can definitely appreciate that. I remember when we first started COVID lockdown; I think, at that point, Datadog was probably about...Datadog engineering was probably about 30% remote, so certainly a significant remote contingent but mixed. But my teams were pretty remote-heavy. So, in some ways, not a lot changed, right? Like, I think more people on my team were, like, who are all these other people in my house now instead of [laughs], I mean, just transition from being in an office to working from home. But I do remember maybe, like, about six months in, starting to feel, yeah, some of the loneliness and the separation of just, like, not being able to do, like, quarterly team meetups or stuff like that. So, it's definitely been an interesting transition. For context, at this point, we kind of have a hybrid setup. So, we still have a significant kind of full-time remote contingent, and then four people who are in office locations, people joining for about three days a week in office. So, it's definitely an interesting transition and an interesting new world. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah. And I'm curious how you find the tech scene in Denver versus New York or if you're engaging in the community in the same way since you moved. SEAN: There definitely is some weirdness since COVID started [laughs] broadly [inaudible 42:21]. So, I moved here in 2020. But I'd been coming out here a lot before that. I helped to build an office here with Bitly. So, I was probably coming out once a quarter for a bunch of years. So, one parallel that is finally similar is, like, in both places, it is a small world. It doesn't take that long for you to be in that community, in either of those communities and start running into the same people in different places. So, that's always been [inaudible 42:42] and especially in New York. New York is a city of what? 8, 9 million people? But once you're working in New York tech for a few years and you go into some meetups, you start running into the same people, and you have one or two degrees [inaudible 42:52] to a lot of people, surprisingly quickly. [laughs] So, that's similar. But Denver probably is interesting in that it's definitely transplant-heavy. I think Denver tends to check the box for, like, it was part of why Bitly opened an office here and, to a degree, Datadog as well. I think of like, you know, if you're trying to recruit people and you previously were mostly recruiting in, like, New York or Silicon Valley; if you're based in New York, and you're trying to recruit somebody from Silicon Valley, and part of why they're looking for a new gig is they're burned out on Silicon Valley, asking them to move to New York probably isn't all that attractive. [laughs] But Denver is different enough in that in terms of kind of being a smaller city, easier access to nature, a bunch of that kind of stuff, that a lot of times we were able to attract talent that was a much more appealing prospect. [laughs] You'll see an interesting mix of industries here. One of the bigger things here is there's a very large government and DOD presence here. I remember I went to DevOps Days Rockies, I think, a few years ago. There was a Birds of a Feather session on trying to apply DevOps principles in air-gapped networks. That was a very interesting conversation. [laughs] VICTORIA: That's interesting. I would not have thought Colorado would be a big hub for federal technology. But there you go, it's everywhere. WILL: Yeah. SEAN: Denver metro, I think, is actually the largest presence of federal offices outside of the D.C. metro. VICTORIA: That's interesting. Yeah, I'm used to trying to recruit people into D.C., and so, it's definitely not the good weather, [laughs], not a good argument in my favor. So, I just wanted to give you a final chance. Anything else you'd like to promote, Sean? SEAN: Generally, not super active on social things these days, but you can find whatever I have done at seanoc.com, S-E–A-N-O-C.com for the spelling. And otherwise, if you're interested in some engineering content and hearing about some of those kind of bleeding edge challenges that I was mentioning before, I would definitely check out the Datadog engineering blog. There's lots of kind of really interesting content there on both, you know, things we've learned from incidents and interesting projects that we're working on. There's all kinds of fun stuff there. VICTORIA: That makes me think I should have asked you more questions, Sean. [laughs] No, I think it was great. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'll definitely check all that stuff out. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Sean O'Connor.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment, but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We’ll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprintSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots