Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Brendan Schwartz from Wistia discusses the journey of the platform, challenges faced during strategic shifts post-COVID, value of simplicity in product development, authenticity in content creation, embracing challenges in business, and future goals of Wistia in video marketing.

Agnes Malatinszky is the Founder of Senga, which takes care of back-office administrative needs for freelancers, contractors, and solopreneurs. Victoria and Will interview Agnes about the thoughtbot Incubator program and what led Agnes to choose to apply, what the demands on her time were like, how it worked, and how she feels now that she's at the end of the program. Senga Follow Agnes Malatinszky on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter 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: I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Agnes Malatinszky, Founder of Senga, providing back-end support for freelancers. Agnes, thank you for joining me. AGNES: Hey, it's a pleasure to be here. VICTORIA: You are the first graduate of thoughtbot's incubator program, and I'm really excited to dive into that with you today. So, before we get started in talking about the incubator program, let's just start with what fun thing do you have going on this week? AGNES: I'm based in Washington, D.C., and it's a beautiful time of year here. Early summer, late spring is gorgeous. So I'm excited because my family and I are actually headed out to Harpers Ferry this weekend for a little hike. So I'm looking forward to that. WILL: So, what is...when you say a hike, can you explain it to anybody that's outside of the D.C. area? AGNES: It's just a beautiful area in West Virginia. And we're going to take our dog and my daughter out there and get some fresh air and walk around. There's a little historic town there as well that's really interesting to explore. WILL: That sounds fun. VICTORIA: Yeah. I've been to Harpers Ferry to go floating, like, on the river. AGNES: Yes. VICTORIA: Where you float down the river in inner tubes and drink beverages. [laughter] There's also...there's rock climbing in Harpers Ferry too, which is sometimes closed for bird nesting. So it is really beautiful. AGNES: Ooh, I didn't know that. That's really cool. We'll keep an eye out for that. WILL: Yes. For anybody that doesn't know, Victoria is an amazing rock climber. I have a lot of respect for her because I don't know if I could do it. [laughter] VICTORIA: You could definitely do it. The next thoughtbot trip that we're on, we'll go rock climbing, Will. I'm confident in your skills. You could do it. Yes, I'm a big rock climber and rock-climbing advocate, so I'll talk about it forever if you let me. WILL: [laughs] VICTORIA: And I'm actually going to go rock climbing this weekend and get outside myself. And we're going up to Mammoth, California. And we're going to do a half-climbing, half-ski trip. WILL: Ooh. VICTORIA: So that's going to be fun for Memorial Day weekend, so...What about you, Will? What do you have going on fun this week? WILL: Yeah. So you said skiing. VICTORIA: Yes. So Mammoth got the most snow in the country this year. When we were there in February, they'd already had, like, 10 feet of snow. And then they got another foot of snow while we were there, so they're going to have snow through August, at least. WILL: August. Wow. Here in South Florida, the lowest we got was 50. So snow, I don't even know what you're talking about. [laughs] Yeah, so you asked what I'm going to do. Last week was a big week for us because my boys they turned four years old and one year old. And we took them to Disney and had a blast. Anybody who's been to Disney knows it's a trip. It could be a lot, especially it was very hot there too. So I think this weekend we're just going to take it easy. We're just going to relax and just enjoy it. VICTORIA: Trip of a lifetime for them, I'm sure. WILL: Yes, they loved it. VICTORIA: We have Disneyland over here in California. I have been to Disney World in Florida. But I still haven't been to Disneyland since I've been here, [laughs] which I think some people would judge me for. AGNES: You know what? I haven't been to either. I hold it against my parents forever. [laughter] Although my family is not a big fan of crowds, so I think that's why. WILL: Yes, if you're not a fan of crowds, Disney is not the place, especially now. I've heard around September is probably the best time to go. So we're going to try that out during that time too. AGNES: Ooh, protip. You heard it here first. WILL: Yes. [laughs] VICTORIA: September, Disneyland, Florida sounds very warm to me. [laughs] But yeah, we're actually going to go to Mexico with thoughtbot as a team meetup in September, which is also going to be pretty warm, I think. [laughs] But it'll be fun. Well, that's lovely. I love getting to hear a little bit about your lives before we dig into your business. Agnes, I'm super excited to hear about Senga. But maybe start with just a little bit about your background before you started. AGNES: I had been thinking about starting my own business for a while. I am an immigrant, and I come from an entrepreneurial family. Actually, my mom ran her own translation business back in Hungary, and now she's a really successful artist. So, you know, I had support from them and my husband as well to sort of try out something new. But, in my last role, I was actually Chief Operating Officer at an EdTech company that had scaled to serve over 80% of U.S. schools during the pandemic. And I was at that company for about five years and had seen the full arc of, you know, startup to a mature organization. So I was ready to take on a new challenge and to learn something new. WILL: You mentioned that your mom was an entrepreneur. And my dad was an entrepreneur, also. He had his own electric and HVAC business, and I learned so much from him. Is there anything that you can just, like, ooh, I learned this and this from my mom as a kid, looking at your mom being an entrepreneur? AGNES: I mean, she is just a, you know, fix-it person in every sense of the word. So she will fix an electric outlet. She will fix something with her business. WILL: [laughs] AGNES: She's just, like, really good at getting her hands dirty and being really scrappy. And I think that's a really important skill to have, you know, especially in a startup, and especially when you're starting out and still on your own. VICTORIA: So, what did your parents say when you told them you were going to start out on your own and build your own company? AGNES: They were really encouraging. They, you know, they keep up with all my LinkedIn posts, and they read everything I publish. So they're just very supportive and the best cheerleaders I could possibly hope for. [laughs] WILL: Did stepping out and starting your business did anything scare you in that area? AGNES: Oh my gosh, every day, something new. It's all just uncertainty and risk at this point. You know, I'm very, very early in my startup journey, so literally every question about the business I have to test. I have to find answers for. And that ranges everything from, you know, business formation to, you know, the nuts and bolts of getting the business organized and setting up financials, and the legal structure for the company, to figuring out what the product is going to be. So all this uncertainty is definitely a little bit nerve-racking. VICTORIA: And I'm wondering, what about your past experience as a Chief Operations Officer led you to want to build a product like Senga? AGNES: So being a Chief Operating Officer, I think one of the things that I really learned was that in order for a business to be really successful, and for people working at that company to be really successful, they have to have the organization's support to do what they do best. You know, what I used to tell my operations team was that you know, we were really the plumbers of the organization, making sure that everything ran smoothly behind the scenes. So, actually, that was one of the inspirations for Senga, for my current company, this idea that freelancers and independent workers don't have that support. They don't necessarily have somebody helping them with HR, and with financials, and with legal stuff, and with everything else that goes into running a business, whether you're a business of 1 or a business of 100. And that's really where I wanted to come in and, you know, support independent workers. VICTORIA: One follow-up question for Agnes on your experience in the COO role. I believe your team also had a lot of background in the freelancing world. So you had people you could ask questions to and start to understand that market. Is that right? AGNES: Yeah. Like a lot of businesses, I guess we had, you know, freelancers and contract workers that we relied on. And that's increasingly true for most companies now, I would say. There's specialized roles. There is seasonal roles that you don't necessarily hire full-time employees for but that are perfect for somebody, you know, on a temporary basis or somebody with more specialized skills. So you're exactly right; being able to tap into that network and having had experience working with freelancers and contractors was really helpful coming into the incubator and having people to tap for interviews and for input. VICTORIA: Great. And then, what is the thoughtbot incubator, which we've mentioned a few times already? It is for a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or a mobile app. It's an eight-week program that helps you get the proof points you need in order to move forward with confidence. So I'm curious, Agnes, what led you to choose the thoughtbot incubator Program as something you wanted to apply to? AGNES: I mean, it's exactly what you named. So this incubator program was really a perfect launching pad for me. It's designed for non-technical founders, like myself, to get their own dedicated team of product and dev experts to, you know, like, hone customer discovery practice, create a product strategy, run proof of concept experiments. And, you know, these were exactly the areas where I lacked skills and expertise the most. So I had actually looked at other incubators and even some venture studios before, but those models were not as good of a fit for me. I was really excited to find and to be able to join thoughtbot's incubator program. 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 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/liftoff. WILL: What was the original idea behind Senga? AGNES: The idea that I came into the incubator with and then the pain points that we honed in on during the incubator, and then the long-term vision for the company are all kind of a little bit different. So I'll zoom out first to the sort of 30,000-foot view of this. So, coming into the incubator, I had been reading and researching a lot about some macro trends that I think are really interesting, and these are trends that many of us are keeping an eye on. So they're nothing revolutionary, but I think they're going to create some really interesting problems to solve in the next couple of years. So the first one is the rise of independent workers, or contractors, or freelancers. I'm kind of going to use these terms interchangeably. In recent years, the number of independent workers has shot up like crazy. There are already over 65 million independent workers in the U.S., and this number is growing by about 25% annually. And then, add to this that economic downturns tend to grow this number even more. You know, this makes up about a third of the workforce in the U.S. already, and it's growing. The second thing is that you know, the fact that early-career folks, especially Gen Z, really like the independence and autonomy that comes with this type of work. Over half of Gen Z already freelance, and the majority want to make independent work their career. In other words, they explicitly do not want to work for a company in the traditional sense. And then, third, there's kind of a mishmash of factors that I'll lump into one bullet that additionally drive up this type of work, which is that, increasingly, jobs are going to be skills-based, not degree-based, and all work, even white-collar work, will become more modular. Both tech advances and even, I think, novel organizational structures are going to make it possible for people to hyper-specialize and to plug into different organizations at different times, and, you know, even simultaneously to perform that specialized work. So take all this together, and what I'm really seeing is that the current market offerings serving freelancers and contractors are not nearly enough to meet all their needs, which is driving huge inefficiency. The types of companies that cater to this segment now or, you know, there's mature marketplaces like Upwork, and Fiverr, and some earlier-stage companies that do, you know, more workflow and back office. But I'm not seeing a comprehensive solution, and that's driving like I said, a lot of inefficiency. So, ultimately, being a freelancer is still really hard. Only about 50% of a freelancer's time is spent on billable work. And so this is what I really want to solve. VICTORIA: And did anything change through the incubator process? AGNES: So the biggest thing I found during the incubator was actually a really good entry point into this market. So startup wisdom says that you have to narrow down your product to a super tight segment that has a very strong, like, yes to your product. So, during the course of the eight weeks that I did the incubator, we did a ton of interviews, and I was really on the lookout for big spikes and pain points that repeated for a specific niche of freelancers. And that's exactly what we ended up finding. There's lots of nuance to this, but generally speaking, people new to freelancing and those that are just looking to get started need help getting started in a more manageable way and then setting up good practices that will serve them in the long run. WILL: You mentioned those practices that helps them set them up in the long run. Are you talking about mostly the operation, so, like, anything that's non-billable for a client? AGNES: Exactly, yeah. So that's kind of how I think about the work is anything that's billable and then anything that's non-billable. So that includes client management, client communication, marketing themselves, finding, you know, new work, so drumming up new business, all the back-office financials, back-office legal and admin stuff. All these other things that traditionally would be, you know, done by, you know, an operations team at a big company, but, for freelancers, they have to do it themselves. WILL: Yeah, I love that idea because my spouse she dipped her toe into the freelance world. And I felt like the operations kind of overcame everything else. And so it almost felt like the operations was taking over the job. But it's one of those things I feel like we didn't really think through of how much work that that 50% is. Like, how much work do you have to do, which are taxes, operations, speaking to clients, even to get to the things that people usually love, like the design, the software development? So I'm excited about this product. AGNES: Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of what I kept hearing again and again in interviews with all sorts of different freelancers because we went out and interviewed folks from, you know, everywhere from graphic design, to UX/UI design, to web developers, to other types of creatives, content creators. And this idea that they all get into freelancing to pursue their passion, the thing that they're uniquely good at. But then end up spending a huge chunk of their time on, you know, things that they're not really specialized in, you know, basically running their business. VICTORIA: What types of experiments did you run while you were in the incubator program with the people you mentioned you're talking to? And what were the demands on your time really like? AGNES: Oh, so the program is between 20 to 40 hours a week. I had a chance to meet with my thoughtbot team daily. We had independent work time, also breakout sessions. Like you said, a lot of that time was spent doing interviews and running all sorts of different experiments, so discovery interviews, interviews showing the prototype once we had it to interviewees. But we also set up Google Ads. We created a landing page with various calls to action. And then based on who was coming through the landing page and what they were doing on the site, we had all sorts of, you know, lessons that we could take away from that. And then another piece of it was I also learned how to basically start building out an organic community around this problem and from, you know, the community of freelancers, which is so important to have, like, for a future user base and also to be able to continue to engage with my target audience. WILL: Was there anything that surprised you about the program, or did you have any interesting findings coming out of the program? AGNES: One thing I learned through the program was that you know, there are concrete steps that you can take and a process that you can follow to build out a strong business that solves real problems for people. And that's really what this program and this incubator is focused on, is to teach you those skills to go through those early steps. You know, everything that I had read before about startups they're kind of clouded in mystery. And, you know, the big ones that end up being really successful tend to be mythologized, and founder stories tend to have these, like, big eureka moments in them, where the founder had their big idea that led to the big company. But really, at the early stage, it's pretty messy. And nevertheless, you have these steps that you can follow and processes that you can follow to build out the company. VICTORIA: And how are you feeling now at the end of the program? AGNES: I feel really excited and, frankly, more confident than I came into the program. So, you know, I'm leaving here with lots of good data, lots of good anecdotal evidence, having had dozens and dozens of conversations with my target market. So, for me, that's a really great feeling to know that my ideas they don't just exist in the abstract in my head but that we've bounced them against the universe and confirmed that folks are having the pain points that we expected and some that we did not expect. And that there is an opportunity around this. WILL: So, what could be done better about the incubator program from your perspective? AGNES: It was a great program, and that's a pretty hard question to answer. But, you know, I would selfishly say make it longer. Eight weeks is, by design, you know, a pretty short time to get started. And that's really what the program is designed to do is to get you started, to set you up with good practices and good tools. But, again, selfishly, I wish it were a little bit longer, so I can stick around and have the thoughtbot team around me. And then I just look forward to building more of a community as more founders join thoughtbot's incubator every quarter. We have a shared Slack channel that I'm going to continue hanging out in and that I've been told the new founders, as well, will be added to. So I'm looking forward to getting to meet them and to, you know, hear about their experience as well. VICTORIA: What's coming up next for you in the next six months? AGNES: So I'm talking to a couple of potential partners in the next couple of weeks, which might kind of change the roadmap slightly. But, basically, this summer and fall, I'm building out a lot of the content and the prototype for Senga. Again, continuing to talk to the freelancers I've been continuing to talk to. I'm also putting together sort of, like, an advisory committee of freelancers I've met along the way who had a strong yes sort of reaction to this product. And then my goal is that by fall or winter, I'll be able to start building out an MVP. WILL: That's exciting. AGNES: Yeah, I'm really excited. [laughs] WILL: Your dream is finally coming true, so, yeah, you have something to be excited about. [laughs] Do you have any advice for any other founders? AGNES: I guess I don't know how qualified I feel to be, you know, handing out advice as a brand-new founder. But, overall, I would encourage others out there who are interested in taking this path to, you know, really take a risk and to bet on themselves. What I've found in the last couple of months is that there are so many supportive communities, and founder groups, and entrepreneur groups. And this is kind of common advice, and everybody says this, but there's really no way you can fully prepare. You just kind of have to start doing. And at least from what I've seen, that's the secret sauce to this early stage is to keep doing and to keep going from one step to the next every day. VICTORIA: If you could travel back in time and give yourself advice from when before this all started, what advice would you give yourself? AGNES: I would just encourage myself to, you know, take the plunge and maybe even go down this path sooner. You know, I feel really confident where I'm at now in terms of my career and my, you know, support networks and everything. But being able to go back and start experimenting earlier and start going down this path earlier might have even set me up better. WILL: One thing when you're starting a startup is funding. Are you looking for any funding? AGNES: Not urgently, but I'm definitely interested in talking to others working and investing in this space. So, you know, if any of your listeners are investors or entrepreneurs in a similar space, I would love to talk to them. WILL: Yeah. So, how could they reach you if they wanted to reach out to you? AGNES: You can reach me by email at hello@senga.app, or you can find us on LinkedIn at Senga. 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. You could 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: Agnes Malatinszky.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

Chad joins cohosts Victoria and Will to talk about thoughtbot's 20th birthday! 🤖🎉 In this episode, you'll find the 411 on the thoughtbot mascot, "Ralph," taking the company fully remote, and our company values and how we believe products should be designed and built! Follow Chad Pytel on LinkedIn, Twitter, or visit his website. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: Hey there. It's your host Victoria. And I'm here today with Dawn Delatte and Jordyn Bonds from our Ignite team. We are thrilled to announce the summer 2023 session of our new incubator program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our 8-week program. We'll help you validate the market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence towards an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. Dawn and Jordyn, thank you for joining and sharing the news with me today. JORDYN: Thanks for having us. DAWN: Yeah, glad to be here. VICTORIA: So, tell me a little bit more about the incubator program. This will be your second session, right? JORDYN: Indeed. We are just now wrapping up the first session. We had a really great 8 weeks, and we're excited to do it again. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And I think we're going to have the person from your program on a Giant Robots episode soon. JORDYN: Wonderful. VICTORIA: Maybe you can give us a little preview. What were some of your main takeaways from this first round? JORDYN: You know, as ever with early-stage work, it's about identifying your best early adopter market and user persona, and then learning as much as you possibly can about them to inform a roadmap to a product. VICTORIA: What made you decide to start this incubator program this year with thoughtbot? DAWN: We had been doing work with early-stage products and founders, as well as some innovation leads or research and development leads in existing organizations. We had been applying a lot of these processes, like the customer discovery process, Product Design Sprint process to validate new product ideas. And we've been doing that for a really long time. And we've also been noodling on this idea of exploring how we might offer value even sooner to clients that are maybe pre-software product idea. Like many of the initiatives at thoughtbot, it was a little bit experimental for us. We decided to sort of dig into better understanding that market, and seeing how the expertise that we had could be applied in the earlier stage. It's also been a great opportunity for our team to learn and grow. We had Jordyn join our team as Director of Product Strategy. Their experience with having worked at startups and being an early-stage startup founder has been so wonderful for our team to engage with and learn from. And we've been able to offer that value to clients as well. VICTORIA: I love that. So it's for people who have identified a problem, and they think they can come up with a software solution. But they're not quite at the point of being ready to actually build something yet. Is that right? DAWN: Yeah. We've always championed the idea of doing your due diligence around validating the right thing to build. And so that's been a part of the process at thoughtbot for a really long time. But it's always been sort of in the context of building your MVP. So this is going slightly earlier with that idea and saying, what's the next right step for this business? It's really about understanding if there is a market and product opportunity, and then moving into exploring what that opportunity looks like. And then validating that and doing that through user research, and talking to customers, and applying early product and business strategy thinking to the process. VICTORIA: Great. So that probably sets you up for really building the right thing, keeping your overall investment costs lower because you're not wasting time building the wrong thing. And setting you up for that due diligence when you go to investors to say, here's how well I vetted out my idea. Here's the rigor that I applied to building the MVP. JORDYN: Exactly. It's not just about convincing external stakeholders, so that's a key part. You know, maybe it's investors, maybe it's new team members you're looking to hire after the program. It could be anyone. But it's also about convincing yourself. Really, walking down the path of pursuing a startup is not a small undertaking. And we just want to make sure folks are starting with their best foot forward. You know, like Dawn said, let's build the right thing. Let's figure out what that thing is, and then we can think about how to build it right. That's a little quote from a book I really enjoy, by the way. I cannot take credit for that. [laughs] There's this really great book about early-stage validation called The Right It by Alberto Savoia. He was an engineer at Google, started a couple of startups himself, failed in some ways, failed to validate a market opportunity before marching off into building something. And the pain of that caused him to write this book about how to quickly and cheaply validate some market opportunity, market assumptions you might have when you're first starting out. The way he frames that is let's figure out if it's the right it before we build it right. And I just love that book, and I love that framing. You know, if you don't have a market for what you're building, or if they don't understand that they have the pain point you're solving for, it doesn't matter what you build. You got to do that first. And that's really what the focus of this incubator program is. It's that phase of work. Is there a there there? Is there something worth the hard, arduous path of building some software? Is there something there worth walking that path for before you start walking it? VICTORIA: Right. I love that. Well, thank you both so much for coming on and sharing a little bit more about the program. I'm super excited to see what comes out of the first round, and then who gets selected for the second round. So I'm happy to help promote. Any other final takeaways for our listeners today? DAWN: If this sounds intriguing to you, maybe you're at the stage where you're thinking about this process, I definitely encourage people to follow along. We're trying to share as much as we can about this process and this journey for us and our founders. So you can follow along on our blog, on LinkedIn. We're doing a LinkedIn live weekly with the founder in the program. We'll continue to do that with the next founders. And we're really trying to build a community and extend the community, you know, that thoughtbot has built with early-stage founders, so please join us. We'd love to have you. VICTORIA: Wonderful. That's amazing. Thank you both so much. INTRO MUSIC: 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 host, Will Larry. And with us today is our other host, Chad Pytel, the CEO of thoughtbot. Which, we're celebrating 20 years of business this year. Chad, welcome. CHAD: Oh, it's good to have the tables turned on me. And I'm looking forward to the discussion today. VICTORIA: Great. We have a whole set of questions, some of which come from other employees within thoughtbot. So we're really excited to dig into it today. Why don't we start with thoughtbot's iconic logo, the Ralph bot, and the little red robot that everyone knows thoughtbot for? And we call him Ralph within thoughtbot. So, how did Ralph come to be? Where does his design come from? And how did that become part of the company mascot? CHAD: I'm happy to tell the story. But I have a question for both of you: have you ever heard me call the robot Ralph? WILL: [laughs] No. VICTORIA: I don't think I've ever heard you refer to the robot. WILL: [laughs] VICTORIA: So, if you did call it, I don't know what you would call it. WILL: Oh, who started that? [laughs] CHAD: It was someone who was at the company, Matt Jankowski. WILL: [laughs] VICTORIA: Ah, I see. CHAD: I actually don't like the name. I think it's a terrible name for the robot. [laughs] I don't understand why the robot has to be gendered at all. And so I've never said that that's the robot's name. You know, when you're CEO, you have to pick your battles. WILL: [laughs] Yes. CHAD: Yeah. So that's the unofficial name of the robot, I think. And Matt started calling it that because Matt's a big fan of coming up with names for things. And yeah, so, at some point, he started calling it that. And it sort of stuck as people joined the company and just sort of assumed that that's what the robot's called. We didn't start with this logo. Logo has always been a robot. But the thing we started with was an illustration based off of a tin robot that I think either one of us had or that we saw a picture of. Another Matt, who is one of the founders of the company, sketched it. He was a designer as well as a developer. And we used it for a few years. But what we learned over the course of it as we gained more exposure is that, actually, it's a really common tin toy robot. And you can find a lot of other art and illustration and uses of it in stock photography and everything. Which at first was good because then we could get a bunch of stock photography, and it was our logo. But then we realized, ooh, this is not something that we really own or have control over. So we started to think about creating our own robot logo from scratch. Since we're a design firm, and I think it's notoriously hard to design things for yourself, we actually went to another agency that we were friends with and hired them to work with us to create the logo. And I have to say I was probably the worst client ever. WILL: [laughs] CHAD: Because I was asking...I had a particular vision in mind for this idea of, like, a powerful robot. And we kept on doing sketches, after sketch, after sketch, and it was really hard. We couldn't arrive at something that seemed powerful, that didn't seem aggressive. The logo at the time was a 3D representation of the robot. And it was really hard to also make a new 3D robot that looked powerful but not aggressive. And we just banged our heads against that for a long time. I think it was a couple of months. Until one day, I just said, you know what? We're not going to do it. Let's just stop trying to do this. [chuckles] Let's just do the simplest 2D representation of a robot that we can think of. And just going back to the drawing board starting over, we arrived at the logo we have today. Now we have to deal with the fact that it looks a lot like the Android logo. [laughter] But that's the, I guess, the story of the robot. WILL: So, first off, scratching the name Ralph. [laughs] CHAD: No, no, you can use it. I just think it's funny. WILL: Definitely. Second thing is Chad is not a good client when working with designers. No, I'm just joking. [laughs] CHAD: No, it's totally true. WILL: [laughs] CHAD: You know, when we have strong opinions that are mostly preferences, that leads to people being bad clients. [laughter] Because there was no reasoning behind, you know, the preferences. It was just what I had in my head. And so it wasn't until I let that go that we were able to arrive at something usable. WILL: [laughs] That's awesome. So, was the robot a passion for you, or was it just a toy that one of the founders, employees had, and that's where you went with it, how you got your inspiration? CHAD: The name thoughtbot with the bot on the end comes from...because before we started thoughtbot, we did a lot of Java development as a group, same people I went to school with them. We did projects together. And we would follow the pattern where you sort of have an object and then a manager object or a service object. And it was a common naming pattern. If you have orders or customers, then the service object might be called order manager or customer manager. And, in our code, we tended to not do that and instead do bots. So we would have order bot over orders, customer bot over customers. So, when we were brainstorming names for the company, we naturally tended to put bot on the end because that was our typical naming convention in the projects we were doing together. And so there wasn't anything particular about robots that we cared about at all. [laughter] It was that naming convention, which then extended to, okay, well, it's the thoughtbot. And so it should be a robot with thoughts on it or thought lines or something like that. That's where it came from. VICTORIA: I love to hear that. I'm learning so much myself I didn't know before even as a thoughtbot employee. WILL: [laughs] VICTORIA: It's been 20 years since you started the business. I want to start...or go back in time. So, if you could go back and give yourself, the younger version of you 20 years ago, some advice, what would you say? CHAD: I've gotten similar versions of this question on different shows. My answer for the last several years has been pretty consistent. So I'll give that one, and then I think I have another one too. The thing that I didn't realize at the time that I think I would be better for and the company would be better for I had a big blind spot in terms of I started thoughtbot with friends. We were the same age. We were all five White guys in our 20s, just out of school. That was the people that I was doing projects with; that was the people I was surrounded by in school. And it was a big blind spot. And, if I could go back in time, I would try to open my eyes to the fact that that was the case. And I think that I would be a lot better for it. And I think the company would be a lot better for having started with a more diverse team from the beginning because it makes us worse when you don't start off that way. It's harder and harder to correct it the longer it goes on. And so that would be something that I would go back and try to tell myself. Look at what you're doing. You don't realize now, but it is important. WILL: So, because we started talking about this at Summit a month ago, and it was amazing to hear that you're saying that because, at the same time, we're at this all-staff event, and we're able to see how diverse our team is and stuff like that. How has the journey been increasing the diversity of the team? Like, I look at our team photo, and it's just amazing to see the diversity in every level, especially in leadership, the diversity in leadership. And I know we haven't, quote, unquote, "arrived." So, how has that journey been? And what does it look like in the future? CHAD: Yeah, I mean, we've clearly made a lot of progress on this. It is better and easier now than it was in the early days because nobody wants to be the first. Nobody wants to be the first woman on the team. No one wants to be the first person of color on the team. You don't know when you're coming into an organization like that, whether it's the kind of place for you or whether you're going to run into problems. And so now that we've made some progress, that in and of itself makes it easier to continue on the journey. But when we were just getting started on that, we really needed to do a lot to intentionally fix it without tokenizing people, which is not easy to do. And so we're very fortunate that we have made progress. And I appreciate everyone along the way putting themselves out there, willing to be the first, or the second, or the third. I know that that's not easy, and it's made thoughtbot a better place now that we've progressed. WILL: Yeah, and I want to interrupt and say this: after that conversation, I remember I had to split and run to another event. While at that event, I met one of the first ladies that were on the team. And I started chatting about her experience. And it was amazing to see the transformation from the beginning to where it is now. So it was just really good to have that conversation with you, and then go talk to her and just, I guess, see the complete picture, so that's amazing because she's still on the team to this day. CHAD: Yeah. But we're not done yet. Like you said, we still have [laughs], you know, we can always be better. WILL: Where do you see it going in the future? CHAD: Well, I think that even though the management team, the senior leadership team, we have made progress there, I think that that is an obvious area where we have more progress to go in terms of making sure that people at the company are represented...the demographics of the people at the company are represented at every level of the company, especially when you have a culture like we do where the leaders are the people who have been here the longest. And we don't have so many of those positions opening up over the years. In fact, over the last five years, we've eliminated more of those positions in order to reduce overhead and to stay financially sustainable. So we actually have less of those opportunities than we have in the past, and so that holds us back. And so we have to figure out how to handle that and to do better with that. The other is, you know, one of the biggest changes over the last three years is going fully remote. And that has enabled us to hire the best people, no matter where they live, in the time zones that we operate in. And that has been really great for bringing new people, new energy onto the team. That is going to continue into the future. And we're going to see the demographics of the company continue to shift away from the United States. 60% of the company is now outside of the U.S., and that's going to keep on going. And that doesn't make us any worse off. It makes us better. VICTORIA: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. So, thoughtbot, as I understand it before we went fully remote, was known for having an amazing in-person office culture. So, what was that shift like for you? And how do you maintain that company culture after going fully remote? CHAD: Well, here's the honest answer. WILL: [laughs] CHAD: The honest answer was I was already not part of that office company culture. I was traveling one week out of every month to one of the studios. I didn't interact with people in the same way because of my position within the company. I was out of the studio a lot of the time. And even when I wasn't there, I was already working from home a few days a week because of my travel schedule or something like that. So moving to fully remote...and I was already sort of over-commuting to 45 minutes each way to the office. And so moving to fully remote has made things a lot better for me because I'm traveling a lot less. I get to be home with my family a lot more. I don't have that commute time. And my experience now, I think, is more similar to everyone else on that team. And I feel like we're all sharing more equally in what the experience is at thoughtbot. And so when I work to improve that, I'm not only working to improve it for me. I'm working to improve it for everybody. And so there are trade-offs. It is certainly different for the individual designer or developer at thoughtbot than it was before. But I think that the benefits of having the team that we have now, people being able to live where they want to live and to get that commute time back, outweigh the downsides of changing that company culture. VICTORIA: The other part is about just that shift, right? Of it was COVID. [laughs] Obviously, a lot of people were going remote at that time. So I'm just curious how that experience really happened for thoughtbot. I know how it happened for me at the company I was at. [laughs] CHAD: Well, it was certainly abrupt, you know. And, at the time, we thought, okay, we're going to shut down the office for two weeks, and then we'll all be back. And that, very quickly, was proven to be wrong. When it came to our actual work, the biggest shift we had was in the way that we collaborated with clients. But we were already collaborating with each other across studios in a distributed way. And so that was a more natural progression. I think the biggest shift was the way that our projects were working and collaborating with clients. You know, we would have clients in the office with us, too, sitting right next to us. And so figuring out how to do design sprints fully remotely, to ramp up the amount of remote pair programming that we were doing, those were the big changes, I think. And then you had the cultural ones, too, that you really need to work at when two people are getting a snack in the kitchen and having an off-hand chat about something. When you're fully remote, that doesn't happen. You need to put a lot more effort into those sort of what would have been casual conversations previously. WILL: So, and it seems like...just having a conversation with you, I know that it wasn't an easy decision to change over. And my question is, how do you make decisions, especially the hard ones that are not...and you stick with them? For example, I know, like, with hiring, we're talking about the diversity and creating a diverse pool that kind of resembles the area that we're trying to hire for, so, you know, resemble the U.S., or overseas, or wherever it is. And that's a hard thing to do at times, but we stuck with it. And there's been other decisions I've noticed. So, how do you make those decisions, one, and then, how do you stick with them when most companies or most people will say, "Hey, it's just too hard. Let's pivot and change it up"? CHAD: Yeah, we have our values, five core values, and one of them is fulfillment. And I often refer to that as our North Star value, meaning that when we're faced with a decision as a company or as individuals, fulfillment is often the one that we most often look to as the guide for which direction to go in. And I think that that is really powerful for us. It causes us to choose things that other companies might not choose. And it also is really powerful for us because it means that I don't need to be the one to make all of the decisions. You can make decisions based on what is fulfilling to you in your work. And that's very likely the right thing for everybody else at the company. And it may mean that we're a little bit less successful financially. But there are two aspects to success, you know, you need to be financially sustainable, but if you're unhappy in your work, if you're unfulfilled in your work, then that's not truly being successful. And so that's the guiding point of the way that we make a lot of decisions. Take the example of going remote, we weren't really deciding between going back to the way things were or going fully remote. Going back to the way things were was not an option because we had already told everyone if you need to move if you need to be away from the studio you were previously part of, go do that. You don't need to worry about remaining at thoughtbot. And about 20 people moved away from where their studio had been located, which is about 20% of the company. So we were deciding between hybrid or fully remote. Going back to the way things were wasn't an option because we had already removed that from the table, I think, guided by supporting the team, fulfillment, trust, our values. So then the decision-making comes, do we want to figure out how to be hybrid? Which we had done before in our history. And we understood, based on that past experience, that you have to work at that quite a bit to integrate everyone fully, and sort of if you don't, it becomes very tough or even just mediocre. And so it was, are we more excited about working at being the best hybrid organization in the world, or are we more excited at figuring out how to be the best remote company in the world? You know, for me, that was an obvious choice. I was more excited about figuring out how to be the best remote company than I was about being the best hybrid company. So I think that that's an okay... [laughter] I think that's an okay way to make decisions. What are you more excited by? What are you going to be more fulfilled by in your work than that? And so that's, you know, sort of dissecting that decision-making, you know, part of what tipped us over the edge in terms of choosing to be fully remote. VICTORIA: I like that you said that you tried to make it so that you're not the one making all the decisions. [chuckles] And I felt that as a managing director and as an associate director that there is a very purposeful tact of when I'm bringing issues to leadership. The response I get back is very careful not to tell me what to do. [laughs] CHAD: Yeah. I'm sure it's annoying at times, right? [laughter] VICTORIA: I think it's a shift, right? Like, if you're coming from a typical, like, top-down organization, it can be a real mind shift, and it can be frustrating. But then, once you embrace it, it can be very fulfilling, like you said. CHAD: Part of why we do that, too, is because if you're not careful, you know, one of our other values is trust. And we really do trust people more than they're used to. And our other value is self-management. So, people should be left to their own devices. People at thoughtbot take initiative in their work to make decisions, those kinds of things. And so, at the intersection of trust and self-management, what happens in a lot of other cultures is this idea of permission. If you have to ask permission to do things, then you can't truly self-manage. So, when you come to a leader and you're asking for something, it's hard for that not to be articulated as asking for permission for something in a traditional sort of power hierarchy. I encourage people at thoughtbot to think about...in the way that our culture works, it's a lot better to frame things as asking for advice because there are people who have more experience in a certain area than you or whatever. And so a much better way of framing the conversation that you want to have with those people is instead of just asking open-ended questions, which it's very easy to misunderstand as basically just asking for permission to do something, it's better to say, like, "Here's what I know. Here's what I would do based on what I know. Do you have any advice for me based on that?" And then I can say, "Oh, well, here's what I know. [laughs] Can I share that with you?" And then, you can take that information in, and then you can make the decision based on having that additional information. I don't want to make the decision for somebody. That's the way I think about it. If you're not sure what's happening, it can be pretty frustrating in our culture because we are sort of averse to telling other people what to do. We're happy to help people and give people information, but we don't like to tell people what to do. WILL: Yeah, and I've definitely felt this, even as a developer here. But it has been the perfect fit for me because I love the, hey, we trust you. Go and do it. Go make decisions. Hey, even if you fail, let's come back and talk about it and move forward. But also the pushing me out of my comfort zone. There has been numerous times where I'm like, "Yeah, I don't think I can do that." And someone in leadership is like, "I think you can. Let's try it out. Let's do it. If you have any questions, come talk to me. I'll help you in any way I can." So, even as a developer, I feel that same way. And so I guess my question for you, Chad, is there's been a lot of decisions that I've seen you make or even this part right here, the trust. Because sometimes, money can override that when you're a CEO, especially because of jobs and everything. But you said fulfillment, and you had the values. But, Chad, as the CEO, like, why do you personally lead like that and make decisions like that? CHAD: It's a really good question. [laughs] WILL: I always wanted to peel back the layers of Chad. VICTORIA: [laughs] WILL: So that's what it is. [laughs] CHAD: To tie it back to development, just like you just did, I think a lot of our values and the way that we do things come from the way that we believe products should be designed and built. When I'm working on a project, I don't want to be told how to do everything. I don't want every ticket to be specified without me being part of the understanding or decision-making process. I want to be able to collaborate with the people that I'm working with, understand the problems that we're trying to solve, and then pick up the ticket and do the research, figure out the best way to solve it or be part of that. And when it's not clear to me, ask questions, learn from other people about the right way to solve something might be, and then to implement it in the best way that I know how, and collaborate with the people that I'm working with as I do that. And then I pick up that ticket, and I'm responsible for deploying it to staging and asking for acceptance of it. And I'm responsible for deploying it to production. So I'm pushing my work. I have agency over my work at every step of the way. I hope everyone who's listening has had an opportunity to be on a project where you've truly had agency over your own work. It's a really good, fulfilling feeling. And so I think that's where it comes from. I think that's what I try to bring to everything that I do. VICTORIA: And I think that philosophy is what creates such a compelling company culture and makes people want to work here, right? CHAD: I think so. Particularly because the work we do, the majority of us are designers and developers, but I don't think it's just design and develop. Like, it resonates a lot the relation to product work. But I think that's true for fulfillment in your own work generally across the board, no matter what your role is. People would rather have agency over their own work than to be micromanaged, to be told what to do all of the time. 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. VICTORIA: In 20 years of hiring people and building products, what has really changed in terms of what you see customers looking for in building products, and what's stayed the same? CHAD: There's a lot that has changed, mostly in terms of platforms and practices. When we were first getting started out, the practice of test-driven development was not generally established as a best practice. It was one that we needed to advocate for and fight for, and really put ourselves out there as this is what we believe about the way good products are built, and if you don't want that, we're not a good fit for each other. So that's what I mean by practices. A lot of those things that used to be controversial we sort of won on as they played out as, yes, general agreement now about certain best practices. And so that has evolved over time. The other is mobile development. You know, when we first started, that wasn't really a thing. We did some mobile development early on for Palm platforms and for Motorola platforms using different versions of Java. It was a very different ecosystem. And mobile development has evolved a lot and become...almost every project we do has some mobile component. And a lot of them are native mobile applications with an API back end that we're building as well. So that has been a big change. The things that stay the same are, I would say, the things that we have sort of been constant about. So in the way that best practices change or evolve, the constant has been that we put ourselves out there, willing to be opinionated about what we believe the current best way of working is. That means that the clients who work with us are coming to us wanting that. And that leads to a culture of work and quality and that kind of thing, which I think has been pretty constant over the years. But it's not because we didn't try. Like, if we were willing to be anything to anybody and to compromise all the time and those kinds of things, it wouldn't be a constant. But we work at it, but I think that feeling of what it's like to do this work has been a constant. WILL: Speaking of changes and constant changes sometimes, what's the story behind the handbook? Everyone at the company can access the handbook through GitHub and how [inaudible 29:35] Whose idea was it? How did that come to be? And explain how it's always changing and what that looks like. CHAD: Yeah. So, like you said, we have our company handbook and the public playbook in a source code repository that everyone at the company collaborates on and has access to change. I don't remember who initially moved it into version control. It started as a document. We worked with an outside payroll or HR company to make as our first company handbook. It had policies and those kinds of things in it. At one point, you know, we were doing some revisions, and maybe me, maybe somebody else said, "Let's move this out of this," whatever it was at the time, Word doc, or whatever, "and move it into Markdown and natural place we want to have version control on it." But even though we moved the document into version control and even though everyone at the company technically had access to it, I think for many years, we still did things like a lot of companies do, which is the version control in and of itself isn't the special thing. It's using GitHub issues to track actual problems that we know about, or potential issues that we know about, defects in our policies, our practices, the company itself, just like we do on our software products. That was the actual fundamental shift that we made because it completely changed the way that we make change at the company and organize the work that we do to improve the company. And the way that that happened was, I think, prior to that, we made changes in a lot of ways that companies make changes. So some people know about some things, some people don't. Typically, senior leaders will get together often in meetings and talk about the issues that they see. And they tend to result in really big changes all at once that attempt to address multiple issues or make big reorganizational changes. And there's a tendency not to work iteratively when you work that way, and we did the same thing. So the sort of final big event that happened that triggered the fundamental change of working was, at the time, we had an unlimited time off policy. We had gone to that a few years prior because it was a trend in general. But also, we were tired of sort of tracking time and the permission that happens around time off and all that kind of stuff. So we had sort of blown it all up and gone to an unlimited time off policy. But it's more well understood now that unlimited time off policies have a few issues. And we were seeing those issues. Time off was very inconsistent among everyone on the team. Particularly, new people would join the company, and they'd be like, okay, yes, but how much time am I supposed to really take? So that was one issue. Another issue was we wanted to increase the amount of parental leave that we offered as a company, like, on paper. Now, technically, we had the unlimited time off policy, but you want to give guidance to people, and you want to be able to say in a job advertisement that you have this much parental leave, you know. And because we're a consulting company and we make our revenue when people are working, the question was asked, how much can we say that we have for parental leave? And it was a very uncomfortable position for us to be in to not be able to work that financially because we could say, okay, we have 12 weeks of parental leave. But, at any point in time, anyone else could take more time off for any other reason because we had unlimited time off policy. And the idea that we couldn't prioritize one kind of time off over another to make it work financially was uncomfortable to us. And then, the state of California passed a sick time law, which was fundamentally incompatible with unlimited time off policies that lump sick time and vacation time together. And so we knew about these things. We got together in a meeting. We talked about them. And we put together a pull request to the handbook that, you know, we said, you know, we could probably fix any one of these problems. But probably all signs are pointing to just switching back to a regular time off policy. And so we put together a pull request. You can probably guess since I'm telling this story that, generally, people were very surprised. It was a big change to take in all at once. And I think even though we have a high level of trust, as a company, it was hard for people who generally viewed an unlimited time off policy as a good thing. You know, they were worried that there was some ulterior motive there, that something was being taken away for some reason, maybe financial. So we worked through it, and the pull request is there for everyone at the company, so you can see. Anna, when she opened the pull request, outlined all of those reasons why, but it was a lot of information to take in. And after we made it through, it sort of caused me to reflect on the process. And there was good criticism from members of the team at the time about the process, and we really took that in. And I think it was the state of California passing that law that the solution that we arrived at to mind for me because they passed the law in, whatever it was, the spring or the summer. And it wasn't going to go into effect until the new year. And that's really no different than, you know, a new version of a library is going to come out, or a new version of an operating system or a browser is going to come out. And we know it's going to break our app. What do we do? We create a ticket in the backlog. We describe what the problem is. We prioritize it among everything else we're working on. And we make sure that the fix is in place in time for that to be released. And yet, we weren't doing that for these very obvious defects or things that we knew were going to break an existing policy against this kind of stuff. So I was like, we could use GitHub issues to log problems that we know about that are out there, and not only would that have led to a lot more transparency along the way. When a change was made, people could have come along that journey with us of identifying the problem, being aware of it, being part of problem-solving, and coming to a resolution, and then getting a pull request. But more fundamentally, I think once you start to work that way, probably would have never made the change that we did in the first place because this way causes you to work more incrementally, to work more iteratively, to take each of the problems to try to identify the root cause and the best way to fix it. And very often, that is a smaller change that you can put into place more quickly. And we know that we don't need to get it perfect. We don't need to change absolutely everything about this all at once in order to fix every problem. We just need to make tomorrow better than today. If we can do that, then we know that, over time, it adds up to significant positive change that is very different a year from now or two years from now than what we're doing today. But we do that by chipping away and making tomorrow better than today. And so working this way with these discrete tickets, with this thing, there are downsides too, don't get me wrong. It's not all sunshine and rainbows. It's hard to work this way. But those are some of the benefits and sort of the story of how we arrived at how we do things. WILL: I love that because I'm familiar with creating PRs, commenting on PRs, just giving feedback through PRs. And also, I've never been in a leadership meeting at thoughtbot, like, just never been in one. But I know that if I comment on a PR, my voice is heard with leadership making the decision. I love that idea. CHAD: Yeah, leadership meetings at thoughtbot are actually very boring. WILL: [laughs] CHAD: Because the only things that we're talking about that aren't represented in GitHub issues are things that aren't proper for GitHub issues, so they're individual personal problems or things like that, or, hey, we're doing a leadership training and, you know, talking about that. Actual change, actual things that happen, are represented in those GitHub issues. And that's why it's super important that we have issues for everything because when we truly work this way, if something's not represented as an issue, it's not getting worked on. There's not a lot happening in leadership meetings other than those things that aren't ideal for GitHub issues, or we're going through, and we're saying, "Hey, this issue has been sitting around for a while," or "What's the update?" And you'll often see someone comment after the fact about an issue. Now, that being said, I think one of the hardest things about this is that when you expose these big issues, it can be a little discouraging over time to have them be around there to be not closed. But the way...I'll bring this back to our product work as well, like, when you identify...at least this is the case for me. A bug could have been there for two years, [chuckles] and I don't know about it, and therefore, it's out of sight, out of mind. I didn't know about it. But the minute I find out about a bug in a product that I'm working on, I can't stop thinking about it, and I want to fix it so badly. It becomes my top priority right away. [laughs] And I have to remind myself that just because I know about something now doesn't mean it's actually the highest priority item, or that I can fix it, or that I should take the time to fix it. I know it's my natural tendency to do that. So shedding light on something that's positive in and of itself, and then we can chip away at that over time. And this way of working allows us to tackle big problems. But sometimes it doesn't feel so great because you're identifying sort of defects in the company itself that make everybody uncomfortable. But I would rather light be shed on those so that we have a chance to improve it than to have it go unidentified, just like bugs in our products. VICTORIA: And just to illustrate, we have 162 open issues on our handbook. [laughter] But, you know, from my perspective, that makes me really excited, like, people are engaging with it. They're putting in issues and creating it. Because I've converted a company handbook to GitHub before, and no one ever looked at it. [laughs] So it was actually kind of nice that -- CHAD: [laughs] VICTORIA: You said that it took some time to build up that interaction with it and make people feel comfortable. And I wanted to ask about actually your Dungeons & Dragons campaigns that you run with the company. And I'm wondering what skills or practices from that comes over into your leadership style or the culture at thoughtbot. CHAD: Ooh, I'm not sure it's as deep as that, Victoria. VICTORIA: [laughs] CHAD: I just really like [laughter] playing Dungeons & Dragons. But I will say the itch that it scratches for me and the reason why I like Dungeons & Dragons, and the reason why I'm really happy to play it with thoughtbot people...my degree is computer science. But all throughout elementary school, high school, I did improv and theater, and I have a degree in theater as well. For a long time, Dungeons & Dragons is essentially doing group improv with other people around a game. And to be able to bring those two things together with a group of people that I like to have fun with it's a really great outlet. And I really enjoy it. But I'm not sure that there's anything deeper than it sort of scratches that performance itch that I have with a group of people that I like to hang out with. VICTORIA: That's fair. And then, just to kind of go back to one of our earlier questions we asked —what would you go back in time and advise your younger self —now, what if your younger person could travel to the future and give you some advice, looking at where you are at now? CHAD: The only way that I've done this for 20 years is day by day. Like, each day, you get up, and you approach each day. This is the way I do it anyway. It's like I approach each day as a fresh day. And now, over thousands of days, it's been 20 years. And I think that that is part of why at least I've been able to do this so long is I don't do a lot of dwelling on what happened yesterday. I think about today and tomorrow much more than I do about what happened yesterday. The upside is I've been able to do this for 20 years. [laughs] The downside to that is you tend to not reflect so much on the good things, just like you don't reflect so much on the bad things. You tend to not celebrate the milestones when they happen or appreciate them as much because you're onto the next thing. You're thinking about tomorrow rather than yesterday. And so I would think that if my younger self came forward and talked to me today, I think the thing that he would say is like, hey, look at where you are, look at what you've done. Take a moment [laughs] to celebrate not only your work but, you know, this is true for the people around me. I tend not to celebrate the accomplishments as much and everything because I'm very much someone who sort of lives in maybe not even the moment but the next moment that's about to happen. And so I think the person would say, relax a little bit, have a little bit more fun. Take a moment to celebrate the people around you a little bit more. I think that's what I would say to myself. WILL: I love learning things that I didn't know about thoughtbot. So this has been perfect. CHAD: Thank you both for the really thoughtful questions. And on the note of what I just [inaudible 44:53], thank you for everything that you both do at thoughtbot. I really appreciate it. We couldn't have accomplished everything that we have without the individuals [inaudible 45:01]. So I'm here sort of representing thoughtbot for our 20th anniversary, but it's not just me who got us to this point. It's been a lot of other people over the many years making it happen. And so I appreciate both of you for helping make it happen. VICTORIA: Well, thank you. And again, thank you so much for joining us. 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 @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. 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.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

Brian Douglas is the CEO of OpenSauced which helps enterprises discover the best engineers in Open Source. Victoria and Will talk to Brian about meeting as many developers as possible, setting goals, and keeping himself accountable, and what makes a successful open source project. OpenSauced Follow OpenSauced on Twitter, GitHub, Instagram, YouTube, Discord, and Dev.to. Follow Brian Douglas on LinkedIn, Twitter, or visit his website. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: Hey there. It's your host Victoria. And I'm here today with Dawn Delatte and Jordyn Bonds from our Ignite team. We are thrilled to announce the summer 2023 session of our new incubator program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our 8-week program. We'll help you validate the market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence towards an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. Dawn and Jordyn, thank you for joining and sharing the news with me today. JORDYN: Thanks for having us. DAWN: Yeah, glad to be here. VICTORIA: So, tell me a little bit more about the incubator program. This will be your second session, right? JORDYN: Indeed. We are just now wrapping up the first session. We had a really great 8 weeks, and we're excited to do it again. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And I think we're going to have the person from your program on a Giant Robots episode soon. JORDYN: Wonderful. VICTORIA: Maybe you can give us a little preview. What were some of your main takeaways from this first round? JORDYN: You know, as ever with early-stage work, it's about identifying your best early adopter market and user persona, and then learning as much as you possibly can about them to inform a roadmap to a product. VICTORIA: What made you decide to start this incubator program this year with thoughtbot? DAWN: We had been doing work with early-stage products and founders, as well as some innovation leads or research and development leads in existing organizations. We had been applying a lot of these processes, like the customer discovery process, Product Design Sprint process to validate new product ideas. And we've been doing that for a really long time. And we've also been noodling on this idea of exploring how we might offer value even sooner to clients that are maybe pre-software product idea. Like many of the initiatives at thoughtbot, it was a little bit experimental for us. We decided to sort of dig into better understanding that market, and seeing how the expertise that we had could be applied in the earlier stage. It's also been a great opportunity for our team to learn and grow. We had Jordyn join our team as Director of Product Strategy. Their experience with having worked at startups and being an early-stage startup founder has been so wonderful for our team to engage with and learn from. And we've been able to offer that value to clients as well. VICTORIA: I love that. So it's for people who have identified a problem, and they think they can come up with a software solution. But they're not quite at the point of being ready to actually build something yet. Is that right? DAWN: Yeah. We've always championed the idea of doing your due diligence around validating the right thing to build. And so that's been a part of the process at thoughtbot for a really long time. But it's always been sort of in the context of building your MVP. So this is going slightly earlier with that idea and saying, what's the next right step for this business? It's really about understanding if there is a market and product opportunity, and then moving into exploring what that opportunity looks like. And then validating that and doing that through user research, and talking to customers, and applying early product and business strategy thinking to the process. VICTORIA: Great. So that probably sets you up for really building the right thing, keeping your overall investment costs lower because you're not wasting time building the wrong thing. And setting you up for that due diligence when you go to investors to say, here's how well I vetted out my idea. Here's the rigor that I applied to building the MVP. JORDYN: Exactly. It's not just about convincing external stakeholders, so that's a key part. You know, maybe it's investors, maybe it's new team members you're looking to hire after the program. It could be anyone. But it's also about convincing yourself. Really, walking down the path of pursuing a startup is not a small undertaking. And we just want to make sure folks are starting with their best foot forward. You know, like Dawn said, let's build the right thing. Let's figure out what that thing is, and then we can think about how to build it right. That's a little quote from a book I really enjoy, by the way. I cannot take credit for that. [laughs] There's this really great book about early-stage validation called The Right It by Alberto Savoia. He was an engineer at Google, started a couple of startups himself, failed in some ways, failed to validate a market opportunity before marching off into building something. And the pain of that caused him to write this book about how to quickly and cheaply validate some market opportunity, market assumptions you might have when you're first starting out. The way he frames that is let's figure out if it's the right it before we build it right. And I just love that book, and I love that framing. You know, if you don't have a market for what you're building, or if they don't understand that they have the pain point you're solving for, it doesn't matter what you build. You got to do that first. And that's really what the focus of this incubator program is. It's that phase of work. Is there a there there? Is there something worth the hard, arduous path of building some software? Is there something there worth walking that path for before you start walking it? VICTORIA: Right. I love that. Well, thank you both so much for coming on and sharing a little bit more about the program. I'm super excited to see what comes out of the first round, and then who gets selected for the second round. So I'm happy to help promote. Any other final takeaways for our listeners today? DAWN: If this sounds intriguing to you, maybe you're at the stage where you're thinking about this process, I definitely encourage people to follow along. We're trying to share as much as we can about this process and this journey for us and our founders. So you can follow along on our blog, on LinkedIn. We're doing a LinkedIn live weekly with the founder in the program. We'll continue to do that with the next founders. And we're really trying to build a community and extend the community, you know, that thoughtbot has built with early-stage founders, so please join us. We'd love to have you. VICTORIA: Wonderful. That's amazing. Thank you both so much. INTRO MUSIC: 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 host, Will WILL. And with us today is Brian Douglas, CEO of OpenSauced, helping enterprises discover best engineers in open source. Brian, thank you for joining us today. BRIAN: My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me on the podcast. VICTORIA: Just tell us a little bit more about OpenSauced. BRIAN: Yeah, it's opensauced.pizza is the URL. So I always point that out because it's easy to found. WILL: I love it. BRIAN: And OpenSauced is a platform for engineers to find their next contributions and enterprises to discover the best engineers doing open-source, so... VICTORIA: Right. So maybe tell me what led you to start this company? BRIAN: Yeah, that's a great question. Actually, if you don't mind, I'll start further back. I graduated college in 2008 during the financial crisis with a finance degree. And what I learned pretty quickly is, like, if you don't know anybody in finance, it's a little hard to get a job in a bad market. So I took a sales role instead, mainly because I just wanted to learn. I was very much introverted. I wanted to learn how to talk to people, and have conversation, and communicate. So I did that four years and then got my MBA. And then started learning how to code while building an app, which is...I mentioned before we hit record I learned about this podcast around that time, which is, like, very serendipitous to be on this podcast years later. But, fast forward, OpenSauced, like, because of the whole networking aspect of how I got my job in sales and how I was able to do sales when I learned how to engineer, I knew the connection to open source, or how I learned how to code was, like, a wealth of information. So I made it my career goal to meet as many developers as possible. And then, I was working at this company called Netlify. I was employee number three there. And my role was to basically be a front-end engineer, but where I was actually getting more adoption to the product by doing open source. Like, every time I'd do an open-source contribution, I'd add a Netlify deploy preview manually in my PR. And that would give the maintainer enough juice to review the PR sooner. And I was doing a lot of open-source contribution at the time. So I wanted to build a tool to maintain, like, all the PRs I had opened in-flight that I needed to respond back to or...because back in, like, 2016, notifications on GitHub they weren't the greatest. WILL: [laughs] BRIAN: So I built a tool just to keep up to date on what I had opened and how I can communicate back with the maintainer. And saw a need...actually, I didn't see the need. I used this thing myself, and then in 2020, I started live streaming myself, building more features on top of this, like, CRM tool, and had a few people ask, "Hey, can you add a login to this? I'd love to use this, too, with my own database and stuff like that." So I did that. I added login. And I say database, like, we actually originally started with no database. We used GitHub Issues as a tracking mechanism for tracking repos and conversations. We've since moved away from that because, now, obviously, GitHub's got way more advanced in how notifications work. But the sort of ethos of the project still lives today, and what we have in the open-source platform. So that's, like, the long tale of how we got to where we are today. And then, I spoke at GitHub Universe on OpenSauced back in 2017. And from that talk, I had GitHub employees reach out to me and ask me to work at GitHub. So I accepted, and I worked at GitHub for almost five years, sort of putting OpenSauced to the side up until last year, decided to go ahead and pursue it again. And at that point, decided to make it a company. VICTORIA: What a cool story. There are so many things in there that I want to follow up on. I'm sure, Will, you also are like -- [laughs] WILL: [laughs] Yes. VICTORIA: I have so many questions. [laughs] WILL: Wow, that's amazing just hearing the story from you [laughs] got a four-year degree in finance, 2008 happened, no job, very hard to get a job because of who you know. And then you go and changed directions to start learning to code. And I love how it's kind of guided your path to where you are here right now. Like, who knows? But would you have been the CEO of OpenSauced if 2008 would have never happened? So it's amazing to see it. So, I guess, because I love the idea of OpenSauced...because I am that developer that wants to get into open source, but it is hard. It is hard to find the issues that you can work on. It's hard to get into the community to do that. So, if you can just explain to me a little bit more as from there, and we can do it from the enterprise portion later. But, as far as a user: a developer, what does it look like for me to use OpenSauced as a developer? BRIAN: Yeah, yeah. And that's a great question, too, as well. It's funny how serendipitous the story is today, but when I was living it, it was like, oh, man, I'm never going to get a job. [laughter] Or I'm never going to learn how to code. And I think anybody listening who might be where I was ten years ago, I just want to preface, like, your story is like a guided path through experiences. And every experience is like an opportunity for that sort of one piece of, like, the sort of stepping stone to move on to, like, CEO of whatever your next startup is or senior engineer, or staff engineer, whatever it is. But, to answer your question, Will, we built a Discord, and the Discord itself is how we sort of discovered this sort of onboard ramp into open source. So today, if you sign up to OpenSauced, again, opensauced.pizza, you connect to your GitHub account, and you get on-boarded into a flow to ask a couple questions. So, like, what languages are you interested in? And then, what time zone are you in? And the reason for those two things is, one because we're going to do recommendations for projects pretty soon. Everything is open source, so you can literally see the issues that are open about recommendations; happy to take contributions and feedback on it. And then time zone is because communication is pretty key. So, like, if someone is not awake when I see their PR, I have an expectation of, like, cool, I'll write a response, and I'll wait for them to wake up and respond back to that. So the goal there is there's a lot of projects on GitHub, like, 372 million repos is the number off the top of my head. They literally announce this stuff, and they share the data. But of those repos, only 225,000 have more than five contributors. Understanding what you're looking to accomplish first out of doing open source to either share knowledge, or gain knowledge, to get exposure, to get a job, or just to enhance your current job by go try something that's not in the roadmap of what you're working on. Eventually, we'll start asking those questions around, like, what type of contributor that you want to be, so we can start recommending those types of projects. But I mentioned that 225,000 repo number because there are a lot of projects that don't have five contributors that could use their second contributor, or third, fourth. And my recommendation is always find up-and-coming, like, growth-stage projects. A lot of people want to contribute to React. You had mentioned you did React, Will. That's a really big lift to go contribute upstream to a project maintained and supported by millions of enterprises around the world. But there are tons of projects that go trending every week that have no documentation, that have no README, that have no structure and are just getting off the ground. Like, those are the best projects that we try to showcase. So, like, that's hot.opensauced.pizza is our sort of up-and-coming project list. And the way that works is like projects that are trending based on our open-source community; we surface those there. There's a lot of work we have to do on that project. That was, like, a Hack Week project we did a couple of years ago as a community. But the basis of that is they're looking to build our recommendation engine off that. So, step one is find a project that is welcoming, that needs some work done, and then find the path in. So the path usually is going to be your CONTRIBUTING.md, which is like established projects will have this. But if you don't find a CONTRIBUTING.md, but you find a project you want to use, chances are you could build that CONTRIBUTING.md and ask the question, so, like, hey, how would I contribute? Like, how can I be supportive? Actually, I did this talk a couple of years ago at Juneteenth Conf. It was a remote conference on Juneteenth, which a bunch of Black Engineers we all gave our technical expertise sponsored by Microsoft. And I was talking about the idea of open-source hospitality. The best thing you could do is be that sort of hospitable person, either you're a maintainer or a first-time contributor. Like, be that person to set it up for the next person behind you. And the idea of hospitality, you go to a hotel. Like, you know where the towels are. Like, you know where the soaps are. Like, you know exactly where everything is all the time. And, in open source, like, if we could set up our projects in a very similar fashion, like, not franchise them in a way like the Hilton or Marriott, but set the expectation that there is a way to source information and to interact and operate, so... VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, I love, [laughs] like, hot.opensauced.pizza. That's hilarious. And I love how you have used humor to...even though it's a very serious product, we're making it more friendly and more hospitable like you're saying. And I like how you said, you know, the journey is cool looking back on it, but it was really hard to go through it. And now you're this wonderful speaker and a CEO. But you said that you weren't actually good at talking to people at first. And you specifically sought to get better at that skill. So I wonder if you would share more about that, how that's impacted your career, and why that's important as a developer to have those communication skills. BRIAN: Yeah, it's like...I have a twin brother since birth, basically. And my twin brother is very extroverted. Like, he actually used to wait tables in college. It was like he was the person that would make you feel very special as a server. Like, he's the type of person that kind of lights up the room when you walk in. His name is Brock. My entire life growing up, I was always Brock's brother. And it's like, oh, you're Brock's brother. And it's like, yeah, I'm Brock's brother. And I'm more of a person, like, if you meet me in person, like, I'm very much reserved. I'm sort of reading the room, waiting for my point to jump in. And I made it a point for me to, like, have enough comfort to speak on a podcast or speak at a conference because I knew that skill set would be valuable. Because I definitely had, in my sales career, definitely got overlooked for a lot of opportunity because folks thought, oh, I don't think Brian could do it. So coming into tech and seeing that when every time I went to a meet up...because meetups also are places where I cut my teeth and got to learn about the industry and the community. They always needed someone to speak. So I was, like, oh, there's an opportunity. I can leverage this opportunity of them always looking for speakers and me always wanting to share knowledge and learn something new to do talks. So my first-ever conference talk was in San Francisco. And I had learned React Native, but prior to React Native, I had learned Objective-C. And then, in between Objective-C and React Native, I learned Swift because React Native and Swift came out the same year. Well, React Native went public, open source, the same year as Swift. So it was like a really interesting year back in; I think it was 2017 where...actually, it might have been 2016. But, anyway, everything came out at the same time. And I was learning iOS development. So I made it a point for me to give a talk. But my pet peeve for giving talks is, a lot of times, people just go directly into the code, and there's, like, no connection to a story, or why do I care about this? So I always bring storytelling into my conversations and talks. So, like, that talk about Swift, and Objective-C, and React Native, I made the comparison of, like...it was the same year that Kanye West took the mic from Taylor Swift at the VMAs or whatever the award show was. And the correlation was React Native took the mic away from Swift because it built similar interactions for JavaScript developers to understand and build iOS applications that was not like Ionic or RubyMine or...I forgot the Ruby one. But, anyway, what I'm getting at is, I just wanted to bring story to this because usually what happens is like, you see cool things, but you never remember what the name is. You try to find that REPL again, or you try to figure out who that speaker is. And it's usually hard to find it after the fact. So, like, my goal was always to make it memorable, which is why I go by Bdougie because Bdougie is easier to Google than Brian Douglas. Shout out to Brian Douglas, who's based in Ireland who does system engineering, and has a great YouTube channel. Like, I want to be memorable. And I want to make it easy for folks to find me after. So, while at GitHub, when I was developing all this sort of like Kanye West-type speaking and stuff like that, well, literally, I would use Kanye West years ago as the example to understand storytelling. I no longer use Kanye West. I'm now a Beyoncé advocate. [laughter] So I use Beyoncé instead. But I guess what I'm getting at is, like, I just had a goal. And I knew if I could teach myself to code...and it was about 17 weeks it took me from zero to ship a Ruby on Rails app. And I felt confident enough to talk about it. I knew basically anything I could just accomplish just by putting some effort and consistency behind it. So that's the...sorry, that was a little more long-winded than expected. But I just keep accountable and set goals for myself and try to achieve enough to feel proud about at the end of the year. WILL: Yeah. It's so funny because I recently had a similar situation. At thoughtbot, we try to engage with the community, and one of the ways was writing a blog post. I've never been a writer. It just hasn't been my thing. But I was telling my boss, I was like, I'm going to do that to get outside my comfort zone and to really stretch myself. And at the same time, I was like, why a blog post? Like, I don't know, it doesn't really make sense why a blog post. Well, when I started writing the blog post, I was like, oh, you have to really know, one, what you're talking about in order to write about it. And so I had to really do some research, really had to study it. And I finished it last week. And then, now, looking back over the last couple of months it took me to write that blog post, I'm like, wow, I feel stretched. But I feel really good, and I feel really good about the topic that I did. So that's interesting that you went through that process to stretch yourself and to grow and even learning to code and get to that point. So talking about...you were at Netlify, and then you worked at GitHub. And then you're at your current one OpenSauced. How have Netlify and GitHub, the work that you did there, how has it prepared you for your position right now? BRIAN: You know, actually, that's a great question. I don't know how much thought I put into that. Like, Netlify prepared me because it gave me an opportunity. So I was employee number three, but I had a sales background. And so I got to be an engineer, but they kept always trying to ask me like, you know, business questions and strategy. And, like, I pitched them a 30-60-90 in my interview of, like, what's the growth strategy of Netlify, like day zero when I start? And I go into way more detail in other content. But that prepared me because I got to see how startups work, being so early. I got to see that startup go from seed-funded, just closed their seed round to get their series B is when I left. At GitHub, I got to see what it looked like at a bigger company, which, like, it doesn't matter how big or small you are, like, there's always chaos. Like, GitHub was, like, so much chaos, and there was a lot of good that was happening but a lot of uncertainty at the time I joined in 2018. And then, nine months later, Microsoft acquired GitHub. So then I got to learn stability and what it looks like to...for personal reasons, I always had a budget but never had extra money, even years into my engineering career. And that taught me what it looks like when success meets career. With that being said, like, the problem that I'm solving, I got to learn firsthand while being at Netlify and getting adoption and traction through open source. And then going to GitHub and seeing every single other company that looked at GitHub as a solution to their open-source collaborations and interactions. And then also seeing that there was a hole in just understanding, like, how do you survive? How do you sustain yourself as your career but also your open-source project? Like, a lot of folks want to know, like, what success looks like for open source. Like, how do you get on the trending algorithm? Like, how do you get noticed? It's more than just pushing to GitHub and hoping for the best. There are, like, other things that happen for projects to be successful. And for us to choose the next in the future technologies, it really comes down to community, marketing, and then resources. And those three things end up making projects successful. With OpenSauced, we're working to help inflate some storytelling and add some of those resources to open-source projects. VICTORIA: Great. So you were able to really get, like, the full vision of what it could be if you had a product that became successful and stable, and you knew you wanted to build it on open source. So I love that you really just...you had this problem, and that's what you built the product around. And that ended up becoming the business. What was surprising for you in those early discovery phases with OpenSauced when you were first thinking of building it? BRIAN: I guess what's really surprising is we're not, like, crazy traction today. But we've done a pretty good job of getting, like, 2,000 developers to sign up to it since December. And then the conversations with enterprises so far just by the sheer...like, basically, what was surprising is if you use proper sales technique and you're early stage as a startup, so, like, not necessarily hire salespeople, but as a founder or as a stakeholder, just go talk to your future customers and your users. Everyone says it, but that's actually super valuable. And I think in the same vein of open source, folks they see projects die on the vine, but then you see projects succeed. And I think it also comes down to how often the maintainer of the project is talking to the contributors and the users and also that distinction as well. There are folks who want to contribute code to the codebase, but then there are folks who want to use the codebase. And, like, how do you interact between the two? And how do you cross the chasm for those folks as well? And, a lot of times, it's just fascinating just, like, just by trying, and just by showing up, that's half. It's all cliché stuff, like, I could say, but it's all true. Like, showing up is, like, it's, like, step one. Just show up, do the thing, do the work. And then talk to people is, like, step two. And it's hard to say, like, okay, yeah, because we are not a multibillion-dollar company, like, we're just getting started. So I can't say, like, yeah, we're super successful. But we've survived the year. And we've survived the year based on those two steps, the showing up and then talking to people. Because a lot of times, we could get lost in the sauce, per se, of just shipping code and never talking to anybody and never coming up for air. And I think what I learned, going back to what I learned from GitHub and Netlify, is talking to people and getting that feedback loop going is the best thing you could do for any product. Any early project, any feature you're working on, talk to people about it and see if it's actually valuable for somebody that after you ship it, something will happen. WILL: You're talking about communication is a big thing for a successful project. Have you noticed any other trends that make a successful open-source project? BRIAN: Yeah, that's...Any other trends? Yeah. I mean, AI, [laughs] just kidding. WILL: [laughs] BRIAN: No, I mean, but it also it is true, like, having a trend not sort of following the herd, but catching the herd earlier is extremely valuable. Like, at Netlify, we caught the trend of React. So, basically, Netlify built essentially GitHub Pages but a product and a company. And that was, like, the original project of Netlify. It's expanded so much further from that. But at that time, when I joined, I joined three months before Create React App was developed. So, like, it was a CLI tool to build React apps easy. And, prior to that, React was, like, super complicated to get up and running. Like, you had to know Webpack. You had to know, Babel. You had to make all that glue happen together. And then there wasn't an easy process to go host it somewhere. So the prevalence of build tools like Grunt, and Gulp, and Browserify, they all made it easier to build a static output from React. And that trend is what took Netlify to where it is today. It's like, people needed a place to deploy these static applications. GitHub Pages was like the solution for a lot of folks. Because Heroku, like, why pay $7 for something you could host on S3 for free? But the challenge was S3 it requires way more thought in how you host and take it down and deploy, and then it becomes like a Kubernetes nightmare. So the trend there was, like, people just wanted to have a better developer experience. When it comes to, like, open source, the developer experience in JavaScript has improved so much more. But folks are now looking at the next thing like a Zig, or a Rust, or all these other new languages and server renderings and stuff like that. So I guess when I take a step back, when I look at how I chose things I wanted to work on, and communities I wanted to hang out in...before committing to React...I'm based out here in Oakland, so San Francisco, basically. By seeing the sheer number of RSVPs to the React meetup, it made me confident that React would be something I should pay attention to. When you look at the RSVPs of now all these AI meetups that are happening in San Francisco, like, every single weekend is a hackathon. Highly confident that if you're engineering today, you probably want to know what embeddings are and know how OpenAI works. Not that you necessarily have to build AI stuff, but it is going to be the thing that people are going to be using. So just like we had to learn build tools, and servers, and CDNs prior, now it's all trivial stuff that you can sort of use Cloudflare for free. Like, AI is going to be very similar, and it's probably going to happen much quicker. But, in the time being, the trend right now is, like, you should probably understand whatever the players are in that space so that way you're able to talk confidently about it. WILL: That's really good advice, yep. VICTORIA: Absolutely. And, you know, in my role as Managing Director of Mission Control, or, like, DevOps, SRE platform, I spend a lot of time looking at trends, more on the engineering side. So I think my question is, [laughs] as someone who hires people to work on open-source projects, and who actively maintains and contributes to open-source projects, what should I be thinking about how to use OpenSauced as in my role? BRIAN: For hiring and sourcing skilled folks, we're actually working on a tool right now to make it more discoverable. So, today, when you onboard as an individual developer, you can check a box in your settings to say, like, if you want to collaborate with other folks, you have to opt into it. So if you want to be discovered on OpenSauced, it's in the settings. We'll probably expose that and share more about that in the future, like, in the next month or so. But for, in particular, our user flow today for folks looking to find other people to contribute alongside their project is, you add your project to what we call an Insight Page. You click on the tab on the top and create a page with your project. And then, you can see contributions in your project in the last 30 days. And then you can also add other projects like your project, so you can see who else is contributing. So, that way, you can start discovering folks who are making contributions consistently and start to get some stories of, like, if they're interested in collaborating, they'll check that box; if they're not, the box won't be checked. But at least you know the sort of scope of the ecosystem. As an individual developer, we have the onboarding flow, but then we also have highlights. So, eventually, we'll do recommendations to get you to make contributions. But, for now, if you're already making contributions, you can highlight the contributions you've made so that way, you're more discoverable on the platform. And the highlights are very much like a LinkedIn post or a tweet. You just drop in a PR, and then we'll either generate that description for you, or you write a description: I did a thing. This is what it was. This was the experience. And then, now you're attached to the project through not just a code contribution but also a discovery mechanism, which is a highlight. And then, eventually, we'll start doing blog posts, and guides, and stuff like that, as they're written. Like, if you want to attribute your career, and your journey to your participation to, like, documentation updates and stuff like that, those will also be highlights coming soon. WILL: I love, love, love that. 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 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/liftoff WILL: I hear you saying that you have some things that's coming soon. In a high, high level, what are some of the things that you have coming? And what does success look like, six months, a year? What does that look like? Because it sounds like you have some really good ideas that you're working on. BRIAN: Yeah, yeah. So, like, six months to the end of the year, what we want to do is actually start getting more deeper insights to what's happening in open source. What we're doing right now is building the individual developer profile and experience so that way, they're able to be discovered, find projects to work on. And then what's next is there are tons of enterprises and companies that are maintaining open-source projects, SDKs. And what we're seeing right now is we're seeing massive layoffs happening currently in the industry. So like, as of today, I think Facebook laid off 4,000 people, ESPN laid off, like, 7,000 Disney employees as well. And some of those employees are around the Disney+ place. It's a lot of technical engineering stuff. So I guess what I'm getting at is there...we want to be able to see the trends of places that activity is happening and start recommending people to that. But also, we want to give an opportunity for folks who...companies...sorry, I'm avoiding trying to name specific companies because nothing is in contract yet. But certain companies, like, you, don't think of as an open-source powerhouse. So, like, a company we're now talking to right now is walgreens.com. And Walgreens they have tech. They've got open source that they participated. But they're not thought of as a place like, oh, I want to go work at Walgreens and go work on some cloud infrastructure stuff. So, how does Walgreens get exposure? And, like, hey, we're involved in the kubectl, and the Kubernetes platform and stuff like that, like, be aware that there's opportunity here. So we're going to start driving that connection to folks. So, as you develop your career doing open source, you can also be noticed, and folks can reach out to you. And also, I want to stand on the notion of open source is not for everybody. But I also want to point out, like, my entire career in open source has not been nights and weekends. It's always been finding a company that supports my interest to do open-source at work. Part of my story is, like, I was getting an MBA. My first kid, who's nine years old now he, was born 11 weeks early. And he's the reason why I built an app because I wanted to build an app to solve a pain point that I had, and ended up building that in 17 weeks. And that turned into opportunity. So I guess what I'm getting at is, like, folks being laid off right now, you might have some extra free time. You might be submitting like 100 applications a day. Consider taking that down to 50 applications a day, and then try to contribute to a couple of open-source projects a month. So that way, there's some more story to be shared as you're in the job market. VICTORIA: I love that you created that app when you had your son and you had that need. And for developers wanting to get noticed and wanting to get their next leg up or maybe even negotiate for higher salaries, what's the traditional way people do that now to kind of highlight themselves? BRIAN: The traditional way what people are doing is they're tweeting. They're speaking at conferences. They're sharing their stories. It's like zero to I'm an influencer in the open-source space. There's no real clear guide and steps to get to that point, which is why we have highlights today. Like, we want to make it low effort for folks to write 200 characters about something they contributed to. We're actually working on something to generate pull request descriptions because I think that's another missed opportunity. Like, when you open a PR in an open-source project, and it says no description added, like, that's a missed opportunity. Like, there's an opportunity for you to share what you've learned, what Stack Overflow questions you looked at, like, how you got to the problem, and why this is the right solution. All should be in the pull request description. And then that pull request should be in your cover letter for your resume so that people can go back and say, "Oh, wow, you did some real work." I can go see the history of your contributions because perhaps the job you got let go from you only worked in private repos. You couldn't really showcase your skills. That now gives you a competitive edge. And I guess when I look into this, like, going back to my original onboard ramp into engineering, I graduated with a finance degree with no network. I had one internship at an insurance company, but that wasn't enough. Like, everyone who I interned with, like, the guy who got a job at the internship, like, his dad was a client, was a big client at that firm. And another guy he worked at a golf course, and he'd be the caddy for all these big finance folks where I went to school. So, once I learned that there's an opportunity to get a job by just knowing people, that changed my entire path. Like, when I got to sales, like, oh, or when I got to engineering, I just knew go and meet people. Go have conversations. Go to meetups. What I'm trying to do with OpenSauced is make that step closer for folks, so they could look up and be like, you know, I've made all these contributions, or I don't know where to start. Let me just look at people who I know and follow in the industry and see where they're contributing, and make that connection. So, like, we've kind of closed that gap without the need of, again, you don't need 100,000 Twitter followers to get noticed. Just make some contributions or show up and ask questions. And, hopefully, that's the first step to establishing your career. VICTORIA: Well, that sounds great for both people who are looking to get hired, but also, as someone who hires people, [laughter] I know that there's a lot of amazing developers who are never going to do a conference talk, or they're not going to post on Twitter. So I love that that's available, and that's something you're working on. BRIAN: Yeah, it's just coming out of my own pain of, like, I was saying, like, looking at the story now, it sounds great. [laughs] But part of that story was like, hey, I was getting severely underpaid as an engineer in San Francisco, living in a one-bedroom apartment with two kids. Like, all that part of the story is like nothing I dwell on. But it's like, all that opportunity and knowledge-sharing that I ended up benefiting from, it's like what I constantly try to give. I pay it forward with folks. And I'm more than happy to talk with folks on Twitter and in OpenSauced Discord and other places because I think there's a lot of opportunity in open source. And if anybody's willing to listen, I'm willing to show them the path. WILL: I'm so glad you brought that up because this is one of my favorite questions I ask on the podcast: So, knowing where you're at right now and your story, you've gone the ups, the downs, all of it. If you can go back in time and know what you know now, what advice would you give yourself at the beginning? BRIAN: Honestly, I would say write it down. Like, one thing that I did is I did a blog post, and that's part of the reason why I was able to find my first job in engineering is I started a blog, which was really for myself to learn what I did yesterday. I tell everyone who I mentor it takes two hours every time you want to sit and learn something new because one hour is to remember what you did yesterday, and then one hour is to do something new. And so, I usually write it down and then make it a blog post just to solve that problem. I wish I did more with that, like, you know, wrote a book, or created a YouTube channel, or something because all that knowledge and that sort of sharing is actually what got me to level up faster. I was asked by one of my close friends, like, "Hey, how do you do it? How do you accomplish everything you've done in the last, like, 9-10 years?" And I didn't know what the answer was then. But the answer today for my friend, and I'll share this with them, is it's because I wrote it down. I was able to go back and see what I did. And then, at the end of six months, I was able to go back six months and see what I did. It's like the idea of relativity with, like, Einstein. Relativity is the idea of motion and the perception. Like, if you're in a train, it feels like you're just going slow. But you might be going 100 miles per hour, but you don't feel that. And when you're going on your journey, you could be going 100 miles per hour, but you're thinking, oh, man, I failed yesterday. I could have solved a problem. But yeah, you solved six problems while trying to solve for one. It's that situation. So advice for myself, in the beginning, write it down and then share it way more than I did when I started. Because a lot of the stuff I'm like, even in this conversation, I'm thinking, oh yeah, this, this, and this. And I never shared that before, and I wish I did. So yeah. WILL: I love that. Because yeah, I feel like that's development, like, you have some weeks that you're shipping out multiple features. And then other weeks, you're like, I barely got one out, or I barely fixed this one bug that I've been trying to...struggling with the last couple of weeks. So yeah, I like that advice. Write it down. And remember where you've been, remember. I just love the example you used, too, because it does seem like I haven't made any movement. But when you look back, you're like, no, you actually made a lot of movement. And you were very successful with what you did. So that's great advice. VICTORIA: I sometimes write things, and then I go back maybe six months later and read them. And I'm like, who wrote this? [laughter] I don't remember learning this stuff. Oh yeah, I guess I did, right, yeah. [laughs] No, that's so cool. What questions do you have for us, Brian? BRIAN: I'm curious in, like, how do thoughtbot folks stay up to date? Like, what does your involvement in open source look like today? VICTORIA: Yeah, so we are known for being active maintainers of a lot of very popular Ruby on Rails gems. So we're a consulting agency. So we're able to structure our time with our clients so that we can build in what we call investment days, which is typically Fridays, so that people can contribute to open-source projects. They can write blog posts. They can do trainings. And so that gives us the structure to be able to actually allow our employees to contribute to open source, and it's a huge part of our business as well. So if you have a Ruby on Rails project, you're probably using one of our gems. [laughs] And so, when there's other crises or other things happening in an organization, and they want to bring in an expert, they know that that's who thoughtbot is. Of course, we've expanded, and we do React, and now we're doing platform engineering. And we have some open-source TerraForm modules that we use to migrate people onto AWS and operate at that enterprise level with a mix of managed products from AWS as well. And that continues to be, like, how we talk to people [laughs] and get that buzzword out there is, like, okay, there's this cool open-source project. Like, one I'm excited about now is OpenTelemetry. And so we're digging into that and figuring out how we can contribute. And can we make a big impact here? And that just opens the door to conversations in a way that is less salesy, right? [laughs] And people know us as the contributors and maintainers, and that creates a level of trust that goes a long way. And also, it really speaks to how we operate as a company as well, where the code is open and when we give it back to the customers, it's not. Some organizations will build stuff and then never give it to you. [laughs] BRIAN: Yeah. So it sounds like folks at thoughtbot could probably benefit from things like OpenSauced for discoverability. And I get a lot of conversation around in OpenSauced as like, how do I get connected to maintainer of X or maintainer of Y? And the first step is like, how do I even know who the maintainer is? Because when you go to GitHub, you could sort this by last commit date, which not a lot of people know. You can sort the contributors by most frequently and stuff like that. But it's challenging to find out who to reach out to when it comes to packages, especially when people move on. Like, someone created a thing. They have tons of commits. And then they look like they're the number one committer for the past ten years, but they left five years ago. Those are things that we're trying to make more discoverable to solve that problem. But then, going into that thoughtbot thing, is like being able to reach out to thoughtbot and be like, oh, who can I reach out to about this gem? And, say, I have an idea, or we have an issue; how can we get unblocked because we're using this in our product? And I imagine with consulting, there's an opportunity to say, hey thoughtbot...which, honestly, at Netlify, we used thoughtbot to solve some harder problems for us. We were just like, yeah, we don't have the bandwidth to go down this path. Let's go to consulting to unblock us in this arena. VICTORIA: Right. And that was really important to me in making the decision to join thoughtbot last year is that it was built around open source. And that ethos really spoke to me as, like, this is a place where I want to work. [laughs] And you can think of, like, if you're looking for vendors, like, oh, I want to work with people who have that same ethos. So yeah, OpenSauced seems like a really cool product. I'd be curious about how we can leverage it more at thoughtbot. BRIAN: We just shipped a feature called Teams, which it's self-explanatory. But, basically, when you build an insight page, you're able to build a team to help the discover process of what's happening in contributions. You get details and reporting on OpenSauced. The goal is basically to unblock teams who are involved in open source together and make it more discoverable for folks who want to find maintainers and collaborate with them. VICTORIA: Will, I know we're running close on time. But I had one more question about what you said around making open source more hospitable. And, you know, you mentioned going to Juneteenth Conf. And I'm curious if you have a perspective on if open source is equitably accessible to everyone or if there are things we can be doing as a community to be more inclusive. BRIAN: Yeah, it's a great question. So the first answer is quick, it's no. The reason why it's no is because we have to admit [laughs] where there are inequitable situations. And as much as we want to set this up of, like, I want to say that there's opportunity for everyone to contribute based on no matter where their background, but just by your time zone, makes it inequitable of, like, whether you can contribute to open source. Because if you look at the data and zoom out, most open source happens in the West Coast U.S., so from San Francisco to Seattle. Like, majority of contributions are there. There are reasons for that. Like, California has a very, very expressive clause of like where you can contribute. And, technically, your employer can block you on doing open-source contributions. Unless you sign...like, at Apple, you sign away your rights to be able to do that in your employee offer letter. Sorry, [laughs] not to be a dig against Apple. Apple buy lots of open source. But what I'm getting at is that the opportunity is there, but it's the awareness thing. I'm part of an organization called DevColor. It's an organization of Black engineers in tech. We have squads and monthly meetings where we just talk about our career, and growth, and stuff like that. And I attribute a lot of that interactions to my success is, like, talking to other folks who are years ahead of me and have a lot more experience. But I say this because the majority of the folks that I interact with at DevColor they don't do open source because they all...to be a Black engineer at a level of like senior engineer at Netlify, or a staff engineer, or a manager...sorry, I meant, like, Netflix but Netlify too. You basically had a career path of, like, you probably went to school at a decent engineering school, or you figured out how to get a job at Facebook or Google. And, like, that's pretty much it. And, like, this is a blanket statement. I totally understand there are outliers. But the majority of the folks I interact with at DevColor they have a job. They have a great job. And they're doing the thing, and they're being very successful. But there's less community interaction. And that's what DevColor exists for is to encourage that community interaction and participation. So, at the end of the day, like, there's opportunity to make it more equitable. So things like, every time there's a release cut for a major open-source project, why not go to Black Girls CODE and have them build something with it? And, again, very specific, like, React 19 that's currently being tested, why not go to all these other underrepresented organizations and partner with them to show them how to use this project? Because the assumption is everyone in open source, you got to be senior enough to participate, or if it's too hot, get out of the kitchen. But if we set up a place for people to interact and level up, in three or four years from now, you'll see the open-source ecosystem of that project be completely different as far as diversity. But it takes that investment to have that onboard ramp to even have that connection or conversation about testing early releases with underrepresented groups in engineering. That's where we have to start, and that's what we're trying to do at OpenSauced. We want to make that connection. I have a whole plan for it. I'll share in a blog post. I also mentioned that a lot of these thoughts are on our blog as well. I've been writing blog posts around these conversations. So opensauced.pizza/blog if you're interested. VICTORIA: Very cool. Thank you for that. WILL: I'm just processing on the whole conversation. It has just been great. VICTORIA: Yes. Thank you so much for sharing with us. And I wonder, do you have any final takeaways for our listeners today, Brian? BRIAN: Yeah, final takeaways. Like, if anything at all resonated in this conversation, please reach out, bdougie on GitHub. I'm pretty active with my notifications. So if you @ mention me in a random project, I'll probably jump back in and respond to you. But also Twitter @bdougieYO. And then, I mentioned our blog. We also have a newsletter. So, if you're interested in any of this OpenSauced journey, please join us there, and keep in touch. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story. 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 @will23larry This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you. 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: Brian Douglas.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

Lauren Maffeo is the author of Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up. Victoria talks to Lauren about human-centered design work, data stewardship and governance, and writing a book anybody can use regardless of industry or team size. Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up Follow Lauren Maffeo on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: Hey there. It's your host Victoria. And I'm here today with Dawn Delatte and Jordyn Bonds from our Ignite team. We are thrilled to announce the summer 2023 session of our new incubator program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our 8-week program. We'll help you validate the market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence towards an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. Dawn and Jordyn, thank you for joining and sharing the news with me today. JORDYN: Thanks for having us. DAWN: Yeah, glad to be here. VICTORIA: So, tell me a little bit more about the incubator program. This will be your second session, right? JORDYN: Indeed. We are just now wrapping up the first session. We had a really great 8 weeks, and we're excited to do it again. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And I think we're going to have the person from your program on a Giant Robots episode soon. JORDYN: Wonderful. VICTORIA: Maybe you can give us a little preview. What were some of your main takeaways from this first round? JORDYN: You know, as ever with early-stage work, it's about identifying your best early adopter market and user persona, and then learning as much as you possibly can about them to inform a roadmap to a product. VICTORIA: What made you decide to start this incubator program this year with thoughtbot? DAWN: We had been doing work with early-stage products and founders, as well as some innovation leads or research and development leads in existing organizations. We had been applying a lot of these processes, like the customer discovery process, Product Design Sprint process to validate new product ideas. And we've been doing that for a really long time. And we've also been noodling on this idea of exploring how we might offer value even sooner to clients that are maybe pre-software product idea. Like many of the initiatives at thoughtbot, it was a little bit experimental for us. We decided to sort of dig into better understanding that market, and seeing how the expertise that we had could be applied in the earlier stage. It's also been a great opportunity for our team to learn and grow. We had Jordyn join our team as Director of Product Strategy. Their experience with having worked at startups and being an early-stage startup founder has been so wonderful for our team to engage with and learn from. And we've been able to offer that value to clients as well. VICTORIA: I love that. So it's for people who have identified a problem, and they think they can come up with a software solution. But they're not quite at the point of being ready to actually build something yet. Is that right? DAWN: Yeah. We've always championed the idea of doing your due diligence around validating the right thing to build. And so that's been a part of the process at thoughtbot for a really long time. But it's always been sort of in the context of building your MVP. So this is going slightly earlier with that idea and saying, what's the next right step for this business? It's really about understanding if there is a market and product opportunity, and then moving into exploring what that opportunity looks like. And then validating that and doing that through user research, and talking to customers, and applying early product and business strategy thinking to the process. VICTORIA: Great. So that probably sets you up for really building the right thing, keeping your overall investment costs lower because you're not wasting time building the wrong thing. And setting you up for that due diligence when you go to investors to say, here's how well I vetted out my idea. Here's the rigor that I applied to building the MVP. JORDYN: Exactly. It's not just about convincing external stakeholders, so that's a key part. You know, maybe it's investors, maybe it's new team members you're looking to hire after the program. It could be anyone. But it's also about convincing yourself. Really, walking down the path of pursuing a startup is not a small undertaking. And we just want to make sure folks are starting with their best foot forward. You know, like Dawn said, let's build the right thing. Let's figure out what that thing is, and then we can think about how to build it right. That's a little quote from a book I really enjoy, by the way. I cannot take credit for that. [laughs] There's this really great book about early-stage validation called The Right It by Alberto Savoia. He was an engineer at Google, started a couple of startups himself, failed in some ways, failed to validate a market opportunity before marching off into building something. And the pain of that caused him to write this book about how to quickly and cheaply validate some market opportunity, market assumptions you might have when you're first starting out. The way he frames that is let's figure out if it's the right it before we build it right. And I just love that book, and I love that framing. You know, if you don't have a market for what you're building, or if they don't understand that they have the pain point you're solving for, it doesn't matter what you build. You got to do that first. And that's really what the focus of this incubator program is. It's that phase of work. Is there a there there? Is there something worth the hard, arduous path of building some software? Is there something there worth walking that path for before you start walking it? VICTORIA: Right. I love that. Well, thank you both so much for coming on and sharing a little bit more about the program. I'm super excited to see what comes out of the first round, and then who gets selected for the second round. So I'm happy to help promote. Any other final takeaways for our listeners today? DAWN: If this sounds intriguing to you, maybe you're at the stage where you're thinking about this process, I definitely encourage people to follow along. We're trying to share as much as we can about this process and this journey for us and our founders. So you can follow along on our blog, on LinkedIn. We're doing a LinkedIn live weekly with the founder in the program. We'll continue to do that with the next founders. And we're really trying to build a community and extend the community, you know, that thoughtbot has built with early-stage founders, so please join us. We'd love to have you. VICTORIA: Wonderful. That's amazing. Thank you both so much. INTRO MUSIC: 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 Lauren Maffeo, Author of Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up. Lauren, thank you for joining us. LAUREN: Thanks so much for having me, Victoria. I'm excited to be here. VICTORIA: Wonderful. I'm excited to dive right into this topic. But first, maybe just tell me what led you to start writing this book? LAUREN: I was first inspired to write this book by my clients, actually. I was working as a service designer at Steampunk, which is a human-centered design firm serving the federal government. I still do work for Steampunk. And a few years ago, I was working with a client who had a very large database containing millions of unique data points going back several centuries. And I realized throughout the course of my discovery process, which is a big part of human-centered design work, that most of their processes for managing the data in this database were purely manual. There was no DevSecOps integrated into their workflows. These workflows often included several people and took up to a week to complete. And this was an organization that had many data points, as mentioned, in its purview. They also had a large team to manage the data in various ways. But they still really struggled with an overall lack of processes. And really, more importantly, they lacked quality standards for data, which they could then automate throughout their production processes. I realized that even when organizations exist to have data in their purview and to share it with their users, that doesn't necessarily mean that they actually have governance principles that they abide by. And so that led me to really consider, more broadly, the bigger challenges that we see with technology like AI, machine learning, large language models. We know now that there is a big risk of bias within these technologies themselves due to the data. And when I dug deeper, first as a research analyst at Gartner and then as a service designer at Steampunk, I realized that the big challenge that makes this a reality is lack of governance. It's not having the quality standards for deciding how data is fit for use. It's not categorizing your data according to the top domains in your organization that produce data. It's lack of clear ownership regarding who owns which data sets and who is able to make decisions about data. It's not having things like a data destruction policy, which shows people how long you hold on to data for. So that knowledge and seeing firsthand how many organizations struggle with that lack of governance that's what inspired me to write the book itself. And I wanted to write it from the lens of a service designer. I have my own bias towards that, given that I am a practicing service designer. But I do believe that data governance when approached through a design thinking lens, can yield stronger results than if it is that top-down IT approach that many organizations use today unsuccessfully. VICTORIA: So let me play that back a little bit. So, in your experience, organizations that struggle to make the most out of their data have an issue with defining the authority and who has that authority to make decisions, and you refer to that as governance. So that when it comes down to it, if you're building things and you want to say, is this ethical? Is this right? Is this secure? Is it private enough? Someone needs to be responsible [laughs] for answering that. And I love that you're bringing this human-centered design approach into it. LAUREN: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I would say that ownership is a big part of data governance. It is one of the most crucial parts. I have a chapter in my book on data stewards, what they are, the roles they play, and how to select them and get them on board with your data governance vision. The main thing I want to emphasize about data stewardship is that it is not just the technical members of your team. Data scientists, data architects, and engineers can all be exceptional data stewards, especially because they work with the data day in and day out. The challenge I see is that these people typically are not very close to the data, and so they don't have that context for what different data points mean. They might not know offhand what the definitions per data piece are. They might not know the format that the data originates in. That's information that people in non-technical roles tend to possess. And so, data stewardship and governance is not about turning your sales director into a data engineer or having them build ETL pipelines. But it is about having the people who know that data best be in positions where they're able to make decisions about it, to define it, to decide which pieces of metadata are attached to each piece of data. And then those standards are what get automated throughout the DevSecOps process to make better life cycles that produce better-quality data faster, at speed with fewer resources. VICTORIA: So, when we talk about authority, what we really mean is, like, who has enough context to make smart decisions? LAUREN: Who has enough context and also enough expertise? I think a big mistake that we as an industry have made with data management is that we have given the responsibility for all data in an organization to one team, sometimes one person. So, typically, what we've done in the past is we've seen all data in an organization managed by IT. They, as a department, make top-down decisions about who has access to which data, what data definitions exist, where the data catalog lives, if it exists in an organization at all. And that creates a lot of blockers for people if you always have to go through one team or person to get permission to use data. And then, on top of that, the IT team doesn't have the context that your subject matter experts do about the data in their respective divisions. And so it really is about expanding the idea of who owns data and who is in a position of authority to make decisions about it by collaborating across silos. This is very challenging work to do. But I would actually say that for smaller organizations, they might lack the resources in, time, and money, and people to do data governance at scale. But what they can do is start embedding data governance as a core principle into the fabric of their organizations. And ultimately, I think that will power them for success in a way that larger organizations were not able to because there is a lot of technical debt out there when it comes to bad data. And one way to avoid that in the future or to at least mitigate it is to establish data governance standards early on. VICTORIA: Talk me through what your approach would be if you were working with an organization who wants to build-in this into the fabric of how they work. What would be your first steps in engaging with them and identifying where they have needs in part of that discovery process? LAUREN: In human-centered design, the discovery process occurs very early in a project. This is where you are working hand in hand with your client to figure out what their core needs are and how you can help them solve those core needs. And this is important to do because it's not always obvious what those needs are. You might get a contract to work on something very specific, whether it's designing the user interface of a database or it's migrating a website. Those are technical challenges to solve. And those are typically the reason why you get contracted to work with your client. But you still have to do quite a bit of work to figure out what the real ask is there and what is causing the need for them to have hired you in the first place. And so, the first thing I would do if I was walking a client through this is I would start by asking who the most technical senior lead in the organization is. And I would ask how they are managing data today. I think it's really important, to be honest about the state of data in your organization today. The work that we do designing data governance is very forward-thinking in a lot of ways, but you need a foundation to build upon. And I think people need to be honest about the state of that foundation in their organization. So the first thing I would do is find that most-senior data leader who is responsible for making decisions about data and owns the data strategy because that person is tasked with figuring out how to use data in a way that is going to benefit the business writ large. And so, data governance is a big part of what they are tasked to do. And so, in the first instance, what I would do is I would host a workshop with the client where I would ask them to do a few things. They would start by answering two questions: What is my company's mission statement, and how do we use data to fulfill that mission statement? These are very baseline questions. And the first one is so obvious and simple that it might be a little bit off-putting because you're tempted to think, as a senior leader, I already know what my company does. Why do I need to answer it like this? And you need to answer it like this because just like we often get contracts to work on particular technical problems, you'd be surprised by how many senior leaders cannot articulate their company's mission statements. They'll talk to you about their jobs, the tools they use to do their jobs, who they work with on a daily basis. But they still aren't ultimately answering the question of how their job, how the technology they use fulfills a bigger organizational need. And so, without understanding what that organizational need is, you won't be able to articulate how data fulfills that mission. And if you're not able to explain how data fulfills your company's mission, I doubt you can explain which servers your data lives on, which file format it needs to be converted to, who owns which data sets, where they originate, what your DevSecOps processes are. So answering those two questions about the company mission and how data is used to fulfill that mission is the first step. The second thing I would do is ask this senior leader, let's say the chief data officer, to define the data domains within their organization. And when we talk about data domains, we are talking about the areas of the business that are the key areas of interest. This can also be the problem spaces that your organization addresses. It also can have a hand in how your organization is designed as is; in other words, who reports to whom? Do you have sales and marketing within one part of the organization, or are they separate? Do you have customer success as its own wing of the organization separate from product? However your organization is architected, you can draw lines between those different teams, departments, and the domains that your organization works in. And then, most importantly, you want to be looking at who leads each domain and has oversight over the data in that domain. This is a really important aspect of the work because, as mentioned, stewards play a really key role in upholding and executing data governance. You need data stewards across non-technical and technical roles. So defining not just what the data domains are but who leads each domain in a senior role is really important to mapping out who your data stewards will be and to architect your first data governance council. And then, finally, the last thing I would have them do in the first instance is map out a business capability map showing not only what their data domains are but then the sub-domains underneath. So, for example, you have sales, and that can be a business capability. But then, within the sales data domain, you're going to have very different types of sales data. You're going to have quarterly sales, bi-annual sales, inbound leads versus outbound leads. You're going to have very different types of data within that sales data domain. And you want to build those out as much as you possibly can across all of your data domains. If you are a small organization, it's common to have about four to six data domains with subdomains underneath, each of those four to six. But it varies according to each startup and organization and how they are structured. Regardless of how your organization is structured, there's always value in doing those three things. So you start by identifying what your organization does and how data fulfills that goal. You define the core data domains in your organization, including who owns each domain. And then, you take that information about data domains, and you create a capability map showing not just your core data domains but the subdomains underneath because you're going to use all of that information to architect a future data governance program based on what you currently have today. VICTORIA: I think that's a great approach, and it makes a lot of sense. Is that kind of, like, the minimum that people should be doing for a data governance program? Like, what's the essentials to do, like, maybe even your due diligence, say, as a health tech startup company? LAUREN: This is the bare minimum of what I think every organization should do. The specifics of that are different depending on industry, depending on company size, organizational structure. But I wrote this book to be a compass that any organization can use. There's a lot of nuance, especially when we get into the production environment an organization has. There's a lot of nuance there depending on tools, all of that. And so I wanted to write a book that anybody could use regardless of industry size, team size, all of that information. I would say that those are the essential first steps. And I do think that is part of the discovery process is figuring out where you stand today, and no matter how ugly it might be. Because, like we've mentioned, there is more data produced on a daily basis than ever before. And you are not going into this data governance work with a clean slate. You already have work in your organization that you do to manage data. And you really need to know where there are gaps so that you can address those gaps. And so, when we go into the production environment and thinking about what you need to do to be managing data for quality on a regular basis, there are a couple of key things. The first is that you need a plan for how you're going to govern data throughout each lifecycle. So you are very likely not using a piece of data once and never again. You are likely using it through several projects. So you always want to have a plan for governance in production that includes policies on data usage, data archiving, and data destruction. Because you want to make sure that you are fulfilling those principles, whatever they are, throughout each lifecycle because you are managing data as a product. And that brings me to the next thing that I would encourage people working in data governance to consider, which is taking the data mesh principle of managing data as a product. And this is a fundamental mind shift from how big data has been managed in the past, where it was more of a service. There are many detriments to that, given the volume of data that exists today and given how much data environments have changed. So, when we think about data mesh, we're really thinking about four key principles. The first is that you want to manage your data according to specific domains. So you want to be creating a cloud environment that really accounts for the nuance of each data domain. That's why it's so important to define what those data domains are. You're going to not just document what those domains are. You're going to be managing and owning data in a domain-specific way. The second thing is managing data as a product. And so, rather than taking the data as a service approach, you have data stewards who manage their respective data as products within the cloud environment. And so then, for instance, rather than using data about customer interactions in a single business context, you can instead use that data in a range of ways across the organization, and other colleagues can use that data as well. You also want to have data available as a self-service infrastructure. This is really important in data mesh. Because it emphasizes keeping all data on a centralized platform that manages your storage, streaming, pipelines, and anything else, and this is crucial because it prevents data from leaving in disparate systems on various servers. And it also erases or eases the need to build integrations between those different systems and databases. And it also gives each data steward a way to manage their domain data from the same source. And then the last principle for data mesh is ecosystem governance. And really, what we're talking about here is reinforcing the data framework and mission statement that you are using to guide all of your work. It's very common in tech for tech startups to operate according to a bigger vision and according to principles that really establish the rationale for why that startup deserves to exist in the world. And likewise, you want to be doing all of your production work with data according to a bigger framework and mission that you've already shared. And you want to make sure that all of your data is formatted, standardized, and discoverable against equal standards that govern the quality of your data. VICTORIA: That sounds like data is your biggest value as a company and your greatest source of liability [laughs] and in many ways. And, I'm curious, you mentioned just data as a product, if you can talk more about how that fits into how company owners and founders should be thinking about data and the company they're building. LAUREN: So that's a very astute comment about data as a liability. That is absolutely true. And that is one of the reasons why governance is not just nice to have. It's really essential, especially in this day and age. The U.S. has been quite lax when it comes to data privacy and protection standards for U.S. citizens. But I do think that that will change over the next several years. I think U.S. citizens will get more data protections. And that means that organizations are going to have to be more astute about tracking their data and making sure that they are using it in appropriate ways. So, when we're talking to founders who want to consider how to govern data as a product, you're thinking about data stewards taking on the role of product managers and using data in ways that benefits not just them and their respective domains but also giving it context and making it available to the wider business in a way that it was not available before. So if you are architecting your data mesh environment in the cloud, what you might be able to do is create various domains that exist on their own little microservice environments. And so you have all of these different domains that exist in one environment, but then they all connect to this bigger data mesh catalog. And from the catalog, that is where your colleagues across the business can access the data in your domain. Now, you don't want to necessarily give free rein for anybody in your organization to get any data at any time. You might want to establish guardrails for who is able to access which data and what those parameters are. And the data as a product mindset allows you to do that because it gives you, as the data steward/pseudo pm, the autonomy to define how and when your data is used, rather than giving that responsibility to a third-party colleague who does not have that context about the data in your domain. VICTORIA: I like that about really giving the people who have the right context the ability to manage their product and their data within their product. That makes a lot of sense to me. 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. VICTORIA: What is it like to really bring in this culture of design-thinking into an organization that's built a product around data? LAUREN: It can be incredibly hard. I have found that folks really vary in their approach to this type of work. I think many people that I talk to have tried doing data governance to some degree in the past, and, for various reasons, it was not successful. So as a result, they're very hesitant to try again. I think also for many technical leaders, if they're in CIO, CDO, CTO roles, they are not used to design thinking or to doing human-centered design work. That's not the ethos that was part of the tech space for a very long time. It was all about the technology, building what you could, experimenting and tinkering, and then figuring out the user part later. And so this is a real fundamental mindset shift to insist on having a vision for how data benefits your business before you start investing money and people into building different data pipelines and resources. It's also a fundamental shift for everyone in an organization because we, in society writ large, are taught to believe that data is the responsibility of one person or one team. And we just can't afford to think like that anymore. There is too much data produced and ingested on a daily basis for it to fall to one person or one team. And even if you do have a technical team who is most adept at managing the cloud environment, the data architecture, building the new models for things like fraud detection, that's all the purview of maybe one team that is more technical. But that does not mean that the rest of the organization doesn't have a part to play in defining the standards for data that govern everything about the technical environment. And I think a big comparison we can make is to security. Many of us… most of us, even if we work in tech, are not cybersecurity experts. But we also know that employees are the number one cause of breaches at organizations. There's no malintent behind that, but people are most likely to expose company data and cause a breach from within the company itself. And so organizations know that they are responsible for creating not just secure technical environments but educating their employees and their workforce on how to be stewards of security. And so, even at my company, we run constant tests to see who is going to be vulnerable to phishing? Who is going to click on malicious links? They run quarterly tests to assess how healthy we are from a cybersecurity perspective. And if you click on a phishing attempt and you fall for it, you are directed to a self-service education video that you have to complete, going over the aspects of this phishing test, what made it malicious. And then you're taught to educate yourself on what to look for in the future. We really need to be doing something very similar with data. And it doesn't mean that you host a two-hour training and then never talk about data again. You really need to look at ways to weave data governance into the fabric of your organization so that it is not disruptive to anybody's day. It's a natural part of their day, and it is part of working at your organization. Part of your organizational goals include having people serve as data stewards. And you emphasize that stewardship is for everyone, not just the people in the technology side of the business. VICTORIA: I love that. And I think there's something to be said for having more people involved in the data process and how that will impact just the quality of your data and the inclusivity of what you're building to bring those perspectives together. LAUREN: I agree. And that's the real goal. And I think this is, again, something that's actually easier for startups to do because startups are naturally more nimble. They find out what works, what doesn't work. They're willing to try things. They have to be willing to try things. Because, to use a really clichéd phrase, if they're not innovating, then they're going to get stale and go out of business. But the other benefit that I think startups have when they're doing this work is the small size. Yes, you don't have the budget or team size of a company like JP Morgan, that is enormous, or a big bank. But you still have an opportunity to really design a culture, an organizational culture that puts data first, regardless of role. And then you can architect the structure of every role according to that vision. And I think that's a really exciting opportunity for companies, especially if they are selling data or already giving data as a product in some way. If they're selling, you know, data as a product services, this is a really great approach and a unique approach to solving data governance and making it everyone's opportunity to grow their own roles and work smarter. VICTORIA: Right. And when it's really the core of your business, it makes sense to pay more attention to that area [laughs]. It's what makes it worthwhile. It's what makes potential investors know that you're a real company who takes things seriously. [laughs] LAUREN: That's true. That's very true. VICTORIA: I'm thinking, what questions...do you have any questions for me? LAUREN: I'm curious to know, when you talk to thoughtbot clients, what are the main aspects of data that they struggle with? I hear a variety of reasons for data struggles when I talk to clients, when I talk to people on the tech side, either as engineers or architects. I'm curious to hear what the thoughtbot community struggles with the most when it comes to managing big data. VICTORIA: I think, in my experience, in the last less than a year that I've been with thoughtbot, one challenge which is sort of related to data...but I think for many small companies or startups they don't really have an IT department per se. So, like, what you mentioned early on in the discovery process as, like, who is the most senior technical person on your team? And that person may have little to no experience managing an IT operations group. I think it's really bringing consulting from the ground up for an organization on IT operations, data management, user and access management. Those types of policies might just be something they hadn't considered before because it's not in their background and experience. But maybe once they've gotten set up, I think the other interesting part that happens is sometimes there's just data that's just not being managed at all. And there are processes and bits and pieces of code in app that no one really knows what they are, who they're used for, [laughs] where the data goes. And then, you know, the connections between data. So everything that you're mentioning that could happen when you don't do data governance, where it can slow down deployment processes. It can mean that you're giving access to people who maybe shouldn't have access to production data. It can mean that you have vulnerabilities in your infrastructure. That means someone could have compromised your data already, and you just don't know about it. Just some of the issues that we see related to data across the spectrum of people in their lifecycle of their startups. LAUREN: That makes total sense, I think, especially when you are in a startup. If you're going by the typical startup model, you have that business-minded founder, and then you likely have a more technical co-founder. But we, I think, make the assumption that if you are, quote, unquote, "technical," you, therefore, know how to do anything and everything about every system, every framework, every type of cloud environment. And we all know that that's just not the case. And so it's easy to try to find the Chief Technology Officer or the Chief Information Officer if one exists and to think, oh, this is the right person for the job. And they might be the most qualified person given the context, but that still doesn't mean that they have experience doing this work. The reality is that very few people today have deep hands-on experience making decisions about data with the volume that we see today. And so it's a new frontier for many people. And then, on top of that, like you said as well, it's really difficult to know where your data lives and to track it. And the amount of work that goes into answering those very basic questions is enormous. And that's why documentation is so important. That's why data lineage in your architecture is so important. It really gives you a snapshot of which data lives where, how it's used. And that is invaluable in terms of reducing technical debt. VICTORIA: I agree. And I wonder if you have any tips for people facilitating conversations in their organization about data governance. What would you tell them to make it less scary and more fun, more appealing to work on? LAUREN: I both love and hate the term data governance. Because it's a word that you say, and whether you are technical or not, many people tune out as soon as they hear it because it is, in a way, a scary word. It makes people think purely of compliance, of being told what they can't do. And that can be a real challenge for folks. So I would say that if you are tasked with making a data governance program across your organization, you have to invest in making it real for people. You have to sell them on stewardship by articulating what folks will gain from serving as stewards. I think that's really critical because we are going to be asking folks to join a cause that they're not going to understand why it affects them or why it benefits them at first. And so it's really your job to articulate not only the benefits to them of helping to set up this data stewardship work but also articulating how data governance will help them get better at their jobs. I also think you have to create a culture where you are not only encouraging people to work across party lines, so to speak, to work across silos but to reward them for doing so. You are, especially in the early months, asking a lot of people who join your data stewardship initiatives and your data governance council you're asking them to build something from the ground up, and that's not easy work. So I think any opportunity you can come up with to reward stewards in the form of bonuses or in terms of giving them more leeway to do their jobs more of a title bump than they might have had otherwise. Giving them formal recognition for their contributions to data governance is really essential as well. Because then they see that they are rewarded for contributing to the thought leadership that helps the data governance move forward. VICTORIA: I'm curious, what is your favorite way to be rewarded at work, Lauren? LAUREN: So I am a words person. When we talk about love languages, one of them is words of affirmation. And I would say that is the best way to quote, unquote, "reward me." I save emails and screenshots of text messages and emails that have really meant a lot to me. If someone sends me a handwritten card that really strikes a chord, I will save that card for years. My refrigerator is filled with holiday cards and birthday cards, even from years past. And so any way to recognize people for the job they're doing and to let someone know that they're seen, and their work is seen and valued really resonates with me. I think this is especially important in remote environments because I love working from home, and I am at home alone all day. And so, especially if you are the only person of your kind, of your role on your team, it's very easy to feel insular and to wonder if you're hitting the mark, if you're doing a good job. I think recognition, whether verbally or on Slack, of a job well done it really resonates with me. And that's a great way to feel rewarded. VICTORIA: I love that. And being fully remote with thoughtbot, I can feel that as well. We have a big culture of recognizing people. At least weekly, we do 15Five as a tool to kind of give people high-fives across the company. LAUREN: Yep, Steampunk does...we use Lattice. And people can submit praise and recognition for their colleagues in Lattice. And it's hooked up to Slack. And so then, when someone submits positive feedback or a kudos to a colleague in Lattice, then everyone sees it in Slack. And I think that's a great way to boost morale and give people a little visibility that they might not have gotten otherwise, especially because we also do consulting work. So we are knee-deep in our projects on a daily basis, and we don't always see or know what our colleagues are working on. So little things like that go a long way towards making people feel recognized and valued as part of a bigger company. But I'm also curious, Victoria, what's your favorite way to get rewarded and recognized at work? VICTORIA: I think I also like the verbal. I feel like I like giving high-fives more than I like receiving them. But sometimes also, like, working at thoughtbot, there are just so many amazing people who help me all throughout the day. I start writing them, and then I'm like, well, I have to also thank this person, and then this person. And then I just get overwhelmed. [laughs] So I'm trying to do more often so I don't have a backlog of them throughout the week and then get overwhelmed on Friday. LAUREN: I think that's a great way to do it, and I think it's especially important when you're in a leadership role. Something that I'm realizing more and more as I progress in my career is that the more senior you are, the more your morale and attitude sets the tone for the rest of the team. And that's why I think if you are in a position to lead data governance, your approach to it is so crucial to success. Because you really have to get people on board with something that they might not understand at first, that they might resent it first. This is work that seems simple on the surface, but it's actually very difficult. The technology is easy. The people are what's hard. And you really have to come in, I think, emphasizing to your data stewards and your broader organization, not just what governance is, because, frankly, a lot of people don't care. But you really have to make it tangible for them. And you have to help them see that governance affects everyone, and everyone can have a hand in co-creating it through shared standards. I think there's a lot to be learned from the open-source community in this regard. The open-source community, more than any other I can think of, is the model of self-governance. It does not mean that it's perfect. But it does mean that people from all roles, backgrounds have a shared mission to build something from nothing and to make it an initiative that other people will benefit from. And I think that attitude is really well-positioned for success with data governance. VICTORIA: I love that. And great points all around on how data governance can really impact an organization. Are there any final takeaways for our listeners? LAUREN: The biggest takeaway I would say is to be thoughtful about how you roll out data governance in your organization. But don't be scared if your organization is small. Again, it's very common for people to think my business is too small to really implement governance. We don't have the budget for, you know, the AWS environment we might need. Or we don't have the right number of people to serve as stewards. We don't actually have many data domains yet because we're so new. And I would say start with what you have. If you are a business in today's day and age, I guarantee that you have enough data in your possession to start building out a data governance program that is thoughtful and mission-oriented. And I would really encourage everyone to do that, regardless of how big your organization is. And then the other takeaway I would say is, if you remember nothing else about data governance, I would say to remember that you automate your standards. Your standards for data quality, data destruction, data usage are not divorced from your technical team's production environments; it's the exact opposite. Your standards should govern your environment, and they should be a lighthouse when you are doing that work. And so you always want to try to integrate your standards into your production environment, into your ETL pipelines, into your DevSecOps. That is where the magic happens. Keeping them siloed won't work. And so I'd love for people, if you really enjoyed this episode and the conversation resonated with you, too, get a copy of the book. It is my first book. And I was really excited to work with the Pragmatic Programmers on it. So if readers go to pragprog.com, they can get a copy of the book directly through the publisher. But the book is also available at Target, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and local bookstores. So I am very grateful as a first-time author for any and all support. And I would really also love to hear from thoughtbot clients and podcast listeners what you thought of the book because version two is not out of the question. VICTORIA: Well, looking forward to it. Thank you again so much, Lauren, for joining 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. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. 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: Lauren Maffeo.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

Jasper (William) Cartwright is a Freelance Producer, Podcaster, Actor, and Motion Capture & Performance Capture Performer. Chad talks to Jasper about his podcast Three Black Halflings, which is committed to discussing diversity and inclusion within fantasy, sci-fi, and nerdy culture from the perspective of three people of color, what it's like to be in the space, and why representation is super important. Follow Jasper (William) Cartwright on LinkedIn or Twitter. Check out his website at jasperwcartwright.com. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: Hey there. It's your host Victoria. And I'm here today with Dawn Delatte and Jordyn Bonds from our Ignite team. We are thrilled to announce the summer 2023 session of our new incubator program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our 8-week program. We'll help you validate the market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence towards an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. Dawn and Jordyn, thank you for joining and sharing the news with me today. JORDYN: Thanks for having us. DAWN: Yeah, glad to be here. VICTORIA: So, tell me a little bit more about the incubator program. This will be your second session, right? JORDYN: Indeed. We are just now wrapping up the first session. We had a really great 8 weeks, and we're excited to do it again. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And I think we're going to have the person from your program on a Giant Robots episode soon. JORDYN: Wonderful. VICTORIA: Maybe you can give us a little preview. What were some of your main takeaways from this first round? JORDYN: You know, as ever with early-stage work, it's about identifying your best early adopter market and user persona, and then learning as much as you possibly can about them to inform a roadmap to a product. VICTORIA: What made you decide to start this incubator program this year with thoughtbot? DAWN: We had been doing work with early-stage products and founders, as well as some innovation leads or research and development leads in existing organizations. We had been applying a lot of these processes, like the customer discovery process, Product Design Sprint process to validate new product ideas. And we've been doing that for a really long time. And we've also been noodling on this idea of exploring how we might offer value even sooner to clients that are maybe pre-software product idea. Like many of the initiatives at thoughtbot, it was a little bit experimental for us. We decided to sort of dig into better understanding that market, and seeing how the expertise that we had could be applied in the earlier stage. It's also been a great opportunity for our team to learn and grow. We had Jordyn join our team as Director of Product Strategy. Their experience with having worked at startups and being an early-stage startup founder has been so wonderful for our team to engage with and learn from. And we've been able to offer that value to clients as well. VICTORIA: I love that. So it's for people who have identified a problem, and they think they can come up with a software solution. But they're not quite at the point of being ready to actually build something yet. Is that right? DAWN: Yeah. We've always championed the idea of doing your due diligence around validating the right thing to build. And so that's been a part of the process at thoughtbot for a really long time. But it's always been sort of in the context of building your MVP. So this is going slightly earlier with that idea and saying, what's the next right step for this business? It's really about understanding if there is a market and product opportunity, and then moving into exploring what that opportunity looks like. And then validating that and doing that through user research, and talking to customers, and applying early product and business strategy thinking to the process. VICTORIA: Great. So that probably sets you up for really building the right thing, keeping your overall investment costs lower because you're not wasting time building the wrong thing. And setting you up for that due diligence when you go to investors to say, here's how well I vetted out my idea. Here's the rigor that I applied to building the MVP. JORDYN: Exactly. It's not just about convincing external stakeholders, so that's a key part. You know, maybe it's investors, maybe it's new team members you're looking to hire after the program. It could be anyone. But it's also about convincing yourself. Really, walking down the path of pursuing a startup is not a small undertaking. And we just want to make sure folks are starting with their best foot forward. You know, like Dawn said, let's build the right thing. Let's figure out what that thing is, and then we can think about how to build it right. That's a little quote from a book I really enjoy, by the way. I cannot take credit for that. [laughs] There's this really great book about early-stage validation called The Right It by Alberto Savoia. He was an engineer at Google, started a couple of startups himself, failed in some ways, failed to validate a market opportunity before marching off into building something. And the pain of that caused him to write this book about how to quickly and cheaply validate some market opportunity, market assumptions you might have when you're first starting out. The way he frames that is let's figure out if it's the right it before we build it right. And I just love that book, and I love that framing. You know, if you don't have a market for what you're building, or if they don't understand that they have the pain point you're solving for, it doesn't matter what you build. You got to do that first. And that's really what the focus of this incubator program is. It's that phase of work. Is there a there there? Is there something worth the hard, arduous path of building some software? Is there something there worth walking that path for before you start walking it? VICTORIA: Right. I love that. Well, thank you both so much for coming on and sharing a little bit more about the program. I'm super excited to see what comes out of the first round, and then who gets selected for the second round. So I'm happy to help promote. Any other final takeaways for our listeners today? DAWN: If this sounds intriguing to you, maybe you're at the stage where you're thinking about this process, I definitely encourage people to follow along. We're trying to share as much as we can about this process and this journey for us and our founders. So you can follow along on our blog, on LinkedIn. We're doing a LinkedIn live weekly with the founder in the program. We'll continue to do that with the next founders. And we're really trying to build a community and extend the community, you know, that thoughtbot has built with early-stage founders, so please join us. We'd love to have you. VICTORIA: Wonderful. That's amazing. Thank you both so much. INTRO MUSIC: 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 Jasper William-Cartwright, Game Master for hire, Actor, Creative Consultant, Podcaster, Co-Host of The Performance Capture Podcast, and Co-Host of one of my favorite podcasts, Three Black Halflings. Jasper, thank you so much for joining me. JASPER: Hey, no, thank you so much for having me. And, man, with that intro, I almost feel... CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: I almost felt...I was like, oh, I feel cool. Those are some fun things. [laughs] CHAD: I almost started with a Heeello robots. JASPER: [laughs] CHAD: But it doesn't really have the alliteration that hello Halflings does, so... JASPER: Sure. I don't even know how the hello Halfling started. Like, I'm going to have to go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes again because I genuinely have no idea how it happened. And now it's gotten to a point where it's unyieldy. Every episode, I feel like I have to get a little bit further and a little bit higher. And I'm like, this can't be good for people's ears, so, [laughs] yeah. CHAD: So I know what the show is, but in your own words, what is the Three Black Halflings Podcast? JASPER: The Three Black Halflings Podcast is a show which is committed to talking about diversity and inclusion within fantasy and sci-fi, and sort of anything that nerdy culture touches, we try to cover it from the perspective of three people of color, what it's like to be in the space, and why representation is super important. CHAD: I want to talk about the origin of the show and how you got started. But I was introducing someone to the show previously because I try to tell everybody I can about the show. [laughter] I've noticed in the beginning when you started, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit, like, we can dive into this stuff and educate people. And over time, you've introduced actual play where you're playing Dungeons & Dragons on the show. And I think it's changed a little bit, and it's still great. But I always also recommend people go back to the beginning. And I think a lot of the episodes are sort of timeless. They're not about the news of the day. They're diving into particular topics and discussing either the impact or the problems that they have or how to play them better. JASPER: Yeah, definitely. I think you're absolutely right. It's been a weird thing where because we've become more popular and we're kind of more in tune with the TTRPG space; I think that typically what has happened for us is that we've spent less time really digging around for, you know, what's some stuff... all the things that we can explore. And we're a lot more kind of like, what's the beat of the moment? If that makes sense. And I think that's why we haven't done as many episodes like that. And also, just because we...I just think that the audience is changing. And the way that people consume our content is changing. It tends to go in cycles for us where we'll do a batch of very topical episodes then we'll do more really nitty gritty kind of game design episodes. And so I think a lot of it does depend on the sort of moment, what's going on. There are still a bunch of episodes that we have planned. And obviously, we have the Halfling University series which is coming out currently, which is a more retrospective look back on poignant things throughout the history of nerd [inaudible 3:11] and nerd culture. So I like to think there's a good variety on there. CHAD: Obviously the show, especially I think when it started, had a very heavy focus on Dungeons & Dragons, which I love. People who know me [laughs] know that I love Dungeons & Dragons. JASPER: [laughs] CHAD: And I've been playing it for a long time. And as someone playing it since I was a teenager, I didn't realize until I got older and learned a lot more...and certainly, the show went a long way to sort of educating me about how not only the origins of some of the tropes of fantasy and Dungeons & Dragons but just in general how to have inclusive play. When you're playing with a group of people, and to bring it back to a non-Dungeons & Dragons specific thing, this is true, I think, in any group of people. When you're surrounded by a group of people who look the same as you, are from the same area, have the same experiences, you don't realize what's missing from that table, and that's true in our companies, and it's true around a TTRPG table too. JASPER: Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that's the same for a lot of us. I remember doing a big post after I'd been doing the show for about six months, and it was just like, I was very open when I started the show that a lot of what I wanted to talk about I wanted it to be a safe space for me to explore some of these things. Because I grew up in a very White middle-class area, and therefore I had a lot of the blind spots that I would see my friends of color call out my White friends for or whatever it may be. And so I was like, okay, it's time for me to educate myself. And I wanted to do it in a safe space, in a place where I could learn from great people. Obviously, we had other co-hosts of the show who are fantastic people, but we had things like sensitivity consultants and people like that come on. I always like to shout out James Mendez Hodes, who, if you ever want to do a bit of a deep dive into fantasy...and you said, Chad, the historical basis for some of the stuff that we use, and he wrote some really incredible stuff. And so a lot of it was about me trying to educate myself as well and kind of put in that work. I thought there was a value there in doing it in an open forum in sort of saying, hey, I'm a person of color, and I'm also trying to figure this out, you know what I mean? CHAD: Mm-hmm. JASPER: Because I think that a lot of the time, the barrier for anyone who doesn't belong to a minority group is like, oh, man, I don't want to burden someone else with my own understanding of this thing, and I don't want to ask the wrong questions. Or maybe I don't even know where to begin in educating myself. And so there was something about the three of us and me particularly kind of being very open about the fact that we were learning about this too and that there might be things that...mistakes or things might slightly be out of place but that we have that openness and willingness to learn. And I think that in today's internet culture where everyone is so kind of reaction-based, it just felt important to me that we had a space where we could sit in and talk about stuff and really be open with each other in a way that we knew we'd all be able to shake hands and be like, cool, that was a good session or whatever [laughs] it was today, and not be like, I hate you, you know what I mean? Because someone had made a mistake, or misspoke, or something like that. And I think you're absolutely right. It's something I've started to do a bit more of recently, which is doing diversity and inclusion talks and coaching for companies because I think a lot of the lessons that I've learned through doing this show, especially around things like language and how you set up a work environment to suit people of color and more generally, minorities, it's a slightly continuous pursuit in the sense that you always have to be kind of open and learning. And I think also it provides a...what I think is best about it is that it provides such richness to your work environment. We always say on Three Black Halflings that we want you to take these things and use them to enhance your game. Like you're saying, if you have the same people with the same experiences all the time and that's all you ever hear, then, of course, you're going to get a pretty one-sided experience. And then, if you expand that out to include people from halfway across the world who have a very different experience, they're going to see things differently. And I can almost guarantee there'll be a problem that you and your team have been stuck on for like months, and someone from a different perspective will come in and be like, boom, there's the problem, or that's how we get around it because they have a different frame of reference to you. And so I always try to...it sounds really awful to say sell it, [laughs] you know, not trying to sell diversity and inclusion, but I always want to try and go further by saying it's not just about getting different faces in the door. It's about enriching the work that you do and allowing your team to do the best work that they can. Just the quantity of difference between the kinds of things like games that I used to run, you know, to link it back to Dungeons & Dragons, versus the games that I run now, just having had this wealth of influence from other people and different experiences is incredible. And I think it holds true for every element of my work. So I work as a producer a lot in lots of creative fields as opposed to just podcasting. And it's improved tenfold just by having a diverse group of people that I draw from their experiences in my pursuits. So I think it makes a big difference. CHAD: I think it's the idea that you wanted a safe space, and so you created a public podcast on the internet. [laughter] JASPER: Yeah, I can see how that sounds now. [laughter] CHAD: I assume that you've had to navigate being in public spaces talking about diversity, inclusion. I'm sure that that has been difficult at times. JASPER: Yeah, for sure. I think just to clarify that as well, [laughs] because I am definitely aware of how it sounds, I've always been a very, like, I don't care attitude, you know what I mean? CHAD: Yeah. JASPER: In the sense that I felt like I needed what I was going to make, if that makes sense. What, I guess, I meant by a safe space is I wanted people to have the safe space of listening to it. I was getting the safe space as far as I was concerned because podcasts aren't a reactionary medium, which is lovely. So thank God your audience isn't sat here just saying everything that you said wrong and correcting you. People are probably shouting at me for stuff that I've said already on this episode. [chuckles] So it's definitely a fine line, like you said, to put something out on the internet. It's a very, very public thing to do. But it definitely just felt like, for me, creating somewhere where people could just disappear a little bit and encounter these things in a way where they're not going to be called out, or they're not going to be kind of threatened. There's no risk of cancellation or whatever if you say the wrong thing or whatever it is. It felt important. And yeah, we've had to deal with...I will say this; it's kind of tricky to sum up the things that we've dealt with because I think a lot of stuff is still so systemic in the sense that just even down to the opportunities that you get and things like that where you kind of go like, huh, they started in this space like two months ago, and they have twice the followers we do. And they're getting loads of money for doing these streams. [laughs] And you're going to go, like, hold on, what's going on here? CHAD: Yeah, there are three people on this show. They have ten times the Patreons that we do. [laughter] JASPER: Yeah, exactly. CHAD: Why might that be? [laughter] JASPER: Yeah, exactly. Exactly that. And that's one side of it. And then, to be honest, the most it's happened...and this is quite a recent thing, which I don't even think we've really spoken about on the show was the reaction to the...so for anyone who doesn't know Dungeons & Dragons, there was a recent controversy where Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast threatened to repeal part of the license, which allowed creators to freely kind of use elements, not all of them, but some elements of the Dungeons & Dragons game and the Dungeons & Dragons IP for content basically. And they wanted to repeal it, and they wanted to start bringing in more checks and balances in terms of what you could and couldn't do. And they wanted to start taking cuts of the profits and all this kind of thing. And anyway, the reaction was, as you can probably imagine, not great. Us content creators are ostensibly the lifeblood of this game, especially in terms of its online presence. So we ended up getting the opportunity to interview one of the executive producers at Wizards of the Coast, and we put it on our YouTube. And it's hilariously one of the most viewed pieces of content that the Three Black Halflings has, full stop. And the reaction is so strange because you have people that get super angry at this guy for being corporate, and this and that, and the other. And we were like, okay, that's fine. So that was the first wave of reaction. Then it was like, he's a racist against White people. And we were like, whoa, okay. And then it turned into you're racist because you didn't call him out for being racist against White people. And then, eventually, I think it just found its way to the trolls who are now just being openly racist about it. So it's a very strange dynamic of seeing that play out in terms of it literally depending on the amount of people that listened to it, do you know what I mean? It didn't hit troll numbers yet, like; it needed to be more popular to hit troll numbers. So part of me does wonder if we just haven't quite got to peak troll numbers [laughter] with the main podcast. I'm sort of readying myself with a spear and a shield, so I'm like, okay, trolls are coming. CHAD: It's like a double-edged sword. You want to be more popular but at the same time, hmm. Part of what I'm getting at is I think the work you do, even if you take sort of systemic racism out of it, the reaction to diversity and inclusion topics out of it, it's not easy to be an independent content creator, then you add that on to it. So how do you keep going? You've been doing it for three years now. What's your day-to-day like? How do you keep going at it? JASPER: I mean, the rewards are just huge. I got to go to the Dungeons & Dragons premiere the other day. I went to a party in the Tower of London and had people coming up to me. Everyone knew who I was at the Tower of London at a party in the Tower of London. And when I say Tower of London, I want to clarify that it wasn't a function room attached to the Tower of London. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: We were in the Tower of London. I was having champagne, sipping it next to Henry VIII's armor. CHAD: [laughs] Amazing. JASPER: It was absolutely wild and being there and people coming up to me and being like, "We love what Three Black Halflings does. We think it's a really important voice in the community. And you guys absolutely like..." you know, because I was sort of like, oh God, I can't believe we're here or whatever. And people would be like, "No, no, you absolutely deserve to be here. It's so important that you guys are here." So I think that has a huge impact. People in the community, the way that we've been embraced there's so many shows and so many people who are creating content that are working so hard who don't have nearly the platform that we have. And I think that is, A, a testament to us and the hard work that we put in. But it's also a testament to just how important what we're doing within the community is. And I still don't really think there is a facsimile for Three Black Halflings in the industry in the sense that we're a talk show. We talk about heavy topics a lot of the time, but we do it with a smile on our face. And we try to laugh as much as humanly possible, you know what I mean? Because the whole premise of this show was that Black joy can be a form of protest. So we wanted to be like, hey, we can talk about serious stuff without having to cry and feel crushingly horrible about it, you know. [laughs] And I think I guess that's how I feel whenever I feel like I want to cry or feel crushingly horrible about my workload or how hard it is to make the show is that I go, this is kind of the point, you know what I mean? This is why we got into it because I think that this is going to make it easier for someone else to do the same thing or someone else do something even better, and that, for me, is incredibly rewarding. But I will caveat all of that by saying we've started to generate some money through ad revenue and Patreon, everything like that. And it's actually...this show has given me the opportunity to leave my full-time day job, which was still kind of creative. I was working in animation before this. And I loved that job, but now I get to be my own boss. And it's been a really steep learning curve learning how to do work-life balance when you're your own boss because you're like, I could really disrespect my time here, you know what I mean? [laughter] I can get a lot done today. And I go, no, I have to spend time with my fiancée. I have to eat food. I have to sleep. I have to drink water. I think a lot of the process has been about that. And I think, especially recently, I've gotten much better at kind of giving myself that work-life balance, and that makes it a lot easier for me to carry on. Because I feel like we've gotten to a point where I can be honest with the community as well and say, "Hey, we're having a late episode this week because there are some kinks with the edit," or something. [laughs] And people are just like, "Yeah, it's fine." So I was actually having a consultancy session for someone yesterday. And one of the big things I kept saying to them was, as a content creator, you have to realize the world is not going to crash and burn if you don't hold the standards that you've set for yourself. Because the chances are your audience has much, much lower expectations, and that's not because they don't think you can do it. It's just because they understand that you're human, and they want you to do well, you know what I mean? So if ever I feel like, oh no, Three Black Halflings has really messed up, I'm like, this episode sounds terrible. And we put it out and, ugh, and I'm there twisting myself into knots and making myself feel horrible. And then I go to the Discord, and everyone's like, "Oh, that sounded a bit janky. Oh, well, I'm sure they'll sort it out." [laughs] It's just like, it's absolutely fine. So taking pressure off of yourself, I think, is something that I think is really important if you're trying to pursue, especially if you're trying to start out in pursuit of something like this because, yeah, it's super easy to drown yourself [laughs] in all of the kind of stress and anxiety about putting content out. CHAD: You mentioned ads, and you mentioned Patreon. I think it was...was it last year that you joined a podcast network? JASPER: Ooh, it would have been a year before. CHAD: A year. JASPER: So I've been with Headgum, I think, for nearly two years now. CHAD: Wow. What sort of prompted that, and what does being part of a network give you as a podcast? JASPER: Hell yeah. Joining a network ostensibly is just like joining a kind of family of other shows. I guess the closest equivalent really is sort of having your show picked up by Netflix or a broadcaster or something like that. It's sort of like you're bringing your show to that family. And then the most common thing...every network is obviously slightly different and will have different kinds of support structures that they offer certain shows depending on the money they generate, all that kind of thing. But the most common one is effectively; you are now in a group that can all support each other and can all benefit each other by doing ad swaps because ad swaps typically is the absolute best way to improve podcast performance, mostly just because the user journey is super simple. It's like, hey, do you like the sound of this podcast? Well, the link to it is in your description. You have to click twice. You have to go into the description, click on that link, and then hit subscribe, and you're done. That's all you have to do, and it will be there. And you know it'll automatically tee up in your feed and all that kind of stuff. So things like pod swaps and everything like that are by far the most effective for spreading the word about your show. And it also just helps you really hit specific target audiences where you go; we have great metrics that we can see of like, the average age of our listeners, how they identify gender-wise, music they listen to typically, what the average Three Black Halflings listens to. I think when you roll all of that information together as a part of a network, you have a huge bank of data, which they can then use to kind of market you in the best way and push you out in the best way. And then, on top of that, most networks will have some sort of ad revenue like sort of system or tech, I guess, is probably the best way of putting it. And certainly, for some networks, they almost run like tech companies, how I imagine tech companies run. You're probably about to tell me, "A lot better." [laughs] CHAD: Don't worry about it. [laughs]. JASPER: But, for instance, Headgum has Gumball. So Gumball is their ad sales sort of site, which has software which allows you to basically...everyone can go, and you can book ads just by looking at the podcast, seeing how many downloads it has; again, it has a breakdown of demographics and things like that that you can look at to see if that will marry up with whatever product you're pushing out. And then that will automatically set up a prompt for me to then read the script, upload it, and then that will put a dynamic ad in the middle of an episode, however many episodes until a certain amount of impressions are delivered. So, again, that will be very unique and different depending on which network you join. But ostensibly, I'd say those are the two main things is pooling of resources amongst a family of different podcasts and then some sort of promise of ad revenue or ad sales. Most of them also have an ad sales team where they'll go and hunt out more specific spots for your show. So, for instance, we just got sponsored by, I think it was Penguin or maybe Random House. Actually, maybe it's Random House who are publishing three little additional books to go in and around the Dungeons & Dragons movie. So we just did a little ad for them. And that was, again, the sales team kind of going out and being like, oh, we can see that you're looking for advertising places. Why don't you come and advertise on this Dungeons & Dragons podcast? [laughs] So yeah, stuff like that, I think. Those were, I'd say, the main areas, and then it'll kind of depend...some podcast networks will help with editing. They'll have almost like a house style. So they'll sort of...they'll say, oh, we'll do the editing for you because we want to marry up all the shows so that they have a similar sound CHAD: Is Headgum doing some editing for you and not on other episodes, or…? JASPER: No. Headgum pretty much does...one of the best things [laughs] about it is we have an incredible sound designer; shout out to Daniel. He's actually one of the sound designers of God of War, if you can believe that. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: He's won several awards for sound design. He basically has almost like a little side hustle, which is him and a group of his friends who do podcast editing for Headgum. He does our main shows and our actual play shows. They were like, "Oh yeah, they can help you out with your actual play shows." And then me, as the incredibly stressed-out producer that was also having to listen to multiple hours of my own voice a week, went, "What about the main show as well?" CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: And they were like, "Yeah, fine." [laughter] I was like, "Thank you," [laughs] because I can't bear listening to myself. I don't mind editing, and I'm not bad at it. But listening to my own voice is not on my list of to-dos. [laughs] CHAD: It sounds like, overall, that being part of a network has been positive for you. JASPER: Yeah, hugely. CHAD: That's awesome. 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. CHAD: Let's talk about...I'm making the assumption...I didn't dwell too much at the beginning of the episode that people understand what Dungeons & Dragons is, but maybe that's too big of an assumption. But it just seems so much more popular now [laughs] than it ever had before. So I feel like I can at least say Dungeons & Dragons to people, and people are like, even if I don't actually know what it's like to play, I know what it is, at least now. [laughs] JASPER: Yeah, yeah, you got an idea of what it is. Yeah, for sure. [laughs] CHAD: But let's maybe, at this point, take a little bit of a step back. And Dungeons & Dragons is more popular than it has ever been before. I think that that's really exciting for creators like you because it must feel like there's more opportunity than ever. JASPER: Yes, yeah, absolutely. And I think that...so this actually, I think really ties into something that I've been doing a little bit of research on, which is...I can't say too much at this point, but I'm putting together a convention. Part of the idea behind this convention was that I've noticed there's a really big trend towards experience-based entertainment. We love movies. We love going out to bowling, all that kind of stuff. But real full immersion-based experiences, I think, are...post-lockdown, everyone's like, yes, give me all of that. I've been cooped up in a house. I want to be whisked away as far away as possible. And so I do think that is part of the reason why Dungeons & Dragons has started to become even organically more and more popular. Because I just think the idea that instead of, I don't know, just sitting around on a Friday with some friends talking, or just watching a movie, or whatever it may be, that you can kind of with your friends go off and take part in something that feels epic and larger than life and really allows you to abandon for just a couple of hours some of the strains and pressures on your life. I think, again, post-lockdown, that just feels like such an appetizing thing [laughs] to be able to do. And I just think with then the general acceptance of nerdiness as mainstream culture; people are just a lot more willing to be like, well, if I'm going to watch a movie with a dude who has a suit made entirely of iron and says really corny lines and shoots laser beams out of his chest, I probably could be okay with pretending to be a goblin for half an hour. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: Whereas I think before, people would have been really like, no, no, no, we don't do that. I only watch, I don't know, Kubrick movies or something. Do you know what I mean? CHAD: Yeah. JASPER: Like, that's their form of entertainment. CHAD: Yeah, that trend really resonates with me. Even before the pandemic, escape rooms and that kind of thing were becoming really popular. JASPER: Yes. CHAD: I mean, there are escape rooms everywhere now. [laughs] JASPER: One of the things that I found out as I was coming up with the idea for this convention...I was talking to a buddy of mine, and he basically owns an event space, which has a cinema in it, and it also has a little theater. And he ran over; I think it was last summer, a "Guardians of the Galaxy" themed kind of experience where you walked around, and you got to meet some of the characters and stuff like that. And then next door in that building, they were showing the "Thor: Love and Thunder" movie. And despite the fact that the experience was three times as expensive as the "Thor: Love and Thunder" movie at the cinema, that experience sold out almost instantly. And the "Thor: Love and Thunder" movie was struggling to get people on the seats; you know what I mean? But I was like, but "Thor: Love and Thunder" is a Guardians film, you know what I mean? All of them are there. It's ostensibly a "Guardians of the Galaxy" movie, and yet people are going to see a "Guardians of the Galaxy" experience, which I don't even know if it was like an official thing...rather than seeing the movie of it. So I just think, yeah, like you said, this trend for escape rooms and all that kind of stuff just really resonated with me that I was like, yeah, that's...like, if I had to choose, if I was in a privileged position and could afford to go to that thing, I'd be like, pssh, yeah, I'd probably go to the "Guardians of the Galaxy" experience rather than just, eh, I don't have to watch the film. I could probably get it on Disney Plus in like two weeks, so...[laughs] CHAD: Yeah. Have you ever been to a secret cinema in London? JASPER: Yes. I did "Top Gun: Maverick" Up here in Manchester. CHAD: [laughs] I went to the "Star Wars" one a few years ago. JASPER: Nice. How was that? CHAD: I guess, actually, it would have been five years ago. It was amazing. So for people who don't know, secret cinema is you're ostensibly going to see a movie, [laughs] but they build up an entire experience with improv actors themed to the movie that you're seeing, and you don't know where it is. It's technically a secret. They send you the location of it. You go there, and you're whisked away into the world of the movie. JASPER: Yeah, I did a "28 Days Later" one. [laughter] Yeah, that was one... CHAD: Horrifying. JASPER: Yeah, that one was a little much, honestly. [laughs] I was like, I love this movie, but I don't feel safe sat in this cinema [laughs] because I've just walked through three fields filled with zombies and I ran for half of it. [laughs] So, I don't know, I was like, my heart was still racing as I sat down to watch the movie, which I think in many ways, did enhance the experience because I was sort of looking over my shoulder for half of it. [laughs] CHAD: And when people who haven't ever actually seen Dungeons & Dragons played before, I often describe it as we're just telling a story together. Or maybe if they're a little less intimidated by improv because some people are into it, it's like an improv show where you can basically do anything you want or say what you want to do. And then you roll the dice to see whether it actually happens or not. And that's really at the base level all it is. JASPER: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. [laughs] CHAD: And I think you're right; people are more open to that idea of an experience or a game like that than they ever have been before. JASPER: Yeah, for sure. There are so many things that you can kind of fall back on if you're not someone who is super comfortable with improvising or whatever. And I think that's what the game provides is it provides enough structure for you to then just kind of, honestly, because, you know, you do just kind of forget that you're doing it really after about 10 minutes of slight awkwardness when you start with a new group because the game provides you with almost like the fuel. You'll be like, oh, I don't know if I can do this or whatever. And it's like, okay, just go ahead and roll me a d20. And then you roll in that 20, and everyone loses their minds around the table. CHAD: [chuckles] JASPER: And suddenly you're like, okay, I'm in this. I'm the barbarian, and I'm getting angry. And I run in there, and I kick the door down, you know what I mean? And suddenly, you're sat there watching this person who was super nervous five seconds ago stood up on their feet screaming at me as the DM telling me how they eviscerate all these bad guys. So yeah, definitely, the game provides a very good structure for that. CHAD: With this...you mentioned building this experience for a convention. Do you want to talk more about that? JASPER: Yes, I can talk about it in very broad terms. I just can't go into the specifics of when, and the whos, and stuff like that. But ostensibly, the idea was to do a...I got really interested by this idea of reclaiming fantasy. It was kind of like this thing that kept going around in my head. And I was like; I wonder if there's a way that we could see our...again, specifically geared towards minority groups. It's what I know well and a community that I want to continue to serve. And I was like; I wonder if we can create a space where it's specifically for them, explicitly for them in the sense that I think there are a lot of spaces that are explicitly for non-minority groups, you know what I mean? I think a lot of the traditional conventions typically are those things. But I think we get very afraid of creating something where we...people with the purse strings usually go, oh no, you can't exclude people, and I'm like, we're not excluding people. We're just making it very specifically for someone else. And a lot of it was...it then came from the idea of seeing "The Rings of Power" trailer get released. And then the thing that's trending on Twitter is like; there were no black elves, not yes, we've got a black elf, you know what I mean? And I suddenly was like, I really want us to have a space where we can be celebrated in fantasy, et cetera, without having to have that caveated as like seeing it as some sort of diversity hire or whatever. Anyway, this snowballed through going to things like D&D in a Castle and combining it with this idea of reclaiming fantasy of, like, what if we did it inside of like a stately home or a castle? What if we made this event and we really made it that you as a minority can be there and celebrated in the space where you've got, like, Baron, what's his name, on the wall? CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: And it's this White dude from 500 years ago, do you know what I mean? And it's like, I just really loved the idea of a room full of minorities really feeling welcomed and like they were a part of this space, and just realizing minorities we've been around forever, you know what I mean? [laughs] There's never been a point in human history where people with Brown skin haven't been here. We've always been here. So I guess it was just about really realizing that when we sat there watching, I don't know, Pirates of the Caribbean, and there's like two Black people in the swamp. It's like, no, no, no, no, we would have been everywhere, [laughs] do you know what I mean? We would have been everywhere. And we can be celebrated in these spaces too. These don't have to just be White spaces, and they don't just have to be for a very specific group that they have been traditionally for in the past. [laughs] And yeah, the reaction to this sort of pitch, if you will, was overwhelmingly positive. CHAD: That's good. JASPER: And it really took me by surprise, actually, because I was sort of thinking, yeah, I'm really sticking it to them with this pitch. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: And then everyone was like, "Yeah, we love it." And I was like, oh, right. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: Okay, yeah. [laughs] I was sort of doing that, and I had to climb down a little bit and be like, okay, awesome. Let's talk about it. What I think is really exciting about that it's just that I really think that conventions and everything can do more in terms of delivering experience. Like myself and my fiancée went to Comic-Con a couple of years ago. And I remember her feeling like, oh, it was just a little bit flat. And it was just sort of...I thought that there'd be more kind of grandeur to it, almost like there'd be more...it was just other than people cosplaying; there wasn't a lot of theater to the whole thing. It was just like in these massive warehouses, and add a little bit of that theater in, have some of those actors, have some of the music and the sound and everything, really give people a place to go and explore and enjoy exploring. And I kind of keep thinking in my head it's like LARP lite, you know what I mean? CHAD: Yeah. JASPER: It's like LARP still with the kind of commercial interaction that you can still go and meet your favorite people. You can still get signings. You can still get previews of things. You can still buy things that you've been wanting to buy all year and that you can only get when you go to a certain convention, and all of the kind of normal convention tropes but really just explicitly labeling it on the bottle: this is for minority groups. Because I honestly think if we explicitly label it like that as well, we'll start to get away from a lot of the things that have plagued conventions for far too long when it comes to making people feel comfortable in those spaces. And quite often, my biggest tip when it comes to diversity and inclusion with companies as well it's just like, put it on the bowl. Like, if you really believe it, have it front and center. Don't tuck it away in like a D&I bit on your website. Have it there so that everyone can see it. Everyone knows when they come to work with you; this is what you stand for. This is what you believe in, things like that, so... CHAD: That sounds awesome. And it's a really good illustration of the idea which we've talked about on the show in previous episodes is that when you are used to being in the majority all the time, and that is the default, when something is being done that's different than that, it feels like you're losing something. It feels like you're under attack. That's a total natural feeling. JASPER: Yes, yes. CHAD: So it's like, that sounds like a great experience. I would love to experience that, and I'm being excluded because I'm White; that's not fair. But that's coming from a position of you've been in those safe spaces for yourself in a world that's been entirely tailored for you. So you haven't realized that you've had that all along. JASPER: Yeah, absolutely. And the beauty of it is..., and this is where it's even better for people in the majority, which is that we have zero intention of making an unsafe space for anyone because that would be wild. So even the spaces that we create for minorities explicitly will still be safe for you as well, you know what I mean? But I think, like you said, it's that reaction, which, again, I get it completely because, as I mentioned earlier, I was there. I've been there. I've been in a space where I suddenly go, oh, I'm part of the problem, and it feels horrible. Like, it's not nice, and it's a really challenging thing, which you have to be comfortable with, and I think everyone should be comfortable with it. Whether you're a minority or not, everyone has blind spots. Everyone has biases. It's a huge part of human interaction. And honestly, in a modern world with the way that social media is, I don't think you can live without biases and without assumptions because you see new people, thousands of new people every day if you want to just by scrolling on your Twitter feed. So to be in this zen place of just like, I will accept everyone only on their merits, and I will not judge anyone would be impossible and maddening, I think. So it's a perfectly normal thing to exist with those biases. The thing that we have to get better at is going, cool; I've got those biases. Now it's time to let them slide, like, to move them over there and to not get defensive if someone calls them out. Like, that's the trick. That's the magic trick. That's pulling the rabbit out of the hat. That's what you got to get comfortable with. CHAD: Yeah, awesome. Well, I really appreciate the conversation, and I really appreciate you taking the time. I know that you get married in less than a week from now. JASPER: I do. I do get married -- CHAD: So congratulations in advance. JASPER: Thank you so much. Thank you. CHAD: If we could just take a few more minutes at the end to maybe nerd out about the Dungeons & Dragons movie, which I know you went to the premiere for, and I just saw this weekend... JASPER: Oh please, let's do. Absolutely. CHAD: It was funny because I think you've said exactly how I left the movie feeling, which was they captured the spirit of what it's actually...like, it was just fun. And Dungeons & Dragons is fun in a way that is not like "Lord of the Rings" [laughs] or just super serious fantasy, right? JASPER: Yeah, yeah. I can't even think of the last time we had a fantasy movie that was like, you know, other than, I don't know, "Your Highness" or something that was just like, I don't know, yeah, whatever that was, you know what I mean? Something that was like an actual movie and didn't take itself too seriously, yeah. CHAD: Yeah, I'm so happy because you could have easily have seen it, like, no, we need to do something super serious and to compete against "Game of Thrones" and "Lord of the Rings" and all that stuff. And to feel like, you know, this was made by people who get it and represented what I love was really exciting. JASPER: Yeah. And I think that what it did for me is I think it lays the groundwork for them to explore more serious places because now they will have that trust that they understand what it's like to be at the table and how to do that. And then I think this is where the real skill is going to come in for them to curate more of these which is like...that, I think, is the art of a really good DM. They can have you absolutely roaring with laughter one minute and then sobbing in like, you know, and it's like an hour's difference, [laughs] you know what I mean? Between the two places. And that's then the next step for these. But I think this was absolutely the tone they needed to strike for this, especially for this first kind of outing. I think they really needed to say, hey, we get it. We understand what it's like, just displaying purely unhinged actions and things, which I think that's the bit that feels D&D for me is when a character...and I think I won't go into any spoilers, but I think you'll probably know the moment I'm describing when a very clear solution is laid out in front of you in big, green letters, for instance, and you choose to do something truly, truly unhinged and wild. Because that was what you decided you were going to do ahead of time. It's such a D&D thing to do. [laughs] And I loved that. It was one of my favorite moments in the movie. And I just thought that perfectly encapsulates the nature of it and the thing that you don't get to see in "Game of Thrones" or whatever because you don't get the Nat 1s or the Nat 20s, I think in the "Game of Thrones." Everything's like 7 to 12; you know what I mean? CHAD: [laughs] Right. Right. JASPER: Everyone is relatively skilled, so they can't just, like, you know what I mean? You can't have the mountain versus the Viper, and the mountain just trips over a rock and brains himself on the floor. CHAD: [laughs] Right. JASPER: You know what I mean? Because that would be a Nat 1, but that would be ridiculous because the mountain is an incredibly skilled fighter, and therefore, it wouldn't work like that. CHAD: Yeah, yeah. I found myself grinning throughout, aside from the moments where I was laughing, just like, oh, that's...yes. JASPER: [laughs] CHAD: Just the whole thing about planning and how he's a planner. JASPER: Yes. [laughs] CHAD: Oh, that is so D&D. And just at the end, the way that that battle lays out, I just feel like it just captures everyone's act in the six-second increments in a D&D battle. And everything's happening all at once, and that's what that battle was like at the end. JASPER: Yeah. And it also just props for like a really good magic fight. CHAD: [laughs] Right. JASPER: Like, I don't even know what the word is, but we have been convinced for years that Harry Potter had good magic, but no, he doesn't. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: Harry Potter has wand-fu, and it's terrible. It's like; it's not particularly pleasing. It's basically the same as "Star Wars." It's just like a little laser pistol type, piu-piu-piu. CHAD: [laughs] JASPER: That's effectively what Harry Potter becomes. And then to see Bigby's Hand and spells like this be used in the ways, like, it was just so fun. And also, it really teaches the importance of flavoring your attacks and how much life you can bring to a game, to anything, by just adding that little bit more, like, that little bit of extra sauce on top. I think Holger the Barbarian does a perfect job of this in the movie where she's always using improvised weapons, and the way that she fights it's, oh, it's very, very pleasing to watch. And you're sat there going, yeah man, barbarians are so cool. But half the time when you're in a game, you'll just be like, yeah, I run up, and I attack with my axe. It's like, no, give me more, give me more. Tell me how and why and stuff like that. So I agree; I think they did a great job. And I was also just grinning from ear to ear [laughs] during most of it. CHAD: I feel like I could talk to you all day. JASPER: [laughs] CHAD: But I really appreciate it. If folks want to either get in touch with you, we mentioned at the top of the show you are a Game Master for hire, and you do games remotely, right? JASPER: Yes, I do. I do. I do. CHAD: So where are all the places that people can find you, get in touch with you, book you, all that stuff? JASPER: Heck yeah. If anyone knows about my GMing for hire, it's you. [laughter] You had me DM for you for, in total, like, 29 hours in the space of a week. [laughs] CHAD: Yeah. So we brought Jasper and we had the thoughtbot summit where we got the company together in person and so Jasper came and he DMed two sessions with two different groups for us, which was awesome. And then I went to D&D in a Castle, which you mentioned earlier in the show. It's where you go to a castle in the UK and play D&D for three and a half days straight basically. It was an amazing experience and Jasper was an incredible DM. JASPER: Thank you. And if anyone is interested in hiring me as a DM, like I said, I do consultancy, whether it be D&I consultancy or podcast to help you grow podcasts and things like that, or even just get started. Most of that information is on my website which is jasperwcartwright.com. You can find me on all social medias. I'm usually pretty good at responding to people in there, and that is just @JW_Cartwright on all of my social media. So yeah, go follow me, and I've got a bunch of really exciting stuff coming up, so it's a good time to follow me. [laughs] CHAD: Awesome. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode along with a complete transcript at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Mastodon @cpytel@thoughtbot.social. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much 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: Jasper (William) Cartwright.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

Noelle Acosta is Founder and CEO of Noula Health, a data-driven platform that uses personalized hormonal health data to deliver tailored care. Victoria talks to Noelle about helping patients with uteruses to better understand their bodies by providing them with hormonal health data that's unique to them and providing them with individualized care they deserve at their fingertips through a virtual app. Noula Follow Noula on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow Noelle Acosta on LinkedIn or Twitter. 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. And with me today is Noelle Acosta, Founder and CEO of Noula Health, a data-driven platform that uses personalized hormonal health data to deliver tailored care. Noelle, thank you for joining me. NOELLE: Thank you so much for having me, Victoria. It's a pleasure to be here. VICTORIA: Wonderful. I'm excited to learn more about your product today that you're building. Can you just tell me a little bit more about it? NOELLE: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I feel like, [chuckles] one, you could work here. You did a phenomenal job of sharing what Noula is. But here at Noula, we are a virtual care platform that really empowers women and patients with uteruses to better understand their bodies by providing them with hormonal health data that's unique to them. Based on that information, we're able to provide them with the individualized, tailored care that they deserve at their fingertips through a virtual app. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And I'm wondering what led you to think I need to make this company. What happened in your life where you decided this needs to exist in the world? NOELLE: Really it stems from my own personal brush with an undiagnosed chronic condition where I truly was the one in five women who felt dismissed, denied, and ignored in the traditional healthcare settings. And that is really something that's actually unified us all as a team here at Noula. We have the shared frustration in terms of the gaps that we experienced overall; not one, two of our health journeys looked alike. And so during this time, I found myself really just kind of banging my head against a wall where I had these ongoing symptoms that disrupted every aspect of my life, not just my physical health, but it became really very much an emotional roller coaster as well. Because despite having access to care and wonderful employer-sponsored health insurance, I was finding that my doctors were essentially brushing me off, attributing it to stress. And it really led to me kind of just having this inner monologue and questioning myself as, like, is this in my head? Maybe it is stress-related. This doesn't feel normal. Should this be normal? And so I, just like 70% of millennials, turned to Google as my medical companion. I lost trust in healthcare settings and just turned to do research around what could be possibly causing the symptoms in my overall health. And I just refused to believe that this was my sense of normalcy. And through my own research, I started finding things like my ethnicity and my environment could have an impact in the symptoms that I was experiencing. I was dealing with chronic pelvic pain, irregular periods to the point where I was actually menstruating for seven months straight. I had horrible migraines. And so I just really turned to these medical journals to try to figure out and uncover what my body was telling me. And so, based on that research, I finally went back to the doctor demanding an ultrasound, where they ended up finding over 40 abnormal follicles and cysts on my ovaries. And even at that point, my treatment plan was a Band-Aid fix. And so, ultimately, I really felt like the system fundamentally failed me. This Band-Aid fix was essentially, hey, we'll put back your former birth control method and call us when you're ready to have a baby, and we'll figure it out then. And so, to this day, I actually haven't received any additional care, guidance from any clinician despite being in and out of the doctor's office with the symptoms. And so I ended up being diagnosed with a condition called PCOS. Again, from my own research, I learned that Mexican women with PCOS, so yours truly, we have the most severe phenotype that puts us at the highest risk for other complications that are beyond just reproductive health. It increases my risk for diabetes. It increases my risk for hypertension. And these are ultimately very costly to my health. And I was just frustrated. I thought, why am I learning about this through my own research versus the doctor's office, where it really felt like a one size fits all approach to care? And so, based on my experience, I started talking to more and more women. And I found that I wasn't alone with this shared frustration. We see that 80% of people who menstruate suffer from hormonal imbalances. And more often than not, women are juggling with more than two chronic conditions at a time. And so it's truly something that I felt as a patient that we were missing to feel empowered in our health and actually feel seen and heard. And then, when I actually spoke to clinicians as well, they felt that they weren't set up to care for their patients in the way that they wanted to care for them. VICTORIA: And I'm wondering how those women and the people you talked to started to inform the roadmap for the product that you were going to build. NOELLE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, truly, the voice of those members, and these patients are the center of our lighthouse in terms of how we shape our product roadmap ahead. And so, ultimately, it really came down to us initially doing customer discovery. So I was really surprised to see how many people were willing to talk about their experiences navigating their health as a woman or a person with a uterus. And that was really telling in itself because I've heard from folks where they had to pay others with gift cards to have this conversation about how they might navigate certain workflows as it might relate to the products they're building. But naturally, these folks wanted to talk about their experiences. So we kind of tackled this in a couple of parts, one, I was going out into my own network, reaching out to friends of friends, posting in Nextdoor Facebook groups, really asking for 15 minutes of people's times to learn about their experience. And within two weeks, I had almost 100 customer discovery calls booked where these women were wanting to talk about their frustration and what they wished they had in terms of the care that they wanted. And so that was point A, like, okay, I think we're onto something. Our gaps in our experiences are shared across the board. And this is the pain that not only I experienced, or the Noula team has experienced, but that hundreds of women have experienced. The other piece, too, is, believe it or not, you know, we're constantly doing customer discovery as an early-stage company. But when we launched our beta, we launched with an initial hypothesis. But we saw that what our members were coming in for more aligns with their hormone health than what we initially thought, where we thought majority of folks would be coming to us at a family building stage. And then even [laughs] truly through social media, our TikTok channel alone when we lead with these persona stories it helps drive this just natural virality to it. And daily, we have folks reaching out to us asking if what they're experiencing is normal or what they should do. And so they're coming to us because we really fill this very prevalent gap in care today. VICTORIA: It must be really reassuring on a personal level and also on a business level that you found a problem that you can really help and make a difference with. NOELLE: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's frustrating that we are all bonded and unified by this experience. But ultimately, we'll continue to use the voice of our members as our guiding light to shape our roadmap ahead. And actually, that's what you see today with Noula. We took the learnings from the beta. We took the conversations that we've had with so many members and just women and folks outside of Noula to really shape what you see today. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. And you already mentioned one surprise that you found in your customer discovery process. I wonder if you could even tell me a little bit more about any hypothesis you had that you found from research; the outcome was quite different, and that changed your business strategy. NOELLE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we have always seen ourselves as truly being this co-piloted partner for women in their healthcare journeys for life. But when initially launching our beta, we thought our niche today is going to be folks navigating family planning, so people who are looking to start a family in the near future, actively trying to conceive, pregnant, or recently postpartum. So we built a beta around that. And it was very low-code. This is before I had any technical talent [chuckles] on our team and essentially no money. And so, we built this low-code/no-code beta and launched it. We brought on about 100 folks to this closed beta. And with that, we built the product with that hypothesis in mind that we're going to be targeting specific stages. But what ultimately happened is as we were onboarding the 100 users, we found over...with each onboarded user, we started to see the scale tip where all of a sudden, 80% of those users very much had a story that mirrored my own experience with health. They were coming to us because they suspected that they had a hormonal imbalance or these unexplained symptoms that they didn't know what was causing them. Several of them had been diagnosed with conditions like PCOS, endometriosis, or fibroids. Many of them were dealing with unexplained period pain and irregular menstruation. And so we started to scratch our heads to be like, oh, wow. Okay, so these folks are actually coming to us for a different reason than we had [chuckles] initially anticipated. They're using the product differently. And also, they are far more engaged than our initial hypothesized users, which were pregnant people. And so while we have been able to really create a product that is able to adapt with these users over time, we found that that messaging and creation of a safe space for those users was incredibly important, and we wanted to lean into that. VICTORIA: That's really cool. And maybe talk more about creating that safe space in dealing with healthcare data. Were there any special considerations you had to bring into building your tech stack with those really delicate elements? NOELLE: Yeah, yeah. I mean, ultimately, safety and security of their data and honoring that privacy. We will never sell any data whatsoever. And I know that was a concern for many and still is since we've seen in the news this has been happening with other apps and stuff where they're selling user health data to social media sites. So honoring and protecting that privacy, first and foremost. The other piece is we had to also empower our care team to support our members in the best way that they can with the information that they had about their unique health. And so, unfortunately, our members were coming to us at such an emotionally turmoil time in their lives that they wanted answers. They were frustrated. They were saying, "Why is this happening to me?" We had to really ensure that we could be that empathetic ally for them, empower them with information, and really arm them with tools to use inside and outside of the clinic to get the answers that they deserve. VICTORIA: Right, and I see that. So on your site, there's a quiz you can take about your symptoms, and then you can sign up for what's ultimately going to be a home test kit. Is that right? NOELLE: Yes, yes. So users are able to sign up for Noula at no cost to you. So you can start free tracking your symptoms, and these symptom trackers are going to be customized to you. So based on... similar to the quiz that you mentioned, you'll be able to answer questions about what you're experiencing, what your goals are. And Noula will make recommendations of what to track within the app itself. You can then track your symptoms that you select over time and get this customized snapshot to build this true picture of your health. You can then continue to add on to that snapshot of your health through that home hormone test. So you don't necessarily need to purchase the test if you don't want to. But you have the ability to test your hormones to get a clearer picture of your baseline hormonal health. And we're able to really help arm you with that information about your body. And then, from there, beyond just that information from that data set, you have access to empathetic coaching from medical experts. All of our care coaches are registered nurses. So you do have that expert at your fingertips who's there to really steer and guide you every step of the way. And that was something that I actually felt was missing from my own experience when navigating my own symptoms pre-Noula. I found myself running these tests [chuckles] on my own, like ordering tests online trying to figure out what was going on. And just kind of hit this wall where I said to myself, I don't know how to interpret these. I don't know what to do with these. I don't know how to talk to my doctor about this. What do I do? VICTORIA: That's so interesting. And I heard you mentioned empathy a few times and how important that is. Would you say that's one of your core values that you bring into founding a company like this? NOELLE: Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So I actually studied to become a doula. And so some of the pillars that we were trained in were really supporting our clients in these four primary pillars: ensuring that we can support them with physical support, emotional support, informational support, and advocacy. So really, those four pillars together have really steered us to create this foundation of empathetic care. And so that is truly integral to our brand and who we are, how we deliver that care, and also in such an inclusive and culturally competent way. VICTORIA: It sounds really important what you mentioned; building an app requires a lot of trust to be able to give you your data and trust that the results that you're getting are helpful. So I really love that that's a part of your core value that you bring to the organization too. NOELLE: Yeah, I think it was something that was really important to us from the very beginning, especially because we are a BIPOC and queer-co-founded company. It's rare that we see ourselves in the ecosystem, not just as founders [chuckles] but even just in how care is designed for us. So we wanted to ensure that we were creating this space where everyone can see themselves. And it's been so reassuring to hear from members and even just folks who find Noula on their own that they finally feel like they're seen and heard as an individual with Noula. VICTORIA: Well, that might be the answer to my next question, which is what keeps you going, and what's the wind in your sails that keeps you pressing forward with this? NOELLE: [chuckles] It's definitely that I think being able to hear from our members how Noula has helped change their life, even it is just a little bit where they feel more confident, where they feel supported, and they don't feel alone means everything to us. And the other piece is I feel incredibly proud when members have actually tuned in to listen to their bodies. And despite their experience feeling brushed off in the traditional healthcare setting, they really listen to themselves and turn to Noula. And there have been cases where we help support these folks to the point where because of Noula (One member is actually popping up in my head specifically.), they were able to find that they had a hereditary thyroid condition before it worsened because of Noula. And so that in itself was so powerful because their experience in the clinic was very much more like, well, no wonder you're fatigued and no wonder you have brain fog. You have a baby; what do you expect? VICTORIA: Oh, I love that; what a powerful message. And I think that speaks to the power of having systems in place that are designed with those people in mind. NOELLE: 100% yes. 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: So what does success look like in the immediate future and in the longer term for Noula? NOELLE: I think today, our success is very much qualitative. I think with health, especially digital health, it's a long game. And so today, we're measuring success by those member stories, by hearing from them that, again, this is a place where they finally feel empowered in their health. They have the tools that they need to unlock the best version of themselves so that they can get the care that they envision on their terms. So really, just through that qualitative piece. Patient satisfaction is another huge factor as well. We supercharge our algorithm based on the identified and pooled hormonal health data so that we can continue providing tailored recommendations that are personalized to each user. So in my example, my Noula experience might say, okay, we know that Noelle is a Latina woman who has PCOS. Other people who might have had similar symptoms to her have found these recommendations or tracking these symptoms to be really helpful for them, and so that's something that I would try. And so really just, again, creating a space where you're not alone is huge. And so that's where we really lean into the qualitative piece. And as we grow, we also incorporate the quantitative success metrics as well. So how are we measuring impact in terms of health outcomes so that we can also just inform the system to deliver better care? Because, I mean, there's just so much unknown about the female body specifically. It wasn't until 1993 that women were even required to be a part of a clinical study. So there's just a lot of gray area that needs to be addressed to deliver better health outcomes overall, especially when health outcomes amongst women in the U.S. is so poor. VICTORIA: And as a woman in the U.S. who has hormones, I 100% get the value and the potential for an app like this. Have you had that same positive reaction from investors or from other people who are looking to join your group? NOELLE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the investors who really understand it and get it, unfortunately, do because either they or someone they loved has been impacted by a hormonal imbalance or by being dismissed in the traditional healthcare settings. So similar to how the Noula team and our members have been unified by these experiences, we find that outside as well with investors. What makes me really proud, too, is connecting with clinicians. Like, our Medical Director, Dr. Marieme Mbaye, who is a highly rated physician in New York City, turned away from practicing medicine to join Noula because she even felt like her hands were tied behind her back with the type of care she can deliver. And so it's always incredibly reassuring when we hear from clinicians that this is why care should be designed to really proactively look out for groups of people who are often overlooked, which, sadly, tend to be women and people of color. VICTORIA: Right, almost like it was designed that way in the system. [laughter] NOELLE: Yep. VICTORIA: That's great. I'm glad that other people are seeing that benefit. And what hurdles do you see on the road ahead for where you're going with Noula? NOELLE: As we are bringing on members, the more that we've built this trust with our member base, the more they want from us [laughs] in terms of us truly just being their end-to-end care delivery partner, and we would love to get there. But as a very early-stage company, we have to build things quickly but one thing at a time. So oftentimes, I feel like, okay, we have this huge leap to make to deliver the care that our members are asking for, and so it's a blessing and a curse where they're like, "We love this so much. Can you be my doctor? I don't want to go to another doctor." Or, "Can I get this through you and only you, or do I need to go somewhere else?" VICTORIA: Well, that must be a great feeling to have. But also staying focused, like you mentioned, would be a challenge, and being able to get done within your capabilities. But it's funny because I think there's a huge demand in this market [laughs] that we've had similar kind of demand for other women's health-focused products or people with uteruses too. Clearly, something is broken. [laughs] So you've got a lot of great work you want to get done. Is there anything really already planned in your roadmap that you're super excited about? NOELLE: Yeah. And we'll be rolling out insurance-covered telehealth appointments very soon, so that's one thing that I'm particularly just incredibly excited about because I think it does...how we got to delivering that was through the feedback from our members. And so I think that, in turn, will allow us to take one step closer to truly being that healthcare delivery partner for all members on all those levels. Very, very excited about that because it very much aligns with our mission to deliver accessible and equitable care. VICTORIA: Yeah, that's a huge capability, and especially considering in some areas, there just might not be access to doctors or hospitals that you can go to in person, so... NOELLE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, only 50% of U.S. counties have access to OBGYNs and with the average appointment length only being 15 minutes. Like, again, physicians have their hands tied behind their backs because that means per OBGYN, they're managing about 3,500 patients, which just isn't feasible or scalable. VICTORIA: Wow. Yeah, that's a lot of patients. [laughs] Well, I want to go back to some folks that you mentioned earlier on your team and just tell me about how it all started coming together with building your team at Noula. NOELLE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So my co-founder and CTO, her name is Suzie Grange. She is an absolutely wonderful, brilliant engineer. Her and I actually worked together at our previous employer company called Maven Clinic. So at Maven Clinic, I was responsible for helping lead sales and business development through some growth milestones. And Suzie was the founding engineer over at Maven. So she was there for the long haul, for over seven years. And so she had left Maven before I did. And once I took the leap into building Noula full-time, her and I reconnected, and we welcomed her to the team as a co-founder and CTO last year, which has been so instrumental to how we've built our product to date. We actually [laughs] ran into fun challenges many startups will where we've had to recently rebuild our entire tech stack and truly couldn't have done this without her and our back-end engineer as well. And so she's just been incredible. And then we also brought on our medical director, as I shared, Dr. Marieme Mbaye, who was a practicing OBGYN based out of Brooklyn, New York City. And she has also had experience advising for women's health startups like Natalist to Frame Fertility and others. VICTORIA: Got it. So you found your technical co-founder, or you maybe already started together and then got the technical expertise there. You mentioned taking the leap to do Noula full-time. What was that decision like for you emotionally? NOELLE: It was a really big decision, and it was also a very vulnerable decision on my part. And so I'm going to open up about this because I think it's important to also recognize that this is a scary decision for all founders to make. When I was dealing with these chronic symptoms, that was back in 2019, so this was before I joined Maven Clinic. And I knew I wanted to build something to change the system. But I thought the best way to ensure what I was going to build were to be successful was to contribute to a company, learn as much as I could, fail fast, fail forward. So I joined Maven. I was there for almost two years, and that experience alone was instrumental. But ultimately, what really drove me to make the leap and place this blind faith in myself and just jump into this unknown abyss was after another health scare. I promise you I'm healthy. But I went through...in early 2021, I had a massive seizure in my sleep, and I was hospitalized where they thought I had a brain tumor. And I just remember sitting in the ambulance. And this was during COVID, so I had to go alone. I was hospitalized alone. And I remember sitting in the ambulance, and I don't know why this sticks with me so much, but I remember seeing the light of the street lamp, and I was just looking at it. And I thought I'm not ready to leave the earth without making an impact here. And so I told myself, I was like, if I make it out of this alive, I'm going to do whatever it takes to change healthcare and make the impact that I want. And so I did just that. I'm okay. I don't have a brain tumor, thank goodness. And I trusted myself trusted that the conversations that I had with friends, family, and other people who shared those experiences with me would serve as our lighthouse to building an incredibly impactful product that would reshape the future of health for good. VICTORIA: Oh, that's incredible that you had that experience that made you think about what really mattered and what you wanted to do with the rest of your time. It sounds like you had friends and family to support you along the way with that decision, right? NOELLE: Yeah. And a lot of them didn't get it. To this day, my mom's like, "Don't you want to go to med school or be a nurse?" [laughs] I'm like, "No." [laughs] But yes, absolutely had their support. VICTORIA: Oh, that's wonderful. I mean, I can see that, even if you have a good idea that some people might be like, "Don't you need a job?" [laughter] NOELLE: Exactly. And that's exactly the kind of position I was in. I said, okay, I need to make a game plan. And when I quit Maven, I had joined an accelerator program called Visible Hands, which was designed by POC founders. And for three months, you got a small chunk of money. And I worked backwards, I said, okay, within this three-month period, I need to prove that Noula is a venture backable business. And so I worked backwards with how much savings I had left to continue supporting myself. And that gave me till...so the program started in September, and I had basically saved enough money for myself through end of February, maybe end of March is stretching it, of 2022. And so, I worked backwards from that date and closed an oversubscribed pre-seed round in February. VICTORIA: Wow. NOELLE: So that was really...it was very challenging. I don't think I've...I worked harder in my life than I ever had before. And so yeah, that's really kind of where we're at today. And it made me one of less than 100 Latina women to ever raise a million dollars, which is wild. VICTORIA: Awesome that you were able to do that, and sad that the number is so small. [laughs] NOELLE: I know. And I did the math, and we said, okay, 0.4% of venture dollars go to Latina founders. I need to have 200 meetings just to get one yes. And so I was chasing as many meetings as I could and chasing nos as fast as I could because I thought the sooner I could get a no, the quicker I could move on to the next. VICTORIA: So, really trying to weed out people who just weren't going to be a good fit. [laughs] NOELLE: Right. VICTORIA: That makes sense. But ultimately, you were able to find someone who aligned with you. Was there a checklist or some kind of way that you used to decide if those investors were going to be right for you? NOELLE: Yeah, I think, ultimately, the connection to our mission. At the early stage, they're making a bet too on founder fit, and so I wanted them to, one understand and feel confident in myself as a founder. And so I wanted to see that on the call. And then two, I also wanted to ensure they understood that this was a problem. And so there were some investors where they didn't understand the problem or why anyone would need this. And some of them didn't understand things like what menstruation was, not even kidding. [laughs] I didn't have any...at that point, I was like, I don't have a single check. I had to make the decision, like, this isn't going to be the right partner for me. And so those were kind of my two main criteria, like, do I believe they're going to be the right partner in helping us accelerate just my vision and supporting me as a founder? Do they believe in me and in our vision? And two, do they understand the problem and the impact? VICTORIA: Right, that makes sense. So then that kind of empowers you to continue doing the work that you know you should be doing. NOELLE: Right. VICTORIA: Well, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about TikTok too, and how you used social media to raise your brand awareness. NOELLE: [laughs] So, our TikTok strategy, I'm embarrassed at how long it took me to make our very first TikTok [laughs] because I probably spent way too much time trying to figure it out. But our TikTok strategy really aligns with our brand strategies. Our core pillars in terms of that really come down to leading with empathy, so showcasing real, raw, authentic stories from real people. So we can show, like, you are not alone in this. And then two, educational pieces as well. So we have a series called Dear Noula where anyone can write in anonymous questions to Noula. And our medical director, Dr. Marieme Mbaye, will answer those on TikTok. And so, really, what's helped drive the virality in our TikTok strategy is the marriage of that approach where one of our most viral TikToks is one of me with my ultrasound behind me. And then another one that's very educational based around what your vaginal discharge might be telling you. And so there's that blended approach to just, again, showing those real stories with digestible educational bits of content has really helped us build that brand awareness and also just the trust in our brand as well. VICTORIA: That's great. And I think that's something that a lot of startups might be thinking about marketing-wise. Like, how do they use those types of tools to really connect with people? And I like the approach that you've taken with being educational and with being very real, [laughs] which makes sense. Okay, so we asked about what your biggest challenges were on the horizon. What do you think are the biggest opportunities that you could potentially take on at Noula in the next six months to a year? NOELLE: What I'm particularly very excited about with Noula is our ability to adapt with users over time. So what we often see with a lot of digital health solutions, especially in women's health, is they tend to be very stage-specific. You use this product for fertility-related stuff, this one for pregnancy-related stuff, this for postpartum-related stuff, or STIs, for example. So they tend to be very specific. And what I'm particularly eager to showcase is truly how Noula is designed to adapt with those folks over time, so from menstruation through menopause. And the more that you use Noula, the longer you use Noula, the more customized insights you'll have about your unique body to inform providers to deliver that individualized care. So truly, the thing I'm looking forward to most is time, seeing how Noula can truly fit patients' lives versus the other way around. And also being in a position where our solution isn't tied to just a reproductive stage. It's truly encompassing our whole health beyond just reproductive organs but taking into account genetics, lifestyle, environment, stress, sleep, nutrition, et cetera. VICTORIA: That's very cool. So kind of expanding into even more tailored patient data and services that you can provide over time. NOELLE: Yeah, and, I mean, this is information that most people's doctors don't have access to. VICTORIA: Yeah, I could see that. And, I mean, anyone who's used a menstrual tracking app you can predict things based on the longer time period you've been tracking it, right? NOELLE: Exactly, exactly. VICTORIA: That's very cool. I'm excited to see it come out. And I think by the time this podcast airs; you'll have launched a new product. Is that right? NOELLE: Yeah. So by the time this podcast launches, we'll be completely launched. I will have the app and care coaching available for anyone to use, sign up for, and it's really, really exciting stuff on the horizon. VICTORIA: That's super cool. Well, my last question for you is if you could go back in time to when you first started Noula, what advice would you give yourself? NOELLE: I tend to be a perfectionist. So I'd say just ship faster; don't chase perfection because things are going to change. I learned that from the beta itself, where we spent time building this product that we wanted to be so perfect. And again, [chuckle] what we learned was that the initial cohort of users who we thought would be our biggest advocates and earliest adopters of Noula was not true. And so being okay with your first iteration as being imperfect is okay. Some of the best advice I actually got after we launched our beta was that if you're not embarrassed by your MVP, you launched too late. VICTORIA: [laughs] That's really funny. It should be kind of awkward, right? NOELLE: Yeah. Isn't that great? [laughs] VICTORIA: That's really good. [laughs] NOELLE: I wish I had heard this before. I [laughs] spent so much time trying to perfect this to the T. [laughs] VICTORIA: I think we're going to maybe print out a banner that says that and hang it behind [laughter] our screens or something. Yeah, I love that. And I love just how much went into the customer discovery and how you were flexible to change your hypothesis for what was going to work for people based on that. NOELLE: Yeah. And I think one thing that really helped, too, just honestly from my sales background, was I was very mindful of not leading a horse to water when doing customer discovery. So I think often we hear that, you know, we ask very pointed questions to try to lead folks to say, "Yes, I would use your product," or, "Yeah, that sounds useful." I purposely asked very open-ended questions like, "Walk me through your experience navigating your health," and just listened. And that allowed me to find patterns across the number of conversations that I had that ultimately led us to build the beta in our product that you see today is through those very open-ended questions and hearing from users themselves as far as what they thought was missing versus me saying, "If we build this feature, would you use it?" VICTORIA: That's very cool. And I learned a lot just from taking the quiz on your website. [laughs] NOELLE: Oh, awesome. [laughs] VICTORIA: So I'm really excited to see what you all come up with next. Are there any final takeaways or thoughts you want to leave for our listeners today? NOELLE: We'd love to hear about your experience using Noula. So you can use Noula free for a limited time. We're offering 30 days of free care coaching for anyone that signs up and discounted access to the hormone testing. So just really excited to share with the world because it's about damn time we get the care that we deserve. VICTORIA: Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us today. And you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript of 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. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. 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.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

Neal Bloom is a Managing Partner at Interlock Capital, a community of founders, investors, and subject matter experts. Victoria talks to Neal about what he finds attractive about startups and companies he's excited about, out of all the pitches he receives, how many he gets to say yes to, and when working with a team, what he uses to manage information and contacts for investors. Interlock Capital Follow Interlock Capital on LinkedIn, or Twitter. Follow Neal Bloom on LinkedIn or Twitter. Check out his website and blog! 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. And with me today is Neal Bloom, Managing Partner at Interlock Capital, a community of founders, investors, and subject matter experts. Neal, thank you for joining us. NEAL: Hey, thanks for having me. It's so great to be here with you. VICTORIA: Fantastic. I'm excited to finally get a chance to talk with you. I met you at an investor hike that you organize once a month. NEAL: A founders' hike, yeah. I get up nice and early on the first Wednesday of each month in Torrey Pines in San Diego. And we hike up and down the hill with ocean views. It's not a bad day. VICTORIA: It's a great way to start the morning, I think, and to meet other people, other builders of products in technology. So tell me more about your work at Interlock Capital. NEAL: Sure. It really kind of organically happened that I became an investor, but not planned at all. I have an aerospace background then built my own edtech and talent tech marketplace. I call it the LinkedIn for students is really what we built as our first startup called Portfolium. We sold it, and I got really into startup communities, especially because of some people who helped me with my first startup. I want to be a part of building an even better ecosystem for others. And that turned into a podcast, a blog, an event series. And once I had the capital from my exit, turned into angel investing as well, too, and really just found that as I got to know people over time, the more and more I got to know them, the more certain ones stood out that said, wow, I don't just want to help them for the good of it. I also just want to be along for the ride. And I started writing checks to other founders. So that was the beginning of my investor journey about five years ago. And over COVID, a whole bunch of other later-stage experience operators, either founder-level or executives at tech companies, said, "I want to learn to do this. Can I do it alongside you?" And we created Interlock Capital as an investment syndicate. A group of us can share and utilize our brainpower, our time, and our capital to help companies. It's kind of our focus. So that's why we call it a community because it's not just kind of a one-way pitch us, and we'll write you a check. It's very much get to know the people, find the exact right domain experts who have subject matter expertise, who've been there and done that before. If they like the company and they want to personally invest, then we go to the greater group and say, "Hey, everyone, who wants to join this deal specifically?" So 18 investments later from Interlock Capital, we now also have an investment fund. So now we write two checks into every company. We do our syndicated style, pass the hat, if you will, "Hey, everyone, anyone want to invest in just this deal?" And then match it from our fund. And we're writing between $300,000 to $500,000 checks into early-stage software or/and software plus hardware companies. VICTORIA: What an incredible journey. And I love that it's led you to creating a community as part of what you do as an investment capital group. What do you find interesting about these startups and these companies that you want to be interested in? NEAL: Part of it is how much you learn about yourself, to be honest. I get to meet three to five new founders a day in a variety of ways, whether it's straight Zoom and pitch, or grab a coffee, or see them on a hike. We're kind of constantly introducing ourselves to each other. There's a bit of learning about how to size someone up to a certain regard. So you're kind of building this inner algorithm of how to top-prank people and their ideas. That's one interesting way that I never thought I would be doing professionally. There's a lot that we say versus what we do, and that's a data point that I have to keep track of because I get pitched amazing ideas that will literally change the world for so much better. And you get really excited about it, and you get invested in it. And I call it founder love. You fall in love with these founders specifically and almost say, "I don't even care what you're working on. I just want to work more with you. How do we do it?" So there's a lot of that. So there are some dating aspects [laughs] in terms of founder dating, like getting to know people. There's the determining how do we date towards marriage? Meaning, I'll write you a check, and I'm along for the ride for the next ten years. And then there's the kind of relationship maintenance which is okay; I wrote the check, now what? Where can I be helpful to the company? How can I anticipate their needs so that they have to think one more thing of how to satisfy me? It's quite the opposite way around. I'm trying not to be a barrier. I'm trying to work for them while they're sleeping. So yeah, it's really interesting the kind of the relationship aspect that goes into getting to know and helping founders take their ideas and turn it into reality. VICTORIA: That's very cool. And I have talked to people who have met you and talked to your company and just how supportive and helpful you all are even if you choose not to invest. So I think that's a really valuable resource for people. And I wonder, do you think it's something unique about the San Diego community in particular that is exciting right now? NEAL: I think so. I think San Diego specifically has always had this culture of give-before-you-get mentality, and so we kind of lead with that. There are a lot of people moving here. And you could choose many places that could be great, like LA versus San Diego, and there's a certain kind of person that chooses here versus somewhere else. And what I have found is there's a certain kind of give-before-you-get cultural mentality here that somehow people register pretty quickly and come with. And so that's an underlying greatness about us here. There's also because of the great environment we live in, by the beach, healthy lifestyle. I think we choose to work on things that maybe are also satisfying, just like our personal lives, meaning we work on things that matter, that are going to change the world, that are life-changing. That's not to say that we don't need certain other kinds of technology. I'm sure at some point, we felt we needed Twitter, and maybe we don't feel like that now. [laughs] But here, it feels like everyone's working on very impactful things, and I think that's really special to think about. Some examples of that is we've got an interesting subset of the SaaS world in nonprofit tech. So GoFundMe was founded in San Diego. They have since acquired three other nonprofit tech SaaS companies in San Diego, like Classy. So that's kind of interesting. You've got people who want to build a business that services nonprofits, and now they're all under one roof. So yeah, I think there is something special. We can dive deeper into some of the other sub-industries or categories that are interesting here, too, if you're interested. VICTORIA: Well, I could talk about San Diego all day. NEAL: [laughs] VICTORIA: Because I'm a fairly new resident, and I'm in love with it, obviously. [laughs] But let's talk more about products that can change the world. Like, what's one that you're really excited about that you've heard recently? NEAL: Ooh. I would start a little high level in certain categories that I'm really liking. I like things I'm seeing in the infrastructure space right now, meaning, you know, whether it's pipes and our water utilities, and I would include that in energy and EV, you know, kind of a mobility piece. There's even the commercial side of mobility, so trucking and freight. That whole infrastructure layer is really interesting to me right now. A certain company that, full disclosure, we invested in recently is a company called EarthGrid. They have a product that is boring holes tunnel-wise underground, but they're using just electricity and air, so plasma. And it's fascinating. They can bore holes 100 times the norm right now. They don't need to potentially trench, meaning they don't need to cut above the surface. They can just dig for miles straight underneath the ground, so they can go under things with that. And really a lot of the expensive pieces, closing lanes on freeways or highways to put fiber in or plumbing and all that. So it's really interesting to see that. Now, one element is the technology is interesting. But they have a plan to actually own their own tunnels that go across the entire United States. So they don't just want to be a device that they're going to sell to everyone. They want to actually own their own utility that has major tunnels across the United States. So that's fascinating to me because that's like think big, think exponential around that. So that's one area that's kind of fascinating to me. VICTORIA: That's super interesting, and thinking about the impact it can have on making power more secure for more people, things like that. There are just so many problems to solve, and so many are people trying to solve them. [laughs] - NEAL: Yeah, exactly. And they have a clean tech angle in that there are a lot of different ways to dig and tunnel that includes chemicals, and so their big thing is to not do that. Some of their background is installing these kinds of lines in the EV space for solar panels. So they have a big kind of clean and sustainability focus there. And our infrastructure is aging big time. We've got 100-year-old bridges and pipes and other things that it's really interesting to see the government put money into. And so that is another aspect, a business model, per se of infrastructure. You have the government putting billions, if not trillions, into upgrading our infrastructure, which as an investor, I like to hear that there's free capital out there in forms of non-dilutive funding to help these along, and that's existed for hundreds of years. Cars and oil industry got these kinds of subsidies, and then the EV and solar panels. So that's a good area that I like to look in as well is where is there additional large-scale funding to help these products really get to market? VICTORIA: That makes sense. And so you're meeting three to five founders a day, and you're watching where the funding is available. And out of all the pitches that you receive, how many do you really get to say yes to? NEAL: Oh, it's small, I mean, one to two a month if that would be a lot, and those could take a few months to work through. The best way for us to invest is to get to know the people for as long as possible. So I kind of mentioned that relationship aspect. I want to see how people operate. I want to see how they build product. I want to see how they get to know their customer and iterate and bring that back into design thinking. And so that's a big piece is getting to know and see the people do the things that they're saying. Man, there are so many companies that I like on paper, whether it's oh my God, amazing team, or, oh, cool, the product. Yes, love that idea. And then you have to look at everything together, the timing, the valuation that they want, the team. Has this team been there, done that before? So there are a lot of elements that go into it. Like I mentioned, you have this founder love where you fall in love with the people, and maybe the rest doesn't work out or vice versa. But yeah, I think each investor comes at it differently. So my area because I built two tech companies that were talent tech-related, meaning connecting people for opportunities; my investing style is very team and talent and recruitment-focused, meaning what are the superpowers of the founders? Are they aware of their weaknesses and their strengths? Have they filled in those gaps by finding co-founders that are complementary and opposites? And then my partner, Al Bsharah, he is a super product guy, and he wants to break the product and see, how can you break it? What are they thinking product roadmap-wise? That's his first go-to. And so, for us, we're super complementary in that regard. So we will assess the same company in very different ways and then come together and say, "Let's share our scores, share our rank. Where do you think this company sits at in all these different areas and boxes?" And so that's a great way, that complementary skill sets as investors. We utilize those strengths together. So yeah, it's hard for a founder to know that. A founder who's building a product, the person on the other side of the screen, they're meeting me. They're not going to know my algorithm. They're not going to know what I value more than something else. So there's this whole dance. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but it is a dance. It's a negotiation. And that's why I build a community because I'd really rather take the gloves off and get to know people when they're not raising capital, when they really are just inspired by innovation and by customers, and they're just excited, and they're building product. That's the time I want to get to know them and see how they iterate before the capital question comes in. Because when it's capital, it tends to feel a little transactional, and that's just not the name of the game per se. VICTORIA: It makes sense. And I'm curious, working with your partner who has a specialty in product, has there ever been a big surprise that he presented with you that you would never have thought of without that product perspective? NEAL: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think there are many times now where either the company is really touting a specific piece of their product, whether it's a certain kind of technology that as a non-product builder either I think, wow, that's unique. That's special; that's novel. And I go to my partner, who really is an automation expert in terms of product building, and boom, can whip it out in a second and say, "I could that with Zapier," or now ChatGPT. So I think there are those elements that are good checkpoints of putting too much...maybe I get too excited about uniqueness or a novelty of a product. And then there's the opposite. There's the team undersells their product, and really they're touting, hey, we have a background in this industry. So we're going to go build because we know how to get into that industry. Our uniqueness is go-to-market, so they think. And it turns out, hey, you're really underselling the product here. There's something special about your vision system here or your data set that you're using to build your ML model. So I've seen a variety of both of those. I think we're going to see more and more right now where ChatGPT and other AI models are going to show that maybe the tech exactly like AI isn't the specialty. That's going to be a democratization across the board. We're just going to expect that everyone can build a baseline product. So how are people going to differentiate on the product? That's where I'm really excited to see where product stands out now that more and more people have more tools at their disposal to build a good product. VICTORIA: Yeah, I'm excited for that too and to see which experiments with AI really pan out to be something useful that becomes part of everyday life. Do you have any instincts on where you think you're going to see the most out of AI innovation in tech? NEAL: AI is such a big word, and it feels so buzzwordy right now. But actually, in San Diego, we have a deep history in the high-level AI, and it starts with analytics. We have a deep, deep bench of analytics talent here. In fact, Google Analytics was founded in San Diego under the name Urchin Analytics and acquired by Google in 2004. VICTORIA: Oh. NEAL: And so you have these big analytic models and builders here that is interesting to tap into. I kind of bucket it in a few areas. I look at the vision aspect, so motion capture, motion classification, image classification. That's really interesting that I think we'll see a lot of that that applied to blank. I'm seeing that applied to life sciences, so cancer detection through some sort of imaging. Obviously, the mobility aspect, whether it's self-driving or driver assisted for blank, whether that's drones, self-driving trucks, all those areas. That's one area interesting from the AI piece. Natural language processing which there's a piece of ChatGPT to that regard. I think it is really interesting from what is your dataset? What are you tapping into? I'm also seeing that applied to digital health, whether it's clinical trials bringing AI models there, whether it's taking genomic data and saying, let's build better clinical trial classes. Maybe we don't need 500 patients when we can build the best 30 patients to enter a trial because we've got genomic data on our side. So yeah, I think I'm more looking at certain industries and saying, what is the right AI model for it? And I think that's pretty exciting. 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: So tell me, you know, at Interlock Capital, when you're working with a team, what do you use to really manage all of this information and these contacts for your investors? NEAL: Yeah, it's a great question. We decided to build our own products in-house thanks to my partner Al who's a great product builder. At the end of the day, there are a few different funnels we are managing within Interlock Capital. We're managing our customer, which really is the startup. We want to make sure we're keeping track of them on whatever timeline. And so we use CRMs, basically, to manage funnels per se. So that's startups. Then there's the deal flow sharing, so these are other VC firms, maybe other service providers, where we're sharing companies with each other. And then we have investors, so we're using CRM for managing our investors, like our limited partners, our LPs. So that's basic CRM. Luckily, we were able to use an off-the-shelf product called Streak for that. But what we do uniquely is we want to engage in two directions our investment community, meaning we want to get to know them, get to know everyone's expertise so we know when to tap them to say, "Hey, can you help on this deal?" And help is very broad, meaning it could be to give it a quick look before I've even met them to say, "Is this something I should even be looking at?" Or I've already met the team, maybe spent a few hours with them. And I'm asking for a deep dive with an expert to say, "Join a call with me after you've reviewed a deck and help me ask harder questions." So there's that aspect of we wanted to figure out how do we get to know our people in our group? Because we're hundreds now. So we decided to build a platform off Bubble.io and Airtable basic no-code where we could build a light profile of everyone. So everyone self-selects a number of profile aspects about themselves. It's also where we're starting to keep data and documents for them as well too. So whether it's tax documents or other forms, we can have it all in one spot. And then lastly, when we do decide to make an investment in a company, we write a very detailed memo that starts in Google Docs but then gets built into our product, the Interlock platform. And so in that memo which could honestly be 10 to 20 pages of diligence, in our language only, what are the pros, cons, and risks? We also showcase who is on the diligence team, what their specific expertise is to this investment, if they're personally investing or not. We really want to show conviction from the diligence team. And then we've built in some really cool features where you've got a Q&A board that you can upvote other people's questions about that investment. You can watch a video right there and then about the company, and then you can commit to the investment itself on our platform, saying, "I'm interested in this deal specifically. Here's the amount." And boom, we take you over to a third-party platform to just sign in and wire. So that's current day the product that we decided to build. We've got this whole product roadmap that we've built out that we want to build out more. We would love to automate a little bit more of our deal funnel so that a certain company that we meet maybe they get to a certain stage that we know we're ready for diligence. We can auto-ping the ten people that have that specific domain expertise. So luckily, we built out the profiles about everyone. Now we need to start building some automation in there so that maybe I'm not the bottleneck. I'm going to meet three to five companies a day, I mentioned. That's three to five follow-ups that I need to do. I'm never going to be as fast as the founder wants me to be on getting back to them and saying, "Here's our next steps." So if we can utilize the greater body of people that are in our investment community, that's where we'd love to build out some of the pieces next as well. So automation is kind of the hope there. VICTORIA: That's great. And I love that you're able to take advantage of these low-code tools to build something that worked for you. What was your initial approach to figuring out how to build this in a way that worked for your user group? NEAL: Well, we looked at a lot of existing products first, and there are. There are these angel syndicate websites like AngelList is a big one, you know, a consumer-facing platform where if you're interested in investing, you can join a group, or you can join a dozen groups and just get an email when they have a new investment opportunity. And so we looked at...first, it was survey what's existing out there already. Start building a product feature must-have or is nice to have list for us to get off the ground within Interlock. And then determine the pros and cons of building off the shelf, the time and cost, and maintenance versus using something that already exists. So that was a big piece, just assessment upfront before we do anything. And I think learning the landscape was big for us. I find that building tools for startups there's a lot, but there are also not a lot of mature ones because there's just not a lot of money out there to be made. There's not a billion-dollar industry of making a website to invest in startups per se yet. So that was another thing as well. It's just understanding will the companies that we choose off-the-shelf products-wise will they still be there a year or two or three from now? And ultimately, we decided, you know what? We got to build it ourselves if we really want the two-way communication, not just one-way. We didn't see everything out there. And I think the piece you always underestimate is the maintenance over time as well as all the third-party tools and apps and services that you end up needing and using and how do they play into the maintenance role as well too. We've definitely had elements of our product break because they're no longer supporting that tool anymore. So those are all aspects that you can do as much as you can self-assessment upfront. There's obviously the maintenance piece that goes into it down the road as well too. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And then, in this way, you have control over it, and you can change it as often as you want. NEAL: Totally. VICTORIA: And as much as you like, if you have the time. [laughs] NEAL: One piece that I think we have never planned or expected is that because we built it and it's super unique, there are many other angel groups who have come to us and said, "Can we use your tool? Like, yours is better than anything that exists." And we did not build ours with a commercial aspect in mind at first. We can't just clone an Airtable and be like, "Here we go. Here's your product. It's Bubble and Airtable," because if it breaks for them, we're on the hook for that [laughs] as well too. So I don't think we thought through too much around a commercialized product when we built out our own. But because we've been pinged so many times about, can people use it? It's on our mind now. Like, it literally is on our list of priorities of hiring either part-time or full-time a product builder to go back in and commercialize aspects so that we could actually maybe turn this into a product one day, this whole investment community manager software. VICTORIA: That's really cool. And it's funny, talking to founders, there's always a story about how you set out to do one thing, which was build a community around startups and founders in San Diego, and then you end up building a product, [laughs] right? NEAL: Yup. VICTORIA: And getting something marketable later that you never even intended. NEAL: Yeah, I mean, I think the big learning there is, one, listen to your customer first, then go build products. And so yes, you said it exactly; we wanted to build a community where we could be more engaged with our customer. And as we heard more and more from our customer, it told us what to build. And I always find that from other startups, that's a great model to follow as opposed to build and then go determine if there's a market out there for it. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So it's interesting that you've had this experience of building tech startups from scratch and then now investing, and then now you're back [laughs], and you have a product again. NEAL: [laughs] VICTORIA: So I wonder, if you could go back in time starting Interlock Capital or when you started your companies, like, what advice would you give yourself if you could travel back in time and talk to your past self? NEAL: Oof, so much. Spend a lot of time getting to know yourself, not just what you're good at but what you like to do business-wise. And I actually see those are two different things. Sometimes the things we like to do we're not as good at, but yet we want to spend more of our time on it, and maybe it takes us longer to do it. So do some self-assessment. I would have done that more on myself. And I'll give you an example, I, for whatever reason, like to brute force certain things like our email outreach, whereas my partner loves to build automation campaigns for it because he built a software in the email space. I know I could learn a quick automation route [laughs] to do certain things, but for whatever reason, I love sometimes the analog version of things. And that's good sometimes, and sometimes there's no time for that. So learn a lot more about myself, what I like, and what I'm good at. And then the opposite, what I don't like doing, what could I shed as quickly as possible and could hire for in some way or another, trade my time or capital for time. And then, only then, once I know myself better, then go find the perfect partner that complements everything. It's the opposite of me in that regard, opposite in network, opposite in skill sets, and in that regard too. And so I think my first startup, we were carbon copies of each other. We were both aerospace engineers who kind of wanted to do the same thing who lacked emotional intelligence at the time. So yeah, that's a big learning. But I didn't know enough about myself at the time. And it took hardship to learn the hard things. Honestly, entrepreneurs seem to learn by doing more than anything. So you can only tell an entrepreneur so much. Sometimes they're just going to have to go and figure it out by running through a wall. That's one thing I would have changed about myself in that regard. I also probably would have, even earlier during college, gotten more internships to just test myself professionally and know what environments I do well in, meaning big companies, small company, or hands-on mentorship and management or hands-off certain kinds of skill sets. How could I be presenting more often versus just kind of behind-the-scenes doing? All of those I probably could have learned quicker about myself the earlier I would have put myself in those situations as opposed to getting my first job and working at one place for five years. That's a long time to dedicate to learning one culture about that I thrive in. But you live, and you learn. VICTORIA: I love the drive to keep learning and to be like, you know, don't expect to be good at everything [laughs] that you want to do. I think that's fantastic. And what do you see success really looking like for yourself in the next six months or in the next five years? NEAL: This year, this calendar year is really about getting the fund up and running. So we've raised an initial tranche of capital and got through this calendar year to get the full capital we want for the fund in. And we're being really picky about that. We really want operators, so that just takes time to go and meet the right people that maybe have recently exited, so have a little bit of time and have a little capital and now want to spend time with earlier stage companies. So that's a big piece of this year. I also, on the community side, want to scale it a little bit. I've found recurring...like the founders' hike is a really consistent and easy way to build community, just meet new people, get to meet 30 people at once instead of maybe 30 coffee meetings to meet those people and just kind of selectively choose who is good to follow up with. So building and scaling, thinking about how to scale community growth is another area, and hiring a little bit around that. So hiring either a community manager and understanding what does that role even mean? Because it's vague in a variety of scenarios. I think we as a company could utilize it. But I think even San Diego could really benefit from someone professionally community-managing all of us. I don't even know what that means yet. And I'd actually push that back on you. Like, you're recent to town. You've started to meet people in a variety of venues. What's the community management void that you see that exists locally? VICTORIA: Oh, great question. I'm actually going to the Annual March Mingle tonight. This episode will come out a little bit later. NEAL: I'll be there too. VICTORIA: Oh, I was like, I'm going to interview you and probably see you later. [laughs] NEAL: Awesome. VICTORIA: Yeah, I think what's interesting about what I've experienced so far is that there is a thriving community. People show up to events. There are a lot of different focuses and specialties. Like, there's the San Diego Design and Accessibility meetup, which had over 30 people over and has a lot of great content. The tech coffees usually have your standard crew who comes. I'm in North County in Encinitas, and then there's Downtown San Diego. And I think you and I have talked about this, that there isn't as much of a major hub. And people are kind of spread out and don't really like to travel outside of their little bubble, which isn't necessarily unique to San Diego. [laughs] I think we've seen this in other areas too. So I think deciding where and how and maybe just building that group of community organizers too. One thing we had in DC was we would have a meetup of all the meetup organizers. [laughs] NEAL: Ooh. VICTORIA: They were just the people who are running events would get together and meet each other and talk and get ideas and bounce off, and maybe that exists in San Diego, but I just haven't tapped into it yet. NEAL: Well, that's a great, great, great, great point because, yeah, learning from others. Everyone is out there doing. Let's learn what's working and what's not. I do that actually from community to community. I do compare...I'll pop into a city on personal travel, but I'll look for, say, the Neal Bloom of Phoenix or something [laughter] and share quick notes. Something Startup San Diego started... when Startup San Diego started ten years ago and became a nonprofit shortly thereafter, it wanted to be the convener of all the organizations that help startups. And so there became kind of the startup alliance, I think, where it was all people who run different startup orgs, mostly nonprofits or just meetups getting together. And that hasn't come back since COVID, and I don't know if anyone's thought to bring it back. So this is a great time to think about that. Let's do it. Let's absolutely get the startup community alliance back together and sharing what's working and what's not. Something else that I think matters as we're coming out of COVID and really matters also for product is it feels like curation matters way more than anything before. Like, we value our time more. We want to be home a bit more. And so we're only going to go to the things that we know there's some value out of it as opposed to, oh, I'll show up to that thing. It sounds cool. I get free pizza. So the curation piece, I think, is interesting to think about, like, how do you scale curation? Because if you make smaller groups and make it more valuable, you still can't make a group for everyone. Someone's always going to be missing out. That's a piece when I think of how has product worked really well for that? Obviously, product has done amazing things on curation with using filters and ranking and other things. How do you do that in real-time for community? VICTORIA: Yeah, that's a really cool idea. And it's interesting talking with organizers from Women Who Code DC who are still there and coming back from COVID. They were all virtual events, and now they're having part virtual and part in-person. And it's interesting where some people really want to get back to the in person and see people in real life. The virtual is also still a very good option for people altogether across the board. So, yeah, I think you're 100% right on the event has to be kind of worth it. [laughs] And how do we make that real? But we still have all these other options for connecting with each other too, and we should take advantage of this. I love that here if we're going out in person, you're on a patio. [laughs] You're outside. Even though it's pouring down rain right now so we're probably going to get rained out a little bit. NEAL: I don't think I realized how outdoorsy we already were until this recent rain, one, because COVID forced everyone outdoors already. So for the last three years, we've only been going to places that have been outdoors. But then I realized, wait, every coffee shop I go to already is just open air. Every brewery, every restaurant is open-air. We've got it pretty good here. March Mingle, as big as it is, which it's like you're 17, 18, maybe 20, it's always an amazingly cool crowd and a crowd that I don't always see at every event. It's not the same, same people. It's a crowd that just comes to March Mingle. VICTORIA: That's super cool. I'm excited to see you there later. And maybe by the time we've aired this episode, I'll have actually posted about it, so it won't be a surprise [laughs] for anybody. But I love that. Okay, so, wait, that was...did we talk about six months and five years into the future of success? NEAL: We didn't. We just talked this calendar year. Five years out, professionally, I think a well-oiled community, multiple funds under management that maybe have realized, like, let's have one with different focus. Maybe there's an infrastructure tech fund, maybe there's a diabetes tech fund. I'd love to explore the curated focused thesis aspects because it's easy to be pretty general when I'm meeting so many interesting companies, and I have so many experts at my disposal. Maybe it makes sense to have multiple smaller focused funds in that regard. I think five years out; also, we will have probably weathered some financial storms, probably be on the upswing of that, and therefore maybe there are some exits that would have happened in town. There's certainly a number of late-stage tech companies that have been at it 10, 15 years that a lot of early investors and employees with stock are just kind of waiting for a liquidity event, and I really think by then we will have seen that. And that will be really interesting to see if and how people recycle their capital back into the community, both from investing, from giving philanthropically, and then their time as well. Sometimes when you have really big success, it's easy to check out and leave, and I'm hoping we're getting ahead of that cycle now. We're getting people to put some skin in the game now so that when the exits happen, they stay connected because they're got some investments in the community. So I'm really hoping that we've closed the wheel on the flywheel of capital, recyclable capital here in San Diego five years out from now. VICTORIA: Oh, I really like that. And I think it makes sense from that idea of if you've benefited from being able to run your own company and to work with all these people in San Diego that when you exit, you invest that back into the community and grow future companies with it. NEAL: Exactly. I mean, someone helped you, all of us, and they're just ahead of us. It kind of behooves all of us; then, to each stage and phase we go forward, we should look back and say, "How can we help someone behind us?" And we started this conversation that is a very San Diego culture thing. And so I'm really excited to see when that line bends back on itself, that flywheel closes. So the other aspects of that is we're starting to build some crossroads with Tijuana. We tried before COVID, and we're trying again now. And I'm really excited to see the long-term effect of connecting these cross-border communities. And then we talked about some technology, five years out, man, if GPT is updating so quickly now, I can't even imagine what AI is building product by itself five years from now. And where do the humans play a role in that? People love the splashy headline articles of here's where AI is going to replace your jobs. I'm thinking quite the opposite. I'm so excited for the new jobs to emerge that don't exist right now, for us to complement technology, that, you know, we'll be doing things that are better than humans. So that's a whole piece of technology and product that I'm excited to see play out. VICTORIA: I agree. I think that it's humans plus machines make the most impact, right? [laughs] NEAL: Exactly. VICTORIA: It by itself won't do it. But I think that's fantastic. What a great note to kind of end on. But is there anything else that you want as a final takeaway for our listeners? NEAL: One, I'd love to meet you if you're building an interesting product. I'd love to connect you into our community, so that's a self-serving ask. Find me on LinkedIn or Twitter; probably, Twitter's easier. Write me that you heard me on Giant Robots Smashing Into Others. Absolutely would love to hear that feedback loop. Also, come check out San Diego sometime. Come join our founders' hike. If you're listening to this, pretty much we have it on every first Wednesday of each month. We'd love to welcome you into the community here. And if you have an idea for a startup but haven't started yet, that's a great time to be talking and thinking how could I iterate way sooner than you would have thought. So don't wait to get started on something; just start talking to people about it. Don't be afraid to share your product ideas. No one's going to steal it. So I would just tell people to get started sooner than you think. And the world will benefit from you putting that out into the universe. VICTORIA: I love that. Thank you so much for sharing and for being a guest on our show today, Neal. We'll have links for how to get connected with you in our show notes. 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. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. 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: Neal Bloom.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

Brian Feretic is the Founder of Blossm, a community marketplace to buy, sell, and trade plants. Victoria talks to Brian about how coming up with the concept happened, getting started in a very scrappy way and then filling in gaps, and opening up the app to have full marketplace functionality with buying, selling, and trading capabilities. Blossm Follow Blossm on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or TikTok. Follow Brian Feretic on LinkedIn. 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 or Tori. And with me today is Brian Feretic, Founder of Blossm, a community marketplace to buy, sell, and trade plants. Brian, thank you for joining us. BRIAN: Hey, it's great to be here, Tori. VICTORIA: Great. I'm excited to hear more about Blossm. Why don't you just tell me a little bit more about the concept? BRIAN: The concept actually happened at the end of 2019, and I'd already been a plant enthusiast for a couple of years. I was actually just going on my way to surf in my town of Ocean Beach, San Diego, and I stopped by this garage sale. And when I came back to pay my neighbor, I brought this rubber plant that are propagated just as a neighborly gift. She flipped out. She was ecstatic. She's like, "Oh my God, I'm such a huge plant person. Thank you so much. Why don't you come into my backyard, and I'll give you a plant tour, and you can pick something out." And what was cool about this was it wasn't just like a simple exchange. It was like this hour-long interaction with someone that lived four blocks from me that happened to be this big plant nerd like me. And I got her whole story. She went through all these different species I didn't know about. And then, she helped me pick one out, which I still have to this day. It's this crassula succulent. When I was walking home with my new plant, I was like, oh wow, I got to go download the app for this. I would have never known this person that lives four houses away was a big plant person like me. And when I got home, I searched the App Store. I did a Google search. I just couldn't find what I was looking for, which was basically this plant-swapping plant-connecting platform where I could find fellow plant nerds in my neighborhood. And so that kind of set me off on this path. I did some more research and decided...I was like, you know what? I'm going to commit to this and make this happen for myself and for my community. VICTORIA: Well, what do you think makes someone a plant person [laughs] or like a...how did you describe yourself? A plant nerd? What sets that user apart? BRIAN: We'll say it's like on a spectrum where people can shift along the spectrum. But I'd say when people start treating their plants more than objects and more what they are. They are these living things. They're beautiful. They bring people joy. I find it therapeutic to take care of them. And then the beautiful thing about it is that these plants grow, and you can propagate them and share them with your friends. And I think that is a critical aspect of this whole plant person thing. VICTORIA: So the plants have become a little more like pets, and you can grow them in a way that creates a community around your friendship and your local area. BRIAN: Yeah, exactly. That was actually the early signal about this whole plant world is that I saw people creating plant-dedicated Instagram accounts as if it was your dog or cat. And that was something that I realized this is a different type of person. This is a very passionate person willing to, like, they're so proud of their plant babies, we call them. [laughter] VICTORIA: Right. And it's funny, you say, plant babies. When I think of people I know who I would consider plant people, they do talk to their plants like their babies. They're like, "Oh, it's so cute." [laughs] Or they're like, "Oh, he's not feeling so well." So I think that's great. And so you started to do some research into this community, into this group. What surprised you about your early findings? BRIAN: This was actually something that I didn't realize until I dug deeper was that I thought that it was only going to be a local thing. People wanted to experience what I did with Sondra, who's the neighbor I swapped with, this in-person connection, swapping, checking each other's gardens out and houseplants. But I learned very quickly that people ship plants to each other not only within your own state but across the country, and this is global. And I was just like, how do people ship plants? Turns out I do it all the time, almost weekly now, for years. That aspect was critical to realize, all right; this plant community doesn't necessarily have to be bound by physical in-person distance. It can connect online, and people share all over via shipping. VICTORIA: That's really cool. So you decided that there's a whole international community. So is that when you decided to really start building something like an application to help people? BRIAN: I remember just throwing this idea out to a lot of different friends, like, various backgrounds. And I was like, "Hey, what do you think of this idea about connecting people through this shared love?" And there is not one person who thought it was a terrible idea. And then I remember talking about it with a roommate at the time, and basically the same thing. I was like, "Hey, man, imagine people connecting through the shared passion. Who knows? Maybe even love can blossom." And he was like, "Dude, that's what you should call it." I was like, oh, that's a great name. It's about three and a half years now, and it's stuck ever since. VICTORIA: I love that, [laughter] about sharing love, and how the name came about, and just starting with your friends and people you knew and bouncing ideas off of them. But your background is not specifically in technology. So what about your background applied? And what did you have to learn new to take along this journey? BRIAN: So my whole career, I've been involved within the science sector. I actually moved to San Diego to pursue graduate school in neuroscience. I was very curious about kind of full neural networks and how those contribute to behavior. Actually, the Ph.D. program I wanted to get into at UCSD, there's a specific lab doing this really cool research with this new innovative imaging technique. And I applied twice, and I didn't get in. And so I went into biotech. But I would say probably two things helped me. I realize now going through this entrepreneur path, things that helped train me for this, was definitely a graduate school where you're pretty much broke the whole time. My lab didn't have too much funding, so you had to be really resourceful and creative to figure stuff out with minimal resources. And that's perfectly summed up the last couple of years, just like figuring stuff out. We have no money. How do we get awareness of our product when we can't spend, you know, we don't have ad spend or marketing budget? And it just kind of requires you to get creative and think outside the box and just really think, all right, what do I do here? And I came up with some hacky-type strategies that have been very effective. [laughs] VICTORIA: Well, very cool. It sounds like you found your team now to start working with you on this in a very scrappy way. So how did you fill in those gaps, maybe in your knowledge or your background on how to get this done by the people that you grew around you? BRIAN: For me, it wasn't too difficult. Well, one, my background. I was very naive with tech at the time and just programming in general. So my first task, I laid out three options. It was like, one, I can learn how to code. I dabbled in it for a week, and I was like, man, there's no way. [laughter] Two, I was like, I can outsource it, maybe somewhat cheaply, but I don't want to spend all my savings on it. But more, I knew that, you know, say you come out of MVP product, the product always is growing, adapting, evolving, or you encounter bugs. And I could just see how full of friction the process would be if I had to, like, all right, we have found a bug, send the contract out. They have to accept the contract. And I just knew progress would be too slow to operate in that fashion. And the third option was, like, find a technical co-founder and pursue this dream with, you know, a buddy. I was like, all right, who do I know that is in the computer stuff? And that was my thought. And my first guy I pitched it to was a friend I went to college with at Bucknell University. And he was like, I think, "This is a good idea." But he's like, "I'm going to retire probably in five years, and this is going to be a very lengthy thing." He's like, "I'm not interested." The second guy was extremely down for it, but it turns out he didn't know how to do any mobile app development. He uses a consultant. [laughs] And so the third and who I ended up working with was my surfing and climbing buddy Nick Mitchell. I just knew he did computer-type stuff. I pitched him the idea, and he was like, "What's up with this plant thing?" VICTORIA: [laughs] BRIAN: And I was like, "Oh, dude, this is a rapidly growing market. I know the ins and outs really well. I know this audience. I'm one of them." He wasn't sold until he heard an NPR piece talking about the houseplant boom. And then his father sent him an article from the New York Times saying how millennials are embracing houseplants and driving this new houseplant market. And so I think this was maybe end of December, now in 2019. And he hit me up, and of course, he's like, "Oh, dude, I want in. Let's do it." But I also wanted to make sure I knew he could actually do what was the task at hand. [laughter] So I had my other first friend vet his GitHub and stuff just to make sure. [laughs] VICTORIA: Oh, cool. [laughs] BRIAN: And he was like, "Yeah, you know, he looks good. Worth a shot." And it turns out Nick is excellent. He did all the front end, back end. He built this whole app basically from scratch. It's pretty amazing what he's capable of. So I got it right on the third try. [laughs] VICTORIA: That's funny. And I'm not surprised it came from networking in the climbing community, either. BRIAN: Right. There's a lot of smart...definitely a lot of smart people in the climbing community. And those are like my closest friends now. So it was kind of cool to find someone in that place. VICTORIA: And I've been climbing with friends before, and you're talking about work or whatever. And they're like, "Oh, yeah, I'm also like an Azure architect," [laughs] like some specific skill that's related to what you need. And I think it's a similar cultural mindset of people you want to be working with too. Maybe that's just me. So, okay, so you found your partner. You had someone who had all the skills that you needed to make this happen. How long did it take until you really had something you were proud of? BRIAN: So, for me, I was laid off in August of 2019. I was working at Celgene, and they got acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb for like 72 billion, so massive merger. And I was kind of getting over the field. And so I was already basically unemployed. Nick, when we started actually working together in...we'll just call it January 2020. We started working on it casually, and then the pandemic happened. And then he got laid off. And he did about a three-month stint before he got another job at ServiceNow. But within those three months, he really cranked out like a full MVP. And then I had about probably at least 60 or 70 people I knew beta test the product for feedback and just initial thoughts. And so that was like a very critical time where we were all locked down. We have this cool idea. Let's just crank this out. So we had an MVP pretty quick. And then we actually launched it in June 2020. And I was already very stoked about the product. As long as it did its core thing, which is connecting people through this shared love, I knew it was like a proper test, a good enough test to see if this is a worthy endeavor. VICTORIA: That's really cool. So was there any surprising feedback that you got from that initial beta testing? BRIAN: Yeah. [laughs] So the initial concept was essentially like a Tinder for plants. [laughter] And I was just thinking about this idea, like, if people could just swipe on plants they've uploaded, and then if both people liked a particular plant and they swiped on each other, and they matched, it would open up a chat that would connect them. And it took the...one of the issues with bartering, in general, is people are like, "Oh, I'd love to swap that with you." And they're like, "Oh, what do you want to swap? What do you have?" And a lot of times, people don't align with what they have and what they want to swap. So I figured that would get this kind of friction out of there, but still, the core was connecting people. And then, very quickly, people found it fun. And this is still a feature right now on Blossm, which we've moved to the homepage. And it got a lot of engagement and interactions on it. But one of the simple changes was like, all right, maybe this is not the optimal way to present these plants people are uploading. Nick actually drew a lot of inspiration from OfferUp. And he was like, "Oh, this is very simple. This is a very clean way to present these things." So we started getting inspiration from OfferUp, and we changed that kind of swipe card functionality just to a scrollable grid. And that was a great insight on his part, and some of that has been core to the product from that point on. VICTORIA: That's so cool. So I can just go in the app and see a whole list of plants that people are willing to trade. BRIAN: Right. Actually, I would say another thing that happened very early on, too, was, once again, bartering is not the most efficient way to exchange things with each other. And within weeks, we're seeing people being like, "Oh, well, what do you want to swap?" And then people are like, "Oh, well, I don't want to swap for that. I already have that." And then other people are like, "Hey, I don't want to swap anything. I just want to buy it." And then other people are like, "Hey, I don't have anything. but how do I get stuff for you?" So right away, we opened it up to full marketplace kind of functionality with buying, selling, and trading. And we didn't have necessarily any payment system to facilitate that. We would just connect people. And then they would use Venmo, or Paypal, or Cash App, or things like that. VICTORIA: That makes sense. 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: Now you kind of got your core features figured out, and you see people engaging with the app. What are you the most excited about on the horizon in your roadmap? BRIAN: We're about to actually finish the TechStars accelerator next week. Next week is our demo day. It's been such a great experience, and I feel blessed. But during this time, we're really figuring out, like, what's our big vision with Blossm? And we kind of went back to really harp on, like, we're more than just an e-commerce or marketplace. We're like this special passionate community where people can do this buying, and selling, and trading. One of the things that's been the trend for years now is instead of just photos; we're about to integrate some video functionality. This is a lead in to the bigger goal. And the idea is creating this...we're calling this full plant experience focused around live video where people can engage with each other on this totally different intimate level and can really showcase their plant collection and give each other a plant tour. How do you take care of this plant? Is another big topic that always comes up. It's just hard to really decipher what's wrong with something just from ecstatic images. And we imagine we could have live plant help. And then people can just show their plant up to the camera and showing a really holistic view of what's going on. And so this vision of live with video and creating a more complete plant experience centered around really using the community as this way to promote that and really build that even further. VICTORIA: That's very cool. I think I've talked to you a little bit before about this giant fiddle fig I have in my office. [laughs] It's going to the ceiling. And I got it from Home Depot, so it may not be the highest quality. And I've asked you about, like, is it alive? It keeps dropping leaves. So if I had a video and I could just show you around and show you where the leaves are browning a little bit and where it's not growing, I could see the value in having that interaction like that. BRIAN: Yeah, exactly. No one's doing that. And definitely, we want to keep innovating the space. We were first to market many years ago. And then, actually, we have some direct competitors that are blatantly just copying us, like copying email templates, features. And on one hand, it's flattering, but also we realize we have to be careful about positioning and making sure we stay ahead of the curve. And we think this is going to be the future and something that delivers really extreme value to this demographic. VICTORIA: Absolutely. And you mentioned you're a part of a tech accelerator. Could you tell me a little bit more about choosing which program you went to and how that's affected your overall approach to your app? BRIAN: Yeah. So last year, we added two more team members, so actually Nick's younger brother, Calvin, we poached from Amazon, which felt really good. [laughter] And then we had another friend, Ari Olmos, who we knew had experience in the startup world. He started, or I think he was, co-founder or CEO of a few other social mission startups. So he understood just the fundraising process was probably the most critical trait we're looking for, just someone that can help refine our systems, our processes, things like that. So now we're a team of four. And we were like, all right; we need money if we want to keep this alive. And I've been full-time since the idea conception. Ari joined full-time. Nick and Calvin both had jobs. But we just knew it's critical for a high-potential startup like ours to really grow; we needed some sort of fundraising. And it seemed logical. We gave our shot at proper fundraising with some angels and VCs last year. There were very encouraging signs, but didn't necessarily translate to any checks being written for us. And then we applied to a bunch of accelerators; Y Combinator and TechStars were our top two. We got a few rounds of interviews from TechStars, and the director, Ryan Kuder, who's great; he's actually based in San Diego. And I credit him to definitely being a key component here because I knew he really liked us. He saw the really good complementary team we built. We had a pretty mature product with traction and an active user base. And we accepted, and it did a lot of things for us. It was our first proper fundraising beyond a Kickstarter. So Nick and Calvin became full-time once we got in. And then we just had this, like, you have access to this massive network and get this really detailed one on one mentorship. We had almost six or seven mentors that we met with weekly. They're always available to help. And probably the coolest thing about it is they're just there to help you. There's no two-sided, like, I'll help you if you can help me. We are here to help you build, grow, accelerate your business. And they gave us really good insights on direction, really formalizing how to build in systems that will last much longer than the three month-program that essentially just mimicked a lot of stuff we've done on the program within our own team, like hosting little daily stand-ups every day. We've always done weekly meetings but using that time more efficiently, knowing how to test and measure more effectively. They've really just refined our company to be a proper business instead of four dudes trying to make this cool plant app. VICTORIA: That's really cool. And I wonder now, like, after you've had this experience, what advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time to when this all started? BRIAN: First thing that popped in my head was...and I kind of knew this going into it, like, this is a big project that needs time. Things that prevent startups usually is, one, you don't execute, or you just don't start it at all, or you give up too soon. And I guess I would tell myself, hey, things are going to be all right. Like, just keep sticking with it. And you're getting all the signals; this is something substantial and worthwhile. Just be patient, stick with it. Survive those valleys, and there are peaks on the way. And getting into TechStars was the ultimate validation. Yeah, I feel extremely blessed to be in it. And I think we're poised to do big things this year. VICTORIA: That's very cool. So you've mentioned those peaks and valleys and how much time you have to spend on this type of starting a company [laughs] and building an app. How do you balance that with also having a regular life and going surfing and climbing? BRIAN: It's tough to find your specific balance and especially during the accelerator where I didn't want to waste any opportunity. So there were a lot of times...I think January was a month straight no days off. And actually, I was injured so I couldn't surf, climb, or even play piano, so all my outlets. But just be okay with setting aside time to where you don't think about work at all. And it took me a few months to reach that point. And I found that as long as I have one activity or some exercise per day, either I surf or climb, I'm good. I don't mind working 12-plus hour days if I do one of those. And then just to allocate one day of the week where I am like, I do a couple of hours in the morning. But one mostly day of don't think about work, just enjoy life. And that has been enough for me to feel refreshed going into next week. And so I think I got a good rhythm, and I got a good formula for what works for me. It might be different for other people, but it's important to set aside time where you don't think about it. VICTORIA: Right. Yeah, just to turn off your brain. Sometimes I find, like, you know, you mentioned surfing and climbing helps you do that because you really just can't be on your phone [laughs] when you're out there sometimes. BRIAN: Right. It's kind of funny because I'll almost say it's a catch-22. But sometimes, those things can be distracting, but they're also necessary for you to be focused if that makes sense. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, totally. Let me bring it back to plants. What is your favorite house plant that you have right now? BRIAN: Man, it's changed over the years, but I do have one. It's like the most popular high-in-demand one; it's the Monstera albo. Its common counterpart is the Monstera deliciosa, which is all green. This one has white variegation on the leaves. They're just inherently beautiful plants. And anyone that sees it can be like, "Wow, that is gorgeous." But I have one specific one, and why it's my favorite is that years ago, I was telling a climbing friend about the app, and I guess the app is out by now, but telling her about it. And she's like, "Oh, my grandmother was a huge plant person. My mom now takes care of them. I think she has one of those Monstera plants with the white on it. It was my grandma's though." And I was like, no way. I have to see this. And when I get there, she has this massive one, incredibly mature and old. I think she said it was almost 50 years old. I can't even believe this. VICTORIA: Wow. BRIAN: And then I asked her. I was like, "Hey," [laughs] I was like, "Can I have a little bit of that?" [laughs] And she was like, "Oh yeah, just go ahead. This is a plant. I'll grow it back." And I felt a little bad because I took a nice big cutting like multiple leave cutting. And she absolutely did not care and just was so happy. Turns out she had three of these like big mother plants. There's one cutting that had very low variegation, so it showed barely any white on it. Over time, I grew it out. Every subsequent leaf kept showing more and more white. And now it's just so beautiful. I check up on it every day, and every new leaf is just more beautiful than the next. And it's a special one. And it was gifted to me by my friend's mother. It started off like you can say a lowly variegated plant, and now it's just thriving and beautiful. So it has some history, and it came from a friend. So without a doubt, that's my favorite one. [laughs] VICTORIA: That's very cool. Yeah, I know those Monsteras that you're talking about. They're really interesting-looking plants. I kept one alive for a short time, and I'm very proud of myself for it. [laughs] So I'm interested in using Blossm to keep my plants alive possibly. But that's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. What else can I ask you? Is there anything that I should ask you that I haven't yet? BRIAN: Well, we could actually segue from what you just said. This is an interesting thing. So I think everybody who's been through this has gone through this exact process. So they have a couple of plants. They're like, what's wrong with my plant? How do I take care of this? And they go down the Google rabbit hole, or they happen to buy one of these plant ID plant care apps. Usually, they're like freemium. You get a couple of free tries, and then you have to buy a subscription or whatever. I also did this. And I was like, you know what? These apps suck. They just don't work, or they're too general. The best plant advice you can get is from other plant people because there are so many variables. Like, which growing zone are you in? What kind of light do you have? What's your ambient humidity, temperature? All these factors come into play on how to properly care for your plant and what could be wrong. And the best advice I've gotten was from other plant people. And so we have, like, beyond the marketplace grid, we have this fully functioning community forum essentially like a Facebook group in a way where people can post questions about what's wrong with my plant, or what plant is this? Or share memes and just nerd out. And it's been such a critical component I think of Blossm to cultivate this community. But it's also just very functional and effective because really the only way to get that advice and care information is by interacting with other people. That's something we want to build upon in the future too with that whole live and video capabilities. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes sense. Just a funny story, sometimes I'll call my mom who's a big plant person, and ask her questions, and she's like, "Well, you should go check that book I got you." [laughter] It's like, it's not helpful at all. [laughs] But yeah, no, I think that's right. I think people get excited about AI and image recognition. But sometimes it's still easier to get a real effective answer from a human. BRIAN: Yeah, I'd be curious with the whole AI getting its spotlight right now. And without a doubt, I could see applications there for it. Right now, I don't think that exists, but I'm very curious and excited to see what happens with all of it. It's going to be cool. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, that's awesome. And I am excited that what Blossm does is really create this community around plants and learning about them and with the people around you. Do you have any final takeaways for our listeners? BRIAN: Hmm, final takeaways, you know, shameless self-promotion; if you love plants or you're getting into plants, Blossm is tailored for the plant person, which is what I think makes it special. And more general, I never intended to be the entrepreneur. I never intended for Blossm to be like, oh, this big tech company. I just had something I was super passionate about and wanted to see come alive for myself and for other people. Without a doubt, that passion paired with perseverance, I think, are critical attributes to follow any idea to the end or to some level of success. So don't be afraid to take that leap. By no means has it been easy. It's been the most difficult thing I've ever done but also the most rewarding. It's been really fun too. So if you got a cool idea, maybe try to build it out, find a good co-founder, a good team. Give it a go and create something for everyone. VICTORIA: Well, I really loved your story, Brian. I think you've found your niche. You built something. You took advantage of the time you had when you had it, and look where you are now. [laughs] I'm very excited to see what comes next. BRIAN: Cool. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This has been lovely, and yeah, stoked to listen to the next episodes too. VICTORIA: Excellent. 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. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. 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: Brian Feretic.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

Etienne de Bruin is Founder of 7CTOs and Author of CTO Excellence in 100 Days. Victoria talks to Etienne about his book, founding 7CTOs, and keeping your technology sustainable by inspiring and motivating technology teams and people to work together and build complex systems. CTO Excellence in 100 Days 7CTOs Follow 7CTOs on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube. Follow Etienne de Bruin on LinkedIn or Twitter. 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. And with me today is Etienne de Bruin, Founder of 7CTOs and Author of CTO Excellence in 100 Days. Etienne, thank you for joining me. ETIENNE: My pleasure, Victoria. Thanks for having me. VICTORIA: You're welcome. I'm excited to talk with you today. I hear that you recently published your book. Is it today actually the day it came out? ETIENNE: Today is the day. The book was finished about; I would say, three months ago. So I have had great anticipation now for many, many months. And you caught me on the day, so I feel like today is my birthday. VICTORIA: [laughs] Well, I feel honored that you chose us as your first stop [laughs] in your marketing push for your book. So tell me, what in your experience led you to begin writing this? ETIENNE: Well, as you mentioned, I founded 7CTOs. I think it's about ten years ago now. I myself am a CTO type. I've had a career of basically being born to code in South Africa, which took me to Stellenbosch University in South Africa. I then joined a startup that took me to Germany and then landed in the U.S. in San Diego. And my whole journey has been a progression from individual contributor and really having great coding skills through the messiness and the intricacies of building startups, contributing to startups, and ultimately being in the role of CTO in startups. And what led me to founding 7CTOs was just a realization that I didn't have the support I needed. I felt like I was going to many meetups, which was mostly oriented towards coding and sort of different new technology stacks and frameworks, or I was going to cocktail hours with vendors who were trying to sell you something. And I really felt the need to just be with my people so that I could, in a safe, and consistent, and accountable way, share the challenges that I was experiencing. It was really from this place of founding 7CTOs, talking to hundreds of...I've probably spoken to thousands of CTOs by now. I've also placed people. I've connected people. I've seen people join companies because of connections I've made. And one of the things I saw that really bothered me was finding a great company in search of a CTO reaching out to me, talking to me about the role, me finding or through my network connecting them with a great CTO, only to find that a few months later either the relationship fizzles or even worse, the person did not succeed at the new company. And I just felt like you can have two people, a great founder, and great CTO, individually wonderful people, ostensibly well-suited to work with each other, but then make some basic mistakes that then lead towards not the desired outcome. And so I was really torn whether I should put some thoughts into a book or into some blog posts about what I think the first 100 days should look like in a fledgling relationship. And that's ultimately how the book was born. So long, long, long, long answer, Victoria. But that's where it all started. VICTORIA: No, that's great. I try to ask deep questions that get full answers back. [laughs] ETIENNE: You nailed it. VICTORIA: So I appreciate that context, yeah. So you talk about how to be successful in those first 100 days, which is critical to joining a new leadership team. What are some common mistakes that you mention that a CTO might make? And on the reverse side, what are some wins you could do early on to build trust? ETIENNE: I think a common mistake that I see is a bit of an identity issue. The CTO joins an organization and is eager to deliver value, and I think that that value is oftentimes misplaced. And what I mean by that is you hit the ground running thinking that there's all this stuff that you have to deliver in order to prove that you can make an impact, to prove that you were the right choice. And I think there's an innate desire to impress your new employer, which I don't think is limited to the role of CTO. But I think for the CTO, this looks like some technical achievements and impact, problem-solving. And I think what I like to see is the first 100 days being used to slow down a little bit, to listen, to be curious, to be open to building relationships, to have a longer view on what exactly is the system that you're joining. And I think to a fault; sometimes people will ignore the system they're joining and just start delivering value. And I think that that can often be misinterpreted or misunderstood. And then, if that is misunderstood in the first few months, then that really sets a tone for the rest of the tenure that I think puts the CTO on the back foot to deliver at a pace that maybe is unsustainable, so... VICTORIA: I love that you said staying curious because I think what you can see is a tendency for, I don't know, what I've seen; maybe you've seen this too. [chuckle] But some people have a problem that they solved in a past situation, and they think that that is now the solution to every problem that they come into in a new organization, and maybe it is. But I think dealing in complex systems, having curiosity as to why decisions were made in a certain way can lead you to a better understanding of the business if that resonates with you at all. ETIENNE: Yeah, I love that you said that. I'm a huge fan and student of complex systems. And so you just spoke my love language. VICTORIA: [laughs] ETIENNE: But that's exactly what happens. And I think that sometimes the debilitater of powerful and impactful people is the problem that you observe is maybe tainted by what you saw in the past. It might be a similar challenge, a similar problem. But what you solved in the past was part of a completely different system, different entities, different relationships. And I think that by nature because the CTO is used to solving thousands and thousands of problems, there may be a bit of complacency around what is it exactly that I'm observing is the challenge here? Why exactly was I hired? What exactly does success look like for them, for the people that hired me, for the system that I've come into? And I think the tendency is to ignore all of those questions and focus on how do I feed my own need to feel valued and start solving problems in sort of a whack-a-mole style? And I have found, even in my own experience, that there are some seriously unintended consequences that can arise from solving people's problems for them in ways that they are not used to, or they don't understand, or in some places just fully disagree with. And I think if you are not patient and take sort of 100 full days to just chill out and really enjoy learning about the system that you're joining, I think you're setting yourself up to fail or to at least be very unhappy. VICTORIA: Right, setting yourself up for some fun conflicts [laughs] to solve if you come out right out the gate. And I think maybe, too, the first 100 days the chilling out and learning, you also have time to build empathy and build trust with people so that when you do bring up suggestions, they're maybe a little more willing to listen, right? ETIENNE: Yes. And I think it's not uncommon to say, "Oh, well, I'm going to onboard myself. It's going to take some time before I show value." And I think there is a general sense that when the executive joins a company that, it's going to take some time. But I think that the temptation to jump into fiery situations is great, great in a bad way. It's a great temptation. And my book and my approach suggests that you take a step back and focus on a completely different area of the company, which is its people and its systems, and what success looks like for those people before you start jumping in and asserting your way of doing things. VICTORIA: And you mentioned a question that I was going to ask, like, what does success look like? Or say you're a CEO, and you're trying to hire a CTO; what does success look like? What kind of value do you think people should expect from someone in a CTO role? ETIENNE: Fundamentally, I think I might not be swimming in the mainstream on this topic. I don't believe that the CTO is a technical role first. I believe that the CTO is the Chief Technology Officer but is primarily a business role. And by that, I mean being a member of the C-suite, you are tasked, just like all the other members of the C-suite, to grow a company in a sustainable way. And whatever that middle letter is, is your domain and your expertise, and that's cool. But that T is surrounded by a C and an O, which in most cases has a fiduciary responsibility to the organization. But also, first and foremost, you are a first-class member of the C-suite. And so my book talks about this, but you are there to join in with the executive leadership team and to help that team towards success. And so what that looks like for me is you are wrestling on what the targets are for the company. You participate fully in that. You then allocate a budget. In other words, you allocate cost towards how you can achieve those revenue goals. And then, with that budget as CTO, you then are budgeting towards a team that you believe can get the technology implemented that will ultimately produce the revenue. So think about revenue target, technology budget, technology people. Now, these are all in the C-suite. These are just entries on a P&L. These are entries on the balance sheet. These are things that ultimately are abstracted towards company growth and company success. So with that, the CTO then turns into someone who wrestles with the tech teams, like, what are we going to implement? What ideas are consistent with our company principles and our vision? What does innovation look like? How do we inspire people to join our organization to do so? That, to me, is a fundamental role for the CTO, to inspire people to join the organization but also to be someone who implements and ideates on that journey. So I think a CTO succeeds when there is revenue growth, and that is due to budget being spent in an effective way to attract amazing people to ultimately build technology that is sustainable that then feeds into tech revenue that ultimately helps the company achieve its goals. VICTORIA: That's great. Yeah, I like that you said sustainable and the importance of people and how that relates to keeping your technology sustainable. And I'm curious if you could share more about what practices a CTO could bring to a new organization to facilitate that inspiration and to really motivate technology teams and people to work together and build these systems. ETIENNE: I think that speaks to my earlier answer, which is the investment in people and investment in understanding the systems that exist. So whether you are a CTO, that is the first time a company ever scales and grows into having that role being created, which, you know, most tech startups these days will have the role of CTO allocated and available. The important thing to understand for you as someone stepping into that role is that your teams have a construct. They have an impression. They have an image, either of your predecessor at that company or their experiences with leadership and technology at their previous companies. And I think it's extremely important to understand how you're being seen as a leader in the company and as CTO and that that vision of what people have of you is not necessarily based on your actions, your reputation, your good mornings in the mornings and your good evenings in the evenings. It really is based on people's constructs about what their experience has been of a CTO in their career, or like I said, the previous CTO, your predecessor. And so I think that it's critical as you step into this role that you take the time to bring that change to show people your ways, to show people what is important to you in a way that's not a bull in a china shop. But when you break stuff, and you come in, and you announce your presence, and you assert the new way of doing things, I think that that is met with suspicion and concern most of the time. And so I think if you can show people in the little things that you care about them, you're listening to them, you're curious about the system they're operating inside of, I think that that sets you up to then come in with the big ideas later on. But again, the emphasis being later on, past the 100 days. I talk about this in the book where introducing your tech strategy, introducing your way of doing things really comes a lot later in the 100 days than is maybe the preconceived notion. VICTORIA: And you also mentioned a few times what the CTO should be doing and a lot of great questions that you ask, like, what does success look like? How do we build this together? And finding ways to maybe generate more ideas than just what you would come up with with your team, you're more powerful. ETIENNE: Yes. And I think tag teaming on to that is a lot of times...and this is actually really a confounding thing that I've come across, which is the C-suite won't always understand what the role of CTO actually is. And teams won't always fully understand what the role of CTO is. When you talk about a CMO, or a CRO, or a CFO, I think you can generally understand what they're supposed to be doing. That isn't always clear for the CTO. And it's amazing how many times I have gotten the question, well, we knew we needed someone to help us with the tech, but we don't really know what it is that you do, or what you should be doing, or what success looks like. I think not making the assumption that people know what you're there to do is a form of showing some respect and humility. And this is why always when I'm in executive meetings, when I'm in stand-ups, or I'm in some sort of an architecture meeting, I will almost without fail I will say, "As the role of CTO, this is what I bring to the meeting," or "This is what the role of CTO would be looking for as an outcome of this conversation." Or "As the role of CTO, it is my job to ensure that our development capacity increases," to just never assume that people know what it is that you're there to do but to show them, I think, the respect and the courtesy that the role of CTO has a certain place in whatever meeting or brainstorm session is going on. VICTORIA: I think that makes sense, too, because I could see, you know, especially you mentioned with people who maybe have had past experiences with CTOs that are not the most positive. If you bring up an idea in a meeting, everyone thinks, well, that's the solution. That's what the CTO wants. And it might not. Everyone might not feel comfortable, like, without you caveating; this is why I'm bringing this up. You know, we're here to brainstorm and not for me to just tell you what to do. [laughs] ETIENNE: Yes, yes. And that's why I will often...honestly, this might be a real tip for people listening. But I will actively divorce who I am from the role that I'm in. And it enables me to have difficult conversations. It enables me to assert leadership without dominance. And that is to just say, "Hey, Sandra, in my role as CTO, this is what I am looking for in your growth or in your career path." Versus, "Hey, Sandra, I want you to..." or "I need you to..." And I think the subtle difference there is to just assure someone that you're operating in a capacity that the company expects from you versus somehow having your identity wrapped in the outcome of a conversation. And that really has been a very powerful tool for me as I integrate into new companies or as I need to navigate tricky conversations. VICTORIA: I appreciate you sharing that. I think hopefully that will be a great point for someone who's maybe struggling with something similar at this time. And maybe there are other common questions or themes that come up when you're talking to all these CTOs in organizations that you can share. ETIENNE: By the way, if your name is Sandra and you're listening to this conversation, I totally made up the name Sandra, so I'm not referring to you, Sandra. VICTORIA: [laughs] ETIENNE: Okay. I think an interesting thing that I've noticed is given the stage of my company, have I addressed all the things that I need to by now? And I think that is such an indication of the times that we live in. Technology is always changing. Expectations are always changing. Clearly, if you're in a technology innovation company, things are rapidly changing. It's funny because some things just stay the same, i.e., people problems and all that. But as far as technology landscape goes, I think that there is a little bit of a daunting feeling that, hey, I'm CTO in this company, but I don't know if I am where I need to be at compared to what other successful companies let's say, for instance, a series A company is doing. And as CTO, am I applying, am I showing up in the way that great CTOs of other series A companies are showing up? And so I would say that's problem number one is, am I operating at the level that I should be that my company is expecting of me? That's a real challenge that CTOs have. And I think level-setting expectations communicating where we should be at is a skill that I think is missing from a lot of people who are in that role. And I think it's because we get to the roles of CTO by being people who rapidly solve problems or speedily deliver on technology. And we start associating speed with being good at our jobs, and I really think that that is wrong; that is just wrong. When you're in an executive role, patience and spending the extra day or the extra week fighting for the extra month, I think, is actually a very important role that the CTO plays in the C-suite. And so if you have an underdeveloped sense of your own leadership style, an underdeveloped sense of your being and your essence and what it is you actually bring to the table, I think you end up just being sort of a knee-jerk tech person that just implements what other people want you to so that you could be valued for what it is that you do. Versus having that solid executive presence inside of a company that really influences and can shape the vision of the organization. VICTORIA: Yeah, I think that's super interesting how common that question is. And I wonder if it gets to sometimes creating a shared understanding between the executive team about the technology and why certain things are important or not important. I wonder if you could talk about any maybe major trends that you see executive teams trying to take advantage of that are either positive or negative. ETIENNE: The thing I've seen the most, which has had the greatest impact on, I think, executive teams, at least from my vantage point, is the desire to adopt some sort of business playbook or a business operating system. I think one of the most popular ones is the EOS model, Entrepreneurs Operating System. Gino Wickman, I think, wrote the book "Traction." And so it's caused a big trend with companies to try and streamline their operations by following the EOS model. And I do think that that might be the wrong solution to the right problem for many companies. What I mean by that is, again, we're talking about blueprints. What works for one company isn't necessarily going to work for the next company. The way you set goals, the way you set your so-called rocks, or the way you set your quarterly goals, or even working by quarter if you think about a quarter, it's such an interesting...it's really a Wall Street concept. It's three months. It's really so arbitrary. And I think that I see C-suites trying to adopt a business operating system that other companies are doing without really the necessary work being done as to, hey, what compels us through our culture, who we are, how we like to do things, what it is that works for us? And I will see some C-suites sort of spin their wheels a little bit on trying to adopt other systems when really all it takes is for them to do their own work to see what is the value stream? What does it look like inside of their company? I actually encourage, and I think I talk about this in this book; in days 60 to 70, I talk about learning to improvise. And I think this is where I look to the CTO to use their spidey senses and their logical deduction skills, their deconstruction skills to observe what is actually happening inside of the C-suite and to facilitate conversations around what is it that people need? How do we improvise on systems that we already have? Or how do we deal with missed expectations? And I do think that the CTO can play a wonderful role inside of the C-suite to facilitate those conversations. But I see inside of C-suites, the role of CTO being relegated to the IT person or just the tech person. And I think that victimization goes both ways. But the C-suite, where the CTO is actually facilitating hard conversations and able to do the decomposition of a complex system or the deconstruction of an often repeated problem or challenge that the company is experiencing, could really push the C-suite into a different track of thinking that could be super beneficial to unblocking some stodgy issues they've been facing. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And it reminds me of trying to adopt agile right when it was first becoming popular and committing so hard to a framework that you don't look at what works for your team [laughs] and works for the specific technology and tools that you have. So it makes sense to me that the CTO could bring an experience like that into applying frameworks to how the business operates. ETIENNE: Absolutely. And I think that's really when dogmatism could be your enemy. And, again, CTO joins a company, knows a certain set of skills in order to accomplish things, dogmatically tries to apply that because they are the so-called expert. And then they fail, or they're unhappy, or there's misunderstanding because we had these high expectations for you. Your interviewing was brilliant, and you said all the right things. But then, when you walked into the organization, your desire for acceptance and delivering value trumps your opportunity to be the new person and be curious about what is actually happening and what is actually going on. This should be so obvious, but when you walk into a C-suite, there are obviously existing relationships between all the different members of the C-suite. And I advocate for being a student of those relationships. Understand the history that exists between the CEO and the CFO. And these could be very great newbie conversations to have with these various members of the C-suite. "Hey, so when did you join the company? Hey, why did you join the company? Hey, wait, which company did you come from? What drew you to this company? Where did you used to live? Why did you move?" I think these are such incredible nodes in a complex relational hierarchy that can give you some very sound ideas as to, oh, well, why does the CEO constantly challenge what the COO is saying? Or why does the COO seem surpassed all the time? You, as CTO you, would do very well. I mean, as any C-suite member, any leader would do well to seek some insight and perception into what is going on for people. VICTORIA: That makes sense, right? If you're going to have influence, you have to kind of understand what are all the connections and energy that's going around in the team? ETIENNE: Absolutely. 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. VICTORIA: And maybe you can tell me more about 7CTOs and what that community can mean for someone who's growing in this role. ETIENNE: 7CTOs, like I said earlier, I founded it...I almost said 100 days ago. I founded it ten years ago. And it was as I mentioned, the genesis of the story, which is important, is I co-founded a company with two people. I wrote the first lines of code for our product. In fact, I wrote the whole version 1 myself. And as the company grew and as the company grew beyond what it was that the three of us were comfortable with, I noticed that my CEO joined an organization a peer group organization. My COO joined a peer group organization. And I just saw this transformation in them that I really admired. I was actually really envious when they were able to start taking what they've learned from their peer groups and bring them into our company to start operating more efficiently. And so, it was just natural that I would look for something for CTOs, and I couldn't find anything. I actually tried to join sort of more generic business leadership groups like Vestige or EO even. And I found that I wasn't really with my people. I wanted to feel like I was with the geeks who could talk all day about tech and development and probably watch the same movies and read the same books or inspired or laugh at the same jokes. I wanted to find my people who were facing the same problems and challenges that I was, i.e., scaling companies beyond the things that we knew, beyond the things that we were comfortable with. And I wanted to have deep conversations with those people. So I wanted to be able to share my insecurities or the politics that I was facing, or the anger that I was feeling, or not feeling seen or heard. I wanted to have deep, meaningful conversations with my true peers in a regular meeting setup that was confidential and fun. And I couldn't find that. So I decided to host a few meetups. My first meetup was actually in Old Town, San Diego, at my buddy's restaurant. And I hosted the first 10 or 12 CTOs and realized that people had a real need for that kind of interaction. And I then ended up hosting 30 different meetings in three different cities. And everywhere I went, there was the same expression that people wanted what I wanted. And then I tried to host a few more meaningful, smaller conversations and people...quite frankly, it was a disaster. I don't think it was the right container for people to respect each other and have empathy for each other's decisions. And instead, it just became a pissing contest for who made the right decision about what situation. And that's when I realized I'm not going to be able to create a meaningful conversation without some rules. And those rules I put in place, i.e., you must attend the meetings. You need to have some skin in the game. And that's how 7CTOs was born. And to this day, it is a vetted peer group organization. We know we have some skin in the game. There's a membership fee. There's a time commitment. And there is a commitment to yourself to grow, to have empathy, to show up for your people, to be accountable to your people, to learn the stuff that you like to learn about and to learn the stuff that you don't want to learn about. And that is where we are today. So anybody who's listening to this who has a CTO who feels cold and lonely, come join us. VICTORIA: I appreciate the hustle, that many meetups in that many cities. I would have gotten tired. [laughs] Like, that's too much. But it seems like there was a demand, and it created something that's really meaningful for people. ETIENNE: Yes. And I was surprised. So from San Diego, I went to Austin. And then, I also started investing in Portland. And I was really amazed how we were in different cities, but each tech scene had this group of people called CTOs who they knew how to talk about technology, and they knew how to geek out of trends and all that. But they were lacking solely in team composition, budget management, C-suite executive presence, handling disagreements with the CEO, maybe knowing when to leave, how to find new positions, to carefully consider the arc of their own careers, to just manage your LinkedIn page. I mean, it was really shocking in the early 2010s how much of that was going on. I will say I was reluctant to actually start something. You know, 7CTOs is very much a membership organization filled with people. Not the most intuitive move for me. I thought I would be building more and more and more tech companies, SaaS products. I do that as an interim or a fractional CTO now, but I don't have my own startup right now in the tech space. But I love 7CTOs. We have a new CEO. Her name is Beth Rehberg. We have our head of coaching. Her name is Brittany Cotton. And we have about 200-plus companies that have enrolled their CTOs in our organization. And the journey is remarkable, truly a remarkable journey to see how people are just blossoming into the full essence and the full impact that they can have in other companies. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. And I wonder, if you could go back in time and give yourself some advice back when you started it knowing what you know now, what advice would you tell yourself? ETIENNE: I grossly underestimated how many White guys I would be attracting. I think about three or four years into the organization; it took someone else to bring it to my attention that there were no women. There were no underrepresented minorities in this group. And so I think from day one, I would have made that a key focal point for myself to really invest in the diversity of the group. We've come a very long way. Our numbers are growing pretty quickly in terms of women joining us and people from various communities joining us. I think that's actually becoming a hallmark of 7CTOs. And I'm very proud of it today. But, boy, back in the day, I would have made that a key prime directive. VICTORIA: Well, that's a really honest take, and I appreciate you offering that to us. And I think that's an important thing to focus on always going forward. [laughs] But I like that, and now it's become a focus for you and creating that space that, you know, hindsight is 2020. [laughs] Well, great. Is there anything else that you'd like to leave as a takeaway for our listeners? ETIENNE: No. I think, of course, I would love some book purchases. Apparently, the first couple of weeks are vital for any new book. So please go over to Amazon and get "CTO Excellence." I also have a website: ctoexcellence.com. So really, anybody who has an inclination towards leadership in the tech space, I'm super passionate about those people. The opportunity to influence in a creative and confident way is just limitless. And I want to help unearth that for fledgling leaders, existing leaders, some leaders who might feel stuck. Please reach out to me. I'd love to get you connected, either through 7CTOs or even I do some coaching as well. So I consider it my life's mission to expand this ecosystem because so many people are impacted by the way we show up. And there's a great opportunity as CTOs to be transformational in our organizations. And this is what I exist to do. VICTORIA: Well, thank you so much for joining us today. And I really appreciate you sharing what you did, and I enjoyed our conversation. 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. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you 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: Etienne de Bruin.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. 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