Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Monique Idlett is the Founder of Reign Ventures, a seed-stage investment firm, and previously the Co-Founder and CEO of Mosley Brands and Mosley Music Group, home to a multiplatinum roster of artists. Chad talks with Monique about how the music industry is like the startup venture capital industry, understanding that representation matters, having a data-forward approach, and appearing on the TV show Undercover Billionaire, where entrepreneurs are given 90-days and nothing but 100 dollars to go undercover and build a thriving million-dollar business for a small town in the US. Reign Ventures Follow Reign Ventures on Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Follow Monique on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Monique Idlett, the Founder of Reign Ventures, a seed-stage investment firm, and previously the Co-Founder and CEO of Mosley Brands and Mosley Music Group, home to a multiplatinum roster of artists. Monique, thank you so much for joining me. Now, you left Mosley Music Group about three years ago to focus exclusively on Reign Ventures. How is the music industry like the startup venture capital industry? MONIQUE: There is no difference in the way I see a pipeline of amazing talented founders. We're truly looking for those exceptional founders that we can help develop, put up that bumper system. The end product in the music industry was the music we were consuming, the experiences through the live art form. And in the startup world, that end product is the success and the ability to scale a real solution that this company has solved with amazing, talented people. So to me, it was a nice, easy transition, and it made sense. CHAD: Are there ways in which it's different? MONIQUE: Oh my goodness, yes, lots of ways that it's different. The difference is that music is an art form. For me, music is the universal language. I believe that I've traveled the world. And I've been to places where there were language barriers, but when a song, a popular song, came on, the language barrier was gone. In the startup world, there may be several people trying to create and penetrate a problem area in a vertical or a category. And we may not have the ability in the startup world to have several of the same sounding things from a business model. They may not all work. And so you're dealing with the emotional capacity on the music side. And on the tech side of things you're truly dealing with, can you really solve this problem? We're solving problems, not just emotional connections from the music industry perspective. And also, it's a lot slower moving. We have a project in the music industry, and it may have a cycle. And now it's an even shorter cycle with technology. You may be able to create an entire project in just a couple of weeks. In the startup world, in the business side of things, you may not see the development for two to three years. So the patience is definitely...I've had to apply a lot more patience and understanding of being able to scale a business versus just a project-driven entity. So it's a little different, but the end result is all the same. Creating real great solutions for real problems, whether it's through an art form or whether it's through a business model, is all similar to me. CHAD: So, do you have a particular investment strategy or focus at Reign? MONIQUE: We do. Erica and I currently we are the largest two female Black-owned VC fund. So one of the things that we felt ten and a half years ago when we started investing together is investing has just been done...venture has been done wrong. There's a reason why less than 3% of funding collectively was...still to this day; it's about 3.2. But over ten years ago, when we started, only less than 3% of funding from VC was going to women, all women, and Black and Brown founders. And so literally, we were like, the problem is that we're not having enough investment or a lens on women and people of color. And we want to do it the way it should have always been done: investing inclusively. We are proud to say that we invest in all founders, all exceptional founders. And yes, we have a lens on women and people of color because they've been under-capitalized and under-resourced and under-everything. And so the reality is that we want to set the tone of how it should always look and the world is inclusive. Diversity is not an issue; the equity and inclusion side is an issue. And we want to keep being that example. CHAD: That's great. Do you feel like, or in your experience, have you found that these founders were already out there and they just were being passed over? Or were the problems so systemic that they weren't

Joseph Mocanu is Co-founder and Managing Director of Verge HealthTech Fund, which invests globally in seed-stage healthcare technology startups relevant to emerging Asia that focus on disease prevention and management, digital therapies, and health system efficiency. Chad talks with Joseph about the healthcare landscape in different places of the world, funding criteria for companies, and how the pandemic has changed prospects for the fund and the market in general. Verge HealthTech Fund Follow Verge HealthTech Fund on LinkedIn. Follow Joseph on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel, and with me today is Joseph Mocanu, Co-founder and Managing Director of Verge HealthTech Fund, which invests globally in seed-stage healthcare technology startups relevant to emerging Asia that focus on disease prevention and management, digital therapies, and health system efficiency. Joseph, thank you for joining me. JOSEPH: Thanks so much, Chad, for having me. CHAD: So you have been focused on emerging Asia healthtech for a little while both at Verge HealthTech Fund, and prior to that, how did you get involved in this space? JOSEPH: I wish I had a really cool, deliberate story that made it sound like it was a smooth transition from point A to point B. But I simply have to owe it to an opportunity to transfer to the region through my old employer which is Oliver Wyman, a global management consultancy. So I joined this consultancy in 2011 after doing my Ph.D. and MBA really to understand how to be a better investor, which, again, sounds a little bit backwards. But I had worked at a hedge fund in China just after my MBA, and I learned that they use management consulting techniques to add value to their portfolio companies. And I thought that's a great skill to learn. And it'd be great to even learn it in English and doing it in healthcare 100% of the time. So I had joined Oliver Wyman in 2011 in Toronto office back home, where I spent a lot of my life. And they asked me one day if I wanted to transfer to the Singapore office to help start healthcare over there. And when I went to Singapore, of course, it's this futuristic city, really well planned. It's got a lot of fine names and a reputation globally of being a modern cosmopolitan place to do business. Some people refer to it as Asia-lite. But the surrounding areas have a lot of issues when it comes to their health systems. I knew this from an academic perspective, having studied about the region before moving to Singapore but seeing it firsthand was a completely different experience. At the time, I was working for primarily pharmaceutical clients, helping them with market access and other commercially relevant activities. And they were faced with a fundamental challenge of trying to sell their product, which was usually placed in the premium category to markets that had difficulty affording this. And not only did it have difficulty affording this, it had difficulty in delivering it as well as in using the product appropriately, making sure it gets to the patients when it's needed at the right time, at the right dose. And so they were looking for partners. They were looking for partners on the ground that could assist with this delivery education, the technology, and the financing around it as well. Now, there was a real shortage of said partners on the ground. At the same time, there were also insurance companies that wanted to expand their business. They also realized that the policies tended to be a bit simple, and they tended to resemble one another across competitors. And also, to manage increasing claims, they had a tendency to increase the premium that they charged. This was not possible to do indefinitely. And at some point, they needed to actually manage the medical conditions, which you're probably seeing more and more of in the U.S. and in Western markets, less so of in this part of the world. And then lastly, you had conglomerates and investors who said, "Hey, we hear healthcare is going to be a pretty hot field. How do we get started? How do we invest?" And all of this basically set me on a mission of target hunting. And during the course of this, well, I met a lot of interesting companies, a lot of them really, really early in their journey and really too small for any of my clients to find a meaningful way to engage with them. And unfortunately, they couldn't get to the point where they are relevant and large enough to engage with without a lot of capital. This is where, you know, you'd have a nice investment ecosystem coming in to fill in the gaps. This, unfortunately, did not really exist at the time. And I had the hubris of thinking that I could do something about it by bei

Carlos F. Gaitan Ospina is the Founder and CEO of Benchmark Labs, which provides IoT-based weather forecasting solutions for the agriculture, energy, and insurance sectors worldwide using proprietary machine-learning software. Chad talks with Carlos about creating the company, the hardware they're producing and what it is doing, and where the machine learning comes into play. Benchmark Labs Follow Benchmark Labs on Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Follow Carlos on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Carlos Gaitan, the Founder and CEO of Benchmark Labs, which provides IoT-based weather forecasting solutions for the agriculture, energy, and insurance sectors worldwide using proprietary machine-learning software. Carlos, thank you very much for joining me. CARLOS: Thank you for the invitation, Chad. It's a pleasure to join you here. CHAD: You work in a variety of different industries with weather forecasting solutions using machine learning. I'm really curious, at a high level, how did you get to where you created Benchmark Labs today? CARLOS: Oh, thank you, Chad. That's a great question. I think that in many ways, it's a combination of life experiences and lots of user feedback. As a background, my mum worked for 28 years in the National Federation of Coffee Growers in my native Columbia. And we experience basically the effects of weather, La Niña, El Niño, local conditions, pests on the coffee growers. I remember growing up looking at the price in The New York Stock Exchange if the pound of coffee was going to be more than $1 or not [laughs] and so on. So, you know, we had a very severe drought in Colombia, and Colombia was heavily dependent in hydropower at that time. And I remember that we even had to study with candlelight and move to a spring savings time for the first time in the country. The country is in the equator, so you can imagine moving the clock was unheard of. So since then, I was always passionate about hydrology, the water cycle, why this happened, how weather can affect the economy at that level that people have to change their working habits. I did civil engineering hydrology, then studied these new applications of machine learning technologies, hydroinformatics, did my studies there in Columbia, my bachelor's, my master's. Then I was fortunate to go to The University of British Columbia to study my Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences. And then, after I finished, I moved to The United States to work at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton with close collaboration with the NOAA, the USGS. And that gave that perspective also of understanding how weather climate models were done at the Department of Commerce level but also to understand the users on how they interact with weather data or climate data and what were the needs that they were expecting from the National Weather Service and the Department of Commerce and NOAA that not necessarily were fulfilled with the current information. So then I moved to the private sector, joined a hardware company, and met my co-founder of Benchmark Labs there then moved to California to work on consultancy of climate change assessments. But since the time at the Department of Commerce, it became very clear that what farmers and what users wanted was weather information that was more actionable, that was tailored to their specific location, especially for specialty crops. Think about wineries, or coffee growers, orchids, stone fruits; they depend heavily on weather, and the information from the National Weather Services was just too coarse for them. And sometimes, there are huge errors in terms of temperatures that were recorded from their farm versus what the National Weather Service was doing. And that's why we decided to create Benchmark Labs to basically solve that problem, correct those errors, and give the information that the users needed when they needed it. CHAD: Did you ever just consider becoming a TV weather person? CARLOS: [laughs] CHAD: It seems it may be easier. CARLOS: [laughs] Nah. That's a very good point. CHAD: [laughs] CARLOS: And I have great respect with my colleagues that went into forecast meteorology and TV persons. I remember some of my lab mates practicing in front of a green screen when we were doing the Ph.D. CHAD: [laughs] CARLOS: That was an interesting scenario. [laughs] However, growing up in Colombia, the weather forecasts were not very, let's say, accurate to a certain extent, and we did the opposite than the weatherman suggested. CHAD: [laughs] CARLOS: So I guess that steered me towards following that path. [laughs] CHAD: So it totally resonates with me this idea that, you know, especially for...I've

Dize Hacioglu is the CTO of Chicago’s mRelief, which offers an easy-to-use platform that helps families connect to SNAP food benefits. Since it was founded in 2014, the non-profit mRelief has helped 2.8 million Americans unlock $1 billion in food stamp benefits. Chad talks with Dize about how the platform helps people navigate the often complicated food stamp benefits system, what her role as CTO looks like as a CTO who codes, and how she hopes to help facilitate the growth of the mRelief program and team. mRelief Follow mRelief on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Follow Dize on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Dize Hacioglu, the CTO of mRelief, an easy-to-use platform that helps families connect to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Since it was founded in 2014, the non-profit mRelief has helped 2.8 million Americans unlock $1 billion in food stamp benefits. Dize, thanks for joining me. DIZE: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. CHAD: And thank you for all of your work at mRelief. It's a big help to everybody. DIZE: It's my pleasure, and it's really an honor to be able to do the work that we do. CHAD: Speaking of that work, tell me a little bit more about what the platform actually does for people. DIZE: So mRelief is an easy to use platform that's accessible over text messaging or web that helps folks find out if they qualify for SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, and helps them apply in certain states or connect with community-based organizations who can help them apply if they'd like further assistance. CHAD: So it's a pretty focused product, right? [laughs] DIZE: Mm-hmm. CHAD: But I'm sure that there's a lot going behind the scenes in order to make that pretty focused product happen. Is that right? DIZE: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yes, there are a lot of moving parts. CHAD: [laughs] So what's involved in figuring out whether someone is eligible or not? DIZE: So there are actually a few patterns that we've discovered as we've been expanding our work from just one state where we were just in California for a while and then expanding it nationwide. We found that eligibility typically falls into a couple of different buckets. So we've been able to turn that into code that helps guide people through the typical questions of eligibility and takes them through the flow based on their state's eligibility of requirements. CHAD: I guess my next question was going to be without mRelief; how difficult is this for folks? DIZE: So I think most folks typically apply hoping that they're eligible, and they'll only really find out after the application process has been complete. They may have wasted time at the office, time filling out the application, time waiting for a phone call from the office only to find out that they are not eligible. CHAD: So you mentioned you started just in California, and you've been expanding from there. You mentioned there are patterns that you found. How different are things state to state? And what does your growth trajectory look like throughout the United States? DIZE: The biggest differences between states are income limits, the threshold that a family has to fall under in terms of monthly gross income to be able to qualify. So that has been a big data collection research project that we've done to be able to expand to all 50 states. And from their past eligibility, applications also differ from state to state. There's no one platform where you can fill out the same questions that are asked. CHAD: I was just doing an onboarding call with some folks who are joining the thoughtbot team. And on the call, there was one person in the United States, three people who live in different countries in Africa; I think one other person in Europe. And sometimes, when I'm doing the onboarding calls with them, I have to explain how disjointed things are in the United States and which things are state by state because it surprises people. Well, one, it surprises people who aren't in the United States that we don't have certain standard benefits like sick time in the United States. And then it also surprises people how much is actually determined by the state that you live in, even with...because SNAP is a national program, right? DIZE: Correct. Yeah, it's federally funded. CHAD: Right. So even with a federally-funded program, it still comes down to certain things being different in certain states, which is often really daunting and surprising to people. DIZE: Yes, totally, totally. And it also gets even more complicated in some states like California and maybe even Texas, where it's county-administered, so each c

Michael Benezra is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the GK Fund: a nonprofit social impact fund to support BIPOC-owned companies in Greater Boston. Michael also serves as the COO of Colette Phillips Communications, helping to lead the All Inclusive Boston tourism campaign, among other projects. Chad talks with Michael about being a BIPOC ally, disparities amongst the VC world, and how the GK Fund looks for the same things in BIPOC-owned companies that they look for in other companies because the innovation is there; it's just that the opportunity isn't. The GK Fund Follow The GK Fund on Twitter or LinkedIn. Colette Phillips Communications All Inclusive Boston Black Owned Bos. Follow Michael on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel, and with me today is Michael Benezra, Executive Director and Co-founder of the GK Fund, a non-profit social impact fund to support BIPOC-owned companies in Greater Boston. Michael is also the COO of Colette Phillips Communications, helping to lead the All Inclusive Boston Tourism Campaign, among other projects. Michael, thank you for joining me. MICHAEL: Thanks for having me. CHAD: I'm curious about the GK Fund. When did you start the Fund? MICHAEL: So, at the time, I was working for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and I was working with venture capital firms, private equity firms. And I was representing over 200 Israeli companies in New England, most of them startups. And my wife is Black; my family is Black. I've been close to that community for a long time. And especially in the venture capital world, I started to see some real disparities amongst other disparities in general everyday life, but it was particularly bad in the VC world. And so Colette being a mentor and a friend of mine, Colette Phillips, I approached her, and I said, "Hey, what do you think about starting this fund, this non-profit fund?" And her and Andre Porter, who is our other co-founder who used to be the head of the state's business development agency in Massachusetts, we all decided to band together and start this non-profit. Now, we started the non-profit in December of 2019, so the pandemic hit right as we were creating this organization. And we had a decision to make, do we put this on hold, or do we move forward and accelerate? And we decided to just move forward. CHAD: Well, I'm glad you did. I'm glad you made that decision. Hopefully, you feel the same way. [laughs] MICHAEL: Yeah, I do. CHAD: You're absolutely right. There's a big need here. And I actually have had over the last two months or so a few different guests that are creating VC funds or funds of certain kind that address underrepresented communities, Black, another one was veterans. And there's such a big need. How did you decide what you were going to focus on or focus down into so, for example, focusing on Boston? MICHAEL: For Boston specifically, it had to do mostly with proximity. So I went to Harvard here for grad school. I worked for Governor Patrick. And so, for me, it was natural to stay local, especially during COVID. In my experience, there were a lot of BIPOC, particularly Black-owned startups, that were on paper akin to a lot of other startups in the Israeli world, which were very developed or also in the United States. I'll give you an example; there was a company that I worked with that had a $100 million valuation but had no products, no physical products. They had no revenue, but they had innovation. Now, you and I being very honest, do you think a Black-owned company could get away with that? CHAD: Yeah, no. MICHAEL: There is no way. I knew that; the other entrepreneurs that I've talked to know that. That is a terrible double standard that needs to be fixed. So we look for the same things in BIPOC companies that we look for in other companies because, for the most part, the innovation is there; it's just that the opportunity isn't. CHAD: Yeah. To dig into that a little bit more, I think one might say, well, if they had a founding team that had a proven track record, then maybe. And that's where you get to the fact that it's systemic, too, because if the headwinds are there where they can never get that experience, to begin with, they never get that opportunity, to begin with, then they're not going to have a founding team that has a track record that will be invested in based on just the team. MICHAEL: That is 100% accurate, but it's actually even worse. So we do not ask our founders in the application process for their educational background. But all six of the companies that got grants from us last November they all have their bachelor's, four out of six have masters or higher. And so

Christopher Nguyen is the CEO of Aitomatic, which provides knowledge-first AI for industrial automation. Chad talks with Christopher about why having a physical sciences background matters for this work, if we have artificial intelligence, why we still need people, and working in knowledge-first AI instead of knowledge-second, knowledge-third, or no knowledge at all. Data reflects the world. Aitomatic Follow Aitomatic on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow Christopher on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Christopher Nguyen, CEO of Aitomatic, which provides knowledge-first AI for industrial automation. Christopher, thanks for joining me. CHRISTOPHER: Thank you. CHAD: So I was prepping for this interview, and I noticed something that jumped out at me that we have in common, and that is your first computer was the TI-99C/4A. CHRISTOPHER: No kidding. CHAD: And that was also my first computer. CHRISTOPHER: Oh, okay. CHAD: [laughs] CHRISTOPHER: You got no storage, correct? CHAD: No storage; everything was off of the solid-state disks. And I remember I was a little late to it. My parents actually got it for me. I think I was 9 or 10. And my parents got it for me at a garage sale. And so all I had was the manual and the basic manual that came with it. And because it had no storage, I needed to type in the programs that were in the back of that book from scratch, and there was no way to save them. So you would type them in -- [laughs] CHRISTOPHER: Oh my God. Every single day the same code over and over again. And hopefully, you don't turn it off. CHAD: [laughs] Exactly. There definitely were times where it would just be on in my room because I didn't want to lose what I had spent all day typing in. CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, yeah, I remember my proudest moment was my sister walked into the living room...and there was no monitor, and you connected it directly to the TV. CHAD: To the TV, yeah. CHRISTOPHER: And younger people may not even know the term character graphics, which is you pick in your book the character space, and then you put them together into a graphic image. And I painstakingly, on graph paper, created a car and converted it to hex and then poked it into these characters and put them together. And my sister walked in like, "Oh my God, you made a car." [laughter] CHAD: That was a good time. It was difficult back then. I feel like I learned a lot in an environment where I see people learning. Today it's a lot more of a complicated environment. They're much higher up the stack than we were back then. And, I don't know, I feel like I actually sort of had it easy. CHRISTOPHER: Well, in many ways, that very abstraction to...you see jobs like to talk about higher software abstraction to make you more productive. I think it's absolutely that powerful. And Marc Andreessen, my friend, likes to talk about how software is eating the world. But it turns out there's one perspective where people have gone up the stack a little too far, too fast, and too much. We're still physical in the industry that I work in. You know, our previous company was acquired by Panasonic. And I've been working on industrial AI for the last four and a half years. And it's very hard for us to find people with the right physics or electro engineering background and the right science understanding to help automate and build some of these systems because everybody's in software now. CHAD: Why does physical sciences background matter for this work? CHRISTOPHER: Let me give you a couple of examples. One example is one of our customers is a very large global conglomerate doing marine navigation and marine sensors. And one of the products they do is fish finding so that amateurs like you and me would go hold one of these systems and shoot it down straight to the ocean. A sonar beam goes down, kind of like submarines. But hopefully, an image would come back. And so to build a system to convert all of that into something other than jumbled what they call echograms, maybe convert to a fish image, you have to build a lot of machine intelligence, AI, machine learning, and so on. But just to understand the data and make the right decisions about how to do that, you need to understand the physics of sound wave echoes in the ocean. If you can't do that and you got to work with another engineer to tell you how to do that, it really slows things down a lot. So knowing the equation but also having a physical intuition for how it all works can make or break the success of an engineer working on something like that. Another example is we worked on avionics. Don't blame me for this, but if you have had poor experience with Wi-Fi on a plane, we ma

Dr. Alan Cowen is the Executive Director of The Hume Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to the responsible advancement of AI with empathy, and CEO of Hume AI, an AI research lab and empathetic AI company that is hoping to pave the way for AI that improves our emotional well-being. Chad talks with Alan about forming clear ethical guidelines around how this technology should be used because there is a problem in that the public is skeptical about whether technology is used for good or bad. The Hume Initiative is intended to lay out what concrete use cases will be and what use cases shouldn't be supported. Hume AI is built for developers to construct empathic abilities into their applications. The Hume Initiative Hume AI Follow Hume AI on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow Alan on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Dr. Alan Cowen, the Executive Director of The Hume Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to the responsible advancement of AI with empathy, and CEO of Hume AI, an AI research lab and empathetic AI company. Alan, thank you for joining me. DR. COWEN: Thanks for having me on. CHAD: That's a lot of words in that introduction. I'm glad I got through it in one take. Let's take a step back a little bit and talk about the two different things, The Hume Initiative and Hume AI. And what came first? DR. COWEN: So they were conceptualized at the same time. Practically speaking, Hume AI was started first only because it currently is the sole supporter of The Hume Initiative. But they were both conceptualized as this way to adjust two of the main problems that people have faced bringing empathic abilities to technology. Technology needs to have empathic abilities. If AI is going to get smart enough to make decisions on our behalf, it should understand whether those decisions are good or bad for our well-being. And a big part of that is understanding people's emotions because emotions are really what determine our well-being. The Hume Initiative addresses one of the challenges, which is the formation of clear ethical guidelines around how this technology should be used. And it's not because the companies pursuing this have bad intents; that's not the point at all. The problem is that the public is probably justifiably skeptical of whether this technology will be used for them or against them. And The Hume Initiative is intended as a way of laying out what the concrete use cases will be and what use cases shouldn't be supported. Hume AI is introducing solutions to the problem of how we build empathic AI algorithms. And the challenge there has been the data. So there have been a lot of attempts at building empathic AI or emotion AI, whatever you call it, basically ways of reading facial expression, emotion in the voice, and language. And there's been a few challenges, but most of them come down to the fact that the data tends to be based on outdated theories of emotion and/or it tends to be based on people's perceptual ratings of images largely from the internet or videos that are collected in more of an observational way without experimental control. And within those perceptual judgments, you see gender biases, sometimes racial biases, biases by what people are wearing, whether they're wearing sunglasses, for example, because people with sunglasses for some reason are perceived as being proud. [laughter] And the algorithms will always label people with sunglasses as being proud if you're training the algorithm that way. What you need basically is some way to control for people's identity, what they're wearing, get people's own self-reports as to what they're feeling or what they're expressing, and do it in a way that's somewhat randomized so that different people express a wide range of emotional behaviors in a wide range of contexts. And the contexts are somewhat randomized. So that's what we're doing with Hume AI is we're gathering that data, and it requires large-scale experiments to be run around the world. CHAD: In terms of the actual product that Hume AI is going to do, is it a standalone product? Or is it something that people building products will use? DR. COWEN: It's a developer product. It's built for developers to build empathic abilities into their applications. And so we are about to launch a developer portal, and we have a waitlist on our website on hume.ai for that. In the meantime, we've been licensing out the models that we're training and the data that we're using to train those models, which I actually kind of view as somewhat interchangeable. Models are basically descriptions of data. Some people have the resources to train those mode

James Oliver Jr. is the Founder and CEO of The ParentPreneur Foundation, which empowers Black ParentPreneurs so they can leave a legacy for their beautiful Black children. Chad talks with James about inspiring, encouraging, and supporting ParentPreneurs to lobby to try to close wealth inequality gaps, shoot their shot and send cold emails, and engage in a community that supports one another. Parents Making Profits The ParentPreneur Foundation Follow The ParentPreneur Foundation on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. Follow James on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is James Oliver Jr., Founder, and CEO of the ParentPreneur Foundation, which empowers Black ParentPreneurs so they can leave a legacy for their beautiful Black children. James, thanks for joining me. JAMES: I'm super excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me. CHAD: So I just said, in a nutshell, the tagline for ParentPreneur Foundation. I know it's a community that brings people together, Black ParentPreneurs together. How did you get started and see the need for this, and how did you actually then make it happen? JAMES: Oh boy, that's a great question with a semi-long answer, so just hang in with me, but I think it's a really compelling story. So back in 2013, (I'm from Brooklyn, New York) at the time, I was living in Northeast Wisconsin. It started in 2011. I was trying to build a startup called WeMontage, which was the world's only website to let you turn your digital images into removable photo wallpaper. CHAD: If you haven't seen it, by the way, you should look at it. That description that you gave, even though it describes it perfectly, I didn't realize until I went to the website and looked at the pictures exactly what it is and how remarkable of a product it is. JAMES: Well, I'm delighted that you say that. Thank you so much. And that's part of the reason why [laughter] it failed. I mean, it's still around. And I know we have a bunch of designers in the community. So look, the website still works. The underlying collage editing software is still brilliant, but the UI UX needs a lot of love. It's a bit of a zombie with about $10,000-$15,000 of technical debt floating around over there. [laughs] But the product still works. And we still print, ship them sometimes. And we have tons of repeat customers. It's just one of those things. You build a great product, and they will always come. But the product is still brilliant still today. So back then, I was a non-technical founder. I was out of money. I cleaned out my savings and living in the middle of nowhere. There wasn't exactly a bastion of technology startups or diversity, even for that matter. And I was fortunate to get into Gener8tor's...I think we were the second cohort. Back then, it was super early. We went to Madison. And right now, Gener8tor is killing it. But I was out of money. I was thankful to get into their Madison cohort, which was a two-hour drive away. My ex-wife now was pregnant with our twins. The kids were supposed to be born end of March. Gener8tor ended early April. So I was like, okay, this timing works out brilliantly. But a day or two before the program started, I had to deliver, and we had to deliver the twins prematurely. Otherwise, my son would have died. CHAD: Wow. JAMES: His blood just started to circulate backwards. It was crazy. So we had to take them out. They weighed two pounds apiece. Every time I tell this story, it gives me agita, man. The accelerator was a two-hour drive each way back and forth to the NICU, waking up at 2:00 a.m. every morning because I couldn't sleep. I cried every day. I had a really talented developer on my team, but he had his personal demons. So he was really unreliable. But he was a brilliant guy. He was so smart, really talented. But anyway, I got through the accelerator. Right before I was going on stage for demo day, I got a call from this angel that we pitched. We were raising $250,000 at the time, which really, in retrospect, was not nearly enough money. But I got a call. He said, "Hey, we're going to fill your round." I don't know. What does that mean? I don't take anything for granted. [laughs] What do you mean? "We're going to give you $250,000." And then I just dropped to my knees. I thanked God. And I cried because I had sacrificed so much to get to that point. Thankfully, my daughter came home after six weeks, and my son came home after ten weeks. The kids are doing fine. They drive me crazy, but they're beautiful. CHAD: [laughs] How old are they now? JAMES: They just turned 9 in January. So after I launched WeMontage, I hired just a really remarkabl

JT Lidell is the Founder of Promenade, which seamlessly matches and connects military veterans to the resources, people, and organizations that matter to them. Chad talks with JT about being a mission-driven, bootstrapped organization, the problems that he's encountered and hopes that Promenade solves, and aggregating people, tools, resources, and funding to make it happen. Promenade Follow JT on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel and with me today is JT Liddell, the Founder of Promenade, which seamlessly matches and connects military veterans to the resources, people, and organizations that matter to them. JT, thank you so much for joining me. JT: No, thank you for having me. Excited to talk to you about what we're building over here and having this conversation. So thank you so much for having me on today. CHAD: I love mission-driven organizations, and Promenade falls right into that. How did it come about for you? JT: Yeah, this has been...the inception of it really truly began many, many years ago when I first joined the military straight out of high school. So I went to The Naval Academy, actually, started there then went to the army. Fast forward 7, 8, 9, 10 years, and as I was getting out of the military and trying to join the civilian workforce, the civilian world, that's where a lot of the problems and challenges that I'm trying to solve through Promenade started. And then, working in the technology space in corporate America really allowed me to identify some of the solutions and tools that I'm working with now. But to answer your original question, the beginning of Promenade or the inception of Promenade really began with my entry into the military. CHAD: What were some of the problems that you encountered and that you hope that Promenade solves? JT: Back in 2000...I left the military officially in 2010 but went straight into defense contracting work from there and worked there for a few years. And it was, as I was leaving, I went literally from Afghanistan, and 30 days later, I was sitting in an MBA classroom. And leaving Afghanistan, I thought there was literally no problem, no challenge...after going through three deployments to Afghanistan and being deployed to other parts of the world, I was like, there's nothing that I'm going to come against that I won't be able to tackle. That was the furthest from the truth. So there are a number of issues when it came to relationships, when it came to navigating the workforce, when it came to just understanding how drastically different the civilian world was from being in the military and the defense industry. So those problems are umbrellas, and there are many, many things underneath those that I came up against. CHAD: What are some of the ways that, you know, I speak as someone not having served in the military. What are some of the big ways in which civilian employment is different? JT: It wasn't even necessarily...well, obviously, there are huge differences obviously from the military and civilian employment. But it was really even like, how do you get entry into the civilian workforce just from the very beginning? So, how do you craft a resume? It seems like a minor thing at this point in my life, but it's a huge one. When you leave the military, you have these 9, 10, 11-page resumes. And that's what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to put literally every single piece of experience that you have on this resume. But when you come to the civilian world, you have to somehow condense all of that down to one page, and there's a science to doing that, and that was one of the first huge hurdles. Because a resume is just your ticket into the door, it's a ticket to that interview. That's just literally the first step. And that was something that I didn't realize was something I was going to have to hone my skill at. CHAD: Do you think that a lot of companies overlook the value of military service? JT: Yeah, that's a tough one to answer. So it's hard to say overlook when as a military veteran just taking myself, for instance, you know, in a lot of ways, I was not communicating effectively what my experience was in relation to the value I could provide to that organization. So as a recruiter or a headhunter, whoever is doing that initial review, they're simply looking...for a large part, they don't have experience in the military. So they don't understand the jargon and what some of these different jobs really mean with the impact they had on their organization. So there's still a lot of meat in the middle here. So that individual needs to do a better job of communicating the exact value through a corporate sense ho

Sam Zimmerman is CEO and Co-founder of Sagewell Financial. Sagewell is building a banking platform for the needs of folks who are trying to retire and live off their savings and income as intelligently and as well as possible. Chad talks with Sam about deciding what their first product should be and what they would be bringing to market, finding the right partners, and minimizing risk to make a business and a product that works. Sagewell Financial Follow Sam on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Sam Zimmerman, CEO and Co-founder of Sagewell Financial. Sam, thanks for joining me. SAM: Thanks so much for having me, Chad. CHAD: I've been following along with Sagewell Financial for a little while now, given our cross-histories and the fact that we worked with a few companies that you've worked at in the past. So I'm aware of what Sagewell Financial is, but I'm not sure that all of our audience is. So I think a good place to start would be by giving folks a little bit of an intro into what Sagewell Financial is, and then we'll touch on the founding story and go from there. SAM: Awesome. So, in a sentence, Sagewell is building the digital banking that our parents deserve. To expand on that even more, America's retirees are a really interesting and important and powerful demo in American culture at large. There are 56 million Americans on a fixed income. And last year in venture capital, nearly $100 billion went to fund financial technology companies rewriting all of finance. And of that 100 billion or a little under, less than a fraction of a percent went to America's seniors. And so we are trying to build banking from the ground up for the needs of folks who are living on a fixed income who are in their golden years and aren't thinking about that new job or making new money. We're building a bank for folks who are trying to retire and live off their savings and their income as intelligently and as well as possible. And that looks really different than the bank that a millennial or a Gen Z user might have. CHAD: So that's really interesting. Right or wrong, what are the reasons that this historically hasn't been a target demographic for investment? SAM: So the prevailing assumption among venture capitalists was (We're changing that and hopefully changing that quite quickly.) was that retirees aren't open to changing. Beyond that, they're also not technically sophisticated. These folks don't know how to use a phone or aren't open to a bank that might not have any physical branch. They are set in their ways. They're not going to move branch, or they're barely going to watch a new TV show. A lot of folks who are trying to talk...imagining a grandma or a grandpa was really what the venture capitalists are drawing on often when they're thinking about why a senior wouldn't expect to have a bank with all the new features that the millennial might. CHAD: Well, that one is certainly changing, especially as the venture capitalists get older themselves. They probably realize that that's an outdated notion in terms of the technical aptitude or familiarity of that audience, right? SAM: Exactly. And it's a fascinating moment. There are 10,000 boomers who turn 65 each day in America, about 4 million folks each year. And those folks were about 40 whenever the.com boom passed. They've been using email. They have XE and PayPal. And importantly, why we're building this company now is that COVID changed seniors' digital lives more than anyone else. ARP reports how 70% of all American retirees know how to use Zoom and video conferencing software nowadays. Across the stack of digital goods and services, seniors were actually the group that was most moved online. And so, from where we sit as entrepreneurs, we saw a massive market, an exogenous effect creating a disproportionate opportunity. And so we began designing and iterating on and understanding our user to build a product that met those needs with this massive and growing market. CHAD: Banking is a highly regulated complex space. And I imagine from day one you're looking at that and saying, "Well, we might want to do everything eventually, but doing everything is going to be difficult." So what was the process you and your co-founder and the team around you used to decide what the first product should be and what you were going to bring to market? SAM: Our founding team spent almost nine months in user interviews and user research across what one director of finance at Capital One called geriatric finance. We talked to hundreds of folks, and a lot of our assumptions about what the simplest or most lo

Brian Hollins is the Founder of the Takeoff Institute and Founding Managing Partner of Collide Capital. The Takeoff Institute is focused on equipping Black undergrads with the resources and mentorship they need to build a young professional career. Chad talks with Brian about providing students with necessary skills like etiquette and polish to break into Tesla and McKinsey-level companies and facilitating facetime, communication, and mentorship with other Black people within those companies who are at executive levels. The Takeoff Institute Follow Brian on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Brian Hollins, Founder of the Takeoff Institute and Founding Managing Partner of Collide Capital. Brian, thanks for joining me. BRIAN: Chad, I'm pumped to do this. Thanks for having me. CHAD: So you are obviously the Founder of the Takeoff Institute. So let's start there. Why don't we give folks a brief overview of what the Takeoff Institute is, and then we'll dive right in? BRIAN: Absolutely. Happy Black History Month. Let's start there. I'm a Black undergraduate student in the past, and I'm building something for Black undergraduate students today. So Takeoff Institute is focused on equipping Black undergrads with the resources and mentorship they need to build a young professional career. I was lucky enough to go to Stanford for undergrad and almost get thrown over the wall, if you will, by mentors and people that could advise me as I broke into my young professional career. And I, unfortunately, noticed that that wasn't the same for a lot of other folks. I ran diversity recruiting at Goldman Sachs for a few years and just saw some of the mistakes and little things that people who don't have advisors, people who don't have mentors, people who don't have an older brother in private equity. I saw the mistakes they were making and knew I wanted to build something to help bridge that gap. So we focus on providing the types of things that I think you need to break into a Goldman Sachs or a Tesla or a Facebook or a McKinsey today that might not have been true five years ago. And unfortunately, I think a lot of career development offices and programs out there are helping students break into a job that doesn't exist anymore, and that's more focused on some of the skills that we've tried to tap into. CHAD: And what are those skills? BRIAN: I'll point to a few off the top of my head. One is just polish. If you've never had an internship, you don't know cadencing on scheduling or sending an email to a direct report or really focusing on your LinkedIn, and your resume, and your social media being clean and disciplined. And so we bring to light a lot of the things that I think employers are looking for today. I'll use a good example with our students. If you don't have 500 connections on LinkedIn, the number of connections you have shows. But if you have more than 500 connections, it just shows 500+. And as a recruiter, when you really think about it, at the top of the funnel, they use these little things to guide a lot of their decision-making. For better or worse, I'm not sure it's a great way to decide who should be a good candidate for your company. But when you get 5,000 applications, and you need to get it down to 100 in a couple of days, there are little things like sending your resume in a Word Doc instead of a PDF or having spelling errors in your application, or not filling out some of the boxes that matter. And so we really train them on that etiquette and polish. Another bucket that I think is super important we built a speaker series at the Takeoff Institute called You Can't Be What You Can't See. And I think for a lot of Black undergraduate students, you go through a Superday at some of these places. You might meet 10, 15 people. Most of the time, you're not going to meet anyone Black. And you're definitely not going to meet Black people that are at the executive level. And so we really pride ourselves on bringing in managing directors from banks, and founders and CEOs from growing companies, and leading venture capitalist investors and just help our students see that there are people out there doing what they did. There are people that come from their backgrounds that also weren't sure who they were going to be when they were a sophomore or a junior in college. And so, building confidence is another key pillar of the program that we really pride ourselves on. And we're very lucky we have students at Tesla, at Apple, at Facebook, at Goldman, at NBC Universal. These students have broken into really exciting roles. And as we think about buildi

Kevin Withane is the founder of Diversity-X: a community to help underrepresented founders who are trying to make a positive impact in the world thrive, scale, and grow. Chad talks with Kevin about giving underestimated founders connections and access, creating a venture fund, and creating a platform via DiversityX. Follow City DiversityX on Twitter. Follow Kevin on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Kevin Withane, founder of Diversity-X. Kevin, thanks for joining me. KEVIN: Chad, thank you so much for having me on this show. CHAD: Kevin, I know you have deep expertise and background in law and ethics and compliance, particularly when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion issues. And that has led you to create Diversity-X. And so what is Diversity-X? KEVIN: Diversity-X is a community for underestimated founders trying to make a positive impact in the world. We're working on creating a VC fund for it. And also, it's an ecosystem to support those underestimated founders and help them thrive and scale, and grow. CHAD: That's great. What kind of support and community are underestimated founders lacking, and how does Diversity-X fill in that gap? KEVIN: I think it's a mix of connections and access. I use the term underestimated rather than what many people term as underrepresented because there are plenty of people of color founders, plenty of LGBTQ+ founders, plenty of female founders, disabled founders, veteran founders. There are lots of them in the world, so they are represented. They're just underrepresented in the equitable allocation of capital and particularly venture capital at early stage, which sees many of these founders not necessarily succeed or have to work that little bit harder just to get a starting place where many others get funding a lot earlier and a lot easier in their journey. And I'm not saying raising capital is easy at all for anybody, but it's easier for certain groups of people than it is for others. CHAD: What makes it easier? KEVIN: I'm going to be candid in my views. I think it makes it easier if you're a white male; nothing against white males, but it's easier. There's that privilege. But also, you look, sound, probably have a lot of similar backgrounds to the people who are allocating the money who have control over whether they invest or don't invest in the startups. And I think; also, they tend to have better connections or better ins. It is a generalized statement, but data shows that 93% of VC money typically goes to white male founders. So it's backed up by data to an extent. CHAD: Right. And it doesn't even need to be ill intent. In some cases, there might be, but it doesn't need to be. So much of the VC world is about connections, and what you've done previously, and who you know, and the intro you're able to get. And then, when you finally get the meeting, if you're out pitching something that just isn't even on the radar of the typical VC, they're not going to connect with your idea in the same way that you do. When we're building products, having a diverse team of people allows us to see all the different aspects of that product and have people saying, "Well, what about this? From my background or my perspective, I understand that this is a particular concern for women around the safety of this," or something. And people say, "Oh yeah, I didn't even realize that." KEVIN: Yeah, that's a great point. Within the Diversity-X community, very early on, I realized one of the probable flaws for VC is, let's be honest, it's a very male-dominated industry. I think they are making real strides to change it, make it more open, more accessible to females and people of color. But essentially, for the most part, it is people who look and sound the same and typically are a white male. And there's no disrespect, but sometimes you can get a pitch about femtech. And while she may go, "Yeah, I can see that this could be a problem," you don't know because the fact is you're not a woman. You just don't know. And I experienced that very early on speaking to a female founder who's part of the community, and she's really trying to do some amazing stuff. But at first, I was like, "I can empathize with the issues you're trying to address here and the problem, but that's as far as my knowledge goes." And it made me wonder if VCs who are getting this sort of pitch will probably turn them down. They can't understand the problem. So, therefore, they can't understand what the solution that the founder is trying to come up with is really trying to ad

Jay Nath is the Co-CEO of City Innovate, a govtech company streamlining procurement through enterprise software and innovative frameworks. He talks with Chad about how he focuses on helping governments be more effective, responsive, and zeroed in on helping their constituents whether on a small city or a big state scale. City Innovate Follow City Innovate on Twitter or LinkedIn Follow Jay on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel, and with me today is Jay Nath, Co-CEO of City Innovate and former Chief Innovation Officer of San Francisco. Jay, thanks for joining me. JAY: Yeah, Chad, thank you for having me. CHAD: I assume based on the name and the fact that I've done my research...but I assume based on the name of City Innovate and the fact that you're a former Chief Innovation Officer of San Francisco that what City Innovate might be. But why don't you give everybody an overview of what it is? JAY: Thank you, Chad. So City Innovate is focused on helping governments be more effective, responsive, and focused on helping their constituents, whether it's a small city government or a big state. And the way that we've been doing this is really sort of an interesting; I'd say wonky place. We found that there's a pressure point in government around documents and specifically on procurement. And why is that interesting? Because what I've seen is if you want to work with government and collaborate, whether it's even volunteering or you're a startup, and you want to work, procurement is often that channel. And it's not really a channel; it's more of a barrier, a byzantine process. You can think of this from a technical frame, creating an API, a read/write API to make that process much more streamlined on both sides, helping governments be able to find the best partners to solve their big challenges. And on the other side, folks from all walks of life, whether you're a massive company or you're a founder in a garage, how do you actually connect those two? So we're really working at that intersection, and it's something that I find a lot of value in and importance in. And surprisingly and maybe not surprisingly, there's a lot of need for technology to help connect those dots. And ultimately, I think what I can do is make that process more inclusive and lower the barriers of entry so that people from different communities can participate and help make their communities better. CHAD: So your clients at City Innovate are cities and governmental organizations. Are you just delivering a product to them, or are you often helping them work better too? JAY: It's a bit of both. From a product standpoint, we're really in the B2B space and very much enterprise, if you will. And part of that standard enterprise SaaS offering is also support services, and that can be training, that can be professional services to help them in thought leadership in different ways. And that's exactly what we do. So we not only have our product, but we help them through something called agile procurement. So it's really borrowing from the software development methodology and applying the same principles and approaches to developing and finding the right partner and being more agile and iterative through that process. And historically, it's been very waterfall and very stilted and overly structured. So really being more focused on outcomes, really being focused on getting data into the process so that you can actually do, let's say, a bake-off and get more information before we make that decision. And it's surprising, Chad, folks in government are often buying multimillion dollars, tens of millions of dollars technology systems without actually trying it out. And think about your personal life. You test drive a car. You look through a home. You make these big decisions with a lot of data and evidence. And in government historically, they've been using paper documents to make that decision, RFPs responses, and marketing material. And it's hard to sift through and say, "Hey, what's real and what's not?" So we've been really helping them think through a more agile evidence-based approach, and our software supports that. And so yeah, it's really leading a movement about changing how they think about partnering with the vendor community or contractors. CHAD: So one of the things that is probably interesting about this and maybe a little bit meta is that this is what you help them do. And so you have to go through that process with them of being procured. [laughs] JAY: It is meta. You're absolutely right. [laughs] CHAD: In order to become the vendor that they use. JAY: That's right

Alexandra Holien is the Vice President of Revenue and Strategy and Deputy Director of Ada Developers Academy. She talks with Chad about working for a nonprofit that prioritizes teaching Black, Brown, Latinx, Indigenous, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and low-income folks software development for free. Ada Developers Academy Follow Alexandra on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Alexandra Holien, Vice President of Revenue and Strategy and Deputy Director of Ada Developers Academy. Alexandra, thank you for joining me. ALEXANDRA: Thank you for having me. I'm excited. CHAD: Let's start right off the bat with giving folks a brief overview of what Ada actually is. ALEXANDRA: Yeah, I'd love to. Ada Developers Academy we are a super unique non-profit, and I think, well-functioning business. We're a tuition-free 11-month software developing bootcamp academy for women and gender-expansive people. That may sound like some of the other bootcamps you've seen out there, but we're completely different. We have this really cool intersection of education, social justice, equity, bringing money to the people that need money sort of drive about us. We prioritize serving Black, Latine, Indigenous, Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander folks, and low-income folks. And we prioritize them because they've been left out of this capitalistic system the most. And we think if we can really put money in the hands of these gorgeous, resilient communities through the career of software development and one of the hugest wealth engines of our time, then we're going to change the world. We're crazy because it's like we're free for our students. CHAD: [chuckles] ALEXANDRA: There are wraparound services, ridiculous, not even ridiculous, just like, natural. And it seems unique, and it seems crazy. But these things that we're doing to support our students are actually just human and basic needs, providing comprehensive support for our students financially, childcare, mental health care, free laptops, just making sure that they're set up for success, unlike I think other more traditional education systems. So they can go and be really amazing software developers. And it's proven time and time again if you just set people up, open the door, give them the opportunity, make sure that you're creating equity, then 92% of those folks what we're seeing is our numbers are going to go out there and get full-time software development jobs. So that's Ada in the smallest nutshell and believe me, I'm going to tell you way more. CHAD: Well, we're going to dig into each of those things and more. I interview a lot of people who graduate from bootcamps. We have a pretty wide-reaching apprentice program. And I'm pretty familiar with what it looks like when people are graduating from those programs. And you can graduate from a three-month program and be successful, and I don't mean to imply that you can't be. But I do see folks who go to slightly longer programs, up to 11 months, a year like at Ada, and those people are often much more well-rounded developers not only with the technical skills but with all of the other skills that are important to development. How intentional was the length of the curriculum? And was there pressure early on to get people into the market faster? ALEXANDRA: Yeah, great question. I think that so many...let me answer your first question, which is how intentional was it? It had to be at the forefront of what we wanted to do. And the reason why it had to be is that we were taking a group of people that had already been left out of the system. And we already knew that there were going to be steps that they had to take to get into...like, once they got into the tech industry, getting in and staying in was going to be harder than their counterparts, harder than the white dude who took apart a computer or a Nintendo when they were in the 80s and growing up because their dads were software engineers. And then went on to college and knew they were going to be software engineers. So our founders, Scott Case and Elise Worthy, were so intentional in making sure that the technical bar and the technical merit of our students going into the industry was not what they were going to have to worry about. That was not going to be the thing that kept them up at night thinking like, oh, man, I don't know if I can do this because I don't understand it. That was not going to be it because we knew there were going to be other things. We knew there were going to be people mistaking you for the secretary. And these are examples that are all true. It's mistaking you for the secretary or the person that&#

Dagna Bieda is an engineer, career coach, and founder of theMindfulDev.com. She talks with Chad about being a software engineer first and then becoming a career coach who has helped a big range of clients with communication and marketing themselves successfully. theMindfulDev Follow Dagna on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Dagna Bieda, engineer, career coach, and founder of theMindfulDev.com. Dagna, thanks for joining me. DAGNA: Absolutely. It's a blast being here. So thanks for having me over, Chad. CHAD: So what you do is a little bit unique in that you provide career coaching to engineers. But you yourself are an engineer and have a background in engineering. So how did you arrive at what you're doing today? DAGNA: Yeah, you're exactly on point there. I was a software engineer and then turned into career coaching. So essentially, I've been coding for over ten years and coaching for the past 3. And I'm the tough love, “I've been in your shoes” kind of coach because I have that engineering experience. And a little bit about what it is that I did as a software engineer is I essentially moved from programming in microcontrollers in C through cell phone towers, providing LTE networks in C++. I also did behaviors of social robots in C++. I wrote a distributed web app in Ruby on Rails. And I also wrote some mobile apps for parking and transit in Swift and Java. Having that range of experience, I really get to help a big range of clients. My former clients have worked for LinkedIn, Amazon, Google, Disney, as well as much smaller businesses. And their own experience was ranging anywhere from 2 to 20 years of experience. And I had clients who are self-taught, who are career-changing bootcamp grads, who are college grads. And my goal as a coach is to really help them reach for their potential. CHAD: Now, did you arrive at this because you yourself struggled with some of these things? Or did you have it easy and you said, "Oh, I don't understand why these other people..." [laughs] DAGNA: So both of these questions are exactly on point. I feel like I had it very easy at the very beginning of my career. I essentially got promoted to a senior engineer very quickly. It took about two years or something, so like superfast. But then, as a senior engineer, there was a moment where I felt that I've just plateaued in my career, and I was stuck, and I was frustrated. And I wanted to learn all the technologies out there. And what was missing was some people skills. So once I finally was able to figure out okay, this is what I'm missing...and in hindsight, it was so obvious. I decided to move into career coaching because I realized that we're kind of brainwashed, so to speak, to put the technology on a pedestal and ignore everything else, right? CHAD: Yeah. DAGNA: But if you don't work on your soft skills and don't realize that at the end, it's all humans because you're working with humans...you're creating products for humans. So it's not something you can really escape from. That was like a huge aha moment. I was like, people don't even know this is important. Like, I got to change that. [laughs] That was a mission for me to change that, to help discover what are those roadblocks? What are those limiting beliefs that software engineers often have that keep them stuck in their career and frustrated and stopping them from really fulfilling their potential? CHAD: I often say that almost all problems are actually communication problems at their heart. DAGNA: Ooh, yes. CHAD: And in consulting, we have clients who come to us with what they think is a technical problem. And we have to sometimes tell them like, "We can fix this problem. But if you don't address the underlying communication problem that caused it in the first place, it's just going to happen again." DAGNA: Absolutely, yeah. CHAD: So I think that's a problem engineers have is that they try to apply technical problems or think code is the solution to every problem. DAGNA: Well, it's not just that. Let's think about how software engineers are trained into their careers. If you have a class and you need to deliver a piece of code that compiles and does whatever it was meant to do for your assignment, even if you had incredible communications with your teammate and partner, even if you negotiated changes in the scope of features, it's all not going to matter for you passing your class if the code doesn't compile and if it doesn't do what it's supposed to do. So early on, whenever we're creating software, we're taught how to create software. We're being taught to put te

Chad talks to Benjie De Groot, co-founder, and CEO of Shipyard. Shipyard manages, creates, builds, and deploys ephemeral environments. Benjie talks about how Shipyard became a funded company, discovering who their ideal customers are, and building out the core team so Shipyard can accelerate and figure out their next steps in how to bring it to the masses. Ephemeral Environments Shipyard Follow Benjie on LinkedIn. Follow Shipyard on Twitter, LinkedIn, or GitHub. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter, or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel, and with me today is Benjie De Groot, co-founder, and CEO of Shipyard. Benjie, thanks for joining me. BENJIE: Thanks for having me. CHAD: Why don't we start by if you don't mind sharing a little bit about what Shipyard is and does? BENJIE: Sure. At the core of what Shipyard is working on is ephemeral environments; not everybody knows what that means. That is changing a bit. But essentially, what we're focused on is on every pull request or commit for a feature; Shipyard manages, and creates, and builds, and deploys ephemeral environments. So that's a disposable one-off on-demand environment that any stakeholder in your internal company can use. And we focus on the tooling around that, on build pipeline, and then security around that. And then all kinds of other cool features that are necessary that pop up. CHAD: Cool. So as a developer, I'm familiar with the concept of developing locally, putting up my pull requests. And also, we deploy a lot of stuff to Heroku. So I'm familiar with some of the infrastructure that Heroku might give. How did you arrive at saying like, this is a thing that I want to work on and believe should exist? BENJIE: That's a great question. I actually am also a developer; that’s my background. And throughout the course of my career, I've always been on the technical side of the company. And what that's translated to, because of passion, to be honest, is always taking on a DevOps type role, so throughout the course of my career, a lot of responsibility. I mean, I started off writing Bash scripts, went to Puppet, did Chef for a while, did Ansible. Somehow I went back to Bash scripts for a lot of this stuff. Then this company called DoCloud popped up, which obviously became Docker, and I kind of got obsessed with that. And then I had a bunch of friends at Google, and they were telling me about this creepy thing called Borg, and that became Kubernetes. And so, my career has kind of happened throughout that entire process. And throughout, DevOps has kind of been my passion. Along with my co-founder, Peter, I was a high-priced Kubernetes consultant in the New York ecosystem just a few years ago. And a lot of companies were trying to make the transition to Kubernetes. And Peter and myself came in and helped people that were struggling to find DevOps resources. And what that always kind of looked like was there was some bespoke version of a deployment system that was perfect for the person that wrote it. But obviously, it wasn't good enough for me and Peter, for Peter and myself. CHAD: [laughs] BENJIE: And so we would rewrite it, and it would be great. But then, eventually, we'd move on, and someone else would rewrite it. And there were a few instances where we ended up going back to companies and just reimplementing what we had already done. And throughout that process of being this consultant, we kept running into this ephemeral environment thing and building the same tooling over and over and over again. So Peter and I, on a weekend, kind of got, "Oh, let's make a tool for ourselves." So we did that. And we made this exoskeleton to help our consulting business. And as things progressed, we kept just adding features, and it was really fun, and it was great. And then some of our customers or clients saw that. And they were like, "Hey, can we click that button?" And we were like, "I guess." And so slowly, it turned into a product that was very duct tape-y and glued together, but it worked great. And to be frank, I had been through the VC process on the technical side in the past and didn't want to go through that again, the hamster wheel of need to raise more and more money and so very, very averse. And was very set on a really nice lifestyle consulting business, and hell was going to have to freeze over for us to take any VC dollars. And then I don't know if you heard, but in March of 2020, hell froze over, and [laughter] there was a little pandemic. And at the same time, we got some pre-emptive term sheets, yadda, yadda, yadda. Next thing you know, we're a funded company building out a really cool product. So that's the origin story of where Shipyard came from. CHAD: Really cool

Chad talks to Tiffany Shubert, Senior Product Manager at Relias Healthcare. Relias is an online healthcare education company. They develop and create education and clinical content for anything from physicians to nurses, physical therapists, to in-home care aides in multiple healthcare settings. They span the entire range from acute care hospital settings to in-home care to hospice. Tiffany talks about how her clinical skills apply really well to product management, defining who you're solving the problem for, being all about your end-user, and making sure they have an amazing experience with your product. Relias Healthcare Follow Tiffany on LinkedIn. Follow Relias on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter, or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Tiffany Shubert, Senior Product Manager at Relias. Tiffany, thanks for joining me. TIFFANY: Hey. Thanks so much, Chad. I'm really excited to be here. CHAD: So, Tiffany, folks may not be familiar with what Relias is, although if you're in certain spaces, it's certainly a big name that you may have heard of. So why don't you start off by telling people a little bit about Relias? TIFFANY: Sure. So Relias is an online healthcare education company. Relias is in many, many different settings. But the majority of what we do is we develop and create education and clinical content for anything from physicians to nurses, physical therapists, to in-home care aides. And we are in multiple healthcare settings. So we span the entire range from acute care hospital settings to in-home care to hospice. CHAD: We do a lot of work with different clients in the healthcare space. And so many of them, without even me prompting, mention, "Oh, we use Relias." [chuckles] And it's remarkable to see. Is Relias the biggest provider of learning management software for the space? TIFFANY: So, we are the biggest provider of compliance training in the skilled nursing space. And we are a big provider in all of the other spaces. And really, where Relias started was in this notion of compliance training which, for those who are not familiar, really could benefit from a lot of design. That is the kind of training that every single healthcare provider has to take in order to see a patient. So that's where you take your patient privacy training, your bloodborne pathogen training, all of those types of trainings. And that's where Relias really started and has grown from there. CHAD: So, how long have you been at Relias? TIFFANY: So I started, interesting, in the end of March 2020. [chuckles] So yeah, it has been my pandemic experience, so almost two years now. CHAD: What brought you to Relias? TIFFANY: So I was at an interesting juncture in my career. I'm a physical therapist by training, and I was in clinical practice for about 15 years. And I transitioned over actually through a very interesting pathway but working for some different startups that were creating different technologies around healthcare. And one of the startups I had been with had run the course. And I was looking for something more around education, which is my original passion. And when Relias actually found me, I didn't realize it was actually in my backyard. CHAD: [laughs] TIFFANY: What drew me to it was this ability at this space where we could be looking at education, especially for clinicians, not as what I would call a penance which is how it's looked at. Like, ugh, I have to take my online education, or I have to take my training. But more of a hey, how can we make education interesting and dynamic? And how can we really apply many of the concepts we know about design and about really developing excellent products to clinical education? Which was incredibly exciting to me. CHAD: As you moved from someone practicing to product management in this space, did you do any formal learning or training in that, or did you just learn along the way? TIFFANY: A combination. Really my original experience in product was working for a startup company that was developing a really innovative concept around creating a soft, light exoskeleton, and they needed a clinician on staff to really understand how bodies move and what kind of problems could be solved. That position really evolved into being a director of user experience. And so that really entailed bringing our end users, who happened to be older adults, into the lab and having them really work side by side with the engineers who are creating the product. So I developed that whole program, validated it, expanded it. And from there, I really realized, oh, my clinical skills actually apply really well to product management. But now I do need to get some more formal training. So I went through some of the different.

Chad talks to the CEO of thoughtbot, Diana Bald, about 2021 in retrospect. thoughtbot, as a company, has settled into a new structure that contains different teams and committed to becoming a fully remote organization. Last year, Diana successfully transitioned into taking over the company's CEO role. She and Chad talk about the improvements the company made in 2021, including DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) efforts and training sessions, and look ahead to some improvements coming in 2022, such as an expansion of the apprenticeship program. P.S.: thoughtbot is hiring! To see open roles, visit thoughtbot.com/jobs. Follow Diana on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter, or LinkedIn. Email Diana at [email protected]. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today back again is Diana Bald, the CEO of thoughtbot. Diana, welcome back to the show. DIANA: Thanks for having me back, Chad. Hello everybody out there. CHAD: You joined us in the spring; I guess is the best way to put it where we talked about the transition from me to you of CEO. And it feels like it was actually simultaneously both just yesterday that we did that recording and a long, long time ago. How has this year been for you? DIANA: Yeah, I completely agree. It feels the same way for me. [chuckles] This year has been interesting and eventful. Well, 2021 has been. CHAD: So we're recording this just in the dawn of 2022. Looking ahead, we're bright-eyed and ready to go to the New Year, right? DIANA: That's right. CHAD: So I thought that it'd be good to do a little bit of a retrospective or a review of 2021. A lot changed for thoughtbot. And the last time we talked about it was way back at the beginning of all those changes. And I've had all the managing directors of the different teams on now to talk about the different teams, and what they're focused on, and how they're working, and what their goals are. And I thought it'd be fun to do that for thoughtbot overall with you. DIANA: Yeah, I think it's a great idea. CHAD: Cool. So since we last talked, we really settled into the different teams and the new structure. And even little things like we've sublet most of our office spaces and those kinds of things. I'm really reaffirming how things have gone. But I'm curious, just at a high level, what's been the most surprising thing for you about 2021? DIANA: [chuckles] That was not a question I was expecting. CHAD: [laughs] DIANA: The most surprising thing for me was (There were a lot.) I think how quickly we put everything together actually. That was probably the most surprising thing. I think that we were able to reorganize and pretty much just get to work in the new team structure right away. There wasn't a lot of reinventing. We reinvented when we redefined. But as we started doing the work, it was very logical, like, oh, this makes a lot of sense. These teams break out very nicely. So that speed in which that happened, I think, was the biggest surprise to me. CHAD: I know that some people said we moved maybe too quickly on some of those changes. How do you respond to those people? DIANA: [laughs] It's different personalities. Well, can I take a philosophical perspective? CHAD: Yeah, totally. DIANA: Okay. So I have a frame of mind as life doesn't happen to us. It happens for us in the sense that there is never a perfect time to do anything. One can be preparing, preparing, preparing, and it's good. Preparation is great. Analysis is great. All that stuff is good. But there's never going to be perfect anything. In fact, it's better to get started to get the feedback because the feedback is real. And it's kind of like the way that we actually work, in fact. You respond, and you iterate based on what the circumstances are telling you. And I think that's the difference in point of view. So, for me, I thought the pace was nice. But I could see why other people might have thought we moved too quickly. CHAD: So I forgot to mention the episode number if folks want to go back and listen to more of the details. It was Episode 392 where we talked, and then Episode 393 at giantrobots.fm/393 is where we talked about the details of the different teams and going fully remote, so if folks want to go back and listen to that. And then obviously, I've been talking to the different managing directors recently. So now that we're almost a full...actually, I think we're a full year from when we actually made the changes. DIANA: January eighth was the day. CHAD: So we're a few days shy of a full year. I think there are really two aspects of this whole thing. There was the concept of going remote and committing to being fully remote. And there's the concept of

Chad talks to Rob Hirschfeld, the Founder and CEO of RackN, which develops software to help automate data centers, which they call Digital Rebar. RackN is focused on helping customers automate infrastructure. They focus on customer autonomy and self-management, and that's why they're a software company, not a services or as-a-service platform company. Digital Rebar is a platform that helps connect all of the different pieces and tools that people use to manage infrastructure into infrastructure pipelines through the seamless multi-component automation across all of the different pieces and parts that have to be run to bring up infrastructure. RackN's Website; Digial Rebar Follow Rob on Twitter or LinkedIn. Visit his website at robhirschfeld.com. Follow RackN on Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter, or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Rob Hirschfeld, Founder, and CEO of RackN, which develops software to help automate data centers, which they call Digital Rebar. Rob, welcome to the show ROB: Chad, it is a pleasure to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. CHAD: Why don't we start with a little bit more information about what RackN and the Digital Rebar platform actually is. ROB: I would be happy to. RackN is focused on helping customers automate infrastructure. And for us, it's really important that the customers are doing the automation. We're very focused on customer autonomy and self-management. It's why we're a software company, not a services or as a service platform company. But fundamentally, what Digital Rebar does is it is the platform that helps connect all of the different pieces and tools that people use to manage infrastructure into infrastructure pipelines through the seamless multi-component automation across all of the different pieces and parts that have to be run to bring up infrastructure. And we were talking data centers do a lot of on-premises all the way from the bare metal up. But multi-cloud, you name it, we're doing infrastructure at that level. CHAD: So, how agnostic to the actual bare metal are you? ROB: We're very agnostic to the bare metal. The way we look at it is data centers are heterogeneous, diverse places. And that the thing that sometimes blocks companies from being innovative is when they decide, oh, we're going to use this one vendor for this one platform. And that keeps them actually from moving forward. So when we look at data centers, the heterogeneity and sometimes the complexity of that environment is a feature. It's not a bug from that perspective. And so it's always been important to us to be multi-vendor, to do things in a vendor-neutral way to accommodate the quirks and the differences between...and it's not just vendors; it's actually user choice. A lot of companies have a multi-vendor problem (I'm air quoting) that is actually a multi-team problem where teams have chosen to make different choices. TerraForm has no conformance standard built into it. [laughs] And so you might have everybody in your company using TerraForm and Ansible happily but all differently. And that's the problem that we walk into when we walk into a data center challenge. And you can't sweep that under the rug. So we embraced it. CHAD: What kind of companies are your primary customers? ROB: We're very wide-ranging, from the top banks use us and deploy us, telcos, service providers, very large scale service providers use us under the covers, media companies. It really runs the gamut because it's fundamentally for us just about infrastructure. And our largest customers are racing to be the first to deploy. And it's multi-site, but 20,000 machines that they're managing under our Digital Rebar management system. CHAD: It's easy, I think, depending on where you sit and your experiences. The cloud providers today can overshadow the idea that there are even people who still have their own data centers or rent a portion of a data center. In today's ecosystem, what are some of the factors that cause someone to do that who isn't an infrastructure provider themselves? ROB: You know the funny thing about these cloud stories (And we're talking just the day after Amazon had a day-long outage.) is that even the cloud providers don't have you give up operation. You're still responsible for the ops. And for our customers, it's not like they can all just use Lambdas and API gateways. At the end of the day, they're actually doing multi-site distributed operations. And they have these estates that are actually it's more about how do I control distributed infrastructure as much as it is about repatriating. Now, we do a lot to help people repa

Neal Amrhein is the founder and CEO and Matt Erickson is the CTO of My Goat. My Goat is a subscription mowing service for commercial properties. They use robotic mowers and elegant software tools to make turf care easy, convenient, and affordable. Follow Neal on LinkedIn. Follow Erik on LinkedIn. My Goat Follow MyGoat on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Instagram. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter, or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is a couple of people from a company with actual robots. It's Neal Amrhein, the founder and CEO, and Matt Erickson, the CTO of My Goat. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me. So tell me more about this idea that you are robot-agnostic? Are you helping people choose the solution that's right for them? Or do you have go-to vendors? NEIL: We do. So my philosophy, having spent a number of years in technology selling hardware and even software solutions, is that one thing that my experience has held is that hardware gets better, faster, and cheaper. And for us to invest in a hardware platform or have customers invest in a hardware platform, I liken it to my early adoption of high-definition televisions where in 2003, I was one of those guys that spent $2,400 on a 42-inch Sony Wega TV. And now you can get a 70-inch with a lot more technology and so forth for about $300 at Costco. So my feeling about hardware is it gets better, faster, cheaper. It's really the software that makes the difference in terms of how you leverage it. So we engage about 6 to 12 different hardware manufacturers that make autonomous robots from robots that are 27 to 35 pounds up to 1,200 pounds and all different variations in between. And then, we extract the communication tools so that we can help our users who are formerly the groundskeepers become technology groundskeepers. And they are now interfacing with the concept of autonomous robots that are mowing commercial properties 24/7, which we would actually call maintaining versus mowing. So we use nighttime, you know, day, night, rain or shine. So that's why we're robot-agnostic and welcome the latest and greatest designers and developers of hardware. We've got some folks that are just totally focused on designing, and developing, and building awesome autonomous robotic mowers with solar panels or great things that are going out there. And we're the software platform that brings it all together. CHAD: I totally get what you're saying about the progress of hardware and wanting to be in the business of creating value on top of that. How do you make sure that you don't take on the business risk of one of the manufacturers just providing the solution that you're providing? NEIL: Chad, we don't look at a business risk if there's a manufacturer that's going and selling autonomous robotic mowers. We welcome that, in fact, because that helps us with the adoption process. The idea of having, you know, Roomba is the de facto vacuum cleaner that goes randomly in your house. But there are half a dozen other hardware devices and opportunities, and they're all selling it. It's really how are you managing that Roomba? Which is also the subscription component of the Netflix part of our business, which is that Roomba may be a shark next year. It may be something else the following year. For our customers, we select the best hardware for their particular property, whether it's a golf course. They may have an autonomous robot that's manufactured by XYZ for the tee box and another one for the fairway, and another one for the greens. They just pay a monthly subscription for access to the software to manage those particular hardware pieces and optimize that hardware. And that's something that Matt will talk a little bit about. But we really have taken the approach that robots are just like cars. They'll sit in your garage 20 hours out of the week, but they're actually effectively useful 168 hours a week. So how do we maximize that and utilize the hardware itself? And that's what our software does. And of course, with that, we share that information with our customers and our users to continue to make it more efficient. CHAD: Thanks, Neil. Matt, what does the software stack actually look like that you're all putting together? MATT: So we got to talk about the technology so Laravel, PHP, MySQL. We host in DigitalOcean. And we have a WordPress front end, but the back end is all Laravel PHP. CHAD: And so it's in the cloud for all the customers? MATT: Yes. CHAD: And then how do you communicate with the fleet? MATT: So we connect through APIs. The hardware generally has an API that can give us status updates at various intervals. So we aggregate that information back. And then, we p

Joe Ferris is thoughtbot's CTO and Managing Director of the thoughtbot DevOps and maintenance team known as Mission Control. Mission Control is our newest team doing DevOps Support, Maintenance, and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering). The goal of Mission Control, rather than building products or pairing with team members to improve their team like the rest of thoughtbot, is to support those teams and support other client teams in deploying and scaling applications. They have an on-call team and do more complex cloud build-outs with the goal being to empower and educate the teams that we work with so that they are more capable of working in those ecosystems on their own. Follow Joe on Twitter or LinkedIn. thoughtbot's Mission Control team Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Joe Ferris, thoughtbot's CTO and Managing Director of the thoughtbot DevOps and maintenance team known as Mission Control. Joe, welcome back to the show. JOE: Thanks, Chad. It's been a while. CHAD: It has been a while. I think you were the first-ever guest, if I'm not mistaken. JOE: I believe that's right. We talked about null, I think. [laughter] CHAD: Yeah. And it would have been with Ben back when I was just a listener and maybe producer. So welcome back to the show. It's been a long time, and a lot has changed at thoughtbot over the years. I've been talking to each of the managing directors of the new teams, and I wanted to be sure to have you on. Why don't we take a little bit of a step back and talk about Mission Control? When we say DevOps and maintenance, what do we mean? And what does Mission Control do? JOE: Sure. Mission Control is our newest team doing DevOps support, and maintenance, and SRE. It came out of our experiments with DevOps a while ago now, almost two years coming up. Historically, thoughtbot has shied away from getting too much into DevOps. I think a lot of us had some unpleasant experiences earlier in our career around sysadmin tasks and expectations there. Not a lot of people have wanted to be on call historically. So we've heavily leveraged services like Heroku that take a lot of that burden away from you and avoided doing things like direct to AWS deployments or getting too involved with CI/CD pipelines that were particularly complex. But we've had clients over the years that have requested more interesting or more difficult deployments. And finally, we had one a couple of years ago, where we said, "All alright, let's just handle this instead of saying no or trying to outsource it." We thought it made sense for them. And after going through it, we came to the conclusion that it was actually pretty good that the ecosystem had evolved a lot and that it was a service worth offering. That began our journey into DevOps, so to speak. So we did some smart DevOps work for a variety of clients over the next year or so before we decided to form an official team doing this new kind of work, which is how we ended up with Mission control. The goal of Mission Control, rather than building products or pairing with team members to improve their team like the rest of thoughtbot, the goal of Mission Control is to support those teams and support other client teams in deploying and scaling their applications. And we have an on-call team. We will do more complex cloud build-outs. And our goal is to empower and educate the teams that we work with so that they are more capable of working in those ecosystems on their own. CHAD: You used the acronym SRE earlier in that little spiel. I'm not sure that everyone knows what that is. [laughs] So it stands for Site Reliability Engineer, right? JOE: That's right. And that's been newer for us. So DevOps is supposed to be the fusion of development and operations. But the operations world is really big. So similar to how everybody has problems getting people to be full-stack enough given the complexity of front end and back end, we have similar problems in design. We also have that problem in DevOps where both development and operations are huge, rich ecosystems. And so, having developers that are fully experienced at both is hard. So the path of least resistance, when you say are doing DevOps, is definitely just to do operations. And it's been a struggle for us to actually break down those silos and have teams work more on the operation side on their own. So one of the things that caught our eye with SRE was some of the built-in mechanisms for engaging with the team. The one-sentence pitch for SRE is that it is operations if you approach it like a software problem. It has these concepts of SLOs, Service Level Objectives, and error budgets, which is the amount of time you spen

Emily Bahna a Managing Director at thoughtbot who leads the Lift Off team, where they focus on really leaning into the core of the company. The team works with new founders to launch new products or they work with existing companies that want to build out a new service or open up a new area to generate revenue for their business. But, the thing that ties Lift Off together, is that they start at ground zero to build upon an idea and actually build the first version product to get it out live into the marketplace. Follow Emily on Twitter or LinkedIn. thoughtbot's Lift Off team Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Emily Bahna, Managing Director of thoughtbot's Lift Off team. Emily, thanks for joining me. EMILY: Thank you. CHAD: So at this point, we've talked with a few of the different managing directors at thoughtbot about their teams. And Lift Off is one of the largest teams that we have. And so what is it that Lift Off actually does? EMILY: Lift Off is focused in on really leaning into the core of thoughtbot. We work with new founders launching new products or work with existing companies that want to build out a new service or open up a new area to generate revenue for their business. But I think the thing that ties Lift Off together is that we are starting at ground zero building upon an idea and actually building the first version product and getting it out into the marketplace. CHAD: And oftentimes, those are pretty significant endeavors. The last episode that came out was with Dawn at Ignite who is more on the validation, early stage, getting things that are fairly straightforward into market as quickly as possible usually in a matter of months. But Lift Off the endeavors are usually quite a bit more significant than that, right? EMILY: Yeah. I would say that the difference between validation...we're beyond the stage of validation. We're working with clients who are ready to build a foundation. They really need to put in the infrastructure that's going to take their product and get it ready to scale into the future. So they really need to make that investment into the longer-term strategy. They need to know what's realistic to build first. But they also have to keep an eye on the long road ahead of building something that can be something that can set out to grow down the road as well. CHAD: I guess another way of putting it is that Ignite often works with brand new teams, brand new companies creating something for the first time. And Lift Off typically works with existing companies who have existing significant revenue who want to do something new, either a new business or a new product, or maybe they have an existing web product and they're going into mobile for the first time. That's another way of putting it, right? EMILY: It could be. I think that when people are ready to move into the Lift Off space, it's about having the investment, the right kind of funding to move in that direction. Sometimes we do work with new founders that have a significant amount of funding, but a lot of times it is folks that are at the enterprise level that are building a new service line. They've got validation and market research already done. And they're building out a completely new line of business that they need to explore and set a new foundation in place. CHAD: Do you have some examples of clients that have been projects of Lift Off? EMILY: Yeah. We've been doing a lot of really interesting work in the health tech space, a lot of interest in improving patient experience. So we worked with a company called Relias in terms of moving them into a new service line that they'd never been in before, really focusing on improving patient care for therapists, physical therapy therapists. We've also worked with an organization called Groups Recover Together, building out a mobile application for an organization that helps people recover from substance abuse. And we also are working with an organization called Airrosti. That is also an organization that helps in the physical therapy space, so improving patient exercises or rehabilitation through an improved mobile experience, virtual experience to improve overall patient outcomes. CHAD: I think it's not a coincidence that a lot of the projects that we work on in Lift Off are in the health tech space because that combination of...like you were saying, a lot of what Lift Off does is really build products that are complex and that are going to scale and have a certain scale fairly quickly and need to really think about more of a platform that's going to be iterated upon into the future. And once you get into a highly regulated industry like health or finance or somet

Dawn Delatte a Designer and Managing Director at thoughtbot who leads the Ignite team, where they focus primarily on validating and launching early-stage products through design-thinking, business and product strategy, and iterative design and development. Dawn works collaboratively with designers and developers to ensure they add value to the people and products thoughtbot works with every day. Follow Dawn on Twitter or LinkedIn. Visit her website at dawndelatte.com. thoughtbot's Ignite team Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Dawn Delatte, Managing Director of the thoughtbot Ignite team. Dawn, thanks for joining me. DAWN: Hi, thanks for having me. CHAD: Ignite is one of the examples I always use when I talk about why we split up into teams the way that we did and what the benefits are, Dawn. So why don't you tell people what Ignite actually does? DAWN: Cool. So the Ignite team we work with entrepreneurs, and non-technical startup founders, in some cases, experienced startup founders, as well as innovation teams within existing organizations. And we work with them to validate their product ideas and deliver very initial versions of their products to continue that validation process. We provide all kinds of services around that from a validation perspective. We use product sprint methodology to understand the opportunity, understand the market, the problem, come up with solutions, all those things to arrive at some ideas and some solutions that we can then quickly prototype and then test with target users depending on who we've decided their customer is or who they've decided their customer is. And that's very high level. I'm happy to get into more detail about what our discovery sprints are like. But after that, then we would go into, like I said, continued validation but through actual product launches. So sometimes that looks like proof of concepts, sometimes that's first MVPs. But either way, we focus on a set of goals, and that could be a certain number of users onboarded to the platform. It could be getting that next round of investment funding. But it's pretty straightforward, not a whole lot of complexity, and focused on getting a product and company to that next best stage. CHAD: One of the reasons why I use Ignite is that it's on one end of the spectrum. It's at the extreme end of the spectrum. Last week, I talked to Josh, who's on the other end of Boost, where we're working on existing products with existing teams. And Ignite is all the way on the other side, which is sometimes we are not even writing any code at all; we're just validating an idea. The work that Ignite does has always been a very important part of what thoughtbot does. But it's a big challenge to go from a product where maybe you have hundreds of thousands or millions of users and a large team, and you're doing development as a developer or designer, maybe it's healthcare or something super complex, and then to the next week where you're working on something that is going to get into market very quickly, maybe is totally unproven. The things you need to do in that environment and the way that you need to work can be a little bit different. And so allowing the thoughtbot designers and developers to focus on the particular needs of the Ignite-type clients I think we have seen, and I think we'll continue to see it as people even get more used to it, it has a direct benefit to our clients as well The best thing might not always be to write a Rails app. But if you take a developer who was on a Rails app on Friday or Thursday, and then they start on a new project on Monday, chances are they're expecting to write a Rails app. DAWN: That's a really important observation and distinction about what our developers do compared to other developers at thoughtbot. I've always said that selling any kind of project or working with new clients with any type of project, whether it's very early stage or that enterprise client that we all wear our product consulting hats, or we're product consultants first, and then we have our toolkit. But I think that is the most true, at least from my experience, in the Ignite team. And we've even talked about and, in some cases, have been able to blur the lines even more between designers and developers because first and foremost, you're coming to the problems thinking about it exactly how you're talking about. Like, what is it going to take to make this product launch successful? It might not involve writing very much code. And we might not discover that until after we've been working together for a couple of weeks and started to validate some of the ideas we h

Chad interviews Kirsten Hurley, Managing Director of thoughtbot's Launchpad II team. The Launchpad II team covers the EMEA area: that's Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. She talks about working remotely for almost the entire time she's worked with the company, her approach to talking with potential customers when she knows she's never going to meet them in person, and what she sees happening to the different geographies that thoughtbot is selling and expanding into. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn Follow Kirsten on LinkedIn Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Kirsten Hurley, Managing Director of thoughtbot's Launchpad II team. Kirsten, thanks for joining me. KIRSTEN: Thanks for having me on, Chad. CHAD: So I've now talked with a few managing directors at thoughtbot about the new team that they're leading. So I think listeners are probably expecting what's coming next which is, you know, why don't you give people a little bit of an overview of what the Launchpad II team, which has a slightly different name than the other teams we've talked to so far, do? KIRSTEN: Sure. So I guess maybe to remind some folks, so Launchpad I refers to the Americas. So you've already spoken to a few of the managing directors who head up different teams across the Americas. You have different propositions. Over in Launchpad II, which historically was the London studio when we were working in a physical office environment, we are a smaller team than everyone else who was based over in the Americas. So we didn't quite scale out to be able to have individual teams working on particular propositions. But I think what the team had been successfully doing anyway was working across everything. And we still do work on Ignite-style projects, Lift Off, and Boost engagements as well. So yeah, that's where we've got to. And I think maybe the changes for us is that since we've gone to fully remote working and officially called ourselves the EMEA Launchpad II team, we've started hiring folks from further afield, which is really exciting for me. CHAD: So not everyone may be familiar with the acronym, although it's fairly common, EMEA. So what regions does that actually cover? KIRSTEN: [laughs] Sorry. So that's Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. And I should say we were already working with clients pretty much fully across the region anyway. It was just never really official. But I think the more global terminology is Europe, the Middle East, and Africa or EMEA. But because we're thoughtbot and we like to do things a little bit...well, we like to own our things. So we've called it Launchpad II to go with the rocket theme that we had in our rebranding. What was that? The end of last year I think we came up with it all. CHAD: Yeah. So what has it been like to go from a team of people that were...[laughs] actually, as I ask this question I realized that you joined a week before the pandemic started, and we had to go remote. So I was going to ask you what it was like to go from a team of people that were going to a studio every day all based in London to a remote team. [laughs] But you never really experienced the alternative. KIRSTEN: [laughs] No. I think the most time I spent with the team as a whole was actually in my interview process [laughs] before I even started in person I should say. That was a pretty interesting week. You had flown over from Boston [chuckles] to spend some time getting me all set up and running. And I think it was the Wednesday where you and I had a bit of a chat, and we were concerned about this virus that was going around and the duty of care that we actually had to our teams across the world from a point of view of them commuting to work, and it didn't feel right. And so I think we made the decision that day that from the following week, everyone would start working from home. And I think we thought it would just be for a few weeks, and we'd see how it went. So yeah, it was interesting for sure. [laughs] CHAD: Right. And I remember what happened is I went to...I usually leave on a Friday when I visit, but a few of us, I think, went to a pub or something on...we were planning on doing that on Friday. So I was going to leave on Saturday morning, and I did. But I woke up on Saturday morning ready to catch my flight to the news that the U.S. had shut down all flights from the UK or from Europe, was what the headline said. And I was like, oh no, [laughter] I might be stuck here. And then when you actually read the article, it said actually the UK is exempt and also U.S. citizens were exempt, so they can get back. I remember waking up that morning and having a fright that I was going to be stuck there and made it back saf

Chad interviews Managing Director at thoughtbot, Joshua Clayton, about what a Managing Director at thoughtbot does, what makes Boost at thoughtbot different than other teams, and the belief in integrated teams of designers and developers company-wide. Empathize with Your Customer by Josh Clayton thoughtbot Boost Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn Follow Josh on LinkedIn or Twitter Check out Josh's website Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Josh Clayton, Managing Director of the thoughtbot Boost team. Hey, I know that company. Welcome, Josh. JOSH: Hey, Chad. How are you? CHAD: All right. I'm back to the show I think. I didn't get a chance to look up the last episode you're in, but it was probably hundreds of episodes ago now. JOSH: Yeah, it's got to have been a while. CHAD: [laughs] Speaking of a while, you recently…now time is all messed up for me, but I know that you have been at thoughtbot for a long time. How long has it been? JOSH: It was 12 years in August. CHAD: It's been a wonderful 12 years, Josh. JOSH: I agree. I agree. CHAD: [laughs] JOSH: It's been fun. CHAD: So in that time, you have had a few different roles. But you've been a Managing Director for a while now. JOSH: Yeah, I think that's...let's see. It was seven and a half years for the Boston team. And then it's 10 and a half months with Boost. CHAD: So your background is as a developer. And you, like a lot of people who have a background as developers at thoughtbot, myself included, still do development on a fairly regular basis. What does the Managing Director job at thoughtbot actually do? JOSH: What don't we do [laughter] is maybe a better question. Effectively, we're running that team's business. So it involves some amount of software consulting. It involves software sales. It involves managing the profitability of the team. There are marketing functions, and, I don't know, anything and everything, hiring-related things. We opened up and recently filled our Development Director position, which was open for a couple of months over the summer. We've just opened up a Design Director position. So it's everything. [laughs] It's everything it feels like. CHAD: At the beginning of this year, we did an episode about the changes that we had made at thoughtbot to reorganize the teams around rather than geographic studios around the types of work that we would do on that team. And that's how the Boost team was created. So in that episode, we gave people an overview. But I'd love to hear in your own words, what makes Boost at thoughtbot different than the other teams, and what do you focus on? JOSH: So what makes Boost different? I think one of the drivers, one of the motivators, is to embed alongside existing product teams, engineering, and design teams, and help them get better, help them grow as well as ship features and fix bugs. So I think that the way that I position it is if there's an existing product that's deployed, people are using it day in and day out. Hopefully, it's been battle-tested. There are probably some funky areas of the code. Those are the codebases that we're operating in. It might be a team of two people; it might be a team of 200 people. But there is an existing product and an existing team. They're looking for our support to help make it better. CHAD: One of the things I love about Boost and the changes that we've made, especially relative to Boost, is that at thoughtbot, we really believe in integrated teams of designers and developers. And a big part of what we've always done has been to be a complete product design and development team that brings new products to market, big and small. And because we were one of the first consulting companies in the world to switch to Ruby on Rails and because of that deep experience with Rails, and scaling, and working on existing products, we had a significant number of customers who engaged us for development for that expertise, and to help them scale, and grow, and hire, and implement best practices or solve problems that they were having in their existing codebase or on their existing team. And even though that was a significant part of our business, it was always something that seemed that we maybe even didn't really want to be doing it, or it was on the periphery of our marketing and positioning. And I was super excited when we officially created this team because it allowed us to acknowledge that this was a significant part of what we do, a significant part of our revenue, and to have a team of people that opted into doing this kind of work who would not only love the kind of work but want to even grow it and do more of it. And we haven't really had that

Chad interviews Co-Founder and CEO, Victoria Ranson of Prisma. Prisma is a stealth-mode education startup on a mission to reimagine the way children are educated. Their mission is to create a generation capable of solving the world's biggest problems by creating and running a comprehensive virtual learning program for kids in grades 4-8 that is very unlike any other traditional homeschooling program you've ever heard of. Prisma's Website Follow Prisma on Twitter or Facebook Follow Victoria on LinkedIn Follow Co-Founder, President, and Victoria's husband Alan Chuard on Twitter For more info, email [email protected] Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Victoria Ransom, founder, and CEO of Prisma. Victoria, thanks for joining me on the show. VICTORIA: Hi, thanks for having me. CHAD: So, Victoria, before we jump into this great product that you have, why don't you tell people what Prisma really is. VICTORIA: Sure. Prisma is a very comprehensive educational program for kids who are learning from home or from anywhere in the world. It is not at all like traditional homeschooling because we provide kids with a very social experience. Kids are part of a cohort where they're meeting live with other kids every single day and collaborating with them on projects, and learning from each other, and discussing. And we provide coaches who are there every step of the way with the kids, providing them with rich feedback, helping to bring out the best in them, providing really engaging, live learning experiences. So it’s not traditional homeschooling, although it has a lot of the really great benefits of that with the flexibility and the ability to learn from wherever you are. But we're equally not like typical online schooling, which I would say has tended to be more of an approach of taking traditional school and bringing it online. So there's still a concept of lectures, and grades, and textbooks. They may be electronic in nature, but they still resemble textbooks. The Prisma curriculum is very different. It's rooted in learning through doing and project-based learning, and applying learning to the real world, and allowing kids a lot of choice. So they're ideally always learning through the lens of something that interests them and allowing them to go at their own pace. So a lot of the best practices from some of the most innovative bricks and mortar schools we're bringing to an online environment. And then, of course, we're very different from bricks and mortar schools because it is a virtual program where kids can learn from anywhere. So we think it's a new approach to education that is really uniquely flexible, really prepares kids. We're very focused on preparing kids for the kind of world they're going to live in. The world is always changing rapidly. But I think this generation of kids is going to experience a future that's unlike anything we've ever seen in terms of the level of shift and change, AI being one of the reasons. If you look at studies that look at the future of work, I think some studies we've read say 65% of today's elementary school kids will work in jobs that are yet to be invented. So, how do you prepare kids for that kind of future? And so, we're very focused on giving kids the holistic skills and the mindset that they will need to thrive in that kind of world. So yeah, that is Prisma in a very long nutshell. CHAD: [chuckles] Obviously, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the context of where we're in, which is kids just went through a year or more where a lot of kids were remote for school. And did Prisma exist before the pandemic? VICTORIA: It did in our minds very much so [chuckles] but not in reality. So Prisma arose out of our own personal needs. So my husband and I are the founders of Prisma. We've actually been entrepreneurs for most of our careers. After successfully selling a company to Google a few years ago, we said whatever we do next in our lives; we want it to be something that has the potential to have a large positive impact on society and on the world. And then struggled to figure out what that should look like because there are a lot of things that need solving in the world. But we have three children, and as they approached school age, it really caused us to do a deep dive into how do we want to educate our kids? What do we think is the best approach to education? And from that, we started to formulate a vision by looking at all kinds of different schooling models, from homeschooling to micro-schooling to innovative bricks and mortar schooling. We developed a picture for how we wanted to educate our kids. But that really inspired us to create something that could be ac

At harbour.today, Natalie Nzeyimana and her team are helping people build holistic resilience. On this episode, she and Chad talk about building the app at the beginning of the pandemic when she witnessed herself and others feeling like they were close to drowning and feeling really unmoored. Harbour is a space for people to anchor themselves, find clarity, and set sail. The community offers one-to-one coaching, workshops, a course, and a daily check-in tool. harbour.today Instagram Twitter Lunchclub Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And today, I'm joined by the founder of Harbour, Natalie Nzeyimana. So, Natalie, thanks for joining me. NATALIE: Thanks for having me on. CHAD: So tell me a little bit about what Harbour is. NATALIE: Sure. Harbour is a space for people to anchor self, find clarity, and set sail. We offer one-to-one coaching, workshops, a course, and a daily check-in tool. Harbour was built at the beginning of the pandemic when I witnessed within myself, and the people I knew who I'd worked with, friends, family, just a lot of us felt like we were close to drowning and feeling really unmoored. And so, it began as a course to think about the ways we could use holistic strategies to anchor ourselves and set sail. And from then, from November 2020 to now, it's become a product. CHAD: You started in November. And I know we first met in London a while ago. You were teaching yourself to code working on an education product if I remember right. And we got together at Google Space there and paired for a little bit. Did you code Harbour yourself? NATALIE: It feels like another lifetime. CHAD: [laughs] NATALIE: I think life before the pandemic and life after the pandemic; there’s a real line there. I've done quite a bit of the coding myself. However, I've also used a lot of no-code solutions to create MVPs. They've been amazing at helping me scale, helping me test out ideas incredibly quickly. And so one of the interesting things about juggling doing client work, and then also building the back end, and building the module, and then building the design work, and thinking about content juggling all of these different pieces, is that equation of do I invest time in HTML, or do I invest time in machine learning that's going to help me scale? And making all of those intricate decisions has been really, really interesting because, of course, I want to make everything myself. But these no-code solutions have enabled me to test hypotheses so much faster so that I can save time in the long run. CHAD: Well, tell us a little bit more about what the product is today and what you went through to get to this point. NATALIE: Sure. So initially, I just posted on LinkedIn to see who would want to join the course. I had a really simple Squarespace page, and then that evolved into a Typeform which I would use with clients to help them track progress and checking in with their chakras every day. And so, the way that Harbour works is that we do an energy review based on the seven in-body chakras. And so, for anyone who might be unfamiliar with this terminology, the chakras are...well, there are different schools of thought on this. They are a system for either focusing during meditation depending on where you sit in terms of your feelings towards energy bodies. They are a subtle body energy system of themselves. And what I find incredibly helpful for those chakras is that they help people map their energy in a way that I haven't found anything else does effectively. So starting from the root chakra, which is the base of your spine, you can ask yourself, am I feeling safe? Am I feeling grounded? Am I feeling as though my material needs are met? Traveling up towards your reproductive area, you've got the sacral chakra which governs your sense of feeling as though you can desire the things that you desire in the world, feeling as though you are sensual. You're able to experience pleasure. You're able to be creative and playful. And then up to the solar plexus, which is around your navel area, governs the sense of personal power, empowerment, will, feeling as though you're able to go after your goals with chutzpah and energy. And then moving into the heart chakra, which governs this idea of do I feel as though I'm open to receiving and giving love freely? And the throat, do I feel as though I'm an open conduit for the truth of who I am? Do I feel as though I'm able to express myself fully in the world? And then into the third eye, which governs your intuition. Do I feel as though I'm able to trust my intuitive leads and to move with grace and ease, trusting and able to go with the flow? And then finally, we have the crown chakra, which governs do I feel open to receiving divine w

Lindsey and Chad talk about product roadmaps. Are they dead? Lindsey and Chad think they just smell. We also say an emotional goodbye to Lindsey as she moves on to new adventures. We miss you! Buffer Transparent Product Roadmap Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: LINDSEY: 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, Lindsey Christensen. CHAD: And I'm your other host, Chad Pytel. LINDSEY: And today we're going to talk about product roadmaps. CHAD: Product roadmaps. [laughs] LINDSEY: Whoa. This is the topic. I feel like recently I've seen some thought pieces that product roadmaps are dead. So I'm curious if you think product roadmaps are dead. CHAD: No, I don't think that they're dead, but I want to make the distinction too. I've never believed in a public product roadmap because I think that sets you up for just disappointing everyone involved, your customer, yourselves. And I think that there's a balance to be struck there. Saying that product roadmaps don't have a place, to me, in my mind, is like saying planning, having plans doesn't have a place and that just doesn't ring true to me. I think you should plan out what you're going to be working on. But I'm sure we'll get more into it. I also believe things about not having big backlogs and not doing too much planning and that kind of thing. So it depends on what you mean by a product roadmap. LINDSEY: Well, yeah. I think that therein lies the issue. You can do it well, and you can also [laughs] run it into the ground. But you mentioned having it public and that being a bad idea. And I think at the core of product roadmaps is communication and alignment and getting all of your stakeholders on the same page about what you're building and why. So to me, I would think those stakeholders are the leadership team of the company, if this is a product company and product is the main business driver, the leadership of the company, the product team, of course, and engineering, sales, and marketing as well. Am I missing others? Clients, customers. CHAD: Right. Customers. LINDSEY: How do you feel about it? Does that count as the externally facing do not reveal? CHAD: Oh yeah, it does for me. So we've all seen the companies that say that they're going to do something and then in a best-case scenario, that becomes a deadline which was arbitrarily made in the first place that everyone is stressing out over, that sales is potentially making promises that are either going to need to be broken or are going to need to be super stressed over. And then in a worst-case scenario, you end up not delivering on that roadmap as you essentially promised. And you actually end up with disappointed customers. LINDSEY: So you would recommend not telling the customers about future features. CHAD: Yeah. I think there's a balance to be struck there. So certainly, if you know that you're working on something now like actively working on something and a customer were to ask you about that thing directly, I might say, "Yeah, we're working on that now, and we're excited about getting it out to you." But I have only [chuckles] ever been a part of when a team is saying, "Q3 of next year, six months, nine months down the road, this specific feature is going to make it to customers." That's a real recipe, in my experience, a real recipe for lots of people being either really disappointed in that not happening or really working unsustainably in order to hit that in the first place. It's really hard to plan software that far in advance. We just had the CEO of Dragon Innovation on the podcast. And I think that even then, you have to be careful with hardware, but at least with hardware or other kinds of businesses, it's a little bit easier to say, "Our goal is to have this incorporated in the product, or whatever, in the next revision of the hardware. And we expect to do that two years from now," or something like that. That's a little bit easier to put a bow around, I think. LINDSEY: Yeah. I was a part of a software company that got acquired by a hardware company. And all of a sudden, we were wrapped into these 5 to 10-year product roadmaps that were blowing all of our minds [laughs] and a very different fit than how we were used to working. CHAD: Yeah. It's worth noting that there are some companies that essentially go so far as to publish a Trello board of their roadmap. I don't know which ones they are. [chuckles] I have to find them. But even then, they're not necessarily making hard promises. And if you're committed to being transparent and publishing some roadmap to the public, the ways that I've seen it done best are working in themes. So you say, "Two quarters from now, our focus is going to be on reporting," or som

Chad talks to Leadership Coach and Founder of Plucky, Jen Dary, about working with individuals and companies to create healthy dynamics at work. In fact, Plucky just released a new product that aids in doing just that! Manager Weeklies are notebooks designed to help leaders intentionally set up their weeks and track progress. It includes tips and tricks, including useful 1:1 tools. Each notebook is designed to last one quarter. Follow Jen Dary on Twitter or LinkedIn Plucky Manager Weeklies info & order link Newsletter: beplucky.com/newsletter Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Jen Dary, founder of Plucky. Jen, welcome back to the podcast. JEN: Thank you. My third time. Three time's a charm. I feel very lucky. CHAD: There aren't many people who have been on the podcast as guests three or more times. So you're in an ever-increasing select group of returning guests. JEN: Thank you. I feel like it's maybe because the Tokyo Olympics have just started, but I feel competitive and ready to take on this third session. CHAD: [laughs] So the last time you were on was October 28th, 2019 is when the episode came out. JEN: Millennia ago. CHAD: Not quite two years ago, but yeah, also a millennia ago. And that was Episode 342 so if people want to go back and take a listen to that. And then before that, you were on Episode 270, which I actually don't even know the date of. It was even longer. So welcome back. You are celebrating the eighth anniversary of Plucky. JEN: I know. I don't really think of it in these ways because I don't have an MBA, or I didn't come from a business background or anything. But definitely when I hit five years, I feel like my husband said something about that. He was like, "Honey, you should be really proud. Not a lot of businesses make it five years." And that was not really on my mind. But now that Plucky is eight, I feel like oh man, I'm just so happy to talk about how businesses evolve and how what you thought it was going to be in year one was different than year three, was different than year five, and of course, it's different than year eight. So we're eight years in, but nothing's the same, and everything's the same. I'm sure you've experienced that too. CHAD: It was actually the eighth year going into the ninth year mark that we at thoughtbot started to make big changes. And it was that idea of coming up on a decade. It started to feel like, wow, there's real momentum here. And instead of thinking about what the next year looks like, what does the next decade look like? And are we the kind of company that is going to last 20 years? And that put us in a different mindset. And I started to think about the impact we were having and the legacy that we would have. And was it big enough for the size of the company that we had? JEN: How old is thoughtbot right now? CHAD: We just celebrated our 18th anniversary. JEN: Oh my gosh. All right. Well, maybe at the very end, you can give me your best wisdom for the ninth year. [laughter] CHAD: Oh jeez. Okay. [chuckles] JEN: No presh, but tuck that in the back of your brain. CHAD: Yeah, get some sleep. That's my best advice. JEN: [laughs] Great. CHAD: That would be great. We can come back to that. JEN: Cool. CHAD: So obviously, it's been a big two years since we last talked. I'm sure a lot has progressed in Plucky. How have things changed? JEN: Well, what's funny is that the two years spread that we're talking about or 18 months or whatever it is, for the most part, overlaps with COVID so far. So by the end of 2019, things were cooking, and everything is good. And even, personally speaking, my youngest son would be entering kindergarten in the fall of 2020. Again, as a business owner, a mom, all those things I was sort of at the end of 2019 hot, so good. And then I was anticipating 2020 to be continued pretty much the same as is. Like, we would keep training managers. I would keep traveling. All that would get easier because the kids are getting bigger, then my kid would go to kindergarten. And I was also finishing a book about...I can't remember if we talked about this before, but I was really sick in 2016. I had a brain tumor diagnosis, and I'm okay now. It was benign. I had this memoir that was eh, I don't know, maybe two-thirds done. All that was the plan for 2020, Chad. And I'm sure this is shocking news to you, but none of it happened, including freaking kindergarten, obviously in person. So on the business side of things, I kept everything stable as best as I could. So coaching kept going because coaching has always been remote. We have some products, and we kept shipping those out as best we could. At the very beginning of COVID,

Chad and Lindsey talk about how the pandemic has changed "normal" remote work and how thoughtbot has dealt with the transition from being majoritively in-person to fully remote, plus the impact it's had on both employees and clients. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. LINDSEY: And I’m your other host, Lindsey Christensen. We’re back. Chad, I've only seen you pixelated for over a year now. CHAD: I know. LINDSEY: Can you believe it? CHAD: It's hard to believe. I haven't seen anybody that I work with [laughs] not pixelated for over a year now. LINDSEY: It seems normal now. CHAD: Yeah, it seems normal, except when you think about it, and you realize how long it's been. We're going to talk about remote work today, and I think that that's something to keep in mind, which is what we're doing now isn't normal remote work. We can make the best of it and that kind of thing, but it's obviously different than normal remote work when you can actually have a social life outside of work and meet people and get together in person to kick off new projects or to be like, “Let's have a retreat or whatever.” So right off the top, we should acknowledge that we're not in this normal period, and this isn't necessarily normal remote work. LINDSEY: Right. Which is a good thing, I guess, or the optimist in me says remote work can be way better than it is right now because this is quarantining work. [chuckles] CHAD: Right. So for those who don't know, thoughtbot made the decision to go remote-first work from anywhere. And we touched on it in the previous two episodes a little bit, and that's what we're going to be talking about today. And I think that that's one of the things that made us confident in the direction was that things aren't great now, but they're certainly not bad. And the majority of the team felt good about what was happening now, even given all of the downsides. It gave us the confidence to look ahead and say, “Can this be even better, and will it be okay?” And I think that's part of what gave us the confidence to move forward. LINDSEY: I saw this interesting stat, and this was actually from a while ago, last July 2020. Gartner did a survey of company leaders, and 80% plan to allow employees to work remotely, at least part of the time after the pandemic, and 47% will allow people to work full-time from home, which is even a bigger percentage than I anticipated. But I think it speaks to the major change that everyone's seeing. We've all learned that remote work can work. I saw another stat that was, I think, no companies are reporting a reduction in productivity because of remote work, and in 27% of cases, companies feel like they're being even more productive. CHAD: We didn't not do this before because we didn't think it would be productive on a day-to-day basis or that we didn't believe in the ability to work remotely working. There were a couple of important points that caused us to choose the direction we did; the first one being we went through a period of time where we were a hybrid remote or about half the team was remote, and the other half was working in an office in Boston. And it felt hard and mediocre and something we couldn't -- It wasn't worth the amount of effort we would need to invest in making that work well. It just didn't seem worth it. And so we made the decision to -- And I think this is the way thoughtbot works like we've got to make intentional decisions in a lot of things that we do and half measures don't really satisfy us over the long-term. And so there was this feeling back then of we either need to decide to go completely remote, or we need to all be in person. And because we work locally with clients, that pushed us in the direction of well, we really like working with local clients face-to-face. We like how that feels, and it feels like something that's going to be enjoyable and fulfilling, and sustainable over the long term. So let's commit to that. And I think that that's one of the reasons why we've been successful in this transition is because, at the same time, we no longer had the client constraints of clients asking us to be in person with them or wanting to work with them in person, that was just completely off the table. LINDSEY: That's interesting. I think I hadn't really fully thought about that element which was need or perceived need from the client to be side-by-side with us. CHAD: Yeah. Once that was off the table, it allowed us to be freed up to make an independent decision, probably more confident in that decision because going through a period where we could show clients that it could work, I'm more confident now that when c

Chad and Lindsey take listeners behind the scenes and go deep into the nitty-gritty of recent thoughtbot company changes driven by the pandemic and the organization's need (and desire!) to go fully remote – all while reaffirming and revisiting the organization's values, mission, and purpose as part of the process. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD PYTEL: 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. LINDSEY CHRISTENSEN: And I'm your other host, Lindsey Christensen. And we're back. Thanks for tuning in. CHAD: We've missed you. LINDSEY: Yes. We’ve been kind of busy. CHAD: We've been busy, and we knew we were going to take a break after the last season. We didn't necessarily know for quite how long, and then a whole bunch of stuff happened, which we're going to tell you about today. From the last episode, you heard about the change to the thoughtbot CEO, and we alluded to some changes that we've made to the company. And we're going to talk about those today. LINDSEY: Yeah. And in true thoughtbot Giant Robots fashion, we’ll go behind the scenes and give you the nitty-gritty of why things happened and how it's going because it's all really interesting. CHAD: Yeah. I think on the surface, it's really easy to think about how maybe these changes have been entirely driven by the need to go remote or the desire to go remote. And the reality was that's an important part of it, but it really was so much more than that. Some of these changes that we've made are ones we've been talking about for a long time. And it wasn't until almost a year of operating in a different way that we said, “We need to make some of these changes in order to accommodate remote and working from anywhere.” And we fell back on a lot of other problems we needed to solve along the way. LINDSEY: So we actually decided to break out remote work into its own episode, which will be the next episode. And I'm sure it's going to come up today, but it's a whole other area of changes and focus, whereas some of the reorg changes that we just underwent solved a lot or are trying to solve a number of challenges that we've been working on over the years. So I guess to start off, before we reorganized, how did we function? And that was largely geographically based. CHAD: Yeah. And the geographic basis means that we had a studio in a city, and in that studio, we offered the complete thoughtbot services. And that was driven by this idea back in 2012 when we started to expand. Prior to that, we really held the company to less than 30 people. And we were primarily a group of people all in one location working together, and we were all of what thoughtbot was. And we really liked that. We liked the structure. But people wanted to move and live somewhere else. And our purpose is that we believe that there's a better way to work. And we want to share it with as many people as possible, although we've revised that purpose now as part of this process. And so I really remember the day we were having a company meeting, and someone stood up and said, “If we really believe we have a better way to work, why are we not trying to bring it to more people? Why are we losing these great team members only because they want to live somewhere else?” But we also really liked the small, close-knit team of people who worked closely together on client work. We had done some client projects that were split across teams and across time zones and that kind of stuff. And it just didn't feel as good as we wanted it to feel, especially because it was hybrid. And so we said, “We know exactly what a great thoughtbot looks like. Instead of trying to expand what that great thoughtbot looks like, let's try to replicate it instead.” And so when someone wanted to move to a new city, we said, “That’s great.” We looked at the market in the city that they were moving to and said, “Let's grow another thoughtbot around them and use that as the starting point for a new thoughtbot studio that would be a full design and development team that offers and works with all the different kinds of clients that we work with.” And that was the model which brought us to being in six cities in the UK and in the U.S. and about 100 people working with a whole bunch of clients every year across those. But for the individual person working at thoughtbot, individual designer or developer, it felt very much like thoughtbot had always felt, which was you were working with a team of three or four other people directly on that client. Oftentimes, the client would be in the same city as you. And when we could meet face-to-face with people, they'd be working in our office, and we'd be working really closely with them. LINDSEY: Another interesting element of that structure was the m

Chad is joined by Diana Bald, the new CEO of thoughtbot, to discuss her background, the organizational changes to the leadership of the company, and the reasoning behind them. Diana on Twitter Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD PYTEL: 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 today, I'm joined by the new CEO of thoughtbot, Diana Bald. Thanks for joining me, Diana. DIANA BALD: Hi, Chad. This is so fun. This is so exciting. I've only done one podcast before this, so I'm excited. CHAD: Well, don't worry. You can still be CEO of thoughtbot even if you're not a podcaster. [laughter] DIANA: Okay, that's great to know. CHAD: So it's been several months now. So I want to go back and talk about how we arrived here. But I'm curious, how are you feeling now? What does it feel like? DIANA: It feels great. I think I'm getting more and more comfortable every day, which is amazing. And I think the year has gotten off to a great start, so that's helping me feel more comfortable as well. So far, so good. CHAD: So for folks who are listening, I'm sure they're wondering who are you? [chuckles] Let's give the audience a little peek into your background and how you arrived at thoughtbot, and the role you originally had. DIANA: Great. How far back do you want me to go? CHAD: As far as back as you're comfortable. DIANA: Okay. I actually was really interested in technology at a younger age. I put myself through undergrad and grad school while I was doing tech roles. I trained lawyers on how to move from the analog world into the digital world. That was one of my very first jobs at a law firm. And then, shortly after that, I did webmaster work when I was putting myself through MBA school. It was a very different world than it is now. This is way back when the internet was really just kicking off; it was 1998 to 2001, around that time. When I graduated from MBA school, I was recruited into Univision into their leadership pipeline, which was very much focused on business development. But my very first project there was web integration, integrating the univision.com with their TV and radio. That was when I started to move away from technology. I was there for ten years. I had a variety of different roles, a really fun job. I got to experience a lot of different roles, lived in a lot of different cities. I spent a lot of time in Philadelphia, where I actually launched a television station in Spanish, which was really fun. And then I came to New York. After Univision, I spent four years in the advertising and marketing world. I spent two years with IPG at ID Media, which was a direct marketing agency. And then two years at MDC Partners at an agency called TargetCast, which later became Assembly, which was more media buying and planning. And then, when I left there, I went to Liberty Mutual for three years. And at Liberty Mutual, I fell back in love with technology. I missed it. I was doing a lot of strategic partnership opportunities with really interesting companies that were doing brand new business models and disrupting insurance, and there was a lot of exposure to telematics and IoT. And it was just calling me back, and I was like, I got to get back to tech. And somehow, I don't recall exactly how, but I found you. You and I chatted, and then I fell in love with thoughtbot [chuckles], and then after that, the rest is history. CHAD: You joined us as the Managing Director of the New York City studio. I want to say that was a position we were advertising for, and you applied to it. DIANA: Yeah. CHAD: And one of the things that really stood out when I first met you and as we've got to know each other and work together is the variety of experience that you had because I've only ever done what I do, which has its own strengths. So the fact that I started freelancing web design and development in high school and have continued to do that now for 25 years is a strength, but it's also, aside from the jobs I had as a dishwasher or the checkout person at the grocery store, this is literally all I've done. And the variety of experience you have not only helps thoughtbot be better, but I also think it positions you well for our business. In consulting, you need to be unflappable in a lot of circumstances, and I think you're good at that. You're good at maintaining an even keel and talking with customers and dealing with difficult situations and that kind of thing. DIANA: In some ways, I'm envious that you have been able to stick with development the entire time; that’s really, really cool. But in other ways, I can see what you're talking about because I do feel like I have had a variety of roles and seen a lot of different situations. And every one of these situations has had their challenges. And they'v

Chad and Lindsey talk with Courtney & Tye Caldwell, Co-founders of ShearShare, discussing culture-fit with new hires, incorporating values into brand-thinking, fostering relationships, and planning for 2021. Please take a minute to help guide our next season with your thoughtful feedback on our Giant Robots listener survey. Thanks! This episode is sponsored by HelloFresh Enter code ROBOTS80 to get a total of $80 off, including free shipping! ShearShare ShearShare on Instagram Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: ShearShare.

Chad and Lindsey talk with Alasdair McLean-Foreman, CEO & Founder of Teikametrics, discussing the intermingling importance of mission, vision, and values. Please take a minute to help guide our next season with your thoughtful feedback on our Giant Robots listener survey. Thanks! Teikametrics Blitzscaling- Reid Hoffman Jeff Weiner - CS183 at Stanford Dunbar's number Previous Netflix Culture Deck Alasdair on LinkedIn Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: Teikametrics.

Chad and Lindsey are joined by Michael Sheeley, founder & CEO of Nurse-1-1, to discuss crafting values with purpose, living those values in the product's messaging & marketing, choosing not to publicly publish them, and what the landscape of healthcare looks like going into 2021. Please take a minute to help guide our next season with your thoughtful feedback on our Giant Robots listener survey. Thanks! This episode is sponsored by HelloFresh Enter code ROBOTS90 to get a total of $90 off, including free shipping! Nurse-1-1 Michael on Twitter Nurse-1-1 on Instagram Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: Nurse-1-1.

Chad and Lindsey discuss the history of values at thoughtbot and how they served as a key differentiator in the early days of the company, and navigating the tricky waters of when client values don't align. Please take a minute to help guide our next season with your thoughtful feedback on our Giant Robots listener survey. Thanks! The thoughtbot Founders' story on Giant Robots thoughtbot Purpose Statement AgencyU Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!

Chad and Lindsey talk with Courtney & Tye Caldwell, Co-founders of ShearShare, about their early days of in-person marketing, the importance of naming, consistent messaging, and the effects of hiring a head of growth. ShearShare Mentored by Failure- Tye Caldwell ShearShare on TikTok ShearShare secures $2.3M in seed funding Google's Black Founders' Fund ShearShare on Instagram Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: ShearShare.

Chad and Lindsey talk with Alasdair McLean-Foreman, CEO & Founder of Teikametrics, discussing the day-one origins of marketing there, building your reputation through content marketing, and the efficacy of various content channels. This episode is brought to you by Teamistry. Discover stories of teams who work together in new and unexpected ways to achieve remarkable things, on the Teamistry podcast Teikametrics Stats & Trends From Prime Day 2020 Webinar "How to Make Podcasting Work for You"- Lindsey @ Startup Boston Flywheel 2.0- Early Access List Teikametrics Acquires Adjusti.co Nikola admits prototype was rolling downhill in promotional video Alasdair on LinkedIn Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: Teikametrics.

Chad and Lindsey are joined by Michael Sheeley, founder & CEO of Nurse-1-1, to discuss the blurry line between marketing, research, & product, committing to branding, acquisition costs, SEO & content marketing, helping to power a new provider platform, and hiring a head of marketing. Nurse-1-1 Nurse-1-1 Healthtech Blog Utilization Management White Paper Well At Home Michael on Twitter Nurse-1-1 on Instagram Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: Nurse-1-1.

Chad and Lindsey discuss 'what's in a name' when it comes to branding, where (and where not) to start when you first begin your marketing efforts, and staying engaged with your customers. This episode is brought to you by: Teamistry- Discover stories of teams who work together in new and unexpected ways to achieve remarkable things, on the Teamistry podcast Hover: 10% discount on all new purchases! SWOT analysis Being Human in the Absence of Humans- Remote Teams Workshop Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!

Chad and Lindsey talk with Alasdair McLean-Foreman, CEO & Founder of Teikametrics, discussing trust within the use of data, planning the future with indexed data, a data-science related acquisition, and navigating the world of buzzwords around machine learning. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM: Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy! Hover: 10% discount on all new purchases! Teikametrics Amazon Marketplace Bribery Scheme Alasdair on LinkedIn Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: Teikametrics.

Chad and Lindsey talk with Courtney & Tye Caldwell, Co-founders of ShearShare, about using data to guide product design, imagining a machine learning recommendation engine, and their experience in Google for Startups Accelerator. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM: Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy! Hover: 10% discount on all new purchases! ShearShare Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders ShearShare on Instagram Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: ShearShare.

Chad and Lindsey are joined by Michael Sheeley, founder & CEO of Nurse-1-1, to discuss using data to drive a better customer experience, some of the regulations around data management in healthcare, and advice for health-tech startups. Join us on Sept 24th at 12pm ET for the Your path to digital health startup success, a digital health-tech event! This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM: Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy! Hover: 10% discount on all new purchases! Nurse-1-1 Michael on Twitter Nurse-1-1 on Instagram Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: Nurse-1-1.

Data drives the world, and so this month we'll be talking about common pitfalls of building a business around data, laying out a tandem roadmap to drive forward both data and product, the importance of insight over raw data, when does it makes sense to reach for machine learning, tooling, and thoughts on the ethics & future legislation of data collection. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM: Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy! GDPR Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!

Chad and Lindsey are joined by Michael Sheeley, founder & CEO of Nurse-1-1, to discuss vetting your investors, his experience with fundraising, maintaining your reputation, his mindset while negotiation with investors, lessons learned while building and funding startups, the importance of establishing a founding team, and involving the team in the fundraising process. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy! Nurse-1-1 Michael on Twitter Nurse-1-1 on Instagram Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: Nurse-1-1.

Chad and Lindsey are joined by Courtney & Tye Caldwell, Co-founders of ShearShare, to discuss their acceptance into the first cohort of Google for Startups' Black Founders Accelerator, speaking the language of investors, preparing for series A, how they think about an exit, and equity for the team. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy! ShearShare Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders Backstage Capital Jaylon Smith Minority Entrepreneurship Institute Capital Fund ShearShare on Instagram Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: ShearShare.

Chad and Lindsey talk with Alasdair McLean-Foreman, CEO & Founder of Teikametrics, discussing early days of community building online, geography in relation to investors, his history with VC, the importance of relationship building, when & how much money to raise, time investment of a CEO for fundraising, and sharing financials with the team. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM: Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy! FusionAuth - Use it for free today and get a free t-shirt, or upgrade to their paid editions and get 25% with promo code GIANTROBOTS Teikametrics BigCommerce files to go public Alasdair on LinkedIn Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: Teikametrics.

This month we'll be talking about all things fundraising! The discussion covers investors vs bootstrapping, crowd-funding, differences between the various levels of fundraising, accelerators, and the expectations of taking venture capital. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy! Wistia on Giant Robots Term Sheet Grader- Pillar VC Backstage Capital It's About Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated into Your Greatest Advantage- Arlan Hamilton Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!

Chad and Lindsey are joined by Michael Sheeley, founder & CEO of Nurse-1-1, to discuss figuring out the summer and working from home during Covid and beyond, his approach to feature rollout, pings, & to-dos, as well as keeping the team on a unified path, and his personal motivations to keep going. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy! Nurse-1-1 Michael on Twitter Nurse-1-1 on Instagram Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: Nurse-1-1.

Chad and Lindsey talk with Courtney & Tye Caldwell, Co-founders of ShearShare, about the offset schedule of the beauty industry, an unexpected source of inspiration, the importance of a routine, and supporting the betterment of their team & community. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy! ShearShare Your First Million Podcast Les Brown Greatness Radio The ShearShare "Concoction" ShearShare on Instagram Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!Special Guest: ShearShare.