the importance of trust w/ ben kettle, vp of revenue at gun.io

full transcript

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals. We don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it for it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, social media at tdesntes E-S-S-E-Y-N. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Well, I know people are trickling in when I hear the music. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're live now. We're live now. We were sure they come in. Let me not come in the door. The door is locked. I mean, it definitely takes a few minutes for people to get here. But hello, everybody. Welcome. Happy Tuesday.

So the reason why I didn't post about Ben coming on the show today is because I messaged Ben at about 4.30 yesterday. I go, Hey, Ben, do you want to come on the show? I had somebody reschedule and he goes, I only have 30 minutes. And I said, OK, great. Well, I'll get you 30 minutes. So so Ben, I'm excited to hang out with Ben. I'm going to say this. And I truly mean this. I'm not just saying this because Ben's on the show and Ben's one of my bosses, but Ben, I came to work for Gunn because of Ben. Ben was one of the many reasons.

And so I'm really excited to bring him on the show today because we're doing some really cool shit and I want Ben to talk about it. So for those of you who are tuning welcome, say, hey, we'd love to hear from you. Here we go. We're starting to get going Ricardo. Mr. Ricardo, he's always the first guy that always comments always. So Ricardo, I appreciate, actually Ricardo, I look for you to make sure I'm live on LinkedIn because if you don't comment, I don't know if I'm live. I appreciate you, man. Robert, it's good to see you at LinkedIn using what's going on. So yeah, so today's gonna be one of those Gundah IO guidance counter 2.0 collabs where you learn more about Gundah IO.

You can ask questions. Even through the candidates. I wanna talk a little bit more about the hiring major side but even if you're a candidate, please ask questions. Ben will absolutely be able to answer them. So why? So I think it's gonna be a great session. I think ask questions, learn about what we're doing, and then we're gonna share a lot of nuggets along the way. But definitely this is more informational, less like, hey, do these three things to find a job. But I think this is really good, especially if you're a developer. Even if you're a junior developer and new in the ecosystem, I think learning about us and starting to get involved in our ecosystem through open spaces that we're doing now, also our public discord.

I think it's a great way to be in community because our goal at gun is to develop, to be the premier community across the world for developers. And it's not gonna be easy, we're not gonna do it overnight, but the help of you guys will eventually get there. So please comment and say, hey, we'd love to hear from you. Again, the reason why it's helping, we'll do that is because it's a networking platform. What I've realized over the last six to nine months is that, what does it meet up and meet up as an event that happens once a week and you show up and you get people all that, that's what this is.

It just happens daily. And so I wanted to create a space that I wish I had when I was graduate, when I graduated college, I didn't know what to do. So if I were you, I would, I would do two things. One comment say, hey, because then what I would do is I would network with every single person who comments and says, hey, I would message Ben. Message Ben say, hey, Ben, sorry, I'm guidance counselor 2.0. Then I would hop on over to unicorn finders and I would connect with every single founder that I bring on the show. If you do that, you do that intentionally for next 30 days, you're gonna have a pretty vast network.

And so that's what I want for you. Second thing is ask Ben questions. This is the time where Ben doesn't have to bill you for it. So take advantage of it. And so, yeah, ask some questions. Second off, I want to give a shout out to that conference. That conference is the only conference that I know that has a coffee line, and they're the official coffee sponsor of the show. So again, ClarkSail, that conference. Thank you. Go check them out. You can buy some beans with a few bucks off. GC2 is the code. It's actually right here. It's really good. I'm actually drinking it right now.

So really, really good. And then also shout out gun.io for taking me on. We're doing some cool shit. So there we go. Alright, I'll see you here. Ricardo Robert, Link didn't use your Link didn't use your Toronto Alex Scott, Mark Hunter. Whoa. Oh, Hunter, look at that. He's got jokes. The party's here, the party's here. Hey Ben, Joel, I see your brother on TikTok. It's good to see you brother. Let me know if we can grab drinks at breakfast, by the way. Let me know if you have like a minute. We'll have to hang out with you all. Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, you went to breakfast?

I'm not. I was a player, Don. You want to more? Kevin is, Kevin on our team has gone. So Kevin will be there. So if you see Kevin Jones at right best, you meet him. Yeah, it's guy. Kevin Jones is gone. Kevin Jones is gone, but Joel messaged me or something. Chris, good to see you. All right, nothing wrong about that. Let's get the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? Welcome. My name is Spain Kettle. I'm at Gondadio. My title is revenue. So that means that I oversee our sales team, our client success kind of everything on the client side is really kind of where I play and where I you know that's what I care about.

You know, try to that I've always been a startup guy not always always but the most part I think this is my fifth you know series A or pre series A series A pre series A startup. Yeah I've had a a ton of them. You kind of live in this space. Yeah, I'm not a big company guy. My wife is so she provides security. I provide risk and this makes the marriage. You're my ruggedly good looks. What's that? I said you provide the jokes and the ruggedly good looks. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, she'll definitely agree with that. Anyway, so my job at Gunness to do that previously.

I've kind of alternated between sales and product roles. Initially, I wanted to be a product manager and I was told because I was an engineer that never getting a product unless I was an engineer or I was really good at sales. So I was like, well, the engineering ship is sailed. I guess I'll get good at sales. So I had product for six years, kind of in my 30s. So I've kind of alternated between the two. I did sales, product, now I'm back to more sales role. And my job at gun is to find the clients, manage the team that finds the clients, and make sure that the devs we have on our platform are well represented in a happy spot and doing their best work, and we don't have to worry about it.

I love it. You had Joe just heard the alarm go off. Joe, someone just left the house. My daughter just went out of the house. And no one's at the door. Yeah, so Ben, so, so gun. So explain, I knew you just kind of reference it, but say one more time, done to Iowa, what do we do? What's kind of our goal in mission? Yeah, so what do we do? So our goal is to connect the very best talent with the very best organizations that need that technical talent. And candidly, I think the thing that we're striving for is like pure liquidity. So if you are really good in a skill, and there is an organization that needs that skill, where you can connect you and you can have a seamless experience on both sides to get whatever project done.

The thing that everyone at gun gets really fired up before is people who build, right? Whether you are the founder of the startup, whether you are a front-end engineer, we are very fired up for you to build and we want to create opportunities for that to happen. What? Now I'm kind of curious, right? People think about it like it's like, oh, you're recruiting from. What would you say to that? I think, like, I'm in sales, right? I just want to make everyone happy. I would say, if that's how you conceptualize it, that's fine. Yeah. I think there's some pretty key differences in what we do.

And Taylor, I can get back to you. Let's talk about those differences. There you go. Let's talk about those differences. So I think this is a good example. This is a good opportunity to talk about my own experience. So I was in product. I was the product lead on a team of eight people. I had engineers. I didn't really know what a good engineer was. I didn't know if our velocity made sense. I didn't know. I couldn't go into the code and debug things. Like my job, right, as a product manager is just to make sure that we shipped the solution to the customer needed.

Right. And I never, like, I never felt like I really, I mean, I've had great, don't get me wrong, I've had great relationships with some engineers I've worked with in the past. And I had some of those guys, you know, like I'd still lean on for advice and counsel on those things. But I just, you know, I never really knew. And I think that's one of the things that we all, for particularly to people who maybe have a deep expertise in one technical aspect of development, but really need like one to branch out. Maybe like they're very, very good and let's say back in, but they need DevOps help, they need fun and help.

Like it's really hard to know what good looks like. And one thing that Gunn does that I haven't seen any technical recruiter, any recruiting agency do, even much of internal recruiters do, is really vet for the skill you need. So like, Taylor, as you know, the technical talent advocates, David G, for the squad, that team, my team doesn't try to pretend that we're experts in React or Python or machine learning. Our job is to go out, start the conversation, get those requirements in, really understand the business problem you're trying to solve, pass those needs on to the engineers to our experts in that and have them go find those people so that you can have full trust in the folks that are working on your project.

I think that's the biggest differentiation. A hundred percent. I wanted to, yeah, sorry to interrupt you, but yeah, because I'm just so enthusiastic about what we're doing, not just because I'm working here, but because it's that cool. But I think that's the biggest thing, right? So for those of you who didn't catch my episode with David G. at a Brazil a few weeks ago, he and his team are the ones that technically vet all of the engineers on our platform. So, and I think that's the coolest thing. I haven't seen that from a recruiting model. You know, I know we used to talk about the company I used to work at, but really we never got around to it because it's such a huge lift and we're already doing it.

So I want to talk about Ben, obviously, kind of you've been here for a very long time. I mean, can you talk about maybe some instances where, maybe because again, the title of this show is called The Importance of Trust. Can you talk about why trust is so important and maybe some examples of how gun was able to establish trust with some clients who may be a little iffy with us? Yeah, well, I will tell you that holistically, we've seen, like, trust is a hard thing to quantify, but holistically what we've seen with our company success managers is that our MPS keeps going up and up and up and up.

What does that mean? What does that mean? Sorry, net promoter score. So when we go to our clients, we say, hey, how is working with us? Their rate is very, very high. Right? And so that to me is a pretty good indicator that we're building trust. Another really good indicator is that they come back to us. We are now the default hiring technical solution for a good majority of our clients. They don't think, they don't even post the job anymore. They call up their company success manager. They say, hey, thanks for all your help with this back-end thing. We have this front end roll. Can you guys help us out with that?

So in terms of specific stories, I show it to that before I came on Taylor. But I'd say most for our clients where they have more than one developer working with them, we make up a majority of their dev team, which says a lot. We have another, one client that I worked with directly, this is a fun one. They came to us, they said, hey, we've got this overseas dev team, we're not technical, we don't really know, like if it's good or not. We don't really know if they have the chops to do the things we need to do. Here's our roadmap, here's what we're trying to accomplish.

Here's, you know, we just raised money. And I said, okay, initially they came to us just for like to have like a tech lead. And we managed to hook him up with a guy on the platform who they couldn't believe that he would even talk to them. Really? Yeah, they were like, there's no way this guy's gonna actually come work with us. I was like, no, you guys are doing a cool thing. You're good people, you're open-minded. You have this really interesting problem you're trying to solve, and they ended up working with them, and it was initially supposed to be a 20-hour, like, hey, help us make sure our ducks are in a row.

Help us make sure that what we're building is right, we're building it the right way, we don't have any vulnerabilities. And he's still there. And he's basically become their de facto CTO. That's awesome. And this is someone that, you know, this is, I think a real testament to Gunch Reach where we have someone who is that skilled and we have a startup that literally just raised their A when I talk to them and they're based out of Australia. Right? And so they're like thousands and thousands of miles away. They connect with this person. That's awesome. And then they're able to like build out their infrastructure to support their growth.

And by the way, their mission is cool. They're all about food insecurity and food waste. It's companies specializing in that. So I think building that level of trust is real important. And we have to have that credibility. And I think that's one thing not to continue my tangent. I remember my last gig, I worked out of a we-work, and there was a recruiter directly below us. And he was very non-technical, very non-technical. And I would get so upset. I'd be in my office trying to work late in the afternoon and I would hear him try to grow up, engineers and clients. And he had no idea what he was talking about.

Yeah, most don't. Zero. Zero idea what he was talking about. Like even I knew, right? Even I knew that I was like, this guy is so full of shit. And sorry. No, you're fine. I criss off on those stuff. And that's one thing you won't get from us. Like my team will not pretend to be technical. That's not our role. Our role is to really help solve the cultural and business problems that you're trying to solve. And then turn it over to our dev rel team to put the right person in the right seat. So I made a post about this on guns LinkedIn today about how I don't know any other vendor that has a technical team that helps walk through the project with a developer replace on project.

Can you talk about the care that a client will receive if they work with us on the sales side specifically? Yeah, so I mentioned the company success managers earlier. They've been on, they've been with us for about a year now. I'm a big fan of being an expert, but do it the customer once. So what they do is they work with our clients, really at our clients, kind of the cadence our clients want, right? I think most of them are happy with two weeks. Occasionally it's a month. And their job is just to make sure that everything is going as painlessly as possible with our clients.

Now, what does that mean? Well, that can mean that in some cases, we coach our clients up. We've had clients where we spend extra time with them, we introduce them to some of our engineering or product teams to talk about, you know, product best practices, how to communicate better. In some cases, that means kind of pointing out maybe an issue with like a work style issue. and directly working with our DevRel team to address that issue with a developer or even with the client. So, it's really, they're not project managers, they're not sitting there with a Gantt chart, they're sitting there making sure they're not counting tickets or points.

What they are doing is they're making sure like, hey, how are you feeling about this engagement? Do you feel heard? Do you feel responded to? Do you feel like you're making the progress you want to make? If not, why not? Is it a youth thing? Is it an engineer thing? So I think they're another level of service that I don't think I know, excuse me. They're another level of service that we have that both our clients and our engineers in our platform love. Right? Because it's like you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about all the like. Well, it sounds.

And this is what's crazy. And for those of you watching, also Carlos from Bogota, Colombia. I love that. What's going on man? I mean, that's why I'm floored when I joined you guys, because the amount of care, and this is why I'm proud to work here, is because there is just a focus on the engineering community, and I think we all know, especially for those of you watching, you know, are in the engineering community, like, engineers are a different breed, right? It is what it is, just a different breed, and engineers are hard, They don't trust easily. They're very skeptical. And so I think what we're doing, we're essentially, you know, hand holding slash giving y'all a big hug both from the client side, but then also the candidate side.

So when you work a project with us, like there's never really any ambiguity from the sound of it. Yeah, and if there is, that's the kind of thing where you can come to CSM, you can go back to the devlog team and say like, like, hey, like these guys, you know, or there's ambiguity in this project and it's making me uncomfortable. Right. You like work with me to help remove that ambiguity. And that is something that we are happy to do. Yeah. Happy to do. Absolutely. Robert, Robert really brings up a great question and Robert, I'm glad you did this because I want to address it.

So due to the nature of what we do, so Ben and Craig, me from wrong. I think you told me these stats, but Craig, me from wrong. 65% of what of the types of jobs we have on our platform is freelance part-time work. Around 35% is like full-time 40-hour week worth, both contract and direct hire. That's about right. Yeah. Because of the nature of freelancing, we can't throw junior devs into that situation, right? These are very complicated, hit the ground right immediately, no training time. So we don't really do a lot with junior developers. to be totally honest with you, we don't do a lot between the zero to five to seven year range.

Now, that being said, that is one of the reasons why I'm here is to create a place to give back and help you, Robert. So again, one of the things we're doing is we're doing open spaces. So it's going to be a weekly session on Thursdays. We're not having one this week, but next week we will Kelly Vaughn's going to be on the open space. She's a rock star of Atlanta, but we're creating a community for juniors to give back to you all through content, right? And we know that's important because the juniors now are going to be seniors, you know, years from now. And we want to develop that trust with you.

But just because the nature of our platform, we don't take on senior, don't take on junior engineers. Ben, do you have any more thoughts on that? No, I really love what you're doing in developing, right? Because, and especially So your point that juniors are going to be seniors in five years. Yeah. Um, and, and I also want to be really clear that years of experience, like I don't have a ton of faith in years of experience that you get, but like, but you will have a chance. Like if you were to apply at as an engineer to gun. Like you're going to get a spare shot, like you're not, you're not going to get just like slipped in the rug.

If you can build and you can talk intelligently about things that you've built, I think you'll find that you'll probably have a place here. Yeah, absolutely. So I want to talk about also to, we talk about the platform, right? We talk about the platform. Talk about, I think one of the reasons, I think one of the differences with us is that we don't really have recruiters per se. Talk about, like when we talk about Gondah IO as a platform, both on the candidate and the sales side, can you break down both sides of what our platform is and how you can use our platform? You being the candidate and then you being the client.

Yeah, so, man, I'll start on the clients I just made a pass. So clients can come in, they can, there's multiple different paths, kind of happy paths they can do to activate, that they set up an account, they can kind of line out what they want. They have a decent idea of what they need and shout out to the product engineering team. You'll actually get real time life feedback about what your parameters mean in terms of our candidate pool. It's really cool. It's really cool. And then you can post a job and then you would have a talk with someone on our team who would help modify that job post.

And this is another value add that we bring that I've seen tremendous benefit from but it's sort of unanticipated. You know, my team knows how to sell to our community, right? They need questions to ask the hiring manager or the prospect who's come in the front door that it'll elicit the copy that we need and the information we need to sell to the community. Right. So then once that job is posted, everyone whose top skills line up with that job post gets an email like, hey, you're a good fit for this. Come apply. So I didn't know that. we actually email the people within our platform, the developers in our platform, if we get a job that's a fit for them.

So they don't even technically have to keep checking on our platform. I'm trying to watch it, yeah. Okay, I didn't know that, that's awesome. Yeah, so you get a notification that happens. So, and then on the client side, so they then apply, engineers can apply, DevRel does their magic yet again, kind of pull the list of like four or five best, better fits. Usually that's based around, obviously technology, but it's a lot to do with previous work experience, both in industry and in like product scope and product need. And then my team goes, we present those candidates to our client, the client can then directly book interviews from there, with whoever engineers most suit their fancy.

That's really kind of like the need of it. That's really like the heart of it. So, again, just to reiterate, client comes in, they can kind of plug in some parameters, see how that affects the candidate pool, talk to us. We help kind of sell that job internally. A lot of times we can provide guidance around like, hey, if you thought about maybe not making this full time, making this part time, then you can afford these like really great people, and you can probably get the same we can kind of talk more intelligently about our engineering population. Sure. And then post it, go supply, interviews your books, and then we're off the races.

I love that. And again, I think what's really cool about this and the search feature that we have is pretty tremendous. And again, we have around 3,000 engineers on our quote unquote platform slash community. And so, and they're all technically vetted and for the most part, they're all senior. So, you know, one of the things that I continually, especially my time in the agency recruiting world is we always need good senior engineers. It's hard to find the senior engineers. Well, surprise, we found them. So you can now use them, right? The thing I always go to is, I mean, yes, really good senior engineers to have really good reputations.

But, you know, engineering and software engineering in particular is one of those things where you really don't want to have to sell yourself. You really don't want to have to make yourself available. You really don't want to have to go out and win work. And I'm not saying that that's necessarily good or bad. It's just sort of the nature of the beast. And so I don't a ton of senior engineers who don't have LinkedIn profiles. Yeah. Because why would they? So I think from the client's perspective, if you're kind of always fishing in the same pond everyone else like the Indeed's LinkedIn to the world, the Dices of the world, then like you're putting this thing on a lot of talent, it's really good.

And the talent in our platform has already said, Hey, you are my client acquisition vehicle, Gandhana.io, you are, you are that. So I am more than willing to like be on your platform. So we have a surprisingly high number of people. Yeah, exactly. And then, and then again, on the candidate side, you know, a lot of people or like, hey, I would love to apply because again, so in our public discord, I do post the jobs, so you can see the type of talent and the type of jobs we have coming in. But what Ben just said, like, if you wanna join our platform, go to gun.io and you have to fill out an application.

Now I'll tell you this, because, so we never exchange resumes with the clients, right? So we don't send you, again, coming from the agency world, we would send three to five resumes and we would have write-ups and summaries and all this stuff. And we would do our best to attempt to tech them out, with our testing tools. Now, you don't get resumes. You just get a built profile that you built within our system that's been technically vetted by one of our engineers. So there's a lot less paperwork that we send to you to have a conversation. So let me ask you, just Ben. So obviously, we go through the talent.

We vet them. There's technically three steps to get onto our platform. What's kind of been some of the pushback that we still get from clients and how do we address that? Or how would you address that publicly? Yeah, so a big one we get a lot, we get this a lot more from our outbound activity. So like us cold approaching companies is that, well, we only want full-time people because they're more committed. Which, I mean, I understand that point of view. I can make pros and cons for both. Yeah, I've heard one of you. But like, you know, the average software engineering 10 years 18 months, you like, commitment is sort of up to the organization is my, like, I know organizations where people are tripping over themselves to be there, right?

And it's, you know, not pull time, it's not time, whatever. So that's one that we get, I think, again, and my answer for all of these is like, what is the business problem you're trying to solve? Like if you're looking for someone committed, but this is a short-term project anyway, our people will be committed. Like, and you have a backstop in case they're not, like we will replace them, we'll work with you, whatever. I mean, again, like I said, we're gonna take care of you on both sides. The hiring side and the consultant side. So the risk is the risk is in air. So we get that one.

We're starting to see more kind of like, I would say, like more desire for hybrid. Like onsite? Yeah, like a couple days a week. I have never ever since the world went remote. I understand the energy and it's fun to be in an office, and I get that. I really do. I mean, I'm in our office now. But I just like, if you want the best talent, particularly for something specialized, you got to get remote. I think another one that we see is, I think a lot of people have a hard time trusting someone else's vetting process. 100%. And that one, I really, I really sympathize with.

It's like, you know, I have my little tips and tricks. I'm a unique snowflake. I have like, you know, I'm different from everyone else. I'm different from every other sales leader out there, in terms of what I look for, right? But, sorry, I think that's one way, where we're like, well, hey, you're interviewing, right? Like, you, it's not like you don't get a shot, right? Like, you get a shot to talk to them. So, you can still apply those things, but now you're, we're making sure that you're only talking to, the folks that aren't awake at the time, right? They don't, we've already screened, we've already done the technical vetting, any kind of like cultural tweaks or unique work style things or unique project experience that you're looking for, that's the interview score.

Yeah. And another word on that, and I've seen this in my own hiring, the best, so Cam, who's on my team, sits in all our interviews. He's done, I think, a thousand at this point. It's in a time. And if you ask him the best interviews on both sides, what do they like? He will not hesitate to tell you. It is like watching two peers meet. Yeah. It's a vibe, man. It's a vibe. I talked about that yesterday on my show with Tracy. Yeah, it's a vibe. It's like, hey, I respect what you do. Hopefully you respect what I do. Let's talk through. Let's talk shop.

Let's talk about what you think. And from my perspective, the best interviews I've had with candidates are at ones where I feel like there's a power dynamic. There's ones where I feel like, you know, I'm talking to a PR, I'm trying to learn. But they're offering that, you know? So that's the other kind of piece of it that we see. Like the objection is, well, how are you vetting? It's like, well, we're doing all this work, but you needed to meet them and you can have that conversation. and you can ask them, like, asking these questions. Right. Like, why are you, why is your betting unique?

Okay, it's unique because X, Y, and Z. Ask them X, X, and Y, and X, and Z. Yeah. You know? I love that. All right, rapid fire with you real quick. I have to ever guess this. Three questions. First off, what brings you joy outside of work? Like, what do you, what do you love to do outside of work? If I'm having a bad day, I can always count on my kids to pull me out of it, which I know is cheesy. And they're at the age where they're super fun and into me, so you get this. How old are they? Eight and six. Nice, yeah, yeah.

They think I'm the man. They think I'm the coolest dude ever. I think it's a cool dude ever. Oh, that's funny. My kid swallowed a magnet last night, so that was fun. She swallowed a magnet because, quote unquote, she didn't want to let the dog eat it. I said, well, you're a. A sacrifice. Exactly. second question. What, what are you like reading about like content wise? It can be tech, it can be non tech, anything that you've read or watched recently that you love. So, man, I read a ton. I've, Kate, there's a CSMR team recommended a book called the club, which is about the the maturation of the English Premier League.

Yeah, and it's just a crazy story and it goes kind of club by club and talks about all the things that they did. I didn't realize like how far it had come so fast. So that's that I'm reading that actually good. That's kind of interesting. I would kind of want to. Yeah, it's a good like, it's a good like business story that isn't really a business story. Sure. Sure. I'm at a middle age now, Taylor, so I read historical biographies. Yeah, you can either go smoke in barbecue or World War II. I do both. I'm reading a biography of Putin right now, which is really interesting.

It helps me understand the Russian Ukraine situation a little bit better, I think. And like every guy who's been in tech for 20 years, you know, I am not immune to falling down the AI rabbit hole. Sure. So I've been doing lots of reading there. I've been digging all the courses. I had a, you know, at five, three this morning, I had my tech center to open. So I'm really good at stuff too. I love it. Amen. You gotta know your audience, right? 100%. Last question. I doubt you go. So show is called guidance counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors middle school high school and college but now as adults we don't really have somebody to give like career advice to.

What would be your biggest piece of career advice to a young Ben? I looked out because I lived it but one of my first jobs out of college was as a bus boy at the four seasons. I was a bus boy. I was a bus boy. I know maybe. But one thing that I really, really appreciate about the way the Four Seasons trained us and really everyone there was that they weren't robotic. They allowed you to be you. They allowed you to like, they allowed you to just like, they encouraged you to be thoughtful or they encouraged you to kind of, but they weren't like, they didn't script a lot.

And they encouraged you to like, be natural and like, match. I think that a lot of, I encounter a lot of younger people who kind of tense up and get really formal. And like, you know, I'm missing. I think my conversation you with us was the least informal possible. I do, I do what I can. But yeah, like, like get to the real shit faster. And like, you're not gonna get there. I love that. You're not gonna be there. You're not gonna do that by like being super formal. And look, like sometimes you have to match people and you have to wear them down and I get that and that's fine.

Like don't, you know. Read the room. Read the room. But I think a lot of, and I was this way, and then the most successful coolest people I ever met were like very open people. They wanted to learn, they were curious, and the second you gave them like you opened the door a little bit, they would give you everything you wanted. And I think that that's something that a lot of folks maybe, they think they have to act a certain way and they don't. I want you to be mature. I want you to know your shit, but like we don't need to be super duper formal.

Right. Exactly. I love that. I love that. All right, y'all. Well, hopefully you enjoyed this again. I know it was more informational, not like a ton of like here's how to find a job, but hopefully you learned something. Go connect with Ben. Ben's Ben's again, a great dude, especially for your Nashville connect with him for sure. Um, otherwise, uh, tomorrow morning, David Pine is on the show. David Pine is a full time. His title is on LinkedIn a content developer. So he's at Microsoft. He's a two time Microsoft VP. And so he is coming on the show tomorrow. No idea what we're gonna talk about, but it's gonna be a good one.

So tomorrow morning, that 30 M central David Pine. And then Thursday, unicorn finders. And then Friday, I have Corey Weathers, who is, I believe the VP of developer relations at Octa. I know he's at Octa, all zero. And I know he's very high up. I just don't know know exactly his title. So David Pine tomorrow unicorn finest Thursday, Corey Weathers Friday, y'all have a good one, Ben. Thank you, my friends. Thank you, Taylor. They all real quick. I can say about you. Y'all have a good one. Peace. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode. And I am very grateful. Because you know why?

There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finished an entire episode. So I appreciate you so so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it. Please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me at Tdastin on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.