from sr. ic to sr. leader w/ vp of eng, matt burch

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for the head to the code in like eight months. So I was the same thing, I'm like, oh my God, did I write this? Okay. I know, I know, it's like, all right. I'm trying to write my answer to you, like, let's be honest, like I'm relatively sleepy proud right now. So like everything's telling me. I'm doing a lot better than I thought I was going to. Yeah. But it's still just like, I was cleaning up Baby Throwup at 3 a.m. this morning. So good morning, everybody. Good morning. Good morning. What a little word try to come in on. Happy Monday. It's been it's been five weeks, I believe, since I've been live.

So I took off for those of you who are tuning in on TikTok or work across everything. TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter. If you are tuning in, you're like, why have you taken five weeks off? Not that you care, but if you do care, I basically, My wife had a baby. And what made it a little bit more interesting is that this baby boy decided to come two weeks late, right? So the original due date was July 4th. So I was booking meetings from July 4th to like July, when he came on July 17th, and basically saying, I don't know if I'm gonna be show up tomorrow.

So if I don't show up for a meeting, so I'll show up for two weeks, for two weeks, I was saying, hey, I don't know if I'm gonna show up. So anyways, baby boy came, mom is healthy, Baby's healthy, we're all good. We're just a little sleepy. So I'm drinking some caffeine coffee. This is what I try to stay away from caffeine because my anxiety, but you know what? Anxiety is getting me through the day right now. For those of you tuning, welcome, good morning. Please say, hey, we'd love to hear from you. Again, it has been a minute. I took some time off. I'm very excited to have Matt on the show this morning, the first guest in five weeks.

So please say, hey, let's show Matt some love. Again, the reason I tell people to say, hey, if you haven't tuned in a while, is I want this to be a networking platform, right? And like, yes, I go live with guests. Yes, like, you know, it's, we talk about kind of various topics, but really the core of this, and I don't mean this bad towards Matt or any speaker, the speaker is secondary to this, to this show. The reason why I go live is for people to network it out in the comments, right? Because what I feel like is that when it comes to networking, people just need an excuse to slide into someone's DM, right?

They need an excuse to just say, hey, So I want to be that excuse, right? I want to be that excuse to be like, hey, John, John messages Chris and be like, hey Chris, sorry in the comments guys, Captain Two-Porter just dropped it and saying, hey, right, so. But if you're not commenting and you're lurking in the chat, I was nobody knows and you're being lame. So please comment, say, hey, hey, it's good to see you, Ryan, it's good to see you, Jordan, my guy, it's great to see you, Chris, John, like always, Mark, thank you, my friend, it's great to see you as well.

Noah, what's up, what's up, man? It's good to see you also shout Noah. He does a lot of my video work. So Noah, he's also becoming a developer as well. He's actively in national software schools. Shout out Noah, Gokanep, he's great. What else? Ms. here, Devan, it's great to see you this morning. Wanna give a shout out to, again, I haven't done this for five weeks. So I'm kind of re-learning how to do my morning show. Wanna give a shout out to of course, Glen I.O. If you need hiring help, we'd love to help you guys with that. And yeah, I think that's it. I think that's it.

Chris, it's good to see this. When we got some people tuning in. All right. Enough of me running my mouth. Let's give the people what they want here. Matt, who are you? What do you do at a high level? And then we'll kind of open up with some questions. Absolutely. Hi, Taylor. Hi, LinkedIn and other audiences. I hope you all are having a good morning. I wanted to comment real quick before we got into it about the exhaustion you face. When a little one comes into the world, because even though it's been 26 years, I'll never forget the first nap I got to have in the hospital room.

Yeah. And when my daughter, Kaylee was born and even all these years later, that level of exhaustion, I've never forgotten it. I'm like, that's the best nap I've ever taken. So I took, I'm not a napper to be totally frank with you. And it's been difficult over the last two and a half weeks. I took one nap for 15 minutes and I was like, holy shit. I was like, whoa, that's so much better now. But yeah, I've only, believe it or not, I've only taken one now. So here we go. It's Monté. I love that. I love that. So anyways, yeah. Matt, let's go. So yeah, VP of engineer, voice actor.

Voice. So yeah, that is. I'm with the very, very beginning parts of that journey. you can see I've got some of the gear. I've got great. Oh, thank you. You sound fantastic. Thank you so much. You know, we're going to see where it goes. I'm trying to get started on the right foot. You can see I've put my little phone things on the wall. I've got my soundproofing curtain behind me. So I've hired a coach. She's really awesome. And so we're going to see where it goes. I'm really excited about it. We can definitely talk more about that if you want. But to get to your early question, hi, folks, my name is Matt.

I love to build things. If I could say that's the number one thing that has described my career so far over about 18 years, it's just a love of building and learning and helping others to grow and build and learn as well, wherever I can. So that's what really blows my hair back. I love that. I wish you have great hair, by the way. Also, I realized between my white shirt, my white hair, the white background, and me just being generally white, I am very pasty today. So I need, I need to go get a tan or something. It's just a pair of glasses kind of sporting.

It's literally just a pair of floaty. I just realized that I look, I look like I'm just a pair of. You look great. That's great. You're the Cheshire cat of Alice in Wonderland where he just is kind of like calling. It's just teeth. That's the one. Ben, our guy Ben, it's good to see you this morning, buddy. What's up, Ben? I'm all right, lots of cover today. So a topic from senior ICD senior leader. Well, before we dive in, for everybody who's tuning in right now, I don't have set questions. And I always ask guests what's on their mind. So Matt, send me a bunch of stuff.

So Matt, before we dive in, I do want to talk about your side project you're working on right now. So if you want to go and intro that, and maybe tease that out so people can follow you, and maybe keep up with you with the release. Yeah, sure, Taylor, thanks. So I think as many of us do, we have these passion projects that are kind of under the radar where we're figuring out like, is this a good idea? Do people really need this? I've been working on a project since last fall called Delete D-E-L-E-E-T. And it kind of came to pass after a particular interview where I realized like these people just don't know how to interview for a front end position, for react positions.

And of course, you know, you're a subject matter expert this field, if you go on LinkedIn, you see all the time about how people are frustrated with DSA slash kind of lead things. And it's not so much about lead, it's about they're not contextually relevant to the role that they're interviewing for. I think that's really what it's all about. And when you're interviewing people about a front-end role or a full-stack role, I feel like you want to see what they can build. What can this person build? they convert requirements into value at a high quality, right? Because that's what they're going to be doing throughout their day.

So when I started to delete last September, it was still kind of the dawn of what AI was doing. And the basic idea is, it is a tool that allows hiring managers to see the full spectrum of what a candidate can do. And so if you would imagine a hiring manager, let's say they work for Netflix and the assignment is, okay, build a React app that is a table of simulated Netflix users and it needs to have sort filter function, all these things. What Delete will do is it'll take those requirements and it'll generate end-to-end tests, Cypress end-to-end test requirements and it generates the data.

So it basically creates the whole environment. And the candidate actually clones a repository to their machine. They build the best thing they can do within the time period. And as they're making commits and pushing it and creating pull requests, delete is tracking all this activity in the background. And once the candidate submits a PR, it's got pass. So the candidate's test will run and then it'll run deletes automated end-to-end tests that will confirm those requirements were met. It gets deployed to a production environment where the candidate can evaluate it and then delete will deliver like a scorecard to the hiring manager going. Here's how many commits, you know, how frequently did they commit and just evaluate everything that I think we normally care about when we are considering candidates to hire.

So that's kind of getting rejuvenated, but that's kind of the basic idea. That's awesome. That's really, really cool. Yeah. Definitely would love to keep following along on your journey. For those of you who heard that, please go connect with Matt. Just you can follow us. That sounds cool. And then also to PNA help. Let me know. Like if you need anything, let me know. Let me talk. So let's dive in. Let's dive in. again, lots of coverage today. You know, for folks, again, I want this casual, but Matt, I can tell Matt is a great engineering leader with how thoughtful he was. Matt was blowing me up yesterday in the DMs and I loved it.

And I tell Matt, I said, Matt, I said, you're one of the few dudes that like comes this prepared. I want to pick on Ben. Ben's like, man, I'll just show up. I'll just talk about it. So, Matt, thank you again for being just so detailed. So let me ask you this, from a senior I see to senior leader, I think this, I think this will apply to a lot of people, right? even if it's like from junior to mid, right? I'm sure there are probably some similarities that people can pull from this. What made you kind of come up with this topic for this show?

Great question. Well, and I would like to kind of hear your input on this too, because my take with what's going on in the market right now is I feel like we're gonna see a lot more startups, even more than we do now. And I think it's because people are really getting disillusioned with this idea that, oh, if I go work for a big established company and I do great work and people love working with me, then that's, you know, I have a ticket for as long as I want with that company. And up up until a few years ago, I think we all kind of thought that.

But what we've been seeing with this, just the layoff bloodbath that's been going on for a couple of years, it's like, well, there are no safe spaces like that anymore. And so I feel like you're a lot of the engineering mindset is you're going to bet on yourself. And so you, I think we're going to see a lot more people strike out on their own. And so therefore there's going to be a lot more opportunities for either young leaders or new leaders to get these stretch or these leap opportunities to take it to the next level with the financial realities of an early stage startup.

That's going to impact who's able to come and kind of do these things. So I felt Like the things that I've picked up on my journey over the last year could be helpful because I think we're gonna see a lot more of this Yeah, I agree. I think I think the notion of I've talked to a lot of people about this I think the notion of safe Full I mean I've been recruiting since 2011. I Tailed nerds like yourself. I've been recruiting with dot net web forms was hot. I feel you. Yeah, right But I've been through the journey with y'all right. Oh, yeah, I mean literally I was like, you have gotten that MVC, that's hot, right?

So again, and so I've seen this kind of journey from a tech stack perspective. It's been interesting to kind of see some of the Twitter sphere jargon around is what's happened to the state of JavaScript, right? I mean, it's seen people seem to just kind of fling down a little bit. So there's just been a lot happening. I think what's happening right now is that the idea of full-time salary jobs that are safe and that have longevity are gone. Right. That was recruiting back in .NET web form days. And I was like, I don't want to do contract because it's not safe. Now everyone's like, I mean, I don't even know if I'm going to be here tomorrow for a full time job, right?

So I think a lot of this fractional work is starting to become really, really hot. I mean, I think platforms like GONAIO are going to grow over the next years because I think, you know, engineering, like yourself may not want to go out and hire a 180K staff engineer maybe project we can throw three you know senior folks part time at something and solve it and it'll be cheaper faster right I don't know so all that being said I do agree with you I think it's gonna be a huge boom with startups I think I think a lot of people just like you know what I don't need salary anymore I'm just gonna do my own thing so that being said Matt you how many points do you have again you said you had five right yeah generally but All right, so let's start real quick.

What are the five bullet points at a high level? Just run through real quick. Absolutely. First and foremost, be proactive with your mentors. Oh my gosh, that's a big one to talk about. Yup. Your communication game has got to be a 10 out of 10. 11 out of 10, Matt. 11 out of 10. 11 out of 10. You should obsess about being brief and obsessed with being good at feedback, right? So that's the second one. The third one is you've really got to make sure you're not spending too much time on IC stuff because leadership is hard and it takes time. So when you're, you know, when you're, you have to really be as firm as you can with that to make sure that you're saving that time to be the leader you're hard to be.

Number four, don't assume anything. You're coming into brand new relationships with your boss, brand new relationships with everyone else. So don't bring all those assumptions from your IC life and just be, be with a curious mindset. that's number four and number five be the owl and the owl is going to be a great way that I think to think about how you are on that team and just generally what you're like so we can talk more about that. I love that. Turn up to 1100 cents. Sam, I love the color scheme. I don't know Sam if you're making fun of my all whiteness but all right so let's so man so again I think all of these topics.

I really think so. If you're a junior developer tuning in, I think these topics are very applicable to you as well. So Matt, let's talk about the first thing. And again, I'm so excited to hang out with you, man. I'm excited to hang out with you. This is so much time to hang out with the crew. I've missed going live. It was good for me to take a break. But man, I've missed this. I've missed this so much. All right. So let's talk about the first thing, mentorship. Man, I could not be where I'm at my career today without a mentor. to talk, talk to me about that.

Yeah, so I think the most important word in the first one is the proactivity instead of reactivity. Because especially when you're making that transition into a startup, into a leadership position, you're probably not going to know the places you needed help with until it's almost too late. So you've gotten through that situation, you're like, oh, Oh, that was harder than I thought or I didn't, you know, there was stuff in there I didn't realize. So, you know, hopefully you either have a mentor or you're figuring out who this person is gonna be in your life that there's a neutral third party, senior person that can really just give you unfiltered advice.

And if you can meet with them, you know, ideally once a week for like the first couple months of your journey with this, with the startup or with any gig where you're just gonna be like, there could be a lot of new stuff here. That's ideal. And when you meet with them, go, here are the things that I know are coming up. And here are the ways I plan on reacting, or here's my plan on how I'm gonna deal with that. Your mentor's gonna hear that, and they're gonna be able to see better than you, you need to look out for this, or here's how I would consider doing this.

They'll give you the ability to go into a situation warm instead of going into a situation, And then after the fact, oh man, I should have reached out to, you know, so and so before this. So just as proactive as you can be. And even if you, you know, if you don't have someone that has that in your life, higher a coach, you've someone that you can go to because you're odds of success when you're leaping a few levels like this are greatly increased if you can have someone to talk to beforehand that can give it to you, you know, straight. So no, what comes in here is a junior dev.

How do I go about finding a mentor? Is that a one-on-one connection I look for, someone just to follow, or someone to just follow? Yeah, so I think a lot of people think of, their first reaction is to think of their immediate manager as kind of their mentor, especially if it's someone that they really look forward to, but it's gotta be someone outside of your job. It's gotta be someone that is disconnected from whatever the situation is going on, that they don't have any real interest in it. So Noah, I would say, of course, LinkedIn is a great place to start, senior people love to help see folks that are just starting out succeed, right?

Because we know how it felt to go through these things. And so like we more than anything wanna see folks succeed in this journey, because it's really hard. So I think reaching out to people and going, Hey, look, would you mind if I DM'd you, you know, just starting that relationship is the best way that I would think to at least get started for that. Taylor, I don't know if you have anything else to add to that. Yeah, Noah also, just ask me, Noah and I talk all the time, he does my video work. So Noah just asked me, you connected, right? Yeah. Go through my entire catalog of leaders I've had on my show and just let me know.

But if you, but I know what Noah's trying to get at. If you don't know me that well, So my dear friend, Alicia Novin, I think it was, so I'm on what podcast episode, I'm on like 300, something podcast episodes now. I think like back in the 200s or the late 100s, me and my guy, Alicia Novin, who's a senior program major at Microsoft, former director of engineering, we actually have an entire episode of this based on how to find mentor and mentee. But the big thing is, it's like, be intentional, you have to drive it. The mentor-mentee relationship is very nuanced, but the big thing is like Matt said, you have to drive it and you have to be intentional, right?

So, you know, Noah, let's say you like something that Matt said, you message Matt, like Matt, I like what you said about this topic, I would like for you to mentor me in this topic, my expectation is 15 minutes, once a month, let me know if you're open, right? It's you have to be so direct and you have to chase after that person, because Matt got time. If you want it, you got to chase after it, right? Exactly, Matt's a busy blow dryer on his hair. No, I'm just kidding. Ben, yes, you need someone to hold up the mirror to you. Absolutely. This year I was really against the work remote.

Oh, this is, oh, this is going back to the whole like nothing safe. Also, Sam, no, I'm out for the live room. Okay, cool. Yeah. I just, again, I'm just, you tuned in late. I was making fun of myself earlier. Online communities are a good place to start with the active practice and reaching out and talking to people. Yeah, or this show, right? Literally, I do this show. Like, like there are some amazing people on the show. Ben Pyle is a former CTO. He's amazing. Nathan's helped me with some side project stuff. He's an amazing developer. I mean, everybody Brett, Brett helps lead a National JavaScript user group that I'm on the panel, or like kind of bored with him to help organize stuff.

You know, Noah does my videos. John is a great senior engineer. You know, Jordan landed the job by helping me on a side project from a junior developer to his first developer job. Like, there are some amazing people on this show right now right now they're tuned in message every single person trying to pick the brains. I mean, Ben is one of my dearest. I would let him know what I would do. Right. Ben and I have been around, Ben was at the first startup I worked at in 2006. Oh, really? Yes, at the time, I think he was just thought that Ben, I believe.

Yeah. So I've been very fortunate to have been along the journey with me, also, for sure. awesome. Wendy's good to see you and Vlad is good to see you as well. All right. Second thing that you talked about that I got chills about. So I get chills a lot when you hit good topics and all five gave me chills, but something like this one. Communicate to 11 out of 10. Yeah. Talk about that right now, man. This is something I feel like nobody talks about. I may do a few series, a few shows on this just because it's so important. Talk, especially as a leader of VP of engineering like yourself.

Why is it so important, especially right now in this market? Especially right now in this market. Well, and it's the biggest thing, especially as it pertains to startups with your communication style is keep it brief. You know, learn to master saying a lot with just a few words. And the reason is everyone you're gonna be working with, especially in those first days, you know, the first couple of months are gonna be all over the place. And so you're founder of the CEO that you're reporting to. They're gonna be doing one of two things, are there selling or raising? And so you've got to master the ability to go in, keep them updated, get what you need to do your role, but do it in a way where you're not forcing them to read through, read into text.

I'm a notorious wall of texture. I am aware of it. When I go into a situation, I just buy and I have to edit it. So really practice being concise when you're communicating. And the second one, of course, we've talked so much about feedback and how important it is. There's whole courses around giving and receiving feedback. And when you're in a startup, it's tempting, especially as a leader, to go, well, everyone's pushing hard to get to this milestone, or everyone's pushing hard to get this built. And you just kind of write stuff down. You're like, I'll come back to this. And you're tempted to not do something you feel like may rock the boat or, well, I don't want to mess with morale.

But that's the skill. The skill is the ability to talk with anyone, whether you're managing down or managing up, and talk about anything, and no matter what the topic is, everyone leaves that conversation feeling better than when they started. Maybe it's stuff that they didn't wanna hear, or maybe it is, but you're able to do that without feeling like, uh-oh, like what sort of impact is this gonna have? Is this gonna cause a sort of a problem? And it's scary, and it's hard. And again, this is where a mentor is gonna really be able to help you with this. But early and often feedback, especially in a startup is good.

and try not to get caught up in what are the deliverables and I just need to keep everyone happy for right now. I think that's our natural place to go. It's like I just wanna have everyone be happy and all of us working hard. So those are the, from a communication standpoint, those are I think the two biggest pain points that you might come across in this thing. Yeah, and again, I mean, I would say right now, communication may save you your job. Yep. that listen I have and Matt you can attest to this we you and I've been in rooms we've had the late people off and we've been laid off yep and and and the conversation here here's how the conversation that goes down in the leadership group ready yep what has so-and-so done?

why should we keep so-and-so? and as a leader I have had to make sure I tell my I have saved and I'm not saying this to brag, this is nature of it is I have saved handfuls of people over the years on my teams. Because I have made sure I know exactly what they do because I have got it out of them and wanted them to upward communique. And I'm sure the same with you. Yep. I mean, I I delayed one guy getting fired at my last company for a year. Because I was saying, I was saying, this is what he's done. This is what he's done.

Yeah, but he's not. I understand, this is what he's done. This is what he's done. Right? And so again, right now, you have to upward communicate more than you ever have because right now, a lot of leadership is getting cut. Right? We're not in the zerp zero interest rate period anymore. I don't know the, that's a fancy word. I say I don't know half of it. But basically at the end of the day, I read one article about it from the pragmatic engineer. Yeah, basically it's like, it doesn't allow a lot of engineering leadership, that, because people just want to drive revenue and get closer to the code right now.

So there's not a lot of follow-up and engineering leaders have bigger teams that can't keep up with people. So you have to upper communicate. Any more thoughts on that? I've just ranted a ton on that. I think the caffeine is kicking them. No, I love it. It's true. And I just keep coming back to often, early and often, the more that you can help build a culture of emotional and mental safety to where people look forward to opening up and look forward to being transparent, not just with your team, but the folks that you work with, the better. And in a startup where everyone's remote too, you don't see these people in person a whole lot.

So yeah, it's a really important skill. Let's see here, got some few comments coming here. Jordan comes in here, verbal communications skills will help so much once you have the job too, still a junior. And I just had to give a sweet and a sweet and sweet and Thai, sweet and Thai presentation last week. I love it. I love it. Yeah. Let's see here. If you can explain technical topics and content with people that your eyes glaze over. Yeah, that's huge as well. I think another thing too, I can always tell a really good engineer by the way, they write their resume. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Right.

If your resume is concise, I can tell exactly what you do. There are facts. There it is just bang, bang, bang, bang. I was like, ah, like even Matt communicating with you through DMs. Like this is the first time I mean, I've now known you for like 40 minutes, right? But like yesterday you were sending me these DMs. I was like, I can tell those dudes got it. Right? And so it's stuff like that. It's a huge thing. All right, let's continue to move on. Yep. Third thing, what was third thing again? So the third thing was about the percentage of time you're spending doing the IC stuff versus the percentage of time.

Let's talk about that. Yeah, so. You're trying not to be applicable to obviously like the junior crowd, but. Yeah, well, right. I think, and I pulled 50%, the number like 50% in terms of like, try not to spend more than 50% of your time doing IC stuff. And this is a thing, every startup, every single one that is going to struggle with. If you hire someone who's used to building things, but you've hired this person to be in a leadership position, you're going to have that person building. That person's going to be building. a lot of things and it's really tricky to manage how much of that time is spent with the team in the day to day putting those features together and how much time you're allowing to do the leadership, you know, kind of the core part of the reason that you're there.

And it takes a lot of open communication with your boss in terms of setting expectations and really doing your homework to go. If I put in this percentage of my time, this is where we're probably gonna end up from a timeline perspective. The biggest thing you have to fight is the desire within yourself to just jump in there and go, I'm just gonna build, just build, build, build, because especially in a place where there's a lot of new things, I think you're tempted to lean back on the things you know for sure that you can do really well. And you have to fight that a little bit.

Yes, you can build awesome things, but that's not why you're there. You're there, the metric of your job success is your team's ability to build a product with excellence. And your job is to empower those individuals to do that. That's your core focus. So don't let yourself get caught up in this thing of, I'm gonna save the day by going in here and just being in IC. And I'll devote enough time for stand-ups and sprint planings and one-on-ones and the rituals, as long as we get the rituals in place, that's okay. It's more than that. It requires more of your time than that. And so if you find yourself at a place where things are just kind of humming along and everything is good, yeah, go ahead and grab some stuff, but my recommendation is giving those estimates in terms of when things are gonna be ready.

I love that. All right, what's the fourth one? The fourth one is don't assume anything. And real quickly, this is really about exploring the new style of relationship that you're gonna have with whoever you're reporting to, whether it's a CEO or a founder. I think as ICs we come into these situations and because we've been used to being managed by other technical people or whatever, there's a lot of expectations around one-on-one intervals frequency with that, but it's really important to understand that the things your new boss are going to need will be very different than the things your past bosses or managers have needed from you.

And so you want to explore what that is. As I mentioned, this person is going to be raising and selling all the time. So what can you do to make their life easier? What can you do to bring their stress level down? As no matter how stressed you feel, I guarantee your founding team and your C-suite is going to be five times that much. So as I mentioned, you want to be really strategic in how can I get the information and guidance to do the role that I've been hired to do, but do it in a way that is as least disruptive as possible to those around you.

So you also be sure that when it comes to things like hiring, how will hiring work, discuss all of that in as much detail as possible. That gets back to the title of this, which is don't assume anything. I think it's easy to assume that the other people like, oh, they're probably going to handle it this way or this is probably how they're going to do it. But you've really got to get it out there. It's a lot easier to figure those things out on the outset than it is when you're in the think of it. And then you realize, oh, there's there's a misalignment on this on the way on the way this works or, you know, this decision, we've got to take some time and get into this.

So again, proactivity versus reactivity, get those topics on the table, talk about those and go into the relationship with curiosity and do more listening rather than talking. You know, we get into this and we go, I've got to prove myself, I've got to prove my value, I've got a show that I know it was a good idea to bring me on. And yes, that's all true, but that should be way turned down. And at the beginning, it's about listening and curiosity and going, okay, what is this relationship really need to be for this to work? Yeah, and listen, I mean, I mean, I mean, Craig, if I'm wrong here, I feel like there, yes, you want to prove yourself, but I feel like there's an expectation among senior leaders that if we hired you, like there's going to some, there's some grace period, like it's okay.

Like, yes, it's always great to deploy code day one or whatever. But like the end of the day, I've talked so many years ago, and they're like, we don't expect like people would be up and running six to 12 months depending on how complicated the code base is. And so it's like, you know, but, but I think what really stands out is coming in and like in asking questions, being curious, right? I think, I think that's helped me a lot in my career, right? Like, you know, when I came in at gun IO, right? I didn't know anything about what a talent marketplace was. I was like, well, what does this do?

What does this do? I was hopping on a call with the product team and trying to go through our product to try to figure it out, right? Like ask good questions, be curious. I think it's a great just life skill in general too. Especially with dating and marriage. Yes, Eric comes in here asking questions and listening is key. All right, last bullet point is we start to wrap up here. Are you asking us something else? No, I was gonna say last bullet point and my personal favorite, be the owl. And what I mean by that, so if you're gonna imagine your role as an animal, I think a good one is the owl because you kind of, you fly silently with a deadly precision, but otherwise you're a calming presence.

So, in real life when we're out and we're hiking, we see an owl in a tree, we're like, oh, it's an owl, he's so cute. He's so fluffy, look at his head spin. And you want him to stay there. And but at night, right? Like he's a deadly assassin. And so when you imagine your interactions and your, so every interaction, every meeting, every bug, you just keep thinking to yourself, I must be the owl. And let that drive your habits because then you're a calming presence on calls and you bring levity to situations. but when it comes down to it, when there's a production bug, or when there is a problem with the platform, you are the rock and you are there to, people feel better when you're around.

And so as much I think as we can have a dual way of thinking in terms of like, when something has to get done, I can do it with laser precision and fly under the radar. But when I'm needed in a caller, I'm needed to solve a problem. People look forward to that. They look forward to this calming presence. You know, it's especially in a startup. The numbers are the only things that matter. It's not your LinkedIn brand. It's not your personality. It's your ability to build a successful team and build a successful product. And so, you know, just try to focus on that as much as you can.

I love that. That's awesome. Matt, we did it. It's 10 o'clock. Time for some help. God, it got it all in. You did it. Anyway, any more questions from the audience as we start to wrap up here, throw them in the comments, I will get to them. Sally, I see your comment about how long is your perfect resume. Listen, I've done a ton of shows about resumes. I'm not going to get into that right now. That is that is a whole episode and a half with that. So go check out my YouTube channel. I like this at startup week and I learned the team is the product.

I like that. I like that for sure. Matt, any other kind of thoughts that maybe you've had while we've been talking that you want to share before I kind of ask you some random rapid-power questions? No, I'm happy that we actually had a chance to not only get through this talk a little bit about deletes and no, I really appreciate the time of the day, Taylor. It's been amazing. Absolutely. All right. So as we wrap up here again, if you have questions, throw them up there. I know there's a little delay on StreamYard, so throw them up. I'm going to wrap up with Matt with kind of some random questions.

Matt, I kind of do a rapid fire, fun little last five questions here. So first thing, what do you like to do outside of work for fun? Hiking and walking. That sounds terrible. I'm always outside. I have an Australian Shepherd both. Oh, well, yeah, you automatically have to then. I gotta do it. Yeah, we do Frisbee in the backyard at least three or four times a day. So I love that and love getting deep into the guts of stable diffusion. And so like training models, I've trained models on family, I've trained them on my dog. And I just love doing anything creative like that. Yeah.

I love that. I love that. If I were to tell you tomorrow that you can't do anything in tech anymore, but I'll give you your exact salary or more, what would you do? Audio engineer. Audio engineer. Do you have any background with audio engineering? I don't, I've been kind of an amateur musician type. My whole, the creative streak is kind of what's led me to into this voice thing that I'm trying to do. So yeah, audio engineering or music production would be. Why voice? Talk about this voice acting real quick. Why voice acting? Well, so a lot of it is more about the acting than the voice.

I've always done, like I did local theater a couple of years ago, and I've just always acted. I narrated some Hack Week stuff at Nextroll when I was there. And enough times, there were enough comments going, you know, you should look into voiceover stuff. I thought, well, you know, now's that time. Let's see if it actually is something possible. So who knows what's gonna happen. I love it. So we're gonna see one of my dear friends is trying to do that as well. So I just thought that was interesting. like you don't really hear it that much. It's so competitive. It is. That's all crazy.

That's all crazy. That's all crazy. Yeah. It's insane. And so we'll see if there's a market for whatever I can do. And if nothing else, I have this cool gear. And I know a little bit more about something else. That's what you say. It's so great. You say so. Appreciate it. At least you got that going for you. New mic. All right. What's the third question? Again, I'm a little rusty. I'm going to be honest with you. If I'm going to do a self-rellection of this live, little rusty. Third question, any tools frameworks, kind of your little nerd out question here, tech tools, frameworks, languages you're experimenting with, messing with that you really like right now so you want to share with the other nerds on the show?

Yeah, let's see, what have I been experimenting with lately? I got a lot of time in electron. So yeah, I don't hear electron that much, okay? It's still going strong. And I think as a matter of fact, I think Slack is made with Electron. There's a lot of things that are made with Electron that you don't realize. And I used Electron on another passion project called Shot Rescue. This was like meant to be the center of your gaming screenshot universe. We could have a whole 30 minute talk about that if you wanted to. I don't know. I'm about. But Electron is a lot of fun and it's still really active.

So if you want to do like desktop type work with, you know, TypeScript, JavaScript, that's, that's really cool too. I feel like there's so many other things, but right off the top of my head, that's kind of the main, the main cool thing I've been doing. So awesome. Awesome. Um, let's see here. Anything else? Last question. Uh, so we had guidance counselors, the show's called guidance counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school and college, but now as adults, you don't really have a guidance counselor returned to an ask for just general career advice. What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Matt?

To young that Focus on growth every day and I know that sounds super a little bit a little bit but not just a generic idea of growth set Set some sort of a milestone for yourself that you can hit either mastery of a platform or a language And I think in this market, most importantly, you're going to have to stand out amongst hundreds or even thousands of other applicants right now. So it's not enough to have just gone through the boot camp or the training or get the certificate or even get the degree. Like a CS degree doesn't carry the way that it used to do.

It's going to take something, I think, to show people that you have the passion that you you can't buy and you can't really train. That's so do everything possible to bring out the parts of you that can't be bought or trained. The unique thing that you bring to that you would bring to your team, work on projects, work on things that really demonstrate those, I think would be the best advice I could give. I love that, that's awesome. Well y'all, thank you again for hanging out with us today. We appreciate that. Thank you my friends, say on, sorry to say about your next age. But again, you'll go connect with Matt, obviously a gem of a human being.

And if you have any more questions, please follow up with him. 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 finish 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 Tdaston on all social media handles and I hope you have a fantastic day.