how to build healthy developer culture w/ matt stauffer, ceo of tighten

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auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

All right. Good morning, everybody. I say everybody, I mean, nobody. Let's see here. You know, Matt, I always ask folks, I usually say this question at the end, but I got asked now, are you, do we do coffee? Are you a coffee guy? My coffee, unfortunately, is empty. I'm a coffee nerd. I have ADHD, and I was informed by my – I was diagnosed as an adult, and I was informed that I had been using coffee to self-medicate prior to getting stimulants. But in order to be able to take ADHD meds, I had to switch to decaf because otherwise it was too much. Okay, so you're all decaf.

i've mastered the art of an actual tasty decaf that doesn't it's not bad it's really it's so i went through you know a few few like i i've dealt with a lot of anxiety and i mean we're just jumping right into it this morning um yeah let's go i mean i've i i've dealt with a lot of anxiety and stuff so i did a i did a higher nutritionist like a few years back and were kind of like you know we're almost basically doing elimination diet where she was like let's get rid of caffeine let's get rid of gluten and so i was on the

decaf cake for a very long time um yeah and i found some great beans um shout out methodical coffee in greenville okay yeah methodical coffee in greenville has great decaf beans great beans in general but great decaf beans and also crema up here in nashville has fantastic fantastic decaf beans my wife can't do my wife got off of caffeine she can do matcha but she can't really do like caffeine she has like a sip of my so i'm back on caffeine though now so what we realized what we narrowed it down to is we narrowed it down to it's gluten so gluten for me like

if i if i have gluten consistently over time um uh i get really angry like it's it's the weirdest thing like i get super anxious i'm really short-tempered um and so uh so yeah it's an irritant right you're just like i'm irritated all the time yeah it's crazy and then my wife being pregnant you know she's cheated a little bit on gluten it gets her like massive migraines isn't it crazy so uh but yeah decaf is not bad do you so i just make iced coffee like i brew coffee at night and put in the refrigerator are you like do you do espresso like what's

kind of i'm doing my main one is a v-sixty pour over so if for anyone who's not familiar it's the simplest possible thing you've got a little cone you know a little cone on top of here a little filter and then you just drizzle hot water over it yeah and i've tried everything i've got aeropress i've got an espresso machine i've got american press all these things that nobody ever tried i was all into it and i've landed on a v-sixty is still my favorite coffee if i go to a coffee shop i'm usually going to get like hey do you have a v-sixty pour

over and i'm like yeah that guy it's great yeah yeah one of the best coffee experiences super blessed to speak at spring io last year or this year in barcelona and barcelona has a um uh they have like the mecca of coffee i paid twenty three dollars or a cup of coffee it wasn't worth it it was unbelievable it was like they they like the it's a certain type of glass it's frosted like they take the ice cubes are perfect they pour something i mean it's just it's just an experience and there's actually a place in nashville if you ever come to nashville let me

know i'll have to take you it's called um it's called um Oh, what's it, Nate?

I just went with a developer and I'm blanking on it. But basically, it's not no free coffee. That was a spot that closed up. That was my favorite. But it's a really elevated coffee. So you can get it like many different ways and drip and blah, blah, blah. It's fantastic. So anyways, I want to share it with everybody. great coffee but first good morning everybody naz did you just say pilk like because i googled pilk after that pepsi and milk please yeah it's kind of like an inside joke within the talk okay um great that's fine that's fine yeah i'm i'm not even uh i'm not even a part of that joke but yeah it's it's definitely a thing within the talk that makes me that's a little gross like it would curdle Yeah, yeah, it does not.

It does not sound good. But good morning, everybody. Welcome to Guidance Counselor two point. Oh, I'm excited to have Matt on the show this morning. I was unfortunately not able to come to the laid off lounge that Matt did within the tort community. But I saw all the messages. And so like it seemed like it went great. So I was like, yeah, I'm super pumped. to hang out with Matt today and obviously get some gems out of him. Um, but, but for those of you tuning in, please say, Hey, we'd love to hear from you. You know, it's like I was telling Matt backstage, I've been doing this for five years now.

And so, you know, what, what I tell people is this is, you know, it's really kind of molded into, in my perspective, like a kind of a mini conference, right? We, we are many meetup rather conference, a little extreme, like a mini meetup because we go an hour, uh, all the people in the comments, you, you, And again, you have access to industry leaders, right? Like the whole kind of vision with torque and what me and Jason and Brianna, the team are trying to do is like, we're just trying to give you access to our people. Right. And I tell folks, if you message every speaker that I've had, every speaker that Jason has keep in touch with them, tell them, Hey, and you've been doing that for five years.

I mean, your network would be expansive. And so that's kind of our vision with Tech Commute and Guidance Counselor two point oh, is just to kind of share our network with you all. So if you have questions, please ask them. But again, please say, hey, tell us where you tune in from. I would love to hear you and connect with other people in the chat. Right. I mean, this is the whole thing. Like, you know, people, you know, you know, Matt and I were talking about kind of conferences and my travel schedule lately, which has been aggressive. And and and i and i tell people i'm like listen like you people struggle for com we're coming up to people at conferences it's really hard to do it's really really hard to do you can do it from the comfort of your own home and just message people be like hey ricardo saw you on guidance counselor or hey jeff sorry so again that that's the whole thesis of this thing um but i want to get to kind of a few shout out a few kind of housekeeping things first off app right I'm a part of their heroes program.

I always joke. I'm probably the only non-technical guy that's never used a product. That's a part of the heroes program. Um, so, uh, I, I like the different team map, right? Uh, I think their product's cool based off what everybody's telling me. It's cool. You should go try it out. That's my pitch. Uh, Um, uh, we also, for the torque doc community team, uh, we, we did a, a website refresh. Um, so if you go check it out, we have open ambassador signups. Um, so our ambassador program has been the single most impactful thing. I would say that we rolled out this year. Um, uh, we were actually at Laracon in Denver.

Um, we had a few people come up to us and be like, Hey, you and Jason can only cover so much. I see everybody else posting. So, um, if you want to be an ambassador, if you like what we're doing, please go sign up on the torque doc community page. If If you were an ambassador this year, you still need to sign up. We're going to dwindle the list. We're going to really make it impactful and really make it kind of one of our cornerstones for twenty twenty six. And then also we've opened our mentor program. Right. So for signups, again, to be honest with you.

you know we could uh we we uh we did good we had ten ten cohorts um for for our first uh stab at it but we've learned a lot and we're gonna make it better so we're gonna have two tracks we're gonna have a technical track we're gonna have like a career job search track um i met a ceo uh in raleigh uh in the ai space he's like i love what you again i don't know this guy right this is the power of what we're doing he emailed me he goes i want to be a part how can i be a part i was like We'd love to have you as a mentor.

Love to have you give a session in our Discord. So Jason's working on him to give an AI session in our Discord, and he's going to be a mentor. So again, we're going to have some pretty high caliber people. And again, if you are a mentor, all we ask, it's really just two, thirty minute sessions a month. That's it. Nothing super intense. And we give you the resources. We just want a way to give back to people as much as we feasibly can. Also, if you want to know when I go live, text me. This is my number. It's actually me. I'm actually using the text messaging a lot more.

I get a lot of people like, Taylor, you were in my city and I didn't know. And I'm like, listen, I live on the internet. If you did not know, that is your fault. So I'm trying to get better, trying to get people not excused. Join my text message community. I send out a text for tickets. I send out a text whenever we're in your town to do a meetup. I send updates whenever I go live. So if you want to know everything that we're going on at Torque, please text me, six, one, five, two, three, five, five, six, five, zero. All right. Enough of me running my mouth.

Matt, let's give the people what they want, man. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. got it my name is matt stauffer i am the ceo at titan which is a consultancy working primarily in a back-end framework called laravel which is sort of like rails for php we do all sorts of fun javascript in the front end we help people build custom web applications primarily when they have some reason for it to either be in php so they're like hey we need modern php well laravel's the answer or if they need something to be uh I don't know the right word for it.

They need it to be minimum MVP, maximum scalability, right? Like if people are like, we are bootstrapped and we've got, you know, just a small amount of money. We got to get something that actually functions and can scale. That's kind of the sweet spot for the type of work that we're doing. So we work with nonprofits and small to medium businesses and giant enterprises, all who have some various needs to do that. I personally am a CEO. I started the company as a CTO with a co-founder, and then he's on his way out of the company now, so I'm now CEO. So I historically have been a technologist and an educator.

I run podcasts like the Laravel Podcast, Business of Laravel Podcast. I wrote the O'Reilly book about Laravel. I love teaching. I love helping people. In a previous life, I did nonprofit work, and I'm kind of just trying to do the same thing here in the world of capitalism that I did when I was working for nonprofits, just kind of taking care of people and trying to make great communities. So that's why when I heard about Torque, I was like, yeah, let's get to know each other. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And again, thank you so much for obviously everything you've done already for us. It means so much.

I did see a text Lucas. I send a, I use a tool called community. It's actually a tool called community. It's a text. It's, it's like if text messages meets email. Um, so I can like segment people and I can like zoom in on regions and stuff like that. So yeah, so it's, it's, it's called community. All right. So, um, So lots to talk about today. Again, I don't have set questions. I always get people to kind of fill out kind of just an idea. And so this is what Matt filled out. So you guys can hold me to it. So he talked about... want we're talking about helping our clients hire and teach them about how to build a healthy dev culture that thinks it's incredibly important and also have a lot of strong opinions about how hiring uh and it can do better um especially helping uh non-white dudes which uh i'm a big fan of as well right more diversity in tech is is definitely a passion of mine and kind of what we're doing at torque so lots unpacked today so i think the first thing i want to talk about matt is i mean how do you build healthy dev culture like what does that look like yeah A lot of it is the golden rule.

My business partner and I had both worked at agencies before. If anyone's seen Office Space before, it was like that, I'm going to need you to come in the weekend and work on your TPS reports. It's salespeople who are making calls about what's going to be maximal profitability without considering the actual lived experience of the programmers. It's it's uh you know setting people against each other so that they are trying to prove who's the smartest because they know there's cuts coming it's always like we've all experienced these things there's all these different toxic things depending on the environment that you're in there's non-profit toxic there's fast-paced startup toxic there's big enterprise toxic we've experienced them all and so we were like well what if we just tried to make a company where uh it it works for the people who work for us the way we would have wanted to be treated in the first place.

And we didn't set out to be one of those like sticky, like we're just going to live by the golden rule TM and, you know, like slap that across everything. But we did say, what if we just build a consultancy we want to work for? Could it be profitable? Could it be successful? And we wrote this blog post like called the great Titan experiment. Like, are we capable of running a company this way and actually making money? Um, And so far, the answer is yes. You know, our twelve, thirteen years in there, there are lots of other nuances we can talk about, about how to build that.

But at the absolute core, it is just empathy. Like in each circumstance, asking the question of if I were this person and I were in this circumstance, what would be the best for me? And sometimes people can take that to an extreme where you're not considering about the fact that the company still has to make money. Right. That's always a balance. Right. We. Sure. I'm not helping you empathetically by making a decision that's going to make you out of a job in a year because the company went out of business. Right. Right. So there's there's a balance there. But in the end, it's just like treating people like people takes you pretty far, pretty far down that road.

How do you think people should vet? Right. Because, again, I'm going to pull everything you say. I'm going to try to pull back to jobs. But also we're going to touch on managers, too. talk about interviewing for a company right what are some things to people should maybe ask or observe or be aware of of what they're about to step into because i will tell you this i've been i've been unhealthy uh cultures as well um i've i've always said i'm never gonna work for somebody who doesn't have kids ever again I think when you have kids and you understand family life, I think that's a key indicator.

But what are some other things that people should be aware of? Yeah, I mean, there was a tweet that went semi-viral this morning, I think it was, where someone said, I'm not interested in... If somebody asks about work-life balance, then they're not even going to make it further in our interview process. And I was like, cool, you just saved us from the possibility of working from someone like you, right? I do think conversations around work-life balance, whether it's that phrase explicitly or something around like, hey, you know... How often are people at your company working extra hours? Do people do work in the weekends? Do people work in the evenings?

How likely is it for people to be able to step away and go pick up their kid from the bus and then come on back? I certainly hear you on the not working for people who don't have kids, but I found that there's, there's jerks with kids and there's empathetic people. That is true. That is definitely the element that like, when you have kids, you got one of those, like, well, as a father of a daughter, suddenly I see the world differently. It does have an impact, but in the end, it's just like, you know, does this person have an understanding and empathy of the constraints that you're living under in the world that you live in?

And to me, the most helpful in an application process is can I talk to somebody who's not the boss, right? The hiring manager, the boss, they're often going to say the nice things that make it sound appealing. One of the things I talk about in my Laracast course that's about this is like, as people who own businesses, Many of us want to be seen a certain way. We want to be the nice boss. We want to be the person who's giving and caring. And so it's really easy to say all those kind things and then not necessarily back them up when it's hard to promise them, right?

It's really super easy to promise that you're going to do all this stuff when it doesn't cost you anything or that cost is something you can really manage. But what happens when that cost is something that now feels painful and really you're feeling the cost, more likely than not, they're going to back off of it. So all the promises in the world, all the great programs in the world only do so much if you talk to the real people and they're like, yeah, you know, they say they talk a good game, but when it, you know, stuff hits the fan, we're working on the weekends, you know, what do you, what do you think of glass door ratings?

Um, I'm too small to know, unfortunately. So yeah, but like just in general scope of it though, cause I know a lot of, I know glass door and blind and all those things were really big when like tech was blowing up back when everybody was over hiring, everybody wanted the inside scoop. But like, what do you think of those reviews on those sites? Yeah, I, I truly have minimal usefulness in answering this question. I, I would say, um, all internet reviews are most populated by the people who are really, really, really angry. And sometimes people are really, really angry for a very legitimate and valid reason.

Sometimes people are really, really angry because they're, um, kind of like they got laid off or whatever, and it was legitimately their problem. So you got to take everything, business reviews with a grain of salt. And then with stuff like Glassdoor, I'm guessing there's also probably people who are motivated to try and make their own company look good. And so they try to push them to do that. So I would say if you've got something that's got a thousand reviews and nine hundred of them are negative, that probably says something. But unfortunately, I'm not knowledgeable enough about Glassdoor and that kind of whole world to be able to speak eloquently about it.

Yeah, me neither, but you answered that question, which is what you said, right? I think you need to filter through it. I remember recruiting for a company back in the day at Vaco, and I had a developer reach out to me, and they were like, man, there's so many bad Glassdoor reviews. And I was like, all right, let me take a look. And I was like, you do realize all these are from nurses. Mm-hmm, which is not what you're doing in the first place. It's not what you're doing. Also, it's like two to three years ago. Mm-hmm. Right. So again, like, like, like we need to, we need to be aware of what we're reading.

Right. Um, let me, let me ask you this. So you talk about lead with empathy, right? Like I want to get a little tactical practical here. We'll, we'll, we'll flip back to the manager side of things. If managers listen to this, I know managers listen to this. I get DMS about it. Um, are some tactical tangible things that you feel like you've done well at titan to obviously live by the golden rule be empathy first like what what does that look like can you give me one or two specifics yeah sure i mean one of the first things is that we tell people that we don't want you to be working you know over forty hours a week and you know people hear that and it sounds like every other company that said that and then they had tried to work forty hours a week their first week and somebody takes them aside it was originally me but now i've tried to have my managers do it and says hey we saw that you clocked fifty hours this week that's not what we do at titan you need to work forty hours a week or less and they're like oh really so you're keeping track of that Yes, we're keeping track.

And again, it used to be me, but now the project managers are attentive to a lot of the socio-emotional aspects of what's going on in our teams. Because first of all, we care about people. And second of all, I always try to tie this back to the caring about people actually makes a better business for you. So we do it because we care about people. But if you need a business justification, which I know you don't, but a lot of people do, Teams are more effective. Employees are more able to do their work. They're less likely to burn out. If you are in a place where you're watching what's going on and you're ensuring that like, hey, we know when this person is showing signs of burnout.

We know when they're pushing themselves too hard. We often know what's going on in their personal lives only when they share, right? They're like, oh, hey, this person's dealing with an injury in the family or a sickness in the family. They're probably going to be a little bit lower. What can we do to kind of take some of the load this week? Yeah. That's one of the things. Another thing for us is, I give this example a lot, but when we make decisions about the decisions we're going to do in terms of the company, for example, what healthcare plan we're going to work with. When we were sitting down to decide the healthcare plan, there was two primary plans we were looking at, and one of the plans had better retirement stuff.

I forget what it's called, but the plans where you can set aside a certain amount of money as tax-advantaged, HSA. Yeah. So we had some people, the company who are like, you know, just financial maxers, right. Trying to always optimize every penny for their savings, which is great. Fire movement is great and everything like that. And then the other plan had better coverage for single moms. And so we were just looking at, they're like, well, in this circumstance, who is more in need of a boost? It is the person who's doing fine. And they're trying to optimize their retirement savings to the last penny. Or is it a single mom who gets pregnant while working at her job and now is worried if they're going to continue to have a job afterwards.

And so it's like questions like that. It's like, you know, I could have gone what's good for me because I'm not going to be a single mom. Right. And I'd like to optimize for my retirement savings. Sure. So again, it's just it's just like in each circumstance, like think about the other person and then, you know, let me ask you this. And I'm going to I'm asking you this because I'm I'm kind of. I'm going to cheat off your paper a little bit here as a leader of an organization. Are you, do you think over sharing or are you more of an overshare or undershare of where the company's going?

and what's happening because, because, and let me, let me tell you why I'm asking you this, right? I have been a part of many organizations where my leaders, not a tort, uh, where, where like, there's not a lot of visibility on what's going on. Right. So it's like, how, how am I affecting the bottom line? How, how is what I'm driving? Like, there's just, there's just not a lot of oversight on what's going on. One of the things I've always been, and it's maybe a weakness of mine. I don't know. That's why I'm trying to ask you this is I overshare. that that may be a fault of mine.

I don't know, but I want people knowing the whole picture. And sometimes the whole picture looks a little not good sometimes, but I'd rather have my team in the know. And what I've seen is that has really endeared all of my teams that I've managed over the course of my year or course of my career to, to be more bought in, to be more empathetic on what's going on. What are your thoughts on that? um i think that uh the more we're in a position of leadership the more the pressure is to under share so while everybody has their own pension you might be more or less likely to do one or the other if i had to give a blanket rule the blanket rule should be lean closer to oversharing than undersharing that's just baseline just knowing people um i also think personally i believe that there's a lot of value in you know, erring towards oversharing for a couple of reasons.

And I'm actually gonna start with the one that's not about me as a business owner, but because of the way that I run the business, my employees often feel comfortable being a little bit more transparent with me about things than they would with other people. So I've actually had multiple employees come to me when they're like, Hey, I'm looking for another job. I have realized this isn't the career for me or I'm looking for another job. This was my first remote job and I realized I need to be back in person or I'm looking for another job. We have a cap on our salaries because with it.

So there's this thing called the agency spiral of doom where basically agencies can only raise our rates so quickly. And the inflation for our salary is faster than that. Right. So if you as an agency raise your rates at your normal pace and then you raise your pay at a reasonable pace, you are going to quickly run out of money. So agencies have to come up with an option and there's usually one of two options. One option is have a crappy enough corporate cultural that everybody eventually cycles out. And then, and they basically agency owners are talk about like, yeah, well our seniors are going to cycle out because they're miserable here.

And then we're going to bring on more juniors and we're going to do that, you know, get our money out of them or do what I do, which is put a cap. And so each of our roles has a pay cap. And after that pay cap, your, your increases in pay go up much smaller every year after that. And so one of the people came to me and was just like, Hey, I've got a job offer for a startup that's going to pay me sixty thousand dollars a year more than you can and so each of those circumstances I'm like great I love you I'm glad you worked here your tour duty here was a wonderful experience and now let's talk about what your transition looks like and multiple of them had six to eighteen month long transitions because they knew they could say that long before they're actually ready to go and we can start kind of working through so it made my job a lot easier because I know this person's gonna be on their way out at some point I can give them a better experience to maybe keep them a little longer but also can prepare for their leaving a little bit better And it gave them the ability to not have to be like hiding this thing and making sure in your calendar or whatever, just sort of like, yeah, this is just what we have going on.

So that's a transparent from the employee perspective. From a business owner perspective, I tell my entire team, here's where we are financially. Here is how we're doing relative to last month. Here's what our savings targets look like. And I do this because I think it's a valuable thing for people to know how we're doing. And if we're doing poorly, so we in twenty twenty two, I'm trying to keep this short. In twenty twenty two, we have until we have until ten. This is why I went an hour. This is why I went an hour. So in twenty twenty two, I did not run the finances of the company.

I was the CTO and my business partner was starting to step away a little bit. And things were this was when things got really tight for a lot of consultancies. And so I started looking into the finances of the company and I was just like, I don't know what's going on here. I'm a little skeptical of how everything's going. So I go to our fractional CTO company, who's also our accountants, and they're like, everything's totally fine. Everything's totally fine. So I check in a month later, everything's totally fine. And I reach out to them in November. I'm like, hey, Facebook's doing layoffs. Google's doing layoffs.

Why are you keep telling me everything's fine? What's it looking like? And they're like, oh, you need to lay six people off. And laying those people off was the hardest thing I've done in my entire career. Because first of all, laying people off sucks. Second of all, they trusted me. And third, I had been asking for months what's going on with our finances and they kept assuring me everything was fine. So I fired them. I learned how I went to all sorts of training to learn how to do the finances. I run the finances of the company now. I'm the CFO and the CEO. Um, but one of the reasons why I wanted to be able to learn all that and take care of it is I never want to be in a position again, where I go to somebody who's been doing a great job for the last five years and say, you no longer have a job as of months from now, I gave everybody like a month, you know, um, uh, what's it called?

Severance, you no longer have a job today and you only got a month worth of pay left because of my mismanagement. Right. Um, so regardless of whose fault it is, I want people to know ahead of time what's coming so that they have the opportunity to say, Hey, you know what? Things are looking tight at work. I might go look for another job that feels more stable. You should have the ability to make that decision. Additionally, we do a profit share. And the only way to do an honest profit share is for the people to know what your profit is or when it is where they're actually going to have profit.

So they need to know what's going on with the finances of the situation. So for me, I'd say sharing. There is such a thing as oversharing. As a business owner, you don't need to know every single aspect of my life or every single business decision I'm making. And it is a fine line. And once you become a little bit of an overshare, it's very tempting to just share everything. Yeah, same. You got to find some people who don't work with you or who are at your same level, who it's more comfortable to share with. So you're not always sharing everything, but yes, Aaron decided oversharing to me.

So let me ask you this. It's interesting. You talked about people leave in and, and you know, one, one thing I've, One thing, after taking this role at Torque, what I've realized is that when you manage a community team or a DevRel team, right, is that your people are going to be very out there, right? And so I know that all my people are getting probably DM'd all the time, all the time. And what I've realized early on through taking over the Torque community team is that if I'm doing my job right as a leader, I should position you for the next step of your career.

Now, do I want that to be with Torque all the way? Sure, absolutely. But sometimes that's not feasible. But for you, what are your thoughts? And it's kind of a dumb question, but I'm trying to tee you up here. As a leader, as somebody who runs a small consulting firm, I mean, if you're doing your job right, your people are going to get picked off, which is crazy to think about. Yeah. And I mean, interestingly, like we have very low turnover and I, it is definitely something I'm proud of. I'm really glad that people want to work here for a long time, but every single time somebody leaves, I've had to learn that that means two things about it.

First of all, they were able to find a place that's an even better fit than Titan. And every single one of them who's left has told me like Titan was one of the best jobs I've ever had. Oh my gosh, you guys have such great things. but you have another thing after that, that is evil, able to give you even more of what you need in that moment of your life than we are. That's, that's, that's great. That's wonderful. You're paying off student loans. You're, you know, whatever it is that you're looking for. So that's, that's a wonderful thing. Um, and second of all, that means there's another spot for a person that I can bring in to give those same opportunities.

Because one of the things that's really important for me to tighten is making space for people who are new to the industry, um, I know people who may traditionally have a harder time getting a job. And so like, if I've only, if I've chosen to keep my company small, like it'd be a lot easier if I had a hundred person company, but I don't want to run a hundred person company. I want a fifteen person company. So that means there's only fifteen slots for that. And so every time somebody leaves, we've got a new slot for somebody I can bring in and hopefully be a part of their journey of going through our training process basically and learning how to be amazing at Titan and then moving on to the next best thing for their life.

So it does mean you can't just ever rest back on your laurels. Sure. Why don't you want to get big? So there's a couple reasons. First one is we did get bigger and it was everything I was worried it was going to be. So in the nonprofit I worked at before I started Titan, we started a lot of organizational psychology and they talk about the fact that there are different kind of tiers of the size of the company. So tiers are, or even not necessarily company, but any kind of organization, you've got, you know, three people and then twelve people and everyone doesn't have the same tiers, but it's often twenty, fifty, a hundred.

And at each point, the culture of the organization changes. And there's two important notes there. One is you have to know when that culture is changing so you can adapt to it and you can't try to run the, you know, fifty person company like you did the three person company. But second of all, you might like those cultures more or less based on what is required. So for example, when you move above twenty, you start needing middle management. You can't have a forty, fifty person company without some level of middle management. You can run a fifteen person company without middle management, right? I don't like middle management.

I like knowing everybody in my team. I like having a relatively flat structure, not a perfectly flat structure. And when we were at thirty, I spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with the newly found miscommunications, mistrusts, groupthink among smaller groups among the company than I ever had before. And when we dropped back down to fifty, led by those layoffs, right? I didn't want to do it in the first place, but when we started getting smaller, every single time somebody's left, I just kind of like, I'm not going to replace them so I can get back to the size that I remember loving, which is fifteen to twenty.

And we got back down that size. I was like, yep, it's just as good as it used to be. It's a totally different set of people. It's not like, oh, it's just those people. But there's just something about our relationships and our interactions with each other that is the company I want to have. And I'm not in this company to sell it and make billions. I'm not in this company to make someone impressed with me because of the size of company I built. I'm in it to make a great job for my family or you make great life for my family and the families of X number of other people.

And I'm like, yeah, everybody's happy at fifteen. And let's keep it at fifteen. I love that. I love that. All right. Let's go on to the next kind of area. around hiring right there's a lot to unpack here let's set the stage first how does titan hire What's the process for you guys? Yeah. So there's two processes. We alternate between them, usually one and then the other. The first process is we put out a job posting. We put it on the main job board for our world, which is LaraJobs. We get five hundred applicants, roughly. It's usually around that. And then somebody else other than me filters through them and gets it down to usually between fifty to seventy that are real applicants, real people to consider, people who are at the right level for what we're interested in.

And then I and several other people at Titan will read through all their job applications. We'll try to filter it down to somewhere between, I don't know, like five and twenty five people who will get a five minute phone screen. Five minute phone screen is just to see you and face to face and say, hey, are you a decent verbal communicator? Can you, you know, laugh at a joke, you know, just kind of what's the vibe? Can you be a person? And then the people who make it through that one will get up. It's truly, truly, even if you think my joke... We'll talk about that.

Like, I I went live with Alex last week. Talk about just soft skills. Talk about why, like being able to laugh is a superpower right now. I mean, there's a couple of pieces to it. One of them is that we're remote. And so how we interact over zoom is how we're going to interact the vast majority of the time. We're either on zoom or Slack. Right. So if we can't have a good time, get to know each other over that, then I'm like, what what's the point of this at all? Right. Cause I'm like, I don't need people. If I wanted people to just sit at a chair and just do tasks that are assigned to them, I could pay an eighteenth of what I'm paying you to get somebody offshore to do it.

Right. Like that's, I want full human beings bringing their full presence, their full set of experiences because it's a better workplace. Sure. But I think that we do better work when we bring all the life experiences that we've had and all the background and thing we had. So I need a person to be a person. They don't have to be me. They don't have to be someone who I necessarily would hang out with because But we got to at least be able to have like a good interaction. But also all of our devs are working with clients. All of our devs are working with project managers, right?

We're not some thousand person company where a dev only ever sees three other devs in a basement at some point. Our devs are in teams of usually between one and four programmers and project manager, which means you're actively interacting with the client every single week. And so you got to be able to represent my company. So if you are incapable of having interpersonal interactions, Not only you're reflecting poorly on us, but you're not reading their science. Like if the client is uncomfortable, I need you to be able to sense that they're uncomfortable and say, hold up. What we're doing is obviously not working. We need to pivot a little bit.

And if you don't have social skills, you're not going to be able to figure that out. So I literally lead each of those five minute phone screens by some intentionally corny joke. One of the things I love to say is five minutes. That's it. Yeah. An intentional corny joke. And I'll say something like, uh, well, you know, this is a phone screen. We just wanted to get to, you know, make sure you can actually say hi to us and make sure there's not an ax in the wall because you're actually secretly an ax murderer. Just some stupid thing to see how quick are they at picking up stupid stuff?

How do you handle a corny dad joke? Like you don't have to laugh, but you gotta give me something. If you were completely stoned faced through that, like, I'm like, okay, we might not not, you know, be able to work alone. So five minute phone screen, and then usually a short take home. That's an hour or two at most. And then a one hour technical interview. usually after we go through those phases we've gotten it down to two to three to five people um and then normally without any more interviews we can figure out who the person is we want to offer the job to if not we might ask for one more um clarifying call and then that's the first round so that person gets the job and then the next round we have a queue of people who are the top three or four or five who didn't get the job the last time plus people in the community we've been building relationships with.

And I got that pile. And so the next two times, three times, sometimes when we have a job, I might be able to reach into one of those pools and just say, oh, let's just grab one of those people. I do want to do one of those big round overview hires as frequently as possible, like every one, every other, or every third, because they bring people in who aren't in our natural cycles. And we don't want to just hire our friends, right? So, but that's kind of some kind of balance between those. Yeah. so so let's talk about being inclusive when it comes to hiring right i went on a huge kick around this when i was at vaco around how job descriptions are written giving people the ability to you know at the time people are coming into the office for white boarding stuff you know whatever what what are your thoughts just on a general state of how to be inclusive when it comes to hiring Yeah, I mean, inclusive can mean a lot of things.

Normally, in my history of hiring, in our world, inclusive has primarily meant not just straight white dudes from the United States and Europe, right? So, you know, we're talking about ethnicity, we're talking about country of origin, language, gender, orientation, religion at times. There are other aspects of inclusivity, like you mentioned coming into an office doing a whiteboard, you know, we can talk about disability and stuff like that. But in general, The biggest thing for me is there's really kind of two pieces you're looking at. One of the pieces is hiring people, making space for people who aren't traditionally represented or given space in the tech world.

And the other one is hiring and making space for people who aren't like you. And they're often the same group because it's often a white man hiring manager, but it's not always the same. And so the second one is easier to address. it doesn't matter whether the person is not like you because of the way they look or because of their gender or because it is a person who's your exact same, you know, gender, blah, blah, blah, but they have been to prison before or they're the exact same as you, but they come from a different socioeconomic status from you. You can be different in a million different ways and you can be bad at making space for them or good at making space for them.

So it's very, very important as a hiring manager to recognize that our biases are naturally going to make us want to hire people who are like us. And that's not racism. That's not sexism. That is inherently how humans work. If you are like me, then I'm going to feel more comfortable on a call with you. And that could be anything. It could be because you grew up in Michigan like I did, or you live in Atlanta like I do. It doesn't matter. You're going to make me more comfortable. So I have to do intentional work to try to build practices in myself and in our hiring processes that are giving space for those biases to be identified and corrected.

And so some of that is me just basically being aware of it and trying to like get comfortable with different people and try to ask the question of like, hey, do I like that guy a little more because he's from where I'm from or whatever? I know. Part of it is bringing other people at the company to be a part of the process. So I'm like, hey, you know what? This person has done an interview with three bearded white men. Let's make sure we get a woman on the call or a person of color on the call or whatever. So that's one of the pieces of it.

But another piece of it is trying to learn from people who have talked about what are the steps you can take to do this. So there are some people who teach about how do you make your job application more friendly and welcoming to people who are from different backgrounds, right? So I read all those articles and I try to build those in our job application, whatever. So first thing is that, the first thing is just trying to build a process that if you do get people from different backgrounds to your door, you're gonna do a better job of giving them an equal opportunity. The problem is it's the whole if you build it, they will come idea.

I've talked to so many well-intentioned, kind founders who are like, hey, I open it up to everybody. And yet I only get applicants of a particular socioeconomic, ethnic, whatever background. Right. I tried. Right. And I was like, no, there's another step that we need to do, which is doing intentional work to understand the dynamics that lead to you getting less applicants and figuring out how you address those. And there's lots of different dynamics there. One of the dynamics is if there's only people of a particular group at your company, someone different is going to feel uncomfortable coming in and you're going to need to. do extra work to bring your first different person in.

And they're going to have to take a leap of faith, which means you've got to build those relationships ahead of time. You might have to actively recruit people. And you need to make sure that that person has a voice to speak to ways where your company might not be comfortable with them because the next person who applies, first they're going to do is they're going to look at that one person who looks different than everybody else and say, should I work here? Is this actually a good place and a safe place to work? And they're going to go behind your back. You're not going to know that happened.

And that is the right thing for them to do. So if that person's not happy, you're in rough shape. And if that person doesn't exist, you're in rough shape. So there's active steps there. There's also recognition that we're not starting from scratch. We're not starting from zero, right? We're starting at a place where we already have an industry that looks a certain way. And so if we want to change it, we have to intentionally move momentum in a different direction. So one of the things that we've done at Titan that's really important for me is like PHP with all the things I like about Laravel.

PHP is an old language and the older languages tend to be more white, more whale because it's just established that way. So I'm like, hey, there's not Frank. Yeah. Right. So it's like there's not a massive surplus of, you know, black women, PHP programmers ready for me to hire at a senior level. So I have to introduce an apprenticeship program so I can allow people to get into the world. I have to be a part of that pipeline because the people are sitting here talking about, hey, there's no pipeline for people who don't look like us to get into the company. Well, create it. Somebody's got to make that pipeline.

So create it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, you know, I'm really big and I have a whole other conference talk that I don't really give because I really need to start submitting for twenty twenty six. But I basically have like how you should hire, which is totally around, you know, inclusivity and the way like, you know, I'll never forget. I tell a story all the time. Becca, who runs virtual coffee. She and I were chatting years ago about a job description that was written. And it said possible travel. It was like an extensive amount of travel. I said possible. She said I was a fit for the job.

But she goes, I didn't submit because I'm a mother of three. And I can't be on the road that much. To me, if I'm being hard on that job description and the person who wrote it, did you actually need that person to travel that much? Because you just rejected a mother. by reading the job description because you said possibly six to eight times a year. It's like, is that actually six to eight times a year or did you just put that in there? So it comes with like even the nuances. Like I truly think that a lot of tech hiring and diversity can be fixed with remote work and job descriptions.

mean like great starts like list the bare minimum right yeah be inclusive and then ultimately you'll cast whatever i love what you said about apprenticeships and internships i don't know why i listen i know it's hard don't get me wrong but it's like if if you're trying to build diversity you're trying to be inclusive it's just like i talk about i talk about uh nfl and college football right nfl has a great pipeline college football, right? What are you doing in your organization to have that pipeline coming in? And almost nobody has internship, apprenticeships, anything like that. And that to me is the best way to be able to serve underprivileged communities.

But you know who had those the most was all the big guys, Fang. They had tons of apprenticeship and onboarding programs, and they were responsible for making job opportunities for an incredible number of people coming out of you know boot camps and everything like that and then zerp ends they and they do all the layoffs in twenty two and twenty three and they didn't open those apprenticeships back up and the thing is it is significantly easier for a large company to um to do all that stuff than is for a small company if you got a large company you got all this excess people excess money Throwing a hundred internships is totally fine.

If you got fifteen people, you have to come up with an apprenticeship program. You basically have to be able to lose money off of an employee for an entire year. You know, like I want to give credit to small companies. That is a harder decision. It is. Yeah, I'm not saying it's not hard. No, totally. Yeah. And you said it was hard. But I do think that a lot of the responsibility lays on the larger companies and they did it and then money got tight. And the first thing they did was completely chop all those programs and all those employees. yeah absolutely um talk about uh let's see here anything else okay so so let's let's pivot a little bit towards general interviewing right now what are people missing the mark on you talked about the personal skills is is ai affecting your interviewing at all right now just kind of give a general lay of the land of what you're seeing to help people during the job search right now So I will tell you one thing that is a little embarrassing.

I have not, because I've said I'm shrinking the team a little bit, I haven't hired in the last year. So I have not dealt with the AI. Yeah, well, not only have we been locked down, but I have so many people I would hire if I got a chance. I'm not going to go through the five hundred people application right now. Like I've got a long queue of people. I'm like, oh, I would give you a job right now if I could. But because we've been countrying the size a little bit, we just haven't. So I have not had to deal with the whole AI hiring thing.

I don't know exactly how I would handle it. I'm not the right one to answer that. But I can still give interviewing kind of notes. There is a large number of people who, because of the circumstance that they are unfortunately in, have to spray and pray, just blast out as many applications as you possibly can. And there's only so much I can tell you to do to make sure that your application reflects the specific place you're applying. But I will still keep saying it. I do think as much as possible, especially if this is a job you're actually excited about, Spend that extra ten minutes, extra twenty minutes, extra fifty minutes, throw grammarly at it, whatever you got to do to write a specific version of your cover letter or even your resume or something or the email that shows that you know who they are and you're not just sending them to one out of five hundred.

If I am one out of five hundred, I'm deleting your resume, period. That's it. I know that's not true for everybody, but at my size, hundred percent, I'm just one of five hundred places you're sending the same resume to. I don't even care about your resume. But once you get in the interview process, if you've actually gotten a face-to-face call, you better have freaking done the work. And that's not always true. But right now, we are in a moment where, unfortunately, the hiring managers have the lead. It is what it is. It is what it is. And so go into that call knowing everything you can about the hiring manager, knowing everything you can about the company.

Have they put out anything publicly recently? Do they have a podcast? Did you listen to the last three versions of the podcast? Do they write blog posts? Have you written all those? Do they specialize in a particular technology? Have you gone back and reread the docs of that technology and made sure you're up to date? The idea that there's this really important job that could change the next ten years of your life and the prep you've done is just read the job posting at best. Many people don't even read that before you get on a call. That doesn't make any sense. No. So good. Let me ask you this.

I know this doesn't really necessarily apply to you, but as a manager. So I've had a great stream recently with Mark Thompson at Google, Debra at Google. And we talked about how to use AI to empower your interviewing, right? One of the things we talked about is using AI to develop like a quick proof of concept approach. for potentially a product company or something you're trying to get into, right? So the example that we use was like, hey, if you love dogs and you're trying to go work at Chewy, right? Develop something with some, again, I'm not technical, some sort of API, blah, blah, blah.

Develop some sort of, be like, hey, I like your product. I think you guys could improve this. Use AI to develop quicker so you don't have to hard code the whole thing like you used to do and be able to present that potentially in the DMs initially to a manager and or during the interview. Do you think that stands out? Um, I think it stands out if it's really good. I think if you gave me AI slop. Sure. It might help a little that you're showing initiative, right? It's that you have good ideas and you're good thinking, you have . But if your job is to code for me and you send me something and there's bugs all over it and I can trigger sixteen edge cases where the whole thing falls apart, or you share the code with me and the code is garbage because it was generated by AI, that does not help.

So I think this is a fantastic idea. but be careful that you're not delivering something to them that suggests that the quality of work you're doing is the quality of work that is immediately spun out by Claude. Because something immediately spun out by an AI tool is not the level that I want to hire somebody at. But if you'd say, I think that you should create a fun little proof of concept that shows you have a really clever way of thinking and you should use AI so that you can spin out that proof of concept in a way where you're doing less coding than you would be otherwise.

That makes it worth it because you don't want to spend fifty hours coding for a job you might not get. But five hours fixing AI output for code you might not get makes more sense. I'm one hundred percent here with that. But it's got to be at a quality that you would deliver code to my company at or I don't want to see it at all. I love that. I love that. Let me ask you this. We had a live last Friday with Kelly Vaughn talked about promotions. right and and again i know you're a small team relatively flat organization what do you like to see from your devs to deserve a promotion or raise or something?

What are some key characteristics? Because I think no one's talking about this. No, go ahead. It's my job to have defined the metrics in the first place. You as an employer should have told somebody, here's the job you're at, here's the next job in your job trajectory, and here are the steps to get from where you are to there. And if it's not defined at your company, you should ask it to be defined at your company. So while I can name some of those things because of the things that I have defined, If a company has not told you what merits of promotion, it's on them.

And you have every right in the world to gently say, hey, I'm interested in moving up to the next role. What's my next role? Or if it's clear, but it's not clear how to get there, I'm interested in moving to this specific role. Can you tell me what things do I not have and how I can get them there? Can we work on them on our one-on-ones? Can we set goals or whatever? You can lead up and say, I should know how to get there and I'd like your help in getting there. So once I defined that, we now have a very well-defined list of here are the roles for a programmer.

You can be an associate, you can be apprentice, you can be a staff programmer, you can be a lead programmer, and you can be a principal programmer. Those are your options. And there's a document that shows you which each of those are and how each one stacks on top of the previous ones. So for me specifically, that promotion is not necessarily based on the best programmer in the company, although you need to be improving in order to move up. Our leads have a higher level of responsibility for ensuring that the work that's done by the team is good and doing data or coding architecture. Yeah, so that's code stuff, reviewing other people's code.

So those all have a level of expectation, your coding ability, but also looking at the more junior employees on your team and helping them grow. So there's interpersonal skills there. There's working together with your project manager to make sure that you are on the same page about what's the most important stuff for us to be working on this week. So you need to know how to split out tasks well and delegate and not get stuck. Doing direct delivery of our work to our clients. So you know how to not only talk to clients and present well, but also understand the priorities of clients, which is not usually the priorities of programmers, right?

You have to be able to be empathetic to the fact that Yeah, you want to build this thing perfect and it's going to take you four weeks, but the client wants it done to eighty percent in four days. And if you don't understand that up front, then the way you present is going to make us look bad or like we don't understand them. So I define those roles and those responsibilities and what delineates one role from the other based on the things you're going to practically do. And then I say, if I put you in that situation, could you do it or not? And I try to give you everybody like little taste of the situation so we can actually watch them.

So how to move up is do the things that the next roll up in your stack requires of you and find opportunities outside of work and in work, you know, to learn those things and shadow other people who are good at them and, you know, get coached on them and whatever else. Yep. I love that. I love that. I have some rapid fire questions, but I want to see if you have any more. Do you want to plug? We haven't plugged what you just dropped. Do you want to? Do you want to? Yeah, sure. Yeah. So Laracast is the premier video education platform for the Laravel world, and it is a paid subscription, but they asked me to give a course for free.

So you don't have to be a Laracast member. All right, I don't think you have to be a member, but you certainly don't have to be a paying member to watch this. They only have the first three episodes out, but this is a course about how to build a dev team. I have spent the first half of my career teaching about how to be a developer and it was a lot of fun. I mainly taught towards entry level people and that's on purpose because that's the change I want to make in the world. But at some point I realized that there was nobody in our section of the world talking about how to be better managers, how to be better owners of technical companies, better CTOs or whatever.

And so I started getting conference talks about it and stuff like that. And at some point, Jeffrey, the guy behind Laircast said, hey, I want you to make a video course, two hour long video course. saying, you know, we kind of brainstormed, but where I landed was if you are running a dev team or you are being tasked to build a dev team. So we're talking about technical leads, CTOs, you know, that kind of stuff. What are the things that I have learned and I want other people to be doing so that my impact won't just be on making a great job for the fifteen people who work for me, but hopefully be making jobs for hundreds of people out there.

I'm like, it's worth it sharing the secret sauce of how we do things great at Titan in hopes that there will be more and more and more great workspaces out there. But I would say that even if you're not a managing director, you should still check it out because, yeah, it's good to know. It's good to know what you should be looking for. It helps you lead up if you're not in a leadership position. I think it's good for anybody. I love that. I love that. Yeah, so go check that out if you like what Matt said today. And based off the comments, y'all have.

All right, so... Rapid Fire here. Again, if y'all have questions, I do think the stream has been lagged a little bit because I see comments coming in from like ten minutes ago. If you have questions, please ask them now as we kind of get into Rapid Fire. So the first question I always ask, what tech tool, mobile app, piece of software that you can't live without right now? Ooh. Um... a piece of software. This is so not sexy, but I'm writing multiple conference talks and a video course. I'm recording a video course. I just finished another video course. I organize everything in Bear, which is old school.

It's not the sexiest news. It's not Obsidian. Yes, because it's old. It was one of the first... Bear, B-E-A-R. It's basically like Apple Notes if it was based in Markdown. That's it. And Obsidian is like Bear, but way better, right? So I'm sure that I should just say Obsidian, but I've got a functioning process in Bear. I love it. It sticks between my Mac. It's on my iPhone. I've got it. I write in Markdown, but you can copy this rich text. You can copy this Markdown. It's got tags. It's just the basic level thing. And so all my talks are in there. All my video series are in there.

I use it for everything. I love it. That's awesome. uh if anybody from bear is watching sponsor this boy uh because it's old um what's the what's the very first job you ever got paid to do Yeah, I was cleaning out horse stalls at a horse farm. I was no way. You want to come muck my stalls? I have done enough. I am good. But yeah, I was below the legal age to get a job, but I was hustling and I was like, I want to get a job when I do this. Didn't have a car, lived out in the country and found a friend who who did the same thing because she rode horses.

So she would clean the stalls for horse time. And I was like, I don't want horse time. Pay me ten bucks an hour or whatever. So I would ride my bike down a little dirt road over here once a week and, you know, over the summer. And that was my job. I love it. I love it. Uh, Tehran, we actually covered this in the beginning. He's a big coffee guy, but decaf and a porn over. So, uh, everybody asks that cause it's, it's, it's a question I always ask. So yeah. So he's a coffee guy, Tehran. Um, let me ask you this. So obviously you leader of an organization, you guys are remote, uh, Do you go on-site ever?

This question I don't love, but I'm trying to get into the mind. If you had it your way, do you want all people on-site? Would you like to have a location, have two days on-site? If you could just snap your finger and business wouldn't change and everything's good, what would you do as a leader? Across the history of the company, we have done two on-sites a year. Right now, I have joined them because the world is tight and finances are tight. If I had my way, I would split it out to two. But basically, we do an onsite once a year where we bring the entire company all in the same place in some very large Airbnb or something like that.

And we hang out. We do a little bit of work, but a lot of team building. We give little twenty minute lightning talks. You know, this year we went to a game show competition place where they like in a dark room and they run a whole fake game show. You split it. Oh, for real? Yeah, it was so freaking fun. We just have a good time, get to know each other. You know, people are FaceTiming their kids and people are saying hi. You learn that this one guy, Mateos, drinks like seventeen coffees a day and you're shocked about how. And there's every year there's one thing that we just get obsessed with.

Like one year it was some stupid reality TV show when we were all slumped in couches at three. I'm being like, turn on another. This year it was some kind of inappropriate meme based board game and we were playing until two a.m. So that is just a really wonderful experience. And then the other one is we all go to our industry conference Laracon every year. And we all show up a little bit ahead of time. Yeah, great conference. So we'll table at the conference. We'll get to know people. There's usually at least a few of us speaking every year. So what I've done for the last couple of years to save money is that we do them back to back.

We go four to five days early to Laracon to the same city. We get an Airbnb. We do it on site. And then we go from there over to Laracon. It's great. I wouldn't mind doing it twice a year, but it's a pretty decent setup. Yeah, I love that. I love that. um what did you want to be when you grew up when you were younger like like like og matt like first grade matt yep so my dad was the president of a american distributor of a german company the german company was called jobo j-o-b-o and they made uh not whatever between professional amateur so prosumer level um photo development products so basically the type of people who now have a four thousand dollar you know prosumer level digital camera and they're in light room all the time but they're not like super professional those people used to have a home dark room and jobo made supplies for small and home darkness i didn't ask my wife if she went to school for photography at scads oh cool yeah she might have heard of joba depending on the timeline So he was the president of the Jobo USA.

He was the distributor of all that stuff. And also, as digital started becoming a thing, he was the one who brought digital into Jobo. And he's like, hey, I know that we have this stuff, but we are the photo people. We need to build these little photo-based hard drives and camera bags, stuff like that. So when I was in first grade, I was like, I want to work for my dad. I don't even know what he does, but it's so cool that my dad kind of is the president of a company. I want to work for my dad. um so yeah that was that was my first desire that's cool i love michael's comment here decaf pour was a weird way to say fancy water uh if you're ever in atlanta i will show you what good decaf pour over do you have a favorite spot in atlanta that was my original question i was trying to get at at the start but i just totally lost my train of thought do you have a favorite yeah There's two that I really like.

I mean, there's probably a ton of really good ones. I've only been here for six years, so I haven't tried them all. But there's Portrait Coffee and then Black Coffee are both really, really, really fantastic coffee. I'll try those next time. What's a career mistake you're oddly grateful for? Yeah. My career mistake I'm oddly grateful for is working for that nonprofit because it was a terrible fit me. I should not have worked there. It was one of these high pressure nonprofits where you're in college and they're working with you. And then they try to recruit you to join staff in the nonprofit. And they're like, you got to do this.

They don't say those words, but they're basically highly pressuring you to join the nonprofit as a staff worker. And I was miserable. I was terrible at it. It was not a good fit for me as a person. And I'm so glad I don't work there anymore. So you think like, well, that's just a terrible mistake, right? But the amount of things I learned about what I wanted, how to run a business well, how to care for people, some of the relationships that I built in that thing. Like I'm still like one of my primary mentors is one of my first bosses when I worked at there and I pay him money.

And I'm literally, I'm like, I'm going to get you to quit this nonprofit one day. But right now I just pay him money to come be my mentor. I'm just like, Hey, we're going to do executive coaching. Right. And it's just us hanging out and talking and him being my mentor. So yeah, like that screw that place. But thank God I had all those experiences and met all those people. That's awesome. I love that. Um, and, uh, if, if I were to tell you tomorrow that you couldn't do anything in tech anymore and I pay the same amount of money, what hobby would you pursue for a living or just what would you do for a living?

Um, I've often named things that are fun for me. Uh, but right now my wife is a filmmaker and wow. Oh, that makes sense. Support her and what she does and do a lot of stuff. That's really fun for me. Cause I like cameras and lights and I've been, you know, I'm a bass player. So I like thinking about the sound connection, stuff like that. So every day being like working with my wife, supporting her career aspirations and getting to play with, you know, not technology technically, but you know, like cameras and lights and all that kind of stuff. I'm like, yeah, that, that would be a great time.

i love it i love it all right last question and again for those who tuned in thank you so much been a great conversation it's crazy how how fast an hour flies by um so show's called guidance counselor two point oh because that guidance counselors are middle school high school and college but now as adults who don't really have a guidance counselor turn to and ask for career advice what would be your biggest piece of career advice if you go back in time and tell young matt something um is very easy in life career or not to be driven based on what other people tell you you should do or you should expect or you should want or to follow other people and it is just absolutely vital to be able to create spaces for you to ask yourself on a regular basis what do i actually want what do i value what are my priorities what do i care about um and That's going to help you in your career.

It's going to help you in your relationship with politics and religion and interpersonal relationships and everything else. So really work on understanding who you are and what you're about, and it'll take you a long way. I love that. I love that. All right, y'all. Well, thank you again for hanging out with us today. Only live this week. We'll be back next week. But y'all have a good one. Please go connect with Matt. He's on all the platforms. Please go connect with Matt. Tell him you saw him on Guidance Counselor and you all have a good one. Matt, stay on so I can see about you backstage.

We'll see you all next week and in the TORQ Discord. Peace.