Transcript: From Chicken to Chatbots: Generative AI in Hospitality with Justin Kaufman
0:00 Brad For me,
0:00 Brad coding has always been the tool that I've had to pay.
0:03 Brad I've figured out how to do it, and I enjoy doing it,
0:06 Brad by the way, but I've figured out how to do it because I have things I want to make.
0:09 Brad And it's the things that I want to make that are who I am.
0:30 Brad Welcome everybody to another episode of the How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast.
0:34 Brad I'm Brad Hefta-Gaub and my co-host is.
0:37 Scott Scott Pohrad.
0:38 Brad And today we have a very, very special guest.
0:45 Justin I don't even know. I can't even dare to introduce him.
0:48 Justin Justin Kaufman,
0:50 Justin you and I and Scott all work together.
0:53 Justin But why don't you introduce yourself to the audience?
0:57 Brad Oh, really the only important thing that I have to say is I reported to both of you back to back. And if we don't at some point in this conversation,
1:06 Brad do a heads up comparison of who was the better manager.
1:11 Justin I Oh,
1:12 Brad feel definitely. like what are we even doing here, right?
1:15 Brad A shack bank of some sort,
1:16 Brad right?
1:17 Brad There's two people.
1:18 Justin Yeah.
1:18 Justin So is that one of the 13 items on your list that you wanted to talk about?
1:22 Brad You want me to share? There's only five items because I only spent about 10 minutes on my list. You want to hear the items?
1:28 Justin Well, before I want to – I do want to hear them, but I want to say to our –
1:32 Justin listening audience that Justin is the first person to come on this podcast with a prepared list of things they wanted to talk about.
1:40 Brad Take it seriously, you guys.
1:42 Brad I wish I could just show it to you.
1:44 Brad Is that something that I can share my screen or share
1:47 Justin You can share your screen.
1:49 Justin I don't think it'll
1:49 Brad a window?
1:50 Justin it won't show up in the.
1:52 Justin uh ultimately in the audio podcast but uh yeah
1:55 Brad Well,
1:55 Brad but you guys are always doing video.
1:57 Brad So this is this is my list.
2:00 Brad The the best one maybe is the first one,
2:04 Brad though, because I don't know if you guys are making bank on this or not,
2:08 Brad but incredible.
2:08 Justin we are we we have we have actual revenue yes we have a patreon uh subscriber so
2:14 Brad Well,
2:14 Brad let's let's multiply that,
2:16 Brad you guys.
2:16 Brad Let's.
2:17 Brad Let's start marketing the drinking game version,
2:19 Brad and we can add rules.
2:24 Brad The other ideas on here that I'm particularly fond of are the do dump marry question.
2:34 Brad I do feel like we can do a viral meme right there with AI models. It hasn't really been done yet.
2:41 Justin Yeah.
2:41 Brad like i'm thinking of you guys i'm thinking of like six second
2:45 Brad viral tech clips because you know that a huge market for the for the tech clips out
2:50 Justin There
2:50 Brad there it
2:50 Justin are there is there is and if we would just figure out how to actually like use our social medias to broadcast some of these things other than just posting them on LinkedIn,
2:58 Justin then we might have something.
3:00 Brad reaches me reaches me
3:02 Justin First of all, love chatting with you,
3:04 Justin Justin, because you're always such a funny guy and you know how to bring the heat when it comes to like.
3:10 Justin like just making things interesting um i honestly think that people would be interested to hear a little bit about what you're working on nowadays because i think that that like a bunch of your little topics here are about ai like obviously ai ai assisted coding ai um you know how we can use these large language models for actual business purposes and you know i don't want you to necessarily reveal too much about what you're working on feel free to tell us
3:35 Justin tell us as much as you want to but i know this is an area that you have spent a lot of time on and you're particularly interested in and you're particularly i believe quite bullish on and so to me that seems like where we should start a little bit
3:49 Justin Well, this is very interesting,
3:50 Justin Brad,
3:51 Justin because where I left off in the Justin story,
3:53 Justin he was working at a chicken.
3:55 Justin restaurant
3:55 Justin He was working at a chicken shack.
3:57 Justin That's true.
3:58 Justin That's true.
3:59 Justin so
3:59 Justin So,
3:59 Justin we
3:59 Justin Justin, give us
4:00 Justin let's
4:00 Justin a quick timeline.
4:01 Justin let's set up an update
4:01 Justin The
4:02 Justin here
4:02 Justin three of us work together in health tech.
4:04 Justin And then what happened?
4:06 Justin like uh i went unibomber and i was like i'm gonna move to a chicken shack in the woods and i'm just gonna i'm gonna shuck and sell chicken out of that little hut and
4:17 Brad The reality is the co-founder of the company that we all worked for for a time and CEO Robbie left 98.6 and it was right around the time when I was starting to feel like it might be a good time for a change or to try something new.
4:37 Brad So I was looking and I wasn't finding the next step and I called Robbie.
4:42 Brad I mean, it was a weird call to make. I really hadn't spoken to Robbie at 98.6, but I was curious what he was up to.
4:49 Brad And, you know, actually, I remember why I called him.
4:52 Brad I called him because he left the week before it was supposed to be my first skip level one-on-one with Robbie.
5:01 Brad It was actually like a triple skip level. Somehow I achieved like the most number of skips you could do all the way up to...
5:08 Brad go up to the top and i was i was actually excited because i was like this is a chance to really like get in with the ceo it's going to be great and then he leaves and he's gone and i was like the real insult here is to me not to him like i got cheated out of my one-on-one and so i called him and i was like i'd still like to have this one-on-one with you and so we so we talked and um uh
5:33 Brad I asked him what he was up to. He said, I'm starting a restaurant.
5:36 Brad I have, as you know, as you both know, I'm a man of many ideas,
5:41 Brad many bad ideas, but also maybe sometimes an interesting one.
5:45 Brad And of all of my like topics for ideas, the restaurant topic is one of the biggest.
5:51 Brad Like, it's hard for my wife to go out to dinner with me because like the entire dinner conversation is just like, well, if they just introduced a Bluetooth sensor at the hostess table, like they could probably make this more efficient. So it's
6:03 Brad It takes a lot of the romance out of dates,
6:05 Brad but at the same time, I have all these ideas for how the restaurant thing could be.
6:13 Brad modified in a positive way in a more human way actually to make people feel less like strangers when they come back to a restaurant and so when Robbie told me that he was starting a restaurant I just said me too we're doing it together and he was like well I don't need a software engineer to there's no role in the kitchen for that for that kind of work
6:35 Brad And I just honestly,
6:37 Brad I think he would agree,
6:38 Brad I just wore him down. Like I kept messaging him ideas and I was like, this is what we're going to do and this is why we're going to build this.
6:45 Brad And, you know, eventually,
6:47 Brad you know, he's got a tech background,
6:49 Brad obviously. So I think I had a better chance getting in with him than I did with perhaps a pure restaurateur,
6:55 Brad but eventually said yes.
6:58 Brad And that that led to.
7:01 Brad Yeah, just building all kinds of interesting things that you can still try.
7:08 Brad It's all still there in the Mount Joy restaurants if you're ever in Capitol Hill or South Lake Union.
7:14 Justin Yeah, and a big piece of what that was all about,
7:16 Justin right?
7:17 Justin If I recall correctly,
7:18 Justin I went and enjoyed some Mount Joy a couple times,
7:22 Justin and it was about kind of like this notion of personalization and engagement and sort of kind of trying to use tech in a humanizing way that then made the...
7:37 Justin restaurant experience more humanizing.
7:39 Justin That's what I felt like it was. Is that a fair characterization?
7:42 Brad Yeah, I mean, honestly,
7:43 Brad if I had fed you some lines to read about what we were building and those were the lines that came out,
7:50 Brad that would have been perfect.
7:51 Brad So you just improv that.
7:54 Brad That's exactly what it is.
7:56 Brad So for me, I think the main, like I'm a lazy person, I go back to the same restaurants over and over because, and I always order the same thing, just a creature of habit to a fault.
8:06 Brad And in all the places I've lived, and all the restaurants that I've picked to be that place that I'm going to go grab lunch at,
8:13 Brad I'm always struck by the fact that when I walk in.
8:19 Brad The same question gets asked,
8:20 Brad you know, have you been here before?
8:23 Brad And like, I was there like an hour ago,
8:26 Brad I'm still hungry,
8:26 Brad I'm coming back for more. It's, it's, it's like you are, it's like you're just getting read a script.
8:32 Brad And so I felt like
8:35 Brad So there's lots of cool ways that we can change that narrative for restaurants and for hospitality,
8:40 Brad maybe in general. And so I'm glad that that was sort of your takeaway from your experience,
8:46 Brad because that's what it's all about.
8:48 Justin Cool.
8:48 Justin So you exited the chicken shack and then what?
8:54 Brad Well,
8:55 Brad not exactly.
8:56 Brad So.
8:59 Brad As part of the restaurant thing,
9:01 Brad I ended up building out a new platform.
9:07 Brad whole different story as to why we didn't use toast and build on top of that or square or any of those existing pos platforms but uh but you know the short of it is there's a lot of customized things that i wanted to do and it was not possible to extend any of these sort of out of the box platforms and so wound up really built like everything at mount joy is 100 homegrown there's no like we're not we're not
9:32 Brad Not using any vendors for our technology,
9:34 Brad which like, by the way, do not recommend that my advice to other people is not to do that.
9:43 Brad However,
9:44 Brad if you make that mistake and you do that and you stick with it long enough that you work out the problems that are inherent in that approach.
9:55 Brad There are incredible benefits and synergies that you get and there's no other way to get them like in a minute I'll explain to you where the messaging platform that I'm working on today.
10:07 Brad comes into this but uh that whole thing is integrated 100 into every aspect of the pos into the kitchen system in the back is uh it's a synergy like i just haven't witnessed really before because it's not usually the way people build things so anyway um
10:26 Brad Built this platform for the restaurant,
10:27 Brad and it took, like, I would say six to eight months before just the basic point of sale aspect of it worked well.
10:36 Brad I could tell you some real horror stories about how it didn't work along the way and, you know, having chefs behind me yelling,
10:44 Brad when are the tickets going to print?
10:46 Brad It was like an episode of The Bear.
10:49 Brad It was really quite traumatic as a software engineer.
10:52 Brad engineer but um but eventually it started to work and then I got the chance to start experimenting and doing the stuff that was you know really the reason I got into this business and the first the first thing that I tried uh was elaborating on the text message like at Mount Joy you get a text after you place an order it tells you about how long we think it's going to take and um and then you get another one when it's ready to come pick it up right
11:17 Brad And I always sort of felt like that period of time is just empty space as far as hospitality, like waiting time at any place, I don't care if it's like a dentist's office or a restaurant,
11:29 Brad is just completely taken for granted and certainly not taken advantage of by the company.
11:37 Justin I'd like to note that
11:39 Justin Justin referred to the dentist office
11:41 Brad As
11:41 Justin as hospitality.
11:42 Brad hospitality.
11:43 Brad Yes.
11:44 Brad Well,
11:45 Brad you know, my definition of hospitality has definitely broadened since I've started this venture.
11:51 Brad But I really do I see all of these places as opportunities to serve people and largely opportunities that we don't really do a good job serving people.
12:03 Justin So you're waiting for your sandwich.
12:04 Brad You're waiting for your sandwich.
12:08 Brad I thought maybe people would be interested in having a conversation with us during that period of time.
12:12 Brad And so I started with a small thing,
12:16 Brad actually.
12:18 Brad somehow hooked into our juke to our speaker system where we play music at the restaurant and i figured i'll see if people want to make song requests like it's always more fun to be at a place when it's your kind of jam going on right and everyone did it like uh as soon as they got their text telling them that they could do it people did it and it was i don't remember if this was always part of it i'd love to say it was always
12:43 Brad It's always part of the plan or if it just occurred to me after the fact, but there was this beautiful thing about that feature that now I know what kind of music this person likes.
12:55 Brad The next time they walk in the door,
12:57 Brad they don't need to ask for it.
13:00 Brad we can just start putting on the music that they enjoy and so it was like this magical thing where like my goal was just to make people not feel like strangers the second time they come to to our place and like this just this accomplished that so easily and people noticed it like they were like people like the messages early on from people were just uh number one they were like
13:24 Brad shocked and delighted and incredibly complimentary of what they were seeing and the other thing I would say about it it was it was sort of sad that that was the bar like it was so easy like you don't even need a messaging system that to accomplish that like you just write down like if you have someone coming in all the time so anyways you know that's not that's not something that I'd seen done and it's not something apparently anybody who came to our restaurant has ever seen done and so
13:49 Brad That was the first little bite of the apple there.
13:51 Brad And then it sort of evolved with anything else I could think of.
13:56 Brad One of the nice things about being a tech organization and product organization combined of one person is I can try everything.
14:04 Brad Like I don't have much standing in my way of friction. And so I did.
14:11 Justin Right about this same time that you were doing all this experimentation with.
14:15 Justin with personalization and you know you kind of found this magical moment of um just the the fact that just knowing the person's favorite songs gave them this sense of connection to the hospitality that you guys were providing right about that same time that's kind of when the llm boom started to really happen and i have to imagine that that that was a nice serendipity
14:40 Justin Yeah, no,
14:41 Justin for sure.
14:42 Justin I think, well, as you probably know about me, I'm the earliest of the early adopters. And in fact, I had actually been using GPT, I think it was GPT2.
14:57 Brad When we were all at 98.6, and there's, I confirmed it like a couple months ago, because I was just curious,
15:03 Brad there's still a message in the data science channel where I'm pitching as a non-data scientist, of course, we should use GPT-2.
15:10 Brad I like have a whole demo of how it could work. And so I've been following this stuff for a while.
15:19 Brad But it definitely became better over the last, obviously, over the last couple of years.
15:24 Brad And so, you know, it occurs to me, I have this messaging platform.
15:29 Brad Why would I ever even send a single canned transactional text,
15:33 Brad period.
15:34 Brad And so.
15:36 Brad Once that sort of light bulb went off,
15:38 Brad everything about the conversation changed.
15:41 Brad In fact, if you go to Mount Joy today and place an order,
15:44 Brad your text with Mount Joy doesn't look like a text thread with a company.
15:50 Brad It looks like a text that you're having with,
15:53 Brad I wouldn't call it like a friend,
15:55 Brad but it's somewhere between a person you know and a company instead.
16:01 Brad So every message is personalized and it uses the entire conversation history to inform how it acts and what it does.
16:10 Brad And there's all these cool things you can do with that.
16:13 Brad Like we ask people,
16:15 Brad for example, how they like the food at the end of their meal, like how their experience was,
16:20 Brad which,
16:21 Brad by the way, is how we are able to.
16:25 Brad get more positive Google reviews,
16:27 Brad which is very important for restaurants because our LLM can rank and determine what the likelihood of this person giving us positive feedback is and then we send them a link.
16:37 Brad But beyond that,
16:39 Brad there's just all this information besides the music and their feedback that we're getting on a regular basis from people who are just talking because they're waiting.
16:48 Brad with us and we operationalize that like somebody will say after one meal you know I loved the
16:57 Brad the chipotle lime sauce with the fries that was so amazing so the next time they come you know we'll we'll give them a free sample or a sample of sauce on top of their order just so that they can try the other ones and stuff like that and there's all these surprises that get baked into the experience because we have this conversation that you know extends over the lifespan of the customer history
17:20 Brad So, the LLM is the only way that's possible.
17:24 Brad You know, being able to take all this loose text content and actually understand what you can do with it until,
17:32 Brad you know, these modern APIs became available,
17:35 Brad you could not,
17:37 Brad it was not possible to do what we're doing.
17:40 Justin Yeah.
17:41 Justin So I think that one of the things that's pretty cool about this story,
17:45 Justin Justin,
17:45 Justin and I think it's.
17:47 Justin It's useful to kind of unpack this is that you you're really like you said earlier a few minutes ago, you kind of said like one of the reasons you've been able to move as fast as you have is because essentially you're you're a small team.
18:01 Justin I don't I don't know how big your team is at this point. I don't know if it's just you or if you've got a couple other folks on the team as well, but you're small and you sort of like unencumbered unencumbered by.
18:13 Justin tech debt unencumbered by process maybe what so so tell us a little bit about that like you know you know a small dev team what's that experience like and maybe contrast it to where you and Scott and I worked together most recently which was health tech company with hundreds of engineers and and lots of process and bureaucracy behind it
18:36 Brad Well, I think you guys both knew at the time that I was frustrated at 98.6 often.
18:44 Brad And I wouldn't say that this was a pervasive feeling there necessarily, but given my sensibilities,
18:50 Brad I often felt like, why aren't things changing?
18:55 Brad Like, why isn't the ball apparently moving?
19:01 Brad And so, you know, I think the thing that I've learned over the past several years since then is the bigger the team gets,
19:08 Brad the slower you're going to go and there's nothing you can do to change that. That's just human dynamics.
19:14 Brad And you asked if the team is small or just me. And the truth is the team is just me.
19:19 Brad Like you don't have a budget for a second.
19:22 Brad technology person in the restaurant business and so um yeah you barely have a budget for the one um and so the the reality is uh it's just been me and that has been uh as fast i think as you can get now the the interesting thing for me along this story is when we started
19:44 Brad There were, you know, it hadn't been like the, this was before ChatGPT was released. Okay.
19:49 Brad And so while there was some stuff out there,
19:52 Brad it had not become mainstream and coding tools certainly like there was Copilot that could sort of help you auto.
19:59 Brad complete some of your, you know, enum switch statements and stuff like that, but you didn't have AI writing code,
20:06 Brad right?
20:07 Brad And it wasn't that fast.
20:11 Brad Like, it took a while to write some of this stuff.
20:13 Brad I remember I was writing our, like, iOS and Android guest ordering apps right up until the day that we opened.
20:21 Brad And it didn't work that great for that reason.
20:26 Brad And so...
20:28 Brad Fast forward to the release of ChatGPT and then fast forward a little bit farther to a tool like CloudCode,
20:35 Brad which I now use pretty much every day.
20:40 Brad This is a true story. It just happened over the past week.
20:43 Brad We've had iOS and Android guest ordering apps since the restaurant started,
20:48 Brad and we've had an iOS based staff.
20:53 Brad platform i always wanted like the staff whether you're working at the restaurant on a tablet or you're at home and you have your phone i wanted people to be able to have the entire restaurant at their fingertips like in their pocket and so i built that on ios but i'm not as fast of an android developer and i don't particularly enjoy it as much just because it's not what i'm used to and so i never got around to doing it and at some point in time like the person who needs
21:20 Brad who needed it most ended up being someone who was never going to switch off of Android.
21:23 Brad So this guy Antonio,
21:25 Brad he's the president of Mount Joy,
21:27 Brad has for the last seven to eight months been operating,
21:32 Brad needing to go into the restaurant onto one of our tablets to access our data,
21:35 Brad which is crazy.
21:37 Brad And I know you're probably thinking, why didn't you just build a web thing?
21:41 Brad I'm going to push that question aside and answer the question that I wanted to answer,
21:45 Brad which is, what did I do to get that Android thing off the ground?
21:50 Brad Last week, I put Claude code on the job of taking the iOS app and creating the Android variant,
21:58 Brad and it took two days, and it's done, and it's out.
22:02 Brad And so when
22:03 Scott wait it
22:04 Brad I...
22:04 Scott took you two days or it took claude two days
22:07 Brad It took the two of us two days.
22:09 Scott The two of us.
22:10 Brad Yeah,
22:11 Scott Just
22:12 Brad well, it's
22:12 Scott for the two of us.
22:13 Brad it's interesting because
22:14 Scott We
22:14 Brad it is
22:15 Scott can make
22:15 Brad the two it it
22:15 Scott if we try.
22:18 Brad is the two though like you're i've heard some of your guys clips from this podcast and people come on and talk about ai with you know the whole range of opinions right like on how good it is and uh and often i hear people say well you know it doesn't get it all right like you need a human to moderate and um my hot take on ai
22:39 Brad Is that it's quite, quite a bit better than any of the devs who are talking about how it's not quite that good.
22:48 Brad The challenge today is in how you're using it.
22:53 Brad When I say I was able to get Claude code to transform the code base into Android in two days,
22:58 Brad I think.
23:01 Brad That's actually where my background in writing native mobile apps was helpful because it's an incredible technical code or it can come in on like a cute section of your code base and just do things probably better than you.
23:16 Brad That's my opinion.
23:19 Brad will struggle to do something like a big task like let's refactor an entire code base without the right direction and it doesn't get everything right and so it would have taken two weeks it could have taken forever had I not had some background in what I was trying to have it help me do and so I think it's it's you know we're talking about velocity and the bottom line is now I go
23:45 Brad faster than I think I thought ever possible.
23:48 Brad And it's scary.
23:51 Scott You know, I think there's something interesting about your situation with relationship to cloud.
23:58 Scott You've been the only engineer working on your app.
24:01 Scott So when it went to go make an Android version for your iOS version,
24:06 Scott it was kind of probably a pretty consistent set of patterns within your app.
24:11 Scott versus if you and I and Brad were all working on it, we would try to align and follow the same patterns, but I'm sure we'd all do stuff differently, right?
24:18 Scott You asked, I saw in your questions earlier,
24:19 Scott you asked about tabs or spaces.
24:21 Scott I mean,
24:22 Scott that's a little pedantic example,
24:24 Scott but like I wonder if the AI was able to be especially effective in a world where only one person wrote the source because it was able to interpret that more easily.
24:35 Brad That's an interesting question.
24:37 Scott Here's the other thing I wondered,
24:38 Scott totally different than AI,
24:40 Scott this comes back to Mount Joy,
24:42 Scott which is not only were you kind of the whole, the truly full stack team.
24:50 Scott what you are doing well maybe i could be wrong it seems like mountain joy actually makes its money doing something else which is selling chicken sandwiches or other types of food products i'm not sure the whole menu i've never been to a mountain but maybe i'll go today as a matter of fact and um i wonder if having the technology be in a you know
25:16 Scott In addition to the core business actually gave you gives you in addition to being a solo person gives you some freedom to experiment maybe in ways that if it was the business it was the core you know companies feel more apprehensive about that experimentation.
25:33 Scott Because the consequences were different. If the music experiment didn't work,
25:37 Scott the consequences were very low, right?
25:39 Brad Yeah, yeah.
25:41 Brad I don't think it existed in the kind of silo that maybe I've depicted it as being in or the way that you're framing exactly.
25:50 Brad Certainly not at first.
25:52 Brad The way the restaurant evolved,
25:54 Brad like all the founders,
25:55 Brad myself included,
25:56 Brad we were all working pretty closely together and we
25:59 Scott It was decentralized.
26:00 Brad had.
26:01 Brad It was. And I think the things that I owned really were product,
26:06 Brad non-food product and tech.
26:08 Brad And as time went on, it did, and the team changed, it did sort of evolve into more of an isolated thing. But just to give you an example.
26:24 Brad One of the things that really moved the ball in a big way with this platform,
26:28 Brad maybe in the biggest way,
26:29 Brad was our marketing team was frustrated at our lack of ability to get email addresses on our website.
26:38 Brad Yeah,
26:39 Brad most people just don't go to a restaurant website.
26:41 Brad And if they do go, they're there for one reason and it has nothing to do with giving you an email address.
26:46 Brad And
26:46 Scott What's the reason?
26:47 Brad check in your menu.
26:49 Brad I was going to go a different direction with it, but I think you're right,
26:52 Brad Brad,
26:52 Brad that's that is the answer.
26:54 Brad The.
26:57 Brad The truth is, personally,
26:59 Brad I hate giving my email address ever in any circumstance,
27:03 Brad and I was very protective of all of the sort of levers that I had control of.
27:09 Brad in terms of like asking people for it. I resisted the entire way from the very beginning asking for an email address at checkout,
27:17 Brad even an optional one where you can not check the box and not put in your email just because I hate that experience and I feel like ordering food should be about ordering food.
27:27 Brad It shouldn't be about like ordering food and opting into marketing.
27:31 Brad So anyways,
27:32 Brad this is an example of how we were able to move fast, but how we were actually a very integrated unit.
27:42 Brad Robbie was like, you need to sit down with Carrie.
27:45 Brad Carrie was the person helping us with marketing at the time. She's like, you guys got to sit down and just figure this out because like marketing is frustrated. They can't reach, they can't talk to people and you're obviously gatekeeping quite a bit in, you know, in the name of a good cause, in the name of a good consumer experience. But even so, there's more to running a business than the customer experience.
28:05 Brad And so we met and
28:07 Brad That led to this idea,
28:08 Brad which has gone big,
28:12 Brad I guess you would say, of a game.
28:15 Brad One thing I had been thinking about doing anyways as my next sort of like random idea was putting a leaderboard on the screen at the restaurant,
28:24 Brad like unlike 98.6 or really any other.
28:28 Brad kind of business restaurants like this incredible thing that exists in a neighborhood in a community it's a physical space there are very few examples of businesses these days where people willingly come in and even stay to experience your product like that's part of the thing and uh and so i was always looking for an opportunity to try to like
28:53 Brad Build a community around that place.
28:55 Brad Make people feel like they're part of something more than just a discreet transaction,
29:00 Brad eat and leave.
29:02 Brad Not to mention one of the challenges restaurants have is you come in and you eat and then you're not interacting with the restaurant again for another month.
29:09 Brad So all that time in between,
29:11 Brad there's no touch points,
29:12 Brad there's no,
29:13 Brad the brand is not on their mind at all, etc.
29:17 Brad So I had this thought I would do a leaderboard with a game and the leaderboard would be on our TV screens when you walk past a mountain joy and Capitol Hill,
29:25 Brad our garage is open and you can see the screen from the sidewalk.
29:28 Brad And so I was like, if I just put like an arcade style leaderboard where it says that the top players, I don't know, I'm not even going to explain it beyond that.
29:36 Brad It's just going to be that people,
29:37 Brad people are going to come in and they're going to be curious because people like a game and they're competitive.
29:41 Brad And, and if it says neighborhood leaderboard on it.
29:44 Brad and they're going to be like well i live in this neighborhood why am i not on the leaderboard and this was another you know this was another dart that i threw and by the way there were a lot of darts i threw that did not hit i'm just not talking about those ones because i want to paint myself in the best possible light on your podcast
30:01 Brad But this start did land right in the middle. And we put this up. And the reason I pitched this in the context of the marketing meeting with Carrie is because I said, after they play this game that we're going to do by text, because that's what we're going to do everything by,
30:17 Brad that's our app.
30:19 Brad We'll ask them for their email address if they want to put their name on the leaderboard and we'll actually incentivize them to do it because they'll be able to use their score as a discount at the store.
30:29 Brad And better yet, if they make it to first place, they can eat for free as long as they.
30:34 Brad maintain first place
30:35 Scott Wow.
30:35 Brad so again these synergies that you can do because the point of sale is my platform and it is completely in the same code base as the messaging stack can do anything right and so all these synergies existed we built this system and I think a week later
30:51 Brad launch the game and you guys you guys should try it sometime it's uh it's a word riddle that I write every single day I've been doing it now for about 370 days so one riddle each day and it goes out in the morning to people who subscribe so every morning we send out about 4,000
31:12 Brad right now text messages containing this game and people play it and so starting around 8 a.m if i look at like the messaging sort of dashboard it just starts going absolutely berserk and all those people have given their email address and what's even better about it is the aftermath of the game after you solve it
31:34 Brad I write like a crazy rant,
31:35 Brad sort of like what I'm saying, like the words that are coming out of my mouth right now, just like pick a random topic and that's what I write a paragraph about.
31:41 Brad And that goes out in the post solve blurb in via text.
31:47 Brad So people get this blurb and then they respond to it.
31:50 Brad and have a conversation about it by text,
31:53 Brad and we learn more about them.
31:55 Brad Like the other day, I did a puzzle where the answer was interstates, like interstate highways,
32:01 Brad and I listed some of the interstates that I've spent the most time, you know, sitting in traffic on,
32:05 Brad and everyone wrote back, and we know like everyone's interstates where they travel.
32:10 Brad And now when they come back, that's part of the conversation that we can give them.
32:15 Brad And part of the customization that we can give them in the restaurant. And so for me, the email address was like, how do I get how do I check this box so that like everyone's happy?
32:25 Brad But it turned out we don't use email address at all.
32:28 Brad I think we still might even ask for it as like a relic of that original idea.
32:33 Brad But we are having actual conversations 24 seven with thousands of people and some of them.
32:41 Brad aren't even customers yet they just see the thing from the sidewalk and then they become customers because our bot gets them over time so it's been been crazy yeah
32:50 Justin It's so interesting to think about. And obviously this is sort of been this is this is not going to be a novel idea that I'm saying,
32:58 Justin but it does feel like the the weight that the one of the pieces of magic that the LLMs did was this notion of introducing.
33:08 Justin a chat like really making a chat bot really actually a viable thing and um i mean we've had chat bots you know one of the earliest computer programs you know liza or whatever was this notion of this really primitive chat bot but
33:25 Justin They're so much richer now with the power of LLMs.
33:29 Justin And so it's really,
33:30 Justin it's a fun story,
33:32 Justin Justin, and it makes sense that you've, you know, you've been this, you know, you had a use case that was really appropriate and on
33:43 Scott Yeah.
33:43 Justin target and you've run with
33:47 Scott Yeah.
33:47 Justin it.
33:48 Scott I mean, you're taking that notion of CRM, customer relationship management.
33:52 Scott To a new level to really that to the AI to the LLM the AI level right and I'm listening to this and thinking about this
34:03 Scott is this is going to be the table stakes for everybody.
34:06 Scott Right.
34:07 Justin Yeah,
34:07 Justin and presumably that's the idea, right?
34:09 Justin Like, is that where you're at now is it's more than just the platform for Mount Joy?
34:14 Justin Are you kind of taking this to the next level to take it to other hospitality providers like my local dentist?
34:21 Brad I mean, if we can't get your local dentist, then there's no business here at all. But I believe that in the future,
34:28 Brad everyone will be.
34:30 Brad Having text message interactions with companies.
34:33 Brad They're not going to be looking up like a customer service number on a website and hoping that they can reach a human being.
34:39 Brad It's not people don't enjoy that.
34:41 Brad But people we have proven with the Mount Joy model people do text and they they like to do it.
34:47 Brad And so I'm not just for complaints.
34:49 Brad So yeah,
34:50 Brad the idea here is, you know, we've been working with some potential early partners to
34:56 Brad That aren't restaurants,
34:58 Brad by the way, like a professional sports team and
35:01 Scott Yeah,
35:01 Brad and other restaurants as well.
35:04 Justin Yeah,
35:04 Brad But yeah.
35:04 Justin obviously, it's like like Scott said,
35:06 Justin this is like customer relationship management.
35:08 Justin Everybody's got a customer wants to engage that that and grow that relationship. Makes sense.
35:13 Justin I love it.
35:14 Justin That's very cool.
35:15 Scott Can I ask a different question, kind of a different topic,
35:20 Scott Justin?
35:21 Brad Yeah, I love it
35:22 Scott You mentioned you had, you know, an iOS app,
35:25 Scott an Android app.
35:26 Scott It sounds like there's some stuff for the kitchen,
35:28 Scott a point of sale system, all these different parts.
35:31 Scott And I was thinking about two different things, and I'm just curious if you would share about them. The first was...
35:39 Scott Is that all a monolith?
35:40 Scott Is it one big system?
35:42 Scott Or how, what is it?
35:43 Justin I knew Scott was going to go here.
35:47 Justin I actually wanted to ask a very similar question.
35:50 Scott And
35:50 Justin Go,
35:50 Scott another
35:50 Justin Scott,
35:51 Justin go.
35:51 Scott was,
35:51 Justin This is great.
35:51 Scott you know, at the beginning when it was just you and there were all these different parts that had to get done.
35:58 Scott I'm just wondering, and this is a little bit for maybe other people who are listening or thinking,
36:02 Scott I want to start my own thing, like, how did you tackle that problem? Because it could have, I would imagine maybe perhaps it felt a little overwhelming.
36:09 Scott And I'm wondering just how you tackled that problem. Those are kind of the two thoughts I had about this or questions I had about this.
36:14 Justin And
36:15 Justin I want to throw a little bit of flavor.
36:17 Justin Let me throw a little bit of a sauce on top Let's of Scott's
36:20 Scott make a
36:21 Justin little
36:21 Scott if you will
36:21 Justin paprika on top of Scott's question.
36:25 Justin You know, one of the things that.
36:27 Justin we often run into as engineering leaders is sort of like dealing with the decisions of yesteryear.
36:36 Justin And so Scott's asking the monolith question,
36:39 Justin but I'm kind of curious,
36:40 Justin Justin, you know, along Scott's line of questioning,
36:43 Justin how are you how are you making sure that you're not digging yourself into a hole for the future?
36:52 Brad I mean,
36:53 Brad the honest answer is I'm not like nobody is every what you just said doesn't change.
37:00 Brad It's an endless cycle of people making decisions and then new people coming in and hating on those decisions.
37:07 Brad And maybe that's the way it should be.
37:09 Brad But I can tell you the decisions that I made and I can tell you why I made them. The.
37:17 Brad I think for context,
37:19 Brad the thing that I was working on right before I started this was the 98.6 code base. And I remember my first day there.
37:28 Brad And let me let me start by saying I have tons of respect for everyone I worked with there.
37:34 Brad And it will be very easy for someone in the future to come and say the same thing about my code base as I'm about to say about this one.
37:43 Brad A hundred percent.
37:44 Brad But you remember the things that were hard, right?
37:47 Brad Like I remember my first day,
37:48 Brad I was given the GitHub repo to clone and told,
37:54 Brad let's start getting familiar,
37:56 Brad build the project.
37:58 Brad First,
37:58 Brad it was hard for me to clone the repo because I didn't have the right,
38:01 Brad you know, token,
38:02 Brad like even just these small administrative things that people,
38:05 Brad you know, take for granted because you just do them.
38:08 Brad They're not easy.
38:09 Brad They're not easy steps, even for a season that like it takes time.
38:11 Brad So it took me time to figure out how to get the repo onto my computer.
38:14 Brad And then it took me the first several days to get the project. I was an iOS engineer then to get the iOS app to build.
38:23 Brad in Xcode there were all these dependencies and all these things that were you know they were done in the name of efficiency and you know code safety and formatting and all that stuff right but it took a ton of time just to get all these dependencies to work in the environment that was my work computer and so I remember looking back at that when I started this thinking
38:48 Brad I don't know what the tradeoff exactly will be from this,
38:51 Brad but what I want to have be the result is that when we bring on our first new engineer,
38:56 Brad it takes him 30 seconds to start building and running and working in 30 seconds.
39:02 Brad If it takes longer than that, then that's the failure of the setup.
39:07 Brad And as a result, I.
39:10 Brad You know, the short answer to your question,
39:12 Brad is it a monolith,
39:12 Brad is yes.
39:15 Brad I am a huge fan.
39:18 Scott So Justin,
39:20 Scott you love a monolith?
39:22 Brad Yeah,
39:23 Brad I love a monolith because if you separate things,
39:26 Brad then they drift apart.
39:29 Brad And a monolith is a, I guess it's a pattern really that enforces keeping things moving as one ship.
39:36 Brad It is easier for me to preach the benefits of a monolith as a one-person team.
39:42 Brad I don't have anyone complaining about the potential pain points associated with having a monolith.
39:50 Brad Maybe I guess most of the people who listen to this know what a monolith is,
39:54 Brad but I'll just add some color to this, at least in my case, a monolith is having...
39:59 Brad all of the projects,
40:01 Brad all of the code bases for the Mountjoy ecosystem in one GitHub repo.
40:06 Brad That's what I'm talking about at least.
40:11 Brad And, you know, at the beginning,
40:12 Brad there were two priorities that I was talking about.
40:15 Brad One of them was I wanted it to be.
40:17 Brad super easy for the next person who comes to start you know whether or not they like the code that they see uh was was another question but i wanted them to be able to jump in easily um and i think that one is still the case uh you know whoever else looks at this code can still use it um
40:35 Scott Hey, Justin,
40:36 Scott can I ask a kind of like a nerdy?
40:40 Scott like in the weeds type technical
40:41 Brad Please,
40:41 Scott question
40:41 Brad yeah, yeah,
40:42 Scott for
40:42 Brad I never
40:42 Scott you but
40:43 Brad get to like talk
40:43 Scott clearly
40:43 Brad to people.
40:43 Scott clearly you have like you've got your app you've got your mobile apps and you've got this back-end service that's doing something and then you've got this other app which is this point of sale app so you definitely have different components to it it makes sense you are in a monorepo that that makes a ton of sense but how do you
41:04 Scott How are you solving the problem of like essentially component compatibility,
41:09 Scott right?
41:09 Scott Since you're not able to, you obviously can't like snap your finger and get your latest iOS app version released like because of the nature of Apple and its,
41:20 Scott you know, guards that it's got up.
41:23 Scott So.
41:25 Scott I'm just kind of curious, like as far as like thinking of it like a monolith versus thinking of it as at least these components that have to interact with each other in a logical way, I'm just kind of curious, like what's what's your take on that?
41:39 Brad Well, first of all, I don't do that many releases of our guest app.
41:43 Brad In fact, I had very high aspirations for what the guest ordering experience on a phone would be.
41:50 Brad I had lots of like crazy thoughts about the way it would work, how we would change the landscape for that.
41:57 Brad And the sad truth,
42:00 Brad I don't know if it's sad, it is the truth though, is people don't want to download a restaurant app.
42:04 Brad Like people want a couple social media apps on their phone and then a couple utilities and that's all they want when it comes to apps.
42:11 Brad And so people would rather use the tablets that we put in the store.
42:15 Brad The upshot of that is I don't have any delay on releases.
42:21 Brad In fact, I built out this deployment system that lets me,
42:26 Brad I can make a code change right now and in 10 seconds.
42:30 Brad 25 tablets,
42:31 Brad eight Apple TVs,
42:33 Brad four Macs, this whole ecosystem of basically iOS,
42:38 Brad macOS, and tvOS products,
42:40 Brad all update with the same thing,
42:42 Brad which brings me to the other.
42:46 Brad decision that I made that was related to this monolith one code base within the monolith to the extent possible obviously it was I did not make the trade-off on like a react native kind of thing to do Android so Android is its special flower in the code base to some extent but beyond that there are only two code bases there's one that has everything like
43:12 Brad On my phone,
43:13 Brad I can open the same screen that is running the TV that has the leaderboard on it that I told you about,
43:19 Brad because it's all the same app, which means that I'm sharing all the same code across the entire thing.
43:26 Brad There's never.
43:27 Brad a single thing that's duplicated whether it's like a design asset or a functionality of some sort when and what's cool about that is i told you we send like a text message with this game right every morning it's the same code
43:43 Brad that puts that lets me program the game in our ios app that generates the puzzle that goes out on our back end um so there's just this incredible as i've said i love these synergies that you get from having one thing um and not only do you get them when you have one platform in a restaurant between like the back of house and front of house and customers and all that but you definitely get huge gains uh in my experience by doing it this way
44:09 Brad as a developer and so the only two code bases that I really work in for like if I named all of the targets that we build products for at the restaurant you'd be surprised that like the quantity it's like there's there's a target that does
44:27 Brad QR code scanning for just just for that for like we have a this is actually sort of cool we have a camera that sits above the counter where the expo person the person who's you know the last line before a customer gets an order is working and if they slide a tray that has the receipt on it
44:44 Brad under this counter in a certain zone it automatically marks the orders ready so it's sort of like you know sort of like a sliding something past uh the grocery checkout um but just it's in the air so like they don't have to think about it and there's a whole app just for that but it's part of the same
45:02 Brad staff based app target and so it's made it very efficient to make changes and anytime I change something it you know the benefits of one change actually are benefits to other parts of the app rather than potential pain points or you know bug
45:18 Brad that that would surface uh there's a lot of tech debt too uh i don't want to like paint any like overly miraculous pictures of what i have uh i think the biggest tech debt that you would see if you looked at my code base is just the result of laziness and going fast um like and i would say that's particularly true in the back end so the entire back end stack is serverless
45:41 Brad I made a decision at the very beginning that this is the way that this code base can grow alongside clients without A,
45:51 Brad breaking all the time and with the ability to scale infinitely and me not having to learn how to do that with like a machine.
45:59 Brad And so the entire code base is a bunch of lambdas and honestly the
46:05 Brad The thing I'm most proud of, and I'll stop after this, of all of the things that I've done, it's just funny, I never get to talk about this. There's no one else on my team who has any interest in what we're discussing here.
46:17 Brad But when I make a change,
46:19 Brad I press a button.
46:22 Brad And if I'm really confident about that change,
46:24 Brad I press a different button and it promotes it to all three environments at the same time,
46:28 Brad which honestly I do that sometimes because I'm a bit of a cowboy.
46:33 Brad But when I press that button,
46:36 Brad it commits the change that I made to the repo and then a GitHub action runs and the GitHub action when it's done and it takes it about 10 minutes to finish.
46:49 Brad It deploys every single thing that we have,
46:53 Brad every single place.
46:55 Brad Like if you were watching on the surveillance cameras at our restaurants,
46:58 Brad you'd see 25 different screens all update one after the other.
47:03 Brad You would see, if you look at our AWS dashboard,
47:06 Brad the entire backend redeploys. Even the things that weren't changed,
47:09 Brad we'd redeploy the entire CDK template with each deploy and all the logic is in there.
47:15 Brad So there's nothing to like there's no questions to ask like I redeployed my services should I go check the server either the server was working or it wasn't but
47:25 Brad These deployments aren't changing infrastructure anymore.
47:28 Brad I'm just adding business logic at this point. And so it's incredibly powerful and it makes me it's made me wonder why, you know, everyone doesn't use serverless for everything.
47:38 Brad But that's the pattern to answer your question.
47:40 Brad And I've been pretty happy Wait with it.
47:42 Scott a second. How is the serverless tech debt?
47:46 Brad The serverless. Oh,
47:47 Brad right.
47:48 Brad I did bring it up in that context.
47:50 Brad I think that there's two ways that it's tech debt.
47:53 Brad The main way is that I am.
47:56 Brad probably a shitty back-end architect.
47:59 Brad This was my first back-end that I've worked on,
48:03 Brad and I chose an architecture that I also was completely unfamiliar with,
48:09 Brad but liked the bullet points on.
48:12 Brad And so if you look at the way that it's built, like there are things that I know that are wrong that I've just decided are acceptable,
48:18 Brad like whereas in the iOS code base there's no...
48:22 Brad There's no duplicated code.
48:23 Brad If you actually went on our AWS dashboard and looked at the code inside of the Lambdas, for example, that run,
48:31 Brad it's I mean, you would you would vomit. It's just like the same huge chunks because I'm like importing a method from here there and I'm not using Lambda layers to do it. And all these things that like are the right patterns if all you do.
48:48 Brad It's back end and serverless and that's the way you do it I have not done those things and they're not that hard to do.
48:53 Brad I just haven't done them.
48:54 Brad So there's a lot of debt.
48:57 Justin The other thing, Justin,
48:58 Justin you said that we kind of blew by, which I think is the most extant thing we might have had in this entire podcast.
49:04 Justin We're on about episode 15 now,
49:06 Justin I think. Isn't that right,
49:06 Justin Brad?
49:07 Justin 16,
49:07 Brad No
49:07 Justin 17, something
49:07 Brad way.
49:08 Justin like that.
49:09 Justin You said.
49:10 Justin Tech debt is the result,
49:12 Justin well actually before I say this,
49:14 Justin we're always looking,
49:15 Justin as an industry we're always trying to find a definition for tech debt,
49:18 Justin right?
49:18 Justin What does tech debt,
49:20 Justin what does tech debt,
49:21 Justin you said tech debt is the result of laziness and speed,
49:26 Justin I think is that what you said?
49:27 Brad Yeah
49:28 Justin Tech debt, that's it,
49:29 Justin tech debt, that's it, that's all it is. It's the negative results of laziness and speed.
49:35 Justin Is that what tech dead is?
49:36 Brad I think so.
49:37 Brad I mean, it's intentional laziness. It's not like you're just accidentally lazy,
49:41 Brad but like you want to go fast. And so you know that you could go slower
49:44 Justin No,
49:44 Brad and
49:45 Justin some people are
49:45 Brad do something with a pattern,
49:46 Brad but yeah,
49:47 Justin just lazy.
49:48 Justin They just don't want to take the time to do it.
49:50 Brad that's true.
49:52 Brad That's true.
49:52 Brad It can be that too.
49:53 Justin Laziness and speed.
49:54 Scott You know, it's funny,
49:56 Scott Justin,
49:57 Scott there's a part of this story where I'm like.
50:01 Scott I mean,
50:02 Scott I'm super bullish on AI-assisted coding,
50:06 Scott and I think that there are going to be more and more businesses that are essentially like one developer that knows how to,
50:17 Scott knows what they want, and just builds their own version. So there's a part of the story of this platform.
50:28 Scott that it's it's kind of of the time in that it's possible because of the time not only because of the sort of like engagement that you talk about being very much dependent on llms but there's this other part of like you saying yourself that like you're so much faster um in this environment by yourself cowboy up
50:52 Scott Coding with you and your your cloud code,
50:55 Scott you know co-pilot
50:58 Scott co-worker and
50:59 Scott You're unencumbered. I think we're gonna hear more and more and more of this
51:04 Justin I have an insight about that to add to that,
51:06 Justin Brad,
51:06 Justin that I've been actually thinking about for this whole call.
51:10 Justin The insight is that Justin is also the product manager,
51:14 Justin that he has the talent to, he had...
51:19 Justin both the vision and the talent to be the product manager and the engineer and i was thinking back earlier just and made this comment about how well you know when teams get bigger they get slower it's just how it is and i was thinking about as we were talking i was just kind of thinking that is true but why is it that way and one of the thoughts that came to my mind as i was thinking about it earlier was
51:41 Justin Is it that they get slower because there's more engineers or do they get slower because there's more product managers?
51:48 Justin And I think, I don't know if it's one or the other, but what I think the combination of it is like there's a tremendous expense of trying to understand what some other person wants you to do.
52:07 Brad That's
52:07 Justin Right?
52:07 Brad it.
52:08 Justin That's it.
52:09 Justin So it's just a, I don't know how,
52:10 Justin and then when you multiply that to say a dozen, you know, many product managers and many, many engineers, and it probably becomes like a exponential complexity there in terms of getting everybody to agree on what we all want, what we all want to do.
52:27 Justin And I think maybe that's where some of the slowness comes from.
52:32 Justin Justin has the vision and the talent to be that person together.
52:36 Scott yeah 100 that's gotta be it that's gotta be i mean i just think about like all the teams i've been on and even the team i'm on right now which we're super small we only have one product owner but but you know just explain just getting everybody to agree what it says on the card like what wait what's this what's this mean exactly and it's like it's you literally it's like the word like
52:57 Scott Like we can spend all this time and energy trying to make those words right and that's all wasted time because for Justin,
53:04 Scott it's like he has the idea.
53:07 Scott He knows what it is. He doesn't need to explain it to anybody and he just gets to build it.
53:11 Justin Highest fidelity communication,
53:13 Justin just right in your own brain.
53:14 Brad Yeah.
53:15 Brad Yeah.
53:16 Brad I mean, just to offer a counterpoint to all that.
53:18 Brad Thank you for the kind things you're saying, but it's.
53:23 Brad I do believe that like the best things are built by groups of people coming together.
53:29 Brad And I think that there is a good question to be asked and answered that Scott was going at before,
53:36 Brad which is, you know, is it necessary that they get so much slower as they grow?
53:41 Brad And I think you absolutely hit on the reason they're slow is because as the distance between the idea.
53:49 Brad And the way that you execute that idea grows,
53:51 Brad processes come in and take time. And that's what it is.
53:56 Brad But I think if there's any maybe if there's any sort of insight that is translatable beyond sort of my weird situation,
54:06 Brad because this is obviously not the norm at most companies. I think it's that.
54:13 Brad Like for me, coding has always been the toll that I've had to pay to build things.
54:18 Brad I'm not actually so I'm so happy to be here,
54:21 Brad but I'm really not like at heart a technical coding kind of guy.
54:27 Brad I've figured out how to do it and I enjoy doing it, by the way, but I figured out how to do it because I have things I want to make.
54:33 Brad And it's the things that I want to make that are who I am.
54:37 Brad So I really am like a product person in a lot of ways trapped in the situation where no one else is going to do it if I don't do it.
54:46 Brad But I think the answer to the velocity problem as you get bigger is number one, don't get that much bigger,
54:53 Brad especially today.
54:54 Brad It doesn't make sense to me.
54:57 Brad I had this idea that the optimal size for a product and engineering organization,
55:01 Brad first of all, which I think should be the same thing, is five to ten people.
55:07 Brad And I think five to ten people can probably do a faster and better job if they're the right people than big companies with big product
55:15 Justin Do you
55:15 Brad and engineering
55:16 Justin mean
55:16 Brad teams.
55:16 Justin a two pizza team?
55:19 Scott Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
55:20 Brad Yeah,
55:21 Brad I would say so,
55:22 Brad like, or a two chicken sandwich operation.
55:25 Brad Yeah,
55:25 Brad it's like.
55:26 Brad The smaller you are with the things that you need and the only things I think you really need as time goes on are the right ideas, people who are like attuned to the market and know how to sort of steer a product in the right direction.
55:42 Brad And some product managers are that and some of them aren't.
55:45 Brad If you can find somebody who's that and has, you know, some idea of how to make the thing, that person is your,
55:51 Brad like, is a person that.
55:53 Brad that can do the job of a product person embedded in an engineering team much faster.
55:59 Brad And so I think it's like the tech company of the future,
56:02 Brad there's going to be a much higher value on the people who have the ability to come up with the creative ideas,
56:08 Brad I think, because the stakes in terms of building those things is going to come down and it's just, it's already lower now than it was.
56:17 Brad Yeah, it's going to it's what I've been looking forward to for my whole life because it's always been hard for me to put things in my head into the world. It's just like I can't do most of them. I have that list, the restaurant thing I was lucky to have a year to work on, but there's lots of other ideas in that list. And so, yeah, if you're interviewing for new candidates,
56:37 Brad I think, you know, you might want to spend less time on algorithms.
56:44 Brad and more time on having them sort of fill their their their process on how they think about a product evolving because yeah if you have to sit there explaining well this is the card design and it's got a corner radius on each side like that's that's got to be a waste of time at this point right okay
57:03 Justin And very interesting.
57:04 Justin Okay,
57:05 Justin so Justin, we have to end on this one last question.
57:09 Justin You said earlier you reported to both Brad and I.
57:13 Justin Now tell us why was Brad a better person to report to than me?
57:18 Brad Scott, what a humble question you've just asked.
57:21 Brad And that's the reason you were the number one, Scott.
57:26 Brad No,
57:27 Brad you guys were both great. Like, I'll say this.
57:31 Brad I learned a lot from both of you in different ways.
57:35 Brad And you guys could not have been more different managers.
57:38 Brad And I will give a 30-second quip about both of you.
57:41 Justin Oh, great.
57:41 Scott All right.
57:42 Brad Brad,
57:43 Brad and these were both things that happened at the very end,
57:47 Brad before either you guys left or I left.
57:52 Brad Brad, toward the very end of my tenure at 98.6.
57:57 Brad I came in to our one-on-one and I said,
58:01 Brad but Brad,
58:02 Brad I can rebuild the whole iOS app.
58:05 Brad Just give me a week.
58:07 Brad and and and like I was so excited because I just like learned about Swift UI and I was like it's gonna be so great and as I said the words I was like I I'm looking forward to hearing why this is not going to be something he's going to let me do and I remember his answer was okay try and I remember at that moment thinking like this this could be a horrible decision like this is what I need to be
58:33 Brad to be checked on by a manager but I also remember feeling like a certain kinship like this person just clearly knows who I am and they know that like this this could be a roll of the dice that has absolutely no value in the last month that I'm spending at this company but but it taught me something about I think risk taking and really knowing knowing your customer like it's very difficult to be a good manager if you don't
58:59 Brad know the way that person works and how to get the most out of them and so I thought about that
59:05 Brad I thought about that a number of times and
59:07 Scott Scott Well,
59:07 Brad I it's
59:07 Scott think you're telling that story in a manner that makes me look pretty good, so thank you.
59:13 Brad it is good it is good I because I don't think you did that in the same way with other like I think you played to other people's strengths as well so it was uh it was like the restaurant is you know personalizing a service so with you and Scott uh it was longer ago but um
59:31 Brad And this was your last day on the job at 98.6.
59:37 Brad And I was reporting to you at that time. And we had a one-on-one of the books. And unlike Robbie,
59:42 Brad who, you know, cut and run before our one-on-one, you were still on the books for that day at our one-on-one and you came.
59:48 Brad And I expected, you know, us to be like just having a friendly goodbye and being like,
59:52 Brad thanks for, you know, being a good collaborator and manager and all that.
59:56 Brad You didn't have any time for that.
59:59 Brad You sat down and you opened a spreadsheet.
1:00:02 Brad And at the time, I had been concerned that something,
1:00:07 Brad a project that I was working on in 98.6 as a principal engineer at the time wasn't going to get resourced in any way beyond me.
1:00:15 Brad And I was very stressed out about that.
1:00:18 Brad And you had put together a spreadsheet that had specific numbers.
1:00:23 Brad This was, again,
1:00:24 Brad this was your last half an hour.
1:00:26 Brad on this job, like you may as well have been gone.
1:00:29 Brad And you put together the spreadsheet and you talked me through how the numbers worked and how to present those numbers to other stakeholders because they painted this picture that showed that the delta with the system I was working on saved, you know, X number of hours and it was a very impressive picture that you painted.
1:00:47 Brad And like, you know, I was it was just.
1:00:50 Brad I don't know exactly what like the nugget of wisdom is here,
1:00:54 Brad but there was something very powerful about somebody.
1:00:58 Brad just being absolutely there until the very last minute and uh yeah i think about that quite a bit too so you both were great
1:01:07 Scott I appreciate that.
1:01:08 Scott Can you remind me the name? I remember visually that system you were working on, but I can't remember the name of it.
1:01:13 Brad it was uh flow i think we call it
1:01:15 Scott Float?
1:01:15 Brad i think it was flow flow
1:01:17 Scott Yeah.
1:01:17 Brad rider yeah
1:01:18 Scott Flowrider,
1:01:18 Brad that's that's
1:01:18 Scott right.
1:01:19 Scott That's right.
1:01:19 Brad right and yeah uh and it got resourced after that i don't know i don't know how much of it was uh
1:01:24 Brad the the spreadsheet but it certainly didn't hurt nice
1:01:26 Scott Yeah.
1:01:26 Brad well this was a super fun conversation just it was great to reconnect with you uh loved hearing everything you all the cool exciting stuff you've been doing and thanks a lot man i really enjoyed this time yeah thanks for having me it was fun
1:01:41 Scott This was super fun.
1:01:42 Scott I'm going to go get a chicken sandwich now.
1:01:44 Brad Yeah, you should.
1:01:46 Brad Have fun. All right. Thanks a lot,
1:01:48 Brad Justin.
1:01:49 Justin This episode of How Many CTOs Does It Take Podcast was edited by Saffron Eppigal.
1:01:54 Justin Our theme song was AI Generated by Brad.
1:01:58 Justin Please follow us on all the social media platforms at at how many CTOs pod you can find us on YouTube LinkedIn Instagram Facebook threads X tick tock and patreon or at our website at how many CTOs pod calm and remember to rate review and subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice thanks for listening