Travis Kimmel - CEO & Founder at GitPrime

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:01) Hello, my friends. This morning I was on a run listening to Tom Bilyeu talking about how identity and values drive behaviors. And as I've been growing myself and helping others, I've learned how important it is not to base your identity on who you've been, but to base it on who you want to be. So if you want to be a great leader, you have to first see yourself as someone who values leadership skills. When you get to the top, you'll see that leadership is everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:27) You can't have a company, you can't have a team without a leader, and there are a lot of bad leaders out there. So what is a bad leader? It's one that doesn't grow, one that doesn't improve themselves. Great leaders are always growing and looking for an edge. To learn more about how you can raise the bar and develop an edge to identify your competitive advantage and become a better leader faster for yourself and for your team, visit leaderbits.io.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) Today we are talking to Travis Kimmel, the founder and CEO of GitPrime. And we discussed the difference in leadership for sales and engineering, recognizing patterns of success, and the importance of having an established culture as you begin to scale the company. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:01:27) Hey, what's up?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:28) Hey, buddy.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:01:29) How are you doing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:30) Amazing. How about yourself?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:01:32) Pretty good. Pretty good. Caffeine still soaking in. You know how it goes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:37) Caffeine. Dude, I'm off the caffeine, man.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:01:41) Oh, man. You are my hero.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:44) It was hard. It's hard. It's like I was off it for a while, and then I got on it again. And then I was off, but when you come off of it, it's like you're withdrawing. It's so difficult.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:01:56) It's the worst. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:56) It's the worst. Yeah. So I switched to a caffeine-free pre-workout. That's what was getting me.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:02:04) Oh, nice. That was the hook.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) Yeah, because the pre-workout's got so much caffeine in it.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:02:09) Dude, and those workouts are amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:12) You're on fire.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:02:14) Yeah, and then you crash two hours later, just like my adrenals are crispy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:18) That's actually their new slogan.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:02:23) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:23) Yeah, it's like, hey, my adrenals are crispy.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:02:26) Are your adrenals too juicy? We can help.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:31) Oh man, I'm gonna stop because I want to keep going.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:02:34) Yeah, I know. We'll be here the whole time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:35) Forty-seven minutes of adrenal puns.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:02:41) Fake pitches about caffeine. Excellent. High-value stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:45) I like it, right? The audience wouldn't be too happy. So usually I start with stories, but I'm particularly excited about your product. So I was scanning the internets and I saw an ad or something, and I clicked on it and I was like, what are they doing? And I was just blown away. So can you tell me a little bit about what GitPrime is, what it does, and how you're changing the world?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:03:11) Sure. So once upon a time, I was an engineering manager and spent a lot of time in the trenches. I grew a few teams from small teams where you have this garage band feel up to, you know, you lose that at like ten or something, which is about the time where somebody walks into a room and they're like, uh-oh, that's too many engineers. And they wait for one to make eye contact and then they're like, you're the manager. You're the most extroverted. That's sort of my view of how engineering managers are born. So I was that person. I'm like, yeah, sure, I'll give this a run. And then continued to be frustrated by sort of two big things. The first one was that as the team scales, it becomes really hard for you to be a good actor as a manager. So one of your deliverables as a manager is predictability. And when you have to talk to people because there's no good data around what they're doing in order to get predictability, then you're sort of this inherently destructive force because to do your job, you consume the time of individual contributors. So I really hated that. I wanted to fix that. And the other thing was other departments had all of this sick data that they would use to build buy-in for whatever they wanted. Like, the head of sales shows up and is like, hey, I need another three million dollars this quarter. And someone asks, well, what are you going to do with that? And they're like, well, I'm going to compress the deal cycle time by 30%. And there's, you don't really have to know much about sales, you can kind of do the math on that. And if the math works out, you figure they're going to succeed at it. They get budget. And engineering shows up to these same conversations, which are all budget is zero sum, and we're like, life is pain, there's this technical debt stuff. And everybody, when engineering talks about technical debt, they're, you know, we're like, hey, we want a month to pay down technical debt. And the rest of the org hears engineering is going to take a month off. It's completely not what's happening, but it goes through sort of the executive translator function. And since there's no new features coming out, no one really knows what we're doing. So what I really wanted was a bunch of data to use on behalf of engineering for advocacy, and then the ability to be a non-destructive manager. So that was kind of the impetus for building GitPrime, which is, think of it like a logistics platform for the people side of engineering. So we have all this stuff and we have servers and all that, and we have pretty good wiring around the stuff. But then when you look at the process of building software, there's not a ton. There's just not a rich set of data. And so we get at that by plugging into version control and the Git hosts and ticket trackers and a bunch of data sources, and then we do data viz on it because you can consume a ton of information really fast in that format.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:05) No, it's brilliant.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:06:07) Yeah, it's fun too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:09) And the website's beautiful.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:06:11) Oh, thank you. We just redid it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:13) I think it's so cool because what you did was you made the intangible tangible.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:06:18) Yeah, exactly. And really help bridge that gap between engineering, who, you know, for so long we've just been thought of as these weird wizards that periodically get angry and you've got to sprinkle money on the wizard tower. And that's just a really, yeah, that's a really dysfunctional relationship because it's better if everybody can make these agreements and know what they're buying. And we'll get more stuff and there'll be a healthier dynamic there. So that's the goal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:46) And wasn't there a component where you can actually learn more about the programmer or the coder themselves?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:06:55) Yeah, certainly. I mean, part of the goal here is to just get a really good view of ground truth. So from our perspective, there's not any reason to sort of think of engineers as good or bad or whatever, right? There's negative unemployment in software engineering. You're damn lucky to have every engineer you have. And so the sort of interesting side of building an engineering team is how to put people where they're really strong and look back over a year's worth of work and be like, gosh, they were crushing over here. It seems like they were super happy. Let's find another project like that and really think about building a team in a way where you can put it together the way that baseball puts teams together. You know, they have all these cool sabermetrics things and they can assemble these crazy powerful teams.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:44) Here's another thing that catches me about what you guys do. You focused on, you started the conversation with people stuff.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:07:51) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:52) Right? And you noticed such an interesting angle about engineers, introversion, and things of that nature. So the reason why I started the podcast was to help, you know, engineers all over the world learn and hear how these people that make it to the CTO of NASA or Microsoft, they started out as quiet, shy individual contributors.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:08:14) Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:15) And you're not typecast. It's not a permanence thing. It's like if you look at, you know, like a caterpillar and you say it's only ever going to be a caterpillar, right? You go through stages of growth. So one of the founding ideas of the show was let's show all the different stages so people can realize that they're not cemented in where they are today. They can actually learn these skills, become leaders, managers, and influential individuals and transition and traverse this path and become more than they currently are today. And so by showing that all of these modern leaders that we think are amazing running these billion and trillion dollar companies all started out quite introverted individual contributors in small towns writing code. That is such an attractive thing to me. So I like how you're coming in and innovating in the space, and I just love it.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:09:09) Awesome. Yeah, we're very similarly minded. You know, I think out of all the industries that we talk to, engineers get the least focus on how to make that transition from being a person who talks to melted sand for a living to being a person who predominantly deals with people for a living. That's a big shift. And so we definitely need a lot more literature and support to help people make that transition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:36) And the hardest part is when you first go because it's like your mind is really good if you're an individual contributor analyzing problems and I'm deep in my, you know, consciousness, thinking and solving problems with myself. Then all of a sudden when you're down there solving the problems, interacting with another human is so inefficient, it's unattractive. Right? It's like I'm so fast inside of my own mind. For me to try to communicate with you is, I'm just better by myself. And so that's a hard thing that we have to transition out of. And then we get to that level where we realize if we can orchestrate these unbelievable resources that we have that are people, that are brilliant, we can get them to communicate and get them to work together, then we can accomplish infinitely more.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:10:22) That's right. If you can act as a force multiplier for the engineers, that's a really powerful thing. And there's all these other lessons you have to learn along the way. Like, the minute you get out of, you know, one of the things that always strikes me is when you're in engineering, we have this way when you're sort of building stuff, we just kind of interact with one another as peers all the time. It's awesome. And the minute you sort of jump up into management, maybe that's still happening with the engineering team, but there's all these other players where status is super important, which is just like a new facet of the corporate world that you kind of have to engage with, and it can be really weird at first.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:59) Yeah, to have to, you know, all those communication and people skills that you have to do to play that social game is, you get blindsided by it. You've been in the boardroom or you've been in the meeting as the quiet technical reference, but it's different when you have to play in it.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:11:17) Yeah, exactly. It's super different. So you're really good at reading people and all that fun stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:24) So we get a lot of people that ask us, you know, how do you do these specific things? And it's hard because every time you need context, right?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:11:31) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:32) It's like, alright, let's boil it down to your exact situation. Otherwise, anything I'm going to give you is not applicable.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:11:38) Yeah. There's this great, so have you heard of the Sufis? It's like this mystical tradition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:44) Okay.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:11:45) And they never wrote anything down because they were worried that people would read it and it would be totally inappropriate to their situation. So there's all this wisdom in the world, right? But it's sort of like if you found, if you found like a hundred years from now the DSM-IV and you're just like, well, this is all medicine, I'll take all the medicine, right? That's not really how medicine works. It's super specific to whatever's going on. And so I think that that is very similar to the way people go into management. It's like there's no real silver bullets. It's all about navigating these really quirky situations. You never really solve it. You just keep working the problem. It's wild.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:26) Yeah, it's one of the things that frustrated me about the leadership forums online.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:12:30) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:31) Everybody's asking the same question over and over and they're trying to be a little bit ambiguous, and then they're trying to give advice, and it just, they never seem to really gain traction long term and be a useful place. And I thought, you know, it's a lot like the doctors where the people who have good health visit less, and the people who have bad health are always in these emergency crisis states.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:12:54) Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:54) And it's like if you just did a good healthy fitness regimen, then 80% of your problems would go away. And so, you know, crack a book on being a good manager, a good leader on a continuous basis.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:13:10) Although I will say there's a funny thing that happens where a lot of the management books out there are built for sort of sales-side culture. Have you noticed that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:21) Yeah.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:13:22) And that stuff doesn't always work in engineering. In fact, sometimes it's incredibly toxic to engineering. Like, one of the things that's really valuable, I've learned a ton about sales culture, which I didn't know before, but one of the things that's really valuable in sales is making sure people are, like the vibes are good, the people are stoked. And, you know, that's actually really important because it's really hard to sell stuff if you're kind of down in the dumps. So that's a thing that management focuses on on that side of the house. It's weird if you do that with engineers. They're like, what are you doing? Why are we in this meeting? I don't need to be fired up. I just need space to think. So you have these cultures that are not really super compatible with one another, and a lot of the management literature out there is tailored toward this sort of sales-side management. So you have to, in addition to finding a good management book, you have to find one that is sort of geared toward managing creatives, right? And there's a lot of stuff to sift through out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:23) Yeah. So we actually, it became such an, what you're talking about right now is in our sales pitch for our company.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:14:33) Oh, boss.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:34) Yeah, so what happened was about month four of the podcast, we had people coming on. They said, hey, you know, we listen to the show, we hear that you talk to these leaders on our commutes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:43) How do we get our people to do these, you know, these small little ideas that you guys have on how to improve? And so we ended up creating this MVP product in ten days and pushing it out, got a couple customers, and now we have 11 people. So we're about, like, you know, almost a year later.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:14:59) That's killer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:00) Yeah. So, well, here was the idea. There's this whole world of leadership development and training, and it's ridiculous because they say, oh, you come, we take this course, we'll give you a certificate, and you're a leader. And I'm like, no.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:15:13) You're not. You're a guy with a certificate or a gal with a certificate. That's what you are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:18) It's a multibillion dollar industry, man.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:15:19) Oh, totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:20) I was blown away. I was like, there's no way this is true. It's true. It exists. So I said, well, the reality is that what we want is we just want them to do, you know, leadership things with their people. Like, we just want them to go do something with their team or just do something with themselves, reflect, and improve. And so I said, you know, why don't we create these little leadership challenges for engineers? And we'll do, like, weekly. And we wrapped it in an app, and we deploy it, and then they make entries. And then we ended up creating a services part of the business. We have leadership advisors that actually reply to them. So they, you know, coach and mentor them every week based on the reply, which is another interesting thing because when you go into a mentor relationship, there's no—like, they share a story. If you watch a mentor and mentee, they get together. They share each other's best stories, deal with any emergency problems, and that's it.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:16:12) Yep. That's super valuable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:15) Yeah, right? So I was like, let's—you need context. We created these challenges. Now you can talk about the challenge and do these things. So we built that whole program and now we're just selling it as leadership development for technologists. Because if you look at the sales, if you go to a company right now that has like, I don't know, 500 people, maybe 100 in engineering, and you ask their HR or L&D person, they have one management thing for every first time leader at the entire company.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:16:43) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:44) And I'm like, you're really telling me that you're going to engage the sales first time leaders with the exact same program that you're engaging the technology first time leaders?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:16:51) That's so nuts. And there—so have you read that book Drive by Daniel Pink?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:56) No. And I'm writing it down now.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:16:58) Super cool. It's all about motivation. And one of the things that we read, that's super interesting literature, but if people are doing a task that they are familiar with, the higher the incentive, the better they do. So this is why you see things like variable comp on the sales side, because there's usually really intense training. You learn a process, and then it's about implementing that process and having the finesse to do it with, you know, specific individuals. But it's largely built around the sort of known thing that you're running. And you don't see variable comp on sort of the engineering or design side of the house. And our thesis is that's in part due to the fact that when people are solving novel problems, the higher the incentive, the worse they do. So the more you pay them to solve it on time or whatever, the worse they perform. So since engineers are constantly running into these new problems, you really want to remove this feeling of pressure or risk. And that's, like, the opposite of sales. Sales thrives on that. Like, they got a quota. There's all this competitive stuff going on. It's super crazy over there. And if you do that to engineering, it basically backfires and you get worse work. And so it's just weird, like, that even the notion of how you sort of apply pressure in sales—right? Hey, we got this goal, we really got to hit it—you have to go about that in a really different way with engineers, or what you will get from the same activity that increases performance in sales is a decrease in performance for engineers. It's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:35) I like you. You know, I knew when I saw your philosophy background, I was like, this guy and I, we're going to hang out and talk about, like, the purpose of the universe and life itself.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:18:49) Amen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:50) I love it. So how did you get into—it sounds like you have a split background, right? How did you get into technology?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:18:58) I mean, my sad little joke that I always tell is that I graduated and realized the philosophy plant wasn't hiring, which is, like, basically true. You know? Like, oh, right. I need a career. Whoops. So a lot of the stuff that you study in certain types of philosophies is actually pretty similar to code, like symbolic logic. You're doing all these proofs and stuff. So I just—I picked up a job, sort of taught myself programming, and then got identified as the most likely manager at a certain point because, one, I didn't have a CS degree. So they were like, hey, why don't you move aside and, like, let the professionals work? You know, there's—I mean, that's not to say you can't be a strong self-taught engineer. You certainly can. But you get a lot of interesting stuff from a CS degree, like all these, you know, design patterns, so people can basically look at you, and there's a little language that everyone speaks about architecture. And I didn't speak it. So they were like, well, you're technical enough. Why don't you run the team? Got into that. Really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed, you know, kind of doing team advocacy. I think that the view of software engineering is that you're sort of—part of your mandate as a manager is to act as this blast shield for the engineers and create a little pocket where they can do work. And you're kind of like the sacrificial engineer. Like, you go to the meeting so they don't have to. Right? You talk to the bosses so they don't have to. You just run interference and create this little zone where they can work. Because at the end of the day, most engineering work—like, the smallest unit of people doing meaningful, heady work in engineering is probably like a half day. Like, if you imagine that someone books a meeting with you—you're an engineer—someone books a meeting with you at 3 PM, like, you're going to get back from lunch and be like, well, I don't really want to take on anything super heady. Because if I get into a nice little flow state, then Bob from legal or whoever scheduled the meeting is going to come in and blow that up. And so what you really want to do is create these big chunks of time that engineers can work in. I love that. Just running interference and, you know, kind of making sure the trains run on time and all the good stuff that's in engineering management. So that's how I got into it. And then, you know, was basically driven by the need to have better communication artifacts. Like, you know, a lot of people underestimate the power of manufacturing an up-into-the-right graph and putting that in a slide deck. Like, that is how corporations work. You basically have to show a picture of what's happening because executives learn through slide decks. They're, like, crazy spastic. I mean, I resemble this remark now. You know, you're stretched super thin, and so you really need a lot of the information that you're receiving to be pre-chewed. Yeah. Like, intensely. And if it's not, you're just not going to get it. Like, there's no—it's too much overhead. And so the goal was to create these communication artifacts for engineering so that they can have these conversations in a meaningful way. And it's not, you know, the exec team being, like, rolling their eyes, being, like, okay, we're going to listen to this nerd for 45 minutes and still not understand it. You know? Like, that creates a dysfunctional dynamic, and it's one that would happen—it's not unique to engineering. It's one that would happen in any industry if there weren't these, you know, this unified language around how progress happens. So we're just a little late to the party.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:30) You're exactly—I love it. It's like my brain's like this computer, and it can tune to either of the frequencies, but it can't be both.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:22:38) That's right. And our brains are so much like computers that we also do this other really weird thing, where, like, if you are—our brains are these amazing pattern makers. Right? And if you feed it with a rich data set, then you can find all these patterns and, like, replicate success. And if you don't feed it, instead of a methodology for success, you get a mythology of success. Right? You're like, well, I can only deploy on Tuesday after eleven if I've had a snack or, like, whatever, because there's not that much data around it. And so, you know, the brain will always manufacture a pattern. But if you're in a data-poor environment, you get this sort of weird cult-like mythology. And if you're in a data-rich environment, you get this sort of scientific way that you can, you know, replicate a great sprint or whatever you're after. Like, build a great feature. You can be methodical about, you know, building a really high-performing team, which is awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:35) And long term, that brings you tremendous value because what it does is it lets you look back and say, okay, I have data to prove I am more effective in this environment, so I can stand up and protect this environment and this style of work. And then it allows me to have more wins as an individual, which then creates momentum. And you can't have high-performing teams without momentum.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:23:59) Exactly, right? Yep. And it allows you to—it allows all these things that we do as engineers to be more powerful. Like, I'm sure we've all been in these really, like, super weird retrospectives. Right? Where it's like, we know we're supposed to do one of these, so we'll go around and we'll talk about how everyone felt in the last two weeks. You know? Everyone's like, why are we doing this? We're the math tribe. Why are we talking about feelings? And so that gets weird. But if you have a bunch of information, then you can say, oh, gosh, it looks like the fact that the builds are taking 45 minutes is actually chewing up about, you know, a third of our productive time. So we should take action on that. And you get, instead of these sort of, like, very weird Kumbaya sessions that, you know, when we talk to engineers, they don't love that style—you get this really focused, again, just methodical—you get these conversations that are really awesome for your career because you learn more about your craft as an engineer. You learn more about the team's craft and how we build stuff, and that's just awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:02) You've got snacks for the campfire.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:25:05) That's exactly right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:07) We're not just all sitting there, just, like, staring at each other. We're, like, making the s'mores. Like, we're here making s'mores. That marshmallow you got, I got some chocolate. Like, let's rock and roll.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:25:16) Yeah. Otherwise, you're like, why is there a fire in the office?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:24) Oh, man. So there was, like, 400 Git jokes that just went through my head.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:25:30) How bad?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:32) Yeah. I was just like—I got overwhelmed by, like, picking which one, so it was just, like, me sitting there stone-faced. Like—so your company's growing, and you'll continue to grow, and you'll get very large because of what you're doing. It's just a matter of time. And so that's why when I saw you guys, I said, oh, I got to grab onto these guys and push them out into the world as far and wide as I can. Because people judge you in life based on the quality of content that you bring into their life. So the better quality and more useful things I can tell people about, then they identify me as, oh, every time I learn from Joel, it's very useful. And so, you know, I like that.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:26:14) So you're saying at the end of this, we'll both be judged.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:16) Oh, yeah. We're being judged right now. Yeah. Five stars. Raves. The Modern CTO podcast. About self.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:26:27) Yeah. We are amazing. Pull quote.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:30) Yeah. That's the hard—speaking of transitioning from engineer to, like, more social, uh—

(Travis Kimmel at 00:26:36) Jeez.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:37) Yeah. All the sales stuff that I've had to learn, all the marketing stuff I've had to learn. It's like, we've got the best guest. It's like, well, of course you have the best guest. Why would you not have good guests? Like, just say we have guests. Like, that's—like, my engineer side is like, guests.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:26:51) Just the facts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:52) There are people on this podcast.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:26:53) Carbon-based life forms only.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:57) Some of them are fine. Some you will not like.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:00) Some will be in the middle.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:27:03) Yeah. It is a standard distribution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:09) And then you'll just provide a graph.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:27:11) Yeah. I know. I feel like that stuff is—you know, if you get into the management side, there's all these skills that are, like, pretty basic things. You know, like, go to Toastmasters, maybe. I did. Yeah. It was awesome. I—you know, public speaking is still probably not my favorite thing. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:27) I think you're great at it.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:27:29) Well, why, thank you. Once again, we are amazing. But, like, you can learn it. You know, it's like anything else. That's the nice thing. You can learn whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:38) Do you have kids?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:27:39) I have one kid who just turned two. Do you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:42) Yes. I have a little girl who's about 17, 18—

(Travis Kimmel at 00:27:46) Oh, that's fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) A little bit—a few months behind yours. But what's been so true to me that is unbelievable—you just mentioned—is she can't speak words, but she taught herself how to walk, how to do things, how to get food. She knew all of this stuff, and she is literally less than two human years old. And her brain—like, she just did that. Our capacity and ability to learn is just massive, but we limit ourselves in every aspect, right, by default. And then we have to come out of that and realize, look, I could learn another language if I wanted. There's people that know 20 languages. You know? I could become a great leader. I could become a great manager and do all these things. So, yeah, man. When we're talking about people's ability to learn and grow, it's just—it's unbelievable.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:28:38) Yeah. It's—I mean, especially if they're—if you just sort of turn toward it. I mean, you know, that's the thing I always find is, like, if I'm not learning something quickly, it's usually because I'm sort of being a douche to myself. Like, I don't want to. You know? Like, uh, it's hard. Just got to sweep all that out of the way and be like, all right, I'm just going to get after it and whatever. We'll get beyond it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:58) Yeah. You just have to sit down, put in the time. That's the other interesting thing too. So you're a CEO now. Right? You're a technical cofounder—you're technical and a founder, but you're labeled right now as CEO. And the interesting thing that I'm learning right now at the stage of, you know, about 11 people is I can do anything, but I can't do everything.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:29:19) And that sucks. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:20) Yeah. Well, and so now I look at my job as, okay, I figure out a role that we need, and I figure out the process, and then I document it, and then I put someone in it, and then I move on to the next thing. So I'm always doing the most difficult, never done before thing at the business. And then I wake up every day with a massive smile on my face to work, you know, twelve, fourteen hours to do it.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:29:41) Yep. And you're like the thread. You thread the needle the first time, like prove that that stuff's possible, hand it off.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:49) Yeah. Totally. But I like it. Yeah. Because I grow, and it's painful and it's difficult, but it's fun. But when it's like one of those universe things, I know putting effort in, it'll be difficult, but I know that feeling that you can only get from putting in hard work, and I love that feeling.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:30:11) I think you're a better person than I am. I like it, but it's contingent on having, you know, the tools and kind of the—I don't know. I think I'm just a little spoiled around it. I definitely love the same process you're describing, but I find it's so frustrating if there's not resources out there for learning the thing that you're after. If you gotta innovate every time, innovation is so overrated. It's crazy expensive. It's better to when you're training up on these things just to go out, find a good resource. You know? So that's my one caveat there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:48) Yeah. I just did that with our marketing funnels.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:30:53) Yeah. Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:54) I was like, you know, I had some experience because I used some marketing to grow the podcast, but it didn't have revenue attached to it. I was just trying to get listeners, right, and share information. But now when we have to actually have ad spend to convert or share results to investors and things like that, I just looked up, like, who are the top five in the world that have built multimillion dollar converting funnels? And I just had some meetings with them, and I hired one of them. It's like, hey, I can't. Now I'm going back to making leadership content.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:31:20) Like, it's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:20) It's like, yeah, do the thing that only I can do, and that's so hard.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:31:25) Yeah. And I think, you know, as entrepreneurs, there's a tendency to overrate creativity and innovation because, like, that's what you're getting paid for. You know, that's what the world's rewarding you for. But you really only wanna do that in the little zone where you're doing it. And all the other stuff should just be vanilla because it's been solved. Markets are really efficient. People have figured it out. Right? You don't need to reinvent sales comp. That's actually a particularly terrible idea. Yeah. I guess—oh my gosh. There's a whole—there are multiple companies that are all around sales comp.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:31:59) Exactly. It's like their whole company. They're awesome. So reinventing that stuff, I feel like there's almost this addiction that entrepreneurs have to, like, oh, I'm gonna be clever here. We're gonna have a unique way to do whatever—marketing. But if you're not building a marketing product, that's probably a real bad idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:19) It's like there's a time and a place for the innovation.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:32:23) Absolutely. Yep. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:25) And it gets us. And then what inevitably happens is you just realize you're doing it and you stop. Yeah. I—my number of at bats for stopping it before it happens, I'm very poor at that statistically. Yeah. But I'm getting pretty good at reducing the amount of time because I know that feeling. I'm like, oh, when I'm—when my notes are getting too long, I'm like, I've created ten notes today. And they're like seven—I've written 4,000 words today. Like, there's a problem here.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:32:53) Yeah. It's time to light these notes on fire and find a professional.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:56) Yes. Yep. And then I realized that as you grow and go through this pressure, you learn about yourself a lot—yeah—and your limits. And so what I realized is a couple things. First, I'm growing into this concept of being a writer and a speaker. Right?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:33:14) How's that going?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:15) It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I'm giving, like, twenty talks around the world this year.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:33:19) That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:19) I know. I didn't realize that I was good at it. And then if you take anyone who's, you know, good a little bit naturally, and then they have a drive to do it, and then they actually put in the work, then you get that continuous momentum effect. So I realized I really like writing. I really like speaking, and then I started offering writing and speaking services, and people just started booking me as a speaker. I was like, this is so cool.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:33:48) That's sweet. Yeah. I think that the ability to try it like that and get a taste for it is super important. It's one of the things that I think sometimes gets weird about the transition from engineer to manager. You get offered this thing, and all too often, it seems like you don't have a chance to sort of, like, yeah, well, you know what? Let me try it for, like, six months and see if it's the thing I wanna dig into. And if not, I'm gonna go back and build some more stuff. We've talked to a few people that are getting a little bit better about floating those types of big career transitions as a test batch instead of, like, this, you know, brand new career thing. I think that's super important. Because if you have the ability—if there's, like, all that psychological safety stuff—if you have the freedom to fail and be like, yeah, you know what? I tried it, and I realized people are horrible. Yeah. And, like, I just wanna go back and, you know, keep being an architect or whatever. I think that's a really powerful thing. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:48) Yeah. Trying stuff—like, I guess the difference would be inside your mind how you look at it. Right? I never—there was never a day where I'm like, I cut off being an engineer, and I started being this, like, book, blog, podcast guy.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:35:03) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:04) You know, I've been writing code every—you know, for the past seventeen years, essentially every day of my life up until, I think, July of last year. And I just realized one day, I'm like, I haven't been, you know, writing code. You know?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:35:21) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:21) That's weird. Right? I'm like, this is weird. And then who am I? Because then you have an identity crisis issue. It's like, my story is that of the engineer who's always been writing code, and all my conversations are related to code related things. And yeah. And now I'm talking about leadership, and then it's amazing because I don't know. It's—I heard—you know Jocko?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:35:46) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:47) He says this line—like, I listen to morning audio when I get up, motivational type stuff—

(Travis Kimmel at 00:35:53) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:54) Discipline, growth, happiness type stuff. And he has this thing where he says success and failure are typically very slow processes. Right?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:36:06) I hate that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:07) It's so true. I know. But it gives you some certainty that, yeah, failure is slow too. Like—

(Travis Kimmel at 00:36:14) Yeah. The feedback loops are so long. It's crazy. So, yeah. It's not like—I mean, that's the nice thing about engineering. You run the build, it's either gonna pass or fail. Quick feedback loops. I love that. Yeah. The whole success and failure thing. No. I mean, we started a company. I think for the first two years, we were like, yeah, I don't know if this is gonna work. Like, probably not just given the odds. Right. It's like this weird, long valley of death before you get—it's like farming. Right? Plant some seeds beginning of the season, and then freaking six months later, you know whether or not that worked. That's a very long experiment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:51) Yes. And then I'm assuming that, like, you know—well, you see this now that you're in a CEO role. Yeah. The market—like, people buy, and the industry happens in these seasons too.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:37:04) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:05) And so it's incredible. Like, we'll get a bunch of cancellations at once. We'll get a bunch of new customers at once.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:37:11) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:11) And they come in these batches, and no one's connected to each other, and there's no way they could know each other. And they're all over the world, but it happens in these waves. And I'm like, this is insane.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:37:21) Yeah. There's tons of seasonality. It's really wild.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:25) So with the slow and fast processes, the only cool takeaway I have from that is if you invest an hour a day into something, and there's, like, 260 workdays, I think, in the year, and that's a forty hour work week.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:37:39) Yeah. And oftentimes, you know, when you're learning new stuff, it's better than just actually spending a forty hour week on it because your brain has to—you know, you go to sleep, myelinates all the new stuff that you learned. It's actually better to do this sort of long incremental thing if you're trying to train up on a skill set than it is to just cram for a week, which is deeply frustrating. Again, if you have sort of a spastic attention span. But, you know, building the skill of building habits—

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:14) Yeah.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:38:14) Is crazy awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:15) And I totally was wrong in that last one, so people are probably cringing. So 260, that's 260 workdays, and divided by eight is 32.5. So it's like if you dedicate an hour a day to yourself, that's like 32.5 workdays.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:38:30) That's not bad.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:31) I think—I think I'm saying that right. The problem is that—the difficulty with this math here is that it doesn't sound right.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:38:38) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:39) Like, it's like if you have 260 days—let's just check this math, Travis. You and I, we're actually gonna break it down here.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:38:43) We can edit it. Only workdays.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:45) Right. How many workdays are there in a year? Alright. How many workdays?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:38:48) I think there's 260, 261, something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:51) Alright. 260—we'll say 260.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:38:53) Great. Great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:54) Yeah. So if we do 260 days and then we put an hour every day. Right?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:39:01) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:01) That's 260 hours. Yep. Right? And we divide that by eight because there's eight hours in a workday.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:39:06) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:06) And that's 32.5.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:39:09) Yeah. That's a lot of—that's, like, more than a month worth of work. Yeah. Because there's, what, like, twenty something, twenty three days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:14) It's like five, six weeks worth of work. So if you invest one hour a day in yourself—but here's the interesting thing. Think about this. People on average watch two or three hours of Netflix a day.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:39:26) That's because they got some really good programming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:28) They got some—but if you think about it, that's like working a full time job for, like, twelve to fifteen weeks. Yeah. Like, that's how much time. So when you talk about success and failure are slow processes, you can leverage the compounding effect in time and not really work that much harder and get massive results.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:39:49) Yeah. That's awesome. And you do it while you're watching Netflix. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:53) Do it while you're watching Netflix. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I don't know. There's a productivity thing. I don't know why that came up. This is, as far as my notes go, incredibly off topic because I just really—I was like, let's just talk Travis on everything. Oh, so I had a conversation this week with the CTO of Walmart.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:40:14) Oh, sweet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:14) Yeah. He's awesome guy. And they were, like—they're having the types of trouble or experiences of, oh, we're hiring 2,000 people this year.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:40:24) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:25) Yeah. So they actually have Walmart Labs, which is—

(Travis Kimmel at 00:40:28) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:28) The, like, R&D division for Walmart. So they hired 2,000 people last year, and they're hiring 2,000 people this year. And it's, like, 99% engineering.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:40:38) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) Yep. And so what are your hiring things like?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:40:43) So we went through—yeah. I mean, as you scale up, you get in these weird little—it's like punctuated equilibrium. You know? I mean, we're probably three to four times the amount of people we were a year ago. You know, it's the act of venture capital on a company is pretty awesome. Yes. And then it's about, you know, everyone starts to feel the torque, and you gotta make sure you're doing a good job sort of, you know, culture and all that stuff. If you three X your staff in a year, all this culture stuff sort of comes into play. Because if you bring in a batch of assholes, they could take over. So you gotta watch that, you know, like good screening and all that. And then the other thing that we ran into was you get to a certain point where you're onboarding people—like, you'd be hiring ten people at a time. And you get to a level of scale once you pull out of early startup mode where you can't just hand them a laptop and be like, good luck, which is how we onboarded people. You know, it's probably still where you're at. Like, I don't know. You figure out where your job is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:46) We got Google Docs. I'm a nerd, dude.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:41:48) Yeah. If you have a job title, you should be able to handle it from here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:53) Right.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:41:54) I mean, the early days, you kinda—you know, there's a class of people who come on board who are actually kinda fine with that. They like chaos, and they're comfortable with it. As you scale up, that just doesn't work anymore. So one of the things we had to get good at was doing more formalized onboarding. And there's a woman who leads revenue on our side, Li Hong, who's done an excellent job of that. It's basically today, we do a week long curriculum where people really learn what we're about. We talk about sort of the difference between sales and engineering culture so that there's not—you know, if you're in sales and you're looking to talk to engineers because they're the buyers, it's really easy to misfire on what a good conversation looks like because the cultures are just very, very different. So we go through a lot of that stuff. We go through kind of the intent of the product and why we're building it and, you know, what success looks like as a company. Like, we're trying to sort of end the structural mismanagement of engineers, which is a really big goal. And that's been a very powerful thing. You know, I would say at the level that Walmart's doing it, it's gotta be a whole new problem set. But it's certainly as you start to hit this ramp phase in any company where you're onboarding people, you go from sort of like, oh, there's a new hire to, oh, there's a batch of new hires. And that batch transition is where you gotta really get good at communication and helping people understand sort of what the job is in a deeper sense than I'm an engineer or I'm in sales. So we've recently invested a lot in that, and it's been great.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:43:42) You know, I think that at each point there's sort of like every order of magnitude you gain in staff—so like 10 people, 100 people, 1,000 people—the whole game changes. Like the way the processes change, everything becomes new and different. So it's been kind of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:00) It's like the Peter Drucker, right? The internal mass grows exponentially. Yeah, I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:05) I love the overall mission. Like when we're talking here, it's like we don't make a platform. We don't make these little leadership video challenges. We don't send invoices and get sales. What we're doing is we're making it easier for technologists to transition into leadership across the entire globe, because the reality of the pain that these people will go through repeating the mistakes that we already know how to solve—it's tremendous. It shouldn't be happening. And so like we're just doing our part, and the thing that fuels us is like the thank you notes. We get thank you notes. We get so much outreach from the community when they start doing these things and taking action, and it's just—I don't know.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:44:49) It's cool. That's the greatest fuel ever. Someone sends in another like, "Hey, I used your thing and I got promoted," and you're like, "Whoa, I didn't know we were that good."

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:58) No, we actually—that started happening. We have a video on the website. By the way, I feel like you're setting me up. Like you've looked up Leaderbits and you're just giving me a bunch of awesome topics. There's a video on our webpage of Jer, and he's like on a rooftop in Uruguay, and he's like, "Thank you so much. It's been three months and I just got leveled up." And so we created a program called Level Up where like we realized that the engineers doing these leadership programs to get better actually ended up getting them promoted. And so then we called it like the Accelerator Program, and now we have the Accelerator and the Level Up. And so we actually take people to the next level, you know. If they have to apply and we figure out which ones are the ones that are ready for it, and then we accept them into the program. But like, that is—you should have seen me, man. I was like caveman that just created fire. I was jumping around after I saw that video. I was like, "We did it. We did it."

(Travis Kimmel at 00:45:49) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we see the same stuff because if you've got—you know, if you're like a director and you roll up to a VP who has five directors, and you're the only one who's bringing like pictures of what's happening in engineering. Yeah, I mean, you're going to—that's going to be a powerful thing, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:08) Yeah.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:46:09) You can take that—like you basically arm people to go into these meetings with the rest of leadership, whether it's like inside engineering or outside, and show what's happening and talk meaningfully about it with math and stats and like depoliticize the conversations. It leads to promotions. And yeah, if that's your goal—I mean, not everyone's after promotions. Some people, you know, they're playing it. They just want like cool, awesome work, which the more promotions you get, the more you're going to want that too. But yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:42) We have a track. It's called Individual Contributor and Technical Mastery, and it's for people who don't want to go into leadership or people leadership or anything like that. They just want to get really good and really influential at what they do technically.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:46:55) Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:55) And so we have a track for that, and it's just like just completely own your Ruby on Rails gym that you've made or whatever it may be. So are you a remote company? Do you have a physical location? How many people are at your location?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:47:10) We're sort of a hybrid. We're about half on-site and half remote. We're headquartered in a small town, and you know, we—I think we initially thought we could be all remote. It didn't always work well in every instance. There's a couple—it works pretty well for engineering. It works pretty well for a style of hire who has been in the game for a while and just kind of knows—you know, they're really familiar with like the nature of the job that they're being asked to do. Works really well for that. If there's a—if there's a learning curve around office culture or anything like that, like if you're pretty—you know, when I graduated from college, if I had been put directly into a remote work environment, I would not have succeeded. And I still don't work remote that often. I kind of like having an office. So our view on that is to try to give people the opportunity to work, you know, in the way that fits with them stylistically. You know, one of the nice advantages of a distributed engineering team is that you get two interesting things. One, it's harder to mess with them, right? Like you can just mute Slack and work, and that's an awesome thing to have as an engineer is the inability for people to shoulder tap you. And you start to be responsive, you know, if servers go down or whatever. But that's pretty powerful. And the other thing is it oftentimes leads to more written documentation. So more written communication around requirements, you know, more documentation just sort of organically, because you might be handing this off to people who you're not in a room with and you can't just explain it over a water cooler. And both of those things seem like pretty powerful side effects of a distributed engineering team. Now we're not sort of hard line for or against. It's just a set of trade-offs, and it works really well for us. What about you guys?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:15) So we right now—we have about 11 people and about two or three—one's a contractor. But full-time people, we have about 11 people, and two are off-site.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:49:24) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:25) And the rest of us are here in office. But we've been talking a lot about that, like the direction of the company, because you know there's several popular companies that are fully remote with like thousands of people.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:49:37) And Buffer does a really good job of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:39) Yeah, and InVision too, like a design tool. And but you know, for me personally, if I look at like my soul and what I want, I want to go into an office and have some energy and have some people.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:49:50) It is fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:50) But that doesn't mean that I would—like right now, engineering is distributed. They're out of house, right? So like Nick, he's our engineer, and it's awesome the way that we've forced—it forces us to communicate in like a very efficient manner, and then there's no—it forces discipline over laziness with like, "I'm going to sit down. I'm going to write everything out in very clear details. We're going to have these structured periods," and then we end up in this cycle where we go a week without even talking, and then we're together like constantly for several days.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:50:27) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:28) And it works really, really well because he's just an A player, you know?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:50:33) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:33) He's very driven. He loves the mission, and it's just—it's very unique. Same with my production. Like Jake, who's listening—like we can go like a week or two without talking in detail. You know, we're in the office, so we see each other, but he produces the shows, creates the clips—like he does—it's known work, so it works really well.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:50:52) Yeah, I think that's the recurring theme that we hear as well. It's like remote work is for grownups. I don't really have—I don't really have another way to say it. Like if you think about working, you're like, "Yeah, game on. Let's do this. Let's just get in there and punch it out, and I'm fired up." That works really great. If there's a—you know, I don't know what it says about me that I don't love remote work. Jeez, maybe I'm not grown up enough. But I think that you've got to really be kind of—you've got to have a really good sense of what a great day looks like, and you need to carry that for yourself if you're working remote. And like that can be hard. That can be really hard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:32) It can.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:51:32) Especially if there's any sort of exploration or you know, learning from other people. I find sometimes managers run into difficulty. I mean, video calls have changed a lot of this stuff, and we've got really good tooling around it now. But it's very stylistic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:51) So what small town are you in?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:51:54) Durango. It's in Colorado.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:56) Colorado?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:51:57) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:57) How far is that from one of the major cities?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:52:00) Pretty far. It's probably like—from what you would call an actual city, we're probably like four hours in any direction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:07) We have a customer called LogRhythm. Do you know them? Like security event analysis. And they're out in Colorado. They're in Boulder.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:52:16) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:16) So how far are you from—

(Travis Kimmel at 00:52:17) There's some tech up there. We're like six hours.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:19) So you're like a separate trip.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:52:21) Are you—

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:21) What are you near? I'm going to Google Map.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:52:24) We're near nothing. But we have an airport, so we can pull it off.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:30) And so how did you choose Durango?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:52:33) I grew up here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:35) Oh, okay.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:52:36) Left for a while. Did a tour of duty in cities like a lot of us do for career stuff, and then came back here. And fortunately, there's a—fortunately for us, there's a growing appetite from venture funding for, you know, companies that aren't necessarily headquartered in like the Bay Area or one of these major tech hubs. So I think the timing was really good. I think, you know, if we'd started even a few years earlier, that was still sort of a novel idea that you wouldn't park yourself in one of the big—I mean, the Bay Area is like tech mecca, you know? And I think that the investors are starting to open up the idea that companies that are in non-metropolitan areas can also do great, because the tools and remote work have allowed us to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:20) It's because it's becoming popular in the investor community.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:53:23) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:23) You can still get awesome returns and great work done without being in a city.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:53:28) Yep. It's just a little bit of a pain to go to the board meeting sometimes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:31) You know, I pulled it up on the map. Yeah, you're in like an interesting spot. That's awesome. The Navajo Nation Reservation nearby.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:53:43) Yep. Yeah, Southern Ute Reservation around here too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:46) I did—for Christmas, my wife and I got DNA tests to see if we were really married. No, I'm just kidding. And we are. Yeah. So I am 99% from the UK and 1% American Indian.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:54:05) Oh, nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:06) Yeah, which was way overstated by my parents, by the way. They're like, "You're 50% American Indian." My brother went as far as to like get a tribe identifier and everything.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:54:16) Whoa, nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:16) Yeah, he's like—it's next level. Yeah, he—Potawatomi is the tribe.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:54:21) Wow. Oh, cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:22) I know.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:54:23) I got to go do that. 23andMe or whatever?

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:25) Yeah, man. It's cool. They give you the maps. They give you a map and it shows where like you're from.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:54:31) That's pretty sweet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:32) Yeah, I was like really not a split. Like everyone else's screenshots, they were like 80%, like 10% one thing, 10%—I'm like 99% from the UK and then 1% American Indian. I know. I told my parents and they like discredit it.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:54:50) Well, clearly the science is BS.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:53) You can't—if I've learned one thing about technology, it's you can't trust science.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:54:58) Yeah. I mean, who are you to throw shade on our oral tradition?

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:01) Yeah, the computer doesn't even turn on all the time. You're going to trust that thing?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:55:08) That's awesome. Yeah, I got to go get that done and compare it to sort of like the—what we, you know, what we think we are and where we think we come from. I love that you can just grab the science on that these days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:21) I love that word you taught me today—or the phrase—punctuated equilibrium.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:55:27) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:27) Like I looked it up real quick, and so what I got from my 30-second scan was when a—when a species becomes a fossil, then its chance for like long-term permanence is—is punctuated equilibrium. Is that what it was, or did I not—

(Travis Kimmel at 00:55:46) Yes. So punctuated equilibrium is like—it's sort of what venture funding manufactures in companies. So you have this spell of like basically equilibrium where the company is largely just sort of scaling up organically, doing the same types of behaviors. And then you get a venture round, and it's like boom, you triple your staff overnight. And so there's this crazy—it's not like this sort of slow climb of growth. It's largely equilibrium, maybe a little growth, and then a cliff of growth. And then you sort of find equilibrium at that new level, and then another cliff of growth, you know? So a lot of times learning happens this way where you're like sitting there, you're working at stuff, and you're like getting a little bit better at it, and then bam, you're great at it. You see some kids too, right? Like they have a couple words that they can hardly pronounce, and then one day you wake up and they're freaking talking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:43) Yeah, they're like—

(Travis Kimmel at 00:56:44) What? Was that a whole sentence? That was crazy. So punctuated equilibrium is just like you're just sort of, you know, at a certain level, and then all of a sudden you climb to the next level almost instantly. But it's the result of, you know, investing in sort of subtle skills and continued progress at the level you were at that then flips you to a new level out of nowhere.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:06) It was like we were—like we got our sales. So I was getting sales, Joel was getting sales, right? Me. And then we were—I did like $100k in like three months, and I was like—

(Travis Kimmel at 00:57:16) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:17) I'd never done sales. I like Googled "sales training," like just kind of taught myself. I was really not good at it, but then I figured out how to do it. And then it's like a process, like baking a cake. And then we got some venture capital. We raised our first round because I proved it. I was like, "All right, people want it. It's useful. We're getting—we have video testimonials. Let's like make it a business."

(Travis Kimmel at 00:57:37) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:37) And then we got money in, and then this whole scramble was, you know, hiring two or three salespeople, resourcing them, getting all their systems set up, and then figuring out how to get them to sell it and not be the founder. Because our messaging had to change. Like I can't just say, "Hey, I'm Joel trying to change the world. Meet with me and let's talk."

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:55) We had to get enough values that people who weren't me could go through the sales process. Then we had to deal with, now we're at this point where I'm sitting around, I'm like, we got sales firing on all cylinders. They can close sales, meet with people, do great, service customers without me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:10) And now it's time to get marketing, so that's why I did the funnels I told you about earlier. And then I'm looking at my 90-day plan. I'm like, alright, so after this company does marketing and this funnel generation, we're gonna have this larger influx. We're gonna need to grow sales and then just take it to the next level, which is gonna be in a new location, figuring out all these new problems. But it's not boring, and I'm really excited about it.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:58:37) Where are you guys located?

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:38) We're in Florida. Nice. So we're about an hour south of Tampa.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:58:43) Sweet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:44) Yeah. And that's awesome. We're in a beach town, but I'm a native here. I was born and raised here.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:58:51) Love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:52) Yeah. And then you guys have moose, or they call them meese? What's the plural of moose? I think it's just moose. It's just moose?

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:01) Okay.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:59:01) Yeah. I think it's like, yeah, we got a couple moose. Yeah. Yeah. We do. We had one walking through the river the other day.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:59:05) Oh, boy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:09) He's getting some water, right?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:59:11) Yeah. They're like, you're not supposed to interact with moose if you see them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:15) I heard they're much bigger in person than—

(Travis Kimmel at 00:59:17) They're very big and weirdly dangerous. They just charge you and stomp you because they're just pissed about being moose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:25) Yeah. They're upset about being moose.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:59:28) I don't know. I don't know why they do it, but they are very aggressive. If you see a moose, you should just not—you just go the other way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:36) Maybe it's our fault.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:59:38) Probably. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:40) Because the plural—the internet is telling me it's mice, which doesn't seem right. What?

(Travis Kimmel at 00:59:48) Mice? Yeah. I'd definitely use that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:50) Well, first of all, I think Google's broken. Yeah. But, yeah, somebody says it's mice. I don't know. Dude, we're gonna get the Quora CTO on the show, and then I'll ask him.

(Travis Kimmel at 00:59:58) That's a good call.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:58) I'm not kidding you. Now that I have problems, this is how my life goes. I'm not kidding you. Three weeks ago, Zoom outage. I had an important sales call to get on to. Zoom outage.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:00:13) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:13) I was like, Chloe, get the CTO of Zoom on my show.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:00:16) Oh my gosh. They—I love what they're doing. Boy, I mean, they've had, you know, everybody has the wrinkles as you scale, but I tell you, cracking video conferences and having that—they have all these cool little features that we just discover. Like, you can—so right now, you can click waiting room. So if somebody joins this, they don't just interrupt the call. It sandboxes them off somewhere else. Yeah. I mean, a lot of really—they're selling for a lot of really cool stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:43) Dude, I just saw the—I just—I'm gonna screenshot this and send it to you after the call. Yeah. You know how you do the—it clicks the link and it opens a Zoom call, but then it's got the web browser? They've got this graphic there, and it looks like Slack. It's like, "Discover the newest features in Zoom."

(Travis Kimmel at 01:00:58) Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:58) I'm seeing it right now for the first time, so I apologize for this.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:01:01) Maybe that's a new feature.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:02) But it—no. The interface, the Zoom thing looks like Slack.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:01:08) Woah. Weird.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:08) Yeah. And they have mobile phone, and it shows people sharing GIFs with each other and stuff.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:01:13) That's mostly what people do with phones.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:15) Yeah. Well, that's why they were invented.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:01:17) Purpose of phones. Yeah. Basically.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:19) Yeah. I want an excuse to come visit you. I wish you're in a bigger town.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:01:25) Dude, do you have one? Moose.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:27) No. Will you show me if I come out there, will you show me a moose?

(Travis Kimmel at 01:01:30) I don't know where they are, but we can try.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:32) Let's track down a herd of—

(Travis Kimmel at 01:01:34) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:34) Of meese. Yeah.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:01:35) We'll go up into the high country and see what we can do.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:38) But is it—it's a modern town. It's not like, you know, the 1900s.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:01:44) I mean, parts of it. You know, there's kind of an old West vibe that we try to keep real. The hilarious thing about small towns is that there's this nice little equalizing effect. If you're in a city, the nicest restaurant in that city, you're probably never gonna eat there. If you're in a small town, nicest restaurant, we've all eaten there. It's a nice little—it's a nice thing about, you know, ski towns and stuff. So it's a pretty fun place to live and work. It does—you know, as you're aware, if you're working in a non-city location, it just means you're probably on the road a bunch.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:19) Yeah. Are you on the road a lot?

(Travis Kimmel at 01:02:21) I am on the road a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:22) Where do you visit most?

(Travis Kimmel at 01:02:24) Jeez. I think we go out—the Mountain States cities when they do sort of tech summits. We're just on Silicon Slopes. It's a great event.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:35) Yeah.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:02:35) They do a really good job. You know, Bay Area, a fair bit. A lot of it's customer visits. We gotta make sure we're doing a good job, and sometimes the best way to do that is to sit down and watch somebody's face when you ask them. Yeah. And they're like, "Yeah. You're doing a great job." And you're like, "Look. You can dish. Tell me what's broken right now."

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:57) Isn't that amazing? That's—yeah. I've learned that they don't wanna disappoint you, especially if they like you, if you're likable. And so I find myself having to pull feedback out of people.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:03:07) Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:07) Yeah. I mean, people—

(Travis Kimmel at 01:03:08) Are just classy, right? They wanna be—most people are pretty awesome, so they don't wanna be awful to you. But sometimes, you gotta just draw it out so you can be better. So road time is super important. I think it's easy to get—if you're not in a hub, it's easy to sort of get lulled into complacency around travel and be like, "I don't really wanna do that." But I don't know. It's really important to sort of get in a room with people too.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:35) Yeah. The energy of the meeting, travel and to meet awesome people. I really enjoy that. That's what makes it fun.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:03:46) Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:47) Travis, this is one of my favorite discussions.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:03:50) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:53) But it—I don't know. Different people, different types of discussions, and that's what makes the podcast so cool, right? Because sometimes people like just hearing tech people hang out and talk about what they're actually experiencing. Other times, we're all like, leadership, leadership, value, value, value. And it's just—yeah. It's—this is one of my personal favorites. So you're fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on and hanging out. I look forward to meeting you in the future because, yeah, you're a great human, Travis. I don't know if you needed that comment from me, but—

(Travis Kimmel at 01:04:26) Look. I always—I'll put it on my wall of accolades. Great human. 2019.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:33) Great human. My podcast host. Yes. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:04:39) Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:40) Alright. Have a great day, my friend.

(Travis Kimmel at 01:04:42) You too. Bye bye.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:47) Bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]. If you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.