James Lloyd - CTO at Redox

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:01) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to James Lloyd, the cofounder and CTO at Redox, and we discuss the advantages of reasoning from first principles, surrounding yourself with people who are passionate about overcoming challenges, and understanding the problem before you work on the solution. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:27) This is the Modern CTO podcast. Hey, buddy.

(James Lloyd at 00:00:38) Hey, Joel. How's it going?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) Fantastic. How are you, man?

(James Lloyd at 00:00:42) Doing great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) So you're in Denver today?

(James Lloyd at 00:00:45) I am. I am. You're seeing the inside of my Airbnb while I try to find a house.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:52) Oh, nice. So you just moved to Denver then?

(James Lloyd at 00:00:54) Yeah. Yeah. I just moved here permanently about a month ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) Nice. Do you have an office there?

(James Lloyd at 00:01:01) Yeah, we do. We have a little coworking space kind of thing. There's a building that they just built that's all healthcare IT, about seven floors of all healthcare technology companies. And we have a little space in there, so that's good. It's good company and good community there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) Nice. So my wife actually just applied to that school out there. She applied to Boston and then out in Denver. So I might end up being in Denver in a year or so.

(James Lloyd at 00:01:33) Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, it's lovely here. Very pleasantly surprised.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:39) Yeah, the weather is really nice, and the atmosphere is good there. It's got a young, cool vibe, and yeah, I'm a fan. I like it a lot out there.

(James Lloyd at 00:01:50) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:51) Your team's mostly remote?

(James Lloyd at 00:01:53) Yeah. Yeah, we are distributed across the US. So we just crossed the 100 employee mark, which is pretty exciting. And yeah, we've got people in every time zone. Due to the nature of what we do with healthcare, we are limited to only hiring inside the US. There's some interesting restrictions around doing work outside of the US and having any sort of patient data cross borders and everything like that. So we're US only, but yeah, we've got people in pretty much every major city and all the time zones and everything like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:36) Well, that's really exciting. So sales, everything is distributed?

(James Lloyd at 00:02:39) Yep. Yep. Yep. We have, I think, six small offices. If we coincidentally get a handful of people in a certain city, we'll help fund a little coworking space or a place to have social events. But yeah, we've got people in pretty much every city, and our coworking spaces and small offices are in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Austin, and Madison.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:09) All the cool places. Yeah, all the popular tech places. So was it intentional at the beginning when you were coming up with this idea of growing this company? Were you like, I want to be remote, or did it just happen naturally? How did that come about?

(James Lloyd at 00:03:24) It was a little bit of both. Yeah. So a lot of the early employees, including myself and the other two cofounders, all worked at this company, a large healthcare technology company called Epic. And they were definitely the opposite of remote. You know, they basically had their one headquarters. Everybody had to live nearby. And because of that, we saw a lot of people who were really great coworkers, who loved their jobs, but had to quit because their spouse got into veterinary school in a different state or something like that. And so we saw that as kind of disappointing and almost unnecessary due to technology that existed. And then the other factor was whenever we first got started, we knew a little bit about the team we wanted to build out in terms of who we wanted on it and what type of people. And as we kind of went through our network and tried to find those people, they weren't nearby us. And so our first, I think probably our first five employees, were not in Wisconsin where we were, and we just kind of rolled with it from day one, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:39) Nice. So I like your story because we didn't get a chance—rarely do I get to talk to a guest before we have them on the show. So we had an awesome call last month, and you told me about how the company got started out of this incubator startup thing. Can you elaborate on how you went from that to taking over the world?

(James Lloyd at 00:05:00) Yeah. We're not quite there yet, but yeah. So me and the two other cofounders of Redox, all three of us worked at a company called Epic, which is a large electronic medical record software company. And me and one of the other cofounders, Niko, we both left there kind of wanting to explore something a little bit more entrepreneurial. The company—I was there for five years. The company had grown from about 1,500 employees to about 8,000 employees in those five years, and the dynamic had totally shifted. And yeah, it was just time to explore what I could do on my own. And during that period, we were kind of exploring, like, what are the other entrepreneurs doing? Where are the role models in Madison? And we didn't really find too many people. They'd all kind of moved off to San Francisco or Boston or all the other tech hubs. And at that point in time, we had really fallen in love with Madison and wanted to stay there. And so the first thing we did was work with a few other folks to set up basically a coworking space as basically a halfway house. There were a lot of people that come to the city, to Madison, for either the university or to work at Epic or—the state capitol's there too—and there's just a lot of people who do kind of a two to four year stint for whatever brought them there, and then they leave.

So we were hoping that—and our hypothesis was—if we make a cool place that's strong community, then people will have these serendipitous interactions, and something cool will form out of it. And for the most part, that hypothesis kind of proved out. So we started the coworking space, got a bunch of really cool people in there, and a lot of companies were getting formed. And we set it up as a nonprofit, so everybody who was a member of the coworking space also gave back to other nonprofits and community organizations across the city. Because of that, we could keep it really cheap. So we got lots of really good members in.

And anyway, we started to see these people coming in with, you know, PhD in computer science, and their project they're going to try to tackle was making the next Instagram or something kind of flimsy. Or people with ten years of hospital billing experience from the healthcare space trying to get into social media or something like that too. And it was cool. It was fun to watch them explore those opportunities, but just over time, we saw a lot of kind of underutilized skill sets that we thought we could help bring out if we start an incubator inside of the coworking space. So we started a healthcare technology targeted incubator. And at that point, Niko and I started working with our third cofounder, Luke, at that point.

And yeah, so we started about eight or nine companies through that process, just kind of finding cofounders or finding the subject matter expert to build the company around. And Niko or Luke or I would kind of augment their team however they needed help. And so through starting all those companies, we learned a lot about kind of the space and different sectors within healthcare and a lot of the challenges that new companies face when they're getting started in healthcare. And kind of behind the scenes—so being the CTO for an incubator is kind of not a real job. And so what I was doing mostly was building websites for people and then building some tools on the backend that I thought could be shared across the portfolio companies we're starting. And so one of those tools was this kind of lightweight API that any of these companies we are starting could use to interact with, to exchange medical record information with health systems that they may be partnering with.

And so as we were trying to figure out how we could fund ourselves as an incubator, we never really figured out the financial model. We just felt like it was the right thing to do and kind of hoped that we'd figure something out as we were going through the process. And yeah, it's kind of as we're going through that process of trying to raise money to be an incubator, we realized that the financial model really wasn't there, but all the folks who we were trying to get investment from kept pushing us to be a product company. They're like, you guys have everything you need. Why don't you just start a product company? And, you know, as we kind of got that message for about the fifth or sixth time, we're like, okay, maybe these guys are right.

We started to look around. You know, should we get involved with one of the companies we've started, or is there something else we could do? And around about that time, we started talking about this platform that we're working on in the background and sort of shopped it out to a bunch of other startups, some more medium sized health tech companies, and, you know, kind of proposed this idea of single API, highly scalable. We can go to any health system with it, and any web developer can interact with it. You don't need any sort of healthcare background to use it. And we kind of sent out that email to, I think, about 50 people, and we got about 40 yeses back in the next three days. And so we're like, okay, I think this is a pretty clear decision, pretty clear product market fit from sort of day one. So that was, yeah, that was kind of how we first got started into Redox was through the incubator and through building that kind of shared tooling framework for the companies we're starting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:37) Nice. So I was checking out the values. Right? Because Redox is the company. That's the name. That's what you ultimately called this company that is this API, this single point electronic medical record API. And you have some really cool values. Being authentic. Number two on my list, at least the list I have—reason from first principles. This is a personal favorite of mine because I first heard it come from Elon Musk. And when I did, I literally have a recurring event in my phone that fires off every quarter, every three months, and it says, "Revisit: Think First Principles" because it's just something that, as a human, I never want to forget because it's such good information. Can you talk a little bit about that?

(James Lloyd at 00:11:21) Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I think it comes a little bit more naturally perhaps because—so, unlike maybe most folks you have on here, I don't have a traditional CS background. I came up through math and physics. And in physics, this is kind of at the core of a lot of what physics training teaches you, is to break everything apart into axioms and to try to challenge things at the extremes and really try to understand what the fundamental bits of whatever it is you're working on really is. So yeah. And you know, the way it manifests in the company is really to give us a way to kind of ask the question of, like, do you understand the problem well enough before you start working on the solution? And, you know, if you can't kind of answer "why" until you get to some sort of fundamental understanding of either the customer or the industry or something like that, then you can probably ask yourself "why" a few more times. And so, yeah, that's how it kind of manifests in the company. And yeah, it's been a useful value for us for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:32) How did you come up with these? Were you all sitting around one day and you're like, we need this list, or what was the moment in time that this list was created?

(James Lloyd at 00:12:42) I will say—so the company is about five years old. I believe this list is probably the third iteration. The first one was basically pretty quickly done, and then we kind of iterated as we grew as a company. And yeah, it was mostly a collaboration between me and Niko and Luke, the three cofounders, and it was basically one weekend. We just kind of spent it and dedicated it towards coming up with this, and we went through a bunch of different drafts and everything like that, you know, wordsmithing and everything like that. But yeah, it was sort of an intent of trying to define sort of who we wanted to be and what kind of people we wanted to—what kind of activities we wanted to promote and support and that kind of thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:30) I like it. I like that it's alive, that it's something you continuously revisit, you change, you make sure that this is who we are and this is what we like to do. I like that you keep them alive. Now I do have some questions from the audience. So we email us, ask questions through Intercom chat, things like that. And so one of the questions is about viewing problems through the eyes of an entrepreneur. So as your company scales, as you go from 100 to 100,000, more and more people are asking, how do we get our team members, our other people at our company, to take ownership? Not to just Band Aid the problem, but to use common sense and figure out—think like an entrepreneur. How do you and Niko and your other cofounder, how do you spread that throughout your teams?

(James Lloyd at 00:14:21) Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if I have a silver bullet to go from 100 to 100,000. But I think, you know, the way that we've tried to instill this is really through just getting involved and promoting and supporting people who are doing this kind of work and kind of shining a light on it. I think one thing that we do that's sort of related to our values—this might get back around to the answer in a second—but we have what we call "Redoxiness," which are a set of traits that we look for during the hiring process. And it's basically a combination of five attributes that, basically, missing one is a disqualifier for the hiring process, basically. And they are humble, hungry, people smart, adaptable, and understands why. And so we have a big kind of repository of questions that we ask to try to understand that. But for the most part, that kind of combination of being really hungry and ambitious while still being not very ego driven and being very mission driven and humble is really a combination of people who tend to want to take on more and want to really look outside of their specific job description and really see how they can solve the biggest problem. And so I think through that process, we—you know, finding people who are interested in just taking on something a little outside of their job is pretty—I want to say easy, but you know, there are plenty of those people within the company. And so we just—for me, I think it's about supporting and helping give those folks recognition whenever that happens, and that helps spread it across the company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:07) Yeah. So you take care of it early on, right? You say these are the qualifiers for our tribe. This is what we look for in people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:17) And so, yeah, that's always an interesting thing because when I hear the large companies that have like 10,000 people talk about digital transformation, they have a whole different set of problems because they have hired in ridiculously large numbers of people that don't align with what they want, and then they have to figure out how to transform, right, which is really tough. But I am curious, on a personal note, so you oversee—you have your two co-founders, and you primarily focus on product?

(James Lloyd at 00:16:47) Yeah. Yeah. So I guess org chart-wise, we don't really normally talk about this, so it's quite this way. But yeah, so I work with our engineering team, our product team, our security team, and as of this year, our strategy team as well. I kind of head up—and in healthcare there's lots of, and it may not be a normal functional team for many companies, but for us there's a lot of regulatory stuff. And just as a developer platform, staying ahead of trends and catching waves of what's coming next and doing that kind of market research is really important. So that's kind of what our strategy team does. But yeah, so that's sort of who I work with most.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:38) So then your other two co-founders, who oversees sales?

(James Lloyd at 00:17:43) Yeah. So basically the three co-founders—so Niko is definitely sort of the face and the heart of the company, but he's very sort of external and does a lot of kind of meeting with people and spends a lot of time out in the community. And then in terms of sort of management of the company, that's split evenly between me and Luke. And so I take kind of the technical teams, and he takes a lot of the kind of business development teams. So marketing, sales, operations, finance, things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:18) Nice. So yeah, the reason why I'm curious about this is because recently, we have a startup over here, right?

(James Lloyd at 00:18:25) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:26) That came out of the podcast, a leadership training company. But I was overseeing everything and just spread way too thin. And so recently I brought in someone to oversee sales and marketing, and the last three weeks of my life have been so amazing. Just working on product and content—I'm spending my time in the areas where I'm really strong.

(James Lloyd at 00:18:48) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:48) And that is such a better feeling than spending the time in the areas where I was trying to learn sales. I'd never done sales before. I built out a sales team. It was very difficult. But the reason why I bring this up and I'm talking about it is, have you ever found yourself in that position where you're spending a lot of time on something you're really not good at and you realize that you have to apply your strengths elsewhere? Has that happened to you yet?

(James Lloyd at 00:19:09) Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think I really enjoy the process of being forced to learn something new, but I think the skill that I've had to fail at to then know that I needed it is when to get off the treadmill. Like, when you stop learning and you're just doing the activity that's kind of way outside of what you should be doing, and knowing when the right time to kind of step away from that is. So early on, we were going from about 10 to about 30 employees. That growth was sort of all on my teams. And so I was basically doing full-time HR and recruiting and interviewing and stuff like that, which was—I'd done a few interviews before and things like that, but that was definitely at a scale that I hadn't really dealt with before. And yeah, I think that was probably the one that comes to mind the most of just sort of getting into a spot of being focused on something that was totally outside of my normal domain. But it was cool, though. We developed a lot of process that the company still has today around hiring, and yeah, it was fun to learn, and it was also fun to be able to step away from that one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:24) It's fun to learn and it's fun to delegate. Yeah. So did you end up getting an HR person yet? Because I mean, you're about right around 100 people, so usually that's when you do that.

(James Lloyd at 00:20:34) So the trajectory of that was actually pretty cool. When we first started, the company itself was really just kind of engineering and sales. We didn't really differentiate marketing and sales. We didn't really differentiate product and engineering. It was really just sort of two teams. And within the engineering team, I was trying to basically establish that we should have somebody in charge of tech management, somebody in charge of people management, and somebody in charge of product management. And that kind of played out really well. And the person who was in charge of the people management of the engineering team is now our company-wide VP of People Operations. And so he's sort of moved out of engineering into a kind of a company-wide role. And now we have a team of five people who do talent acquisition as well, so full-time recruiters. So yeah, we've definitely grown that team, but it's really fun to have somebody who comes from an engineering background and a very kind of thoughtful systems-type thinker working in the people ops domain. So it's fun to be able to talk about how would our company work if we were all microservices, and the thing is that we get to kind of explore some of those areas of really embracing that. I don't know if you know Conway's Law, but it's basically that the structure of the organization will inevitably directly mirror the structure of the technical architecture. So if you have a really kind of highly centralized team, then you end up with a highly centralized architecture. If you end up with a decentralized team, decentralized architecture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:23) So is this pretty new? Is this new or no? Because I haven't heard of this yet.

(James Lloyd at 00:22:26) No, I don't think so. I bet it's from the seventies or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:32) I'll research it. Yeah, I'm interested because it started to remind me of Peter Drucker, where the internal mass scales on the organization. But no, the Conway's Law sounds really cool because people—it's people that make the technology, right? As I interview all these awesome leaders like you, what happens is over and over they end up saying how important and surprising it is that it's about the people. Individual contributor, you're highly focused on the task and the tactical technology. But as you step back and look at the organization, you realize that whatever the people value, they're producing a product that mirrors who they are as humans. And that's really high-level, heady-type concept, but it's truthful.

(James Lloyd at 00:23:12) Totally, totally. Yeah, I would completely echo that. That is the single biggest kind of realization or learning that I've had over the course of the past five years is, yeah, you know, going from basically being an individual contributor for about the first 10 years of my career, and just how important it is to be able to build strong relationships and build strong teams.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:37) I'm really curious to know because you just went through this. It's sort of fresh. You said you saw that you had your engineering teams and product, and then they split, right? So now they're separate. Product and engineering are separate. How do you split? I'm sure there's someone listening that wants to know. At what point are you like, they're different and we split them, and how did you split them?

(James Lloyd at 00:23:56) Yeah, yeah. So the initial split was pretty easy. We basically had—well, let me back up a second. So when we first got started, we didn't really need a dedicated product management team, mostly because a lot of our engineering team had kind of firsthand experience from past jobs of kind of the work that we were doing, either by working at a large medical record vendor or working at another kind of health tech startup or something to that effect. So we had a strong kind of intuition on the team about, you know, we're building tools for developers, so we have a good user empathy already because we're making developer tools. And so for that reason, we got to kind of kick the can down the road pretty far in terms of setting up a product management team. But about three years in or so, one person on our engineering team who was very kind of business savvy and very comfortable going in front of customers and was already sort of displaying a lot of those attributes was really interested in kind of getting more into that space. And so he basically became our first kind of full-time product manager. And so he and I worked really closely together on building our roadmaps and things like that, the kind of typical product management activity. And then from there, I basically just—he's basically kind of running the show in terms of bringing on new product owners, kind of developing the overall strategy for the team and things like that. So, you know, I would say if I were to kind of distill it down to the steps we took, it was mostly finding an engineer who was really kind of passionate about the product, passionate about speaking with customers, and fairly business savvy, so could make some informed prioritization and could be sort of strategic about saying yes to which things and saying no to what other things. And finding that person and kind of letting them run the show was important. I think if we didn't have him on the engineering team, we probably would have had to look outside and do that as a separate hire, but got super fortunate that we had somebody like that on the engineering team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:06) Nice. So you separated the product and engineering, and then that looks like product works with a lot of the customers and decides on the future roadmaps, and then that creates this pipeline for engineering to then devour.

(James Lloyd at 00:26:22) Yeah, yeah, that's right. So today we have six delivery teams. So these are your traditional scrum two-pizza teams, whatever you choose to call them. And they have somewhere between five and eight engineers, one product owner, and one scrum master on each team. And so that's kind of the structure that we're using to go forward. And kind of as we hire in more engineers, we kind of grow one of those teams to about 10, then it goes through mitosis or whatever and forms into two teams. And we kind of go from there. So yeah, that's kind of the structure that we take today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:00) Now do you have separate, actual fully separate products, or do you take your API product and take features and make product teams out of the most used feature areas?

(James Lloyd at 00:27:10) Yeah, we try to base it around user groups effectively. Yeah. So we have one team that is—because we're so kind of infrastructure-based, some of our users are actually services. So sometimes the robots are the users. But so we have one team that's focused on kind of system performance and just stability and resilience. We have one team that's really focused on developing tools for our own internal teams. So we're doing a lot of kind of from the customer success and the implementation standpoint, we have to connect up with all these different health systems, and they're all using very non-standard standards and, you know, FTPing us flat files of things, and we have to get that all into a consistent format. And so we have a lot of tools to allow our implementation engineers to be able to do that. And then yeah, we have another group that's more focused on kind of the end user experience through our dashboard and through our website, kind of the developer experience of API docs and developer tools and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:20) Now I'm curious, and I'm turning this into half a knowledge call for me. I'm thinking if I've got these questions and I'm around this size, and there's gonna be other people who have them—

(James Lloyd at 00:28:30) For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:31) We'll include your advice in the book and it'll be really awesome. Okay. So do you have at this stage of your company, do you have designers on each team? How do you handle design quality within each product?

(James Lloyd at 00:28:44) Yeah. So we're fortunate, perhaps, that our product is fairly back-end intensive. I think if you were to look at our GitHub repos, you would see not very much CSS, I guess. And so, you know, most of what we're designing would be more of an interaction with the API and a developer experience, right? So if you don't have a required field, how do we respond to you? How do we error that out? Those kinds of things—that's where we do a lot of design. From a visual standpoint, it's fairly functional-based in terms of, you know, we have error logs, message logs, kind of standard analytics and set up your endpoints and security and things like that. But, you know, it's a fairly functional-oriented type design on the front-end side of things. But in terms of how that design actually happens, we do sort of the—I don't know if this is, I think it's fairly standard—kind of design doc review process. So we have for any kind of major piece of development before we actually start doing the development, we'll put together a kind of full design doc. And we have the tech leads on each of the delivery teams meet up Tuesdays and Thursdays for an hour and a half to review any of the design docs that came up that week. And yeah, so that's kind of a pretty—and one really important thing that we started doing, not from the beginning, we kind of learned that this was important, was that we started putting design doc authoring into the story points for the scrum. So a lot of people, you know, if it's not actual development, they don't actually count it towards their velocity and things like that, but it meant that the work was really not getting prioritized. So we started basically making Jira cards for putting things into the sprint for actually working on the documentation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:53) Yeah. We ran into the issue with Pivotal. It's like certain things don't count and they're priority, and so people aren't incentivized to complete them. And it's like, it's great to have them have a high preference or high structure in there, but at the same time, we're working around it the best way possible.

(James Lloyd at 00:31:12) Yeah, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:13) So you ever look at companies like Stripe? Because they're a company that had huge success with APIs.

(James Lloyd at 00:31:22) Yeah. So I think some of our sort of inspiration-type companies—Stripe, Twilio. Luckily, our chief security officer came from Twilio, so we got to have a little bit of an inside view there. And then also, we get compared to Stripe a lot, but actually there's a company that's way more similar to us in the financial space called Plaid. And they're super cool.

(James Lloyd at 00:31:51) They're, so whenever you transfer money out of Coinbase or Robinhood or one of those into your bank account, they're the ones actually brokering that transfer. And so they're similar to us in the sense that they're connecting up consumer-facing applications with these institutional kind of on-prem style banks with their using kind of legacy and industry-specific standards. So yeah, those are some of the ones that I would say we can compare to kind of frequently.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:23) Nice. Yeah. Because I found Stripe within the first couple months of it existing, right? Because I was having this problem with, what was that, Authorize.net.

(James Lloyd at 00:32:33) Like, it was just

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:34) the worst thing in the world. And then someone's like, hey, check out Stripe. And so I followed them. And one of my thoughts about why they're so successful—this is just personal—was they were super easy to use and get started, and they were beautiful. They spent so much time on their documentation. It made it so easy for developers to learn with what they had. And so whenever I hear of companies that are highly based on APIs, I'm always like, oh, dude, you guys making your stuff look beautiful like Stripe?

(James Lloyd at 00:33:03) Totally. Yeah, totally. Yeah, there was definitely, you know, some early days where we definitely got some strong inspiration from a lot of their documentation on how we set up our stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:14) You've got to. You just have to. It's like music, right? The next generation of music builds on the previous generation. So you can't not build upon it. You have to. That's us doing our jobs, right? So yeah. What, like, or who right now are you really looking for? Your company is growing, so you're definitely looking for different types of talent. I always like to give people a shout out for the type of talent that they're looking to attract. So who—we talked about your Redoxiness. Yeah. So we know the style of people. But what type of hard skills are you looking for a lot right now?

(James Lloyd at 00:33:51) Yeah. So you sort of asked before, and I didn't quite give you a straight answer on kind of, you know, do we have multiple products or just one product with multiple features. And we're at a point now where we're starting to look into, you know, product two and product three and starting to think about growing that way. So we are actually starting to, and some of those are going to be a little bit more user-facing. So we are actually looking for some more front-end-oriented folks, both kind of UI designers as well as more front-end engineers. And then the other big area that I would say is, I guess, two big areas. So on the kind of DevOps or infrastructure side, growing that team for sure. We've, over the past year, we had kind of a, I think it was almost a 10x volume increase in terms of the number of transactions we were handling. And meanwhile, also had about a, I think it was a 6x improvement in kind of throughput and performance. So anyway, we're doing a lot to stay in front of our growth from an infrastructure standpoint. So both from kind of the traditional DevOps working with our AWS environment as well as CI/CD pipeline type teams. Definitely trying to grow there as well as we're about to spin up a new data science team, specifically focused on some really interesting problems that we are pretty uniquely positioned to solve based on kind of the network that we provide and the kind of data that we're transacting. So there's some really, really interesting and really fun problems to try to tackle from a machine learning and data science standpoint.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:35) Nice. So is there anything else that you want to get out there into the world? To follow up on the people, the DevOps is growing. You're hiring some front-end engineers. Obviously, continuous integration's important. And then you're looking to do a data science team. But if people are listening right now and they want to actually take that step and reach out and contact you or the team, how would they do that?

(James Lloyd at 00:36:02) Yeah. So our website is redoxengine.com. So Redox Engine, redoxengine.com. And we have a careers page there. Feel free to apply there. You can also just find me on Twitter or LinkedIn or any of those. I'm sure we can post some of the social links and stuff like that. But yeah, and feel free to reach out or reply. Yeah, I'd love to hear from you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:30) And then for you, personally, as we wrap up, I want to know, like, where's the first touch of technology in your life? Like, was it a video game, computer? Like, when did you first start interacting, or Blender? When did you first start interacting with technology?

(James Lloyd at 00:36:50) Yeah. So this is, like, even before I can remember, but my mom always would tell me that I just kind of chronically would disassemble things in the house and then try to reassemble them with whatever screwdriver I could find or anything like that. So I definitely had an early interest in figuring out how things worked. And I think the first real kind of where I kind of felt the power of getting inside of some technology was pretty early on. I think it was 7 or 8 or something like that. I was playing a video game really early, like, MS-DOS days. I realized I could find the config file and make, like, could change my, like, guy's strength from, you know, 10 to 100 and destroy everybody or whatever. And I remember that moment being like, oh, yeah. You can just change anything. This is awesome. And so started getting really into, you know, seeing what I could find and seeing what I could manipulate at that point. You know, similarly, just trying to figure out how things worked and trying to get to the, get to an understanding of sort of how all the pieces put together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:01) Were you able to get the things back together?

(James Lloyd at 00:38:06) Um, for the most part.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:08) Most part. That's awesome. Yeah. I was really good at disassembling things. And then once I got my answer to, oh, that's how it works, I'd be like, alright, see you later.

(James Lloyd at 00:38:16) Yeah. And now you have a broken toaster on your...

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:21) I know. I once looked at taking apart a microwave, and I thought, this could kill me. So that's where I drew the line. I was like, I won't do the microwave. Yeah. Oh, man. This has really been fantastic hanging out and talking with you. What's, like—and I'm just going to get one more question in here because it's just on my mind—like, if you're going to look back at the past five years and sort of consolidate everything to one master takeaway, right? Like, what's the big one? And there can be many, but what's the one that pops into your head right now?

(James Lloyd at 00:38:55) Yeah. You know, the thing that kind of comes to mind for me is really kind of, I think a lot of people tell the story of, you know, it was three guys in a garage, and then we just worked really hard and played some ping pong, and then we IPO'd. And the truth is—and there's actually a book called The Messy Middle sort of about this—but the truth is there's a lot of ups and downs. And, you know, it kind of all goes back to the people that you're around and the mission that you're trying to serve. And I think without those, the ups and the downs feel—you actually feel the emotion of those. And being around people that are all interested in the same things and all, you know, sort of oriented towards the same mission makes those things just challenges or things to overcome rather than things that become kind of emotionally taxing. And so I think, you know, the biggest takeaway is just kind of focus—you know, have a really meaningful and impactful kind of ten-year vision and stay pointed there and kind of just deal with stuff as it comes up and surround yourself with people you enjoy being around. And yeah, I think the other thing that I also tell people who are trying to start new companies is if you get to be choosy, pick customers that you like being around too. Because if you're going to start a company, you're going to spend a lot of time talking to your customers. If you don't enjoy those people, it's going to make your job really hard. And luckily, we get to work with some really, really great people. So yeah, I think that's probably my big takeaway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) I like that last piece of advice, the customers, because I didn't realize how much time you actually spend with the customers. Like, it's very important. And if you get the right—like, I've had a couple customers, and they've referred me to their board members and they're so nice and helpful, and I'm like, I don't know why. And they're like, we just like what you do. Yeah. And I'm like, alright, well, cool. But it's a weird feeling because, I don't know, it just feels good. I guess it provides some validity. Like, when people tell you that they're referring you to their friends over here because they just really like your API and it solves a problem, like, that feels really good, doesn't it?

(James Lloyd at 00:41:19) For sure. For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:21) Yeah.

(James Lloyd at 00:41:21) And, yeah, we're very fortunate that we do get that happening quite a bit and, yeah, it's awesome that I think probably one of our single biggest pieces of referrals is actually from people's board members. You know, they're...

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:35) Oh, yeah.

(James Lloyd at 00:41:36) Like, it looks like successful companies are all using Redox. Maybe you should too and that kind of thing. And yeah, that's super awesome to see. And yeah, we have, I guess maybe I'll put in one plug here. Towards the fall here, we're going to do—we do a yearly interoperability summit is what we call it. So it's sort of half free conference to talk about industry health care industry stuff and half kind of user group meeting for us. And it's going to be in Boston. And yeah, it's just a super cool community. We had it in Denver last year and had about 300 people there and just talked about health care technology, how to sell into health systems, how to build a resilient, scalable architecture in health care, and kind of all the different kind of technical and nontechnical tracks. And yeah, it's going to be fun. We had about, yeah, like I said, we had about 300 people there last year. Hoping for more this year. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:37) Alright, man. Dude, it was fantastic hanging out with you. Next time I'm in Denver or maybe in Boston, because I go there a lot to do different talks and things like that, I look forward to meeting you or saying hello or however our paths cross.

(James Lloyd at 00:42:52) Yeah. For sure. This was a blast, and thanks for having me on. And yeah, it was great to chat with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:56) Fantastic, man. If you need anything at all, you just email me anytime, and then you and I, we will talk soon.

(James Lloyd at 00:43:01) Sounds great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:02) See you, James.

(James Lloyd at 00:43:03) Talk soon. Bye. Bye.