Monstar Labs CTO - Casper Rasmussen

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, we are talking to Casper, the CTO at Monstar Labs, and we discuss ways to create a deeper connection with your customer, what it takes to align culture across a global organization, and why it's never too late to spend more time on the people. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. What's up, buddy?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) How are you?

(Casper at 00:00:32) I'm good. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) Where are you calling in from?

(Casper at 00:00:36) So I'm in Copenhagen at the moment. The headquarter for us is in Copenhagen. That's where I live.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) I like Copenhagen. I've been there before.

(Casper at 00:00:46) Amazing. Where have you been?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:48) I just came in, and then I went across the bridge to Malmö. And yeah, I just went to Sweden. Yeah. It's a cool place.

(Casper at 00:00:57) It is. It's a bit cold here in the winter and very dark. It's 6 p.m. now and already dark. And it's not gonna be light until 8:15 in the morning.

(Casper at 00:01:09) That's the window.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:11) So tell me a little bit about the company and what you guys do.

(Casper at 00:01:15) Yeah, so Monstar Labs, where I'm group CTO, is a digital consultancy. We're spread across the entire world, have branches from New York all the way to Tokyo. Tokyo is the headquarters and where they originally started. And then from 2012, 2013, they started acquiring companies in APAC.

(Casper at 00:01:34) And then in 2016, they acquired the company I used to work in, Notes, which is now the EMEA branch. And then we got a New York office last year. So that's the journey we've been on. And now we are trying to get everyone together and work under the same umbrella in the future. That's why my position is now in the group of everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:57) It's a big company too. You guys work with Shake Shack, like some really large companies.

(Casper at 00:02:03) Yes, indeed. Especially in New York brands and in EMEA and in Tokyo, we have some really big companies we're working for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:11) And I see Pokémon on your sales site. You guys did some work with Pokémon. Is that the game Pokémon?

(Casper at 00:02:20) Yeah. So I think it's not actually Pokémon Go. It's some other projects within that branch or within that company. But we did a lot of games out of the APAC, the Asian companies. There's a lot of Unity games over the years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:36) Do you play a lot of video games?

(Casper at 00:02:38) I used to play a lot of video games. When I was at university, I played so much World of Warcraft. But nowadays, I don't really have that much time for it anymore. I could see the same engagement with programming when I got out of university as I did with World of Warcraft. I got the same feelings when I did mobile applications. So I managed to transfer it over to something where I actually got paid for it, so it's a great move.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:08) Right? All those hours I've logged on Call of Duty or Halo, I didn't really get paid for it.

(Casper at 00:03:14) Yeah, exactly. I had a World of Warcraft account with more than 300 days online, and that was a full year full online, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:21) Right. That's crazy. Yeah, I remember when they started tracking that, I was really excited about it. And then I realized how much the time stacked up when it told me my total playtime inside of Call of Duty.

(Casper at 00:03:36) Yeah, it's not something you should look at. It's scary. If you just took an entry-level job for the same amount of hours, you would be a rich man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:47) Sometimes I only screen time on my phone, and it's like, "Oh, your screen time's up 55% this week." I'm like, "Because I was watching TED Talks." Right? It makes me feel bad. I was doing something educational, and that's how my screen time got up. And I'm like, oh well.

(Casper at 00:04:01) When I'm on vacation, that's when my screen time goes up because I don't have my laptop around. Normally, I prefer doing most on the laptop instead of the phone, but I don't have that high screen time on my iPhone, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:11) You work for a really innovative company. I'm just curious, you personally, what do you think the next thing is? We got all the computing power in our phones, then we have the laptops, and some people are working more from their phones and less from desktops. But if we look 20 years out or something, where do you think we'll be?

(Casper at 00:04:34) So I still think you will have some variation of the phone, but I think it's gonna be an interesting race. You have Apple and Google going both directions there, where Google is trying to put all the computing power in the cloud, and Apple is trying to put everything in the device. It's gonna be interesting to see which one of these is actually winning because, of course, it makes sense to have some really thin mobile devices and then put everything in the cloud. If the Internet connection is good enough for it, why not? So I think that's the one I'm betting on at this point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:04) You think the cloud?

(Casper at 00:05:05) Yeah. I think that you don't need that crazy hardware on your phones if it would just be online all the time and you could transfer the computing to the cloud and just be like a screen streaming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:18) That's true, especially with the 5G and you see all the satellites that SpaceX and all these companies are putting up into space.

(Casper at 00:05:27) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:28) There's tens of thousands. I was watching StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. They do podcasts and stuff, and there's this website called I think it's like Space Junk or Stuff in Space, and it shows you all the debris and things that are in space. It's ridiculous. You can barely see the Earth. And they showed the future launches that they have coming up. I think it was like 28 or 58,000 more satellites between now and 2025. And astronomers are starting to get upset about it saying we're not gonna be able to see the stars.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:07) And so there's some interesting pushback. But what those satellites do is it gives us that ability to stream down consistently at a high volume so that we can have that Internet anywhere.

(Casper at 00:06:22) Yeah, exactly. I'm traveling a lot, and I can go mostly around the world now and not even get billed for 4G. It's just in your subscription these days. It's very modern. You're very connected.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:37) I think what happened, you make a good point. I think what happened is those executives at Verizon, they were traveling and they're like, "This is so frustrating." And then through that using of their own product, they just made it easier because it used to be ridiculously difficult to go internationally with your cell phone.

(Casper at 00:06:55) Yes, exactly. Yeah. Until lately, it was around $12 US dollars per megabyte when I was in the Middle East. So imagine the bills you get from that if you just roam like you normally do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:09) Watch a quick YouTube video, $500.

(Casper at 00:07:12) Yeah, something like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:14) Oh man. So what projects are you really excited about?

(Casper at 00:07:18) So in the entire group, we do a lot of projects simultaneously. But from the EMEA branch where I spend most of my time until now, we've been working on some really cool projects over the last couple of years. Are you familiar with a taxi company called Careem?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:18) No.

(Casper at 00:07:18) So they're operating in the Middle East. Uber bought them last year for I think it was $3 billion, a big acquisition. So we helped them get started with an Uber Eats competitor, where we built entire banking infrastructure and the apps for them. We also have a couple of wholesale chains. One of them having the wholesale outlet at Atlantis, the Palm in Dubai if you're familiar. 7,000. Yeah. So that's some really interesting ones. We're getting more into the pharma business, trying to digitalize around that, and it's a more regulated space. So that's very interesting to pick up all that knowledge around that now, but also some really big opportunities and some very, I'll say, you can do some projects which are really touching people in that business, in that area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:22) Yeah, that's a big driver—doing work that's meaningful. So when you go around and you're the CTO of Monstar, correct?

(Casper at 00:08:31) Yeah, I'm Group CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:32) So when you get to go around and talk with these different companies as you're building out their projects, how do you connect to the why? Do you meet with them? How do you do that?

(Casper at 00:08:45) Yeah. So a normal process where we would like, if we could define the process ourselves, then we will be invited in the early stages before there's even a project while you still talk about the problem so we can be part of shaping what kind of solution would it take here? Will it be a solution? Does it even have to be digital at all? That's the dream scenario, but we also have the other kind of projects where we get in what they say. So we've already figured out that we need this application, we need this website, and then it's more scoped out at this point, right? And then it's about trying to figure out what is the right match. How do they prefer to work? Depending on companies and especially also around the world, they are operating very differently and in very different speeds.

(Casper at 00:09:30) So you need to set up a team which matches that somehow. Also, how far they are in digital transformation. Some of the companies we recently started working with, they are teaching their teams Agile at the moment. They're used to waterfall until now, right? So, of course, you need to be in a more teaching position there and also take the team with you. So that's the best situation—to come in that early, be part of shaping all that and figuring out what's the right match. Also, do they need local developers? Do they want nearshore, offshore? How can we set a team which is fitting their expectation and budgets?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:03) So I'm curious. You're part of this growing company. It's bigger. It's expanding. But how do you continuously attract top talent to you?

(Casper at 00:10:14) That's a good question. Yeah. So when we started expanding Notes out to Europe, we started doing that in 2012 when we opened up in London. We figured out that the recruitment market was very different in London than it was in Denmark. It was highly run by recruitment agencies controlling all the positions, and you needed to use them to attract talent.

(Casper at 00:10:39) And what we figured out was it was, one, very costly. And secondly, people were not super loyal when they got placed by a recruiter. The same recruiter would try to place them a new job one or two years after. So we tried to really turn things around and say, "Why don't we spend that money on making Notes a really cool place to work for engineering, so we will have the best talents coming to us?" Then we came up with this, I think we called it hashtag Visible, where we wanted to be out at meetups, speaking at meetups, hosting meetups, attending conferences, speaking at conferences, writing a lot of blog posts, contributing to open source, even building our own open source, taking over some abandoned open source projects to kind of keep maintaining them, things like that. So we kind of got our name out a little bit even though Denmark is a small place. We managed to attract engineers from all over the world. We even have a couple from the US moving to Denmark to work for us. So I think that was a differentiator for us to do that. So today, still, on the core technologies we're doing—iOS and Android front ends, a couple of back end languages—we have a really solid pipeline of people who want to work for us.

(Casper at 00:11:45) So that's a very good position to be in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:47) Yeah. I like that. I like the idea of taking over related but abandoned GitHub projects because that happens a lot. There's projects you depend on and then you go check on and you're like, "What happened to the two people maintaining this?"

(Casper at 00:12:03) Exactly. Yeah. I think the iOS team, they used a caching library for a while, and then suddenly it was just completely abandoned. So they asked if they could take over and maintain it. So I think that was a fine example of that. But you don't need to, it doesn't make sense to make a new caching library, right? There's probably already 50 of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:22) So how many people are there at the company?

(Casper at 00:12:25) So inside the company is 1,300 people. 800 of them are in the engineering department.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:32) So, like, how do you, as a leader of these 800 engineers, how do you maintain a relationship with them?

(Casper at 00:12:39) Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. So I actually got it this morning from my sister as well, and I said, "I write them good morning every day, all of them." Obviously, no. That's not possible. But...

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:51) You just use the at-here on Slack. You're like, "At-here, good morning." Dude, that's what I do. My team's five people big, and I do that.

(Casper at 00:12:59) That's a good start. Yeah. No. So, of course, we're structured in various ways. As I said earlier, I'm traveling quite a lot. So I'm out visiting the offices at least one to two times a month, I'm on a business trip. Some of them are long distance to either the US or to Asia. Next week, I'm going to Vietnam, where we have two development companies in Da Nang and Hanoi. It's 100 and 250 engineers in each. So that's part of it.

(Casper at 00:13:30) The other part is spending time with the middle managements. So we're structured in, we call it management structure, where each of the offices will have a tech director, and there will be some teams below them. And then we also have a practice structure, which is different technologies. So in that sense, I spent a lot of time in back end and architecture over the last couple of years and have a lot of knowledge I can share there. So I help on projects, and then when I can see them looking for solutions in Slack and things like that, you can step in. And when you're out visiting the offices, it tends to jump into some stand-ups on projects or client meetings and things like that. So that's a part of it. But I think the trick is it's not you who has to do it. You need to build a structure in ways of doing it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:19) I like what you mentioned about jumping in because it's an art form in the sense that you can't micromanage. But when you have everyone having a conversation in a channel and you start to watch that conversation mature, and then you're like, "Oh, they're going down a path of making a decision on this, and I've made that decision before. And it wasn't clear to me when I was making that decision. But if you go left, you're completely screwed."

(Casper at 00:14:47) There's a good chance. Unless they're smarter than you when they implement it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:51) Absolutely. But that sense of, do I chime in? Do I let them learn this? Or have I learned this lesson so many times it's becoming almost factual? That's a hard thing to do.

(Casper at 00:15:06) Yes, of course. It's a case by case, but also I think it's very important what you just mentioned—do you want to let them learn the lesson, or do you want to pull someone aside and kind of tell that person so they can bring it into the team so it didn't come from you? So very often on the bigger projects, we structure ourselves in a way we have a type of role called a solution architect, which are kind of doing the drawings and tech leading the project and making sure that we have alignment between iOS and Android and anyone who's using the APIs the right way and things like that. So that's normally the ones you would speak to and say, "Hey, I tried this a couple times, and this is actually scaling really badly in these situations. Have you thought about that?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:43) So it's like aligning your different tool sets. Do you—first of all, do you even try to align your toolkits across the entire globe, all these 800 people?

(Casper at 00:15:52) Yes, a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:54) How? Like, how do you do that? Must be crazy hard.

(Casper at 00:15:56) Yeah. So across everyone at the moment—that's also new for me to get that rolled out into APAC as well. But, like, in the EMEA branch, we have development offices in eight different locations. And so that was what I mentioned with the practice structure we had. So we have, like, for example, iOS development is a big core service we have. The iOS developers across the different offices, they have like a practice structure together where they are forming a community and aligning on how to do things. They'll put one in charge. We call them head of. So it'll be a head of iOS, which are responsible for this community. But really, the most important thing is that they see it as a community and make sure that everyone can contribute and come up with ideas. But we end of day, we discuss it and make a decision, and this is what we go forward with. Of course, you can have a couple of experiments. Should we try to do this? Should we try to do that before we roll it out for everyone? But having some kind of structure—it's not really structure. I think what I normally call is, like, it's a toolkit. Like, how do we attack a project? Like, what tools are we using? When and why? What architecture works for what kind of projects, those kind of things. So it's something we spend quite a lot of time on aligning over the last many years. And it gives us a lot of flexibility, first of all, because people will be able to jump in and out of projects easily, but it also gives us the ability to move in the same direction as a team even though we're spread across a lot of offices. We're assisting each other with the same problems and moving the team forward. That's what we have seen. And I think—you mentioned earlier, like, it's not because this should be micromanagement in any way. We want to hire great people so you don't have to micromanage them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:49) Yeah. And I like how you create communities within the company with that, like, iOS lead. That's really great. It's almost like you could be on a plane, you could be reading a book on iOS, and you could find that author, and you have the resources, because you guys are a larger company, to, like, go track down that person and say, "Hey, you know, come join us." Have you ever gotten to hire any of your mentors?

(Casper at 00:18:13) So within the communities and the ones which are speaking at the communities and coming to the conferences and that, yes, very often they actually come apply for a job now and then, and then we make sure we make room for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:26) That's smart. So what does your day to day look like right now?

(Casper at 00:18:31) So my day to day is very often a lot of meetings, both with my own teams and, like, the different head ofs in the technology sectors. Spend some time with them on making sure that I agree with the direction we want to go, but it's also client meetings. I really enjoy client meetings because that's where we can see if our strategy actually works, and you can kind of feel it on your own hand. See if the technologies we are pushing for, the ways of doing it is still what they want. Also, like, the engagement model, like, how do we do and how do we staff projects, and are we working at our own office? Are we outpacing them at the clients? All these kind of things. So that's a very important thing for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:14) When you put people on-site, right, at a client's office, how do you keep them connected to your ecosystem?

(Casper at 00:19:25) Yeah. So part of our engagement model is that we don't outplace people on projects, just let them be in a client's office for six months. We simply don't think it's efficient. We know a lot of our competitors are doing this. We don't do the other thing either where we say we are only working from our own office. So we try to do some collocating with the client, but it makes sense. They have time for it and we have time for it. Or you schedule in every three weeks, you get together a couple of days. And then other time, we feel we are much more efficient in our own office where we can zone in on the project, but also there will be a lot of colleagues doing the same technology. For example, it could be iOS again where you can get sparring, but that would be harder if you were sitting somewhere else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:11) No, working near each other is definitely useful. There's, like, a different level of collaboration that can come from that. You build a relationship. The human things kick in a little bit more. So I'm curious to know—you get to meet all these people. You get to meet lots of clients. You get to work with, you know, hundreds of amazing technologists. What sort of habits do you value or what traits do you value in individuals?

(Casper at 00:20:41) Yeah. So in the technology side, I think the thing I admire most and also the thing I spent most time on getting to that point to figure out that that's actually the most important thing, that's the collaboration part. Like, being a team player, understanding your colleagues, also understanding that people are different. So when you get to this person, you need to do a little different when you get to this person. So that part, like, I think you also touched upon it in a couple of other of your podcasts, like, we used to call it soft skills, like, how do you communicate, how do you team play? Do you manage to get people involved around you? Are you proactive at communicating when you're behind, things like that? That's where most in the technology sector today are struggling most. Of course, you need to have some baseline in the technology and development. Otherwise, it will be very hard to have you on the team because, yeah, you need to learn a lot still. But in those other aspects, that's where I admire most.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:40) Yeah. It's funny because for me, at least, I got good at technology and computers and engineering younger, and the way I did that was by isolating myself by, like, not interacting with people. I would just—in school, all I could do is think about video games and writing code. And when I'd get home, all I would do is video games and writing code. And that loop just played out. Like, I had one or two acquaintances, but learning to interact with other people was just such a—for most people, it's not this, like, big point in time where you do that. They just gradually develop these skills. But for me, it was like, okay, now I want to go outside and interact with people. I have to go start learning how to do that. And so that journey was, like, a pretty big one for me.

(Casper at 00:22:31) Yeah. I guess it is for a lot of people. It was a little bit different for me. I came very late into computer science. I think I wrote my first line of code at university. I was always really good at math and physics and stuff like that and very social in school and high school. So I was kind of not a classic match to the technology university. So I spent minimum time at the university, and as soon as I could get off, I went back to my flat I had with a good friend and played a lot of video games and went out on the weekends, something like that. And then it was very late that I got, like, really pulled into the coding where I got really—I would say, like, where I spent a lot of time on it. That was when I discovered mobile applications. I had a course at university where we did, like, Java applications for Nokia phones, and then we did for the first Nokia, like, OS Lumia, if you remember that one. And then Android came around, like Android 1.5, I think, something like that in 2007. I jumped on that. And then you got the same feelings that you could build something in the evening and you could really see your progress from day to day, and you could release in the store and all these things. So at that point, that's when I shifted over and started spending much more time on writing code than playing computer games. I did that for quite some years and got really, really good at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:09) So Elon Musk is having an AI party at his house for his autonomous driving team. Have you heard about that?

(Casper at 00:24:17) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:18) Oh, it's all the rage this week. I just follow him. But, yeah, he's having a party at his house. And I was curious. Have you guys ever done any autonomous vehicle technology?

(Casper at 00:24:32) No. Not ourself. We were talking with a couple of startups on helping them build their applications, but never anything serious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:41) I think that's going to be, like—I think the autonomous driving is just going to explode and go really, really fast over the next four or five years. What do you think?

(Casper at 00:24:51) I think the technology is close now. I think that's the human factor right now which needs to be taken into account that we need to, like, pick this up and also create laws around it and accept. I think that's it. And then I don't know. Maybe there will be some kind of, like, traffic regulations and things like that which needs to be adjusted a little bit down the line, but it's definitely going there. But I think if you said the same thing five years ago, people would also say 2020, it's going to be a lot of self-driving cars. Right? And we're not there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:25) But we're there some. There's more than five years ago.

(Casper at 00:25:29) Yeah. Yeah. Of course. But, like, I think I would have been surprised if it was this little at this point five years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:38) That's true. Yeah. But I think it'll just happen, like, really fast. And I've also been seeing it, like, at, like, campuses. I believe there's, like, an autonomous bus at, like, Facebook or on the Google campuses. So just because they're not, like, in the streets for everyday people. Like, didn't Uber just do a delivery, an autonomous semi truck delivery like that?

(Casper at 00:26:02) I think those buses, they are coming. Like, I think that they are coming to Copenhagen next year as well. There'll be some places where they will be driving around. But I think, like, imagine the amount of vehicles on the road today and all that needs to be replaced, or there will be some kind of transition period where you both have human people, a human driving while computers are driving. That's going to be interesting. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:24) Yeah. When I was in California, they have, like, the lane for carpooling, and, like, most of the people are not in the carpooling lane. And so you can drive in that lane if you have multiple people in the car, but you can also go in it if you have an electric vehicle. And so what they're doing is they're incentivizing people to essentially, like, you want to use that lane, have an electric vehicle. And then eventually, what I think will happen is, like, two lanes, three lanes, and then, like, then at one day, there will only be one lane for all the, mechanical or the gasoline human driving cars, and, like, they have to all drive in that one lane, and the other eight lanes are for all the autonomous and electric vehicles. That's—I think that's how, like, it'll transition on the public roads.

(Casper at 00:27:05) Yeah. On the freeways, that might work. But, like, in the older cities where you have a fixed amount of roads at this point, you need to have them together. Right? So, like, in the Nordics, we've done a lot for electric cars as well. Like, so I don't know if you know, but in Denmark, for example, we have a really high tax on cars. But if you buy a full electric car, that's almost no tax. And from this year on, you will be able to park freely in Copenhagen if you have an electric car. So they're kind of pushing a lot for it. And I know they did the same in Norway. So that's how we push it here. So that's a lot of, like, Teslas and electric cars driving around here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) So as we start to wrap up, I'm going to give you a hypothetical situation. Okay. You might have some knowledge of this. But let's pretend that we both get invited to Elon Musk's AI party for autonomous vehicles. Right? And we go there and Elon Musk taps you on the shoulder and he takes you into this back room and he's got a time machine. And you go into that time machine and you get to go back to your past self right when you started at Nodes. What advice would you give to yourself then?

(Casper at 00:28:19) Yeah. It's a good question because, like, a lot of the errors you did took you to here. Right? But I think for a long time, as we talked about previously, I was really sewn into technology and just spent a lot of time in projects all the time. But at the same time, we were building up a company and building a tech department. So it was very late. I discovered that if you invest much more time with your employees all the way from recruitment to onboarding to training and keep involving, that's coming back many times. So spend more time on people, I think. And then also, when you're building up a company, you are most likely extremely motivated and ambitious, and you cannot expect that the people you hire will be the same. You need to build a company where there's room for the everyday guy as well. Otherwise, you're going to be running really, really fast yourself, and you're not going to be able to do it unless you work double shifts or more or less. So I think that would be some advice I would give myself, and then maybe get more offline. Don't spend that much time on the computers, but I don't think I would have listened to that. I was—I am still very passionate and, like, really enjoy it. That's also, like, a big hobby of mine when I'm, like, on vacation or something like that is to if I have time to do programming. And I have a lot of side projects I'm working on because that was what got me into this business in the start. Even though I don't have that much time to do it today during the office hours, it's still a big hobby. So yeah, I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:06) I love that you said that you might not listen to yourself because me too. Right? I might be like, nah. And then I'd probably come around after a little bit, but, no, that is great. Dude, this is awesome. Casper, we did it, my friend. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Casper at 00:30:21) That was fun. Great. Yeah. Great meeting you as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:24) Yeah. And I really like that last piece of advice. It was very unique, and it was really true.

(Casper at 00:30:30) Which one about the spending more time on recruitment or—

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:33) Yeah. And with your people and, yeah, that—I—it really resonated with me. And then making sure that while you're driven and you're doing the startup, you have to make room for the everyday person. Like, that's important too. Like, you have to have those people that are that will do it.

(Casper at 00:30:52) Exactly. I was very tough on a lot of people in the beginning because I didn't understand why they were not as motivated as me. And, of course, that makes sense. They don't have any shares in the company. They're not coming in here to build up a company.

(Casper at 00:31:06) They're coming here to do a job and get paid and get home with the family, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:12) And there's also some benefit to having them not stressed and just, like, I'm going to come in and I'm going to do this one piece really well, and then I'm going to go home. And if you get people that have a high level of quality that just get in that pattern of just coming in and doing something really well, then you end up—it compounds, and you get—

(Casper at 00:31:32) Thank you. The thing about the quality is, when I asked some of the clients I worked with late, last couple of years, that's very much why they still work with us—is that we really believe in quality. And for a lot of the big companies, it's like, quality first time is just so important. And they're not used to full agile where you say, we will launch MVP, and then we do 15 iterations, and then we'll be okay.

(Casper at 00:31:59) They have a really hard time getting that. So getting in with good quality first time is very important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:05) That's exciting. All right, man. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today, and then I'll have Jake and Chloe let you know when we release everything.

(Casper at 00:32:12) Thank you very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:14) All right. Have a wonderful evening. Thanks, bud. Bye bye.