TravelBank CTO - Reid Williams

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Reid Williams, the co-founder and CTO at TravelBank, and we discussed the benefits of becoming a great communicator, leadership lessons from the time he spent in the Marines, and insights into the process of raising venture capital. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here

(Reid Williams at 00:00:21) we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Reid Williams at 00:00:34) Hey, how's it going?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) Hey, buddy. How you doing, man?

(Reid Williams at 00:00:37) Doing well. Nice to meet you. I'm Reid.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) I am Joel. Robot Joel today.

(Reid Williams at 00:00:43) Robot Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:44) Robot Joel. Sometimes I feel like a robot version of myself. Do you ever?

(Reid Williams at 00:00:50) I can't say that I do. Maybe if I'm sick, I might, you know, just be going through the motions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) Yeah. You have little kids, you get sick a lot?

(Reid Williams at 00:00:59) I actually have three kids, but I don't get sick too often.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:04) Are they in daycare?

(Reid Williams at 00:01:06) No. My kids are a little bit older. So my oldest daughter is 22. She's actually—we adopted her. She's my niece. Then I have a 13 and a 10-year-old. So they're at the stage where, you know, it's like at the daycare stage, it's just like that's where it all happens. All the sickness goes around.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:26) Yeah. I've got the kids in daycare and I try to avoid them like the plague.

(Reid Williams at 00:01:30) Yes. Yeah. Joel, do you mostly work from home or?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:35) No. This is our office. It just looks very homey looking. But Jake and Chloe and everybody are outside that door. This actually—we rented it. It used to be a therapist office, right? So it's very calm, neutral colors.

(Reid Williams at 00:01:52) Where are you guys located?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:54) So we're right outside of Tampa, Florida.

(Reid Williams at 00:01:58) Okay. I'm in San Francisco, but I'm originally from North Carolina. So, okay. East Coaster also.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:04) What part?

(Reid Williams at 00:02:06) It's in the mountains near Asheville. Do you know where that is?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:09) Yeah. My sister used to live in Asheville.

(Reid Williams at 00:02:11) Oh, wow. That's a small world. So I say Asheville, but we're an hour east of Asheville because nobody knows where I'm from. It's so small and tiny.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:20) What is it?

(Reid Williams at 00:02:21) It's called Morganton.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:23) Morganton. Yeah, I don't know.

(Reid Williams at 00:02:24) Yeah. See? So my theory is proved. But I have known about you for a while actually, Joel. I mentioned to you when I messaged you on LinkedIn that I saw some of your Facebook posts probably several years ago and ended up liking your page and just always enjoyed your content. So, you know, I want to say appreciate that at least.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:43) What? Dude, thank you so much. Yeah. When I got your Facebook message, I took a screenshot of it, and I sent it to Chloe, our PR person, because I said this is the perfect example of how to introduce yourself to me. Because I get people across the board and some are just like, "Hey, let me come on your show." And I'm like, that's a weird thing. Like, who are you? What do you want to talk about? Do you have a relevant—are we going to—what are we going to do? But you had such a professional introduction. I actually put on my notes as one of the things I wanted to talk with you about because it was really good.

(Reid Williams at 00:03:16) Oh, thank you. Yeah. And actually, I didn't know that Brandy and team were already talking to you guys either. So because I think you had followed me, and I saw that you followed or you had connected to me on LinkedIn. And I didn't realize that there was this conversation going on behind the scenes at the same time. That's when I reached out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:34) It's perfect timing.

(Reid Williams at 00:03:37) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:37) Yeah. And you're in the travel industry. Is coronavirus popular right now in the travel industry?

(Reid Williams at 00:03:44) I don't know if I would say it is popular. It is definitely something that I think we are learning a lot from. And I was going to give a shout out to our marketing and PR teams. They actually have put together a couple of blog posts that we are keeping up to date as things evolve in regards to how it's affecting the travel industry. So, for example, you may or may not know, but United actually—they are waiving all change fees for the next 30 to 60 days or something like that. And so it's happening with a lot of vendors. And so, obviously, a lot of our clients are affected because we manage their travel, and so we want to make sure and try to stay on top of it for all of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:33) So what is it—how do you manage your travel? Is it an interface where people book travel?

(Reid Williams at 00:04:39) Yeah. So basically, TravelBank started—you know, Duke, my co-founder, and I, we started this business about four, four and a half years ago. And it actually started through Concur, believe it or not. So when we worked together at this company called Parature, ended up selling to Microsoft. And so Duke, as the CEO at the time, went over there, and he was forced to start using Concur. And very shortly after that, what happened was Concur got acquired. And so I think for us, it was a signal that, hey, there's this opportunity in the market where we see this platform, and we think that there's going to be room for other people to come in and start creating some disruption. And so that was kind of the nexus for the idea, and it's evolved since then. It actually started with this idea that we could change the way that people think about making purchasing decisions. And so the very first thing that we built was this budgeting tool. And so you would put in, like, I'm going from New York to San Francisco, and here are my dates. And we would look at live pricing and determine an algorithm for how much that trip should cost. And the idea was that once you had that budget, you would use that to make purchasing decisions. And if you beat your budget, you would get half of that back as a reward. So if you think about the way that you change the way that you make purchasing decisions when you're on a business trip, it's completely different than when you're doing it for a personal trip. And so instead of staying at a three-star hotel, maybe you'll stay at a lower class hotel or maybe you'll stay farther out so you can save rewards, or, ultimately, maybe you can stay at a friend's house who's in New York. And by beating that budget and by giving them that incentive, it changes the way that people can approach their everyday decision making while on that trip. So it saves the company money and the employees are also happier because they're able to get some personal benefit from it. So that was the idea, the budgeting tool. And then from there, we knew that you had to track your expenses against that budget, so we went into expenses from there. And then ultimately where we ended up today is with travel also. So what we have today is a fully managed travel and expense program that helps companies save money on their business travel while keeping track of where their employees are and what they're doing and just helping them wrangle all the costs that are associated with that. And that's kind of the value that we drive today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:08) Yeah. And I like the evolution of the product. And if I'm correct, you had a consultancy, so you built product for quite a while before you got into this?

(Reid Williams at 00:07:20) Yeah. So my personal path has been very untraditional, I would say. So I don't know how far back I should go or—

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:29) Let's go back to the Marines. I want to know about that.

(Reid Williams at 00:07:32) Yeah. So it's funny. When I got out of high school, I went to college for a few years, and ironically, I ended up failing out of two schools. Two years in a row academically suspended. Right? And so then I ended up—I was waiting tables and I got recruited into the Marine Corps. And so once I joined, I did systems and network administration for about three years. And then for another three years, I did development for them. So I was building software for the base Quantico. And while I was in, I ended up getting a bachelor's degree. When I got out of the Marine Corps, I ended up doing some consulting on my own. I had my own business, and I ended up getting my master's degree at that time, and then ended up joining Parature for maybe a year, which is the last company that Duke and I worked at. And then from there, went to—when Microsoft made the acquisition, I left. Maybe about a year later, Duke called me up with this new idea to start this new company. So, really, I don't have any sort of traditional big company experience at all. I mean, I wouldn't consider the Marine Corps in that bucket. So I have a really interesting and diverse way of thinking about things that I think maybe aren't something that you usually see. So it's been an interesting ride for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:55) Yeah. I have never worked at a large company either. And when we started to expand and grow our software to enterprises and started getting the security questionnaires, and they were saying things like making sure that the same developer who has access to production doesn't have—the same person that has staging can't touch production data and all this stuff. I was like, what are you talking about? I was like, it's a team of two people. And we build stuff. Like, what do you mean that person? And that's when I started to understand. And I was having conversations with different CTOs and they were saying if you wanted a machine provisioned, you would have to go submit a form. I'm like, you just spin up an instance. What are you talking about? And so there's a lot of red tape in those bigger organizations, which is why I love the smaller ones when they innovate so quickly.

(Reid Williams at 00:09:45) Yeah. That was—I went from the one extreme of that, which is in the Marine Corps. Obviously, everything is very much—it's very systematic and bureaucratic. And actually what happened was that left a very bad taste in my mouth. I think I was looking to do the complete opposite of that and so that's what I did and I bring a lot of that with me into my experiences today. But it's really funny because, yeah, I kind of ran away from that, and that was part of my decision not to go to Microsoft when that happened, because of those reasons exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:17) And I get it though. Right? Because when you get the organization that big, those controls need to be in place because you don't know everybody. Not everybody's in the same room together.

(Reid Williams at 00:10:28) Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it totally makes sense. And so we're growing into some of that now. I have lost track of the number of security audits and reviews I've done in the last 24 months. So you learn those skills as you get a little bigger also.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:42) Yeah. I saw software started to pop up for them too, to manage your compliance and security. They started to get pretty popular.

(Reid Williams at 00:10:49) Yeah. We use some today. Um, by the way, your business, are you talking about Leaderbits or something else?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:55) Leaderbits. Yeah. Yeah.

(Reid Williams at 00:10:56) Okay. Okay. Yeah. So you're doing—you're having to go through any sort of security compliance for that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:01) Yeah. Yeah. We got customers that are in the banking industry and, yeah. So, you know, we have the leadership platform, and we connect their company, and then their people are on it. And, you know, we send them emails and they have the Slack magic links. And then because we're sending them emails and their people are in our systems, they're having us comply with their vendor requirements.

(Reid Williams at 00:11:24) Yeah. I was looking into it a little bit. I like a lot of what you're doing there. I think the development piece is interesting. I think that I've been fortunate because I've been leading people since I was 21, 22, and then they teach you that through the military. It's like leaders are made, not born. And through those experiences, I have realized leadership itself is such an abstract concept. Right? It's not like you can point to one thing and say, "This is what makes this person a good leader." It's a combination of many, many different things. I mean, it's something I'm personally passionate about and then, you know, obviously, sounds like you are as well since you build a whole business around it, at least for the leadership development piece.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:03) Yeah. And it kind of happened backwards too because it happened because of the podcast. And it was less about me teaching leadership, and actually, I teach nothing in the content. We take insight from leaders that come on and share their advice, and we figure out—you know, I was before we founded the company, I was driving to the office to record a podcast, and I was listening to an Audible book. And I was like, "Whoa." On that 20-minute drive, I heard 15 good things, but there were just good things to hear. There was no way to actionably implement them. And I was like, we need to just break—we don't even need 20 minutes of listening to something. You only need two or three minutes of an idea or a concept and then figure out how to put it into action. And then if you just do that, you make way more progress. So because you can't point, like you said, one specific thing, figured why don't we just take a stream of the best ideas and then figure out a way to put them into action, and then we just—it's better than the current system. Right? Because there's nothing perfect, but it's better than the go to a workshop and sit there for four hours and then just go back to work. It's better than that.

(Reid Williams at 00:13:13) Yeah. It's an interesting way to think about it. I kind of think—I draw this parallel sometimes that leadership is like, you know, if you're into martial arts and that kind of thing, a martial art is something that you study for your entire lifetime. And so I feel like leadership has some characteristics of that because if you feel like you are the best leader in any given point, I think that's the wrong mindset. You always have to be learning. You always have to be improving. And I think it's something that you can never fully master. You just, you know, over time, continue to improve at it, if that makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:48) Yeah. Maybe it's kind of like music. Like, you don't win—there's no destination. Right? There's—you just continuously improve and grow at it.

(Reid Williams at 00:13:58) I definitely can see that. Yeah. It's very similar.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:02) So you guys raised some capital along the way, right, as you guys have grown? We get a lot of—we're actually in the middle of raising capital. What sort of insights or thoughts do you have for me going through this process?

(Reid Williams at 00:14:16) Well, let me think about the right way to talk about this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:19) Share publicly.

(Reid Williams at 00:14:22) Yeah. I think that you have to know what you're getting into. I think venture capitalists, you know, they really are looking to understand the value that you're going to drive to your customers. You know, is the market big enough? I think that's a huge one.

(Reed Williams at 00:14:40) Right? If the market's not big enough, you might have trouble attracting capital because you can't grow within that market. So those are a couple of key elements in terms of how you're thinking about it. And ultimately, just like any form of communication, when you're going in for the pitch, you gotta understand who your audience is and what they're looking to hear from you, and you gotta tailor your approach against that. And that's not just for a venture capital pitch.

(Reed Williams at 00:15:10) That's for any conversation that you have, whether you're trying to get somebody to do something or you're trying to affect a change through your communication. But it's very important to understand what is driving the, in this case, the venture capitalists in that conversation so you can tailor your conversation towards them. And that's a completely different set of skills than I think when you're communicating in other situations. So it's pretty important. And then I think resiliency is important because you may get a lot of nos before you get some yeses.

(Reed Williams at 00:15:45) But each time you do that, you're improving your approach to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:51) Yeah. I like how you mentioned finding out what drives them. That's one of the things I do when interviewing people for job positions. I'm always trying to figure out, like, what is the driving force in this individual's life, and then does that align with the work that needs to be done here?

(Reed Williams at 00:16:09) Yeah. That's a great example. Sales is another one, right? Sales, recruiting, and pitching, basically, which are kind of all boiled down to the same thing.

(Reed Williams at 00:16:17) I work with a lot of the—we have grown a lot of people in-house through this journey. I think we have a statistic that 30% of our people have been promoted internally. And the thing that—especially for the engineers who are growing, I think it's really interesting because sometimes that communication and thinking in that way doesn't come naturally to an engineer. It's kind of like, well, I know this thing will do this because that's how it's made, right? It's very logical, but communication is not like that. And so I work a lot with my engineering leaders to understand, like, how do you take what you know about your craft and turn it into something that somebody else can understand and get? And that's a very interesting skill that I think as you grow and as you want to have wider influence, you definitely need to work on that. And that applies, I think, to pitching too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:12) No. You bring up a good point because it's counterintuitive. So, you know, as engineers, we're like, let's move the ball forward, and let's write this code or complete this ticket or do something to move us forward so we're farther on this journey. And anything deviating from that is a distraction and useless, right, to the point where me communicating my progress to an overall objective becomes something that I'm against, right? And so it's counterintuitive to think if I take time away from completing objectives to then summarize in some verbal way to these other individuals who aren't doing the work or who won't—that that's a waste of time. And it's just difficult. And it happens all the time. You could take it from there. As an engineer, you could take it as a founder having to communicate back to the VCs, right? Like, I always find it pretty frustrating when I have to do my quarterly or monthly updates because I'm like, oh, we just need to focus on the metrics and do more things with the team to get the metrics done. But, you know, you just have to develop systems and processes around that because it has to be done.

(Reed Williams at 00:18:23) Yeah. I call it kind of—I think what happens with engineers is they have a very direct way of thinking about things, did you say? So what I call it is rounding out your communication style and understanding, you know, how that's gonna affect the other person and really, like, what is the other person gonna get out of this interaction? Communication as a skill is something that's very interesting that I think about a lot, at least. I don't know if it's evident or not, but that's kind of how I try to mentor internally also with the people here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:59) So dive deeper into that. So, like, let's say you're talking with an engineer, excellent engineer, they're growing in their career and they're having to learn this communication. How do you approach that?

(Reed Williams at 00:19:10) So I advocate for professional development through reading and study. That's a big one for me. There's a couple of really great books that I like. There's one actually called The Power of Communication. That one I stole from the Marine Corps, actually. It's on the Commandant's reading list. So he has a list of books around leadership and things that he publishes. And so that one was on that list, and that one's pretty amazing because it helps you think about how you tailor your conversations. And it's more specifically, actually, believe it or not, geared to PR and PR specifically in crisis. And so it's a really good read.

(Reed Williams at 00:19:52) So professional development is one. Also, I think knowing about different techniques is fairly important. So, for example, I'm a big proponent of active listening, which is basically a way to improve your own communication by helping others feel that, you know, you're actively engaged in the conversation with them. And then it helps you have a little bit of empathy towards what they're trying to say so that you can then be a more effective communicator.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:22) So when you're in the Marines, they—you mentioned that, you know, leaders aren't born, they're made, and that you learned a lot of leadership traits there. But how did they teach you that, or what were some of your takeaways from there?

(Reed Williams at 00:20:38) So there's a lot of things that they do. So there's, like, I think 14 leadership characteristics that they teach you. I don't know them all offhand, but it's things like judgment, dependability. I've actually been writing some LinkedIn posts on it as well, but they have a lot of things like that that help you think about the knowledge. But, honestly, a lot of it comes from the experience.

(Reed Williams at 00:20:59) So I was thinking about the story. I thought I'd tell this because it's a really interesting story, but it maybe speaks to how to think about leadership a little bit. But I remember I had just joined my unit and I was maybe 20, 21 years old. And I had this leader, and there was this experience that happened. And so I'm gonna maybe tell on myself a little bit because it's kind of a funny story.

(Reed Williams at 00:21:25) But in the barracks where you stay, it's kind of like a dorm room, right? And everybody stays in the barracks, and you get inspections from time to time. And sometimes there's surprise inspections and sometimes there's contraband that you're not supposed to have in there. And I had some, I think, hard liquor in my barracks room, right? And so we had the surprise inspection and all of a sudden, everybody's out there standing in line. And it wasn't my boss that did the inspection. It was two layers above him. So this is a big deal and you can get in some real trouble. And, you know, I'm a young kid. I don't know anything. I'm just now joining in and I'm kind of like, I'm starting to freak out a little bit, right? And so I'll never forget it because they found the liquor, and they, I think, were asking, like, whose is this? Right?

(Reed Williams at 00:22:14) And I didn't say anything at the time. But I waited until later. And later on, when I went to my boss at the time and I told him, I said, hey. Look. I just want to tell you, this was mine. You know, I went to the store and got it. And so, you know, I'm just trying to take responsibility for it. And he told me he said, you know, thanks for coming to me and telling me. He said, you know, I'm gonna talk to whoever I need to talk to. He said, don't worry about it. We'll take care of you. And so, you know, what's interesting about that is after that, I would have done anything for that guy. It's just this one action where he took care of me. And by doing that, it made me—it just created in a sense some loyalty behind it. And so, you know, after that, like I said, I would have followed him anywhere.

(Reed Williams at 00:23:06) So it's just really interesting because I think if you take care of your people, ultimately, they're gonna take care of you too. And that's an example. And it's just kind of a story or something that I could share where you learn about leadership through your experiences, and it's really like a six-year-long sequence of events like that that showed me or sort of taught me. In a lot of ways, you know, I didn't even realize at the time when I was learning, but now that I have progressed and now I'm in this role, I realize how valuable those things were for me to get to where I am today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:45) So what type of company do you have today? Is it all in-person local? Are you guys remote?

(Reed Williams at 00:23:52) Yeah. So we have 70 people from all around the world, actually. You know, we have a lot of our marketing and PR on the East Coast. We have PR on the West Coast. We have a lot of our engineering is spread also, so we're distributed. Our core base is in San Francisco. But, yeah, we have people who are helping us from all over the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:18) Nice. So, yeah. Actually, you guys—and we'll talk about it after the podcast. But we just did this exercise at the beginning of the year where, you know, in your first two years, you take a lot of different customers as a startup. You try different value props and marketing messages. And we said, oh, you know, where are we after two years? Like, who are our best customers? You know, who do we want 10 times more of? And developed an ideal customer profile. And because you guys are spread out the way you are and the size you are, you're actually our exact fit of companies that do really well with Leaderbits.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:57) So we took all of them. We looked at the customers that do the best, and then we figured out how to develop a profile to just find those types of people. And we actually did that probably, like, three weeks ago.

(Reed Williams at 00:25:08) What's funny is we also did the exercise. I mean, I think we probably refined ours maybe a year and a half ago. It's necessary, right? Because you gotta know where your product fits in and how it delivers value to that customer. And as a smaller company, if you haven't defined that really clearly, you can end up, I think, being a little bit less focused on what you're doing because different-sized customers are gonna need different types of features. And so it's an important exercise for a startup too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:43) So what did you guys learn? Where is your sweet spot in the market?

(Reed Williams at 00:25:47) So I would say we base our customer size off of travel spend, and so where we can give the most value is probably at $10 million of spend and below is what I would say roughly. You know, business travel—when we talk about, you know, we talked about earlier about making sure that the market is big enough to support your venture capital injection and expected growth after that. Business travel globally is like $1.7 trillion. In the US, it's $300 billion. Probably the top, you know, 150 companies represents maybe a third of that.

(Reed Williams at 00:26:24) So we estimate that the SMB segment is probably between $150 to $200 billion. So for us, our target is kind of the SMB, and that's where our focus has been and where we're seeing the most success.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:40) So that $150 to $200 billion, that's how much these companies are collectively spending on travel as a whole?

(Reed Williams at 00:26:47) That's correct. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:48) Nice. Lots of movement.

(Reed Williams at 00:26:51) Yeah. It's really interesting because what's happened in the last—we're very fortunate. I think we kind of got a little bit lucky in our timing. We're seeing a lot of things shift in the business travel industry, but in the past, the way that it worked with like Concur traditionally is that, you know, they would sell through travel agencies and travel agencies are service-based companies. And so they're basically leasing the software and bringing it in and saying, hey. We can help you manage your travel. Here's the software that we recommend that we work with today, and that's a lot of their distribution model, right? But when you do it that way, you have to do it through a sales motion and you have to have a top-down sales motion, meaning you're looking for the bigger companies with the bigger spend so that you can go in and it makes it worth your while. So what happened then is that that's not really what's tailored for the SMB because it's too expensive to capture that segment of the market with a top-down sales motion and a heavy sales team.

(Reed Williams at 00:27:49) So you have to have product to distribute to that segment of the market, and it has to be product-led, right, that growth. And so that's kind of been a key component of how we've thought about going after that segment of the market and having a great product first and then pulling in a great service behind it. Because today, we are a fully, you know, licensed travel management company, but we started with the product and technology background.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:16) And how many customers do you have on your platform?

(Reed Williams at 00:28:21) Yeah. So because we're, you know, product-led, we have about 2,300 orgs on our platform and 130,000 users today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:31) Nice. Scaling up those instances on Heroku.

(Reed Williams at 00:28:35) Yeah. Well, actually, we grew out of Heroku.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:38) Oh, yeah? So tell—I want to actually narrow in on that. How did you grow out of Heroku?

(Reed Williams at 00:28:45) So it's actually a very technically specific thing that happened for us. But what happened was when we built this feature called NGS, which stands for Next Generation Storefront, which if you look at a traditional travel search, what you're doing is you're selecting your from and to, so SFO to NYC. Selecting your dates, August 1 to August 15, and then you're selecting your class of service, so economy, business, first. And so that's the traditional search, and so you only see the one listing of results for that search class. But this idea behind NGS is that you do everything, select all the same things except the class of service. And when you do a search, you're showing all the results from all classes of service. And so that way you can compare and see how much, you know, an economy class flight on this airline versus a business class flight on that airline and et cetera. But when we had to do that, we actually had to, on the back end, do all of the same searches because the technology that supports that doesn't support multi-class searches. So all of a sudden, now every search request that we're getting in, we're actually doing four or five searches behind the scenes. And so Heroku for us at that time, when you put it at scale, what happens is there's some, I think, internal mechanics behind Heroku's routing where our requests are sitting in a queue and not actually getting sent at the same time.

(Reed Williams at 00:30:18) And so it was extending our search times. And so for us, we moved—we did an entire complete infrastructure overhaul. We moved to Kubernetes on AWS, and it reduced our search times dramatically. And so, you know, before then, Heroku was working fine. You know, it was great. And then we just hit this point where the level of scale that we needed, we needed more functionality and really, I would say, less limitation to the platform. And in addition, not to mention it saved us some money on the hosting costs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:57) Yeah. And I think that's really where their sweet spot is in the market is helping those companies get started. You can get up and running so fast. And by the time you have an at-scale need, you have engineering resources to do something like make a move.

(Reed Williams at 00:31:14) Yeah. I mean, we ran on it for two and a half years or something like that. So it definitely works. And we actually did evaluate Heroku Enterprise to get some of the other types of support, and we ended up just deciding to roll our own. When you talk about security and compliance, there are some things that when you run in AWS, that gives you better control of. So for example, we host our databases through a third party, and so with Heroku, you can't actually lock down what's connecting to your database because Heroku has these sort of transient IP addresses for the outgoing requests. So I can't really whitelist and say only Heroku connect to my database, and that's a security risk. So we had to move. Another reason that we moved to AWS is because of the networking capabilities. So for example, we set up a VPC. All of our database instances now actually spin up inside of that VPC alongside of our Kubernetes infrastructure, and the communication is locked down to within that VPC, and nothing else can connect in. So it gave us greater control.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:32) So, you know, I love when I get to talk with people who are founders because there's always those difficult moments, you know, when things aren't going right and you get discouraged. And I'm always curious about how you handle those moments.

(Reed Williams at 00:32:49) Yeah. Well, that's an easy one for me, Joel. I've been in some stressful situations through my life experience. Right? I, you know, to say, the Marine Corps—I actually deployed a couple of times, and so those gave me a lot of tools to understand how I should process the stress that we deal with from day to day and how I can do that in a positive manner for my team so that I'm not sitting here with my hair on fire, letting it out on the team. I process it, and I use the tools from my experience to do so. And then I make sure that I'm setting a great example for the team behind me so that they feel comfortable following me wherever we're going next. And so I think that's a very easy one for me, and that's also something I talk about internally even with my other senior team members. I'll tell them, you know, you have to understand that as a leader, people are looking to you to understand how their behavior should be modeled. And so dealing with those ups and downs is a large part of it. Right? You know, when we're having a good day, it's gonna be good for me. It's gonna be great. I'll be excited. If I'm having a bad day, I'm also gonna normalize that too. And so it's understanding how not to let the extreme ups and the downs affect you like this, but maybe keep it level throughout all of that where you still wanna keep it level and positive and then just be forward-looking and confident in yourself and your team and your business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:30) Preach. Yes. Yeah. This is a hard-learned lesson for me because I tend to be a pretty excited person. And it's interesting because it's an abnormal—you have to develop an abnormal response. So your normal response to stress is to be stressed. Right? Like, oh man. This is not going well, or your excitement is to respond with excitement. And I think you said it perfectly is you have to normalize it because the team will respond to the leader's mood whether that mood is justified or not.

(Reed Williams at 00:35:14) Yeah. Definitely. It's interesting. I say, I've told some people who I know have served, and the way that I kind of talk about it, at least for my own experiences, the Marine Corps puts you in very, very stressful situations, but they do it on purpose because it's almost like in a way they break that reaction in you and reform it in a way that's gonna be better for the situations that you may find yourself in. So, you know, I'm 18, 19 years old and all of a sudden I'm dealing with these crazy levels of stress. They're putting so much pressure on you, and that changes something, I think, fundamentally in you. And the reason they do that is because you may be going into some really life-or-death situations. Right? And so they kinda have to condition you for that in a way. And so that's definitely something I bring with me every day into the office and into this environment is that I know how now because of that to kind of process that. And I kind of think about it like I wanna be that rock in the river where whatever's happening is flowing around you, and it affects you, but you are still solid and you're still a foundation that others can come behind and look to you and say, hey, okay. We're gonna be all right. You know? This is gonna be cool. We're just gonna keep carrying on and doing what we do. And again, I say the confidence is important because you have to believe that you have the right team behind you to go and do something awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:54) No. I like that we're talking about this and going deep into it because I—and tell me what you think if this was true for you. But I initially had resistance to the normalization because I was like, I like the experience of going up and going down and I like feeling this way. And I don't wanna shut it off in a mental deconstruction way or a way where I'm detaching from it. And then I figured out how to, I guess, put it in my stomach almost. So I can be very excited, and it's in me, but I'm not too overly animated or excited. And I guess I just learned that there's more value in normalizing it and being that stable thing because that's what will get me what I want long-term.

(Reed Williams at 00:37:54) Yeah. I kinda—I think it's funny because a lot of times I think that's why it's also important to have a diverse team because I know there are others on my team that will also—I always say, I'm the ice and they're the fire. Right? You need both of those things. Right? Because I think there's a healthy amount of some of that that you could bring to the table, but that's a slippery slope too because there's also a very unhealthy amount of that that you could bring to the table. So stress is good. Pressure is good. But if you're, as a leader, folding to that, then I think it can very easily become not good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:40) I guess that's just where experience comes in. That's why experienced leaders that are going through these things, learning these skills, are why they make more money.

(Reed Williams at 00:38:52) I don't know. Yeah. Can't comment on that. But, one thing I'll say is I've been very fortunate to have some really great examples of leadership when I think through the history of what I've seen. And dealing with stress is one aspect of leadership, I think. I think there's a lot of other things, like how you carry yourself day to day, you know, how do your people see you. You know, that's really important, right, because how people see you affects how you can influence them. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:24) So you promote leadership throughout your organization. You said you do a lot of the reading. You suggested some books. What do you do for fun? Like, how do you unwind with your team?

(Reed Williams at 00:39:34) There's a couple of things that come to mind for me. I think the biggest one is, when I think about people who join a startup, the day to day of it can go by really, really fast. And so I think it's important every once in a while to kind of step back and look at what you're doing and kind of measure progress and see where you're at. And so what we've done actually—and we just did this last week, and this is why this comes to mind for me—we have a yearly off-site in February, and that is we brought everyone in from all over the world, and we went in and we talk about our goals for 2020. But, you know, regardless of that part of that experience, something I think that's really important is taking some time to really realize what you're doing and celebrating that with the people who you're doing it with. Because, you know, I think when you're at a much larger company, right, things are very, I think, focused on what the company can do for you. But when you join a startup, it's a little bit different because I think you have to think about what can I do for the company? And if you have the right people in the room with the right mindset, they all hopefully will think in a similar fashion. But you need to take time to make sure to step back, look at what you're doing and who you're doing it with, and celebrate that time together. And so what I'll do, for example, is every off-site or every holiday party or every time we get an opportunity to do that, I will always take a step back and just look around and not talk to anybody and just kind of soak it in a little bit because I think those are the moments in between the chaos a little bit that you remember, and I think that's why a lot of people do this. Right? Those are the things that bring people together at the end of the day. So it is very important to have those moments and create them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:30) So where'd you guys go for your off-site?

(Reed Williams at 00:41:34) Oh, we went to Napa.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:36) Oh.

(Reed Williams at 00:41:36) So it's, yeah, wine country here in San Francisco. And so we stayed at a pretty nice place and we had about three days where we just had some internal announcements and discussions around strategy and things like that and then also some times to, you know, celebrate together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:55) Nice. Dude, that's exciting. That must've felt good having everyone together from all over the world.

(Reed Williams at 00:42:01) Yeah. It's awesome. So this time around, we have them in Brazil. We have them just all over. Right? And so we flew them all in. And so some of them have been working with us for, you know, two, two and a half years, and it's the first time they came in. And so to see them, they were just kind of, really, I think, enjoying it. And it was really cool to give them an opportunity to come in and spend some time with everybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:25) Nice. What's your relationship like with your co-founder Duke?

(Reed Williams at 00:42:30) I think really good, actually. I think we're both pretty level-headed most of the time. I mean, we don't have a very contentious relationship, and I think we both bring different things to the table that make us a good combination. So, you know, Duke is a visionary for sure, and so he definitely brings the vision to the table in terms of where the business is headed and what we're doing. And I feel like I bring the value to the table, and so we call that the vision and the values. Right? That combination is so important. And so between the two of us, you know, I think we definitely bring great things to the table to help push this business forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:12) What's the rallying call or the big mission that you guys wrap your flag around?

(Reed Williams at 00:43:20) Yeah. It's to build a delightful travel and expense solution for every business user, if I'm quoting it verbatim. Yeah. I mean, that's really our mission. We wanna change this industry. I mean, when you look at some of our competition and—started in the nineties. And I told you earlier about my daughter who's 22.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:43) Mm-hmm.

(Reed Williams at 00:43:43) And if I see her entering the workforce and I look at that software and I think to myself, can I ever see my daughter using that software? And I think there's no way. Right? It's like—this is the girl who—I'll give you an example. When I went to apply for college, I did it on my computer. When she went to apply for college, I'll never forget it, she's applying for college on her cell phone. So I'm like, clearly, there's a generational difference here that's really funny and interesting that I can learn from. And so I think about that the same way in terms of how we think about our product. Right? Who is gonna be using our product? And I think it's that next generation, and I think that's who we built it for. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:26) And then your grandkids will not even apply to college. They'll just download the knowledge into their brain.

(Reed Williams at 00:44:32) Yeah. Who knows, man? Yeah. The singularity is coming. So.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:35) Come on. Musk's Neuralink is on its way.

(Reed Williams at 00:44:38) Oh, man. Oh, gosh. What do you think about that stuff?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:41) Are you excited about the future?

(Reed Williams at 00:44:45) Yeah. I think I'm ready for autonomous cars to hit and be fully functional. Yeah. I think that's gonna be really interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:52) Are you on Team Tesla?

(Reed Williams at 00:44:55) Uh, do I have a Tesla?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:57) Oh, yeah. Are you on the team?

(Reed Williams at 00:44:57) Do you love the Teslas?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:58) Do you love the Teslas? Have you driven one?

(Reed Williams at 00:45:00) I think Elon is definitely very interesting, a little bit polarizing. He may be a madman or a genius, you know. Time will tell. You know, I'm not sure how much they'll change the world with their mission. I think it's very, very aspirational. I know a lot of people are Team Tesla because of the recent jump in the stock price.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:24) Have you driven one? Have you driven one?

(Reed Williams at 00:45:26) I've ridden in one. I haven't driven one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:28) Oh, you had to drive one without autopilot? Jeez.

(Reed Williams at 00:45:31) Oh, yeah. Oh, you're not technically driving, Joe. Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:35) You are because it only kicks on mid-driving.

(Reed Williams at 00:45:39) That's fair. Have you seen the concept cars for the autonomous cars that don't have—so they're basically two couches facing each other.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:49) What? What are they called?

(Reed Williams at 00:45:50) They're—uh, I don't know. I think it was a concept maybe by Cruise. I'm not sure. But, yeah, it's this idea that you get in and it's just two couches and you're just kind of lounging in this vehicle that's driving you around. Let's do it. Yeah. That's what I'm looking for. So. But what I think is most interesting about that is that, think about all the truckers that are driving on the road today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:14) Mm-hmm.

(Reed Williams at 00:46:14) When there are autonomous cars, it's gonna completely change the trucking industry. A lot of people are gonna be put out of work. Right? So what is that gonna do to the economy? What is that gonna do—

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:28) I don't know. I think the economy is very resilient. I'm one of the optimists that we've just seen throughout our entire life, like, what happened when the printing press came out. You know, every innovation lays off massive chunks of the market, and yet the economy still goes forward. And I'm a growth mindset person, so I'm always learning and adapting. I'm, you know, fairly competitive in the sense that I wanna grow myself, and I compete against myself primarily. I wanna be a better version of myself today than I was yesterday. So that's why I got the Invisalign. You can't really tell with the cameras, but that was one of my personal upgrades for this year. But, yeah. So I think that it will absolutely create a change in the market, and people will have to learn new things. But I think it'll be like a frog in water. Like, it'll happen slow enough to where it won't—like, when we imagine—I think when we imagine the scariness of it, we imagine it like it's a light switch being flipped. Like, it'll happen in an instant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:36) Like, tomorrow, all truckers will be gone. But it'll always be a gradient. Right? And as you expand that gradient over time through laws, it'll just kind of happen. There won't be a day that you wake up and all the truckers are displaced.

(Reed Williams at 00:47:50) Yeah. I can see that. I think it changes things though. Like, as more stuff gets, if those opportunities get taken away, I think eventually—this may be controversial—but I think eventually, over time, we may need to see a basic living wage. Because if everything's automated, what are people going to do? And then maybe people focus on other endeavors. You know? But, yeah, that's neither here nor there. But I did like one thing that you said, Joel, which is about the growth mindset. I'm a huge fan of that.

(Reed Williams at 00:48:17) I think I first learned about it actually—my son, my younger son, maybe two or three years ago, came home from school and he was telling me about this growth mindset.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:26) That's awesome.

(Reed Williams at 00:48:26) And his teachers are talking about it in school now. And so I thought, well, this is amazing. So let me learn more about that. And so it makes so much sense. Right? Like, it's kind of like that outlook and that frame of mind is going to help you so much over time as opposed to, you know, they say a fixed mindset, which is like, you know, you don't—if you don't have any control of what you're doing or you're blaming other things for the things that are happening around you, like, you just get so much more out of life with a growth mindset. So I did want to at least comment on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:00) Yeah. And you know what? I actually heard the first alternative to the basic living wage concept, or it's like a modification of it. I heard somebody talking about it on the Joe Rogan podcast, and they're saying, like, an alternative to just giving people the money where to make basic services, like, just things that you have. So, like, you would have a basic housing service. You would have basic cell—we actually already have basic cell service in the United States. Like, if you're a homeless person, you can fill out some form and you can just get a government cell phone because they deemed it like a requirement. Right? So I think that as the automation increases, which before I started this podcast, I almost started a podcast called Boom Automated where we track the automation and displacement over time. But then I was like, nah. I went with this one instead, and I'm very happy I did. But I think that the system, like, the super organism we're a part of—right, this thing called life—I think it's smart enough and resilient enough that it will survive without complete and total catastrophe. I think we make it through, but I definitely think there's pain along the way.

(Reed Williams at 00:50:15) Oh, yeah. I agree with that. That's funny. So what was the inspiration for this other podcast for you, or this idea?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:21) Well, so my wife, her father has been a trucker for UPS for thirty-five years. And I was talking with him at dinner and I was like, you know, I've known Michelle for seven plus years. So, you know, year after year at dinner, I'm talking and letting Will, her dad, know about these advancements. And it started out first year, he's like, oh, it's never going to happen. And then things started becoming more autonomous and gaining more success, and I'd always share our latest news story with him. And then I think, like, two years ago, they had the first autonomous semi-truck delivery occurred.

(Reed Williams at 00:50:59) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:00) Yeah. Yeah. I let him know about that one. And he's retiring, I think, next year anyways. But I was talking with him because at the time, I said, hey. Look. You know, I used to automate real estate jobs and accounting functions in the early two thousands with the software I had written. And I'd go in there and the company would have 30 plus people in accounting and it would whittle down to like two because of the efficiencies of the technology. And it was always the people who were like, oh, this is cool. This is the future. Let me learn and, like, let me help. Those are always the ones that had the job after because they learned how to maintenance the system. So I was sharing with them. I was like, hey. See if UPS has an autonomous division where they're working on this and see if you can get transferred or be the test pilot or, like, you know, get involved in the transition so that you're relevant after the transition. That's like a strategy. That's why I was sharing with them. So—

(Reed Williams at 00:51:59) That's interesting. And so what made you decide to go with the Modern CTO podcast instead?

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:05) Well, I'll be real with you. So I had Logic17. We're a consultancy, like, just building technologies for companies. And I really enjoyed it, but I was having my first child, and then my mom had just passed away. And I was like, you know what? This next twenty years is going to fly by, and I really want to do something great. And so I said, you know what? Let's start to help. And then I found Gary Vee, and he was talking about sharing what you know today, trying to help others who know less, and just sharing the experience and starting that conversation. I said, okay. Why don't I start this podcast? And worst case scenario, I help a bunch of people, and I get to meet some great people who also, you know, led technology teams and built product. And I'll be in a better position. And if I started the Boom Automated, I didn't want to turn into like a fear monger because that's not where my heart's at. Like, I don't want to make money off of—I didn't want an audience. Like, I don't want an Alex Jones audience. Right? And that's just—that's where you go. Like, if you're doing Boom Automated podcast, you're going to be selling survival gear, you're going to be selling prepper gear, like, you're going to have advertisers in those areas. And, like, that's not what I wanted.

(Reed Williams at 00:53:24) Well, I think, you know, maybe it worked out for you in the long term. I was going to mention, I actually used to build real estate software also.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:32) What? What real estate softwares?

(Reed Williams at 00:53:36) So I was partner in my consulting firm. I was with two other guys, and we built this company called Usability Dynamics, and we built real estate software for WordPress. So it was a plugin that you would install on your site that would allow you to list your properties that you were selling.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:57) Oh, nice.

(Reed Williams at 00:53:58) Yeah. And so it's really interesting because we got to do a couple of cool things. So one of the things is, like, out of all the sites where all of the real estate is listed, we have the opportunity to build in kind of like a "E.T. phone home." So we could aggregate all the properties across all of the sites that were using the product. Of course, if they opt in and they want to share and then ultimately create kind of a centralized location to show all of that same data. But what's funny about real estate is I don't know if you're familiar with the RETS.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:29) Oh, yeah. I did lots of RETS and—yeah. Standard that's not a standard, but yeah.

(Reed Williams at 00:54:34) So what I was going to tell you is that's exactly how travel technology is. It's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:39) Really?

(Reed Williams at 00:54:40) Yeah. It's a standard, but sometimes it's not really standard. And so, you know, whether it's like, you know, there's RETS is funny. Right? Because it's one standard, but there's basically infinite different variations with how that data goes in there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:57) I know.

(Reed Williams at 00:54:58) And so travel is the same way in a lot of ways. It's very complex in that manner, and I always draw a lot of parallels between the two. So I think that also means there's opportunity for people to come in and disrupt those technologies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:12) So you've had to create, like, your own internal mappings and things like that?

(Reed Williams at 00:55:17) Yeah. So what we've done is we treat any technology vendor as an abstract layer, and so we have our APIs in the middle and our APIs basically translate from what our apps expect into what the different supplier expects because there's many different suppliers for hotel and airfare and car rental. And so I can connect, and I've abstracted that all away so I can connect to multiple sources at once, and they all sort of translate into this one format that my apps expect. And so there's this middle layer that we built to completely pull that away from how we connect to the independent services.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:01) Nice. I built a layer like that with the real estate stuff because we connect all the different boards, and we called that middle layer Transfusion.

(Reed Williams at 00:56:09) Yeah. Oh, yeah. Very fancy. Right? Very—but I definitely know that problem well from both real estate and travel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:19) It's a fun one. Yeah. So what does the rest of your day look like?

(Reed Williams at 00:56:26) Today? Or—yeah. A lot of meetings. A lot of things like vendor review, security review, team planning, growth, those kind of things. I really have had to transition away from the individual contributions that I can make to our code.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:43) Yeah. It's a tough thing, but when you make the transition, you realize that you can have a larger impact and still be around, and you realize how many more levels up there actually are. And that you can start helping the people make their transitions too and coach them through their careers, and that just becomes, you know, massively rewarding.

(Reed Williams at 00:57:07) Oh, yeah. You are preaching to the choir. I talked to my team about when you're an individual contributor, you're focused on your craft, right, and being the best at your craft. And then as you grow in seniority, your influence just becomes wider so that you're now helping others, and you're influencing their craft and what they do, and that over time, that just becomes wider and wider as you grow. And some people, like, especially engineers, I think it's kind of infamous that everyone thinks, like, I have to become an engineering manager at some point. But then a lot of people get into it, and they don't really like it because they've never done it before. Maybe, you know, you just have to, I think, try it to see if you will like it or can be successful at it. And then some people end up saying, well, I just want to be an individual contributor. And so I think that's why you see kind of these two career tracks for engineers, you know, going all the way up to architect on the IC side and then eventually, like, manager, director, et cetera, on the management side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:11) Yeah. Environment's also a big thing too because you can get promoted and have your first experience as a manager be at a company that, like, isn't good. And so you can have a bad experience as a manager because not all companies—especially getting to see the culture now and all these different companies, you get to work with them—the culture is like a massive differentiator between organizations. And I didn't realize how much so until I started talking and doing hundreds of interviews with people and then getting to go visit them and see their cultures. And it's not like there are ones that are wrong and right. There's just ones that work for you or don't, you know.

(Reed Williams at 00:58:55) Yeah. That's interesting. I always wonder about how other companies do it because I only, you know, I have my limited view of the world based on my experiences. And so, you know, like, what really separates a good company from a great company, you know, culture-wise?

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:14) Well, you have an office in San Francisco. Right? You guys got some people there?

(Reed Williams at 00:59:19) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:19) Well, next time I'm out there, I'll stop by and we'll hang out and I'll just get to experience, you know, your office and I'll share with you candidly, like, the differences that I see between companies and then, you know, you interpret that how you would like to interpret it.

(Reed Williams at 00:59:35) Yeah. That'd be awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:36) Yeah. But a spoiler alert, the way you think as a leader, like, top 1%.

(Reed Williams at 00:59:41) Oh, thank you. Yeah. I appreciate that. Yeah. It is important to me, for sure, for this company and just, you know, all the things that are involved with it. It's high up on my radar. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:56) You guys have a careers page on your website?

(Reed Williams at 01:00:02) Yeah. Let me—travelbank.com/jobs is where it's at.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:06) You guys hiring?

(Reed Williams at 01:00:08) We are. Yeah. We're growing.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:10) Alright. So if you want to work with TravelBank, go there. And we'll put that in the show notes too for you so they can go click it.

(Reed Williams at 01:00:17) Okay. Great. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:19) Alright. Awesome.

(Reed Williams at 01:00:20) Great.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:21) Dude, we did it. I'm excited. And I'll let you know next time I'm out in San Francisco, and I'll come by and say hello.

(Reed Williams at 01:00:26) Yeah. Definitely reach out. It'd be great to get to meet you face to face.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:30) Awesome. Talk soon, Reed. See you, buddy.

(Reed Williams at 01:00:31) Thanks. Bye, everyone.