Ryan Debenham & Charlie Besecker - CTO & CRO at Route

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Ryan and Charlie, the CTO and CRO at Route, and we discuss how Route is changing the ecommerce experience, crafting a culture of accountability, and the benefits of having high standards. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) Hey, guys.

(Ryan at 00:00:33) Hello.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) How are you guys doing without the haircuts? I even brought my hat. I was like, I don't know what to do. You can't get anywhere.

(Ryan at 00:00:42) My hair's getting quite long.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:44) Oh, you got a guitar back there.

(Ryan at 00:00:47) I do. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:48) Wait. Is that a microphone holder too with the little pop filter?

(Ryan at 00:00:52) Yeah. Charlie makes fun of me because he thinks I placed it there on purpose to look cool. It just happens that my office is also a little studio.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:01) Oh, nice.

(Charlie at 00:01:03) Ryan's one of those people that's annoyingly talented at everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:08) I like it. So what type of music do you like to play?

(Ryan at 00:01:12) You know, I grew up playing the piano, so that's the basis, but then I just love writing music on electronic music, really. Yeah, just playing with Ableton Live and a MIDI keyboard and that sort of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:29) Making it happen. Now do you have a band going, you and Charlie?

(Ryan at 00:01:35) We should start one. Charlie, can you play the clarinet or something?

(Charlie at 00:01:40) I've got some solid fourth grade recorder skills if you ever need that.

(Ryan at 00:01:47) I figured you'd be pretty good at that.

(Charlie at 00:01:50) Yeah. No. That's what I got. And Joel, you should see this guy snowboard too. It's like I said, it's annoying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:56) Do you have GoPro footage, Ryan?

(Ryan at 00:01:59) I could dig that up somewhere. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:02) Oh, man. I like that. Are you athletic? What do you do, Charlie? Now you gotta—

(Ryan at 00:02:08) Charlie has talent, you know?

(Charlie at 00:02:11) Somewhere. Somewhere. We're still trying to figure that out. No, I grew up playing soccer, but as I like to say, that was about 40 pounds ago. And I snowboard for fun right now, but I'm usually pretty good unless I'm next to Ryan or behind Ryan, I should say.

(Ryan at 00:02:29) Hey, we have quite fun snowboarding together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:32) Do you guys both live in Utah?

(Charlie at 00:02:36) Yeah. We both live up in Park City. So it's definitely worth it. You know, we got a world-class tech community here in Utah, and we live in a world-class ski town. So the commute's a bit much, but I actually miss it at this point.

(Ryan at 00:02:51) Right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:52) This hat's actually a Vail hat. That's a little ski town.

(Ryan at 00:02:57) All right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:58) You go there in the summers. Everyone's in casts from their broken arms from the mountain biking.

(Ryan at 00:03:04) Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. True.

(Charlie at 00:03:06) It's true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:08) Oh, man. At some point, you probably gotta talk about Route and technology stuff.

(Ryan at 00:03:14) That was the point of this, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:16) I think so. What's the 30,000-foot view of Route?

(Ryan at 00:03:21) I can give an answer. You know, Charlie and I are gonna have similar and also unique perspectives on this. But really, our mission statement as a company is to help people see, share, and discover the world's products. For what people know about Route today, part of that may make sense and part of that may feel like there's some questions there as to what we really—you know, Route started actually, the CEO's story, the founder, is really cool. It started four or five years ago, and he was doing a lot of work in performance marketing and direct-to-consumer brands that he would spin up and down.

(Ryan at 00:04:10) At one point he was actually over in Italy, and he wanted to buy this antique trunk. The seller was nervous to sell it because he said when they ship it over to the states they often break. And Evan responds to that and says, "Well, you know, let's put insurance on it." And he said, "I don't know how to do that." And Evan responded, "I don't know how to do that either." But in that moment, Evan thought about what he was doing and thought, "You know, providing the opportunity for the consumer to add insurance at the point of sale might be an interesting way to increase conversion on his sites and to help people feel confident that they can make a purchase." And so he came back and actually started the idea of shipping insurance within a previous business of his and was just blown away by the success that had. You know, it did increase conversion across all of his sites and also became what he recognized as a really interesting business opportunity to focus on. And so, a handful of years later, Evan found our cofounder, Mike, and the two of them decided to take that idea and spin it up into a business called Route.

(Ryan at 00:05:32) But they definitely envisioned much more than just insurance. However, you know, the cool thing—I mean, so many startups start and they have this fantastic product idea, and they're gonna go change the world, then they have to figure out how to make money. You know, one of the amazing things that Evan and Mike figured out was, "Hey, we have this fantastic business model, a really good idea and a way to make money, and let's evolve our thoughts around that to create this really interesting product vision." And so as they were thinking through that idea, they evolved to the mission statement of helping people see, share, and discover the world's products and a shared goal, North Star product of bringing everything that you buy online into one place.

(Ryan at 00:06:23) So those really two are the 30,000-foot view. We have a goal to take everything that you buy online, bring it into one place, and then provide a way to elevate that shopping experience. You know, today that's through a premium tracking experience so that you can track that order in a very nice visual user experience and also to build confidence into that order so that if something goes wrong, whether it's lost, damaged, or stolen in the process, Route's gonna make it incredibly convenient and simple for you to resolve. So I would kind of put it there. Charlie, I don't know if you have any thoughts to add to that.

(Charlie at 00:07:01) Yeah. I think one of the more interesting things that you hear Evan talk about quite a bit is, you know, he was in high school, he started his first ecommerce company. And in 1994, the dawn of the internet, you buy something online, and what happens thereafter is you get an email that says thanks for your order. And, you know, you fast forward 25 years and you think about the state of technology 25 years ago compared to today. And then you realize that if you buy something online today, what happens is you get an email that says, "Thanks for your order," and that email is slightly better.

(Charlie at 00:07:36) And so it's just one of these incredibly obvious areas of modern life, modern technology that once you actually look at it, you realize that it's still kind of stuck in the stone age. And all we have now 25 years later is better emails. And then on top of that, you look at really another thesis of the business, is that the post-purchase experience, kind of from the moment you hit checkout until the moment you get your order, it's a very fragmented experience. And so, you know, the second you go shop online at your favorite brand, as soon as you hit checkout, that experience is now handed over to a carrier who doesn't really care about the brand and doesn't really care about user interface or a great experience.

(Charlie at 00:08:26) And if you want to find out where your order is, you have to dig through your email and find a link, and you end up on an ugly carrier tracking page. And then if you run into some type of issue with your order, you know, you have to go read terms and conditions, reach out to support for the merchant. You have to go sometimes deal with the carrier. And so that is just a fragmented and broken process. And so an additional thesis of Route is that we just think that there's a fundamentally better approach to that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:55) So if I download the consumer app, will it show me where my stuff is?

(Charlie at 00:09:02) So I describe it as kind of like an Uber-like user interface where it's a map, and all of your packages are on there. You order something online. You automatically get push notifications. And so, you know, especially in the current landscape, you know, you order a lot of stuff. Sometimes you even forget what you ordered, and now you get push notifications. The other thing which is really interesting is, you know, we've seen a 131% increase in stolen packages in the last three weeks due to COVID. And in addition to that, the major carriers are suspending a lot, if not all of their guarantees, including signature requirements. And so those two things play together. So the fact that I can get a push notification from an app to the second that my package hits my doorstep, it's more valuable now than ever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:50) So what do you guys do? You authenticate through my email and you're scanning email and then you're picking up on tracking IDs and you sort of process your own experience behind that? Like, how are you figuring out what I'm ordering?

(Ryan at 00:10:02) Yeah. We really take a couple of approaches. You know, now more than ever, people have different perspectives in terms of what they feel comfortable with in terms of giving access to email or not giving access to email. And so we definitely wanted to approach this problem as making it optional. And so when you sign into Route, the first thing is Route has partnered with somewhere close to 2,500 stores at this point to offer insurance and also integrate with their tracking. And if you buy from one of those 2,500 stores, then part of that transaction comes with Route or, you know, depending on whether you elect to add Route or not to your order. But Route gets that information directly from the store, and we're able to pull that into a very elegant user experience and visually track the order from the point where it ships to your door. You know, Route also wanted to make sure that we provide an app that's useful more than the handful of times that you order from stores that Route has actually partnered with. And so to do that, Route provided a way to connect into your email and therefore pull everything that you order online into one place. You can do that through Gmail today. You know, Gmail offers the ability to authenticate an app for access to your email.

(Ryan at 00:11:26) If you're not comfortable doing that, you can also forward those emails to Route. And so those really are the options. You know, use Route just for the stores that Route has partnered with. Use Route by forwarding your emails to Route, or allow Route to access your email, and we will do our best to find that automatically for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:44) I'm comfortable with the integration. I have no problem being like, "Yeah. Here's my Gmail," and I get to see when—and I saw the—I pulled up the web page and saw it. It's actually a pretty cool interface. And for me to just authenticate my email, and then it just shows me the world with all of these packages coming to me, that seems pretty cool because it actually had the product image on the map where the map marker would normally be. I thought that was really neat. Also, it would help my wife get a visual of the expenses.

(Ryan at 00:12:17) Yep. Yep. You know, we take privacy incredibly seriously. And, you know, from day one, just actually just getting permission from Google to make that connection requires that we went through a very robust security assessment that included penetration testing and understanding of our business and policy and everything with relation to data privacy. You know, we're very, very serious about it. We also have, you know, we want to make sure that we're only accessing the things that are actually important to the tracking experience. And so we've invested a ton of actually our R&D into some impressive algorithms and ways in which we can really only pull the emails that have, that are predicted to have any sort of tracking or order information. And actually, we've made big investments into machine learning specifically to do this with greater than 99% accuracy at the ability to look at an email and know whether or not that email is about order and tracking data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:29) I like it. That's smart. I'm curious on the other, on the merchant side. I was on the consumer side. On the merchant side, you mentioned a couple times insurance. It seems like that's a business model for you guys, correct, insuring some of the products, which is smart. So if I'm a merchant, could I add an upsell, like, insure it would be a checkbox, like, "Insure this product with Route," and I would check it, and it would charge an extra, you know, X dollars, like $10, and then it would be insured? Is that the flow? Is that what I gathered?

(Ryan at 00:14:01) It's very close. So we actually insure the shipments, not the product. And so, you know, I mean, basically, the product is insured if it happens to get lost, damaged, or stolen. And, you know, it's not sort of like an extended warranty, but it's particularly ensuring that it leaves someplace and arrives in good state. But it's exactly like you described. When you go to checkout, at the point of checkout, you'll see an option to add Route. And, you know, Route is some small percentage of that charge, you know, somewhere between 1-3% typically. And then you can elect to add that, and it adds, you know, a dollar or a few dollars based on what you're buying. And the next part of that experience, if you're using the app, is you'd get a notification on the app that, "Hey, you know, we just found your order." If you're not a user of the app, you'd get an email from Route that said, "Hey. Congratulations. You know, your order is protected," and it would invite you to go and download the app.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:02) Oh, that's pretty cool. Do I, as a merchant, get part of that fee or no?

(Ryan at 00:15:07) Charlie, you want to take that one?

(Charlie at 00:15:09) Yeah. So we actually do share some of that feedback with the merchant to make sure that the value is aligned. And we have a lot of merchants as well that actually opt to pay for Route protection for all of their orders going through because of the impact that Route can have through visual tracking. It dramatically reduces the "Where's my order?" calls, which typically speaking is 30 to 40% of the calls that are going to support. So we can dramatically reduce that. Obviously, we're dramatically reducing the amount of claims, issues that they're dealing with, sometimes as high as 90 to 95% of the time and volume that would go through to their support department.

(Charlie at 00:15:53) And then obviously, most brands today basically are customer focused and want to provide a great experience. And so if something shows up lost, damaged, or stolen, a lot of times these merchants will just eat that cost and will send either a refund or a new order. And our insurance policy basically turns that typically sunk cost into a new order for these merchants. So if you look at all of those cost savings, a lot of our merchants have really determined that it's in their best interest and it's cost neutral for them to actually pay for this for all of their customers. So that's another option as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:30) Yeah. Well, and it also helps spread Route. It's just so interesting as I'm learning here about the business and the model. It seems like this thing should have existed a long time ago.

(Charlie at 00:16:41) I say all the time, I think some of the best businesses out there are face palm, that's so obvious, why didn't I think of it? And the second—I literally, from the first time Ryan told me about Route, we were colleagues at a previous company, and he called me to get a go-to-market perspective on the company. And it's one of those ideas, the second you hear that you could have all of your orders in one place, it never ceases to be infuriating if you have to go into email and click on a tracking link and then try to figure out where your order is.

(Charlie at 00:17:15) And then you have to do that multiple times per order, per shipment. And so it's one of those ideas that it's hard to get the bug out of your head once you realize that there's a significantly better way to be doing it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:28) Yeah. And it really hit home too with the ugly experience. I hate the emails from my UPS or whoever they are to click it, and then it's always this old system. And then I get into the system and the map is garbage. It's like a map graphic from 1998.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:43) It's like they're still using MapQuest. You know? So what's going on? Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:48) So I totally get that experience. Plus, it was already a proven model from what they did with flight tracking, right? Flight tracking already had a very similar model where they're getting people's—they're detecting your flights through your email, and you would just have it on the app, and it would just know all your schedules and travel. So it was already something that's happening over there too.

(Ryan at 00:18:09) Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:10) Yeah. This is great. I love the product. This is actually really cool. How large are you guys right now? How fast have you grown?

(Charlie at 00:18:19) Yeah. Quite quickly. So as Ryan mentioned, we have 2,500 merchants that are currently using the Route app. We basically from a cold start in January of 2019, we went from three employees to about 150. And we broke Slack's five-year-old record for revenue in the first year of business. And we've got some even more mind blowing things up our sleeve for 2020, but I'll leave that as a teaser.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:54) Nice. That's exciting. Yeah. You gotta follow up with me on that. You guys got bought by FedEx. They were like, we needed a prettier interface, we didn't know what to do. There you go. They're actually doing some pretty cool stuff. That's one of the episodes that I think you would like as far as logistics-wise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:12) I always try to figure out what episodes the guest would like. The one that we did with FedEx, it wasn't their CTO, but it was their head of Blockchain, one of their executives there. But man, there's some really interesting things happening on a global logistics level with Blockchain, and they'll work together with FedEx and UPS. They'll all work together as a collection to help push these technologies forward. It's quite fascinating.

(Ryan at 00:19:35) That's very cool. I'd love to hear that one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:38) So Ryan, let's talk a little bit about leadership and technology.

(Ryan at 00:19:44) Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I can just riff for a little bit, and then you can dive in anywhere where you're interested. But for me, it really starts with one very important, kind of uncompromising thing, which is to hire great people.

(Ryan at 00:20:03) And I think the day I started at Route, I was talking to Evan and Mike and said—and of course, day one, it's like, hey, we gotta go hire a bunch of engineers. And I think the first thing I said was, we're gonna start by setting a ridiculously high hiring bar. And I know we feel pressured to go and hire. However, taking some time upfront to make sure that we hire the best people is gonna pay dividends forever. And this is actually something that Charlie and I have five to six years worth of experience of working with similar strategy at Qualtrics. Charlie and I were both there previous to joining Route, and we came to Route. And absolutely, something that is just paramount in our business is to hire the very best people. Once you've done that, it's about enabling their success.

(Ryan at 00:21:00) And what does success look like? From my side, Qualtrics was an interesting experience where I went from having a little bit of leadership experience to managing a very large team that was around the world. And that happened over a few short years. And I absolutely made a lot of management mistakes. It's hard not to.

(Ryan at 00:21:23) I like to tell people, when talking about opportunities at Route, that good people do not necessarily become good managers. It takes a lot more than being a good person to be a good manager. And management really comes down to a very important skill set and a very important motivation. If the motivation is anything other than enabling people's success, you're probably thinking about management wrong. But ultimately, what

(Charlie at 00:21:57) —what

(Ryan at 00:21:57) does it look like to enable success of people? For me, it comes down to establishing how we work and what are we trying to accomplish, right? And so product vision is very important. Do the engineers on the team, do the people at the company understand where we're going and why we're going there?

(Ryan at 00:22:16) Do they really get it? Do they believe in it? Do they have passion for what we're trying to accomplish? And after product vision, it really is, how are we going to get there? Engineering's core responsibility is to deliver that product, and then how do we go about doing that?

(Ryan at 00:22:36) For me as a leader to be successful, I certainly can't do all of it. I love the fact that I am an engineer through and through. I've been coding for 15 or 16 years professionally, and I'll still take time today to write code, even though the team will make fun of me for it in certain cases. But it's very important to me to be in the detail. But at the same time, as the team scales out, I can't be there every day.

(Ryan at 00:23:05) And I have to know that when I'm not there to make a decision, that the team knows how to make the best decision without me. And that's around establishing how we work as a team. What is the culture and what are the tenets of our team? The tenets for me, and for our team, start with delivering value frequently, right?

(Ryan at 00:23:27) How do we make sure that we are consistently delivering new value to our customers? That's easy to do for a short period of time. That's hard to do over the long period of time, right? And so as we are thinking about a long term strategy and the goal to deliver value frequently for the long term, we have to be very thoughtful about how we go about delivering the value, what technical decisions we're making, what debt we're incurring, what systems and strategies do we have for building it.

(Ryan at 00:24:00) Another very important tenet of ours is that we ship software fast and reliably. It's easy to ship software fast, and it's also relatively easy to ship software reliably, but it's very hard to ship fast and reliably. And the engineers actually came up with a little motto of, we're not going to deploy code with our fingers crossed, right? We want to have confidence in our deployments, but we want to do it quickly.

(Ryan at 00:24:29) And so that comes down to investments into automation and testing strategies and the quality of how we build software. And I'd say the other really, really important goal, and one that I learned with a lot of scar tissue from Qualtrics, is to prioritize operational excellence. And really, what do we mean by that? Operational excellence in engineering is about having confidence that you understand how your system is working and how your system will continue to work at various degrees of scale. And I've been a part of a team where we did not understand that.

(Ryan at 00:25:12) And as businesses move fast, Qualtrics moved very fast, Route is moving even faster somehow. If you are not prepared for those sort of things, you find yourself hitting a brick wall at 100 miles an hour and holding the business back. And so thinking about and prioritizing operational excellence is something that just needs to be a part of how we work on a daily basis. So I would say that's a part of it. Another really important part of it is creating the right culture, and a culture—I actually, something else I'll have to tell people.

(Ryan at 00:25:53) As I was progressing into various leadership roles in my career, I kept getting feedback that I need to be—I needed to be a bigger jerk to be effective. And I didn't know how to interpret that. I mean, I understood it, but I couldn't figure out how I was going to be very successful as a leader in technology because I just fundamentally am uncomfortable being a jerk. I just don't like to be a jerk.

(Ryan at 00:26:27) And it was three or four years ago, the CTO over at Qualtrics now, his name is John Timson. But he phrased that a little differently at one point. He said, Ryan, you gotta hold your team to higher expectations. And that was all of a sudden this epiphany for me. I was like, you're saying the exact same thing that I've been told over and over again.

(Ryan at 00:26:50) However, you phrase it in a way that now I understand better. I don't feel like I need to be a jerk if we've all talked about and aligned on expectations, and then I just need to hold you accountable to those. And that's a part of business. It's part of being professional and working. And I would say when I learned that, it fundamentally changed my career and my ability to be successful as a leader because at that point, it was about defining expectations and then enabling people to be successful and empowering them to be successful at accomplishing them.

(Ryan at 00:27:24) And so those expectations are a very important part of technology leadership. What does it mean to have operational excellence? What are we trying to accomplish? Who are we trying to hire? What are we trying to get done?

(Ryan at 00:27:38) And allowing the team to be a part of those conversations. I don't want to, and in fact, it's not very successful for me to come out and dictate to a team how we're going to work. If I tell the team how we're going to work, then it's likely to get met with a lot of resistance, and it's likely that the team won't be as bought in as if they had come up with those strategies as a part of some sort of collaborative process, right? And so my favorite thing to do is to sit down and say, hey.

(Ryan at 00:28:11) We've all talked about our tenets, our goals. We have found ourself in a place where we're not achieving one of those goals. Let's say that for some reason, we're not shipping software as reliably as we wanted to. Well, I'm not a jerk to come out and say, hey, does everyone agree we're not doing as good here as we want to do? You know? Yeah. It makes sense. Okay. Well, then how can we evolve to do this better?

(Ryan at 00:28:39) And that becomes a very collaborative process and ultimately creates incredible accountability, right, where the team feels like they've been a part of it and they're now responsible to make sure that they can meet those expectations. And the buy-in and the culture that is created from that is just unbelievable. The team at Route is really probably the most impressive team I've ever worked with. All the way from the executive group down to every group, definitely engineering, is the most impressive group of engineers that I've had an opportunity to work with. And the culture of the team as a result is also—it's collaborative.

(Ryan at 00:29:30) It's humble. It's low ego, and it's highly accountable. And I don't have to be a jerk to facilitate that culture, and the team doesn't have to be a jerk to facilitate that culture. So that's a part of it. I would say the last thing I want to touch on here, and then you're very welcome to dive into details because obviously technical leadership is incredibly broad.

(Ryan at 00:29:57) But it's very important for people to also know what's in it for them. So I've described, hey, obviously, here's what's in it for Route. Here's where we want to go, and here's how we're thinking about enabling your success to help us go there. But what's in it for people?

(Ryan at 00:30:14) What is in it for their personal story, their personal growth, their personal careers? And I think a lot of that comes down to just a lot of transparency in terms of, what does success look like and how can Route help enable the success of people? And so from day one, we actually set up levels and expectations and ways in which you can get promoted and things that just give people a sense of understanding of, okay, I am here today. Success in my career looks like this, and here is how I can go about demonstrating that my personal contributions and my ability to scale and grow as a professional are heading in that direction.

(Ryan at 00:31:04) And so that structure is very important. So I think I'll stop there and happy to dive into anything specific, but that's a broad overview of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:15) Preach. If this were a contest for best tech leaders speak condensed, you'd win.

(Ryan at 00:31:23) Oh, thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:24) Awesome. Dude, I was just sitting there, and I was just like, keep going, man. I was like, there's no way he's got another one, and then you just pull it out. I'm like, yes, there we go. Dude, that was just—now I have something to point people to, right? I could say, hey, go listen to that because super condensed video editors will love you for that. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:44) But I do want to dive into some parts. So one of the things that kept coming up in the back of my mind, because I get to interact with so many different types of leaders, and I get to go out in public and meet thousands of people, and they listen to the show, and they're from all different levels. And one of the things that I noticed the most that your talk helped me process better is that we really have to drive home to people that listen is that all the best practices, whether they're what, you know, Ryan just said or you're reading a book or anything like that, all of these, they really do have this baseline of having great people. Because all the problems I hear about, 90% of everything I hear about people that are down and coming for advice, it's because they're just in the wrong position with the wrong group of people. Specifically, I'll get more down in the details.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:45) Specifically, when you were talking about getting people to come together to collaborate over how you could be better or letting them influence and help originate the process so that they have ownership of it, that doesn't work with poorly skilled people. You can't do that with them. And what will happen, what will actually happen in the real world, is people will come on, they will listen, they'll read books, they'll figure out, "Oh, I need to let these people own it." And then they go back to their C-squad team, right? And they try to get this, and it's a complete cluster, and they're like, "That didn't work."

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:06) And it's like, it definitely does work. You just have to have the right people. It's step one. The next thing is that I find that when people will have the realization that they don't have the right team, there are two types of people I found, because I'll go speak at teams and companies. There are the people who will walk away with the acknowledgment that they don't have the right people, and they either won't be strong enough to make adjustments and get a right team in place, or they will. They'll either make the adjustments or they won't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:50) And I would say 80% of the people, they don't do it. They know, but it's difficult. And so for that, one of my favorite quotes from, you know, I'm big into personal development, so one of those personal development people said, "If you do what is easy, your life will be difficult. If you do what's difficult, your life will be easy." Right? It's a discipline thing. So many times we know what we should be doing, but we won't do it. And so I guess to ask you a question, the first question I have is, at any point in time, did you find yourself in your entire work history, did you find yourself on not a good team, have the realization, and then go find a better team? Has that ever happened for you?

(Ryan at 00:34:38) You know, I've been incredibly lucky, I think. I would say I've not found myself in that position. Prior to Qualtrics, I was at a company called Backcountry.com, an e-commerce online retailer of outdoor equipment and gear and things like that. I went there to work for a guy by the name of Steve Brein, and Steve Brein had been a VP of supply chain in different areas over at Amazon for ten years. And, you know, Amazon has done incredible things with regards to technology and culture and things like that.

(Ryan at 00:35:22) And so Steve came out of Amazon with just unbelievable experience that helped me learn. And absolutely from day one, you know, that team at Backcountry was some of the most talented people I've ever worked with. And they've left Backcountry and gone to Facebook and Qualtrics and Apple and Google and just as many of the great tech companies you can think of. People from Backcountry have filtered out and joined them. And so I've been very lucky. And, you know, Steve definitely set my career off in the right direction.

(Ryan at 00:35:58) Thinking about technology and leadership and product in ways that are very scalable, very customer focused, very high bar in terms of people. So I feel lucky about that. You know, I definitely empathize with what you're saying, which is if you've not done that, it's hard to change. I've got to give some credit to Jared Smith, one of the founders of Qualtrics, for being absolutely relentless in terms of maintaining that bar, completely uncompromising. I'm sure Charlie can share some stories here as well.

(Ryan at 00:36:34) You know, and Jared, yeah, I remember day one, him just describing, "This is the type of people we hire, and this is why." And, you know, "We won't compromise." I remember feeling desperate to make certain hires. And as we drilled into, you know, their experience and different things about them, I remember Jared specifically coming out and saying no. And at the time, it was like, "Are you kidding me? This person's great in all of these different dimensions." And, yeah, there might be this one thing or these two things, but, like, you know, we need them really bad. We should hire them anyway.

(Ryan at 00:37:01) And to see him, even though he felt more than probably anybody, like, "Yes, I also feel the need for these people to be here," but to say no, you know, just taught me that it's possible. It is possible to do. And when you do it, then it becomes a little bit easier the next time, right, and a little bit easier the next time. And, you know, once you get the flywheel started, then it really starts to go, right?

(Ryan at 00:37:45) I mean, the first few hires at Route were really hard. I was not the CTO. I was the head recruiter at the time, right? I had to figure out how to get good people to Route. And we're a tiny company, and, you know, we have a very exciting vision and mission, but how do I convince people to come and join us? And, you know, we interviewed a bunch of people, and it was like, "No. No. No. No. No."

(Ryan at 00:38:10) You know? And I remember feeling pressure from, like, "Hey, we've got to make hires." But ultimately, we did. We made one, and then we made two, and then we made three, right? And now we're a team of close to 40 software engineers, some of the most talented people I've ever worked with, you know, experience all across the map from people right out of high school—or sorry, right out of college at some of the most impressive universities—all the way up to they left Amazon and joined Route, right? Or they left Apple or something like that. And, you know, now people come and they interview, and they read a blog post that I wrote or they do a little bit of research and they talk to the team. And they leave and they're like, "I want to be there. Those people are good."

(Ryan at 00:38:59) Right? Like, that is a talented team, and I like that philosophy. And I want to surround myself with the best people. And, you know, we have enough of a team now that they can see that, and they realize that it's different than other places, right? And so that investment and that pressure upfront was worth it. And, you know, to anybody that's listening to this, if you're doing a startup, start with that strategy. You know, start from the beginning. It's hard to get started, but, you know, once you get going, it'll move. If you're not there, I would say figure out how to make a change, and that's tough.

(Ryan at 00:39:38) That's a cultural change. You've got to figure out how to reestablish what great is. And, you know, I don't know. That's, it is tough, I would say. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:52) Here's the best, here's the best thing that I've got. And I was just thinking about it now. I was trying to figure out, everyone wants the bullet points that they can rattle off. "Oh, if you do this process, you're gonna get the best people." But there's no way to describe it because, like, I could see, you know, for me, it's like, I could see Fabiana or Jaime. I could see them in my head because I know them, and we just need more people like them. But if you were to, there's nothing you could do to pick apart the attributes. It's partly spirit, soul. It's partly energetic too in personality. But I would say, and I'm just going to freestyle here, so let's rip it apart.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:34) If you think of the most professional person in the world, so if I was talking to somebody who's like, "How do I get out of here?" or "How do I set a bar? How do I figure out where I am in the stack?" Think about the most professional, passionate, hardworking person in the world, and they feel like they're one in a million. But what I've learned through this show and getting to visit people, there are entire organizations where that's the norm. There are a bunch of those people. Those people are the 80%. And it's near impossible to imagine. You're like, "This is a one in a million person." But then you come across organizations, you know, like Route, right, or Amazon, and you realize that this is something that's so deeply baked into who they are that you won't survive if you're not that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:23) Yep. Yeah.

(Ryan at 00:41:24) Yep. Yep. That's exactly right. And it's tricky to interview for that. You know, we've definitely set a high bar just in terms of people's understanding of computer science fundamentals and problem solving and things like that. You know, we want to make sure people have the right technical foundation to be successful. But then there's this other piece, right? It's attitude. It's curiosity, growth mindset, humility, and it's hard to interview for.

(Ryan at 00:41:56) You know, and it'd be hard to create a bullet point of, like, "Ask these questions and expect these answers" to really, you know, identify that. But, you know, I would say a lot of interviews is you kind of get trained. You start to see it. And, ultimately, you know, I would say the team, you know, it's so critical to the interview process, is setting up some structure where the team gets to be involved and participate and evaluate, right? And we actually, you know, set up some simple process so that a manager doesn't get to make the decision on a hire, right? We have a hiring committee, and the committee's job is to make sure that we're continuing to raise the bar, and we're looking for folks who are going to fit the culture and the expectations that we have. And setting up a simple process like that, you know, and some structure where when we interview, we do these different types of interviews, and we take notes, you know, and the notes kind of look at these different angles of behavior and technical fundamentals. And, you know, then you have a committee that understands our culture very well, read through those interview notes, and, you know, I would say that almost always gets it right, because they know our team, they know our people, they know our goals.

(Ryan at 00:43:16) And when you read through from an unbiased perspective a candidate and you look at their resume and you look at their job history and you look at the decisions they've made, I would say that, you know, most of the time, we can make the right decision through that process.

(Charlie at 00:43:31) I want to add to that because I think a couple key takeaways just finishing off what Ryan was saying is if you have a group of people, you interview by committee, right? You always have a cross-functional person, right? So no direct management chain can make that decision because that can lead to their urgency leading to a compromise and leading to a suboptimal hire. But I think when you actually get together and you review everybody's feedback on a given candidate, you start to realize when you do this over time that it gets incredibly obvious. And so one of the things that I train my hiring managers on is if you're using a term like, "I like them, but I'm on the fence," the answer is no. If you're using terms like, "You know what? I'm a soft yes," the answer is no. And what you start to build is this culture where it's like, the expectation is that you are not, if you are not emphatically pounding the fist on the table because you think this is one of the best people, you know, that you've ever seen, then we're going to move on, and the expectation is that we keep looking. And then the way this, this isn't something you can really quantify, but what I push all my hiring managers to do is if you don't have a very reasonable expectation, a strong belief that this person will be in the top third of your team, then don't hire them.

(Charlie at 00:45:00) And so that's kind of, that's how we talk about it. It's like, is this going to be, you know, of our 10 CSMs, is this going to be one of the top three? And if the answer to that question is no, and you don't have strong confidence the answer to that question is yes, we should keep looking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:06) I love this. Because if you want to step up, right? Because everyone has to grow in their career. We don't imagine that everyone comes out perfect, and you usually grow through pressure, right, and pain, and that's how it works. And if you want to do this, it really, for, like, if I wanted to come work at a company like Route, it would really force me to double down on what I'm the best at, where my skill set is and be very aware. It forces awareness. It also puts me in an environment where people are pushing themselves forward, so I will naturally have to be a part of that. I'll have to continue to push myself forward as well. No, I love it. It's just you get this cyclical positive feedback loop. And we have, I like that you guys said that too. We have on our website, one of our core values is "hell yes or not at all" in reference to talent. It's like, did we walk out of that and we were like, "Oh, we have to have them?" Or did we walk out of that, we're like, "Yeah. That could work." You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:03) Yep. Dude, this is great. How do I get a job at Route? No. For people listening, my team's like, "What?" No. For people listening, route.com/careers?

(Ryan at 00:46:19) Route is one of the fortunate companies to be very actively hiring during the current environment. You know, we, being in e-commerce and seeing a shift of buying trends more online with some of the latest environmental changes, you know, has been great for Route, which is crazy to say. And we are very actively hiring in engineering, in revenue teams, and across the board. So, you know, finding our career page, our job descriptions, and all that sort of stuff would definitely be a way to get in touch. And, you know, and just be curious. You know?

(Ryan at 00:47:03) Route is very, I would say, really wants to see that people want to be at Route. And that starts with our CEO. I remember, I think the last question he asked me was, "How excited are you about Route, or how bad do you want to be at Route?" And that is his litmus test at the end of, you know, "Is this going to be the right person?" And, you know, I'd say that's continued. We want people, you know, ultimately, the final step of being wildly successful at Route is just loving what we're trying to go and do. You know, Route wants to, like every startup, of course, change the world in some interesting way, but Route really has an opportunity to do that. You know, we are making really big moves in e-commerce, and, you know, the product future and the strategy that we have is so exciting, and it's so ambitious. And there's no way to accomplish that without people that feel like they want to be a part of that, and they want to give it everything that they've got and be all in to make, you know, this a wild success, and they're going to benefit from it in the process. You know, I think Charlie and I could absolutely say that, you know, we owe our career success to an incredible rocket ship called Qualtrics that blew up and gave us unbelievable opportunity to make mistakes and grow and figure out how to be, you know, better at what we do.

(Ryan at 00:48:44) You just don't get those sort of opportunities in companies that are not experiencing that sort of growth. You also don't get the chaos that comes from that sort of growth. Like, I've got so much scar tissue, and I refer to some of my days at Qualtrics as like the dark days of my life because the pressure that I felt and that my team felt, and the mistakes that we made were sometimes just hard to handle. But even through those experiences, having phenomenal leaders and mentors that allowed me to keep trying and coached me and mentored me through those experiences—that ultimately gave me a set of tools and experiences and philosophies around how I could go and do this again and how I could go and do it better. Right?

(Ryan at 00:49:45) I mean, that's the awesome thing about the experience that Charlie and I have right now, is that we get to go and do it better because we've both made mistakes. We've seen problems with—

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:57) Charlie says no. Charlie should take a sec. Like, I don't know what the heck. Speak for yourself.

(Ryan at 00:50:01) Never made a mistake. Yeah, but you know, like, we've seen problems with customers and product and people and hiring and everything you can imagine. I could tell you about an experience where it was like, I totally screwed this thing up. Right?

(Ryan at 00:50:19) And it just allows us now to be so proactive about repeating these sort of experiences and doing it better in some way. Right? And it's not to say that we're not going to make mistakes at Route. We are and we have, and we're going to find new challenges and we're going to develop new scar tissue. But those sort of environments—that is why I would encourage anyone that is listening to this and is like, oh, that sounds kind of cool. Like, it is cool. And immerse yourself in an environment like that, and you'll walk out five years later, ten to fifteen years ahead in your career because of what you experienced and the opportunity that you had to evolve with a company through those kind of phases of growth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:11) Dude, this is great. You guys are awesome. I think it is good exercise to even try for someone to try to get a job. Maybe they'll realize, like, where their skill level is. Yo, try to get a job at a great company. Like, if you're at a company, you can either try to fight the entire culture, or you can step up your game and go work at a company that'll, like you said, advance your career by a decade or more. And I believe that too because there was a time in life when I didn't try that hard, and then I decided that path wasn't for me, and let's start trying. And I'll tell you what, when you start trying, you get results like fast. Everyone's like, oh, it takes a long—yes, it takes a long time. It takes a lifetime to do something great. Right? Like, to do a lifetime's worth of work. Right? But you can get instant progress right away from just stepping it up and changing your routine and actually—like, how many people sit down for an hour a day and try to improve as a leader? Like, come on. Not many people. But if you do that or twenty minutes a day or put that into your routine and let it compound over a year or two, you'll get so much further ahead.

(Charlie at 00:52:23) Yeah. Yeah. I think one of my favorite quotes in terms of career development is, like, everybody overestimates what they can do in a year, and everybody underestimates what they can do in a decade. And you might feel like maybe you haven't made a tremendous amount of progress in the last twelve months. That's fine. But it's like, look at where you were ten years ago, and it'll blow your mind. And if that doesn't motivate you, like, we're not on the same wavelength.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:47) Yeah. And if you haven't gone anywhere in ten years, buy some self personal development. But I think Tony Robbins has a course for that or something. You know, I tend to be a high performing person, and I say that with as much honesty—like, I try really hard, and it sometimes creates this issue where, like, I'm pushing myself too hard. And so one of the ways I ground myself is I say, you know, where was I twelve months ago? Where was I twenty-four months ago? And when I make bullet points out and have to really consolidate it, I said, oh my God, like, look how far I've gotten in the past twelve months. Because you definitely have to take that time to reflect and figure out what bullet points are important to you and how you've grown. And if you look back, that's a real eye opener.

(Ryan at 00:53:42) Yeah. Absolutely. I think even just being in a space—your comment around twenty minutes a day to reflect on your leadership or twenty minutes a day—finding yourself in kind of the headspace or other where you can pull yourself enough out of the detail to think about that is so important. And if you can't, we have a structure where this kind of career levels at Route, and every degree of success or movement, it really introduces more ambiguous, broader, just kind of scoped challenges. And it really, what I try to tell people is, it's like, hey, if you find yourself in a spot where you're not scaling, really what that means is that you've not been able to identify, you know, kind of step outside of the box and identify that the problem or the challenge or what you're dealing with is getting bigger. And you've got to step back and think about how can you solve it at a bigger scale. I remember one time—yeah, here's some scar tissue—but John Timson, the CTO at Qualtrics at one point, I was up probably forty-eight hours straight trying to save a big deal and just working my ass off and was so exhausted. And ultimately, at the end, we fixed it, and it was successful. And it saved, you know, a tremendous amount of money for the business and whatever. And he's like, rather than, like, "Ryan, thank you so much," it was something like, "Hey, you really need to level up." And I was like, what?

(Ryan at 00:55:52) I was so mad in the moment, but he's like, you know, he's like, "If you're going to scale with Qualtrics and your job, you've got to level up." He's like, "You can't—like, thank you for doing that, but you shouldn't have had to do that. You shouldn't have had been in the detail working forty-eight hours straight. Like, you should have been able to think about and solve that problem in a bigger and better way." And so yeah, the big picture here is find a way to take those twenty minutes. Find a way to get outside of the pressure and stress and everything that's going on and think about, like, am I solving this effectively? Am I solving it at scale? Is the problem getting bigger than what I'm capable of doing? Is there a way that I can change the way I'm doing this to do it better? Is there a way that I can bring more people in, more process, more whatever? Like, there's always better ways to do it. And if you can take the time to do that on a recurring basis, like, you'll probably have a lot more success than you would otherwise. Right?

(Ryan at 00:57:01) And when you think you might be crushing it—I love the confidence track. John at one point was like, "I don't have confidence. I don't have confidence that you're going to solve this, or I don't have confidence that you're the right leader for this problem." That for highly motivated people and people that have a lot of—like you described yourself—you know, I'm a high performing person. When a high performing person hears that someone doesn't have confidence that they're able to do something, there is probably nothing in the world more motivating. Yeah. It's like, are you kidding me? Like, of course, I can do this. And, you know, so it's a talk track of mine now. It's like, "Hey, I am not confident that you're solving this in the right way, or I'm not confident that you're the right leader for this." I can say that without being a jerk, you know, because it's honest. And I love what that does to high performing people because it instantly kicks them into gear, and they start to think about—they take that time, those twenty minutes to step back, think about the problem differently, and come back and be like, "You know what? You're right. I could do this better. And here's what I'm going to do about it."

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:14) I did have a talk with my wife, like, last weekend, and I said, "Honey, you just have to stop believing in me. This is, like, incredibly demotivating." Because every time I want to do something big, she's like, "Of course, you can do anything. You're the man." I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. That is not the instruction manual of Joel. Like, tell me it's not possible, and I can't do it, and it'll likely fail." And then I'm going to go at it with more energy than I've ever gone to anything in my life with. It's like I need that reason. I don't know why. You know, maybe historically from, like, when I was younger, I got hit by a car, I had to learn how to walk. I did a lot of difficult things early on in my life, and I saw them as challenges that needed to be overcome. And so, you know, rather than trying to unwork all of that, it's like, this is how I operate. Let's just put a challenge in front of me. Let's find some resistance, you know, some people who say I can't do it. And that's how I make the cake. Right? I need the challenge. I need the people to tell me it's not—like raising money. Yeah. Like, don't just tell me no. Tell me the idea is never going to work. Like, don't be nice to me. Like, kick me out of this meeting and tell me you're not going to raise, and my idea is stupid. Right? Like, they're way too nice these days. Like, I think people have gotten a little bit too nice these days. Like, you hear the stories back in, you know, when people are trying to start their businesses, like the KFCs and whatever. You hear those stories, and they're getting, like, kicked out of things or being told absolutely not for, like, films. You hear those things, and I'm like, where is that? Why is everybody so nice? Like, I need that fuel. Yeah.

(Ryan at 00:59:45) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:46) My wife doesn't work that way, though. She has a different motivation structure, so, like, for me not believing in her, that doesn't work. So I have to, you know, support her, but I like using relationships because I think relationships are relationships. There are definitely different flavors, but, you know, humans interacting as humans interacting. You can learn a lot. Like, do either of you have kids?

(Ryan at 01:00:11) Oh, yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:12) You do. You learn so much from having kids. Right? I've got two little ones under the age of three, and, man, watching them as little AIs boot up, and their algorithms learn—

(Ryan at 01:00:22) Oh, I would love to chat more about that. That's exactly how I feel.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:25) Right? It's like, how long is it going to take? How many iterate—they're surprisingly efficient. Like, they can learn things pretty fast. Yeah.

(Charlie at 01:00:36) That's impressive.

(Ryan at 01:00:37) I got a three and a six year old. It was so funny the first day. I was like, "Oh my God. Like, you're a little amazing AI, and I can just see your neural net learning kind of in this unsupervised way as you experience all this stuff and get rewards and pain and different—" Like, that's amazing. But, um, that's funny. I guess that's a different topic.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:58) No, it's a good topic. I was—when I watch them go about their day when they don't know I'm there or something, like, I'll watch them in the other room, learn something. Like, I'll actually watch them try two or three times and then get it, and then be like, "Oh," and then reinforce that learning. I realized, like, one day, I can't remember the number, but I calculated the hours, like, their waking hours, and, you know, and I know that my daughter, she's the oldest of the two. She's about three years old now. And I was calculating her hours, and I was like, that seems reasonable. Like, it was a couple thousand hours that they of waking time that they've had over three years. I was like, that seems about reasonable for what it would take a machine to learn, or I'm sure there's, like, some exponential curve that happens too after they get that. Language really enables learning too. The language supercharges their learning.

(Ryan at 01:01:46) Yeah. That absolutely. No. I mean, you think about all the inputs that they have. Right? There's so many different inputs. Like, it actually gives me a lot of faith in the long perspective of AI because I watch kids learn. It's like, I feel like you could design that theoretically. Like, if you could build something that had those sort of inputs and the processing capabilities that people have and, you know, just the—and then get it to build—like you said, language just enables a whole new dimension of growth and experiences. And so—and I—having kids didn't make me more spiritual. It made me more believing that, you know, in the long run, AI is going to take over the world.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:38) Oh, of course. A hundred percent. You know, it's interesting too because, like, I think about this quite a bit. Like, these are some thoughts that keep me up at night too and, like, a way that you were just sort of alluding to, like, you wouldn't need to sit there and train them on a thousand pictures of what a monkey looks like. You know, that's, like, super narrow. Like, what you would do is you would create, like, these input sensors, these ability to process input data, and then you would create some basic driving factors like hunger, survival. You just need to program those, and then you'd let it run. And people would say, "What's that going? They would say, well, that would take forever." Of course, it takes about fifteen to thirty years. Yeah. That is about how long it takes with an incredible processor. I mean, I noticed my last mental ledge was around turning 30, and where things, like, had, like, a very large shift for me. And so I was like, wow. It lines up with the physiological, like, or biological age of when they say you hit maturity. And yeah, about thirty years, and I'm still making mistakes, and not everything's perfect, and my knowledge is incredibly narrow. Like, compared to every possible thing that you could learn, you know, it's just—it's absolutely fascinating.

(Ryan at 01:03:53) Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:56) Alright. Well, we went a little bit over. I hope that's okay with you guys.

(Ryan at 01:04:00) That's okay with me.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:01) That's fine. Did we miss anything? Did we have a call to action that we need?

(Charlie at 01:04:06) Yeah. Don't—don't download the Route app. You know, get into the modern age of how you should be tracking your online orders. And if anybody owns an ecommerce site out there, check it out. It's free. Deploy it on your site. And I think those are probably two pretty good ones.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:24) Have you connected with Shopify yet?

(Charlie at 01:04:28) Yeah. Yeah. We have an app on Shopify.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:30) Oh, cool. Have you met their CTO yet?

(Ryan at 01:04:33) I've not met their CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:33) Dude, listen to his episode and, like, reach out to him. He's a cool guy. He would totally talk with you. I don't know if it's useful for you, but he was definitely one of my favorite guests.

(Ryan at 01:04:44) No. That's awesome. Yeah. I'd be happy to do that. We—yeah, I think I think the call to action is as well.

(Ryan at 01:04:52) Like Charlie said, Route is—we've got some big and creative thoughts for the future. And so, you know, whether you're a consumer or a merchant, joining the Route network on either of those sides is a lot more than just what you experience today. You're buying into our strategy and our ability to have success. And, you know, I think—I don't know. We're pretty thrilled about the next one to two to three or four years about what Route's gonna be able to do.

(Ryan at 01:05:40) And, you know, I think I'd love to go into more detail there, but like Charlie said, we'll leave some teasers. But there's just so much opportunity to elevate online shopping and make it better, and make it more social and make it more discoverable and make it—you know, just think about when you want to buy something. What is your process for figuring that out? Do you go onto Amazon and type it in and you look at the reviews, and then you decide if you trust the reviews or if they're fake? Or, you know, are the people that are reviewing it even like you? I mean, there's so many broken aspects of discovering products, of buying products, of sharing, you know, and that is an opportunity that Route is just very excited to go and be creative in.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:35) The last thing I shopped was a home workout squat rack that you would drill into your garage and it would come down. And because I don't shop much stuff, but I was looking for those because they were out everywhere, so it forced me to shop. I try not to shop that much, but I try to just find one thing, find the best thing fast. But I'd say that the big takeaway from that experience was that I usually buy pretty fast.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:09) And because I couldn't, because everyone was out of stock, I ended up finding—after I got past the Amazon and the couple big named retailers, Sports Authority or whatever, or Dick's Sporting Goods—I started to come across, and I don't know exactly how, but these smaller brands that actually had higher quality stuff for maybe a hundred dollars more, totally reasonable. When I saw it—I think it was actually a company in Utah or something, like PTX. I don't know. But I saw it, and I was like, whoa, this is a hundred dollars more than this bulk brand over here, and they're manufacturing it in Utah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:48) And it looks cooler because of the color and it looks sturdier, and it was not like the bulk stuff that they were ordering from China and just slapping their logo on. And I was like, why can't I find those brands faster? How do I find those brands faster? Like, the cool thing. And so that's just something that came off the top of my head.

(Ryan at 01:08:12) I 100% agree. You know, we're in a world where it's very hard for these brands not to exist on Amazon. Right? It's hard to compete.

(Ryan at 01:08:25) It's hard to not be Prime. It's hard to not provide free shipping. It's hard to do a lot of stuff. And Route is coming into a cool opportunity to empower these brands to provide similar services in some ways. Right? How do we give you an Amazon-like experience to resolve an order issue? I mean, in Amazon, you just go into the app and you say, you know, this is wrong with it, whatever, and you typically are taken care of. It's really convenient. There's a reason why Amazon's had a lot of success.

(Ryan at 01:08:57) Well, how can we do that for other stores online? How do we allow merchants to provide similar sorts of capabilities and services to their buyers? And then, ultimately, how do you find them as a consumer? How do you learn about them? Right? So there's so much there, and, you know, it's gonna be fun to unpack it and to build towards that ultimate vision that we have to help people see, share, and discover product.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:25) I love it. Dude, this is great. Yeah. Good, Charlie.

(Ryan at 01:09:28) Good chatting with you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:29) You're the man. Thank you.

(Charlie at 01:09:31) This is awesome. Thanks for having me on.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:33) You guys are the best. Cool.

(Charlie at 01:09:36) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:36) Have a great day.

(Ryan at 01:09:37) That was fun. Cheers.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:38) See you.