Ryan Donovan - CTO at Hootsuite

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Ryan Donovan, the CTO at Hootsuite, and we discussed the unique way he does mind mapping, growing your direct reports with stretch assignments, and how Hootsuite has created their unique culture. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) Hello. Hello. Hello.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:00:35) Good morning, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:36) Ryan.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:00:38) Nice to virtually meet you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) Good. I was just stalking your Instagram.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:00:43) Oh, nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:45) My sister has a bunch of them, and my brother—my brother and my sister both have the same type of dachshunds. Right?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:00:52) Yes. No, they are a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:55) Oh, yeah. How many do you have? Just the two?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:00:59) Just the two. They are what I—they are now at the grumpy old men stage because they are 12 and 13 respectively.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:06) What are their names?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:01:08) Peter is the black and tan long hair, and Otto is the red short hair.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:14) There you go. Peter and Otto. Those are pretty cool names.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:01:17) Yeah. I can't take credit for that. That was my wife because they were her dogs first. And then, when—because we actually met, interestingly enough, ten years ago today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:28) So this is going to turn into the Modern Puppy Podcast.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:01:31) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:34) So did you have any kids too, or just the dogs?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:01:36) Nope. Just the doggos.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:40) Nice. Nice. So they are lots of fun, lots of high energy. Right?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:01:45) Oh, yeah. They've slowed down a little bit, but they're still pretty boisterous. I've never—when I'm working from the house with them, I've never ceased to be amazed at the things that Peter, in particular, can come up with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:59) I saw your little home office. I saw the little Hoots. It looked like a little Hootsuite stuffed animal, like the stuffed owl.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:02:06) Oh, yeah. No. In my—I've got Owleys at both the house and the apartment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:13) So that's what they're called, Owleys?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:02:15) Owley. Owley is our mascot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:17) Can you buy them on your website?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:02:20) You know? Yeah, we sure can. They're actually—if you go to the Hootsuite store, you can actually get your own Owley.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:27) This is the first time I'm ever going to push a product on the show. I'm going to go get an Owley. I'm going to go get an Owley. By the way, this is the podcast. Just you and I hanging out, talking about owls, dogs, whatever we want to talk about.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:02:37) Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:38) So how long ago did you get involved with technology? Were you really in it at the age of eight or in your later years?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:02:46) So I think I first seriously started using a computer when I was three or four. And so, you know, learned to type before I even went to kindergarten. I'd say I really seriously got into it when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I discovered that I could write GW-BASIC programs on an Apple IIe to automate my math homework.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:13) So that is by far the youngest I've ever heard, which I believe too because I have a three-year-old daughter, and we've taught her sign language. She won't speak a lot verbally. She'll say mom and dad, but she'll do the sign language. She knows everything we're saying. I could probably get her to type.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:03:28) Yeah. No, I think it's really good to encourage kids at a very young age to learn how to use technology, but then, you know, learn how to use it responsibly as well. I certainly didn't get to play unlimited games, for example, but I could use technology to do anything I wanted to do with my school and homework.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:52) So then you go through middle school, high school. How did it take the next step?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:03:57) You know, I think I figured out in high school, you start to figure out what you're good and not good at. You know, I was—I'm never going to be a champion athlete by any stretch of the imagination. You know, I'd thought about at one point I wanted to be a pilot and then realized, okay, I don't really have the eyesight to do that. Technology is something I've always loved and just decided to make a career of it because I was coming of working age just as the internet was really starting to take off. I saw that as a big opportunity. Started my own consultancy, and it just went from there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:40) Yeah, I saw that you had a very entrepreneurial background.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:04:44) Yeah. No, it's interesting because I've flipped back and forth. I've worked at companies of all sizes, you know. I'm very grateful to have spent the better part of my first decade working at Microsoft. You know, the thing that I took away from Microsoft is how to do it right at incredible scale. You know, from a software engineering and thought leadership perspective, they've always been at the forefront of best practices in software engineering. When Microsoft got hacked with Nimda and Code Red circa the early 2000s, the pivot the company took really set the standard even to this day for how to do, for example, secure software development.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:27) Yeah. They are an absolutely fantastic organization. I got to speak with Kevin Scott, their CTO. He's super passionate about—what did we talk about? They're using—he was visiting a company that was using AI to detect rainfall for crops and how to water crops. It was unbelievable.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:05:47) Oh, yeah. No, and I still look up to them. What they're doing across the board with respect to productivity and AI and all that is just—they're quite a force to reckon with, and it's just so cool to see the company going through this second generation renaissance these days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:05) So here comes the big question, Ryan. Slack or Teams?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:06:10) You know, we use Slack here. Yeah. I think it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. I used Teams at my last company, and they're very comparable. I think it really depends on what's your corporate infrastructure. Obviously, if you're an Office 365 subscriber, Teams is going to be pretty compelling because you kind of get it for free. But if you don't have Office 365, then Slack is a really good choice as well. But to me, it's kind of like Ford versus Chevrolet. They're both going to get you to the same destination, and they're both very similar in terms of user experience these days, now that Teams has caught up with Slack a fair bit. There were a lot of gaps for a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:01) So you're really passionate about product management. Right?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:07:05) Absolutely. You know, I think that product management is really something that a lot of organizations don't—it's a missed opportunity. Because if you really build the right product for the customers, you know, that's how you're successful in all things software. And that's really—if you look at Slack, they filled a void between email and other collaboration and built a huge company on that by delivering something that customers fundamentally want.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:39) So what type of product management stuff are you doing at Hootsuite?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:07:43) You know, a lot. Right now, we are really putting the finishing touches on establishing a multi-year product strategy. This is a first for the company and really making sure that we've got the long-term focus to be where our customers are going. If you look at our customers today, their social marketing maturity varies widely. You've got some customers that are doing super advanced things, and it's very critical to their business. You've got other ones at the other end of the spectrum where it's still very much a hobby or a nascent thing. But one thing that's very clear is that all of them are getting pulled into social, and they're going to have to be taking social more seriously over the next couple of years because their customers are demanding it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:41) So what is Hootsuite?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:08:43) So Hootsuite is the market-leading social media management platform. The problem that we fundamentally solve is—for a digital marketing team, we give them the toolset to manage their brand presence and customer engagement on social. And that's bronze with a variety of use cases from the content management side of things such as creating content, routing it through workflow and approvals, possibly even compliance if you're in a regulated industry. This is—as much fun as it was to watch Elon Musk do his 420 tweet that ended up costing Tesla quite a bit. Then engaging with customers, providing the tools to engage with customers at the other end of the customer journey, such as when they're reaching out to the brand and asking for help or more information. And then finally, the last piece of it is really the paid component because if you want to connect the right content with the right audiences, paid media through social is a great way to do it. Because, for example, if you know that you've got a certain demographic, you can do a paid campaign with Facebook and reach exactly your target audience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:57) You guys have come so far. I found out about Hootsuite I think it had to be eight years ago. You guys are at least that old. Right? Because it feels—

(Ryan Donovan at 00:10:07) We're going into our eleventh year this month.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:09) Yeah. So I remember I was doing some real estate projects back in 2009, and so that's ten years ago. Yeah. And I saw Hootsuite because we were building—looking at things we could API with for the agents and then helping them schedule their social media posts. And so I'm so glad I asked you what you did because the product has evolved so much from just scheduling social media posts to doing all—being able to engage and interact with people. That's pretty cool.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:10:35) Absolutely. And also, don't underestimate the compliance aspect of it because that's something that's becoming increasingly of concern to customers now that—just look at how easily something can go viral on social. So making sure that you're truly saying the right things is quite important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:56) Yeah. I did a project a few years ago with a financial advisor, and he did a lot of radio and stuff. And I was like, why don't you push through social, like, download some white papers or something? He's like, the compliance is—there's nothing for it. And so maybe I'll be like, hey, check out Hootsuite.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:11:12) No, and the other one too is that, you know, Hootsuite's also playing an increasingly critical role to integrate with the rest of the customers' MarTech stack. So that's where you see us having partnerships and integrations with the likes of Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce to really help connect all of the dots together. So that, for example, if a customer is coming in on a social channel, you figure out, okay, here's all the other interactions you've had with them across other digital marketing channels. And, of course, the other scenario that's quite keen for our customers is attribution. So if you do something on social and then they come buy something through the website, then being able to actually tie that together and say, hey, this social post is what ultimately led to this conversion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:00) That's how you can track down your ROI.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:12:04) Absolutely. And that's why analytics is such a big play in terms of what we do now versus, you know, our start, which was just scheduled posts, as you mentioned.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:14) So tell me a little bit about your team and your culture. What do you guys value over there?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:12:20) So Hootsuite's culture is one of the things that drew me to the company and one of the things that I really like because it's incredibly passionate, aligned, focused on the customer, and focused on winning in the market. And that's very much the culture that Ryan Holmes has driven as the company's founder. And something else that's also part of the culture is really what I call the human touch. You know, what we do in terms of our software and our brand promise is helping our customers connect with their customers, but inside the company, it's also one of the most collaborative and caring for its people cultures of any company I've ever worked for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:01) That's—you know, I've noticed that as I talk to these companies that have these amazing cultures, that it sort of creates this gravity, and it just attracts all of these people that have similar items that they care about.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:13:15) Absolutely. And that's one of the things that makes this one of the most fun jobs I've ever had.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:20) So tell me a little bit about—I have some questions here. What is social selling? Because most of the listeners—engineers, CTOs, founders, some startups, some more mature companies. I get social selling, but I want to hear it from you. What is it?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:13:37) So this is really the notion of using social to actually go out and prospect customers. So, for example, consider if you're in the insurance industry, you know, putting together a set of content that you can roll out to all of your people in the field to actually be able to go out safely on social to actually prospect new business without doing something that's going to actually get the parent company in trouble. That's a really big social selling use case where you're rolling social out to your entire salesforce.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:13) That's an interesting use case.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:14:15) Well, and that's actually becoming very much a thing. It's really interesting. One of the things that we do is we have a customer advisory board. We meet with them twice a year, and it's really interesting because I would say more than half of the customers in our customer advisory board are planning a major social selling initiative in the next three to four years, even if they're not there today. Because in many cases, an organization is only focusing on social within the realm of their marketing or customer care teams as opposed to rolling it out to their entire salesforce. But that's very much going to be the next chapter because, again, social gives you probably the best toolset in a highly regulated privacy world to actually connect the right content with the right audiences.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:06) I really do believe that because we have a company here, and a lot of people piggyback off of my social presence. Right? I said, we have two salespeople. We're a growing company, and they'll piggyback off of my social presence. And I'm like, you need to post your own thoughts, and you don't have to go recreate the world. Just take a popular article from today and put your two cents on it and post it out. So people get to know you as an expert in this industry because you are an expert. You eat, sleep, and breathe this stuff. And so it's been a challenge on—there haven't been a lot of tools that we have found that make it easy for our sales staff to do that. I don't know if we should actually look at Hootsuite though. Should we?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:15:46) No. That's actually very much where we're going as a company. It's one of our biggest product investments is what we call Amplify, which is our solution for social selling. It's separate from the main Hootsuite product. In fact, it was just ranked as a leader in the first ever Forrester Wave for social selling as a scenario, and that's really the toolset that we see some of our largest and most socially progressive customers using to roll social out to their entire salesforce.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:17) I like it. It's like you've got the market of paying influencers, right? You've got your marketing team just putting out content: lead magnet, call, first appointment, second appointment. You got that. But it's like, how do we take those people that are sitting there all day in sales and actually make each one of those individuals somebody who's producing valuable content, or at least their thoughts on valuable content?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:16:39) Absolutely. So that's obviously one of the key use cases that we're focusing on. The other one I want to bring up that's very adjacent to it is employee advocacy. We did a market survey this year that shows that the number one trust point for a consumer with a brand is actually a direct employee of that brand. And so if you think about it, social selling is the first wave. The second wave would be actually rolling out social in a curated capacity to your entire workforce because that's who consumers are going to trust if they have a question or a thought, and if they know you or have a friend that works for a particular company, that's an awesome way to actually engage that wouldn't have been there even a couple of years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:33) See, now you just have my mind spinning. I'm just thinking, like, this is actually very, very useful. I like this. Is the Amplify tool available today?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:17:42) It is. It is. It's available as part of our commercial packages. And so, yeah, that's been out there, and we've got some very, very large customers using it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:52) So let's talk about your responsibilities as CTO. Like, how do you see those today?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:17:58) You know, it's really twofold. So it's identifying the right product for our customers, then building it and delivering it as a high-quality, reliable user experience. That's really what the job is in a nutshell, because things like performance and reliability really do matter. And when you've got a software platform that's scaled to over 200,000 paying customers, you know, that's some serious responsibility. And it's also a challenge in the sense that the social networks are one of the most fluid platforms to build against because they are changing each and every day. You know, in a past world, I've built applications on top of AWS or Azure. This is a whole different animal because Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google—they're changing all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:57) Yeah. It's like Instagram is just like, oh, we're going to shut off likes for a little bit.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:19:00) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:02) Then you have to respond like immediately.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:19:04) Absolutely. So it creates a very unique software engineering challenge that's getting, I'll say, progressively more difficult as the years progress. That's why if you look at the social tech landscape, it's actually shrinking as opposed to growing, because it is a very challenging problem and the barrier to entry to it gets higher and higher every year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:33) So like, how do you from an engineering perspective—do you have like a special, like, fire truck engineering team that repels in and solves the emergency issue? Like, how do you react to those changes?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:19:46) So we actually have a dedicated team. We call it channel integrations that's really focused on the actual connective tissue between Hootsuite, the application, and the underlying social networks. And they partner very closely with our alliance team, which actually manages the business and commercial relationship with the social networks. And it's their job to stay on top of everything. And so generally we get a reasonable amount of advanced notice. It's not long, but we'll generally get some notice of new capabilities and changes. And then we basically jump on those and have built quite impressive machines to be able to respond to those quite quickly and get them out there. And then same thing would be like dealing with an outage of the underlying social network, because it has happened. We've seen some pretty large Facebook and Instagram outages in the last six months just as an instance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:44) So you have probably a lot of engineers, right? A lot of big team over there. But how does your direct report team look?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:20:55) Yeah. So it's very—it's a very traditional, if you think about this as an integrated product organization. You've got product management, you've got user experience, you've got program management to make sure all of the pieces come together, engineering, operations, and then security and compliance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:12) That was like the best answer. You've given that to a board before or something?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:21:16) It's a little bit of practice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:19) That was so good. It was articulate, it was short, it was exact. I was like, oh, this is a good one. So I think that's a takeaway in and of itself. Like, having really good answers for these questions when you're an executive at your level—that's very important, right?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:21:34) Absolutely. I mean, the other requirement of the job, if I had to say, is be on top of your game 24/7, 365, because it's a very dynamic universe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:46) So how do you approach growing and mentoring your team?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:21:51) So we have, at Hootsuite, we've got multiple paths to do this. So there's obviously the direct one-on-one engagement. I spend time with each of my directs both on not only the day-to-day, but making sure they're taking on new responsibilities and challenges on a periodic basis. We actually have at Hootsuite a very robust career progression system. So very defined job levels and like how you can keep progressing up or make a sideways move. We see quite a bit of lateral movement in the organization. And then the last piece we have is we have a bunch of learning and development resources, both internal and external, to send people on training. So we do quite a bit of that. And then lastly, we have an actual formal mentorship program. So a good example is I've been the direct mentor of one of our senior product managers in our Bucharest, Romania office. And so he's not somebody I would be typically interacting with on a one-on-one basis, but through the mentoring program that's giving me a chance to really engage with and help them. We also have what we call a stretch program to help people take on new assignments in other fields. This also gives folks a chance to try out, for example, an assignment or a project in a different department as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:13) So you can let people move around so they don't leave. Like, because people want to—we're all humans. We want to do new things here and there.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:23:19) Absolutely. And the nice thing is, with the company growing as fast as we are, there's lots of internal opportunities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:25) So I saw that you travel a lot, right? I saw a lot of awesome travel pictures. You're in Copenhagen. I was just there a few months ago. When it comes to the concept of reflecting that I read a lot about in leadership books—I try, I've got my own little things that I do—I noticed that when I'm traveling, that's like a naturally good time for reflecting. Do you find the same thing?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:23:48) Oh, absolutely. The amount of notes I took on my flight back from Europe the other week was just a perfect example of that. Also, you know, I also carve out dedicated time to pause and think about things on a weekly basis even when I'm not on the road, because it is such a powerful tool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:07) So you just put like a recurring event in your calendar? Like, how do you tactically do it?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:24:11) You know, I'll spend time like on the weekends, in the morning and the evening. So like I'm generally in the office, for example, about an hour to an hour and a half before my first meeting starts just to give me a time to pause, take a situational awareness. And I'll try to wrap things up and make a bunch of notes at the end of the day and take half an hour, hour to do that. Like, for example, I was making quite a few notes last evening as my day wrapped up, and then that really kind of drove a lot of to-dos and agenda for today that wasn't on my calendar.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:44) Nice.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:24:46) I'm also a big fan of mind mapping for more at a more strategic level where you've got potentially hundreds, if not thousands of interrelated topics, to just get them organized.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:59) Mind mapping. You just do it—do you have a journal? How do you do it? Digitally? Journal? What do you do?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:25:04) No, digitally. There's actually many software programs out there that use it. I happen to like Corel—it's MindManager. 2020 is the one that I happen to use, but there's other ones out there. And the reason I like the software is that it actually allows you to maintain dedicated relationships between topics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:26) Like, so you can make—have multiple mind map sessions and it'll connect things?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:25:30) No. It ends up looking like a tree with many interconnected branches. So you can draw up, for example, a connector between the topic on this branch of the tree and the topic—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:43) Got it.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:25:43) Whenever you go to iterate on that topic, you realize, okay, hey, there's a tentacle that's going over in this other area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:50) So you don't have to—that's actually pretty cool. So you go reopen the mind map. Basically, like when you're programming and somebody interrupts you and everything clears, and you have to like reload everything back into your head before you can start again?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:26:02) Exactly. Whereas this, you can just pick up where you left off, and it's all digital, backed up to the cloud, and you can use it on pretty much any device with a reasonably sized screen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:15) So use it on your iPhone?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:26:17) That's too small. I'd say an iPad is about the minimum to actually be able to see one of these things. Because like, if I printed out the one I used to put together my onboarding at Hootsuite, it would fill a wall.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:32) Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. Wait. So how do you—how do you onboard at Hootsuite?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:26:37) Yeah. There's lots of books on the topic, but I'll just net it out to the best practice. The first thing I did was get to know the team and get to know the aspects of the product that I didn't know. So then I went to get to know the rest of the company. And so meeting with folks in sales, customer support, customer success, and marketing—get to know that. And from there, you know, a lot of trends started to emerge with kind of the good, the bad, and the ugly. So then what I did is I scheduled—I built an agenda out of the mind map that came from just getting to know everybody. These are like a deep dive to go get a 360-degree point of view on everything from how the engineering team's working to our security compliance, to each of the different product areas, to also how the product organization connects to the rest of the company. So a lot of—and then from there, that kind of brought out a whole new set of topics, and we've used those to really pivot into both establishing a roadmap for the second half of this year that we're executing against, and then that's also fed into what's our multi-year product strategy that we're just finishing up, you know, as the year draws to a close here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:59) So what's the name of the software again? I want to actually make a note.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:28:02) Corel MindManager 2020.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:04) Corel MindManager. Because it's so interesting because I take a lot of notes too. And there are some times where like my Evernote's really useful, but then there's other times where if I took the notes in the form of a mind map, they would have additional value.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:28:19) Yeah. What I do is I take notes freeform, and then I will go back and put them into the mind map. And that's how you start to connect a lot of the dots.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:33) So that's important. It's like baking a cake. The steps matter.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:28:36) Yes. They most certainly do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:39) So I have got a hypothetical question here for you as we start to wrap up. Let's say—where are you located, by the way?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:28:47) Right now I'm in Vancouver at our corporate headquarters.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:50) You're in Vancouver. Okay. So is it snowing? Lots of ice?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:28:55) No. It's gray and raining.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:57) That's so sad. We're going to change it. We're going to say it's snowing and there's lots of ice because it's hypothetical. And you're out at holidays, right? You got some candy canes. You're out on the ice, ice skating, like on a lake, right? And your wife is there, and you guys are loving it. Okay? And all of a sudden, you notice this person skating next to you has sort of a South African accent. Right? You know who it is? Elon Musk. And he's got these little turbo jets on his skates, and he's showing you them, and they're very cool. And he asks you, he says, hey, come check this out. There's a pine tree in the distance, right? You guys go skate over to the pine tree. He beats you with this turbocharge. And behind the pine tree is a time machine. And you go in the time machine. You go back to your ten-year-old self. Now let's say—I'm going to change it. You go back—the time machine had an issue. You go back to your eighteen-year-old self. You're just starting out professionally. You're just eighteen. What advice—you can only give one—but what advice would you give that version of yourself?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:30:05) Get out and enjoy life a little bit more. Balance work and fun a little bit more. I'd say that if I think back, if you think back to that time, I was working and studying around the clock. Didn't take a lot of time out to enjoy life, and those are just some missed opportunities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:28) You seem like a very happy person, Ryan.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:30:32) Sure. You know, I have no complaints.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:34) Do you work on it? Do you consciously, like, think about, like, you know, is this making you happy? Like, how do you approach happiness?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:30:41) You know, I think what you have to do is look at the positives in any situation, even when you get dealt a blow of some kind. You have to look at what did I learn from this, or what good can I make of this, and focus on that. Focusing on the negative is just a way to get into a spiral that usually ends poorly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:05) Yeah. I've been—I'm getting older. We're all getting older, right? But I'm starting to learn now in my thirties that like the most logical thing after sort of wrapping my whole mind around different ways to live is that, yes, bad things happen, but like logically—I used to not be a positive person. Like, I didn't. But I found out that like logically, after looking at all the options, you have to be positive because things are just the way they are. And it really is affecting you in your life, and it's your choice. And so you have to make the decision to see it, find the positive. Like, whenever there's a problem, I'm just like, okay, the problem—it's just a solution that hasn't been converted yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:46) Like, how do we convert it? Or this thing's negative, but okay, what's on the opposite side of negative? Positive? Like, let's just flip that thing around.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:54) Right? Let's flip that thing around.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:31:57) Yeah. Make lemonade out of the lemons you're dealt.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:00) Yeah. Amazing lemonade. And then lemonade popsicles, and then start selling those. Because you're in Vancouver, and it's cold.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:32:09) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:11) So you guys have a pretty cool headquarters there?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:32:14) We do. It's—we actually have two buildings a couple blocks apart. The one that the product organization's in is actually a former Vancouver Police Precinct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:25) Really?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:32:26) Absolutely. And we even have a bullet hole in one of the conference rooms to show for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:32) Does it still—do you still have any cells in there?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:32:35) No. No. Those have all been converted into conference rooms, most of which have a very impressive owl-themed piece of art on the walls.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:45) So does anyone ever say that this place feels like a prison?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:32:49) Nope. Never. Never heard anything even remotely like that. Usually, it's more, could we get faster coffee machines?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:58) Oh, let's do it. Let's do some adrenaline to measure the rate of coffee for the machines, and then systematically improve performance over time.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:33:06) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:08) So, hey, next time I'm in the area—because, like, whenever I find guests that I really, really like—awesome, successful, positive people—I always make a note in the spreadsheet and say, hey, when I'm traveling around this area, I'll reach out to them and maybe we'll both be in town at the same time and we could say hello, get together. Would you like that?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:33:24) I would love it. But if you're going to be in Vancouver, drop me a line, please.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:28) Awesome. Is there anything else that we didn't cover that you want to get out into the world? Maybe if people want to experience that culture and hang out with Ali and work at this type of place, would they go to your website? How would they learn about careers?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:33:42) So we have a great career page on our website. You can also check out our LinkedIn page. We're quite active on that as well. We also have a very active Facebook page.

(Ryan Donovan at 00:33:52) Those are good places to check, but you can also search for the hashtag Hootsuite Life. And you get—you know, we have a pretty heavily engaged employee base, so you can see a lot of the fun that our other peeps have by looking at the Hootsuite Life hashtag.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:08) I like that. And that's L-I-F-E?

(Ryan Donovan at 00:34:11) Yep. Hootsuite Life. All one word.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:14) Nice. Nice. Thank you so much, Ryan. We did it, man. We made a podcast.