Ryan Chartrand and Josh Johnston - CEO & CTO at X-Team

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Ryan and Josh, the CEO and CTO at X-Team, and we discuss the incredible uniqueness of the culture that they are building, how they create micro challenges and bounties to keep remote developers energized, and the benefits of prioritizing consistency over intensity. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Ryan at 00:00:35) Hello. Hi, Joel. How you doing, my friend?

(Josh at 00:00:39) Good. Nice to meet you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41) Nice to meet you.

(Ryan at 00:00:42) Hey, hey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:44) What's up, Ryan?

(Ryan at 00:00:46) How's it going, Joel? Great to see you, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:48) Dude, is that an owl? Is that a purple owl on your shirt?

(Ryan at 00:00:52) An owl is a great idea. This is actually a werebear.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:59) It's a werewolf slash bear.

(Ryan at 00:01:02) That is correct, which means that it's a man who can turn into a bear at night. X-Team has these houses in its community, kind of like Game of Thrones. Right? You have the house, and each of them has a sigil.

(Ryan at 00:01:18) And so this is House Nightclaw, and this is their sigil, which is this awesome bear guy. But the cool thing about the houses is they come together. They do all these competitions, and they're always basically competing for survival. And so we just lost a house a few weeks ago, unfortunately. It's very sad times.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:41) So what happens when you lose the house?

(Ryan at 00:01:44) The people stay. But yeah, no. It's a cool thing. I mean, that's the thing we've been doing. We've been remote for a decade now, or more than a decade now. So you figure out ways to bring the energy back, to make things interesting, to create micro communities within a much larger community, which is all the kind of things you normally get with an office. But you have to intentionally do it in some way remotely.

(Ryan at 00:02:13) And so because we're all geeks, we're all developers, doing houses works out quite well for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:19) I've never seen that, but I love it. Is there a list of the houses on your website?

(Ryan at 00:02:24) You know, I'm not sure that we have it explicitly on the site. Our blog is filled with—you can go back and look for any of the seasons because basically they're broken into seasons that they compete. Just look for any of the past season reviews, and you'll see some of the other houses competing there. The one that just died, unfortunately, is called Steelfire. It's a mechanical dragon. Really cool house. I'll have to go wear that later.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:51) This is quite possibly the most interesting thing I've ever heard. I want to know more. Under what metrics do they compete?

(Ryan at 00:03:01) Yeah. So a good classic one is steps. So we have the competitions are called "versus," so we have "versus steps." And it's really important that it's 24 hours so that everyone around the world, because we're in 50-plus countries, has a chance to participate. But basically, you've got 24 hours, log as many steps as you can on your step tracker, post it to the Slack channel, and then we tally them all up. And whichever house has the most steps for the day basically wins that competition, earns their points, earns their resources for their house, et cetera, et cetera. And then, yeah. So we do Pac-Man. We'll do Space Invaders. We're doing a battle royale within Slack this upcoming season, which is a really cool Slack bot we made.

(Ryan at 00:03:45) Yeah. There's all sorts of competitions. We try to keep things fresh, try to keep things interesting, all about bringing the energy as much as we can every week.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:03) Did you get your start as a game designer?

(Ryan at 00:04:08) You know, I never professionally been a game designer, I don't think. I worked at a casino, though. That might have had some impact.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:17) I would win the steps one. I'm a pretty active person. I would motivate my house to win the steps one. I would make the people who don't even want to take steps take steps. Yeah. We would win.

(Ryan at 00:04:29) What's the most steps you've done in a day? Let's see if you can beat our top score.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:34) I don't know. But I just know I would win.

(Ryan at 00:04:36) Oh, you never tried?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:37) No. I don't track. I know that I'm a very—I used to be 300 pounds. I used to be a big boy. Yeah.

(Ryan at 00:04:47) No way. Wow. Congrats.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:48) Thank you. And then I got into high school and everybody was getting girlfriends, to put it politely. And I was like, oh, I want to lose weight. And so it worked out pretty well. But yeah, I'm very competitive with the fitness stuff. I like it. I like pushing my own boundaries. Like, as far as my mindset goes, I'm that individual. I'll get up. I like to do 5 a.m. runs because I like to look at the stars, and then I eat, and then I go and I lift, and then I'm getting into the office by 8:00.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:18) You know? So I do my whole fitness morning routine, and I'm going 100 miles an hour by the time 9 a.m. hits.

(Ryan at 00:05:27) You sound like an X-Teamer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:30) I probably do. You guys have some good people then.

(Ryan at 00:05:35) I think the most we've seen is 50,000 steps in one day. I can do 10,000, and I'm hurting. 50,000 is crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:49) I'd be getting joint injections. You're like, let's win.

(Ryan at 00:05:55) Your point, though, about being a game designer, I just remembered a lot of the inspiration for me comes from when I was 12 years old running a Heroes of Might and Magic—you ever played that game?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:06) No. Is it good?

(Ryan at 00:06:07) Heroes of Might and Magic, one of the most amazing PC games back when I was 12. And I ran an online clan for it. And there was just so much belonging and community and energy that I would race home every day after school to get back to that. And so when we're thinking about, well, what kind of company do we want to make? What kind of community do we want to live within that?

(Ryan at 00:06:32) You know, we want it to feel like those days. We want it to feel like something you whip your laptop open to every day because you're excited to see what happens next. And so I think it's a very different way of thinking about how to build culture within the company. But when you are completely remote, you have to start getting creative in ways that you can do that. And that's a cool thing.

(Ryan at 00:06:51) You know? That clan was people from 20 different countries too. So to anyone who says you can't sort of build culture online, it's kind of silly because there's so many examples, whether it's the Linux community or World of Warcraft or all these communities that have built culture online for decades now. You just have to put in the effort, and it takes a lot of effort.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:14) Yeah. I was on Team Compete early. When it was Xbox before Xbox Live came out, it was Xbox Connect because you could network and fool the LAN. And then Xbox Live came out, and that was actually one of the earlier softwares I built. We tried to make a competitor, or we did. We made a competitor to Team Compete, which at the time—I don't know if they're still around—but at the time they were the place where you would go form your clan and go through your championships.

(Ryan at 00:07:47) Oh, nice. That's the kind of stuff that you see people's faces light up even talking about it, and that's what life's all about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:55) I've never seen a company implement it like that. Now, you're Ryan, you're the CEO. Josh, you're the CTO?

(Josh at 00:08:02) That's right. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:03) So how did you meet Ryan?

(Ryan at 00:08:08) I remember that first day. Yeah. Do you remember that first day?

(Josh at 00:08:10) They were good days. So we met Ryan when we worked with him on a project in his previous company.

(Ryan at 00:08:20) The casino?

(Josh at 00:08:21) Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Tell us a bit about that story and how that came to be.

(Ryan at 00:08:27) Yeah. So we were working on basically, it was the Yelp for slot machines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:37) That was a hard one to connect, a Yelp for slot machines.

(Ryan at 00:08:41) Yeah. Stay with me. Stay with me. It doesn't exist anymore, by the way.

(Ryan at 00:08:51) But I don't know if your mom plays slot machines, but 55-year-old women are pretty intense when it comes to slot machines. They are as hardcore passionate about slot machines as we are about video games or Heroes of Might and Magic. So they never had sort of a community or a place to go rate slot machines or talk about, you know, "I did this little trick. I tapped it three times fast, and I won 100 bucks." You know, they have crazy superstitions of things.

(Ryan at 00:09:22) So they needed a place to come together, and so we made that. And that was actually how I first met X-Team. And then after that, yeah, Josh. So we started working together with Fox Broadcasting and building that team up.

(Ryan at 00:09:40) And, yeah. Eventually, the offer came along to be CEO, so took that, and it's been quite a wild ride the last eight years now.

(Josh at 00:09:50) Yeah. You came along at a really interesting time when the company was still in its formative stages, and there were lots of things happening, lots of new opportunities opening up. And, yeah, it's just been really wonderful to see it grow and become its own, develop its own culture and its own experience. Yeah. It's been a fun time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:15) Where are the founders at?

(Ryan at 00:10:18) So the founder works on all sorts of other investments. For example, he's working on a school system. I guess you know more about that, Josh.

(Josh at 00:10:28) Yeah. There's—I mean, Dave is an incredibly talented and creative guy, so he's always got his hand in lots of different things and ideas. There's education platforms, different ventures going on there. So that's keeping him busy at the moment. And X-Team was one of his early brainchilds that really took off.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:56) Do you know what the education platform does?

(Ryan at 00:11:00) Yeah. So it's actually kind of an iteration upon the X-Team community in some ways. You know, we have a lot of internal platforms that facilitate all the stuff we were kind of talking about. For example, we have these things called bounties, which are these little micro challenges that you can do to, again, stay energized as a remote worker. So, you know, something like "go hike to the highest peak in your city," or right now a popular one is probably going to be, you know, "watch a concert on YouTube with full volume on your TV," you know, because we can't go to concerts.

(Ryan at 00:11:34) So there's these little micro challenges. They come with rewards that are various sort of collectibles like this shirt. And so we wanted to say, well, what happens if we move that into the education sector? Now what if there's this whole sort of community platform for schools, especially as they're going remote, to help keep them connected, help still strengthen all those bonds and those friendships, and keep people energized that way. So that's just one part of it.

(Ryan at 00:12:03) There's a lot of integrations with various other school platforms like, you know, scheduling and—not PTO, but what's the equivalent of kids taking time off school, I guess?

(Josh at 00:12:17) Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:18) I don't know.

(Ryan at 00:12:20) I love it.

(Josh at 00:12:20) I think so. PTO time. Yeah. Yeah. There's a whole lot of organizational challenges within the life of the school when you've got students, teachers, and parents, and all of the interactions that they have. So building that around a community platform is a way of getting beyond just the necessities and getting to something that energizes people, that makes them excited to take part in that community, which is what we've seen in X-Team. So that's what we kind of want to bring into other communities as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:00) How deep does this go? Because I think this whole interview is going to be about your culture because I am blown away by this. So I'm going to throw something out there. You tell me if it's true or not. So are there collectible shirts or something? Will some people have physical goods that they've collected that other people won't have, and then they're talking about it?

(Ryan at 00:13:21) Oh, yeah. You know, I've been looking for this for months. Thankfully, you brought it up. Here's my collectible hat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:31) Okay. So how did you get that hat? Tell me how you get this hat.

(Ryan at 00:13:35) So I probably competed in something, or I am the admin, so I just stole it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:43) You can't tempt me. I'm the admin.

(Ryan at 00:13:45) That's fine. But no. Josh, for example, you've had to earn your beanie you just got?

(Josh at 00:13:50) Yeah. I'm still waiting on—

(Ryan at 00:13:52) How did you get it?

(Josh at 00:13:52) I'm still waiting on the beanie because, you know, the mail system these days is a bit slower than normal. But I'm waiting on that beanie. I'm so excited about it coming. And, you know, I've had this experience before. You get a package delivered and you can tell that it's from X-Team. You open it up, and it's very exciting. You want to get on Slack and share with everyone, "Look at what arrived in the mail today." So that's always a good moment.

(Josh at 00:14:20) But, yeah, how do you get it? As Ryan said before, you know, we had this—it's kind of like a scavenger hunt style thing. So there are a lot of targets, or bounties, and there's plenty that are related to your area of interest. So people who are photography enthusiasts, there'll be a bounty of, "Take a photo that's using focal depth and share it with the rest of the group."

(Josh at 00:14:54) Or people who are always getting outside, you know, "Go for a run that's longer than you've ever run for before." So there's little mini challenges like that. You complete one of those and share it with the rest of the group, and then you get awarded these Slack coins. And that comes up as a little notification. "You've earned some coins."

(Josh at 00:15:23) And then you can head over to the vault, which is where all of these collectibles are stored. And depending on how many coins you've racked up, you can pick a few of these items and get them shipped to your house.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:39) Do I have to be an employee to participate? This is awesome. I'm joking, but this is so cool. Oh, you're pulling it up on the screen share?

(Ryan at 00:15:49) Yeah. I feel bad this is an audio podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:51) No. We do a video on YouTube. We'll drive everybody to you.

(Ryan at 00:15:54) Okay. Cool. Yeah. So here's some of the current items that are in there. Here's the beanie he just got. Yeah. Here's the Steelfire, the guys who fell, unfortunately. And so the other cool thing is—

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:08) Now it's even more collectible because they've fallen.

(Josh at 00:16:11) That's right. Yeah. They've been—I know. Rare.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:15) Gotta up the coins. Now it's gotta be—you should not print anymore and make the current ones more expensive.

(Ryan at 00:16:21) That is true. But this is a cool example. So this is, for anyone listening, a Goku-inspired t-shirt. And the cool thing is we let the community design it with the designers. So they come up with the concept, they vote on the concept, what it'll look like, what character will be, whatever.

(Ryan at 00:16:38) You know? And so they actually get ownership sort of in this too, which I think is really important. The other thing here is we have a lot of charity-based things. So if you don't want any of the flexible hats or shirts or whatever, you can just donate that straight to a cause that you believe in. And so, you know, five coins gets you a $50 charity donation.

(Ryan at 00:16:58) That's a very popular option. We've raised funds for so many amazing causes over the years as a result of this. Just tens of thousands of dollars have gone into this. So there's just so many cool things. And actually, I'll flip over to the bounties page so you can kind of see what those look like.

(Ryan at 00:17:14) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:15) So this is per season. Look at that. You've got, like, a season thing up there.

(Ryan at 00:17:18) Yeah. Next season's kicking off in a few weeks. So here's a "share a photograph or a story of your proudest moment in XHQ." It's a cool way of just getting to know people too, you know, because it's kind of like that high school dance issue with Slack channels. You know, everyone's there. No one knows what to say other than, you know, post a link to whatever you saw today. So when you want to actually get meaningful conversation going, sometimes you've got to kind of nudge them in the right direction, and it's even better if you can get a reward for it. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:49) So do you license this yet?

(Ryan at 00:17:52) Yeah. So, I mean, like we said, the education platform we've built is also sort of a white label version of that that can be applied to any community. So, you know, we're starting to look at bringing this to other businesses now that remote work is more popular. People are looking for this sort of thing, and also providing sort of service on the side to provide it because, obviously, it takes a lot of work to send all the creative and all—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:23) Exactly. Well, it's great. My first thought was, okay, you have this tool, right? But the hardest part is going to be actually getting the organization to get into it. I mean, your organization design the shirts. And then you have to have the people who are builders of community in the organization who are attracted to this. So there will definitely be a handful of companies that have the right people and will want to do it. I think everybody would say that they want to do it, but in the actual—walk me through a season. How long does a season last?

(Ryan at 00:18:55) So we try to make them three months, and then there's sort of a break in between. The break is super important. But, yeah, about three months. And within that three months, you'll have a new event happening every week. You don't want to burn people out, but I think if we take a step back, there might be some people listening thinking, "Man, this is too much for me. I just want to go to work, code, and go home," or in this case, as remote work, turn off the laptop. And that's cool. There are some people who just only take advantage of one piece, so they might do one bounty a season. This is not a constant. It's all optional, and it's there when you need it.

(Ryan at 00:19:34) And that's kind of the thing with remote work. Sometimes you just need that energy boost because you don't have an office around you. You don't have the buzzing and the people to talk to and that kind of stuff. You just need an energy boost. So that's kind of what these events do. That's what these bounties do. We also have this other piece of season called Unleash Plus, which, of course, is not going to load right now. So I'm not going to show you that. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:57) Well, let's take just thirty seconds real quick because I got so excited about this culture thing because it was unique. What is X-Team?

(Ryan at 00:20:05) Oh, yeah. Right. There's a whole company that we run. No. So, yeah, X-Team is—let's give some context, obviously. We're a fully remote company, as I've said, and we build these high-performing, on-demand teams of developers for companies, really, of all sizes. We're working with a lot of big brands as well, like, you know, Riot Games. I mentioned Fox before, Coinbase, Sony, Kaplan Education, Beachbody, FAIR is a new one. You know, tons of cool companies, and we act as sort of the extension of their engineering teams, and we help them scale faster.

(Ryan at 00:20:40) So they'll come to us saying, "Hey, we need two front-end guys by tomorrow." Boom. Done. And so we're helping them scale, helping them improve their products. And so the key to that, though, and having that scalability ability, is having a community of developers at the ready that we can sort of call upon to join these teams. And so we had to create the ultimate community for developers, the community that everyone wanted to be a part of. And that's sort of what we did. It took us many years, but now we have this experience that so many developers are attracted to, and it allows us to quickly call upon people to scale these teams and keep them energized. Keep them, because that's the other thing.

(Ryan at 00:21:32) Our companies come to us because they want that consistency with every developer that they add. They're looking for that proactive, highly energized people that are going to move their projects forward. And the only way you get that is by keeping their energy high. And so everything we've been talking about the last twenty minutes is how we keep that energy high for them, how we keep them consistently executing and adding value. I think we were talking, Josh, earlier about how it's about consistency, not intensity. And so that's the key for us is how do we keep remote developers who are in a very isolated environment keep their energy consistent. And so that's where all this cool stuff comes from.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:07) Yeah. I mean, I was a mostly remote developer for seventeen years. So it takes—I refer to it—I think one of my more popular things on the website is where I'm talking about work-from-home depression. Because what happens is it sneaks up on you. You don't really realize it's happening because it doesn't happen just in one day, and then you have to end up—well, you either succumb to it, or you end up figuring out these little tricks to play about how to move your office from room to room, or how to structure your days like you're going outside to the gym or you're doing a workout or you're going to a coffee shop. You have to figure out how to satisfy the human side of you in order to not get depressed.

(Ryan at 00:22:50) Right. Yeah. No. That's a huge, huge issue, and it's only going to get more, I think, evident to the world now that so many companies are going remote. Everything's good at the start, but like you said, it's going to sneak up. And when it does, you really have to support your people through it because you've got to make sure that—for example, what we're going to talk about before is we do give developers $2,500 a year, for example, to spend on anything that energizes them, anything that keeps that energy going. So whether that's a gym membership, whether that's, you know, a jet ski rental—you know, I don't know what it's going to be. But something's going to come along to you. You're like, "You know, I'm really getting tired of these four walls. I need to change cities for a weekend."

(Ryan at 00:23:37) "I need to go to the coffee shop and work." You know, whatever it takes to keep that energy and keep you sane, we will sponsor. And so I think that's sort of the next gen of company—of what you're going to start seeing is, "Oh, there's this remote depression thing. Okay. How do we help people with this?" And it's going to be supporting them through whatever means necessary to get them what they need. And I think you mentioned it, you just learn over time a lot of self-awareness of what you need to be able to function still, whether that's, like you said, changing rooms to work on certain tasks or, you know, going out and changing environment, whatever it might be. So it's going to be an interesting next year, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:22) Did you guys—give me some insight, because people are going to be listening. They're going to think this is amazing. There's a million things you guys do because you've been around for a long time, and so they've gotten to build up. But, you know, if I were CTO listening, and or, you know, maybe just a team lead listening, and I'm like, "Hey, what is one small culture step that I could take today?" What would that be?

(Ryan at 00:24:48) Yeah. It's interesting because I gave a talk about this, which is probably worth shouting out, I guess. If you search in YouTube for "Running Remote X-Team," there's a good thirty-minute talk I gave on the answer to that, because a lot of people are like, "Well, we don't have a ton of money. We don't have a lot of time." Like, for example, we have full-time game designers. I don't think that exists in companies that are not gaming companies, like, full-time game designers. But that's, you know, we've invested a lot in making this work. So if you're just looking for that first sort of step, my number one tip is always talk to your people first.

(Ryan at 00:25:47) The biggest mistake that I'm seeing happening right now is they are assuming that everyone wants more Zooms, for example, that everyone wants a bunch of happy hours, that everyone wants whatever the office was. Let's just do that again, but let's do it online. And that's not what people want once they're at home. Once they're at home, they want to spend more time with their family. They want to spend more time, like you said, going to the gym in the morning. They want to spend more time doing the things that they love, doing the things that energize them. And so start with, "Well, what do they need, and how can I help support them?"

(Ryan at 00:26:04) "How can I help energize them? How can I help give them more of what they actually want now that they're in this environment?" Don't assume you just need to recreate the office experience. So that's kind of step one is just start talking to them and figuring it out. A lot of them won't know what they necessarily want from you, and that's okay. And that's when you can kind of try to start innovating and try to start doing things. I think a simple one is certainly, you know, the Versus Steps we talked about earlier. That's so easy. Just people take screenshots of their step tracker and post it to a channel over twenty-four hours. Anyone can do that.

(Ryan at 00:26:40) You don't need special apps, just a simple sort of little competition that can help unify people in an easy way. So, I mean, that's one example. But, yeah, just start getting to know your people. This is the cool thing. Now companies are actually going to start caring about their people and their interests and getting to know them and getting to understand what moves them forward.

(Ryan at 00:27:04) Because before, they didn't really care. You just come in and, you know, go to work and go home. But now it's, "I need to understand how you operate, how your day is going to operate now, and how we can sort of fit into that and allow you to do your best work."

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:21) Yeah. It's interesting. We check the random channel, you know, on our Slack, on our team. We're a small team. We're about eight people. But checking the random channel, we get into the most interesting conversations. And it's really—I'm trying to find a way to articulate it because I can see it in my head, but I haven't said it a lot. But it's like these other interactions that we're having, like, maybe let's use the step example. You and I, we go head-to-head for competing on the steps, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:48) And who cares who wins? But the bond that's built in that action carries over into the work, and it's actually useful because it helps smooth the edges of maybe a text on chat not having context or vocal tone, you know, how you'll hear it. It's just—I think it's undervalued, and I don't think it's discussed a lot, because of the—in the eighties and the nineties and early two thousands, we had the management style of "don't get to know your people" because you're going to have to let them go. And, you know, I'm not a fan of that. I'm a fan of getting to know your people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:23) You can understand what they want, and then you can position what you need to happen at the organization and figure out if there's alignment between what they want and who they want to become in life and what you're trying to do. Because when there is, it's magic, and when there's not, it's chaos.

(Josh at 00:28:40) That's right. Yeah. And what we've seen is that if you want strong working relationships between your team, you can't just only connect in one way. You need to find ways of connecting in all kinds of different ways. You know? So we have these little games and challenges that come up, and you see people who aren't normally stepping up to lead suddenly saying, "I can do this. You know? I can encourage other people, you know, get out there and get your steps," or you see people interacting in ways that they wouldn't normally in a work situation. And all of those connections come together to energize people, to make people appreciate each other in different ways, to build empathy, and all of that enhances the work experience as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:30) I like how you guys came to the conclusion of seasons, because so over here, we did the podcast, and then after a year or so of doing that, we ended up creating a leadership company where we take clips of leaders giving advice and turning them into leadership challenges. So then companies will license it, and we'll send out leadership challenges. So the first idea was, "Okay, we're going to send one a week," right? Because we can do the podcast and get lots of good advice. But we found that there's a lot of burnout. To actually do something every single week becomes massively hard. Even if it's small, even if it's, "I'm going to give you something that takes ten minutes and I want you to do it every week," that become—by week 20, it is the hardest thing in the world to will yourself to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:18) But then we found, like, we broke it up into quarters and we'll do a three-week sprint or, you know, so every Friday for three weeks, you get challenges. But it's interesting to see the human dynamic of even if you're doing something fun that you love—that's not a leadership challenge—

(Josh at 00:30:24) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:25) Even if you're doing something that you like, we still come to the conclusion that it needs to be broken up so that it—there's a—so that it's not a constant. So it becomes something to look forward to.

(Ryan at 00:30:36) Yeah. Human psychology is super interesting because the season thing took many years to figure out, but it is—I think we've had a six-week break now between the last season. And, you know, you're starting to see people saying, "I really want the next season to start." Really good. That's how we want it. You know? You want people looking forward to things, not saying, "Uh, there's another thing—there's another notification I can ignore." Like, creating anticipation, especially in work. Work needs to be something you look forward to, and this happens all the time with projects, especially when you're on a project for three years straight. The same project is just constant.

(Ryan at 00:31:19) The same, another sprint meeting, another sprint meeting, another more grooming. You have to add some variety into their life. And so to do that in a way that's still the same people coming together but experiencing new things together all the time other than the grooming meeting is so important. And so, yeah, seasons have really, really helped with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:41) Dude, this is really exciting. I think you guys are onto something. I wonder if there's a Slack app or something that would, because I've seen stuff for fitness, right? I've seen entire companies just build stuff around fitness and getting people moving, but that gets old really fast because it's like, okay, fit person. Joel's gonna win every time. Right? My team's listening to me, they're like, hell no. But I think the way you did it, when I saw your categories when you were doing screen sharing, you did something for everyone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:58) You had mentioned earlier all the way from photography to health. And so you guys come up with these each season? There's a fresh batch?

(Ryan at 00:32:23) It's a fresh batch. There's about 50 new ones a season, and then there'll be an expansion pack in the middle of the season. So many gamer terms, I know. But hey, they're developers.

(Josh at 00:32:32) Part of the strength of it as well is that it is community-led. It's not all coming from top to top. You know, people are stepping up and saying, I wanna run something with this thing that I'm really interested in that other people would be too. And we can, you know, this is a platform that we can empower them to hype up the rest of the community around this thing, to manage it a little bit, to have some ownership in it. And so all of that helps with the longevity of it, of it not just becoming yet another thing that the boss wants everyone to do.

(Ryan at 00:33:05) Yeah. It's all about ownership.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:07) That is true. Yeah. And then your stuff looks so good, like the shirts and everything. I mean, the designers you have on staff are unbelievable.

(Ryan at 00:33:18) Well, that's another cool thing. We don't have some of the stuff on staff. It's more about how can we celebrate as many game designers or how can we celebrate as many artists out there as possible, and so trying to make it sort of a global experience. But yeah, going back to that thing, like we had the cycling club is in heated debate right now about what the bounties will be in Season 6. Are we trying to go for elevation? Are we trying to go for duration? Are we trying to go for, you know, what's the metric of choice gonna be this season in terms of how they motivate and push themselves? And so it's really cool to see that they take the ownership in it rather than us just shoving it out, like Josh said.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:02) Do you guys track your employees' NPS or whatever the term is? Do you track their happiness or their engagement? Because it must be off the charts for you guys.

(Ryan at 00:34:16) Yeah. So we've got, it's at 98%, which is kinda funny. We have a 98% satisfaction and a 98% voluntary retention rate. They're always about the same, which 98% voluntary retention is crazy. It should not be that high. But yeah, the satisfaction side is interesting. We do it every two weeks where they get pinged with just, you know, how's your mental health, how's your productivity, how's your this and that, and just quick indicators to see how things are going. And usually things are really quite high. Obviously, you know, you can never fully trust that data, and so that's why we also have people on staff that dive deeper into every person. And we'll track just about everything we can. We kinda treat them as customers in a way to where, you know, we kinda wanna be the Zappos of the customer service world, but with developers, to where they constantly feel like they are supported, they have what they need. You know, if you end up in the hospital, you're gonna get a care package by the time you get there. You know, if you say something in Slack about, my goal this year is I really wanna learn piano, a piano might show up at your door, kinda thing. You know? So it's, we're trying to be just the highest level of service to our developers so that they are inspired to give the highest level of service to our partners. And it's worked. So, you know, the last decade, we've had incredible retention also with the companies we work. We've been working with some companies for over ten years, with some of the same developers too. Like, they won't leave. Developers should leave after ten years. They won't leave. So yeah, it's kinda really fascinating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:06) The creativity alone is really unique because, for example, you know, I'm thinking of, I have found that I happen to have a strong creativity, and then someone alerted me that not everybody is like me. And so I realized that some people don't have the same level of creativity as others. And in that case, they are the consumer of the creativity. So what you're doing with coming up with the challenges or how you built the community to do that, that is actually something that's kinda hard to transfer because you would have the, even the act of coming up with it gets the buy-in for the season. It's even if you just packaged everything and said, here you go, somebody, you don't have the same ownership over that. It's almost like they have to have the will and actually do it as a group.

(Ryan at 00:36:57) Oh, absolutely. And, you know, creativity is probably the most draining part of it, but also the most energizing part of it. Because, again, ownership, they start to take ownership of the creativity too. I mentioned we're doing Battle Royale this upcoming season as a Slackbot game. And you got some people from the community working on that, and they are having the time of their lives building Fortnite in Slack, essentially. And so yeah. I mean, it's just, creativity is something I don't think a lot of people think, oh, developers are creative. No, they're code monkeys. No. Developers are, they're all people. We're all people here. You need to tap into every aspect of them. How can you tap into every part of them that brings them alive? And so that's the cool thing about these seasons is they tap into all aspects of their lives, all the areas where they wanna grow, all the areas where they wanna improve, and all the stuff they wanna focus on. And how can we tap in all that and bring it all together and package it up? And yeah, it's a really cool experience to be a part of. I would love to invite you in our Slack so you can experience it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:08) That'd be crazy. Yes. We'll talk about that off the podcast or another time.

(Ryan at 00:38:13) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:14) Yeah. But I really like, I'm not kidding. This is really cool. I am also curious to know about, because you're out there building all these projects with these different companies, what are some of the trends? What technologies or skill sets are you seeing become more popular right now?

(Josh at 00:38:30) We're certainly, you know, working with a pretty wide range of technologies. In terms of trends, we're seeing that there's a lot more move towards people having expertise across a lot of different areas in a stack. So the idea of the full-stack developer is the cliché, and everyone wants to call themselves a full-stack developer. But we are seeing a lot more sort of demand for people who can find themselves moving across, you know, front-end developments and AWS and working with databases and that sort of thing. We're seeing a still very strong movement in React. That's been a growing part of the community, growing part of the trends.

(Ryan at 00:39:31) I'd add, I guess, Vue. Vue is the one that's starting to come up in terms of the front-end frameworks. Starting to see Vue gain popularity. Something that took a few more years than expected, but yeah, definitely the React Node stack is still pretty classic. And adding into that now, though, is the AWS side and the serverless side. And you know, you can't ignore AWS anymore if you don't have Dynamo, if you don't have Lambda on your resume. It's getting hard to get hired. And so that would be the biggest thing to urge any developers listening, obviously, is definitely get certified in AWS. Now is the time, because that's a huge growing trend.

(Josh at 00:40:18) That's a great point, actually, because, you know, for the first time in a long time, I think the idea of managing your infrastructure as code is really getting traction, and it's inviting up a lot of developers into a space that previously they didn't really feel at home in. But, you know, bringing in technologies like Terraform or CloudFormation, other vendors, you know, Google platform has its own thing there. It's kind of opening up a lot of new avenues for people coming from an engineering mindset to also be thinking about a complete product, you know, an infrastructure as well as just the code that they're running on, which is great. You know, being able to share ownership of an entire feature from conception to delivery, that is really empowering. And so those kind of technology trends are changing the way that people think about their skill set as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:21) Yeah. I've, when I first went into AWS years ago, I was like, okay, this isn't intuitive. I'm gonna need to learn. Using Heroku, you know, something like that, very, very simple. But there's just, the interface was so daunting in AWS with all their products. I was like, okay. I know I need a server. And then I figured out all the different tools I would need in order to set it up correctly. And I figured it out, and then hired a company to manage it for me for that company because, you know, you wanna take the, the things that aren't, as founders or as CTOs and CEOs as the executive team, right? And simply put, you wanna be spending your time solving the problems that only you can solve.

(Josh at 00:42:10) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:10) Right? Yeah. So those things quickly—

(Josh at 00:42:10) Ideally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:14) Yeah. Ideally. Perfect world scenario.

(Ryan at 00:42:18) Very perfect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:20) Do you have any physical offices at all?

(Ryan at 00:42:23) I think we did for, what, a few months? Long, long ago. But no. Not anymore.

(Josh at 00:42:29) I mean, they can spring up as needed. You know, that's the advantage. You can rent out a place for a little while if you need to get a bunch of people together for a spike. You know? But it's good to be fluid in that regard. Yeah.

(Ryan at 00:42:45) How do—

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:46) Oh, go ahead.

(Ryan at 00:42:48) I was gonna say, what we do have is something called the X Outpost. And this is, it's kinda like a hacker house. Essentially, we'll rent out an Airbnb in some exotic place. Not always exotic, but somewhere around the world. And every month, it changes. They've unfortunately all gone on hold this year. But yeah, usually every single month, there's about 15-ish X-Teamers all living and working and exploring together in some city around the world. Places like South Africa, Thailand, Canada, Argentina, all sorts of different places. They've gone everywhere. And so that's a cool way to, again, create micro-communities within the bigger one and create new relationships, create a lot of cross-pollination of, you know, people on very different projects getting to share knowledge and learn from each other, but also getting to stay energized and go explore and do cool stuff on the weekends together. So that's been a cool addition as well. Rather than the office, how can we actually bring people together to have a great time together and also cross-pollinate?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:54) And when you first said houses at the beginning of the conversation, I thought they actually were houses that the developers lived in in different areas. And then as you explained it, I realized that that was not the case.

(Ryan at 00:44:06) Right. Yeah. So, and actually, sometimes it's interesting. Sometimes it'll be one house. Other times, it'll be, you know, they're in multiple different houses, but we just kinda go with whatever they wanna do. It's cool because we'll first center it around an experience. For example, we'll get a bunch of skiers together to go to Croatia. And, you know, they'll get a bunch of cabins. And so, but they're not retreats. They're still working full-time, but you're giving them the opportunity to still come together and kinda co-work in a more unique environment than just going to Starbucks down the street.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:40) Yeah. It's something that having a lot of remote experience you get natively. I can be in a different area and then enjoy the outside-of-work time in this local culture that I'm in. But to try to explain that to someone who's an older mentality, who wants to see an ROI of why they're going to do this, right? It's like, they just don't mesh. And so I'll have, you know, I mean, I firmly believe the work style and the culture you have or that you've created at the company is the future of work. This is where people are going. You're just in early, and you got, you're just, because what you're doing is you're following and understanding and making decisions from first principles, human behavior, really low-level concepts, and that always works.

(Ryan at 00:45:31) Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's funny. So Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, like ten years ago said that we, we're the future of work. And I don't know that we were, but it's kinda been always in the back of my, of our mind, like, let's make sure we are the future of work. That sounds good. And going back to the X Outpost, though, you know, it's hard to explain to a client. Like, no, they're, don't worry. They're actually being more productive now that they're at the X Outpost, so don't worry about that. And now our clients actually join us in them. And so they'll go be a part of it, and they're like, wow. This is amazing. I wish I worked this way. I'm getting so much more done, and this is so much more energizing. And they get a taste of the culture too. So it's cool, and we can kind of combine with our clients in that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:19) Yeah. There's something to be said for movement. I found this out, you know, at first with what I had said just being a stay-at-home developer, work-from-home developer, and learning how to move around. And I was a lot quieter then. And then when the podcast happened, I started going out speaking at companies. I started physically traveling around to different organizations. I did 50-something trips last year. And what I learned from that, yeah. And what I learned from that uptick was that changing the city is like changing the room on steroids. I would get more done in the airport and then in the hotel room. I would look at myself on the, I just traveled. I did six hours, you know, two flights that were three hours, and I woke up early and I had to go, you know, do all of this. And but in those, in that time of waiting for the airplanes, being on the airplane, and then being at the hotel room, the all those transitions of environments, and for some reason, I got so much done on a day most people would say is scrubbed because of travel. And it was that freshness of being around these new people and these new environments, and you just get this energy going from you. And it's like, I have to move more. You know? I have to get out there more.

(Ryan at 00:47:31) Yeah. Well, and that's what's making this period of time so difficult. This is not remote work. This isn't how we stay energized normally. We try to get those new sights, new tastes, new smells, new, you know, things that move us forward and keep that energy high. And so, and Josh and I have both done this as well. I traveled three years with my wife doing that same sort of concept. Josh did the impossible, though. He traveled with his whole family for a year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:59) For a full year?

(Ryan at 00:48:00) Yeah. For a full year.

(Josh at 00:48:02) It's a good day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:03) Staying in places?

(Josh at 00:48:05) We didn't want to move too fast from one place to the next. So we would do four weeks here, six weeks there, and move along. We had a bunch of colleagues and friends and family to visit in various countries. So, yeah, we got around the world over about ten months.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:24) Nice. How old are your kids?

(Josh at 00:48:26) They're now six and 10.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:31) When you were doing this, how old were they?

(Josh at 00:48:33) They were two years less than that.

(Ryan at 00:48:35) Yeah.

(Josh at 00:48:35) Four.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:36) Oh, really? You had kids under three when you were doing this?

(Ryan at 00:48:40) They loved it.

(Josh at 00:48:41) They loved it. They still talk about going to all these places and seeing these people and having these experiences. It's a wonderful thing if you can travel with kids because you get to see the world through their eyes as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:56) Did you have an au pair for your wife or some help?

(Josh at 00:49:01) She was kind of legendary in what she did. But, yeah, we broke it up as well so that sometimes we'd be on our own in a place, and then other times we'd be staying with friends or with family and have a bit of a change up as well. So just like you said, you have a change and you get to reenergize and enjoy things more. If you had to be a tourist for that entire time, that would just be exhausting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:31) Yeah. That is true. We were actually looking for flights to go out to Colorado because after being stuck inside—that's not a vacation, being forced inside. That was the most—I mean, we're still in it. We're kind of coming out of it right now. I'm in Florida, but yeah. And you said, oh, it's like a bad thing.

(Ryan at 00:49:50) I said, oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:51) Oh, poor Joel. He's in Florida. No. So—

(Ryan at 00:49:57) A lot of people in—

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:58) The United States make fun of Florida. But, yeah. See, now I lost my train of thought.

(Ryan at 00:50:05) Yeah. Sorry. I ruined it. I ruined it. One minute—oh, killed it all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:08) We're just going with the flow, my friend. No. But Colorado, I was trying to get out to Colorado. We're big hikers, outdoor people. And the flights are so limited right now. So the layovers are twenty-four hours, and I'm like, I can't—yeah. So I was like, well, the only way we would be able to do it is if we stayed, you know, not the whole time in Colorado. We did two or three days at the connecting area, which is fine. But in July, the flights sort of resume. So we could see on the flight trackers that they're coming back. So once July gets here, we'll probably avoid the heat of the summer and go check out the mountains. But yeah. Traveling is something to—to go from constantly traveling to just stop. There's so many professions and people, it's just mentally, it's difficult. How did you guys handle the COVID?

(Ryan at 00:51:03) It's been tough. It's been really tough. I think we've had enough practice with it, though, in terms of the isolation side of it to where we've got the routines down. The hardest part is how do you create the novelty? How do you create the new experiences that keeps the energy going? So that's—thankfully, we had a season going. And it was called New World, which we had named it back in October. But it kind of worked perfectly. Yeah. Well, the idea was to be about finding new worlds in your life, whether those new worlds are things like learning piano or discovering a new genre of book. The key to the remote lifestyle is constantly finding new worlds, and it's up to us to find them. It's entirely on us. I think a lot of people when they first become remote, they think they're kind of waiting because they're used to the office sort of presenting them with new experiences and new worlds and whatnot. So when you're first new, you're waiting for, okay, well, something's going to change eventually, right? Something's going to get different eventually, right? And so that's what this quarantine period has been like. It's like, okay, I really need to force myself now to find those new worlds, to find those new things that are going to give me new challenges in life to go explore and do that even if I have to do it from home.

And so now looking ahead to this next season, it's like, okay. Not all of us can necessarily go do everything we want to, but what can we do? Like, let's not make any excuses. Let's stop putting our life on pause and stop waiting to be told what to do and actually start figuring it out. And so I'm really excited for this next season because it's going to be fun to explore. Like, for example, we're going to go buy some bikes for the first time, and I've been putting that off for so long. And this is finally the motivation. Like, come on. Stop making excuses. You need a new world to explore. You're very limited on what you can do right now. Go do it. And so that's really cool to get to do that. But, obviously, cannot wait for the travel to come back. I think it's going to be a long ways away until we feel comfortable doing it, but definitely looking forward to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:21) How do most of your customers find you?

(Ryan at 00:53:25) Yeah. I mean, a lot of it is referral based, obviously, advertising based, but it's a lot of just building great relationships with people. And the cool thing is a lot of people go on to work elsewhere, and so they'll kind of take us with them. And they'll spin up a new team. And so that's really cool because that allows us to spread into new industries really quickly. But, yeah, I mean, it's been a lot of word-of-mouth, to be honest, over the years, and that's really cool to see that happen naturally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:58) What's the size of the organization now?

(Ryan at 00:54:02) Well, I mean, it depends if we're talking community or size of the team. But either way, we try to keep that stuff wrapped up for now in terms of investing and all that stuff. But we put ourselves in the top 10 of the all remote companies in terms of size and scale and revenue and all that. So we've definitely come a long way in the last ten years, and we're in the several thousand in terms of the community, in terms of what you can tap into if you're a company. So we've got that scale there of qualified people ready to go. And so that took a long time to build up that network, obviously, because the vast majority of people out there are not qualified for what companies are looking for. Companies like Toptal, for example, tout the top 3% or whatever. The actual qualified number out there is well below 1%. So it really doesn't matter what number you tout. There's such a small sliver of people out there that are truly forward moving, that are truly experienced in working remotely, and are truly sort of proactive and have the right energy to add value to your team immediately. So we're looking for a very specific sort of person, and that's what keeps companies coming back to us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:20) That's awesome. Yeah. Because, I mean, I'm very attracted to the—if I had known something existed like this a while ago, I would have joined that team because it's—I mean, I say that, but also I'm just so entrepreneurial that I don't know what it is. I just like going out there and—you know, I guess it's just the way that my specific life unfolded, right? Everybody has their path. I'm so grateful that you guys do what you do and that you're creating an environment like that. Obviously, it sounds like the people that you attract have that entrepreneurial spirit too.

(Ryan at 00:56:02) Yeah. That's kind of interesting. I think you have to have a certain level of entrepreneurial spirit to be a great remote worker because it requires so much independence. I think that's going to be another interesting thing to watch over the next year. Facebook's getting a lot of criticism for saying that working remote's going to be a privilege. I don't think that everyone's necessarily cut out to work remote, to be honest. I think you need—you know, it is something that some people need the office to stay energized, to stay focused, to stay at a high performing level. It requires so much independence and focus and, you know, kind of like that entrepreneurial spirit, that ambition to constantly be moving things forward if you want to work remote at the highest level, which is where we are. So it's going to be an interesting year to see how things pan out.

(Josh at 00:56:55) Yeah. And what we've found as well is that, you know, over the years, it just keeps coming back. If you don't have sustainability, you've got nothing. If you can't sustain what you're doing and grow it gradually, you know, organically, then you're going to lose what you've built. So we've—with the kind of people who are attracted to this style of working, you know, you asked about tech trends before. Well, the one trend is that things keep changing in technology. There's always something new to learn. And so when you've got the people who already are constantly wanting to learn and grow themselves, the way to sustain that is not by piling more and more expectations on them, but it's by giving them permission to step away from the computer now and then. You know? You already know that they want to learn and grow. So the way to sustain that is by giving them opportunities and empowering them to develop other parts of their life to find energy and inspiration in all those unexpected places. And that's where I think we've been able to build something really strong.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:14) Yeah. I like that you keep mentioning about the consistency over intensity because that's something that I'd say it's such a lesson that I've learned so many times that I don't make the mistake anymore. I just—similar, I guess, the guy who writes a lot about it, James Clear, Atomic Habits. Like, just look at the recurring habits in your schedule, and that's what's going to happen long term. And so I guess maybe it was getting older or just experience, whatever it may be, but I always—I get reflective, you know, because I want to answer people's questions. We get a lot of outreach from the show and stuff, and people ask a lot of these questions. And so I'm always trying to think of what's the smallest pieces of advice I could give that would genuinely help individuals and not necessarily be cliche. Because a lot of the advice we talk about—I noticed when people give advice or when they're talking about the end result of what they learned, right? Like, this is what I was left with. But I was trying to work that backwards and say, okay. What's the formula I could give someone that would allow them to end up at the successful result no matter what? And it would just be don't give up. Like, just keep trying, and then you'll definitely make mistakes and figure it out and learn. Like, for me to learn the consistency over intensity, I went and burnt out so many times. And then I realized I reached my peaks of my motivation and my physical ability to work. There's only so many hours in a day, and you hear people about working twenty hours. And so you just—you try, and I just kept trying and experimenting and failing and then figuring out what is the best setup for me and, you know, how do my natural patterns of energy work throughout the day and how much attention and focus do I have? Like, how many blocks of things can I get done and then build it around that? For me personally, I have three blocks of energy a day, and I get—so I structure everything like that. And it took me, you know, thirty-two years to figure that out. I'm saying, okay. I can get—I get three solid blocks a day where I can have extreme focus and achievement over some task or things I want to move forward. And that's been really useful. But, yeah, I think that concept of just keep trying at something, and I think that formula will always lead the individual to the result after a lot of pain. If you don't—I'm not selling it very well. But yeah.

(Ryan at 01:00:48) That's the beauty of remote, though, is you discover that, oh, wait. Everything now is about the value I add. It has nothing to do with how long I water cooler talk. It doesn't matter whether I get the corner office or not. It doesn't matter about the politics. All that matters is what value are you going to add today. And the beauty of that is it forces you into self-awareness because you have to figure out very quickly, how am I going to add value today? I need to figure this out. I need to figure myself out. I need to figure out when am I most high performing. And that's—this is why I absolutely love this way of working. I think it is the most effective way there is. I think there will always still be a place for offices. We need to collaborate on big ideas in big moments in person, I think, a lot of times. But in terms of getting things done, this is everyone with self-awareness and knowing how to add value and how to do it in an instant. So very exciting times.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:55) I think the technology of us—I mean, if you look at it, it's exponential for us communicating, right? Like, the idea of doing this, what we're doing right now. I mean, you guys are in Australia. We're here. We're having a fluid seamless conversation face to face. Some of the future technology that I've seen with the holograms and people being in the same room, that's just going to level the playing field. And I don't even think that that's ten years away. I mean, I think that's a few breakthroughs and then a couple companies commercializing it, and I think that could be here pretty quickly.

(Ryan at 01:02:27) Who needs holograms? We've got conferences in Animal Crossing now. Animal Crossing itself.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:32) I know what that is. Wow.

(Ryan at 01:02:37) I mean, that—but that's my favorite part of this year has been people are getting so creative. And, you know, we've been sitting in the sidelines for ten years trying to push the innovation. You've seen what we've done now, but the amount of innovation coming out now in the last four months is awesome. We're getting so much inspiration coming from that. I love seeing what escape rooms are doing, allowing you to control things with a live actor in the room. Like, there's so many cool things happening that again, I keep talking about this next year. I'm so hyped up for this next year because remote work is just going to skyrocket in all new ways, and it's exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:18) Do you have any examples on your site of projects that you guys have done or things you have built?

(Ryan at 01:03:24) Man, yeah. We have a case study section. In terms of kind of the most interesting ones to point out, a lot of it's NDA, obviously, but I think the biggest one recently was the Super Bowl. We did a lot of the video streaming work for that, which was, you know, we're talking massive amounts. People are finally watching the Super Bowl online a lot. And so, you know, we're looking at a lot of concurrent users, a lot of scalability. And so there's—I think there's a cool case study on that on our website for anyone who wants to check that out.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:58) Nice. Yeah. I actually just got a request from a listener that said that they wanted me to have on someone from this company called Charter, which apparently owns Spectrum or a big communications thing because they wanted to hear about the topic of digital transformation there because apparently, they went from all the physical cables to the Internet. And I was like, whoa. I've never thought about that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:22) That was like a massive transformation that our whole world just went through, because we used to go through cable, and now we go through the Internet. And I wanted to talk—I got some questions for those people.

(Ryan at 01:04:34) They were also working with Beachbody, who is the biggest fitness company in the US, and their numbers are just skyrocketing right now too because everyone—they can't go to the gym. And so doing a lot of cool video on demand stuff there, and just dealing with all the scalability. I think that's the other cool thing happening right now. Again, this next year is going to be interesting. Really, and why AWS, I think, is such an in-demand skill is, you know, scalability right now is off the charts to keep up with everyone being at home and everyone needing the Internet and everyone needing to stream more video. And there's so many interesting tech challenges going on right now that it's a great time to be a developer, but it's also a lot of cool new challenges.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:20) I saw a new chipset last night, or a new—I think it was a chip. And what it did was it multiplied over the fiber. It multiplied how much data could be transferred by splitting the light spectrum into these different, like, 100 different lines and then running parallel data. And it was unbelievable. I'm not describing it exactly perfect, but it, like, 100x the ability of transfer of data. It wouldn't be for, like, an office. It would be for, like, a telco or something like that. But it was how you could amplify the current throughput of the existing fiber systems versus laying new cables. Right? Because that's, like, a big thing. And I like to watch some of the research happenings when they make major breakthroughs because I'm always thinking one of these days, I'm going to commercialize one of these coming out of a school or a lab or something like that.

(Ryan at 01:06:22) That's awesome. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:24) Anything we didn't cover today or want to get out there? What's the call to action? Go to xteam.com. Right?

(Ryan at 01:06:31) Call to action is, get your t-shirts.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:34) Can I buy that stuff on your website, by the way?

(Ryan at 01:06:37) You know, that's the cool thing is you have to be an X-Teamer to get this stuff. Now, actually, no. Our radio station—which now we're just blowing the minds even further—we have a radio station.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:47) What? Let's give a shout out for the radio station.

(Ryan at 01:06:49) Radio.xteam.com is a pretty amazing radio station, as you will see when you get there. But yeah, you can win collectibles there. We do give away some items there, so that's—if you really want one, you can get one there. But in terms of call to action, yeah, xteam.com. If you're a developer, you can check out the developer section there. Anyone with senior level experience, we're certainly interested in talking to. Any companies out there looking to scale and grow their teams with people who, again, have that forward-moving energy and they want to see immediate value added to their projects, definitely come our way. Xteam.com. There's a nice hire button in the top right. Click that, and we'll get you someone immediately.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:35) I love it. Yeah. Look at that. It's the first—it's right there. You go to xteam.com and just join X-Team.

(Ryan at 01:07:41) Boom.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:42) Dude, this is great. We did it. Easy. Ryan, Josh, we made a podcast together.

(Josh at 01:07:48) Thank you, Joel.

(Ryan at 01:07:50) The Internet is an amazing thing. I think it's going places.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:54) I would like to buy a shirt.

(Ryan at 01:07:58) How about I send you one as a gift?

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:00) That would be—

(Josh at 01:08:01) That's the other way. That's the other way. Right?

(Ryan at 01:08:03) That's the other way.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:04) I've been actually trying to buy, like—I'll see, I do so many of the interviews and I see them wearing, like, their custom swag, like, somebody in design just made for fun or something. And they had, like, 10 of them. And I want to, like, buy them. And they're just, like, they're like, well, I don't know. We don't have any more. Just a one-time thing. And I'm like, where is the place where I could buy, like, these cool internal company swag? Like, it's—wow.

(Ryan at 01:08:30) Yeah. There's a startup idea.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:32) I want it too because, like, anyone can go buy the GitHub swag. That's cool. I want, like, the tech insider, like, the company that's only making 10 for their team or 100 for their teams or whatever, and then throw a couple extra in there because the creativity that comes out of those is just so unique. Like, you couldn't pay someone to, like, make you something like that because there's, like, a story behind it. You can explain it. Like, when I'm sitting next to people on planes or wherever I am, you know, oh, that's a cool thing. Explain that. And it's got a story. Like, that type of stuff is cool to me.

(Ryan at 01:09:04) I was at a Jimmy John's the other day wearing one of these shirts. It was the Zelda one.

(Josh at 01:09:08) Yeah.

(Ryan at 01:09:08) And it was like, oh, you're really into Zelda, man? I was like, no. This is X-Team. And then I didn't explain what X-Team was. I just walked out. Now his mind's blowing. He's like, where's X-Team?

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:18) Does it say, like, xteam.com/hire on the back or anything?

(Ryan at 01:09:22) Well, you know, we used to have that, but no one wants to wear an ad. You know? It's just the X-Team logo back there. Just the X. So—

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:32) The curiosity works because I would have Googled it.

(Ryan at 01:09:35) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:35) If I would have saw your shirt—yeah.

(Ryan at 01:09:37) It's the exclusivity like you said. You don't want a GitHub shirt. You want the one that's hard to get.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:43) Yeah. I want the one that not everybody has. Alright. Well, I'll wear it. You send it. I'll wear it on the show and give you guys shout outs and stuff too.

(Ryan at 01:09:49) Perfect. The cool thing about these, these are all limited run. So if you get one, no one's ever going to get it again.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:55) You can give me a used one. That's cool. Just send it—even better. Sorry.

(Ryan at 01:10:01) Perfect.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:02) Awesome. Anything else that we need to do to wrap up here today? You guys feel pretty good?

(Ryan at 01:10:07) I think we're good. This was a fantastic conversation. Thank you.

(Josh at 01:10:10) Yeah. Thank you so much.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:11) Alright, my friends. You guys have a lovely evening, and we'll talk soon.

(Josh at 01:10:16) Yeah. It was lovely hearing your story as well, Joel. Great to meet you.

(Ryan at 01:10:19) Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:27) Thank you, guys.