Miles CTO of InKind Capital

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today we are talking to Miles, the CTO of InKind Capital, and we talk about how technology is changing your restaurant experience, how he communicates with his CEO, and how Miles is giving back to the startup community. 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) What does an average day look like for Miles?

(Miles at 00:00:36) Phone calls, meetings, some coding, and more coding, I guess. And usually travel. I'm usually traveling all over the place, which is fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:47) Oh, excellent. Where's the last place you went?

(Miles at 00:00:50) I went and saw some family in the Midwest over the holidays.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:54) There you go.

(Miles at 00:00:55) But yeah, last year I was all over the place. I guess some of the highlights were the Bahamas was fun, DC about a dozen times, Austin, Texas about a dozen times, San Francisco, Napa Valley, New York. Yeah, a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) So when you're traveling around, who's coding?

(Miles at 00:01:16) Me still. I don't really take any days off.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) Me either. I love working, man. I absolutely love what I do in life. How long have you been programming for?

(Miles at 00:01:32) Almost a decade now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:34) Yeah. So you're passionate about it. You know, it's the thing that you do, right?

(Miles at 00:01:37) Yeah, absolutely. I'm moving more and more into management and less coding, and I think as our company scales, that's kind of the plan too, is to do less and less coding and more and more planning, management, things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:54) How many engineers do you have now?

(Miles at 00:01:56) Right now it's just me on the team. We had a little larger team last year, and then we decided, well, they just kind of one by one decided to go elsewhere. We kind of pivoted the company, which is fine. And then now we are looking to grow quickly. So I actually just hired an agency that I used to work in, actually, to help me build our next version of our applications. And that's exciting while we then go hire some full-time people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:33) Oh, great. Yeah. You know, I've noticed I have quite a few CTO friends, and I'd say a good portion of them are starting to use outside contractor agencies to extend their product even when they have a couple developers in-house.

(Miles at 00:02:45) Yeah. You know, I mean, for us, part of it was, the biggest part of it was, for us, this next version is kind of testing some theories about how we're going to scale our company. And so we wanted to get that up and going as fast as possible without having to kind of take time to find the right people, onboard them, things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:07) Oh, so you guys are going to test some stuff?

(Miles at 00:03:10) Yeah, yeah. Testing kind of...

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:12) Who's your customer?

(Miles at 00:03:14) Our customers are restaurant owners and restaurant customers. So yeah. One of the main things that we do and kind of what we build our business around was inventing a new way of financing restaurants. So growing restaurants always need more capital if they're expanding to multiple locations or they're just renovating a current restaurant. They can always use capital like that. And so we started the company three years ago, and my business partner, our CEO, he had previously invested in about 20 restaurants across the country and just saw how much of a struggle it is for restaurants in particular to line up capital. And that's why we kind of started down this path of how can we help them get the capital that they need in a way that makes a lot of sense. And so the main thing we do is we finance growing restaurants, but the restaurants that use us get access to this really cool mobile app that provides a really cool customer experience for their customers. And so that's kind of the state of it. And the future vision that we're working on now is to allow any restaurant, even if we haven't financed them, to use that really cool customer experience mobile app. And then if along the line they need capital, we're there for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:44) Very cool. How many restaurants do you have now on the platform?

(Miles at 00:04:48) We've done about 40 across the country, and we just launched a few in Australia, actually. I think we've done...

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:56) But we have an Australian guest coming on the show today.

(Miles at 00:04:58) Oh, cool. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:00) Yeah. One of the main guys, his name is Ram. He has a popular podcast, Growth. I believe it's a growth podcast. Right, Jake?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:07) Yeah. I think it's something related to growth. Super popular, super great personality guy, and we're staying late at the office because of the time difference.

(Miles at 00:05:16) Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We had half of our guys down there a couple months ago for a while, and it was interesting trying to get the time difference. There's a small window where it made sense to have team calls and stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:28) Right. So you've got these 40 companies. And then are you open to the public?

(Miles at 00:05:34) So we're not really. So restaurants right now can come and reach out to us. We get a lot of referrals too for the financing part of it. And then, like I said, once we finance them, then they have access to all these really cool experience applications and get their customers involved to do cool things. So that's kind of the plan in the next three to six months is to just let any restaurant anywhere just come to our website, sign up, and start using our really cool customer experience technology. And then when they need financing down the road for whatever, that's what we're here for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:17) So what sort of value do you provide? So you have the financing concept. That's a service that they would use of yours. But what value do you provide other than that? Because it seems like they might come to your app for something and then transition to financing.

(Miles at 00:06:32) Yeah, exactly. So the app value add is really about the experience. So you provide a better experience that we can help. We can leverage technology to help you provide a great experience. So one of the things that restaurant owners don't know about is when do their best customers walk in the door. So there are some companies, point-of-sale companies, that are starting to match credit card usage to say, "Hey, this person's been here three times prior." But it's susceptible to if you use a different payment source or whatever, then that wouldn't work. Or more likely the case is that you just don't care at that point, right? You want to know as a restaurant owner that this person has come in six times before and they ordered these things and they spent this much money. But you want to know that when they walk in the door so you can provide them a great experience, not at the end of the meal when you're cashing them out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:29) Yeah. You know, that's interesting because I was talking, I think October of this year or September of this year, I was talking to our local restaurant, five-location chain, little local restaurant. And one of the things that we were talking about is the possibility of using some sort of data analytics, you know, I guess machine learning type deal, to do guesstimations of the credit card matching to the customers. So when they check out, they could ping the manager to go say something nice as they leave, right? And so that's one of the things that we were just talking about, brainstorming about. So it's awesome that you bring that up. But so that's not the answer you say. Well, what is the answer? How do you do it then?

(Miles at 00:08:12) Well, the answer in terms of hospitality is that you want to know when they walk in the door. You don't want to know at the end of the day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:17) I'm asking, how do you do it?

(Miles at 00:08:19) Yeah. So every one of us, so our customers, we help the restaurant identify the best customers. So their customers buy these things called house accounts, and then they have our mobile app. And with our mobile app, we can use location and beacons to say that, "Hey, someone just walked in the door for you."

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:38) Oh, smart. So you get them to install a rewards app, and then on the rewards app you're tracking location, and when they enter the vicinity you alert.

(Miles at 00:08:47) Yeah, pretty much like that, exactly. It's not really a rewards app. We call them house accounts. And basically the idea is that we help you identify your best customers by having them prepay a large amount, and then we'll give you bonus credit. So for instance, you pay $500 but you'd get $700 in credit, right? And if you're someone that goes there multiple times, you would totally do that, right, since you're going to use it anyway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:15) When you first started speaking, I was like, "Nah." But then I thought of three people who I know would actually do that.

(Miles at 00:09:21) Yeah. And I'm sure you can think of multiple restaurants yourself that you frequent all the time that you really care about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:28) My stepmom? Okay, yeah. She will go on the Christmas sale to Bonefish and buy a thousand dollars worth of their gift cards because if you buy 50, you get 10 free.

(Miles at 00:09:39) Right, right, right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:39) And she'll just use the gift cards the whole year.

(Miles at 00:09:41) Right, yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:43) That's crazy.

(Miles at 00:09:44) We'll do that. Yeah. Quite a few people do that. And then the reason, obviously, you want to provide a great experience is that those people keep coming back. But also, those are the people that you want to be referring new customers. So every restaurant wants new customers. That's what they'll talk about all the time, and the best way that you can do that is by providing a great experience to the people that you want referring. You know? Groupon, a few years ago, was the really hot way that every restaurant would do a Groupon deal. And you would get a new customer, that's true, but they would come in, get their half off everything, and then never come back, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:21) Interesting. Yeah. See, I don't know much about the restaurant industry. I just know that nine times out of ten, Gordon Ramsay is involved. So I assume he's the backer financially of this project.

(Miles at 00:10:32) Oh, of course. Yeah, I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:33) Of course. Of course. Okay, good, good, good.

(Miles at 00:10:34) No, we actually know a lot about the restaurant industry over the past three or four years because we also, through doing this, have, we opened our own restaurant in Washington, DC, and we still own and operate that today. And so it's pretty, it's a pretty unique thing that I can go out to DC and be a bartender for a night or be a waiter for a night and actually see what it's like and have a place where we can try out new features in our app and things like that. It's pretty fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:05) No, that's super cool. I was actually talking with, I hope I get this right, Douglas Woodrow. Is that right, Jake?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:10) All right. I was talking with Douglas Woodrow. They are making software for moving, like a product for moving. But in order to really understand the business, what they did was they actually started a moving company.

(Miles at 00:11:21) Yeah, nice. Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:23) And I'm like, "Oh, man." Then, you know, you start a moving company, do a brand, you do a website, you throw some Facebook ads, you generate some feedback, you know, you engage with the community. They network with real estate people. So once they sell their house, they get referral and, like, a discount. They did whatever they could just to get business into the moving company just so that they could figure out what the problems were and then solve them with software. That's their business model. I was like, "Oh, man, I love that."

(Miles at 00:11:46) The best way to know what your customers need is to be your own customer, you know. So that's definitely something that we've taken into account. And like I said, we started this business after, you know, our CEO invested in a ton of restaurants himself personally and got to see kind of the behind-the-scenes of how things are financed, how things grow, common mistakes. You know, you have really passionate people providing great food, drinks, and hospitality, but they're not that savvy at setting a term sheet for an equity investor or figuring out what loan they should take or something like that, you know. So that's why we wanted to, that's, I mean, that's how we grew our expertise for sure is by being in there and being in the domain.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:33) Well, it's also interesting because, like, you have the perspective of, so things change, Miles, right? Like, okay, so I was talking with one company and they're a 30-year-old company, and things have, and their revenue's decreasing every year, right? And so I'm talking with them about it, and they're like, "We don't understand. We're doing the same thing that worked for us for, you know, 25 years, and it hasn't worked the past five years."

(Miles at 00:12:56) I don't think it's a problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:58) Yeah. I'm like, "All right, look. Things can work for a long time, and then they cannot work because it's, pay attention to the market. What does the market want? What are they doing?" And so just bringing that sort of perspective, one of the ways you guys are protecting against that is by actually owning and continuing to operate the restaurant after you have the initial experience to build the initial product, right?

(Miles at 00:13:22) Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the number one thing we see done incorrectly in the restaurant industry is that you get a bunch of smart people that can code something beautifully or, you know, make a great product, but they don't understand the industry. And, you know, they think, "Well, wouldn't it be awesome to be able to do this, this, and that on your phone?" And it's like, good luck trying to get a restaurant manager or a restaurant customer to do that. Like, good luck, because it's not going to work, you know. I think what's interesting is you're seeing, you're seeing kind of a next generation of how technology can eventually influence restaurants, you know. And it's interesting to see pockets of it all over the world. So I know a big thing in China is when you sit down at a table, there's just a QR code in the middle of the table, and you scan it, and it shows you the menu. And you pick out what you want and it gets delivered to your table, and then you pay through your phone too, right? But imagine trying to, I mean, that technology exists. It's not very complicated. It's pretty straightforward. But imagine trying to do that in most of the restaurants you frequent in the US. Like, it's just not practically feasible even if the technology is there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:31) Well, they're making a lot of progress with the little touchscreens at the table.

(Miles at 00:14:38) Yeah. Large chains are, pretty much everyone else except Applebee's and Olive Garden. Those huge chains are very resistant to that even though it helps reduce, you know, labor costs and helps you possibly turn tables a little faster. And at the end of the day, a restaurant still is about hospitality. And for a lot of people that are trying to provide a certain experience, that just takes away a lot of the experience they're trying to provide.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:06) That's why you're getting me, that's why you're getting me fired up right now, Miles. Getting me fired up because they're trying to be, as Gary Vee would say, they're trying to be romantic about what they think the experience should be rather than what the market wants. I want to enter my order on that touchscreen because I want to put in the dessert when I want to put in the dessert. I don't want to wait seven minutes for the waiter to finish their cigarette break and come back over to me and ask, "Oh, would you like dessert and a check now?" I want to put in that chocolate mousse cake right when I'm ready for it, like, halfway through my entree, right?

(Miles at 00:15:41) Sure. Sure. Yeah. I think that's one perspective for sure. I mean, personally, I don't like—I hate those touch screens.

(Miles at 00:15:49) I think they—well, I hate them. It may, like I said, it makes sense if you go to Applebee's or Olive Garden, something like that, where you're just getting—and it's whatever. But when I go to a local restaurant here that's really passionate about some aspect of food, whether it be really fresh vegetables or some kind of new beef steak program that they have going on or something, I want to learn about it. I want to hear about it.

(Miles at 00:16:19) I want to interact with the people. You know, your waiter is an important part of the hospitality aspect of the entire experience, not just the food you put in your mouth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:31) Right. And you know what I see for some reason going through my head right now? I see at the nicer restaurants—have you seen those—I saw this company called Oak something, and they have these amazing mirrors, like, straight out of the future, Miles. And they look like the future where they have, like, the mirror has the weather on it and stuff, and it's done really, really well. It's not cheaply projected.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:55) It looks really rich experience.

(Miles at 00:16:56) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:57) Yeah. I think we'll find maybe the higher end restaurants will have a classier version of the touchscreen, like a more expensive, nicer version of the touchscreen. Just like faucets. Like, you know, you got the standard faucet, the standard chrome faucet, but then you go to, like, a really, like, a mansion, and it's got, like, these touch sensors, and it's still a faucet. It's just a way more advanced version.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:20) Do you think that'll happen?

(Miles at 00:17:23) So, I mean, you kind of already see that happen if you go to, like, a high-end steak place. Sometimes they'll have their wine list on an iPad. Right? And, yeah, you can go through there. Very rarely can you actually push the button to have it ordered or something. But having a list of 300 things on a menu when you want the expert sommelier to walk over and talk to you about what you prefer and what you like or don't like and what you're eating tonight and what goes well with that or doesn't go well with that is really an experience that's harder to replicate on an iPad. And, again, it's really hard to think about how you cross the human aspect of it.

(Miles at 00:18:10) You know, there are so many people and so many things that even if technology can do it, the fact that you have a human there talking to you, looking at you, talking to you personally just makes a huge difference, especially when it comes to hospitality, especially when it comes to having a night out where it's partially entertainment, it's partially experiencing something new and learning about something that you haven't heard of before, or just getting that human connection. Even if technology can replicate it, I don't think there are going to be a lot of places that you can see that. Like I said, you might see some augmented things, like maybe a wine list on an iPad that you're seeing now. But I don't think we'll get to a point in the majority of restaurants where you are not interacting with the waiter.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:58) I get that. I mean, I think in a couple hundred years, the robots won anyways, so we will all be living in VR. But that's, like, you know, crazy talk. I'm not looking at autonomizing or removing the waiters. I definitely think they will shift to, like you said, more of a specialist role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:18) And I definitely don't want them gone because I love human interaction. What I want is the option. You know, I want the option—sometimes I'm feeling really social and I want to go in. I'm asking, I'm interacting with the waiter. How are you doing? What's your day? Today's going to be—I'm going to try something different today. I'm going to get a new wine, you know. I'm not going to do my standard one. And now I'm going to interact with someone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:42) So, you know, what do you like? What do you think? And, like, sometimes I'm very human-y and I want that. And other times, I'm just like, yo. You know, chicken.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:51) Like, almost there.

(Miles at 00:19:52) Let's get it in. I'm hungry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:54) Yeah.

(Miles at 00:19:55) No. For sure. And I think people go to different restaurants sometimes for those experiences. You know? And I think that's—you know, right now, obviously, that's done based on the waiter just feeling at the table. One thing that, you know, piece of technology, one of our point-of-sale partners that we use at our restaurant, is a point-of-sale called Toast. And so one of the things that they do is every waiter has a tablet. And instead of having to talk to the table about what they want and then go back to a station to punch in the order, they can just do the order right on the tablet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:30) Right.

(Miles at 00:20:30) So in our restaurant, one of the things we do is we have the waiter stay in their section. They don't ever leave the section.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:37) I like that.

(Miles at 00:20:38) Everything that is brought out, drinks, food, whatever, is brought out by a runner. And when you order, they sit there on the tablet right with you, push the buttons, a ticket gets printed out at either the bar or the kitchen, and then food or drinks get made and get brought out to you. So the waiter is always there, always talking to you, always trying to make sure things are all right. And if they feel at the table that it's, you know, they're just in here, they know their order, down to business, whatever, then that's fine. But they can be more attentive rather than wasting time running back and forth and around for things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:10) Okay. I want to know what's the name of this restaurant.

(Miles at 00:21:12) So our restaurant in Washington, DC is called Prequel, and we named it that because of the kind of format that it does. So we opened it as a way to allow chefs at different restaurants—if they wanted to open their own restaurant. This was kind of in earlier days of our company when we were focusing more on new restaurants, but we still do some, but we mainly do existing restaurants now. But, anyway, they could come, and for three to six months, they can do their concept, run the whole kitchen, have the whole table, do whatever. The bar is the same bar program.

(Miles at 00:21:48) Cocktails, wine—a great cocktail program. We actually have the largest barrel-aged program in the country. Probably we have about thirty, forty oak barrels that we age a bunch of cocktails in, which is really fun. So people come for the cocktails, and then they come to try whatever the flavor of that those few months is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:08) So you mix and age the cocktail?

(Miles at 00:22:11) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:13) How interesting.

(Miles at 00:22:14) Yeah. The restaurant is about three blocks northwest of the White House. It's on K Street where there are a lot of law offices and lobbyists.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:22) Yeah. My sister works there.

(Miles at 00:22:25) Oh, awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:26) Right in those law offices.

(Miles at 00:22:28) Awesome. Well, tell your sister to drop by sometime.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:31) No, I'm going to go. I'm excited. I've never been to a restaurant that does this, that has this format. And I want to know what the dining experience is like not having to hunt down help.

(Miles at 00:22:43) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They should be around, not having to leave and just punching things on a tablet just to be able to talk to people, which is a pretty cool experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:54) All right. Well, we're going to go there, Miles. And you're going to help me with my wine because, man, I texted my wife before this interview. I'm like, what wine do I like? Because it—oh, it just popped my head.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) I like the Coppola. May not be classy. I don't even know. But I don't even know what Coppola is, if it's a type or if it's a brand. But usually, when I go there, I get that, and it's pretty good. There's a couple other ones, but I have a lot of people around me who are good with wine, and that removes my desire really to learn a whole lot about it. I hear this guy, Gary V, all the time. He's talking about, like, something like Châteauneuf-du-Pape or something. Like, do you know what he's talking about? What is that?

(Miles at 00:23:29) Yeah. So it's this estate in France that the pope owns.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:35) Oh, cool. Crazy, man.

(Miles at 00:23:37) Yeah. That's why it's called Châteauneuf-du-Pape. It's Château of the Pope.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:43) Oh, house of the pope.

(Miles at 00:23:44) Exactly. Yeah. It's house of the pope. But, yeah, anyway, it's this estate that the pope either does own or used to own, but it's very good wine for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:54) Interesting. You guys program in—you're programming in Ruby right now. Right?

(Miles at 00:23:59) Yeah. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:00) You loving it? You've been in Ruby a while?

(Miles at 00:24:03) Yeah. I've been in Ruby a while. Like it a lot. Yeah. It's really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:08) Were you—is that your first language?

(Miles at 00:24:13) Jeez. I don't remember even what my first language was. Like, Perl CGI scripts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:18) Right.

(Miles at 00:24:21) Yeah. I really like Ruby's expressiveness, its natural reading language. And I'm also just a really big fan of software that has an opinion. So, you know, Ruby on Rails is not the most flexible thing in the world for all situations, but that's okay. I think it has an opinion about what it's used for and what it's good at, and you should follow along.

(Miles at 00:24:46) And if you need to break from that, then they have, you know, some advice on how you can break from that. But if you're looking to do something totally different, then they may not be the right solution, which is totally fine. You know? And I think that's a great way to go about it. I'd rather help a smaller number of people immensely than a large amount of people really poorly.

(Miles at 00:25:08) Right? I saw that you interviewed the CTO at Basecamp, and they're another group of people that I respect a lot for some of those same reasons. You know? They have opinions. They have thinking this is how it should go. And if you're not a fit for their product, then that's fine. You can find something else. But the people that do use it really love it. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:31) Oh, yeah. No. I loved how steadfast Ryan Singer was, like, with how they do things. He's very, very, very specific and direct, and I super admire that. Did you listen to it, or did you just see that he was on the show?

(Miles at 00:25:44) I haven't gotten a chance to listen to it, but I saw that he interviewed him, so I'm really interested to go back and listen to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:49) Yeah. They do these—I'll give you the summary. Right? They do these, like, six-week

(Miles at 00:25:54) development cycles. Cool. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:55) So that's—and, like, nothing interrupts them. Like, it's a religion there. Nothing will interrupt the six-week development cycle. They decide what they're doing. They do it. They have a small team, a developer and designer. Usually, the designer will write up the announcement because I was asking, like, oh, you have this—you know, who writes the marketing? They don't have marketing people.

(Miles at 00:26:13) That's awesome. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:15) And I'm like, yep. Yep. That company is run by three engineers. Right? They have a great—like, you know, I was on Basecamp for quite a while. But it's so interesting how the company totally takes on the personality of the owners in, like, every instance, like, every company.

(Miles at 00:26:32) Yeah. Absolutely. And I think one of the side effects of focusing on the people that you want to serve, the use case that you want to serve, and having an opinion about that is that they're much more likely to refer other users to you. And I think that's how they can get away with not having a marketing team or someone that's constantly monitoring ads online every day, all day to be able to get more users. You know, they just make their current users really happy and let them know that they should be referring people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:01) Interesting. Right?

(Miles at 00:27:03) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:04) And it's also interesting that, like, that's where our mind goes in 2018, that the marketing person is sitting down running ads all day. That's so interesting that, like, that's the default view. Like, nope. Not out developing relationships with customers that can open up and give you more distribution. They're running ads. I think that's interesting. And I definitely—at different stages, the marketing people should be doing different things. Um, but—

(Miles at 00:27:25) You know, fame and exposure from just the way they run their company and the various books they released.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:31) They did a great job. Yeah.

(Miles at 00:27:33) Yeah. It certainly helps. Although, I don't know how much overlap there is between the nerdy fans like you and I that read their books because they're great technologists that we all want to emulate, and the people that actually use their product. You know? I don't know how much of an overlap there that is, but definitely a big fan of their books that just talk in general about how businesses should be run and how you should do work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:59) Yeah. And, of course, Rails helped them tremendously. They got every developer to be a fan. Right?

(Miles at 00:28:04) Yeah. That's true too, which—developers and their respective companies can be advocates for, hey, we should try this Basecamp thing. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:12) Absolutely. Did you use Basecamp?

(Miles at 00:28:14) We are using Basecamp. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:17) Cool. Would you like it? And I'm just throwing this out there. Just tell me if you'd find any use to it. Do you have an Alexa, by the way?

(Miles at 00:28:25) I do. I have three.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:26) Oh, yeah. Would you like if you could say, hey, Alexa. What's going on in Basecamp today? And she can read you some summary?

(Miles at 00:28:30) I—I don't—yeah. I mean, sure. It'd be fine. They'll figure that out. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:37) I'm asking you if you'd like—would you enjoy that?

(Miles at 00:28:41) I don't know. I think so. I'm also kind of opinionated about kind of boundaries for things. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:48) Oh, man. You should work at Basecamp.

(Miles at 00:28:52) I don't do notifications on my phone for emails or anything like that. If I'm sitting at my computer, then I'm in work mode, you know. But I don't want to glance at my phone and have 20 emails that I feel compelled to respond to, you know, right away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:10) Wow. I love how—this is what I like about talking to everybody, all these different CTOs of people. I mean, everybody's so different, but we're all so similar. It's beautiful. Because, like, me—I get high on it. People email me about the show. Oh, man. Show was awesome. Brought a ton of value. And I'm, like, every second, I'm, like, yeah. I mean, I'm up till, you know, two in the morning every night responding to people, you know, working on the—working with editors on the content and the book. And, like, I chunk my day into, like, three segments, you know, my mornings, and then my work day at work, and then my after-work work. Yeah. Right? Because based on who's around me at the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:41) Because, you know, I do my family time in the mornings, actually, because I like to give my family my best time.

(Miles at 00:29:46) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:47) So I have a little, uh, four-month-old daughter, my first child. So—

(Miles at 00:29:52) Awesome. Congrats, dude.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:53) Yeah. In the morning, I count smiles. Like, I get up. I make some tea. I'm a straight black tea type person. Make some straight Earl Grey black tea. Play with my daughter and try to get her to smile as much as possible. I'm typically getting about eight to 10 smiles a morning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:07) So—

(Miles at 00:30:08) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:09) Yeah. It's a solid count. Solid count. She found her feet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:11) She figured out her feet the other day, so now she's moving those. Yeah. And then I play some guitar. Cool. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:20) We'll sit around and make up songs just for fun, kind of like freestyle. They get very wrong. There's no holds. So we play some music, and we have good family time. And then I start my calls and head into the office and do my work all day with people, record multiple shows, do production, review everything, run some of the businesses that I'm a part of, get back to all of them. And then I get home, I eat dinner, go for a family walk for an hour, and then, you know, until two in the morning from like nine to two at night, I'm editing, book stuff, all the stuff with my other group of people that work with me. So it's a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:06) But yeah, I love it. Like I love it. So I'm addicted to it like a video game. You know?

(Miles at 00:31:13) Yeah. No, yeah, that's awesome. I mean, that's really cool.

(Miles at 00:31:18) And when you're doing family time, do you turn off your phone? Do you put your phone somewhere else? Or like, how do you not get roped back in?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:28) I don't touch my phone. And my family time is heavily consolidated, like two hours in the morning and an hour at night. And in those times, it's rare that I touch my phone.

(Miles at 00:31:39) That's awesome. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:40) Yeah. It's hard to touch your phone while you're playing guitar.

(Miles at 00:31:42) Oh, let me see.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:44) Yeah. Or counting smiles.

(Miles at 00:31:45) It's easier now if you can see it and you see notifications coming on, you can ask Siri or something. You know? But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:53) Well, I do Do Not Disturb, and I have it heavily figured out. So that way, I can take pictures and do videos with my family without actually even seeing anything come through.

(Miles at 00:32:02) Yeah. That's really smart. That's one of those features that I wish people knew more about and kind of took advantage of, because I totally agree. That's a great way to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:11) Yeah. That's how I shut the world off. If I'm like, not right now, I hit Do Not Disturb. And it takes actually a little configuration too. Like at first, you try it, and it's got some settings where it'll let calls through if they call enough. And like, it's got these weird settings. But if you set it up and completely black it out, it's really good.

(Miles at 00:32:27) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Most of the settings you've got to do a couple of times again. I started using the I'm Driving mode, doing automatic texting back. Hey, I'm driving. If it's important, call me. And it was really annoying. I had to turn that off.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:46) Yeah. I do. Because I get driven a lot, and I need to type while I'm driving—well, while I'm being driven, while the car is in motion.

(Miles at 00:32:53) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:53) It doesn't know that I'm not driving.

(Miles at 00:32:55) Absolutely. Yeah. It happened to me on a boat, actually, this summer. On a boat, and it's like, you don't have to start a lot driving. And I'm like, I'm riding in a boat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:06) Dojo4. Am I saying that right?

(Miles at 00:33:08) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:09) Yeah. What is that, man? A worker-owned agency? Like, I don't know anything about that. You used to work there.

(Miles at 00:33:14) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:15) What is it?

(Miles at 00:33:17) So they—I don't know the legal entity for it—but they're basically a collection of freelancers that work on different projects together, and the entity is co-owned by people that do the majority of the work together. So it's kind of cool that they've really tried to democratize what projects they bring on and who's kind of in control. And it started with a couple of people, and then they decided that they really wanted to give equity and voting and ownership to the people they frequently work with. And so they started doing that. And I think they—I think it's structured as a co-op.

(Miles at 00:34:08) Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:10) That's how my power company is structured. Like, it's a power company, but it's a co-op. I don't know. They just send me mail. I'm just like, okay. That's great. Now, you worked in this co-op. Right?

(Miles at 00:34:24) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:25) How was it? Was there lots of benefit? Was it different? Was it kind of just the same stuff? Or—

(Miles at 00:34:32) Well, at the time, they were not doing the co-op when I was there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:36) Oh, great.

(Miles at 00:34:39) They were kind of the full-service agency with full-time employees, and so I was a full-time employee. And then they kind of decided—they decided to go into the kind of co-op freelance entity-owned model. And then it had been three years I had worked there and really enjoyed myself and really learned a lot. Still have, obviously, a lot of friends there since I'm working with them at this company too, hiring them as a paying client now. But I started to look for my next gig and got in touch with our CEO, and the rest is history.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:23) Nice. So you're the CTO at the company. Correct?

(Miles at 00:35:26) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:27) So how is the day-to-day relationship? We like to talk about everything that the CTO actually experiences to bring value to other CTOs. One thing that's super big—and I've never heard it in a book, never seen it anywhere—people don't talk about it much. The relationship between the CTO and the CEO. Like, it's tough.

(Miles at 00:35:46) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:46) It's a relationship. Like there's ups and downs. Like, what have you experienced? Like, how's it changed you? How have you grown from it? I want to know about it.

(Miles at 00:35:55) Yeah. No. It's definitely a relationship that you have to manage and understand. I think my CEO and I are in a unique position because we're the two C-level at the company right now. And so we kind of bear a lot of responsibility for the company, and so it kind of unites us in that way.

(Miles at 00:36:17) I'm also—it's kind of unique that, you know, our CEO has a computer science degree and has done some tech work in his background. So I feel pretty comfortable talking to him about things that I probably wouldn't be able to talk about with nontechnical people. He did that early on in his career. So not as familiar or adept at it as I am, obviously, but still can grok some major things, which is cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:46) Yeah. So he's got some context, some empathy, some awareness of what's going on.

(Miles at 00:36:50) For sure. Yeah. I think one of the things that you talk to non-business, non-tech people—and I saw this a lot at Dojo4 when we talked with clients that were not technical about saying, hey, can we just have this one little thing that does this thing? We're like, great. That'll be four weeks. And they're like, well, why? How does it take you—you know? Blah, blah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:09) Raw angry noises. Yeah.

(Miles at 00:37:13) Yeah. You don't realize how complicated it is, and I think that's kind of one of the benefits of a CEO now is that I can tell them, like, okay, yep, that's great. I'm really excited about that. We're definitely going to do all that. It's going to take two months, and they'll be like, yep, got it. Not even questioning me or anything like that, you know. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:30) Yeah. You build that trust, and then it's just like, you tell me what it takes, and then I let the experts execute.

(Miles at 00:37:36) Yeah. Exactly. In terms of managing the relationship, one of the things we've implemented is daily old-school phone calls where he or I just pick up the phone and call each other every single day. We're often not in the same location. We both travel a lot, and right now we live in different cities.

(Miles at 00:37:58) So that's why we do a daily call to just make sure we're on the same page about business and everything that we're doing, but also just personally, you know. Yeah. It's good to hear someone's voice on their end and know what's going on in their life to kind of have a better relationship with them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:20) Well, long-distance relationships are tough, Miles. You're going off to college? Will your high school sweetheart stay? No. So I checked out InKind, of course, which is this whole restaurant app technology that we're talking about. I love how you guys are providing value to the market with this House Account concept, while also supporting what you want to do with the financing. It's like you guys have two products and they flow into each other, which I think is super smart. So kudos on that. Your website, I liked it, and here's why. You guys communicated exactly what it does on the front of the page. You're like, one, two, three, four. This is what we do. And I'm like, thank you. Right? Like, every—I'd say eight times out of ten that I go to a site, they make me work for it. Like, oh, I've got to—now I feel like a research analyst trying to figure out what they do, digging through their site pages or using ambiguous terms. And like, oh, man. It's so frustrating. But you just serve it right up right in front of you. That's what I like.

(Miles at 00:39:23) I think that's also sometimes a side effect of having a large marketing team as they get kind of ahead of themselves of the language and the layer on top of the actual functionality. And, you know, we don't have a big marketing team. We don't have any marketing people actually in the company right now. So we all think that same way of, like, just tell us what it does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:43) Right. But it's definitely highly dependent on the marketing people.

(Miles at 00:39:48) Absolutely. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:49) Because, you know, given the opportunity, people will make things more complicated.

(Miles at 00:39:54) Yeah. For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:54) More often than—I mean, like, look at our tax system. It's like, okay. I thought it was really funny, and I'm not—like, I don't like political conversations really at all—but it's not political. It's something we all have. It's a tax system that exists, and it's our system. We pay for it. Right? It's ours. So I thought it was really interesting. Like, you have experts, and I was talking about this with engineering too because this happens in your programming team—can get into over-engineering. And that's what brought it up. We were talking about over-engineering. And then in the book, we're talking about it. And then I was talking about taxes later, and I was like, oh my goodness. The same thing that happens in technology teams with over-engineering and making products and code bases more complicated than they need to be is because the experts are in control of the creation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:35) And that's happening with our legal system too. Like, lawyers write the laws. Lawyers are really complicated. The more laws they write, the more work they have to do. And the more granular and refined and distant it can be from how we actually exist. And then our tax system. And now I just had this moment where I had to be like, all right, turning off my brain now because it's overloaded with—our whole world is run by people who are incentivized by making it more complicated than it needs to be.

(Miles at 00:41:01) Yeah. Absolutely. That's absolutely true. I think the other thing I think about when I think along those lines that I see a lot is you have to be on the same page about what the simple goal that you're trying to achieve is. You know, what's the one thing we're working towards? And I think that when I ask that question in a lot of discussions, whether it's about features or our company plan or anything like that is, what's the simple goal, it helps us focus a lot on what we should be doing or what approaches need to be improved. And to me, that's also one of the things that—you talk about taxes and politics—and that's like, well, what's the goal? Is the goal to make everyone not have to think about taxes? Is the goal to put as much money in people's pockets? Is the goal to have a lot of money so that, you know, the money that we all throw in the pool together can pay for everything that we needed to pay? You know, like, what's the goal that you're trying to achieve? And to me, that's always the question I'm asking in politics because I think that's more often than not very revealing, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:10) Oh, yeah. So I will look at a lot of businesses—most of them with technology. And the most interesting thing I have ever found, and I kind of stumbled into it by accident, is I'll walk in and I'll say, you know, this is cool. I like what you got. I like what's going on. You know, like, what do you guys—like, what do you do? What's your macro? Like, what are you guys all trying to do? What song is everyone at the company singing? Like, what value do you bring to the market? And you get deer in headlights. I don't know. I'm working on this project. Well, like, why? Well, our competitor did a similar project. I'm like, oh, no.

(Miles at 00:42:43) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:45) You don't even know why you're doing what you're doing. And they've just been doing the same thing for years or months, and I'm like, well, this is why the business is in trouble.

(Miles at 00:42:54) Right. Yeah. Yeah. We need to have kind of a North Star here if you guys are going to be doing anything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:00) Oh, yeah. And we're not perfect. So we actually had this conversation yesterday about the show. And so I'm going to get your input on it too. We were sitting around, and we started out as weekly, then we went daily, and now we're doing two-a-days because the listeners have just kind of exploded. But our editing queue is piling up. Right?

(Miles at 00:43:19) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:19) And we have a staff of four, I guess, including me, three of which are editing. And we were thinking—we've got these two episodes. We've got Carl and Ryan and Issa. We've got these two or three episodes. Now four, now five—now you're number six. We've got them all piling up. And I'm like, what are we waiting on? So we made a list of what we're waiting on. All of them were waiting on show notes. Like, these things where we have our producer listen to the show and type up, you know, in these ten minutes they covered this. And I'm like, all right. I listen to a lot of podcasts—I listen to two or three, but I consume many of them. Never once have I ever listened to their—went to their web page and looked at the show notes. Right?

(Miles at 00:44:01) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:01) And so I asked Jake. I'm like, you know, Jake, you listen to a lot of podcasts? Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever once looked at show notes? No. Hey. We started texting around. We started texting everybody we know that listens to podcasts. Nobody ever looked at the show notes. And I'm like, this is holding up us being able to produce content, and we just—we axed show notes. No more show notes. That's it.

(Miles at 00:44:24) No. I think—well, and even simplifying them to just this is what they talked about, and that can be as simple as, after our conversation, you write down three phrases of, we talked about restaurants, we talked about—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:37) Oh, yeah. You know, we're doing the general summary, like the paragraph that sets it up that you can actually see in the podcast app.

(Miles at 00:44:44) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:46) But we're not doing the transcription, like play-by-play, minute-by-minute thing anymore.

(Miles at 00:44:52) I definitely look at the summary paragraph that's in the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:55) Right. App. Right.

(Miles at 00:44:56) But never do I go to anyone's website and look at the long form transcription or long form summary.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:04) Yeah. I write that. So we do the edits, and then I listen to it while I'm driving.

(Miles at 00:45:11) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:11) To make sure it sounds good. And I'll listen to it back and forth, and then I just write up a summary, and then we come in and record the intro and the summary, and we type it all up. And then that's how we release it because I want to make sure that, you know, it's covered correctly.

(Miles at 00:45:26) Yeah. Definitely. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:27) If you're not eating your own food at the restaurant, you're a horrible chef. Right?

(Miles at 00:45:31) Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. No. That's good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:34) Excellent. So your CTO day to day, that's good. You guys talk every day. You had some experience, some early on experience at Lockheed Martin. And I'm assuming, Barry, you built killer robots. Can you speak on that for a minute?

(Miles at 00:45:52) No. So what I did at Lockheed Martin was we worked on an application that was basically a war planning web application. So generals and commanders would go into this web application and basically plan out different scenarios happening and what they would do and blah blah. And so yeah. It's one of those examples which a lot of government projects are where you have a kind of a high level explanation statement like I just gave you, and that sounds really cool. And then you dive into it and see how many crazy acronyms there are and just how complex it gets. Not necessarily for any reason, but just the web application gets out of hand complex just the way they do things. I was a developer on it and would not be able to use it as a user. Like, that's how...

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:53) I got it. Like, you know, Elon Musk is famous for sending this email about acronyms, like, no more acronyms at my company.

(Miles at 00:47:00) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:01) Because when you walk up and it's like the halo or the c prop, you're like, no. Just say it's the propulsion thing.

(Miles at 00:47:09) This is...

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:10) This is the thing that pushes other things forward. Like, this is the propulsion thing. This is the fire. This is the catch on. This is the thing that keeps it from exploding. Like, you don't need to have a conversation with 800 acronyms. It's impossible.

(Miles at 00:47:22) It doesn't make... and my dad was actually in the army. That's why I moved around all over the country, and so I had a lot of exposure to those things since I was pretty comfortable with quite a few acronyms. But the level of acronyms there were crazy, and then just the level of complexity in the applications was just crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:42) Oh, yeah. My dad was in the Air Force. Cool. They put the... he was in charge of the team in the eighties that put the first GPS system into the B-2 stealth bomber.

(Miles at 00:47:55) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:56) Because it was a stealthy airplane. What's better than a stealthy airplane? Well, one that knows where it is. Right?

(Miles at 00:48:03) Yeah. Generally, you want that nowadays.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:06) Yeah. Well, that's like... it's amazing how it's just child's play compared to what we have now. You know? Oh, this is a fantastic conversation. If you could go back... let's say Elon Musk calls Jeff. He's like, Miles. And you're like, why are you calling me, bro? No. He calls you up, and he's like, I got a time machine. And you can go back in it, and you could speak to yourself ten years ago. What sort of advice would you give yourself? What would you tell ten years ago Miles?

(Miles at 00:48:31) Buy Bitcoin?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:33) Yeah, buddy.

(Miles at 00:48:37) No. I sold Bitcoin like a year ago at two hundred bucks, and now it's at like 20,000. It's crazy. Oh, no. Yeah. But no. I mean, I would say, you know, to not worry so much about the big picture because it will work out. You know? Just do what makes sense at the time and to... you know, I've always worried about what my long term career is and security and job security and all those types of things. And I've learned over the years that if you follow what you're passionate about, if you just explore things and follow what you're passionate about, I think it'll all work out and it's going to be just fine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:18) Well, and put the effort in. You know, I don't like work super hard.

(Miles at 00:49:21) Yeah. And put the effort in. And something that I really do a lot and try to do a lot too here in Boulder is kind of give back to the community and provide value to the people that are around me. And that's been the best thing for me to be able to learn from other people and to get the opportunities I've been able to have, just by providing value to other people and helping the community.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:41) Oh, I'm curious. In like, what way specifically?

(Miles at 00:49:44) So a couple different ways. So have you heard of any of the startup weeks or startup weekends?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:55) Yeah. Yeah.

(Miles at 00:49:55) So that was all started by a guy here in Boulder, and Boulder Startup Week was the first one. And about three, four years ago now, I volunteered to run the development track for Boulder Startup Week, and I've been doing it ever since. And so I do that every week... a week every year and put together a bunch of events around developers and the startup community. So that's really cool. And then a buddy of mine... so when I took the CTO job, I started talking to a couple of friends about, you know, like, are there community or other people that have the engineering background, but they're making this switch to different dealing with different problems that a CTO deals with than hiring, leadership, management, and all these things that aren't taught in your computer science degree. And he was like, no. There really isn't. We should like, do something about that. I was like, great. Let's do something. So now flash forward, we have a group of a hundred people that are all startup CTOs in the local community here that are on an email list together, use that as a resource to help each other out. And then once a month, we have a lunch together where we can just informally talk and hang out. And that's been a really, really cool resource for sure for a lot of people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:18) Oh, excellent. That... I mean, that is what I'm... what we're doing. Right? That's what Modern CTO podcast is.

(Miles at 00:51:25) Yeah. That's really, really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:26) Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Miles. It was a fantastic conversation. I would love to have you back anytime you want to come back.

(Miles at 00:51:32) Absolutely. It's great talking to you too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:39) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.