Ellin Tolstov CTO of level.travel

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today we are talking to Ellin. He is the CTO of level.travel. They are the Expedia of Russia, and we cover a wide array of topics from artificial momentum, electricity, AI failure, cryptocurrencies, and even React Native. All right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Ellin at 00:00:21) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. To give some perspective to everybody who's listening, how old is the travel company level.travel that you operate?

(Ellin at 00:00:43) So we started in 2011, and we launched a website in November 2012. So we basically spent a year and a half just studying the industry and developing our first MVP, I may say, that only had three suppliers at the launch date.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:06) Excellent. So you looked at the industry, you analyzed the market opportunity, you built, and then you deployed within a year and a half, right?

(Ellin at 00:01:14) Yeah, yeah. That includes the time we needed to raise funding because me and my partner, we had a full-time job. And we were working nights and lunch breaks. We used to meet some industry people and gather all that intel we needed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:35) So you hustled. You had great work ethic.

(Ellin at 00:01:37) Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:39) This is primarily a Russian travel site, correct?

(Ellin at 00:01:43) Yeah, we currently only serve Russian customers. But anyone who would like to fly out from Russia can also purchase. If you have, like, an American citizenship, you can very well fly from Moscow to Turkey because it's just cheaper. Yeah, it might be cheaper for you. Like, the nearby countries like Belarus, Ukraine, they sometimes go to Moscow to fly to Dominican Republic. It's just cheaper.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:11) Got it.

(Ellin at 00:02:13) And what market share do you have in Russia? Like, your site, like, how big is it?

(Ellin at 00:02:21) That depends on the terms we're talking, because in terms of online sales of package holidays, it's a very emerging market. And now we think that only about 5% of package holidays are purchased online. So the rest is for the travel agencies. And those travel agencies, it used to be like 40,000 of them back in 2011, and now the number has dropped to 15,000.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) That's still a huge reduction.

(Ellin at 00:03:00) Yeah, that's because of the economic crisis mainly, because all those businesses—there were, like, an office in a basement with two travel agents working there. They didn't have any barriers to enter the market, and many, I would say, middle-class men...

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:21) When they didn't have barriers to enter the market, that's an opportunity for you guys to come in. So let's say that 5% of the travel, the package travel, is booked online, and you're primarily package travel, right?

(Ellin at 00:03:34) Yeah, we just sell package holidays, so we don't go into separate flights. But we do have a small share of dynamic packaging that includes their normal flight and then accommodations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:48) So 80% is your package holidays?

(Ellin at 00:03:52) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:52) Okay. And then are you in the top three websites for package holidays in Russia?

(Ellin at 00:04:00) Yeah, I would say that we're number one now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:02) Oh, excellent.

(Ellin at 00:04:05) Yeah. Our technology is being used by all the major players in the market because our website is a retail, like a store. We work B2C in this area. But also, our platform, our technology, is being used by the industry leaders like search engines. There are two main search engines in Russia that compete with Google on the Russian market. That is Yandex, and they have about the same share as Google in Russian.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:41) Right. And they integrate your data?

(Ellin at 00:04:44) Yeah. They built their travel website, and it's built solely on our technology. So it's just the front end they designed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:57) Excellent. And so, how big—a lot of our CTOs are developer CTOs, or they're, you know, I would say almost all CTOs today have some form of product life cycle development. They're developing some product or some internal tool or something, right? How big is your internal development team?

(Ellin at 00:05:17) We're now employing about 20 people. Yeah. It's not only developers. That includes quality assurance. We have two QA engineers, one analyst.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:33) I have a very good question about the QA engineers. So I was talking about this yesterday. Your QA engineers—did they start out as QA engineers, or were they junior developers that you converted into QA engineers? How did you get that role filled?

(Ellin at 00:05:47) No, I put a listing out, and I was specifically looking for a QA engineer. And I think that's a job that requires much more attention to detail than just a developer. And that's just a totally different mindset. You have to be an engineer, but that's a little bit tricky to convert any developer to a QA engineer just out of the blue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:15) Excellent. So you actually put a job listing out for a QA engineer, and there was a market. Now, did you get a lot of junk applicants, or did you get a lot of high-quality applicants for this QA position?

(Ellin at 00:06:29) You know, that's a very good question because the QA engineer positions are extremely difficult to fill because there is not a lot of market of highly experienced and skillful people. Because if you are a developer, you just develop, you just code, but you can work basically anywhere. But a QA engineer—not every company can afford to have a QA department. And I was focusing on hiring from the best industry companies in Russia. So I found one girl that was very structural, very, I would say, with a very high level of responsibility and structural thinking. And she was able to set up all the processes and the flow, the quality assurance flow, I might say. And she was able to hire more people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:43) Excellent. So she was able to look at what the QA role needed, define the processes, and then grow the QA department, which is an excellent attribute. So I want to know, today, as of today, are you still the one hiring developers? Or do you have—because you have about 20 people in the department—so are you still hiring each developer, or do you let one of your other lead developers hire?

(Ellin at 00:08:09) Normally, I have an HR director, and she just looks for resumes online and on all kinds of websites. Because when I was in the U.S., I was on a program and I worked with a company in San Diego, and they told me that Stack Overflow is a very good resource for hiring developers in the U.S. But that's not the case in Russia, unfortunately, because they don't have that kind of tool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:43) Oh really? Stack Overflow isn't big in Russia?

(Ellin at 00:08:47) No, no. It's big, but it's just not a very good hiring resource.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:53) I get it. I get it. I think everyone listening gets it too.

(Ellin at 00:08:56) I normally let my HR director talk to the person and just determine if he or she is just a normal person on the basic level. And then I have a list of questions that I give to my team leaders, and then they interview the person. And then I have an engineering interview that I do myself for each and every developer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:25) Excellent. What's your primary language at your company?

(Ellin at 00:09:29) We use Ruby, Python for analytics, and Golang for highly intensive tasks, like our search platform, which uses Golang and all those heavy-lifting applications.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:46) Excellent. Do you guys have a mobile application?

(Ellin at 00:09:49) Actually, we're long overdue on this subject, and we're planning to ship it right after the new year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:57) Okay. Did you use React Native?

(Ellin at 00:10:01) We were thinking of it because we do use React on our web part. But we decided to go native with Swift, and actually we're using Kotlin for Android. That's kind of an experiment for us. So now we go native with the mobile apps because that just looks more natural—to not be limited by the APIs provided by React Native and not be dependent on a tool that is, I would say, not very well tested just yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:40) Okay. So, just to give you my perspective of it, right? So I've been really hesitant about React Native, and I kept hearing about it and hearing about it for, you know, a year or two. And then I decided, because it kept coming up so much and I saw that Facebook and Instagram and Airbnb and massive site after massive site was using it—and their lead engineers were putting out articles on how they're using it, and it's all on the React Native site that they link to them and stuff. They're putting out articles on how they're using it and how much time it's saving and all this stuff. And after about a year of that, just nonstop, I finally said, "Okay, okay, okay. Here we go." On a small project that doesn't matter to my business, right—it was just a personal project—I'm going to do a React Native application and just give it a go and see how it goes. No client work or anything like that, just me. So we gave it a go, and I was blown away. And I was like, "Okay, well, whenever something's really great, I kind of calm myself down and say, 'Okay, well, what am I missing here?'" And so on and so forth. And we kept going down, making customizations, seeing where the weaknesses and strengths of it are. And wow. We moved after that personal project, right? We moved all future work. We no longer do directly native because React produces the native code. So at any point in time, I can just produce the Xcode, you know, or the source code for whatever the framework is at iOS or Android, right? But what it does is it allows us to build these reusable components, and we're reusing about 60 to 70% of our code base. And it's unbelievable. So all future projects—I mean, do you know what that does to a business if you cut their development budget by 60%? It's unbelievable. So all future projects—and now we've been React Native for almost, we've been full-blown React Native for almost six months now, four to six months.

(Ellin at 00:12:57) So the new development you do with React Native?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:00) Right. Because you can branch off and touch the iOS bindings and Android code directly. You can just build it as a component and bring it up into React Native, or you can just transition right back and forth between them, and it's very, very simple. So anytime you need to do something that's not supported by React Native—so things that are supported, you can write a component in React Native and you can share it. But the things that aren't supported, you just write it in the native language, and it's right there. So we kept all of our employees, right? We kept all of our dedicated iPhone and Android developers, right? We kept them, but we added React people. And then whenever we have special parts of the project, that 30%, right—the 30% that isn't reused—we'll have the iOS and Android developers go in and build reusable React components so that we can reuse them in the future. Unbelievable what it's done to my business, right? And so—

(Ellin at 00:14:01) That's impressive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:01) Yeah. And so I was so hesitant to go, and then I finally gave in. And now I would bet money that it's the future because we all got burned by things like Titanium and all of these other nonsense.

(Ellin at 00:14:23) Yeah, and Xamarin, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:23) We got burned by these ideas, and so we imagine React Native's like that, and it's not, right? React Native's this totally different thing, and it's amazing. So I became a huge fan in the past four to six months of it. And it's, yeah—

(Ellin at 00:14:39) You sound like an evangelist.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:41) I don't mean to be. I just want everybody to know, like, it makes your life easier, right?

(Ellin at 00:14:49) Yeah, yeah. Thank you for sharing that. That's really interesting because I thought that it might limit us in some cases, like Xamarin, like PhoneGap, and all that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:58) Oh, horrible. Horrible. They're horrible. They ruined it, and that's the only reason why React hasn't spread as much. But the thing that sold me on it was their website, which is off of one of the Facebook—you can get to it through Facebook or something. But there's, like, a React Native site, and they put the articles from their lead engineers on there that talk about what they do and how they do it. And it's just very open. And if anything, I'd go back in time and do it sooner, right? So—

(Ellin at 00:15:30) Okay. That's a thing to think about. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:33) So, I'm surprised. I didn't realize I was that excited about it till I started talking about it. So I want to know, are you a fan of Elon Musk?

(Ellin at 00:15:47) Yes, somewhat. Somewhat. I think the whole world is now, right? It's a little bit, you know, I'm a little bit confused by all the hype because I think a lot of people are saying it's just kind of public relations stuff. But I'm very impressed by his ideas and his ability to think big. And, you know, the things that SpaceX mainly achieved is really impressive as an engineering achievement.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:27) And that's what I want to know. I want to know—the SpaceX reusable rocket was great—when is level.travel going to offer SpaceX vacation packages?

(Ellin at 00:16:42) It depends on their technology. We have a very long list of technical requirements. I'm not sure they'll be able to fulfill them all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:50) Well, if you ask Elon Musk, he would say next month.

(Ellin at 00:16:55) Yeah. And he's a little bit afraid of the AI, so I'm not sure we can work on this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:01) Right? Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. What do you think about the AI? Are you afraid of it, or do you kind of just see it as, like, "I'm so focused on business and what I'm doing right now that AI is not really on my radar"?

(Ellin at 00:17:14) I can't tell that I'm a specialist or I have very deep understanding of all the technologies behind AI, because you have to probably work full-time in a lab that studies all kinds of neural nets and machine learning algorithms. But I think we're still very, very far from singularity, I might say. Very far in terms of technology, and all the machine learning I've seen, all their recommender engines—they're still pretty dumb. And it's just an application, just a very useful tool in speech recognition and image recognition and in that kind of field. But I don't think that we're close to building a full-blown AI. But I do believe in machine learning as a technique to work with data and to give usable insights to the people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:24) Absolutely. And it's interesting whenever I have this conversation because I always like to bring up the fact that in my country, a hundred and thirty years ago, right—and there's people that are a hundred years old, right?—but a hundred and thirty years ago, nobody had electricity. Like, electricity was not something that people had in commonplace everywhere, right? It barely existed at all. So a hundred and thirty years, and we know people—there are people in my town that are a hundred years old. That's mind-blowing, and we're sitting here talking about AI advancing. It's like we didn't even have electricity, let alone computers, or anything of that nature. We had basic cars at the time, and now we have supersonic jets and rocket ships that reuse fuels, and that's a hundred and thirty years, right?

(Ellin at 00:19:20) Yeah, it's so impressive. The time we live in, the pace we move, the technology that's emerging every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:30) Yeah. I think it'll happen in our life. I think I will see AI fully blown in my lifetime.

(Ellen at 00:19:36) You hope.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:37) I don't know if I hope. I just think I will.

(Ellen at 00:19:41) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:42) Yeah. I'm not jumping up and down, throwing my money at it, asking people to make it happen. I'm hesitant and, you know, I'm not hiding under a rock, but, you know...

(Ellen at 00:19:56) You know, now is a very big thing in Russia, all the ICO hype, all the blockchain stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:03) Tell me about it. Yeah.

(Ellen at 00:20:05) Yeah. And I'm not sure if you have that kind of craziness in the U.S.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:12) It's insane. I have had so—like I said, investors call me, and they use me to validate their investment. They'll say, oh, we want to put a million dollars into this company. What do you think? And the number of Bitcoin and ICO cryptocurrency projects that have come across my desk in the past month, I mean, I think I've had seven.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:34) Unbelievable amount of them.

(Ellen at 00:20:38) What do you think of it in general?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:40) You know, and I'm honest with—you know, they pay for my honesty. Right? So I'm honest with them, and I think that I like the idea of the benefits of some of the cryptocurrencies, like Dash and Bitcoin and Ethereum. Like, I kind of like the idea of the independence from government. You know? Because right now, all of our fiat currencies are tied to political—because their fiat currencies are printed by governments and governments are political.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:11) Right? So I like the independence of the currency not being super political. But at the same time, I don't—it's growing pretty fast. I don't know where it is. And I don't look at it like a super investment, like, when we talk about investing in coins.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:32) Because I know you asked about ICO. There's like the initial coin offerings. I think a lot of those things kind of—like I don't know. My—I could be wrong. Right? I'm wrong a lot. But the ICO initial coin offerings, they seem a little cheap to me. Seems like a kind of like a marketing hype, like, not a lot of value.

(Ellen at 00:21:51) Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree with you. The—I totally agree with you because I've been talking to a lot of people. And, actually, a good friend of mine, he was a kind of a colleague in the travel industry before, and then he just left the company he founded and went to like freelance and all the stuff with the low level of certainty, and he just likes that kind of stuff. And I recently reconnected with him, and he was building a media and Internet media about blockchain technology and all this ICO stuff. And he invited me to a conference that was in Saint Petersburg. And I just talked to all these people, and there were guys who told me that they raised $42 million. And I thought, shit, man.

(Ellen at 00:22:57) I don't think that this is enough to raise $40 million, what you've done. Because you're just selling science fiction ideas in a good promotion video. And you actually don't have any technology because that's impossible to build any technology in three months. Any technology that might be worth 40 million, except masquerade.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:26) Right. No. And that's the problem—so and then you kind of have to see through the bullshit. Right? Because they say 42 million, but is that 42 million convertible fiat currencies?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:38) Because what you can do is you can create an ICO and assign an arbitrary value and sell it. Right? Or you can have really unpopular ICOs that have a markup, and it might not actually be $42 million. Right? It might just be a nice marketing number to say. Like, they may say, well, at maturity, it'll be 42 million or whatever it is. But if they're actually raising $42 million, which I fully believe is possible because—

(Ellen at 00:24:09) They have successfully raised it. So I've looked at their numbers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:14) Wow. So yeah.

(Ellen at 00:24:14) So, and that—

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:15) Like I said, I'm not surprised by any means. But what I'm saying is this scares me because if you put $42 million into something that's—that's like what you said, masquerade or vaporware or just some—you know, they spent $5,000 to $50,000 on a video, right, and put it out there and raised $42 million, that is super scary.

(Ellen at 00:24:38) Yeah. But they actually, the numbers are, like, I might say it's more of a $200,000. They know the fee of the company that manage your ICO. If you want to make an ICO, you can come to a company here in Russia, and they speak like 30 languages. They're going to help you set it up, help you produce a video, help you write a white paper, and you just collect the bounty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:09) It's insane. It's a problem. It's going to be a huge problem because it's happening here too, Ellen. It's happening here too. And I was trying to determine the scale. Right? Because everything's very isolated. I don't see a lot of reporting on the total number of ICOs because everyone's—it's all private. This is the thing. Like, when a stock exchange is public. Right? So you can see everything. But here, it's kind of private what they're doing with their ICOs and all that stuff. So it's—like I'm trying to get context and wrap my brain around how much money is actually flowing to these junk startups. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:47) And it's—

(Ellen at 00:25:48) It's worse than the millennium, the millennium.coms.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:56) Yeah. It's going to be like the nineteen ninety-nine crash. Right? Because they had all this—they said they had all this value and it blew up, it blew up, it blew up. But it blew up in a very obvious way because you could go to the stock market and you could see it. Right? So you could actually see the shares and see the money that was happening and see the valuations. But here, it's invisible. It's invisible right now. You can't see it.

(Ellen at 00:26:21) There is no fair valuation because if we speak frankly, you can't imagine a startup that is able to invest 40 million dollars in an idea. You have to start small, smaller at least. Like, it's—at least in Russia.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:42) No. It's—that's everywhere, everywhere in business. The—so I've been talking to people every single day for like almost two weeks now, CTOs. Right? And the guys that have the 400-people companies, they didn't take any investment capital. None. They built something while they were working side—while they were working at their main jobs. They built something on the side. They then went and found the people to purchase their services. They took all the profit from that first contract and rolled it into their first employees.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:10) Then they—they designed the—they, you know, did everything they could in their power to design the best possible product, then they rolled all the profit again. And that's how I—that's how I run my business is constantly, you know, doing very small, rolling the profit back in. And that's how my business has grown. It doesn't grow fast. Right? It grows slow and steady over six, ten, fifteen years. Right? But these people, what they come in and it's this—I call it artificial momentum. They take this investment capital and they just burn. They burn it on things that they don't need, things that don't bring their customers value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:45) And they—it's nonsense. And it's going to catch up. It's going to catch up at some point. It's just when.

(Ellen at 00:27:53) Yeah. It's like winning lottery, and the people who would win a lottery then they lose all their money in like 90% of the cases. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:02) That is an actual thing. Yeah. Yep. I think you're right. I think it's like 90% of people that win the lottery lose all of their money because they don't have experience.

(Ellen at 00:28:17) Yeah. I like that we share this idea about the blockchain hype. I think we, the community of engineers and technical people, we should warn the regular people that this is not another big thing because to my mind, the blockchain is just another technology, like a relational database. And nobody, I think, invested like billions of dollars in Postgres. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:49) Right. Yeah. And that's funny too because that's like the least greedy database there is. Right? So, that's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:01) Yeah. And, you know, every time that there's a—there's one of these—I guess the buzzword would be bubble. Right? Every time there's artificial value inflating somewhere, there's always the group of people or the guy that's going around on the talk shows and the TVs, and he always says, watch out. This is happening. This is a big issue. Beware. Beware. Beware. And everybody blows them off and says, no. No. No. No. No. You're just, you know, the sky is falling. You're just crying. And then it happens, and then they have him on the show again in three to five years, and they all hail that individual as the expert. Right?

(Ellen at 00:29:39) Yeah. I told you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:41) I told you. So that's what we should do. We need to go on the talk show circuit, Ellen. And we—you handle Russia. I'll handle the U.S.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:49) And because—

(Ellen at 00:29:49) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:49) Because you can't escape it. You cannot escape it. If you're putting money into something where there's no value and there's no return, it will evaporate. You put the $42 million in, it's a system. Right? It's energy. Right? You put 42 million units of energy in, and they blow it, and only 20 million energy units come out, well, you have a loss. Right?

(Ellen at 00:30:13) But someone going to get rich. Yeah. A lot of middlemen. A lot of middlemen. I think the only right way now to earn money on cryptocurrency is building the infrastructure like all those exchanges and all that trading tools.

(Ellen at 00:30:35) And that's probably the only way to really, in the long run, be successful in this market.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:43) And those tools and those platforms, they—in order to be successful, like you mentioned, they have to follow the core principles and the core rules of what you and I are talking about. Because if they went and got—they went and got $42 million to do it, then the value is not there. But if they're smart and they bootstrap an app that provides real value and pushes it out and actually gets a bunch of—you know, gets a bunch of adoption and generates revenue, then they have something real that they can pull money out of the system and go rock and roll and make some money. But that's the name of the game is being valuable.

(Ellen at 00:31:20) Hey. You know, another issue is that if you go to a venture capital fund, they then come to you or me, and they ask you, what do you think of a company? What do you think of their technology? What do you think of their finances? Or they could—they can decide whatever they want to do. They will request due diligence. They will request all the reports and detailed plans. But with an ICO, a lot of people just spending money without any guarantees and any proof of this technology being—being not only successful, but possible—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:04) Right. And—

(Ellen at 00:32:05) —that someone's going to need it in the end.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:07) Well, Ellen, of course, there's proof. There's the pretty white paper in the video. Yeah. And that's how I make all my investment decisions.

(Ellen at 00:32:17) Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:21) Well, the—Ellen, this has been like an absolutely fantastic talk. And we're going to go ahead and wrap it up. I like to wrap it up with asking you the question, if you could go back ten years—go back ten years in time and give advice to your past self, what would you tell yourself?

(Ellen at 00:32:43) I would tell myself that, no, that I should do everything the way I did it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:52) Excellent. So you would say you're right. Keep it going. Follow your gut. Yeah. Do what you think is right, and you're going to do well.

(Ellen at 00:32:59) And don't be afraid to fail because whoever doesn't fail doesn't succeed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:06) Absolutely. Well, I found that, you know, I was really shy about failure and things of that nature at first when I was, you know, a lot younger. And then I realized as I started failing, the people around me who were the other entrepreneurs around me who were watching me fail, right, make mistakes, they were saying keep going. Like, this happens. And I wasn't getting down about it, but they were just saying, you know, you learn, you move forward, and they were kind of, you know, providing me some guidance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:29) And then I kind of started, you know, asking them for help and using all the resources I could. And what I found is that, you know, success is like almost a collection of failures. Like, you go into an experience, and two things will happen. You'll either have success or you'll learn something. Right?

(Ellen at 00:33:45) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:45) And so you—the people who know the most had that non-success the most. Right? They learned a bunch of things, and then that gave them a better chance of success in the future. So I don't mind failing. I actually avoid people who are like scared of failing because they say, look. All you can do in life really—all you can do in life is just try things. Right?

(Ellen at 00:34:09) Yeah. Like, don't get too disappointed about your failures because, of course, you should aim for success, but just—I'm always trying to make my life more interesting and more like a movie or something to—and every failure is just a part of—a part of this great script written by myself for me. And every thing I do is just going to lead to many new opportunities, and this is just very interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:43) We're best friends, man. Like, when I see my life, I'm always thinking of like the Rocky movie. Like, am I down? Am I going to come up? Like, dun dun dun dun. You know, like, when do I get the—when's the comeback? If I'm down, I love that comeback. And when I'm up, I'm like, alright. I'm waiting for it. Let's see how far this thing goes, and let's, you know, push through and come out—come out this experience a little bit smarter than before.

(Ellen at 00:35:07) Yeah. Sure. Great words.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:14) Thank you so much for listening. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Stitcher, the podcast app. We are everywhere that you are, Modern CTO. Thank you so much. You guys sharing this means the absolute world to me. We want to get this information as far and wide as possible.