Jon Hyman - CTO at Braze

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to John, the CTO at Braze, and we discuss ways to create a culture of ownership, how to approach leading through uncertainty, and the benefits they've experienced by bringing in an outside agile coach. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(John at 00:00:20) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:21) This is the Modern CTO podcast. Hey, buddy. I like the shirt. What's that? Is that a B?

(John at 00:00:36) Yeah, this is a Braze B right here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) Whoa. My last name is Beasley, so I'm always a fan of things with a B in them.

(John at 00:00:43) Nice. I want to try to get into the Braves uniform, but I got my apparel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:49) It almost looks like an at sign and the A is kind of flipped backwards.

(John at 00:00:54) Oh, yeah. I guess when you kind of look at it, it could also look like a horoscope sign, I feel like, now that I'm seeing it in the reflection.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:03) Or the word Joe, like J-O.

(John at 00:01:06) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:07) Or J-B. That could actually be an insignia for me, for Joel Beasley.

(John at 00:01:12) Oh, yeah, that actually could be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:14) Yeah, I'll talk to the recruiting team.

(John at 00:01:18) I'll also try to modify this and add an N, and then that way I'll just be like, it's John.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:23) Oh, there you go. Yeah, put the little scientific N on the end of that and it would kind of flow with that style of text. People listening are like, what are you guys talking about? I'm talking about your shirt. He's got an amazing symbol on his shirt. So that's the Braze logo, that's the Braze brand.

(John at 00:01:41) That's our monogram, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:44) That's the better word, right? I love it. You guys are a really modern brand. I'm a big fan of design and things like that.

(John at 00:01:53) Right, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:53) So this is the podcast. We're just going to hang out, talk. Probably coronavirus will come up because you're in New York, right?

(John at 00:02:01) We're headquartered in New York City. I'm actually up in Connecticut right now, so I'm just outside the city. But that's where our headquarters is. We got about 250 of our folks or so in New York City.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:14) So do you usually live in Connecticut or did you retreat to Connecticut?

(John at 00:02:18) Did a little bit of a retreat. My wife and I last year did kind of a thing that some New Yorkers in their mid-thirties do. They have their one-bedroom they rent in New York City, and then because real estate prices are so crazy, they get a place that's like a ninety-minute drive away. So we did that last year, and so it's kind of fortunate to find ourselves having a place that we can go to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:44) That's not bad. That was only ninety minutes away from the city? Nice.

(John at 00:02:48) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:49) How are you doing on the haircuts? My haircut places are closed, so I got more hair to cut.

(John at 00:02:53) Not doing so well. You know, it's kind of bad in the back over here and on the sides, but I just kind of did a little bit of a side comb so I could look nice and style it in front of my laptop here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:07) You look beautiful. It's going to get crazy. I think it's going to get insane. I told my team my beard especially turned into a mane, so it's a mane now, no longer a beard. We changed the name.

(John at 00:03:19) I tried growing a beard for about eleven days, which was, I believe, either eleven or thirteen. It was under two weeks though, but it was the longest I'd ever gone without shaving. And then I just threw in the towel and decided to shave again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) Dude, that's the tipping point. Let me show you. I actually have a beard album. Okay, so look at this. You see my progression, right? And then within two months, I go from looking like I'm 13 to looking like I'm 32.

(John at 00:03:49) Yeah, that's pretty great. You could just post a series of that like it's baby photos, you know, week by week.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:55) This is private. I won't share this with anybody.

(John at 00:04:00) It could be a cool collage to post to Instagram at the end of all of this and then be like, here's what I did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:07) That's true. I could do some before and after stuff. I'll talk to the girls that run Instagram and ask them how to do the lighting and all. The pictures are unbelievable. My wife, she just started with the whole virus thing, redoing our cabinets. And I promise we'll talk about technology stuff, but she's redoing the cabinets and she's doing before and after. Man, she's got some talent there with the refurbishing of stuff.

(John at 00:04:34) Yeah, that's great. I mean, there's some people who are just flourishing in this ability to have projects and be productive. I've got a buddy of mine who is also a woodworker. He has built himself basically his own kind of workout studio. He's built his own CrossFit gym in his house. He's built cabinets. He's built a closet. He's just so happy that he basically is able to do so much work at home through this. But then there's folks, you know, like me who haven't been doing a lot of things around the house. And, you know, that's okay. It's a challenging moment for everyone, and I think it's okay to just kind of take it easy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:14) Well, we build digital stuff, right? We're still building. My dad, an engineer, but all his brothers and siblings, construction, right? So they all have grown construction companies and build houses and buildings and all of this stuff. And so I figured that's probably where I get the building from. I just happen to do it digitally, typically.

(John at 00:05:42) Yeah, you know, that's actually what got me really excited about programming. I started when I was 11, and that I could create something I thought was just fantastic. I mean, I used to think that software was only something that could be built by big companies like Microsoft. And the fact that I, you know, as a preteen or with other teenagers that I connected with that were writing software could do it was impressive. I mean, the first app that I built—I'm calling it an app now, I used to call it a prog back then because they were programs and they call them progs—but the first thing I built was actually a clock. And I just, it was in Visual Basic 3, so very easy to kind of build the clock then. And I just stared at it being like, I did this. And it was really cool and fun to have created something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:31) Oh, yeah. I mean, my first stuff, I was doing some scripting. My dad was giving me stuff to keep me busy because he was doing engineering work and building actual systems, and then he was doing a lot of embedded systems work. But he would give me these little tasks, and then I remember when I switched from creating small programs in DOS to things that would help the collections of other programs, right? And from creating those things into—what did he give me? Like Delphi? It was an editor. I could actually create windows and buttons and do stuff. And I was like, oh, it looks like an actual thing. And then I was playing with the open-source-type projects over there. And I don't know, it was just like that whole caveman making fire thing.

(John at 00:07:22) Yeah, I definitely recall that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:24) So where did you get into it from that? So you did some initial programming, and then were you like, oh, I know I'm going to do this forever? Did you want to do other stuff? How did that progress for you through high school and your career?

(John at 00:07:35) Yeah, I mean, really for me, that was kind of the spark that got me excited about technology. I started to learn to program when I was 11. I would create little games for myself and for my friends, and I kind of quickly got into building things like websites. So this was the mid-nineties, and you know, the web kind of was a thing, and you'd go to many websites and have that construction worker construction sign. I would kind of help people in my community create a website for them. So in my middle school, for example, I created websites for all of my projects. And this was early enough where I was really one of the only people in my area doing that, or at least in my school. And, you know, that kind of caught on to being able to build websites for my school. I built a lot of websites for my high school, whether that was for the musicals or for just kind of the different technology organizations or anything like that. I started building websites for small businesses I got connected to from schools, people who were either parents of kids who were in high school, or they were connected to teachers or the school board or whatnot. I ended up being able to kind of work, you know, as a 14-year-old making really good money building websites for folks because not many people were doing it. And so I kind of got that entrepreneurial spark at that time, and I just knew right when I got into high school that I definitely wanted to study computer science. I took an AP computer science class my freshman year, just kind of was digging in and trying to teach myself all that I could and just really enjoyed that. And when I went to college, it was obvious that I was going to major in computer science.

(John at 00:09:17) And then from there, I in college also worked with a number of other businesses as a programmer. You know, I call myself a programmer working for small businesses, but now I think you kind of elevate the language and you're like an engineer working at startups. But basically it's like, you know, I'd have a number of people who either had ideas of things to build. Because I went to college—I went to Harvard—and when I got there, Facebook, for example, was only at Harvard. And so it's just that era of things just really kind of blowing up in terms of social media and people wanting to found companies and kind of come back off that dot-com boom or that dot-com bust.

(John at 00:09:57) So I then kept with that spirit of creativity. And when I actually was graduating, I was trying to decide between going to a stable company like a hedge fund, or joining a friend of mine to start a company with him, or continue working for one of the small businesses that I was working at as their CTO. And I ultimately decided to go to Bridgewater Associates, which is the world's largest hedge fund. I thought that it would be really great to kind of know what good looks like. Up until that point in my life, I'd only really ever programmed by myself or with maybe one other person. And I wanted to learn how to build what I would refer to as enterprise software. You know, how can I build something that is relied upon by a giant organization that I have to work on with other people and has to meet a ton of other additional requirements that I've never really had, like observability, monitoring, logging, testing, reliability, all that stuff there? And so I was there for about three years when I just kind of realized that I was kind of missing that entrepreneurial spark in the sense that I also wanted to be close to our product. I mean, I was working as an engineer or a technologist at a hedge fund. And, you know, at the end of the day, their whole P&L process is so very divorced from what the technology people were doing because it was all about research and trading and execution and constraints and portfolio optimization, all that stuff.

(John at 00:11:22) And I wanted to be someplace where I could be close to product, where I could have a win, you know, or at least it would be like, I'm working on something, whether I'm working at a big company like a Google or a Microsoft, I'd still be able to celebrate the wins we had building our product. And at the same time, I was a person that really kind of got into mobile where, you know, when I was in college, I kind of graduated college right when the iPhone came out, so I kind of missed that, the start and big spark of that. But I wanted a BlackBerry Pearl when I was a senior, and that was the thing that I was really excited about because it had, you know, the internet in your pocket. I thought this is going to be really, really cool. It's funny because when I started college, I actually couldn't even text message on my phone. It didn't have that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:07) They had that trackball, that pearl.

(John at 00:12:09) Yeah. And so I was excited about that. And then when I was at Bridgewater, the first Android phone on Sprint came out, and I was really excited, excited enough that I left work in the middle of the day and I waited in line at a Sprint store to go get, you know, the first Android phone. And so mobile was really exciting to me. So, you know, I decided to leave Bridgewater just to work on newer technologies, work on a product, either start a technology company, join a small technology company.

(John at 00:12:37) And that was where I met Bill, who is my co-founder and our CEO. Bill and I worked together at Bridgewater. He joined from Google about a year into my tenure at Bridgewater. That's where we started working together. We became close friends, and we were essentially kind of—I was out of Bridgewater for about a month when TechCrunch decided to have their first Disrupt conference in New York City. And that was something where I called Bill up and I was like, hey, you want to do this hackathon with me? It'd be really fun, 24 hours. And Bill was supposed to go camping with his girlfriend that weekend, but I had a really good sell in convincing him to kind of come hang out with me, you know, for 36 hours straight, no sleeping. And we ended up being fortunate. We won the top honors of that and kind of got introduced to a ton of different folks, a ton of different investors. And it was from that that we met a guy named Mark Ghermezian, who was looking to start a company around mobile app engagement. And we talked together and we're like, this was really exciting to me. It was kind of fitting all the things that I was interested in: mobile, being a product, you know, kind of a startup or kind of being able to do something from scratch and from the beginning. And also I thought that Mark was a really great guy. Bill and I obviously had had great chemistry and Bill's brilliant. And I was like, you know, being able to start this together with the three of us, I thought it would be really fun. And so we just kind of jumped in and that's how we got our company in 2011. And fast forward today, and now we've, you know, we've grown pretty tremendously since then.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:10) Yeah, only a decade of hard work, right? That's it.

(John at 00:14:13) Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's an overnight success that took nine years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:16) Yeah, that's—

(John at 00:14:17) But even now, I mean, sorry to take the joke, but it's like even now, it's still, you know, on the progression. You're not even anywhere close to the end.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:28) No, and it's a journey, man. I did have a question about—I read that book Principles by Ray Dalio.

(John at 00:14:35) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:35) And that's Bridgewater. You worked at that company?

(John at 00:14:39) That's correct, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:40) So I was just curious. I really liked the book. Have you read the book?

(John at 00:14:45) Yeah, I've read—I haven't read, I don't say, the entirety of the Principles book itself. But when I started there, the Principles were something that they gave you printed out in a manila envelope. It was about—it took only about 45 to 60 minutes to read.

(John at 00:15:01) So you read it a ton. And as I was there, they started increasing the principals more, doing principals training and learning a little bit more. It later kind of ballooned a bit into that big book. I mean, the principals book now is like a tome. But, you know, so I have a copy of it. I've read a good chunk of it. But yeah, I'm very familiar with everything else in there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:24) Well, I was just curious. Like, I'm not gonna quiz you on it. I probably couldn't even name most of the principles right now. But I was curious, like, you know, you work there, you get to experience that culture. I enjoyed the book. I thought they were, like, you know, most of them were sound principles. You could definitely tell, like, some of them were there longer than others because there's something that, like, super impactful. But I was kinda curious how, you know, you work there, you experience that type of culture, and then, like, what elements did you bring in to Braze?

(John at 00:15:56) You know, it's an interesting question because when I talked about the culture of Bridgewater, which I think is really unique and very exciting. I'm so happy that I went there. I really kind of owe a lot of some of my initial personal development to Bridgewater. The people that were there when I was there were completely brilliant. So, you know, I have a ton of positive things to say about the culture. And I thought that, like, look, the things that really matter from a cultural perspective are gonna be the things that people leave and take with them. And, you know, there are some good—there are really good aspects of what Ray talks about that Bill and I brought to Braze. You know, one of the things that we talk about is just the concept of having a responsible party. You know? I think that there's some principle that something of, like, responsible parties act responsibly. I don't know if it's—you know, like—but, basically, it's just saying that, like, when you assume you've gotta assign someone, you know, the responsibility for a thing, and then that person will then in turn act, you know, in ways that an owner would. But you really need to make sure that you do that. And this is something that we try to do, which is just things of, like, making sure that people are assigned for follow ups. You have clear understandings of what the next steps are. Those things are just kind of good. You don't diffuse out responsibility amongst a group or kind of talk about things. At Bridgewater, they really hated any kind of plural pronoun of, like, let's or we should. You know? Like, hey. How are we doing with this project? You know? Like, let's make sure that we're ready on Monday. Like, you know, those kinds of things that you might have people kind of soften the tone by not being so direct. Bridgewater was not like that. Bridgewater would always say, like, you know, hey, Alice, are you going to be ready on Monday, you know, for this thing? Or, like, you know, Bob, you're responsible for doing this. There wasn't any we's or us's because that diffuses responsibility. And Bill and I really, you know, try to take some of that to heart and making sure that we know, you know, who is driving, you know, what kind of initiatives. And then also, you know, we make sure that we can follow up and understand how we can get transparency around how that's going. And I think that's something good that we took from Bridgewater.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:08) Nice. Yeah. I like the culture. I like the way you talk. I like the way you sound. Like, you sound like a pretty down to earth person that is basically, you know, doing what they love with their life. I think we should probably set some context too and discuss, like, you know, what Braze does and what size you guys are currently at.

(John at 00:18:27) Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So Braze, what we are, is we're a comprehensive customer engagement platform. And what we wanna do is help power, like, memorable and relevant customer experiences between consumers and the brands that they love. So, really, what I mean by this is that we wanna help provide context to any interaction between a brand and their consumer, whether that is through a personalized email or push notification in that message or text message. But any communication that a brand is having with their consumers, we, again, just wanna make sure that that's fostering, like, a human connection by being relevant and memorable. So, you know, for example, I think we'd likely have interacted with you, Joel, if you ever gotten a push notification from Disney Plus letting you know there's a new episode of The Mandalorian to watch. That's orchestrated from Braze. Or if you get an email from Overstock.com about some new and exciting sales or items that you may be interested or perhaps you'd already browsed and were looking at, that's also sent to you from Braze. So we together help, like, hundreds of customers over 50 countries with all of their customer engagement for their messaging strategies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:37) That's pretty cool. I actually think I have got—well, candidly, I actually did this thing a couple months ago, like, I think a month ago where I shut off all notifications. Obviously, you guys do more than that. It's just more notifications. But prior to shutting that off, I did get some Disney Plus notifications. I got some—I think about, like, the movie Up for some reason.

(John at 00:20:01) Oh, yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:01) Because I watch all the kids movie because I've got the—I got two little ones. So I basically—I also think there's a shortage of, like, kids movies, like animated—like, really high quality animated movies because I feel like I've seen them all. And when I consume that Disney Plus application, we watched, like, all of them relatively quickly.

(John at 00:20:23) Well, I think that they—I mean, it's, you know, it—well, I'll say it's really easy to watch all that content because I think it's just so good. I feel that, like, kids' movies now are very heartwarming and wholesome, and they just—there's just a goodness to them. So I really like the content. You know, I think that they need to cater for different ages. I mean, like, my wife and I actually just watched Onward on Disney Plus on Sunday. And oh my gosh. So good. But, you know, it's got more adult themes, you know, of two boys who lost their father, one lost, you know, before he was born, and, you know, their journey to kind of wanna get to see him. And, you know, it's really—it's a theme for, you know, teenagers. You know, maybe not for, like, a little one if you got a four or five year old. You know, same with, like, Inside Out, which is amazing. I mean, that movie is so good, and, again, maybe more for 10, 12 year olds if you wanna go to them, the younger kids. We did watch Frozen 2 last weekend, the weekend prior. And that one was great. I think that one's probably good for little ones.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:25) Yeah. We left the kids at home for Onward. Like, we saw that probably, like, oh, you know, very beginning of March, like, right before the whole virus thing. I think that was the last movie we got to see. But, yeah, it's funny because there's definitely the animation ones that you can tell that are, like, made for the preteen era, you know, because of the different themes. But it's also, like, the animation style and the age of the characters really matters, because I noticed, like, I don't think my daughter would really watch Onward as much as she would watch Frozen or Inside Out, which, by the way, the themes in Inside Out, that is a brilliant movie for all ages.

(John at 00:22:04) So good. So good. Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:07) Like, if you want people to start thinking introspectively, that's a good movie.

(John at 00:22:12) Mhmm. Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:13) Just there we go. We talk about everything, even Disney movies. One thing. So I know you guys know Datadog because I was reading—I was doing my research, and I saw you guys actually, like, collaborated on a study. But do you know Alexi over there?

(John at 00:22:29) Oh, yeah. ALQ? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're, you know, we're somewhat close to the Datadog team. We share investors with Iconic and Meritech, which is really great. And we're actually only a few blocks away in New York City from their office. We recently moved offices in 2019, but before then, we were actually about 200 feet from them. So we would go over there. Our teams would work together on some of the drivers, and we beta'd their APM product as it was coming out. And so we're fairly close with that crew overall.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) So did you guys work on a project together where, like, you moved to AWS?

(John at 00:23:08) So we moved to AWS in 2016. And then we started work with Datadog in 2019. So it was a few years later, but, you know, we've got a huge coverage of our AWS environment with Datadog.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:23) Yeah. I like them as a product. I found them pretty early on. They were just, like, a really easy way to get set up. I think I just did, like, a free trial of them, and I was like, this is sufficient.

(John at 00:23:35) Like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:35) Yeah. Check the box.

(John at 00:23:37) It's good, and it's fast. You know, I think that that's a thing that's valuable for us is, you know, at Braze, we have a tremendous amount of scale. So if we think about, you know, all the messaging experiences that we do power, you know, we have nearly two and a half billion monthly active users across our entire customer base cumulatively. And we send billions of messages every single day. And so when you put this all together, there's just a tremendous amount of activity that's going on with us and our servers. And, you know, we monitor so many things. We really try to make sure that we can, like, measure, like, everything that's going on with us. And they're, you know, keeping up with our scale, and they're doing it, you know, basically instantaneously with their, you know, their real-time performance of all of our traces and our stats metrics, something like that. That's all been really positive for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:29) I still gotta get my T-shirt from them. I was supposed to reach out and get—I dropped the ball on that one. We did this thing when—so that's his nickname, ALQ. But we did this thing where, like, we did, like, a sign-up link. I don't know if it's still active. Maybe Jake can message me in chat if it is. I don't wanna, like, tell people to do it if it's not. We did this, like, free trial thing where—Jake said, yeah, it is. We did this free trial thing where, like, people that got a free trial through, like, datadog.com/moderncto got a free Datadog shirt. And—

(John at 00:24:53) Oh, nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:53) Yeah. So that was because, like, people love free shirts. Right? And they have a good—but free shirts only work when you have a pleasant brand. Right? Because, like, the Datadog brand looks pretty cool. Do you guys do, like, free shirt stuff?

(John at 00:25:16) So we do have a ton of shirts that we give out for recruiting, for our customers. You know, one thing is that, you know, our businesses are a little different in the sense that we're, you know, an enterprise software as a service. So, you know, we've got more than 800 customers, but we're working with, you know, again, those brands like Disney or with HBO or with Canva. Datadog, I feel like, is one of those businesses that really can just work with thousands and thousands of different companies and individual developers. They need to get in the developer community. And in that sense, like, you know, them having some kind of swag budget for just developers, sign-ups, startups, all that kinda makes sense. So a little different for us. So, you know, we can get some Braze stuff. I also can see if we can shoot you, you know, one of these shirts or kind of get over to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:05) Dude, I will wear it.

(John at 00:26:06) Yeah. We'll make sure we get you something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:10) No. Especially because it's the B? Like, I'm all over that. Yeah. Hopefully, it says, like, braze.com on the back. Does it?

(John at 00:26:17) We've got—we've got just Braze.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:19) Oh, there you go. People know enough to Google it. Right?

(John at 00:26:23) Yeah. Yeah. So we can do something like that there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:27) Do you guys ever sell your shirt? I've been asking everybody this, by the way. Do you guys ever sell your shirts, like, online? Like, you can buy, like, Braze shirts?

(John at 00:26:35) No. We haven't. You know? And I think it, you know, maybe a little odd thing for us to try. I've given out shirts for folks doing different things. So I've, like, had, you know, people email in. I've been like, oh, okay. This is really great. Thank you so much for this thing, but, you know, maybe I'll send you a shirt, you know, for that. You know, we also have engineering Braze shirts. So that's why I think I wore that one, like, two days ago. I basically sometimes joke that I didn't, like, start a tech company. I started a clothing line. I just basically feel like I try to wear Braze attire, like, three days a week. And Bill, actually, Bill wears Braze, I think, like, every single day. He's got a Braze shirt on. But we've got an engineering Braze shirt, and we give those—or we had—I think we just ran out two and a half months ago. We give those shirts to all the candidates who interview on-site with us. So we at least give people something for coming on and working, you know, with our team, spending a day with our team or something like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:37) No. I love that. See, I found that, like, the big sites, like GitHub and stuff, like, they'll have—you can go to some website and find where you can get, like, a GitHub shirt or something because they're just such a big brand culturally. But I'm, like, in this, like, sub-brand now where, like, I wanna wear, like, a hoodie of a company that's, like, got 400 employees but makes, like, the sickest mobile apps. Right? Or a communication company that's like, oh, we do the Disney and HBO push messages because we're, like, badass and they're amazing. And I'm like, because the reason why is it gives me a talking point. People are like, what's that?

(John at 00:28:13) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:13) And it's like, oh, this—like, the shirt I'm wearing today, it's, I think, probably, like, from JC Penney, and it's a medium standard men's tee. It's like, there's no conversation points there.

(John at 00:28:26) Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. No. You can always spark up something with, like, what is that thing or, like, what's the logo or anything like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:32) Yeah. Or if you're really bold and if you're doing, like—once we get out of the social distancing, I'll put on a Braze shirt and just walk up to people and start telling them about Braze.

(John at 00:28:44) Yeah. I mean, that's actually been kind of a fun thing as we've grown a little bit larger, is also starting to see some of the Braze more out there in the ecosystem. You know, I remember this was, like, a few years ago. We saw one of our clients was—they're asking us if we had any referrals for a job posting that they were just putting out for a CRM manager. And on some of the requirements or nice to haves for qualifications, they listed, like, you know, familiarity with Braze.

(John at 00:29:14) We thought that was really fun that we kind of made it in a job description. Now we've actually seen that happen a couple times, or we've had people who, you know, we've just kind of seen in the New York City subways holding a Braze bag or a Braze shirt because across our customers, you know, we have given them a lot of swag, and there's a lot of marketing teams out there that use Braze. And so, you know, it's kind of cool to see that it proliferate out in the real world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:42) It is quite possibly the coolest thing ever. I know exactly what you're talking about. When you see your brand out there by someone that you don't know, or you hear someone talking about it and you're like, oh, wow, they're consuming some content or they're discussing some content or topic. It is surreal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:00) It's like, this is so cool because

(John at 00:30:02) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:02) You put in so much work for so long and then, like, you get one little tiny sliver of a glimpse. And it makes you appreciate, like, all these brands you know and love, like, how much work and time that they put in to get them that big.

(John at 00:30:16) Oh, yeah. Definitely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:17) So I want to talk a little bit. I have some questions here, topics, conversation. You know, with the COVID thing, a lot of uncertainty. You can see it in the stock market. Right? You could see it pretty much in every aspect of business, like unemployment, all of that type of stuff. And I was just curious, like, how you approach leading your teams, like, through the uncertainty.

(John at 00:30:40) Yeah. Well, I mean, one thing I'll just kind of start off with is, you know, just know that this pandemic's really affected all industries. Some have been affected way more than others. You know, what's good for us at Braze is that we provide our customers with the ability to communicate with their consumers. And that right now is more important than ever. And so we've been really fortunate, let's say, more fortunate than some other businesses that we're in high demand and we've kind of prepared for this type of scenario in the sense that, you know, our business is kind of all about connections and human connections, and that's something that people again need now.

You know, when we think about our teams—product and engineering and design, so kind of lump all together—we're kind of, I'd say, maybe more of a team that is used to kind of doing some things remotely. You know, Braze, the way that we kind of approach remote work policies and things like that is a lot of this is generally kind of federated out to managers in different departments to kind of do, you know, kind of what makes sense for them. We really like having a strong work in the office culture, and Bill and I are deliberate about that. We provide lunch daily in the office. And part of that is we want to form a community. Like, if we're about building human relationships between brands and consumers, we want to make sure that we're also building strong relationships inside Braze and at our offices. So we really do like having folks be in the office. But that being said, we've always thought about flexibility as one of the important parts of our employment structure. And we have people that are just kind of more used to working remotely for product, design, engineering because you can be an individual contributor, hands on keyboard, programming, making a design, doing customer interview, you know, kind of more remotely than it may be if you're in some of the other fields or some of the other departments.

(John at 00:32:28) So we've been able to acclimatize to it, I think, fairly well. You know, that being said, like, you know, it's kind of like we're not all working from home. I feel a bit like we're at home trying to work through this in a global pandemic that's going on right here where, you know, we see folks who, it's challenging kind of being in one space. Like, for example, right now, just for me, it's 12:10 PM where I am, and I've taken 689 steps today, which is not a lot of steps. You know, it's something that, by the end of the day, will likely kind of wear on me where I'll just get to, you know, say, I've got to take a break. I've got to go for a walk. I have to kind of move around. You know, you kind of don't get that organic movement of moving between conference rooms or seeing other people or getting up and walking around as you do in an office. So, you know, it is something that you kind of do need to make sure that your teams are actively, I want to say, like, on top of.

You know, we're talking about here with our teams of, like, how do we kind of keep that community together? One thing that we do at Braze is we have, every two weeks, we do a kind of a tea time. We were doing this in person. We just moved this virtually, just kind of like people have tea and, you know, snacks and things like that, and we all just kind of chat. We are moving our kind of board game slash, you know, kind of game night that we have to be virtual. So next Thursday—we can today—we're going to be having a, you know, department-wide trivia. This is going to be really fun. So we do try to kind of keep things up together, you know, so that we can kind of stay connected to folks. But I think there's a lot for us to kind of figure out to do. I mean, one thing that we want to look at too is, like, are people taking as much time off as they used to? Like, we don't want people to burn out. You know, we have managers encouraging people to use their PTO, and I think that's something that is, you know, equally still important today to make sure that folks are not, you know, kind of burning out and they're taking the time they need for themselves. So we're just trying to think on how we can be best supportive of everyone through this. But, you know, it's like we're fortunate, but it's still not a cakewalk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:39) Yeah. I was listening to an audiobook. It was talking about, like, children and psychology and the importance of their routines because I was trying to be a better parent because my kids are going nuts because their routines have completely changed.

(John at 00:34:57) How old are they again?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:58) Three and one and a half.

(John at 00:35:02) Okay. Great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:03) Little girl, little boy. And they're still going in the daycare because my wife was considered an essential worker because she worked at a vet hospital, but then they recently furloughed a lot of their employees. It's an odd thing. Like, the hospitals are not full. They're, like, keeping space. Oh, it's a weird—I don't want to talk too much about it because I'm not an expert in that area. But, uh, yeah. So she, that's why she was redoing the cabinets and stuff.

But I was trying to understand the kids and their routines changing and their teachers changing, their classroom structure is changing, but it completely affects their behavior. And then the individual I was listening to said the same thing is true for adults. So, basically, what happened is we just did this massive social experiment where we changed everybody's routines overnight. And that has unbelievable consequences that we'll soon learn about as we have the professionals in these fields show the research and learn what happens. But it's definitely, if it has such a horrible effect on the kids, it just, you know, I think it really just reinforces the need for personal responsibility and then to realize that we have to take control of our schedules and we have to create order for ourselves in the absence of the existing order that we were used to because we sort of take our order structures for granted. Right? We build up our routines over time slowly, and we get used to them, and then they provide us a net benefit.

You know, we go to our work and that provides us financial support. We go to the grocery store. We cook. We care for ourselves. But the amount of effort it requires you to pull out of all of those routines at the same time and reestablish new healthy routines for every single part of your life, that is at the same time, half the world losing their jobs and being stuck inside with, like, these new constraints. It's just a lot to process. Like, it's just a lot. Like, I tend to be a pretty disciplined person, and I tend to be pretty on top of stuff. And I noticed that I'm having difficulty with it. You know, even, you know, my workouts and my runs, I'm noticing I'm less interested in the food I'm eating. I'm less interested in the workout, and it's like, oh, man. Like, objectively, this is like mild depression, you know, because I'm not interacting with other people face to face or I'm just adjusting and I'm just giving myself as much space as I can and doing difficult things because I know I like doing those, but it's definitely not the same.

(John at 00:37:43) Yeah. That's true. I mean, I think that, you know, there's feelings of grief that everyone's kind of dealing with and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:50) That's a good word.

(John at 00:37:51) It's, yeah. It's for me and for our teams, like, we look at it as, you know, people, it may be harder for them to kind of work, whether with their kids or the time that they're working is a little more draining. I find that true with myself where, you know, when I'm at the office, you know, and kind of in my normal routine, wouldn't be hard for me to work a twelve-hour day, just in the sense that, you know, I'm kind of moving around. I work some at home in the morning. I go to the office. I'm there. I'm meeting with people. I have my meetings, and I stay after meetings are over to do some work by myself. Come home. It's very normal to me. But here, now, it's like doing twelve hours of work. It's very, very difficult because it's, you know, a lot more taxing to just kind of, again, you know, be entirely on a screen, not really moving, and kind of, you know, with distractions here, you're not able to kind of go outside.

I mean, I would, it's, I think you're right in the sense that people will get new routines. I think it's going to take, at least with me, it'll take a little bit of time. I think that's all fine and, you know, honestly, like, normal. But, you know, it kind of, it's going to be a while where we're going to have this, you know, kind of period where maybe not exercising as much as I used to and maybe kind of not eating the same as I used to or whatnot, and I'll kind of get through that. And then I'll, you know, kind of settle back into something that really makes people happy. Because, like, people are really resilient, and I think that, you know, is kind of a good trait about, you know, just seeing, you know, some people doing some positive stuff out of this. But, ultimately, I think that, you know, we'll kind of adjust to how things work. And when we get past this, I think it's going to also change some possible, you know, ways in which we are all interacting anyway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:29) Yeah. I think having something to look forward to is something that is incredibly valuable. So, you know, I didn't look forward to as much in the weekends that, like, oh, we have to go to this person's birthday party on this weekend, or we have to go do this on this week. Or it's like you have things coming up. Oh, I'm going to go fly to this city, and I'm going to speak. So, like, this next month is going to fly by because I'm anchored to that awesome event I'm going to go speak at. And things kind of revolve around that. And then when you get this future, it's, like, it's a real important job of our leaders, like, for, you know, you, me, and within our companies, for our governors within the states, and, you know, nationally and globally, it's really important that, like, within all this chaos that we establish concrete things that we can look forward to, and that will help us, you know, it's like an anchor point. It's like a, so we can orbit around it.

And that'll help us with the transition that we're in right now of finding our new routines, but we have to also all remember that when this is over, whatever time that may be, we're going to go through the same exercise because we're going to have to break all of our routines now because they're not going to be identical to how they were before. They're going to be different. They're both familiar. But I think that that vision of planting something in the future to look forward to is lacking a little bit. I mean, I feel like I'm lacking it a little bit in my life. Like, I think I need to do a better job with myself and my team and the frequency of it and the clarity of it. Just as I hear myself talking, like, yeah, I could definitely do a better job here. And I think we could also do a better job on a state, local government, state level, and national level of, like, constantly reinforcing the future. Because there seems to be, like, a lot of attacking on every angle. Like, forget politics. Just, like, every single angle, there's a lot of attacking. And I just I would like to see more of a vision and constant reinforcement of that vision and have it be positive because we need a morale boost. You know?

(John at 00:41:34) Yeah. Well, you know, you can watch, John Krasinski is doing this thing on YouTube called Some Good News. I think that that's a morale boost. If you, I highly recommend checking that out. That's something that you can look forward to. Hopefully, he brings it out on at least a weekly basis. He's on two episodes about twelve, fifteen minutes each. You know, really kind of tearjerkers of joy. There's the, it just talks about a lot of the positivity that, you know, comes from people coming together to support each other during this challenge, and it's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:06) I love it. Alright. So John Krasinski, Some Good News, and that's on, you said YouTube or Netflix?

(John at 00:42:12) It's on YouTube. Yeah. It's on YouTube. He just started doing it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:15) Good. Thank you. He's the character that is in The Office. Right?

(John at 00:42:20) That's right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:21) But he's also done so many things. Like, I felt like that guy was, like, typecast in The Office, and so now I'm going to play every other opposite role to this just to show my range. And I was, like, you know, some of the stuff, I was, like, this is pretty good.

(John at 00:42:33) Yeah. I think he seems to be, you know, super competent as an actor and a great, you know, nice person. So I think that's also fairly common. You see that, you know, kind of people maybe get typecast into a silly role, and you find that they're actually phenomenal actors. And I think Steve Carell was another, just keep with The Office theme. I thought that, you know, he's a fantastic dramatic actor and really kind of able to have a big range, even though he kind of started off being so goofy and, you know, being on Anchorman and Daily Show and all that stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:04) I think you can do that. I think there's some places you can't mix. I think, like, if you play the evil character, I think you're typecast as evil for your career. I don't know if there's any, we should do some research, Jake, on that after the podcast. Figure out, are there evil characters that have made the transition? I don't know. Like Malfoy?

(John at 00:43:26) There's certainly people who maybe play evil characters in the middle of their careers. You know, Javier Bardem is, I think, a fantastic actor, and he was a Bond villain.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:37) Oh. And then he did some other good stuff too?

(John at 00:43:40) Oh, yeah. I mean, I think he's just, you know, kind of done, you know. So he was also in No Country for Old Men, which I guess you could say that he is kind of the villain. Definitely was the villain in that movie. Certainly the villain in that movie. And, yeah, I think he's just been in some really, you know, great things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:57) Some good comedy movies. Right? That's a good way to lift spirits. I noticed myself, like, I don't get into horror movies or anything. I watch comedy stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:06) I watch children stuff. I watch stuff that, for me, makes me feel good inside. And that's just, you know, selfishly, I like to feel good inside, especially when I don't consume a ton of content either. So when I do, it's like, oh, I'm with the kids or I'm doing something that, like, I want to laugh right now. Where's my laughing content?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:24) But, yeah, I've noticed that that's a pretty good technique, some good news. That sounds like a good technique. Any other, like, favorite ways to boost morale?

(John at 00:44:34) I mean, I think that a recurring kind of in-person or recurring kind of video conference with friends and loved ones is good. I mean, I have a weekly video chat with a kind of core group of friends. You know, we're all in our mid-thirties, all married, some of us have kids. And, you know, it's just kind of good to see us. You know, honestly, we're all in the group talking more together than we have in years because we're spread out geographically.

(John at 00:45:06) You know, and also it's kind of difficult with everyone's obligations. That's been good. Got another group of friends, you know, doing like a virtual Sunday wine tasting every Sunday night, which has been fun. I just kind of hopped on that one lately. So, like, those are just good things to kind of, you know, know that we can stay connected.

(John at 00:45:24) I did a virtual Seder yesterday. I did two of them for Passover, one with my family, one with friends. And so I think that those are just things in our mind that you're not alone. Everyone's experiencing this together. You know, but we are fortunate to live now when we do to be able to connect with each other through technology.

(John at 00:45:41) And if this was happening 20 years ago, you know, it'd be very challenging. You know, and if this happens 20 years from now, I think that there'll be even more ways for us to connect through technology. So I'm just really fortunate that we have the ability to be close, you know, remotely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:01) Yeah. My brother, he's like a big Android guy, but he got an iPad and started FaceTiming me so that, like, we could talk more. He also is doing it with his patients. So he's a physician, and surprisingly, like, they're doing very poorly. And he's at, like, one of the main doctor areas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:21) It's interesting. Do you have siblings, by the way?

(John at 00:46:24) I have a sister. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:26) So you'll probably appreciate this. So I'm just like, oh, you know, he's my brother. And then I find out he wins an award. He's like one of the best doctors in the town we live in. I'm like, this is hilarious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:36) He's got, like, all these ratings online and everything, and then he gets, like, he won an award. I was like, this is unbelievable because he's really, like, he won't talk about it, but I saw the newspaper. And so I was really excited, and I was asking him about all this stuff. But, yeah, apparently the whole health groups, you know, they kind of conjugate as, like, groups, like chains of doctor's offices. They're, like, not doing awesome because people aren't coming in to the doctor.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:02) They're, like—and then they're not doing surgeries at the hospitals. He was talking a lot about that. He's, like, yeah, a lot of the surgeons, like, everybody's hurting because they're not doing many surgeries because they want the beds available for a surge. And so, like, the whole ecosystem that he's a part of is, like, shrunk down. He's working, like, two days a week now, and it's just a really interesting dynamic because I would just imagine that they would be packed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:30) Right? Like, you would imagine that the doctor's offices, people being scared and stuff like that, you would imagine that they're, like, somehow packed, especially he's, like, a general physician, but they're not. And I was, like, pretty surprised by that. And I live in a retirement town too. So we got, like, all older people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:47) Yeah. Yeah. We're in, like, we're south of Tampa. But, man, dude, this is exciting. Do we—oh, I have one. I had another question for you. What do you normally do pre-pandemic? What do you normally do for fun, like, to unwind?

(John at 00:48:02) So there's a couple of different things. One is I started playing guitar after college that I kind of got into. My wife can help me on that. Basically, when I was a senior in college, the popular game at the time was Guitar Hero. And once I got my job, once I accepted my job, basically, you know, right around December, January of my senior year, and I was like, I'm going to reward myself. I'm going to get this game. And then about a week into it, I was like, this is so dumb. I've always wanted to play guitar. Why am I, like, spending all this time playing this virtual guitar when I could learn a real one? And my wife, who's my girlfriend at the time, got me this cheap $99 acoustic guitar, really thinking that it was going to be just kind of a, you know, something that kept my attention for a week.

(John at 00:48:46) Unfortunately, it's kind of kept it longer than that. So that's something that I like to do. It's, like, my hobby. But then, of course, you know, you've got the other stuff. My wife and I, you know, really enjoy cooking.

(John at 00:48:56) I think that maybe we don't enjoy it as much as we are currently doing it. But, you know, it's nice to cook something together, do something for each other, with each other. You know, it's good to have a home-cooked meal. You know, we've been a, like, Blue Apron customer since 2014. We love it.

(John at 00:49:15) Just really like that. It, like, no matter how busy scheduling can be, it essentially forces us into, like, three meals together that also are ones at which we're, you know, not only eating it together, but we're making it together. Or if we make it for each other, me for her, her for me, you know, then it's kind of like a nice act of kindness that we're appreciative of. So, you know, between that, playing with—we got a seven-month-old puppy—and kind of exercising. I like to work out. Maybe those kind of the main types of things before you get into that next tier of Netflix and travel and all that other stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:54) I have a workout guy I like to follow. Yeah. It's called Built by Science. If you want to nerd out, this guy is so—he constructs these workouts because he was, like, he started in doing it in college, and it actually has turned into his whole business and he's become, like, pretty popular, like, million-plus subscribers on YouTube now. His name is, like, Jeremy Ethier or something like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:15) If you type that in, it'll autocorrect. But he was doing when he was, like, doing nutrition and workout, all the stuff in college, he just saw all of these different people saying all of these things. And so he's like, none of this is backed by science. Like, these are just people saying their opinions on these exercises and, oh, this one, like, this gets me swole. So he went and looked at, like, all the scientific research and built programs specifically off of, like, stable research, and he cites them throughout his whole thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:43) And then he, you know, you can pay, like, $60 and get, like, a premium version of the workouts, but you can definitely get, like, a lot of value out of his free YouTube videos. But I'll tell you what. Like, it's made a huge difference because, like, the order of the exercise in which you do it apparently, like, really matters and the type of lifts that you're doing. And then, like, there's a lot of counterintuitive things that he points out in studies, and it's just really, really—like, I couldn't recommend it more. It's, like, for $60, it was, like, the best fitness purchase I've ever made.

(John at 00:51:17) Oh, you check that out. Yeah. You know, see when we can get back into a gym. Right now, I've just been going for walks outside. That's kind of the extent of exercise for me today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:29) Yeah. He did a, for, like, all the people that had previously purchased this product, he did, like, a coronavirus, like, version of it at home, which is pretty funny because I'm on the Facebook group. I don't do Facebook, like, at all except for this group. And, like, people's, like, window shades and stuff got ripped out because, like, some of his suggestions didn't, like, work very well. But for the most part, the modified version of the workout after we got through a few iterations of it in the group—it's come out to be something pretty nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:00) I think he actually released that one for free to everybody. Okay. So that was pretty cool.

(John at 00:52:05) Check that out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:05) Yeah. I usually don't promote stuff, but, like, after three months of doing this program, like, I noticed, like, significant differences. And it just was really useful because it allowed me to work out, like, without getting sore every time, but still, like, making progress. So I liked it a lot. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:20) Dude, I'm sorry. We were definitely, like, almost over time, but, yeah. We covered a wide range of topics today.

(John at 00:52:30) Yeah. Yeah. There's a whole bunch of different stuff. I can go a few minutes over too if there's any specific tech questions you want to kind of dig into as well. Happy to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:40) Let's throw a plug for you guys. Like, we've talked a little bit about what you do, but, like, how could people learn more?

(John at 00:52:47) I mean, really, essentially, you know, in terms of just, you know, learning more. If you work at a, you know, consumer brand, you know, I would say to kind of challenge you to think about how your company is engaging its users and whether or not you, if you're an engineer listening or data scientist listening, knowing what ways you can kind of be partners with your marketing and growth and engagement teams, or your product or data science or engineering counterparts, to help, you know, really have a more engaging, more cohesive customer experience through different platforms and channels. I think that would be, yeah, you know, something to challenge you on. And if you are interested in how to really do that in a strong way, to take a look at Braze because, again, as we work with hundreds of customers, we have tremendous amount of experience with this, with really great and exciting consumer brands.

(John at 00:53:38) You just go to our website, you'll see, you know, fantastic companies like KFC and Domino's Pizza just on kind of some of the food side. I mentioned, like, HBO and Overstock.com and Disney that we can kind of help you use the same technology platform that they use in order to, you know, bring similar or, you know, your own unique kind of cross-channel experiences to your consumers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:00) And then so you just go to braze.com, Braze?

(John at 00:54:03) Yeah. So you go to braze.com. If you are interested in kind of in our services, again, we're an enterprise kind of business, so there is not, like, a self-sign-up for, you know, for kind of developers there. But you can connect to our sales team, and we can kind of walk you through our offering and our solution. And, you know, hopefully, it'll be something that is going to be a great benefit to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:27) The consultative approach is really nice because, you know, you get all the experience of you guys doing this for all the other customers. Right? And so that's really, really useful because if it's just self-serve, then it's up to, like, a third-party education. It's—I don't know. I've just found that when you find experts in an area, you can, you know, cut the learning curve real fast.

(John at 00:54:50) Yeah. And some these are also, like, deliberate kind of decisions that we made. You know, one of the things that, you know, if I talk a bit more about, like, Braze's culture and things we do is I think that we're very deliberate. You know, in engineering, for example, we begin to design documents or begin committees. So giving people the opportunity to have input on how things are being done.

(John at 00:55:11) Like, for example, write a proposal, have a meeting on it, send out the proposal, you know, for a couple of days to get people's feedback on it, come back to it, rectify that feedback, and kind of figure out how we decide and move forward. You know, we turned off self-serve a few years ago after kind of similar discussions across different departments to understand, you know, what made the most sense for our business. And we look at it as, like, we've got—you, sure, you and your company have a lot of smart people, but you kind of just dig into your product here. But it's like, we've got a lot of smart people as well that we want to help show your smart people how to, you know, really get the best value out of the product.

(John at 00:55:47) Because one of the things that I really love about what we do at Braze is it's not just a technology platform, so to speak, but, really, we want to help our customers, you know, with a certain paradigm of how they're thinking about engagement. I mean, we built Braze in a very opinionated way of being, like, essentially, a vertically integrated stack of data ingestion and classification and personalization and action and kind of this feedback loop of how we want to work with your data scientists and get data to you and how we want you to kind of make sure you're thinking about these things and working with your product design, engineering, and data science teams. You know, we could kind of go on and on about how we think about the shape of the world. But, you know, what's great is that we want to help, you know, brands with that kind of transformation. Like, we often work with a large enterprise company that, you know, perhaps they have an email team and a web team and a mobile team.

(John at 00:56:37) They're using different data sets or work on different strategies. And, you know, our technology helps break down that silo and essentially, you know, have them work in a different way. And we want to be a part of that and help kind of guide them through that. And, you know, self-serve isn't necessarily the best way to drive transformational change. And so, you know, it's something that we deliberately, you know, kind of decided to do there.

(John at 00:57:00) But, you know, I think it's been a good approach, like you said, that, you know, we can take these learnings we have from so many, you know, hugely successful brands or campaigns they run and, you know, kind of apply those learnings to the folks' business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:16) I've also found, like, some of my best customers have come in. We do, like, a leadership program. And we definitely thought about, like, we could open this up and be self-serve. It'd be pretty easy to do, but—and we played with it a little bit. And then we thought, you know—first of all, our best customers tend to just want the solution to the problem and then come to us and say, look, educate me on this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:41) I'm thinking about doing these three things. Here's some of our options, and we want to pick a competent provider and delegate and, like, let them run with it but be a part of the process. So, you know, that worked out well for our business because, you know, those relationships and knowing what—it keeps us closer to the product, it keeps us closer to the industry and understanding the problem. And it's just a—it's just for me, it was, I guess, it was like a personal thing. I was like, I'd rather own a business that's like this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:09) It made more sense for me. But I did have a technical question for you, kind of semi-technical. Business-slash-technical. I got asked this the other day and I realized I haven't probed and talked to the audience much about it. How do you connect the work your teams are doing and budgets?

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:27) Like, you obviously have several teams of engineers and product managers and designers. And how do you take that budget and, like, allocate it to different projects? Like, what's that process you go through?

(John at 00:58:41) Sure. So one thing that I try to talk about when I talk about budgeting is importantly around the cost for us to make our business—the cost of revenue, the services that we have—so we calculate our margins. With Braze, we try to be a very responsible business. We announced last year that we crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, and we want that to also be responsible business growth, meaning that we're paying very close attention to how much it costs us to provide the services whenever we're working with clients. We sell a deal and we want it to be a fair price that is fair for them, but also one that's very sustainable for us to grow and be a large independent business. So when I think about budgets, the thing that I care most about is just already being responsible with the costs of what is revenue.

(John at 00:59:35) And to that end, we have a couple of different processes in place. It's not perfect, but basically we meet with our financial planning and accounting team on a monthly basis to go over all of our essential costs, make sure that we can understand why costs change, and try to adjust any kind of forecasting that we have there. Really, a lot of our forecasting, our budget for technology, for the cost of revenue side of things—the things that are building our product—comes as a proportion of revenue just as we then make sure that we're keeping in line with a certain margin. And so it's something that we're really kind of targeting on, but we haven't had to do anything where we've had to kind of turn our eye inward of saying, "Hey, this is totally out of whack. We have to figure out how to do this much cheaper." I know that there are a number of technology companies that do things like that. We've been fortunate that we've kind of had that discipline since the beginning, and we've designed it in a good way since the beginning to have been pretty cost effective early on. When it comes to new initiatives, this is something that we just try to forecast on at least a quarterly basis, where we talk with our different heads of different engineering teams around the things that we really are interested in doing.

(John at 01:00:52) And then ultimately that'll come to me, and then I'll make a budgetary decision of how much we want to allocate or if there's things we want to shift around. For example, we decided last year that it would be hugely valuable for us to hire an agile coach, some trusted third party that would come in here and help us be more productive and just be better at execution. And we thought it'd make sense to do a third party, so that way it wasn't incumbent on one new manager or one team to kind of be the agile experts. We had an unbiased party there. And that was something that we needed budget for, and that just essentially came out of, "Okay, well, how do we get that budget? Well, we'll maybe take some headcount budget out of that because we think we'll be more productive from it." So we kind of have those conversations fairly regularly.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:45) That's a smart move. I like that. The agile coach move. How did that work out for you?

(John at 01:01:49) Oh, it's actually fantastic. We have a blog post on it too that I can share with you. But I think that some of the best things that we've done in the engineering organization has been a move to cross-functional teams from formally having just teams split on technology. We used to have a back-end team and a front-end team and all of that, and we kind of moved that as we shifted toward a much more product focus. And then at the same time, we decided to kind of really improve our agile processes.

(John at 01:02:20) We were always using some methodologies of agile. We talked about sprints, and we talked about kind of having the work that people were doing as cards and continuous releasing and those kind of ways that'll help you move fast. But the ceremonies—we did stand-ups, but the ceremonies of the grooming and writing cards well and retrospectives—having someone who helped everyone know what a card looks like and how to write a good one, or know that we should be estimating work. Those types of things just really helped us. We've got answers to questions of, "Hey, how do companies and businesses usually do X?" We would just kind of get those as a matter-of-fact way that we could then bring back to ourselves. So it ended up being a huge success, and something that we also may bring an agile group back in again in the future when this COVID situation is gone, just to see if we can also continue to get more productivity out of the way that we're building our own processes.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:20) And who did you use? Who do you recommend?

(John at 01:03:23) So we went with Eliassen. We did an evaluation of a couple of different firms and came to them. We had a huge document that we created of all the things that we wanted to do, and this goes into that deliverance of our engineering organization. In fact, if you just Google "Braze agile," you can probably find—maybe you'll find the first result there—"How Braze Engineering and Braze Agile Software Development."

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:01) That was recent too. Yeah. The past year.

(John at 01:04:03) Yeah. We just did this blog post a year ago. But, you know, see in there, there's a link to this thing called a big document that detailed all the things we want to do. It's a 13-page document of what we wanted out of our process. And we hired Eliassen in order to help us do it. And it really kind of changed not only our processes but our tooling. We had been using Trello and Asana. We had different teams doing different things. We had a team that was using Jira. And so then we almost just decided, "Okay, we just gotta standardize." We standardized entirely on Jira, and that's been really nice for us. Again, it was good that everyone learned how to write and groom and point and break down and pick up stories, and we all learned to speak the same language. We all use the same interfaces. So it's ultimately all a huge success for us.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:56) Yeah. I might share that with a couple people I was talking with about—this one company, I was actually talking with them a little bit about it, Flywire. They're a payments company, and they had made acquisitions, multiple acquisitions over the course of two years. I think they made three-plus acquisitions. And they were talking about, you know, integrating the different cultures and the companies and the design and engineering teams. And I went and gave a talk with them in Chicago, and what I realized after sharing the best practices and some of the stuff that I've learned or seen in other companies was that what you really need is someone to walk you through it, hold your hand through it and really understand the details and get to know the people and get to know everything. Because a talk, or a framework that you print out or make up or outline—you just really have to have someone go through it. And so I googled that company. At first, I spelled it with an A, like A-L-I-A-S, and then Atlassian came up.

(John at 01:05:59) Oh, nice.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:00) Yeah. Autocorrected. But it's E-L-I-A-S-S-E-N, right? Eliassen Group?

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:07) Okay. Cool. So we'll give a shout-out to them. I always love finding really great products and services and then helping amplify them because that's how we move the market forward, right?

(John at 01:06:18) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:19) Dude, this is awesome. You're gonna go make some lunch with your wife?

(John at 01:06:23) Yeah. Today we actually did a whole meal planning spreadsheet because after the first three or four days, we just realized that it was too haphazard, and we had to keep making decisions. And when you have to make a decision on the spot of "What are we doing for lunch today?" you end up being like, "Uh, peanut butter sandwich." You just basically don't plan things out. "What do we do for dinner?" "I don't know. Spaghetti." And so fortunately, we planned everything out and have kind of a good menu for us to do today. It's supposed to be chicken pot pie.

(John at 01:06:55) So it should actually be kind of—it's also good too. You gotta block off time in your calendar for lunch. I learned that a week in when I booked myself too much. On days that I can't cook, those become roast beef sandwich days, and then everything else becomes an actual—I get to cook something. So, you know, good to go. Good to go do that soon.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:17) That's fun. Yeah. We have a menu, a chalkboard that's fancy looking, and we just outlined the menu on it. We just outlined dinner, though. We haven't gotten to three times a day. But I make all my meals. So my breakfast is pretty standard. It's omelet, wheat toast, and then just jam, no sugar added to it, just straight crushed strawberries or whatever it happens to be, which is actually really hard to find. Most of the jam, they put 80 things in it. So, that and then lunch, I usually do some chicken or some tuna or something or another leftover-type stuff. And then usually for dinner, we do a pretty cool dinner. So we focus kind of around the dinners. And the chalkboard thing really helps because it allows us to go to the grocery store, be really clear about what we're getting, and then you don't have to think about it at all. It's like, "Oh, tonight's, you know, chicken sandwiches night," which is actually—

(John at 01:08:17) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:18) It's a pretty bland name, but we make some baller chicken sandwiches.

(John at 01:08:23) Oh, yeah? Yeah, man. You gotta get your recipe sent over to me. We are set for two weeks, but then we'll go to the grocery store in mid-April. So need to set something out.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:36) Well, yeah. Do you post your stuff on Instagram or anything?

(John at 01:08:40) You know, I'm unfortunately not a very big social media guy. I want to get back into it, but I kind of stopped, you know. I even removed them off my phone, different kind of spaces, just in terms of—I think that having something that can wildly swing my mood in my pocket, you know, it's just kind of challenging. I heard it kind of put on one of those podcasts. It was a thing where someone was like, "You ever been at a restaurant and you're with your friend and they just go to the restroom or something and excuse themselves from the table, and you're bored, so you just pull your phone out and you click on Instagram and you see something that immediately makes you jealous or upset? And it's like, you know, that is an emotion that you may probably should try to avoid that kind of big swing, especially in an arbitrary part of your day." And I was like, "You know what? I think that's right." With me, Instagram—I look at FOMO as something where I feel like people are on vacation. I'm missing out. Can't I do that? It looks so fun. But it's more of just there is kind of an emotion of some amount of comparison or just something where you kind of see it and you're just like, "Why am I seeing this? And, you know, it's making me just feel a little different even if it's hard to qualify."

(John at 01:10:00) So I just kind of push that away. But with everyone being apart, I think that it can be a way to connect with folks, and I think social media has been positive in this time. So I think I may kind of, you know, crawl back into it a little bit here.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:15) I found that—100% agree with you. And my social media usage is very low. And the way I handle it is the same way I handle reading news headlines, as I schedule a 15-minute block. And I'll do that. And then I'm very particular about using the reporting and the feed clarifications, and I pretty much only use—I try to do it with a purpose. I use literally—the only thing I'm using Facebook for is tracking that workout group because I just want to see people's success and failures and answer questions. Sometimes I like to go in there just with the intention of just motivating the last five people that posted. Right? That's a positive way to use it. Right? I'm going in there to find some people to help, motivate them just for the first five, ten minutes. And then on Instagram, I noticed if you use the close friends feature and you don't follow junk accounts and stuff, so I actually had remade my account. And then it's just pretty much just family and people I know and past guests and stuff. Yeah. And then usually it's pictures of their kids. And every once in a while, you can tell the algorithm on Facebook tries to creep back in. You know? So, but even I follow guitar stuff and I will get that little hint of, "Man, look how good that person is. That's—that'll take me—I'm so far away from that." And it will have a little hint of, you know, "I could be that, but that's not my focus right now." Because I don't know if I told you earlier, but I've played guitar for five years now, five or six years.

(John at 01:11:49) Yeah. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:50) And I'd say I'm intermediate. I'm pretty intermediate. I play a lot of Ed Sheeran, John Mayer-type stuff. Lot of acoustic and then a little bit of blues. So I just put on backing tracks and jam, you know? So that's a lot of fun for me.

(John at 01:12:06) That's a great way to get better. Yeah. It's fun. I mean, when I was removing the things from my phone, I would replace every icon with a Kindle icon to try to remind myself that that's the thing I should be doing if I'm bored on my phone and want to waste time. And so I had at one point, I had four Kindle icons on my home screen because I replaced Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all with Kindles, and then I had my other one. So we're gonna just try to also encourage better behaviors. I haven't done that as much as I want to, but there's a whole bunch of things around my phone that I want to try to do to make myself be a little more thoughtful. Notifications is one, so I've kind of tuned that down. But I want to build a lock screen for my Android phone that when I unlock my phone, what it says is, "What are you doing right now?" And then it's like, "Email" or "Respond to a message" or "Other," and I gotta tap general things. And then it just prompts me and says, "Is this the most important thing you should be doing right now?" And they just make me basically have to be like, "Yes, I'm onto my phone." Because I think if you just kind of get a little bit of pushback against that habit, you know, that dopamine hit or whatever, you know, it may hopefully help me a little bit. I don't know. Who knows? But it's something that I thought could be, you know—I think—

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:28) You're on track.

(John at 01:13:29) I think that that could be something that, like, you know, could lean me a little bit more off of, you know, just kind of looking at it even though I know there's nothing there. Or, hey, I just looked at it ten minutes ago. Why am I looking at it again? So, you know, there's stuff like that, but I want to try to do the distance a little bit on the phone.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:45) I promise you, from my subjective experience, although that's not how objective reality always works, but from my experience, when I did this about a month or two ago, then turning the notifications off, I can—well, actually, it's very real because I look at it in the screen time and my number of pickups, my number of pickups down more than two-thirds down just from turning notifications off. Because you're training yourself every time to look at the notification. Every time it pops up on your screen, it just says do not disturb. But every single time you're caught, that is training you every single day that that screen lights up and there's notification. It's just training you to look. And if you disable that feature, then you're not getting the reinforcement training to constantly look and you'll actually pick up your phone less.

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:35) And for me, it's like, after I got over dealing with how it works with my personal relationship with my wife and stuff for always living with do not disturb on and having all notifications disabled, I figured out how to make her stuff still come through when I want it to.

(John at 01:14:54) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:54) Yeah. I think—

(John at 01:14:55) I mean, you've got the selective overrides. But I think you're very right about that because, um, you know, I have my phone just on vibrate. But if I feel it vibrate in my pocket or I hear it vibrate on the table, the amount of willpower it takes to check it later is tremendous. In fact, even last night as I was going to sleep, my phone vibrated on my nightstand. And I've gotten a little bit better about not checking it right, you know, if I'm trying to fall asleep and it goes off.

(John at 01:15:28) But, you know, it's very difficult because you just kind of have this burning or itching feeling toward, like, oh, what's going on? You know? How hard is it to binge watch something with a phone? Right? Like, you're watching episode six of Tiger King, and then your phone vibrates, and then you're like, alright, I'm gonna go look at my phone. Right? So it definitely has a lot of power over you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:52) It gets out of control too because I get so frustrated when—the only notifications that come through on my phone are text messages from preferred contacts. And when I put do not disturb on, I don't get those. I don't even get those then. But when I don't have do not disturb on, it's just those. All other app notifications are off.

(Joel Beasley at 01:16:11) And when it's on, I'll notice, like, I'll be watching something on Netflix. Like, I watched a comedy special the other day to get happy, which sounds weird. I watched it to get happy. But I was getting text from my wife about the kids, and in the middle of Dave Chappelle's special, I'm like, go away. Like, stop. Like, I'm trying to watch this Netflix special, thinking I lived probably the past five years of my life with hundreds of notifications a day interrupting every single thing I did. And I'll tell you what, it definitely gives you some peace of mind turning that stuff off.

(John at 01:16:48) Yeah. Great. Well, Joel, thanks so much for having me on the podcast and everything. I'm going to make sure we send you some Braze swag. And, yeah, I'm gonna look into that workout thing that you were mentioning to me. So I'll go over that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:02) Jeremy Ethier. I don't know if that's how you say his name.

(John at 01:17:05) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:05) But, yeah, I'm hungry too, man. So I'm like, yes. But, yeah, let's stay in touch. And then after this whole thing blows over, you know, I'm in New York City several times a year. You seem like a really cool guy to hang out with, um, grab some tea or coffee or something. So next time all this is taken care of and we're all socially together, I'll hit you up and we can get together and hang out.

(John at 01:17:26) Perfect. I'd love that. Thanks so much.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:28) Alright. Have a great day, John.

(John at 01:17:30) Take care.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:33) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.