Desi McAdam CTO of Nanno

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, we are talking to Desi McAdam, the CTO of Nanno, and we discussed the importance of staying lean during the early stages of product development, managing the co-founder relationship, and the dangers of building a product too fast. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. When Jake, when he saw that you were coming on the show, he's like, you gotta check out her bio.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) She's a female Joel. And I'm like, what? You've been programming for like seventeen years and you primarily are programming in Ruby. And the way your bio was written, we were like, oh man, Desi's gonna be the most fantastic guest ever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) So the pressure's super high, you know.

(Desi McAdam at 00:01:01) Well, you know, we'll see how it goes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:05) Yeah.

(Desi McAdam at 00:01:06) You guys can be the determiners of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:08) So what are you working on now? I'm really excited to hear about it.

(Desi McAdam at 00:01:11) So right now, I am working on my own startup called Nanno. So it's myself and Liz Oertle. She's the CEO. And then we have two other team members, Amanda and Anthony. And it is basically on-demand childcare.

(Desi McAdam at 00:01:27) So think Lyft for childcare.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:30) Oh, I like how you use Lyft, right? Because Uber is overused. That's real smart. Desi, you were the female Joel. I'm loving you.

(Desi McAdam at 00:01:38) Well, and, you know, Uber, I'm kind of mad at Uber right now, so I don't compare myself to Uber at all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:44) Let's talk about that. We did some relationship stuff here. What did they — did they not show up? Or like, what happened with Uber?

(Desi McAdam at 00:01:51) Oh, no. I mean, it's just all the stuff that's happened with them for like the last — well, their entire existence — for how they treat their female engineers or just their engineers in general, but especially their female engineers. And then, you know, just Travis, man. Like, I just decided I — I had always been an Uber user from like the very early days. Like, I don't even remember the first time I used it, but I used it in San Francisco, and it was a long time ago.

(Desi McAdam at 00:02:21) And I used Uber, and I stayed true and loyal. And then, you know, all the different articles started coming out about the various unethical things they were doing. And then, you know, the female engineer who posted her recap of her time there was just enough for me to be like, okay, I'm out. And I don't compare us to them ever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:46) Well, I think it's smart, period, just because it's an overused comparison.

(Desi McAdam at 00:02:51) Yeah. For sure. It definitely is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:53) Yeah. So like if you're a capitalist or some sort of investor and you hear Uber, Uber every day. We're Uber. We're Uber. We're Uber. You know, it's like crazy. Now I heard — I have limited experience with the politics of the C-level type stuff at Uber or engineering or anything like that, but what I have heard is Gary Vee talks about Travis

(Desi McAdam at 00:03:16) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:17) in some of his videos and stuff like that. And then I did see some articles kind of come across and it looked as if though, at first, Uber was a side project and then farther down the road, now they were like backing down as CEO and then that there was some drama there. So like, that's literally as much as it affected or came into my view. So I didn't even know what it was about.

(Desi McAdam at 00:03:39) Yeah. I mean, there were some other things too. There's definitely a whole lot of drama around all of that. Yeah. And I, you know, I didn't try to stay up on it too much.

(Desi McAdam at 00:03:47) But when the female engineer posted her post, I did read hers, and that was enough for me. Like, that was enough for me to say, okay, you know, the least I can do is support the other women in the industry. And if there's a company that's mistreating them, then I'm not gonna give them my business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:07) Yeah. I'm the same way, right? Like, it's all about the people. It's all about the team. The only reason the company exists is because of the people in the team. The only way it grows and, you know, thrives or survives is because of the group of humans behind it. So you gotta be, you know, responsible to your people for the culture and the environment, and that's like the most important thing because you have to have a good place to work. Otherwise, you're not gonna get good people.

(Desi McAdam at 00:04:30) Well, yeah. I mean, yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:33) Yeah. So I'm loving Nanno, and here's why. I have a five-month-old little girl.

(Desi McAdam at 00:04:39) Oh, congratulations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:40) I am so pumped. Her name is Ari.

(Desi McAdam at 00:04:43) Ari? My daughter's name's Aria.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:45) No. Well, her legal name's Aria, but we call her Ari. I promise you. Yeah. We, because I'm big into music, and we were looking for a name that I liked that, you know, is kinda cool. And then Aria came up, and my wife and I looked at each other. We're like, yes.

(Desi McAdam at 00:05:00) Yeah. You and I are so in tune. My oldest girl's name is Cadence, and my youngest girl's name is Aria.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:07) Perfect. I get you right now, by the way. Like, I get it.

(Desi McAdam at 00:05:10) That's my husband's doings, but, you know, I'm totally in support of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:14) We didn't come up with our middle name. We, my brother-in-law, he is a music producer. And so he's really good because he writes lyrics and like wins Grammys and all this crazy stuff. So we said we really like the name Aria, but we could not find the middle name, right? So we send him a text and he comes back, he's like Aria Elizabeth. And I'm like, thank you! Like, I love that. Yeah. I was like, that sounds good, you know?

(Desi McAdam at 00:05:37) Ours is Aria Lucia.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:40) Aria Lucia. See, that works too.

(Desi McAdam at 00:05:42) Yep. And the funny thing is is that there's actually a famous opera called Lucia. It's an Italian opera. And we spell it exactly the same, but we say it Lucia.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:54) Nice. Yeah. For some reason, when I'm telling people her name, I wanna default to Ari. I don't know why, but like, in public, like, last night we were at dinner and the people at the table next to us were looking at her and they were giggling, like she was giggling at them and doing her little baby thing, right? And they're like, oh, what's her name? And I'm like, Ari. And my wife's like, Aria. I'm like, it works.

(Desi McAdam at 00:06:16) Yes. Yeah. We call Aria Aria, but I have a feeling that as she gets older, she'll probably have friends that nickname her Ari.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:25) So now do you — so Nanno

(Desi McAdam at 00:06:28) Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:29) You're Lyft on-demand babysitters, right? And did this come about because of Aria or because of Cadence?

(Desi McAdam at 00:06:36) Mostly Aria, actually. So about — well, she's three now. So about three years ago, I was working at a company called Thoughtbot,

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:49) Oh, I know Thoughtbot.

(Desi McAdam at 00:06:51) Okay. Cool. Doing the — I was director of development for the Denver office there. And so I went on a maternity leave, had Aria, came back. And so my oldest daughter is actually my stepdaughter, so I didn't go through infancy with her. I met her when she was 18 months old. So this was the first time I'd really experienced, you know, the early years of a child. And Aria had a lot of ear infections and was missing, you know, she missed a lot of school and that sort of stuff. And it was very frustrating because it's really hard to find someone at, you know, seven-thirty in the morning on a Wednesday to come and watch your kid, you know, because she woke up with a fever or whatever and, you know, otherwise is relatively fine other than she has a mild fever and can't go to school because they have these rules.

(Desi McAdam at 00:07:44) So it was something that I was kind of running into a lot. It was frustrating because, you know, I was doing a lot of sales and a lot of biz dev type stuff and also an advisor for a lot of projects, and it's very hard when your day is full of a lot of different, you know, meetings that you gotta go to to shift all of that. So like, you look at your calendar and you're like, oh my god, what am I gonna do? I gotta move eight meetings, and I have the rest of the week filled, and it took me a month to get this particular meeting.

(Desi McAdam at 00:08:14) And so it's just very frustrating. So something that I experienced on a relatively regular basis. So fast forward to, I don't know, somewhere around May 2016. I met a neighbor of mine. So we walked to school. My daughters, both my daughters went to a private school right down the street from us. So I was walking the girls to school and ran into another neighbor whose kids also went to our school, introduced myself, met her, that sort of thing — that was Liz. So then Liz and I ran into each other again on a Slack channel called Women Who Startup. And she was

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:58) Oh, cool.

(Desi McAdam at 00:08:58) She was like, hey, so I have this idea of this thing that I wanna build, and I know I'm gonna need some software. So I was wondering if, you know, you'd maybe meet with me and talk to me about what that might look like. So, of course, I said yes. And we met at a coffee shop not too far from the house. And we were sitting there, and we were kind of talking about Liz's idea, which has since been built by some other people, so it's great that it has been, was a co-working space that, you know, was kind of geared around working parents with like on-site childcare and that sort of thing.

(Desi McAdam at 00:09:29) And so we were talking about that. And in the context of that, we were sort of going back and forth about, well, would you have someone there all the time? Would that make sense? You know? And we were like, you know, something like Lyft for childcare, like, where you just kind of go on your phone and you tell someone, meet me at this co-working space. You know, there's a space you can use to watch the child. And we're like, wait. This has to exist, right? And so both of us spent a fair amount of time kind of Googling around that day to figure out if it did exist and it didn't.

(Desi McAdam at 00:10:02) You know, there were lots of — we have competitors in the market that are doing things differently, but nothing kind of fit what we were originally thinking. And I think I wanna say it was like a week or maybe two weeks later we were incorporated and had formed the business. And we were working on, you know, we were ideating and, you know, sketching and basically starting to build.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:26) So now you have it.

(Desi McAdam at 00:10:27) Now we have it. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:28) It's out in the market. People are using it. Super exciting.

(Desi McAdam at 00:10:31) Yeah. It is super exciting. It's also crazy because there's so much stuff that you don't know. So like, I spent most of my career building other people's ideas. So helping them take their idea from, you know, the idea phase to a built product.

(Desi McAdam at 00:10:49) But a lot of times, that was about where I ended, you know. So I might help with, you know, lifecycle stuff as far as, you know, infrastructure and things like that, but I never really got into a lot of the marketing or the growth hacking or any of that sort of stuff. So now that's the part that I'm like, oh, there's all these things that I didn't really know and am learning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:15) So did Liz have that experience though?

(Desi McAdam at 00:11:17) No. Neither one of us did. So Liz is actually a lawyer by trade, and she's worked primarily with startups her whole — you know, most of her career. But

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:27) Mhmm.

(Desi McAdam at 00:11:27) you know, she also didn't have any sort of marketing background or growth hacking background. So it's been a learning curve for us. So we have really good product-market fit. You know, like, we have users who use it, and we've, you know, we've done a few iterations on things based on them using it in ways that we didn't expect them to, which is great because that's what you're supposed to do with product. But then we're kind of in this new stage of, okay, now we have to build traction. And how do we do that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:58) So what cities are you open in? Just yours?

(Desi McAdam at 00:12:00) No. So right now, we're in Denver, but we're working on building out our caregiver base in New York, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Austin.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:08) How are you picking these cities?

(Desi McAdam at 00:12:11) So part of it is where we have potential partnerships. So for instance, my husband's company is called Sweetness, and they are basically a company that allows you to book high-end suites in places like Vegas and New York. So we have a partnership with them so that they actually have a lot of families that book. It's really cool. So we have a partnership with them to provide childcare through them.

(Desi McAdam at 00:12:37) And in those cities, that was a motivator for us to go ahead and start opening in those markets because then we have sort of a ready-built demand side of our marketplace. So we could go ahead and justify getting the supply. And then Austin's just because Austin is cool and it's a, you know, it's a startup haven kind of place, and it just is a good fit for us. And we also already have lots of parents that are demanding the service there.

(Desi McAdam at 00:13:05) So we're looking at Austin and building out the caregiver base there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:10) Have you done any business development with like the big brands that people know and trust, like the Parenthood or like, you know, the twenty-year-old brands that everyone knows their logo that are in the parent-child space?

(Desi McAdam at 00:13:22) We haven't done a lot of that sort of stuff. We're just now starting to kind of understand affiliate marketing, which is where I think that would have fallen. We're toying with PR and kind of learning how to, you know, how to utilize PR that we're getting, and we're working on marketing funnels. So making sure that when we do have people who come to our site and express an interest, we don't just sort of abandon them. We're an invitation-only system, which is a little bit of a barrier to entry, and there's reasons for that, primarily safety.

(Desi McAdam at 00:13:52) And so we've struggled a little bit with how to have an invitation-only system that we can grow fast enough because it's a little bit of an impediment to traction for obvious reasons.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:03) Yeah. So you actually went — it's invite on the caregiver side?

(Desi McAdam at 00:14:07) It's invite on both sides.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:09) Oh, it's invite on both sides?

(Desi McAdam at 00:14:10) Yep. Got it. Because, I mean, we're sending caregivers to people's houses. So, I mean, we need to make sure that both sides are at least vetted to some degree on the parent side, and then we do a lot of vetting on the caregiver side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:24) That is true. So I've actually thought about this, right? Because how could you not if you're a creative person and you have the skills to make technology, right?

(Desi McAdam at 00:14:31) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:31) So when I thought about this, the first thing — you go through all the standard issues like your type of safety, all these roadblocks pop up, and you kinda decide to go through and problem solve them and think about them. And one of the things that I thought about that would solve some problems is like, now that we have friends that have kids as well around the same age group, because they have to be around the same age group as one of your litter, right?

(Desi McAdam at 00:14:58) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:58) For it to mesh for you to go on that park play date. I was like, the short of it was the conclusion that I came into if I were to do it would be that it would be like a private network between us and the friends, and we would have some sort of credit system where we exchange time, right? It's not on-demand and it wouldn't be for the use case that you were specifically saying, right, like wake up Wednesday morning. But it would be more of like a — give me — let's exchange date nights, right?

(Desi McAdam at 00:15:33) Yep. So bartering time essentially.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:36) Yeah. So if we're on this network and there's four families in this network, if I can watch their kids and I get credit on the network and they're like—I don't know. That was my sort of paper napkin sketch of how I would begin to try to solve it, right?

(Desi McAdam at 00:15:53) Well, so you're not too far off from what we did as well. So partly what we said was, okay, how do we normally solve this in our everyday life? Well, you text your friend, Liz, and you say, "Hey, Liz. Do you know anybody who might be able to watch Aria today?"

(Desi McAdam at 00:16:05) And she texts you back, "Well, I got this one person. Maybe you can try texting her." And so you go through this whole drama of texting this person and that person, and it's just a hassle. So we said if we can mimic that behavior and take away the hassle of it for parents, that would be the ideal situation.

(Desi McAdam at 00:16:24) So that's what we tried to mimic, and we have this concept of a network within our app. So there's varying degrees of your network. So there's your favorites, like your normal go-to caregivers, right? Everybody has a few that they always call first.

(Desi McAdam at 00:16:39) So you put those in your favorites, and then there are sort of groups that you're a part of that you kind of inherently trust. So, like, my kids' school—you know, I tend to trust the parents in that school. We're kind of all—we have similar mindsets, that sort of thing. I trust the teachers that come from that school, and that's another thing is that we actually target a lot of—well, our target audience for caregivers are people that we feel are already qualified to work with children, so teachers is one of those. So I trust the teachers from my school, and I trust my friends, you know, and their judgment on their caregivers.

(Desi McAdam at 00:17:14) So you can kind of build up this network of people, and then we will broadcast to those ahead of anybody else. So we'll go to your favorites first and give them an opportunity to pick it up. And then we'll go to your friends' caregivers first and give them an opportunity to pick it up. And then we go to your organizations, and then finally out to a broader network. And you can control that on a job-by-job basis.

(Desi McAdam at 00:17:35) So if you're working from home, you're probably okay with it going to a broader network, right? But if you're—you know, maybe it's an overnight—then you only want it to go to your favorites.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:44) Right.

(Desi McAdam at 00:17:45) So we let parents sort of decide that on a case-by-case basis. So it's not too dissimilar from what you're saying, with the exception that it's not necessarily a network of your friends bartering each other's time, but more a network of your friends and their contributions to the network of caregivers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:05) No, that's amazing. So you have—there's four or five people right now there? Because I wrote down Amanda and Anthony because I was curious what they did.

(Desi McAdam at 00:18:13) Yeah. There's four of us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:14) Oh, I understand. So yes. So keep going. I want to know what kind of—what everyone does, like, the overview.

(Desi McAdam at 00:18:19) Well, so Anthony and I are primarily development. I've been very fortunate to have him with me since pretty early on. He and I worked together at Thoughtbot previously. And then Liz is our CEO, and she's a lawyer by trade and has amazing writing skills because she also used to be a copy editor. So she does all the business stuff, all the legal stuff, and she's done primarily our marketing stuff.

(Desi McAdam at 00:18:43) And Amanda is also marketing, does a lot of social media stuff, public relations, that kind of thing. And then I am doing primarily operations, so making sure that, you know, when jobs are getting booked that the caregivers are showing up. If someone doesn't show up, I make sure that someone new gets there to make sure the parents are taken care of. So I do a lot of the operation stuff, and then Amanda helps me with a lot of the operation stuff as far as the caregiver side of things go. So it's kind of split.

(Desi McAdam at 00:19:11) I'm sort of COO-CTO, and Liz is sort of CEO-CMO. And then Amanda and Anthony basically just support everything that we need them to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:22) Yeah. And then so right now, are you doing—is the business running off of its cash flow, or are you still dependent on investor capital?

(Desi McAdam at 00:19:29) So we've only taken—we've taken a small amount of investment capital, but it's been primarily bootstrapped to this point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:37) No, that's good. I like staying lean and figuring out the business before, you know, you really go to scale it, right?

(Desi McAdam at 00:19:44) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:44) That's it, because that's how you retain the most of your baby, right?

(Desi McAdam at 00:19:48) Yes, exactly. You keep the most of your equity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:50) So I'm curious—I've been thinking a lot lately about the importance of generating cash as a startup, right? Because, and this is not aimed at you, this is aimed at the amount of people that reach out to me and ask me questions because of the show.

(Desi McAdam at 00:20:06) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:06) And a lot of people are like, "Oh yeah, how do I raise money? How do I get the next round?" And I'm starting to see that it's a bigger thing than I thought it was. So now I'm responding to them and thinking more about it and saying, you know, take half of your—if you go pull, you know, $300,000 from some VC to make a product, that's $300,000—you're losing. What you should do is you should make a product that's like $100,000 and spend $200,000 on sales.

(Desi McAdam at 00:20:30) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:31) Go get your company cash. That way you can survive. The idea is not to get to the next round. The idea is to do whatever—you're taking in whatever round—to be able to become independent from that specific round.

(Desi McAdam at 00:20:42) Yeah. Exactly. And I have to give Liz credit. She's really, really good at keeping us in check with that and is good at, you know, sort of gauging when we should be looking at taking money and when we shouldn't be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:54) And I'm sure that as you apply more focus, you get better at whatever you're focusing on, right?

(Desi McAdam at 00:21:00) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:00) That's a first principle-type deal. So I'm imagining that there's some sort of audience. There's some range or neighborhood or lifestyle. Like, there's some—there's an audience. Maybe if they make $350,000 a year or whatever, and they have this, and they have two to three kids between these ages, that they have this very specific need that they're willing to put more cash out or do more business with than, let's say, any other segment, right?

(Desi McAdam at 00:21:29) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:30) And then by identifying that segment and focusing on delivering on that need—because right now, what you explained to me was you had some—as a COO-type role, you had a lot of air traffic controlling. So when I saw that, my mind said, okay, that's not a problem, right?

(Desi McAdam at 00:21:50) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:50) That's not necessarily—that does not mean, like—people always think, "Oh, there's manual stuff involved," or "If you have to have teams involved, you're not going to make money." I'm like, no. Stop saying that. What it is is you just have to adjust your approach and go look at the models that successfully exist that have the human interaction, and then you see what things you can apply from that model to your model, like maybe a higher-end service.

(Desi McAdam at 00:22:17) Right. So, well, what we try to do is figure out—we always try to figure out what does it look like before we automate it. And with regard to operations, there is a little bit of human interaction, and I don't know if we'll ever be able to get completely away from that. You know, everybody still has customer support, and Lyft drivers sometimes don't show up. And the app is not always great at helping you with that.

(Desi McAdam at 00:22:42) In fact, I got stranded in New Jersey at the airport because a Lyft driver said on the app that he picked me up, but he hadn't, and then left the airport. And the Lyft app thought I was in the car, and so I couldn't get a new Lyft. And so, like, there are things that—things go wrong, right? So you're always going to need some humans to be involved and make sure that things are going as smoothly as possible.

(Desi McAdam at 00:23:07) But for instance, we opened up the—in the very beginning, we only allowed you to book within forty-eight hours. You know, we were thinking this was very much a last-minute type market. But then what we started seeing was that we had parents who wanted to book further out, and so we opened that up. And then as part of that, I started realizing, "Oh, well, this caregiver booked this job three weeks ago. They engaged on this job three weeks ago. I should probably text them and make sure that they remember that they're booked on that job." And then it's like, okay, there's a story for that. We need to—you know, this is something I'm doing manually at the moment, but I can build the code to do that. And so that was how we kind of came about that.

(Desi McAdam at 00:23:49) And that's sort of how we try to approach everything—we see what is it that we're having to do manually and then figure out how to automate that into the system.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:00) Right. And that's why you have seventeen years of experience and know that you have to do that. It's not a question of, "Should we do this?" You just know that this is how you'd go about developing a product that's stable, right?

(Desi McAdam at 00:24:09) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:09) That's why I like you.

(Desi McAdam at 00:24:11) Well, thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:12) I've got some CTO questions.

(Desi McAdam at 00:24:14) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:16) So what is the biggest challenge from a CTO perspective that you faced in this business that you're doing, Nanno?

(Desi McAdam at 00:24:28) So I think the fact that we have development chops on the team and have had development chops on the team from the beginning is that we sometimes do build stuff too fast because it's easy, right? So for us to just tackle whatever the thing is with development. And so I think sometimes it's—probably the biggest challenge for us is not building stuff and making sure that we don't jump to that solution too quick. That's been the hardest thing for us thus far.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:04) I feel you right there, because when you have that skill, it's like a woodworker—is like, "Oh, I need a chair," you just go right into his facility, right into his garage. Boom. Chair. Right?

(Desi McAdam at 00:25:14) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:15) It's a little bit scary because other people don't have that capability. And so they have to—they go through this different thought process of, "I think I need a chair. I really need a chair."

(Desi McAdam at 00:25:24) Maybe I don't need a chair. What kind do I need? Who—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:27) Who should be building my chair? What should the features— And we're just like, "Nope. Chair." Like, squirrel.

(Desi McAdam at 00:25:33) Exactly. So that's probably been the biggest challenge thus far with all of this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:40) How about—this is the first time you're a co-founder?

(Desi McAdam at 00:25:43) Yes. Yes, yes. This is my first time as a founder.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:46) How is that relationship with you and Liz? It's a relationship. Humans have relationships. There's ups. There's downs. How long did it take for you both to kind of find your balance? Couple months? A year?

(Desi McAdam at 00:25:58) You know, I don't know the exact timing, really. We didn't know each other before we started the business, really. And we've heard—we've gotten feedback that, you know, investors are always wary of founders who didn't know each other, who don't have a long relationship. But I think it's been a benefit for us that we didn't know each other because we've had to learn how to communicate and also have had to over-communicate in order to make sure that we could do this thing together. So we're basically in a relationship.

(Desi McAdam at 00:26:32) We're sort of married, right? We spend a large majority of our time together. We have to make decisions together all the time. And Nanno was essentially our child, so we're raising a child together. You know, we have to make decisions about, you know, what direction to take its education. There's all sorts of things that we're trying to sort out between the two of us, and that requires that we sort out our values together. And so it's been a really interesting journey for the two of us, but I think we have done extraordinarily well at making sure that we are compromising when we need to, not compromising when we shouldn't. So, you know, really standing up for what we think when we should, and, you know, just talking to each other constantly in order to make sure that we are on the same page and able to keep this thing going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:26) Yeah. You've mentioned a really good point that I found a lot of individuals with success bring up, and it's this over-communication and then values, of course. When you take that distance of conversation—like, you have a conversation, "We're going to do this," and you walk away—the longer that distance is, the higher the exponential chance for error and confusion.

(Desi McAdam at 00:27:47) Yes. Yes. And recovering from that too is a very important part of it. So being able to step back and say, "Okay, here are the ways that we failed at our communication. Let's address that." And then also, "Here's the thing that we miscommunicated about. Let's address that." And then now, "What are we going to do in the future so that this doesn't happen again?" So it's all about communication.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:11) Oh, I love it. Are you a fan of Elon Musk?

(Desi McAdam at 00:28:14) I am.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:15) Oh, you excited? I was so pumped when those dual rockets—when those land stages landed. I was like—it's like—

(Desi McAdam at 00:28:20) It was about time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:20) Yes, right? I was like, please, not another cycle of this. I need this to work so that I have space travel as a common thing in my lifetime.

(Desi McAdam at 00:28:33) Right, right. I probably won't ever get to do it, but that's fine. Just the fact that it exists, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:39) Right. Did you get a chance to buy a flamethrower?

(Desi McAdam at 00:28:42) No. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:43) Me neither.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:44) He posted a follow-up on Twitter. He's like, "Uh, many governments are saying that they will not allow shipping in because of the word 'flamethrower.'" So he came up with some other name for it, which was hilarious. But yeah, I thought that was a real smart PR marketing push that he did with that. Cool. So, let's say that he calls you up or texts you, right? And he says, you know, "Send a babysitter over," right? He needs one, someone to watch the kid. You decide to take it because you see the request come through and you want to go meet Elon Musk. He gets there, fantastic. But he's got something special. Elon Musk has a time machine. You can jump into it. Actually, he's holding a flamethrower and he's requiring you to go into it. And you get to go back ten years—ten years ago—and talk to your specific self, give yourself a piece of advice. You don't have to worry about time travel issues or things messing up or anything like that. Just give yourself some advice. What would you say to yourself ten years ago?

(Desi McAdam at 00:29:40) I think I would just tell myself to keep doing what you're doing. Continue to be confident. You'll get where you want to go eventually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:50) Oh, I love it. Desi, that was really well done. Were you prepared for that?

(Desi McAdam at 00:29:55) No. Not at all. In fact, I was a little bit terrified when you started going on this path of time machine. I was like, "Oh no. Do I gotta totally start talking about time paradoxes? What the hell?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:09) I love where your mind is at. Thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us.

(Desi McAdam at 00:30:14) Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's been a joy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:16) Smooth talker. You're definitely someone to watch out for.

(Desi McAdam at 00:30:20) Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:28) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:33) I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.