Doug Woodrow CTO Knightspeed Moving

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, I talked to Doug Woodrow, absolutely fantastic guest. He's early in his CTO career, but he's saying and doing all the right things. He is absolutely someone to watch out for. He is the CTO of Knightspeed Moving, and they're developing software and changing the moving game. We talk about the pain of gaining experience, machine learning, billionaires, Musk, Bezos, and Branson, and even KFC. This episode is finger lickin' good right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. Alright, so you were talking about the blended role now that's kind of cropping up between CEO and CTO. And that is something that I've experienced too, because, you know, twenty years ago, CTO was super technical.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:59) He was just the quiet tech guy, and that was it. You know, just make the computers work, and the CEO was, you know, mister personality man. But what you're seeing is you're seeing that gap slowly bridge. And one of the things that's driving that is the fact that the technology is moving so fast, and you have to have very detailed knowledge of the technology in order to even make the business decisions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) And if you're constantly communicating that to the CEO, right, at some point, it becomes a better use of time just for the CTO to be making the technology business decisions. Right? Or at least that's where it seems like that's the extreme. That's the extreme of where it's going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:40) So, yeah, I think that the technology is driving that. Like, I was having this conversation the other day about Facebook advertising.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:01:51) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:51) And the developers know what's going on before the marketing people do.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:01:54) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:55) So the marketing people are always asking me, like, what do we do? What do we do? Because that information hits the API before Facebook's marketing department even gets it out the door.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:02:03) Right. Yep. And, you know, the interesting thing is, I mean, we look at the growth of programming and the growth of software engineering as a whole and the needs that we really are going to require for the next thirty years, and it's hard not to be a technical person now, I think. You know, I think it's actually more work to go out of your way and try not to be technical than it is to just learn. You see a lot of marketers now that are incredibly talented from a technical perspective in some senses, whereas ten years ago, they were saying things like, you know, I want this taken over to my programmers or whatever.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:02:45) And I think that's exciting, and I agree with you that the growth of this job, the CTO, is huge. It's definitely become like this really involved role where, you know, like you said, there's one side business and then another side technical. And, yeah, the technology is moving so quick, and I see that on a day to day within, sorry, a Kelowna moving company called Knightspeed Moving. We started back in 2012, and now we're finally getting to the point where we need software and logistics in order to fuel the business moving forward.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:03:25) And it's funny how things from the technical world, computer science and programming, all those types of things, integrate so closely with the business and how they drive the business forward and making decisions. And it's strange how well they line up with each other, because I find a lot of times, like, I'll use—I'm trying to think of a good example here, but using technical skills to solve non-technical problems. So I find myself modeling real world problems in my head as code and then using them in real life, you know, like going out and networking or something. I guess networking is a great example. You know, you got networking on computers, but on the other side, you got networking within human beings and things like that.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:04:14) And it's just so funny how the business world and the tech world line up so closely. So, yeah, I think the CTO is becoming a much bigger role and a much more important role. I would say that they're equally as important as the CEO, maybe more important if they're a very technical company. But it's an exciting time to be a CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:35) Yeah. I've seen some of the more popular tech people when they're starting these companies. I've seen it a handful of times. They'll actually wear the label CTO and act as the CEO.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:04:47) Yep. Yep. Because I think it's glamorous in some sense of the word. Right? I think we look at—I think one of the movies that really spawned this in a big turning point was the movie The Social Network.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:05:02) Even though, you know, the acting was great, but some of the details definitely—I'm sure they blew it out of proportion to kind of get the Hollywood effect going. But I think, you know, after that, everyone wanted to build their own social network, and everyone wanted to be a technical person. Everyone wanted to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. And, you know, it's becoming more and more glamorous every day because I think being in technology calls to this inner person that everybody kind of has in them, this inner pioneer, that's really excited and able to do anything without any rules and limits. And I think the computer in many ways provides that for me and for a lot of other technical people.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:05:45) So it's really awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:47) Yeah. I loved how that movie—I read somewhere that they actually spent a portion of their budget on making sure that the commands the actor, Mark Zuckerberg's actor, was typing in—like, I think he was just doing some basic curl commands to grab some images. Right. But that they actually made sure that it was technically correct. And I enjoyed that.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:06:06) Yeah, me too. I had to go back a couple of times and watch it just to see if it all lined up. And I was like, yeah, yeah. They're using wget there. They're using this and this. And I was like, oh, wow. That's awesome. So, yeah, they—it's a—that was a really great one. The only other one, the only other show, because I feel like usually this is the cringe worthy part of every show. You know, they hand over the phone, and it's some random designer put together a sketch in ten minutes of what an operating system looks like, and now you're looking at it on the phone. But Mr. Robot's the other show that really does that well. They actually hire—

(Doug Woodrow at 00:06:41) They hire people from DEF CON to actually do all the commands and whatnot. So all that's legit too, which is pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:48) No. That's awesome. Yeah. I like that show. I'm actually total honesty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:54) For some reason, you know, I was hooked on it season one right into season two on Amazon Prime and obsessed with it. And I actually make music too. I love music and I actually made—sometimes I like to make songs for different shows or movies or sentiment that I'm seeing. And so I made a song from Mr. Robot called Mr. Nobody. So I really liked the show. It kind of—cause it wells up that this very interesting sense inside of you that I feel like a lot of introverted tech people feel and they nail it. Right?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:07:25) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:26) Definitely. So I love that they hit it right with the technical stuff. How did you find out about that?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:07:34) Mr. Robot?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:36) Yeah.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:07:37) I—God, I can't remember now. I think—

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:41) Oh, the DEF CON fact.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:07:42) Oh, the DEF CON fact. I can't—that was just one day in passing. My buddy and I were talking. I turned him onto the show, and then he got super into it. He became, like, super fanboy of it.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:07:52) So he ended up—he came over the next time and was telling me all the facts, and I was like, oh, snap. Like, you must really like the show, man. You know? So he was watching and must have been looking up facts while he was watching, and he just had a whole slew of things to tell me. And that was one of the interesting things. I was like, oh, yeah. So I love that show. I have watched—I'm pretty caught up. I think I got a little bit left on the end of season two. And is season three out on Prime yet?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:22) Yeah. It is. It just came out recently. So you gotta let me know if you feel like the momentum was lost. Or maybe it was just because my personal life got so busy that I actually just haven't been watching anything for a couple months.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:08:35) No. I totally understand that one for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:37) Yeah. I just had a daughter, so I have an 11-month-old daughter.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:08:40) Oh, wow. Yeah. That's definitely—that'll take you away from watching TV, I'm sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:45) Oh, yeah. And then the business is growing. So my business doubled last year, and then it doubled again this year. So—

(Doug Woodrow at 00:08:52) I love that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:53) That's been—yeah. Yep. I like Knightspeed. So I looked up Knightspeed. That's the moving company where you currently wear the badge as CTO there. And I super enjoyed the website because it was modern. The design, it was well designed. And even your—although I'm fifty-fifty on the background video, right, your background video was super crisp. So it was like a very good background video, and the site loaded ultra fast. You made that site. Right?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:09:23) Yeah. Yeah. So, actually, the funniest thing too, because we're actually about to replace that entire site with one that's leagues, leagues, leagues better, like ten, twenty times better than what that is right now. We ended up striking out the background video because, you know, we found that—like you said, it's a fifty-fifty thing. We just ended up deciding that it probably wasn't the best to keep.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:09:47) It's just so interesting that we—the new site, we based all around consumer psychology, really, and science. So rebuilt the entire thing, and it was all built in Angular before, Angular 1, AngularJS, which actually created a lot of problems for us. And for anyone listening to this, definitely do not use AngularJS for a consumer website because it is a nightmare. You can't do SEO. Preloading's really difficult. There's a slew of different issues. Thank goodness that, you know, we're on into Angular 2 and Angular 4 now. But, yeah, definitely, we're really proud of—I think, you know, the thing with Knightspeed is that we've really tried to change the image of what a moving company looks like. You know, even the more modern companies that I think are more household names like Two Men and a Truck, you know, they're still getting by without being very innovative, which I think can ride in some industries for a while. But somebody needed to come into moving in general and just kind of clean up its—how old it was and how antiquated everything in that industry is.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:11:00) It's incredible how, like, by the books, everything runs in the moving industry. And, you know, that's kind of our mission is to change all of that. So it's been an interesting ride.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:14) Yeah. Well, moving, you know, boring and needed that sexiness of the technology. And, you know, you guys saw the market opportunity, and you went in and executed. And I think—I don't see the books of the company. But visually, to the end consumer, me acting as a consumer visiting the site, it was a win. Big win.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:11:34) Well, yeah. And the exciting part has been is that, you know, right now—so I'll kind of take you back a little bit here. So four years ago, I come to college, UCF, to study computer science, and my father was an entrepreneur. So, you know, I ended up pretty much being an entrepreneur as well. I always had that fire in my stomach.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:11:56) Met my business partner in the fall of 2012. He tells me that, you know, he'd been working at Lockheed Martin at the time and had been doing moves for cash on the weekends. And, you know, realized that, like, wow. You know, like, a lot of people actually need this, and it's fairly profitable. At the time, it made sense. It was very profitable because he was just putting the cash in his pocket. So, you know, puts up a flyer, gets a couple move calls, ends up going out there, and then realizes that he needs somebody. He's not a—he's become a little more creative, but he's not the super creative type. He's more of the run the business by the numbers kind of guy, which is great because, you know, he's balanced my scatterbrainedness, and I think we've learned a little bit about each other from each other. But, you know, one of the things that we knew from an early time was is that if we were going to make this work, we did need to make it look really great. So, you know, started with a website and have grown the business really by word of mouth for the most part. We've used Facebook ads. We've done things like that. We haven't really gotten into that. We're about to really hop into that, you know, like the online marketing game here in the next few months. But, you know, from a book side and kind of how we've run the company up to this point, you know, we've tried to take the least amount of investment on. We've gone through two rounds of funding now. And, you know, we've broken even just within Florida. Our operational costs month to month are covered by the moves and things like that. We have some other outside services that we do, like labor and some freight and transportation and things like that. But now at this point, I've really moved it to, I guess, what you would say as a fairly profitable model. We've really broken even, even—you know, we own two moving trucks, 40 employees. I mean, it's a big operation now.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:14:06) And we've been able to break even month to month, which has been great. And now the exciting part is we're actually going up for another round of funding right now. And I just sealed the deal and sent a video over to the team, the management team, so they can send it to our investors for pretty much demonstrating that, you know, we haven't just broken even on the model, but now we're coming with a vengeance because now we have the first version of our logistics software called Manage Move ready so that we can scale this out to twenty, thirty, forty, a hundred cities across the U.S. and really, you know, start becoming a household name. So now this round of funding, the goal is really to kind of expand out to outside of Florida's bounds so that we can start doing more state to state moving, because we're finding as we grow, in order to really keep the momentum going, we have to, you know, kind of move outside of the state and start taking on bigger jobs.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:15:11) So it's been a crazy learning experience, and it also reminds me every day that, you know, even though sometimes the CTO's role is very important, you really do have to build that good old business model under the hood where people really love your product. You know, you can't sell crap to people. You know what I mean? Like, you really have to make something amazing, get it, grow it between people.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:15:36) Some things work that way, and once word-of-mouth is going around that your product's great, you're able to expand the company. And now we're finally at a point where software comes into play, and hopefully that will kind of move us towards an exit strategy in the next three or four years. So this has been crazy. It's a very complicated company, and the story is incredibly complicated too.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:16:02) So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:04) Crazy. Like, a huge skill is to be able to communicate complicated things very simply.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:16:10) Right? Yep. Yep. I think that's what I'm explaining.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:14) Yeah. Because if you want investors or if you want your customers to be able to access your services easily or understand your concepts easily, you have to be able to boil it down. Yeah. I was actually talking to a moving company two or three months ago, and they're a local moving company. You know, we're actually only two and a half hours away from each other.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:31) Do you know this?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:16:34) Oh, really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:35) Oh, wow. No. I did not know that.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:16:37) Yeah. I'm a native to Sarasota.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:16:39) Oh, nice, man. Yeah. Yeah. I looked around a little bit. I snooped around a little bit. I saw you'd gone to MIT and done stuff there. And then you're back in Florida now, obviously. I didn't know that we were that close, though. That's awesome. We'll have to get some face-to-face time for sure as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:56) Yeah. And I've got—I mean, UCF. I used to live in Baldwin Park.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:17:00) Oh, wow. So okay. Yeah. Yeah. Like, right—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:04) Right near the school. Yeah. You go down and do the Coronado and stuff like that, you know?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:17:10) Oh, yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:10) So I'm familiar with the area. I was talking to this moving company, and they were asking me—they were like family friends. Right? And they were just at some birthday party or something. They're talking about expanding their business, and they're like, oh, you know, Joel, I'm the most business-y person in my family. So they're like, oh, ask Joel. And so I was talking to him about growing. And he said, you know, do you have any ideas? And I go, well, you know, off the top of my head, I was really big in real estate software for a while, speaking at real estate conferences and things like that. And I said, well, I guess the first thing I would do is—I happen in my city, I happen to know like the top three agents that do all the business. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:50) And so I said, well, the first thing I'd do is I'd go talk to those guys. I'd go talk to like David Beachy. I'd go talk to those guys and I would say, hey, here's a percentage of my company—or first, I would start by saying, hey, I want to do some sort of joint venture where we give like a coupon for like $50 off or $100 off to every single one of your clients. And then you include it—you give it to them with the sales package. And then, of course, I would further incentivize them. If they would say no, I'd go down the chain, and then I'd ultimately give them like a percentage, like a small equity piece or some stock or something so that they directly benefit and profit off of the transaction. But I would get them involved because they literally sell a hundred homes a month.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:39) Yep. It's a hundred moves a month. Like, why would I not cross-promote with the largest brokerage firms in my town?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:18:46) Yeah. I know. And it's amazing to hear that because that's exactly what we did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:52) Oh, okay. I see. You know? Yay.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:18:55) Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah, we—it's so funny how, you know, birds of a feather flock together, I guess. You know? But, yeah, that's exactly the approach we took. We went to brokers. We got really tight with Coldwell Banker, Keller Williams, and RE/MAX in Orlando. And now we're really trying to get it in Miami, and it's worked magically for us. And the software allows us to track all that so that we're able to pay referrals out. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:21) Amazing. This is unbelievable. It's hilarious. Yeah. Alright.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:19:24) Yep. So there you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:25) I'm gonna see them at Christmas, and I'm gonna be like, hey, guys. Did you do anything with that advice I gave you? They're probably gonna say no.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:19:34) Well, you can let them know that—

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:35) Excellent. Yeah. Woo-hoo. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:39) Good job.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:19:39) Plus one for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:40) Made my day there. Right? And I love that you guys designed the software. And another point to mention when you were talking is you said you developed some custom software, and that actually gives the business some IP. Right? So if you guys did have some sort of management fiasco or like something happened outside of that was unique to your specific operation, that software is still licensable and salvageable to some extent. It's like investors—they like that. Right? You have the option to license it out in worst case scenario.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:20:15) Yeah. And I think, you know, within every company, and I think this kind of ties back to what we were saying about the CEOs versus CTO type—where, you know, these things tightly integrate together—is because we are technical young people that are running the company. We're able to see these things as, like, you know, hedging the risk of—because you're right. Tomorrow, something may happen, and we may have to shut down the operation. I mean, you know, we've obviously put a lot of time into training to make sure that doesn't happen, things like that. But who knows what's gonna happen. Right?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:20:45) The great part about having the software is that, yes, exactly, we'll be able to—if anything, God forbid, anything happens, we'd be able to move over to that. And, hopefully, you know, longer term—looking at a longer-term option—the hopes would be that we kind of maybe move towards more of just a software company. I think that every good piece of software comes from somebody that really knows that industry or knows the pain points of something in that area.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:21:17) And that's, I think, why we really built this moving company—was really just to be the biggest case study ever for our own software, to show that, you know, like, if we can run it and figure it out, then so can you kind of thing. That we've been able to just kind of take this intellectual piece of software and then, you know, kind of hopefully move over towards just being a software company one day, and then, you know, maybe move away from the operation side of things altogether and, you know, hopefully sell that off or, you know, whatever direction that ends up taking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:52) Well, yeah, it's business-wise, it's super smart because what you did was you essentially bootstrapped a case study business and it's like, it's such a testament to like 2018. Right? Oh, I had a software, but instead of getting some other companies, we just built our own company, ran it, ate—you know, I chomped up 0.25% of your market share of the person who's the biggest national brand. And why? Well, I don't know. It was Wednesday. Right? So—

(Doug Woodrow at 00:22:16) Yeah, exactly. And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:18) You know, then you can either pick them up as a client or work with them or you can just continue to eat away at their market share if they're that close-minded, right?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:22:26) Well, I think that's like crucial. Right? Because the other part of it is that if we go to license it to other moving companies, like, that's gonna kind of look weird if we're competing with them in our own space. You know what I mean? Like, that could just get weird and funny. So I think to the investors, this is like the Holy Grail. You know? Because it's like we started as a cash business. We started as a business where we didn't have to take on a lot of debt in order to grow our infrastructure. And now we're at a point where the infrastructure is there where we need to facilitate the need for software, and that will move us out of the, hopefully, the operations game eventually. So it's been a very organic path to this point.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:23:07) You know what I mean? Like, every move we've made has been—it wasn't like, you know, we didn't sit there for hours, like, how are we gonna get rich? You know what I mean? It was just like literally making choices for our customer that were the best. It was like, you know, do we refund this customer because their couch got dinged or some leather got ripped or something like that? And, you know, the answer was always yes. You know, focus on the customer, build a great business that is able to pay the salaries of the management staff and the needs of the movers and laborers in order to—exactly. Yeah. So it's been cool because we've been able to grow out of that model and into, hopefully, this new software model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:56) I love it. I gotta ask about influencers. Like, who do you surround yourself with? Everyone's out there producing content. You kind of pick and choose the universe you—and I'm a huge fan of like Gary Vee. Have you heard of Gary Vee?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:24:14) Oh, yes. I think it's hard not to hear about Gary Vee.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:16) Is it, though? I love him as an—

(Doug Woodrow at 00:24:20) I love him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:21) Alright. Here we go. Six months, a year ago, I heard about him for the first time. About six months ago, I started listening to him like all the time. Alright? Yep. And then about six, eight weeks ago, I said—so I have an app company. Right? We make apps, and it's great. And it's been around for a long time, and I'm not like trying to get a bunch of new business. I've got a select few relationships that I work through that continually give me business. Right?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:24:52) The best.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:53) So I didn't—yeah. And the hardest thing about the app company is scaling. You've got to get experts and you got to pay the experts a ton of money so that you can make your life easier and, you know, execute flawlessly to keep your relationships happy, consistently execute amazing, provide lots of value, get experts. But the experts are the hardest people to find because the market—there's so much growth in the economy that a lot of the experts, they get a business bug and they go do their own thing. Right?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:25:17) Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:17) So—and that's more power to them. But from a scaling development agency, it's incredibly difficult. So I said, alright. Well, we're about like 10 to 14 people now, and we're gonna stay there. And what I want to do is I want to take Gary Vee's advice and apply it to a project. Right?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:25:38) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:39) So I had this book that I've been working on last year to kind of share because I work with investors, and they bring in like startups and midsize companies and even large companies. And then I'll end up working with their CTOs, and we'll just be like, you know, nothing super crazy. We'll be at dinner, and we're talking, and I start sharing my stories. I start sharing these topics, and they're like, wow. This is great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:58) And so instead of just constantly talking, I said, well, I'll write it all down in a book, and then I'll write a book, I guess, and then I'll just share it with everyone I know, things like that. So we started talking about it. It became—you know, we started recording the calls and then podcasts and so on, and that's where we're at today. Right? But in that whole process, I thought, alright. Well, I want to do this Gary Vee. I want to use Gary Vee's knowledge. Like, it's what I believe in. It sounds good, but I want to apply it to a project, and I don't want to scale my development agency.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:26:29) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:29) And so I said, well, why don't I just apply it to the book? Why don't I apply it to like the book and the podcast? And so I said, okay. So, you know, I took a chunk of money and put a four or five person team together. I got a PR person, got a writer, got, you know, general administrative person and some technical assistance. And we've been rocking this out for like eight weeks now.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:26:54) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:56) Crazy. I love—I love that. No. No. No. Like, take whatever—like, my expectations—

(Doug Woodrow at 00:27:04) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:05) Like, quad—like, I don't know the number. Like, heck does something. Like, I'm not kidding you. Like, it's insane. This opportunity was great, and I love being able to do this and bring CTOs on and talk with them.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:27:20) Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. That's why I was looking around. I was like, oh, snap. Like, this must be a brand new thing. So yeah. And the ability to have the impact is so direct now that, you know, being able to kind of have the personality plus some experience, you know, behind you and being able to launch that and to be able to just give people the knowledge to be able to reach their goals, I think, is—at least, you know, for me—it's my biggest philanthropic endeavor. That's the thing I want to go after the most is education. So it really excites me to be able to hear that, you know, there's other people in the world thinking about, you know, these types of things, because, yeah, I couldn't agree more that, you know, being able to have the impact that you want so quickly—you know, within eight weeks to be able to make that big of a difference. You know?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:28:15) And being able to reach out to other people and just connect on the same level with other CTOs is, I think, something that's really powerful. So I'm like I said at the beginning of this: yeah, I'm really, really happy to be able to, you know, just be here and talking to you because I'd been thinking about, you know, where are these CTOs? Because I know that the demand for this is growing, but the number of CTO titles that I'm seeing aren't necessarily. You know? So it's great to see more of these types of information being able to be readily distributed to young CTOs or people that are thinking about becoming CTOs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:02) Experience is painful to obtain. Okay? Experience is not like this pleasant, you know, frolic through a forest concept where you go easy breezy and you come out with a bunch of it. I mean, you come out like with battle scars. Like, you learn, man. You put yourself through the dirt. Like, you work for the experience. Right? And so my goal was—when the thing that runs through my head all the time, like the recurring Gary Vee thing—is like, double down on what you're great at. Like, double and triple down on the things that you're great at and what you know you are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:35) And so I kind of had to—it took like, you know, a month or two of me trying to figure that out and just saying, no. It doesn't feel right. That's not it. That's not it. That's not it. You know, it's not scaling an agency. No. It's not making an app based on my experience of like working with other people. I mean, I don't need to. Like, Slack is the best. Like, I don't need to do anything. Like, I kept thinking—I kept going back to my old, you know, because I've got a developer mindset. I've got a creator mindset to go create an app or go create a technology or go, you know, monetize some white space. Like, all of that is like my default stuff. So I just took like a break and I just kind of waited—waited for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:14) And as I was doing that, I was working on the book, and I just said, well, you know what? Let's just apply it to this because I spent so much time—I mean, I've been going at this seventeen years. Right? So I spent so much time screwing up, and all I really want is to go back to my previous self and hand me a road map and say, look, this isn't gonna be easy, but this will make it a little bit easier.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:30:36) Yeah. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:39) It's not easier. Here's a little piece of help. So we're entering—a hundred and twenty years ago, we didn't have electricity.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:30:47) I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:48) Alright. There's countries right now that don't have electricity. I think it's like a billion people don't even have electricity. These people are gonna come up, come online, and come through the same shit that we're going through.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:30:59) Yep. Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:00) Macro. Like, thinking decades.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:31:03) It's huge. Yeah. And the crazy part about that is too, you know, you look at things like, well, I think this is a whole other topic in itself, is the whole Facebook colonization of the Internet type stuff. But the opportunity for us to create that content and share it with anybody in the world—like maybe you can give yourself, with quotes around the word "yourself," you can give yourself somebody in another country that's going to have this opportunity in the future, that road map with the work that you're doing right here, right now.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:31:37) So in a way, you're existentially moving—you're kind of paying it forward. You know what I mean? Giving somebody else the opportunity to read the mistakes and the trials and tribulations, the successes that you've had and learn from those. Because, yeah, I mean, there's, like you said, experience is painful. And, you know, if you'd been able to give yourself a map to this, it would have made things a lot less painful. Somebody in another developing country might find this content one day and not even have to think about, oh, well, I wish I had a map, because you've provided it to them.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:32:13) So that's a really exciting position to be in. And I've realized that having impact, I think, is really the reason why I got into this. I keep asking myself, like, right, when we get up in the morning, we ask ourselves, like, why do we do the things we do? Why are we driven to do the things that we do? And for me, I know the answer in some ways is because I wanna have an impact or have the ability to have an impact.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:32:39) Technology, I think, allows us to have that pretty freely. You know, we can get on the Internet, on Facebook more particularly, and broadcast a message to millions of people, you know, and for free for the most part, which is pretty astounding considering, like you said, that a hundred and twenty years ago, we were just getting into the brink of electricity. And, actually, you know, Tim Urban of Wait But Why has some really interesting things to talk about with that and the upcoming AI revolution and how that's gonna make us think about—I think AI is gonna be in many ways our next electricity, like, the impact that electricity had. AI is—I know. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:23) I was at a talk yesterday for that.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:33:25) Yep. It's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:26) Yeah. Yesterday morning. It's a futurist named—who is bad, I'm meeting a lot of people now—David Hall, David Hall. And he's like a futurist and speaks all over the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:39) And he did a breakfast yesterday morning at this club that I went to. I was invited by a friend of mine, and he used that exact phrase. He said AI is—or machine learning, more accurate. AI has got the brand recognition, but it's really machine learning. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:55) The machine learning is going to be the electricity.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:33:58) Yes. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:59) And I fully agree because I booted up some ML projects a couple months ago and I was blown away by what I was able to do.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:34:08) Well, and the crazy part is too, I've had—we've been developing an AI technology for the government, all declassified stuff that was really neat that we got to work on. And we were building something for training soldiers. And we use TensorFlow for, you know, for the AI part of it. And it was incredible, you know, watching it learn and watching it gain cognition of the subject that we were teaching it. And it's crazy because, you know, we classify those as ANI, artificial narrow intelligences.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:34:45) But the really crazy part is, you know, when we get up to AGI and ASI, artificial general and artificial superintelligence, I think that's really where things are gonna really start changing in a big kind of way. Because, you know, there's a lot of things have been said about ASI, artificial superintelligence, where, you know, in the early afternoon, the robot or whatever form it takes would be learning how to walk, but by dinnertime could be solving problems about general relativity that have completely baffled mankind for the years that we've been working on the problems. So it's incredible thinking about, you know, just the impact that that will have on humanity in general and, you know, what kind of a generation that we're looking forward to. Like, you know, maybe travel across the galaxy will become trivial in our time. You know?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:35:45) And the opportunities are just incredible just thinking about all the things that are gonna come of it. You know? Amazing.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:35:53) It's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:54) Amazing. Um, Boston Dynamics, you ever see their videos online?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:35:58) Oh, yes. Most definitely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:00) Yeah. The parkour robot type deal. That stuff is like, unbelievable.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:36:04) Yeah. Well and that's where I think, like, the physical is gonna match. You know? Like, we have to get to that point where physical is gonna match the brains, I guess. But I think it's wrong. You know? We shouldn't be making these AI look like humans. I think we should keep them distinguishable and, you know, keep them as machines. But, hey. You know, I'm not the one making the latest—

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:25) No. Everyone's gonna wanna have sex with them. That's just how it goes.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:36:30) Yeah. There will be a market. If there's people that want it or don't want it, there will be a market. So that's too funny.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:36) If humans make it, they try to have sex with it. Yeah. But like, that's—I mean, I saw American Pie in, like, 1999. Like, this is—

(Doug Woodrow at 00:36:45) I mean, that was—

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:46) Jason. Right?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:36:47) That was an—yeah. Pie. That was an inanimate object. Yeah. So yeah.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:36:51) Exactly. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:52) What they don't tell you in the movie is you have to wait for it to cool.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:37:05) That's funny.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:05) It's so good. Simon Sinek. You ever come across this guy?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:37:10) Oh, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:12) Man, I love his stuff. Yeah. I got hooked on him five, seven years ago. Obviously, the start with why situation. And I was like, this guy is speaking my language. Like, Simon Sinek is my spirit animal. Right? Like, I love it. I often—I mean, I love associating people. I have my Gary Vee spirit animal. I have my Simon Sinek. I put on their—I wear their personalities internally, and everybody does it. I'm just talking about how I do it. And I call on my spirit animals, and I'll flip out. I'll be like, you know what? Today needs some Simon Sinek. You know? I need to boil it back down to the why and bring the human back into it because I've been executing like a Gary Vee beast lately. Right?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:37:56) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:57) So, again, it's all about that balance. You know?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:38:00) Yeah. And, you know, I think the thing is—the cool part is, like, you have to kind of balance, like, your—because I think, you know, Simon Sinek is his view and his, you know, like, I wouldn't call him necessarily somebody that's super into tech or super into—you know, he's just like a really good, like, this is how you kind of should live your life and think about things. And I really like that there's people out there that are able to gain the credibility and the recognition that he has because what he does is so useful. And I, you know, I've definitely watched his approach to things. And he just—you know, he's able to look at his situation and really tear it apart in the way that—yeah, I hadn't really thought of product design until I saw, you know, starting with why.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:38:49) And I think that was really like the first introduction to kind of, like, you know, there's this very organic side to being a technical person that, you know, he just echoes the things that I'm thinking about oftentimes from a, you know, just like who I am as a person and, you know, what is the message, the underlying message that my product tells my buyers and things like that. And he really highlights those things really well, and he's incredible with the advice that he gives. I really love watching. You know, you always feel super motivated to go do something meaningful in the world when you watch a video of his.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:28) Yeah. He's great at verbalizing introspection.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:39:31) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:31) Right. He looks at himself a lot, and I look at myself a lot, and you look at yourself a lot just by the way you talk. But what he's—what he really nailed, I believe what, you know, has been so attractive about him is his ability to verbalize and communicate the analysis of the introspection and the value he's extracting from that act. I think that's really—and I love it. I love it because I'm always learning. It's who I am. I'm always making mistakes. I'm always learning. I'm always growing, and I love it. And it's life to me, and it's—like Gary Vee would say, it's a win. It's like my win is growing, learning, loving, and then just being in the position that I'm in right now. Like, my money will change, right, over the next decade. It'll grow, but I can't love it—you can't love it more than I love it now. I wake up every single day and I do exactly what I want. Like, I love it. Right? But I ate shit to do it. You know, I had to go spend years and years and years figuring out first acquiring the skills to build, then building, building, building, then building different projects, making money, then learning how to manage my money and not lose it, then learning how to work with other people and hire people and grow a business so that I can manage the people so that they can make money for me or with me. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:45) And then I had to get all of that going to the point where now I have a little system that is a positive feedback loop. I'm not rich on it, but it generates enough income for me to have the most magical thing in the world, which is time. Like, I could just be sitting around the house doing nothing because I have a system that's making me money. Right? That's not who I am, not even close. So that's why I take all my time now, and I'm putting it into stuff like this because I'm like, why not? Yeah. It's Tuesday.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:14) It's Tuesday. Well and—

(Doug Woodrow at 00:41:16) And, you know, the thing is is that you hit a great point there is that I think we all kind of have to get to that point in our lives where, you know, there's a lot more to life than, you know, getting a mortgage and having kids and settling down in my opinion. And it's really about making an impact and changing the world. And I think that once you are able to get yourself enough cash in hand to live happily—like, you know, for many years, I thought two things that I think are very different from each other. I thought I was gonna be somebody that's super wealthy. And then on the other side, I thought I was gonna be a programmer, like a very devoted programmer, like, just a programmer. We all have those people in our lives that are really, really into coding, you know?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:41:58) But then as I kind of grew throughout the years and looked at what I was doing, I realized that both of those things are very wrong from each other, and they, you know, they don't go together, is that I probably—you know, like, we look at, you know, the giant majority of wealth. I don't even really wanna be in that group anyway just because of the amount of stress. You know, having too much money is just the same as not having enough money. It's caused a lot of stress. And I don't—you know, I grew up in a family where I saw my parents were always difficult with, you know, bills and getting things through. And I told myself at a very young age that I wasn't gonna let money rule my life, you know, once I had it and kept it a little bit. So it's crazy because that's what I've really focused on now. And, you know, just like you're working with getting the book going and Modern CTO and things like that, I've really realized that the way I can contribute to the community is, I've really started working on getting into Facebook groups very passionately.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:43:16) One for aspiring people that, you know, may not be programmers yet, like marketers or, you know, anybody that kind of has a job that's semi-technical, giving them the skills they need to learn how to build websites, make money doing it, and that's called Programmer Incubator. So I really wanna focus on, you know, giving the opportunity to people that don't know where to start because, you know, I'm sure you remember the first couple days of learning about programming. I was like, where the hell do I find all this information? You know? And then the other side of that is also, like, how do you make money doing it?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:43:52) So it's one thing to have this really cool toolbox. It's a whole other thing to be able to actually utilize those tools in a useful way to make money. So it's been, you know, focusing on that and teaching younger people or older people. It doesn't really matter if somebody's not satisfied with their job the way it is now. You know, programming really does, I think, allow that opportunity to become a very critical thinker and see the world in a different light. And I really think that it enables, because of the nature of the work, we're able to work from the beach or we're able to work from a plane or wherever, it doesn't really matter, that it's the reason why I've boiled down a lot of myself. I've asked the question, why do I do this? And I think at the end of the day, it's because I'm a pioneer, and we all, I think, have some undying sense of being a pioneer inside of us. And the programming and being a CTO is really just a medium to get there. You know what I mean?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:44:48) It's a tool to get there. I love what I do. I would never—you know, this is my favorite thing to do. I work sun up to sun down every day because I want to, because I love it. But I realized that it's also just a tool to kind of get me where I need to be, which is, like I said at the beginning, making an impact, you know, and being able to teach somebody that skill and how to be able to be an independent person in this growing economy that's becoming highly competitive and everybody has to have a brand and, you know, all those things, those things are becoming much more sought after.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:45:27) And the ability to give somebody that skill or whatever, I think is really engaging and it's really powerful, just because of the opportunities that this work allows and opens for us, the kind of doors it opens. So it's very exciting to learn how to program right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:45) No. I like that. What you're talking about, the website programmer incubator?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:45:49) Yeah. Yeah. It's a Facebook group. I figured building a website for it would work, but, you know, Facebook, it's such a passionate community right now. There's so many great opportunities on Facebook, so, yeah, it's pretty much a Facebook group for now. Probably will become a website here in the near future, and, you know, some LMS component added onto it so that people can go through programming lessons or whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:15) Alright. I have an idea. I want to contribute to that. I want you to tell me what you think of this.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:46:20) Sure. Go for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:21) So I have the, you know, Lodge Seventeen or whatever. And I have a friend, and he made a bunch of money with his Bitcoin. And he's very smart with the whole cryptocurrency, and he's one of the leaders in cryptocurrency.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:46:37) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:37) And, yeah, he's, I don't know what they say. He's on the boards of some of the cryptocurrency. He's just involved. Right?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:46:45) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:46) So I had done this exchange that I built for him and made it look really pretty a few years ago. And it's done really well and he's been around Bitcoin forever. Right? So he came to me and he said, oh, I saw what's happening with your Modern CTO stuff. And I want to do that for my company. And I was like, well, you know, we're not really, we're just figuring it out. All I'm doing is executing this guy Gary's stuff. Go watch his stuff, you know, consume every single piece of his content for months and then just do that. And I realized, oh, wait, oh, snap. That's value. Right? I like the fact that I consumed this content and I know what he does is value because there's no Gary Vee one sheet. Right? You know? Like, you have to just train your brain with his stuff. So I was like, alright. Well, look. Here's what I'll do. I will let you have access to my, what I'm doing. I've got a Google Drive, and it's got all the notes in there. It's got how I put together everything, and it's got all my contacts for my producers and everything like that. And I would love to give them more business too. Right? And help everybody involved. So I was like, yeah. Yeah. We'll do all that. And then he needed a vehicle. He needed a really awesome website. Right? To start directing people to that's outside of his exchange. Right? Sort of his consultancy and sort of his PR stuff. So I was like, well, look, I'll do the website for you because I've known the guy for seven years, and he's kind of a cool guy. Right? He's a drummer too. So pretty cool. And, yeah, I like him. His name's Robert. He's a great guy. And I said, alright, well, you know, I'll charge you for the time and we'll do your website and we'll knock it out of the park. He's like, oh, that's fantastic. Right? So that just, you know, happened a week or two ago, and we're starting the project this week. And we're recording so much stuff and so many guests and all of this stuff that we're doing with video now, and it's just gonna be crazy. The amount of content, this content machine we're putting out for Modern CTO, is just, it's gonna be unimaginable. Right? So I said, let's, since this is a project from the beginning, I know this is something I've done a hundred times, let's just document the whole thing on video.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:48:50) Yep. Let's do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:51) From all the client meetings, all the sketches, all the wireframes, all the value communications, the coding, the testing, the photo shoot that we're gonna do, the photographer, the PR write up that we're gonna do. Let's document every single thing we do and let this be completely transparent because it's not my business. I don't want to be hired to make websites. That's not what I want to do. But there are lots of people out there who do want that to be their business. There are lots of people out there who do want to learn that. Right? And there's a little bit of, you know, the coding side of it, the business side of it, the project management side of it. There's a lot of jobs that occur in there that I have skills with. So I said, alright. We're just gonna totally voyeur, transparently document this entire process and just release it all online for free.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:49:38) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:39) Yep. Just release all the videos. This is it.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:49:41) Well, you know, I think that people love living vicariously now. So any amount of content that allows them to kind of introspect into somebody else's day, I think, is hugely useful because, you know, that's one of the things that I always wondered. I guess I'll talk about my inspiration from a long time ago. I think the one that got me really inspired in everything tech-wise was Steve Jobs from a young age. I think a lot of young entrepreneurs find that to be the case for themselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:15) What us to do, us asset? Or, yeah. Right. We know what's going on. Yeah.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:50:23) The sharp edges of Jobs. Yeah. For real.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:26) Right. Sorry to interrupt you. No. No. You're good. You're good.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:50:30) But the thing that I think frustrated me the most was that, you know, back in those days when I don't think content was a first class citizen, because, you know, things like Facebook didn't exist and whatnot. You know, you always see him at the keynote presentation giving the keynote about, you know, how this is the most amazing MacBook they've ever sold and blah blah blah blah blah. But you never saw his day to day, you know, and especially Jobs particularly was a very, you know, he didn't want to be entirely public about the things that he did from day to day and things of that nature. But there's really, when I see my heroes like Elon Musk today showing their day to day, it just gets me really excited because, you know, I study that stuff as if, you know, it were me in that situation and, like, what would I do? And it's really cool to be able to see the people that I look up to, you know, or my peers even, being able to share their content with the world because, you know, I always wondered what people's day to day look like, and I think that's the secret sauce for most operations is, like, what is their bedside manner? I guess, you know what I mean? I guess that's kind of a strange way to put it. But, you know, what are the dirty details as far as, like, what do they do during the day that makes them so successful? Like, every interaction that they have, like, what does it look like? And being able to get into a content machine, I think a lot of people share that ambition. But, you know, maybe some people couldn't put the finger on the point that they needed to, and they couldn't identify it. But I think that being able to create content where you're able to see what people's day to day looks like is incredibly powerful because it's empowering a whole new generation of people that aren't just, you know, seeing the day of the presentation, but they're seeing every day that leads up to that presentation and the sweat that had to go through, you know, carving the aluminum or whatever, you know, situation and industry they're in. But it's really powerful to just be able to see what your, the people that you look up to and the people that you want to be, what they do, and then be able to almost mimic them and do the same thing and, you know, get similar results. So it's a very exciting time for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:52) You're nailing it. You're just flooding my mind. I love you as a guest. Okay. A couple points. Monkey see, monkey do. Something I talk about all the time.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:53:00) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:02) I think it's great to be a billionaire. Right?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:53:05) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:05) Just, life is a game. I want more points. I think it would be a cool thing to do. Yep. Be a billionaire, great. If I don't hit it and I dive, no sweat off my back. Right?

(Doug Woodrow at 00:53:15) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:15) So I want to do this. So I took a very Elon Musk first principles approach, boiled it back down. And one of the first things I did was I found the life stories of three billionaires. I got Bezos, Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:53:31) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:32) So I Audible'd their life stories, right, because I like Audible. And I Audible'd their life stories, and I listened to them. And it's monkey see, monkey do. When I can watch that, I don't even know how to verbalize it. You get more benefit out of watching or listening to the life story of a billionaire than you would from a book or even a talk of a billionaire telling you what to do.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:53:54) Yep. And it's so crazy that, you know, I think for a long time, people were scared that, you know, that was their secret sauce. They couldn't tell anyone. Like, shh, don't tell anyone that. You know, that's like KFC giving its fried chicken recipe out. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:10) Right.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:54:11) People like Gary Vee realized that that's bullshit. You know what I mean? Just because you show everybody, you know, if you show everybody how you do it, you show everybody everything, you're completely transparent. There's still only, like, point zero zero five percent of those people are actually gonna take action. They're actually gonna do it. You know, that's what makes me laugh, and I think you'll share the sentiment with me a little bit. But, you know, you hear of all these people that have the best idea for an app ever, you know, but they want to be like, oh, you have to sign three NDAs before you can even look at this idea. You know what I mean? And it's so funny because you look at those people and you're like, you don't really see it, do you? Like, I don't care about your idea. I'm gonna be doing my own thing. I'm gonna be working on my own stuff. People are so scared of everybody stealing their idea, but the people that get ahead in the market are those that don't care about that stuff. You know what I mean?

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:09) Where were you yesterday? Yeah. Hold on a second. Jake, Jake's one of my awesome people that help me out, and we don't even give him a label. He's just always here. And he listens to the call. He helps make notes and things like that of the good parts and everything like that. Jake, do you remember who we were talking to yesterday on the call? Andrew Ward. Andrew Ward? Alright. We were talking to this guy, Andrew Ward, yesterday. And we were, this is what came up. This conversation right here. Right? Yep. Because everyone wants, people come up to me and say, oh, I want to hire you to make an app. I heard you make apps. Okay. And then, you know, here, I want you to sign this NDA. I'm just like, look, dude, first of all, you don't have it. Just because you want to do an app does not negate you from it being a business.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:55:53) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:53) Okay. You have to do all the, like, it's like you're a business that uses an app as your product. You don't get to not be a business. You don't get to not do the business things because you have an app. You just put it on the store and it's like, oh, I'm a millionaire. It's like, okay. No, no, no. Secondly, you have to go, if I have an app idea, I gotta go ask 50 people if it's worth pursuing. Right? I got a lot of ideas. I go say, hey, is this good? Is this good? Is this good? They tell everybody your idea. If people think it's great, then, okay, you have something that's, then you pursue a business model. And if you've got a great idea and a business model, then you go back to the people who can, you say, would you actually pay me money for this? Alright. You get through all those steps. Now you actually have something worth building.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:56:37) Yeah. Right. And I think people take the exact opposite approach. They build it and then they go, well, I'm gonna be a millionaire, aren't I? It's like, uh, well, what about that business you had to make? You know? Like, it's funny how, I guess, you know, I guess we're lucky because we've had the experience to learn these things throughout the years and, you know, get really good at kind of nailing it on the head every time, you know, just being able to kind of take an idea from, because I'm sure for you, you feel the same. I don't really think of it like being, I don't think of the business and the app as, you know, completely separate things. They just kind of work together. They're woven together very closely, and it's the growth of both of them that make it really successful. And I think that's obvious, hindsight is 20/20 kind of thing. But the number of people that don't understand the underlying philosophy and I think this is where The Social Network, that movie, you know, really created a lot of hype around that. You know, people slamming phones down and, you're talking to my lawyer. You know what I mean? Like, all these crazy Hollywood things got people so excited, and they feel like they have to ask everybody for an NDA and a non-compete and this and this. I had some guy that I built a website for about a month ago. And I call him and, you know, we figured everything out and got the proposal all finished up and got everything squared away and we were ready to go. And he calls me and he's like, hey. I just talked to my mom and, talk to his mom, LOL. But I had to talk to his mom and was like, yeah. My parents told me that I should get an NDA and this and this with you. And I was like, well, man, we're just doing a website. Like, you know what I mean? Like, we're not, I'm not giving you the codes to hack the Pentagon, man. Like, Jesus. You know? It's just a website. And I feel like people, everybody thinks their idea is worth a million bucks. I think that's the summary of it. You know what I mean? Like, everybody thinks that their idea is worth, you know, they're gonna be the next, they're gonna be the next Facebook, which...

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:46) KFC. KFC. I mean...

(Doug Woodrow at 00:58:49) Exactly. No. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:49) Here. When you're talking about KFC, alright. I got a weird connection to KFC. So I have a cousin. Right? We don't get to pick our family. Right? We don't get to pick, I mean, younger cousin who's in high school. And the kid is, for some reason, he latched on to KFC. Like, he's obsessed with KFC. Like, he makes jokes, but he's always, let me tell you what. So he had, for his birthday, he had his parents got some guy to dress up like KFC, the Colonel.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:59:21) Oh, the Colonel?

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:22) Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. You can't make it up. Right? And he loves KFC. Like, the Colonel came to his birthday. Some kids have, you know, Woody from Toy Story or something like that. This kid had the Colonel from KFC come into, we won't even think more about it. We'll just let it be. Right? So with the secret recipe, it set something off in my mind when you were talking about that. Because let's imagine a reality where they did give it away.

(Doug Woodrow at 00:59:49) Mhmm. Okay?

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:50) Because the reality that they imagine if they gave it away is simple. No one would come to KFC. Their competitors would copy them. Whatever. But here's the looking from today backwards, here's a more realistic reality that I think would have happened. There would have been, they would have had more fans because people would be able to engage with their brand outside of being at their location. They'd be able to make it. They'd be able to make slight improvements, and they would actually probably form a community.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:17) There might have even been KFC clubs where they get together and they all share the different variations that they made. And they grew a brand, and now you've got people always talking about KFC. And you've got these KFC enthusiasts and influencers who are always representing the KFC brand even when KFC isn't running ads. You would develop this entire community around KFC, and it would cost them nothing.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:00:40) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:42) And that's the reality, I think, if they would have given it away.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:00:45) Well, and, you know, the question is back in the day when they started, you know, I'm sure that that was more of a prevalent issue, you know, giving away these things and whether that would work for their business model. Probably, you know, back in the eighties, that probably wouldn't have worked all that well. But, you know, we start to see, and this is where it's incredible, and I think where technology is bleeding into the rest of the world and society and things like that, is that, you know, I see the congruence to this in my head is the open source nature of projects and things like that. And it's a great question. It's like the age-old tale, especially for software developers. It's do we open source this and give this and let a community grow around it? Do we have to get a community going and, you know, put all the time into getting that? But once that community has grown, it's gonna grow the product so much more.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:01:45) Or do we keep it closed source and do we keep it, you know, is it our intellectual property? And I think we're finding more and more that the former, you know, making it open source has really become really powerful. Like, it's almost like a separate part of your business. And that's really one of the big things that I focused on as well is the technology that we are building for this company, the moving company. You know, we're gonna try to open source a lot of the core components and the features of the actual product so that we have a community grow up around it, and that, you know, solidifies our position in the market. I'll give you a great, another example of that.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:02:29) You remember when, I'd say probably about two, three years ago, everyone thought that Facebook was gonna die one day. You know? Oh, it's gonna go. It's gonna disappear in thin air. But the reality of it is that they were probably the smartest, they're probably one of the smartest, like, open source slash business and code integration type companies.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:02:53) Because what I realized was that they can never die because what do you sign into all your apps with? What do you make payments on? What do you build your entire events system around? You know, like, there's all these different integrations that they've given to developers, and they've solidified their name. You know, there will always be until the end of time, of computers, or maybe not till the end of time, but whatever. We get the metaphor there. Till the end of time, you know, there's gonna be code. There's gonna be source code running in somebody's system that's gonna be owned by Facebook, which is genius because now Facebook can never die. You know? And that's the same thing that I, that's the way I see open source, and that's the way I see positioning, you know, my products and my services and things like that.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:03:43) You know, don't be scared to tell people how you do it. I think that just gets people more excited because they feel very honest and they feel like there's they can have a connection with that company. And I'm making sure that I build, you know, everything around that mentality is, you know, try not to be closed source. Sometimes there's good reasons for closed source, you know, security, some security things, some, you know, there's a few various things. But keeping it open source to keep your community active and give back to the people that, you know, like, developers are gonna grow a platform.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:04:17) Like, they're the people, they're the workers that are gonna, you know, say you're trying to make some cool recipe website. Right? Well, if you allow, you know, developers to integrate their cookbooks and their XYZ into your product, you're really just, you know, solidifying your position in the market, and you're giving yourself a leg up. And I think that's what creates sustainable products that live long, that don't just, you know, come and go is creating a presence in the market, not just from a business standpoint, but from a code side. And, you know, there's many different places. But open source, I think, is for this.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:56) I was having this conversation with a CTO, and he's got a great development team and great company and everything like that. And I said, I was talking with him. I said, look. I would take, he asked me what I would do. Right. So it was prompted. He asked for my feedback. Right. So, all right. Well, what I would do is I would take some of my top developers, as far as the people with the best skill in communication, and I would put money, I would actually put the company's money behind them to grow them as a developer, put them out at conferences, have them teach, have them give lectures, make some videos, like, do some videos in the office of them working, like, kind of build them up.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:31) And they said, well, we don't want to build them up. And I said, well, why? They said, they'll leave. They'll get a huge, they'll get a huge reputation. I'm gonna start using reputation instead of brand right now too. They'll get a huge reputation. Right? They're gonna get a great reputation, and they're gonna leave. They're gonna leave. I said, so that's how you see it. It's a fear-based decision. Whenever I feel myself making decisions out of fear, I try to make sure I really want to. Right? So I said, well, here's an alternate perspective. Okay? That person leaves, but they got their entire reputation by being the lead person at your company.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:06) You're gonna attract the best talent off of that person's success. Not only that, now you're the company that puts the best people into the market.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:06:15) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:16) You're the company that puts the best people in the market. Your brand will, he will forever be known as the guy that came out of XYZ. You know?

(Doug Woodrow at 01:06:25) And, you know, like, they're not thinking, I know they're not thinking over at Google, like, oh, what if our developers leave? You know? That's not the mentality. You know? And it's smart that you've taken that route because I totally agree. And the other part too is that that person will always wear a badge of pride for working, for having worked at that company. You know? So...

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:48) And he'll thank you forever. He'll talk about you forever. He'd be, he gave me my start. He, in every interview ever, let's say that they go on to be the extreme, he's like Elon Musk. You can't buy that. And when you actually look at the money you would spend to do that, you're not talking hundreds of thousands of dollars. Okay? You're talking, like, you know, you could take $10,000 and put it into three of your top people, and the return on that would be absurd. You'd be blown away by the return on that.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:07:14) Well, the interesting thing to me as well is, you know, the thing I've learned, you know, there's still places for good old networking within, you know, any business. I think every business has an opportunity to network. You know, if you're a moving company, it's going out to, you know, meetings of apartment trade shows or, you know, if you're a web development company, it's, you know, going out to, you know, maybe a meetup or something like that. You know, there's still places for networking and everything. And the power and the presence of a positive, I guess, just a feedback from somebody that appreciates you, to me, is so much more powerful than the negative one.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:07:59) I mean, you know, the negative news travels faster. But I think, you know, when you hear of a lasting interaction that somebody had with another company or something like that, you know, that is so powerful because they're gonna continue selling your product for years, you know, instead of bad-mouthing your product. Because I, from a, like I said, from the impact it has on me, a good review of something, you know, it shows me, like, I'm willing to trust that person. If I know that person, I'll buy that product. But the problem is that if they are talking negatively about, you know, your product, that's gonna spread so much more quickly.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:08:40) So, you know, giving that person the resources they need to get a leg up or whatever, I think that, you know, that's super, uber powerful. And that's why, you know, I never focused on, you know, trying to make a profit off of somebody that's, you know, trying to learn a new technology or something. I'm always just trying to help people up because I know that the positivity of that genuine interaction with that new programmer that, you know, is just getting their start. I just had this happen actually, which is hilarious that we're talking about this. But, you know, I had a guy that I mentored for six months, you know, without any, you know, he'd been helping me out with a little bit, and I was giving him a couple bucks here and there.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:09:23) You know, and he was more than happy just learning. You know? But I wanted to show him that getting paid in programming is just as important as learning how to program.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:32) Right.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:09:33) But, you know, I was teaching him all this stuff, and he just got a job. And I called him up the other day, and I was like, hey. You know, I noticed that there were some tickets ready for testing that, you know, hadn't been gotten to for a few weeks. And I wanted to talk to you and see where your head's at. And he's like, yeah, man. Like, you know, I was really trying not to avoid, yeah. I was trying to avoid telling you about it, but, you know, I think I've got this job now, and my time's too crazy. And I think he was nervous because he thought I was gonna be like, oh, you know, wow. You can't, blah, blah, blah. You know?

(Doug Woodrow at 01:10:04) And I was like, yeah. Like, wow. I'm so happy to hear that, man. And I think that's what most people think. You know? It's just that, like, you give something, you expect to get something back. But, really, in this case, you know, I just really wanted to see this guy succeed. And the power of that interaction, just judging on, you know, I've had this situation happen before. Knowing the business that that's brought to me now in this standpoint, I'm so glad that I invested the time in teaching those people. Even though they may not have ended up being on my, you know, direct team, they ended up being on my team indirectly because they promoted the product for years.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:10:38) So it's powerful. It's very powerful.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:42) Awesome. I have a, I love reading your bio here. We could go forever, but I want to wrap it up, and I've got a last question for you.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:10:48) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:53) Okay. You get a time, let's say Elon Musk calls you up. He goes, Doug, I don't, I don't have this as great of a voice as you. I've loved your voices throughout the call, by the way. He calls you up, and he says, Doug, I just invented a time machine. And you can use it, but it only goes in one place. It'll go ten years back to your previous self. So you can jump in it, and you get to give yourself one piece of advice, and then you gotta come back. What is it?

(Doug Woodrow at 01:11:21) That's a tough one, man. I think that the one thing that has resonated throughout the years is that there's really no way to fake being awesome. Like, you really have to spend the time. You have to focus on the little details. You can't, persistence and time on one good thing creates something amazing.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:11:53) So, you know, really focusing on every little detail you can, even when you think, you know, I, my brain moves so fast that I find myself quickly moving between projects because, you know, my brain has a moment of idle. But through the years I've learned that, you know, having that idle time is probably one of the most important things because it's where your inspirations come from and it's where you're able to look at all the details of a project and really, you know, consider them in every light. So, you know, I think persistence to being awesome, you can't fake it. You know? You really just have to spend the time. I would say that that's probably, you know, the thing that...

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:34) Nailed it. Yep. You know what? I've been talking a lot about needing a sound effects board. When you were preaching there, I wanted to do some, like, organ piano, like, some gospel music, like, preach it. I just wanna be like, oh, Doug. You know? Like, that's what I was feeling. I was like, hey, you know, I wanna, I feel like I should, I'm gonna wear a gown. I need a gown. I need a gown. We need a...

(Doug Woodrow at 01:12:58) Gotta get the choir going. Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:59) We gotta get the choir. We gotta get the choir. That's what I was feeling like.

(Doug Woodrow at 01:13:03) Gotta do a little preacher.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:04) Amen. There you go. I gotta edit in some music there for you. All right. No. This is great. Yeah. We'd love in a couple months to have you back on. Thank you so much for listening.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:24) You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Stitcher, the podcast app. We are everywhere that you are. Modern CTO. Thank you so much. You guys sharing this means the absolute world to me. We wanna get this information as far and wide as possible.