Andrew Ward CTO of MODL

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today we are talking to Andrew Ward, the CTO of MODL, and we talk about what makes great leaders, machine learning, asking for feedback, and much more. This episode is high energy and packed full of knowledge, all right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) I had an early morning. I was at this breakfast event where this guy named David was speaking. He's a futurist, so he talks about the future.

(Andrew Ward at 00:00:41) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) And wow, he scared everyone a little bit. But it was a lot of fun.

(Andrew Ward at 00:00:46) So any particular specialism of the future, or just trying to basically predict?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) Yeah. So he is apparently pretty popular. He goes around the world and speaks on different continents, and his list of credentials was pretty great. His name is David Houle, like H-O-U-L-E. But he was talking about the next five years, the next ten years, and stuff like that. And he tries to make predictions that really help the CEOs to kind of align their business. So he was pretty big on machine learning. Have you messed with that at all?

(Andrew Ward at 00:01:22) Us ourselves aren't machine learning specialists. However, it's a common question amongst these kind of projects that we take on at the moment. I'm seeing a lot of people asking, "Hey, how can we build machine learning into it?" I'm not sure if it's necessarily because they know what they want to do with machine learning. It's more, I think it's become a buzzword that's tied with innovation. Everybody wants to be jumping on the bandwagon because it makes their startup more valuable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:51) A hundred percent. First it was artificial intelligence that made its rounds in the VC circuits, right? And then they jumped over to machine learning. And before that it was the cloud, right? So I love the buzzwords and how they go around.

(Andrew Ward at 00:02:03) I always tell people to stop thinking about machine learning and start thinking about predictions. Like, if you can't explain what you're trying to do in terms of a prediction that you're trying to make, then maybe machine learning isn't actually what you're looking for. Maybe you just need an algorithm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:19) Oh, exactly. What is machine learning without predictions that you're trying to test, right?

(Andrew Ward at 00:02:25) Yeah. But a lot of people don't think of it that way. So a non-technical person approaching the machine learning topic just thinks, "I want the computer to do it for me." And they don't necessarily know the distinction between what's artificial intelligence, what is an automated system, and what is—well, I was going to say the types of machine learning that, you know, they don't know what's the difference between a statistical analysis that makes prediction versus true node-based machine learning, deep learning. I mean, there's a lot to understand with it and a lot of capabilities and benefits. And I think most people in the tech sphere, in the startup sphere, when they're thinking machine learning are really thinking deep. I think that's when you're seeing the big innovations. But there aren't that many specialists in it, not in the UK at least, not from what I've seen. What you tend to see, particularly in the larger organizations, is a tendency to look at what data do they have at the moment and how can you make meaningful machine learning predictions based upon that data. That's one way of approaching that problem. It's how have you seen the whole Google data collection at the moment where you visit a place and it asks you a ton of questions about where you've been or what your experience was? They're looking at the users that are using their systems at the moment and trying to get data probably for crafting these machine learning algorithms. The big question that I have, however, is how many unsolved problems are there out there where the data to solve the machine learning problem isn't readily accessible? Because, you know, you might need a hundred thousand to a million data records to truly do meaningful machine learning. And what problems exist out there where actually the problem isn't necessarily the training of the computer. The problem is getting that meaningful data to solve the problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:19) I was talking about this yesterday.

(Andrew Ward at 00:04:23) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:24) A guy messaged me through the website because I'm right there and I respond. It comes right to my phone. Cool. And he started—he said, "Oh, I've got some ideas about cognition. Point me in the right direction. Well, what are your thoughts on this?" And what he stirred up inside of me was, about two months ago, I was having a conversation with some investors, and I was actively looking at a few machine learning projects that they were going to put money into. And I said to myself, the big play here, in my opinion, or the play that's least discussed, is having high volumes of quality curated data for the models to train themselves on. Because that's the shortage, that's the oxygen that they need to breathe, right?

(Andrew Ward at 00:05:06) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:07) If you want to teach the machine learning about empathy, right, let's pretend that we're farther in the future, right, because that's always fun. And let's say that they can already process text and do it at a much greater level than they can do it today, right? So if you want to train it on the concept of empathy, you'll need hundreds of varying stories where empathy is like the center of the story, right, in a form that can be consumed by a machine learning model.

(Andrew Ward at 00:05:35) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:36) So that doesn't exist. You can't—

(Andrew Ward at 00:05:38) You can't put on an episode of—

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:39) —a series of Friends and say, like, "Be like Joey." You know, you need quality data that, based on what you want it to do, you know that it was made for that purpose.

(Andrew Ward at 00:05:52) Yeah. It's true. What's the empathy score for that particular sentence? Yeah. I think you see this in tech as a whole, though. Problems that people can get their hands on and solve as a lone developer tend to be solved and tend to be solved well. Like, there are loads of really good programming tools out there because programmers know what they want and they build them. So you get them cheap and abundant. I mean, where you tend to see the biggest opportunities at the moment in the world is where you get a crossover of disciplines that doesn't necessarily happen naturally. And I guess you can relate that to machine learning data in the same way, where it's the alignment of those two sectors that kind of results in that problem being solved. Once the problem exists in the marketplace, it seems obvious, but until it does people don't—

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:36) Yeah. We have like the diversity concept of the rainforest. Like what makes it so sustainable is its large variety of everything. And that's exactly what we're seeing happen in this technology space, right? Technology is not becoming less sustainable. It's becoming more sustainable because of the vast amount of variety that's cropping up everywhere. And it's like mixing specialties, like you're talking about, that all breeds creativity and it's brilliant, right?

(Andrew Ward at 00:06:58) Yeah. It's true. I mean, I heard a story the other day about a tech conference and they had two different disciplines. They had a medical conference that was next to a tech conference. I might be paraphrasing here. And this guy walks in. You don't know who he is. And he sat listening to the medical guy. And the medical guy's there talking about how they've got this problem about how to serve this medicine into these cancerous cells. But if they could solve the problem, then they'd basically be onto a solution. They'd be onto a winning business, make big changes in the world. And the guy who walked in from the tech conference happened to be like an expert in nanotechnologies. So he came up to this guy and starts talking to him about all of these different things that you can do with these little machines. And the guy just thinks he's some student sat at the back spouting off. And it turns out he runs this like multimillion pound nanotechnology business, and the two guys then set up a company off the back of it. So it's things like that where you get the understanding of a problem in one space where you apply discipline from another. That's where you get the big innovations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:59) Absolutely. Yeah. My brother and my mom are both doctors and they were actually talking about that. I think it was last Christmas, they were talking about delivery of medicines using nanotechnology. I think that's similar to what you were talking about.

(Andrew Ward at 00:08:11) Yeah. It's exactly right. I mean, you think of one of the big problems, like how do you stop a virus in your system that's mutating and you're relying on your system and your body that creates antibodies to meet that specific virus. Your body has to evolve to create ones, your antibodies evolve. At the moment, you don't see any practical applications for that where you can go get an injection and robots are just going to self-scan everything and kill it for you. But the technology is—

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:37) Hopefully Elon Musk will hurry up.

(Andrew Ward at 00:08:39) Yeah. He seems to be stuck with all the meaningful problems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:43) Right? He's going to inject that neural net with his little nano robots, and then the world, everything, all the problems will be solved. Oh, this is great. I'm super in love with this conversation. You're awesome, Andrew. I'm reading your bio here.

(Andrew Ward at 00:08:59) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:00) My awesome producer, Jenny, she puts together these great one sheets for me. And it's like your credentials are freaking awesome. I love that you do—you've got information. Let's identify your knowledge areas, or at least the ones we're going to talk about. You've got information from going from developer to CTO.

(Andrew Ward at 00:09:23) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:24) Huge fan. What was the base programming language that you learned in?

(Andrew Ward at 00:09:28) So I actually started learning—well, the very first programming language I ever used was Visual Basic. Yeah. Which, that was at college. Not my favorite programming language. At university, really, it was a lot of Java programming, sort of enterprise Java, that kind of thing. Though from sort of the freelance stuff I was doing alongside university, and the primary languages I went into after that tended to be a lot more web. So nowadays, it's a lot more PHP, JavaScript, you know, those kinds of web-based languages.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:04) Right. Because the web just massively expanded. Now, I never programmed in Java, right?

(Andrew Ward at 00:10:11) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:11) But what I did enjoy about it was that most of the books that were written about code structure, like Martin Fowler and stuff like that, a lot of the code structure books that had that type of information, their examples were all Java. So it seems like they had a lot of great people in Java.

(Andrew Ward at 00:10:32) Yeah. I think if you look at historically what's happened with programming languages, so back about ten years ago, if you look at the PHP world, it used to be a very loosely typed language. You could still argue it's loosely typed. It was considered like you're kind of hacking away in your back shed. You've got flexibility to do whatever you can with it, whatever you like with it. You're not really restricted, but also you could write very, very bad code very easily. And I think what you saw around that kind of time was Java came out very—you know, it's a typed language. You've got to be strict on certain conventions that you use. And there's certain concepts that were popularized particularly through the universities with the introduction of Java. A lot of people coming out of sort of colleges and education with that understanding. And I think it's actually led the standards behind programming languages that were traditionally considered not to be very good, like PHP.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:27) Is that so? You program in a lot of PHP?

(Andrew Ward at 00:11:30) Yes. Yes. We do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:32) Framework of choice. Framework of choice.

(Andrew Ward at 00:11:34) Framework of choice. Yii Two or Symfony. It's probably the two that I would—

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:38) Oh, there's one I have not heard of. What was the first one? Yii Two. Oh, I was doing PHP about ten years ago.

(Andrew Ward at 00:11:47) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:48) I did it for a handful of years, let's say four or five. And then a friend of mine, Derek, we got on this Ruby kick. And to us, it was like the most amazing—it's like we found out what water was. We were just like jumping up and down, so happy. And then we just fully committed over to Ruby and been in love with it since. But so you stayed on the PHP train.

(Andrew Ward at 00:12:11) Yeah, we did. I think a lot of that comes from sort of where we came from as an agency. So when you're growing a company from being just yourself, which is how it started originally, through trying to employ people. Like, when we were very small, we never really had the credibility to take on large projects, right? So at the time, like, if you look at how we're building the team, we're building the team all around web-based solutions, websites, right? And really, like, a lot of the early day stuff was pumping out websites, right? And you're not—unless you're building something large, I think it's unlikely that you're going to approach a brochure website using Ruby. So that's kind of where the PHP journey started. But, you know, like, nowadays, the tools and everything that exists for it are so much more mature. And the platforms that exist to support hosting it, the server infrastructure you can put in place on things like Amazon Web Services, if you're trying to offshoot from running your own cloud setup. They're really modern and mature, and they scale well with that technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:20) Do you use Heroku at all?

(Andrew Ward at 00:13:22) No. We haven't really used that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:24) I find that people are kind of split, right? Some people are huge fans. Like, I'm in that category. I'm a huge fan of Heroku. That being said, I have both—I have production apps that are both directly on AWS with its own infrastructure and just AWS tools, and then I've got apps that are on Heroku.

(Andrew Ward at 00:13:44) Yeah. I mean, I've done little bits on Heroku. So we had a customer application that was built using—oh, was it Pulse or Parse? Was it Parse that got bought out by Facebook?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:55) That got axed. Yeah. They got axed.

(Andrew Ward at 00:13:57) Yes. It was that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:00) And then I think they open sourced, right? They got axed and then they open sourced, right? So you could host your own installation of it.

(Andrew Ward at 00:14:07) Axed, open sourced, and then you've got a big community supporting this Parse thing that is, I think, essentially dead.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:13) I love React. Are you a fan of React?

(Andrew Ward at 00:14:15) Favorite. Use quite a few things. React is stuck—firmly stuck. We adopted Angular very early on. So we still have quite a few projects running that are using Angular One. And that was a real pain with their whole upgrade cycle through to—

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:30) Oh, yeah. Like, when they upgrade and then like all your stuff's obsolete?

(Andrew Ward at 00:14:34) Well, it's completely different. Yeah. Absolutely different. Yeah. So we kind of moved away from Angular. We still run some projects in it. Still doing a little bit in Angular One and Two. But, yeah, React is—if you look at the study they do, I can't remember the source now, but there's a source that does research into the frameworks that developers are most happy working within each year. And every year for the last like two or three years, React's been right up there. Everybody loves using it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:01)
Yeah. We switched our — so I have an app company. And about six months ago, we tested the waters with a React Native app. And before that, we had, you know, multiple developers on every project. You know, got the iOS, Android guy on the project.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:16)
And we have since in the past six months, we are 100% native for every project going forward, and we've only gone back and converted, like, two. And we leave the rest of the clients on their old systems unless they wanted to do full rewrites, but, you know, people don't really wanna do that. So I'm absolutely in love. It's made my — I'm biased because it made my life easier. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:41)
Right?

(Andrew Ward at 00:15:42)
Yeah. It's true. You gotta be careful, haven't you? I mean, it's good. We use it because it's good, probably for the exact same reasons that you do. Yeah. But do you ever find yourself trying to be careful that you're making decisions based upon what's right versus what's easy?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:58)
I took a long time to get into React, both the web component and React Native projects, because I was so burned by those previous projects, like Xamarin, all those frameworks like PhoneGap, all those garbage things, right, that, like, caused me infinite stress just trying them. I didn't wanna go into React, and it was from a marketing perspective, it was hard for me to get sold on it. And then I kept reading the blog posts of the developers using it, and I said, alright. Well, let's try an internal small project that doesn't really matter. And we did, and I was just blown away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:37)
So I went to my next client that I got, and I said, hey. We wanna try this. Is it cool? They said, yeah. And I said, alright. So we tried it. Because I — here's a good point. I was open and honest with the client. Okay? I didn't just, like, throw a long shot. Right? I didn't just do a Hail Mary pass and say, oh, I hope this works first. I tested it on an internal project that didn't matter. I liked it. Then when I told the clients, look, we could do it the way that we absolutely know, the way that we're completely fluent in, but we wanna try this. And I actually gave them a price reduction because we were trying it. And I got them involved with it, I shared with them, and it's that communication that allowed it to happen. So I think when you say struggling between doing what's — what did you say — doing what's right and what's

(Andrew Ward at 00:17:22)
Doing what's right and doing what's easy. Because the reason I mentioned that is when I first saw React, I was interested in it because it ticked the, oh, that looks easy box. Do you see what I mean? Like, that was my first, oh, I like that. But then you kinda gotta stop yourself and be like, well, is it the right solution? I personally think it is. I think it's great technology. But I think some of the Cordovas and the PhoneGaps that exist out there, they were on the surface, oh, that makes life easier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:49)
But does — and they were not. They did not deliver.

(Andrew Ward at 00:17:53)
No. Not when it comes to six months down the line and you wanna update it and all — you like, the dependency night — I don't know if you've had to do this yourself, but the dependency nightmares you can have sometimes with a project that is an infrequently updated one. Could be an absolute nightmare in Cordova.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:08)
Oh, no. Luckily, I haven't gotten that far with Cordova. I never got past the testing phase, um, with just playing with it, and it was that frustrating for me. So I just let it go. I see here that you have a couple apps.

(Andrew Ward at 00:18:19)
Yeah. So ScratchSoft is my web app and mobile app development agency.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:24)
Oh, excellent.

(Andrew Ward at 00:18:26)
And MODL, which is a mobile application platform that allows people to book professional agency represented models.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:34)
Oh, that's cool. Cool. I like how you did the language thing there with MODL. And where is that? Is that —

(Andrew Ward at 00:18:41)
The second business, the model app?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:43)
Yeah. Yeah.

(Andrew Ward at 00:18:43)
So we're based in the UK.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:45)
Now I'm curious. So when did — how did that project come about?

(Andrew Ward at 00:18:50)
So through ScratchSoft, I've been in the tech scene locally in Birmingham, which is the area that I live in the UK for the last seven years. So you end up taking on a lot of tech projects. You network a lot in the tech scene. You meet other like-minded entrepreneurs. There's kind of like an ecosystem forming in this area, kind of probably not quite what you've got in Silicon Valley, but, you know, kind of akin to that kind of thing. Right. And there was some friends of mine who we met through business, also entrepreneurs, run kind of — into social media. They run their own social media agency. We were kind of talking about this problem that existed in the modeling industry. So you've got essentially quite an outdated marketplace. You've got high fragmentation, lots and lots of agencies out there, small ones, with small rosters of models. But from a model perspective, it's not uncommon for people to take thirty to sixty days to receive payment for a job if they receive it at all. Gotta do a lot of chasing. Everything's email based. It's really not kind of like a modern up to date process like you would expect for most industries.

(Andrew Ward at 00:19:59)
So we sat down and decided that this was a meaningful problem to solve, and we formed a business together. So, I mean, if you look at the team, you've got myself as CTO, head of tech. Amy, who is COO. She's got a lot of experience in photography, working on big budget productions, that kind of thing. You've got Jody, who runs a social media marketing agency, and Ben, who is a professional model. So it's kind of like an alignment of skills that kinda came together to tackle that particular one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:31)
Oh, smart. So you — you have an agency and you do some social media stuff?

(Andrew Ward at 00:20:36)
So Jody, her agency, JC Social Media, they're kind of like a social media agency. So they are a shareholder in the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:46)
Now do you ever come across Gary Vee?

(Andrew Ward at 00:20:50)
Who hasn't come across Gary Vee?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:51)
Okay. First of all, huge fan. Right?

(Andrew Ward at 00:20:55)
Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:55)
Cool. We started executing — so I've been listening to him, I don't know, on and off. He was just a guy coming through my feed for about a year.

(Andrew Ward at 00:21:05)
Oh, really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:06)
Yeah. And then about six months ago, I was like, alright. This guy, he said enough things that are the way I think to where I validated him. Right? Cool. I said, alright. We're similar. Good. Let's listen to him some more. And then I started consuming more of his content, you know, made him a priority in my feed. And then I said, alright. Well, this guy is — I like him a lot now. And he says great stuff, and it took about six months of me listening to him because, you know, I'm busy running my business and I'm not, like, hurting at all for business or anything like that. But then I was so interested in what he was saying and the value he was bringing, I took a chunk of cash and I said, alright, we're going to execute a project. You know, and I'm in the app development world, right? So I said, we're going to execute a project, and we're gonna do what Gary Vee says, and we're gonna just science the shit out of this. Right? We're gonna do science. We're gonna do what Gary Vee says and take his advice and just kind of be an example of that. Right?

(Andrew Ward at 00:22:05)
Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:05)
And we did. Wow. Like, unbelievable. It works. The project?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:13)
This. This is the project.

(Andrew Ward at 00:22:14)
Oh, this is the project.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:16)
This is the project.

(Andrew Ward at 00:22:17)
Makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:18)
Yeah. I've got, you know, 2,000 pre-registered. I wrote the book. 2,000 preregisters are ready for it. Top CTOs in the world on my podcast. So this is the trans — the story. This is how it happened. So I start writing this book last year. Okay?

(Andrew Ward at 00:22:36)
Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:36)
And I get halfway through it, and a — and life happens. And then over the summer, there was kind of like a lull. And then I started, you know, watching Gary Vee. I said, alright, well, it's time to get more serious about the book. So I hired a staff writer to help me finish the book. Right?

(Andrew Ward at 00:22:51)
Good call.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:52)
Yeah. Because if I can put it in my schedule and say, alright, Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11 AM, we meet for an hour and all we do is the book —

(Andrew Ward at 00:22:59)
Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:59)
— then it gets done. So we did that for a couple months and finished the book. And it came out really well. I was very, very excited about it. So I started sending it to all my CTO friends. Right? I said, oh, you know, what do you think of this? What do you think of this?

(Andrew Ward at 00:23:12)
Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:13)
I was sending the chapters to them as they come in. And then they started calling me and saying — and then we were talking for, like, thirty, forty minutes about the book, about the chapter, you know, like, how I covered it, what was covered, so on and so forth. And then one time, my wife's like, you know, you should just record the calls, because she hears me, you know, making the calls. And I said, oh, that'd be kinda cool. That way I could remember what we talked about and everything. And then I started playing the calls back to my different friends. Right? I'd sit down and say, hey. Listen. Look. I talked to this CTO. I listened to the call. He's like, oh, that's great. And then someone's like, you gotta do a podcast.

(Andrew Ward at 00:23:46)
Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:47)
You gotta do a podcast. So I went online, and I found a podcast producer, and I said, alright. Cool. And then I took the preregisters, the 2,000 people that had preregistered for the book, and I, no joke, Gary Vee, DM style, went to every single person, looked them up on LinkedIn, looked them — this is how I found you. Right?

(Andrew Ward at 00:24:07)
Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:09)
Yeah. So I looked them up. I was like, alright. This is a cool, interesting person. I wrote an email. I said, hey. Do you have anything you wanna share? Because everyone seems to wanna, like, talk to me about it. So I was like, you have anything you wanna share? Yeah. Then I set up a calendar thing. I had people book. And, Andrew, you could see the calendar on the website. We're booked, like, two months out.

(Andrew Ward at 00:24:26)
Yeah. You will fill up. I was like, wow. Because I was — I was on holiday at the time when you messaged, and I was thinking, oh, they — you know, I'm away at the moment for the next three weeks. I hope they don't mind waiting. And you weren't even available.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:39)
Yeah. No. It blew my mind. So it's definitely, like, a gratitude situation because I just, you know, reached out, and then everybody was ultra responsive similar to how they were registering for the book. And I start — you know, as I'm looking through these people and getting to know them, the people that registered for my book, I mean, they're the top CTOs in the world. Like and they're so interesting. Like, you are so incredibly interesting. I love the whole weightlifting, acrobat, developer to CTO. You're involved in the community, like, you speak well, you communicate clearly. I mean, these are the people that if at the end of my life, when I'm sitting on my deathbed type situation, I wanna be like, alright. Well, I made some apps. I made some money so I could feed my family. But, man, every single day, I talk to this, like, awesome person who I had similar interest with, and, like, that's winning for me. Right?

(Andrew Ward at 00:25:29)
Well, if you're looking at what you're doing and you feel enjoyed and fulfilled, you're finding meaning in what you're doing. Why not? I mean, I think it's great. What you're doing is a great idea. It's the whole reason I decided to sign up for it. I never expected to be reached out to, so that was nice. But if you've got the opportunity — if you've got the opportunity to improve yourself, you're gonna take it. And I think a lot of the — in the world of being a CTO, you've got to be constantly looking at what the best resources out there are to teach you the things that are adapting that you don't know about yet that are no doubt on the horizon that could kill you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:03)
Yeah. That's — no. It's amazing how similarly I'm finding that I think with all these people. And when they start airing, you'll start hearing this as well. These same conversations come up. And when I was watching the futurist guy this morning, David —

(Andrew Ward at 00:26:19)
Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:20)
— he was saying he was describing to the audience his job. Right? My job is to look and pay attention to what's happening so I can then predict the short term and long term future so that I can help companies, you know, make the right decisions with their paths. And I thought to myself, well, that's, like, a huge part of my job. Everything from where am I gonna hedge my bets for what — you know, like React Native. That was me making an investment decision in my company. That's a critical move. Right?

(Andrew Ward at 00:26:45)
One of the biggest challenges I always have is — so when you're small, when you're one man band, you can look at technologies that exist out in the marketplace. You can flip and change and move. Every project moves on and there's no real debt associated with making the wrong decision. You just move on. They're your projects. It doesn't matter. Once you start to form a team, however, anytime that you adopt something new, even if it's trendy and modern and what everybody's doing, if it's a change in any way, there's a huge amount of cost to the business in shifting and pivoting. And if you make a mistake, not only have you risked a potential project, but you could also be in a position where you need the expertise team to support something that long term you don't really want to be having the skills in your team to support. You don't want to have the training there. You don't have the structures and the infrastructure. So was it the right decision React Native? I think so. You think so. But at the time when you're doing it, you do feel like you're taking a gamble. There's no getting around that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:49)
Oh, absolutely. That's why when I did it, I did it in a way that allowed me to minimize my exposure. Right? By informing the client, trying it internally, like, I did it in a — I took a risk. It is a risk, nonetheless, but I took a risk that I could absorb if it went south. Right?

(Andrew Ward at 00:28:08)
So how are you finding other people handle taking these kinds of risks? Because it's a common thing in this industry. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:13)
Taking risk in general?

(Andrew Ward at 00:28:14)
Well, just like deciding the horses to back, really, because it's — you know, I always battle with myself over whether you're doing the right things. And it's very easy in tech where everyone's got an opinion and an acronym that they know that another developer doesn't know. And it's — where you really — it's focusing on where you need to direct that attention really from a business perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:37)
Oh, that's a huge — I just wrote an article on that. I think the post was called The Visionary CTO, and it was talking about how I — I feel the way — when I'm working on technology or I'm trying to communicate something. This is great. I love that I'm stumbling around communication while trying to talk about communicating clearly.

(Andrew Ward at 00:28:54)
It's always the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:55)
Irony. It's thick, the irony. So I said, we have this inside, I've got this monkey version of myself, right? This very primal version of myself. And then that's my stupid version, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:07) But just pure animal. And then I've got my intellectual side. And when I'm drafting communication, like if I'm going to explain a complex technology in a very clear way, it takes a lot of back and forth between seeing how my animal side feels and how my intellectual side feels. And when I align them, I have this excellent, clear communication. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:26) They're in sync and they're aligned. And the response to that is people hiring me to communicate their technology clearly. They'll say, "We've got this very complicated technology, and we want to go take it to market, but we don't know how to communicate it in a very clear, concise way. Will you help us out?" And so I started taking on a few of those projects recently, and then people were asking me, "Well, how do you do it?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:48) And then my explanation for how I do it was, "Well, I've got the autistic side of myself, right? The part of me that just doesn't understand, and then I have the intellectual part. And what I do is I try to bring them together."

(Andrew Ward at 00:30:03) I know what you mean, though. Like, I certainly get times where, and my friends joke about it, where sometimes I'm so absorbed in what I'm doing, particularly if I'm hungry. Have you ever heard of being hangry?

(Andrew Ward at 00:30:15) If I'm hangry, my ability to be emotionally intelligent and empathic just completely switches off. It's gone. But it's interesting what you're saying about the whole visionary side of things and teaching and training because I think you've got a customer or you've got a stakeholder and they could be anywhere on the spectrum, a different spectrum here, of tech savvy to completely tech illiterate. And you have to be able to communicate to them pretty advanced, complex topics in a way that not only do they understand, but they can make decisions off the basis of.

(Andrew Ward at 00:30:53) And in order to do that, it's not just a case of knowing the tech. You've also got to know the person. You've got to be able to read the person. You've got to be able to read the situation. And I think maybe, like, if we're talking about things that are about being an effective tech leader or effective senior person in general, I think that that is one of the most important characteristics that you can have.

(Andrew Ward at 00:31:14) Do you—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:14) Do you ever listen to, are you a fan of Simon Sinek?

(Andrew Ward at 00:31:17) Yes. I've seen him. He talks a lot about millennials, isn't he?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:22) Yeah. Well, that's a favorite buzzword. He does the whole "Start with Why." He does "Find Your Why." He talks about "Leaders Eat Last." He's got a couple good books and a couple great TED Talks. But for some reason, he just popped into my mind when you were talking about that.

(Andrew Ward at 00:31:36) Yeah. He's an interesting guy. I think a lot of the concepts of what makes great leaders, you see regardless of the sector and regardless of the role. I was thinking about this the other day, and I'll keep bringing this to the whole CTO topic. But in terms of what makes an effective senior manager, just look at a business. You look at the CEOs, you look at the CTOs, you look at the CMOs. They're never down in the trenches doing the doing. They shouldn't be. They are communicating, they are strategizing, and they're managing people. That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:12) You know what's interesting about that is when I made the transition going from developer building a product to having investors come in and having to make that transition to do more of the business thing and assume a role of a CTO, it was very difficult for me to qualify or quantify the work. Right? Because previously, I had done it based on progression throughout the code base. I get the feature, I build the feature, the features are complete, we ship the product. And it was that sense of completeness.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:43) And honestly, as a developer, I would almost scoff, and I fully admit when I'm wrong. Right? So I would scoff at the business people. "Oh, they don't work. They just talk." Right? "They just talk. We're doing the real work, the developers." You know, all that. And then I got into the business side of things, and that is work. It is real work to be able to communicate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:09) It takes a lot of effort. It's a lot of energy to come up with the simple communication, to be able to then, conversation after conversation, relay the same information with the same consistency and energy. And it is a whole world of work, and that was surprising to me.

(Andrew Ward at 00:33:26) I think there's a massive difference as well. So you've got the work side of it, but it's a whole different psychology to how you motivate and drive yourself and decide what tasks are meaningful. I mean, when you're working on an engineering topic, you have a particular output you're trying to solve. You can sit down, code away, play with it when your problem's done and you've ticked the box of the thing that's done. Like when you're trying to do businessing—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:53) That's the name of your next book, Andrew. "Businessing" by Andrew Ward.

(Andrew Ward at 00:33:57) Yeah, that should. Next book, "Businessing." But when you're businessing, you've got to constantly evaluate whether the things you're doing are the things that are worth the time and worth the effort and worth the energy. And it's very, very easy when you're transitioning from being a developer to a business person to seek the comfort of coding away when actually that's completely distracting from the long-term goals of what you actually want to be as a business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:26) Oh, a lot of people needed to hear that. I get that from a lot of conversations, people that are often drowning in development or they're, I get a lot of people who call life raft style, like, "Oh, help me out. I just assumed this role as a CTO, and I'm kind of going crazy because I'm trying to program forty hours a week and then manage forty hours a week, and I'm working eighty hours a week, and it's not working." And I'm like, "Drop the programming." And you don't have to drop it completely, but move to an air traffic controller role where you're reviewing code and doing pull requests and doing deployments a few hours a week, right, and then spend the other amount of your time on the actual CTO-style role. Right?

(Andrew Ward at 00:35:05) Yeah. But there are constraints stopping people from being able to do that so easily.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:09) Now, I want to get into this. Give me an example of the constraints.

(Andrew Ward at 00:35:14) So I'm going to come at this from the perspective of an agency model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:18) Okay.

(Andrew Ward at 00:35:18) But it can apply to other sectors as well. Lone ranger, myself, back in the day, programming becomes very good and can win freelance and contracting roles. Right? So they're in a position where they're kind of touching on the whole entrepreneurship game, but they're not fully embracing it at the moment because they're still essentially working for somebody. So I've seen agencies that go, "Right, I want to grow."

(Andrew Ward at 00:35:43) And what they do to grow is they start to take on other tech people in the business and they're a tech person themselves. That's actually how I grew as well. And they start to grow their team and they become a team of one or two or three and they're able to take on these tech projects. Okay. But you hit a point where if you want to step away from being a developer in a business, in that environment, you have to—so let's say go from three people to four.

(Andrew Ward at 00:36:12) That step isn't going from three developers to four developers. That step is going from three developers to three developers plus a 100% fee-burning head in theory. And the business has to change in order to support that overhead. And it's not an easy thing to do. I mean, if you've got existing customers, you may have to review your hourly rates and increase them because your old model of charging doesn't work anymore.

(Andrew Ward at 00:36:40) You've got to have a change in the way that you do business and the processes in your company to support having the additional heads in it. And it doesn't stop there. So that's the first time that you go from a position of everybody in your business being a fee earner to a fee burner. If you want to grow, you're going to need account managers. You might need a project manager.

(Andrew Ward at 00:37:01) You might need additional heads in your business again. And unless you really have a solid structure there that supports that growth, there's a lot of lessons to be learned to transition from just being one person to being many, unless you have money right off the bat like you might do if you're raising straight away. It's a difficult thing to transition into.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:22) No. It's the reason why you find a lot of the lone rangers who are completely booked solid, but they can't expand. I mean, and then you find the agencies that have 400 employees and the technical skills of the leaders at the beginning are on par. They're together. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:43) They're similar. But it was their ability from a business management strategy that allowed them to scale it up. And to bring it back to the previous topic was these developers that become CTOs, the big problem that keeps coming up in my life when they're messaging me and emailing me is that they're not able to step away from the development, and it's something you brought up. And because they love it. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:11) And then they assume a CTO role because the project's going, but then they have issues either letting go or they just don't know what to do because they quantify their value. They don't feel like they worked a day when they're sitting around having conversations with different businesses or different partners or whatever it is. When they're not writing code, they feel like they're not working. So then they're stressing themselves out. And I see this happen a lot.

(Andrew Ward at 00:38:39) It's really tough. When—I knew when I was at university, when I graduated, I knew that if I wanted to do what I wanted to do, which was to run an agency and run startups off the back of that agency, that's what I wanted to do. I knew that I had to stop programming at some point, but that the programming was really important to get me where I needed to be. But the roles and responsibilities as a business person, almost like the personality of being a business person, is so different to being a technical engineer that there's almost an inherent misalignment there between what motivated somebody to get into tech and what they need to be to be a business person.

(Andrew Ward at 00:39:24) It's almost like, if you did a Myers-Briggs of the average business person, you did a Myers-Briggs of the average tech person, I bet you there would be a clash in between the two. And that's why I think it's so hard to transition. You're getting right to the bottom of what motivates people. People who code love to solve problems. They love to get their hands dirty and solve problems themselves on their own.

(Andrew Ward at 00:39:49) They love to test and play with what they've built when they've done it and have this sense of achievement and meaning that is on a feature-by-feature basis. I mean, we've all been there. We've built something and probably clicked around on it for half an hour testing when actually we just like the animation of it popping out the side or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:07) Right.

(Andrew Ward at 00:40:07) You know what I mean? And you don't—

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:09) Especially when you get that nice easing when it eases real smooth. Oh, my God.

(Andrew Ward at 00:40:13) Makes you want to lick it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:15) Okay. Nope.

(Andrew Ward at 00:40:17) Is that just me?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:18) That is just you.

(Andrew Ward at 00:40:21) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:22) Let's hope it's an animated ice cream cone.

(Andrew Ward at 00:40:24) Yeah. Oh, that's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:27) No. I get what you're saying though. You get, so I was able to successfully transition the adrenal rush, right, or that shot of excitement and adrenaline from writing the code to building the business. And it wasn't an overnight thing. It actually happened very slowly over probably about seven years, right, where I was still a lead developer on a project that I was also an investor and an owner of, and I had junior developers with me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:57) And I was still programming, you know, twenty hours a week, maybe thirty hours a week. And then I would do that for six or seven months. And then as the business started to take off, I would slowly program less and less and less. And then the next business, I would be the beginning developer. And that happened, I think, two or three times where I started out myself, built it up, sold the business, started out myself, built it up, sold the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:19) And in that act of doing that, I slowly, like, I tiptoed. I eased into the business. And then I went back to developer, eased into the business, and I kind of got those skills over seven years. And then, you know, most recently, I didn't ever decide, I never had the moment where I'm like, "I'm not coding." Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:38) It just kind of happened. I realized, I was talking to my wife about it. I was like, "I haven't written code in like three weeks." You know? That was the first time I noticed it because it happened.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:48) And then I'm still—then I was only doing GitHub commits and pull requests and stuff like that. And I try to stay in it. You know, I still get my Ruby Weekly emails, and I still watch, our Deepgram, and these are just personalities in Ruby. Right? So I still watch the code stuff come in because I want to stay aware of what's happening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:09) But I'm not doing it every day. And I guess I'm finally at the point in my life where I'm okay with that.

(Andrew Ward at 00:42:14) But that's the challenge. Right? Because as a CTO, you mentioned having dinosaurs. Right? So you mentioned on one of your—

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:20) Oh, yeah.

(Andrew Ward at 00:42:20) Dinosaurs. Well, maybe a dinosaur exists because they reach the point where they become a senior person and it's difficult to know what technologies—it's difficult to know what you need to focus on to stay in the game and what you need to step away from so that you've got the right combination of business and tech at any one time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:42) That's very true because you usually look to the newer people who are in it, eating, sleeping, and breathing it. Right? They're obsessed with it. And they're always excited about whatever technology that they're using. And there's always new stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:56) So from a higher-level perspective, when you're looking at all these people, you kind of have to find the right person that you really believe in and trust and that you validate that person and then say, "What are you using? What are you doing?"

(Andrew Ward at 00:43:08) Yeah. I think asking people is always a good thing. But when you're problem-solving, and as a CTO, you are always problem-solving, it's like a foundation of computer science that you've got to know to be able to solve that tech problem in a meaningful way. And you do need a deep understanding of some of the tech things from a programming perspective.

(Andrew Ward at 00:43:31) So even though you can't program, you need that deep understanding and that deep knowledge, and it's something that you've got to try to stay in and build. I mean, I—so I don't program. Well, I say I don't program. I can never avoid doing bits. I mean, you always get drawn to it like, "Oh, just, it's just this little..." It's kind of like a lack of discipline maybe. I should just not do it, get used to delegating it. But something I find as a technique to help is I will often when developers in my team have a technical problem, I will almost pair program with them, with them programming and me just sitting over their shoulder as a means of just making sure that I'm constantly exposed to the code that we're working in, even though I'm not necessarily working on it. So I'm constantly problem-solving in the code, which means I don't need to get into it too deeply. But I'm also seeing enough of it and know how it works and know how it stitches together.

(Andrew Ward at 00:44:26) And I could write it, but without ever needing to write it, if that makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:30) No, it's like the book, right? Like, I sit here and I share the experiences and I detail them out, and then a writer goes back and makes them into a writing. And then I look at it a second time and make sure that all the sentiment was conveyed the way I want it conveyed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:45) So it's how I scale myself, right? It's like I can't sit down and spend that time. That's not a good use of my time. And the same thing with if I'm behind the computer writing the code all day, I can't be out there with the large clients and getting the projects.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:01) Right? But it's also interesting because you go back, the reason why the clients are so comfortable with me is because of my seventeen years experience writing code. Like, I know what's happening at my business because I'm not a non-technical business owner.

(Andrew Ward at 00:45:15) I mean, is this common problem when you're talking to people? Like, are other people feeling this too?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:20) Which problem?

(Andrew Ward at 00:45:22) The whole stepping away but also not stepping away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:26) Yes. This is huge. And here's the thing I'm getting. And because there's not anyone on my radar, and if there is, let me know, that has come in and connected all the CTOs together, and that's why I wanted to do it because I love these types of people, right? So I started pulling everyone together and emailing out every single person, and they all start, you know what the most common response I get, Andrew, from me asking somebody if they have an experience to share?

(Andrew Ward at 00:45:49) Is it yes?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:50) No. The most common one that surprised me was I don't know if I have anything valid to share. I didn't take the traditional route. I went from developer to CTO.

(Andrew Ward at 00:46:01) Which is the traditional route?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:02) Yeah, nobody knows because nobody's out there creating a CTO platform where we can all talk about it. But apparently, we have found this to be true.

(Andrew Ward at 00:46:11) It's the whole expert mentality, isn't it? Like, if you take somebody who is not very good at something, it's very common to get people who think they're very, very good at something, but they're actually not. Like they're unconsciously incompetent, if that makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:27) Yeah. That's a sweet—I'm going to—unconsciously incompetent. Yeah.

(Andrew Ward at 00:46:31) So you got the conscious competency matrix, haven't you? So you got unconsciously incompetent, you've got consciously incompetent, consciously competent, and then unconsciously competent. So like if you get somebody who's got all this bravado, thinks they're really good and they're not, then they are unconsciously incompetent because they don't realize how bad they are. Now, what you often have with people who are true experts in their field is they might be consciously competent, in which case they're thinking very much about what they do, or they're unconsciously competent where they're literally doing things on autopilot. And they don't even realize at that stage the difficulty in what they're doing and how advanced that is and everybody else.

(Andrew Ward at 00:47:13) But what they do see is the more unconsciously competent they get in their field, there's a whole perimeter around this unconsciously competent bubble that is growing as someone gets better and better, where people realize more and more things that they are not good at. It's like the whole analogy of if you have a torch and you've got a thin beam, you can see the wall, but the perimeter is small. You get a really big beam, you can see more of the wall, but the darkness, the perimeter of darkness is much larger too. You realize what you don't know. And I think particularly in tech, you've got people who are probably very good at what they do, very good computer scientists, but there's so many technologies out there. There's so many acronyms that you don't know. What one person uses for testing might not be what another one does. Computer scientists will sit together in a room and everyone will be talking jargon and people don't see what they know. People only see the anxiety that they might feel when they're in a conversation and someone mentions something that they don't know that they feel they should. And I think it makes experts feel like they're incompetent, which is probably why people say, I don't know what I would have to offer. I don't know what I have to share. Because they don't realize the value of the knowledge they've got.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:20) This is a brilliant explanation. I don't know if it's your own, but I'm loving it, right? Problem solving. We were talking about problem solving earlier.

(Andrew Ward at 00:48:27) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:27) About how essential it is. And I wrote about this in the book about how I do the problem solving. And I mentioned in the comment in the book, I say, if you walked up Jay Leno style, like he interviews people on the street, if you walk up and interview someone on the street and you ask them, what is your go-to problem solving heuristic? What is the way you solve problems, like, when something comes up in your life? Tell me right now. You would get crickets. You would just, their eyes would glaze over. Most people don't have it on the top of their tongue. Do you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:01) So I—

(Andrew Ward at 00:49:01) I think it's actually a negotiation. So when you're in a negotiation with somebody, you are trying to get them to engage their prefrontal cortex, right? So let's say I'm talking to you and I offend you, your prefrontal cortex turns off and you can't think, right? So when you're problem solving, it's a similar thing, right? Like, if someone's under threat or someone's got anxiety against the problem, they're not going to solve it very well. Why is that relevant? It's the questions that you ask to get people to solve the problem. So I think well positioned what and how questions force people to innovate in their answer to you, as long as you're asking the right ones. So it depends upon the problem. But a series of well-placed whats and hows is probably the most effective tool that you can use in a negotiation and in creative problem solving.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:46) My method, what I do, is I take a science, very science approach to it, and I say, we're just going to do some trial and error variation selection. We're just going to try 10 things, and we're going to take the top three that work the best, and we're going to create, you know, revisions of those, and then constantly—

(Andrew Ward at 00:50:07) You assume you know what problem you're solving by that point. That's later down the chain, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:11) Well, yeah. If you don't know what problem you're solving, you can use this technique to find the problem that you need to solve.

(Andrew Ward at 00:50:16) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:16) There's some Inception stuff, right? Because and I say that to people that I work with too. When I come in and I'm working with the team and I see people that don't know what to do, I said, oh, well, that's real simple. If you're not doing anything, your problem is you don't know what to do. You'd make that your problem. You write it down, and then you apply a problem solving technique to that.

(Andrew Ward at 00:50:37) Okay. Interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:39) Yeah. They all, you know, usually people say it's the first time they've heard that. But I came up with that skill because I was always a lone developer entrepreneur type person, and I would sit around and have these gaps and say, I don't even know what I'm doing right now. And then I had to figure it out. And so I created this skill, I guess, by accident, where whenever I don't know what to do, I don't have a problem that I'm solving or I'm not doing something, I use a problem solving technique to figure out what to be doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:11) I like it.

(Andrew Ward at 00:51:12) So you got this problem solving technique. Yeah. Is it always the same set of questions that you ask yourself?

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:17) No. It's not questions. It's a—well, yeah. I mean, there's recurring questions that I go through, but it's more of the framework of trying a handful of things and then testing them and seeing which ones work and then creating variations on those and then repeating that process until I find the solution I'm satisfied with. So let me give you an example of when this—how people do not do this, right? Okay. I love learning by what not to do. I call it the single method expert solution, right? So they have a problem—

(Andrew Ward at 00:51:51) Oh, we're out of business and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:53) We have a problem. Let's bring in an expert and he'll give us a solution, and then we will enact that solution and we'll call it a day. And that's how you get into the situation where you walk into a business and you say, why are you doing this? And they say, well, we have no idea. It's always been done this way. All right. Well, it doesn't make any sense. And they're like, I know. We talk about it, how it doesn't make sense every day. And everyone's sitting there and doing that. They're like, well, we paid this guy and he told us to do it this way, and this is what we do. And it doesn't even work, and we just went with that solution. And then you trace back to that guy, and he's like, well, I just came up with a solution, and I put it in place. And I'm like, woah, right? Like, how often are you good at something the first time you try it?

(Andrew Ward at 00:52:31) Never. Well—

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:32) Never. And so—well—

(Andrew Ward at 00:52:35) Sometimes. It's lucky, though, isn't it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:37) Usually in the bedroom. That's the only place that there's an exception.

(Andrew Ward at 00:52:41) Oh, yeah. Me too. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:42) Yeah. Yeah. There we go. No. But, you know, so I take that approach to the solutions too. Like, usually, the first solution is not the best. If it is, I'm surprised. And I get that there's balance, right? You can't take, where does the coffee maker belong in the office? Let's try 10 different places and see where—you can't take this approach on every little decision ever. But when it comes to the macro, the big decisions that are going to be the core parts of your business. That's how I take the approach.

(Andrew Ward at 00:53:16) Yeah. I think it's a good way of going. I certainly see it where people are so eager to launch the perfect thing that they don't realize that the perfect thing could be based on completely flawed assumptions. And until you've tested those assumptions, you just don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:30) Welcome to the startup world. I get people they come to me and they say, oh, we want to do this app. Here's the idea. And I just look at them and there's no business here. Like, we can't—I'm not going to take your money and build this. They're going to hate me, right? Like, you have to build something that has value. And the way you do that is you come up with an idea. You test it. You ask a bunch of people. And that's another thing I find. You're in the startup world.

(Andrew Ward at 00:53:54) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:54) What do you, how do you feel about when everyone, they have this, oh, I have this great idea, nondisclosure, nondisclosure. I'm not going to tell anyone. I don't like that. I take the opposite approach. I have an idea, so I ask 50 people and then I see if it's worth building. Are you NDA, keep it close to the chest, don't tell anyone, build it secretly, or are you like, let's go ask a bunch of people if this actually has legs?

(Andrew Ward at 00:54:15) Well, when people come to us, I would always sign an NDA because that's what people expect. Yeah. If they want me to sign an NDA, I'll sign it. But the reality is that even if you have an NDA in place, the cost of actually suing someone is so high and the friction that it puts in the process of having 50 people have to sign an NDA, it's just not worth it. The reality is, is most people, they haven't got the time, the energy or the capability to steal your idea and do it. I mean, if you really put your time behind it, you're probably spending hours and hours and hours on it. I don't really think it's something that people should worry too much about. I think it's better to just focus on doing it right. But I think it's subjective. I think if you've got an engineering concept or a particular patent, you've got to do that stuff. So it is subjective, but I just wouldn't let myself personally get held up with an NDA in order to progress my ideas. I mean, I've never actually got somebody to sign an NDA based upon me talking to them about my startup idea. I've never done it for that reason.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:19) Yeah. Me either. I just want to get the idea out and see if people like it and respond to it. And then once I do that and I find that people are responding positively to it, then I say, okay, well, it might be worth building.

(Andrew Ward at 00:55:31) Yeah. Yeah. You gotta be careful though because asking people sometimes is the worst way to know the true answer. Like, have you ever heard of ugly baby feedback?

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:40) No.

(Andrew Ward at 00:55:41) Well, the idea of ugly baby feedback is no one's going to tell you if you've got an ugly baby.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:45) I will. Yeah.

(Andrew Ward at 00:55:48) So you have to ask them, look, is my baby ugly? Yeah. So I think it's all well and good asking, but you've got to do it in the right way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:55) Right. So in perfect example, this is a whole chapter on the book. I talk about the different ways to ask for feedback. Like, you can—the way you ask for feedback, you can screw yourself from the beginning, right? Because if you put someone up on a pedestal and you say, analyze this, you know, their mind shifts to negatives. Like, instantly, you go to negative identification. Like, what is wrong with it? Because that's typically analysis, right? So if you ask them to analyze it or for their feedback, you put them in a completely different state of mind. So how do you get true feedback? And, well, the way I found is that you ask them what they love about it. You say, hey. What do you love about this? And you put it in their hand, right? What do you love about this? And you let them start giving, talking to you about it. Oh, I like this. Oh, I like that. And then what will happen naturally is unprompted, they will list two or three things that they enjoy about it, and then there will be that one thing that they say after that. Say, oh, I like this, this, and that. Oh, but it would be cool if or, oh, but it doesn't do—and that's so natural because you put them in the frame of mind of focus on the positives, tell me what's great about it. And so the natural negative will seep up through it. You don't even have to ask them for a negative.

(Andrew Ward at 00:57:13) Oh, that's an interesting approach.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:14) Yeah. That's just me trying a lot. Just trying a lot and doing a lot of projects and figuring out that every time I ask for people's feedback, it just wasn't working out. So I just tried a couple different things, and I found that asking people what they love, they naturally will list a couple things, and then that last item will be something that needs to change. And then you do that with, you know, 50 plus people, and you'll see that there are two things that everyone says.

(Andrew Ward at 00:57:47) Do you always do that at the beginning or is it sort of like a mid project UX thing or—

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:52) Well, lately, the way I design the apps is we do wireframes and then we do completely clickable interfaces with InVision. And then at that point is when I'm taking it around and showing it to people. Like, I like to keep people involved. Every project has this group of people that just form around me, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:11) And I take the different personas of the users. So if I were doing a legal app, there would be, you know, trial attorneys would be like a persona. Maybe divorce attorneys would be a persona. Maybe it's all attorneys, but there's different sub-personas inside it. So I will find the one human or two humans that represent each group, and I will bring them into my project through relationships and friendships and develop the relationship.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:38) And then I will be constantly getting their feedback in an unobtrusive, non-annoying fashion, right, through a relationship. And I'll constantly be putting it in front of them and understanding what they think, and then I take what their opinions are and I associate them with that persona. So a lot of people talk about personas and having that and so on and so forth, but I think that they're useless without having an actual relationship with the person that you believe represents that persona, and then involving them in the project.

(Andrew Ward at 00:59:07) Yeah. That's very true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:08) So then working with that person, I'm constantly asking them about this. Tell me what you love about this. This is great. I'm so excited about it. What do you love about it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:17) Oh, it's—

(Andrew Ward at 00:59:17) So great. Yeah. This is great. This is great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:18) And then this is, like, I don't know. Right? So there's my secret sauce. That's it.

(Andrew Ward at 00:59:25) Do you not ever show people it as if it's not yours? Because that's what I've always done. Like, hey, friend has got this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:31) Yeah, I've done that. I did that most recently with the fitness app. We did this fitness app and I showed it to my wife's friend. She had a friend over, they brought the baby over or whatever, do a baby play date. I said, oh, look, have you seen this? It's crazy. Everyone's downloaded it in our town, which was very true. We had several thousand downloads in our town.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:50) And she said, oh, yeah, I saw it on Facebook because she saw—we were on the news for it. Right? So, like, oh, I saw it on Facebook. I saw the news article on it. I was like, oh, cool. And I put it in her hand and let her play with the app. So I got her feedback from it, and she had no idea I was the developer of it.

(Andrew Ward at 01:00:13) That's great. We did something similar actually with the model business. So with the model business, it's a web system, but it's also like an in-person process. So what happens is someone puts a job brief through, once they put through their brief, a load of models get notified. And there's a whole process then to the model basically accepting that they want to do the job.

(Andrew Ward at 01:00:33) And we kind of automate all of that, which is a big part of the value. But what then happens on the day is the model actually goes to the photographer or the marketing agency or whatever that's booked them, and they're likely to have a photo shoot. So early days, obviously, we've been able to test the tech, but the in-person process we had to test too. So some of the first bookings that we put through were us doing marketing shoots for our own business, where we got real brands on board to book models through our platform, essentially, where we were fulfilling the photography side of things because we wanted to make sure the quality was there.

(Andrew Ward at 01:01:15) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:16) So what—

(Andrew Ward at 01:01:16) Was really interesting is we had a real customer there and we had a real model there who had no idea almost that we were running it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:25) Nice. Nice.

(Andrew Ward at 01:01:27) So it was really cool to be like, hey, this model was good. How did you find the process? And they're like, oh, yeah, it's really—you know, we really like this, or this bit could have been improved. And it's just such good organic feedback that you just wouldn't have got if you'd done it any other way.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:43) Awesome. I love it. Yeah. It's like incognito feedback. You can make that a chapter in your business book.

(Andrew Ward at 01:01:48) Incognito feedback.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:50) Incognito feedback.

(Andrew Ward at 01:01:50) How to be a spy.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:54) That's awesome. And your accent is perfect for Audible, right?

(Andrew Ward at 01:01:57) Do you like it?

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:58) Yeah. You got your Audible accent for your spy business book.

(Andrew Ward at 01:02:03) Yeah. I forget, don't I? Yeah. Yeah. You're US-based, so I must sound like a proper Britain.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:09) Yeah. I don't know how I sound to you. I hope—oh, man. What's the big American thing there? Like, how is it?

(Andrew Ward at 01:02:21) Build a wall. That's a joke.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:25) That is awesome. You know, when they were talking about the wall, you know, everyone, like, why don't we do something that makes more technology sense than a wall? Like, I get—let's tie it back to CTO. The solution that they chose—this is single expert solution right here. It's happening in real time, Andrew. The solution they chose was not trial selection variation. It wasn't science. It was like, wall. They decided they were going to put a wall up, and then they put metaphorically a wall up to the idea of doing anything other than putting a wall up. It's, like, insane. Right?

(Andrew Ward at 01:03:09) It's the whole idea of the political sphere being beyond truth. Like, people not caring about truth anymore. I think it's the same thing really. Like the whole concept of a wall is so easy for people to understand that people really don't care about the science behind the decision. I think about this a lot, right? So I'm going off on a tangent here. Tell me anywhere in the economy that you see anything that even remotely resembles the open source movement and the open source community. If you look at it, deep down, it is an economic movement. It's a structure and a way of doing things that we've never seen before. It exists because the intellectual property and the development side of things are so easily replicable that the cost of replication is close to zero.

(Andrew Ward at 01:03:52) And I wonder, like, as a society, as we progress, how many other things can we get essentially to a cost point of near zero or so cheap that replication is easy, that it actually changes the economy from the inside out. And that's the way that we shift from being a capitalist society through to sort of a society of people that you might expect to see on the Culture series of books by Iain Banks. You know, humans don't even have money anymore because they've got so much unlimited resource. So what do you think is going to happen with education? Because that's another big thing, right? Because people pay a great deal for essentially—

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:32) Gone. Gone.

(Andrew Ward at 01:04:34) You think gone?

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:36) Their brands—we still shop. You know, it's the big box store. It's the store. You go there to the store until Amazon consolidates the margins, delivers it faster, and you just Prime it next day. You know? People like the idea of going to the store. They like the brand. They feel comfortable. You got to let it die out. You know? Gary Vee talks about romanticizing it. Right? Like, oh, I went to this school, or, oh, I went to—you know, I am educated by MIT. So, like, oh, yeah. That's real cool. You know? But it doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. If I'm on a team and I can't do the things that the team needs to do, my piece of paper from my branded school is completely and totally irrelevant. It all comes down to value, and you get the value through the skill.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:20) So it's what value do you bring? So at our company, we have this—I'm looking at it right now—we got this giant whiteboard. Right? And there's everybody's name on the whiteboard. And every single day, we go up on the whiteboard, and we write the value that we bring. Like, today, this is the value I bring to the company. And I tell each one of the people that work with me, let's say you have 10 people under you, because ideally, that's where the company is going. Right?

(Andrew Ward at 01:05:45) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:46) You would want the same thing. You're spending your money and your budget in your department, every single person. You don't need to micromanage them. You know, you say, what are you doing in this hour? What are you doing in this hour? But what you have to do is you have to take this conversation of value and put it up for everyone at the company to see. And that does two things. First, it is very clear who brings what value. And I make people erase check marks and items off the board, and I say it's not big enough. That's usually my thing. I say that—nope.

(Andrew Ward at 01:06:12) Not enough value there.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:14) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you put some granular item on there, and I don't think it brings value, I was like, that's too small. It's micro. I need macro. You got to bring macro value every single day. And that's exactly what we do. And at the end, I have people present me their value. You know, go up on the board and show me. If I come in and there's four things checked off on the board, I don't just look at them and say, oh, they're checked off. I say, Jake, stand up and present your value.

(Andrew Ward at 01:06:38) So what are some examples?

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:40) Yeah. Things that, if I'm in a high-level conversation, not at the office, and I say, if I had to name three things this week, what are we doing? What will actually move my business forward? The three huge things that will move my business forward. And this Sunday, it was an Alexa skill. We're working on a Modern CTO Alexa skill where you can ask her different things, and she'll present content, both from the Audible book and the podcast. You can ask her to play the most recent podcast, things like that. The promo video is super important. And then finishing the book this week through editing. Like, those are the huge pieces of value, and we're knocking them all out of the park.

(Andrew Ward at 01:07:19) Yeah. It's always a thing with managing people, isn't it? Like, you put in these metrics for tracking things, whether it be testing metrics, time recording metrics, productivity metrics, whatever they might be. But actually, those aren't really what matter. What matters is whether you hit the big objectives, and it's the small doings that add up to those big objectives.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:41) So that's exactly right. So I like to say here when we talk about metrics and everyone—there's every app has graphs and the to-do list. The first thing I say is we don't do to-do lists. We do to-done lists. You get to write stuff on the list when it's done. That takes all the creative energy away from actually making the list and forces you to instantly act and make an item happen. So you don't get a to-do list, you get a to-done list. Right? You put the value up on the board. And then when it comes to metrics, my position on that is, with work metrics, they're the byproducts of you doing some work to create value. So rather than put focus on metrics, that's like looking in the past, like, oh, we did 400 things. All I want you to do is I want you to put your eyes on the value. I want you to set your eyes on the goal, the value that moves the business forward, and I don't want you to worry about anything else. You're directly judged, and the only way that you get money from the organization is an exchange. I am exchanging the cash flow from the organization to you for more value, and that's how I grow the business.

(Andrew Ward at 01:08:48) Yeah. And it's good to get people on board and understanding why they're doing what they're doing versus just being machines.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:54) That's exactly it. We always present the why. So whenever we have the conversation about value, we talk about the why we're doing this. Like, why are we doing the Alexa skill? Well, look at the rise in voice. It's growing exponentially. That's why we're doing the Alexa skill. That's why it's one of the three most important things at my business this week. We have to understand it. It's too big to ignore. And it's not next week. It's not last—it's this week. I just decided, it's this week. This week is Alexa skill. So, loving it. This is great. We're actually super far over, so you're going to—I think you're officially the longest podcast.

(Andrew Ward at 01:09:31) Yeah. I hope that's a good thing.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:33) It's a great thing. No, you've been an absolutely fantastic guest. Speaking of value, Andrew, you brought a significant amount of value to the podcast. It was fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:59) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.