Rob Dufalo CTO of defi SOLUTIONS

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) I want you to think of something that you are really great at. Maybe it's a programming language or a framework. When you speak with someone who knows less than you, it's really clear. We all do this verbal dance to see how deep one another's knowledge pool is. The same is true with leadership.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:16) Senior leaders at your company can tell the difference when they're interacting with you about how ready you are to lead. Now, it's not about going crazy 100% leadership and abandoning your craft. The greatest leaders are masters of their craft, and then they've also learned leadership skills. So what is the right mix for an individual contributor or new leader role? Well, you could start by once a week setting aside a small amount of time to learn what leaders do and then practice this with both yourself and others.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) You'll have to intentionally allocate time to developing yourself as a leader if you want to get to the next level in your career. Take advantage of this season in your life and decide to improve yourself as a technology leader by going to leaderbits.io/technologyleadershipdevelopment. Take action, not classes. Today, we are talking to Rob Dufalo, the CTO of Defy Solutions, and we discuss investing in yourself and the people around you, creating a successful remote culture that works, and how empowering your team keeps the morale high and promotes growth. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:01:27) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:28) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Oh, yes. All right. Let me get my recording systems set up and back up.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:01:44) No worries. For some reason, the neighbors are deciding to have their lawn finished up right now. So I'm hoping I was like, really? Of all times. So I'm hoping they finish up in the next few minutes. I've been at it for like forty minutes now. So I can't imagine there's not that much lawn out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:58) How much lawn is there? What's the square footage?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:02:03) Maybe like 200? Come on. It's not that big.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) Oh, this is so good. All right. So the backup system's going. Jake, how's our systems going? Any lighting adjustments for the beard? The beard's looking good.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:02:14) Beard looks good. As long as the beard looks magnificent, that is all that matters to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:21) Is that an upside down Yeti you got going on there?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:02:23) Yes. That's exactly what I have up there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:25) Oh, yes. We got a right side up one.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:02:28) Yes. Excellent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:29) It's like parallel universes.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:02:32) You're in Florida, so maybe I don't know. And I'm in Seattle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:37) So do you primarily work from home?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:02:39) Yes. Yeah. Actually, I work from home three weeks out of the month, and then I spend a week down in Dallas, Grapevine area where we're based down there, just to get face time with people, kind of working with them on the executive pieces and all that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) So we have an internal debate at the Modern CTO Podcast here. How do you say the name of the company?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:03:03) It's Defy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:05) Defy. There's a whole video on it, actually.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:03:06) Yeah. No, I'll see if I can find it. We did a whole marketing joke around it, DeFi or whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:13) Yeah.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:03:14) Yeah. No. It is Defy. Defy Solutions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:17) It's smart that you realized the market saw that, and so you use marketing to address it.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:03:21) Oh, yeah. We've got a brilliant marketing group headed up there. I have never worked with a group that is so fun and inspirational. It works both internally and externally for what they do. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) So what does Defy do?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:03:36) We are really—the core of what we are is we give loan origination and just that entire ecosystem around providing accessible lending systems for everyone from small mom and pop groups that want to actually get into lending of any kind all the way up to big larger groups. Some of the bigger banks even, you know, we talk to them and things like that. Mostly, we deal with indirect loans. So the idea is you'd go into a dealership or something like that, and you'd sit down and you'd usually fill out all that paperwork and it goes through a system. For prime loans, that's fine. Right? You know, 800 scores, 750 scores, things like that. Those just go right through. But when you start getting into some of the subprime and the areas where things get a little more tricky, that's where a lot of our systems kind of come into play. Automation of being able to say, hey, based on your scores and what we've seen in your history, we pull these rules and formulas together and say, yeah, we can either give that loan or not and do that in seconds.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:35) Oh, that's awesome. And then the last time I got a car, I got a Jeep. Right? They had this giant DocuSign screen. That thing's crazy.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:04:45) I know. Right? No, it's getting to that point. The one thing I'd say is you've got the housing market, and that really pushes all the technology. Right? Now you can just buy a house on your phone and things like that. But the auto lending industry has always kind of followed behind that, and this is our whole game was being able to help everyone kind of start to catch up in that technology world and really be able to make those decisions really quickly and play against some of those bigger competitors and stuff because, you know, time's money in those things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:15) So are you like a multi-rater? Is that what they're called? Or...

(Rob Dufalo at 00:05:18) I'm not—we never use that term or anything like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:22) That's a bad term. Yeah. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to use that word here.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:05:26) No, it's fine. I don't know if it's actually bad or not, but it's a—I would say that it really comes down to what the lender wants to use. That's half the point of what we do. We work very hard to make sure that we have a system that's flexible to where you can bring in whatever kind of scoring you want within the system. And if it's not there, we have a technology team and a group there that will work with the people who want to work with Defy to put those systems in place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:54) So your customer is the lender. Because there's also, I saw a screen when I got my car. He said, you know, here's your four or five options, and he puts the information in once, and then four or five lenders come back, and then we go back and forth and figure out which one's the right one. I didn't know if you were that or your system probably interfaces with that system.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:06:14) Yeah. Yeah. We were actually behind that. What you might have been dealing with is actually one of the many entry points that you can come into our main system, which is the LOS, loan origination system. And so you could have gone through a Dealer Track or a RouteOne tool, which those are companies that actually work directly with those dealerships to sell cars. And behind that, though, those dealerships usually have some kind of partnerships with these lending companies, either the main banks or the smaller ones. And through that, they can make decisions whether who's going to give the best loan, who's going to give the best rates. And that's why the time is so important in this and why it's got to be as fast as possible because those dealerships are just looking to push those cars. Right? So they need to make sure that they get the best loan, the best options available. And when they put all these things together, who's going to make that pop the most for them. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:05) Oh, nice. You want to return your results the first to that multi system. That, I think that's the system I was calling the multi-rating system.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:07:12) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That might be what it is. Because, yeah, they probably got ratings from multiple other LOSs and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:17) Yeah. Yeah. So if you return fast, you have an ability to be at the top of the list. Right?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:07:21) Yes. Absolutely. And so, yeah, we want to be as fast and as quick as possible because, yeah, if they're seeing the best option right there and, you know, it's all about that big quick buy, that's how they do it. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:33) So how did you get from Microsoft to Defy?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:07:37) Okay. That's a good one. So I worked at Microsoft for fifteen years. I started right at the beginning of 2000. I actually worked for a bank in their technology department there, and then I literally quit the minute before Y2K hit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:56) Because of Y2K? You're like, I can't deal with this. I don't know the stress this is going to bring. I'm out of here. I've seen the source code. I'm not dealing with it. I'm out of here.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:08:03) Yeah. No, it was kind of a funny one as far as that went. But then, first thing I did was I went to Microsoft and worked there. But back in—Satya kind of came in. He was really looking to reorganize everything. And so, yeah, I was part of that first big layoff group with Microsoft at that point. I actually watched a lot of my friends who I'd worked with for a long time all kind of put out to the street, so to speak, and it was an interesting day. But I took that time off for about—I took six months off, just kind of re-got in touch with my family, things like that. And one of the people who I'd actually worked with during that time was working at Defy because his sister knew the CEO. And for some reason, he had in his phone that he knew that I was going to start looking for work at the beginning of the year. And no joke, I had actually just finished typing up and finishing my resume, set my laptop down on my coffee table, and I got a phone call. And he's like, "Hey, Rob. I thought I heard you're going to be looking for work soon." I'm looking at my laptop.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:05) The universe is watching you.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:09:09) And I've never been to Texas before. For the most part, I've stuck around Asia and kind of the North—the North Side of America and all that. And I went down there and I looked at the company and I loved what I saw. It really had that really kind of early Microsoft tech, you know, small company feel. I'd never worked for a company of that size, and so I was in. I wanted to be a part of it, and that's kind of how I got into that game.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:36) Nice. What size was the company when you joined?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:09:38) Right around 30, I think. I think we had about 30 total people. We all kind of just did our huddles in the middle of the main room there at that time, and we still have a lot of those core people. But, yeah, we've bloomed up to—I checked with HR before I got on. We're at 96 people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:56) Yeah. Feeling good, though. Right?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:09:58) Oh, yeah. No. It's been great. It's been really exciting. I love the feel of a smaller group. There's the idea of all that red tape, all the stuff where you're like, well, you got to go through this process, that process—they kind of fall away. You still need to keep certain walls around the cat, so to speak, but it's a lot more freedom to innovate and work forward. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:24) That's exciting. Yeah. That's a good question for me to ask. So the CTO of Microsoft, Kevin, he's coming on in three weeks. I'm going to ask him about how he keeps it small and family-like the best possible way. I mean, you're struggling with the fact that you have a company that's a technology company with 10,000-plus employees. So, I mean, you're obviously putting in a tremendous amount of effort to not let it feel corporate because no corporation's like, we want to be corporate. Nobody strives for that. But I'm curious about the challenges that he faces and how he tries to keep it small and family-like.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:10:56) Absolutely. And, I mean, even when I was working there, I was working on some really cool projects, but I never actually had a lot—I had face time with Steven Sinofsky and some of the other people that were there during the Windows 8 push and all that, but I never really met any of the true CTOs in that time. I'm really interested to see how that talk goes and kind of what they're looking for next, especially when you look at all the things they've been doing recently as far as opening up to GitHub. Now they've got a Linux distro they're working on. All those pieces, surprising to me. I really love what I'm hearing there. So I'm curious to see how they're kind of pushing out into that open source market, really starting to play and not just kind of lock it all up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:33) They're going to make such big waves. I was watching their release of their HoloLens technology and the new components inside of it. They're making some small advancements in the chipsets and stuff for depth detection. And I was geeking out over that, and I was like, oh, man. You know, when you build those core pieces that everyone's going to API with and build into their vision systems, that's how you Qualcomm this thing.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:11:55) Oh, absolutely. One of my very good friends, actually—my old team, the one I was with right before I left, actually became what the HoloLens team is, and some of my friends are still working on that. And that stuff just blows my mind. I know you like to talk a lot about the voice that—oh, I forget. I'm going to turn—she—oops.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:12) Me too. Yeah.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:12:13) Right. And so... I just realized that I was going to do that before we started. But the whole HoloLens—I've got a chance to play with it, really look at it—and VR is kind of awesome, and voice technology is awesome. I really love what I could see in a hybrid VR world where you're taking things around you and adding data to them as you go. It's brilliant. Like, let's say you were going through a car lot and you were looking at these cars like we're talking about before. And let's say you had these glasses on. It looks at the car, recognizes the car, knows the VIN numbers, tells you all the options, can even tell you based on software like this, like, hey, this is what your loan's going to look like based on your information. Here's the options you can get now. Here's what you could get if you wait, and it's all right there for you. You don't have to talk to people. It's all information right in your face right now. What do you want to look at now? I'd love that game plan. It's brilliant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:04) It actually makes—and then technology advances so fast. We don't even need it for car shopping because Uber's flying us around in their new little drones.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:13:10) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:13) I saw their roadmap the other day, this video. They're putting—they actually have their pilot actually in the vehicle, but have you seen the custom vehicle Uber has made?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:13:24) No. I have not actually seen the actual vehicle. I heard they actually have been doing some test work on that down in the Dallas area or down in the Houston area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:32) The Dallas-Houston area is going to be—they're launching in 2020. And they're going to—it's going to take riders. They're doing a private launch, but it's going to take riders by 2023. And it's going to cost as much as an UberX. And it looks like a plane, but it taxis to a platform. And you would go to the station or it'd be on top of an existing building. And then the plane thing taxis to the edge of the building, and then vertical. Because it looks like a plane, but it's got the drone-style things on it as well.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:14:07)
Right. Yeah. And how's the FAA gonna deal with all that? They're already wanting to put it on bigger drones and things like that.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:14:14)
I mean, they're—

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:15)
Gonna put pilots in it now. That's how they're dealing with it.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:14:17)
Well, yeah. But I mean, you gotta register all the—you gotta register your flight.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:21)
Flight path. Yeah. Yeah.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:14:22)
You gotta have to automate the heck out of that. That's gonna be—

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:24)
A little upgrade. We usually do it on the drive to the airport. We're calling up, getting a flight path, you know, tail number and stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:30)
I've somehow ended up with four friends who are pilots.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:14:33)
Oh, wow. Okay. So you can do that. I didn't even know, but I've heard—my brothers works in technology over at Alaska Airlines, and all the systems over there—the core of it's still built in the sixties, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:50)
Oh, yeah. When you have a private plane and you're gonna take it for a spin, right? And on the ride to the airport, you call up—and you have a phone number because you have your plane registered at an airport, right? And you call the phone number and you give them your tail number and you register your flight path. And they'll go back and forth with you because sometimes they'll adjust your flight path.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:12)
And then when you get into the plane, you enter in your path and then you just do your normal procedure.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:15:17)
Then hit all the nav points. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:19)
There's this—yeah. There's an invisible interstate in the sky and you have to register for it and get cleared on it. And they put different planes at different altitudes based on the type of plane they are and what else is happening around. It's all really interesting.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:15:34)
That is really cool. Yeah. They gotta get that in Seattle because our traffic is just not gonna—

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:40)
You should do what Elon Musk does. He's like, "Forget it all. I'm just drilling under the earth."

(Rob Dufalo at 00:15:45)
Under the earth indeed. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:47)
I'm gonna use flamethrowers to melt the rock, bore through the center, and then put a giant Hyperloop tunnel in there. That's what I'm doing.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:15:55)
Absolutely. I mean, if you get rid of all the air in there, then yeah, you can get that 700, 800 miles an hour. You could be anywhere in Tokyo.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:03)
Asia.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:16:03)
Yeah. Asia. Well, they were talking about an LA to New York run where they'd actually just have this tube and completely no air in it, then you basically lose all resistance. You can go 800 miles an hour, faster than that even, between these two spots, get there in a couple hours.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:21)
Yeah. They were trying to do it so long with these planes that are bouncing in and out of space, you know, riding the edge of the space and the atmosphere. But then, I think that this ground way is gonna be way more efficient.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:16:34)
Well, you look at how subways even started, and there was all these worries and scares about being under the ground and all that. And that's where, you know, you've left earth, so to speak, as far as they'd said in the late 1800s and such when they were putting it all in Boston.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:52)
Yeah. They actually—I had a friend who's an architect, and he's telling me that when they started to build these large buildings, people would freak out because if you stand under them, it looks like it's leaning over and gonna fall on you. So they actually—in the architecture—they have to engineer ledges to prevent the optical illusion that the building's falling over on you.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:17:13)
Oh, yeah. I can see that. I haven't spent much time in—I've been in Seattle, and the buildings there are pretty tall. But I was over in New York City for an architecture conference a couple months back now for Riley. And yeah, I was walking on the street kinda looking up, and I could see that kinda almost vertigo effect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:30)
Right?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:17:31)
Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:31)
And they also remove, you know, the 13 number from the floors and most of the buildings too. So you are an author. You write some books.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:17:40)
Oh, so you know that. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:43)
We have a research team.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:17:45)
Yes. I've written some books. I was—that's why I was so impressed. By the way, thank you for the book. I really do appreciate that.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:17:51)
Woo.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:51)
Uh, I—

(Rob Dufalo at 00:17:51)
I was looking at it like, "Oh, yes." So it looks like you're also doing your own self-publishing things because I've played around with a lot of that. And we built this small little group of mine that, you know, we love to write. I really just wanna challenge myself to put something out there and really tell a story. So I started doing some kinda sci-fi thriller stuff and that's pretty fun. I've actually spent the last year writing in young adult romance, believe it or not. Just try something completely different again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:19)
Yeah. That's actually a really popular category. You're the third person who's mentioned that to me.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:18:24)
Oh, really interesting. I'm glad to see it's picked up. Some of my favorite authors even in that area—I just their writing style and just their way with words is just epic. Gosh. I can only hope to aspire to be that good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:38)
Right. I love good writing. So what were you doing in Asia? You said you spent some time in Asia.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:18:43)
Oh. So I had some—one of my couple of my really good friends were over in Japan, and I spent some time over there. I've always had an affinity for Japan in that area. So I was in the Chigasaki area, just living some time in Japan, having a good time over there. It was a lot of fun. It's such an amazing culture. And when you go someplace and you think you have an idea of it, but till you truly experience and live it for a while, you just haven't. You just don't know what it's like. So I was doing that for a while and then I actually got to see a bit of Hong Kong as well. I had a friend who married someone from Hong Kong, so we were over there for the wedding. I got to spend some time over there and just see in that culture as well and how different it is here.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:19:33)
All kind of in that same area. It's amazing. At some point, my wife and I wanna get over to Europe as well, but yeah, Japan—seeing a lot of it, just the entire history. I've really fallen in love with the whole spiritualism around Shinto. If you ever looked at that and just kind of being one with the earth and the world around you and kind of looking at it as this big—you know, bigger organism than just yourself. And it's just an amazing way to—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:01)
This morning on my Audible, I just finished up one of Deepak Chopra's books. You heard of him?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:20:07)
No. I have not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:09)
Oh, yeah. He's just a—I encountered him because he was speaking with Tony Robbins about something. They were having this back and forth conversation, and he talks about basically thought and like, you're not the mind. You're the observer watching the mind think.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:20:28)
And like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:29)
Yeah, your different parts of your consciousness and how it works. But very simply explained. This is my first time trying to repeat it, right? But so I think it's going well. But he—yeah, Deepak Chopra—he's got a number of books. I was first introduced to him by—I was reading this book called The Untethered Soul by, I think, Michael Singer.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:20:52)
Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:52)
And he had done a quote or an intro to it, and I was like, "Oh, who's Deepak Chopra?" And then I saw him years later with Tony Robbins, and then I was listening to him more. And then I figured, "Oh, I'll grab one of his books." And I did, and it was just really good. I like the concept of that we're not our thoughts. We're the consciousness observing our thoughts occurring. I like that because it feels very real to me, right? I can almost watch myself think, if that makes sense? Not to get too far off of the CTO podcast topics.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:21:28)
No worries.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:29)
Do you ever get that moment where you're kinda observing yourself think? You're like, "Oh, that—" you're like, you know, "That was a weird thought" or whatever. And the way that they explain it is very unique and simple. So it was worth a read.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:21:41)
Oh, absolutely. I'm trying to—I'm taking a second here to see if I can find—yeah. Daniel Kahneman, he wrote a book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. I'd love to put these two guys in a room and see what they thought because he has this idea of the first mind and the second mind, right? The first mind is just pretty much all automation. It's all programmed when it experiences something, it has an immediate reaction, and it's kind of that first defense. But then as you start to think about it and the slower mind's second one where it takes that and analyzes it and then completely reprograms the first mind to react differently as it moves forward. So I'd love to see how that would work because the minute you start talking about, that's what it reminded me of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:23)
Those are the concepts just stated in different words. They all have their own words for it, but they're describing the same principles. You have these multifaceted brains that can observe other parts of itself operating, which is pretty unique.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:22:35)
Oh, yeah. I know. It's brilliant. I love it. No. I spent a lot of time doing that because it helps me to make sure I'm not just having an emotional response to something that's happening around me or something that's being presented to me. Keeping that path—that was important to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:50)
Well, it's being aware of, like, "Okay, this is the emotional response, and now I'm gonna put my little webhook or my interrupt line. I'm gonna put my little notification," I call it, "saying, 'Alright. Now I have the choice of how to respond.'" And that is something that has come with age because it was a fluid thing prior. At 18, it was just, oh, action, reaction. And now there's this space between where I'm like, "Is that what I wanna do?"

(Rob Dufalo at 00:23:16)
Yeah. Yeah. Or for me, it usually comes down to, like, there'll be this opposed opinion, and I just wanna be like, "Nope. Not doing it. Not happening. Never gonna—" They're like, "Well, no. Wait. Think about it for a minute. What is the objective? Or are they really doing it?" And I have to slow myself down and really think through it and not just have that first emotional response.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:36)
Yeah. I actually—so I started this new project from doing these little things called Leader Bits. These little bits of leadership, like, two, three minute videos about leadership with a little exercise. And I was recording one last night called "Hacking Neural Links."

(Rob Dufalo at 00:23:49)
Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:50)
And it's this discussion right here. It's that realization that something fires and then you have the ability to acknowledge it and then respond to it accordingly. And then I give a few examples of how it might actually happen in the real world and write it to technology leaders. So yeah, this exercise of both writing the book plus doing these Leader Bits now, which is—you sent—like, it's like the extension of the book because I go through this—it took my place in my schedule. Like, instead of writing the book, I wanted to keep that spot in my schedule going, so this was the excuse to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:28)
And so it's kinda cool because now I get this little lesson out all the time. It's really exciting for me.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:24:34)
No. It's really cool. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:37)
Yeah. So what sort of challenges—because you are remote. And is most—is your team remote? Are they all in Texas? Or—

(Rob Dufalo at 00:24:44)
Sure. No. We—so the core of our company started around the idea of freedom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:51)
That's a good idea.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:24:52)
It really is. Freedom but not chaos. So the core of our company is in Grapevine, just outside of Dallas there. And we've got a lot of what I consider central hub there. But I've got five people now, from both the business side as well as technology side living in around the Seattle area. I've got a manager actually who just moved out to the South Detroit area just a couple years ago, and he's been living out there. I got another one that's moving to Tennessee very soon. And so that's the one thing I really—that we really kind of love about is the fact that you might decide to move or your family situation takes you in a different way, but the next thing you do is you have to go find a job. So we've really kind of embraced that idea that we are a company that is going to be distributed throughout the United States. In fact, it makes really great for disaster recovery plan when you think about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:57)
Uh, they're—

(Rob Dufalo at 00:25:58)
Looking at executive or the executive level of—what you say. Like, what happens when we have a big problem in the South or the East or the West.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:05)
Yeah. Hurricane hits Florida. Is the hundred person company shut down for three weeks?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:26:09)
Exactly. Yeah. And that's not what happens here. In fact, we do have one person on the business side who lives in the Florida area. And I meant to ask where exactly that was because I knew you're in the Florida area. We have another one in California, but—and then so—and then the another group of about four in San Antonio area and then everyone else just around the Grapevine place. So pretty distributed now, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:34)
And where where is Grapevine?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:26:37)
So you know what? Have you ever been in the Dallas airport?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:39)
Yeah.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:26:40)
Okay. So we are three minutes away from there. Just—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:43)
Oh, that's easy.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:26:43)
Yeah. Yeah. It's right here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:44)
It's got a nice name though.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:26:46)
Yeah. It does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:47)
It really does.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:26:48)
Well, I mean, they do wine out there. So Grapevine makes a lot of sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:52)
Oh, there you go.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:26:53)
So yeah. I guess it's—I believe it's just a little south of there. But you get off of out of Dallas airport, you go south, hit Texas Trail, boom. That's where our offices are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:05)
Oh, that's awesome. So so your development team is somewhat distributed as well?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:27:10)
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Between—yeah. Like I said, Seattle, Michigan, and then Texas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:18)
Nice. Cold, cold, warm.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:27:20)
Yes. Yeah. I tell you what, as I said, I go down there once a month for a week, and I'm not relishing—I'm going down—I fly down Sunday for next week. I'm not relishing it because it's gonna be warmer and warmer. By the time August hits, I'm gonna be waiting for it. But I'll tell you what, I—oh, go on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:37)
Sorry. One month every week?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:27:39)
Yeah. Or—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:40)
Oh, one week every—yeah.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:27:43) Well, in my—for what I do, I did it too. But yeah, one week every month I go down, and we have an actual duplex, part of a duplex that we own. So when people fly in for meetings or whatever, they have a place to stay and they keep toiletries and stuff there. So it's not quite like always getting a hotel room and having to fly in and such.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:28:04) They've done a really great job to accommodate for that. Those things like Zoom is something we use all the time, Slack, all those conversations that we talk about. You have to just consider your hallway conversations are now like a Slack conversation, or "Hey, let's talk for a minute" is popping open a Zoom window and talking them through things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:21) Yeah, and it's always about the people. It's like the tribe. Some tribes, it doesn't work for them. Other tribes, it works amazing.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:28:29) Well, and that was the funny thing. There's this guy—once again, back to that architecture, and I was just eating up everything he said. His name was Alan Holub, and you gotta get him on the show, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:43) What's his name? Allen Holt?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:28:44) Let me make sure I get that right. I wrote it down just to make sure I didn't forget it. But where is it? Shoot. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:55) H-O-L-T? I'll Google it. Yeah.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:28:57) Holub. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:59) Holub. And what does he do?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:29:01) He—Alan Holub, H-O-L-U-B. He's kind of a big talker now. He does a lot of talks on architecture, incremental architecture. I was in town listening to his incremental architecture talk. You can find one of his videos on architecture on YouTube as well.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:29:19) But the way he thinks about just getting down to the agile methods necessary to put together an architecture and really just kind of get to the core of the meat of what you need to do and not worry about the technology behind it—it's just really brilliant. And I'm just eating up this work all day. And then we get onto this side topic of working remotely. It's like, "Oh yeah, you just can't do that." And I was like, "Oh, you're killing me now."

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:43) No, you're like, "I loved you for a minute."

(Rob Dufalo at 00:29:45) I still do. And that was the thing. But it goes off, and it's like, yeah, the energy wasted and the amount of time and then just trying to get a point across over—

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:56) But he had a bad experience.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:29:57) Yeah, exactly. He had a bad experience. That's what I have to hope. But I'm just like, "Oh, man."

(Rob Dufalo at 00:30:04) So I went back to my hotel room after that talk, and the funny thing was it was also after I did an interview from my hotel room for someone I hired later about working remote and using all these tools. And I just had to internalize for a minute and go, "Is it really bad? Do I need to move to Dallas? What should I do?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:22) I got you thinking.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:30:23) It got me thinking, and absolutely, you always have to be a student. You always have to—

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:27) Be a student. Always.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:30:28) Yes. And so I'm thinking about it. I'm like, "No, I think I'm gonna keep trying this and keep working with it." And I think it's worked really well. But if your culture of your company doesn't support it, I could see where that happens. But if everybody is lifting this up on a pedestal where it works, then absolutely it can succeed. I mean, I have trackpads and all that so we can do whiteboard stuff through Zoom. We have breakout sessions in there. We do all of our stuff. We have all of our conference rooms set up with conference equipment to make sure that every meeting has the best possible video and audio for anybody that is working remote versus in the office.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:31:06) It can—but it does take, it takes a whole tribe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:11) Yeah. Well, also, people tend to fear what they don't know. So if you haven't forced this individual to work for three years remote, they won't have the skills to solve the problems to overcome the difficulties that arise. For somebody who does have those skills, it's just another day.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:31:26) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:27) I know how to make it work like this, right?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:31:29) Absolutely agree. And that would be the one tip I'd give to anybody—you do have to become a lot more aggressive. You can't go, "Well, if they need me, they're gonna let me know." No. You have to go get yourself involved in things and make them realize that your value, even though you are at a desk 1,600 miles away, is still important to the process that is going to move forward and adding that value that way. That would be the one tip I'd give to anybody that's really gonna do it, because that's what's worked for me is just making sure that you stick your nose in where you think it needs to be and not expect them to just bring you in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:02) Right. You're taking what already happened in a physical environment, and you're finding your variation of it for the environment you're in. Because this is what a boss does, or like a leader does. A leader walks into the room and says, "What's up?" You know, you're just doing that in the way that's acceptable for your situation.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:32:21) Absolutely, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:22) Yeah. Oh, man. So what's on your leadership mind lately? You read leader books, I'm assuming?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:32:28) Yeah, yeah. I do read some. Actually, I've kind of gone a little bit the other way. I've been looking at more leadership in technology lately.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:37) Yeah.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:32:38) Like books that I've looked at very recently. Have you read The Phoenix Project?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:44) Oh, it's right—it's right there.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:32:45) Okay, so right there. Yeah. And have you gotten the follow-up book, The DevOps Handbook?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:52) Oh, no.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:32:52) Yeah. Basically, Gene Kim and, I believe, Patrick Debois, they have The DevOps Handbook. So what I end up doing—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:06) He's like, "No, man, I want the book." I'm sorry, I want the book.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:33:08) The book. Take your time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:09) Yeah, thank you. Because no one here can hear the other—I mean, only Jake can hear the other side of this conversation.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:33:16) No worries.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:17) Jackie's sitting next to me. She's like, "What?"

(Rob Dufalo at 00:33:18) What do you mean, "Reaching for"?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:20) I'm pointing over there because this just came—this was recommended to me this weekend by an individual on LinkedIn as an automated testing QA company.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:33:31) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:32) Yeah. And he's like, "It's like a novel." And I'm like, "What do you mean it's a novel?" And he—so—

(Rob Dufalo at 00:33:36) It is a novel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:37) I got it, and I started flipping through it. And I'm like, "Clearly, she thinks John's theory is crazy." I'm like, "Where's the bullet points for things to look for when testing?"

(Rob Dufalo at 00:33:49) So here's the birth of that book right here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:52) Okay.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:33:52) This is the book that he basically took and adapted into The Phoenix Project.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:58) Oh, nice. So that's Gene Kim or Kevin or George?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:34:03) Yeah, yeah. Gene Kim and Patrick Debois, I believe, is on that one. I don't know. They also did The DevOps Handbook, which if you've not got that, you want to get that book. But I'll tell you what, I took The Phoenix Project and I started reading it. I couldn't put it down. I usually read a bit of fiction and nonfiction books. I was all in on just reading The Phoenix Project. So make sure you have a strong, you know, a good light weekend before you pick it up because you're not gonna put it down once you start. At least if you're—

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:31) I am—I'm actually taking some time, taking two days with the family, the first time in the past year. We just had a baby, so we've got an eight-month-old daughter. We've been tied at home for a while.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:34:42) Yeah, yeah. I've been hearing about it. I'm one of those people who's kind of a completist. So I picked up your book, read the first page, saw you had a podcast, and I was like, "Oh." So I put the book down, immediately started picking up the podcast. So I was working one through, and I think I'm up through 20 now. And then I listened to the last few just to make sure I was up to date on how you're kind of rolling things before I got into this myself. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:04) So what do you think? I don't have the opportunity to be outside of myself, right?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:35:09) Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:09) So going through in the completist fashion, through each item, like what do you think?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:35:17) Dude, the value you've added even to my company based on what I've done so far has been impressive. In fact, I wrote down a few of these things. Andy Budd, the UX designer you had on—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:27) Yeah.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:35:28) Oh, I literally wrote down, "Hell yes." I knew that I wanted someone to come in and help with our UX and getting a good flow for that. But the tips and tricks—I was like, maybe we can find someone that kind of help with it and it'll be great. And he's like, "No, I gotta go get the best one money can buy." And I was like, "Okay." I totally got a different outlook on that. So in my look for UX designer, definitely, that's added value to my company, what we'll be looking at there. Derek Johnson, you had him on podcast number four. He really helped me internalize what I was doing as a CTO. What's one of the things that you really said in the first part of your book, and I was like, "Yes, this guy is like—he knows exactly everything I was thinking about two years ago when I took on being a CTO." I was like, "I had no idea." And when I looked in Amazon, I looked around—all the things you'd said you—I could've wrote the first page of your book. Maybe slightly different words, but all of that went completely true to me. And I was just like, "You get it," which is why I've been so in love with all this. And just helped me, because of that, help me internalize. I wasn't just taking crazy pills with some of the things I was thinking about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:35) Right.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:36:36) It really made sense because, unlike a lot of other people who kind of came from a development background, I actually came from a testing development background into this role, and I was just thinking, "Am I—should I still be coding?" Things like that. "What's the most important piece I should think about?" He really helped with that. Podcast number seven, Ryan Singer. I loved him. Yeah. We are now experimenting with six-week shift cycles within my architect group and a couple of my other teams. And we're looking at how we can set up for Q2 to play around with that idea and actually try it out, see how it works. Really love that. And then you just had me go on recently with the New York CTO guy. His talk on net neutrality was just like, "Yeah, I'm all in. What do we need to do for it?" Washington just passed some laws that pretty much are going to uphold net neutrality, and I couldn't agree with him more. And thinking a little bit more about it from a business perspective, not even a personal perspective, absolutely, it's something we need to be very, very cognizant about and continue to push the right things forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:45) Yeah. You know, he just—on the show, I don't know if it made it into the final edit, but we were talking about—he's got some big news coming up.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:37:51) Yeah, I saw that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:53) You saw it? So he went to Mastercard.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:37:56) Yeah, I saw it on—that's exciting—LinkedIn. Yeah. No, I saw it on LinkedIn. I was like, "Wow, that's gonna be cool." I'm so much—I'm happy to have to be a Mastercard holder now. It's like, yeah, I love what he's doing there. It really is awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:09) Yeah. And we have Nir—there's this product, a book called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. And it's a real popular book on that. They went around to Facebook and all the big sites—they do these same things to get products to be sticky. And so he analyzes that. It's like a bestseller, and he was on the show, so his episode will be coming out soon.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:38:29) Excellent. No, I'm looking forward to it. I did hear you talking about it, and I've got it on my list. But now I—in the morning—

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:35) Best feedback ever.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:38:36) Oh, I leave you in the morning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:38) I'm sorry, I'm so excited to talk to you right now.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:38:40) That's all good. I had to build pages of notes to make sure I didn't—yes, wait—

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:46) No, this is amazing. I love it. We've got—crap, we've got four pages of notes on you. Thank you, Jake, right?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:38:54) Yes, absolutely. No, it's—I feel honored. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:58) Yes. So what were you doing in the morning?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:39:02) Oh, in the mornings, what I'll do is—my friend owns a coffee shop down the road. So first thing I do is pop on when your podcast is going on. So you're kind of my morning meal, five-, ten-minute drive back and forth. So yeah, keep bringing the value, brother.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:18) We got coming up—we got Microsoft—

(Rob Dufalo at 00:39:21) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:22) VMware, T-Mobile.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:39:24) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:22) And then we have—just so you know, we have like 20 podcasts that haven't even been released yet. Yeah.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:39:33) When are you sleeping, man? When are you—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:34) Well, we started with three a day. Then I lost my voice. So we backed it down to—then back down to one. And so we've been doing one a day solid for, I don't know, six months, seven months.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:39:48) Wow. Jeez. So awesome. Yeah. I really—I want at one point, I will get in and actually start—that's why I have all this equipment. I wanna do some podcast stuff myself, but I just haven't—that's one thing I haven't got to yet. But yeah, just—

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:01) When it happens, you gotta have me on.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:40:03) Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:04) You're at the—

(Rob Dufalo at 00:40:04) Top of the list.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:06) Even if it's tracking Elon Musk boring holes in the dirt.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:40:10) What's Elon Musk Doing Today in the Podcast?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:13) Oh. I'm not kidding you. There is a podcast. Call it The Daily Musk. God.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:24) What—

(Rob Dufalo at 00:40:24) The heck is this? No, it's interesting. Just tell you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:26) You would have a good time. I'm serious. You would get a following, and then that is your most likely path to meeting the man.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:40:33) Oh, man. You're not wrong.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:35) Gosh, right?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:40:36) Just become super fanboy. I love it. Love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) Yeah. I love what he's doing too. Okay. So I mean, we talked about managing remote teams, leadership, developers, CTO. You love craft beer—

(Rob Dufalo at 00:40:48) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:49) And Star Wars.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:40:51) Star Wars, indeed. Love Star Wars. Love craft beer. Huge fan of craft beers. In fact, that's kind of how I met my wife.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:41:00) She's a Canadian, and Canada has an amazing amount of craft beer that never gets in the US just because it's too expensive, really. So I was always up there just drinking the beer up that way too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:15) Yeah. And so have you ever made craft beer that has Star Wars themes?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:41:21) No, I have not made one with Star Wars themes. Not yet. I did brew a dark cherry porter that was absolutely—

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:29) I'm a fan of dark cherry stuff.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:41:32) Oh man, so good. I was so impressed. Had the most beautiful kind of, you know, you've got your dark porter, but had this red tint to it that was just beautiful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:40) Yeah, it's called, like, Vader.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:41:42) Yeah, yeah. Trying to think, right? I gotta think of a good fruit and then mix it with the word Vader, like, I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:49) Yeah, Peach Vader or something.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:41:50) I don't know. There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:52) Peach Vader. That works. Alright, well, we'll take an iterative approach to this just like product.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:41:58) Absolutely. Take first round, bring it in, put some—right, just Vader, but with the head of a peach instead of the helmet. That'd be perfect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:06) You win. Alright, but you can't drink while you're racing rally cars. I want to hear about the rally car racing.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:42:13) Oh man, so I have an affinity for Subarus probably more than actually rally racing. But the back in the early 2000s, my good friend who I knew from high school, he had bought a Subaru Impreza. And everything I known about Subarus were pretty much, you know, that was your grandma's car. In fact, my grandma had a Subaru. And when he brought this thing over, it just looked sexy. I love the look of this car, and I'm like, this is a Subaru? I can't even believe it. And from there, I kind of got in. And when I get into something, I'm all in. I just dig as deep as I can. I wouldn't even drive a car if I didn't understand how it worked. And so I'm learning far more about boxer engines and how all this works, and then I get into the whole thing about rally racing. And they had a club rally scene in the Northwest. And so I had a couple of rally cars that we built up with roll cages, all that. We rallied all over the Northwest. The SCCA has a racing scene there for club rally, and I did that for a long time. And then when I had my son, my wife had asked me to just kind of cut it out because it's kind of dangerous and you should probably be here for your kid. So I kind of backed off from the really hardcore racing like that. I went to some of the predecessors to DirtFish and such in Maine, and for the one in Florida, I can't remember where it is now. It's down there near Tampa. They had a race school down there and I went over there and did a lot of the training for all that. But yeah, I did that for a good couple years. I look back at the price tag of what it cost to run one of those things and I'm like, oh yeah, I could have probably packed away a lot more retirement if I wasn't buying cars and wrecking them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:08) My grandfather is a professional boat racer.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:44:12) Oh nice. That's even more dangerous than rally racing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:15) Yeah, he rode with, like, Don Johnson. They won, like, a world championship for boat racing in, like, 1988.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:44:22) That's crazy. I mean, I've met some of those guys but never ran with them. We were—we had always kind of would basically have your big pro day and then the next day the club rallyers get in there. So you'll see them kind of clean it up from the day before. So you meet and mingle a little bit, but never actually get a run with any of those guys. Nothing too crazy there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:44) I have a friend for you now. So his name is Marco. He has a company called Vinzy. They just went public in Canada, so he's in Canada. And he's a CTO. I think their company is around the same size as yours. And they do some really cool stuff, but he's into the Subaru racing as well.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:45:04) Oh wow. Awesome. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:06) You can go to craft beer, talk about your Subarus, and his episode's actually coming out in the next two or three weeks, or probably the next two weeks.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:45:13) Oh, that's brilliant. No, definitely have to talk about all the GMH and GCA body types and what's this, what's that. You know, STI—

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:20) All your acronyms.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:45:21) All of it. Those things. Yeah, absolutely. No, that'll be fun. I'll have to meet with him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:29) Yeah. And I'm going to call Derek too after the show. Be like, dude, somebody liked your episode. A lot of people liked it, but he was like—he called me up after. He's like, I don't know how it went. I'm like, it went fine, dude. You were awesome. He's like, are you sure? I'm like, yeah. Yo, Derek, fun inside fact, Derek was the first episode.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:45:45) Oh, was he actually? So he wasn't actually a podcaster before. He's number one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:49) He was number one. Derek was the first episode, the only episode that had happened outside of the podcast studios because I had gotten the—I decided to do Modern CTO podcast because we had been successful in a conversational way with phone calls and stuff. So I got in the office for it, and it was like two days before I moved into the office. And so I just did it from my home office, and I was like, Derek, you gotta help me pilot this episode. And it was awesome.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:46:20) Yeah, no man, like seriously, I think if you had the perfect moment—I wasn't kidding when I sent you an email. I think you should get, like, some like Darren and Ryan and a couple of these really big guys. You just need to do a roundtable with them. I'd love to hear all these guys just talk about all these ideas. I think it'd be brilliant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:37) We will. I'll do it. We'll find a place where, like, I'll look at a map. We have a past guest sheet and we have all the locations of everybody. So I'm going to find a place where we can easily all get together, and then just get, like, at the hotels or the conference centers, you can get a conference room for the day. And then get everyone there as easy as possible, and then just have everyone pitch up topics and have an awesome conversation.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:47:05) Absolutely. No, definitely. I'd love to. That'd be great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:07) Yeah. And then, obviously, you're on the list, dude.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:47:10) Yeah. That'd be awesome. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:11) You gotta come.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:47:12) I better give more CTO advice then, or else—

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:16) Oh, since you listened to the older episodes, recently, we gotta do the—the time machine question. You're prepared for the time machine question.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:47:22) Oh man. The—I have thought about that. I won't lie.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:26) Alright. What is it? I'm giving you the time machine question. Elon Musk—he says, hey, hey buddy. He pulls up next to you in your Subaru, right? That's what it sounds like. Jake will edit the effect in there.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:47:36) Yeah. Make that Subaru. And I'll be in the—well, his will just be silent because he comes in the electric, the e-Subaru.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:41) That is true.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:47:43) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:43) Mine sounds like your neighbor's lawnmower and then yours sounds like a muscle car. So you meet Elon Musk, pull up at a red light, and he asks you—you get in his car for some awkward reason, and his car is the time machine. And back in the past ten years, what advice do you give to your previous self?

(Rob Dufalo at 00:48:03) Whew. Well, I went over this a couple times in my head. I will say that the one thing I would—it would be while I was still at Microsoft—I would say that invest in yourself and the people around you more than the company you're part of. At the time I was at Microsoft, I was all in on the Kool-Aid. I really believed in that game plan there. But looking back, I think I wouldn't have changed a whole lot, but I would say that I would have put more in people and more in investing in your career versus necessarily the company's needs. Like, make sure that you're building yourself up because people are what make all these things. That's what the culture is. The one thing I'd say that keeps DeFi rolling for me right now is people are what make it. You can—I promise you, I'd put $20 on the table and say call anyone in my company, ask what's the number one reason you're there, and it would be people. People are what make it. So invest in that and invest in those people around you and make sure that you're doing right by them and building a community and a culture that will thrive for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:12) Oh, I—that's like—I want to cry. It's like a poem. It's like a beautiful, responsible, amazing, insightful poem answer. I love it.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:49:22) Thank you. Yeah. But it was—until you got a little bit. I mean, that's the core of it. Like, when I first became a CTO two years ago, I wondered what it'd be like to be the person who was the chief technical officer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:35) I am too. Right. Yeah.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:49:37) Yeah. And I look back at—I look at it then, I think, oh yeah, I'll make these decisions. It's going to be great. Now I've got this completely different aspect of it. And that is just that, oh man, I have so many people's careers and responsibility for making sure that they have an opportunity to succeed. That is my number one job, is just to empower all these developers and all these managers, all these people that work for me to make sure that they are able to do their best job possible, and that's the most important thing that I can be doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:09) Yeah. And it's amazingly rewarding to be able to be in a position where your job is literally to resource these amazing people around you to do the best that they can do.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:50:17) Oh, I absolutely agree with you. Today, we do kind of scrum—we use the Scrum methodology. We do these sprint reviews. And at the end of these two weeks, watching what these people are putting together and showing off to the rest of the company. Today, we were working on kind of our formula engine, how we wanted to improve its performance. And I'm just sitting in my room just jumping up and down going, this is blowing my mind. Awesome. Yeah. And it wasn't my idea. It was not anything that I had to do, but just the fact that I was able to help these guys nurture this creative experience and just make these huge wins. I was—it made me far more proud than if I had figured it out myself. I can't even express how proud I was of that. So it was awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:01) It's weird how we work as humans, but I love it and it's beautiful.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:51:04) Oh yes, absolutely. Managing Humans, actually—another book you should read.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:09) That's actually on my wish list. I have to get through Phoenix Project, Zero to One by Peter Thiel, and then, of course, I'm doing a Leader Bit on The Pragmatic Programmer. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. So I started writing the Leader Bits, and then I was like, you know what I should do? There's some—when I'm reading books, they'll give me thoughts about my past, and I'm like, oh, you know, I had a lesson like this. And I'm—just like when you're reading my book, you're like, oh, I experienced this. I'm not crazy. Yeah. I get that from reading these books. So then I was like, hey, maybe I'll do a set of Leader Bits on what I took from The Pragmatic Programmer, and then just—I research the law so I don't get sued.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:51:51) Absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:53) Yeah. So that's why—yeah, it works. Definitely. Rob, this is the best. I love this conversation. This has been fantastic.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:52:03) Absolutely. We should do it again soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:05) We absolutely will. I'm going to look at the past guest spreadsheet and actually see and plan and think about the ability to do this get-together. I'm going to start reaching out to people and see if they're interested in it. If they're interested in it—I think they will be—we'll figure out how to logistically execute it, and then you gotta come out.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:52:24) Absolutely. I will be there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:26) Got it.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:52:27) Got my word. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:30) Alright. So I'll stop the backup system. Backup system stopped. Jake, how are we doing? We doing good? We got the whole thing recorded? Alright.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:52:37) Great. Crazy thing. Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:40) Thank you. We're going to tag you and micro-clip it and put it out. We're definitely behind, but you're—I really enjoyed your episode, so we'll bump you up. It won't be a crazy amount of time.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:52:53) Just let me—yeah. If you let me know about it, I'm sure our marketing team will want to, you know, play it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:58) Yeah. They do that a lot.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:53:00) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:01) Thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it.

(Rob Dufalo at 00:53:04) Anytime. Anything you need, just email me, brother. I'm there for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:07) Talk soon. Cheers. 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.