The Tech Layoff Crisis: Understanding the Reality and Finding Solutions Part 1 with Brian Singer, CIO & CTO at Propio Language Services

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're bringing you the first part of our conversation with Brian from Propio Language Services, and we're talking all about the recent tech layoffs. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) The thing that caught my eye, I believe you had posted something on LinkedIn about layoffs. And when I saw that, I said, okay, this was probably a month or two ago when there was a bunch of layoffs in the news, I think at the beginning of the year. And I said, I want to talk with him about his thoughts, what's going on in the tech industry regarding layoffs.

(Brian at 00:00:37) Yeah. And it's interesting, you know, you say that because, one, I'm kind of reaping the benefits of it. Through those posts, I've had 20 plus former Amazon engineers reach out, and we just had the guy sign today, a former SD3, which is an awesome win for us. And we're putting in another offer for a former Amazon engineer here shortly. But it's kind of what I thought was intriguing was the timing that all of them did it.

(Brian at 00:01:07) And if you look, I mean, you've been in this industry a long time. You see how expensive engineering resources are getting. And talk about inflation. Right? That's hurting businesses like ours because, you know, a smaller company, smaller revenue company can't compete with that type of compensation. We just can't. Right? Whether it comes with, you know, almost free benefits, all the stuff that they do in the offices, full remote, you name it. Small businesses can't compete for that. And so that makes it very difficult now for anybody else to get a competitive advantage and hire really talented engineers because everyone thinks they're that valuable.

(Brian at 00:01:48) Right? And, you know, earlier, well, come last year, if you recall, Amazon had finally made a commitment to increase total compensation. It was right around when they did the 20 for one stock split. And I thought that interesting as well because they had been so balanced on, you know, ownership. You know, set base, a little bit of a sign-on bonus spread over the first couple years, and then everything else is all equity.

(Brian at 00:02:14) And then they were changing that and, you know, finally bumping people's salaries up because they, too, were having a hard time maintaining their current engineering talent as well as, you know, competing in the industry because it had somewhat become a rinse and repeat. You know, you bounce between, you know, the Amazons, the Metas, the Facebooks, the Googles, or the Microsofts, the Googles. And so all of a sudden then, you know, sharp turn left. It's like, wait. Let's let go of all this stuff.

(Brian at 00:02:42) It's very odd to me because there was really no rhyme or reason. So I know from actually former employees of mine, you're talking senior managers and above, SD3s, which are, you know, somewhat unicorns, right, in the industry. And they're being let go, and they're not even trying to repurpose them. So, it was, it seemed like it was, I don't want to say unplanned, but it was certainly not, like, calculated. And they were just killing off business units, if you will, because there was a lot of Alexa layoffs as well.

(Brian at 00:03:12) And I found that interesting too because, you know, Amazon had always prided itself on having engineers and anybody at the company have that option of, you know, come here, join a team, and then stay with us because you can switch jobs everywhere. So it's a long, I'm kind of giving you all the backstory because I feel like it was, in a way, Amazon's saying, you know what, engineers? We gotta take back control of this situation, and we've gotta kind of reduce the overall cost of this type of talent. I think, you know, and again, a little bit of a conspiracy theory. I'm going to throw that out there.

(Brian at 00:03:48) But I do think it has a correlation to that because the talent's getting too expensive. And, you know, everybody in that industry, everybody on the Left Coast, if you will, is starting to leverage everyone else and everybody else's offers, you know, to jump ship. And so I do think that in a way, it was like them kind of setting a recalibration because it was a lot of engineering talent that got let go. It wasn't, it wasn't like, you know, peanut butter spread across different roles and the like.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:18) So it wasn't entire products. They didn't, they just ditched mostly engineers within different products?

(Brian at 00:04:25) From what I see, it was entire products, but it was mostly engineers in those products because the majority of the talent in those product lines is engineers. And so, and again, like I said, there wasn't a real good justification. It wasn't, you know, a lot of, for example, a lot's been talked about in the press about how Amazon does their review process and, you know, the kind of the ranking system in it. And, look, everybody does this. It's just everybody wants to pick on Amazon.

(Brian at 00:04:58) And it would have made more sense if they took that model to reduce staff, basically saying, hey, we've got a certain amount of top tier. We've got a certain amount of, you know, middle talent. And then let's look at this reduced tier of folks and, you know, go back to each of the organizations and kind of say, hey. Here's what we, you need to do. But axing entire products or business units, that was very odd in my mind. Very odd.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:28) In my mind, it's not odd at all.

(Brian at 00:05:29) Yeah. I'd love to hear more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:31) Because I would just look at the P&L and see how different products are doing. And if I have to make cuts, then I'm just gonna pull up the P&L and say, you know, cut the things that are underperforming. If they were performing well and they cut, that would be interesting. Right? If the product was profitable and they cut it instead of cutting a less profitable product, that might be kind of interesting.

(Brian at 00:05:51) Yeah. I just thought what, the part about it that I thought was interesting, it wasn't, you know, stopping and doing things that weren't producing value. That I get, and I agree with you on that. It was not looking at the good, like, the top talent that remained in those verticals to ensure that, wait a second, we're not just killing a business unit and losing the talent. So I had SD3 recs open for two years at Amazon and wasn't able to hire them. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:23) So they'll, I'm agreeing with you on a lot of things. First of all, I love a good conspiracy. Secondly, I've got my own sort of conspiracy about why they did it from my perspective, but I like that you mentioned about these recs being open and them not keeping talent. So when I think about that, I'm like, alright. They made these cuts and they didn't choose to be particular about keeping their top talent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:49) And that says to me that it was, you know, somewhat of an emergency, like a quick reaction to something. And so then I think, okay. Well, what's the quick reaction to? Well, from my perspective, the government was giving us so much money to keep employees. It's literally called the ERC, Employee Retention Credit.

(Brian at 00:07:10) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:10) They just give you massive tax breaks on your payroll tax, and they'll actually give it back to you. Very rarely does this happen in the tax code, but they'll actually give you back the check or credit it towards payroll taxes, which is a huge deal. So they were doing that for two years, maybe more, and then they stopped it. Right? At the same time, you have the Fed increasing interest rates because too many people have too many jobs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:33) So what I think happened, it's my conspiracy is that these executives sat up there and they said, because this is what I would do if I were in their position. Right? They said, look, we're losing all this tax credit, so we have to rebalance our budgets because we're losing a huge chunk of cash that's gonna come in because, I don't know, for most of the businesses, I would argue that human capital is the greatest expense.

(Brian at 00:07:57) Right? For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:58) Yeah. So now you're gonna lose this huge credit against keeping all these people, so then you have to figure it out. So that's one incentive. Another incentive is the Fed keeps raising interest rates under the argument that the job market's too hot.

(Brian at 00:08:10) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:11) And then the third reason is these engineers are just crazy because this has gone nuts. I never planned, Brian. When I joined the economy, essentially, it was around 2009 when the real estate crash happened. So I got this specific view that it was, you have a bunch of talent and then you just have to figure out what to do with that talent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:31) Right? I never thought my business would face struggles of just everyone's paying everyone more, and so I can't keep people because the moment they start, they get a better offer somewhere else, and then you can't even get anything done. And I never thought that my business would struggle, and it did a few years ago with the idea that I just can't retain them not because of culture, because of benefits, just because of straight pay, just the amount of pay you'll get.

(Brian at 00:08:57) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:58) And so that hurts. So those are all my things. I think there's, I think your conspiracy is part of, like, a triple incentivized conspiracy. Right? Reduce the headcount so that makes the Fed happy. Reduce the headcount because you're losing your federal credits anyways, and that's a huge chunk of change. And then, you know, reduce it to keep the engineers' salaries in better alignment.

(Brian at 00:09:20) Yeah. I don't disagree with anything that you said. I wasn't aware of the ERC. But, yeah, given the amount of people that they employ, that's obviously a significant payday. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:32) Yes.

(Brian at 00:09:33) Losing that essential free income, it certainly can hit people. And there was a little bit of that before, like, right when you came in because at that point in time, the administration then had reduced payroll taxes as well. And it went over the course of, like, two or three years. And that was both for the payroll tax, like, the employer, as well as it reduced the employee's contributions. So we were all making more money, and that was because of, you know, the economy at that point in time.

(Brian at 00:10:01) So I do remember, like, even personally, I remember, crap. I'm gonna start paying more again. I don't really like, I don't really like this. So, yeah, from an employer side, when your human capital expenses as much as all of their companies are, that's definitely a hit. And, you know, the returns for them as a business are not what they were. It's not a guarantee anymore. You know, when you went in, most of your compensation was based off of, you know, 20% growth year over year. And that's not happening anymore. And frankly, you know, like I said, it's been a benefit of me in my position as a former Amazon leader to then, you know, have that outreach and say, hey, look, we're a growing startup company. We're doing great things that are actually helping people.

(Brian at 00:10:49) You're not gonna, and this is a little bit arrogant to say, but I'm gonna say, you know, you're not building software to ship boxes of things to people. You know, I'm one of those people that accept those boxes and buy a bunch of stuff that I don't necessarily need. But you can join us, and you can actually build software that's bridging communication gaps, you know, globally between people who really need it. And I see what I'm seeing when I'm talking to these engineers is they really wanna get back into having meaningful work. And that's not to disregard anything that the tech companies are doing.

(Brian at 00:11:23) But at the end of the day, there's something tangibly, you know, there's a big tangible result that impacts people's lives for, you know, your contributions as a software engineer here at Propio. You can't necessarily say that for the FAANG stocks any longer. And so it's not to say that their, you know, their growth and, you know, their peak has happened. I just think that certain generations are seeing more value in the result and the impact of what they do, not just the result. And that's where, you know, that's where we come in. That's where my passion is. That's why I'm here. I came to Propio from AWS because I wanted to be bringing value to a company that, one, valued me, but also was doing something different in the world that helped people. And you've seen, you know, I've, since 2010, it's Amazon or health care tech in some way or fashion. And that's the pull. Like, I wanna build software.

(Brian at 00:12:28) I wanna be a part of something that really helps people because that's the area that we don't really pay attention to. You know, if you think about all the population, and there's even articles today. Actually, there was an article specifically about Amazon Clinic and how that could potentially change, you know, how we're doing telehealth and the cost of telehealth and things like that. But it's an industry that has not ever really had disruption in terms of technology at a grand scale. And it's the industry that really needs the technology to disrupt the status quo.

(Brian at 00:13:03) So I love being a part of this, and that's, you know, that's a big pitch that I give to the engineers, you know, be it product engineers, quality engineers, software security engineers. That's the pitch that I give them. That's why it's different. That's why you wanna come work here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:17) And so what is the problem that you're solving there?

(Brian at 00:13:19) So with our diversified population, there's 300 plus languages in the US. And, you know, when you have a high volume of immigrant population and English is not their primary language, we sell to clients who need that intermediary, who need a real-time interpreter. We need to be able to help make sure that in a legal situation, in a medical situation, that what you're hearing is understandable. It's not a matter of you trying to listen to a provider, or a legal specialist for that regard or an education. That's another one of our big verticals.

(Brian at 00:14:00) Tell you what's going on and not really comprehending it. So we make that available through, you know, it's really point and click. If you see your language, you click on audio, you click on video, on an average of fifteen seconds, we have a live interpreter there for you. We support over 350 different languages, including American Sign Language. And we do that through a global, certified interpreter population.

(Brian at 00:14:22) So they're medically certified. You know, they're understanding of HIPAA. Everybody's under, you know, compliance and regulatory coverage. And, you know, we make people's lives easier so that if they're hearing, you know, a diagnosis or, you know, talking about care, they hear it in their natural language. We also give them the ability to add additional family or friend participants to the call.

(Brian at 00:14:46) So, you know, if it's a, if it's your mom or you need a sibling, or your mom needs a daughter or son to be on, we give that option as well. So that way, we can have more of a family situation, everybody hearing what's happening, all at the same time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:01) Yeah. I love that, especially because my brother and stepmom are physicians. And growing up, she ran the ER in Largo. You used to live in Florida. So she ran the ER for Largo for, like, twenty years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:15) And I got to go there after school from time to time, and you're exactly right. It's just a mix mash. And even when I was doing a project a few years ago, I was researching, I was surprised by this. I don't know the percentages, but I was doing some research for marketing about what countries had the highest population percentage-wise of people who spoke English.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:37) And I just remember, I don't know what number it was, but it was not in the top 10. The United States was not in the top 10, and I was blown away by that. I think it was, like, 26 or something. But, yeah, that was so surprising. And so I love what you guys are doing. I'm glad our show got pushed because I actually went to the, like, an emergency clinic on, I think Saturday. So we were driving back, and we stopped at a Buc-ee's, like, to get gas and stuff. And my wife's like, hey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:05) Can you check on the baby? Because we took two cars. So I got out of my car, went over to open the door for the baby because she was in, you know, gas station, and something got in my eye.

(Intro Narrator at 00:16:15) Oh, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:16) So something from the wind, it blew like a grain of sand or like a small grain of something into my eye, and I couldn't see. And my wife said, "Yeah, you got this bump under your eyelid. It's like something's in there." And I was like, "Oh my goodness."

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:33) So obviously, this is at the worst possible time. Right? We're traveling back. We're in...

(Brian at 00:16:38) A city where we're all...

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:39) Yeah. We're in, I think, Atlanta or something. And so I get in her car, and she drives me to the closest, you know, what do they call it? Urgent care?

(Brian at 00:16:52) Urgent care. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:53) Yeah. And I get there, and I'm having to explain it, you know, to them, like, what's going on? And when you were describing what you do, I was sitting there thinking, like, wow. I'm so lucky. I walked into a place that spoke English because if I were in maybe France or Germany or some other place, to explain to them what's going on and how my eye got hurt and what's going on, and then they looked at it and all this stuff. That would have been so difficult and so challenging. And luckily, everything was okay.

(Brian at 00:17:22) It's amazing because, you know, I've got three kids. You've got a couple kids. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:27) Three.

(Brian at 00:17:28) Yep. And you reflect back and you think about, you know, when you're in those situations, you're not very clear. Right? You know, your mind is not on answering or hearing every single thing that the provider is trying to tell you. And they're asking the same things over and over and over again. And it's really CYA. But there's times where you don't understand. Right? Like what they're saying, and you go, "Doc, you know, break it down to me so I understand it." So just having that ability to say, "I don't really understand what you're saying. You need to break it down further," is something we have to do all the time. I mean, we do that every day. It could be our friend explaining something that they do at work that we just don't understand. Could be your boss. Could be anybody. But in a medical situation or in a legal situation or an educational situation, it's exponentially harder. And so when I put myself in that and I think of all the times that I've had to say, "I don't get it," right? It's like, damn, if you don't speak English, can you imagine being in that position where, you know, certain, like, English speakers don't get it? And so, you know, it's an amazing benefit we provide.

(Brian at 00:18:44) Plus, what I didn't actually know until I began working with Propio is hospital systems are required to have on-staff interpreters. And Medicaid and Medicare, if it's coded right, they cover interpretation as a part of the quality of care. And so, I didn't even know that. I didn't realize that whatsoever. And as a part of what we're doing now, we're helping hospital systems partner with us to keep their on-staff interpreters, you know, functioning at all times. So raising their capacity. So we have this program called Interpreter Rewards Program, where if you're a client of ours and you have your own interpretive staff, we'll put you on our platform, and we'll prioritize your interpretive staff first. Let you fill the request. You're on our portal, and that comes at basically no charge. And then if they can't handle it, we handle your overfill. And that helps your staff, you know, be as maxed out in capacity as possible. And we're also building out a SaaS offering for workforce and capacity management for both on-site and remote interpretive staff to sell directly to health systems. And that just opens up their ability to make sure that all of their members, everyone that's being given care, is taken care of in terms of, you know, having that availability for their natural language speaker. So it even gets more expansive to where, you know, we can help other hospital systems maintain their capacities and basically lower their costs in terms of their interpretive staff. That doesn't even come into play.

(Brian at 00:20:21) Like, we have a translation component of our business. So we're doing document translation. We do 50,000 different projects a year on document translation. We do websites in real time. We do manuals, any type of document that you might need translated. We do that in over 125 different languages. So we're a full-service language provider. And it's, you know, like I said, building software for that, it matters. It's a lot of fun when you see the results and the impact of what we're doing. Because I look at data all day. And, you know, to see the increase in our fill rates to make sure that, you know, we're connecting clients to their preferred language and, you know, we're making sure we're connecting it on the channel that they requested, whether it's video or audio. And we're seeing the results because of the length of the calls. We know that there's a positive interaction happening. That's fantastic. And then from a quality assurance standpoint, we built our own internal quality assurance application. So we do essentially like a real-time stream. It's restricted access to supervisors and quality assurance folks on the interpretive side, and they randomly check in on recorded audio to ensure that the interpreter quality is at the bar that we expect it to be. And then in addition to that, we've built a full 360-degree view from a dashboard standpoint that pulls in network jitter, packet loss, round-trip time, so latency, and then correlates that against insight data that Twilio publishes per call into a centralized dashboard. So we know what clients are having difficulties, what interpreters are having potential difficulties in terms of just things that are out of their control. We have region-based heat maps that are telling everybody, you know, where we could potentially have problems. So it gives our interpreter relations organization the ability to do outreach and predict when we're gonna have issues. So it's just been a fun time. You know, comparing us back to, you know, 21 months ago when I first joined, it's a completely different company already, and it's been a blast working with them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:40) Yeah. I mean, I think we met about five years or so ago. And you have been, I think, at two or this is your third different place that you've been since I met you, and you've seemed the happiest and the most on fire that you've ever been here.

(Brian at 00:22:55) Yeah. It's, uh, we're 25 years old this year. And that's amazing to me because I look at what we're doing, and I correlate it back to a five-year startup. Because our CEO and our chief revenue officer, Marco and Joe, they joined right upon that time. And, you know, since then, the whole business model has transitioned, and we run like a startup. We run very lean. That's thrilling, man. It's awesome when we just work together to solve problems. You know, it's one of the most rewarding and fun places I've been. It's the hardest place I've been at the same time, but it's never been work. And that's what I love. Like, you know, I'm an early riser. I'm one of those crazy guys. You know, I get up probably 2:00 in the morning and I'm working right away. And it never feels like, "Oh, gosh, I gotta get out of bed because I have to do this." I get out because my mind's racing and I got a bunch of ideas, and these guys are challenging me on a daily basis to do bigger things, to be better, to think outside the box. And that's fulfilling. You know, it's opportunities like this and it's working with the people like I am right now that make you realize that you don't ever have to retire because you could do this forever because it's fun. And that's how I feel. These guys bring out the absolute best in me. I mean, they challenge us on a daily basis, and I thoroughly enjoy working with them. I put this leadership team up against any executive team that I've ever worked with, AWS, Amazon included.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:25) Absolutely. When I started, I used to think that there was this goal of making a bunch of money so you could retire. And then when you actually fit in to what you wanna do, I got to talk to this guy. I think his name was Adam, and he was one of the people that invented video codecs and streaming technology that he sold to Google or something. I probably got that completely wrong, but you get the idea.

(Brian at 00:24:45) I would like to talk to him because...

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:50) But he, it's like I think he got several $100 million or something. And I did an interview with him. Super cool guy. They like to give away a bunch of their money and everything. And I was asking him, or he was asking me, what would I do if, like, he wrote me a big check and, like, I had infinite money, what would I do? And he said it can't be in tech and it can't be the podcast.

(Brian at 00:25:07) Oh. Interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:07) And I had to think and I was like, "Alright, so this is what I'd do. I'd buy, like, a sweet castle, giant mansion. Right? Really cool. Do all of that, and then I would pay the smartest people on the planet and fly them into my living room and have conversations with them."

(Brian at 00:25:27) Dude, that'd be cool. Right? That idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:30) Just like, "Hold on, Zuckerberg. Branson's up."

(Brian at 00:25:33) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:34) You know? And he's like, "He somehow managed to turn that into a podcast."

(Brian at 00:25:37) A podcast. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:38) We don't have to record it.

(Brian at 00:25:39) Are you doing that right now? Yeah. No. I mean, but that just proves that what you're doing right now is what you love to do. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:46) Yes.

(Brian at 00:25:46) And that's part of why, like I said, I thoroughly enjoy this. Look, I commute every week. We're based in Overland Park, Kansas, right outside of Kansas City. My family's still based up in Michigan. And I fly in on Sundays. I fly out on Thursday nights or Friday mornings. That's my drive to work as I call it. And for a lot of people, that's like super intense. For me, it's awesome. Like, you know, I'm working on the flights. And, you know, on Friday mornings, I typically get off. I land around 9 AM, and it's, you know, drive or take a Lyft over to my house, and I walk in the door, go right into my office. And then on Fridays, I'm usually not, you know, I'm still working till six, 7:00 at night. You know, it makes it difficult because my kids play hockey and all that kind of stuff, but it's also rewarding because it doesn't bother me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:41) But you get to their hockey games and stuff. Right? You get to the games. Okay.

(Brian at 00:26:44) Yeah. I get to the games. I've had to miss a couple away tournaments just because of logistics, but I get to the games. I'll miss the practices and things like that. And, you know, it's probably better for me because I'll get out there and skate, and I have a terrible back. So me getting out there and skating anymore is probably not the best use of my time. But, you know, it doesn't bother me. For a lot of people, that's more like a grind. Like "I have to work. Oh my God. I'm working till six or 7:00 on a Friday." I love it. Like, because we're, it's not just busy work. I'm not on meetings. There's things that we're strategizing on and we're doing, you know, architecture reviews. We're thinking about new ways of doing things and that's fulfilling, you know. What could you do? What goes wrong with that? Right. And sure, you know, money and all that stuff matters. But it's, to me, it's like, value. Invaluable. You know, can I bring value? And I can. And am I valuable? You know, so it's like that reciprocity. And that's been for the last six years, you know, after doing the kind of young person thing and saying, "Oh, there's all these things I wanna achieve and I want more money. I want more money." I came back to very easily that I need to be in positions where I bring value and am valued. And that's probably the most rewarding thing here. There's value every day that I can bring, but there's a trust that we have in the conversations when we're talking about problems or future growth opportunities where input matters, and it's not a matter of, you know, somebody's got a higher title than you or anything like that. It's you're here to sit at the table. And for a long time, tech leaders really didn't sit at the table. Right? They were just taking direction from the business because it was more of like an internal consulting agency where the business paid for the call center that is technology. And in my mind, you know, I love that you call it Modern CTO because I've said this before, the CIO role is going away. You know, that's less and less. You know, it's going towards CTO because every company, whether you are a technology company or not, you are a technology company. And in order to do that, you need people who have been hands-on keyboard. You need people who understand that. And that's not to discount any of the CIOs, but the CTO role is really what's taking over because they're expecting, you know, that software engineering component to everything that we do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:18) Yeah. What else do we wanna get out there to the world? Anything else? Go work at Propio. Is that how I say it?

(Brian at 00:29:24) Propio? Yeah. Yeah. You got it. You got it. Going back to the, you know, the start of our conversation, and I said this before. I've posted this before. If you look, if you're defeated because you got laid off, ignore it. Use the layoff situation as an opportunity to find what you love and wanna do or reinvent yourself. Reflect on yourself. A good colleague of mine was saying some similar things, like, take a moment to reflect. Why was it you? And don't beat yourself up about it. Just take it as an opportunity to learn from your past and create a new version of yourself. Like, I've reinvented myself several times, and I'm very much one of those people who's reflecting all the time. And I don't have regret. I just wish I could do some things over again. Right? And so, you know, I've been in that position before where you come to an end of an employment opportunity, and you kind of are at that crossroads, and you start to question, you know, your confidence or your self-worth. And every time I've been in that situation, I've just used it as a chip on my shoulder to go prove that, nope, it wasn't me. I can do this. I can keep going. So just use it as a springboard. Use it as an opportunity to go be a better version of yourself. And, you know, from that, like, come work with us. Come be a part of something that does matter to people. You know, just because you're out of an opportunity with, you know, the big guys, the Amazons, the Googles, the Microsofts, the Metas, it doesn't mean that your impact is gone. In fact, you'll make more impact coming to work with a small startup like us. So start to consider that. You know? Take a leap of faith. Move into a region of the country that is completely new to you, and go work with really smart people who just wanna make things better. Because I just think that that's the tone. That's been the common theme of our conversation today is look around you. Look at all the different tools that you have at your availability to just make your life better, your life simpler, and to free your mind to go learn other things. There's tons of opportunities out there. So give us a call. Come help us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:32) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.