Cultivating a Top Tier Work Ethic & Leading Tech Teams with Gil Feig, Co-Founder at Merge

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Gil, co-founder at Merge, about where his work ethic comes from and how he's used it to lead his company. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) So where are you at in your journey?

(Gil at 00:00:19) Yeah, I've been working in tech. I've been coding since I was 12. Started doing video game development when I was young, and then over time just got even more attached to it. Went to college, met my now co-founder, graduated and worked at LinkedIn for a few years, got deep into iOS development. And then I think I realized I missed being a deep builder, being able to just constantly get things out the door and see people putting their hands on them. So I went to startups and ended up leading engineering at a startup in the recruiting space. And yeah, there did a lot of things. I think management was a big aspect of it and building integrations and coding and just kind of tackling a million things at once, and ran into the problem which is what led me to here and now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:04) When you were 12, who got you into the game development? How did you know that was even an option?

(Gil at 00:01:09) So I played games a lot, and I think it actually started with video game botting. So I think I noticed, you know, I would log in and it would be like cutting trees in a game, and then you'd log in 24 hours and they'd be in that same spot still cutting trees, and you start to get suspicious. So I started just doing research and found a community. And I think, you know, I actually found more passion in building the bots, to learn to build bots, than I did for the benefits I was going to get out of the game. And I think that's where I kind of saw that shift in what I was interested in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:41) Bro, I just like cutting down trees. Leave me alone.

(Gil at 00:01:44) Yeah, I could just click for 24 hours. Yeah. No, it was really, it was so fun to just watch that and then see the opposite. People coming up to me just in the game being like, "I don't understand how you do this all day," and it just happens to be when I'm walking by my computer and seeing them and being like, "Yeah, you know, I just love it."

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:02) Now you said something interesting. You could build bots that would build bots?

(Gil at 00:02:07) Tell me about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:08) About that.

(Gil at 00:02:09) No, so not building bots. I would build bots. Build just like, build bots that would kind of run all day. I think I was part of this community. It was a forum. And in order to get into the sort of like secret forum part of it, you had to build a bot that could run autonomously and do any task for 12 hours without failing. And so that was like my rite of passage. I spent a lot of time on it, got accepted into the community, and it was just really fun. And I think it was like an early start to complex coding beyond just web. You know, the game had bot detection. It would pop up and make you solve the puzzle, and there were solvers for that. You know, it was really cool and really challenging for that age.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:46) What game was this?

(Gil at 00:02:48) Yes, RuneScape.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:50) Oh, very cool. Very cool. I knew it. I knew it.

(Gil at 00:02:52) Josh knew it. Josh. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:54) I wanted to chat in earlier, but yeah. He built bots for RuneScape too. Yeah. In his off time. So what gave you the idea—well, I already know a little bit about why you started Merge and co-founded it, but I'm curious about you as a human being. Like, did you see parents start companies? Like, where did you get the audacity to think you could start a business?

(Gil at 00:03:15) Yeah. So my mom was a lawyer, and she always said, "Don't become a lawyer." My dad was a software engineer, and he always said, "Don't become a software engineer." So I think I was kind of torn. I obviously just—I think for me, I had experienced software engineering before, and I wanted to do it. My dad started software companies when he was younger. And so I think it just always felt like an attainable goal for me. It didn't feel easy, but it felt like something that was doable because I had seen someone, you know, at least do it my whole life. And so, yeah, I think for me, like, I had been talking to Shensi for a long time. I always knew I wanted to start something, but I wasn't going to do it just for the sake of that. We had to find a true problem. We had to actually find something that viscerally, you know, was that 10x pain point. I think for me, it really came about when I was building these integrations that I was like, I just do not—I can't comprehend how something for this does not exist. I was looking up questions just on very small niche parts of integrations, for example. And there were a thousand people asking about it, and I was like, "Alright, there is pain here. I need to do this."

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:17) How did you validate it?

(Gil at 00:04:19) So Shensi and I spent probably four or five months just reaching out to tons of people at various companies. They were very gracious with their time, hopped on calls with us. These are like random senior PMs, random directors, CTOs, you know, just always willing to get on calls with us. We had a CTO of a huge tech company meet us in Dolores Park in San Francisco, walk around with us, and tell us risks and benefits, and he ended up investing too. So I think just, you know, just people being willing to help with ideas, but also just give us their time and validate. And, you know, obviously, not everyone said it was a great idea, but most did. And I think most expressed it in a way that wasn't a pity, "Hey, you know, go for it," type of thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:59) And where do you get your work ethic from?

(Gil at 00:05:02) I think a mix of things. I worked really hard my entire life. I always have. My parents had a rule. They never told me how to work or when to work, but they said if you don't get straight A's, you're not working hard enough, and that's our rule. And so I liked that. They were very much self-directed. I think for me, it's that—I'm a very goal-driven person, and it needs to be measurable, which can be bad in some cases. But I think, you know, when it comes to work, when it comes to starting a company, you're able to either have those goals set for you or set your own. And if I'm not hitting goals, my innate childhood anxiety around not getting straight A's kicks in. So for me, I have to be hardworking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:36) I saw that quote. You were on another podcast. You said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." I was like, a classic. Love that one.

(Gil at 00:05:44) Yeah. Yeah. I think also, like, I will be honest. The other half comes from my co-founder, and people always say, you know, one of the biggest reasons for companies failing is co-founder breakup. And I think part of it is differences in work style and opinions and whatever, but I've always been a hard worker, but Shensi is another level. I think for me, I don't view that as something that's—to me, that's purely positive. It's inspirational, and it's made me work even harder. So I think it speaks a lot to our relationship as co-founders, but also to her as, you know, really just someone who understands that we're not the only people in the world who can work smart, so we just have to work hard if we want to win.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:17) And so you guys are technically in, like, the B2B SaaS industry. Tell me about, like, exactly the problem that you solve.

(Gil at 00:06:24) Absolutely. So I think the best example would be describing, you know, again, what I ran into in my last company, which was we were a recruiting company, and we needed to integrate with applicant tracking systems. So you have Greenhouse, you have Lever, Workday, and we couldn't just integrate with one of them because our customers could be using any of those platforms. And part of what our product did was send candidate data, send data into our customers' applicant tracking system. So we built Greenhouse to support our Greenhouse customers. We built Lever. We built Workday, and then we wanted to expand pipeline. We wanted to expand our TAM. It was essential to our product to have those integrations. And our sales team was like, "Well, all these prospects are on iCIMS, Taleo, SmartRecruiters, all these other platforms." And we were just like, "We do not have time to build those." In fact, I currently have 15 engineers just adding functionality to integrations, just working on fixing bugs, working on a bunch of other things, but they're not even touching our core product. So the idea of building new integrations is actually—it's just a no. Like, I understand the biz—we can't. It was painful. It caused a lot of fights at the company, and Shensi's company was experiencing the same thing from the ticketing side. They were cybersecurity, had to build ticketing integrations. And, again, it was taking them months to build each one. They have to go back and redo them when they encountered errors. It was just hugely painful. And I think for us, we knew this was solvable because internally, what we were building at our companies was a solution to this problem. But no, we were doing it well because we didn't have experience doing it. Neither of our companies. And we realized that everybody was rebuilding this internally. So that's why we decided to tackle it. Essentially, allow companies to integrate once with us, and we integrate with a ton of these platforms and we translate to a single language. Kind of think of us as, you know, a mix of your integrations microservice that powers the normalization and sort of like data syncing, as well as your integrations team. We provide a whole suite of tools to help your non-technical team support your customers so you don't have engineers going back, digging through logs, figuring out everything that's going wrong with your integrations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:20) Yeah. And that's not a foreign concept to us at all as engineers because, I mean, I don't know where you programmed, but I spent—I have different languages, but I think I spent the most recent amount of time in in Ruby. And the idea of, like, if you're going to do a payment gateway, you know, rather than—you wouldn't just go get the Stripe gem. You're going to get a—if you're doing it for a customer or client, you're going to get an abstraction. There's like—tons of payment gateways that are abstracted, and then you could just switch your config to be like one of 50 different payment gateways. And so these concepts of these abstractions are not foreign to us at all. You were just—that's why you were probably surprised there wasn't one. Like, where's the plugin I can get that's just going to send it to these 50 systems?

(Gil at 00:09:01) Totally. Yeah. You'd expect there would be some parent class called integration, and it has a model called like "export candidate." Right? And then that subclass for each individual integration you want to build. That just did not exist. And everyone was—you know, I think if you built it well, that's the way you were building it. But a lot of times, you didn't know that you were going to have to build multiple. So you'd start with one. You never thought about, "Oh, we need this whole gateway," because—I think that's a big problem. It's a failure along the way. And the other one is you have to revisit it all the time. So, you know, you have a customer complaining, like, "Hey, John's name is spelled wrong." And you dig in. You're like, "Okay. Well, there's no way our code is changing the spelling." We have to have our team go dig in and investigate. They actually find out that, like, John's name was changed and the resync didn't happen properly. But each of these little things that happen multiplied by 50 platforms that you're integrating with, multiplied by not having scoped any time to actually tackle those problems. Like, integrations are paralyzing companies, and it's just not a specialty. It's not something you should be working on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:54) Have you found, like, a very specific part of the market that you're excelling in?

(Gil at 00:09:59) I think for us, you know, especially B2B SaaS is really it. Like, that's the main sort of like segment because, candidly, the market has shifted, and everybody expects their platforms that they buy to have integrations. And there's a lot of reasons for that. There's the unbundling of the SaaS giants that had everything stored in one database. You know, there's a lot of reasons for that, but ultimately, we're just seeing more and more demand among tech-forward platforms. And now even looking towards, you know, less tech-forward, non-SaaS companies, we're seeing some really exciting momentum. But purely B2B is our target.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:34) Did you have any troubles when you were raising money to get people out of the Zapier mindset and understand exactly what you're really doing?

(Gil at 00:10:43) Yeah. It was honestly so frustrating in our seed round to try to explain the difference between the incumbents. I think half was on us. Like, we were well-versed. We were new to the space too. We were well-versed in how we were different. We knew how we were different, but I don't think we were great at telling a story around that. And then I think, you know, also, there wasn't like evidence really to prove it yet. I think once we had our seed round over and we had, you know, going for a Series A, we had example customers probably in most VCs' portfolios who could talk to them about the problem and how we're different. That's where it started to become, you know, easier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:16) And then what's this—what's this unified API? How is it different than, like, rolling your own, or what are the benefits of it?

(Gil at 00:11:25) Yeah. So I think the piece before that I was saying around, like, we are your microservice really speaks volumes to the right way to build, which is, you know, you should have a normalization. You don't want to build one-to-one with each platform. And if you do need to make changes to how your system functions, you don't want to have to go change every single system. Right? So most people internally build a unified API. They integrate with, like, a single language, and then they build adapters for each platform they integrate with to translate it into that language. So that's what Merge does for our customers. But then, you know, essentially so our customer integrates once with us. Say they speak English with us. We speak the language of each integration, and we're always giving it to them in that format. Bidirectional, so they have the ability to really build out full integrations, but get a one-to-many benefit. So build once, get 50 integrations that you can offer to your customers. Very different from, you know, the Zapier, a lot of the other platforms of the world, which are more workflow automation. They're really—you still have to set up one-to-one. They're more visual, but you're still coding in a UI. You're still dragging the if blocks and all of that, especially in platforms like Workato. And you have to build integration by integration, so you can end up with, you know, hundreds or thousands of these different workflows that your team has to learn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:36) How do you handle customizations? Like, obviously, then the market moves. Right? You've got 50 of these people. Let's just use the applicant tracking system. And eventually, some new feature will emerge that everybody will have, but it starts out with one company doing one. Like, do you just have the experts in there, like, paying attention to what features are and then making them available in the unified and then just saying, "If you're going to use this feature, it's only supported by these?" Or how do you handle that?

(Gil at 00:13:01) Yeah. So we basically have a lot of different features that our customers can use programmatically to only build once. Like, that's what we always say. First of all, anything you can do by building directly, you can do with Merge, and then build once, set, and forget it. As new features become available, once they hit, you know, we—there's certain criteria we have, but a majority of platforms or that new functionality, it's the major platforms.

(Gil at 00:13:21) We'll add and normalize either model or additional fields for it, and our customers can adopt that. And there's always an API endpoint they can hit to basically say, is this field supported by this platform? So let's say, you know, middle name on an employee is supported by most HR systems but not others, and a platform wants to say, should we show this column of middle names? All they have to do is hit our API and say, hey, for this customer, is middle name supported?

(Gil at 00:13:44) And, you know, I think they kind of build on top of that. It's a one-time kind of set it and forget it, build an adaptable UI that works with whatever the underlying platform supports. The nice piece there is as that platform does support it, Merge is monitoring. We see what we're getting back from the endpoints. We also do visual diffs on docs using monitoring tools.

(Gil at 00:14:03) And when we see those, we add them, and our customers' platforms automatically update to support that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:08) And what type of technologies are you using to build your platform?

(Gil at 00:14:15) So we use a bunch of different tech. I think what's, you know, we're on Kubernetes. Auto-scaling is really important. Uptime, reliability is all critical for our customers. Obviously, we're a deep infra tool. So, yeah, we're all AWS-based. We host in a lot of regions around the world. We use Python on the back end, a mix of different, you know, Redis, OpenSearch, and Postgres databases and quite a mix of technologies. And, yeah, I think for us, the most important is that we're able to really support whatever our customers need in terms of, you know, availability, data storage, location, all of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:52) Do you have competitors that are trying to do this as well, or is it mostly you guys dominating?

(Gil at 00:14:58) Yeah. Look, I think there are some ankle biters, you know, companies that popped up and saw what we're doing and decided they wanted to try it as well. But it's just a tough problem to solve. I think, you know, some companies, until you've built your first integration, you think of integrations as have it or not. It's a binary. And I think once you've built one or used, you know, some really deep ones, you understand that's not the case. It's fully a spectrum of how well it works and how deep the integration actually is. And I think that with a lot of these, you know, ankle biters, it's tough for them to gain traction because their integrations are super buggy. Customers hit those bugs. They churn. They come to Merge. Meanwhile, we've already solved all of those bugs across platforms because we have thousands of customers using them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:38) Nice. And you've got a cool logo too. Is that like a hoodie or just a sweatshirt?

(Gil at 00:15:43) It's a sweatshirt. We made this in the early days. We had an embroidery machine. We did them ourselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:48) Do you have any merch hoodies?

(Gil at 00:15:50) I don't think we have hoods. We're big on sweatshirt culture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:54) Sweatshirt culture? Yeah. Alright. And then from a leadership perspective, you're building this growing team.

(Gil at 00:16:02) Uh, I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:02) I heard that you're all in in New York City, right? Or you're all in person in one of your physical offices. So you're building these engineering teams. What are you struggling with right now? What are you learning a lot about right now as an engineering leader?

(Gil at 00:16:15) So it's a few things. We, yeah, so we have our New York and San Francisco offices. We are completely in person, as you mentioned. I think, you know, we've really honed in on good engineering talent is not easy to find, but it's much easier to find than people who are truly dedicated and excited about building a business, growing a startup, aren't just in it for sort of this nine to five, you know, code, walk out the door. You know, for us, it's really important that we're getting the people who are motivated. We've learned we can teach people skills. We'd much rather teach someone skills than teach them motivation, which we don't find to be super possible. So I think in interviews, we've actually just doubled down a lot more on culture and understanding that. I think that in person is sort of a filter. It doesn't apply to everyone, but it's a filter for us. It really does actually help us find people who are very motivated and dedicated to what they're doing. And then on top of that, we've just always been in person. We've done it since the beginning. So just kind of a part of who we are at this point. And I think that there's tangibles and non-tangibles to why we continue it, but we're super happy with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:15) So many people seem like motivated people in the job process, and then you hire them and two months go by, and it's just not, they're not there. I haven't found a secret hack to figure this out. Have you?

(Gil at 00:17:28) I think there's no secret, and you're gonna make mistakes. You have to take risks in hiring. But I think there's certain questions. Like, one of the big ones that I like to do is just express a reality. Like, why would you wanna work here given we're a startup? We work harder than, you know, a big tech company. There's more highs and lows. Things can be difficult. It can be stressful when a customer, you know, personally insults a feature that you've built. You know? You're not as detached from the customer. You're not as detached from the business. Why do you wanna do this? And there's, you know, I think two people can say the same words and mean very different things. And so it's sort of just having done it many times, knowing how to listen for tone, for true excitement, for why someone is motivated, why they wanna put themselves through this. Right? I think the people here would never think of it that way. But I think that's what we're looking for. You want the person who's not like, well, look, it's the pain I'm gonna do to make money. You know? It's very different from someone who's like, I have to do this. I need to grow for my career so that later on in life, I have all the knowledge I needed early on, and I could focus on my family. Or I don't know. There's a lot of reasons, but yeah. I think even among our very senior employees, we see that level of motivation. That's the reason they moved up quickly in their careers. You can often kind of correlate that with the things that they say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:43) I agree with you. Two people can say the same words, and it'd be very different. There was this funny clip I saw on Instagram yesterday where they had Nate Bargatze. He's a popular comedian right now, and he was at this thing called, like, a comedy improv or whatever, comedy karaoke. I think it was actually in New York. And they would just show you phrases of absolute killer comedy text, and you have to try to do it. Stand up there and do it like karaoke, because the timing is so important, and the personality is so important. And it was just amazing to watch this Jerry Seinfeld material come out of Nate, and then it just not even be, like, not working at all. And so you're right. You nailed it. And I don't know if we're at the point where we have computers that can detect that yet.

(Gil at 00:19:30) Yep. Well, yeah. Computers that can detect that. But even harder for us, me and Shensi still interview every candidate because one of our, I think, areas that we really need to improve in is how we train other people on that interview. How do we make sure that someone is gonna be aligned with what me, Shensi, or some of our more senior managers who are, you know, very adept interviewers? How do we make sure we can align the team with that without making them do a hundred interviews first? It's tough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:54) Hey, I wanted to talk about security because I got to do a couple security interviews in the past few weeks, so it's on my mind. When you're working with all of these companies and doing all of these integrations, the security questionnaires and that whole process is kinda super difficult and annoying. I've integrated into Fortune 500 companies, and it takes months, and it's chaotic. And half the questions they ask don't even make sense. How did you handle that? Did you hire a security expert on your team to handle that full time or how?

(Gil at 00:20:25) Joel, we work hard. Yeah. No. I mean, I think the truth is at the beginning, I did most of it. I just spent my nights, weekends just filling out security reviews. We built up a really good bank of them. Now we have a head of security who manages a lot of that. But I think the other piece was, we haven't spoken, like, we've kind of, if we haven't spoken with our customer about security by the time that they are asking us to fill out a security review, we've already gone wrong in the sales process. Security is first and foremost to us, and it's on us to bring that up first to really show how dedicated we are. And I think we got our SOC 2 Type 2. We have ISO 27001, HIPAA, we comply with GDPR. We have all of this stuff going for us, and it's on us to show that to them upfront. These, you know, the reports that we have share a lot more than they would ever ask in a security review. These are forty, fifty page documents, and so we try to share that first. It can, you know, I think fly with SMB, mid-market sized companies. Enterprises, we just have to go through the security review process, and we just do what we have to do. I know there are a lot of tools that can help automate, autofill those out now. We've explored a few of those, but, you know, we still do it mostly manually, I would say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:35) Let me know if you find any good ones. I always like looking for good tools.

(Gil at 00:21:38) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:39) And that's something I get a lot from companies that are, you know, trying, there'll be companies that are fifteen, twenty people when they're trying to land Fortune 500 deals, and compliance is difficult for them. So—

(Gil at 00:21:51) Yeah. I've seen a couple things out there, like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:51) Security Scorecard and a couple other ones. But if you haven't found something that you love, let me know when you do.

(Gil at 00:21:57) Yeah. I think for me, the most important part is getting your certifications. And when you do that, if you're the person who went through that process, the security reviews also just become kinda easy to you because a lot of those questions that you're gonna get asked are ones that you've already had to do for your SOC 2. Notably, SOC 2 is a good learning lesson too. I just view it as a crash course in cybersecurity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:17) And so what's the future roadmap of Merge? Is there anything, any features upcoming that you're allowed to talk about publicly?

(Gil at 00:22:24) Yeah. We have some really exciting new categories coming. So we're gonna be launching file storage to the general public very soon. A couple other really exciting ones next year. I think some other things I've been really excited about are, you know, just a lot of the AI use cases we've been powering. So we launched our Blueprint AI integration builder, and we're definitely doubling down there. We're excited about how that's gonna help our customers have integrations faster. But the other cool piece is how AI companies are using Merge to power a lot of their use cases, gives them an advantage just having the data that Merge has. So, yeah, I think those are a few really cool things I'm excited about, and notably some categories which I can't disclose just yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:05) What can I do with the file storage?

(Gil at 00:23:08) So let's say you are a procurement platform and you wanna help, you basically help your customers, you know, get contracts, make sure they get the right approvals, all of that before they get signed. You can integrate with, basically integrate with Merge's file storage. We provide a file picker UI. So this platform could then say, select a file. It pops up and it says connect to, you know, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, any option there. The end customer can authenticate and then select their files and just share them directly over. So that way our customer doesn't have to integrate with all of the, you know, enterprise and non-enterprise cloud storage solutions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:45) That's pretty cool. And what's this Blueprint AI integration builder?

(Gil at 00:23:50) Yeah. So Blueprint is our first version of using AI to automatically generate integrations. I think the benefit to our customers and why we're excited to show that to the public is that it really helps us move more quickly with building integrations and then also auto-detecting and fixing issues with integrations. So things can go backwards. Someone can release a bad change to an API, and we're really fast. We get alerted. We have someone on. They fix it. We push to production. I think our average response time to, you know, API change P0 is under five minutes from, you know, discovery to production. So we built a lot of good processes, but we want that to be automatic. And we also wanna be able to add improvements and, you know, launch new integrations much more quickly for our customers. And the ideal state is our customer comes to us and they're like, hey, I have this customer using this really obscure HR platform or this really obscure ticketing platform. Can you build that integration? And we're like, sure. We paste the docs URL into Merge and then boom, we have that integration.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:47) What else are you excited about that's happening at the company?

(Gil at 00:24:50) I think a few things. So one, we're really starting to sell to larger and larger companies, which brings a lot more demand for sort of, you know, what our product can do. So we're already selling to quite a few Fortune 500s, moving up more into enterprise. And, you know, I think when you sell to companies that sell to, let's say, a company like Boeing as an end user, they have millions of employees and potentially hundreds of millions of candidates. You actually physically cannot sync all that data across an API. If you try to, you know, estimate how long it'll take, it's like one of those Windows, you know, updating progress bars. It's like forty-two years. So we can't do that. And I think what's been cool is it's forced us to invest a lot in how we can integrate with these platforms that deal with massive, massive data scale. And a lot of that comes from features like the ability to only pull employees on certain teams or only pull tickets in certain projects, really giving that investment in the onboarding, the limited syncing function, all that stuff that if you were building integrations in-house, you just would never invest in. It even applies to our onboarding flows. We had industry leading 40% success rate of someone who tried to authenticate an account using Merge. Now, it's like 85 to 90%. But no company who builds integrations is actually gonna do what we did and have a full team spend several months just optimizing an onboarding flow for one integration they offer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:10) That is pretty cool. Yeah. So what are you doing outside of work? You obviously work a lot. What type of hobbies do you have outside?

(Gil at 00:26:19) Yeah. I do a few different things. So I travel quite a bit. Obviously, half the time it's work, which is definitely tiring, but very grateful for that as well. Travel quite a bit for personal whenever I can, try to do long weekends. And then I like boxing, so I've been doing some, you know, different boxing workouts and various workout classes in general.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:39) Oh, nice. Yeah. Your co-founder, she told me about your surprise trip to visit a client. She's like, yeah, I just called Gil, and I was like, gotta be there tomorrow.

(Gil at 00:26:48) Oh, yeah. I mean, she sent me to Utah, to London. I'm just all over the world at anyone's whim. They're just like, going. I'm like, alright. I'm going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:56) Nice. You're just doing a ton of work and then boxing and traveling. That's what's going on.

(Gil at 00:27:00) Exactly. Look, I wanna act like I'm more fun, but I think as a founder you just obsess over your company. And, you know, people used to ask me, what's your hobby? And I said, coding. And if I did that now, that would be... yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:15) Yeah. That was an awkward moment in my life when I was programming at work for day job type work, and then I was also trying to do it in my free time, and it just became... yeah. I knew I had to stop when I was writing code in my sleep. I was like, my dreams suck.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:30) Yep. I shouldn't be debugging in my dreams.

(Gil at 00:27:32) But the truth is, even if you are doing that and someone asks you what's your hobby, you generally can't name your career as your hobby too. I mean, you could, but...

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:39) It sounds lame.

(Gil at 00:27:41) It sounds lame. That's true. It's actually a fantastic thing, right? To love what you do so much that you consider it a hobby as well. But, you know, I don't know if other people see it that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:51) What are the dreams? What are the paths not taken for you? Professional boxer, musician?

(Gil at 00:27:58) That's the boring part. I absolutely love what I do. I love Merge. I love the company. I love building.

(Gil at 00:28:04) I think there's passion areas that I would love to explore. Like, I just really enjoy ecommerce. I always have. I've always found it super fascinating. But Merge is my life, and there's nothing else I'd rather be doing.

(Gil at 00:28:16) So I don't know. I think maybe eventually, you know, get a small little villa and just build a tiny one-person... just me, you know, no people drama, no... just build. That's the dream life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:29) You're a builder. You're like Bob the Builder. Yeah.

(Gil at 00:28:32) I love building. Me and Shensi built our whole app in three months. We built the prototype.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:36) Yeah. She said that you'd bike over to her place, and you guys would build it and build it and just made it happen. Yep. That's my style. You guys are my people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:43) You're my tribe. I'm a builder. That's what I love.

(Gil at 00:28:46) And that's why it's a...

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:47) It was a hard transition for me from building people and engineering and systems to building the business side of things. But once I figured out how to look at it through the perspective and the lens of... that I'm just building systems, whether they're code systems or processes, business process systems, when I figured out how to look at it like that, then everything kind of clicked for me. But it was a rough transition for me to figure that out.

(Gil at 00:29:13) Yeah. Yeah. I think the hard part and the big difference is you get immediate gratification when you're coding. You build. You see it work.

(Gil at 00:29:20) When you're managing, there's just delays on things. You change a process. You have to wait weeks potentially to see if it actually is starting to take hold. I think it is cool that you can still measure and you can still apply a lot of engineering principles, but just not as fast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:33) I love it. Awesome. Well, I want to be respectful. I did see in the notes that you had a hard stop, so you probably have a meeting that you're running a little bit late to. But Gil, this was awesome, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:42) Thank you so much.

(Gil at 00:29:43) Yeah. Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:44) 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.