Ryan Roemer - CTO and Co-Founder at Formidable

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Ryan, the CTO and co-founder of Formidable. And we discuss the differences in the CTO role at a consultancy versus a product-led company, how you can use open source to advance business outcomes, and why the problems you focus on solving should have the greatest multiplier effect. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) What was it like back in the day when you were growing up? Was it really exciting living out there in California, or did you live kind of away from the tech hubs?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:00:50) Yeah. So the Central Coast, for those unfamiliar with it, it's kind of like take San Francisco, take Los Angeles, split it right in half, and put it on the beach. So what that means is it's kind of small town. San Luis Obispo area is near where most folks would remember or might know of the area. The major freeway doesn't go through it, so it's kind of a pain to go there if you don't already want to. So it's always been small town. Great growing up. Did a lot of hiking, climbing. There's a lot of surfing and good stuff there, but no real big tech hubs because that starts in Los Angeles or San Francisco in the big hubs, and we're just not that close.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:32) So how'd you go from outdoorsy, not near big tech hubs, to really getting involved in technology?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:01:41) So yeah, it's kind of weird because I never really anticipated tech as a big thing. Like I remember I used email, I think, like five times my senior year. I graduated in '95 and, like, heard about that. And I went to, started undergrad at Stanford, and I'd always kind of thought I was gonna be a lawyer. So I got a major in political science. And then all of my friends were taking the intro to computer science class at Stanford, and it was really well supported. That series, their intro series, has actually won awards. And like, econ majors, everyone just kind of took it at the time. And so I kind of went with the flow and tried it out, and I was like, this is great. So started doing some, but I was just kind of like, I still think I'm gonna be a lawyer and all of that, and got a minor and then graduated in the heralded year of 1999, the height of the dot-com boom.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:02:31) So I hadn't totally made up my mind, so I decided to go take a programming job. And I moved down to San Diego and worked for, kind of like building websites and stuff. And yeah, so that's how I initially got into tech. But it's like kind of actually a toothache story because, as we all know with the dot-com boom, the dot-com bust also happened. And I had applied to law school before starting as a programmer in case I didn't like it, and I did like it. But a lot of my friends were still up in the Bay Area, and although it hadn't trickled down to San Diego yet, I was getting the sense of Armageddon in tech. And when those law school acceptances came in, I was kind of like, oh, that's looking kind of nice now. So yeah, I figured like, oh, well, I will just do tech law.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:03:20) And then I went to law school and yeah, I enjoyed that. And I graduated and became both a patent prosecutor—that's a type of attorney that writes patents, I don't know why they call it prosecution—and a litigator. And most of us know what that means, is somebody who argues in courts over cases. And in my case, I did mostly intellectual property cases, copyrights, patents, et cetera. And then for me, what it was is that I lasted about three years in practice. Doing patent prosecution for like my small inventor clients that built something and are willing to pay like big firm prices. I worked at a really cool, very large firm called Morrison and Foerster. They were so excited about what they built, and I realized that like, technical writing is what patents are, and it was rewarding helping those clients. But I'm like, I want to build something, and I really just felt that. And so, knowing that I didn't have a full tech degree and I was gonna switch careers, I decided to bite the bullet. I went to grad school at UC San Diego and actually got a full computer science degree. And then from there, that was the official switch.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:04:35) Since then, I've been in the tech industry. I joined Microsoft's cloud storage group upon graduation after telling myself I'd joined a startup. So I didn't get it right the first time. But since Microsoft, then I've been in a series of startups leading up to Formidable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:52) Nice. It sounds like you were exploring, gathering information, learning, and then you went out and started Formidable. I love the name, by the way. It's a very strong name. It's solid.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:05:04) Yeah, it was funny. In talking with one of our new clients, they were talking about it with their advisory panel, and I believe one of the advisors was French and said that, oh, that means inspires terror, right? And we were like, oh, didn't know that. But yeah, no, I think it's a nice name because it's in the sense of like, I like to think that the type of application development we do is robust. It is powerful. It helps our clients do cool stuff. I like being able to like, see what our clients do and be able to point, even though sometimes it has to be an NDA lean, like, we did that. We helped them ship that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:44) Yeah. Dude, it feels good. Well, you're doing what you wanted to do, man. You're creating. You're building. You love it?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:05:52) Yeah, I do. It's, the things I love about it is just, yeah, being able to see what we built, look at it, help take an idea and actually have it translate into something real. I remember, like, we do a lot of e-commerce. So it's always that cool thing if you work on a product for a long time, particularly if it's with ordering or something. And then it's not like theoretical. You're hooking it up to different environments. You're testing it out along the way. But at some point, you have the team come in for the test run of you are going to actually order something that should translate to a real thing happening and seeing that that whole flow come back to real life where, like, we'll order a product. That's just how it happens. And having those kind of moments where the rubber meets the road of like, we build something and like, it actually works. Not that we expected it wouldn't, but it just feels more real and more like it actually impacts our life, especially for like a lot of our clients. Like I regularly use them and such. Yeah. We pitched an athletic wear company that we're doing a lot of work with now. It's like, my whole wardrobe's in large part them. And it was so cool to be able to walk into that meeting. It's just like, I'm drinking the Kool-Aid already before we've met, and to help them and watch them succeed with the help of some of our really, really good engineering team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:19) Yeah. I watch our sales pipeline, you know, see who the people are that are in like their different stages of deal progress. And so I love that meeting where I get an update because, you know, every once in a while, there's a product that I use in there. And so I reach out to them and I'm like, hey, look. I'm glad that you're in the pipeline, but we've built our business on your product. You know, this is great.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:07:41) Yeah. No, that is so cool. Yeah. And especially, I mean, for you, you talk to so many folks to be able to have this like, oh, I already know all about that going on. It's gotta be a really nice feeling.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:54) Yeah. So do you have a co-founder in this adventure?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:07:57) Yes. My co-founder is another Ryan, Ryan Eastridge. And little kind of like side digression here. We are Ryan heavy at Formidable because our VP of Product is also named Ryan, and one of my coworker developers in Denver is also named Ryan. We started off with five engineers, so we were 40% Ryan at that point. And we've diminished. But it is this interesting thing of that, yeah. Like, internally, we mostly go by last names. But yeah. So Ryan and I met in Seattle when I moved to Seattle, and Ryan actually had the contract that we kind of built Formidable on. He had been doing work with Walmart on their mobile web app, not the native one, but if you just went to Safari on your phone and decided to go to Walmart and shop. And so he and one other dev basically wrote the front end to that and, based on that success, got handed a larger contract, and he needed someone to kind of help with that at the time. And I just moved to Seattle, was writing a book on a technology framework called Backbone.js that's not used much anymore. Yeah, I loved it too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:15) Yeah. I used it. I used it. Yeah.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:09:18) Yeah. So I wrote a book on Backbone Testing and I was looking for peer reviewers to kind of get the—that's the final thing you do before submitting for final. And Ryan Eastridge had written a framework on top of Backbone called Thorax to just handle a lot of stuff. So I wanted to meet him. He was—I didn't know this, but at the same time, he was trying to get a co-founder to help launch what would become Formidable on this big Walmart project for helping them write their checkout for the desktop app. And we both independently wanted to meet each other and spoke at the same meetup. And yeah, that kind of, that's how it all kicked off.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:57) That was—it was so competitive. Man, I can't believe you just brought up like an old memory. What happened to Backbone? I guess, like, React and other ones. I actually did a project with Backbone and Rails. There was like a Backbone Rails integration, because that's when I first started learning about these sort of, you know, the way that these JavaScript interfaces were working where you could just have a better user experience and everything's just kind of on the page. And so that was one of my first experiences with those types of frameworks and yeah. Sorry. Blast from the past.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:10:31) No, no, it's great. Backbone, for when it came out, was fantastic. It was something that was like you could buy into just a little bit of it, take its strengths and go do something with it. And at the time, the competitor frameworks were like Ember and Angular, which were a bit more kind of kitchen sink, and you had to buy into the whole thing. So Formidable started as a mostly Backbone shop. And then when React came along later, React was just like a UI view layer at in a simplified form that you could buy just some of the parts you needed. And, you know, it really spoke to me and us at Formidable as the thing, and we invested early in that and heavily. And so it was because of that that we helped Walmart—who we're still working with—try out with their engineers too. One of the first proof of concepts of React there to kind of help them test the water, see how it went. And then from there, Formidable really started growing when a lot of folks wanted to learn React and kind of build on that. And a large part of our early marketing was open source, and we still have a very strong presence and activity in the open source ecosystem. We wrote one of the first CSS-in-JS libraries called Radium, which, it's since been superseded by what like, what the ecosystem would recommend now. But at the time, it was one of the first ones there, and it worked with the React, the web framework. And that was one of our toeholds into getting known. A lot of folks first learned of us through that open source, and now we have a lot of other open source projects that are higher profile. Like, we've done Victory that is the data visualization thing that works in web, works in mobile, and that's what a lot of folks now know us for. And we'll see a lot of folks coming into us from the open source community.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:22) So open source has contributed a lot to your business?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:12:26) Yeah, it really has. And how we kind of view it is like, we work with a lot of different clients. Most of what we do is the, you know, the secret sauce, their application logic, the business logic, what is shipping their product and getting them revenue. But then there's a lot of the stuff that's not core to the business that is just this common problem that once we encounter it two or three times and has nothing to do with the domain of expertise that our client has or what they're all about, that's when we look for an opportunity is like, you know what? We should just take some of our own time, write an open source library about it, contribute back. So that if nothing else, we don't have to do the same thing again, and we can just take a dependency.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:09) I love it. I love it. You would like this. One of the last apps that I built in with React Native and then React Web was a legal software for depositions. So we use like the TalkBox API that handles all the video streaming and recording, and multiple parties could join, and then there would be like transcripts of the speech-to-text, and you could mark things, and you could show exhibits, like, you could press a button to show the exhibit and then discuss it. And I didn't do the business, so it was a business that was growing. They had, you know, Scotch Tape and Bubblegum, their MVP, and then they got investment dollars, and then they asked through one of the investors, like, who can make this something that feels like an Apple application? And that's how I got connected with them and yeah. So that's pretty cool.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:14:01) Oh, no, that's great. And I'm always thrilled to hear when somebody's doing better legal software. Like, so back in the day in 2003 to 2006, I'm not sure how much has changed, but legal software was just Byzantine there. And our firm was like such a tech-heavy firm for like what we litigated, what we did business-wise and patent-wise, but the technology was just the Stone Age. I remember one other patent attorney who also had a computer science background. When we'd see our own software, it'd just be like, how long would it take you to write this? And we'd like kind of place hypothetical bets on like, I could replace this in two weeks. So I'm always thrilled to hear that like, all the modern tech is going into something like, as, like, otherwise boring as a deposition, but that can be done better and more usefully so that you don't have to go through these seemingly, to a technologist, like arcane, slow series of steps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:59) Yeah. You gotta make it the delightful user experience. And I was curious to know, you mentioned that you got your start with like maybe the Walmart concept, which is an e-commerce thing. Do you specialize in e-commerce? Is that like, what percentage of your business is e-commerce?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:15:16) You know, I don't know the exact percentage of e-commerce, but the other, I guess, broadly speaking, the industries we are in, in addition to e-commerce are like financial and tech, health and human services. We've done some cool kind of like pharmacy work with Walmart. We've also helped like healthcare manufacturers with how they do internal lab research. We've done a good amount of media, like review websites, and data visualizations and such. We have even done some legal software.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:15:49) That's always a blast for me, especially because I'll just check in just to know what we're building because in my previous life, I have some, like, oh, okay, that's great, we're doing it. And then other things as well, like delivery companies, helping with their apps and stuff. Ecommerce has been a big push for us because doing that correctly, because one, it's so revenue sensitive.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:16:14) Every step along the way for, like, say, the common flow of a user and whatever your site is, comes to the home page, hopefully clicks a product, hopefully clicks the add to cart, and then hopefully checks out. Getting that flow as fast, performant, and as you mentioned, delightful as possible is so key. And us having that experience is when folks come in and they usually have something that's not as efficient, their revenue team wants it better. Us being able to translate that into, like, we've done that before and we can help you is powerful. And I would say that in the pandemic, a lot of companies had their ecommerce initiatives, their digitalization initiatives.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:16:55) Those, as far as I can tell, really got ramped up once you couldn't do as much in brick and mortar. So, yeah, that's a long way of saying, yes, we do a lot that's not ecommerce, but particularly in the pandemic, there's so much need for many of our clients or prospective clients to really amp up and really do that correctly now more than ever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:19) Dude, that's exciting. I was looking at your customers and different things that you've built. I was curious, what did you do for Starbucks?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:17:27) So we helped them build out one of their first PWA apps so that you can have that kind of like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:34) What's PWA?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:17:36) A progressive web app. And what you typically think of it is, especially on an Android phone, it's something that can act like a real app, a native app, while still being a website that works kind of in both worlds. Now there's a lot of gotchas to it, and we worked with a well-known developer who helped us kind of build that out. Starbucks really kind of broke a lot of ground with that, being just being able to do that because, yeah, not having to download something from the App Store, but you still want that app-like experience is really cool. But it comes with a lot of challenges because, ultimately, you're still doing a web page that has special hooks to some built-in functionality. And then the other thing that we did in relation to that was we helped them build out their web ordering so that you could actually order from your desktop computer instead of just their native app.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:18:32) So their native team is so good and has done so much. And for a long time, you could order from your phone just in the native app. We helped them with the web ordering to do it from anywhere. And what I would say is that especially at a consultancy where we have lots of clients, there's so much we, me personally, have to learn for dealing with different things. Our clients oftentimes have deep areas of knowledge in all of these different areas that aren't core to what Formidable is usually on the contract for or something. So we're always kind of learning.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:19:05) It's amazing what clients have, like, a full AI division doing something that's gonna be hooked in. And it really is just so impressive because we help our clients do specific things, but the other things that the big tech orgs that have a targeted reason for bringing us in can talk about is just amazing. And especially because one of our recent clients that's doing computing hardware is when we're in the pitch meeting, I knew so many names in that call, and their founder is somebody who I've known for years, who has written operating system internal stuff that is so cool and I used in grad school. And it's just amazing to kind of be in there where we bring a specific capability that they need, which is great. But I'm also just so humbled to be like, wow, this really is in the presence of computer greatness knowing we get to work with them and they want us to do something special.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:03) Isn't that great? It's like kid in the candy shop forever. It's like this is the life now.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:20:08) Yeah. Yeah. And I would say, you know, that's the good part of consulting. We get to see so many different things. We get to be a part of so many different projects that ship and go to production, and you can see the result of that.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:20:22) And, yeah, it's really nice. And it's been kind of a trip for me because prior to Formidable, I'd never done consulting. I'd always been with product companies. Like Microsoft is a product company, and then smaller startups. One of them was actually an intellectual property data mining company. So I actually got to use both degrees there.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:20:41) But I'd always been kind of tied to that sense of destiny, whereas now consulting, you don't get to tie yourself to, like, everything is aligned, all of our eggs in this one basket, and it's that kind of both terrifying and exciting thing. But as a consultant, we do get to try out so much and usually when we come in, it's because somebody needs help somewhere and we're able to deliver and hopefully make the client happy, ship something cool. So, like, that's the kind of trade-off and it's been an interesting change for me since I've only had one consulting job that's fortunately still continuing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:18) I'm curious to know about consulting or I guess what I would, what I really wanna know because we're sitting here talking about all of these various technologies. We're talking about open source, you know, both of our past projects and things like that. And there's people that are like, alright, they're doing cool stuff in these different spaces. They're working with Walmart. They're working with Starbucks. You know, why would I use them? Or, like, how could I use them? What are your engagements look like? Like, you keep saying consultancy, but, you know, some people do team augmentation. Some people do remote. Like, what is your model?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:21:54) Yeah. Our model is that we don't do just straight staff augmentation of more bums in seats to kind of help churn things out. It sounds a little cliche, but we really do look to partner with prospective clients. And what that means is that when we take an engagement, there's a couple of different common scenarios that come up. One is that the client wants to level up their team in something like React. This company is doing a transition to React or React Native, and they not only want to get something built, they also want to have all of their engineers kind of rise up. So we kind of pair up, will sometimes be the senior developers on the team. We all take tickets together alongside our client counterparts, and the goal is mentoring the clients as we go so that as we build the app, and that's the kind of forcing function for this. So it's not just you sit down for training.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:22:43) It's we build an app together. And, hopefully, at the end of the engagement, if that's the work they needed and Formidable moves on, the remaining team has learned more about React, more about their app via doing the app, and can support the app on their own. So that's one common thing. We do wholesale, kind of more holistic arrangements for certain clients that in addition to engineering, we've also got a great design team. And we also will provide technical project managers when the client wants it.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:23:13) And so a lot of times, a client engagement will be that we want a team that can kind of own a lot of that and deliver the project as a holistic team. And our design team is great, and a lot of times we'll do just design-only projects. But when we actually pair up the engineering and design teams together so that the design team designs how the app's gonna be and the engineering team implements it and iterates together, it's really nice to see and we've had really good feedback from our clients for when we've been able to get those engagements.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:46) Yeah. Your design is awesome. I'm listening to you, but I also pulled up your website, your home page here. It's beautiful. I am a design geek, if you know me. Like, I love—I'm not good at it. I don't do it. I love it though for some reason. I love things that look beautiful.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:24:06) Yeah. No. Our design team has alongside our marketing team and we've, you know, we check in with outside companies as well to kind of figure out what's the most impactful thing and then to translate that to an actual implemented design. It's actually a good case of what Formidable does. But, yeah, our marketing team driving what the messaging is and overall thoughts for appearance and the design team, bringing that to reality, and then, of course, the engineering team, which is when folks are between projects, one of the things that you can help out with is the Formidable Labs website because, surprise, it's a React app, and we put them all together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:46) Dude, the site's beautiful. Sorry I get off topic. But when I'm looking through here, your projects too, I love, like, you guys are doing style guides. It looks like you really, you do things right. Like, there's companies that get stuff out the door. And then there's companies that can't get stuff out the door because they're trying to make everything perfect. And then there's companies that have figured out that sweet spot. And that seems to be—correct me if I'm wrong—it seems to be where you guys are at.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:25:13) Yeah. I would hope so. And I think, you know, you just mentioned the style guides that we have, I think, a case study there for both Walmart, Starbucks where we did them. And style guides, which are just, you know, you take your, in most common cases, React components, put them together, pair them up with the styles from the design team and have one blessed set for everyone to use. You know, at Walmart, when we were originally helping them with their site, there were five different carousels. Each different team had their own image carousel. And it was enough for us to say, alright, everyone stop. We should have one. Let's coordinate it through one place together.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:25:47) And just, yeah, it's ideas like that that, you know, most folks these days will do a style library, kind of component library, but it's just that, like, that's immediately the type of thing we want to do to just get a better outcome so that when you think of the site as a whole, even if organizationally, you have 10 different teams that don't necessarily organizationally roll up together. And that's a lot of the challenging that I see in companies, and we see it a lot more as a consultancy going between clients and what their different organization structures are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:23) I'm curious to ask you about channel partners as a concept. So the reason why this sticks in the back of my head is the way you described how you sort of can level up a team while building a project with them. So I did a series, I think, maybe last year, where I wanted to really wrap my mind around why I'm getting stats that say only 10% of the market has moved to the cloud when I grew up cloud native and I didn't really understand the on-prem stuff personally. And so I started exploring and asking people why and learning about the different business models of the organizations that are going and helping companies move to the cloud and the different strategies. And one of the things that stood out to me that a couple of them said is when they move, it's not just you're moving the technology or you're rewriting the technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:17) It's all the people within the organization, how they program, what processes they use. You can't just shift the technology because none of the people know how to operate it. Have you guys ever done—and so then I found that, you know, a portion of these digital transformation cloud companies also had services. So they would come in there and do something similar to what you talked about, but in direct relation to their cloud strategy. Some of them didn't get into that and they referred out to channel partners.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:50) Have you done any channel partnerships like that with these companies that are helping other companies move to the cloud and their systems are getting rewritten?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:28:00) So we have, let me answer the question a little bit. Sometimes we will use sister consultancies that will subcontract for some of the cloud work when we're overloaded. But Formidable service offerings, which is basically front-end web app development, back-end web and APIs, a lot of the time GraphQL, mobile. The fourth one is cloud. So we have our own kind of cloud infrastructure department, and we are not one of these broad AWS or GCP Azure consultancies that come in soup to nuts, lift you into the cloud off of your on-prem setup like you were mentioning.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:28:40) What we have is a very targeted cloud infrastructure practice that for those three other service offerings of the apps we typically write, we are able to get those to prod in the absolute best way possible. Because what I will say is that we have a focused knowledge of the cloud as it relates to a React front-end web app, as it relates to a GraphQL back-end, and that's what our engineers really focus on and really deliver. So a lot of the time with our clients, we integrate with their ops team, and we help them with that one narrow slice of getting the app. Our other engineering teams are writing up to the clouds. And so it's things like, for example, CDN choice.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:29:25) CloudFront comes with AWS, but it's very limited in so many ways. And oftentimes, a modern CDN like Fastly or Cloudflare can give you a better opportunity for the type of app you want. And Lambda's function as a service for AWS are so flexible on the developer end, but there are some potential performance implications. But if you hook up the right CDN, you can kind of get the best of all worlds. And it's that type of interesting interplay that we really excel at in our cloud practice.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:29:55) And so our cloud practice is actually one of our service offerings for not a full level-up of your entire DevOps team, but help your DevOps team with this new thing that the engineers are writing, get that to prod in the best way so that it integrates into your overall infrastructure. And, I mean, we use Terraform and CloudFormation if we have to, to do the modern tooling that every ops organization is probably using. But we do have a lot of work, and so sometimes we'll subcontract it out to some of our sister consultancies that are cloud orgs that can also do that and have worked with us before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:31) So we're talking a lot about some of the bigger brands because those are the most fun to talk about. We're just being real. Right? But let's say I have, like, 15, 20 engineers and maybe we're embarking, you know, a team of them, maybe three or four of them are embarking on this, you know, they've researched it. They've just started using this, you know, React technology. I mean, React's super popular. And now they need some help. Do you guys deal with companies that small?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:30:58) Yes, we do. We usually like having at least two engineers on a project for at least some amount of time because Formidable is very remote friendly, but it can sometimes be isolating to be the only Formidable employee on a project. You've got the client team, but having at least one other Formidable to kind of do things together, that's usually the minimum size of project we want to start. But depending on, we've taken, we have clients that are like 15 people of size and a startup and such.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:31:29) And, you know, those are fun because there's usually often greenfield projects going up from scratch, which is, you know, scrappy, getting it done, don't know if you're going to make the deadline, but pushing real hard. Like that type of fun stuff too. And for startups as a broad, like, you know, stereotype, there's so much excitement there. Just like everyone's like, are we going to make it? Going through that. So it's really fun when we can take on one of those projects.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:56) Do you ever miss like being a product, like working in a product company? Like you worked at Microsoft, you had your own product, and now you get to make everybody else's product. But do you ever want to have like your own kid?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:32:11) Yeah. Yes. Yes. I think so much of like me being a CTO here is I am following and putting my finger to the wind of what everyone else is doing to kind of best support them. It's like, I don't know, say TypeScript.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:32:27) A couple of our clients started using TypeScript, then all of them were like, okay, we're doing TypeScript to support that. Whereas it's not so much, I do miss the days of here's our product. Technologically, what do we need to get there and be really driving that. There are things we will encourage our clients to do, but so much of it is like we're here to help them ship as the primary goal.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:32:47) Whereas like if we're here to help us ship, we have a little more control of our destiny and can take bigger risks, so to speak, about how we get there. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:58) And I'm sure you've got some like internal tools or some projects you get to work on, right?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:33:03) Oh yeah. Well, we've had a ton of internal tools that we'll use for various things. We've had a couple of internal product ideas that we started off and then didn't go forward with as, I mean, as a consultancy, starting off your own product internally is very expensive for taking folks off billing consulting work. But we just toy around with it. I mean, we've got so many folks with so many good ideas, and we do think of things.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:33:28) So not yet in terms of bringing it all the way to fruition, but yeah, it's nice to consider some possibilities for the future in that regard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:38) Yeah. Let me know. We'll give you a shout out when you end up doing it and bring it back up on the podcast and check it out.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:33:47) Oh yeah. Great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:47) A little bit about like company culture and what's it like working at Formidable.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:33:53) So, you know, our company culture is just amazing and it's, we have a very supportive environment. I mean, it's part of our values to like come as you are. Our values are craft, autonomy, and inclusion. We are welcoming. We are friendly.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:34:13) We have a lot of smart people who don't have big egos. And at the beginning, you know, it was pretty much organic growth. We started with five of us, and that's kind of luck of the draw for like what type of team we were going to be. But we, over time, have really evolved a good people organization that really focuses on what can keep folks happy. We have a kind of like witty, humorous Slack banter, which isn't a substitute for a culture, but it is a reflection of what we've been able to do.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:34:43) And we invest a lot in people with trainings, with mentorship, and with a people department that cares and kind of keeps tabs on people. In the pandemic, like our VP of Operations sent out care packages to like almost all of the employees. We have, we've had a recent baby boom with like kids being born and stuff. There's a Formidable onesie going around.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:09) Oh, I know. Nice.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:35:10) Yeah. And so we have like, and swag's not a substitute for culture, but it's reflective. We've got a great swag game going on. And we, as a consultancy, what we do is like a lot of the times we have to assess how people are doing on projects if it's supporting them. Because one engineer might do great with a certain client and not with another and vice versa. So that we have to keep tabs and do regular check-ins there to make sure that people are supported, have what they need, and are actually growing and, you know, going to stick around and be happy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:45) I'm pumped up to hear about the swag. You guys have t-shirts, hats. What do you have?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:35:48) Oh, we can totally hook you up. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:51) That's what I'm asking. I collect, I've started to collect this from like guests that have, man, you'd be surprised. Some of the best things in life, like there's only a few of them or like you get them from the companies that will have this unbelievable culture. And I pay for them too, man. You don't even have, we'll cover the cost, but I'll have Adam reach out to you after the podcast because I like that stuff and I wear it. And I think it's so cool because it is the best conversation starter. Like people will be like, what's that? Because it's not something they always see.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:36:21) Oh, well, and don't forget, we've got great kid gear too. I've seen some of your podcasts before that you've mentioned you got kids. I've got an almost three-year-old and almost five-year-old, and they are outfitting, fitting their t-shirts with one of them's a Formidable Taper, which the taper has like kind of special meaning to us as a point of humor. And I have my kids rocking the Formidable swag as well.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:36:43) So if you want that, we can hook you up there too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:45) Dude, we definitely want that. I want to, I want to learn more about, okay, so you have a good culture. I like that. And you mentioned that you do like leadership or mentorship, you know, this type of thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:57) Can you give me some more details about, you know, your leadership programs or how those things work?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:37:02) Yeah. So we have a very successful engineering manager program, whereas over time as engineers progress and look like they kind of want that next stage of their career to be a manager of other engineers. And there's a strong support network there. We have directors above the managers to give them all the support they need, kind of help train them up, mentor them. And your engineering manager is basically who you go to for support, because your client is who you're doing your work for.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:37:38) But a lot of the times you need support to how to navigate the client. How is your personal growth going? And the engineering managers are kind of that mid-level to kind of help all make that work. And it really is more kind of a, you know, a mentoring relationship than a strict like I'm managing you, where might be more in a product company, because you're doing work for somebody else who's not necessarily the manager. And so that's, I think, has been a large part of secret of success is identifying great candidates, people who can get along and then supporting them as they start off being an engineering manager and over time watching them grow into like successfully helping and having a multiplier effect for all of their reports.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:22) How official is it? Like I'm just curious, like because I geek out about this stuff. Is it something where like quarterly you take all the people and like put them through this? Or is it something that, like how does it actually come up in their life?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:38:38) It's on a rolling basis for when we decide we need the next engineering manager based on growth. It's as we're hiring all the time, and lately we've been doing a lot of hiring. And so somebody has to go to an engineering manager, and we're watching the kind of fan out of, oh, Jane is getting overloaded. John has like eight people now. And then we make an assessment of it's time for a new engineering manager to come up the ranks, and then we kind of rebalance everything.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:39:07) So because the engineering managers are still billing engineers, there is a good slice of non-billable time to handle your reports. But at the end of the day, you also are doing your job, so we can't just like shove 20 people under one person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:23) Yeah, right? No, I like it. I'm sorry to ask like so many detailed questions about your leadership program. I just, I like that type of stuff.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:39:32) No, it, well, and it's been an evolution. I mean, like I mentioned, when we started, there was five of us. There was a CEO, a CTO, and our engineers. And now we're at, I think the most recent number I've seen is 110 full-time employees worldwide, which is in some sense mind-blowing for how large we've become and just the eight years that I've been here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:58) It's so great. It's so great to, once you start to get that culture formed, then it becomes less about making a ton of money and more about how do I invite more people to the party? Like, how can I find more great people and just continually like pack them around us so that we can have more fun and do cooler things?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:40:16) Oh, absolutely. I mean, when I think of it personally is that as a consultancy, and we've got our CFO who is so experienced in professional services firms assures us that professional services firms need to grow at some sustainable rate to attract new clients, to be able to have career trajectory for the folks inside and grow at some rate as you go. But I've never viewed it as growth for growth rate. My goal at Formidable is I love doing my job. I love the autonomy I have.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:40:47) We were super remote friendly before the pandemic, and now we're, I guess, extra remote super friendly. Now I like having the autonomy that as my kids grew up, I could kind of like work from home and watch them as grandma took care of them before they got into daycare and stuff and still get my work done in a way that's flexible. And so I personally like what we've got at Formidable and want to continue, even as we have to kind of grow and adapt and change just for the way the nature of the business is. Because when we started, we had one client. If that client went away, we'd have big problems.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:41:22) Now we have a very diversified set of clients where anyone or probably two or even possibly three could go away, and we'll still be doing just fine, especially with our sales pipeline at least these days, which is doing amazing. So yeah, that's how I see it personally is like I want all of the good day-to-day work I do and feelings of flexibility I have to continue, even as kind of the face of Formidable changes as we grow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:56) Man, you set me up perfectly there. If people are listening, they want to get into your sales pipeline. How do they do that?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:42:03) So yes. You can send an email to [email protected]. Our website has a handy dandy contact form that will get in there. It's of course integrated into Slack. We'll see it immediately, hook things up.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:42:17) Yeah. There's lots of other places to find it, you know, myself or any of our leadership on the interwebs via GitHub or whatnot. But the website's probably the best way. But yeah, we're out there in all of the modern social and communicative available ways that you would expect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:36) We'll post a bunch of links too in the show notes and everything so people can find it super easy. I just got like a couple more leadership questions if that's cool. Yeah. So I'm always curious because I get to talk to everybody and everyone's having different experiences and learning. So like I want to know, what are you learning as a leader right now?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:42:56) No, that's a good question. And as a leader, we've recently kind of like changed who reports to the CTO in bigger ways than we have in the past as we've recently went through the most recent growth spurt. I have more reports now than I ever have before. We also have under the technology org, which I'm the leader of, a group called CoreTech, which is our individual contributors who are expert technologists.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:43:25) I do regular one-on-ones with all of them. And so I'm not their manager, but I am regularly getting their feedback. And I also have regular one-on-ones with all of our directors up on the people side of things, and I kind of synthesize all of that. So my leadership style is I have a handful of direct reports in the technology org. I have a lot of what I'll call dotted lines to other folks to feed up the technological information, and that becomes kind of our steering for how technology goes here, which really means what do we invest in?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:44:00) Things that we're going to do our own trainings for ahead of the curve that we're not just going to learn from doing a client engagement. Where are the needs that aren't being met? Sometimes that means we have to do a new open source library. But one of my main roles is assessing where we're at and what the stumbling blocks are and how to solve those on a broad organizational level. So leadership style is, as you kind of expect, I regularly check in with a ton of people and then hopefully identify the correct work to do and then see that it gets done.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:44:34) Occasionally, it's me coding. I still code a little bit, and I love it, but it's becoming less and less, especially recently. And then oftentimes, it's clearing the path for a project or training that should happen to kind of like level up the org.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:48) That's pretty cool. I like it. Dude, I'm learning so much. I love your self-awareness of your leadership style. I think that's fantastic.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:44:57) Oh, thank you. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:59) Some people don't have that. So I'm just excited now. That was really good. I have rarely, do I get somebody who has like extreme self-awareness. And then when they do, it's even more rare that they can articulate it on demand like you did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:14) So kudos to you, my friend.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:45:16) Oh, thank you. Yeah. I mean, the thing that hasn't changed over time has been, I mean, not my North Star, but one guiding thing is I'm here to unblock people, especially on the range of projects we get. Things are blocking, and so what can I do best to kind of like grease the wheels and make it so that what we do day-to-day is easier and is the correct thing and is a good path forward? It's like I said, I guess I'm about sustainability.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:45:44) I like what I do. I want it to be able to continue, even as we grow. But there's a lot of changes that, you know, kind of have to happen org-wise and leadership-wise along the way. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:55) You're in the growing stage. I actually keep notes based off of what different companies are experiencing at different levels of employees because it helps me like pick topics better for the interviews. So—

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:46:06) Oh, that is such a good idea. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:08) Yeah. You're in this tough spot where, based off of the numbers that we have for you, they start wanting more defined career paths. They'll start wanting, you know, because you're at the point where it's not five of you in the room anymore and everybody knows each other or they're one level away at 25. You're just growing and there's these unique pains that happen at this level. And I think you're very aware of them and you're talking about them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:35) So, man, I know you're gonna do well. I did have one more question about your direct reports, though, because you said you kinda go around the organization. You have these relationships. I get it. I do that on a smaller level as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:46) But for your specific technology direct reports, if you had to pick one or two concepts that you want them all to understand or spend some time with, sort of maybe management concepts or leadership concepts, things that maybe if you think back that you teach them through your conversations and your one-on-ones that are really important. What are these one or two things that are important for your direct reports?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:47:13) For my direct reports, I think it is, and I guess I would say is that if it's for a direct report that has come up the ranks as an individual contributor and transitioned on to more leadership-ish responsibilities and whatnot, is the idea of having a multiplier effect or something outside and beyond myself. Because that's one of, for me as well, it's been the biggest transition from when I started: I'm an engineer. I am churning code and shipping things to that. When I make decisions, when I now have autonomy to choose what broad initiatives I'm doing, what's gonna have the biggest multiplier effect on everyone else to enable them to do fill in the blank of what's appropriate for the type of director I am? Be it the director of open source or the director of, we've recently created two positions around cloud infrastructure and application services. What's gonna have the biggest impact there and to look at, yeah, multiplier effect, getting the most people the best value.

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:48:17) And then there's more specific things within that that you can go into. But that's the meta-level thing that I want to have ingrained in my reports.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:29) The multiplier effect. Yes. That is good. It helps with whenever I'm doing priority lists. One guest had shared this a while back about, you know, it was a notable brand.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:40) I can't remember. But I remember that this advice works because I implemented it, and it worked. And the short of it was you take your list of priorities, and you figure out what's going to create the biggest multiple. What's going to unblock the most people and then put that thing first? Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:58) It's something we are constantly doing as founders. But he articulated it so well. And so I started organizing my list like that. And I said, okay. I have all the things I wanna do, and I have all the things that need to be done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:09) And these things that need to be done are actually blocking other work from being done. So that's my dinner, and then I get to do my projects, which is like my dessert. Right?

(Ryan (CTO and cofounder of Formidable) at 00:49:19) No. I think that's a perfect metaphor for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:25) 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.