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In this episode of the Business of Laravel podcast, Matt Stauffer talks with Alex Millar, CTO and founder of GovAI, about his journey from selling his previous venture, Bonfire, to adopting Laravel for his latest project. Alex shares how Laravel improved his two-man team’s efficiency and his experience as a newcomer to the framework. They discuss challenges in adopting new tools, the importance of documentation, architecture testing, and strategies for entrepreneurial success. Alex also offers insights on leadership, communication, and how small, well-executed details can drive significant growth.
- Matt Stauffer Twitter
- Tighten Website
- Alex Millar’s Website
- Alex Millar Twitter
- GovAI Website
- MinMaxing Software Costs Talk
- Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership [The Knowledge Project Ep. #96] "")
- Jim Dethmer: Leading Above the Line [The Knowledge Project Ep. #60]
- TED: Speaking so People Want to Listen
- Alex’s README
You can email Alex at alexander.millar@gmail.com.
Creators & Guests
What is The Business of Laravel?
Short, powerful interviews with business leaders working with and within the Laravel ecosystem--about business, tech, and more! Hosted by Matt Stauffer.
Matt Stauffer:
Welcome back to the Business of Laravel podcast where I talk to business leaders who are working in and with Laravel. My guest today is Alex Miller, CTO and founder of GovAI.com and plenty more, but we're just kind of kind of focused there for today. So Alex, would you mind just kind of saying hi to everybody and sharing a little bit about what is GovAI and who are you, what's your history and what's your kind of relationship with Laravel?
Alex Millar:
Yeah, thanks, Matt. So I'm Alex. Yeah, I'm building GovAI. This is my second venture. So I previously built a product called a website domain would gobonfire.com company. The company's name was Bonfire and built that for about 10 years, went through Y Combinator, scaled it, sold it in 2019, took a little time off, handed over the company, stayed a bit, took some time off and I'm doing this new thing now. So it's been a journey and part of why we connected is for this new thing we're all in on Laravel where I wish I had been all in on Laravel for the old one and man, it's been just such a positive experience so far.
Matt Stauffer:
I love that and you we know we talked for just a tiny bit beforehand and one of the things you mentioned is you know you're not new on the PHP world like your last one was with PHP as well but this kind of this project is your first one with Laravel and I have lots of things I want to dig into there but I think my first question is how did you discover Laravel in between the two?
Alex Millar:
You know what, my co-founder is like addicted to reading Hacker News. And when we were getting started end of 2022, some posts I think hit the front page of Hacker News on like, is PHP good again or something like that in and around Laravel. And he's like, Hey, you should really look at it. And, you know, I was really deep in the throes of what are we going to pick from a tech stack and framework, you know, cause I felt the pain of letting things
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Alex Millar:
kind of like letting the potato grow the ears, you know, and not nipping those off, right? And the old company. And so I was really drawn in initially to like, okay, well, everything's in React and ya know, Prisma seems really hot and Remix and all this stuff. And, you know, I was really looking into it, but also I never got strong in React or in those worlds. And I never really liked JavaScript, like getting in there. It always just felt.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Alex Millar:
Odd to me, you know, difficult to really build in that. So my co-founder Corey was like, Hey, you should take a look at Laravel. And then I looked at it and it was interesting because at the initial blush is the JavaScript ecosystem, at least end of 2022 compared to like Laravel, they have the sex appeal in terms of how they market all their websites. Like I'm not trying to show shade and there's new designers over at Laravel team and big awesome stuff happening, but you know, I would, you know, go to those, the remix site right back then. You're like, wow, like this feels expensive and rich and, know, it doesn't mean it's necessarily the right choice for you. Right. But so I was dealing with that personally as like a, I know nothing about either of these, you know, this seems like the, you know, the nice fancy car, whereas maybe the Laravel website doc site wasn't presenting that way to me at that time. But I, I pushed through in the sense of like, you know, the book, you don't judge, don't judge a book by its cover.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Alex Millar:
And just as I kept opening up and reading the docs and looking, there's this and then that. And I had like my obsidian file for like taking notes on everything was just exploding with all my Laravel stuff. And this person, should bookmark that and save these. And wow, these courses. It's like, seems like every element of what I would need to do. And then I, you know, all of a land on something, Laracasts. It's like, holy crap, like that's insane. Like just that alone is like, so good, right? So just every kind of next chapter that I turned to and read the first few pages of the chapter was just like, it just felt like it was never ending of how much was flushed out there, right? And so that's how I ended up saying like, let's do this in Laravel and go all in and, you know, we start building some stuff and then you actually feel it versus reading it. So that's kind of how it all came to be for us.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, and is Laravel powering the whole app or just a backend API? Kind of what's the relationship between GovAI and Laravel?
Alex Millar:
Yeah, so it's powering the whole app. We run it. we're Laravel, Livewire, and Deploy and Vapor is kind of our stack.
Matt Stauffer:
Nice. And I know that a lot of people in the startup world, you because usually when I have people on here, they have historically not been fully immersed in the Y Combinator startups, you know, Bay Area kind of world. And so you're there. We've heard a lot of people say, I found Laravel and then some investor or some, you know, technical leader said, oh well, JavaScript or die, right? Did you get any pushback when you were trying to choose Laravel?
Alex Millar:
I didn't get push back, but I do remember getting push hard pushback with the old company being in PHP and at least to start meeting with some investors and people being like pretty flippant about it. I'll, I'll say, you know, to an element of like, we're not going to invest unless you rewrite this off, you know, code igniter. Now code igniter was showing some age at the time and we were in transition, but, you know, I, I don't say, I don't know what people would be at now. Like if I was in those meetings again with investors, but the proof's in the pudding in terms of how quickly you ship and growing your company, right? So you can't, I guess if you're not growing well and it's not happening, it'd be easy for someone to try and poke holes at whatever they want to poke holes at, but you know, growth forgives all sins, so to speak. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, especially in the investment world. Okay. So when you first got started, I mean, part of what was interesting for you was switching to a new ecosystem, right? You were moving from PHP and Code Igniter and then also taking a break for a couple of years, things probably changed even in that world and all of a sudden you're stepping into Laravel. So I imagine part of the challenge then was just getting into a new tech ecosystem. But you've also kind of mentioned that there was some speed there. So what was it like for you as your first challenge just being like getting familiar with the ecosystem and the programming and like how to do idiomatic Laravel as you were building a functional app. And this is not some like piddly little side project by somebody, you like you've built and sold a very, you know, your website says how much you sold it for and it's a very large number. So you've done this before. So this is not someone just kind of kicking something around. Did you do side projects first? Is this your actual first Laravel app? What was that kind of like spinning up project like for you?
Alex Millar:
Yeah, yeah. Well, it was even more than that because I hadn't really written any code in a serious way for the last, since I'd say about 20, end of 2017, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Right, because you're running the thing.
Alex Millar:
Because we raised a series A for the old, yeah, we raised a series A early 2017. You know, I ended up having about 20 people on my engineering team and you are fully managing that and growth and fires, right? So, I hadn't really been writing code a lot, which was a problem in the old company.
I have some thoughts to circle back on that later. So when we started GovAI, it was end of 2022 when I was kind of like figuring out this tech stack. I basically just, know, with Laravel New, you know, GovAI app and just started building, right? Like, okay, well, let's start with Jetstream, right? And get in there and get a feel for and add a feature. And, you know, the best way was just doing something and doing something real. Like this is what I want to build features versus the quintessential make it to do list app, right? Because you don't find those weird things, right, until you actually hit your business requirements. And it was a little slow and clunky for me at first, right, as you kind of get your footing back. But then just as you got going and then all of sudden, okay, I'm gonna install Nova. And then being like, Artisan Nova resource create it's just the same EloquentMod. and now it's all, and everything's, no policy classes are all tied in and I just have a fully working admin piece and I swiped my credit card and it works and now I can basically run a CLI and it does 80 % of the work and then with a little bit of AI code complete where it can tell the files, it will fill in the properties for me and then you're off to your races, right? So it was just a lot of like, okay, do the next thing, do the next thing, read the docs, figure it out, you know? And then I stumbled on Livewire and I've been...
I feel like I email Caleb too much, just things that are like,
Matt Stauffer:
Nah.
Alex Millar:
I'm loving what you're doing. And it's just like, maybe like Alex chill a little bit, right? But I can't get over how much, you know, how much easier it makes us to write. My proof on the pudding for that is I hired one of our old guys I worked with from the other company who was in DevOps traditionally, right? So he's Python guy, living in AWS, doing infrastructure as code, using Ansible and whatnot.
And I'm like, hey, can you help with some of these front end features? Cause you have some bugs and stuff. And I just dropped him in and he figured it out and had no problem doing it. Cause it was just like, it just that easy, right? That's just HTML on a wire and just kind of hook it up. So yeah. And I'll tee off that thought, Matt, cause I, like we said in the preamp before the show, I can, I can ramble a little bit. I love to talk about things.
Matt Stauffer:
No, this is all fantastic stuff. It's really good stuff and I love the note that sometimes gets lost in the questions of what can Livewire do and what can't Livewire do is Livewire can allow not even just back-end programmers because you think you got like front-end and you got back-end and then you've got like ops and DevOps, whatever. It can allow a DevOps person to ship front-end code. That's a pretty incredible testimony.
Alex Millar:
Totally. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's also advanced stuff to do there, but even just coming in and saying, we have a bug, it's not that hard to get in there and tweak something, right? So, yeah, yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So as you are building GovAI, are there ways where you are able to kind of either accomplish your goals or the goals of your end users or the goals of potential investors differently as a result of having chosen Laravel? I mean, speed might be one you can talk about, but are there any other ways your team is structured differently or anything else, any other benefits you're getting from choosing Laravel?
Alex Millar:
Yeah, I think the benefits so far where we've been deeply focused because we've been a team of two for well up until yesterday, well today actually, so we have a new dev that started today.
Matt Stauffer:
That's awesome.
Alex Millar:
So we've been a team of two but we were taking advantage of everything we possibly could in Laravel to avoid the pains we felt and grew into in the old company, right? So like seeders just as a concept like undervalued, I don't know if people undervalue them, but I value them like they're amazing, right? And it's just, okay, build really, really good seeders. And we have some relatively, I don't know, sophisticated, but robust seeders, right? And we're adding new things. like, hey, there's a PR up. Why don't you have some seeder data for that to pull something in? And I'll take one step back from that. The broad category of the old sins of the other company was as we got bigger, it became
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Millar:
harder to introduce change confidently and quickly, right? And at the end of the day, we're trying to develop, deliver value to users. And we do that through changing the system. And if it's slow to do that or risky or all these things, that's where you just start to fall behind or things get more costly or you get tension between product and engineering or tension between the executives. So Laravel's made it really easy. Like almost everything we've gone out to build so far, we've been like, that didn't take as long as I thought it was going to take.
Matt Stauffer:
Fantastic, I love that.
Alex Millar:
Which is rare, right? Now I think that there's a lot of little things we put in place for that. So like really good seeders, really focusing on maintaining test quality and coverage out the gate, right? And making sure the tests can run fast and they're meaningful. Lots of little like just the shell script automations, but like I can check out a peers branch and it'd be like the defaults on a get hook checkout or like, you do wanna reset up your local to like install their whatever composer would say, I've rerun the seeders, like do all the stuff and like, yes. And now I can run with whatever data he has set up, you know, my coworker really easily locally and play with it and then jump back to my branch later and rebuilds my seeders and stuff. So I think people who are in Laravel are like, yeah, this is all obvious stuff. But as somebody who's living in a world where that wasn't like a thing that was included in your framework, you go, Wow, it's so nice how tight this is integrated, right? So, yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Well, and I love that because one of my hopes with this podcast is for people who are doing business and may not live in Laravel on a day-to-day basis, see what might motivate or behoove them to choose, you know, Laravel. And so I love this perspective that you're givingofp like, hey, you know, by using Laravel, we win in this direction. We get it easier in this direction. We're able to avoid those pains. I mean, almost every conference talk I've given in last five years has referenced this great talk called MinMaxing Software Development, and it's a very, very academic way of looking at coding at a Laracon Europe a few years back. And the guy basically just said, like, the most important thing is to optimize for the cost of change. You should not try and build the perfect system that will adapt to every single potential thing that happens down the road. You should build the system that is as easiest to change. And I love that you're kind of naming that as a valuable thing, because I don't know if people fully understand that, the importance of that.
Alex Millar:
Yeah, and I think on the other end, having, so I did the previous company for 10 years, especially if you're a first time builder of starting a company or even like, you know you went to university, the longest code base you ever worked on was maybe an internship, like four months or eight months. So things get weird over years and years and new people in and out. And so it's not just, oh it's easy to introduce change. It's easy to onboard new people. It's when people move on, you know.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yep.
Alex Millar:
Because even if you run a great company, there's an average lifespan of people, Like you call it two years, three years, four years. And, you know, something leaves when they walk out the door unless you can, you know, enshrine it in tests and knowledge, right? And so all these things just compound over time, right? And really help you avoid getting, I don't know, like the gunk in the gears, right? And you just slow down and then people kind of want to flip the table and start again. And that's never a good idea necessarily, right? To just start a new whole new project. So yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
So for you, one of the questions I normally ask is what has your experience been in hiring Laravel developers? On the one hand, you've only done it once compared to your old company, you hired a bunch of people, but you have done it very recently. So I'm going to ask you, what has your experience been like of hiring Laravel developers?
Alex Millar:
Yeah, well, I guess it's a little bit of a cheat because the gentleman I just hired did also work for me previously at the old company. However, I think I have a slight tangent or version of that. So we recently hired and have been working with the Vehikl team to help us deliver some stuff because we're in the same town as them.
Matt Stauffer:
Local. Yeah, right.
Alex Millar:
So it's very convenient. It's local, right? So that's been awesome. They're very competent, you know, in Laravel, but just ties in all the stuff of like hey, well we put good things in place and it's easy to get the branches checked out environment so it's just really easy to collaborate with them and get in and it's been really powerful because they know more like I'm learning a ton from them just in the style of like how they're gonna code they write some tests right and like oh this is you know, they're very open to be like let's do things the way you want it done But I'm also like I'm I'm only I'm a noob, know in Laravel So, please show me right so I have some opinions.
Matt Stauffer:
I have some opinions. Let me learn from you. Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Millar:
Yes, exactly. But one thing I'm really excited about, you know, when we go a bit broader, a little bit of the hiring to start has been the strong people that we worked with previously. Part of the benefit is you're not rebuilding relationships and all these things and you know what you're going to get, you know, with somebody. When we get into that next phase, into next year, because we're kind of like in this, you grow and you kind of unlock that nox tranche of burning cash, right? Because it's like, growing, but we're burning cash like crazy right now. Looking at L'Aridure and looking at the like more bespoked ways of like going out to recruit will be, I'm planning on doing that, I guess I would say. And then a big way in which I did hiring previously at the old company and tend to do it here is I very much view it as a two way street, right? It's suboptimal if either person doesn't get the full story from the hire.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Millar:
Like the hiring process, right? Like that's ultimately the goal. So I try to, whether the candidate is confident enough to like interview me per se, or I am just very forthcoming and here's who you're going to work with. Even little things, like when we put a job posting out, I put out like links to the LinkedIn profiles of who will your boss be? You know what I mean?
Matt Stauffer:
Very cool.
Alex Millar:
So like you can get a sense of, it's not just, you know, I remember I joined Microsoft as a small tangent, as a, out of university. And it was like, cool, I didn't know. I guess I'm working for Office. You just show up with 150 other people and it's like you're interviewing for product management at Microsoft Office or it could have been Xbox or it could have been whatever. You didn't know until you showed up. But yes, making sure that it's very clear to them, whoever we're hiring and interviewing, what it's like working with me, how we work. One, I find it's also a competitive advantage as a recruiter.
Right? Because if someone's weighing what you have versus something else, but they have a way clearer picture of what they're going to get with you, you know, even if some of the company seems a little flashier, maybe they have a slightly higher salary. It's just like, yeah, yeah, but I know what I'm going to get. And that's valuable, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Millar:
Versus having a false start in a role due to like misaligned expectations. And yeah, and very much when I go to do that hiring, it's a lot mostly selecting for competence, right, and your ability to learn and grit in communication. It depends on the roles a little bit, right, but the idea is like Laravel or the way we do things can be learned, right? Are you a person who's open to learning? Do you dig down and rise to the challenge? Now that varies. If you're a junior dev, I don't expect you to be as gritty as a 10-year seasoned vet, right? And same thing on all the you know, the communication skill set, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Yes.
Alex Millar:
Can you clearly and concisely articulate your ideas and work well and communicate with others because your realm of influence kind of, maybe a local maximum if you can't actually improve that skill set. And it can be hard to teach that versus teaching a technical skill. So, yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. I know you've gone a lot of places, which is great, which is great, but I did want to name something you said at the very beginning. You mentioned that you'd hired Vehikl, and I think that this is an under appreciated trick that especially people who are just getting started can use when they're building up their own internal team. I think maybe my favorite or...
Alex Millar:
Yes.
Matt Stauffer:
I think maybe my favorite projects at Tighten are probably nonprofits just because I like nonprofits. But I think my second favorite after that is exactly the situation you're talking about where somebody comes along and they said, hey, we're building this thing and we just need somebody who knows what idiomatic Laravel is, who can kind of make sure we're making these right decisions up front. Sometimes we're just doing some high-level advising, like reviewing their pull requests. But often we're building the thing alongside them. And they're like, I didn't know you could do that. Or why did you do that?
Or can I pair with you on this or whatever? And it is so much fun being able to like bring people along and educate them. And especially if they really are that type of like self-directed learner, watching them kind of like really rise up to the point where like, yeah, you don't need me anymore. And that's like one of my favorite, you know, like I don't want to be pandering to our clients because they're all capable and brilliant human beings, but there is a good moment to be like at the beginning, you all did not know a bunch of things that we know. And at the end of the engagement, you don't need us in the same way you did. And it feels great to kind of like, send the project out in the world. So I just wanna name it's really cool that you've kind of come up with that cheat code.
Alex Millar:
Totally. And it gives me more confidence as well too, because as much as I'm reading the docs and consuming things, ya know, getting someone who's contributed to a hundred other Laravel projects of different shapes and sizes and saying, yeah, I think what you've got set up here is great so far. It's been really easy to contribute. You're not fighting with the framework. I'm directionally correct at least, you know, of some of the choices I've made, right? So yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yes. Yeah. That's really cool. And I also really appreciate everything you said about hiring. It sounds very similar to my values in hiring. It's like, I want you to know what you're going to get. I want it to be something that sounds appealing to you upfront. And then I want it to come true when you come to work here so that we don't have any of those alignments of, well, I assumed it was going to be like this, or you said it was going to be like this, then it wasn't, or whatever else. So I think it's really nice to just say, like, you you're just being very empathetic in doing that. You're saying, I want to know what I would want if I was applying to a job there and let's just kind of make that happen. So that's very cool.
Alex Millar:
Yeah, yeah, and there's the, what I've learned over the years too, that awareness piece is it's easy to say, it's a two-way street, you should just interview me, but it's, if ya know, for someone looking for, in a stressful time looking for a job, whatever, you know, they might not feel like they're in the environment to be as candid or open or, you know, even though you come across that way, so you have to help coach people through that as well too, because there can be a lot of stress on the other side of the call for someone, right? So, yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
That's so cool. And yeah, to your point, I didn't even realize that this was a great answer to my question, but the question was, what is it like hiring Laravel developers? And I tell people all the time, I can teach you how we work. I can't teach you to be a good person or a good learner or whatever. And you put those pieces together, you and you even mentioned, you're like, look, I know this guy is a good person. He's a good developer. And yeah, he might be, you know, writing a different language right now, but I can teach him Laravel. He can learn Laravel quickly enough because he's that kind of a guy. Like you didn't have to hire a Laravel developer into that position. You hired a good programmer in that position and they picked up Laravel quickly.
Alex Millar:
Totally.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's very cool. So I did have other questions about your career trajectory, like what has kind of helped you grow and stuff like that, but I know that you had some more things maybe queued up to talk about from how you chose to use Laravel in the business and stuff like that. So actually wanted to kind of throw it over to you. Are there any topics that you kind of really were excited for us to talk about before I start asking more about your personal trajectory.
Alex Millar:
I mean, I had them on the notes. We touched on them at moments here and there, like seeders making it easy to introduce change. Just maybe a couple of things I'll mention in that realm of like, do these things and do them well, right? In terms of case, we've got good test coverage and written good tests. I haven't yet dug into doing mutation tests, but I'm very excited about the concept of that. Like we went in on Pest and just this idea of like, yeah, you have code coverage, but is it a...
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Alex Millar:
Is it a worthwhile test, right? And so that's a new stone I'm ready, like excited to turn over. And as a total tangent, if anyone wants to talk about this aside, I have this like vision of a semi AI, you know, what the diff kind of code helping tool that like can go out and like nightly like try to run mutations and find things and suggest changes based on the failing mutations, which would be really, really cool, but I don't have time to look into that right now.
Matt Stauffer:
That's very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Millar:
So there's that seeder, that good testing. Also a concept that has been extremely valuable for us is architecture testing, which I think is relatively new overall. But the way I like to look at it and put it out there is we're trying to encode like this is the way in tests. So certain things of like, of course you can add more columns to a table, but we don't really want them to get that wide, because it can be performance issues. So we have a small architecture test that basically says, okay,
Matt Stauffer:
Yep. Yeah.
Alex Millar:
these tables are getting big, we don't want them to get wider anymore, so that'll fail a test and you'll notice it in the PR versus, we remembered, we agreed that we weren't gonna make the user's table any wider, we actually need to trim it, right? Or something you get burned on, ya know, this is really specific, but like, Linux and Mac OS have different case sensitivity for the file systems, and if you put something in your public dir and you check it in and on your server, might not recognize it due to case sensitivity, so we...
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Millar:
wrote an architecture test just to cover that so you don't get burned by these little things. Yeah, so just trying to like, anytime you're like, we have to remember something, get it encoded as code so that it can be repeated, you know, and then we talk about that long-term, you build that up over five years and people come and left, like that one time you got burned by it, that was one employee on one PR two years ago and then maybe took down production or something like that, right? But it's like, we got it as a test, so like that won't.
That won't happen again. And we can write some nice verbose comments in there to explain why this happens and like reference the source material. So I'm excited for those with our new developer and Vehikl has hit a few of these too, is go, the test suite failed. They're like, Alex doesn't want us doing things this way, right? Because he wrote an architecture for that.
Matt Stauffer:
That's all.
Alex Millar:
Yeah, so that's been a good thing. But anyways, without getting too nitty gritty on specific things, yeah, we could probably leave it on that topic and jump over to kind of next one.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, and I do want to note on the architecture testing. We built something called TLint a while back that we're trying to trim it down as much as possible to hopefully eventually nobody needs it. But at the time there's the only way to test certain things and they were things much simpler than what Pest can do But just things like we shouldn't see any of these or you you know what? It was there's two things one was it did a whole bunch of Blade testing But the other one was it did certain things like no DDs, right? Like that was like the first thing that Pest showed as an architecture test and we're like, yeah No DDs anywhere.
Alex Millar:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Stauffer:
It's really great because if you think about code style linting and formatters, they are code should be written this way, but this way is a very narrow scope of what code kind of should be written. It means like, where do your commas go? But code style testing does not say it should be written this way such that everything that is in this directory should be named that way. You know, so architecture testing to me is your traditional code style linter formatters writ large. It's just an expansion of the same concept taken to a broader degree.
And I'm like, I don't think anybody would disagree that having a consistent code style is of value. So I've found that people are pretty open to architecture testing as an idea, but not a lot of people have done a lot of it. So it's really cool to hear from you, like two things, first of all, I guess three, one that you're doing it, two that you're doing some things outside of what a lot of the standard examples of architecture testing are, things like, you know, the difference between Linux and Mac doesn't just have to be in everybody's brains and you just have to have.
You screw it up once and then you learn it after screwing it up. But no, it's actually encoded. But I really like this idea of knowing that if your company is around long enough, you will see people who are a part of writing the original system leave with love, right? But they're still gone. And a lot of people say, well, how do we handle for that? And the answer is, well, make them write everything down. I'm like, nobody's going to go read hundreds of pages of documentation, let alone want to write it in the first place.
Alex Millar:
Yeah. Yep.
Matt Stauffer:
And it's something that we often say when it doesn't come to somebody leaving is like, what's the best documentation? The best documentation is the tests. Now we do still need those robust comments sometimes, but the test is the first place to start from. But I don't think I've ever heard anybody say, also use the test as a way to encode knowledge about this code base in a way that when people leave, they've left behind their documentation. So I think those are really helpful. I mean, it's, I guess now that you've said it,it sounds obvious, but I've never heard anybody talk about it that way. So I really appreciate you introducing that concept.
Alex Millar:
Right. And I'll just throw one more thing out there for anybody who says, but this would be really hard to get started and all of a add them to an existing code base. We've written a lot of ours to be like, hey, we now want something done like this. So check all these classes or this area of the app and do all of them except like have an exclusions list so that you can eventually get the old things into the new way, which works really well because that's what I felt that the old company is like, hey, you develop over time new standards, but you don't want to just put like
Matt Stauffer:
That's smart. That's really cool.
Alex Millar:
it for the whole code base, can't migrate to that really quickly. And then so you do it with the exclusions. And then when a new person joins and does something and it barks at them, they go, why this test failed? It says, OK, well, I'm supposed to it this way. Yes, there are examples in the code base that are not doing it that way, but they're on the exclusion list for a reason. And we're trying to move off them over time. Right? So yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
That's so cool. You can also have like regular tech technical debt days where you just kind of say okay this this one file on the exclusion list needs to move into the the normal way of doing it. That's very cool. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about you this is because often when I have somebody on the show They are at a position in their career that other people want to be at and so of course I want to speak to hey other people at Alex's level here's some things to learn from Alex about kind of like, Larry, about stuff like that, but also people who want to get to Alex's level.
So I wanna talk to you little about, know, especially as you were in a successful company, but you also are out of another successful company, you know, and you had a decade in there. What was the process of getting to the point where you were able to start these companies, run them, build teams, figure out how to sell them? What did that look like? Was there...
Was it all purely lived experience? Was there training and education that you went through? Were there books or courses or podcasts that you really have loved that have kind of gotten you to the point where you, maybe where you are today, but also where you were when you were successful with Bonfire?
Alex Millar:
Yeah, yeah. I wrote a couple notes ahead of time thinking on this. But the one piece before a few of the specifics for being ready of like skills, when we talk about specifically like starting a company, let's say, right? A big thing you can do is reducing the risk of starting one, right? So if you have these aspirations, say I want to start a company one day, I don't have an idea, I don't have these things, don't have that, but.
Just getting your finances in order in terms of like save your money, know, lower the risk, right? So like when you're really young and you don't have a car, home, dependent, spouse, there's, it's easier, right? But as you get a little bit older, you pick up these things, it can become harder. So a good thing, whether you wanna start one or not is getting those things in order. And this also includes like having strong relationships with your spouse, your girlfriend, whoever it is, because you will you know, you'll build a surplus and you'll debit from that sometimes when you have to work hard on things, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Yes. Yeah.
Alex Millar:
So getting those things in place creates, makes it so that you are better positioned to take the opportunity to jump into something when it presents itself. Because a lot of life is that, you know, me starting Bonfire, I didn't have the idea, right? Now I was young and so it was easier to take the jump and I'd been working at Microsoft for a little bit. But the story of Bonfire, of me getting involved in it is, I was in my final year of university, I met a girl, I really liked her, but I was leaving to go work at Microsoft in Seattle and I did everything to try to get a job locally, but I couldn't, so I still went. As part of to getting to know her, her sister's husband had the idea for Bonfire. I met him at Christmas, he showed me what he was working on, ya know, next thing led to another, I was moonlighting while I was at Microsoft working on Bonfire, showing him I could build stuff, and then he raised a little bit of capital and I...
I was like, I wanted to leave Bonfire or I wanted to leave Microsoft anyways to come back to Canada to be with my girlfriend now wife. And I had saved a bunch of money when I was there because my costs were like, so it was easy to take the jump, but I could imagine today in my life, right? The idea of being like move across the country to join to start a like that would be crazy, but really, really hard. So so you can do a lot to be able to like, you know, when because life is a lot of like there's luck events that occur. Right. And so
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Millar:
setting yourself up to take advantage of the one. So this has nothing to do with like skill set and competency and all that stuff. It's just more of like, hey, if I had the chance, I could take it. And it wouldn't be as big of a risk because I've saved some money, because I've done these things. I have a strong relationship with my spouse, you know?
Matt Stauffer:
That's so good.
Alex Millar:
Right? So that's one point that I think is not necessarily spoken about, but needed to jump in the risk and then needed as you kind of continue working on something for a long period of time, right? So, yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I want to hear your other ones, but I just want to note on that one. The idea of luck happens to everybody, but are you ready for the luck? It's so much less sexy than the, you just got to hustle and you got to push and you got to whatever, whatever. And it's not to say that that's not a part of it, but recognizing that like, you need to do the work now, not even knowing how it's going to pan out. But if you don't do the work now, when that opportunity comes, you're not going be able to take it.
I don't know, man, it's like it feels very classic, like build integrity, build character, do the right thing, build up savings in a way that sounds very like, humdrum, have a nine to five or whatever, but like doing that enables you to do the nonstandard story, right? Do that other thing. So I love that, and I also really appreciate this naming of building up relational capital with your spouse. Anybody who's done any kind of reading on love and successful marriages and stuff like that knows about the idea of like you're depositing from the bank, sometimes you're withdrawing from the bank, but explicitly naming that there are times in our career, even if that time is for something that hopefully will build us freedom and independence down the road, but there are times in your career where if you're gonna do this thing, you're gonna be withdrawing from that bank a lot, it's gonna be very hard once you get there to make those deposits, right? Like you're there, you're now withdrawing. So like you have to do this work ahead of time.
I don't know man, like I don't know if I have anything to add other than what I want to really highlight those to make sure people are hearing those messages that you said because those are both unexciting in some ways, unsexy in a lot of other ways. It's very much not what we're hearing from a lot of startup culture and stuff like that, but it's so good. I love that you said that.
Alex Millar:
Well, it's an element of like, yeah, because who you're going to tend to hear from are that I had an exit, I sold one, right? Like, it's not that, no, I'm not saying like you're not selecting people for the show that aren't the other way, but it's the survivorship bias or whatever, to see like, these people did all this other stuff, but yeah, but nine out of the other 10 people failed and it wasn't just that their company failed, you know what I mean? They withdrew, they had a huge debt, you know what I mean? And it didn't work out.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Alex Millar:
As you're already taking a whole bunch of risk of like you're paying yourself low when you start a startup. You have no money, you have to get customers, you have to get going, right? You want it to succeed, but man, like you don't wanna lose everything, you know? So, yeah, yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Wow, I want someone to make a podcast just interviewing failed startup founders or founders of failed startups. Okay, so I interrupted you and I had originally asked, you know, kind of what has helped you get there. Were there any other answers or was that kind of your main one? I wanted to make sure that you did.
Alex Millar:
Well, that one was a lot about, know, hey, I want to start a company one day, right? So here's things you can do that don't necessarily, don't guarantee you will or can start a company, but will make it easier when you do, when either an opportunity presents to be a co-founder, which for technical people, I think is a very strong path because there are a lot of business-ended folks out there who are...
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Alex Millar:
you know, okay, there's memes on this and all this stuff, right, of like, I want a technical co-founder, but as someone technical, if you want to be a CTO co-founder, right, you don't necessarily have to come up with the idea and be that, you need to set yourself up to take the opportunity to capitalize on luck and then expose yourself to luck events, i.e. go out and meet with these people at events and the stuff and talk and get out there, right? So there's all that. And then there's like the skillset and I had a few items on there.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that'd be good.
Alex Millar:
And a lot of these are, it's kind of like the classic thing. It's like, cool, you can start working out tomorrow, but you're not gonna see anything like quick. It's a lot of slow reps, you know. My background that led me even to that point, so when I was growing up, I was in air cadets in here in Canada. I don't know what the US kind of style things are like that, but it's like a paramilitary organization. Like you're basically pretending you're in the army to a degree. So.
Matt Stauffer:
I the Boy Scouts is the closest we have.
Alex Millar:
Yeah, but this is like you're wearing an army uniform. You're polishing your boots You're doing the drill and the guns and like all that stuff, right? I did pilot training with it and whatnot. So I did that because I was originally on the path and wanted to as part of that go to royal military college. Which I don't know the exact equivalent in the US is but you know, that's you're in the army the army pays for school You go to university with the army, right? So I started doing that.
Matt Stauffer:
Is it training you to be an officer or no? Okay, so West Point may be our closest.
Alex Millar:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah West Point. Yes. Yeah, it would be the definitely the closest. So I was on that path. So I learned a lot in that experience. Nothing to do with building companies on stuff, but about leadership and doing it wrong and getting the reps in and learning, you know, very small things that become kind of edicts in your mind. Like, you you never choose someone out in front of their peers, right? I mean, and the army does that on purpose in specific ways, but you know, in a non-army context, right? It's very debilitating to somebody, right? And demoralizing. So that was a big thing I did. These are kind of precursor stuff.
So it's not go join the army isn't the takeaway from this. But you learn something from there. And so can you simulate that in some other way of putting yourself in organizations locally, whether it's volunteering for something that gets you to take on leadership roles and lead people outside of work? TBD what it is, but that was a bit of my experience. And then, like I said, I was a year out of university.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's really good.
Alex Millar:
I was showing some of those signs, at least to Corey, who he got to know me through our spouses. And then as I was on the job, the big thing that I was really focused on, I a couple of resources on here, is that learning. And I'm absolutely obsessed with the Knowledge Project Podcast, Canadian guy Shane Parrish.
His big thing is, tagline is like classic timeless lessons. And if you could go back to any episode and they're good, they're not like talking about necessarily current events, they're all in there. And there are two learnings from there that I had highlighted, like the show notes even linked here as well. One was about leadership from this gentleman named Randall Stutman, or Stutman, I might be mispronouncing it. And this idea of that when you give feedback, you need to be as intentional about the...
Like you need to give just as much effort and attention to the positive elements as the constructed ones. So it's not the like good, bad, good sandwich. It's like, yeah, I'm going to really sit down and think about something that I can actually genuinely positively say about this and be just as intentional because it's easy to be intentional about the negative stuff. And you know, what was good about this? Nothing was good about it. was all terrible. Something was, right? Like find something, right? And put it in there. And just this one other lesson that I learned along. These are small things, right? But I'd say like just start listening to that podcast. I mean, it doesn't get you there, but there's all these little leadership things and they're amazing. This idea of, it's a quick mental model, right? But just checking myself and being like, am I above or below the line right now? And being above the line is like, I'm open to new ideas. I'm in more of a victor mentality. Like I'm ready to take things on versus in a closed model, ya know, you're below the line, you're closed, you're a bit more defensive, you may have a bit of a more of victim mentality, right?
You know, even like things where you know, you're sitting, you know, how you might be like, manifesting yourself. And those things come into the like, before I send this Slack message to somebody as the CTO Co-Founder to the 50th employee who's, this is their first job. And am I above the line or below the line when I'm sending that email, right? Or that Slack message or that PR comment, right? So you can do those things now, not as a leader, but to demonstrate, right? communication and influence, in your current role and get those reps in there because you want to be sending messages and doing interactive when you're above the line. And if you're not like to step away from the keyboard, just walk away, take a break, you know, like my thing is usually go for a run. Like that just gets me reset. Right? So anyway, so a little bit tangential, but you know that that Shane Parish knowledge project amazing. A few things I tend to like listen and then take notes. And I have my little like readme of Alex, so like, hey, you're new employee, here's how to interface with Alex, and these are things that I've like lifted from that, or like, these are great moments, like listen to them, if you don't listen to it, here's the little takeaway that I did for you, Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Wow. It's probably weird, if there's ever any way for you to share even maybe like a little bit, maybe not the whole readme, because I know that might be super personal, but like if there's ever a way for you to share like a little bit of it, maybe like a picture, I think that's a fascinating concept. I'd love to learn more and if you're willing, I'm sure the folks listening would like to as well.
Alex Millar:
Yeah, I'll take a look at it and I could link to it on my website, send it to you directly as well too for others. And there's one other resource. It's just a video and I've probably watched it like 50 to 100 times and I give it to anybody who's ever struggling with communication and more in the verbal sense, right? Around like when I'm delivering one-to-ones and I'm with an intermediate dev and they wanna be a senior dev and they wanna get there.
Internalize and look and watch this video. So it's a Ted talk called Speak So People Want to Listen. And it talks about two parts, right? It talks about like your literal voice, right? And like tapping into like speaking loud, speaking softly and pacing and timing and like, this is an instrument and you could, you could look at it be like, that's stupid. I shouldn't have to do that. But if you speak in a monotone noise and like really annoying and repetitive, like people aren't going to want to listen to you. They're to tune out, right? And so your, your ability to lead and influence others will be constricted by your quality of how you speak, right? And anybody can do this, right?
And then there's an element of like on that talk, it's really good about the content of your speech, right? If you're the type of person who's really into gossip and complains all the time and all these other things, those are, you're at the water cooler and you're whining and complaining about X, Y, and Z. Like things can be frustrating, but now you're presenting yourself in a certain way and that's probably not going to anybody who's viewing you in a leadership role or things like that, make them want to elevate you to some status. It's not to say you never have gripes in the world, right? But his example in the talk was like, often my grandmother, I ask her and say, how's today? It's Tuesday. And she goes, isn't it dreadful? It's just like, OK, that's not going to set us up for a great conversation, right? She just happens to be, you know.
Matt Stauffer:
Wow.
Alex Millar:
Anyways, it's a good little talk. I'm not doing it justice, but those are like kind of three elements. Again, I pulled from that. Read me on Alex of things that I've learned that I try to make easy for others. And then that read me talks lot about like how to best interface with me and where are my strengths and where do I falter? You know, and I will say I can always talk. If you give me space, I'll talk. so start to learn how to be able to corral me, you know, and that's easier. Like I said, said that done with someone who's new and getting started, but even by naming and calling it out, it helps to give the permission to do that versus someone being like, my God, I was on with my boss for an hour and he wouldn't stop talking. Like, yeah. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's so cool. mean, I definitely have found that sharing that I have ADHD has given people a lot of permission to kind of be like, yeah, okay, Matt is, you know, whatever, off in space or has a whole bunch of great ideas, but doesn't always remember the idea he had last week or whatever else it ends up being, you know. So it's fun. I've done that in just that narrow scope, just being able to say like, hey, here's something that gives you permission to understand how to interact with me.
But again, I'm just blown away by this idea of the read me, of just a broader scale of like, here's everything that you want to consider, good and bad, how to get what you want or whatever for me.
So one of the things that I had noticed that seems to be a thread through not everything but a lot of the things you're saying here are this if you do well in small things then big things are gonna be available to you in different ways you might be ready for them when they come people might notice that you're doing the small things and then kind of give you more opportunity you might be training yourself up for something and it really has made me think about folks who've come into Tighten at varying levels of theoretical ability experience or whatever and how they have some of them just skyrocketed through our growth levels. And it's not to say that everybody should be able to skyrocket or whatever, you know, like it's totally fine if it takes time for growth. But I do realize that like one of the things that make people skyrocket the most is watching that work that they do regularly, diligently to improve themselves, to take advantage of opportunities or whatever.
And they're not skyrocketing just because they came in day one brilliant, although many of them have come in day one brilliant, but because of who they showed themselves to be and how they showed that they do things when it was just something smaller, just this one project. But if you, on every single project you're on, the project is better, even if we don't always know why. We don't see everything that happens, but every project is better because you're there.
Alex Millar:
Yep.
Matt Stauffer:
If every person you work with may not say something and then when I ask them six months later they say, oh my gosh, working with her was the best experience I've ever had. You build up your own skills and also everybody around you's likelihood to want to give you opportunities. And so I just noticed that thread, like you've said probably four different ways where if you do the thing when it's not the moment, you're gonna be so much more ready for the moment. And I appreciate how that's very clearly a very well kind of that goes throughout your whole way of thinking. Does that sound reasonable or familiar?
Alex Millar:
Hmm. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I always I think it's in my read me as well, too. It's like, what's the one word? And it's like that thing. I was like, care about integrity. Right.
Matt Stauffer:
Yes. Yes.
Alex Millar:
And like, that's what that is. Right. It's it's doing the right thing when no one's looking. I mean, maybe this all boils back not to be like, let's psychoanalyze this. But I had a very formal experience when I was about five years old, where I was at a corner store and some teenagers be like, I want a piece of bubble gum. Dad said no. Teenagers like, just take it. It's a five cent thing. And I took it. And I'm walking around at home thinking I'm a hot shit chewing on my gum. And dad's like, Where'd you get that gum, Alex? And he drove me back to the store and made me apologize to the clerk at the store and pay the five cents for the piece of bubble gum. Right. But like, I was like five years old. I still very vividly remember that, you know, and so that's, you know, that's a, that's a little integrity lesson there. Right. So, yeah. So that maybe that that's all we're kind of boils through for me and why I feel that and express that. But I I've seen it. And that's why I'm hiring some of the people from the old company and bringing them in as well too. Right. Because.
Matt Stauffer:
Wow. Yeah.
Alex Millar:
They did that, you know, through and through all the time. And it reduced my risk, you know, as a business owner and trying to build to bring these folks on. And we won't only do that, right? We will bring out new people. That's just a little bit of a, I can short circuit, you know, you know, us moving really quickly, because I don't need to necessarily do all of the like, let's build up the relational capital together and learn each other, right? We can kind of just drop in and go. And so that's even another little minor thing on this, which is like, if not at your current role, if you work and you get exposed in your current role over a four or five year period to 30, 40, 50, 100 other people and you show that all the time, they will go to new companies in the next four to five years and their companies will need people and they'll be like, oh my God, you should hire Steph. You should hire John. Like I would love to work them with a heartbeat. And that's where the opportunities get created for you, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's fantastic. Man, I'm supposed to be wrapping this up already. This is so good. Okay, so let's see. I would say, what is it? I think my last is going to be, well, this is hilarious. Hold on, before I say the hilarious, is there any advice that you would want to give? Any, actually, just.
Step away from that. Is there anything that you wish we had talked about today that you feel like we didn't get time to? Whereas I'm supposed to wrap this thing at 45 minutes, we're at 50, and I feel like we got another hour of conversation. So is there any one last thing that you're like, man, I really wanted to make sure we got a chance to talk about this we didn't get to?
Alex Millar:
Yes, I think you would get there in the next question, but one thing I'm really hoping selfishly a little bit to get from this, because Matt, you get to get me exposed to a broader audiences. I really, I have an amazing CTO peer group here locally in Kitchener-Waterloo of other local businesses that are in the area. I really, really want to have like a Laravel specific, basically I was gonna email every one of your past guests just directly personally, right?
But a Laravel CTO or director of engineering, like this high level engineering peer group, right? So maybe you're gonna ask me if I want to link to, I don't have any links for any of this. It's not a thing that's out there yet. The version is just email me. I can put my email in the show notes, I guess. If you're interested in this, and it's not like a discord and a chat and whatever. It's like we're in an email group. If we get a lot of people that say yes, we'll segment it out, but it's.
My peer group's like six to eight people are regularly on the call. We meet once a quarter over lunch and everyone just comes to the table and eats and is just like, what's the biggest problem you're having right now? And we just go around the table. And it's been so valuable and I would love to have that in a Laravel ecosystem because we're gonna have the like, oh my God, I hit this gnarly thing and someone's gonna be like, I did it or I can ask my team and then get those answers quickly. And I think there are, I don't know.
I want that, you might be able tell me like something's out there that I'm missing that already exists. There's, ya know, Laravelpeergroup.com or something like that, right? But yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
You know I'm running though. We're gonna talk more after this. But I do think that folks should just for now they should just email you if they're interested. But I love that idea. So, okay, cool.
Alex Millar:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that was one thing I wanted to hit on. I guess it's kind of a plug thing, but not really. It's just something that I wanted to make sure was said. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, and normally I do also ask, are you hiring? And I know that you just hired, but is there any chance you'll be hiring in the near future or do think you're good for now?
Alex Millar:
If all goes according to plan into 2025, yes, I will be hiring more people. I would say in the short term, fire me an email if I seem like the type of person you would want to work with in terms of what we're doing. At a minimum, I can build a list. So when I post a role, I can blast you so you know, but I don't have any TS and all these things set up to like capture emails ahead of time. But if you listen to this, and you get to this far in the show, and you're like, I'd love to work, or maybe work or whatever, just fire me an email and I'll at get it into a Google Sheet somewhere so I can email blast everyone when we post a role.
Matt Stauffer:
Is there a pro, do people get bonus points if they're in Kitchener-Waterloo?
Alex Millar:
No, we're definitely open. I mean, we're in Canada, so it's easier for us to hire Canadians right now, but we will expand out and have a US subsidiary eventually and be ready to hire into the US. And we'll probably actually strategically want to do that as well. So no, but I think the only thing is that we're probably still in the North America time zone currently.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Okay. All right. And this is this last question is making me laugh. And I can I don't know why I was acting like I can't say this because it's on your website. But your website says, you you guys had a 108 million exit. Obviously, 108 million dollar exit does not mean 108 million dollars in your pocket. But it does make me laugh that that's literally my last question. So if you personally in your pocket, somebody came along and said for GovAI for your portion, you're going to walk home with 100 million dollars after taxes.
Alex Millar:
That's right.
Matt Stauffer:
What do you do tomorrow?
Alex Millar:
Yeah, it's a good question because I had a, not that number, right, but a much smaller number than that, you know, because you multiple founders and you get diluted through raising and all the rest. I think there's a big element of it's exciting and it's new. All these are relative to dollar numbers. But the big thing that I think about having had the previous exit and the new one is things get easier in terms of like you can remove pain in your life, right? About like, I can easily afford to have a cleaner now. And that gives me time, right? I think a lot about it's that it's exciting and daunting. And it's not like, I'm not complaining or anything like that, know, but it's like more money, more problems. Like there's a new class of problems that you get, right? That come up.
But you wanna make it so that the money doesn't stress you out or these things that cause you problems, right? And gives you freedoms, it gives you affordances, right? To do things and to take, so that's why I'm building this other company, not like to make more money, but we built a great workplace for 150 people at the old place they loved it, like, man, if I can do that again, that would be awesome, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Millar:
So yeah, you take some time. There was a moment there where it's like, I don't do software anymore because you're stressed and all these problems and things and you go, I'm gonna be in, I'm gonna go to a building houses, right? And then you realize that, my God, everything you do, if it's worth doing is hard and difficult and there's no easy path, right? So it would be foolish for me to pivot into home construction, you know.
Matt Stauffer:
No experience whatsoever.
Alex Millar:
Versus doubling down on my skill that I already have, right? That I've built over the last 10 years. So this is a little meandering. Like if we sold GovAI, my share was worth a hundred million bucks right now. Yeah, we'd probably do some nice vacation, take some time off, spend, you know, I'd probably spend a couple of years not working on stuff with the kids more, right? And being able really take advantage of that. But at the end of the day, like life needs purpose, you know? And so if you don't reorient yourself into something in your community or other things you're doing, right? You can orient it into work.
And again, we touched earlier on this, right? It's in that balance, like with family and relationships and all these things. So part of that will make that easier to a degree, yeah, it should be, money is a tool and if you get it and then you have a responsibility when you have it to do more with it in the world. And there were times when I didn't wanna do it and build and my dad's like, well, you're smart and you have this stuff and you have this opportunity, it's pretty rare. So you don't have to, but you ought to, you know? So that's not the parents, that's the classic. I'm not angry, but I'm disappointed, but in a different direction, right? So yeah, yeah. So.
Matt Stauffer:
Thanks, Dad. That's awesome. Well, Alex, I mean, I say this to most of my guests, and I mean it every time, but I could talk to you for hours. And I'm a little frustrated with my podcast format, but you know what? We're just gonna leave the people wanting more. If they do want to learn more from you, you mentioned emailing you, so I'll make sure your email's in the show notes. But anything else, are you active on any social media? Are there any podcasts, any way for people to keep up with you?
Alex Millar:
Yeah, I mean, have, you know, Twitter, Blue Sky, email will be in there. I'm like lightly active. It's kind of the last thing at my it's like focused on work. Shut it down. Focus on family. You know, I'm a big I have the instruments, but and it's on my website, but I'm a big into rec miniature table war games and painting. So between that and then trying to stay fit, there's you know, it's hard to find the time to like, well, it can suck you in, but I have screen limits to keep me out of it. So
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Millar:
I'm not really on there. I consume more than I create. But email, I love, like if you send me an email and we can just one-to-one over email or whatever, right? That's the best way for sure. So yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
I love it. Well, thank you so much for sharing your experience. Thank you so much for this time. Your openness is really, really valuable. And there's just so many things that you've said today where I'm like, and that's the best point, and that's the best point, and that's the best point. So thank you. This has been really, really fantastic.
Alex Millar:
Thanks man, I appreciate for you for having me on.
Matt Stauffer:
And for the rest of you, we will see you all next time.