Build Your SaaS

Bootstrapping a business is like getting a plane to lift off the ground. But what do you do once the plane is in the air?

Dave Giunta and Justin Jackson recorded a recent phone call about maintaining motivation after the initial startup phase. How does founder energy shift once you've achieved your early goals? Dave prods Justin to find new sources of motivation – whether through mentoring junior team members, connecting with customers in fresh ways, or knowing when it's time to explore new horizons.

They also discuss why Dave left Home Chef (after 8 years) and what he's doing next.

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Timestamps:
  • 00:00:17 - Giuuuuuunta
  • 00:01:15 - Chatting in Guatemala: maintaining motivation, remote work, career transitions
  • 00:02:12 - Motivation in early vs late stage startups
  • 00:06:00 - Challenges with maintaining motivation once the business is established
  • 00:15:35 - Working with different team member motivations
  • 00:26:42 - Importance of understanding individual team members
  • 00:29:20 - Remote work advantages and challenges
  • 00:35:35 - Working with junior team members and mentorship
  • 00:54:00 - Why Dave left Home Chef after 8+ years
  • 00:57:00 - Discussion of career transitions and giving yourself space to explore
  • 01:02:20 - Future plans and exploration after leaving long-term role
Thanks to our monthly supporters
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  • Greg Park
  • Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit.com.au
  • Marcel Fahle, wearebold.af
  • Bill Condo (@mavrck)
  • Ward from MemberSpace.com
  • Evandro Sasse
  • Austin Loveless
  • Michael Sitver
  • Dan Buda
  • Colin Gray
  • Dave Giunta

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Creators & Guests

Host
Justin Jackson
Co-founder of Transistor.fm
Editor
Chris Enns
Owner of Lemon Productions
Guest
Dave Giunta
Web Developer, Ruby on Rails, Designer, Photographer, Filmmaker

What is Build Your SaaS?

Interested in building your own SaaS company? Follow the journey of Transistor.fm as they bootstrap a podcast hosting startup.

Justin:

Hey, and welcome back to build your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2024. And I'm Justin Jackson, and I've got a guest on the show today, Dave Junta. As listeners will know, Dave has been a fixture on the podcast for many years. His name is presented in the aforementioned dramatic fashion every episode.

Justin:

Dave was VP of engineering at Home Chef for over 8 years and just recently left that position and is currently exploring new opportunities. And Dave and I, believe it or not, we recently found ourselves in a bar in Guatemala. We had a great conversation and then we promised that we'd do a follow-up call when we got back home. And that follow-up call just happened. And I said, Dave, why don't we record this and maybe publish it?

Justin:

So we decided to record it last minute so you get to listen in. In our call, we discussed the challenge of maintaining motivation once your business has made it. How remote work and different working styles affect motivation. The difference between early stage motivation where every decision you make feels consequential versus late stage motivation where you have to actively seek out things that energize you. And this is all in the context of starting a business, of course.

Justin:

How working with junior devs can reignite motivation. The importance of understanding individual team members and what motivates them. Why Dave decided to leave Home Chef after so many years and giving yourself space to explore and transition between different phases of your career. The whole thing was great. And now I give you Dave Giunta.

Dave:

I was gonna ask if this goes back to, the conversation we were having in Guatemala about, like, maybe I don't know. Maybe maybe I'm misremembering some of that conversation. I was remembering it being a little bit about, like, motivation and having a team and a and a bunch of people who are sort of, like, at different levels of motivation. I think we were mostly talking about, like, what to build next. Right?

Dave:

But I wonder if this isn't sort of, like, another symptom that sort of, like, falls out of that. Like, the day to day has become the day to day, and it's not something that you're really spending a lot of time thinking about and crafting as the you know, as what you're doing.

Justin:

Yeah. I've been thinking I mean, I'm constantly thinking about this because there are moments once so once you've built the thing building the thing, getting the airplane into the air is so much work and is usually preceded by multiple crashes. So, you know, it's like I've been trying to get an airplane up in the air since I was 15 years old. And I've had multiple airplanes. I've had multiple flights and a varying success.

Justin:

And then you get one up in the air that's really going. And I think in the same way that I have to remind myself, like, when I'm on an airplane and I I'm by the window and I wanna, like, I just wanna, like, be the guy that closes the window and just, like, watches a movie. There's this other part of me that's like, no. I need to open the window and look outside because this is a miracle that I'm up here. This is incredible.

Justin:

This is a perspective that throughout human history, only a fraction of people have ever seen, and it's unbelievable. And you have to kinda put yourself in that place of recognizing, you know, that this is and kind of feeling emotions and maybe so, yeah, I think once the business was going, I found that you don't have the same kind of you you almost have to force yourself to or put yourself in a position where you're, like, enjoying it at that same level of that highly activated level. Does that make sense?

Dave:

I think so. You you mean in terms of because we were talking about, sort of, like, motivation to record a podcast.

Justin:

Yeah.

Dave:

And that that motivation sort of came I my what I heard, I think, was that that motivation came out naturally because you in the moment, in that in those in that time, for 1, I'm guessing that you and John were talking about talking to each other a lot more frequently Yeah. And a lot more actively because it was just the 2 of you at the time. And then it was like, you had nothing but decisions to make constantly every day. And they were all about these, like, super minute things, and they were all about things that you were, like, really excited

Justin:

Yeah.

Dave:

Talk about and make a decision.

Justin:

And they felt consequential. It's like like the pricing the the pricing structure we have today, we came up with it was it was birthed, you know, in those moments of grinding up the hill. Like that, it was like we came up with those kind of fundamental those those fundamental pillars when during that time. And yeah. So now it I I I would say things just really kinda slow down once you've built it and the plane's in the air.

Justin:

But sorry, you were going somewhere. I think I I think I No.

Dave:

No. Well, I guess I'm wondering, did it feel consequential in the moment for, like, that pricing decision?

Justin:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It felt super consequential. Like, the difference between everything feels so consequential at the beginning and and really is because everything from choosing the market that we went into, like saying, yes, we're both going to pursue podcasters and pursue this product category, which is hosting. You know, that was incredibly consequential.

Justin:

And then figuring out our perspective on that, our point of view, our differentiation, and then executing on it. It it was it all feels incredibly consequential. And and a lot, like, we haven't really touched for example, we wrote up together a values document, but we haven't really touched that since then. We came up with you know, we had this philosophy of, you know, we why do we like this particular category? And we had all these reasons because it's slow media, because it's, open protocols, because it feels like the old web.

Justin:

All of that stuff happened then and and was very consequential. And then you even get to the point that this idea of every move we made, a move in a given month could mean we went from a 100 customers to 200. So, like, that was a doubling. And then the next month, we might go from 200 to 500. And that kind of growth and consequential growth where you really feel it, whereas, you know, once you get into 1,000,000 of dollars of revenue, it's incredible for all of the reasons we dreamed it would be incredible, but you don't get the same kind of lift.

Justin:

You know, it's not it's like the decisions you're making month to month. It's not like you know, our our dream initially was just like, can we get to $10,000 a month in recurring revenue? Right? And and that like, once he hit it and it's like, oh my god, we hit it. And and then it's like, well, clearly, like, if we can get to 20 k, then we're we're almost we're like at this we would be at this point where we could both quit our jobs and, you know, at least have enough to live on, and that felt super consequential.

Justin:

But, yeah, once it's going, there's still exciting things, but it's it's it's not the same. Like, every customer conversation felt so important. And I think that's actually a good example of how I've been able to fire myself up at this point is forcing myself to go have a customer conversation. Or, like, today, I I've been, bringing up this point to the team that we're so lucky in podcasting because our customers often talk about why they started the podcast or why they found Transistor on episodes. It's just, like, right there.

Justin:

We just have to discover it like an anthropologist. And I I found this episode. I just today, I just looked at who had started a show today. And someone had published an episode. And I looked at it, and they were talking about what motivated them to start the podcast.

Justin:

And I just get super I got super fired up. It was it was it just felt like, oh, yeah. I remember this feeling. Or, you know, Michael, who's on our, customer success team, has gotten really excited about doing Zoom calls with new customers. And he's here in Vernon, and so sometimes he'll come into my office and say, oh, I just had the most amazing call, and he'll tell me about it.

Justin:

And that gives me energy as well. But it's definitely different in that it feels like to get that energy now. I have to kind of get into character. I have to, you know, do things to, to make it to have it happen. Right?

Justin:

It's not just naturally there. You don't have that natural kind of builders energy and momentum. And I I don't think I wanna go back to that builder's energy. Like, there's it's the you you know, there were hard things about it there's it's hard to build things. You know, it's it's nice to have built something.

Justin:

But it's definitely at this stage, I think this has been ever since we kind of reached our big financial goals. There's this this kind of constant existential question of, like, man, okay, so things are good. And how do we continue to motivate ourselves? How do we continue to motivate our team? And then and I think there's other things too that make this stage just more challenging in that invariably as a company grows, both in terms of revenue and headcount and just like after you've been around for a while, there's more and more administrative burden.

Justin:

Just naturally you accumulate administrative stuff or the administrative stuff catches up with you and you have to deal with it. And that part is not fun. Like, you can kind of play fast and loose when you're building. It's like, hey, it's just John and I. And it's like, health care?

Justin:

Who cares? You know, sales tax, we haven't hit any of the thresholds yet. Like, we're there. You get this there's this magical time when you're building something where it's just like it's simplicity. It's not just an illusion.

Justin:

It's simple for the time because a lot of stuff just doesn't apply yet or unless you're in Germany. But, you know, the the over in Europe, they have a lot of business that they're very serious about, you know, you know, the right way to do things. But in North America, we've all a startup has always been like a little bit like, well, if we missed a government form, we're making a $100 a month. Like, what's the worst that could happen? But once you get to a certain stage, there's just more of that.

Dave:

So this is interesting. When I first started asking some questions here, in my head, I was thinking about how motivation is definitely different, I think, when when the business starts to get big or when the business gets to comfort a comfort level. Right? Is that you have to start setting your sights on different things to be your motivation. Some of those things might be like you you're motivated by creating the system of your company in a way that you just did to your point.

Dave:

You didn't have to think about it at all in the beginning. Sometimes it might be a motivation about, you know, the inherent risk that comes with making changes at a when a company is this size. Because, you know, in the beginning that's why I asked you if, like, making your, your pricing level decisions, did they feel consequential in the moment? Because in my mind, I was like, and that you could you could have chosen whatever you wanted. It doesn't like, it kinda doesn't matter.

Dave:

You're gonna, like, make a decision. You're gonna try it out. If it doesn't work, we could change it tomorrow. It's not a big deal. You changing your prices today

Justin:

Yes.

Dave:

Is I think it's actually true. Like, you probably could make a change, but it feels so much more consequential because you have so many more customers and your business is so warm.

Justin:

That's so interesting. Yeah. Consequential can have two dynamics. So looking back, our pricing decision was consequential in that No.

Dave:

You haven't changed it.

Justin:

It it it really set us up for where we are now. I think, yes, I think now making changes feels so consequential. Like, there's part of this machine that none of us even understand. And jiggling any of it makes me nervous. Like, any of it.

Justin:

It's infrastructure changes make me nervous. Any sort of changes to the sign up flow make me nervous. Any sort of changes to onboarding, any sort of changes to pricing. And we've considered a lot of them. You you know, at one point, it was like, maybe we should try.

Justin:

A lot of our competitors have something to the effect of, free to sign up, no credit card upfront, and you can publish your first episode for free. It's like, oh, man. There's something about that that you might get way more inbound because then people can try it out. And and I think, ultimately, we decided that wasn't a good decision because we already have a sign up flow that's really working well and, like, again, don't jiggle it. And also just like I don't think it would actually improve the numbers that we care about, which is new paying customers and retention and monthly revenue.

Justin:

But there was a big part of that decision where we're like, we just don't want to change this because that's a massive risk. And you make that choice, it's like that all of a sudden you could be go from right now, we have about a 75% conversion rate from trial to paid over a 14 day free trial. You can already imagine, like, if you made that free, if you added a freemium plan, those people might not convert for 3 months, 6 months, 2 years, whatever. And so it it could really throw you off. So

Dave:

It would throw off your 75%. Your 75% is definitely gonna go down because you're putting so many more people into the funnel, and you're and you're making it at so much less of a commitment. Yeah. Level. So, you know, you're gonna you're gonna mess with that number just by virtue of making that change, and you should if you're gonna go through it, you should prepare yourself for the emotional impact that comes from seeing a number go from 75% to, like, 30 or something.

Dave:

Right?

Justin:

Yeah.

Dave:

But you're also putting a lot more bets into a pipeline, a a marketing pipeline. You're also getting a lot more interest that gives you as the person who of the group who is who is responsible or maybe, like, cares about customer outreach Mhmm. A lot of opportunities, opportunities that you don't necessarily get right now. Like, right now, you get the opportunity to go talk to you were just talking. Right?

Dave:

Like, talking about some talking to somebody who they just published their first episode. Yeah. You're gonna get a different type of customer, a different different type of person who starts their free trial and then never converts for 3 months. And that'd be an interesting person to go talk to because instead of you getting getting motivation from them having, you know, started it, you're gonna be the one who's gonna be giving them the motivation to to make it happen.

Justin:

Interesting.

Dave:

It's a very different kind of place for you to be. But might be very interesting thing for you to learn, because, you know, that mark that segment of the market exists Yeah. Of people who wanna who think a podcast would be cool and but but get as far as, oh, you want me to put in a credit card? No. I'm not gonna do that.

Dave:

And and then back up.

Justin:

Yeah. I think in this particular case, though, this is where my instincts or my gut was was once I thought about it. And once I talked about it with the team, I think our instincts here were actually correct in that, especially for creator businesses. What you really want is the most self motivated customer. Like, you don't wanna have to motivate the customer.

Justin:

And the credit card upfront if we weren't getting enough trials every month, I think then it would be like we gotta solve that problem. But this was a case of, like but we don't have that problem. We get we get hundreds of trials. And I think my my instinct there in terms of just human behavior and human psychology is the money, like, people paying upfront actually is a motivating factor in unto itself. So it both attracts people that are highly motivated.

Justin:

And once they're paying for it, it's more likely that they'll continue with it. And we've seen these in the numbers, like, if you look at Spotify's free hosting, those shows have less episodes per feed and kind of fade out faster than an average transistor customer.

Dave:

Don't get me wrong. I wasn't suggesting that, like, there was a huge business opportunity to be had by making that change. I was mostly trying to point out, like, a change like that can have a meaningful impact on where you and the team derive motivation to show up at work every day. Even if because, again, my suspicion is that you making that change while it makes that number go from 75% conversion down to 30% in terms of actual people coming through the funnel and completing the thing. It's probably actually not that different.

Dave:

Your money, your business doesn't actually necessarily change all that much even though your metrics change in a way that feels bad. But you may have made a decision that helps you and the team get access to a thing that gives you more motivation, not less.

Justin:

Yeah. But this is this would actually be an interesting thing to talk to you about because I think over the past couple years, one thing I've realized, I started doing more one on one calls with people on the team. And also just trying to, you know, during team retreats and other things, understand people's personal motivation. And it's a lot of this initially came out of, Helen, who's our our kind of lead customer success person. Her and I started doing 1 on 1 calls.

Justin:

And then she gave me this great document, which was how to best work with me, basically. And it was it was divided into sections. One section was, here's what really fires me up. Here's and the other section was, you know, here's stuff I can do that I'm good at, but it's kind of neutral. And then at the bottom, here's stuff that really demotivates me.

Justin:

And what I found fascinating about it is that I had been giving her all this stuff in the demotivating category. Because for me, those things were motivating. So I felt like I was giving her the best jobs, you know, like, these are the best things. But in reality, she's like, that stuff doesn't fire me up at all. And the stuff that she actually loves is coming up with procedures, process, research projects, things that have a very, defined scope.

Justin:

And, you know, I was sending her things like, I want you to go out and build relationships with all of the possible affiliates. And she's just like, what is that? You know? And but for me, that's very motivating. You know?

Justin:

I I love these kinda unbounded things. And so I'm I'm wondering if, like, is there even such thing as team motivation? Or at the end of the day, is it really all come down to individual motivation? Like, what motivates us individually? And it's kind of like the owners job to just figure out a direction for the product and the company and everything.

Justin:

And then align that or match that up with the individual's strengths, abilities, desires, motivations. What do you think?

Dave:

I mean, what you're describing is the job of a manager. Yeah. It's like that is your job is to as a manager is to understand, your direct reports, like strengths and weaknesses and what they care about, what they want. You should have some goals for them too that maybe stretch them in ways that they don't really see as being valuable, but you can sort of foresee that this is a way that they will sort of grow. Yeah.

Dave:

I think it's natural for, like, business people to think about all of those things in terms of, like, business goals and objectives. When I when I when you think in those terms, it feels very manipulative, I find. Mhmm. I find myself wanting to think much more in terms of, like, the individual that I'm managing. You know, a lot of that stuff is sussed out exactly like you're doing.

Dave:

You have regular one on ones with people. Those one on ones are you try and have them be like normal human conversations. And during the course of those conversations, this kinds of stuff kind of stuff comes out. As you start to do this more often, you start to make mental notes for yourself of, oh, here's some things that like, that thing that Helen put together for you is awesome. I've only heard of that happening, like, 2 or 3 times in my entire career of someone who came to somebody who was like, hey.

Dave:

I did this thing, and here's what and and it's always great. I always I love to see that. I find that I am not able to really take that stuff into account until I've internalized it for them too. And, you know, sometimes even that that list is it's, like, filtered through their own sort of self bias. Like, you know, it requires a certain amount of self, awareness Yeah.

Dave:

To, like, put that list together. And sometimes there's some blind spots that cause some things to be in different areas of that list. Right? And, again, as a manager, I think that's your job is to sort of start to suss that stuff out and then to put challenges in front of people that, that help them get to whatever the next thing is. And then, you know, as a side effect, you end up getting the things that the business needs too.

Dave:

Because, again, better highly motivated people perform better and do all of those all of the kinds of things that you're looking for and that you need out of your business.

Justin:

I think having because I've hired now I've hired well, we hired Helen in the UK. John is in Chicago. Then we hired Jason, and Jason was in Ohio. Now he's kind of in Chicago area. Then we hired Josh, who's in Langley.

Justin:

And then we hired Michael, who's here in Vernon. And the the interesting thing about having Michael here is we initially when we hired him, we'd said, okay. Well, he's interested in engineering. Why don't we hire him as a support engineer? He'll his primary task will be, you know, doing customer success.

Justin:

But then maybe we can start to give him more web development projects as a way of kind of filling out what he wants. And, we started to do that, but we realized that the nature of customer success at Transistor is that you're in live chat all day, and so you're constantly having your attention taken off. And he really likes, he actually, like, legitimately enjoys being in live chat all day. And he came up with this other idea. So he just the advantage of him being here in Vernon is that he can knock on my door in this office and come in and say, hey.

Justin:

I'm wondering if I could talk to you about something. And then say, you know, we've been trying this, but it's just so hard to like, for me to focus on it. But I've been getting on some of these Zoom calls with customers that I love that. Like, is that something that you would like me to do more of maybe? And I was like, hell yes.

Justin:

Like, I that would be incredible. And, you know, it led to conversations about jobs to be done theory and recommending some books and even talking about in terms of, you know, he's just starting his career in tech, but in a overall arc of a tech career, the people that learn these kind of customer interview skills end up being great product managers and all these other things. So it ended up being this kind of amazing conversation, and it came up because he's here and he was able to knock on my door and go, hey. And, like, it it was just like a a passing hallway conversation. It is a little bit harder to orchestrate those.

Justin:

You have to be a lot more mindful about it when it's all remote. I find, like, there's just some stuff in so many ways, remote work is amazing. And in so many ways, it just sucks so bad. And this is one of them. It's just like, ah, like because even when I'm not feeling particularly motivated or proactive, when you're co located, there's always the reactive option, which is somebody knocks on your door and you have to react to it.

Justin:

But, yeah, I I think that illustrates part of this idea of of, you know, with a team anyway, how you end up discovering what fires people up and what motivates them. The other tricky part with all of this is for both owners and employees is that the trajectory of your personal motivation and desires has to somewhat align with the trajectory of the company.

Dave:

Trajectory in what way?

Justin:

In the way of, like, like, if it was my personal dream, for example, to be the CEO of a 500 person company, that is very unlikely to happen based on Transistor's current trajectory. Like so if if that was a legitimate desire I had or I I've had friends who've recently this has been a weird year for bootstrapped self funded companies because my understanding is almost the entire founding team at Tuple, maybe everybody, have stepped away from the business, have kind of retired. My friend Paul Jarvis just announced that he's retiring as founder of Fathom Analytics.

Dave:

What does retirement mean in this context?

Justin:

In this context, his partner is buying him out, and he is no longer gonna be an active partner in the business. He might the company might contract him to do some design work, but he is he's out.

Dave:

He's an exit of sorts, but but not like permanent retirement or whatever.

Justin:

No. No. No. But retiring from the company. I think this retire founders retiring from the companies they started is the trend.

Justin:

Matt Wensing at Summit also just announced that he was retiring from the company. In this case, I think, either selling the company or shutting it down, and, he's taken on a different role. So, my point with that was, I think in a lot of cases, the founders were realizing like, for Ben at Tupelo, one thing he realized is that he he Tupelo is a a product for remote teams to do screen sharing, but Ben really didn't enjoy remote work. He wanted a co located team. And so in his case, his kinda aspirations and what motivated what he felt would motivate him didn't align with the trajectory of the company.

Justin:

There was no way to make that happen. And so the natural step was for him to retire as CEO and and, still be an owner, but not be active in the company.

Dave:

This isn't be, like, because the company is not doing well or whatever

Justin:

either. Right?

Dave:

This is this is company is doing well. It's just there's a divergence between or realization maybe of this distance between the motivation of the founder and the and the trajectory of the company. That totally makes sense. Go but at the top level Mhmm. At the lower levels of your organization, I don't know that there's it's much more difficult for that large of a gap to show up.

Dave:

You're still gonna have them, but it I think it's not as common for, like, you know, a a senior software engineer at a in a company with whatever to be like, oh, you know, I would I I should really be CEO. What they're looking for is, like, the next level up. You know what I mean? Then,

Justin:

Yeah. The next level up or I mean, I've been on teams where, you know, some of the folks wanted to really wanted to work in a certain tech stack. And it was like, well, that that's not gonna match the trajectory of the company. Like, we're not we're not gonna change our whole tech stack for that desire. Or I mean, I've also worked for companies where I really desired to have more remote flexible work.

Justin:

And the company is like, that's just doesn't fit with what we're doing. So there is a tricky tension here, I think, both on the ownership level and on an individual contributor's level that in general, you the most important desires in your life need to be somewhat compatible with whatever this industry, this product category, this particular company, this particular product can provide. And then there's within that there's the just the the for owners, I think that might be generally true. And then there's this question of, like, okay, within this these constraints, how can I be more motivated at work? And then for employees, it's within these constraints, how can I, you know, make sure that I'm noticing those kinds of things?

Justin:

Like, instead of forcing Michael to continue to work on web development projects, being like, oh, no. Like, this other thing you are interested in is totally aligned with what we care about. And a lot of people don't wanna get on Zoom calls with customers. So if you have that energy and you wanna do that, god bless you. Like, please do that.

Justin:

I you can do that, you know, forever if you'd like.

Dave:

I was reflecting on, like, at at Home Chef or, like, at a company that is that is a little larger than where you're at.

Justin:

Yeah. How big was Home Chef?

Dave:

The Home Chef engineering team when I left was 45, almost 50.

Justin:

Okay.

Dave:

And the tech team as a whole was almost a 100.

Justin:

Wow.

Dave:

My team was half of the half of the tech team. Wow. And then, like, in terms of, like, relative to the rest of the company, I think our corporate team was somewhere around 500. And then our plant team, like, the people who are, like, in the plants packing boxes and stuff were, I think that was somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 ish people. And some number of those people were, what do you call it, part time or temporary or seasonal.

Dave:

Like, they're you know, it that that number sort of, like, fluctuates a bunch. Bunch. But, like, just to situate you

Justin:

Big company.

Dave:

Yeah. We still felt like a small company, though, because, again, compared to the competitors that we had. HelloFresh, their tech team was over a 1000 people. So, you know, some order 2 orders of magnitude larger or an order of magnitude larger than ours. And they're they were interested in growing.

Dave:

So we still felt scrappy and small by comparison. So it's it's an interesting everything I think is a little bit about perspective. But what I was getting to is, like, when you're a team of that size, you start to run into, I think, more of the circumstances like you're working in a giant code base, and that code base can't you can't to your point, you can you're not gonna go we're not gonna rewrite it in some other framework or something like that. It's gonna say what it is. You either like it or you don't.

Dave:

You have to find ways of showing people that there are ways to be motivated even about the job that they're doing today.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Dave:

And I found when I was talking to engineers of all levels, oftentimes, what I would tell them is, yeah, occasionally, we're gonna do a big project, and you're gonna get an opportunity to sort of lead that project, and that's gonna be great. We only get a few of those a year. We don't get we don't get, like, one of them so that everybody can lead a project. Mhmm. So in the in between times, when you're not leading a project, you get an opportunity to do something that, yeah, maybe you've done it a 100 times before, but much like, like martial arts or something like that where you, like, practice the same thing over and over and over again and every single time you try and do it as an opportunity to perfect that one little thing, or to remind yourself of the fundamentals of the thing that you're doing.

Dave:

Mhmm. Or to take somebody else who's who's more junior than you and bring them along. Show them how to do a thing that they're like, for them, that is, like, brand new to them and they're super excited. You can draft off of that motivation.

Justin:

Yeah.

Dave:

It's you know, there's all these, like, little tricks to try and make the mundanity of the everyday work a day job that you just kinda have to do because it's the stuff that keeps the business moving.

Justin:

I think that point about There's it does seem like there are some features that really help with ongoing motivation. And one thing I've been reflecting on is over the summer, I hired this recent university grad simply because he needed a job. He he had no he he just graduated. It's hard out there for juniors. And I said, well, I've got an idea for a project.

Justin:

I'll pay you out of my own money to build it, and, then you'll have something to put on your resume and have something to put in your portfolio. And so we did this project together. And the the, which we launched, it's called swagfan.com. And what I found was he's 20 he was 27, so not a young kid, but I just couldn't believe how much energy he had compared to somebody who's in their forties. It just reminded me of that kind of, like, lightning bolt energy.

Justin:

And just to feel like as an older, wiser person, I could just direct this energy ever so slightly. And the things he didn't know were fascinating to me, you know, just like the he had a he was a fairly competent web developer, but there's just all of these things he had never experienced or never touched or and, you know, his his instincts are still quite, you know they're not quite there. They're developing. And so it was very fun to have somebody who you could say you could meet with them and and because of time restraints, like, constraints, we would meet maybe once a week. Okay.

Justin:

Let's show them what you've done. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, it's interesting that you did it that way. Well, here's some other thoughts about that, but let's just keep it this way just to see what happens. And and then we and then I'd say, well, here's a bunch of things here.

Justin:

Let's here's some things you can work on. And he would go away and come back, and he just had to solve so many problems on his own. And it was it was just so interesting to me. And then I contrasted that with what's the average of 4427? Average of 4427.

Justin:

35.5. Okay. So our average age was 35.5. And then I reflected on the average age of an employee at Transistor, which is in the forties. I think our youngest person is in their late thirties.

Justin:

And so one thing that I have been thinking about, I've talked about with John is, like, maybe we do need to just get some junior interns or some summer school summer students or something in here because it's that feature alone could be motivating. Like, the swag fan as a a project or a product was was interesting, but it's like not the it it's not like I was like, oh, this product's gonna change the world. It was just like something I wanted for myself and but what was motivating and energizing was working with Ferdinand, this this graduate who is just like, you know, just having that energy was so exciting. And so, yeah, I have I've been thinking about what are some of those elements we can bring in. It's also interesting talking to other people at other companies and going, you know, like, what makes you wanna stay there?

Justin:

What motivates you to stay there? And some of it is just very intangible. Like, you know, I love that we do a team retreat every year, or I just love that the rest of my team is wakes up 8 hours after me, and I get to, like, have these long interrupted periods of work. Like, everyone has those things, you know.

Dave:

So I am a huge proponent of having junior members of your team. People people earlier in their career. What Mhmm. I know a lot more about that in the engineering world

Justin:

Yeah.

Dave:

Than I do about, like, other disciplines. My suspicion is that this works is, like, regardless of discipline. But I know for sure it works really well in the engineering world. Yeah. I am self taught as an engineer.

Justin:

Okay.

Dave:

And so that predisposed me to being very willing and excited about the developer boot camps that came up 10, 15 years ago. Yeah. So I got I got involved in those very early as, like, a mentor and, like, helping and, like, this idea of, like, anybody can sort of teach themselves how to do something with, like, a little bit of mentorship and, like, with the right amount of curiosity and tenacity and then the right attitude. Like, those kinds of things all are what propel somebody through those, like, super early stages of growth. Mhmm.

Dave:

And that I also was watching companies be very, you know, everyone was looking for the ninja rock star, you know, senior engineer. The the one engineer is gonna 10 x the whatever.

Justin:

Yeah. So I

Dave:

was always predisposed to being sort of, like, very much against that. When I had an opportunity to build a team at Home Chef, we built it I mean, Home Chef as a company started from one of those boot camp grads who, like, went and built the the beginnings of it himself.

Justin:

That was the founder.

Dave:

That was the founder, which I, he was a he was assigned to me. I was his mentor in boot camp. So I got to watch him go from like, do all of this in the very beginning. The very interesting thing like, if you talk to talk to tech founders early start up people, like, and they and they're and they're like, who let me go hire my first engineer. Mhmm.

Dave:

None of them would tell you, hire a boot camp grad as your first engineer. Home Chef didn't. We started with, the very first full time engineer was another guy that I mentored and referred to to the founder, who was only a couple years out from boot camp Yeah. And had had a couple of experiences, but, like, not a ton. But, you know, even before that, that guy was, like, hiring his friends, hiring other people who who do you know that has any of these skills whatsoever?

Dave:

You know the guy who's going through the boot camp with you and, like, you'd fight through it together. The beginning of Home Chef started with more junior engineers than, you know, any other startup that I had been a part of. Right?

Justin:

Yeah.

Dave:

And there's something to that. Like, it being in the culture of the company, this idea of anybody, we're gonna care about the add the attitude and the motivation and the, what do you call it, the curiosity and tenacity to look outside of the boundaries of these skills that you have. And in service of, like, just doing more, doing better, following your curiosity and help and having that be directed about making this business go to whatever the next level is. And so when I had an opportunity to build that team with the CTO who's also very much on board with this, I think it was our 4th engineer that we hired, was an apprentice. Like, another person, like, right out of boot camp, they were their where their very first job.

Dave:

Even there was a front end guy that we'd hired, before that who had no back end experience whatsoever. And from within, like, 2 weeks of the dude starting, I was like, let's you know, he starts asking questions like, how does this controller work in Rails? I'm like, let me tell you about model view control. Whatever. Right?

Dave:

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I feel I feel like I got an opportunity to to, like, teach somebody Rails from the very beginning. The thing about that for me is that exactly all the things we've been talking about, you get to draft off of that energy and that excitement. Like, the excitement that comes from someone going from from nothing to hello world when when that is when they've never been able to do it before Mhmm.

Dave:

Is they're so excited in a way that a senior engineer who've done that who's done that 75,000 times can't possibly be excited about that, but put them that person next to a new person who's just learning that. And like that the glow that comes off of that is infectious.

Justin:

Yes. Yes. Well, I mean, I'm experiencing this with with, again, with Michael doing these customer interviews is, like, you know, it it reignited my excitement and passion about doing this kind of customer research and to get to teach him all of these things that I've thought a lot about and I've written a lot about, but haven't really I'm, like, dusting off all this these old things. And it's it's reignited, some excitement for me in, like, oh, let's look at this transcript. And look at the emotional triggers or the emotional nudges that move people along to the point where at some point way down that trail, they're taking out their credit card on the transistor website.

Justin:

Like, that's so fascinating to me. And so yeah, I felt this this energy. And, yeah, it'd be interesting to try to, like, operationalize this by saying, you know, okay, every summer, we're gonna hire 1 or 2 people, or 1 or 2, you know, interns or summer students or something like that. And getting some of that that energy and and bring down the average age of, you know, the the the we're a very old team. Like, for a tech team, we're we're, you know, this is, like, nobody is in their twenties.

Dave:

Mhmm. You keep saying age, and I I know exactly what you're talking about. I for myself, I would shift that to longevity in a career. Like, only because the goal should be that everybody finds their way to beginner's mind.

Justin:

Yeah.

Dave:

Right? Like, I don't care what age you are. I hope that I never retire this part of my brain that is excited and curious and interested in, like, learning new things. Yeah. I might practice that in different ways as I get older and older.

Dave:

But I wanna that's to me, that's like the the goal in life is to, like, constantly find a way to engage your curiosity. Yeah. To me, the benefit of doing this thing that you're talking about is that it it reminds everybody in the company about that it's okay to be that beginner person again. Mhmm. That's just so valuable.

Dave:

I have I have one more story if you're willing to

Justin:

share. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave:

And that is well, 2. The first is one of the like, I keep coming back to this experience when I was a mentor at one of the boot camps. I would spend all day I was working at Groupon at the time in their giant monolith application that was, you know, all kinds of fun to work in, but well above me in terms of, skill set. Yeah. So, like, I I would be there and spend all day beating my head up against some problem that, I just couldn't find a way to solve for any number of reasons.

Dave:

And it was so frustrating. I would leave the office feeling so dejected about I mean, like, all the imposter syndrome stuff. Right? Like, how could I

Justin:

Mhmm. I thought

Dave:

I was a senior engineer. There's how can I possibly not know how to get through blah blah blah whatever? And then I would, like, walk across the the city and go meet with my student, and, you know, he would I would encounter him experiencing the exact same problem, except it was I don't know the difference between instance variables and class words.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah.

Dave:

And I'm like, dude, I gotcha. Yeah. And And I would leave that experience going like, oh, I am still good at what I do. I there there is still this depth of knowledge that's underneath there, that is so valuable. We forget

Justin:

that That's such a good point.

Dave:

The teaching part is the is the way we get to, like, in in a little bit, like, rehashing the the beginner stuff is the the way that you remind yourself of just how much you have learned and grown, whatever. It's a it's a thing that I try and, emphasize with we had an apprenticeship program at Home Chef. Over the course of the, like, 9 years or whatever that I was there, we, had, I think, upwards of 15, apprentices come through. And every single one of them ended up becoming a software engineer 1 on our sorry. All but, 1.

Dave:

And that was not because they were unworthy. It was because we didn't have a position I could put them into. All of them becomes became software engineer ones. Most of them have stayed at the company for a significant portion of time. I mean, you know, 5, 6, 7 years.

Dave:

It's great. One of the things that I would tell those apprentices almost as soon as they would, like, get into that software engineer 1 and we had another apprentice coming up behind them was your job is to be that person's buddy. Your job is to help that person through all the things that you just learned. And and it's funny. You would see this, like, step level jump in confidence, in motivation, in all of these things.

Dave:

It's like when you're in it, you forget to notice just how far you've come. I kinda wonder if the same is true, actually, of, like, business owners and founders like like you where every day is like a little bit of a not a slog, but it's like it's incremental. And, you know, it's hard to take stock of Oh,

Justin:

it totally feels that.

Dave:

Like just how far you've come unless you're having conversations with people who are at a different level or an earlier point in that and you get an opportunity to retrain.

Justin:

I think you're right.

Dave:

One of the things that I learned at Home Chef in the last gosh. It was in, like, 2023 sometime. Like, kind of, like, right around fall, like, October ish. So we're, like, just before Thanksgiving, you know, break kind of thing. I had misconfigured our email, and so we had this admin@homechef.com email address that was, like, open to the world.

Dave:

Like, anybody could email it.

Justin:

Okay.

Dave:

And I think when I set it up, I was, like, assuming that what they what this would be would be some sort of, like, customer support sort of catch all that was tech focused. I had just had it forward to our general, like, tech team email that would, like, go to the whole tech team. And, occasionally, we would, like, receive this, like, really weird spammy kinda emails, and I go in and block them. And I I just I forgot that I had, like, set up this weird rule and, like, how it would get through. Yeah.

Dave:

One day, we get this email, and it's from somebody who says, I'm a student. I'm working on a project, and I would love to be I wanna I wanna, like, screen scrape your content. I wanna know if that's okay. And I was like first off, I thought, like, cynical me. I read this email, and I was like, this is spam.

Dave:

Like, this is this is garbage. Yeah. But a funny thing happened is because I went to the whole tech team in Slack, some of the people on my team started, like, like, commenting about it. Yeah. The person's name was Lila.

Dave:

And so they were, like, somebody sends some swag, some Home Chef swag to Lila, whatever. Right? So I was like, alright. The team is talking to this person. I, you know, I can't let I can't engage my own cynical brain about how this is, Like, I just had to assume this is like some bot something, whatever.

Dave:

Right?

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah.

Dave:

Yeah. Back, and I said, of course, it's a public website. You have you have access to screen scrape and do whatever you wanna do. I just you know, we ask that you don't sell any of the content or, you know, whatever. And I said, listen.

Dave:

If you're young and you're interested, you know, and you want some help on something, let me know. I'm happy to answer your questions. Yeah. This started off a saga of, like, weeks of me conversing with this high school student. Yeah.

Dave:

Who is using chat gpt to, like, write their responses back to me to try to be I don't know. Hilarious. But it's so great. And, you know, because the team was so excited about it, I felt compelled to, like, just basically copy and paste all of my back and forth with this person

Justin:

Yeah.

Dave:

Into the Slack channel so that they could sort of, like, read it, follow along. It was huge. The motivation left on the team of just being able to sort of, like, be part of that experience. Like, we ended up sending her, like, a bunch of swag and stuff, and I like, her her teacher contacted me. I talked to her mom.

Dave:

Like, it was like a whole thing. So great. Yeah. You can't manufacture those kinds of experiences. Like, the closest you can come is you can try and create a culture that that values those kinds of things.

Justin:

That's right. Yeah. You know

Dave:

what I mean? But it's so valuable. Like I said, like, you know, in that lull between Thanksgiving and Christmas Mhmm. You know, things kind of fell off, you know, after that. But, like, you could just see this person is like she's doing a bunch of stuff in Python.

Dave:

I don't know Python. So I was responding to her going like, hey. If there's some you know, if you need Python help, I got a data team. I can, like, you know, send send your way. And they were super excited, like, hey, we should tell her to try this.

Dave:

This is exact she's doing exactly what we do, and I would tell her, hey, you're doing exactly what our data team does all the time. Nice work.

Justin:

It's interesting. It just went through the whole organization in a way.

Dave:

So that channel I I created was, like, I forget what I named the channel. It was, like, Lila saga or something like that. Yeah. We got way more people than just the tech team into that channel. Yeah.

Dave:

To the point that, like, somebody on our supply chain team got a similar sort of email from somebody and asked me, like, what what did you like, I think they were nervous about, like, what were you worried about proprietary stuff? And I was like, no. Not at all. And, like, what is it good? Should we do this?

Dave:

And I was like, yes. You should absolutely do that.

Justin:

Yeah. Just for the motivational reasons.

Dave:

Exactly. It's huge.

Justin:

We've just been talking about motivation and aligning motivation within the constraints of an organization. You just left Home Chef. Why? Knowing what you know about, you know, keeping team members motivated within the constraints of the organization, what what caused you to to wanna leave? What was what could what couldn't you do inside of Home Chef that you're looking to do now?

Dave:

That's an interesting way to phrase it. I don't I didn't think of it in those terms.

Justin:

Okay.

Dave:

I don't I have been sort of, like, working my way out of Home Chef for years now. And it just would be like, oh, now is not really a good time to do it. Or, like, oh, we just lost a bunch of members of our team, and I got you know, I'm not gonna leave the team in a lurch is kinda like how I would always feel. One of the reasons why it happened this year and in the way that it did is because I'd finally gotten the team to a point where it was pretty self sustainable. Yeah.

Dave:

And there comes a time when there's just there's only so much not doing anything that I can feel comfortable with. Yeah. You know, I was my job became like, I'm gonna be around and available to the people on the team, but, you know, they're pretty self sufficient. They don't really need me. And and, you know, I had several levels of managers and tech leads and, you know, several sub teams.

Dave:

And, again, you're managing 50 people. Mhmm. You know, I wasn't managing all those people directly. I kind of systematized myself out of a job is a little bit how it felt. And, again, it comes back to motivation in the sense that, like, there's a version how to put it?

Dave:

There's a version of of, you know, like, the person who who took my position. This was this represented a a pretty large jump in size of team for that person in terms of, like, what they were managing, a much different relationship for that person between, you know, him and the team and him and the rest of the company. It represented something that was, like, big and important and the thing that he was super excited and motivated about. Right? This represented a challenge to him.

Dave:

This was no longer a challenge for me.

Justin:

Yeah. But, you know, it's not

Dave:

that I was unhappy. I stayed at the company for, like I said, years in

Justin:

Yeah.

Dave:

Some version of the state. In fact, I would say, like, the last year of my time there was mostly transitioning out of my role and transitioning helping the new person transition into their role, helping all the people on the team, like, like, deal with the fact that we are changing this, you know, changing leaders and all this stuff. All of that was huge, hugely valuable for me and very rewarding to get to talk to people and, you know, in a weird way. Like, most people when they leave a job, they put them in put in their 2 weeks or if they're really generous, they give a month and then they and then they they're out. They don't often get a chance to, like, know who's taking over for them.

Dave:

They often don't know that they're, like whether or not they left the team in a good spot. I know all of that stuff with certainty Mhmm. Which is just a very different and very satisfying way to, like, leave a company that I really care about a lot. And to know that I've left it in good hands and in hands that are, like, motivated to help, you know, to take it to whatever the next level is. I think that's where where I was what I was trying to figure out how to say is.

Dave:

I think everybody has a certain amount of motivation to do, you know, a a business from one step to the next. Mhmm. Not everyone has this has enough motivation to go from that step to whatever's after that. You know? Like, these growing, like, orders of magnitude take a certain level of energy and a little bit of dumb idealism.

Dave:

You know what I mean? To, like or optimism or whatever to just be like, oh, and then we're gonna go to the next.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Dave:

I learned this, like, in a very early time in my career. I was a graphic designer, and I was working next to this this other graphic designer who was a very senior designer. And we were working at this this, like, very early dotcom company from, like, way back in, like, the early like, the late nineties, early 2000. That company, like, went through in the span of, like, a year, they went through 3 rebrands. And this designer had to, like, rebrand the company every time.

Dave:

And then, like, when it came to the third one, they came to her like, alright. It's time to go again. And she was like, I'm out, man. Like, I did it 2 times. I I can't come up with another whole, like, brand identity for a company that's doing basically the same thing.

Dave:

Like, I'm out. I don't have the energy to do it. And that's a little bit how I feel. It's like, all this is great, and the company is doing well. They're gonna they're gonna do great.

Dave:

The guy who's taking over for me is gonna do great, in a way that, like, I just you know, I've I've done I've done this a bunch now, and I'm ready to go back to something a little bit smaller, a little bit I wanna reclaim some of that early stage Home Chef feeling that I got to have, that I didn't I don't I didn't have anymore.

Justin:

Do you feel like you have you because you're exploring now. What are you kind of exploring? Like, what are you looking to do, do you think?

Dave:

Well, let's be clear. For the last couple of 2 months, my last day was, like, middle of October.

Justin:

Yeah. It's

Dave:

not been, like, a long time. And so most of what I've been exploring is, like, house projects that have been on a list and haven't been I mean, if that's if you it's funny. Like, if anybody from Home Chef sees this video, they will laugh because this background of having guitar going well just didn't it was a blank wall behind me constantly. So, like, rearranging my office was, like, a thing.

Justin:

Yeah.

Dave:

I'm sort of riding out the rest of the year, at the moment. I wanna get back to some mentorship. I don't know if that necessarily needs to be, like, crazy technical. I need to brush up on my own technical skills to be quite frankly with Frank, which I'm actually very excited to do. Mhmm.

Dave:

I kind of I feel like I have a lot of experience growing teams from in this one specific circumstance and, seeing that grow from from nothing to what we grow to. So I have a feeling I hope that that experience is valuable to other people. And I would love to give, you know, advising, you know, people or companies or whatever an opportunity or a shot at that. Mhmm. I don't know what that looks like as a job.

Dave:

Mhmm. I feel like I could do that for a little while. And then all of a sudden, all of my experience is gonna be too far away from reality or whatever to be, like, to be warranted or something or valuable. But I think there's an opportunity. 6 months, maybe a year of, doing that.

Dave:

And, again, my hope is that just meeting people and talking to them and and that one of those people is gonna be the next founder that is looking for a cofounder or looking for somebody Yeah. That I am in a perfect position to sort of, like, help or join or or do.

Justin:

So you're you're really giving yourself exploration sabbatical?

Dave:

Pretty much.

Justin:

That's I I actually really like that idea of Derek Sivers has this great post on, change careers like Tarzan And and the the metaphor is if if you wanna change careers, don't let go of the old vine until you've got a hold of the new vine, which is good advice. But I think the challenge of that is there's also just a different if you can. This idea of just giving yourself space for sabbaticals is something that John and I have been talking about as well, like giving ourselves 3 months or 6 months or whatever to just take time away and explore. Because I I think there's something about that that is and so for you to give yourself some time to explore and just, you can do something like, you know, without constraints of having to go to a job every day that I I think is harder to do when you're still in you know, you're still going to work every day or whatever.

Dave:

So I've had a version of this not nearly as long as I have runway for right now, but at several points in my career. Mhmm. Sometimes they were chosen, like, I'm gonna take 3 months off because I'm contracting and nobody needs me right now. So I'm gonna go take the next 3 months. I saved up some money and then back at it.

Dave:

And I knew I with some certainty that I could come back after a couple months and another contracting gig would be available to me.

Justin:

Yeah. Sometimes they were

Dave:

not so chosen. Like, I got laid off from a job and, you know, honestly, like, John and I both got laid off from the same place and at at roughly the same time. And so, that was a a really formative honestly, like, the beginning, if you if you will, in a certain way of, like, looking at it of how I ended up where I'm at right now was that moment getting, laid off and and realizing that I can make some drastic changes in my financial world. Mhmm. I sold my car, and I paid off a bunch of debt and, like, was like, how can I lean can I be?

Justin:

Mhmm.

Dave:

And was able to ride that out for a couple of months until I started contracting. And then that again, like, that that whole thing. And I needed that time. I mean, that was the other thing too is I I don't know the like, leaving Home Chef is not, like, leaving a horrible situation, like John and I were leaving way back then. But, you know, I needed that time to, like, let go of the baggage of that experience and not bring that baggage into the next thing, which is the thing that I find the most.

Dave:

Like, when you're hiring people, you're not just hiring them for their skill set. You're also hiring them, and they're gonna bring the like, all of the good and bad baggage that comes from their previous job into your day to day until they've fully acclimated to your to what it means to work at Transistor. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's why I like hiring people is such a hard hard thing is, like and why it changes the company in a weird way.

Dave:

Every single person you add to the team is gonna change the team. And, you know, you get to blunt that a little bit as the team gets larger and larger. But, you know, those are the things to be watching out for. Those are the things that I care about when I'm interviewing somebody. I'm not interviewing them about their skills.

Dave:

I'm interviewing them about, like, okay. What things are you gonna hold on to so tightly that are so at odds with the things that we care about?

Justin:

Yeah.

Dave:

And then I know I'm gonna have to fight with you over and over and over again till you can either assimilate or you've shifted my my point of view a little bit your way.

Justin:

Yeah. Is is is part of your purpose right now to get rid of some of that baggage or is bag is that just you're gonna have that no matter what?

Dave:

I think everyone has it no matter what. I also don't think it's necessarily bad. Like, I think, you know, baggage gets a bad rap. It would be natural for me to come into like, if I took another job, like, right now today, another VP of engineering job of some place that was relatively small, my instinct would be, how can I do exactly what I did at Home Chef over again? And to not just to not to realize or to not realize that the thing that made Home Chef go the way that it did is that I was in the moment responding to the things that I was seeing and making a judgment call based on reality.

Dave:

And, sure, like, your your history and experience and all that stuff comes to play. But if you try and replicate those decisions exactly, you're, like, ignoring the reality in front of you. And so I think for me, it's just about putting all of this experience into some context. Yeah. And and distance so that it's not my knee jerk.

Dave:

I'm gonna go do this immediately. Or, like, this is my my quick answer for everything. In some ways, I think that's the reason why I wanna advise people going through this as I get an opportunity to make suggestions, but not be the guy who's actually doing it. Mhmm. I get to watch people, like, take or leave those suggestions and see how they turn out.

Dave:

I get to challenge a bunch of the things that, I think of as big successes or maybe big failures in in the course of my career at Home Chef through the course through the course of advising other people and, you know, and seeing how that goes.

Justin:

Yeah. I mean, you said that one of the things you like doing is being on Zoom calls all day.

Dave:

I do.

Justin:

That's that's that's that is such a that is such a a a peculiar skill set. Like, people that like that, I think it's you gotta lean into that if that's one of your strengths.

Dave:

Well, I you mean, I don't know if it's a strength. I think it's something that I hear people talk about Zoom fatigue.

Justin:

Mhmm.

Dave:

And I understand that it's a thing. I I certainly don't wanna put that experience down in any way, but I just don't even I can't relate to that experience whatsoever. To me, I I feel like I have just as rich or, experience talking with people, over over screens

Justin:

Mhmm. As I do

Dave:

when I'm sitting in person with them. I don't know if that's, like, just something about my personality that makes that possible, or I don't know what it is. But I find that to have been I find when we moved to COVID and everybody was remote, I was like, look at how I'm not late to every meeting, because I don't have to go and, like, race across the office to go find whatever other next meeting room. And and it's just all these things that, like, this, like, low level anxiety that just went away for me. You like that?

Dave:

I know I can flip I can be I can be downstairs in my kitchen making coffee and upstairs in my office in 2 minutes and make it to my meeting and be and and the richness of that conversation is not lost.

Justin:

If anyone out there is, like, interested in talking to you about your next thing or advising or anything like that, what do you want them to get a hold of you? Is there a way they can get a

Dave:

hold of you? Sure. You can email me, dave@juntacreative.com, which we can put that in the show notes or whatever. I'll put

Justin:

it in the show notes. Yeah. I think this whole thing is fascinating. Just like you quitting this job that you've been at a long time and then exploring, the space, you know, and trying to figure out what you wanna do next. And and, basically, it sounds like you're just you're looking to put yourself in the path of some collisions that might lead to something else.

Justin:

Right? Like, that's the whole purpose. Yeah.

Dave:

That's exactly right. In some ways, it's not that dissimilar from the thing that you were talking about with founders and startups in the past year of, like, retiring. I don't I can't speak to what they're gonna go do next or what they're interested in, but I I feel fairly similar in and it's a very similar kind of experience just that it not at the founder level. You know?

Justin:

Yeah. Well, this has been great, man. I I gotta run for a dentist appointment, but let's do it again soon, man.

Dave:

Anytime. Anytime. I have time as you know. So I'm around. But listen, if I don't talk to you before, the holidays, have a great holiday.

Justin:

Yeah. You too.

Dave:

I hope you

Justin:

enjoyed that conversation. Now it's time for me to thank our supporters on Patreon. Pascal from Sharpen.page, rewardful.com, Greg Park, Mitchell Davis from recruitkit.com.au, Marshall Folly from wearebold.af, Bill Kondo, who is atmavrck on all the socials, Ward from memberspace.com, Evandro Sassy, Austin Loveless, Michael Sitver, Dan Buddha, Colin Gray, and Dave Junta. See everybody. Thanks for listening.