People Strategy with Tyler King
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Brian Casel : [00:00:00] It's open threads. It's my podcast. I'm Brian Casel. Welcome to it. Back on the show today is Tyler King. Again he is the founder of Less Annoying CRM and in today's conversation we got into all aspects of growing a team in a software company. I think they're up to around 20 people over there at at a Less Annoying hq, which is an actual physical hq in St. Louis Missouri. So we talked about the trade offs between remote and and hiring in-house, and it was actually interesting to hear why they chose St. Louis. They, they intentionally chose to build their company in St. Louis specifically for the people there, which was interesting. Another part of this conversation, which I really found interesting is this fellowship program that Tyler and his company have put together for people who are brand new to, [00:01:00] or not even in the industry yet, they're just sort of exploring it, and underrepresented minority groups in this industry, which as we all know is definitely a thing that companies struggle with to grow a diverse workforce.

They've been able to grow a really unique fellowship program to introduce potential people to this industry. If they're kind of interested in tech, this is a perfect opportunity for them to actually come into a real company in the real world. Learn and see what it's like. And that is the first step toward building a career in this industry. So, they've been able to do that as a successful saas. It's been super cool to watch. So yeah, I asked 'em all about how that's actually structured and how they do it and, and sort of the benefit that they, and like the win-win nature of all that. Today's episode is brought to you by ZipMessage. That's my product. It's for async messaging with your team and with your customers and clients, and it's really cool. You should try. But I will tell you a bit more about that later on. For now, let's talk to Tyler about people.

[00:02:00] Tyler King, great to have you back on the show here.

Tyler King: Yeah thanks. Good to be here

Brian Casel : So, you know, another thing that I think is interesting about what you've been been talking about on, on your podcast, which by the way, I definitely highly recommend, I'm gonna talk about it in the intro, but startup, Startup to something or Startup to last.

Tyler King: Startup to last

Brian Casel : It's definitely one of my favorite bootstrapper podcasts cuz you guys really get into like the, the nitty gritty, which is, which is good. I, I want to talk to you just in general about building a team as a software company. We, we got into it a little bit in, in the last episode, but I think we're, we're actually like total opposites in a bunch of ways when it comes to our teams, you know? But this is the first time that I'm starting to really grow like a software focused company. All my stuff before has been like a productized service and like I come from the world of a have always been a hundred percent remote. Like even today, our small team on ZipMessage we are literally [00:03:00] in five different continents now, which is insane.

Tyler King: Yeah that's wild

Brian Casel : But in Audience Ops, actually most of the team, we were like 25 people. Almost all of them were US based, but all remote. But I always lean heavily on contractors. even like what you might consider, like, close to like part-time employees, but like, they're, they're contractors and they, and they are like decidedly like, I'm a, I'm a freelancer, but I want a couple of really good retainers that are just long term, you know? And that's, that's seemed to work well. But yeah. Why don't we start off like, what, what's the makeup of your team these days?

Tyler King: Yeah So we're 19 people plus we do have one contractor but that's cuz we tried to hire her full-time and-

Brian Casel : Mm-hmm

Tyler King: -she didn't want to. So she kind of had all the onboarding of a full-time employee so you can kind of think of it like 20. And yeah it's the team is I wanna say something like eight CRM coaches or customer service people. Eight, me, sales, BizDev person and a [00:04:00] marketing person. So it it's not like the normal breakdown you'd have normally you go on other company's websites and like see who they've got It's like half marketing and sales normally. So we're way under invested in that but overinvested in customer service probably

Brian Casel : What do you call it? Is it the, like an apprentice ship program or intern program?

Tyler King: Yeah we call it a coding fellowship which is not a very self-evident name but we wanted it to look fancy on a resume so that people would be inclined to apply for it basically.

Brian Casel : And so those are are, are those like paid?

Tyler King: Yeah. Yeah. So we've done a lot of internships in the past. And internships are great but the problem is like for someone to get to the point where they can get an like an internship as a say a software engineer they already have to overcome a lot of hurdles which are it's easier for you know people from certain backgrounds to achieve that than others. So we kind of wanna say well how do we hire a more diverse group of people if every single like college junior majoring in computer science, not every single one but the vast, vast majority, all kind of share similar backgrounds. And [00:05:00] so the coding fellowship is basically what a like what if you had something for the year before an internship. So for someone who knows they wanna get into tech they haven't quite figured out how to overcome those hurdles yet and we're just kind of the stepping stone for them to get an internship the next year. And so it is paid but it they're not working for us it's about them learning and building an app for themselves. Yeah So there's a lot of like curriculum to it, there's like lessons and stuff but then they also pick everyone picks their own project and and we help them build it.

Brian Casel : That's super cool. I wanna come back to that in just a minute. But just let, let's just stick with like, generally like building a team around a software company. So you guys have been around for like over 10 years. And is, is your entire team local? You're, you're in St. Louis?

Tyler King: St Louis St Louis, yeah. So we started I was in San Francisco and my brother who's the other co-founder was in Boston and then we hired a few people remotely. So we actually started out fully remote

Brian Casel : Is, is your brother like in, in the business like day

Tyler King: mm-hmm He's not like in a people management role. He's an individual [00:06:00] contributor but yeah he's full-time dev-ops person.

Brian Casel : Oh, awesome. And he's technical?

Tyler King: Yes Yeah So we're like really misaligned for what you'd want founders to be like. I'm a software engineer by trade and I'm the less technical one so we basically have nothing on the sales, marketing, all that stuff we've got no expertise on.

Brian Casel : That would be super cool to be in a business with my brother. But he and I, professionally, are complete polar opposites. You know, like I, on the internet building software. My brother runs a farm. He has 40 cows. They, do milking and yogurt and cheese and yeah, he's, getting hands dirty everyday Yeah

Tyler King: But hear me out here This .My dream has always been, not like my my one ultimate dream, but something I've always wanted to do is find, we talked about this bit in the last episode, like a domain expert who knows this thing that software engineers know nothing about.

Brian Casel : Mm-hmm.

Tyler King: I bet he could give you some pretty interesting insights about software or technology that farmers could use.

Brian Casel : Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, and that, I mean, talk about it like a [00:07:00] niche. I mean, that's the, stuff

Tyler King: Actually I my cousin-in-law builds software for farmers and yeah it sounds

Brian Casel : Yeah, yeah, for sure. The, the only thing is like, most farmers are like dead broke, but

Tyler King: Yeah, true.

Brian Casel : So, it started out just you and your brother building

Tyler King: Yeah just built it. And you know we both kind of did a little marketing I did more than than he did but we both we just kind of grew it to the point where we could afford to start hiring people. Brought on a customer service person to free up our time and then grew from there.

Brian Casel : Well, so I've been self-employed since 2008 I've been hiring remotely since the very beginning. In, in the early days, I was doing web design consulting, hiring, hiring out other freelancers and then all the different startups over the years. Always hired, like I've been a hundred percent remote. I, I've never had a coworker, employee contractor, local in my, in my office. And early on, and this is still the case today, 13 years later as a bootstrapper, today I mostly [00:08:00] bootstrap.. But, it always starts with a money thing. Like it's just more cost efficient to hire remotely. Like yes, overseas, of course, but then even, in the US I mean, I live in Connecticut. A lot of what made Audience Ops work so well was like hiring writers in the Midwest where living is a lot less than where I'm at, you know, I mean.

Tyler King: I hear you. I I think that's especially has to be a part of a services business cuz with with the service business you have to charge the customer more than you're paying the employee and there's a very one-to-one map for that. With software I I don't think that has to be as true. Like the value you can get from one employee is basically unlimited, I mean practically speaking it is limited but it's not like a they put in an hour of time I can bill for an hour of time kind of thing.

Brian Casel : Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. But even like thinking like the early days of Less Annoying, how large did you grow when you were at the point? Like, did you start with a full-time salary? Did you start with a part-time person? Like what did that look like?

Tyler King: Yeah I wanna be clear that like where we are now is due to [00:09:00] a lack of creativity not... This was not some grand plan. Basically we'd gotten enough revenue that either Bracken, my brother, or I could go full time. And we were talking like, "Is it gonna be you? Is it gonna be me? What are we gonna do here?" And then I forget who suggested it but someone's like you know we're both pretty comfortable like making enough to get by and working on the side. What if we just hired somebody else. So it was very much like the tail wagging the dog here where we're like Well someone's getting a full-time salary. Which of us Is it gonna be. And then it ended up being a friend of mine, Michael, who came on as our first employee.

Brian Casel : Oh, okay. So you, you started paying them, like before you started, like paying yourselves?

Tyler King: I was getting some but yeah, not not a full-time I I was first full-time employee was neither of the founders.

Brian Casel : Yeah. Yeah. Very cool.

Tyler King: Which I'm not sure I would plan but And that that kind of like informed a lot of other stuff where a a lot of I don't know I kind of feel like you can't plan everything. Like the culture sort of took over from there. Like why are we in St. Louis - because after we'd hired three or four people they were like I don't wanna [00:10:00] work remotely. Which goes against every narrative right, that everybody wants to. And we're like well we we can't hire in the Bay Area. Like bootstrapping in San Francisco is an absolutely stupid idea so we gotta move somewhere cheap and so we moved to St. Louis.

Brian Casel : Oh, really? So you're not from St. Louis?

Tyler King: I am from St Louis but I was not planning on moving back aside from that like it was time to grow the team.

Brian Casel : Huh? And, and the people that you had at the time, did they move for that or were they already in St. Louis. .

Tyler King: So we basically said anyone who was hired as a remote person we don't wanna like bait and switch you so you can stay remote if you want or you can move. So two people moved to St. Louis three people stayed remote. Of those three, Bracken is the only one still with the company and a big part of that is like even if you love remote work I think it's not great being of the few remote workers at a company that's mostly in person.

Brian Casel : Yeah, yeah, I could see that. And so it was like a conscious decision, clearly, like early on, like, okay, we will need to grow the [00:11:00] team as time goes on. Let's just decide to grow it in, this city. And

Tyler King: Yeah that's correct Yeah we put a lot and I it's not like we just said Well we're leaving San Francisco let's go to St. Louis we looked at a lot of cities and thought pretty pretty deeply about it And it was a combination of like low cost of living but every city or a lot of cities -

Brian Casel : mm-hmm

Tyler King: - have that. But it was like what cities have a low cost of living, the right culture for customer service, cuz customer service is super undervalued in most tech hubs, and then the final thing was like what's the pool you recruit from. And there are only a few mid-size cities in the country with top tier universities and St. Louis

Brian Casel : Mm

Tyler King: is one of them. So we were basically deciding between St Louis, uh kind of the Raleigh- Durham area, Pittsburgh, Nashville, I think, Baltimore maybe.

Brian Casel : Cool. Yeah, that makes sense. Like the other thing that I'm like always jealous of friends who have successful saas with large teams is the in person like camaraderie. And, and I hear you talking about doing these like [00:12:00] office parties and stuff and like before I, you know, before 2008, I was employed at a, at a very small web design shop in New York City. And I used to love, like hanging out in person and getting beers with coworkers and, and doing things like that. And even a lot of our folks in our industries who are fully remote, they do the retreat thing. They fly everyone in to a fun location and, and you do that a couple times a year. And it's one of my dreams. I I would love to grow ZipMessage to a point where we can do that sort of thing. But the, but like the reality is like we are so far away from that, like financially, like being viable that and I used to think there, there was a time, not, not long ago, like in the early days of ZipMessage where I was like, If I'm gonna start to grow the team, let's try to be close in time zones for logistics. But also like, I would love to fly everyone or travel everyone to a certain location and, and hang out a few times a year.

But then ultimately for me, the like take the financial stuff outta the picture, going [00:13:00] remote, I'm curious how you think about this. Like it's so much more about the pool of talent out there. I mean, being able to open it up worldwide or, or like, at least nationwide. I mean, to me that's like a huge advantage. Not that in person companies can't overcome it, but like, just for example, like, like Claire, our, our marketing coordinator, I, I've had so many, like in the last episode we were talking about marketing and how it's so hard and, and even so hard to hire for. That's one of the hardest things about marketing is hiring people because there are so many quote unquote marketers who you can't like, review their code or their design portfolio to know if they're good or not, you know? And she was like, out of all the applicants that I've had, like, she was the only one who I, who I sort of know and I've worked with and I, and I know was a great fit, except she's in Australia, you know. So it's like, that [00:14:00] kind of is difficult. We work around it cuz we're fully async but like, you know, she's just the best person available. Like, there, there are no other options. So it's like, yeah.

Tyler King: I yeah I have a lot of thoughts on this. I mean first of all, being in a city like St. Louis you have to acknowledge we are not gonna be able to hire domain experts if we have this in person requirement. We have to train people up which is easy-ish for customer service and software engineering cuz like we know how to do those really well. One of the reasons I said we're so understaffed on marketing and sales is like we don't have anyone with that expertise to then go out and hire and train an entry level person. So it is tough. Instead you could be based in New York or San Francisco and just hire people there but of course it's much more competitive.

Brian Casel : Mm-hmm.

Tyler King: You you're definitely missing out on a ton of talent even if it is New York or whatever like a a huge market. You're missing out on the rest of the world.

But but I mean there's a pretty clear parallel I think with how bootstrapped [00:15:00] businesses think about their whole business model which is like we're gonna find a niche and we're going to own that niche instead of trying to play the same game that everybody else does and go mass market

Brian Casel : mm-hmm.

Tyler King: yes you can hire anyone in the world but also you're competing with every company in the world. There are some people in St. Louis who want to work at a good tech company and want to work in person and there are very few options for them. And we kind of own that - I shouldn't say we own that market, we're still a small fish even by St Louis standards but like there's a lot less competition if you just focus on those people.

Brian Casel : I could see that. I mean, and, and I'm seeing this, this interesting, I'm sure you see it too in, you know, since pandemic times. I'm just seeing a lot more people applying for roles, especially marketing roles .Because they're trying to leave a career as a teacher or leave a career in, in some corporate job to try to find a, an internet, internet based startup that, that has a role with with the same skill sets even though it's, it's completely different. it's an opportunity for them to work remotely. Like I see a lot of [00:16:00] that in my applications inbox all the time.

Tyler King: Yep

Brian Casel : But the thing is like the people who are, even if they have the right talent and skills, they're not necessarily remote working people. That's a certain style of professional. To be like, comfortable and actually thrive as a remote worker and, an asynchronous worker too I find. Like if you, if you need to be on calls and meetings and in person and that's your thing, like, it doesn't matter how talented you are, you're just not gonna work as, as a teammate.

So I wonder in your case, like if there's the opposite effect, right? Like local people who just seek out in person roles or, or you seek people out who, like, they don't necessarily have to check the box of like, being good at remote. they're just great in person.

Tyler King: Yeah And yeah and I mean a lot of people hate remote work. Not the majority I I think like I'm talking about a minority but like double digit percent.

We just did a three week [00:17:00] period, we do this twice a year, where three weeks at a time it's fully remote just so people can go travel or whatever. So in August we did that. And one day I remoted in Like I I joined the video call for our weekly meeting like 12 people were at the office. And I was like What is going on here You know you don't have to be there And they're like Well we wanted to come in today. There are actually people out there, counter to the narrative that like that.

Brian Casel : Mm-hmm.

Tyler King: But yeah I think you're right. So if I if I were making this decision Like I didn't think this through at the time. But if you're going for the in person route like we did you've gotta say well we need to have a company culture that appeals to those people. It's probably more extroverted people. It's probably like I think a smaller city really helps with this because no one's commute is more than like fifteen minutes.

Brian Casel : Yeah.

Tyler King: Whereas like in the Bay Area, my friends there, they're like Well I'm on the bus for an hour and a half every day both ways That's why they wanna work remote.

Brian Casel : Yep

Tyler King: And then the flip side is if I was building a remote team I'd probably be like it's probably older people who are more established in life. Like they don't need to make friends and stuff at [00:18:00] work. Not like old old but you know

Brian Casel : Mm-hmm.

Tyler King: Married, living in the suburbs type of people are a lot more likely to prefer remote work I think.

Brian Casel : I find like any, anyone with kids, it's like a huge benefit to be remote.

Tyler King: Yeah. And probably not coincidental Like I think the average age at Less Annoying ,it's still fairly young, but it's probably like early thirties and only two people have kids like it's a group that's self-selected into a different lifestyle. Living in the city,

You know wanting more social fulfillment out of work than you would get remotely.

Brian Casel : Yeah one thing I I've always felt that we miss out on and maybe this is it's just not my thing as, as a leader or, or a weakness is, is like building the culture and keeping a strong culture. You know, like, I felt in Audience Ops and I feel it again in in ZipMessage now where it's like, we're always talking about work. We have a Slack channel. We try to post some photos of our kids and pets and travel stuff when, when we can. But beyond that, like we don't have much [00:19:00] culture here. It's just...

Tyler King: Is that okay though? Like I I've gone back and forth like maybe that's fine Maybe people don't wanna get that type of thing from their work.

Brian Casel : I don't know. I tend to sense, I, I haven't run a company myself with this, but from everyone that I speak to, probably you included, is like, you get actual value for the company and for the work by having these friendship relationships grow. Right. Or, or like, when I think about doing a team retreat in the future, it's not gonna be to go work somewhere. It's, it's like, let's just go somewhere to bring everyone in and we're all just gonna have fun for, for two or three days just to have that, like, build it into the relationship, you know?

Tyler King: Yeah Yeah There's definitely some value in that. Yeah. At the same time there are people out there who like if you go on Hacker News and read the comments there are people who are like, Give me my commands

Brian Casel : Mm-hmm

Tyler King: I will do them.

Brian Casel : Yeah

Tyler King: And like I'm not saying you should every company should not be built around that person but probably like there should be a [00:20:00] company for that person.

Brian Casel : Yeah

Tyler King: Like we've had interns in the past who are really, really good that we didn't give offers to And then when someone would call me and say Hey can you give a recommendation for this person I'd say This person will be great in this environment. And I'm like Is that your environment Yes or no I think you ju like everyone just needs to decide what they're trying to do.

Brian Casel : Yeah.

Yeah,

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Okay, back to the show.

Brian Casel : So, alright, like, before we go, I want to hear more about the, now, I forgot the name of it. Not, not the apprenticeship program,

Tyler King: The fellowship

Brian Casel : right. So like, you described it a little bit early on. Where are you finding these folks and what I'm curious about is like, [00:22:00] what goes into the work for you and your employees to take time out of their actual work to show them a thing. Or two or to teach them and, and, and all that kind of stuff.,

Tyler King: Yeah let me start by just saying I acknowledge upfront that this is not a high ROI activity. And if the reason you're running a business is to maximize shareholder value and exit you probably shouldn't do this But that's not my primary driver anymore.

Brian Casel : Yeah, but we have the benefit as as bootstrappers to do things like this, right?

Tyler King: Yeah exactly. And everyone at the company, myself included, gets just gets a ton of fulfillment out of it. So it's worth doing but it's not not for the money. So yeah Where do we find people. Well the the way we structure the program is it's full time during the summer like an internship. Very few people who are not current college students can do that. So we've tried looking outside of colleges but it's like how many adults with jobs are gonna like quit their job for three months

Brian Casel : Yeah

Tyler King: to do this, Like nobody. So we've kind of settled on okay it's gotta be college students. We've dabbled with [00:23:00] Like what level of experience should they have. We've hired people for this who like literally didn't even own computers and like had never didn't even know the tech industry was a thing all the way through computer science majors who just weren't experienced enough yet for an internship. We've had a lot more success with the people who are up that ladder. I think entrepreneurs like to tell themselves they can solve all the world's problems sometimes or at least in San Francisco they do. We found that if someone wasn't already pretty close to being in tech like one summer's not enough time to change their life.

it all like they they love the summer, they get paid, they learn a lot but then they just go off and none of those people ended up in tech anyway. Whereas last summer we had six coding fellows, three of them coming into the summer said they were majoring in computer science but they were thinking about dropping out cause they were like I'm not sure this is for me or whatever. At the end of the summer all six said I know this is for me I know I can get a job in tech.

Brian Casel : That's

Tyler King: that's where the impact is I think.

Brian Casel : That's so cool. Cuz I, I think about like back when I was in college, you know, [00:24:00] and, and I jumped around majors a couple times and like, yeah. Like, and this is partly a big reason why I'm kind of down on college in, in general these days. Like when I think about my kids growing up, like, is college really gonna be important?

And because everything I learned about the web and I didn't major in web design or computer science or anything like that, like I did audio production. But then after college, I got an internship at a web design shop, and they paid me for that time. And that took me from amateur to professional, and then I was off and running in that industry from there. Like seeing it in, in real life is like a thousand times more valuable than hearing about it in a classroom, you know?

Tyler King: Yeah when we hire interns, not even fellows, but like people who pass a real interview. They come in, three years of college experience, don't know how to use Git, have never gotten a real code review in their life. They have no idea how deployment works. They have no idea how performance of anything works aside from like time complexity in an [00:25:00] algorithm. I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2007 with a computer science degree. That's the main school we recruit from now. The curriculum has barely changed since 2007.

Brian Casel : I, I bet. Yeah. I was talking with Ben Orenstein on, on this show, a couple episodes back about, this. And I sometimes regret not getting a CS degree because now I've, had to like hack together these backend skills later in my career. Which has been fine from a getting to a point of like being able to build a product standpoint. But like, I, I do lack the deep knowledge that a CS degree of like how it works from, from the inside out. I sort of regret that sometimes, but like, but our industry just moves so fast. The tech, like you're just not gonna see the real stuff. And seems true on from the business side too, like get learning how to get customers and, and all that like, and hiring, like you don't learn that in school, you know?

Tyler King: Yeah a business degree is about how to succeed working at a giant Fortune 500 company.

Brian Casel : Like how to work a spreadsheet like

Tyler King: Yeah exactly if I can give a quick [00:26:00] shout out So cuz a good chunk of our dev team do not have a traditional background in computer science. There's a book called The Imposter's Handbook which uh, I don't know if you've heard of it but, a number of people including our lead developer who's the you know the strongest developer on the team now. He majored in theater, learned to code at Less Annoying and then read that book and it gave him enough of a foundation that when I talk about computer science concepts with him I don't feel like I know more than he does.

Brian Casel : So like, what types of things would say one of your actual engineers do to like pull off time and teach one of the apprentices?

Tyler King: Yeah we're trying to get more structured about this. So we kind of made a commitment as a company well sorry. Historically the answer has been like there's no system just be reactive. Which isn't how anyone should be but like if someone if someone needs your time give it to them.

Brian Casel : Or is it sort of like on the apprentice to say like, Look, look, you're gonna get out of this what you, what you want to get out of it? Like go ask questions, go be curious, poke around, that thing?

Tyler King: Yeah there's a lot of that. So I [00:27:00] normally run the fellowship and I'm in the process of kind of gradually transitioning to someone else. Where I like teach lessons, help them like structure the summer and stuff like that. And then each fellow gets paired with one developer as like their technical mentor. That's the person who's gonna be like doing code reviews helping them troubleshoot like, Hey I can't figure out how to do this, How do I do this. So it's a combination of like me doing one to many communication and project planning and then each developer has a mentee. And basically yeah if they submit a poll request -review it, if they ask for help - give them help. It's pretty unstructured.

Brian Casel : Do you actually have them like work on like real parts of the app, even though you might not

Tyler King: even

Brian Casel : actually merge their stuff into production? Like let them hack on little features or bugs in Less Annoying?

Tyler King: No, we we do not. And they want to and I think it would be really good for them to. The thing is it is a discriminatory program, in that it's specifically for people from underrepresented groups. I'm not sure of the legality of discriminating when hiring someone and then having them do work for the company I think that's illegal.[00:28:00]

Brian Casel : Yeah.

Tyler King: So they are not employees. We give them a stipend. It's not like W-2 wages and we are very careful to make sure they don't do any work for the company so that there could be no confusion about them being employees.

Brian Casel : Interesting. Super cool

Tyler King: But we have hired some of them back as full-timers and as interns the following summer so it, you know, it's not our primary recruiting

Brian Casel : Is that pretty common, like part of your hiring pipeline comes from...

Tyler King: Yeah I mean the reality is like I wish we were growing faster cuz we could hire more great people than we have openings -

Brian Casel : Mm-hmm

Tyler King: -for right now. Speaking of which if anyone has wants to hire like very entry level people, but that I can vouch for being really high potential, I'd be happy to put you in touch with some people.

Brian Casel : That's really interesting. You know, Jordan and I have been talking about this on Bootstrapped Web. You know, Jordan has been talking about this concept of solutions engineer.

Tyler King: Right. I heard you talking about that.

Brian Casel : . You know, someone who, and, and I, I do think that this is like a, a role that's emerging. Especially if you're doing like sales based or, or high touch onboarding with customers. You do need someone with like some [00:29:00] technical chops to be able to hook up your new customers stuff so that they can get active and be successful.

You know, I, I feel like it's perfect for like a junior engineer.

Tyler King: I agree in a decent number of people who have gone through the fellowship a lot of them are double majoring and a lot of times they're like I'm really glad I learned more coding. But like they look at our developers just sitting behind a computer all day and never talking to anyone, I mean they talk to their colleagues but not talking to customers or anything, And they're like That's not for me. So we've actually had a handful of people that they didn't use these words but they were basically like I want to be a solutions engineer I wanna use my technical skills but not be an engineer as my primary job.

Brian Casel : Mm-hmm. . Yeah. So interesting. All right, man, well, we, we've covered

Tyler King: all

Brian Casel : so much ground on, on this episode and, and the last one. We could probably talk all day. Hopefully, We'll, we'll, you know, get you back on the show here and, uh,

Yeah!

Find some other random topic, to about. Good stuff, man. Well, yeah, it's been exciting, you know, following your, podcast

Tyler King: exciting

Brian Casel : and Less Annoying CRM.

We'll get everything linked up in the show notes. But yeah, thanks for doing it.

Tyler King: [00:30:00] Awesome. Thanks. Have a good one.

Brian Casel : Well, that wraps up today's open thread. Hey, tell me what you think. I'm on Twitter at casjam, and right after that, head over to iTunes and give this show a five star review. Really helps it reach more folks like us. I appreciate it. Talk to you next week.