Ep 49: Kristen Buchanan, CEO of Edify

James Thomason: 0:04

It's The Next Wave Podcast episode 49. Our guest this week is Kristin Buchanan. She's the CEO and founder of Edify, an AI platform that helps engineers to be high performing. edify is first product. Eddy is a Slack native solution that helps developers and product managers build technical onboarding plans for their new hires. She recently received 2 million in seed funding in December 2020. Right before being accepted in the TechStars, Seattle 2021 cohort. Prior to founding edifies, she consulted for large organizations implementing onboarding and learning plans for engineering and product teams, including AWS elemental Open Sky at Alibaba and Puppet and many, many others. Kristen, welcome to the show. And thanks for coming.

Kristen Buchanan: 0:40

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it, James.

Brad Kirby: 0:43

Yes, Chris, and thanks for joining us some. Back in July, we released an Episode Episode 40, I think it was featuring Sean McCullough, who previously worked at Groupon with a rockstar CMO, Laura Roman. And Sean is now head of engineering at Atlassian. Compass Group meanwell. I noticed as one of your seed investors was Atlassian venture arm back in December. And they have a pretty good track record of investments. If I look, I saw slack on there. And a number of other pretty I think zoom was in there as well. So they expect you to be the up there no time.

Kristen Buchanan: 1:21

High expectations. There you go. Let's

Brad Kirby: 1:23

do it. Yeah. And so we've been talking a lot about AI, digital labor remote work lately. So we really thought you'd be a great fit on the show, based on like, recent conversations. So

Kristen Buchanan: 1:35

thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And it was pretty amazing to get that sort of validation, frankly, from Atlassian. You know, when one of the incumbent Dev Tools companies in the world tells you you have something interesting, it's like

Dean Nelson: 1:49

they do I do. Notice, they notice me.

Kristen Buchanan: 1:54

But in all seriousness, they've actually been an amazing partner from, you know, helping us think about new features, designing things, learning about what's different at scale, versus, you know, with 50. Engineers. So it's been awesome to have them as part of our investor portfolio.

James Thomason: 2:11

How many people are you now with 2 million in seed funding? And a few months down the runway?

Kristen Buchanan: 2:14

Yeah. So we are a team of 11. Now we're fully distributed, and all over the country right now and then one employee outside of the US. And we're actually you know, as time would have it, we are about to raise our next round, we have grown a bunch in customer traction, and the product has really changed and grown. So it's time to get back out there.

James Thomason: 2:38

Always be raising right as much.

Kristen Buchanan: 2:42

Yeah, I kind of joke with people, I ran a real business before this. A real money, this fake money business?

Brad Kirby: 2:50

And how did you enjoy TechStars? I was actually an advisor to a TechStars startup from 2019. And he graduated, and he's doing quite well. Yeah. It's a company's balance sheets are like a very crypto asset custody company, and they're over a billion. That's amazing. Doing well, yeah,

Kristen Buchanan: 3:09

I loved it, I have to say, you know, I can't speak for every TechStars program, but the Seattle one was awesome. I think, you know, I was interviewing for TechStars and yc. At the same time, and I'm really glad I didn't get into yc. Because my ego would have, do it do yc. And I think it wouldn't have been awesome, to be honest. In technical terms, I think that TechStars was an amazing connection, you know, building a business out of a non Silicon Valley City, you know, it's getting easier, but it is not always the easiest thing to do. And you have limited investor connections, you have limited customer connections. And TechStars really helped with that. And it just taught me so much about really the difference between being a business owner and a CEO, and that you can't just call yourself a CEO, you actually have to go through some, some failures in some learning to get to that place. I may not even be allowed to call myself CEO at this point.

Brad Kirby: 4:09

James, how many startups have you had? No, James?

James Thomason: 4:12

Well, that number is of some debate, but I know that I have been deeply involved with at least 14 and not including a couple of small ones that I sort of like pre failed myself. But you know, I've been everything from engineer to CTO and co founder. I haven't other than my own, like you know, lifestyle business. I haven't been CEO yet because I just don't think that's my DNA. My DNA is more as like a technical and technical leader.

Kristen Buchanan: 4:41

You have to be a little bit crazy. You have to have authority problems. I always tell people like do you know yourself well enough to do this job?

James Thomason: 4:53

Right especially the name of our, our CEO and sometimes podcast guest at at edge x when you said authority problems. He's like Calvin? Well, you know, that's that's true of us both, though. I mean, we really, really have authority bombs. But

Brad Kirby: 5:06

no, but you're both trade two or four. And you're both great leaders. So that's all that matters. Good recovery.

Dean Nelson: 5:09

Brad, good recovery faster.

James Thomason: 5:11

Thank you, Brad. That was good. Thank

Dean Nelson: 5:12

you. Yes. Well, Kristen, I can relate to your conversation about the CEO side, I stepped into a CR will reluctantly right at the beginning of the pandemic, I was asked to step in as interim. And then I really quickly Yeah, there. What did I say about interim? What did they tell you? Mr. Thomason was correct. He's like, there is no interim. So and investors knew they had so they wanted me to go in. And so but I started having a lot of fun with it. And I think there's something about being in charge. That's interesting, in two ways. One is you can really get stuff done, you can move, right. But the other one is the realization that there is zero other people to blame. The URL, really, every decision is on you, every result is on you. Right. It's all it's your ship, you got to steer it the right way. And, and I've actually really enjoyed that. So this has been a really interesting exercise for me, because I've been at two startups when I was an engineer at you know, back in 2000, right in the middle of the bubble, right. And then I stepped into this one, and it's been, honestly really rewarding. I enjoy the role. I enjoy building teams, I enjoy the marketing aspect of it, the alignment of the product that just like you're touching everything, you know, and

Kristen Buchanan: 6:19

it's super fun. Honestly, I tell people that this I've, I've never had a more engaging job. And I've also never been more exhausted and stressed and anxious at the same time. Amen, sister. I would not have it any other way. I mean, I think I'm generally unemployable elsewhere. And so, which is another thing, you know, I think, for you to be really, you know, all the good founders and CEOs that I have looked up to are, you know, we're all kind of psychotic in our own ways, and it makes it hard for us to do anything else. I think that I have almost always been fired, I've never been actually fired from a real job. But I asked enough sort of threatening systems level questions, that it's like, your time is limited here, you need to just stay in your lane. So that's a clue that maybe you should think about your own company.

James Thomason: 7:09

I have to say, like, female CEOs of tech startup companies have got to be one of the rarest of the rare of the rare, right. And in my immediately previous startup, my co founder was female and our CEO. And when we looked at the data, we were 70, something percent less likely to receive funding, just by that fact alone. Like if you eliminated other variables, I mean, having having a female co founder, even, you know, forget CEO, having a female co founder, I was already 70% less likely to get funding. And she's doing very well as you did, we did get funded, and she's charging forward still. So I have to say that congratulations, because that is it's bad enough to sort of get funded normally, I think, but it's it's nigh impossible to get, I think less than 3% of VC funding goes to female without down this. It's like It's like go down, which is another way of saying like none.

Kristen Buchanan: 8:00

Yeah, you know, I really appreciate that first, and I also, I'm not going to make any friends saying this. But I also, I think that there's a lot of nuance here. I think that, you know, I have been in small business development and in startup coaching for a really long time, while I built my own businesses. And there is an interesting thing, that is a generalization that I'll make is certainly not true for all women. But women are extremely good risk takers. And they are also very good at assessing opportunity. And they are often doing a lot of care taking at home, right? They're doing other things. And so women are thinking about what's the risk, if I lose, you know, leave this corporate job, and the business fails, there could be a downstream effect on my, you know, my income, my family, these other things, for those of us that are in that bucket. And I see a lot of women making really interesting lifestyle businesses that stay at a certain level, and not necessarily diving into the muck, that is venture capital funded businesses and startups. And this is an extremely demanding type of work to do. It's literally, I was thinking the other day, because I was one of the biggest things I have shame about is that I do not spend 80 hours a week working on my startup. And that is sort of what people would think that you should be doing right now, other founders asked me about this frequently, and I'm very upfront with it. And a lot of women don't want to do that. And I don't blame them. And and I think a lot of men don't do that either. But I just think there's a lot of nuance. And so I would be really curious. I did see that the venture capital went down this year to two women founded businesses. But I also want to know, you know, what was the rate of people leaving their jobs? What was the rate of business creation in general? This is a really weird year, frankly, the last 18 months and at the same time It is a real pain in the butt to raise money, male or female? I think edify ended up doing well, because I've inadvertently networked my way into it for seven years, right? Building a business before this, and having some of that network, to kickstart you to have a few people who will write those Angel checks and pass you to the next biggest investor is really helpful. And so I think if you are starting off the block, and you don't have some of that, it's going to be even harder.

Brad Kirby: 10:31

Right. And the private business is a consultancy firm, which is, it doesn't even hold no investors to real thing. sound real? So yeah, it's much easier to operate.

Kristen Buchanan: 10:42

Oh, absolutely. Pretty much just be like, I'm not working right now. You know, I'm going to Southeast Asia, which is a thing that I did.

Dean Nelson: 10:49

You know, there is a trend and a change, though, if you think about it, there's, I think it's like I saw an article about 17 Female venture capitalists that are actually changing the way things are working right now. So there's new funded backing that's going back and doing that, and they only fund female startups. And I think was it Rachel from Uber? Rachel Parnham? I think it was. She I forgot the name of it. But I know of two companies, two firms that have been spun up specifically to help change this trend.

Kristen Buchanan: 11:17

Yeah, I think it is changing. I will say that. I will also tell you that I've never been successful raising from a women focus fund. And really, I have a theory about this, that, you know, it's either that my business is terrible. Which if that could be a thing, or I think this might be the more likely answer. I actually think that this is probably terrible. I think that when you are a female general partner at a venture capital fund, you actually have to overproof your returns, because you're such an underestimated, you know, it's sort of like the concentration of wealth, there is so little in the first place that you're trying to make the thesis that there are enough women founders that are fundable, right that have venture capital fundable businesses, because let's remember that not all businesses should take venture funding, right. And many of them still get funding, even though they they don't have the business model that really should allow for that type of funding. And then can fail unfortunately, because of that, it can be a real Albatross, unfortunately. And so when you're a female focus fund, you need to try to make the best investments that you possibly can. And so you have to de risk them. So if you're looking at say, a pre seed stage company that's still in beta has 10 customers in it, which is where edify was when we were raising our precede. That's pretty risky. Right? And, you know, frankly, venture capital is a gambling addiction anyway, but, you know, it's it's hard enough

James Thomason: 12:51

to resemble that remark.

Kristen Buchanan: 12:54

You know, and the numbers aren't much better, unfortunately. Right. So, I think that there is change afoot. And it's also gonna, it's fraught with its own other challenges,

Brad Kirby: 13:05

right, I think probably what people see in you and correct me if I'm wrong, is your ability to understand the customer is really just to get in there. That's what I see. In terms of understanding customer, therefore being able to acquire customers and retain customers and develop that ecosystem. That's what we just met. Right. So. But that's my assessment of you as a, as a person. So and that has value.

Kristen Buchanan: 13:28

Yeah, I appreciate that. I think, you know, engineering teams are, unfortunately quite misunderstood that despite the fact that we have so much of our company's money put into those teams, their people kind of pigeonhole engineers as code monkeys, or, you know, they get paid a lot, frankly, and so people can get frustrated that, you know, engineers are choosey prima donnas. I've heard that divas. And I have certainly seen that. But I also think that engineering teams deal with very, very specific organizational development problems in their organizations. And there's frankly, not much on the market to help them right. And there's a lot of expertise that helps solve problems that are not code problems. And so I've spent the last seven plus years for whatever reason, trying to understand those teams and do something useful for them.

James Thomason: 14:23

So how does Edie help? We said a buzzword we said slack native solution in our interview, but what what is Eddie and what is a Slack native solution? It hasn't worked? Yeah,

Kristen Buchanan: 14:33

absolutely. Edie is. You can think of it as your assistant if you're an engineering manager and your assistant that will build a technical onboarding plan for your new hires, and then automatically deploy that plan and manage it for you. The downstream effects of using something like that is that you as a manager, don't forget to help onboard your new hire. You don't neglect them in the process. You can go on vacation and don't have to be the single point of failure and sharing knowledge. And for your new hire, they are getting the scaffolding that they need to actually become productive. And what we have seen, both in my own experience for the last almost decade and industry data is that it can take six to nine months for an engineer to get up to speed, even a senior engineer, really to understand the code base to understand the norms, the processes, how do you actually work in this team, it can take quite a long time. And frankly, if you look at the engineering tenure right now, which is at an average of about 18 months, in good cases, the idea of spending nine of those months, basically losing money, not even getting to breakeven on onboarding, you know, first buying that talent and then training them. And then for them to leave there, they often are leaving not because of compensation, which people think but they're leaving, because they're not acculturated and they feel like they can't be productive. The developers that I've known over my experience, want really two things, they want to be able to be creative, because it is an incredibly creative job. And they don't want to be blocked on that work. Right. And if you block them in either way, they're going to go look for another job, and onboarding and giving them that scaffolding is the way to do that. So this is has been up to this point of really manual process checklists, Confluence Docs, Google spreadsheets that are out of date, notion now, you know, yours notion. Yeah, we love notion. But the problem is that, you know, I'll bring in my my museum background here. CMS is and knowledge management solutions are built like museum vitrines, which are the glass cases that keep specimens in there. It's designed to keep information in and it doesn't update frequently. Right. And they're, you know, your metadata is all interesting. That's like a little registrar's card on that specimen. But it's actually quite hard to index and quite hard to serve up when somebody really needs it. And to figure out, oh, gosh, this really is out of date. This is actually four versions out of date. And now we need to fix it for the new hires, who's coming tomorrow. So Edie manages that for you, and he tries to be the expensive human person that you can't hire the engineering operations person who can help make sure that this always happens for you. Because humans are not perfect. We can't remember to do everything. We can't perfectly onboard and continuously train and hand out the right documentation. Every everybody needs it.

James Thomason: 17:28

Yeah. And as you were saying, you know, neglect your new hire, I was like, guilty, and you're like, and maybe go on vacation when a new hire is wondering what they should do. And I'm like, guilty, yes. And then I was really thinking like, Well, okay, you know, this is definitely I'm known to be guilty of this stuff. And I have a amazing human being engineering manager, or senior vice president engineering at his name is Vivek Sharma. And he's, no one else can have him. He's ours. And he is amazing at this stuff, and amazing at not forgetting. And I honestly don't know how he does it, because I just, I live inside my own skull, and I can't remember this stuff. And if I don't have a calendar, reminding me where I'm supposed to be at a moment in time, I will literally drift off into my own thoughts and realize that I am supposed to be on stage. So I see immediately see the value of what you're trying to do with it. And I gotta tell you right now we're gonna we're gonna try this internally. Well, it's already on our Slack team. Okay, okay, he's already invited.

Brad Kirby: 18:24

I'm gonna onboard you know, you're mad, you're mad. I'm also the founder,

James Thomason: 18:29

as they'll tell you, though, I'm also the foremost skeptic of virtual

Brad Kirby: 18:32

assistants and bots, and shooting. Yeah, that's the other piece.

James Thomason: 18:35

I feel like, you know, there's a real danger in like, people don't necessarily like talking to bots, right. And the worst offender of bots is like the automated voice response system IVR systems that we've all become accustomed to in the last few decades where you call hoping to get a human being, which never happens down a robot tells you what menu items you should select. And more recently, they've replaced those with voice response. And which is even more infuriating, because it picks up whatever background noise and it's like, I'm sorry, I don't understand elephant. I'm like, I didn't say elephant. And it's, you know, it's just it.

Brad Kirby: 19:09

And you have a funny story about Your Head of Product. Jamie. I think when you're first starting Yeah,

Kristen Buchanan: 19:13

absolutely. And it just to acknowledge what you shared. James, I think you should be skeptical of bots and AI assistants and these things, I think that the technology is actually still really green. And if you are not very, very specific about how you're applying it, which I think that we have been at edify and we continue to try to be then it can get out of hand very quickly and be completely useless at best, right. And at worst, extremely annoying and frustrating. Right. And, Brad, your your point actually, before we even started writing, you know, touching the low code tools that we built the MVP on. My director of product Jamie I essentially conned her into coming to work for my nascent startup. I don't one does yes as one does. I I told her I would trade her she wanted to start her own consulting business. I was like, help out. We will be your first client and we won't pay you because I will teach you how to run a business. And she was like, that's a good idea. And then eventually, I was like, so you know, you're just gonna come work here, right? You're not gonna get other customers because I hiring you. So

Dean Nelson: 20:19

sounds like interim CEO. Yeah.

Kristen Buchanan: 20:22

Yeah. But anyway, we Jamie came up with this idea of being of this human as bot experience, right. And so actually, puppet was our first victim. And we basically deployed Jamie as a bot. People didn't know it was a real person behind there. And so she was actually operating on Belfast, timezone Pacific and east coast. So that she could serve this team that we're working with. to

James Thomason: 20:49

That's genius. That's yeah, fake it till you make it. That's yeah, yeah, it's

Kristen Buchanan: 20:53

amazing. Awesome. I can't even believe that she did that for us for free. At that time, that's why she has equity business. I better be successful. I gotta pay her back somehow. So that was basically we did this before touching anything, because people were so skeptical, right? We I said, I do think that engineers will talk to a well designed, but that's my thesis, my hypothesis I want to prove. And people said, I don't really think that's true. And I had enough friends at puppet that were willing to try this, that they said, Okay, we'll let this happen. And you know, funny enough, when it's a human, you don't actually have to go through security review. So that was easy for us. Right. So I think we signed some NDAs, stuff like that. And basically, it worked, you know, and actually, we found that one initial thesis of the product of the the idea that we had the first product wasn't going to work, the initial way we were sourcing information was we thought we would go and ask everybody on the team, a series of questions to source documentation that was useful to new hires. And that was really annoying, people did not like that. And so we had to rethink how we were going to do that. After that, we ran sort of a Google style design sprint to work on that specific part of the product, because we knew that the other component, the new hire, interaction was going to work. We just didn't know how to source the information. You know, as a consultant, what I had been doing, I used to bring this giant spreadsheet that I built over the years called the touch point matrix, and it had hundreds of unique moments in an engineering, you know, IT teams experience, like linters, security protocols, all of these things, what's the answer to this? And I would take their piece of documentation from notion conference, whatever, nobody was using notion back then actually, but and drop that into the spreadsheet, and then automate that for them in a zero workflow, right. So it was very manual. I was doing that as a consultant. So we knew we couldn't ask our customers to do that for themselves. Right. So that's where the human has bought experiment led to that design sprint and where we are today. Well,

James Thomason: 22:57

your customers like this bot is amazing. And has really as a convincing.

Kristen Buchanan: 23:00

Yeah. So lifelike, so like, it was very helpful as humans are.

Dean Nelson: 23:09

So I just noticed something. You mentioned a number of words in there, did you you're following the lean startup? Like methodology?

Kristen Buchanan: 23:14

I would say? Yeah, I mean, I've actually, this is a sin. I've never read it. Actually. I'm a skimmer of things. skimmed it, yeah. Probably many years ago, probably when it you know, not when it first came out, but somewhere in there. And I have to say, it's always just made sense to me that you would try a small experiment, right? Yep. You know, no skin off your nose kind of experiment. And, you know, I don't want to go homeless trying to make something right. And so I'm not gonna take you know, a bunch of your bootstrapping. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I, I believed in this idea enough to literally close my own business, and I took some money out of it. I also took on $100,000 in loans to do this. And so that's what after we prove this out, we built the MVP in that in that loan money, and which is, I think, something that people don't talk about that is actually a really great way, if you feel like you can feasibly pay it back. It's a great way to start without getting investor capital. But investors pretend like they don't like it, but it's actually pretty valuable. And, and then you just kind of like, fix it in your, your investing round your next round. But I think that if you if we continue to do that, you know, the secret now is, I was going to tell Brad, you know, if you've got an existing checklist, we're beta testing a feature now where Eddie will, quote unquote, automatically ingest that for you. And guess what? That's us humans. You know, it only takes about an hour for us to do it, but it's gonna feel magical to you, right? And so you don't have to go through that onboarding filter, because we know that there's some friction still in the product, right? It's not perfect. You got to get You're working. And so instead of spending the next three months buying a bunch of engineering consulting time to expand my team, we're just gonna human it until we figure it out, right?

James Thomason: 25:13

So let's try a tried and true strategy. You know, we've done that with early stage products for years, we used to joke that the product comes with a human being in the box to jump out and install it for you and make it work in your environment. You know, that level of customization almost like glove professional services, like so, very tried and true and wise strategy.

Kristen Buchanan: 25:32

I appreciate that I was reminded by a mentor recently to get what you are selling to a customer is actually not the product, right? What you are selling is the ability to take this pain away or to add this value, right? You are selling for me, you know, if James and Brad you, you want to keep using it, and it's useful to you, I wanted that the whole point of it is that in some way, somehow, you should not have this problem anymore. Right? That it should your life should be better because of this. You know, I've actually never run into a customer that cared how I did it. Right? As long as we're ethical.

James Thomason: 26:06

percent true. Yeah. Customers don't care. They don't care how your product works. As long as it provides the value that they're, you're reporting that they're going to get for the price that they're going to pay. And that's that's what they truly care about. I mean, customers, I will say like to be wowed by technology, sometimes. Like they like to be impressed by the, as we all do, you know, by the newness and sophistication of something that is a technological marvel. But that's not what they pay for. You know? No, we say that's, that's the sizzle and not the state.

Kristen Buchanan: 26:34

Absolutely. And I think that we can, you know, this is where I think CEOs get into fights with their CTOs and their chief, you know, their heads of product. And we've had to actually be really cognizant of it at edify even at such an early stage where, you know, my job is to serve customers, right, and to enable my team to serve customers. And my job is not to build the flashiest product, or the product that has the smartest decision trees or the most intelligent AI because no one cares, right? They really just don't. And so what that can mean is that is often counter to what your engineers want to do, right? engineers want to solve a problem with engineering, right? And product wants to solve a problem with design, right? And those two things may not actually be the right solution to your customer problem, right. And so you've got to have a shared vision at your company, even in the earliest stages, where you don't get caught up in how does this product? Look, there are questions about is this super turning off our customers, right? And this is not working? I think about the fact you know, we've talked about notion a couple of times, we love notion edify, and also some of the most interesting features of notion are very hard to learn, and very hard to figure out. Because they don't, they're kind of obfuscated, and the simplicity of it. Same with MAC's, right, like, those are so much of this, right?

Brad Kirby: 27:58

That's true. And I think, I think that goes back to the scaffolding and being able to direct people to like, in our notion, I have like a landing page that I've just created, right? So I've typed it out for someone to read with some videos and, and that kind of thing for certain aspects of onboarding. And I'm not an engineer, I think engineers have a much harder onboarding time than, than, say, someone in business development or finance or, you know, HR,

Kristen Buchanan: 28:24

I think it's because we take it for granted, right? You know, we have the is it hasn't always been true. But we have sales enablement, we have sales operations, we know, you know, when we hire somebody into our sales team, they're going to need certain collateral to help them right. And when we hire an engineer, we're like, oh, God, I'm already paying you$150,000, can you just get going? Right? And it's like, well, putting up this darn in development environment is going to take a whole day, you know, and also, you didn't give me all of the repos and the permissions. So I'm kind of at your mercy, right, as an engineer, right. Yeah. So I think also,

Brad Kirby: 28:57

the cross functional communication becomes a bit of a challenge, which that does come down to leaders in terms of being able to, to get those swimlanes and make sure that people aren't talking about the same thing five times across different groups, especially in distributed teams. And I'm speaking for James here, because he's very good at it. He's very good. If there's if there's like, four people in a Slack channel, that's not a group. It's like, what are you doing?

James Thomason: 29:22

You know, get back in the channel, you can that's why

Brad Kirby: 29:26

I try to exclude

James Thomason: 29:27

one of those things to share information, not compartmentalize it.

Brad Kirby: 29:30

Exactly. So

James Thomason: 29:31

I want to hone in on something you said you spoke too quickly. And that was on making sure everyone is aligned to the same vision or purpose. And well, one, I'll just echo that in my own experience in running companies and building products. I think the person who put it in most salient Lee for me was John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, who I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago in Palo Alto, although his Our meeting was disrupted by protesters for some reason, but I don't want people everything is John Mackey. I mean, he's given that talk many times, he's written books about it. And he always starts with why, I think more recently, you're probably familiar with the work by Simon Sinek. You know, he gave a pretty compelling TED talk a few years back, and then later wrote a book about, you know, starting with why. But there is really as a magic formula to doing early stage stuff. And it has to do with hiring really smart people, and then getting the hell out of their way, as you know, as the leader and not becoming a constraint or a bottleneck on them doing their jobs. And the way that you get out of their way is you convey to them the same vision or purpose that you have, you know, the reason that you started the company, the thing that we're all building together, and then literally get out of their way. Because smart people, wherever they are, are fantastic at solving problems. And I think that's another unique characteristic of information workers or engineers is that they're not satisfied to merely do a job for the sake of doing a job, I would say like 90% of them aren't, right, they want to know, what it is that they are doing, and how that connects to the business of the company. And like, does their work actually mean anything? Because to them, it's just maybe an abstract or arcane list of features or functionality that, you know, seems completely random, right. And so I think that's a really critical point you honed in on right away is that like, you have to instill them with purpose and and share that vision. And so I wonder, how are you doing that your company's 11 People now, tell us a little bit more about the composition of your team? Like, what roles have you already hired? I mean, this is, I think, great for the audience understand, like how really nascent companies work and how difficult it is, and how even among 11 people, getting them all on the same page about one thing you should be doing the one purpose that you're trying to fill is can be impossibly difficult. And I think many, many startup companies fail automatically, because they're unable to create that kind of alignment. And so how are you doing that? At your company? And tell us more about the composition of your team?

Kristen Buchanan: 31:54

Yeah, absolutely. So we'll start with the team, and then I'll kind of tell you what I have done and why I started doing it that way, because I screwed some stuff up. And as I as you do, as one does, yeah, frequently, daily, I'm sure, but I just don't know what yet. Mostly, I'm just waiting for somebody to be like, Yeah, that one, that was not your best work. Which, you know, sometimes I'm self aware enough to notice and other times not. So, you know, the team today is our director product, our head of operations. Our CTO, a director of data science to engineers, one product designer, one SDR, my assistant whom I could not live without, and amen on that one. Yeah. This is the bigger bite side note here. If you are an early stage founder, you've got to find an assistant. Right. It is, I think people think it's some kind of, like, luxury thing. But you have to find a good assistant and then be let them do their job. Just be you know, James, to your point of getting out of people's way. There's actually no, no one more important than getting out of your executive assistants way. So I think that's up to 11. I'm not missing anybody. Right now. We've also got two interns right now, not in that 11. And I made some relatively non traditional hires early on. So as I mentioned earlier, Jamie, our director product was the first person that I conned into bringing into this company. And a lot of people will argue that a non technical CEO like myself, which sort of present this, right, like I can code, I just don't. But I also resent it, because I'm actually so technical, in the work that we do, right, from an adult learning science perspective, from knowing our customer. And so I don't sit neatly into, I'm clearly not the CTO, I'm not the I like to sell, I like to make sure that I'm matching a customer's pain point to something we can provide for them. But I also have some product vision, but I actually am not very good at translating my vision into particular components that make sense to engineering, right. And so I brought in somebody who's got that discipline. That was Jamie. And I actually had a little kind of a therapy session with two of my TechStars cohort, friends, their co founder, CEO, CTO, and they're kind of having this like marriage problem right now, right? Where, you know, the CEO is trying to go sell and CTOs like, Oh, we don't have deadlines. I just build when I build, you know, and it's, frankly, it's because they have not agreed on what are we delivering to customers? What is the point of our work this week and next week, right? And you can't just work, you know, without that vision, right. And sometimes your vision as a CEO is too high. I also tell my team that I am from the future from 10 years from now, and I come back sometimes, and I try to drag you about a year ahead, right? Because that's about all our customers can handle right and is when we first started to do customer discovery. interviews, we probably did 100 customer service discovery interviews this summer and fall of 2020. Customer, you know, prospects would tell us engineering onboarding is just bad. That is how it is, it will always be that way. I do not believe you that you could do something different, I probably would have hired, there's no, there is no hope. I basically say that engineering teams have Stockholm Syndrome themselves to bad process, right. And then when I gave them something, right, when I gave them the MVP, they were like, Okay, it's not as bad as I thought it was gonna be, I kind of trust you. Right, and then you give them one more thing, one more feature makes it a little bit better. And then another one, another one, their horizon line changes, right, so they can start to see into the future with you too. But if I came out to my team, and came and told them, This is what I think the future is going to be, you can't build to that, right, you can't market to it, you can't sell it. And you can't build to it, because it's not specific enough. And so I really needed product early on. So I made that hire. I also brought in an advisor of mine, Karen, who's our head of operations, operations is a strange title. Sometimes it means office manager. Sometimes in my case, it means essentially, every little corner of our business, Karen is managing, right? She watches sales, she watches the data from the Google ads and make sure that that's linking back to our product positioning and how we are checking whether or not features in the product are working well. How are we marketing? How are we managing our team? Are we being equitable, and how we dole out equity as an example or salary, right? Things that I saw as problems as a consultant that 100 person startups had to deal with, I wanted to solve for as much as possible, and 11 in 10 people. So I made the investment, right, and it is an investment to hire an executive in this place. And that's it. That's what Karen is, she comes from being an executive at SurveyMonkey. And spent a long time at Google before that. And then we also have our director of data science and who is a former our former CTO. And this is also this can be a challenging thing for people to talk about. But I'll try to be honest about it that, that doesn't always work out, right. And this person, Kate is really smart. And we knew that we wanted to have her on our team. And so we made a new role with her, not just for her, but she collaborated with the rest of the team to figure out what are the data holes in our organization? And what do we need to fill. And we were able to bring in, Liz, our CTO, and she's bringing that experience of actually having been a CTO for a long time having built these kinds of products before. And I think the rest of the team, we couldn't deliver what we do for our customers. Now without them. I did miss somebody I missed our customer support, and service manager, Brett who goes by alternate titles, depending on who we're talking to Customer Success most of the time, and which is really interesting, because he sits between sales and products, really. And he makes sure that there is a loop between those things. So this is all part and parcel of getting to the vision and how do you align people to it, and that you are going to think that you have done it properly. And then you will find out that there are giant communication holes, even amongst four people, 10 people, right? And I would say, Gosh, in April of this year, March, April, May, yeah, April, May, I started to feel like we had not delivered enough value to our customers, because we had actually spent a long time working on a back end problem. That turned out to not be the problem that we thought it was, and had basically spent all of our time in engineering, doing things that did not value or did not deliver anything useful with customers. And so I was getting really itchy and really uncomfortable. And I realized that our team, you know, nobody does this on purpose. They're not like I am explicitly going to spend five months not being useful to customers. Right. That's not what's happening. What was happening was I think that the scalability issues that we thought we had, are really important right now. And if and I the way that I'm seeing the customer need is I have to solve this problem first to deliver value to them. Well, you would think that if people had not if you have not actually heard the real goal, right. And this is also a point of contention between CEOs and heads of engineering often in early stage startups, until you have 1000s of people on your product on a minute by minute basis. It can be duct taped to hell, right? It can be super bad in the backend, right? There can be a lot of technical debt, and you want to be careful that there's not that that's really going to harm your customer, or make it impossible for them to use the product the way it's intended to be used. But a lot of things can be not as perfect, right. Thanks. can be refactored later. Later as in when you have proven, you have a business, right? And that's the kind of the funny thing about this stage of startup, right? And I realized, in the middle of this year, that not everybody at edify actually realized, seriously, what kind of stage of business? Are we? What are we trying to do? What are the constraints on our business? And how must we work given those factors, right? So we had actually, we spent basically half a day, recalibrating to all of that and recalibrating to everybody's personal mission. Why are you personally at this company, when you could be working somewhere else making more money? And why are we all here, because we are here as a company to make sure that engineering teams can make better products for their customers, because we believe in our heart of hearts, that engineering teams that are toxic, that are not healthy, that have these kind of organizational development problems, cannot ship the best product to their customers. So that's why we're here. So it's a convoluted way to get there. But that's the team in alignment.

James Thomason: 41:02

That is utterly fascinating. Sorry, Jean, you're gonna see something.

Dean Nelson: 41:05

Yeah, I was just I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm not in my head and so many different areas you just touched? Yeah, I was absorbing everything you said. And I can't agree more like, again, I'm at a similar stage with my own company. And it's interesting, where you have this balance between, like, I know exactly what the future looks like, it's crystal clear to me, I know where we got to go, I know what's the I know, the disruption that we're gonna bring? Like, all that stuff. But translating that vision back into, as you think about it, it goes from this big grand vision down to what am I doing today. And it's also not a straight path. Right? And that translation, it takes a whole bunch of different types of skill sets. And we've got a balance of this, like you just outlined your team, and how they are, you know, like your operations, head of operations is like a Chief of Staff. Right? Just a different role. But it's like, all the balls are in the air, and you're bouncing, right? And juggling all those balls to make sure because it's not who else is juggling them. Because the CEO, you have a few critical responsibilities. The number one is What do you deliver to a customer, the number two is your investors and making sure that you have enough money, right. And number three, is to make sure that everything is cohesive and running, but there's so much going on, there's no way that a single person can do that. And you've got to have people that are augmenting you in ways that you don't have that skill set. So I totally agree with what you're saying, I appreciate you compliment. That's huge.

Kristen Buchanan: 42:30

I agree the same for

Brad Kirby: 42:32

CTO as well, if you're thinking James's case, right, as a co founder, he's doing almost all the same things that our CEO is, is he's sitting in front of investors, because he's a co founder, and it's in his interest. And

James Thomason: 42:46

so we're two sides of the same coin, you know, and the deal is that, you know, John has his eye, we fight as I say, often we fight back to back just like two sides of the same coin. Like we're focused on different things. But we're, you know, we're the same thing, really. And so we have a lot of trust with a mutual trust, that the other is doing whatever it is they need to be doing, because we don't have time otherwise to, you know, to chase that down. But I wonder if you, one of the things I've struggled with, I think everyone who's starting a tech startup these days must feel this, like this industry, I'll just say is so full of posers. And like, bullshit, I'm sorry, but like,

Kristen Buchanan: 43:25

I think that's true. I would agree with you, James,

Dean Nelson: 43:27

share what you really feel. Yeah, yeah.

James Thomason: 43:31

The glamorous SNESs I guess, the idealized vision of what startup founders do, compared to what we actually do is so far off the mark, you know, and I know that that's part of the seduction, and I think a lot of it's created by the venture capital industry to lure in fresh meat, quite honestly. You know, otherwise, their supply chain dries up, right. I mean, that's, that's, that's there to tell other

Kristen Buchanan: 43:50

founders that it is not you that needs this money is the venture capitalists that needs to deploy their capital. Right. And right now, actually, there is such a large amount of capital in this asset class, that they literally just have to find deals to invest it, which is why you're starting to see 10 and $20 million seed rounds, which is probably the worst. I mean, I would I don't know any of those founders. But that is trash. That is trash. And it's not because I don't think you deserve all the money in the world. It's because well, actually, I think I'm gonna rephrase that. I think you don't actually at this stage, I think you need to prove that you have a business first. But I also don't think that founders and you're talking about glamour, James that founders don't realize when you take money, you have to scale the expectations of your company to meet that capital, right? So the difference between taking the 5 million and having OKRs or KPIs, whatever you want to meet the goals of a $5 million raise versus a $20 million raise in the same period of time, right? Let's remember, we're all on the 12 to 18 month cycle, right? That's insane, right? So that's why people work in 80 and 120 hours a week and ruin their marriages and don't ever see their kids, right? It doesn't have to be that way, you can still leverage this asset class, build a good business and not behave that way. Yeah, and

James Thomason: 45:13

founders that burn the candle at both ends, I don't think that they are nearly as productive as they think themselves to be. I mean, you know, putting putting in quotes, a lot of work doesn't necessarily translate to output that is meaningful, right. And I think I think people need require downtime, in order for their brains to function correctly, and to make the best decisions possible. And since we're all making decisions under uncertainty, in this particular case, our brains need to be on a very high level, like we need to be rested, we need to be adjusted to our situation and aware of everything that's going on. And you just can't do that. If you are, you know, putting in 80 hours in front of your screen every week, you know, you need to have a life or you need to have a life. In addition to that, and I've never felt any founders are more similar. In fact, I you know, I have very strict limits on my time that I have learned through success and failure to enforce so that I don't become burned out. And that's, you know, that's another problem is that, if I become burned out, then you know, my team will pick up on it, he immediately like the same if I show the slightest hint of maybe not feeling 100% Today, you know, I will get three or four slacks or a call. It's like, hey, what's what's wrong with is everything? Okay? Is the company going down in flames? No, no, it's fine. It's fine. I just, you know, today, I'm a little tired today.

Brad Kirby: 46:27

It is, it was quite obvious. Yeah. And I can attest to that, because I see you three times a week. At least, this is important. And it's good that you can recognize that and then solve it very quickly.

Kristen Buchanan: 46:38

And you don't science is behind you on that, right, there was one thing that you missed, missed in there that's being well fed, right being, you know, physically healthy, there's a lot that I think we choose not to talk about, and that you, the majority of startups do not get written up in Fast Company, and TechCrunch and geek wire, right. And a lot of people really tell themselves over this, and I'm not meaning literally, but you know, your health really declines. And I think, you know, for me, this comes down to what is how do I define my identity, and not to get squishy on it on here, but, you know, actually, edify success is not a part of my identity, what is part of my identity, is doing this kind of work. And being, you know, being able to say I had integrity, doing it, right and feeling like I didn't trade anyone out feeling like I didn't trade my own values out, right. And if a value of minus to stay healthy, then I can't trade that out. Right. And so, you know, I look at my own track record, and not to be, you know, this is hard for female founders. But not to brag too much, but it's a decent track record, right. And so I can tell you that you can, it is possible to achieve have a decent track record, not doing awful things. So that's not to say that I've not had hard weeks, hard weeks on it, and many in a row. Right. But that's what we talked about with our team, we even have, you know, when we have our team meetings that were small enough now that we can kind of jokingly call each other out if nobody's if you haven't taken time off, right. And at the we have unlimited PTO, but we also have a minimum four week policy, you've got to take four weeks off, right? When we're a little bit bigger, and we have tight, you know, a way to actually track this better, I'm probably going to make some part of your bonus attached to that,

Dean Nelson: 48:26

that balance,

James Thomason: 48:27

just after that, I'll tell you, one thing that we do at our company, and the product team is that when we push to a release, and we're all in the release crunch, and you know what that's like, and how brutal it can be,

Kristen Buchanan: 48:37

unless you're releasing every day, and then it's only scary a little bit, you know,

James Thomason: 48:41

I feel like in my experience, at least, there's always these sort of big ticket items that get, you know, create a backlog for the rest of the business and are bottlenecks. And so that's what you you experience pressure to write. And let's see, what we do is we have a mandatory week off after every release. So the entire because the way that I see it is that the only way that someone can truly take time off is if all of your colleagues are also taking time off. Because there's always something in a small team that's going to require input from that person. And so they can't really turn off your phone, or get away from their computer without thinking, you know, I need to check email, I need to check slack. And so what we do is, we say, hey, you know, it's a week off, everybody's taking a week off, and it's not part of your vacation time. It's not your personal vacation time, this is downtime for the whole team. And the purpose of that is to reset, you know, because, and of course, we we also align our incentive bonuses to the same schedule. So we take time off, we give more money. And you know, we try to create that incentive to get people I think it's interesting, you know, the names slack, we're talking about Slack, you're a Slack native company, what is slack? You know, Slack is a is a management concept, right? That you have to provide slack in your team, if they're just pulling as hard as they can all the time, they will burn out very quickly. Right. And so I you know, we'll see how long we can keep this up as a small company, but I have every intention of you know, every quarter at least, you know, giving people a mandatory Golf, so that they can truly take downtime and people want to build their personal vacations around that that's even better, you know, because they, they get sort of the double dip effect of being able to do that and truly energize and recharge. And I think it's, it's successful here. I've done it one other company, it's it was successful there. And I'd recommend that to any founder, I wanted to, you know, monopolizing the horn here. But one more thing I wanted to ask you, that has to do with something you just brought up a few minutes ago. And the Dean was also talking about, and that's the dean said, you know, I can see it crystal clear, I can see where I need to go how to disrupt the market, but you don't have to translate that into something has to be done today. And that's the really difficult thing. The other really difficult thing about that is there's always, I guess, there's two conflicting ways of dealing with this problem of, you know, do you have a reasonably intelligent founder, a visionary who understands the customer, and therefore is trying to build value based on their understanding? In other words, an intuitive, right? And famously, you know, Steve Jobs was that guy, for better or for worse, right? He was, he famously said, customers don't know what they want. And market research is almost worthless, because you know, customers know what you want, when you show it to them. Right. And so the, what we do here, is try to anticipate what they want and build that, versus sort of the Google, I would say that the googly way, which is like, we maximally talk to customers about everything. And that's, you know, we do great big research projects, understand what color our widgets should be. And, you know, that's how we create a product, and you can kind of appreciate the difference in their products, right? Like, if you look at an apple, you know, just look at an Apple product visually, and the highest statics, you know, that are sort of built into it versus, you know, a lot of Google things sometimes sorry, if I'm offending the entire world, Google people right now. But some of the Google things are a little, you know, crafty, little funky. And I believe

Brad Kirby: 51:47

their icons really function to what they are now here, we can look at them look at them right now.

Kristen Buchanan: 51:56

It is actually very interesting that you bring this up, though, James, and then Brad, that follow up because it sounds silly, but it is seconds that it takes me when I have to click on the little nine Dialpad to figure out I actually want to move on to a different app. Right? And and then he then your brain kicks in and you're like, oh, yeah, that's calendar. Sorry. That strike, right. And that simple fact means that there are some broken loop to me, it means if I if I were the product owner, the founder dealing with that in my product, there's some broken loop where I don't understand what my customers are going through.

James Thomason: 52:32

That happens on the intuitive side, obviously, as well, famously, I remember, you know, for those of us old enough to remember the first iPhone, when the iPhone came out, here's this amazing widget, right? It does music, it's a camera, it's a web browser, it's a map does everything you need, but you can't cut and paste with it. I mean, so like I you know, I can't cut and paste from one thing to another, that's a serious problem. And that's a you know, something that didn't get caught in the design process. Because you know, you had a sort of browbeating intuitive at the helm saying, you know, it's got to be this and this and that. But, you know, truly the most valuable thing is did get created right in that product. And they, of course, they fix they're like, Well, how are we gonna do cut and paste, and then they introduced touch gesture, pressure, gestures, and time gestures, and they fixed it. But I feel like that kind of risk can also kill a company. You know, that's, I think that's maybe why people talk down the intuitive so badly is that they, you know, if you do your research, you're not going to miss, you're not usually going to miss something like that, like you, hey, users want to cut and paste. Did you know, yeah, if you ask nine out of 10 users want to cut and paste. Yeah,

Kristen Buchanan: 53:32

I think identify it's a balance. Right? I'll give you an example. Jaime and I were in a discussion with a mentor earlier today, I believe that there's going to be a phrase called developer enablement in the future five to eight years from now, right? It's different than developer experience, right? developer experience products are things that individual developers can literally get for free, that they play with add to their own work, right, and make their workflow better, right? Whether it's in code or in their actual workflow, right? Developer enablement, in my eyes, is the category in the ecosystem that doesn't yet exist that covers what do teams need to work better together? Right? Not individual's writing code, but what are the individuals writing code who have happened to be strung together in a team and then a larger organization need? Now if you go and ask a VP of engineering today, what they think of they do not define it the way that I think it should be defined, right? So what that means is I cannot go out and start marketing this ridiculous phrase, like, I don't know if any of the three of you have seen this, you really need to go out and see it. But if you've not seen mean, girls, there's a moment where, you know, she's, I forget which one, but she's trying to

Brad Kirby: 54:49

measure my kratoms She's

Kristen Buchanan: 54:50

so cool. That's awesome. But you know, one of them is trying to make fetch a term right? I cannot make Yeah, so fetch. She's just like, there's never gonna be a thing or something like that they're very meanly in high school way. Right? I have to do that to myself. I can't say developer enablement, developer enablement. That's not a real thing right now. And so that's the intuitive side, I'd like to believe that I'm going to be right, we'll see, I'm probably going to be wrong in some ways. And, Brad, you made a really good comment, I think earlier that it is not a linear path, right. And so what we have to do now, is articulate how our product solves a real painful experience that people will will articulate in their own words, right. And we translate that and over the next three 510 years, we slowly explained, we think it's called this. And would this make sense to you? Right? You know, we were literally thinking about running a landing page and an ad, you know, just like maybe$1,000 experiment to say, Do you have any of these problems in your ENTJ? Team? It's called this and see what kind of conversions we got on it. Right? And that will tell us? Are we totally barking up the wrong tree? Or is there any hope that we can play with this word for a little bit in our blog posts and other things, right? So I think you've got to care for your customer in the way that they want to be cared for today, and not tell them, This is what you should be calling it or this is what you should want.

Dean Nelson: 56:23

Kristen, there's a couple things I want to touch on there. Because, again, with we've got different personalities on this podcast, right, with different experiences, different balance, which I love, because we can have discussions about things that we normally wouldn't if we're all the same kind of people in the room. And but what I think I hear from you, is very similar to me, you you can see what the future looks like, would you say? Right, it really comes at, you know, what is needed in the future. But then you gotta back up. Well, I know I agree with you, I can see that it's, it's crystal clear again, right? It's like, it's all about productivity. Well, point is you get the team together, how fast can you make them productive, right? And so I look at like, in my own business, virtual power systems, we created this thing about what is 10 years out? It's simply autonomous digital infrastructure. Okay, what does that mean? Well, there's a lot of things around that. But can we do autonomous digital infrastructure today? No, there's like, a whole bunch of things that have to happen, because there's physical environment, all the other things that go on, but at the end of it, our product internally is called Adi. It's literally baked into our platform, right? Because we are going towards that goal. So everybody gets the idea. But then you back it up. And you said something in there that I really loved, which was, you know, when you said, the human Chatbot. The whole point was usually that the simplest answer is the right one. And it's all about progress. And so what is it that you can do the fastest. And this goes right to that Lean Startup, it's funny, because you could written the book with everything you just outlined, because it intuitively came to you. That this this whole idea that, look, I'm making an MVP, that MVP could be as simple as a spreadsheet, that spreadsheet gets me an answer for my things I learned from there. And then I iterate again, but I'm like rapidly doing this, and I'm getting these test samples out there, right, that thesis is getting proven or disproven or adjusted or changed. And I, I love that because it still is, again, you have to have the visionaries, you'll never get there. If Steve Jobs didn't envision a phone like we have today, we wouldn't be where we are. Right? But then someone had to go back and say, how does that get done?

Kristen Buchanan: 58:24

There's a skill around reverse engineering that I think is a cousin or a sister skill to critical thinking. And I am pretty darn good that I don't think either of these two skills are taught anymore, either in primary school or college. There's, you know, whole academic disciplines around these things. And I don't think that people, our kids are taught that and I don't think that they're reinforced at work either. And it shows up in edifies interview process and in our work, and then the rigor that I try to push into our team. And, you know, I think one thing that I've been chewing on this whole time we've been talking is that you actually need to be really comfortable with conflict, and I intentionally throw in a lot of monkey wrenches into my team, and what I think is kind and compassionate way so that we will deal with things that we are not looking at. Right and so that we will face things that will be eventually troubling to our customers, or to our investors or what have you. And we may not have an answer right now, right? Because it's not linear right? And to Brad's point, we have changed the quote unquote roadmap 7 million times this year, right? We thought we were going to do this we thought we're going to do that. We thought the market wanted a Microsoft Teams but and not just a Slack bot. Well, they don't really because no cool companies are using Microsoft Teams,

James Thomason: 59:45

right. Sorry, Microsoft Teams.

Kristen Buchanan: 59:48

I actually do have a very unpopular opinion that Ms. teams might win. Now that Salesforce bought slack, but that's for a whole nother podcast but

Dean Nelson: 59:58

making friends making friends

Brad Kirby: 1:00:02

Okay, that was great. No, I was definitely very insightful from from everyone in a great chat. And I'm looking forward to testing out Eddie a little bit more on our channels,

Kristen Buchanan: 1:00:12

you should send us that checklist that you've got what beta test that feature for you. Alright.

James Thomason: 1:00:18

Well, Chris, this has been fascinating talk. And I just want to thank you so much for coming. We often in the show on predictions, and what kind of asked you do that a little bit now, by since you are deeply technical co founder, or founder and co founder? What technologies do you think are going to be most impactful for your business and building your product over the next, say, one to three years? What do you have your eye on? Could be anything could be a poison you with? Seeds of could be an LP or can be cloud stuff? And what do you have your eye on?

Kristen Buchanan: 1:00:48

Yeah, I'm first getting an answer did you won't like, which is humans? And I actually, okay, okay, gotcha, gotcha. I, you know, I am really, really jazzed about our team right now, because everyone is on this page of, we still can MVP things, right? We can still try new things, and we can human them. Right. And I think that is sort of the original technology, right? The original way. Because when you do something for five times, and you don't really like it, you're you'll write a script. Right? You'll figure it out. Right? And then you'll realize a place to workers in the scripts. Yeah. And then, you know, I'm sure they went on to better places, right. And you know, and that's the interesting thing about these kinds of companies, these kinds of products that we're building, they make other opportunities that we did not know, existed earlier. Right. And so that's very exciting to me. So that's probably the first thing. The second thing is that I am very curious about other chat frameworks. There's actually not a lot on the market right now. Slack is not very developer friendly. Ironically, there's a lot that they obfuscate in terms, there's, you know, here's like the basic API's. But there's a lot of stuff that they obfuscate, and we use a framework called Flow xo. And it's actually really more geared toward Microsoft Teams. And I don't think that we're changing backends anytime soon, we had that sort of five month process earlier this year. But I am very curious about whether or not there's going to be something interesting, like it's open sourced or something that can help teams build their own really well, right, instead of spending half day cycles doing it and actually building the original code for it. Is there something they can pick up and glue pieces to? I think that there are a number of companies that I'm eyeing little startups that are edify sizer or earlier that I'm pretty ruthless and that I think some times people start companies that are not companies, they are features of somebody else's product. And I see a lot of features of my product out in the market. So we'll drop names but one day maybe I'll scoop them up acquire

James Thomason: 1:02:58

Oh, there you go. Ruthless but honest. And also insert is true is

Brad Kirby: 1:03:01

true. We can all relate to

Dean Nelson: 1:03:02

that actually so and you can human it. That's the thing that I just learned. Yeah.

Kristen Buchanan: 1:03:09

Yeah. I will human the automation problem that you

James Thomason: 1:03:13

have, Kristen, where can people go to learn more about edify and to try it out for themselves?

Kristen Buchanan: 1:03:17

Yeah, you can try it out for free you can go to get edify.co and we would love to have you try it out, giving us feedback, helping us human and automate better.

James Thomason: 1:03:27

Thank you so much. Well, folks, if you enjoy podcasts, such as this one where we bring you the best and brightest leaders in industry who are actually doing it non posers, not those are founders okay. Please do give us a like it does help us grow our audience. We are sponsored, of course by infrastructure Masons whose uniting builders of the digital age, learn how you can participate by going on the web that imasons.org That's imasons dot ORG and by EDJX, who's building a new platform to enable developers to connect all the things, visit us on the web at EDJX.io. That's EDJX.io.