Speaker 0 | 00:09.238
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today we’re talking with R.C. Johnson coming live out of an undisclosed location surrounded by plywood that has been recently constructed for this very purpose, which is to record this secret show. Welcome to the show. And just, why don’t you just take a second, tell me, A, what your first computer was and how you got started into this whole, this insanity. And I mean, I don’t usually talk with developers that much because they’re usually hiding in a closet somewhere with all the lights turned off and sunglasses on. But I’ll let you, I’ll let you take this away. Give me a little bit of a, give me a little bit of a back. background and what your first computer was and how you got started in this.
Speaker 1 | 00:59.621
Yeah. Well, thanks, first of all, for having me. It’s a pleasure to be on the show with you. And yeah, no, definitely don’t quite fit the developer stereotype, but have been one in the past. Kind of, I guess, a recovering developer, if you will. My first computer was actually a Trash 80. uh trs80 it was a hand-me-down from my grandfather who was into computers and and uh upgraded to to something else i don’t actually know what he upgraded to but handed me uh and my my cousin each of us got trs80s and no you know no hard drive you know did you have that like the side like the side lp tape player thing i didn’t but i have i have the five the five what are they five and a half five and a quarter uh
Speaker 0 | 01:47.041
and floppy like a real thing
Speaker 1 | 01:51.272
yeah and you know you know the os was sitting on that so it was like boot into that and then kick that bad boy out and that he could load a game in or whatever and he gave me he gave me the manual let me explain that first of all for people that are listening because i’m assuming eventually somebody that’s not i guess we’re old now um
Speaker 0 | 02:08.103
i don’t like to think of myself as old but when my kids are like what you were born in like the 70s like they were like one of my kids that it was like what like for real like seven zero And then I’ve had comments before that are like, you grew up in the, what is this, the 1980s? I had someone say that to me. I was like, what’s wrong with the 1980s? It was like, it was a great time.
Speaker 1 | 02:31.093
It was a great time, but I’ll tell you, it was a different century.
Speaker 0 | 02:33.754
Different century, different time. Go, please, just go on that. We’ll get back to what you said, which probably makes no sense to other people that are not our age or, you know, mature. But what do you mean it was a different time?
Speaker 1 | 02:46.176
well i just i mean you know there was so much that was different in terms of the disconnectedness the you know not everything was always on you know um credit cards were not nearly as trend you know everywhere as they are today which you know pros and cons to all of these things like they’ve definitely been a give and take people had credit card it was a credit card it literally was a credit card not
Speaker 0 | 03:11.864
you don’t you can get away without having a credit card now but people used to have those big wallets and like billfolds or whatever you call them that would like unfold out and you had to go to whatever it was macy’s or the mall which is kind of a dying thing now not not in other countries in other countries the mall is still alive surprisingly and you’d have to do that manual like carbon copy of your card isn’t it amazing that people just trusted that it was writing like writing checks checks. When’s the last time you’ve written a check? It might not be that often, but I cannot remember the last time I’ve written my check. It’s usually for the property taxes.
Speaker 1 | 03:52.633
Yeah. We have a babysitter who very much relies on actual checks. And I’m like, I would rather pay you via Venmo. It’s so much easier for me to manage it.
Speaker 0 | 04:01.780
Look, I trust these check things. I know. For check bouncing. You bounced a check. So. You said this so nonchalantly, like it should just be understood. Like, yeah, you flop in a disc, you boot it up, you pull it out, you put in the next disc, and then you run your program. There’s got to be some people listening that may not even understand. I’m hoping, again, it’s probably not, or it’s all people like us. Let’s be honest. But maybe my child, one of my children will listen someday, or one of yours will maybe take interest in any of the stuff that we do as fathers. And… what do you mean here you put a disc in and booted it up what do you mean well we should we should start with what the thing looked like it was it was a tv
Speaker 1 | 04:47.298
you know like a like a 13 no no no no no it was not tv but let’s be clear not not like an lcd we’re talking about a giant like 13 by 13 by 20 d box you know catherine gray tube projection if you drop it on your foot you had to go get surgery sitting on top of a very large toaster that produced plenty of heat where all of the cpu and everything else for the actual computer was you
Speaker 0 | 05:18.050
toaster that you put you know pieces of plastic toast a floppy disk in i used to uh i used to butter up with some suntan lotion before i got in front of the screen right yeah it’s i just love talking about this because it’s so it was fun it was like there was this thing about growing up in technology as it was just so unknown it was it was just so different today like now when something new comes out you’re like yeah like so what it’s just it was just so different it was just you know video games were new they were coming out it was so it was so the whole thing was just it was such an amazing uh it really i could honestly say that part of my childhood was was was fun and and mysterious and like very um it was just it was really cool all
Speaker 1 | 06:05.919
right so a lot of just a lot of discovery left at that point in time
Speaker 0 | 06:09.494
So I was ADD procrastinator for most of my life through school and college. So I wasn’t cool enough to even probably care about coding. I would ask someone to code for me back. Hey, can you make a video game for me? But you, you at some point must have gotten into something somewhat intelligent surrounding these devices that we call computers.
Speaker 1 | 06:29.890
Yeah, I got fortunate that, you know, the next computer I had, big, big jump, you know, actually had a modem and the internet was starting to become a thing. And My school district was connected to the progressive library.
Speaker 0 | 06:45.501
Before you answer, what year was that in comparison to side by side with us landing men 220,000 miles away on the moon with technology that was less than that?
Speaker 1 | 06:58.208
Yeah. So that would be, let’s call it. 1960.
Speaker 0 | 07:03.371
30, 30,
Speaker 1 | 07:05.212
not quite, not quite 30 years later. 20. 2025 years.
Speaker 0 | 07:08.354
Oh, interesting. And the internet was just coming about, but we had landed men on the moon 20 years prior, which we still haven’t done since then. I just, I, the more I read about this project, I get very skeptical. And I am a man that was, we, you are an idiot if you don’t think we landed on the moon. Are you crazy? I’m just throwing it out there. If you’ve read any of the reports of how I’m mixed up in all the problems that there were with the rockets and problems and issues and people burning alive, uh, tragedy. And then the problems behind the scenes just throwing that out there for anyone that wants to maybe go down that rabbit hole uh moving on um so the code what what was the so we had the internet come about and we started coding or something i just uh i haven’t done this in a while so talk so talk to me yeah
Speaker 1 | 07:53.828
so it was html you know no css yet there was you know css was just being invented a little bit of javascript on the web but you know even that was really early days and and and Perl CGI scripts, you know? So I made the jump from basic programming on that TRS-80 to Perl programming in CGI and did a little bit of that in high school. And that was kind of the tipping point for me to say, okay, I’m going to go study this in college.
Speaker 0 | 08:21.918
Did you have any mentors or nerd friends that were doing it with you at the same time?
Speaker 1 | 08:25.739
Yeah, yeah. One really good friend that was just a little ahead of me, had every computer game, had more access to computers, had more access to the internet. But honestly, it was our school. You know, our school was, you know, it was a fairly rural school, but thankfully it was connected to the county library who was actually fairly progressive. And because of that, they had, you know, as a high school student in 90, you know, 94, we were actually even back in middle school, we were able to get email addresses, you know, and so we could send email to each other. Not that we had anything important to say.
Speaker 0 | 08:59.436
That’s actually pretty crazy because I graduated in 95. I didn’t have no email back then. then my first email was a hotmail account i think did i have email in high school no i don’t think so i don’t think i ever had any reason to touch the internet until i wasn’t what was the something net something net something what was the free dial up remember when the free had some phone net zero net zero until i had a net zero account and a hotmail account then i had then i had email i don’t know who i was emailing exactly like emailing my dad or something maybe i don’t know um It’s interesting. What’s even more interesting is that you could look up everyone’s address in Microsoft back then. You could actually like a global address book for every email on the face of the earth. Can you imagine? I mean, that’s just… That still blows my mind that you could just be like, I don’t know. What’s my dad’s email. I don’t know. Let’s just look it up. Let’s look up his email, like right here in the address book. That’s insane. No way. Let’s do that now. Was there something at some point along the way that absolutely blew your mind that was like, this is a huge jump that this is going to make a big difference.
Speaker 1 | 10:10.122
Yeah. I mean, so, so you asked me about nerd friends, you know, Dustin’s still a friend of mine today and we’ve stayed in touch. We’ve worked together three different times actually. And, and, you know, he in high school, you know, we were the same year, he was able to get a paying job and built an online shopping cart. You know, this is in like 96, 97, you know, maybe 98, but I don’t want to say 96, 97, you know, because shopping cart, you know, technology was not a guaranteed thing. There weren’t. you know just off the shelf open source software for it there wasn’t you know even even paid packages to build it and so he you know took up a contract with a business that wanted to start selling products online and they needed to build a shopping cart and that was the click for me of like okay this is there’s going to be a there’s going to be business happening online but it’s going to have to be done better than this and it’s not that’s not to say anything about dustin skills he was he’s great and still is. But it was just like, you know, we can’t go back and constantly reinvent all these pieces. And it began to click even in college. Like, oh, wow. When the software is running on the web, you’re not because, you know, back then it was, oh, well, let’s package a CD and ship software to people. They were buying the CDs of software. And I was like, no, no, no, that’s got to change. And I saw that, you know, and lots of other people did too. But I saw that while I was in college and I was like, okay. How do I get better at writing software that’s going to constantly be evolving and getting better for users so they get more value out of it without having to wait for a CD that only comes out once a year and a patch that comes out once a year on the off quarter? And that was a real turning point for software in general.
Speaker 0 | 11:59.651
In other words, being able to download and update. Is that what you’re saying?
Speaker 1 | 12:03.292
Download and update and or just use web-based software such that the software was. kind of constantly updating but yeah all both of those it was it was a big shift in in transmission or even going you know eliminating transmission of software and just saying hey we’ll give you the output from the software but you don’t even get the software on your machine so that that pendulum swinging from you know thick client to thin client where it’s like where’s the software going to run you know between you know big mainframes out to many computers back to data centers like that pendulum shift has been an interesting you know kind of pivotal moment in in software development for for all of us in the industry it’s a great transition to what we’re going to talk about which is business innovation right and where we’re in how to run a run
Speaker 0 | 12:52.097
an innovation team on a tight budget which i’m very excited to talk to you about but it is quite amazing if maybe people forgot that yeah aol used to send out a bunch of fruit cds in the mail Like you needed to get the free AOL CD and you used to throw them around like Frisbees because you got so many of them, you know, it was just kind of a stupid thing. But being a software guy that has also been an innovation leadership guy, which is the heart of the show, how do you run an innovation team on a tight budget? Right. How do you do that? And how do you get… Yeah. How do you do that?
Speaker 1 | 13:36.896
Yeah. Well, let me start a little bit with the background. So for the last seven years at Indeed.com, I was running the engineering team for new product innovation. We called it the Indeed Incubator. And in that group, we built a program of effectively creating an internal venture capital model so that we could explore ideas and do it efficiently, capital efficiently, time efficiently. I would say the crux of that for us was, one, making sure we had the right people in the room, really having that cross-functional team. So that’s not just product and engineering, but it’s obviously UX. It is legal and sales and marketing and a number of other disciplines to really fully encapsulate it. Basically, our hypothesis was… The world has already invented a great method for taking startup ideas and finding the good ones and investing in them and seeing them successful. How can we replicate that into a larger environment and make it successful?
Speaker 0 | 14:42.421
Let me unpackage that.
Speaker 1 | 14:43.561
That’s the crux.
Speaker 0 | 14:44.662
Let me unpackage that. No pun intended. Because there’s a lot there. And you started with getting all the right, you said the right people in the room. And that doesn’t, well, what does that mean? It doesn’t mean hiring. You’re not talking about hiring. You’re talking about getting all the right people that are in existence in the company and, and, or why is that important?
Speaker 1 | 15:05.868
Yeah. Well, it’s important because engineering on its own can’t build a great new product, depending on what you’re trying to build. Like if you’re trying to build.
Speaker 0 | 15:13.654
How dare you? How dare you insult the engineers? You know,
Speaker 1 | 15:17.520
look,
Speaker 0 | 15:17.660
if you’re trying to build some amazing- We know best what you need for yourself. If you need something, we will tell you what you need. But, you know, go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 15:26.344
Yeah, no, just, you know, look, if you’re trying to build some crazy new technology like ChatGPT or some sort of, you know, technical platform, yes, it’s going to be led by engineering. But look, ultimately, engineers are good at engineering. There’s a reason we’re specialized in that. And there are other disciplines that are out there that are really good at what they do as well, whether it’s product who really understands the user and really can drive that customer centricity in and can help us to measure whether or not we’re producing the value we want to be producing for that consumer, whether it’s a job seeker or an employer, some other software has other users. You’ve got user experience who’s really thinking about how do we make them efficient and effective and how do we… you know get the you know the foibles of this this communication mechanism via the web or whatever the the interface is how do we get that out of the way so that the user can just get what is the job they’re trying to do how can they get it done um you know and then sales and marketing man like as an engineer it’s really easy for me historically to just be like oh you know if i make good if i make good product people will come and want it and there’s there’s some extent that that’s true but on the whole There is so much value add by having really great sales and marketers who will step in and look at it and go, you’re attacking the wrong market. You’re using the wrong communication medium. You’re using the wrong channel to sell into.
Speaker 0 | 16:53.866
Can you give an explanation of that? And the reason why I say that’s so important to, why that’s so important to running an innovation team that’s going to help the company make money, which is ultimately going to make people sitting at the executive round table really love technology and want to have technology guys there. is because the sales guys and the sales and marketing guys know really who the hungry crowd is. Right. So there’s the whole, there’s the famous, uh, Gary Halbert for anyone that doesn’t know that he’s like the king of direct marketing. Right. He’s the guy that sold that sent stuff in the mail for years. Right. And he said, I will, he’s like, I’ll beat any one of you. I just need one thing. You can have whatever you want. It was like the old hamburger stand, the old hamburger stand. Uh, um, metaphor he said we’re gonna do hamburger stands i’ll give you guys whatever you want you can have organic meat you can have the location you know because people say location location location you can have anything you want i just want one thing one thing and one thing only you can have anything in all of it and so people are like yeah well give me a location on the corner give me this give me organic meat give me the best that give me the best you know food cost whatever you know he said okay i just want one thing like what he’s like i want a hungry crowd that’s it Right. So that’s what sales and marketing is telling you, right? You can’t, you don’t go out and build a product and then hope people show up for it. Sales and marketing is going to tell you what people’s actual needs and pain points are and what people are actually looking for. And then you can build a product to that. I’m assuming that is what you are talking about by meeting marketing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 18:18.616
Well, and I, and I, and I won’t even go so far as to say meeting with sales and marketing. I mean, sales and marketing in the team from first principles. Sure. Someone had an idea. could have come from sales or marketing, to be honest with you. The program we were running allowed those ideas to come out of those folks and out of those groups because they were the ones who were sitting with the customers and hearing the problems. But wherever the problem, you know, the genesis of that problem started, you know, we nurtured it a little bit. We explored a little bit, but then once we decided we’re going to commit and we’re going to work on this problem, then you go back to first principles, you go back to square one or, you know, wherever with the team. And that is, that’s the sales, that’s marketing, that’s product, that’s UX, that’s engineering. all sitting in the room and going, here’s what we think the problem is. And here’s where we think we can attack and solve that problem for this particular user. And so, you know, just to give you a concrete example, you know, when we started building hiring events for Indeed, you know, the thought process was, yeah, employers have a hard time running these in-person events. This is pre-COVID. And they have a hard time running these events and using Indeed, which is, you know, the number one hiring platform in the U.S. Why? What’s missing there? And it turns out that actually it was the spending model was broken, that the way Indeed kind of spent your advertising budget didn’t work for these hiring events. And so we came in and we repositioned the spending model. That was an engineering task. But then… We needed the sales and marketing team to figure out what’s the channel to get in front of the people who are doing this. Right. And then once you’re in front of them, how do you position that product as you know what? There is no viable alternative. It was just like, well, you’re using Indeed this way, but now you should use Indeed this way. And they worked on that positioning, worked on that and landed it and grew that into a nine figure business line within Indeed. And, you know, a massive, massive success on ultimately for us. funding the rest of our innovation, you know, with, you know, 60 plus other innovation teams that we ran all easily funded out of the revenue of just that one massive success in the first couple of years.
Speaker 0 | 20:26.347
So, well, first of all, congratulations on that because it’s, it’s cool to have big wins and to be able to have something to look back on and to say, I did this before I can do it again. I know what it takes. And a lot of times we don’t know our own value. So I’m just going to tell you that you’re a very valuable person right now so that you know that because I find it, sometimes you find it hard to, sometimes we do things that we do easily without thinking there’s much value in it. Like it’s not rocket science, you know, we say things like that, you know, but in reality, if you were to go actually teach someone what you do, then you’re like, oh, wow, this is going to be, this is going to take a long time. I only realized that because I do a lot of, by default of being involved in the community and some, uh, some other nonprofits and stuff, I, by default, become the like youth mentor, you know, sometimes like, Hey, how do I get a job? How do I do this? How do I do this? I’m like, well, first of all, show up on time, dress up, you know, work hard, do all of the things that none of you guys are doing, you know, don’t sleep until 11, stop playing video games all day long until late hours of the night. You know, like some of that, it’s weird how that type of thing works. Right. But it’s, and only reason I said that is because right after I got off our pre-call the other day, you know, like one of those youth mentors called me. He’s like, so I’ve been on Indeed. And he’s like, I found these different jobs on Indeed. I was like, oh, wow, that’s cool. Because I just spoke with the guy that was very responsible for quite a bit of change, change agent. I guess we call you a change agent. Something you said that was very mind-blowing and goes, in hand with what with what you just said of these 65 different innovation teams that you guys have and i’m a huge fan of first break all the rules and question everything and there’s this there’s this philosophy going around of you know stay focused focus on one thing at a time or just a handful of things at a time or do the one big thing and do your one big thing really really well but You said something that was almost the opposite, which was like, no, all the good ideas are dying. They’re dying on the vine. We’ve got tons of ideas. Do a ton of things really, really well. Do 1,000, well, 65 things in your case really, really well, which makes my brain hurt. But it revolves around, I guess, companies that innovate, innovate fast and do a lot of things really, really well that are new and fresh and better. Right. Because most things come from innovation, not just brand new inventions. But how the heck do you do that? Yeah. Well, because if I could if I could make all my ideas come to life. Right. Because they just kind of come and go. And I don’t have like an idea notebook, you know, to write them down. Like I could actually do all that. That’d be great.
Speaker 1 | 23:24.313
Yeah. So we had to build a pipeline. We had to build a process for taking those ideas in, vetting them, testing them, getting an executive sponsor. on board so that we knew that like there was somebody who was willing to put some some real money behind the project but i will also argue we had to be equally good at shutting stuff down we had to be ruthless at it it’s it’s almost the like sir you know servers are cattle not pets kind of mentality of like look these innovation projects are are not special until they are right and and they’re they’re kind of proven they’re they’re assumed dead until proven alive and it’s proven alive mean though
Speaker 0 | 24:03.020
makes money. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 24:04.340
Yeah. So, so, you know, the first round of funding would be only for three months on these startups that we would test. And so typically we would build the MVP and get it out in front of users and start to get responses from users about four weeks in, you know, so that’s from first principles, the team gets together and does the kickoff and, and really wrestles with, okay, we think we want to do this. And sometimes they’d even change the idea on the first or second day. And they changed the idea of what the software was going to be, or the solution was going to be or whatever, but they would. dive in and by week four we’re sitting out there with something embarrassing i will admit that but embarrassing but hopefully valuable and trying to get it in front of the right users what’s embarrassing to you Well, so, you know, I don’t use the phrase.
Speaker 0 | 24:49.896
It had a DOS prompt blinking. I mean, it wasn’t embarrassing.
Speaker 1 | 24:53.558
Well, I don’t use the phrase technical debt. I’ve eliminated technical debt. We probably couldn’t scale it. It was embarrassing in the sense that it was probably not reliable. You know, it was running in a single data center. So from an IT perspective and from an edge perspective, we’re looking at it and we’re like, we can tell you all the ways that this is going to fail for us. And we’re going to look kind of foolish. But it was also embarrassing on the UI. Because I had a team of generalists who could do decent UI, but could deliver business value. They could write the business logic like nobody’s business. They weren’t great at tuning databases either. They were generalists. And so there were lots of ways for this to kind of embarrass us. It could scale up and we’d get caught with our pants down on that. Or the UX just didn’t have the polish or there’d be a UX bug or an accessibility bug. For a long time, we produced products that just really probably were not as accessible as they needed to. and could have been.
Speaker 0 | 25:46.978
Can you give me an example of a database bug? Like if you have a weakness in the database, what problem is going to be blatantly obvious?
Speaker 1 | 25:54.641
I mean, the biggest one was we would just, we would throw everything into MySQL and index very, very little. And so it was not uncommon for, I mean, one of my favorite examples, although the team I’m sure is still loath to recall this, we had, we were using Python and Django and had a sessions. database, a sessions table that would just kind of be a little persistent store for sessions in case the cookie got blown away, you could kind of restore it back. And we did not exclude a health check URL from getting a session. And so every call from the health check system, which obviously was globally distributed and checking us from all around the world with lots of different machines, was getting a session. And so the team… All of a sudden I noticed, hey, we think we have 80 million sessions. And I was like, we don’t have 80 million users. Why do you have 80 million sessions? We start looking. Oh, okay, we’ll fix that. So we stopped making sessions, but you still have this giant table sitting there with all these records. And it’s actually like making it hard to do database migrations and upgrades and stuff like that. And the data team was screaming at us because it was taking up a bunch of storage too. And so the team says, hey, we’re going to clear the sessions. Everybody’s going to get logged out. But then like we’ll have all those old sessions gone. And I said, okay. yeah let’s go with it you said 80 million estimate doesn’t look like that’ll be too long to clear it and then unfortunately the team again generalists wrote a query that said delete from sessions where id equals blah uh you know it was in and so it went delete delete delete delete and
Speaker 0 | 27:26.743
as opposed to just truncating the table that’s that’s the smarter way to i would be lying if 50 of that didn’t go over my head and that’s why you are in the position but the but the point is is that that query started to run
Speaker 1 | 27:38.790
And it ran for about 30 minutes. And while it’s doing that, nobody can use their application because the table is locked. And so they’re stunned. And so we go out and we do a double check. It’s like, OK, crud. That query is deleting one record at a time instead of just truncating the table. We can fix that. Let’s just do a rollback. Let’s real quick, how many records are in this table? And they were off by an order of magnitude. It wasn’t 80 million. There were 800 million records in that table. And instead of a 30 minute run, maybe an hour run, it was going to be about 30 hours of run. And so we said, okay, okay, wait, stop, stop, stop. Let’s roll back. So we do the rollback. Well, it turns out in my sequel, rollbacks can take 20 times longer than the process that actually had been running because it has to go back and restore everything correctly and carefully. And so now we’re staring at as long to roll back as it would be to let the thing continue. And so we’re really… stumped and it’s all because of just a little bit of misconfiguration thankfully you know we had a little control and so we actually went in and because the way this team could operate pretty quickly i was able to do an export of their database restore it in a cloned copy truncate the table which is an instantaneous operation and then they just changed their configuration to point it copy two of the database copy one is over here just turned away for the next seven days and they were back up and running 20 minutes later so If you teach a team to move fast and focus on value, and uptime is definitely value, then we can come up with dirty, hacky, embarrassing solutions, but that ultimately deliver value to the user. Otherwise, we were going to be down for three to seven days.
Speaker 0 | 29:18.215
What do you mean by get the team out of the way? You said that to me last time. You said, get the team out of the way. Ideas are dying in the corner. We just hit on the ideas are dying on the corner, but what did you mean by get the team out of the way?
Speaker 1 | 29:34.392
Yeah. So let’s circle back to that. So every company is full of great ideas. There are tons of great ideas. There are tons of great ideas in the world, but they’re not always in the right place to get them done. And so when you have a great idea for a new product, for some new feature, sometimes that lands in the wrong place within your organization. And when you try and work on it, it looks like a distraction. And I think when you and I were talking in the pre-call, I mentioned Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma and that concept of jumping from one S-curve to the next. And that book is a little dated, but it still tells a great story of paying attention to where these seismic shifts in the industry, whatever industry you’re in, are coming. His book is all about hard drives and the move from spinning platter hard drives to solid state and jumps in size and jumps in magnetic technology and whatnot. And these manufacturers had to pay attention to that. And for us, we looked at it the same way that like, look, you know, Indeed was a multi-billion dollar company in a job search advertising business, but that wasn’t necessarily going to be forever the only or, you know, thing that they would do. There would be other things that they would be able to do as they kind of searched to be, you know, closer to the higher and take over more of that space. And so what we wanted to do was find those ideas around the company, whether they were coming from a salesperson who was on a call with a client. you know, or a marketer who was exploring something and kind of hit on something, or maybe it was a product manager who had this great idea. And that’s where hiring events came from. Product manager saw the problem and was kind of doing it on the side, but it, you know, it’s a distraction for him. He’s got his core business that he’s focused on. He’s kind of on the side with some spreadsheets running this other business and testing it. And we were like, Hey, why don’t we create a bubble? Why don’t we create a program that says, bring all those in here and let’s combat them against each other. thing one versus thing two to say which of these is you know and i think i think this is a question i may not have fully answered earlier which one of these is gonna actually take off and be valuable and so which one has the legs yeah like which one has legs versus the uh i don’t know one-legged database you know loop yes yeah and so it comes down to you know having them there so you can compare them head to head and look you’re still ultimately gonna have to make some amount of calls like Well, this one’s producing users, but not very many. And this one’s producing revenue, but not very much. Where do we place our bets? Because you ultimately have a budget for this whole bubble of innovation. But the good news is that then at least you’re trying to compare a startup versus a startup instead of the startup versus your incumbent business. Because when you try to compare a startup against your incumbent business, your incumbent business always has more revenue, always has better return on investment of what’s going on there. And it always has tons of growth ahead of it. And so the startup, it looks like, well, that market looks like it could dry up. The amount that we’re having to put in to make this work does not look like the unit economics are ever going to work in this. And it’s like, well, when you compare it to the incumbent business, it’s 10, 15, or however many years old. You had 10, 15 years to refine that and get those unit economics to work. We think we can prove it, but we’ll do it in a cost-effective way where we’ll set goals at the three-month mark, at the nine-month mark, at the 18-month mark that stop and say, is this exceeding our expectations? Is it delivering on the promises that it said it could deliver on? And when it does, great, keep going. If it doesn’t, then you’ve got two choices. Do you think it’s on the precipice of turning or do you think it’s played out? We’ve learned everything we can learn and then you shut it down. And I think I started to hint at this a minute ago. We had to be really ruthless. about shutting things down. I mean, we shut down 20 things that the team had been working on before I even started this program. And then during the, during the, you know, 60 experiments that we ran, 45 of them didn’t, didn’t actually, you know, make it. Only 15 of them made it to a sizable enough success to go off into other parts of the business. But of those 15, they were more than valuable enough to pay for the entire, you know, 80 person engineering team that I had at peak.
Speaker 0 | 33:50.388
you know and that that’s just the engineering team we were probably 150 people in total across the incubator it’s wild what do you say to someone because there’s other people out there right now that don’t have a 80 to 100 100 person 100 fold team not even close what do you say to someone that’s that’s in development or would be in a similar position of yours in a company where even the main product’s broken it needs help let alone Maybe they feel stuck or maybe it’s working and they’re just kind of keeping it going. There’s a tiny bit of little innovation there. There is a bunch of ideas, but they’re not welcome or fresh, new. spend, or they’re just maybe not welcomed by upper management. And that could just be due to how they’re selling it to executive management. Do you have any advice for people in that position?
Speaker 1 | 34:48.636
Well, I think the first thing is, if that core product is not working, then you have to have that. And so your innovation time should be spent on how do you figure out where are the… bottlenecks? Where are the hangups in that product? Is it sales? Is it marketing? Is it some sort of engineering piece that’s getting in the way? And engineering can be an unlock for any of those pieces, right? I can have an engineering team go out and build the pieces that are the unlock so that marketing can see their funnel or so that marketing can really work in the right channel or sales can see and convert the right leads. And we can begin to segment the business and really understand, okay, we’re, you know… S and B or, or no, actually we’re winning when we sell into enterprise, you know, whatever. And like, you begin to, to help them have the right tools to then go in and just, you know, absolutely win in the space that you’re in.
Speaker 0 | 35:42.785
And give me an example. Can you give me like a real life example of some kind of like, where we, and the only reason I’m thinking this is from a very greedy executive perspective right now. Like, let’s say I’m playing yes, tools, tools. I want tools. I want to make more money and sell into the space. I like it. How? Tell me what? What tool are we talking about? Can you give me concrete examples? Just some kind of example for the listeners.
Speaker 1 | 36:09.186
Yeah, I mean, so I’ll use the marketing team as an example. We had a great partnership with our marketing team. And, and, you know, they had a number of email platforms. But ultimately, like they were having trouble tracking users from, you know, the initial landing page through, you know, actually from the email journey.
Speaker 0 | 36:28.852
Yeah, absolutely. So customer journey from hitting the website to what products did they look at? Did they make a phone call to the contact center? Did they, was it omni-channel? Were they chatting with somebody? What did someone call them up? What happened? The whole customer journey. I get it. Go.
Speaker 1 | 36:43.379
Exactly. And so we, you know, what we did was we worked with, you know, this was for these new startup programs. And it was just that our data was just disappearing in the wealth of the rest of Indeed data. And so what we did was we got to, you know, work with them and they selected a platform that was going to give them that. perspective and then the engineering team unlock for them was we will pipe all of this product’s data from the landing page from the emails that the platform is kicking out they were doing their own emails they would have that track back into the same system and and so all the way from you know the the initial touch point with the customer all the way to the conversion point which is really when marketing would you know would hand off to you know the product and client success side That was all tracked. And so then we could see that funnel. We could see where the breakdowns were. And then we could begin to experiment in the weaker parts. This email is not converting at a rate that we want. Let’s try the different messaging.
Speaker 0 | 37:38.302
And marketing would tell you this email is not converting at the rate that we want, or you would tell them that and then tweak it or what?
Speaker 1 | 37:46.889
It was a partnership, but I mean, product would be the one who would.
Speaker 0 | 37:50.692
typically be drafting a lot of those well it depends on which email is the marketing email or a transaction what was the marketing email that wasn’t converting and what’s conversion to them and the marketing well you’re in recruiting so it’s probably kind of a high conversion but i’m just wondering what a good marketing email conversion rate is like yeah it depends half a percent is it half a percent even i don’t even know what it is it looks like it’s not emails real top of funnel yeah yeah yeah but it can be you know it can be single digit percentages we you
Speaker 1 | 38:19.428
For these new product innovation groups, we didn’t accept low percentages or partial percentages because we would be doing such small user groups that if we weren’t getting 50% sale rates, 40% growth rates, then you don’t likely have a hockey stick for that product if you’re not constantly adding 50% more users. If you’re not really seeing this resonate with the users. that says, this is great. This is really providing the value that I needed. You’ve really solved a problem for me. Then, you know, then we would kind of keep iterating on that, on that problem and that solution to make sure we were really, really getting into the, into the pain solution, pain management business for them.
Speaker 0 | 39:04.000
I would love to email as such. And it’s something we haven’t talked about on the show. Usually when we talk about emails, we talk about it from a hatred standpoint. What was your email strategy? Were you guys, were you involved in that at all? I mean, what is, how do you even go about an email strategy in a large company like that? Where, I mean, it’s like, if I went to my inbox right now, we’d find, you know, obviously thousands of emails. Anyone listening to the show is going to find thousands of emails unless you’re one of those real ADD dudes that just manages a zero inbox. And we know who you are. right it’s probably based on your head nod that was you that’s me that’s me two types of people there’s a zero inbox like super 88 you know super you know like that which is what i used my manager used to make me manage a zero inbox so i have a huge appreciation for it a huge huge huge appreciation for it but the reality is i have 143 622 unread emails not in spam you That is the reality of my, and I, people are probably like, I will never talk with Phil Howard again. Now there’s certain people out there to listen to that. They’re going to be like, there’s something wrong with him. And I just, I mean, it might be due to the old domains and stuff that I have running in there. And I hate deleting emails. I really do. There’s just some, like, I have this, like, it’s, it’s, it’s, it must be ADD. It’s like, well, someday I’ve got to search. I might have to. That’s the email that got sent in 2009. I mean, archive then, you know, I mean, email is fascinating to me. What, what could we, I mean, I’m a fan of snail mail now. I think I have a better chance of getting someone like you to read my email. If I take three days, put a stamp on it and put it in a huge yellow envelope, make it real bulky, put something in the envelope and send it to you. I literally have guys that have said, I could not get. in touch with this person. I needed to get in touch with him so bad that I went to Best Buy. Everyone’s going to steal this idea now. Bought a digital picture frame, filmed my message, uploaded it to the digital picture frame, sent it to him in a yellow bulky package, hand wrote his name on the front, nothing else. That was the only way I could get him to, it was the only way I could reach this person. Pretty cool idea. But, um, Yeah. So I don’t know if you have anything to add to email strategy or for people that don’t have an email strategy. I mean, I send out emails for the show, like, Hey, this, this shows episode, you know, released. And I literally had, and I need to do it again. Cause I changed my domain name. I literally just paid my, I’m going to pay and get my daughter’s going to do it this time, but I paid an assistant before to literally direct message, physically phone call every single person that’s ever been on the show and every single person that’s on the email list and said, Phil’s going to send an email or I’m going to send you an email. Are you okay with that? First of all, are you okay that we send you an email? Yes, I’m okay with that. Could you please go into your spam folder if it gets quarantined or whatever it is right now while we’re on the phone call and could you white label the domain? That was my email strategy. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 42:23.313
Yeah. I mean, look, search engine marketing, SEO and email type stuff.
Speaker 0 | 42:29.238
I’ll be in peace. How did you guys, with the amount of emails that you send out, how did you not get like marked for like spam or some kind of like, you know, how do you get just not so many spam complaints or whatever, you know, big companies have money to pay for it. I mean, I don’t know. What is it?
Speaker 1 | 42:43.928
Well, yeah, I mean, so my experience with email service providers is you have to care and feed for your email servers. You know, you really do. You have to pay attention to, you know, the authenticity and the scoring that you’re getting. And if you get too much spam, you got to get it under control. Um, you know, for us, you know, the focus was on how does every single one of these emails really provide value that that’s obviously the goal for everybody, but then also how to get it to the right person, right? Because if you, if you send something of value, but to the wrong person, it is immediately not a value to them. And so it was, it was an incredible challenge. And honestly, you know, indeed sent a ton of email, a ton of it useless. And it will ultimately you know that was something that we were constantly working on there were whole teams dedicated to you know trying to track down where were the emails that were not helpful the ones that were were getting flagged and getting those terms of them getting them you know it was an a b testing culture and so you know yeah sometimes the answer was like okay let’s change this let’s change the recipient list or let’s change the content of this to try and you know get the value right.
Speaker 0 | 43:57.744
Literally tweak just the subject line is usually what it is. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 44:01.785
Yeah. You know, or, or even the two, you know, a lot of emails from Indeed come from John at Indeed or Frank at Indeed or Emily at Indeed. And, and usually, usually those were actually real people to begin with. Their name just, their name just got attached to that particular product line. And, and so, you know, it’s not like we’re trying to trick people. in any in any stretch of the imagination but it was definitely it made it a little bit more personal it made it made you realize that like emily you know was the one who ran the customer success you know the um the job seeker success group and so like if you go out and you get in and a resume review you’re going to get an email from emily at indeed and it’s like okay great you know i i know why they chose emily for that but it makes it a little bit more personal but but to your point about how did we protect i think because we were careful with the AB testing to make sure that those emails were converting, they weren’t getting flagged, and you’re only doing, you know, 1% of the target audience to begin with. And you’re sure that it’s good in that 1%. And then you go to five or 10 and then 50. And you work your way up to that. So you don’t just blast your entire email group right out the gate and find out that like 90% of people are going to think that was spam, click spam. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 45:16.207
Yep. We put it on drip mode today. I’ve never done a show on email. I think it’s worth doing a show. If you’ve got any good people from the past that would be, want to talk about email. I just never done a show on email. Let’s do a show only on email. It’d be cool.
Speaker 1 | 45:32.247
Quasi engineering, quasi, you know, email deep people. So yeah, absolutely. I happen to make an intro.
Speaker 0 | 45:37.809
The point, and then we can end with this. This has been a great, a great show. Most, I don’t know how many. it departments would have this type of discussion with cross across departments like you said i don’t know if i just don’t know how often it would you know maybe even talk with marketing about you know i don’t know dns health or whatever domain health and i don’t know i haven’t done a show on email yet but uh would love to but what would you i mean what would you think yeah i mean to me the
Speaker 1 | 46:17.386
core of this is is driving that communication and it gets harder the bigger the organization gets of course but when you can when you can really foster a good information flow such that everyone is informed and able to do their their specialty i think that’s kind of one of the themes of our conversation is that like everybody’s able to like really operate in their wheelhouse and just like do their best work because they’re empowered to be successful that’s when you know you all of a sudden you get an awesome unlock from marketing or an awesome unlock from sales or you know honestly also unlocked from engineering or i.t that happens we all have a part it takes it takes that village working together and you know really working to have really good information flow inside the organization like to some extent the same problem exists in email inside the organization the sense that like you know when i was at indeed i was getting thousands and thousands of emails and it’s a real tough problem to cipher through that and go, that’s relevant to me. That’s relevant to somebody on my team. And it’s like pushing through all that’s really, really challenging. So anyway, I just, I say figuring out and really driving at that communication and making sure you’ve got the right voices and ears in the room every single time.
Speaker 0 | 47:33.698
One of the, one of the biggest aha moments for me here was, I guess, well, no, it’s not an aha moment. I guess the, it would be more along the lines of, no, it is. is that there are a thousand good ideas out there and we should actually entertain them all. We should just kind of maybe eliminate them more fast, eliminate them faster, put them in a box, make them compete for each other. But you can actually do, I mean, if you had a team doing 65 different projects or anything over 60 at one time is, is significant. And so from talking with you, the aha moment is, is that. And this would be, I would assume this would be something or a possible piece of advice. I’ll let you have the final word. But my, my advice to people out there listening is that you actually, as, as any technology leader and in the company, you can go up to leadership, executive leadership, I don’t know, CTO, CEO, whatever owner. And you can say, you know, there’s a lot of great ideas in this company. So a lot of great ideas that could make us a lot more money, maybe not as much money as our. core product makes right now. But there’s a lot of good ideas that when combined might actually bring an extra 10 to 20% of the bottom line and they’re dying on the vine. And some of them are just completely disappearing as employees leave and go work somewhere else. Would you like to collect those ideas and at least incubate them? That’s my summary of you. That’s what I’ve taken away from this conversation with you. Am I missing anything?
Speaker 1 | 49:11.492
No, I think that’s a great synthesis. We had a ton of success, you know, doing that. And ultimately, you know, I think the only like tweak that I would add is. If you’re careful and you pay attention to how you do it, this does not just end up as a cost center for innovation. It actually ends up being a profit center. Even though you don’t expect revenue and profitability from every single piece, if you approach it like a venture capitalist would, some of these things are going to return one for one, but some of them are going to return 100 to one. And those… odd ones that you find that return 100 to 1 on the investment that you put in easily pay for all of the other experimentation that you did that, you know, made this product a little bit better or gave a new idea that sparked some other new product over here or some new feature over here. But ultimately, certainly more than pay for all of the innovation that you can do, you know, at that time and for a long period into the future.
Speaker 0 | 50:15.673
RC, Ben, a pleasure having you on the show. Really. uh just just opened my mind and made me and removed some blockers for me uh to be honest with you so that that’s fresh and and new so i really appreciate you being on the show uh certainly certainly hope to hear more from you in the future and if there’s anything that we can do for you over here dissecting popular t-nerds please don’t hesitate to to reach out to us and and we’ll we’ll explore more things in the show and i look forward to talking about email with somebody that wants to go deep into uh to email because email is exciting to me, believe it or not.
Speaker 1 | 50:52.817
Well, Phil, thank you so much for having me. It was great. Great being on.
