okay our YouTube live stream is taking off very soon our YouTube live stream is coming on very soon so we're excited for this okay our YouTube live stream is taking out very soon okay guys all right so someone asked me what would I say I'll quickly share about what would I say given the situation um so if I were to meet one of these people I would always start with a compliment so something about them or their or like especially if I've heard or learned about them I did my research or I'm fascinated by them I was always start with a compliment like hey I really like this then I would try to get into casual conversation something that's more personal like if we're at a cafe what coffee are you getting if we in an elevator what floor are you going to so then we have built some common report and this is like 5 seconds and then right after that I would share like I would ask I would tell them a little bit about my background hey my name is Yin I'm the CEO of head starter or hey my name is I was I'm a software engineer at Capital One or I'm an intern whatever uh or I'm a student I'm CS student so and so uh I really like my most you know impressive thing is sh this I was just curious and I will always ask them a question you have to ask them a question never like sell something you'd always like like ask him a question and ideally it's a wellth thought ey question right like if it's uh sh are like hey um so what's it like being uh working on um you know Financial transactions without having a finance background how did you get through that are you a bank like do people give you want to get them to open up you want to get them to like really share like you know what they're doing and so that just like that's kind of like you know how I would go about it there's been some really good responses here though um so a lot of you guys have already like done some research connecting different things so um uh that's really good and I would always leave that 30 second with trying to get their email or some form of contact and then after I get their contact I'll follow up with them the next day or immediately hey you remember me I met me you met we met at the cafe we met and previously I met you at head starter and then after that in a follow-up email I would say another follow up like hey why don't we get a conversation somewhere or if they're really B busy or you know they don't have time I would say like hey um I really appreciate your journey I'd love to keep you posted and reach out to you you know sometime and that's it you don't have any call to action you just let them know you really appreciate their time and hopefully they remember you for who you are actually sorry people are not going to remember you for who you are they're going to remember you for the questions you ask them because whenever you ask a question it makes them feel something and they're going to remember that feeling right so if you can ask good questions or any questions in general even the stupid ones you can probably uh have good ones and I see people asking me to pin uh someone's messages I'll take a look into that in a bit um oh correct yeah please don't spam anything so uh if I'm able to pain that that would be great I want to bring on our upcoming uh panel so let's see if I [Music] can the uh hey Dustin I just made you a panelist so if you're able to uh like talk let me know do like a little mic check one two or something hey as I'm just coming in one second awesome awesome yeah take take your time to take a minute uh looks like I can hear you H there we go amazing yeah there we are Hey Hey Hey so uh uh really it's an honor to to to have you here Dustin uh so want to quickly tell us what city and Country you're calling in from yeah so it the city in the country is the same it's Singapore ah shoot okay and what's a what's a fun fact about you what are you doing in Singapore and how long have you lived there oh wow okay so I've been here three years but I've been in Asia 16 years I've lived in uh Japan I've lived in Hong Kong and now Singapore uh but I'm originally from Atlanta and then yeah I've done Global business my whole career most people kind of start off domestic and then go Global I've always been uh handling a global markets incredible incredible uh so Dustin I am super stoked to uh introduce you and have you share your journey a little bit background about yourself thanks so Dustin was a former uh manager and would you say director as well at am um you led their product division in in South Asia and as you know you're very very close with both the rise of Nvidia and also the you know how how sustainable it is because you're a product leader and thought leader in this space um before that um you've worked a ton of jobs uh before uh letting it aim AMD and more more most recently you know you're the director of ltis so uh there's some going to be some interesting comments that wouldn't want you to be fased by any of them I want to give you five minutes to share about your personal journey and some you know advice you would have and then another five minutes if you can share about very specifically how can people build their own product because you're a product leader um and some advice on that especially with the context that a lot of people here are being you know held to a level of standard where they have to ship to A Thousand Years as make a th in Revenue so go ahead yeah sure okay so I high l a little bit of background on me uh I'm Computer Science Background uh and then went into the business side uh in my career uh I actually started learning computer science by myself so uh I'm uh old enough to have grown up in the 90s and back then we had the Riley O'Reilly books these books you may see with with various animals on the front and so it used to be a really exciting thing when a new book would come out uh because in a lot of ways that that's how we learned this was kind of pre- internet and then once we got the internet uh obviously we got on like uh icq and uset and all these other things uh to where you could trade stories uh but basically started off teaching myself uh C uh back in the day uh and then uh also did like networking so it used to be like a job to be the CIS admin essentially I guess it still is but back in those days CIS admin like you know i' literally just set up people's computers and and wire together um like ethernet and and it was magic you know like the first time we we wired up the ethernet at my school uh the the teachers had no idea what it was and and I became basically the uh the tech teacher uh at my high school while I was like 16 or something like that and started getting paid and I was making you know like a lot more than my friends who were you know working at McDonald's or whatever and so I thought oh wow this is this is awesome you know Tech's pretty cool uh and so I went to University and majored in computer science and kind of uh went through I guess I guess I would consider a traditional computer science uh program uh this is at University of Georgia um and you kind of start off you your standard Java was the main language that they taught and so we started off doing Java we learn object oriented programming which was still a bit of a new thing uh my father was actually a programmer as well from the late 80s like he was really like uh one of the first kind of generations uh or I guess the first generation to be programming out in the corporate world um and he uh he didn't really code in objectoriented programming so like just that was kind of a thing and then um we kind of went through that we went through data structures you know like kind of like trees and sorting uh we went into Theory that's where we got introduced into like finite automata and like regular expressions and uh pumping Limas uh and and Big O so like all these things that that as computer scientists are really important but maybe since then uh apart from regular Expressions uh maybe don't come up in in common everyday language outside of like you know software engineering circles um but it kind of gave a a good insight into the history of computer science which was math and a lot of my professors were actually math guys they' had been around since since like you know the 60s and uh you know they they were doing computer science but since before it was really a thing uh and so it was kind of cool to see the history that way um and then later we got into um Advanced kind of classes like networking security myself really hard and this is something I'm glad that I did was uh I took the kind of hybrid graduate level classes where you got like up in the 3,000 4,000 level or 300 400 depending on what you call it uh that would be a hybrid class along with The Graduate students right and like the first first year graduate students and so I pushed myself to like you know we went through RSA encryption you know like line by line how does it work um you know we went through all the Sorting algorithms and learned the efficiencies and all these types of things so uh that was really really insightful to where I started kind of seeing things as two disciplines like one the algorithmic side or the kind of thought process if you want to call it that and then the actual software engineering side of like how do we Implement pseudo code you know if this is the algorithm is the idea of the pseudo code how do we then go Implement that in a professional robust scalable secure manner you know these kind of two different uh disciplines um and so as a part of that I kind of did my own stuff at at home like I had set up my own Linux server in my dorm room and uh you know was running websites off of it coding websites myself and you know I had like my own blog engine like before blogger was a thing and um like I even started kind of doing like a little bit of a what we call social network today but you know I heard about this guy like Mark up in Harvard was doing something and I was like yeah that doesn't really sound very interesting so I was I was really really wrong about that obviously and so uh yeah I uh I kind of just continued on with computer science traditionally and then uh as I was as I was studying um I saw some job ads and uh and they were hiring for something called bioinformatics uh and I had no idea what that was and so um I just applied I was like well you know I I need a summer job and you know I don't want to go work at McDonald's or something so no no no shade on McDonald's but applied for that and it turned out to just be you know really awesome uh because I got exposed to working at a a graduate level lab uh in the department of biochemistry um where we started doing what what today maybe you call Big Data right so we took in literal just like DNA you know it's like all the t's and what have you like all the letters and uh it's text from a computer science standpoint and then we we basically started to draw correlation between when we did or the scientists did work in the wet lab uh how did that impact uh what DNA looked like and and what uh people who had cancer you know what was the correlation between people had cancer and people didn't versus what the lab results were and so it it was kind of this I stumbled onto this um career essentially in Big Data bio emper answering a job ad so kind of reflecting on that a bit was like you know you know looking for opportunities and taking opportunities even though you don't know where they go sometimes can really play off uh and it and it then got me some mentorship with like a you know graduate level famous guys in in in bioinformatics um to where I I got to learn from them and I got to take a lot of responsibility like I think literally we went down to a computer store and bought like 60 servers and then set it up ourselves and that was our first data cluster you know this is before kubernetes obviously or anything like that or or containers even existed and we were like you know wiring together uh servers with pearl scripts so uh that was pretty fun and then uh after University so I got I got you know some interviews at Telos and that kind of stuff um because of my bioinformatics work and so that helped me land like really my first programming job uh was working uh doing like business automation flow like RFP flows RFQ flows so in the business world that's requests for proposal or requests for quote is when you go out and buy something in an Enterprise level typically people kind of do initial solicitation of of bids and offers that's called an RFQ or an RFP and so I started writing like automation workflows for things like that uh in the corporate world in.net and transition from java into C at the time and kind of as I was doing that um I you know I I liked being a programmer I liked being behind the desk I like the product or I liked I like building things but I love the people aspect of it too like I really loved HCI when I was in university as well and so that kind of led into me uh raising my hand to get into the product side and want to be the bridge in between the technical team uh and the customer and the sales team and then that kind of expanded uh and just to shift forward 20 years of career uh you know I went back and did my MBA and then uh after my MBA I got hooked up with with AMD and kind of got harder into uh the hardware side of things and the semiconductor side of things okay uh so yeah that's kind of like career-wise at a high level uh what I've done there um at AMD uh actually as y mentioned I was the lead South Asia but also I was the the GM for their consumer business uh in Asia Pacific before uh I got back into the software side of artificial intelligence at Lis uh working in computer vision uh so I've gotten to get Hardware side of of AI at AMD and then software side a bit now at Lattis and then you know when in my private life uh also kind of working with a few uh different companies uh a few startups uh in in the AI space so it's been kind of interesting but um I'd say it's like you know going back to what we did 20 years ago uh in the lab um you know a lot of the the stuff is the same concept I mean it really hasn't changed that much uh llms obviously it's a different thing Transformers is a different thing uh or an improvement but a lot of the kind of overarching ideas uh were there and in fact I remember talking to a professor M about the semantic web uh in his lab you know 20 25 years ago and back in those those days you know Json hadn't yet been invented we were like just trying to we were like scratching our heads like you know how can we get the two websites to talk to one another you know like and what would they talk about you know we were we were trying to figure this out through like XML and stuff and uh it's just kind of funny to see like actually some of those those nuggets of those ideas of of stuck around and now we're we're finally getting to see him implemented so it's uh it's pretty cool to still be in the industry and and still relatively young to where I can go out and uh and hopefully bring some of these things to fruition that that have been talked about for years and and hopefully contribute uh part it all right so uh I'm happy to try to pause for questions if somebody can help me read I can't read the chat fast enough I'm happy to take them um Dustin uh I can kind of guide you through some of these questions but I I did want to kind of get your your two cents on the importance of team collaboration and the importance of soft skills in the tech industry yeah yeah yeah yeah so I'll transition a bit there thanks um so the second I going to talk about from perspective right so just to Dive Right into soft skills so um as you can kind of see as as I expanded my career the the core functionality of of the technical skills is is the foundation as the base right and and you wouldn't be in the chair if you didn't have them to some extent right now obviously Mastery is a different thing and this is a lifelong Art and Science that we practice U But ultimately to do something big you're gonna have to collaborate with with other people and you're gonna have to collaborate with people uh both laterally to the same your peer group uh people above you especially at beginning in your career people below you as you get higher up in your career and also people outside of your functional area uh and so for me um what what I've found is the most powerful skills communication the ability to go out and articulate uh your position on something to listen to what the other person's position is on something what their goals and values are what they're ultimately trying to do you know maybe how what word did they choose you know did they choose like an active verb in this case versus like a passive one you know what's their motivation level uh all of these things kind of put together will let you ultimately rise above and ultimately get your projects into the real world get your businesses uh to to be successful and to kind of go into the second part of the discussion around hiring is is when I'm out hiring that that's kind of how I'm bucketing things I'm looking at okay what what are the kind of core technical skills like okay if it's a software developer are we talking cc++ python do you know you know pie torch or tensorflow you know have can show me a project these kind of like basic kind of portfolio things like basically walk me through your GitHub you know like that kind of stuff um then when we go beyond that I kind of encapsulate it as attitude and and I would say that's actually the thing I'm looking for because to some extent um you have the skill or we can teach a skill like I can teach a hard skill actually or or if somebody is U maybe not so good at market analysis or something like that like if they don't know how to like you know gauge a tam and then identify a Sam or whatever or they don't know the four piece of marketing I can teach these things actually quite quite easily and readily if they're willing to learn and if they have the willingness like if they have the capacity to learn and the willingness to learn and so uh and if they want to collaborate with me so I always kind of tell people like I can't teach attitude like I can't teach somebody to be a good team player to some extent I can't teach you to be a decent person so you can though you can improve yourself you can practice your communication skills like atin said before and that's something also I've I've actively tried to get better at uh and am I think still trying to get better at is how do I collaborate with people that you know maybe I I'm just very different than them you know have very different interests in them or in my case I work across 18 countries in Asia Pacific so you you have to learn how to talk across cultural values and barriers and language barriers and all those types of things and so learning that that empathetic skill and practicing it is is really really important and then you you also kind of find that when you're working within teams um you you want to have conflict but you want to have the right type of conflict you want to have a healthy type of conflict so uh you want to have what we call task conflict and not personal conflict and and that implies that you're going to separate the two right and that implies that you have some sort of delineation or or line of sight to well what's the task at hand and then who are the people I'm working with right so I'll kind of say that again what's the task at hand what are we going to do here what's the goal and then who am I working with like you know at a base level who are they what's their name where are they from you know but okay what are their goals what are their strengths what are their weaknesses maybe you know how can we come together as team to accomplish this goal and then when we have those conflicts you know how how can that be a healthy thing in that the ultimate product is going to get better because we had the conflict right like we decided uh a path together that ultimately we couldn't have figured out as individuals and and this is a large topic that if you ever go to an MBA actually you you'll work a lot through but at a high level you'll kind of discover a few a few kind of uh elements there around uh just getting Clarity on what you want to do is important and valuable it may sound kind of trivial in an academic perspective because in an academic perspective you're typically hit you know handed an assignment right whereas in the in the corporate world that almost never happens to be counted you know usually your job is to go figure out what to do and that's a lot of the challenge right just knowing what to do is maybe half the battle right there but then if you've got to articulate why your view of the situ ation is is uh appropriate or a good fit and why others should follow you on this journey to go accomplish this goal and then you need to like I said kind of work through the hurdles between the beginning and the the end even if you can't see the end as to how we can we can ultimately come together as a team and make the best product that we can and then I'll kind of just one final note on that as I'll say a lot of times the the pitfall I see is we've got a lot of things said we can do but then how are we going to narrow down and prioritize and say what we should do right now right like what's in a computer science perspective it's like okay we've got 50 features on the on the docket here but what's version 1.0 and what's what are we gonna say for 2.0 and 3.0 and what are we just kind not going to do at all and and kind of getting a good group dynamic to where you can work together with trust and you can work together with open communication with the knowledge that hey if we're not in agreement that's okay right we're not in agreement that's a task conflict we may not agree on the task but on a personal level we're good right just because I don't agree with you on you know whether we should use this API or that framework doesn't mean we're not getting coffee later you know and so the kind of big uh takeaway I'll leave you there with is building that trust I think comes first like to to get to know your your team establish that kind of foundation because you'll use that Foundation later on uh further on and then keep refreshing it you know keep checking in with people and don't just assume uh that because you had coffee with them six months ago you know you guys are still you know uh close together right so that that team building stuff as cliche as is uh it really really matters right and a lot of times at an executive level uh that's actually what you're doing right you're not working in the business necessarily uh you will work on the business okay I just happened to see one question as an American do you know a good place for these Global jobs in Tech all right so Tech um Tech in general is a big world right number one uh what you will find from a hardware perspective is there are certain kind of centers of excellence I'll call them to where really you probably couldn't launch a tech product without them and and that would be Silicon Valley uh increasingly Austin Texas uh then um China still Taiwan Malaysia and then the coordinating thing sometimes there a lot of time is Singapore but you'll find a lot of the hardware tech industry especially is is really really uh semiconductors especially are are really focused around those areas um and over time you'll see probably that change uh due to the the geopolitics but uh yeah for now I think you'll still see things pretty much there uh let's see is it easier to find work in a different country compared to us and Tech uh not necessarily um I think what you need to do is view things from a few different lenses is one the geography uh two is the people and three is probably the skills you're looking to obtain I would probably lean mostly into the people right ultimately you're going to get the best opportunity at the beginning uh through networking into the folks uh networking into the opportunities that you want and then most importantly or maybe just as importantly the second uh opportunity is once you have the job what are you going to learn and in my experience a lot of that does come down to the leadership that you're working for you know your your Superior officer is going to be able to or your reporting manager is going to make a big change in your destiny yeah and sorry I saw a question about AMD gpus and I I couldn't read it so may have to come back to that one uh what would I ask okay I caught one of like what would um how do you get to SF when you're not American that's a very complicated one obviously with the visas but um I I'll say the the American non-american thing um I wouldn't I wouldn't read too much into it you know I I have a multi-is I have I have a multicultural team and I I've worked with people around the world uh at the end of the day what the color your passport the flag on your passport isn't really the thing that's going to make a difference like I said the skills the attitude that you have willingness to work um communication skills those make a big difference that's where maybe being a non-american or a non-native English speaker uh you may want to put some time energy and effort into is getting the language skills well because it's like you could be you know Albert Einstein let's say if he didn't speak English well he's not GNA go help the US government in physics now is he you know it's it's really hard and on top of that you know we're not we're not just dealing with uh normal everyday let's get coffee we're dealing with semiconductors we're dealing with like you know node sizes or and computer science find out automaton all these things these these very complex technical topics and so um it's important that that you're able to communicate those types of of um complex topics with uh with your team right otherwi it's kind of kind of difficult and yeah sorry I'm getting Symon it's hard for me to follow on but uh in today's job market what would be my Kernel Panic oh no I'm sorry I wouldn't be able to answer I wouldn't be able to Colonel P Panic um imposter syndrome is an interesting one and sorry I'm trying to see if I can expand the chat here where I can get a little bit better line of side uh let me add a imposter syndrome actually because that is actually something um uh I I find really interesting is everybody will deal with it right myself included my mentors included you know I've chatted with my mentor about imposter syndrome sometime um and and actually it goes back down to um I think remembering that you have a lot of biases in your life like just as a human right like you naturally overreact more to things that just happened to you that's recency bias you naturally view yourself as the protagonist that's a bias right and so impostor syndrome or is in some ways implying that everyone's kind of thinking about you and judging you and that's just simply not true most of the times people are not judging you and and thinking about you they're thinking about themselves right because they also have the protagonist biased I'll call it so number one is that that's just not true number two though I would say is it's it's not a bad thing I think to challenge yourself and to ask yourself yeah am I a good fit for this in an honest fashion and is this really what I want to do or is this what somebody else wants me to do like am I motivated to do this and if you could say yes to those two things well three prove it right like it's not a bad thing to go prove things to yourself so that when it is natural that maybe you have times of self-doubt and you're thinking like can I really do this go back to like I don't know your GitHub page where you built a difficult project or go back to like the time where man you know I didn't notice it but it was like 7 am in the morning and I spent five hours just like you know kind of reading about uh what's the latest algorithm in artificial intelligence I really love this stuff right like go back and kind of remind yourself of your experiences and and ground yourself uh in the real world experiences and I think uh I think you'll you'll be able to kind of like quiet that voice in your head a little bit with like with with with reality and kind of get away from uh from that kind of stuff uh all right uh sorry I saw a couple other really good ones oh how do you practice articulation and communication okay um so I wasn't actually really good communicator earlyer in my career either you know I was like I was very logical very structured very computer scientist computer scientist right so I'm used to doing these these huge projects you know like we're going to Define this and then we're going to go you know do like our requirements analysis and then we're going to come back with you know and then we're gonna have our stage gate processes and then we're going to do our QA you know it's these huge big things that's not what communication's about you know communication is is number one not these huge structured projects communication is uh more Dynamic and flowing so loosen up uh number two is it's not Perfection no one's going to give you a QA about your communication okay and if they do you can you know tell them where to put it you don't need to approach the skill of communication the way you approach the skill of of uh software engineering and then a lot of about it is about the person across the table from you and so what what I would try to do uh I remember I had a job interview is really intense uh with the US government early on in my career and I was interviewing and like a a mock kind of team setting and they put us in a crisis situation and a scenario and it was just oh my God it was stressful um and I was with people that are mostly older than me I was uh maybe 26 and everybody in the room was like in their 40s and 50s right and so I just told myself you know what I'm not I'm not gonna be able to go toe-to-toe I'm just gonna ask a good question I'm gonna ask one good question and that's what I did I just focused I was like quiet I listened and I asked one good question so my advice on communication is um start with good questions like ging kind of alluded to before before ask a good question you know try to get insightful don't don't think you have to like you know ask them their entire life story but ask some good questions and then again listening active listening is is really the way to go when it comes to medication all right uh thank you so much for the time I really appreciate it I know you know for you and that side of the world it's a morning time uh so we appreciate it my pleasure so Dustin you had done some great incredible work for us uh by talking to one of the senior directors of software engineering within AMD uh and guys the stuff that DUS is talking about this is like quality and please like note like write down notes like what he's sharing share with your friends post it online post it amongst like like just you know these are these are good things these are good Snippets now I'm going to give you like a bigger and a little bit more snippet uh I'm excited for our next speaker too but I just had to share this I think this was incredible like uh Corpus of information that you had gotten uh this is this is this is real leadership talking this is this is real real senior directors who are responsible for hiring you know inventing what what people look for in hiring right and you kind of shared and you already kind of shared this in your talk like oh you look for these signals so and so signals uh I think these were very very uh interesting uh regarding like you know the newer like this is who AMD looks to hire right and we can kind of assume maybe this also a nid is looking to hire because it's really very similar pool of talent that it is you'll discover not in but you'll discover it's a very small industry I'm I'm literally seeing my counterpart of Nvidia at of barbecue tomorrow that's crazy yeah yeah it's a really small industry and so I know people here would be asking this is it okay if I share this duck with the folks here uh we can maybe uh what how how sorry what what scale are we talking how many how many folks are we sharing it with uh we might we be like 15,000 people we we'll remove all the names we'll remove all the names yeah yeah that'd be my ask is is remove the names and I think you should be good other than that I think it's fine yeah I'll run it by you one more time I'll run it by you one more time so wor be there but I think it was great to have that insight as well as well as your own personal Journey uh guys can we just thank Dustin for his time like what was your takeaway what was your take away from his call today what was your take away from his call today just share in the chat thanks guys Dustin I don't know how fast you can read but we're gonna test it uh you know I'll just I'll pipe it into Chad GPT later and let it summarize it for me I see all the thank you it's really heartwarming guys really I appreciate it and really a sincere uh good luck on your journey man uh I I love computer science I love software engineering it's an art as well as a science so I just leave you with enjoy the science and enjoy the art part of it too you know ultimately it's it's it's a source of creativity so enjoy amazing all right with that being said Dustin I want to say goodbyes and I'll invite our next speaker uh Logan I saw you popped in and out twice are you still there yes I am hey hey Logan Logan calling in from New York City yep uh I guess right outside your office so not too far okay are are you in the eighth floor or you're in court Square uh today I'm actually back in my apartment but uh yeah it's nearby the office building awesome Logan we're just going to get right into it I'm going to quickly introduce you uh and then you can share a little bit like your journey and whatnot um so we have we have a lot of folks here tuned in who are part of the fellowship or part of the larger headed Community I want to introduce to you Logan as as a peer right I really look at you as like you know um someone who is maybe a year older than me who's also building I look at you as a marathon partner we ran the New York City marathon together uh and a little bit more about your journey you start off at JetBlue uh you worked there for about one and a half two years uh and then you got them as a client which was really cool for your company and what is what is your company and what do you do uh so Logan's company the way I can describe it is anyone who's ever interned or worked or you know may heard of the tools called bi analytics um and and Logan's company has a lot of use cases but this is the one use case that sells and really resonates with me which is every single team in in in Enterprise companies microservices and whatnot teams they have their own dashboards they have dashboards that track spending they have dashboards that track vulnerabilities and a lot of times two teams track the same dashboards which costs a lot of spend it can be hundreds of millions of dollars for the company what Logan his team is able to do is find out these vulnerability and other dashboards and bi analytic tools uh such as tableau and several other tools that exist out there he's able to find whatever redundant information is already there and delete all the stuff for them this is one of the informations and Logan can share more the part about Logan I love is his journey Logan has raised um he's he got his start by being part of the Sky Deck program which is a Berkeley uh exelor program then he has raised uh 2.5 million in seate funding uh and then I don't know if it's public uh but he has raised a lot yeah uh yeah we raised uh eight million last year yeah and then he raised basically you raised two more rounds that you were you were you not supposed to raise right your seed your seed round was done and then two two more investors just came like hey just take here just take 4 million check it does take a $5 million check it's not even a series a check it's like it's a check and once people gives you money you know it's great so we definitely want to hear from you Logan what is your journey and uh thank you so much for being with us yeah definitely and thanks having me today and uh I was listening to the end of Dustin's presentation I was very impressed by that background and I think it's be a hard act to follow uh but yeah I can of start with kind of how I got started uh in the tech entrepreneurship space uh data logs what we do and then talk about our fundraising journey and how we build our platform product uh from day one to where we are today and the kind of state we are today just I guess starting there to paint the picture uh now we're about 25 employees globally we've been through a handful of fundra ing rounds and we're really focused on solving this problem as companies get more analytics dashboards reports it becomes thousands of thousands of reports and near impossible to manage so we plug in as a solution on top of tools like powerbi Tablo click looker there's all kinds of these bi platforms that large businesses use and we create insights around hey what's duplicative what's failing to refresh where is someone viewing the wrong data and we're identifying all these different issues and servicing back to our customers and and users and we're typically selling to large Enterprises think Fortune 1000s or on the government side we're doing some business on the Department of Defense and a few uh different agencies on the public sector as well and I guess taking a step back from I guess that's where we are today as a company uh but kind of how I got started in this Tech World entrepreneurship so I was working at I guess I went to school even taking a step further back at Texas A&M so I studied industrial engineering there I wasn't in compai uh was kind of jealous and wish I started in computer science uh but eventually kind of found my way into the development side of the world but at Texas A&M I was always very interested in entrepreneurship and so throughout College I was playing around with different startup ideas creating kind of little different things I had a one point an app that promoted different uh bar craws clubs and College Station where Texas A&M was uh we ended up getting a handful of users on that but didn't really go anywhere my junior year I had a different program that did legal compliance on uh companies that use Biometrics and again it was a fun Journey but we made zero dollars zero Revenue uh but really taught me a lot about entrepreneurship and how to get in front of customers talk to them sell understand pain points but while I was at Texas A&M I started off uh my sophomore year doing a co-op program at JetBlue so I would spend six months in New York City and then six months back at Texas ANM for football season and uh while working at Jet Blue I got really deep and exposed into the data world so on the reporting side data engineering side a little bit of data science uh some projects where things like hey can we predict flight delays and to what accuracy and things like that of course there's endless data inputs that an airline has but got exposed to all kinds of different data products at Jet Blue and when Co hit not a lot of people flying airplanes anymore and I guess this was about two years into my kind of full-time Journey post internship after I did three co-ops there as well so it's about five years total at Jet Blue uh but when Co hit no one was flying airplanes anymore so I ended up with a ton of free time on my hands and started hacking around kind of different problems that would help me in my day job and when I ended up building first uh was kind of a cataloging product related to some of the work I was doing at Jet Blue and bi and it was I'd say a very like imagine the most basic MVP that's what I built and I didn't know how to develop very well it was a combination of SQL scripts python plus using a no code development tool called Bubble I don't even know if that's still popular anymore but I spent about four months on it was kind of proud of it and I ended up putting it on a couple threads in the space I'm on on Reddit and it just happens to go viral so I think we got 400 signups from different companies overnight and when I say companies it was like inbi users not people with budget that could actually buy it uh and I was super excited and I quit my job at Jet Blue like two weeks later thinking like I've made it I got all these users we're going to be a real company super excited and then I'd say another 12 months or so go by and zero of those early users converted into any Revenue almost all of them turned on the platform after a few days and never actually like Revisited the tool and I think we ended up with one kind of customer that was half using it that was a friend uh who worked at a fisherman's Alliance that wasn't anywhere near the original use case that we started with and was plugging in data for it uh but then I took that opportunity like okay I have all these people in this analytics bi space that were interested in this problem enough to sign up for a random link on Reddit and kind of start clicking around so I emailed and S very aggressive cool to email campaigns out to all these people and started doing as many customer feedback interviews as I could so I think we talked to almost 120 different kind of bi data analysts Chief data officers uh at all different size companies different stages and we land on a slightly different product but went through a similar Journey where we kind of iterated on it improve the product a little bit uh but ultimately wasn't getting a ton of trash and I was about I think 18 months in zero salary living in New York City burned through my savings where I was I guess day trading on Robin Hood cryptos trying to make it uh with uh kind of the YOLO stocks at that point and surviving day by day living in New York and uh we ended up uh I think we had about two weeks left of kind of Runway cash in the bank and got into this skyq accelerator and there they uh invest an initial $200,000 uh you get to go move out to Berkeley and start working with uh the team there to really turn your early stage startup into a venture bable company and uh just a shout out to Sky Deck their applications are just opened a few days ago uh but now they're taking all kind of applicants in there but yeah we got into a Sky Deck with a handful of customer conversations at that point we maybe had three or four customers probably doing like 7 8K Mr a month but really like there was no true signs of product Market fed or like we were really on to something that was going to work and then uh we were kind of still exploring different ideas testing different things and we met this large company and they agreed to pay us more money than we made our tire history for literally just a python script that exports data to a CSV file and I think that at the time they paid us like $30,000 to use this very very simple product had nothing else to do with that other tool I've been working on from almost two years well like it had something to do with it was the same general space same area and we were able to get our first deal for that python script that went to CSV that solved like a real Enterprise problem and I think the difference was we were tying that to value at Cost savings on security side and governance in this very specific area in the data stack that basically gone unmonitored and so we're like okay this is more money than we made our entire uh other product uh let's just stick with this and go all in here so we got rid of that original product we built shifted over to kind of more similar to what we're doing today on the bi Ops bi Administration side uh we were able to get a lot more Enterprise conversations going talking different customers and then uh we okay we graduated the program we need more cash if we're going to build up Enterprise level product there's expectations on security on deployment it can't have major bugs issues and all kind of expectations there uh so we then went out to start fundraising in the VC Market I think we pitched 93 investors total over about four months I'd say majority of them did not respond or ended up ghosting us uh but we were able to meet a really amazing fund called squadra out of the Baltimore DC area uh who decided to lead our round and their thesis was really around what our product was doing on the Enterprise side our early customer track traction I think I had one slide uh during my pitching that had 10 different Enterprise logos that could basically vouch us that hey this is a problem no one's solving it and if the data logs tool at the time actually worked we would buy it for real Enterprise contract level 100 to $400,000 and so we able to close that first round of funding with squadra and with that we able to build a stronger engineering team uh hire additional salespeople I have two great co-founders working with me uh as well to really push our product to Market we onboarded a few more customers and then we ended up meeting a second fund at a happy hour uh in San franisco called great Point Ventures and started discussing hey this is the market we're seeing this is the growth this is the traction uh on the Enterprise side and the type of customer so it's Fortune 100s Fortune 200s they're doing Pilots with us we have more demand than we expected at that point and uh we ended up doing a second Venture round with them for an additional $5 million and so that allow us to grow stronger sales team then stronger engineering team our product got better but I think everything so far has been really on the Enterprise side about being very Target on the value that we're producing around how are we saving companies money reducing risk or really improving their life and on that side is that's what we have to do to actually add that value but yeah that basically takes to where we are today as a company in my background uh thank you so much Logan guys what do you guys think about Logan's background how was what what did you like the most about Logan and I'll try to take like two people two or three people to ask question on the voice so like if you have a good question and so the comments are funny we'll take your question uh I'll ask you guys to come on voice I some people raise their hands and stuff Logan I have a challenge you know I have more of a a dilemma that I'm facing we have a lot of fellows who are accepted in this program and I told them that they have to make $1,000 in revenue or get ,000 user for a product that they have to build it what what advice do you have for them what would you do if you're if you in the hot seat today with your knowledge yeah I'd say first a thousand users or you say thousand dollars it's uh not a easy feat to accomplish like it took me 18 months to get any dollars coming in on our company and so my advice would be really focus on a core pain point and go all out on the user Discovery side before you write a line of code talk to a hundred people who you are think could be your customers and then uh the other thing that someone told me and uh maybe doesn't apply to everyone uh but very early on in my kind of startup entrepreneur entrepreneurship Journey uh that anything on the consumer side most customers consumers are very fickle and Enterprises if you can solve a core problem they're easier to sell to so I challenge people is don't just think about the consumer problems you see in your life is think about internships experience Enterprise company level and uh look into those because one customer on that side could be the equivalent of a 100,000 on the consumer side that's incredible Logan uh so just a followup to that question before I take someone here from here is um um a lot of people uh don't like what do you look for in a hire right like right now I know you you're not more of an engineering side but like when you you hire 25 people right either you or your team what do you look for in hire what what's like three most important thing like in 30 seconds yeah that's a good question uh so I guess it very much depends on of course the role we're hiring for what's the Hot Topic or challenge we're facing but in general an early stage startup like my biggest thing is I want people who don't sit around for me asking them or someone else in leadership to do something I want people who jump in take action and really solve problems and make my life easier uh and then on the flip side is like my expectation for my company is anyone who works there I want them to be able to demo our product I want to feel comfortable putting them in front of customers whether it's going to a Fortune 500 office or meeting the chief data officer of the IRS I want to be confident in my team that from software engineer all the way to saleside that I can put people in front and out there and I'd say yeah someone people who take initiative own what they're doing uh work hard and either uh show that impact in a measurable way and do you have a rough idea of how many people you'll be hiring the next one year so you're 25 right now what's the goal for next like you know yeah so I guess our company goals is uh we're gonna be doing another funding round uh coming up towards the end of this year and with that we plan to uh double inside and really focus though on the sales and engineering and expanding our presence in the Department of Defense yeah absolutely uh okay so I'm gonna take one question from here let's see uh no I don't want raise my hand uh someone says wondering how Logan measures risk in his career in his company as he was really close to failing yeah I guess uh uh in a startup like by default you're going to be having constant risk in terms of what's the outcome going to be what's the likelihood of success and from day one I've always thought is I'm progressing and growing so much faster doing this startup than I would be at most corporate jobs like I think in the first kind of few months of just working I had opportunities from different LinkedIn campaigns meeing uh Chief data officers at different companies like a example of that of just building that Network which helps offset the risk because if the start doesn't work out well this network you have is timately going to help you land the next job or a future job so I sent a cold email out to every data leader who went to my university Texas A&M who had a chief data Chief data officer of CIO title well one of the people that responded happened to be the chief data officer at fizer I was actually on a panel with him last night and he became an early adviser for our company uh would come literally lock himself in a room with us for four or five hours helping us give feedback on the product and really talking from that CIO CDO perspective what do you actually need at the Enterprise level and I would have I guess if I had not taken a risk to do a startup I would have never had that opportunity to get in front of someone like him at that seite level at a major company and I'd say as we've kind of continued on in our journey like the two big things is just staying persistent time in Market Focus on One Core problem once of course there's kind of demonstrated that hey this is an actual issue but all of that offsets the risk so if I were to lose my job even three months after I started or not lose my job but the startup goes under well there's probably a thousand roles that I'd be more qualified to do uh after oh you you're on mute Logan I really uh want to thank you for your time I really really appreciate it uh there's tons of questions here unfortunately we're not going to be able to get through all of them right now but guys if you're able to um share some praise for Logan and maybe like the greatest takeaway what what's your greatest takeaway you had uh someone said D Drake or Kendrick a very funny comment uh uh share share uh your your greatest takeaway from from Logan uh so that this is something I want to share with him you know the praise that's shared from the h Community uh so I don't want to take any more of your time Logan thank you so much for you know literally last minute you texted me like hey you want to get some food and I was like I'm an SF like all right send your team and like this happened so uh this is really cool and just something I want to throw out there Logan kind of randomly this weekend we're doing a hackathon with head starter fellows and so uh I don't know we can maybe potentially create get creative in creating like a data logs track or like a bi tool track any ideas that you have I can text you afterwards but it can be like we get like literally an army of people hacking away at you know whatever idea or track or some side feature that you might have okay yeah definitely text me uh I think it's very interesting and we have endless engineering problems to solve yeah and yeah I think every challenge under the book exists and we're actually debating doing a hackathon with our team where flying everyone to Grenada locking them in a not locking them but Gren basically in W uh a Caribbean Island one of our Engineers lives out there but yeah doing a weekl long hackathon for similar just solving problems okay incredible incredible okay Logan with that being said uh we're gonna say bias so again guys everyone let's say a very nice thank you to Logan uh definitely take his notes uh and mention to share the takeaways um so uh up next is gonna be Nabil nail can you hear me I can hear you all right all right awesome I'm gonna quickly and then like you can just take away take it away um who's hyped to listen to Nal who's hyped to listen to Nal hey guys if I don't see great comments if I don't see a lot of hype I'm leaving I'm just kidding I'm not yeah he's gonna go back it's gonna go back home not going anywhere so I'm uh I'm I actually let me just share about how this happened so I just texted nil in the morning or I was like hey look I'm really excited for this Fellowship thank you so much for your guidance uh and then Nabil just randomly facetimes me and then one thing led to another I was like hey you want to come show up to our event tonight he was like yeah let's do it uh so who is Nabil Nabil is someone who uh studied uh in the cuni program went to your college he's always been hustling he's always been doing things on the side um he in his early days worked at beer Burgers uh the restaurant chain if you guys are familiar with that uh from there he got inspiration amongst also uh probably other other incidents um and you started this company called lunchbox in Jamaica Queens and from there on you you grew it step by step you raised a seed round you raised a a a b uh and you raised probably a lot more since then so um your company today is how many people Nabil both in a little less than 200 people right now right L less than 200 people so it's been Incredible Journey incredible growth a lot of your investors are also some of my friends that I've run marathons with uh and um they look up to you you are actually a phenomenon in New York which is why also I I look up to you uh and I love your company I think your company is doing incredible things um just a little bit context I'll let you explain your company and then and your journey yeah oh you want me to do it yeah sure go ahead okay perfect all right cool I'll jump in uh so uh this is what the company does think about Shopify Shopify is for small businesses right anyone can go and set up a shop Shopify uh store and go ahead and sell merch or sell things we do the same for restaurants and we do that for chains we do that for chains around the country so if you are in New York we do chopped and do Toros and clean uh and 16 Handles and everyone but if you're around the country we do 1,200 chains like firhouse subs or Papa Johns or others we help chains with their app and their website and we help them with their Commerce so you can you know imagine ordering on the Chipotle app that's what we build for restaurants uh so that's a little bit about lunch boox yeah that's uh that's incredible should we go Q&A style I guess we can we can keep it to Q&A style whatever whatever you want you're in charge okay so can you tell me exactly like how did lunchbox idea come to be and then like what are the reservations that you had in yourself did you have any Reser I mean right now you you're like very much like whatever's in your mind you do it but back then um how I know that jump right to making it happen yeah uh listen I 90% of me right now is like if I'm going to put some 80% of me right now is like if I'm going to do something I'm going to do it it's going to happen everything's going to go great I'm amazing this is amazing everything's awesome 20% of me still is like you don't know what you're talking about every's gonna find out you're a dumbass and you're not going to be able to do this and just criticizing myself now that 8020 split is healthy but when I was younger when I was everyone's age in this room I don't know what everyone's age is in this room uh yes what what is everyone's age uh you probably want to consider them between 20 to 25 yeah I was like yeah 80% of my voice was critical and 1020 had some confidence right so it was the opposite so you build confidence slowly with mentors with having some wins with life but even now I'm very critical uh of you know myself or what we're doing um but it just happens you know Heming me as a line which is how did you get poor and the line was gradually and then suddenly and that's how you build something great is gradually and then suddenly and so the way I got here is I'm an immigrant I came to the country at 15 I grew up in Queens my dad was a taxi driver my mom was a worker at Duncan we grew up in the projects we were really poor and I hated every second of it and I really really wanted all of that to stop so I just was you know hard worker I I did not know anything I just wanted to work hard I just wanted to put in hours that was my bias at the time work a lot of hours fry a lot of things increase your surface luck area go out as much as possible do this and so so you can go ahead and you know increase you know your opportunity and your chance out there right so at 15 when I was new in the country I worked my way up got a job as a bus boy at 17 and from 17 to 27 I worked for a single company called bearger I worked at the first location of barburger in Australia Queens as a buzz boy I'm like what am I doing here and then I went from there to uh working opening 50 restaurants in five countries and I worked my way to CMO that sounds like a great story but it's over 10 years so over 10 years it's a normal story so that's what happened there and then five years ago I was like okay what do I do next I you know now I I got some courage I got some like oh yeah I can I think I can do more I think I'm meant for more you know you you give your that Small Voice gets more and more oxygen you feed it nurture it take care of it realize that that's the real voice not the negative one and then I'm like okay I want to do something but I I want to do something in Tech what everyone's in Tech I want to do something in Tech but I was like I don't know Tech okay maybe I compromise I do food Tech I do food and Tech I know food I learn Tech we work our way to the next phase you know you never want your life to be so hard things don't have to be hard just for the sake of being hard you a company you start a job you start is going to be hard anyway so try to make as many things easy as possible you want uh it's for founders of companies it's called founder market Advantage you want founder market Advantage you want to look at your what you have and you're like how do I make more of this so we started lunchbox my first customer was Bear Burger my last job and I said hey bear Burger can I go do this can you sign a 99 year contract with me so if I don't sign anyone else at least I have you guys they signed it and then I signed all my friends in New York and then I went to raise money from investors and said 73 investors are this is the first time we're raising 72 investors said no and what what happens when 72 investors said no to you is you start doubting yourself you go ups and downs you're like you know Investor's dumb then you say no I'm dumb and then you're like this Investor's [ __ ] you're like no you know what I suck I'm not supposed to be here I need to get a job and you just go up and down up and down and you do that forever and one day so a 73rd investor says yes and when they say yes you get $2 million wired and then 20 million for our series a and and then 50 more million for a series B and you get in people like the CEO of Sue green as an investor and rapper n is an investor and you look back and it's a beautiful story but I hated every second of it and I love every second of it I'll pause there I've said a lot uh and I'll take followup questions so Nabil I'm gonna actually go into the chat but I want to ask you uh like our users one of the challenges they have right now I've given to them I've increased their standard of what makes them comfortable I said hey you have seven weeks to build your skills there have seven weeks to build a team we're going to give you projects we give you environment and deadlines the last two weeks you have to create a project that makes $1,000 in revenue or gets a th users a very core component of this would be product and user Discovery like understanding pain whatnot if you were to sit in the hot seat how would you do this what advice do you have if I was in their shoes yeah you know I I I got to tell you like you know you don't have to love your job but you have to try to go ahead and make it as bearable as possible right uh so what do I mean by that so yes if I was in your shoes I'll definitely do something with this incredible Community you have built the community you have built here is where I'm trying to find my first thousand customers the community you built here is really unique everyone in this room or the likelihood of the folks in this room of being very successful is really really really high because I don't know Engineers who are putting themselves out there like you guys are so you guys are a unique group of Engineers very entrepreneurial in so many ways I'm like all right what do they need what is the day-to-day product they need that I can go ahead and you know work on I'll do that I wouldn't try to go start something in AI or something in restaurant you have to look around you and say how do I go ahead and have easy entry to barrier that doesn't mean you're lazy all right some of us grew up really broke and poor and all we think is working 100 hours is the only way to be rich it's not true my dad worked 100 hours every week and he hated it right so you you have to work really hard but you have to also go ahead and try to find lazy wins because you're gonna have to make your life easier so I'll try to look around guys if you are if you're if you have a day job somewhere else or if you grew up playing sports or something the answer is around you not far away from you you know so I would look around you to find your first 100 just just to clarify what you're saying NE what you're saying is instead of coming up with an idea look at your last 24 hours look exactly are where you are what you're interested in where is your mind in and that's nice dog and that should give you the spirit of where to uh get your idea right and then just go hard on that instead of coming up with some fancy big thing and think like a lazy so instead of coming with a grand thing what is something that's EAS that can to those Ty of users customers I'm ask one last question before I into audience for some questions go ahead you hired a lot of people now and you've also fired a right yes what are high signals for you what do you look for as as as like in talent and specifically you might even go to like technical Talent or like a tech leader what you look for in them or in general what you look for I by the way um this speech I don't want to confuse people with my speech that I'm successful I made so many fuckups in my life where I there was a day two years ago we had to fire a 100 people because I overhire okay in a single day I had people texting me you ruin my life I had people texting me you're you're a [ __ ] [ __ ] I have people texting me everything okay so if you're GNA be a leader just realize you the burden is all on you and it's going to be very hard and you are responsible for a lot of people and something else that you need to realize is you're going to screw up you're just going to screw up you're just going to make mistakes uh so that's my point of view as a CEO now let me flip that aside and put myself in your shoes and think about the next job I would join right if I was to join a if I was to join a company I wouldn't try to oversell myself you don't want to oversell yourself because you want them to pick you for who you are because you don't want to pretend 365 [ __ ] days a year to be something you're not there's someone out there that will like you for who you are and your skill set and what stage it's at and everything you're going to do that happens via rejections what do you want you want a bunch of rejections or you rather get a yes most people rather get a yes and because you rather get a yes you are going to be miserable for the rest of your life if you're just looking for yes you looking for NOS looking for a bunch of notes so you can find the right fit this is true for your life partner this is true for a job this is true for investor I didn't go through 72 investors because 72 investors were bad or I was bad I went through 72 investors because the 73rd wanted me and I wanted them back so but that doesn't happen when you're getting rejected you're just so pissed you're like I I I I wish just why can't they see that I'm trying and working so hard you cannot spend too much time on things that are not going to work you have to spend all your time where people are opting in because so the right employers going to opt in they're going to be like they're going to give you signal they're interested that's where you go all in you don't go all on 20 employers you go all in on the few that want you back so that's the first thing the second thing and this is a continued emphasis on being transparent and yourself is the the employer needs to tell you who they are and you need to tell the employer who you are so ask them their core core values ask them do they respect uh work life balance ask them if they like Grinders you got to look at their core life core values you got you have to look at what they respect and value and those companies They promoted more and those companies will be more successful what we all do is we just lie to each other all [ __ ] I respect diversity if I don't actually respect diversity in my recruits I shouldn't talk about it I should talk about meritocracy because I respect meritocracy so employers and employees are lying all day long and we need to just be honest and what happens when you're honest is you just make a lot of money you end up being very successful but it comes with some pain and you just have to lean in for the all that pain Nill you said a lot there guys you guys should be writing this down like literally I said this before but like the people the smartest NBA candidates who work for investment banking firms when they do their internships and even get their full-time jobs they're not allowed to sit down and meetings they have them pen and paper and they're told to to take notes and if they're see not taking notes it looks really badly on their performance these are the smartest kid from the smartest schools at the smartest companies if that's what they tell they're told to do we're expected to do the same so we have to take notes right so n you just you said a couple of things you said one was um like ask the in ask the employer questions like it's not just interviewing but you're also interviewing them you talked about not lamenting over like rejections right like like like don't don't just look um like crazily for a yes like whoever takes me in but like be like choiceful like think about like what you want to do um uh like who is going to be you know important to you and also be specific on where you're going to apply so instead of like applying you said like tons and tons of places she like 20 or something like be specific on who you want your employ to be right I don't know if you should apply to a few places I think you should apply to a lot of places I think so actually agree that yeah I think you should apply a lot of places but you should narrow it then very quickly yeah right you should narrow down your list very quickly I think you should go like guys so much of uh work life and investors are Universal so let's just talk about dating because unfortunately for you guys I'm not technical I am a marketing and sales and go to market CE you so all my examples will be dating examples you don't want to you want to go through the bar and talk to as many people as possible right that's fine but you don't want to harass the girl who doesn't want to talk to you you're a creep that's the same thing with employers right so I think you you do want to go ahead and you know uh cast a wide net but you want to go ahead and narrow the field and you want to only talk to employers who are like hey we do want to talk right so I think that's what I would do uh to go ahead and you know find the right places but then you have finite amount of resources you can either spend time with 50 companies or you can spend with three now let me tell you the types of engineers I would hire I would hire the type of Engineers who would say hey I have done research on your business and this is how it personally connects with me if it does if it does otherwise don't say that I would say hey uh we both went to the same school I hated my school too I dropped out to can we connect St that if that's true I had someone who mispronounced my uh who misspelled my name wrong incorrectly um and send me a message like that still responded I bought their company they now work for me right they had a nice exit because of that so you just want to connect with the companies you actually want to connect with right you want to go ahead and look at something they wrote eight years ago when they were in school maybe your manager you're applying to was in school eight years ago maybe you want to do that right maybe you want to add a couple of key people the CEO and the head of people and you want to write messages on the LinkedIn post all of this is uncomfortable all of this is work and all of this is just going out outside the box of how to get recruited unfortunately that's what you have to do if you want to stand out in any non-engineering job why not in engineering jobs as well why should marketers and salese have a Twitter account or LinkedIn account and not you guys what's the difference do you guys not build a product and actually talk to more customers than we do so I think you need to just look at these things and and put yourselves out there in the long run even after you join the company you considered a thought leader I have a intern I said no to a engineering intern she got a job at IBM or something she writes a article on LinkedIn every week a LinkedIn post every week every Friday learn first week update second week update third week update I regret not hiring her every day every week when I see it I regret not hiring her and I bet you she gets paid more from IBM because she puts herself out there a little bit the world is hard guys get over it it just is play the game don't fight fight it don't say it's unfair let's let's just go above and beyond and you you guys have the right profile to do it anyways you guys are in this room it's 926 you're in this room so you are these people anyways I'm not asking you to do something you guys are not comfortable with n two quick questions and we'll end the night so one is uh that period of time comments by the way yeah are so nice this is like the reverse Reddit or the reverse comment section of like Instagram this is the nice comments in the world like my heads guys not I might not be able to walk tomorrow after this this great yeah yesterday we had one of my my friends and my roommate here on SF fary so far is a big you know I don't know if you've seen life with fary on Instagram or Tik Tok uh so he has a lot of followers right like a couple million but he was he was blown away when he saw like the like the Zoom reactions because it's great I just started on Tik Tok two months ago amazing guys go follow what's your handle what's your handle noal let's I'm trying to hide it because I'm so offensive on my Tik Tok but I'll tell you guys it's called parody under CEO parore CEO I started two months ago I got 20 million views already and all I'm doing is talking [ __ ] so yeah don't tell anyone else don't tell my employee employees because I'm talking [ __ ] about them too dang all right so nail what I want to ask you is like some questions so one question is like that time when you were like a bus boy at beberg becoming a CMO how did you hustle like let's talk about that hustle like what did that look like buzz boy to CMO uh Buzz Boy to CMO I think I think that happened first of all that happened slowly and one of the things I think there's an important lesson for everyone yeah I I think I just listen I worked hard everyone here worked hard everyone here works hard that part is given right that part is given you know there's a movie in Zero Dark 30 what do you think about her and and someone said she's smart and then the CIA uh guy said we're all [ __ ] smart what else we're all we're all hardworking guys right so what else can we do beyond that you have to tell your employer what you want you know you have to if you got an internship if you tell them I want to internship from you I'll work for two months for free I'm not saying this is the right strategy I'm giving you an example but if I do a good job on the third month I want to get hired and I want the hiring salary to be this you have to tell the universe and the people view what do you want and so they can help make that a reality right so I did that at beb I was working a lot and I said hey I love what I'm doing here but can I also update the menus I wanted to update the menus I wanted to design the website I want to do this I want to do that and eventually I'm like I'm like okay what what are these jobs online I was like what is these jobs they're like oh you're like a marketer I'm like oh I would like to be the marketing intern I'd like to be the marketing manager I dropped out of school and I was like okay guys if I do a great job for a year I'd like to be a marketing director if I do a great job for the next six months and we hit these metrics I'd like to be that the problem with Engineers is they just work hard and they work their asses off and what employers do is do a great job of not telling Engineers hey you know all the hard work you're doing bunch of that did not matter and bunch of these things matter so employers do a bad job communicating so you as engineering leaders and future engineering leaders and current engineering leaders can say hey what is the company goal what do I do and we're winning and what do I do when we're not winning I want to do things that have impact you can ask your CEOs you can ask your manager and ask whoever you want but you have to say the word out loud the worst they'll do is say no you know who gives a [ __ ] they'll say no great embarrassing oh it's said no collect notes guys collect notes I love it this is this is the greatest piece of advice everyone here I want to like basically ask questions State your thoughts like like be in like do more than Beyond what's asked you right like when I was a Capital One I was crazy for this like I would just look at directors like hey why you doing this why you doing that I'm an entrylevel kid right entry level kids are not even supposed to talk to their managers like that I would talk to my managers managers managers managers managers the same way right like hey well obviously in a respectful way like hey look I did some research I think here's how much we can save like I would like in Zoom calls with like 40 or 50 people or a couple hundred sometimes I would always raise my hand right and share my thoughts and I think you the exact same quality as in you and I'm really glad that like in corporate world they call it visibility but you know it's actually how you learn right when when you ask a question number one you do get visible but then you learn and they also get to learn you and potentially like you know uh what value i' you bring um I want to ask you one last question sh before we end the day if that's okay one last question yeah sorry Nabil Sharia are you there yeah I'm here man yeah I wanted to give it to you uh and I'm going to Hype you up too introducing as our next thing but Shia would you like to ask n question yeah to make sure it's a tearjerker inspirational 10 out of 10 question no pressure all right n some context nille uh me and Sh we go back from high school sh is an incredible Builder uh we have offices in the same city he went to sty and then a hunter uh he's he has a company called Ruby card and they were part of the YC batch awesome nice awesome listen I when Yen said you are like a legend in New York he was talking about he was he was completely hon it's like all my friends know you your story um and we all wondered you know you kind of alluded to this when you were working um at Bear Burger uh how did you know that you would one day be this entrepreneur that you are today because when we when we were looking at your journey we were like holy [ __ ] bro we're from ozen Park we're from Richmond Hill there's no one like us out there we see you we see like will from next Health if you're familiar with those guys what motivated you to go get that is it like an internal thing seeing your parents you know like you mentioned working 100 hours a week what what was that key motivating factor that made you want to go get it first of all the legends about how great I am are underrated I am 10 times better uh in person uh but none of us will ever find out so uh I just want to put that out there uh but more importantly I want to talk about where I thought I'd be right now I did not think I'd be here okay I I did not think I'd be okay I am a son of a taxi driver that hated my father cuz he was a [ __ ] you know that he was working really hard I love them but I hated them I say this about my family I love my family but I don't like them okay so did I didn't want to be anything like them I still retired them I still did what every nice Bengali kid does I still have responsibilities but I hated being poor so initially what I wanted to do was just be rich that's all I wanted I got all my problems would go away when I would be rich a lot of it Go went away maybe over half of it the other half is in here guys the other half is a negative voice in your head that tells you you're shitty okay you got to work on that too you got to work on the mental game because that's 247 right so there's an incredible book called don't believe everything you think maybe we pick that up or maybe we try something like that on YouTube but when I was 17 my only dream was to go to NYU when I was 20 my only dream was to get paid 50 when I was 21 my only dream was to get 70 when I was 23 my only job was if I one day get six figures I'll be enough and I'll be loved you know and all my childhood trouble will go away none of that is true but slowly the muscles build and now I want to go ahead and you know take over the world one day eat everything kill Crush build a bunch of companies but that happened today that happened slowly uh I was very hard on myself and I wish if I could go back I'd be a little bit Kinder cuz we'll get where we we'll get anyways I just wish I was a little bit kinder to a 21y old Nabil the 17y old nail the 24 I go back and now I have we have made peace okay in therapy we've made peace we were kinder to them because I was very harsh on them would I still get there if I was a little bit nicer to them I think so right so we got to find the balance we need to figure out when to find the fire when to figure out when to become either way I did not think I'd be here okay so I'm living my dream and I'm very appreciative but today I won a 100 times more and I will not rest until I have it love it naille thank you so much guys can you guys drop in the chat some love for naille like what was your greatest they've been they've been so nice it's it's ridiculous yeah yo how about like big W's like big W's really share no spams if you do that paragraph stuff I'm watching [ __ ] out no paragraph blocking spamming single messages only thank you guys good time to record this as well uh so I'll just record this thing right here uh cool Co he hey that's a Spam right there hey no spam this is the nicest chat in the world seriously every time I'm down guys I'm coming in here hang out with you guys yeah yeah yeah yeah NB you see the love I see it the W someone did the W Juan Duran I got I got your number I'll keep an eye out for you yeah yeah I mean this this is an incredible energy uh thank you so much really appreciate you taking your time out uh to come to come here thank you I'm hoping this is not the last time with the community and um uh I think everyone really loved your energy uh I think some people also want to emulate that energy whether they want to be entrepreneur or not I think that is one thing that that that is um infectious so I'm glad I'm glad we can make this naill thank you so much and with that I'm gonna say bye thank you so much for that thank you everybody I wishing you all the best you guys are already ahead of the curve rooting for you guys thank you y you built something awesome here thanks with your help thanks take care sh how do you feel about that man that was crazy no guys are awesome man fantastic I I love his journey everyone should aspire to be like Nabil um and a lot of the things that he said he just wasn't saying it trust me it takes all of this to succeed um and I hope as you guys go through this Fellowship some of what Nabil is talking about you can see it ingrained in how Yen has orchestrated the seven weeks uh so take it seriously and put put your best effort um because this is what makes a a good software engineer but B just a great person a great Problem Solver um you do all that odds are you'll be successful yeah yeah absolutely absolutely Shar sharar um I introduced yourself a little bit already why don't we just jump into like a little bit about your background well keep yoube two three minutes uh and then I'll ask you some questions uh and then we'll have Miguel go and then we'll talk a little bit more about the role and like what you're looking for you like side by side for that awesome how's that sound okay cool sounds good yeah I'll do a quick intro um sh are CEO and co-founder of Ruby um Ruby is this financial operating system for e-commerce businesses we do everything from providing banking to corporate cards audits some of other um AI automations on top if you're familiar with products like Mercury Rex ramp we do pretty much the same thing but for e-commerce businesses before this um Native New Yorker came here when I was four from Bangladesh uh went here uh for high school I see some of you uh specialized high school kids here I went to sty went to Hunter afterwards at first I wanted to do the whole like doctor med school thing I think I got like a a 20 on my first test and I was like this is not it let me stick with cs um that's I think that's when I met Yen at the first CI hackathon and I remember talking to him and we were making these projects and we like man this this hackathon project that we're working on it could be a company it could be massive it didn't go anywhere I don't I don't think any of us actually won um but we stayed in touch ever since then um and listen if you want to be a good engineer you seen as a role model that you look up to this guy knows it ins and outs we stayed in touch we interned at a lot of places I personally interned at um what do you call it a nonprofit the New York City dot um I interned at Heroku Salesforce the National Football League um and after that I worked at Salesforce for about a year and a half um one thing you'll know if you work with the aen and uh and myself is we are go-getters like although we were some Junior engineers every time and you seem can share stories too we would go to our manager like hey give me more give me something more that a lead is doing just because the best way to learn is throwing yourself into the fire right feed yourselves to the wolves um and Yim can talk about what he did with Capital One Eno I worked on a pretty significant project at Salesforce I talked to the VP and he's like man you guys you guys are really doing right by the company the company's you know generating a lot of Revenue I asked them how much money is our team making and it it was a lot of money I I can't say how much uh but it was in the hundreds of millions and I I was like man that's crazy and I look at the money I'm making which is still great as a software engineer um and I tell myself this isn't it I have to go build my own company um so I convinced uh the one of the best technical Minds ever Miguel to quit his job he's a Google engineer work at HBO Max as well as my one of my best friends uh Jordan um to quit his job and we built Ruby um and the reason we built Ruby is because obviously broke Bengali kid broke Filipino kid broke Pakistani kid we're going to college together tuition's got to get paid um and so we pulled together you know our FASA refund money and we built a few e-commerce businesses the first few failed spectacularly like it was terrible like we were selling like fidget Spinners um none like we were buying them from China selling it wasn't working but all those failures helped us learn what wasn't working and that is the key like I I know you see you're probably going to ask me in the future uh you on this call what's the best advice I can impart on you it is failing gracefully you should want to fail you should put yourselves in a position where you're so ambitious the odds of you failing are extremely high because if you succeed that's great right Moon rocket ship if you fail though there's so much to learn from that failure and when we built these e-commerce businesses we were like all right the product is crap uh we're using some scammy uh manufacturer in China that just robbed us for five grand right all these things uh helped us build better e-commerce businesses we got some good Pocket Change we you know um paid our tuition off and that gave us the concept of Ruby we were using Chase we're using Bank of America all these Banks suck they have all this data they don't do anything for you you just hold money there and we were like hey what if we built a bank for e-commerce businesses for smbs for online digital businesses and we like let's do it but we were some naive you know seniors in college what did we know we didn't know any better we called I think hundreds of banks to be a partner none of them responded the same number you call when you lose your credit card and like hey I lost my credit card I I got so desperate I was calling that number to get into contact with the CIO the CTO of the bank right chief of uh product and sometimes they would just hang up with me other times I would get a call back from their like fraud team asking I I assume they thought I was like social engineering them or something in any case in any case One Bank gave me the time of day and the funny thing is he didn't give a crap about the product we were building he was more interested in my experience at the NFL um he was out he was like hey is there actually like a referee referee review center there do you meet the commissioner are there players there and 50 minutes in the one hour call the guy taking notes he's like hey you want to talk about your idea and the guy's like oh yeah I have a hard cut off let's let's sync up next week um and he gave us his like small little term sheet to sign um that said charar and we agree to talk for one more week it's some weird Bank polic Jordan um he's busting my ball he's like yo we should give up like we've talked to like over 100 Banks no one wants to work with us um and he's joking he's like at least we got a term sheet though um and so I used that and I emailed all these other Banks all these service providers that I'm like hey this Bank gave us a term sheet and what do you know those same same people that never gave me a call back ignored my emails now now they want to talk to me um now they're taking my calls they're super interested like wow we love the idea we want to work with you right right um and then it came to the conversation of hey how much money do you have um in funding I'm like damn I just started my Salesforce job I have like a 20K signing bonus um but I didn't say that I was like how much do you need they're like well we need like three million I was like can you work with me can you lower that you know they lowered that we went to another provider they lowered their requirement we got them bidding um and eventually we got to a point where I found you know a partner bank that really wanted to work with us and I was like hey look we have a great idea we can't you know raise the 1 million that you need but we raise some money give us a keys to open up bank accounts open up you know MasterCard debit cards whatever and we'll make it worth your while we did that we got a couple hundred businesses on our like really crappy MVP we got into I combinator um uh we did that last year in Winter we raised a seed round um and now the product has evolved uh really well um hopefully one of you guys will be working with us uh later this year um but yeah that's a quick intro on myself and Ruby incredible bro incredible uh I'm going to ask a question that I've been mean to ask you um I think you were different from from from like early early um like when when did you say you you wrote your first line of code uh and yeah yeah how mature of a coder were you while you were still in high school and then yeah I I really hate telling the story but um for you for you kids born in the 990s you might be familiar with those free Xbox giveaways free like PS4 giveaways that Taco Bell used to run the first line of code that I ran um was essentially submitting like thousands of entries into those uh Raffles um and I found out that you didn't actually have to buy Taco Bell to do it you could just submit it with like zero as the code and for whatever reason it accepted it I found that and I wrote this really crappy script um to automate this um and the cool thing was I I didn't win anything like I I don't know I I submitted like 10,000 entries and I didn't win Jack but that let me uh into the world of programming and I think you see I don't know if you play the game but there's used to be this really cool game um that I used to play back in the day it's called RuneScape I made a bot for that um my account got banned like the next week cuz my bot was really crap uh but that's how I got the start in uh in programming and then in high school uh you know I started building like Python scripts for like scraping things um yeah you're a builder from the get-go uh Sharia we'll talk a little bit about that role and bring out Miguel to the panel but um when it comes to I've given people like a standard a very high standard which is like can you create a product that can get a th000 uses or generate ,000 in Revenue maybe generating $1,000 in Revenue i' be easier because you know1 $100 customers or $1,000 customer whatever other peration how would you advise someone can go about this right for example other day I met Ryan Hoover the founder of product hunt he said get your first pain customer as as possible don't focus on the code don't Focus just send him a stripe link if soles a problem sell them tell them solution is coming in one month that's how you can make the money some people say like just just you know don't code talk to as much use as possible you're the Builder from ruinscape to all this how would you kind of connect 100% I'll give you the Playbook that we use for Ruby listen when we launched our company it was it it was just it was a really bad landing page and we were asking people to put in tens of thousands of dollars in our bank account like our Ruby bank account um and a lot of people like some some this one person I remember vividly responded back to my email saying please take me off your emailing list or I will report you to the FBI and totally understood that right like I'm some random guy asking to deposit money in this bank account what we did instead is we went on Reddit we went on Facebook um and we went on these groups that are very specific to e-commerce um so it's like you know like Etsy sellers Walmart sellers Amazon sellers and we started talking to these people when somebody would have a problem because we are e-commerce sellers ourselves hey this one thing happened I'm getting too too many chargebacks what did you guys do I'd go in I'd comment I was very active in these communities to a point where people started recognizing my replies and so once I got some people recognizing me I dm' them and I said hey I'm actually working on on this thing could you could you try it out we built a weight list like that and if if youen is telling you hey you have two weeks to make $1,000 or a th000 users that is the same Playbook that you run whatever product you build if it's something for like salon owners if it's something for uh Home Care owners I guarantee you there is some Niche Facebook group in there with like 3,000 really dedicated salon owners just sharing tips and tricks and if you came to them and said you solved the problem they would most definitely give you money and try and try it um and the secret is a lot of these Niche SAS products start exactly that same way and I think Logan was saying the same thing he posted something on Reddit and had like 400 people um sign up for his product this is quite literally how you bootstrap a product yeah 100 per. I mean that that's that's the advice is right on do you guys agree with SH what he said you guys agree I mean it's great that there's a personal touch to it right I think niches and Rich riches and niches find your at ready find your uh I would say like the initial thing that a lot of Cs kids think about is I'll create a CS product which is great you can do that but think about something very specific and going back to what nail said think about your own life what happened last 24 hours like where where were you physically where were you mentally and what are things that you do right and what what are some things you some efficiency you can bring and be very specific be very specific about the Discord like some people like sneakers some people like fashion some people like food some people like sports some people like banking or some people like find problems in different these different uh you know areas cars know etc etc um so find that sh Let's uh let's kind of like uh bring on Miguel to the table here so uh let him do a quick uh intro uh and then uh we'll we'll put you guys side by side we'll talk about the Ruby partnership Miguel can you hear me Miguel just n you panelist hey how are you doing good how are you good good yeah a long no see yep how's it going everybody so let me describe me and mig's interactions it'll be like I'll go D of sh like yo Miguel hey what's up or we'll just run into each other at lunch and in the elevator whatnot in our building um but Miguel I I have a very intimate moment that we share together right um in 2019 and let let me give you a little story I have a friend his name is halal actually I started started with him initially in the early days with him this guy went to high school together and every like when I was in college I would convince him like Hey can you please go to uh can you please join me in computer science he wanted to be an eye doctor and then a mechanical engineer and he said no no no and then after his freshman year he realized all the seniors in school got good jobs the ones that did computer science or the ones that pursu software engineering and then he made the switch then together we went to hack NYU together he was an NYU student went to hack NYU together and there was so many people and and we actually like we didn't win right and a year later a week before Co it was like what February or March it was March 4th I think right yeah seven a week before covid we show up at NYU hacks and there are four tracks right and the the context here is in between these um four tracks me and H has won like like six or seven hackathons in a row together right he has come to CS I kind of taught him like how to do the hackathon stuff and we're having a lot of fun come back time in NYU Miguel and I go head-to-head NYU but the good thing is you won first place I won first place right but there were different tracks was really cool I I still think we had the cooler app and I if if you remember I made a blunder i i i exposed my credit card information in front of everyone oh demo right I was like yeah in the demo of the hack anyways Miguel since then you've worked at a variety of companies uh was it HBO or Warner Warner Brothers you work there and then from there you um you know got a job at Google always been buddies with SH at Hunter did hackathons together and then you built Ruby and Sharia Praises you a lot so I know you're good I know Shar is good I know you're good too so love to hear from you your journey like what's tell me the ugly side just jump into it talk about the insecurities talk about like the hiccups um and then talk about Ruby yeah yeah for sure um yeah that's kind of a loaded question um I I can get I I could just start by saying and like you know I also grew up in Queens I went to Hunter with charar um so you know I I kind of have that like same CI experience of like uh just going in and like not really knowing what to do there's not as much like resources that were like shown on like uh what to do and and funny enough like going into Hunter I actually tried um doing nursing first and then like because it's Hunter and and like um that actually didn't really work out and uh I I eventually like saw that I was like really interested in TS and that was like when I started writing my first lines of code but uh funny enough I I go into Hunter and like the first class is always just like theor it's like discreet math and like and like it's it's really hard and I I actually didn't know that that all this stuff wasn't like as useful and um uh I was part of the the hunter Scholars Program and then I I got into uh k2x and that was kind of like my first internship at Animoto um so it started out with uh some some up experience then eventually I got into um uh Chase code for good uh so I think a big part of it really was the hackathons um I know I've seen you in so many hackathons hack canyu um H hacky like like I think that's kind of like where I my passion gets kind of like ignited like I've always like tried to make my own like side project um I remember like going to interviews uh I would always bring up like um I made a Chrome extension that would basically show uh your professor's like great my professor profile like within Cy first like i' I've always like was hacking around different things um I was always kind of just like looking up um different documentation in my free time you know always was been a guy who's like really into like react or like react native you honestly I'm that guy who like argues with you about like which is like the best JavaScript framework and which is really funny because like like Sher is really that type of guy that's just like yo you just just got to get the work done like what what are you doing like why are you trying to save like 10 different renders like why why are you like going down this rabbit hole and finding out like what is the best like react um rendering library and and you know that that is a really great point and um and I think that that's what's really important to highlight too because there's like a lot of different like balance of of like thinking and like um you know I like to optimize for like a lot of like um our infrastructure and our our stack and at the same time you know I I have co-found that thankfully keep me grounded and um yeah uh so so that's kind of like uh kind of some of my background um so yeah after after those internships um uh I eventually um went to the uh went to Google and I worked for uh the goang team and the classroom team um so I had uh fortunately um I I had some experience working on stuff that wasn't web development um and that was actually really fun too uh it was a really great experience um and then eventually Shar uh me sh and Jordan he he kind of mentioned that we were working on e-commerce stores on the side um you know Sher got like this banking partnership and then he really needed a tech guy and you know we were always friends so that's kind of when he hit me up and then he kind of convinced me to just quit my job and you know the rest is kind of History uh but yeah I'll I I guess I can just like kind of pause there or like take questions from anybody or um yeah so uh there is um some questions here in the chat let's just do like two or three and then let jump into Ruby so um let's see do you prefer backend or front in engineering yeah I think up to this point I'm like so full stack um because i' had had the opportunity to work with both and I think uh I I still like like front end the most I um I I know it's like really complicated but I think I just like nerd out a lot about like UI um and like I feel like it's just kind of more my expertise but definitely I I at this point I'm kind of just like a full stack guy yeah I love it you know I'm a personal believer that software engineer should know everything uh front back end AWS apis Cloud knowing how to use the AI stack so agents like embedding libraries like this very new right now like fine tuning all that stuff and on top of that traditional machine learning so everyone should know everything right like while you're in college before your entry level interviews uh like bits and pieces like you've done like several projects in that so that when you're in the role you're already at like kind of like a mature level um and then you can decide like where you want to double down on and especially if you're a Founder like you are you got to be trick of all trades you kind of have to you have to you have to right uh cool so can I bring on sh and you guys side by side and guys can we have uh praise for both of these guys like yo that was some good like good intros right like some good backgrounds there goes the W's you guys see the W your community is cracked man yeah it is dude you know yesterday fary came FY you know life with far yeah I know I know he's hilarious BR this guy has all the has all the followers in the world right but he was like oh my God this is crazy so um I love the W's you know they like share the W's they don't they don't go unnoticed so uh I want to feel I want to have you guys feel part of the community Sher like this is happening like are we doing a partnership like what what's up oh yeah yeah we're in the same office uh listen if you if you work at a startup you're G to be working at 10 pm 11: PM it's just how the thing it's how it works yeah wait I think you're still sound has to go off may his sound gota go yeah awesome listen ever since I met Yim at that CI hack down I was like dude we're going to work together on something whether it's together or indirectly so I'm really happy we got a chance to do this I know Yen and I we've been talking about a pipeline for head starters to an internship thing for a while I'm glad Yen didn't mention it before uh just because you know we wanted to make sure the people that really believed in the fellowship in this program are the ones that benefit from it um so we waited to announce it uh now um but yeah he already posted about it I have a big belief that software engineering how someone becomes a software engineer is going to change it's not going to be the four-year curriculum it may not be boot camps what youen is doing here which is like a coordinated granular Fellowship structure is what is going to make a great engineer it touches on hard skills it touches on soft skills and I wanted to put my money where my mouth is with my friend and say hey look I trust you I trust the vision you're making and I want to hire some of your fellows at the end of this Fellowship there's not going to be an interview there's no leak code there's no algorithms I'm not going to ask you the runtime of I don't know I haven't had to use anything like that really in a long long time uh there's no take on Project I will literally give you give some of your fellows a guaranteed internship at the end um so with that in mind I know some of you guys have asked like what what is a top fellow what does it look like um look it's not somebody who knows the most backend the most algorithms because Yen and I we were at a point where we didn't know anything right somebody had to give us a chance to work at somewhere to earn our Stripes um and we want to give that back so it is literally any one of you whether you are just starting out or you know everything it's your progression how in tuned you are with the community are you taking in everything that you seen is saying are you working with a team are you reaching out to people um to make a project now one thing that we are going to look deeply at is a hackthon I I don't I don't this week is the first one but in a couple weeks we'll be a dedicated Ruby one that is something that will be similar to the type of work you will do that project will have a big uh standing on who who we're looking at who we're keeping a close eye on that's heart skills but heart skills are given you are expected to know all of this you're expected to know a database a backend a front-end uh framework the other half of this is soft skills I'm going to be talking with the to see to see hey who's interacting with head starters um you know in the in the uh your reddits in your discords but the other half is soft skills with Ruby um I I I hate to give away some of your Alpha uh to some of the head star Fells here but I think a hundred of you have already connected with me on LinkedIn and message me letting me know you want to work here introducing yourself um and that is how you show soft skills persistence right there are people out there who will send you an email and if you reply back instantly they're going to think to themselves wow youen is great it is 10 p.m. and he just replied back to me there are people who will wait until 8 AM to reply things like that matter right reaching out to us you know messaging us we we may not see your message but being persistent and look I know there's what like you see 30,000 of you guys or 15,000 something crazy like that um and we are hiring two people like guaranteed no interview nothing um but we are going to like interview um dozens of other people that one will be like external as well so you'll be competing with people that are like externally applying um but one thing that I want to tell you guys is take advantage of every opportunity you have yine is building this program you're not here just for the fellowship you like get to know Yim get to know fison get to know us because Miguel Jordan we're in the Y combinated Community there are thousands of companies there are thousands of jobs right somebody who has messaged me on LinkedIn made a genuine effort to get to know me or ask me for advice right if we have a genuine connection and a few months down the line even if we don't work together you hit me up and you say hey I need an intro to this company at YC I am more than happy to provide that intro and provide a snipp it like this guy he is a great engineer he reached out we were considering him for an internship but it didn't work out but I would hire him the next chance I get those intros go much further than just applying on a job portal and it could be anyone like we've met the founders of some of the largest companies at YC and we are also close friends with the companies that are on the come- up so when you meet someone make a genuine connection you don't know when they'll be helpful um and like nail was saying 72 people rejected him one person believed in him and that person is very happy because lunchbox is a great company he's going to make a crap ton of money um and it goes to show make a genuine connection believe in someone they'll help you out so keep that in mind like stay engaged with the head star stay engaged with us um and do your work because hard skills they're not you know there's no leg up you're expected to do this you're expected to know all this um but yeah I'm really happy to have uh some of the fellows working with us uh later this year and one thing I'll add is this is a great opportunity and I obviously I'm bias but I didn't know a thing about fintech before I started this at all um and now I can I can look at a think that company and almost know exactly how they operate um I want you guys to be really engaged with headart because it gives you an opportunity to work early stage at a fintech if you work at Mercury brex ramp there's probably not a chance you'll be very close to like the payment reels maybe maybe right um but with us you are literally moving money right hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time you are processing payments with MasterCard the networks there's a lot of knowledge that you can learn and it's going to really accelerate your career um so would love to have some of you guys uh there I just want to say a few quick things M can maybe share a little bit of a text stack and then we'll take M I'm muted can you hear me oh yeah I think you guys can right so uh I just want to say a few quick things so so one is um guys my my I have a couple of jobs in this Fellowship right my one job is to get I asked you guys a question yesterday you rather me have a nice and neat fellowship or find more people who are looking to hire from head starter you guys all had one resounding answer which was you guys remember would you rather want to have a really nice program like school or would you have like you know a little bit disorganized Fellowship but then like get as many companies as possible right all right so that's like everyone like the reason why I start a head starter is to help you one they get that software engineering job we do that through like helping find finding great people like sh Miguel hearing their Journeys and now these are actual software Engineers who are creating jobs right that that's incredible and so whoever does end up hiring from them might even have a shot fulltime for them like one day like who knows like whether it's immediately or down the line as they grow as a company so this is incredible another thing sh had said is he has a lot of uh people that he knows right from the why combinator are hiring and just to give a context of what why combinator is because I think many of you may may or may not know let me just share a little bit every year and uh correct me if I'm wrong about like 20,000 every two times a year about 20,000 people like apply to I combinator and then uh 240 get in sh is is a m ofin correct yeah about 200 2 250 yeah yeah 250 240 get in of the 240 get in I believe 140 are in the US and these most of these companies a good amount of these companies they complete this three-month program raising a couple million dollars anywhere between like you know 500,000 to like5 million right and I know a ton of my friends who got into the program or who were part of it or we became customers of why com programs when they raise this money most of the time they're hiring software Engineers like immediately and sh is saying that he doesn't just know his peers who graduate with him he knows companies who are much much more mature like maybe anywhere between like knowing 10 nabes to people on the path to becoming a Nabil and he knows them and so this is a great way for him to get signal like hey are the people het serious or the people like who are genuine connection whether you make the job at Ruby or not there's a lot of opportunity here for everyone um and then lastly I just want to share another thing which is the purpose of header here today isn't to give you a job right away that's that's a bonus that's a kind of add a Cher on top right it actually be very specific we're not looking for the best performer of head starter we're looking for someone of course who does a bare minimum who works hard as n was saying but also has some very specific Tech skills that that they're looking for right ideally like you know you want to be someone who was better than Shar was right when he was your age right or if if you're younger than him so so uh we're the person who they would likely hire already has a skills to be hired as so and so company we just have to do the hard work of finding that person now that can change maybe through grit Maybe through hackathon tracks or maybe visibility that that may change but I'll tell you from our end our goals help you line a job one of my my responsibilities as head starter is to find more shs another responsibility is to find a big fat brick and throw it at your face right so the more bricks I can I can hit with you right you'll be more resilient when you go into job market and so today what I say that to is the main purpose of head starter is when you complete head starter and you build a project and you give your best to get a thousand users you get the Thousand users you make the $1,000 you'll be much more ready for the job market compared to everyone else you'll be landing interviews compared to everyone else right and so and you've already experienced rejection whether you get shards or several other companies if you work with them you've already experienced rejection so now you have you have Scar Tissue right and so what do you learn from properer Founders like niil rejection is Key Don't Look for the yes just collect nose right that's what he said collect nose so uh today is going to be a kind of like that frame set and keep trying give your best to get into sh's company but yeah sh you're gonna say something and then yeah I just want to say um I mentioned this early on and it's you'll speak to a lot of the founders like you just have to get lucky like luck plays such a huge role in bring in in success but you have to give your chance your to get lucky I know people are saying here hey there's like a 0.001% chance of getting this intership there's 15,000 people there's two of them what I want to let you know is there's also a hundred of you guys who have DM me or Miguel on LinkedIn and we we we have Excel sheet of all hundred of you guys that we're tracking every time you submit a project you 100 are the first people that we're looking to on on that sheet so there are things to give you an edge you just have to go and take it right if you're sitting here and you're not engaging with the you're not engaging with the Reddit if you're not engaging with us how can we you know obviously we look at everyone but how can we really give you that you know uh microscope uh view that we need to hire you guys so give yourself the best chance of doing something something and the other thing is yes rejection is key man um what you know I did an internship and I I asked my manager I was like you know you do the you do the dance right to get a return off he's like hey what can I improve on what what am I doing well and the first thing he says is sh you're like you're really good at failing and I thought that was a backhanded compliment at first but then and he explained he was like look failing is one thing right you could like you know be on the floor getting kicked down whatever but you have to keep getting back up and and learn from that failure and so like was saying even if we don't hire you or one of the other you know people don't hire you I'm a connection out Y is a connection out in four months 6 months when you're applying for full-time jobs and you see something that has the Y combinator badge right you can think of me and say hey is Sher willing to go and uh recommend me to the founder um and so that's learning from failure right and failure is a good thing um so keep that in mind guys this is the a great opportunity and one thing is this is the first time you seen is doing this Fellowship in the structure you want to be on a boat when tides are rising in the future yine might have crazier Partners he'll partner with a lot more people guaranteed and I bet you if one of you guys from the first batch hit him up and say hey yine I was part of the inaug the first batch of headstar fellows I would really love to work at Intel and NV video Whatever crazy company youen is going to bring on I guarantee you he'd be more than happy to do it but what's he going to look at first how engaged was he with the fellowship right if he sees you have zero submissions your project was like you know half ass he's not going to be inclined to do it that's just the nature of it an intro referral is a huge thing in the space so be engaged do the best that you can um and that's it yeah 100% now that we've we we' shared this let's go to n grey of what we're looking for so number one thing is all the stuff on the H platform please try to do them take it religiously right that is not is going to show you great is going to show you everyone's going to struggle right consistency uh so those are things the the projects spe specifically going into a lot of detail about the projects right especially the upcoming weeks make sure the project is is is done well CU we're collecting all the data the second thing is uh team collaboration make sure that your teammates are proud of you you're not like an [ __ ] by any means right um that is like every week we're going to ask for team feedback right anonymously please uh rate your three teammate feedback also peer feedback go on Reddit give each other like comments like hey I like your post on Discord be helpful find out who on Discord you go to uh like who needs help or like everything we're tracking right um and then also for the mock interview and stuff like give your best we're not going to be looking directly at that you know if you're if especially because this is not a mock interview uh you know accelerator this is a project accelerator right um so use this as a time to do all that of course the networking that sh was sharing we're going to do inperson Events maybe volunteer to be like be helpful right so like all those things will will will give you rewards either right directly in the fellowship or definitely after right but you'll definitely be in the up and come up and up so again go through all our stuff uh our Reddit our Discord on inperson um and uh great things will happen so uh Miguel do you want to just quickly share like one two minutes about like what is the role that you're looking for like what is the future you're trying to build perhaps or that may be helpful yeah um yeah I wait do you want to say a few things first oh yeah I can I can talk about it I think we're having some weird audio issue but um yeah Miguel so basically um there is one key component we're gonna have like a ruby um structured hackathon we're going to give a track on that it won't it's not the one this weekend it'll be one I think two weeks later um it'll be more you know somewhat tied to some of the work you'd be doing but in terms of the people that we're looking for um we really want Strong full stack is great but really want strong backend Engineers you should know how to use a database you should know uh backend language whether it be like you know node.js or typescript um if you know Java C whatever it's fine like we're not hiring a great node.js expert we're hiring good problem solvers so at a minimum if you know a backend technology if you know how to use a relational database um you that you know that that's it and then after that it's like good problem solvers we'll see what your project is we'll see how uh you know how um is it if you see if you seen says Hey make a to-do app is it just a bare B to- do app or is there some complexity to it did you go out of your way to make it more advanced than it needed to be right because when you're competing with 15,000 other people these These are the metrics that we have to go over so again backend language doesn't matter what you can learn on a job but we personally use no JJs we use postgress as our database uh we use reddis um that's pretty much it no backin Technologies uh you don't have to be great at front end honestly like uh I think both me and Y were under selling Miguel even with High Praise this guy will teach you how to be a good front end engineer even if you think you're the best um so keep that in mind uh whatever projects you do uh make sure the back end is good not even not just for us but for yourself because with the market how it is um backend Engineers they're it's one of the best ways to get hired um yeah oh and another thing is uh one quick thing I want to add is um we're not just like a tradition you know Bank like Chase whatever we have a lot of software and automations in place so we will also be looking for like outliers that know how to use like vector databases rag technology um so if you know something like that um it really you know it really uh what do you call it brights up your uh your projects to us um and one thing I want to add there's a lot of new people here just because I'm saying know rag pine cone no. JS you know relational database it doesn't mean uh you won't have a chance at like being hired whether it's like Direct with the instant uh offer like indirectly um like what I said earlier was I want the best problem solvers because I don't care what language you know what what you do all that translates over if I give you this unscoped project can you go and solve it so somebody who doesn't know who's just getting started you have just as high of a chance as the person who's sitting there thinking to myself man I know how to use a pine cone DB I know a rag you know I know all this stuff everyone gets uh the same amount of uh opportunity but it's up to you if you want to go and get it just like n said go and get go and get it because that's the only way you'll succeed in life Y and I we can't you know prop like we can do our best but it's up to you to give uh to get yourself a chance to get lucky absolutely um so that's great to share some context about like the the the technology and the Forefront like what you're looking at um a lot of you guys may not know these Technologies but in the upcoming weeks we we're going to very like going to Deep dive everything from vectors to front end back end API Cloud so us this also a learning opportunity um I want to ask you guys what questions you have for Miguel or sh please drop in the chat or to in a Q&A so Mel and um and Sh you guys can also see some of these questions you have to reply right away uh so um yeah let let me go let me know what questions you have regular software engineering career-wise like Ruby specific I think one thing we can do is you don't have to answer all of them Sher General I could create like a channel on Discord like has sort of X Ruby like Channel and like people can ask some questions regarding that yeah yeah do that I think that's great I think there's a lot of great questions definitely want to dedicate time to the fellows yeah and also I don't want to pick too much of your time so you don't have to like respond to all of them uh and especially hackathon will be helpful I think will be helpful that sounds good I'll just answer some here um yeah quick one do you just hire from the hackathon or is it overall um it's definitely overall but I will say the hackathon that we do is going to be uh weigh heavily because that's the one that is most closely tied to what we do um but uh it is an overall thing so if you just do that one hackathon and I ask you I'm like hey I really want you know uh this one guy and you comes back and tells me well this guy sto after like week three um we we likely won't proceed with that um how important is domain knowledge when it comes to hiring for Ruby zil you don't need to know anything about fintech ledgers banking issuing processing why because we didn't know any of that when we started um you will learn our Tech stack you'll learn how we operate on the job um and like working on a banking product is is very difficult there's a lot of things you have to keep in mind you have to um L literally like we have to watch out to make sure there's no like people on the FBI list using our you know banking product there's like a whole service dedicated to that so there's so many things that we didn't know ourselves that we built we learn on the job and you'll get the same opportunity to do so um how did you go from idea to First user I think I mentioned this but we went on Facebook groups um I started dming a lot of people uh I was contributing helping them out and they gave us a chance um let's see oh this is a great question what do you think the best way to make effective to have an effective team yeah uh the best way is to be blunt and honest to each other um and be okay with confrontation if someone comes to you obviously be nice to people don't be a jerk um but you know for me personally I would I love people that tell me hey sh that idea sucks to some other people they might think of that you know is not nice but it is what it is um be honest with your teammates if you want to say in a nicer way go ahead uh because the worst thing you could do is waste the seven weeks you have here working on like a nothing uh something that's really easy to do that you're just doing to feel good about yourself uh be honest be very very like overc communicating is better than underc commmunication uh if you think someone could be doing more or someone uh could improve let them know but at the same time if there's someone some if someone's doing something really well let them know they're doing it you see fison they are putting these talks together and you do not know how much work it is to get people to come here um to dedicate their time there's a lot of effort that goes into it so you guys should definitely like get some W's in the chat for youen and F on there you guys are in a very lucky spot um some other question uh how did you determine analytics uh so we do e-commerce ourselves we know what analytics are important to us but but most importantly talk to your users we we went to our users and we asked them what do you want building software is very easy right selling it is hard but you can make it easier on yourself if you talk to your user if Miguel says Hey I want a dashboard that has X Y and Z I'll go back and I say what are you willing to pay they'll say I'll pay $20 a month and I'll say okay I'll build it Miguel pays me $20 a month if if I tell Miguel what do you pay and he says zero I probably won't build it um I see I see a good question uh it says Miguel in your honest opinion how does someone get insanely at frontend was the best way to drill really drill something in your head and effectively use it moving forward on any project um I think as as front developers like we are surrounded by all the like million rappers in the world like there's a rapper for fetch there's a rapper for um a lot of like like different libraries there's Shaden which is a rapper for radics which is a rapper for all all this stuff I think a a good start would be to actually like look if you're really interested look in one of the libraries and actually like look into the code base and and try to understand kind of like The Primitives or the fundamentals and then like um once you like kind of like recreate it on your own that's actually a really good uh practice too like try to make the library yourself except use what you know and see how far you can get with that and then you would actually learn like a really good amount um if if you're interested so i' say that's a really good strategy let's see is there other question said um what does a week look like um I will treat our inters exactly how I like to be treated when I do internships I will throw you into the into the fire so to speak I will tell you here's our GitHub here's our uh other gith hubs for our microservices and here is a summary of what we do and what's important you will be you will be drowning you'll be going through the codebase and listen I don't know a single thing that's happening in that front end repo that Miguel has I don't want to touch it um that's probably going to be the worst part uh but you we will give you a task and you will really own it like you're not going to work on some random like uh side project we will give you a task for you to do and you're going to own it from a uh all the way to Z um and so it's going to be up to you to learn obviously we'll do stand-ups and all that we'll teach you when you have questions uh but it it will teach you how to work at you know like a softare you know a software company there's no handholding uh it is up to you to teach yourself learn struggle because if you don't struggle uh you won't improve so the first week is literally access to repos uh here's some like a one pager on what we do here's your task go do it um let's see how did you learn the legal guidelines for issuing cards to businesses well that's a great question uh Jordan's not here but he's our uh he handles compliance for us he worked at Capital One so there were some compliance things that he was around um but a lot of it was learning on the job reading um what do you call a lot of the laws that happen like every time we send an email you have to have like an unsubscribe link things like that um literally we taught ourselves everything we know about fintech from the banking products cards to compliance um what we have to do when we monitor uh you know transactions for fraud right it's someone stealing somebody else's identity how do we identify that that what do we do if that happens all of these things that we taught ourselves we also have a great Chief compliance officer in New Jersey he's a great guy um he like knows everything it's it's uh we hired him uh and he's very helpful with that among the problems that you solve what kind of problems do you prioritize first at Ruby um yeah uh it's the one that's going to make us money um at a start in a startup the day you die is the day you run out of money so what we focus on is what will generate revenue for our customers and in turn us uh we you know we want to make sure our customers suced we're a banking product if our customers fail uh we fail as a business so how can we generate the most money for our customers right with analytics we help them make smarter decisions so they can make more money or decrease spend somewhere um if they if they're successful we're successful so what makes our customers money and what would generate revenue for us um trust me there have been a lot of times where we're in like a standup we like man this new like API came out from open AI can we use it somehow and we have to like stop ourselves and be like no no it's not going to make anyone money we're going to lose money uh doing this let's not do it um I think I think that was most of the questions um but yeah you let's let's get something happening in the slack Channel and more than happy to answer all your questions there um also um I'm answering questions on like LinkedIn um my Twitter if you guys use Twitter um but if I if I don't see it please just ping me uh no worries don't you're not pestering me and Sh you know what I just thought about this a little bit but you know instead of asking random questions we can already look at the date like the quality of submissions from week one and week two and the hackathons and the team collaboration stuff we can already Identify some people and so then the people whose questions you ask answer can be also more curated yeah yeah and save your time save their time as well yeah and you know I'm answering some questions on LinkedIn right now um anywhere you guys can ask go and ask right oh take like like if you don't ask you're not going to get a question you're not going to answer and I'm not going to get to know you like somebody on LinkedIn asked like this great question I never thought of um and like like it's it's great like I I didn't think about this and I've been working on this for like over over a year so uh just do it like wherever um yeah so and one thing I'll ask at least sh and Miguel maybe is like a additional thing um is like feel free to uh post often on LinkedIn maybe once a day or so like at least once a week you know once a day would be nice like just share what you guys are doing so people can follow your journey right and then so the questions they ask can also be like more educated instead of of course no one should be like hey sh hire me right now or hey sh what's text your so like they have some context like oh look I looked at Ruby I saw sh was you going through this like certain situation or they have this certain Journey like in the up and up and like you know the question can more educated to rooll or you yeah don't take social media advice from me you seen is great with like LinkedIn all that uh stuff um we're like for us we uh what do you call it um uh yeah LinkedIn is still the best place to reach out to me because unlike you seen I'm not daunted with like a bunch of people commenting like hey what's what's happening with head starters so yeah definitely we'll post if you see something there that seems relevant like we are going to be posting some product updates it's a great idea you that's great yeah we're going to post some product updates uh you'll get to know and honestly you the people we hire will probably work on one of these products um comment on it what you're curious about um yeah that'd be great and maybe may may I just throw this out there sh one of the things we talked about is you have a ton of backlog and you're potentially also to seeing like some side projects or projects on its own that that that poti intern can take ownership of so it's like its own domain maybe like a Chrome extension I don't know what it is the equivalent of like maybe its own full stack solution like API microservice stack to front end stack that someone can build the whole thing right like on their own uh while you guys build your own thing and they do their thing as an intern so there's a lot of like interesting stuff here uh and uh I know that the call is going off uh sort of long so I want to end it here uh sh any final thoughts or I think we're good for today yeah I think we're good listen um you know I don't want to keep keep beating this you guys but take this is a great opportunity um take it seriously um because it will pay dividends in your career you will look back when all of you guys are either starting at your own company um you know when you're like the next Neal you'll be thinking like man you know I'm only here because I took that first step so keep that in mind uh this is a great opportunity for you um and listen I have no dog in the game like like I not an investor in head starter like I like yine like is just my good friend from a long time and like although I want him to succeed and that's like my bias I wish I had this when I was coming up as an engineer dude because youen and I we had to fight like dogs to get our first intership bro from we're fromi we we went to a school and when we were applying for internships when we used to apply when they asked for a college we had to never there we had to click other and type in Queen's College Hunter College cuni so this is a great opportunity trust me you guys have it good it's just up to you to see the opportunity um it's it was great interacting with the community thank you so much for your time guys guys w w chat guys share some W's for these guys guys all right guys you guys see that it's all love guys also I think I tutored some of you guys um five years ago I saw the messages dude hit me up I'd love to catch up with what you guys are doing yeah it's crazy the SAT or c. cons right yeah is pretty sick um cool awesome and okay I guess we'll wrap it off here so guys thank you so much for being here sh and Miguel appreciate your time it's late out there too it's late here so must be way later there so again Miguel hopefully the best of things come to you and this is all a great value ad for you guys that's all I'm here for awesome thank you guys so much okay all right good night everyone uh guys who are still here I want to quickly share that if you have team if you do not have teammates please find teammates if you do not have teammates please find teammates uh oh my God I love that you were here from Cairo that's amazing the people who are here from 5: am. 7 am. you guys are incredible thanks so um yes we pause Discord links that is correct we will we'll keep the Discord links paused until maybe tomorrow we'll open it up or Monday will'll open it up but right now we want to take care of everyone who's in our Discord so I appreciate everyone in the funny UK Africa uh time that so it's um it's really nice to see a global Community here we will open up the invites correct we will open up the invites but in a in a bit uh so guys who here does not have a team whoever here does not have a team please please share like your um your track of Interest share what um uh like region you're in some skills and backgrounds and then your LinkedIn or Discord link probably yeah LinkedIn or Discord link right and uh actually before before you guys share before you that did you guys like today's event before you share the team stuff those do have team do you guys like enjoyed today's event okay if you en because a lot of you guys have never experienced this we've been doing this is our 13th event 13th event we did this each one of them we had the former AI of dueling head of had dingo former CPO of hinge uh we had someone who's building an International Space Station we have multiple Nabil on on panel we had multiple software Engineers multiple directors of who had computer science backgrounds like you saw Dustin today you know by the way just the directors make a lot of money brother they make tons of money right so everyone's super worried about what's my TC gonna be how am I gonna be that software engineer forget all that stuff what where the real juice is is when you become a leader right when you become a manager that's like when you have real impact or real say and so um that's that's really good n is one of my heroes so uh I'm hoping I get to you know all the good stuff that nail has in into me as well so um if you guys enjoy this feel free to go to our Discord chat please go to our Discord chat you can definitely change teammates uh you go to our Discord chat and then type um type uh like your like go to channel called Zoom recap and share what you learned from today those are not able to be here they can see from what's going on there so go to zoom recap and share that and then of course please do post on online go on LinkedIn go on Reddit go on Instagram you know take snap snippits or SnapChat uh pictures you know share share with others show people that you're curious show people that you're learning um take the biggest takeaways you got from Nabil or Shar or whoever other Journey that you really enjoyed take it we'll have this event that we have like this every week and I will try my best every every week um we'll try to bring one company is going to hire from you guys ideally multiple but at least one company will hire from you guys right so um uh so so so go ahead and post in the zoom uh recap now the people who here here who do not have event who do not have teammates the hackathon will be online yes um so I had shared the a link to the calendar for the hackathon if you guys remember I had shared a link link to uh sorry a a a calendar um so all the people who are accepted they have a sharable calendar one of the emails please check all the emails please check the Discord announcements um uh I will take a look at people's backgrounds uh in ch uh an Patel I I I'll look through your notes and I'll see if I can pin it yeah no problem if it's a good one so guys feel free to um when I say Reddit you know we have H has his own Reddit right so feel free to share your your your biggest takeaways on our own Reddit that would be great right the quality of speakers and the knowledge and wisdom is incredible so um I'm like fanboying the same way you guys are so it's cool so please those people who don't have teammates please drop your information and don't just drop your information go click on 15 others go click on 15 other people's informations please go click on 15 other people's information I'm going to leave the chat here I'm gonna Omar come on I'm gonna work on you in the bdr r no problem um uh okay I'm going to keep this chat alive so guys please reach out be proactive go to people go find people on Discord go find people in other places right and then then things will happen also use our IRL chats right find people in your location that's the best way to find teammates find people in your location uh that is great yo someone's spamming the chat I think I think is PTA I mean you can't do that man that that's not cool uh just send me an email or we'll take a look at it yeah uh uh your Indian YouTuber friend please Conta me with him uh SP ready uh go to the contact at headstar put on caps Indian YouTuber friend I'd love to host him for an event in New York or SF right so we'll we'll we'll do an iners event with him and we also maybe add him for a zoom call no problem so so thank you for making that bring that up I appreciate I appreciate you're not going to be seen yes I'm gonna upload I'm gonna upload yesterday's recording I'll do that thank you thank you everyone thank you all right with that being said I'm going to close the the meeting is over but for those who don't have teams those who don't have teams we'll keep this alive for a little bit right and guys we're going to run this back again next week we're gonna run it back again next week and each week you're going to see some incredible speakers so thanks thanks for coming everyone else please share uh your teammates information thank you thank you thank you e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e