Giuuunta! Motivating yourself when you're not in startup mode

Justin Jackson: This podcast is hosted by Transistor fm. Hey and welcome back to, uh, Build you'd SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2024. And I'm Justin Jackson and I've got a guest on the show today, Dave Junta. Uh, as listeners will know, Dave has been a fixture on the podcast for many years. His name is presented in the aforementioned dramatic fashion every episode. Dave was VP of engineering at Home Chef for over eight years and just recently left that position and is currently exploring new opportunities. Uh, and Dave and I, believe it or not, we recently found ourselves in a bar in Guatemala. We had a great conversation and then we promised that we'd do a follow up call when we got back home. And that follow up call just happened. And I said, dave, why don't we record this and maybe publish it? So we decided to record it last minute so you get to listen in. M In our call, we discussed the challenge of maintaining motivation once your business has made it. How remote work and different working styles affect motivation. The difference between early stage motivation, where every decision you make feels consequential, versus late stage motivation where you have to actively seek out things that energize you. And uh, this is all in the context of starting a business, of course. Uh, how working with junior devs can reignite motivation, the importance of understanding individual team members and what motivates them. Why Dave decided to leave Home Chef after so many years and giving yourself space to explore and transition between different phases of your career. The whole thing was great. And now I give you Dave Junta.

Dave Junta: I was going to ask if this goes back to, um, the conversation we were having in Guatemala about like, uh, maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm misremembering some of that conversation. Um, I was remembering it being a little bit about like motivation and having a team and a bunch of people who are sort of like at different levels of motivation. I think we were mostly talking about like what to build next. Right. But I wonder if this isn't sort of like another symptom that sort of like falls out of that. Like day to day has become the day to day and it's not something that you're really spending a lot of time thinking about and crafting as the, you know, as what you're doing.

Justin Jackson: Yeah, I've been thinking. I mean, I'm constantly thinking about this because there are moments. So once you've built the thing, building the thing, getting the airplane into the air is so much work and is usually Preceded by multiple crashes. So, you know, it's like I've been trying to get an airplane up in the air since I was 15 years old. And I've had multiple airplanes, I've had multiple flights and, uh, a varying success. And then you get one up in the air that's really going. And I think in the same way that I have to remind myself, like, when I'm on an airplane and I'm, um, by the window and I want to, like. I just want to, like, be the guy that closes the window and just, like, watches a movie, there's this other part of me that's like, no, I need to open the window and look outside because this is a miracle that I'm up here. This is incredible. This is a perspective that throughout human history, only a fraction of people have ever seen. And it's unbelievable. And you have to kind of put yourself in that place of recognizing, you know, that this is incredible and kind of feeling emotions and maybe. So, yeah, I think once the business was going, I found that you don't have the same kind of, uh. You almost have to force yourself to. Or put yourself in a position where you're like, enjoying it at that same level of high, that highly activated level. Does that make sense?

Dave Junta: I think so. You mean in terms of. Because we were talking about sort uh, of like motivation to record a podcast.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: And that. That motivation sort of came. I. My. What I heard, I think was that that motivation came out naturally because you. In the moment, in that, in those. In that time. For one, I'm guessing that you and John were talking about talking to each other a lot more frequently.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: And a lot more actively because it was just the two of you at the time. And then it was like you had nothing but decisions to make constantly, every day. And, uh, they were all about these, like, super minute things, and they were all about things that you were, like, really excited.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: To talk about and make a decision,

Justin Jackson: and they felt consequential. It's like, like the pricing, the. The pricing structure we have today, we came up with. It was. It was birthed, you know, in those moments, um, of grinding up the hill like that. It was like we came up with those kind of fundamental.

Dave Junta: Those.

Justin Jackson: Those fundamental pillars when. During that time. And. Yeah. So now I would say things just really kind of slow down once you've built it and the plane's in the air. But. Sorry, you were going somewhere. I think, I think I.

Dave Junta: No, no. Uh, well, I guess I'm wondering, did it feel consequential in the moment for, like, that pricing decision.

Justin Jackson: Oh, yeah, yeah. It felt super consequential. Like, the difference between everything feels so consequential at the beginning and really is because everything from choosing the market that we went into, like, saying, yes, we're both going to pursue podcasters and pursue this product category, which is hosting, you know, that was incredibly consequential. And then figuring out our perspective on that, our point of view, our differentiation, and then executing on all feels incredibly consequential. And, uh, we haven't really touched, for example, we wrote up together a values document, but we haven't really touched that since then. We came up with, you know, we had this philosophy of, you know, we, why do we like this particular category? And we had all these reasons. Because it's slow media, because it's, um, open protocols, because it feels like the old web. All of that stuff happened then and, and was very consequential. And then you even get to the point that this idea of every move we made, a move in a given month could mean we went from 100 customers to 200. So that was a doubling. And then the next month we might go from 200 to 500. And that kind of growth and consequential growth, where you really feel it, whereas once you get into millions of dollars of revenue, it's incredible for all of the reasons we dreamed it would be incredible. But you don't get the same kind of lift. You know, it's not. It's like the decisions you're making month to month. It's not like, you know, our dream initially was just like, can we get to $10,000 a month in recurring revenue? Right. And that, like, once you hit it and it's like, oh, my God, we hit it. And then it's like, well, clearly, like, if we can get to 20k, then we would be at this point where we could both quit our jobs and at least have enough to live on. And that felt super consequential. But, yeah, once, uh, it's going, there's still exciting things, but it's not the same. Every customer conversation felt so important. And I think that's actually a good example of how I've been able to fire myself up at this point is forcing myself to go have a customer conversation. Or like, today I've been, um, bringing up this point to the team that we're so lucky in podcasting because our customers often talk about why they started the podcast or why they found transistor on episodes. It's just like, right there. We just have to discover it, like an anthropologist. And, uh, I found this episode today. I just looked at who had started a show today, and someone had published an episode, and I looked at it, and they were talking about what motivated them to start the podcast. And I got super fired up. It just felt like, oh, yeah, I remember this feeling. Or, you know, Michael, who's on our, um, customer success team, has gotten really excited about doing zoom calls with new customers, and he's here in Vernon, and so sometimes he'll come into my office and say, oh, I just had the most amazing call, and he'll tell me about it. And that gives me energy as well. But it's definitely different in that it feels like to get that energy now, I have to kind of get into character. I have to do things to have it happen. Right. It's not just naturally there. You don't have that natural kind of builder's energy and momentum. Um, and I don't think I want to go back to that builder's energy. Like, there's. It's that, you know, there were hard things about. It's hard to build things. You know, it's. It's nice to have built something. But it's definitely at this stage, I think this has been ever since we kind of reached our big financial goals, there's this kind of constant existential question of, like, man, okay, so things are good, and how do we continue to motivate ourselves? How do we continue to motivate our team? And then. And I think there's other things, too, that make this stage just more challenging in that invariably, as a company grows both in terms of revenue and headcount, and just like, after you've been around for a while, there's more and more administrative burden. Just naturally you accumulate administrative stuff, or the administrative stuff catches up with you and you have to deal with it. And that part is not fun. Like, you can kind of play fast and loose when you're building. It's like, hey, it's just John and I, and it's like healthcare, who cares? Um, you know, sales, uh, tax. We haven't hit any of the thresholds yet. Like, we're. You get this. There's this magical time when you're building something where it's just like. It's simplicity. Uh, it's not just an illusion. It's simple, uh, for the time. Because a lot of stuff just doesn't apply yet. Or unless you're in Germany, but, you know, over, uh, in Europe, they have a lot of business. They're very serious about, you know, uh, the right way to do things. But in North America, we've all. A startup has always been like a little bit like, well, if we missed a government form, we're making a hundred bucks a month. Like, what's the worst that could happen? You know. But once you get to a certain stage, there's just more of that.

Dave Junta: So this is interesting. When I first started asking some questions here in my head, I was thinking about how motivation is definitely different. I think when the business starts to get big or when the business gets to a comfort level. Right. Is that you have to start setting your sights on different things to be your motivation. Some of those things might be like you're motivated by creating the system of your company in a way that you just didn't. To your point, you didn't have to think about it at all in the beginning. Sometimes it might be a motivation about, um, you know, the inherent risk that comes with making changes when a company is this size. Because, you know, in the beginning, that's why I asked you if, like making your, um, pricing level decisions, did they feel consequential in the moment? Because in my mind I was like. And that you could, you could have chosen whatever you wanted. It doesn't like, it kind of doesn't matter. You're going to like, make a decision, you're going to try it out. If it doesn't work, we can change it tomorrow. It's not a big deal. You changing your prices today is. I think it's actually true. Like you probably could make a change, but it feels so much more consequential because you have so many more customers and your business is so large.

Justin Jackson: That's so interesting. Yeah. Consequential can have two dynamics. Uh, so looking back, our pricing decision was consequential in that no, you haven't changed. Really set us up for where we are now, I think. Yes. I think now making changes feels so consequential. Like there's part of this machine that none of us even understand. And jiggling any of it makes me nervous. Like, any of it, uh, infrastructure changes make me nervous. Any sort of changes to the signup flow make me nervous. Any sort of changes to onboarding, any sort of changes to pricing. And we've considered a lot of them. You know, at one point it was like, maybe we should try. A lot of our competitors have something to the effect of, uh, free to sign up, no credit card up front, and you can publish your first episode for free. It's like, oh man, there's something about that, that you might get way more inbound because then people can try it out. And, and I think ultimately we decided that wasn't a good decision because we already have a signup flow that's really working well. And like, again, don't jiggle it. And also just like, I don't think it would actually improve the numbers that we care about, which is new paying customers and uh, retention and monthly, uh, revenue. But there was a big part of that decision where we were like, we just don't want to change this because that's a massive risk. And you make that choice. It's like that all of a sudden you could be. Go from. Right now we have about a 75% conversion rate from trial to paid over a 14 day free trial. So you can already imagine, like, if you made that free, uh, if you added a freemium plan, those people might not convert for three months, six months, two years, whatever. And so it could really throw you off.

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

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: But you're also putting a lot more bets into a pipeline, a marketing pipeline. You're also getting a lot more interest that gives you as the person who, of, uh, the group who is, who is responsible or maybe like, cares about customer outreach, a lot of opportunities, opportunities that you don't necessarily get right now. Like, right now you get the opportunity to go talk to. You were just talking about, right. Like talking about some talking to somebody who they just published their first episode. Yeah, you're going to get a different type of customer, a different type of person who starts their free trial and then never converts for three months. And that'd be an interesting person to go talk to because instead of you getting motivation from them having started it, you're going to be the one who's going to be giving them the motivation to make it happen.

Justin Jackson: Uh, interesting.

Dave Junta: It's a very different kind of place for you to be, but might be very interesting thing for you to learn. Um, because that segment of the Market exists of, uh, people who think a podcast would be cool. But get as far as, oh, you want me to put in a credit card? No, I'm not going to do that. And then back up.

Justin Jackson: Yeah. I think in this particular case though, this is where my instinct or my gut was once I thought about it and once I talked about it with the team, I think our instincts here were actually correct in that especially for creator businesses, what you really want is the most self motivated customer. Like you don't want to have to motivate the customer and the credit card up front. If we weren't getting enough trials every month, I think then it'd be like, we gotta solve that problem. But this was a case of like, but we don't have that problem. We get hundreds of trials. And I think my instinct there, in terms of just human behavior and human psychology is the money. Like people paying upfront actually is a motivating factor unto itself. So it both attracts people that are highly motivated and once they're paying for it, it's more likely that they'll continue with it. And we've seen these in the numbers. Like if you look at Spotify's free hosting, those shows have less episodes per feed and kind of fade out faster than an average transistor customer.

Dave Junta: Don't get me wrong, I wasn't suggesting that like there was a huge business opportunity to be had by making that change. I was mostly trying to point out like a change like that can have a meaningful impact on where you and the team derive motivation to show up at work every day. Even if, because again, my suspicion is that you making that change, while it makes that number go from 75% conversion down to 30% in terms of actual people coming through the funnel and completing the thing, it's probably actually not that different. Your money, your business doesn't actually necessarily change all that much. Even though your metrics change in a way that feels bad. But you may have made a decision that helps you and the team get access to a thing that gives you more motivation, not less.

Justin Jackson: Yeah, but this is, this would actually be an interesting thing to talk to you about because I think over the past couple years, one thing I've realized, I started doing more one on one calls with people on the team and also just trying to, during team retreats and other things, understand people's personal motivation. And a lot of this initially came out of Helen, uh, who's our kind of lead customer success person. Uh, her and I started doing one on one calls and then she Gave me this great document, uh, which was how to best work with me basically. And it was divided into sections. Um, one section was here's what really fires me up. Here's the other section was here's stuff I can do that I'm good at, but it's kind of neutral. And then at the bottom, here's stuff that really demotivates me. And what I found fascinating about it is that I had been giving her all this stuff in the demotivating category because for me those things were motivating. So I felt like I, uh, was giving her the best jobs, these are the best things. But in reality she's like, that stuff doesn't fire me up at all. And the stuff that she actually loves is coming up with procedures, process research, projects, things that have a very defined uh, scope. And you know, I was sending her things like I want you to go out and build relationships with all of the possible affiliates. And she's just like, what is that? You know, and, but for me that's very motivating. You know, I love these kind of unbounded things. And so um, I wonder if like, is there even such thing as team motivation or at the end of the day is it really all come down to individual motivation, like what motivates us individually? And it's kind of like the owner's job to just figure out a direction for the product and the company and everything and then align that or match that up with the individual's strengths, abilities, desires, motivations. What do you think?

Dave Junta: I mean what you're describing is the job of a manager.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: Is like that is your job is to as a manager is to understand um, your direct reports, uh, like strengths and weaknesses and what they care about, what they want. You should have some goals for them too that maybe stretch them in ways that they don't really see as being valuable, but you can sort of foresee that this is a way that they will sort of grow. Yeah, I think it's natural for like business people to think about all of those things in terms of like business goals and objectives. When I, when I, when you think in those terms it feels very manipulative. I find, um, I find myself wanting to think much more in terms of like the individual that I'm managing. You know, a lot of that stuff is sussed out exactly like you're doing. You have regular one on ones with people. Those one on ones. Are you trying to have them be like normal human conversations? And during the course of those conversations, this kind of, kind of Stuff comes out. As you start to do this more often, you start to make mental notes for yourself of, uh, oh, uh, here's some things that. Like that thing that Helen put together for you is awesome. I've only heard of that happening like two or three times in my entire career of someone who came to somebody was like, hey, I did this thing and here's what. And. And it's always great. I always. I love to see that. I find that I am not able to really take that stuff into account until I've internalized it for them too. And you know, sometimes even that that list is, um, it's like filtered through their own sort of self bias. Like, you know, it requires a certain amount of self, uh. Awareness. Awareness, yeah. To like put that list together. And sometimes there's some blind spots that cause some things to be in different areas of that list. Right. And again, as a manager, I think that's your job is to sort of start to suss that stuff out and then to put challenges in front of people that, um, help them get to whatever that next thing is. And then, you know, as a side effect, you end up getting the thing that the business needs too. Um, because again, better, highly motivated people perform better and do all of those. All of the kinds of things that you're looking for and that you need out of your business.

Justin Jackson: I think having. Because I've hired now. Well, we hired Helen in the uk, John is in Chicago. Then we hired Jason, and Jason was, uh, in Ohio. Now he's kind of in Chicago area. Then we hired Josh, who's in Langley, and then we hired Michael, who's here in Vernon. And the interesting thing about having Michael here is we initially, when we hired him, we said, okay, well, he's interested in engineering. Why don't we hire him as a support engineer? Uh, his primary task will be, you know, doing customer success. But then maybe we can start to give him more web development projects as a way of kind of filling out what he wants. And, uh, we started to do that, but we realized that the nature of customer success at Transistor is that you're in live chat all day, and so you're constantly having your attention taken off. And he really likes, uh, he actually like, legitimately enjoys being in live chat all day. And he came up with this other idea. So he just. The advantage of him being here in Vernon is that he can knock on my door and this office and come in and say, hey, I'm wondering if I could talk to you about something. And then Say, you know, uh, we've been trying this but it's just so hard to like for me to focus on it. But I've been getting on some of these zoom calls with customers and I love that. Like is that something that you would like me to do more of maybe? And I was like uh, hell yes. Like I, that would be incredible. And you know, it led to conversations about jobs to be done theory and recommending some books and even talking about in terms of, you know, he's just starting his career in tech but in an overall arc of a tech career, um, the people that learn these kind of customer interview skills end up being great product managers and all these other things. So it ended up being this, a kind of amazing conversation. And it came up because he's here and he was able to knock on my door and go hey. Like it was just like a passing hallway conversation. It is a little bit harder to orchestrate those. You have to be a lot more mindful about it. When it's all remote I find like there's just some stuff. In so many ways remote work is amazing. And in so many ways it just sucks so, so bad. And this is one of them. It's just like uh, ah, like because even when I'm not feeling particularly motivated or proactive, when you're co located there's always the reactive option which is somebody knocks on your door and you have to react to it. But yeah, I think that illustrates part of this idea of uh, with a team anyway how you end up discovering what fires people up and what motivates them. The other tricky part with all of this is for both owners and employees, is that the trajectory of your personal motivation and desires has to somewhat align with the trajectory of the company.

Dave Junta: Trajectory in what way?

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

Dave Junta: What does retirement mean in this context?

Justin Jackson: Uh, in this context his partner is buying him out and he is no longer going to be an active partner in the business. He might, the company might contract him to do some Design work. But he is, he's out.

Dave Junta: This is an exit of sorts. Uh, but, but not like permanent retirement or whatever.

Justin Jackson: No, no, no. But retiring from the company. I think this retire founders retiring from the companies they started is the trend. Um, Matt Wensing at Summit also just announced that he was retiring um, from the company in this case I think either selling the company or shutting it down. And um, he's taken on a different role. So uh, my point with that was I think in a lot of cases the founders were realizing like for Ben at Tuple, one thing he realized is that he did he Tuple is a, a product for remote teams to do screen uh, sharing. But Ben really didn't enjoy remote work. He wanted a co located team. And so in his case his kind of aspirations and what motivated what he felt would motivate him didn't align with the trajectory of the company. There was no way to make that happen. And so the natural step was for him to retire as CEO and still uh, be an owner but not be active in the company.

Dave Junta: This isn't because the company's not doing well or whatever either. Right? This is company's doing well. It's just there's a divergence between, or realization maybe of this distance between the motivation of the founder and the trajectory of the company that totally makes sense. But at the top level.

Justin Jackson: Mhm.

Dave Junta: At the lower levels of your organization, I don't know that there's, it's much more difficult for that large of a gap to show up. You're still gonna have them but it, I think it's not as common for like uh, you know, senior software engineer at a, in a company with whatever to be like oh, uh, you know, I would, I, I should really be CEO. But they're looking for is like the next level up, you know what I mean?

Justin Jackson: Um, yeah, the next level up or I mean I've been on teams where you know, some of the folks wanted to, really wanted to work in a certain tech stack and it was like well that, that's not going to match the trajectory of the company. Like we're not, we're not going to change our whole tech stack for that desire or I mean I've also worked for companies where I really desired to have more remote flexible work. And the company's like that just doesn't fit with what we're doing. So there is a tricky tension here I think both on the ownership level and on an individual contributor's level that in general, uh, the most important desires in your life need to be somewhat compatible with whatever this industry, this product category, this particular company, this particular product can provide. And then there's within that, there's the. Just the, uh, for owners, I think that might be generally true. And then there's this question of like, okay, within this, these constraints, how can I be more motivated at work? And then for employees, it's within these constraints, how can I make sure that I'm noticing those kinds of things? Like, instead of forcing Michael to continue to work on web development projects being like, oh, no, this other thing you are interested in is totally aligned with what we care about. And a lot of people don't want to get on zoom calls with customers. So if you have that energy and you want to do that, God bless you, like, please do that. You can do that, you know, forever, if you'd like.

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

Justin Jackson: Yeah. How big was Home Chef?

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

Justin Jackson: Okay.

Dave Junta: And the, uh, tech team as a whole was almost 100. Uh, wow. My team was half of the. Half of the tech team.

Justin Jackson: Wow.

Dave Junta: And then like, in terms of like, relative to the rest of the company, I think our corporate team was somewhere around 500. And then our plant team, like the people who are like in the plants, packing boxes and stuff were, um, I think that was somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 ish people. And some number of those people were, um, what do you call it? Part time or temporary or seasonal. Like, you know, that number sort of like fluctuates a bunch, but like, just to situate you.

Justin Jackson: Big company. Yeah.

Dave Junta: Um, we still felt like a small company though, because again, compared to the competitors that we had, um, hellofresh, their tech team was over a thousand people. Um, so, you know, some order of two orders of magnitude larger or an order of magnitude larger than ours. Um, and they were interested in growing. So we still felt scrappy and small by comparison. Um, so it's an interesting. Everything I think is a little bit about perspective. Um, but what I was getting to is like, when you're a team of that size, you start to run into, I think more of the circumstances. Like you're working in a giant code base, and that code base can't. You can't. To your point, you're not going to go, we're not going to rewrite it in some other framework or something like that. It's going to say what it is you either like it or you don't. You have to find ways of showing people that there are ways to be motivated, even about the job that they're doing today. And I found when I was talking to engineers of all levels, um, oftentimes what I would tell them is, yeah, occasionally we're going to do a big project and you're going to get an opportunity to sort of lead that project, and that's going to be great. We only get a few of those a year. We don't get, like, one of them so that everybody can lead a project. Um, so in the, in between times when you're not leading a project, you get an opportunity to do something that, yeah, maybe you've done it 100 times before, but much like, uh, like martial arts or something like that, where you, like, practice the same thing over and over and over again, and every single time you try and do it is an opportunity to perfect that one little thing. Um, or to remind yourself of the fundamentals of the thing that you're doing. Um, or to take somebody else who's. Who's more junior than you and bring them along, show them how to do a thing that they're like, for them, that is, like, brand new to them, and they're super excited. You can draft off of that motivation. Yeah, it's, you know, there's all these, like, little tricks to try and make the mundanity of the everyday work a day job that you just kind of have to do because it's the stuff that keeps the business moving.

Justin Jackson: Hey, how come your team doesn't have their own podcast? Head over to Transistor and use my coupon, Transistor FM. Justin, you'll get 15% off your first year of podcast hosting. I think that point about it does seem like there are some features that really help with ongoing motivation. And one thing I've been reflecting on is over the summer, I hired this recent university grad simply because he needed a job. He had no, uh, he just graduated. It's hard out there for juniors. And I said, well, I've got an idea for a project. I'll pay you out of my own money to build it. And then, um, you'll have something to put on your resume and have something to put in your portfolio. And so we did this project together, Um, which we launched. It's, uh, called swagfan.com. and what I found was he was 27, so not a young kid, but I just couldn't believe how much energy he had compared to somebody who's in their 40s. It just reminded me of that kind of like, lightning bolt energy. And just to feel like as an older, wiser person, I could just direct this energy ever so slightly. And the things he didn't know were fascinating to me. Uh, you know, just like that he was a fairly competent web developer, but there's just all of these things he had never experienced or never touched. And, uh, you know, his instincts are still quite, you know, they're not quite there. They're developing. And so it was very fun to have somebody who you could say you could meet with them. And because of time restraints, like constraints, we would meet maybe once a week. Okay, let's show me what you've done. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, it's interesting that you did it that way. Well, here's some other thoughts about that, but let's just keep it this way just to see what happens. And then I'd say, well, and, uh, here's a bunch of things here. Here's some things you can work on.

Dave Junta: And.

Justin Jackson: And he would go away and come back and he'd just have to solve so many problems on his own. And it was just so interesting to me. And then I contrasted that with. What's the average of 44 and 27? Uh, average of 44 and 27. Uh, 35.5. Okay. So our average age was 35.5. And then I reflected on the average age of an employee at Transistor, which is in the 40s. Um, I think our youngest person is in their late 30s. And so one thing that I have been thinking about, I've talked about with John is like, maybe we do need to just get some junior interns or some summer students or something in here, because that feature alone could be motivating. Like Swag Fan as a. A project or product was. Was interesting, but it's like, not the. It's not like I was like, oh, this product's going to change the world. It was just like, something I wanted for myself. And. But what was motivating and energizing was working with Ferdinand, this. This graduate who is just like, you know, just having that energy was so exciting. And so, yeah, I have. I've been thinking about what are some of those elements we can bring in. It's, uh, also interesting talking to other people at other companies and going, you know, like, what makes you want to stay there? Or what motivates you to stay there? And so some of it is just very intangible. Like, you know, I love that we do a Team retreat every year or I just love that the rest of my team is. Wakes up eight hours after me and I get to like have these long interrupted periods of work. Like everyone has those things, you know.

Dave Junta: So I am a huge proponent of having junior members of your team people earlier in their career. I know a lot more about that in the engineering world than I do about other disciplines. My suspicion is that this works is regardless of discipline, but I know for sure it works really well in the engineering world. I am self taught as an engineer, that predisposed me to being very willing and excited about the developer boot camps that came up 10, 15 years ago. Yeah, um, so I got, I got involved in those very early as like a mentor and like helping and like this idea of like anybody can sort of teach themselves how to do something with like a little bit of mentorship and like with the right amount of curiosity and tenacity and the right attitude. Like those kinds of things all are what propel somebody through those like super early stages of growth. Um, and that I also was watching companies be very, um, you know, everyone was looking for the ninja Rockstar, you know, senior engineer, the, the one engineer is going to 10x, the whatever.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

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

Justin Jackson: That was the founder.

Dave Junta: That was the founder, which I, um, he was, he was assigned to me. I was his mentor in boot camp. So I got to watch him go from like do all of this in the very beginning. Um, the very interesting thing, like if you talk to, talk to tech founders, early startup people like, and they, and they're, and they're like, let me go hire my first engineer. None of them would tell you hire a bootcamp grad as your first engineer. Home Chef did. We started with, um, the very first full time engineer was another guy that I mentored. And Rick referred to the founder, um, who was only a couple years out from boot camp and had a couple of experiences but not a ton. Um, but even before that that guy was hiring his friends, hiring other people. Who do you know that has any of these skills whatsoever? You know, the guy who's going through the boot camp with you and like you'd fight through it together. Um, the beginning of Home Chef started with more junior engineers than any other startup that I had been a Part of, right?

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: And there's something to that. Like it being in the culture of the company, this idea of anybody we're going to care about, the attitude and the motivation and the, uh, what do you call it? The curiosity and tenacity to look outside of the boundaries of these skills that you have. And in service of like, just doing more, doing better, following your curiosity and help and having that be directed about making this business go to whatever the next level is. And so when I had an opportunity to build that team with the cto, who was also very much on board with this, I think it was our fourth engineer that we hired, um, was an apprentice, like another person, like right out of boot camp. They were their very first job. Even there was a front end guy that we'd hired, um, before that who had no backend experience whatsoever. And from within like two weeks of the dude starting, um, I was like, let's, you know, he starts asking questions like, how does this controller work in Rails? I'm like, let me tell you about Model M view controller, whatever, right?

Justin Jackson: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Junta: Like, I feel, I feel like I got an opportunity to like, teach somebody rails from the very beginning. The thing about that, uh, for me is that exactly all the things we've been talking about, you get to draft off of that energy and that excitement, like the excitement that comes from someone going from, from nothing to hello world when, when that is, when they've never been able to do it before, is they're so excited in a way that a senior engineer who've done that, who's done that 75,000 times, can't possibly be excited about that. But put them, that person next to a new person who's just learning that and like that the glow that comes off of that is infectious.

Justin Jackson: Yes, yes. Well, I mean, I'm experiencing this with, again with Michael doing these customer interviews is, you know, it reignited my excitement and passion about doing this kind of customer research and to get to teach him all of these things that I've thought a lot about and I've written a lot about, but haven't really. I'm like dusting off all these old things and it's reignited, uh, some excitement for me in like, oh, let's look at this transcript and look at the emotional triggers or the emotional nudges that move people along to the point where at some point, way down that trail, they're taking out their credit card on the transistor website. Like, that's so fascinating to me. And so, yeah, I've Felt this. This energy. And. Yeah, it'd be interesting to try to like, um, uh, operationalize this by saying, you know, okay, every summer we're going to hire one or two people or, uh, one or two, uh, you know, interns or summer students or something like that. And, um, getting some of that. That energy and bringing down the average age of, you know, the. We're a very old team, like, for a tech team.

Dave Junta: We're.

Justin Jackson: We're, uh. You know, this is, uh. Like, nobody is in their 20s.

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

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: Right. Like, I don't care what age you are, I hope that I never retire this part of my brain that is excited and curious and interested in, like, learning new things.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: I might practice that in different ways as I get older and older. But, uh, I want to. That's. To me, that's like, the goal in life is to, like, constantly find a way to engage your curiosity.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: To me, the benefit of doing this thing that you're talking about is that reminds everybody in the company about that it's okay to be that beginner person again. That's just so valuable. I have. I have one more story, if you're willing to hear.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: And that is? Well, two. The first is one of the most. Like, I keep coming back to this experience when I was a mentor at, ah, one of the boot camps. I would spend all day. I was working at Groupon at the time in their giant monolith application that was, you know, all kinds of fun to work in, but well above me in terms of skill, uh, set.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: So, like, I. I would be there and spend all day beating my head up against some problem that, um, I just couldn't find a way to solve for any number of reasons. And it was so frustrating. I would leave the office feeling so dejected about, I mean, like, all the imposter syndrome stuff. Right. Like, how could I. I thought I was a senior engineer. There's. How can I possibly not know how to get through blah, blah, blah, whatever. And I would, like, walk across the city and go meet with my student, uh, and I would encounter him experiencing the exact same problem, except it was. I don't know the difference between instance variables and class.

Justin Jackson: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Junta: I'm like, dude, I got you. And I would leave that experience going like, oh, I am still good at what I do. There is still this depth of knowledge that's underneath there, um, that is so valuable we forget that.

Justin Jackson: That's such a good point.

Dave Junta: The teaching part is the, is the way we get to like, and, and a little bit like rehashing the, the beginner stuff is the, the way that you remind yourself of just how much you have learned and grown. Whatever. It's a, it's a thing that I try and um, emphasize with. We had an apprenticeship program at Home Chef. Um, over the course of the like nine years or whatever that I was there, we um, had I think upwards of 15 um, apprentices come through and every single one of them ended up becoming a software engineer one on our, uh, sorry all but um, one. And that was not because they were unworthy. It was because we didn't have a position I could put them into. All of them become. Became software engineer ones. Most of them have stayed at the company for a significant portion of time. I mean, you know, five, six, seven years. Um, it's great. One of the things that I would tell those apprentices almost as soon as they would like get into that Software Engineer 1 and we had another apprentice coming up behind them was your job is to be that person's buddy. Your job is to help that person through all the things that you just learned. And it's funny, you would see this step level jump in confidence, in motivation, in all of these things. It's like when you're in it, you forget to notice just how far you've come. I kind of wonder if the same is true actually of like business owners and founders like, like you, where every day is like a little bit of a. Not a slog, but it's like, it's incremental and you don't. It's hard to take stock of uh.

Justin Jackson: Oh, it totally feels that like just

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

Justin Jackson: I think you're right.

Dave Junta: One of the things that I learned at Home Chef, um, in the last. Gosh, it was in like 2023 sometime like kind of like right around fall, like October, ish. So we were like just before Thanksgiving, you know, break kind of thing. I had misconfigured our email and so we had this admin homechef.com email address that was like open to the world. Like anybody could email it.

Justin Jackson: Okay.

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

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

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

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: But a funny thing happened is because I went to the whole tech team in Slack, some of the people on my team started, like, like, commenting about it.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: The person's name was Lila. And so they were like, somebody send some swag. Some home chef swag to Lila, whatever. Right. So I was like, all right. The team is talking to this person. I. You know, I can't let. I can't engage my own cynical brain about how this is. Like, I just had to assume this is, like, some bottom, something, whatever, Right?

Justin Jackson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Junta: So I wrote back and I said, of course, it's a public website. You have. You have access to screen scrape and do whatever you want to do. Um, I just, you know, we asked that you don't sell any of the content or, you know, whatever. And I said, listen, if you're young and you're interested, you know, and you want some help on something, let me know. I'm happy to answer your questions.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: This started off a saga of, like, weeks of me conversing with this high school student.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: Who is using ChatGPT to, like, write their responses back to me to try to be, I don't know, hilarious. But it's so great. And, you know, because the team was so excited about it, um, I felt compelled to, like, just basically copy and paste all of my back and forth with this person. Yeah. Into the Slack channel so that they could sort of, like, read it, follow along. Um, it was huge. The motivation lift on the team of just being able to sort of, like, be part of that experience. Like, we ended up sending her a bunch of swag and stuff, and her teacher contacted me. I talked to her mom. M. It was like, a whole thing. Um. So great.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: You can't manufacture those kinds of experiences. The closest you can come is you can try and create a culture that. That values those kinds of things.

Justin Jackson: That's right. Yeah.

Dave Junta: You know what I mean? But it's so valuable, like I said, like, you know, in that lull between Thanksgiving and Christmas, you know, things kind of fell off, you know, after that. But, like, you could just see this person is like, she's doing a bunch of stuff in Python. I don't know Python. So I was responding to her going, like, hey, if there's some. You know, if you need Python help, I got a data team. I can, like, you know, send. Send your way. They were super excited, like, hey, we should tell her to try this. She's doing exactly what we do. And I would tell her, hey, you're doing exactly what our data team does all the time. Nice work.

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

Dave Junta: So that channel I created was like, uh. I forget what I named the channel. It was like Lila Saga or something like that. We got way more people than just the tech team into that channel.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: To the point that, like, somebody on our supply chain team got a similar sort of email from somebody and asked me, like, what. What did you. Like, I think they were nervous about, like, what were you worried about? Proprietary stuff? And I was like, no, not at all. Um, and, like, what is it good? Should we do this? And I was like, yes, you should absolutely do that.

Justin Jackson: Yeah. Just for the motivational reasons.

Dave Junta: Exactly. It's huge.

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

Dave Junta: Uh, that's an interesting way to phrase it. I didn't think of it in those terms.

Justin Jackson: Okay.

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

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: Um, and there comes a time when there's just, there's only so much not doing anything that I can feel comfortable with. Yeah, you know, I was, my job became like I'm going to be around and available to the people on the team but you know, they're pretty self sufficient, they don't really need me. And you know I had several levels of managers and tech leads and you know, several sub teams and again you're managing 50 people. Um, you know, I wasn't managing all those people directly. I kind of systematized myself out of a job is a little bit how it felt. And again it comes back to motivation in the sense that like there's a version, how to put it, there's a version of you know, like the person who took my position. Um, this was, this represented a pretty large jump in size of team for that person in terms of like ah, what they were managing. A much different relationship for that person between, you know, him and the team and him and the rest of the company. It represented something that was like big and important and a thing that he was super excited and motivated about. Right. This represented a challenge to him. This was no longer a challenge for me. Ah, but you know, it's not that I was unhappy. Uh, I stayed at the company for like I said, years in some version of this state. Um, in fact I would say like the last year of my time there was mostly transitioning out of my role and transitioning, helping the new person transition into their role, helping all the people on the team like, like deal with the fact that we were changing this, you know, changing leaders and all this stuff. All of that was huge, hugely valuable for me and very rewarding to get to talk to people and you know, in a weird way like most people when they leave a job they put them in, put in their two weeks or if they're really generous, they give a month and then they, and then they, they're out. They don't often get a chance to like know who's taking over for them. Um, they often don't know that they're like whether or not they left the team in a good spot. I know all of that stuff with certainty. Which is just a very different and very satisfying way to leave a ah, company that I really care about a lot and to know that I've left it in good hands and in hands that are motivated to help to take it to whatever the next level is. I think that's what I was trying to figure out how to say is I think everybody has a certain amount of motivation to do a business from one step to the next.

Justin Jackson: Mhm.

Dave Junta: Not everyone has enough motivation to go from that step to whatever's after that. These growing, um, orders of magnitude take a certain level of energy and a little bit of dumb idealism, you know what I mean? Or optimism or whatever, to just be like, oh, and then we're going to go to the next.

Justin Jackson: Hm.

Dave Junta: I learned this at a very early time in my career. I was a graphic designer and I was working next to this other graphic designer who was a very senior designer. Um, and we were working at this very early.com company from way back in the late 90s, early 2000s. That company went through. In the span of a year, they went through three rebrands and this designer had to rebrand the company every time. And then like, when it came to the third one, they came to her like, all right, it's time to go again. And she was like, I'm, um, out, man. Like, I did it two times. I can't come up with another whole, like, brand identity for a company that's doing basically the same thing. Uh, like, I'm out. I don't have the energy to do it. And that's a little bit how I feel is like, all, ah, this is great, and the company is doing well. They're going to, they're going to do great. The guy who's taking over for me is going to do great. Um, in a way that, like, I just, you know, I've done, I've done this a bunch now, and I'm ready to go back to something a little bit smaller, a little bit. I want to reclaim some of that early stage Home Chef feeling that I got to have. Um, that I didn't, I don't, I didn't have anymore.

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

Dave Junta: Well, let's be clear for the last couple of two months. My last day was like middle of October. Yeah. So it's not been like a long time. And so most of what I've been exploring is like house projects that have been on a list and haven't been. If you. It's funny, like, if anybody from Home Chef sees this video, they will laugh because this background of having guitars on the wall just didn't, uh. It was a blank wall behind me constantly. So, like, rearranging my office was like a thing.

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: I'm sort of riding out the rest of the year. Um, at the moment I want to get back to some mentorship. I don't know if that necessarily needs to be like crazy technical. I need to brush up on my own technical skills to be, quite frankly, which I'm actually very excited to do. Mhm. I kind of, I feel like I have a lot of experience growing teams from. In this one specific circumstance and um, seeing that grow from, from nothing to what we grew to. So I have a feeling, I hope that that experience is valuable to other people. And I would love to give, um, you know, advising, you know, people or companies or whatever an opportunity or a shot at that. I don't know what that looks like as a job. I feel like I could do that for a little while and then all of a sudden all of my experience is going to be too far away from um, reality or whatever to be like, to be warranted or something or valuable. But I think there's an opportunity. Six months, maybe a year of um, doing that. And again, my hope is that just meeting people and talking to them and that one of those people is going to be the next founder that is looking for a co founder or looking for somebody that I'm in a perfect position to sort of like help or join or do.

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

Dave Junta: So I've had a version of this not nearly as long as I have Runway for right now, but at several points in my career, sometimes they were chosen. Like uh, I'm going to take three months off because I'm contracting and nobody needs me right now. So I'm going to go take the next three months. I saved up some money and then back at it. And I knew with some certainty that I could come back after a couple of months and another contracting gig would be available to me. Yeah, sometimes they were not so chosen. Like, I got laid off from a job, and, uh, you know, honestly, like, John and I both got laid off from the same place and at roughly the same time. And so, uh, that was a really formative. Honestly, like, the beginning, if you. If you will, in a certain way of, like, looking at it, of how I ended up. Where I'm at right now was that moment getting, uh, laid off and realizing that I can make some drastic changes in my financial world. I sold my car and I paid off a bunch of debt and, like, was like, how lean can I be? And was able to ride that out for a couple of months until I started contracting. Um, and then that again, like, that. That whole thing. And I needed that time. I mean, that was the other thing, too, is I don't know that, like, leaving Home Chef is not like, leaving a horrible situation. Like, John and I were leaving way back then. But, um. But, you know, I needed that time to, like, let go of the baggage of that experience and not, uh, bring that baggage into the next thing, which is the thing that I find the most. Like, when you're hiring people, you're not just hiring them for their skill set, you're also hiring them, and they're going to bring the, like, all of the good and bad baggage that comes from their previous job into your day to day until they've fully acclimated to your. To what it means to work at Transistor. You know what I mean?

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: That's why, like, hiring people is such a hard, hard thing is like. And why it changes the company in a weird way. Every single person you add to the team is going to change the team. And, you know, you get to blunt that a little bit as the team gets larger and larger, but, you know, those are the things to be watching out for. Those are the things that I care about when I'm interviewing somebody. I'm not interviewing them about their skills. I'm interviewing them about, like, okay, what things are you going to hold on to so tightly that are so at odds with the things that we care about?

Justin Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Junta: And then I know I'm going to have to fight with you over and over and over again until you can either assimilate or you shifted my. My point of view a little bit your way.

Justin Jackson: Yeah. Is, is part of your purpose right now to get rid of some of that baggage or is bag. Is that just. You're going to have that no matter what?

Dave Junta: I think everyone has it no matter what. I also don't think it's necessarily bad. Like, I think, you know, baggage gets a bad rap. It would be natural for me to come into like, if I took another job, like right now, today, another VP of engineering job of uh, some place that was relatively small, my instinct would be how can I do exactly what I did at Home Chef over again? And to not just to, to realize or to not realize that, uh, the thing that made Home Chef go the way that it did is that I was in the moment responding to the things that I was seeing and making a judgment call based on reality. And, and sure, like your, your history and experience and all that stuff comes to play. But if you try and replicate those decisions exactly, you're like ignoring the reality in front of you. And so I think for me it's just about putting all of this experience into some context and distance so that it's not my knee jerk. I'm going to go do this immediately. Or like, this is my quick answer for everything. In some ways, I think that's the reason why I want to advise people going through this is I get an opportunity to make suggestions but not be the guy who's actually doing it. I get to watch people like take or leave those suggestions and see how they turn out. Um, I get to challenge a bunch of the things that I, uh, think of as big successes or maybe big failures in the course of my career At Home Chef. Through the course, through the course of advising other people and you know, and see how that goes.

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

Dave Junta: I do.

Justin Jackson: That's, that's, that's, that is such a, that is such a, a peculiar skill set. Like people that like that. I think it's. You got to lean into that if that's one of your strengths.

Dave Junta: Well, I mean, I don't know if it's a strength. I think it's something that I hear people talk about zoom fatigue.

Justin Jackson: Mhm.

Dave Junta: And I understand that it's a thing. I certainly don't want to put that experience down in any way, but I just don't even. I can't relate to that experience whatsoever. To me, I, I feel like I have just as rich, uh, experience talking with people over, over screens as I do when I'm sitting in person with them. I don't know if that's like just something about my personality that makes that possible or I don't know what it is, but I find that to have been. I find when we moved to Covid and everybody was remote, I was like, look at how I'm not late to every meeting, um, because I don't have to go and like race across the office to go find whatever other next meeting room. And it's just all these things that, like this like low level anxiety that just went away for me. You like that in that? I know I can flip. I can be downstairs in my kitchen making coffee and upstairs in my office in two minutes and make it to my meeting and be. And the richness of that conversation is not lost.

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

Dave Junta: Sure. You can email me Daveunta, uh, creative.com, uh, which we can put that in show notes or whatever.

Justin Jackson: Put in the show notes, Yeah. I think this whole thing is fascinating. Just like you quitting this job that you've been at a long time and then exploring, uh, this space and trying to figure out what you want to do next. And basically it sounds like you're looking to put yourself in the path of some collisions that might lead to something else. Right? That's the whole purpose.

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

Justin Jackson: Yeah, well, this has been great, man. I got to run for a dentist appointment, but let's do it again soon, man.

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

Justin Jackson: Yeah, you too. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Now it's time for me to thank our supporters. On Patreon Pascal From Sharpen Page, rewardful.com, greg Park, Mitchell Davis from recruitkit.comau Marcel Folly from Wearebold AF, Bill Condo who is at M A V R C K on all the socials, ward from memberspace.com Evandro Sassy, Austin Loveless, Michael Sitver, Dan Buddha, Colin Gray, and Dave Junta.

Dave Junta: Uh,

Justin Jackson: see everybody, thanks for for listening. Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor FM. They host our MP3 files, generate our RSS feed, provide us with analytics, and help us distribute the show to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more. If you want to start your own podcast or you want to switch to Transistor, go to transistor FM M. Justin and get 15% off your first year.