How We Hatched: Nick Skytland, Director of Gloo Developer

Speaker A: Welcome to the PEAR program from Hatchpad, the podcast that gives you a front row seat to candid conversations with tech leaders from the startup world. I'm your host, Tim Winkler, the creator of Hatchpad. And I'm your other host, Mike Gruen. Join us each episode as we bring together two guests to dissect topics at the intersection of technology, startups, and career growth. Nick, welcome to the PEAR program. Uh, this is another bonus episode in our miniseries that we call How We Hatched, where we, for the most part, we sit down one on one with tech leaders that are shaping the future of innovation. Uh, today, uh, our guest is Nick Skitland. Is that right?

Speaker B: That's right. He got it.

Speaker A: The director of Glue Developer, where he's leading efforts around values aligned AI and building technology that supports human flourishing. Uh, we'll, we'll dive deep into that on this conversation. But Nick's background spans everything from working at NASA for a number of years, entrepreneurship, uh, innovation in the public sector, and now he's tackling one of the most important questions of our time, which is, you know, how do we build AI that actually helps people thrive? Uh, so, Nick, I'm so, so pumped to have you join us on the show and tackle this very important topic.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker A: Cool. Now before we get into, uh, a little bit more about your journey, let's, let's, uh, start things off with a, you know, a pretty high profile question. You know, what did Nick Skitland have for breakfast this morning?

Speaker B: Oh, uh, man. So I'm not much of a breakfast eater, but my wife isn't too excited about that. She loves breakfast. I'm more of a coffee guy. I just get a simple shaken espresso. That's all I need. How about you?

Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, man. First off, the shaken espresso is actually a kick that we've been on, uh, since the summer hits, right? It's like you get something a little bit more chilled and cold and um, we can drink those on like, repeat. But my wife's a dietitian, so she keeps things pretty, uh, you know, pretty healthy in the household. We usually will do something like a, like a yogurt parfait bowl, something like that, little fruit, little granola, like to drizzle some honey on it. So, uh, it doesn't make you feel too weighed down. But, um, you know, then again, I will also enjoy some, uh, cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal every once in a while.

Speaker B: So that's a good way to start the day, though. It is When I'm, when I'm with my kids, it's Cinnamon toast crunch.

Speaker A: There you go. Kids love, must love you. Um, awesome. Well, let's, let's, let's dive in. I always like to kick things off a little bit about, you know, the, the, the guest journey with, before we dive into the technology that you guys are building. So let's rewind a bit and you know, tell me a little bit about where you grew up and what kind of led you down this path that brought you to Glue.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's been a pretty incredible journey. I grew up pretty much In Canada, uh, 20 miles from the Canadian border in North Dakota. And it was, um, a pretty amazing childhood. I, I grew up in a race car family actually. We did a lot of racing across the Midwest, um, and then I ended up at University in Indiana. And while I was there I really just got a bug for space exploration actually, and so ended up interning at NASA, uh, over about 25 years ago and ended up working at NASA for 25 years. And I actually just joined GLUE recently. Um, so prior to joining glue, I most recently was overseeing early stage technology and innovation and partnerships and at NASA in a chief technologist role. And um, had been doing that for quite a while. I've led a lot of stuff, um, in terms of open innovation and technology development, data science, AI in government at NASA, worked across the government and also done a ton of work in just ah, hackathons and mass collaborations gathering technologists to build technology for good. I've been doing that for a number of years as well. And that actually led me, um, to glue. Uh, so I've been doing a lot of work kind of in the intersection of technology, faith, the future. And I really feel like we're living on one of those inflection points in history where technology is becoming even more important than it's ever been. Uh, it really is in every aspect of how we live and we work and that. You know, I'm an explorer by nature and so I'm always looking for where the new frontiers are. You know, the moon had its astronauts, the ocean had, had its navigators, and the Internet had its pioneers. And really if you look around today, it's in the age of AI. The explorers that are working on the frontier of the industry are at places like Glue. So that's why I joined Glue, ah, about four months ago.

Speaker A: Well, um, yeah, uh, it's a pretty radical difference there in terms of you think of working in a public sector environment. Uh, environment is a large Organization like NASA. And then Glue, from what I understand is of. Not. Not. Is it more recent of like in a startup ecosystem or. Tell me a little bit about like, just some of the, the quick hits of, you know, when you all were founded and the size and scope of the company.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So Glue.

Speaker B: Glue's been around a little while. It was founded in 2013. Um, and it's, it's a couple hundred, uh, folks work at the, at the company. You know, the Glue exists to shape technology as a force for good. It helps people flourish. We're going to talk a lot more about human flourishing and helping communities thrive. And really it's a technology platform that serves the faith ecosystem, but it also works with a really broad network of nonprofits and service providers and churches and many others. And like you mentioned before, it's all around values based, um, AI. Values align AI. But the company, um, has been around a while and has been doing a lot of work in data and AI and technology.

Speaker A: Yeah. And it sounds like now's a pretty big inflection point based on, you know, you, you called it out. You know, we're at this intersection with technology and AI where, you know, the, the future is shaped, being shaped right in front of us right now. Um, you know, AI being so powerful, um, a lot of folks comparing it to the, the dot com boom, you know, and, um, you know, even, even more so than that, just given how powerful the technology can be. Um, so let's, you know, we got a lot to uncover here, so let's kind of dive in and start picking apart some of these things that are connected to the mission at Glue. So, um, defining kind of like human flourishing was on my docket here. Uh, let's talk about this idea of human flourishing and what it actually means in the context of your all's work.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, so human flourishing is really, really important, especially in a world where AI is being infused into everything. I think without more deliberate efforts to align AI with human values, we risk building these systems that are really, really influential, that maybe don't reflect the interests of humans. Maybe they are more built for machines by machines. Right. We want to encourage human flourishing. And so, you know, what is human flourishing? It can be kind of a general term, kind of like the word love. Like, what does love mean? So human flourishing, the concept, you know, it can be traced back through centuries, back to Aristotle. It continues today. There's a lot of scientific research being done around the idea of human flourishing. And in general, what we're talking about is just Living a holistically good life. And so it's like one where people feel happy, you have strong relationships, your health is good, you understand your purpose, you're a person of good character, you're financially stable. Um, a lot of work around human flourishing has been done by Harvard and Baylor in a thing called the Global Flourishing Study, which is one of the largest longitudinal studies of its kind. It's about 200,000 participants from 20 countries. Oh, yeah. And so Harvard defines it. I really like this. They define it as living in a state in which all aspects of a person's life are going well. So, you know, Harvard, Harvard and Baylor and others are doing a lot of work around different, uh, domains or dimensions of human flourishing and trying to investigate how various factors influence those domains across religion and geography and social relationships and income and different value systems. And so we are really interested at glue in understanding human flourishing when it comes to AI.

Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. So I was doing some research, and you all have developed something that's called the flourishing AI Benchmark. Um, can you kind of speak to that and, uh, why it's needed?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's really important. Right. I mean, technology is important, but I would argue that maybe even more important than the technology are the actual benchmarks for. So how we measure and, uh, understand the technology that we're building so that we shape it for good. Right. So the idea of, you know, there's a lot of ways to measure when a new foundation model comes out, There's a lot of ways to measure that. And current AI, the industry just generally, um, especially the research industry, is really, really focused on harm prevention, but not necessarily on the active promotion of human flourishing. Right. So there's a. There's, you know, we're trying to optimize for performance and for energy, um, for answering questions, especially objective questions, really correctly. But there's really a fundamental gap in how we measure AI to advance human flourishing. So we've been doing work building on the Global Flourishing Study around seven dimensions of human flourishing. So character, close relationships, happiness, meaning and purpose, health in both physical and mental, financial stability, and then faith and spirituality. And so these seven dimensions we look at kind of holistically and how they're interrelated to advance human flourishing.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a fascinating topic. Uh, it's something that I think a lot about. You know, it's also, you know, I've been seeing it happening globally as well. Um, I was. I think about the, like, the G7 summit last year and the late, you know, Pope Francis was Attending that and specifically was attending like a session that was calling for more human centered AI. Uh, and I was just, you know, you know, when you see the, the Pope kind of getting involved in technology, it's like, okay, there's something's, something's happening here that's bigger than just, you know, the tech itself. Um, so, you know, when I think about, you know, glue's kind of like faith, you know, rooted approach, you know, it seems like, it seems like it leans into like, Christian principles, um, things like, I think about like, like service or humility or, you know, compassion, um, things that, you know, you can kind of, I would say you almost reach beyond the church in context that supports more of a broader, like, diverse, um, like communities at large. Um, do you all feel like. Yeah, I guess maybe like, how do you feel like it reaches, uh, broader, you know, diverse communities that maybe aren't explicitly identifying with like, like a, uh, a faith tradition, if you will.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. We get it a lot. And because, because glue does look at a lot of things through the Christian faith lens. Right? But I think when you kind of take a step backwards and you think about just AI in general and the technology that we're creating, we want to create technology that again, helps humans thrive. And so it needs to be built on values that are shared across all cultures and worldviews, like dignity, injustice, passion. Now, a lot of those things are deeply rooted in the Christian faith. Um, but we want these principles to kind of shape the technology so that they serve all people and not just some. And oftentimes the tech industry can kind of get a bad rap for maybe doing things opaquely, doing things in a closed room, maybe getting the wrap for thinking about profit or power over humans. And I don't think it's necessarily such a good versus evil setup like that, but I think we do have a responsibility and maybe even a moral imperative, especially as Christians, to shape technologies so that, you know, it. It really does intentionally allow humans to thrive. And the, the best way I kind of think about this is with, with my kids, right? So my daughter, who's. Who's eight years old is. Her name is Ada. When I always, I always joke that she's fluent in two languages, English and Alexa. So we have, we have Alexis, and maybe this is just bad parenting on my part, but we have Alexa's everywhere. And I just, I don't know how I ended up with so many of them, but we have them in every room. And my daughter, since she could speak, has Been really fluent in Alexa. And so she'll ask questions to Alexa like, hey, what's the weather? Call mommy and daddy. Yeah. But she'll also also ask Alexa questions that are maybe more, you know, traditional ethics questions like around character. Like, Alexa, is it okay to lie if it helps someone feel better? Or, you know, or maybe it's around, um, happiness. Alexa, what makes people really happy? Or maybe it's around health. Alexa, is it okay that I feel sad? Or maybe it's around 8. Alexa, who is God. And, and it started happening when she was really young and she's still really young, she's eight. But we've had a lot of conversations now and, you know, Alexa responds very directly and convincingly, maybe more so than her dad would. Um, I don't have a great answer to some of these questions, but Alexa does. At least Alexa has a quick answer to it. And so it started, you know, I started thinking about, well, who writes the algorithms? Who shapes the answers? And in a world where we're, you know, technology is more infused in everything that we do, are we okay with that? Do those answers reflect our values? And I think it's something we really need to think about as humans.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a good point. Um, I've got a two year old daughter and I, you know, she's not there yet, prompting, uh, Alexa, but, you know, not far off. And, uh, you know, those types of scenarios. Yeah, they kind of scare me. You know, it's, it's, it's scary when you, you know, when parenting gets put into the hands of technology in a sense. Um, and, you know, who's providing those answers to your child?

Speaker B: Um, we often go out to dinner with our friends. And I mean, if you have young kids, you probably have been in this situation. You go to a restaurant and you're trying to just talk to your friends, but you have all your kids running around and you're like, you know what, just watch this YouTube video or just play on this app and you almost outsource your parenting to technology. And I'm not, uh, I do it all the time. Right. So I'm not being judgmental. I'm just saying it's kind of the reality we live in.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker B: And none of us have time to monitor everything that's happening. Right. And so again, uh, these platforms are influencing the world whether we like it or not. Not necessarily good or bad, but it's happening. And so we as technologists have real decisions to make when we're building technology. We should be aware of that.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I, you know, I think it's really popular uh, amongst users right now. You know, I see a lot in, you know, folks crave like community centered technology. Right. Um, and maybe taking it away from like um, maybe a non religious context. Right. People crave tools that help with mental health. You know, they, they crave tools that help with parenting, healthy relationships, just having meaningful connections with others. Right. So I, I see glue, you know, similarly scratching that itch where you offer an alternative to profit optimized platforms and instead you're focusing on that human optimized outcome, which I think is what folks need and, and are expressing interest in. Um, I want to jump to um, something that uh, we had listed out here that we want to dive deeper into and that's the values aligned AI, uh, at glue that you all are building. So let's talk about this, let's talk about what you all are building. What is kind of like glue AI and what are some of the problems that it's solving?

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, well, first of all, as technologists I think we really need to think about, you know, we can build anything, so if we can build anything, should we build it? Um, oftentimes we don't even step back to ask that. Right. And if we are going to take the time and effort and capital to build something, then the next question that we are really thinking a lot about is if we build technology, how could this help humans thrive? Right? Not just what does technology do, but, but what kind of life can it help create? And so we're focused on that well being. And so the idea of values aligned AI is really that human centered approach around flourishing as the means, not technology in itself. So for example, you know, does technology that we're building, does that cultivate deeper relationships? Does it cultivate more connection? We're talking about community there, right? And maybe it's around physical or mental health instead of just building a diagnostic tool, um, to treat an isolated symptom. We want to design systems that are more holistic around mind, body and spirit. Or maybe it's around maybe purpose instead of just ranking systems and performance systems. We want to encourage lifelong learning or moral development. And so we really look at things holistically and so we want to look at it from the value system that's going into, that's really shaping the technology and the algorithms and decisions behind it. And a lot of this feeds into. Right. You know, if you, most people listening here understand how AI works, but you have your data layer, you have your foundation layer, you have APIs on top of that and then the tools built on top of that. So Glue is participating in all of those things. So we have, we have data, um, that we're using to train our models as well, and then we're building tools on top of that. We're working with developers to give them access to all these, all the models and the data through APIs. Um, and we're doing that in a way to try to build trust around the answers that AI is providing.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, these were some things that I picked up, uh, along my research as well. I was like mentioning these principles like openness, trust, uh, fair licensing, um, it seems like these are things that are a top priority for you all when you're thinking about the AI landscape. Is that right?

Speaker B: For sure. So Glue has been really, um, open about a commitment to being more open with our research, data models, the tools we're developing. We're doing it under open licensing. Uh, we don't want to lock this stuff away. We know that a lot. We want this to represent all of us. Right. To serve all of us. We want to build transparent, transparently so that we build trust because we know the trust is that foundation for the future that we all want to live in.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it is. Is there things specifically that you would point out that if it's something's prompted, uh, like Glue AI, uh, as a chat. Right. Is it, ah, like how would you interpret like a different response versus that of like a ChatGPT or a Claude or something like what, what, what can you expect as a user?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good answer. So, uh, you know, going back to my daughter, um, Ada, ah, when she asks Alexa, hey, my friend hurt me, should I forgive them? You know, forgiveness is kind of a subjective thing and so when, when the chatbot spits out the answer, that's the type of thing that we are fine tuning for so that the answer for that is more align with a value system.

Speaker A: M. What, what do you, um, I just kind of, I want to talk like, big picture here in terms of like, where you think the space is headed over the next couple of years and, and how do you envision, you know, kind of GLUE position itself for, you know, what's to come?

Speaker B: Well, obviously in 2025 we're talking a lot about agents and autonomy and, and doing really complex tasks through AI with less human prompting. I mean, I think all that stuff is pretty obvious and it's where we're definitely going. Um, I tend to be just a pretty optimistic, hopeful glass half Full person. So I'm excited personally about where technology is going, um, and how it's going to be infused in everything that we do. I think it's going to just, it's like a superpower, right? It's just going to provide all of us the ability to um, do everything differently and hopefully better. Um, I am concerned about the lack of transparency, the lack of alignment with the value systems that are, that are stated. Um, maybe I see a lot of um, trust gaps in the technology that's being built, especially when we're going so fast. There's a lot of risks and liability with that and I think um, I would love to see more people speaking into this, more people talking about not only the technology itself but the benchmarks and the standards that we're using to measure the technology. I'd um, also love to see more work in the open source space and we're seeing some hints of that in 2025. Right? Like there's some exciting stuff happening in open source but at the same time then we get another headline saying that a company might decide to do everything not open source on purpose. M so that people aren't seeing what's happening behind the scenes. I think that's pretty concerning.

Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. I'm a huge advocate and fan of keeping a lot of AI uh open sourced because when it's controlled just by a few then you're staring down a pretty scary uh, problem where it's just controlled by you know, the big tech leaders, uh, or what have you. So I think um, you know, keeping it open source it seems like is a big part of you know, you, you're all's kind of uh, values and principles here. When you think about building responsible AI. I couldn't agree more. I think it's, I think it's huge. I, I know that um, you know we talk a lot on here around um, you know, talent and recruiting and you know, the workforce at large and it is an area that some folks uh, we've seen it firsthand really. If you think about like software um, has replaced you know, some, some uh, some roles here or there. What are your thoughts in terms of you know, when folks have those concerns about, you know, is AI, you know, going to replace my job? I think it's a, it's a big, it's a big one that comes up quite, quite a bit.

Speaker B: Yeah, we were having the conversation the other day. There's a few of us around. Table I tend to be a pretty efficient person anyway. I love to use technology I'm a really good note taker. I can go into a complex situation and make sense of it and then kind of explain that to the rest of the team. And there was, we were having this conversation of like, that is exactly what AI is really good at. Did AI just replace, uh, my role on this team? And I think the answer is it's going to happen a lot to almost everybody where AI is going to fundamentally challenge them to learn something different, to approach it differently. And I think the more open we are to change, the better, the better that will go. Um, I think ultimately that's an identity issue. You know, when I worked at NASA, for example, I was there 25 years and oftentimes I would work with, with colleagues who are, who had been there for 50 years. I mean they spent their entire career working in space exploration, which is fantastic. But then they would retire. And when you retire you kind of almost lose your sense of purpose and of meaning. And you hear stories about um, how that leads to shorter, you know, shorter life. You know, people pass away because they feel like they don't have a purpose anymore. I think AI could disrupt all of us in terms of an identity challenge. And I think we really have to think about how can we be, have an open learning posture, how can we approach this in a way of like, hey, how could I use AI to advance the thing that I'm trying to do, like a superpower, rather than be fearful of it or just ignore it as if it's not happening?

Speaker A: Yeah, I, I, I'm a identical kind of point of view on that where it's, you know, how can you, you know, look at what AI provides and say, how does it empower my skill set versus how does it replace my skill set? Right. Because um, you know, we see it time and time again in different domains. You know, we, we hosted an episode about, you know, security, um, uh, operations centers like the soc, right. And ah, a cyber company that's creating AI to empower the SOC analyst, which, which honestly, you know, these are, these are positions that are extremely, you know, one short staff, but then to like, they're extremely fatigued. You know, they're working sometimes 24, seven shifts. And uh, you know, these are the things that help to kind of like you, I like how you put it, like kind of give them a superpower where it's like, you know, they, they now have a better visibility into, you know, um, any sort of alerts or um, you know, things that might be, you know, a threat to their, you know, to the security environment and um, you know, versus saying, you know, well this is going to take over all of our roles. You know, it's, it's more around how is it empowered, the skill. Um, so, but before we uh, you know, talk a little bit about, you know, the role, uh, of hackathons with glue, because I know this is a really big thing for you all. Anything that you wanted to touch on in closing? Um, yeah, just around, you know, your all's technology at large or the future, uh, of glue.

Speaker B: Yeah, a few things I guess. Um, number one, we are releasing a new benchmark around human flourishing. Um, I think this is really, really exciting work. You know, again, before I said, you know, benchmarks are probably even more important than the technology itself. And so what we've done is we have uh, just an assessment that we have of 1200 objective and subjective questions very similar to the humanities last exam approach. Right. And so we have this geometric mean aggregation of these questions and we look at the top foundation models out there and, and assess them about how they do in regards to even flourishing. So we are releasing that white paper around that, we're releasing the results as well. Um, it's interesting, the findings as you might anticipate, uh, kind of show that the current AI foundation models aren't really aligned well with human flourishing, that they underperform in some of those seven dimensions more than others. So you would expect finances probably to be an area that they excel in. We hear about how ChatGPT is really good at math. Right. Um, maybe not so much in faith and not surprisingly it's the faith dimension that they lack the most in. So we, we're releasing this, this benchmark. You know, 0 to 100 is the, the scoring rubric. And you know we, we think 90 would be an acceptable robust threshold across all the dimensions and we're seeing on average about 6. The score is about 65. So it shows that uh, we have a lot more to do in terms of human flourishing. So we're releasing that right now and then in the near future we're releasing a number of other products and things that are really interesting. So you mentioned Glue Chat, uh, which is going to be great as a consumer product. We also have a, ah, studio product that we're releasing with developers that want to build on top of trusted values aligned AI. So we have a lot happening in just the next couple months.

Speaker A: Yeah, very exciting. And um, you know, maybe if the uh, timing aligns for this we can link out to some of that stuff in the show. Notes that'd be cool. Um, cool. Now let's talk a little bit about hackathons because this is something that you, uh, were pretty passionate about on our discovery call. Um, talk to us a little bit about, you know, how you've helped kind of Lead Glue's annual AI, uh, and church hackathon. And what is it, you know, describe it a little bit for us.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, and I'll just say, even stepping back before I even got to glue. So I've been in the hackathon space for over a decade really since the early days of the tech industry doing hackathons. I was at NASA leading the hackathon approach. We had a great partnership called Random Hacks of Kindness. That was Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, NASA, hp, World bank way back in the day. And that led to NASA doing our own hackathon, which has grown into this hundred thousand person, 250 city event that we do annually or that NASA does annually. And so that actually got us thinking a lot about like, if it works, if it works in those type of places, could it work in other industries as well? And that led us to the Glue hackathon three years ago. I mean just fundamentally we, I really felt, firmly believe that hackathons drive innovation. And this was before the Vibe coding days, before the AI days. I mean it just provided a perfect gathering of technologists to think about challenges that were big, that were bigger than any one person or organization. Like if we came together, could we develop something in a short time that addressed these challenges? And we've seen it time and time again work. Um, what's exciting to me in 2025 is just what this looks like with AI. And you know, if, if you've heard of Vibe coding, you know, you don't need to be a developer anymore to be at a hackathon and create great technology. Um, so it's, it's kind of the perfect storm when it comes to hackathons. And so we have a hackathon in October. Actually this is the third year we've been doing it where we just convene technologists and designers and everyone in between around compelling challenges. Um, this year we're going to be doing, uh, not only just develop like soft focus on just developers, but we do Vibe coding. We'll be doing Bible translation and we're going to also focus on gaming. So we're going to have a number of tracks as we build and expand the hackathon this year. Um, so it's pretty, pretty amazing event. If you've not been to a Hackathon. I highly recommend going to one. They're pretty, pretty great places.

Speaker A: Is it. So is this, um, virtual, or do you all come together physically? And where. Where would it be?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the one that we're doing in October, the Glue hackathon, is going to be in Boulder. It's open to everybody. We have capacity for a lot of people. Um, the last couple of years, it's been about 300 people. We anticipate it's going to grow this year. So that's a single city. Single city in person event on October 8th through the 10th.

Speaker A: Very cool. Yeah, we'll, um, we'll have this episode out before then and make, uh, sure that we point out, uh, any, like, landing pages that are connected to it or tied to signups. But, um, I also really like that the, the name Random Hacks of Kindness. That's, that's really catchy.

Speaker B: You know, it's. Funny story. I think I can tell this now. We. It was pre2010 and we were doing hackathon. We were doing rock. We were doing hackathons at NASA, and we started to have this conversation about doing a hackathon at the White House.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But we weren't allowed to call it a hackathon because still back then we were like, what does it mean to hack? Are we breaking into.

Speaker A: Yeah, right.

Speaker B: You can't do that from the, from, from the White House. Anyway, we ended up doing the White House's first hackathon and ended up being pretty fantastic.

Speaker A: Oh, uh, that's cool. What a story. Now they're doing UFC fights on the, on the lawn of the White House, apparently, what I'm hearing. So we'll see how that goes. Awesome. Well, thanks you. Thanks for joining the, uh, the, the pod and telling, you know, this story of, of not just glue, your, your journey and what brought you here. Uh, before we do, uh, you know, any sort of formal close, we like to wrap things up with a, a fun segment that we call the five Second Scramble. So this will be a little bit of fun, kind of rapid fire Q and A. Try, uh, to keep the answers under 5 seconds if you, you know, if you go a little bit long. We don't air horn you off or anything, but, um, uh, let me know if you're, you're ready to rock and roll.

Speaker B: All right, let's do it.

Speaker A: All right, here we go. Um, if glue were an animal, what animal would it be?

Speaker B: Oh, man. Uh, that's a hard one. Uh, under five seconds even. I, uh, don't know. An Eagle. Because it's majestic and it's soaring.

Speaker A: It's majestic. That's true. Uh, what's one thing that gets you excited to start work each morning, man?

Speaker B: Just working with top talented people doing stuff at the cutting edge of an industry frontier and are just taking a very different approach than anyone else is doing. It's just, it's so exciting.

Speaker A: What kind of technologist would you say thrives in the glue environment?

Speaker B: Um, I would say the missional one. The one that's passionate about having a real impact in the world.

Speaker A: What kind of uh, roles are you all hiring for over the next say, six months?

Speaker B: Yeah, we're looking for top talent that's mission and values aligned and um, just across, I mean developers, but also people in, go to market positions and really just across any position you think in an enterprise. But ultimately looking for builders, people that want to build the future and shape it.

Speaker A: What would you say is one of the more underrated tools or platforms for technologists today?

Speaker B: And you know, I was just on a call with the developers literally right before this and they didn't know what lovable or replit was. And uh, I'm just like, man, you gotta, you gotta start playing around with it because it's not something to be afraid of. It's just so awesome to be able to build with generative AI. It just like we talked about before, it's a superpower for sure.

Speaker A: Uh, what's your favorite late night snack?

Speaker B: Probably ice cream.

Speaker A: Any specific ice cream you want to shout out?

Speaker B: I'm just a simple guy, like Vanilla Bean.

Speaker A: Yeah. What's a book or podcast, uh, that you've kind of recommended the most in the past year?

Speaker B: Oh man. Um, the podcast. I'll tell you one podcast and trying to think I want to get the name right on here, so I'm going to look at, at it. Um, the AI Breakdown podcast. I really enjoyed that one. Just as a daily dose of like what's happening in the industry also just does a great job of being really clear, concise up front. So if you have only a few minutes, you can, you can check that out.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'll check that out. Um, what's an unex unexpected place that you've ever traveled to?

Speaker B: Elon Shrine.

Speaker A: Yeah, that is very good. Very number one answer.

Speaker B: Uh, well, it's crazy too. We were on a 10 country four day road trip and the second to last country we went through was Liechtenstein. And we were in the mountains and the clouds parted and we thought we were going to die because of the snow. And then all of a sudden, there is Liechtenstein, and we end up in a motorcade with, like, the royal family or something from Liechtenstein. Then they all turn off. It felt like James Bond. It was.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: I know.

Speaker A: That's cool. Uh, what was your very first job?

Speaker B: Um, my very first real job as an adult was a diver in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, which is the world's largest pool at NASA, where we train astronauts for spacewalks.

Speaker A: Wow. What about your first kid job?

Speaker B: I worked at a cranberry marsh, digging trenches.

Speaker A: Um.

Speaker B: Um, it was very. It was not the most fun job that.

Speaker A: That's the story folks want to hear about right there. That sounds intense. Um, um, on the kid. As a kid. You know, what was your dream job as a kid?

Speaker B: To either be an astronaut or a race car driver.

Speaker A: Very cool. Uh, uh, and then the. The last question. Uh, what's something that you hope. You know, AI never replaces human relationships. Yeah, that's. I was thinking you're gonna say that. That was a good answer. Uh, Nick, thank you again for. For joining us on the pod. You know, the work that you guys are doing at Glue, uh, I just. It's a powerful example of what it looks like to build with purpose, and so appreciate the work you all are doing setting the. Setting the bar high, uh, for the future of technology. And, uh, I just want to thanks. Thank you for joining us on the Pair program.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me. And this was great. Sa.