 Thank you. So, yeah, where were we? So, yeah, Brad, tell us your story. You're from New Zealand. You've done this plenty of times, haven't you? Yes, I have. Okay. So, my story. Yeah. And you're supposed to ask questions. Yeah, tell us your story. Like, where are you from? How do you get started in this? Okay. Well, it's a long story. So, for all of you who don't know me, which is this half of the room. This half is mostly people that I pay. But thanks for coming down as well. Well, they didn't have to pick between you and Cam. So, they're showing you support. They're showing who their favourite co-founder is. Exactly. The co-founder is having another event on the other side of town this evening. So, we'll be checking the numbers to see who won that one. So, moved to Singapore. We're coming up six years now. So, I started the company with my brother, Cameron. Okay. And the co-founder Carl, who's not so much part of the company anymore, still good friends, but kind of fell out. So, yeah, born and bred in New Zealand, grew up in the most, I guess, stereotypical Kiwi fashion you could. I grew up on a Kiwi foot orchard. So, it was a Kiwi foot orchard. But we also raised sheep. So, that was you and your four brothers? Yeah, me and three brothers. Oh, right. Three brothers, 25 sheep, a couple of dogs, half a dozen chickens, and a cat. So, yeah, it was just a stereotype, like, through and through. But it was great. My father was kind of an architect, wannabe turned engineer. What kind of an engineer was he? So, not like a, I studied engineering kind of engineer, as in like, hey, there's something you want built. Tell me about it. I'll work out how to build it and build it. That's cool. It's quite cool. So, he's been as like, a stage five. So, he, well, funny it's, well, I guess it's funny. The world today, so obviously Kiwi foot orcharding, like being, like picking Kiwi foot has grown all over the world. And so, about 25% of the technology they use to pick Kiwi foot internationally, my dad invented at the age of 20. Because he was being an orchardist, and he's like, this makes no sense, I'm going to do this instead. What is Kiwi foot picking technology? Things like the trailers you need and the processing units and that sort of stuff. How you grow them, even some of scaffolding. So, he just saw problems and fixed them and then gave away his ideas. Because, again, that's also a very Kiwi, stereotypical Kiwi things that we're great at solving problems but really bad at monetizing them. So, that was literally my dad, but I grew up in this environment of creativity. I never got yelled at for pulling things apart, and then trying to put them back together. What did you do in school? High school, I guess, going back to. So, actually, my high school years was, I focused mostly on some of the, like, your hard sciences, chemistry, physics, maths, but also English and some history as well. Actually, I think we were leading into this, this leading question was about, I actually went and studied psychology at university. So, nothing to do with computer science at all. I think it was weird for me to ask this question. I can see where you're leading that to. Because that's the funny part of the story, is that I actually don't have a commissary degree in any way. And actually, I think half of my team doesn't either, which is, I think, this is a great one. Okay. What did you do for work when you first started out? What age of my life were you up to so far? Like, 18? When you graduated from, like, a psychology degree, like, what were you doing? Because at one point you were in construction. Yeah. So, you know, so I finished my degree in psychology. Okay. I took a year off, went to South Korea and taught English. Like, these lovely people over here. Wait, how many of you guys start English in South Korea? Is that an interview question? Okay. Anyway. And then I went back, actually, I went to med school for six months. Six months and I realized that... Medical school. Yeah, I realized I don't like sick people. So, turns out that's a pretty important part of being a doctor is being to empathize with sick people. I like healthy people more. I'm really more interested. I wanted to be a doctor, but I just couldn't take surgery. So, I had to. No, I actually cut dead people. It was like cadavers, not like just random people on the street. Wait, so here's the code from, like, trade geckos co-founded. I cut dead people. That's going to be a runaway code for the night. So, yeah, what do you do after that? So, yeah, I went to med school for a while, dropped out. Okay. And this is, again, you've already kind of ruined my story here. But this was back in 2004, at showing my age a little bit. Okay. Back when the entire world was in kind of a bit of a crisis. And there was no jobs. So, I had a degree in psychology, minoring, and biochemistry. I had six months of med school, and I had a year teaching English as a second language. And so, yeah, I was overqualified and underqualified every single job I could apply for. So, I actually literally applied for over 100 jobs with, like, customizing the cover letter and got, I think, three callbacks and no jobs over the period. And so, yeah, I just... Thanks. Okay. This is going to make money, right? Yeah. And so, I did a bunch of really interesting stuff. And as I said there, I was working in construction for a while. It was a lot of fun. I was a promo girl in supermarkets for a while, giving out, like, wine samples. That was a lot of fun. You got a lot of free wine from that. Do you drink a lot of that wine? Yes. Was it Taylors? Was it Australian wine? Actually, I had it for the first time again last week. It was actually really good. Okay. But it's been a long time that I could drink that again. Absolutely. But it's really good. It's pretty solid. All sorts of random odd jobs. I remember I spent kind of a couple of months painting an industrial chemical storage building with a friend of mine. It was actually a lot of fun. Being outdoors, using your body... So, how long was that period? So, okay, a while. Okay. So, when did you start learning coding? That's the question, right? So, about... So, am I making this hard for you? I'm sorry. This is why I took so long. I think we have a role here. I'll ask the questions. I'll answer the questions. You don't get to ask your own questions and answer them. Not how this works. You told me to tell my story. So, I'm not sure if this is probably further in depth. Most people here were particularly interested in. So, just as the story goes... It's true it's not even made up, which is nice because not all my stories are that way. About 80 months in, I picked up a crossword puzzle. I was over at my auntie's place for breakfast. I picked up a crossword puzzle and I couldn't fill in a single word. I think it was like a Friday. So, it was a really hard crossword puzzle but still threw me. So, I actually picked up coding as a hobby to kind of move my brain a little bit. To do crossword puzzles? Well, I felt... Hey, I'm using my body. I was in fantastic physical shape. I had a great tan. I lost that now. I guess I was waiting for other people to say those things. No, I'm from New Zealand. I'm all about self-diffication. Okay. So, yeah, I actually... Well, it's partly because I want to use my brain. I don't know... I think of almost everyone here, but hopefully some of you have probably met Cameron, my brother, the CEO I've tried to go. He is also... I love how everything is about stereotypes. He is the stereotype of a start-up CEO. He was about six businesses in. Me and him were always... It was kind of the creative, creating things and also the entrepreneurial side. It was always been big on that. And so, he actually was learning to code. Well, he'd already learned to code. And I said, well, it was kind of cool. Like, he wanted to get into the business side of things. And so, I said I learned because I wanted to use my brain and similarly because I knew that I wanted to get into technology and really be able to make a difference. And, well, I think back then it was more about starting the company and taking over the world, but like, it's still the making the difference at the same time. When do you guys decide that Treadgicker was a product that you wanted to work for? What problem were you solving? Well, the second week of our incubator, actually. We came to Singapore with a different idea. What idea do you come up with? So, we came here with... We'd actually built this thing for a... So, it was kind of doing consulting work over and back in New Zealand. And we built this product for a client which was actually, hilariously enough, it's very similar to the iPad app that Shake had built for us recently. But it's for the sales reps. So, the customer, what they were doing was they were going... They were a pharmacy supplier. So, they'd go into pharmacies and supermarkets looking at tweezers and stuff and just making sure the stock was there. And so, they were going around and product listings, going out and selling products into these places and just being able to manage that. And the original version was built on top of NetSuite and I was the one doing the NetSuite plugging code. And this is, yeah, seven, eight years ago now. So, there was nothing like JSON APIs or anything like that. It was a horrible experience. And so, we came here going, actually, let's... We built this thing that's solving a real problem. Let's come over and let's... It was time. So, we'd actually started like three businesses that we should all flopped in our free time. And it wasn't like, actually, we need to sit there. This is something real and sit down, actually make the move, kind of, just cut our ties and go work heads down, tails up for as long as it takes to get something off the ground. And so, this was a solid idea. We can productize this. We came to Singapore, joined JFDI, which sadly is now defunct as of this year. They had a good run. That was a good day. That's how we met. Back in the old days, yeah. No. We made a JFDI. We did. We made a JSConf. JSCamp? What was it back then? I can't remember. I can't remember. I can't remember. I can't remember. Okay. The casual plug that he's not even paying attention. Yeah, we just plugged his conference and he doesn't care. Thomas? Now I'm not going to tell everyone that they should look forward to JS Conference, which is happening again in January 2018. That's great. 25 to 27. Okay, so back to points. You were at JFDI. Okay, so you were at JFDI, and you guys, like, changed your business model and it was called you and Cam. Yeah, so it was me, Cam, and Cal, and we literally followed the textbook word for word. Was it Eric Rees? Yeah. That one? The Lean Startup guy? The Lean Startup was the main one they made us teach. I think so. Yeah. And so we went and we made the customer calls. And so, to be honest, it was mostly Cal. Three o'clock in the morning, like for two weeks straight, it's been like four hours on the phone talking to these customers. So we're in Singapore, and we were talking to the U.S. and Canada, and wherever we'd kind of answer the phone. And so we talked about, we walked through the problem, we asked them what their problems were, we walked from our solution, and it was everyone's like, oh, that's really nice. Okay. But no one was like, we need that. And so from those conversations, and also from Cal's experience, we're like, hey, this is just real, like they're saying this is our biggest pain point. And Cal, who was actually a fashion designer himself, if we go back a couple of years, he's like, yeah, this was, like my business went under because of all this stuff. And so just managing the, I guess it's operations, but also like the inventory and sales and just managing the core data of your system was, there was no good solution for them. They had spreadsheets. Okay. Or you had SAP. And so there's obviously a big gap between the two of those. Who are your first few customers? First few, actually. So we had a bunch of fashion companies to start with. So local fashion companies, Australia, New Zealand, so kind of, we went out and made friends. If you've ever met Cal, one of the friendlies, like this is the most extroverted person you'll ever meet. But we're now made friends. And so we kind of had a bunch of fashion companies based out of Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, because we had those as well. Okay. And so, yeah, we were just trying to solve that. I still remember the one line we used to say, but it was part of our pitch way back when we were building the Walmart supply chain for everyone else. So it was fun. So around then, it's a funny story to tell now. Sorry, wildly off track, but that's okay. Forgive me. Funny story to tell now. So back then, maybe six, about six years ago, there was a story going around the international news, and I had Lord Esk about this man who went into a Walmart and started yelling at all the staff members because they'd sent a catalogue for baby clothing to his teenage daughter. Oh, yeah, that story. Yeah. And so we thought, what the hell's going on? We're all like just going crazy. I don't know. That's not like, what are you doing? And so, we went home after coming home crazy. Everyone's apologizing. I'm sorry. I don't know what happened. We went home and his daughter's like, oh, dad, I'm pregnant. And so, actually, I think in the story where there's actually the store new before she even knew based on her purchasing power. And so, back then, that was crazy. Today, people are like, yeah, of course. But back then, there was a massive invasion of privacy. We've lost a lot of privacy, I think, over the last five, six years. But back then, this was this crazy international story about how they had to kind of roll back some of this intelligence they're doing. And so, okay, cool. So your average person obviously kind of fought that. So how can we provide that sort of, that sort of automation for everyone else? And so, yeah, there was really no one else in the space. There was a couple of kind of desktop-based, old-school things. And then you had SAP and Oracle and Excel in the middle. And to be honest, about six years ago, it was about when browsers became powerful enough to start driving some serious applications like Trageco. So it was kind of a fortuitous accommodation of timing. Okay. Yeah. And how has your product changed from the time you started to now? You mentioned that Cam was working on it for three days before you were like, okay. So actually, so the story is that Cameron and Carl were actually here for about four weeks before, four or five weeks before I turned up. Okay. So I was, they were at the consultancy. I still had my, I had another job at the time. So I had to kind of finish up before I, before I came over. Yeah. So there's, kind of mentioned to you just earlier, you're asking about technology stack. Yeah. So I turned up, actually, to be fair, it was like a week before I even came over. But I turned up in Cameron. It's been like a week trying to, they build out the very first 0.0.1 version of Trageco. Obviously it didn't do anything. It was just kind of a basic, a gem file, more than anything. And yeah. So as, one thing that I've been reading about before, and I, I think I like to take as my own these days is that when you, when you're building a new, a new platform or something like that, you've got, basically you get one stretch choice, crazy choice, and everything else needs to be solid for a real, for a real platform, real, if you're building a real product. And so I walked in, we had Ruby on Rails, which I think is a solid choice, EmberJS, which was a crazy idea back then, but I pretty, it was a really solid choice, but then it was, I had Mongo, and so that was kind of my first step is, okay, this is, this was back when, well, I never really recovered from the back days when they just made so many bad mistakes when they first launched that product. So I repped it out through, in a much more reasonable data level. Okay. And what were some of the hardest challenges that you had when you were building Trageco? Is that like such a wide question? That's a massive question. How about the time you joined? We just, everyone know that story? I think so. Gary is laughing at his ass off, yeah. Oh my God. You were with us then, right? I haven't joined yet. You were just about to join, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it was, it was like, maybe it was a week before you were joining. That was in, that was in late January, so like, yeah, a week or two before you joined. It was in San Francisco for a conference. You know the story, obviously, so it's a little everywhere else, but, it was in San Francisco for a conference, and, yeah, heading home after the conference as I got, well, I had a couple of drinks with the people. And it was heading home and yeah, I got, I got mugged on the way home, had my laptop and phone and wallet and actually everything got my passport, so I just take my passport out of my laptop bag and put it in my pocket to get into the, into the karaoke bar that we were in. So I got everything, everything taken. Priorities? What was a, I guess, a freak coincidence at the same time, something went wrong and our servers went down. Okay. And so I'm in San Francisco, right, no, no one, apart from people just at the conference literally that day, who had obviously no contact with, apart from through, yes, was slack, no, slack wasn't around, but through IRC back then. Yeah, and the website went down, I mean, they had more stuff stolen and I was kind of like, oh, fuck, that's, you know, I feel like, I feel like there was a bunch of stuff that wouldn't fit right into like Silicon Valley, the TV show. So, kind of, I don't know as much to do it, like, went to bed, left it the next morning, woke up, was kind of on the, the shitty, the most horrible, like, your hostile, if you ever used a hostile computer, literally take the worst thing you could find and I kind of jumped online and just seeing, if it was in or around that I knew, it's kind of more to commiserate, I just wanted someone to commiserate with me. I was feeling really sad for myself. Okay. And kind of reached out to, no idea of time zones at the time, it was like once in a program, which I think a few of you know, but she was actually, so I was like, how was the Singapore going? I'm actually in San Francisco, right? Like, I'm like, you're fucking kidding me, right? And so, I managed to reach out and, like, told her my soul story and she actually dropped by and I knew her laptop for a couple of, for the day and some cash, because I was completely, because obviously kind of, ripped out. I managed to get the side back up, which was, which was nice, but it was down for about 14 hours, which would be just, catastrophic these days. Back then we had, I think we're about 35 customers, 35 paying customers, and they're all on this, pretty much all in Australia, New Zealand and, I don't know, if you know many Australian New Zealanders, we don't work on the weekends. So it was the weekend. Such slackers. Yeah, we take us, we have amazing weekends, we can go outside, we go play on the beach. So actually, I think about three people noticed. Okay. And again, we're still early on. So we actually wasn't, like it wasn't a catastrophe at any time. It was, it was just, I think more of a hilarious story. Okay. They managed to get back up, got back on the plane, came back and the first thing they did when I got back was to, to move us to, off AWS, to Heroku. Like I'm like, I never want to be the only one who has access to our servers ever again. So yeah, we only, we had, like Cameron, who was very good with computers and we had another engineer, PAE at the time. But yeah, I was the only one who had access to the servers. So that was, no one could do anything about it. I've got these fine, like, when I turned, got the computer back on, just like a million text messages from Cameron going, hey, server's on, server's on, server's on, just trying to reach out to the CEO, the CEO can't get in touch with them and everything's broken. That's kind of like a crazy story. How was it like, you know, getting investors to buy in when you guys first tried raising the funding? Oh, yes. Okay. Take a different tangent. Investors buying in, we first tried the very funding. That's actually what JFGI was all about, was teaching you how to pitch. Okay. Well, teaching you to make sure you had a good solid startup video and then how to pitch it. I think, to be fair, when, like, probably half our batch and half of every batch, every startup thing, don't do that first half and without that first half, you don't go anywhere. And so we got through the first half, the second half, really teaching you how to pitch and put together that pitch and work on that. And so we actually, it was Cameron, well, Cameron, Carl, working on the pitch and I was working on building something to try and sell. And so, yeah, we went through, went through pitch today, we did our pitch in front of, I think 20, 30 investors back then. It's funny to think how scared we were with people like, now, a few... Way to break it. Now a few years then, we're obviously good friends with almost every investor in Singapore. It's amazing how scary that we're back then. If you had to go back and do JFDI again, would you go back and do it? So I think our JFDI batch was amazing. I don't know too much about the rest of the JFDI batches. I paid attention to the next couple. I just think that the combination of mentors and then teams and they were just, it was fantastic. We wouldn't have got to where we were today without them. That was a really, was a really the best option for us at the time. I'm really glad we made a lot of interesting people. Okay, you guys have grown a lot since then. How many people are at trade gecko right now? I don't actually know. I think we're actually about to hit 100. So that's across three offices now. And how's the team structured? Like what do all these people do? I don't really know. So what is your role founder and CTO? Right? Tell us what you do for a living. I come and drink wine in front of people. See, no one would have to know that what's in your glasses wine. They could have thought it was water. Who didn't think I was drinking wine right now? I got red teeth. Anyone who's on like that watching on the other end of the camera? Okay. Hi. So almost 100 people across three locations. Okay. And so the big part is our development team is based in Tali in Singapore. Okay. So this thing with 30 states. And then so that's product management, design, engineering, the UX and other stuff around like that. Okay. These are the team all of you guys are from? Yeah. Awesome. Yes. Everything's from something inside of development. Okay. And what's the culture trade get go like? Well, I managed to convince a bunch of them to come down. So I think pretty good. It's either that or it's a dictatorship. What do you call a two-person political dictatorship? Was it like a DOS dictatorship? Just answer my question. No, the culture is really the most important thing for me. So I started this company to work with people that I want to work with every day. Okay. And then a great job of that. I make a horrible employee. Well, I worked in a fruit shop before and that's the only real. No, I know I saw I worked in a fruit shop and I worked in a Dave shop. I also worked in a fruit shop. Right. I think it was going to hit me to the ass. It was really great. It's around I, I think we started with a very Kiwi like the initial culture was three of us and we're like, Hey, are you right then most of. Should I should I pause? You're right. So we started with it. We're the Kiwi caught again Kiwi caught. We're very late. We laid back. We get it done like with like like don't for no bullshit. So that's kind of our thing and as I'm working on that. What's all we are today? You can ask them in a second. Let me finish the story So we've grown from there obviously starting with three we're obviously not an entirely New Zealand based team or anything like we're in We're based in Singapore we have I think we're up to like 25 30 different Countries if not cultures inside of trade go like we've really built around that It's so important being in Singapore where we've obviously got a lot of Singaporeans even inside of Singaporeans There's a lot of a lot of different melting pot But also bringing people from this we can from all around the region all over the world And so it's really the main things for us is for me while personally the name before just begin people who are friendly along with others Get should done. They just they care about what they do. They care about growing as people. I think that's Really the most important part. I think we've done a fantastic job of bringing these people in Sorry, I keep looking at these are this is some of them But there's like there's almost a hundred people now, and I think we've done it What do you look for when you hire someone? What kind of people do you like? hiring So the rule we have is that everyone we hire needs to like Improve the overall culture of our company, which is a bit of a stretch, and I think we stole that from Amazon as well but Amazon's got a lot of amazing stuff to steal. Was it the only thing you stole from Amazon? Not even close No, we've spent a lot of time looking at like trying to like think the first 10 14 people don't ever think about anything around culture you get to 25 30 you can think a little bit at 40 There's just this huge change where you do need to document some of these things. So in the first 40 people everyone Spends a lot of time with the co-founders with the people who are the core of that Like everyone had had time to talk with all of us all the time about things as you get past 40 It just doesn't become feasible anymore So you need to start putting some of these things in into documentation and so like we stubble like we Like we wouldn't go directly to having the perfect culture. We had a couple of we've had a couple ups and downs I'm actually really happy with the where we are today. I think with me and He didn't make it. It's got a daughter at home Rohan our creative director We spent a lot of time locked away in the cafe down the road Working I promise working on the the vision mission values. So we did a lot of that stuff Really both understand and then we went back and asked a lot of people to make sure we're on the right page But yeah, so I think the culture is super important to us We want to make sure that everyone wants to be there. We've got like we're all trying to Not all trying to get we don't all have exactly the same things we wanted the thing But like as long as it's on the same page, right? Okay, how does product development like you know, you can you mentioned that you kind of like in Judge of like product dev. Am I right to say that? Well in charge is a bit of a stretch. Okay, they oversee it. I'm the one reporting it to the executive team So I've been spending a lot of time trying to democratize the whole thing, but yes, so Yes, my my half of the company is the product development half is the this is engineers. It's designers. It's Product management a little bit of data. I'll say that we've only got one person in our data team right now, but She's doing a great job She's to be a tear for us Like so many GL I'm in your Awesome. So yeah, how does the product dev process at tracheco work? Okay, so I said all of our team is all the product of all the his team is in Singapore Which makes that quite easy Trying to hold on to that for as long as possible eventually We're going to have to open up secondary places for that But so what we have is that we do we've broken up the team and by functional teams rather than by like Rolled or anything like that. So we do have functional teams, which are made up of product of engineers a product managing of designers, so it's generally like a product manager designer and kind of Three to five six engineers per per area. So we kind of that's what we're going at is we're focusing on That that cross-functional team focusing on a specific area of the product or what the feature we're facing the customer And that that's all gonna change over time But we've only got to a size where that it really kind of makes sense to focus it that way Okay, and speaking of like building teams, which other countries are you guys building teams in right now? so we've had a The Manila was our very first a very first second office Okay, this other office and so we've had a team there for coming on two and a half three years now That's great. And so we we have actually it's only like 10 people there at the moment It's not a it's not a huge team that they did a lot for us Are they doing sales and marketing? So they're doing sales and customer support. Okay. Um, and so just kind of kind of handle the Yeah, they will kind of handle those sort of things Yes, it's a cost-reason. I'm not like we just found some great people there And so and then our third office We opened in Toronto it must be almost a year ago now. Okay, so literally 12 hours apart really good for time zones For our customers really hard for us because it's those meetings make it really tricky But we've got some amazing people over there. I've spent a bit of time over there meeting the team and just making sure that the culture side of things works Really really awesome. Did Boulder happen? Boulder. Yeah Boulder no we have no one in Boulder. Okay. Okay. Is that something I'm definitely something I've thought about in the past But it's a okay. I don't think I don't know where that one came from because you don't mean like you guess We're planning on like opening up something in Boulder at one point. It was in Boulder, Canada, right? We're looking at a lot of different places. Okay, Boulder We're actually now looking at still looking lots of different places. Okay I think the latest one we've added to our list is KL having a look at that. There's some great people out of there So, okay, like the easiest time zone in the world. Yeah Well, again, it's still entirely Singapore, but we're looking at how do you keep growing the team and growing? Okay, and what are the some of the biggest? Challenges that you're trying to solve at the moment How do you grow a team past 100 people? How do you grow an engineering team past 30 people? So when you were first like, you know, first it was just you, Karlyn, Cam, right? When you were like building the product team, what was your idea on like, you know What kind of people you wanted to be in first and like how many people you wanted in certain functions? What do you feel you did right and what were the things if you could go back and change certain things about how you built your team? Or would you change? Wow? I think it would have been fantastic job bringing some really amazing people in very early on I don't still don't know how we got very very lucky with Gary. He was in the JFDI with us No, I think I had no idea how to hire people back then It was literally it was Lewis friends and family and people reaching out and we still got like the first little bunch Then we worked out, okay Like you need to put job postings up and stuff like that and start interviewing people and then They worked out pretty well Still I would I don't think we hear what I would like to other I would I Feel we could definitely be a little bit bigger than we are today people wise I'm just really bad at the They say that you get to get when kind of CEO CTO you need to be spending kind of 25 to 50% of your time hiring and that includes this sort of stuff going out and making a face to yourself And then obviously obviously the hiring process is a pot as well I think personally my main thing is that I spent a lot of like I'm I was still Spending a lot of time and I don't think it was a bad thing But it was probably not the most valuable at all time So it's been a lot of time building stuff and working with the team and creating things That being said, I think that is part of the culture is that we're all work very closely together And so I could probably substitute a little a step away a little more But I feel like I'd stepped away and actually become that that like Like manager CTO type thing. I think that would actually ruin the culture that we have I think there's a there's a fine line in the middle I probably step slightly to the to one side, but I don't think I was too far off Okay, how does the day in the life of an engineer a trade get go look like why you're asking me? You're the CTO So, okay, so we have again, we've got these functional teams. So Let's go through it. So first in the morning get to the office somewhere between nine 10 30 I'm Sometime earlier earlier in the morning I mean I don't think we don't have too many noon starters anymore Actually, that's just me. I swear. I'm working from home No, this is really the talking to Canada means you need to be up early. And so it's kind of hard to get the office I know so I guess up early we'll get in Have a stand up with the team pretty early on discuss what's going on like in what are what are things they're focusing on What's your what's your main goal for the day? What do you have any blockers? I don't know some teams do like what is something interesting you learned yesterday But it's kind of a little bit hard to do every single day. And so hopefully yeah, obviously once or like every sprint We're doing the planning so everyone should know exactly what they're doing on a day-to-day basis So it's really about coming in How did I go yesterday any blockers commitments? What am I committing to do today any blockers and it's a thing So we kind of go through that process and then for most of the teams you'll then sit down with the the person You're like I think it's kind of almost I would it's but we're like semi-pairing with So we have a lot of we try and get more things working in pairs But it's not like to the strict strict parent you get in a lot of places okay all the time and this are done and kind of Solve the problem How do you grow people at trade gecko? We throw hard things at them I Make a brick it well like we give them support network as well Like you can't you can't push things horribly like we have they get the review process is really important to us But it's really around just kind of making sure what we've got taking in But we try and push people and think it's as hard as they're willing to go And I think there's a lot of people in this room came in a different sort of very different roles from where they're working on today In very different levels and it's just around giving you the chances like we've got things we need to do but within that is it would try to Try and work with the people who are there to kind of grow but at the end of the day it's We still have it's we still is a team of adults like I'm not like it's not it's not a GAI class I'm not not giving you a syllabus on how to do thing you come in We'll let's work together work out what you can do and do everything we can to support you to build awesome shit So one of the things you mentioned earlier was that you tend to hire a lot of people similar to yourself who are people like without very formal Degrees in like CS and stuff. How does that work for you? And how do you evaluate whether someone's good enough to join tracheco? What's the interview process like? Well, I think that it's kind of you're flipping it the wrong way around is that our new process We just don't check to see if they have the CS degree Okay, we look at the look at their today experience And then we we actually asked very early on if they make it past the sniff test to do a little project for us to really To prove yourself. So we'll ask you we've got a couple of these projects We send out depending on which part of the stack you're working on we send that out We give you a couple of days just maybe two three hours work. It's not too much Couple of days and we can bring you back and then then they'll sit down with an engineer or two and actually walk through And we'll ask you questions around like you don't have to get it like we're not looking for perfection But we want we're gonna ask you questions or why you did certain things. We want you to answer We're like understanding why you've made some of these choices and we'll ask you about alternatives and that sort of thing so it's really about I Have you been thinking about what you're doing and I like Kind of do you understand what's what's going on? Okay, and I for me a comms in computer science degree gives you lots of useful information and Algorithms and stuff for most people who kind of join a school web dev They've actually learned to the stuff that they need day-to-day from us either in their free time or since So we're not and actually don't know what I don't know what the specific use case of a comm side degree is I get apart from getting you like I guess you can become a comms a teacher So that's not fair I actually know I do have a lot of respect for comms computer science and to be for more I know that Singapore does the end uses a really good computer engineering course Which I think there's a actually more hands-on to the real world type stuff. So I have nothing against degrees Okay, it's not a black mark. I don't know. It's just not a green mark as well I just mean it's really good that you guys are having a diverse pool of talent like you guys have heard from So that's awesome. I think I'll be a bit hypocritical if I was not one of the high people didn't have like very specific at CS degrees when I literally have no CS background myself like I read this book What's it called? I Shared it with you. I read this book. What's it called? I shared it with with Gabriel. I'm about It was it was kind of a CS for imposter saying something Maybe it's something around like computer science for the impostors, right? And so it's a few people who don't they've been alone was just kind of teaching some like algorithm stuff that I'll find the name for that I I'm sure that a few people here have read it. I actually I shared it with Gabriel I wasn't just like randomly throwing that over there. Okay. Yeah So, you know you mentioned that you guys have like a diverse pool of talent at Trey Gecko You guys have I like think so quite a lot of like women quite a lot of like people from all over the world Was that like a conscious choice or did it like just happen? Yes and no like So I would love to say that we don't have 50-50 in our team. I would love to say we do was a percentage Are we 20 maybe I think 20 25 I think like people tell them the people in other people that tell me we're doing well I'm like I until we're 50-50 and then we're doing it properly, but it is hard because they're just once you get past the first few years like because of the horror that is this computer the See the the industry these days it's a hard place for a lot of cases for women And so what I've done is doing a thing I guess in Singapore and a lot of other countries you've got to talk about diversity of other things and well But I think in Singapore where the people here are so diverse It really just comes on the gender is really the main diversity issue we've got here and And all I can really like try it best to make sure it's welcoming and that we think nothing Like none of that suffers even remotely welcome and in our startup company and yes So I I've pushed a little bit to do some reach out, but it's If you look at incoming CVs, you're looking at 90 95 percent male And so So you feel like it's more of a supply issue. No, it's things. It's not a supply issue. It's partly well a little bit so there's I know this I've been reading some interesting stuff on particularly how you word Word word your job posting. So if you put a checklist of things Females are more likely to not apply if they don't fit every single checklist piece on the checklist Whereas guys will play anyway. And so we're doing through my best to make sure that we've removed any sort of gendered language any sort of checklist because I've from hiring and it's not perfect But we're trying to be like the gender has absolutely nothing to do with your skills as a computer science It's working with computers And so doing my best to kind of reach out a little bit and I said we're pulling a few people from GA Luckily, which is they haven't had luckily haven't been burnt out by the the market in your way. It's a year. We're looking It's not just a look at a few other people one of us people Awesome, well, we've hired five GA grades now, right? Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, okay, cool. So I'm just gonna like segue Do you need some more wine? You have to cut that bit later You can't say you should like this on camera Like a square one this is going really well, Brad. I thought it was going pretty well I don't know if I'm gonna invite you back here again. Okay, so before I like open it up to the floor. No Thomas. Thank you. Yes, please I can wait. I'm just gonna ask you like a series of like rapid-fire questions. Oh, we're really through that stuff Like where we're done She's got a little bit more first then you can jump in okay I'm just gonna like okay, so you got like about 10 seconds to answer each question Best piece of advice anyone has given you You are horrible at this she actually prepped me on this question to what I still don't have an answer No, I think this goes back to that. I haven't don't have gone out and reached out as many mentors as I should have Okay, what piece of question advice? Same answer like I did the best piece of advice. This is way past 10 seconds. Um, No How stubborn are you? Yeah How's it working out? I feel like you're personally attacking me now You just gave it away that this wasn't water Okay, favorite book and why? Okay, so there's a good moment before because it's easy to explain. This is awesome book called blindness. It's a fiction book It's about a blindness blindness. Okay It's it's really makes you think it's about this story bases is around there's and so actually I do fear it's interesting because I read it thinking of New York City, but actually it's about Lisbon I guess it's where he's from is but it's a it's a city and there's an outbreak and like a mysterious outbreak No, no, nobody knows what happens But like all like I'm a one every single person in the city goes blind Apart from this one woman and no one knows why and it's kind of like the first her husband was one of the first ones They get put in this and this I guess camp and then kind of lift her to rot and then everyone else is and it's going through the The story of them kind of making that and and so that the story is really interesting really intriguing over 10 seconds Anyway, but I think it's just it's the way it's written. The pros is really nicely flowing as well. Yeah, favorite genre and why? favorite genre book I'm assuming. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm a big sci-fi fan. Okay I'm in technology and I like sci-fi crazy No, there's so many interesting things come out of that I'm I also like like I like reading sci-fi from the 60s Okay, because it's like I have really like warped ways of it's just funny reading some of these things like you go back There was a I remember reading a high-line book once around Like it was a crazy spaceship all sorts of crazy stuff going on But one of the core plot points was that they were stuck because they had to go find the nearest phone attached to the wall So like all this place of heaven, but they didn't think of cellular phones And so like that was the 60s where we are today like the stuff that's come forward and That's something to look like again. Where's my jetpack? All these things we've built and all these things we haven't okay One person you'd like to invite to dinner and what would you ask that they can be alive dead or fictional? Fictional that wasn't part of your pre-question I'm gonna cut out fictional because that changes my original quite answer which I really like because I went with the I think King is calm was a really interesting one for me And I Think it's really I would really just like to know whether he was a complete psychopath Or it was just a really smart guy who was doing what he needed to do What was the best solution to solve that problem to do that thing at the time? Does this have to do with like create Gecko's quest for world domination? That's honestly my related. Yeah, but if we got fictional actually would really love to meet Sherlock Holmes as well Well fake guy anyone got any questions. Yes. Yes Tell us your name and what you do before you Right I remember time where That was part of the initial funding or something thought about actually leading to the US And maybe you can just like on that story Thomas is cheating clues and invest on Trigger Maybe we should ask Thomas has a investment working out for him I have no idea So around the series a we were talking to we started off and Looking towards India for money that we thought went into the US later. Hey, look, there's a lot of stuff going on So we're talking to some really interesting VCs in the US. It's like top top 10 tier ones And so we're we're getting really close with there was one called DFJ who we had a lot of conversations with But again, if you've had any experience working with UC US VCs and More so back then but even still pretty now like they're they're not willing to look past again I think it's if you're a West Coast VC I'm not even looking willing to look outside of the West Coast And so they're just not gonna they don't want to do any investments outside of especially at that level outside of the area And so yeah, we were looking at what became a serious conversation is What does it look like to to move a large chunk of the team to to the Valley? It's it's one of those what ifs. I guess I'm really glad what we have now, but what would that have been? Would you consider it now? Oh, so we're a very different beast now. Okay. Yeah, very different beast Any other questions guys? Someone else. Yes Put it like satisfy the needs wire your product Answer that question Where do you customers come from what's the segmentation right now in terms of geography? So geography wise it's so our core customer base is actually is an English-speaking world So US Canada Singapore Hong Kong, New Zealand Australia South Africa UK The cool ones will go a lot throughout Europe. We actually don't have much in South America But we do have a bit around that you at the UAE sort of area But actually we I think we've got customers in 90 different countries, okay, but our core product is only in English So back to the question back to the question I think it's based out of Singapore. I think they're kind of half-answered is that our core customer base isn't actually here We talked a bunch of people in Singapore. We talked to people all over the world We talked to our customers all over the world and so we there's really no substitute to talking with your customers It's nice to be able to go visit them occasionally, but it's just There's no there's no magic trick You just really need to kind of to talk to them and I again if we decided If we need to go put that we wanted to start making a big push into Somewhere around South America around those those hubs there I think we'd probably go spend some serious time I think I'm able to go go get a feeling of what they like or find something from around there And you got the next question So especially we are in a business software Sometimes specific clients have very very specific requests and it's so hard to generalize them So how do you try to do some specific modules for them or try to generalize everything? Yeah, so Again, I think it's a difference. That's where we try to classify a We are definitely a product company rather than a services company Like we do a little bit of service, but at the end of the day, we will never build something specifically for one customer It's just the wrong direction for someone who's doing what we do And so yeah, we will look at someone comes with a particular use case Well, we will look around and things were to the point now We have thousands and thousands of thousands of customers So I think there's no one's coming to us with unique ideas that I generalize these days If it's coming with something specific, it's almost always specific to them. And so what we do have is We have a network of partners of development partners so we can go Hey, I'm here to play with it So we've built a core part of who about it from out who we are from a technology point of view is that we expose Absolutely everything via API so anything you can do in our platform in the core platform You can do via API as well And so we've got developer partners would again if you come to us with a very specific solution You want that we can't that doesn't make sense for us to build as a more generalized solution We will kind of refer them on to a development partner And yeah, we just have a super powerful API to do pretty much what if you like on top of that? Yeah Thomas your question You know most of that's owned by operations these days But we do like I we do strong feel that they should be like we every single person at work So try to go has some stock of some kind we would take I think it's kind of it's partly we want everyone to have a bit of skin in the game, but also like It's mostly that we want everyone to kind of it helps get everyone on the same page Like we really want to make sure that if more often when well when we Go crazy and whatever the big exit becomes that we can make sure that everyone who's helped us get that point You can kind of share in that From the specifics of how it works. I have no fucking idea Sometimes I saw remember to be about a year and a half ago now So it's kind of we're a lot smaller but someone saying they wanted to join us because we were a larger stable company I'm like what the fucking you talking about Wait, did they this do you want to join us because you're large and stable We were a stable a lot more stable company than other people were talking about only we're like 45 people back there I'm like, I guess like in comparison. Yes, but I was the first time I thought maybe wait wait We're a real company. We're not just a startup anymore. Well, I still like to think we're a startup because that's how we the mentality of things But yeah, I guess I think for instance like Your paycheck is always going to go through compared to some of these other people he's talking to yeah So that I think I was kind of where I came from Okay, anyone got any other questions I guess no Again, we're more about these days of surround we've got we went with we we have solid integrations with the top four e-commerce platforms Which are most of the e-commerce market the top two accounting platforms, which are most of the accounting market We've got kind of a couple of we have a third-party piece to plug into like the CRM's that sort of stuff We're we're looking at a little bit, but right now for most of like any sort of obscure Ecommerce integration we would rather look at a third-party Development like well, there's a couple more we want to look at in the longer term They didn't if they've been around for a while But there's also nothing wrong with going after a fad if it makes sense at the time The thing about code is you can't throw it away. Yeah, okay I'm gonna wrap this up and you guys can talk to Brad over wine in a bit What should we be looking forward to from trigger correct was exciting Um, we're not a we're not a B2C company. If you have an inventory management Needs you sell buying sell goods We've a lot of exciting stuff happening if you're looking for a role in the new job very exciting We saw real customer problems. What role are you hiring for? I'm hiring for anything inside of product development. Okay. Are you an engineer designer product manager? Everything they love to talk to you. Okay. Anything else so worth having a chat like Sounds good, so we're gonna wrap this up. Thank you so much Brad for like spending time with us Thank you for being so generous with your I'm never coming back We get it Thomas the train That's Percy that's not Thomas. This is Thomas. No, that's not Thomas either Actually That is Thomas. No, that's the that's the Thomas this is Thomas's friend with a bigger face No, that is Thomas. I Don't even know it's been a long time Why are we arguing about this at the end of? I'm sorry. This is this kind of keeps with our theme though, right? The most awkward fireside jet ever in my entire career. Thank you, Bradley Priest I And this was the one thing that SG engineers chose to like record Hey, at least it was entertaining for me and you at least so I'll be enjoying it as well Huge shout out to Trey Gecko. They've been awesome employers Go look for them. If you guys want to go work for them A shout out to JS conference as well It's gonna happen in January 2018 if you guys want to go speak at JS conference They're taking in speaker applications right now Yeah, so if you've got an interesting topic, you know, if you want to go speak up That's the man. You should be submitting your applications to okay. All right. Thank you so much guys and thank you so much too SG engineers run by Mike and a team of people They basically like you know record some you know They record like community events like this one and they make it available for free for the community Thank you so much everyone help yourself to some wine and bad will still be here for a few more minutes to talk to you Thank you