 we're gonna be filtering in from the exhibit hall right at the point where we're showing all of our marketing information about our company and our Twitter handles and stuff and that's why we're really here. So, we got it brand hard. It's good to see everybody today. This is a lot of space between the stage and the first row of seats, so you look very small. If you came here thinking that we were gonna do Q&A with like passing a microphone around, we're not, sorry, but we're gonna be here all week so if you do it, ultimately enjoy the talk and you have a question about running a business, there's almost nothing that Todd and I aren't comfortable answering. We'd love to talk to you and meet you. Trying to figure out now like how to go from this awkward series of spills to actually starting in a meaningful way. Should we just power clap? Okay, this is starting, yay, all right, go. So, the title of this presentation is Business on Rails. It's a Q&A session of sorts about running a business as a software developer. Our company's name is called Test Double. We are on a mission to improve how the world writes software. How we work is our developer consultants pair up with developers like you on your work project to get stuff done, but also to look for ways to improve things as we go. You can read more about us at our website. We are founded in 2011 by just us two developers and we had zero prior experience running a business. This here is Todd, my business partner. He goes by Todd Kaufman on the internet. He likes beer and running and pugs. I'm Justin, I go by my last name Sorals on the internet. I like fruity cocktails and what I would more classify as jogging and corgis. And now the company's grown a bunch. We're actually 45-ish people now. We're serving 14 clients currently and we collectively have one experience running a business. As a result, all of our answers here, your mileage may vary. They are pretty specific to that one experience, but we're gonna do our best to provide as much value to you today as we can. Over the last two months, we've been accepting, soliciting your questions at testdouble.com slash business. And you all submitted some really, really awesome questions and continue doing it today. I guess the first piece of business advice is that developers really suck at estimating because we handpicked 35 questions we wanted to answer and I went so far as to write slides for 25 of those questions, only to realize we could only fit 12 into 40 minutes. So we got a lot of other content, bonus content, that we're probably gonna find a way to parcel or deliver to you in bite-sized chunks after the fact today, so stay tuned. And the first series of questions that we got were really about like, hey, I haven't started a company yet, but I've got an idea for it. And I thought the best first question we could ask is, hey, Todd, why'd you decide to start a company? Yeah, thank you. People who know us probably think we started the company for the wrong reasons. Say we're trying to get rich. Maybe we were trying to get away from having to wear khakis at our enterprise clients, or we're just trying to become our own boss or get away from the pointy-haired bosses that we had worked with in the past. That wasn't necessarily the case with us. Justin and I worked at a consulting company where we were commuting five hours to a client at the time, so it provided a lot of time for us to discuss what was wrong with that client, and the conversation expanded to what was wrong with the consulting company we worked at at the time. And from there it went to other clients, other consulting companies, and we started to pick up a common theme. One of the things that we saw were that people weren't compensated according to the value they provided. Oftentimes at these consulting companies, there were extremely rich, well-commissioned sales reps, but they didn't always do what was in the best interest of the business. Oftentimes they would set up a project just to get a commission check even though it was destined for failure. I had one story where a sales rep was showing off a picture of his new boat that he bought to the team that was working on his project. That team was working nights and weekends to try and bring this thing in. That didn't seem fair, so we didn't wanna do that. The company we were at was heavily focused on agile at the time, so much so that we spent an inordinate amount of time talking about user stories and the product backlog and estimation and very little time actually writing software or applying test-driven development. Further, some companies treated developers like they were a commodity at the time. I had a CEO tell me at one point, one of the best developers I've ever worked with left and he told me that he was replaceable. He could find another developer on the street. And further, some of these clients were really toxic and the goal wasn't to fix them, it was to become more pervasive in our work there. And that didn't sit well with us. So, we talked about building something that would be different. We would move away from these enterprise restrictions like having to wear khakis or even any pants at all in our case as a remote company. We wouldn't have to work with Java anymore. We wouldn't do fixed bid, fixed scope projects because they were really easy to sell, really hard to deliver. We wouldn't do perpetual client travel. So, driving in a car with Justin for 10 hours was definitely a good shove in the right direction here. We felt like we could set up a company that would have realistic expectations, both for our developers and for our clients. If those two things were in alignment, we would add a lot of value to both sides and really build something that was different. So, question for you, Justin. How long should I wait before quitting my day job? When is the right time to launch my company? Great question. Well, it turns out like legally and technically speaking, you can start a company without having to quit your job first. Point in fact, you might know Aaron's company Adequit and you might think that it exists for some legitimate purpose. But in fact, he just wanted to buy pork belly at wholesale prices and the restaurant group would only give him the discount if he was incorporated. So, anyone can start a business. But I think what people are really asking here is like, when can I quit my job and focus on this other thing that I wanna be doing? And when Todd and I started Test Double, we were laser focused on one thing and that was like figuring out how to build a runway so that we could have plenty of time to make the business stable and viable. What that looked like is a calculation in our heads, like given some hypothetical amount of revenue, how long could our savings last? And maybe if we were able to win some early revenue or get confident that maybe we could pull in something early that could stretch that runway out so that we could go a little bit further before having to call it quits if we weren't successful. You know, another thing I'd recommend you do is talk to who your potential customers are. If you think you wanna start a business, make sure that people are willing to part with their money first before you quit your job. Second, a lot of people like to work in like a stealth mode capacity. Maybe you do proof of concept. Maybe you actually like start building your product on nights and weekends or if your services some people moonlight. That can work well for people but just keep an eye on your offer letter because a lot of us and a lot of our current jobs have signed something that doesn't allow us to do that without assigning rights to our employer or talking to them first. So be mindful of that. So before you launch, just a few things to remember. You know, make sure that, you know, your finances are in order that you're gonna have a sufficient runway to get started that you've validated that customers are willing to pay for your timer goods. And that you have the right mix of naivety and courage to take that leap of faith. Because to be perfectly honest, programmers are really, really hot commodity right now and even if you fail, you could probably turn around and get a higher salary as an entrepreneur. So really the bar is really low and it's a great time to take this jump if it's something you want to do. Next couple of questions we got. We're about like starting up a business logistically. Couple of our favorites here. Todd, at what pace do you hire more developers? Are we a growth obsessed startup or do you constrain the rate of growth? Yeah, so this is a good question. And we see this a lot in our industry right now. Startups, especially VC backed startups appear to be growing just for growth's sake. We know a founder of one of these companies back in Columbus and he talked about changing their company motto to you gotta spend money to spend money. And I thought that was like really funny as he was like off trying to get a series C until we talked in more detail about what he was doing with that money. He's basically burning through loads of cash to throw developers at this problem. And we know from past experiences, developers, Fred Brooks told us this 40 years ago, throwing people at a problem doesn't necessarily make it go faster. It doesn't necessarily result in a better product. So why are people so obsessed right now with growing just for growth's sake? I think it makes sense when you think that some of these companies don't necessarily have a lot of customers yet, they may not have any revenue at all. So when they're trying to get that next round of funding, they have to show something to those investors to let them know that look, we're gonna be successful here. So one of the things they can come on to is the number of developers they have. So, hey, I have 50 developers, that's great. Here's your series C, go higher 100 more. That hasn't been test doubles model at all. In the early going, it was just Justin and I working at one client. And at that point, you have to grow for stability's sake. Like when we were just at one client, resignation and acquisition, anything like that could cause our project to end early. That could literally put the company in financial peril in a relatively short amount of time. So we made a couple of hires and they also wound up at that company. But that allowed us the freedom to start pursuing a little bit more aggressively, more clients and more projects. And eventually you start to find them and you start to hire people and this keeps on going. So now we're at the state where if a couple of projects end unexpectedly, it's not necessarily financial ruin for the company. In fact, we may still be very profitable that month. It may allow us to go pursue other opportunities we'd otherwise have to pass on. So we've termed this kind of growth model as cautiously opportunistic. Those of you who know Justin and I well will understand that Justin is extremely cautious and I'm extremely opportunistic. So in this way we work pretty well together. But that has resulted in growth that I think has been very healthy for our business. We're nowhere near like the exponential growth that some of these companies talk about but we're also not linear. And now we're growing so that we can have a bigger impact at a larger variety of clients. Justin, this one's for you. Why did you start the company remote first? Any unexpected consequences? Yeah, we get asked this a lot. Truth is there was no master plan to be a remote company. It was just victims of circumstance. Todd and I live 10 miles away from each other in Columbus, which in commuting terms is like an hour and a half of billable hours that we wouldn't get if we insisted on co-locating. After the 2008 crisis, a lot of offices downsized their space. So instead of expecting all their contractors to come inside they no longer had a place for them. And then additionally home internet was getting fast enough that like pair programming was viable. And all of these things kind of mixed together to create the situation where just defaulting to remote seemed to make sense at the time. And it turned out to just be a really happy accident. We treated it like a liability for years, but now I think it's one of our kind of core assets that allows us to be really flexible in who we work with and who we hire. Just imagine like people fly to the conference this week. Maybe you meet somebody that you'd really like to work with and you get as far as like really deciding like you're really passionate about like what they're doing and you want to work together. But then the next step in the conversation is, okay, great, now sell your house, separate your family and move to Reno. And that's a, you know, co-location introduces a really high barrier of entry to collaborating working together in this time where we have all these tools that make it so easy to collaborate and work together. So it's a shame. Another thing about, so basically what we've been able to do though as a result of hiring everywhere is we've got people in like 14 states, 16 states and two Canadian provinces are all over the place and we will hire a very narrow ideology of like developers who happen to like really agree with our mission and impression of how we might be able to improve this industry and people at a great skill level that would be really difficult to like hire all within one zip code. The other thing I really like about remote is it's autonomous by default. I've had way too many clients with like, you know, just like moldy cube farms with like executives who literally will scream at you and like somebody microwave in something funky like every day being on their network and under their control, like being under the thumb of somebody else is like the easiest way to feel like you don't have control over your work. And so when you're at home, you know, you control a lot more of the variables about when, where, and how you accomplish what you need to do your job. But there's still, there are plenty of challenges with being remote. It's not, you know, a panacea. We're all spread out and we don't get to see each other all very much. Oh, excuse me, wrong point. So we're all spread out which means that we owe tax in a lot of places. We pay probably way more to our accountant than any other like 30%, 40% company. Our tax returns are a total mess. So additionally, when we go to Ohio and we're like, hey, can we get a tax abatement? We were a successful startup in Columbus. Isn't that great? They're like, yeah, no, because you're not gonna hire three more people in Ohio. You want to hire them elsewhere and that's a fair point. Additionally, we've got people and like employer regulations just haven't caught up. You know, we have Ali in Maryland and we had to buy these like gigantic employer regulation like placard notices for him to hang in his break room. And we just did that and sent them to him because we didn't know what to do. We also have a hub and spoke communication system where everyone's on different projects and it's just a shame that people like Dave and Schoon might go months without having an excuse to talk to one another. So we created an institute of this thing called coffee time. It's a little robot that emails people at random every week and you get a message and then you schedule time together and you talk and people actually do this and it's such a delight because you get to talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to and it doesn't necessarily have to be about work. Additionally, you know, like it's a shame that we don't get to actually see each other because we've disassembled this team of people we really love working with that really like, you know, opportunities to collaborate don't happen by happenstance. And so we come together twice a year both to enjoy each other's company and camaraderie as well as be amazed at how big the company has gotten in the physical sense. It's hard to scale on like looking at a slack sidebar and we plan out together the vision for like the next six months of the company's planning as a group in person. Additionally, we're all gonna be tough if you're an extreme extrovert and working days on end at home without a lot of interpersonal interaction is hard. Like there are, you know, you might try co-working spaces and ways to work around it but it's just not gonna work out for everybody. And if you're really, really introspective, you know, you might think that you don't wanna a boss breathing down your neck but like in the absence of that the negative self-talk that might occur in terms of worry about like whether or not you're doing a good job. Like at least for me indicated like what I really wanted was like continuous positive reinforcement and it took me years to really get comfortable in my own skin as a remote worker. But overall I don't have any fear of missing office. I, you know, I would not, I would not regret this. I don't regret this at all and I wouldn't have made it any other way. I think for businesses like ours this was a really, really great choice. Next couple of questions are about like once you've reached a point of stability like how do you go to market? How do you market and sell yourselves? First question here, Todd. I would love to know the answer to this one myself. How do we find clients? What's been the most successful source of generating leads? Yeah, I think this is one of the, a great question. Just know that strangers oftentimes don't wanna hear your pitch, right? Like elevator pitches are there cause people don't wanna hear you talk for two minutes. They'll tolerate you for like 30 seconds. Cold calling people is really hard. Cold emailing people is hard. Cold LinkedIning people, all these things are really, really difficult. We felt from the early going that our success was gonna be predicated on the number of meaningful relationships in our network. So we've spent a lot of time trying to grow that network and trying to grow the meaningful relationships within that. It's no coincidence we're in front of you at RailsConf. Justin goes to a lot of conferences. We met at a user group eight years ago. So go get out to user groups, get out to conferences. Even if you aren't speaking you can meet people who share similar interests. LinkedIn, if you can tolerate the amount of recruiter spam that's on there can be a really valuable tool for keeping up with past coworkers, college friends and things like that and seeing how their careers evolve and finding occasionally somebody who may be able to benefit from your product and service. Eventually you get big enough where you kinda need a tool to manage some of this stuff. Your network starts growing, keeping in touch with everyone becomes difficult. We use Pipedrive as a sales CRM tool. We like it a lot but there's like literally 30 of these things out there. It's important as you're trying to expand your network though that you're not selling people. People don't want to be sold. All right, one of the things I love about Justin's conference presentations he's rarely like doing it with the mindset of I want to pitch test double. Instead he's trying to like put himself in the audience's shoes, understand what he can share that may add value to you all and that's the right mindset. We're not all able to come up with 800 slide decks to deliver in a 40 minute presentation like Justin though. So find your own thing. Maybe that's blogging. Maybe that's social media. Maybe it's, you know, offering a book contributing to open source, whatever it may be figure out ways to help solve others problems to help share what you've experienced. One of the best sales reps I know doesn't focus as much on what I can do for him. Every time I meet him for lunch he asks, what can I do for you? Who can I connect you to? I think that mindset of service to others is why he's so effective as a sales rep. So even if you're just connecting two people at RailsConf who may have an opportunity and may be looking for a job that good karma comes back to you eventually. I think as your network grows it becomes difficult to kind of keep in touch with everyone but these relationships take a lot of time and effort to build up. So basically make sure that you're persistent with it. Make sure you're investing the time to help these relationships grow because it will take time. We eventually got big enough at Test Double where I think the strongest generator of sales for us has been the awesome consultants that work for us. They do a lot of good work for our clients. So much so that when a project ends our clients are often asking us, hey, can you take a look at this? I know of a project over here that could use your help. Further, when they leave their company, Test Double is one of the first companies they think of. And when they talk to their friends who work at other similar companies, they recommend us. So this is what Jim Collins called the flywheel principle in his book, Good to Great. As we have prepared the talk, we found out this is what a flywheel looks like because we've never really knew what that was. But the concept holds true, right? This thing is hard to get moving. It took us a long time to get to this point but now it has enough momentum where even when our outbound efforts for sales maybe aren't producing the results that we want, we have a lot of stuff coming in inbound from past clients and people that we've worked with who recommend us. So that's been huge for us lately. Justin, this one's for you. Test Double has a strong and quirky brand. Did that develop organically or intentionally and how do you maintain it? Todd's strong and I'm quirky. I'm a firm believer in brand for the job you want. There's a reason that when we started the company I didn't just put our names up and say we were independent contractors for hire. I really wanted to at least put on a brave face and pretend we were a real company and I called ourselves a studio again even though we were working out of our bedrooms to present the image that like maybe we'll become a real thing someday. But unfortunately that exhausted everything I knew about branding and so we hired a company called Basecraft and a branding agency and first things first we needed a logo and it gave them a few constraints about the logo. Thing I hate about all logos in tech I told them I don't want some Helvetica thing with a dingus on top, not gonna cut it. Next we have the word test in our name so we probably should avoid reds. And then finally we kind of found ourselves from a marketing perspective sandwiched between apathetic waterfall development and like snake oil agile consultants and we wanted to provide like a message of improvement that was indeed counter cultural so maybe a little bit cheeky. And you know they delivered, we have this really distinctive logo mark. We have certainly it's not red, a very, very bright green and you know if you look at our marketing copy and stuff it's a little bit cheeky. In fact like I didn't even realize nice code was like a double meaning until several years later. I'm dense. We also got a brand book like 22 pages. Like here's how to not use your logo. And I'm the one now who is the keeper of the brand book and I use it to shut down productive discussion whenever anyone has creative ideas. Cause that's apparently a really important part of branding. We have internal branding too cause it turns out when you start a company you have a lot of stuff that you have to name internally and having a theme helps. I had a contest on Twitter years ago asked me like what should we call our employees and Leon Gersing won it. He said double agents which I thought was a fantastic thing we all love and so now we've taken the spy motif way too far. So our full-time employers are double agents. Our subcontractors are special agents. People who leave the company we call sleeper agents which was a joke but then like they you know they tend to win us work at their next employer anyway and so it's kind of true. Bridge agents are who help shepherd people through our recruiting process. We compartmentalize information between subcontractors, full-timers and managers. You know in these separate repositories. Our first recruiting app was called Gum Shoes. We have two modes of management the M branch for career management and Q branch for technical management. And then when you join as a full-timer you get your own double low designation. So internal branding it's just fun and goofy and silly and we don't normally talk about it publicly but it's there. Basic branding tips these are the first lessons that that agency gave us. They said whatever you do it doesn't have to be the best designed thing in the world it just has to be clear and distinctive. It needs to be consistent. The goal is to like give a stimuli and then get a particular response hopefully a positive one out of people so that's why the brand book guidelines are so strict and it needs to just be repetitive just hammer it into people's skulls and eventually they'll think of you when they see some image. The next questions we got were a little bit about like how to scale up as an organization once you've had some initial success. This one's also for you Justin. How should founders split responsibilities when starting and how does the structure change and why? Well one of my least favorite questions is what do I do all day? And Todd and I have had a really hard time answering this question for ourselves because it just seems like the time flies but when it comes to like how we divide these responsibilities between ourselves the only thing that really matters to me is clarity. We understand what the job is, who's doing it make sure that no balls get dropped. Guess what every new business lacks? It's clarity as to like what the jobs that need to get done are and who should be doing them. And so lacking clarity we really just instead formed a consensus management model for the first several years of the business. What that means is we would just every time anything came up we would argue about it even repetitively over and over again and that's a very slow and exhausting way to manage a business but it has benefits too because eventually after the fourth time that we have that argument the DVA we reached an equilibrium state where we roughly are acting and normalizing in our approach. And then once that happens it just becomes a battle of who cares more. So like Todd you clearly care more about recruiting congratulations you're in charge of recruiting now and that's the moment where we feel comfortable splitting up our duties. We wrote this like accountability chart of the basic functions of the organization that we need to keep operating. But back in like 2012 it was really just sales delivery and some admin tasks. And again we paired on all that stuff but the next year we started going more public and selling publicly to other people and marketing and so we paired on that too. Eventually we got to a point where having somebody sit in an integrator role to make sure that all the parts are talking to each other successfully became necessary and Todd took that task. And 2015 we were old enough that we had to like consider you now like what's our vision, how do we articulate it internally and externally and I own that. In 2016 we reached a point where we couldn't manage everything anymore. Todd and I were talking five, six hours a day sometimes just to keep everything straight. And so I stepped away from administration. That's why I don't know how to run payroll anymore for example and Todd took a step back from marketing. And then in 2017 we decided that every single seat in the accountability bus should have just like one person in it. And so Todd backed off from sales and I backed away from delivery a little bit. We're still really involved in these things but like each thing now has one person solely accountable for decision-making and stuff. And you can see now how I have like a more external focus and Todd's got a more internal to the business focus. But that's still not a job. Like we can't recruit somebody to replace us cause we're still doing these three disparate things two of them poorly. And we can't replace ourselves or really grow much beyond this without making some changes. There's too much of our face in this chart. And so this year and moving forward our objective is to divest ourselves of the jobs that we either don't want or aren't good at and instead sit on the seats that we want to be in the long-term. But you know we got a long way to go. If you email hello at testdouble.com you will still get either zero or two replies because we don't have a system in place for figuring out who already responded to stuff. Sorry about that. But Todd, this question I loved because well the statistic is unsighted but it said 90% of people who reside in site poor management. Have we had much turnover and what have we learned about managing people? Yeah, so our turnover through the years looks somewhat like this. First year, Josh and I could still tolerate working with each other. Two people we hired at the very end of the year. Neither one left, so that was good. Second year, same thing. We had very little turnover, no turnover. Third year we had our first person leave which wasn't great, we wished he would have stayed but that was still fine. We felt very proud that we'd only had one person move on to a different opportunity in the three years of running the business. We use this as marketing. We would tell candidates in our process we've had like minimal turnover and that was just one misguided soul who left the company, right? We're an awesome place to work at. Then 2015 happened, yeah, so that was not great. That was five of 20 people on our staff left in one year. So you're probably wondering like look, what does it look like the last two years? Yeah, we don't talk about it as much anymore after 2015, we stopped sharing a lot of this data. Anytime you have something like that happen, you start to ask a lot of questions. We did exit interviews with everyone and to kind of answer the question like was this poor management? That wasn't what came up in the exit interviews. Really they had different reasons for the most part. So we were trying to read the tea leaves and really understand how did we get there? How do we get to the point where five people left all in one year? And I think looking back at our organization, like it was very flat in the early going. I was high levels of autonomy and no process really whatsoever. And we felt like these were strengths and they did serve us well when we were really small. As we scaled up though, once we got to about 20 people, we started seeing that they also cause a lot of issues. People didn't feel like they had clarity where the company was going, how they could help. They didn't have direction. Even worse, they didn't have support. So when client issues came up, they didn't feel like they could get time from someone to get through them. These are management issues. This is definitely a management problem and that fell directly on my shoulders at the time. I was the one doing all of our one-on-ones. I was trying to support 20 people doing their jobs and that was like a fraction of my day. So I was failing as a manager. I didn't apply enough time to make it successful. So we've leaned harder into one-on-ones since then. We have four people conducting them now. They're more valuable. They're driving career growth. They're driving support for our clients. We've become a lot more effective at this throughout the years and it has resulted in much less turnover. We've had one person leave in 2016 and 2017 total. So some of the things that we've learned as we've kind of gone through this management roller coaster, obviously it needs to scale. That's the lesson you should take away from our 2015. And you probably want to scale it proactively and not wait until five people leave to then scale it. But this is in no way optional. I think one of the things that we felt early on was that we were hiring very experienced people. So they may not need that much support. They may not need that much management. And that's not the case. The moment where you're going to hire a person, I don't care what their capabilities are, you need to start putting some systems in place and people in place to support them effectively. Justin, this one's for you. How do you manage open source? Is it based on employee interests or does it have a conscious business focus? So if our open source appears to be strategic, that is a happy coincidence. In fact, it's probably just a signal that our people's personal and professional goals are well aligned. We hire a lot of people who want to make software better. So they spend time building open source. We want to make software better so we work with clients doing the same. We have a lot of fun projects like Scripty helps you wrangle your package JSON scripts. We recently adopted a dependency injection framework for Node.js called Dependable. That's actually pretty good. I've put a lot of my heart and soul into TestDouble, which is a mocking library for JavaScript and the team's done a great job helping me. We have a legacy rescue or refactoring tool for Ruby applications called Suture that's helped some teams out. Jason Carnes is the lead maintainer of Node ENV which is exactly like RBE ENV but for managing Node.js environments and some really, really great projects. But last year at the retreat, somebody asked, so what's our open source strategy though? And I did not have an answer. Sometimes we've jokingly referred to the dozen or so testing libraries that we maintain as the TestDouble stack but I don't think that really makes a whole lot of sense because there's just so much open source everyone needs. Somebody else suggested that we make a mocking library that's really opinionated for every single language and that just sounded like a lot of pain and misery. But where I think that we are special is we are on all of these like so many projects every year starting up in different environments, solving different problems. We've gotten really good at curating dependencies and figuring out what are the best tools for different kinds of jobs. And so we don't have a solution quite yet that we're ready to share but we have a lot of ideas about how we might become leaders and curators of helping other developers figure out what are the best tools for each different type of tasks I wanna do and understand that that's a constantly changing and churning kind of environment. So last but not least we got a lot of questions asking you know like basically what do we regret or what would we have done differently? Yeah this one's for you. What's something you've had to give up control of? Yeah so one thing that I refuse to give up control over is that whenever anyone spells our company name this way I absolutely lose it. I can't stand it. I get really really angry. That space is for some reason very important to me because it's two words not one if you only learn one thing today. It's probably gonna be this now. But to be completely honest growth requires that you let go. The weird thing about being a founder is you're finding yourself really stretched thin and all these jobs that you don't wanna do. And as the company gets bigger and bigger and bigger you'll just pop if you hold on to all of them. And so people often see me like following on Twitter you see like I'm just complaining all day. Like I'm sad and I'm complaining about the stuff I don't wanna be doing and people are so kind and they're like can I help and so then I do the completely rational thing and I snap at them and I say no. And I must retain control of everything all the time. And so I've retrospected like why do I crave this kind of control? What makes me a control freak about these jobs I don't wanna be doing? I think that the reason is that I've only like they're not my profession or my vocation. Like I only know them well enough to like do them just well enough to get by. And that means I don't know them well enough to actually articulate what it is that I'm doing how to do it and share the work with others in a reasonable way. So we started operationalizing a lot of how we work. That means like understanding what we're doing and documenting it as some kind of process, figuring out how to evaluate whether that job is being done well or not. And then the hardest part holding ourselves accountable to that level of measure and only really at that point is it at all fair to like hand that work to somebody else because like if you just give them unclear expectations and then try to hold them to those without communicating you're setting them up for failure. Todd, I'd love to know your answer to the question what's the worst business decision that we've ever made? Yeah, that's a good one. Does anybody remember our marketing towards the end of like 2016? Justin was getting out speaking at a lot of conferences leading up to RubyConf of 2016. We had this great pitch called make Ruby great again. Like we were super excited about this. We bought a bunch of hats and stickers. Then two days before RubyConf the election happened and yeah, we threw all that stuff away. No, that's kind of a joking answer. Most importantly to test double we're trying to improve what we feel is largely a broken industry. Software development is broken in a lot of ways. What we wanna do is show maybe some clients some of the things that we've learned about attracting, hiring, retaining and empowering software developers. So one of the ways our industry is broken is diversity. So the EEOC data respondents there about two thirds of people in tech respond to he or him. Around one third respond to she or her. And the EEOC survey doesn't actually give you another option. So that's obviously not fantastic for our industry. So how does test double stack up against that? Much worse. So don't follow our example here. At least learn from our mistakes though which we're happy to share with you. When we were starting off we were extremely nervous. You get to a point where you're delighting a client the two of us were doing a good job and they're asking for more people to help out. So we were really, really afraid of putting someone in front of this client who was gonna fail. And we didn't have a qualification process or even a recruiting process at that time to rely on. So instead we did what most people do in that case the higher people they know people from within their networks. There's only one issue with that. Our networks looked a lot like this. They looked a lot like us. So we hired in a lack of diversity in the early going. And as we started to have more fast paced growth in those early years we kept repeating this process. And at the point where the company was initially it was justinized networks were the company network. And it was largely a bunch of white men. And then as we hired eight other white men, guess what? Now it's just the same problem times 10. Okay we didn't think about this enough in the early going. So please learn from our mistakes here. Proactively build your network. Try to make your network resemble the level of diversity you wanna see in the company that you work at and the industry that we're a part of. Beware of culture overfitting. It was easy for us in the early going to want to hire someone because we like them. That's not good enough. You may like them because you share hobbies or a taste in IPAs, right? You need to make sure you're hiring people who align with your company values and you provide capabilities you need for your product or your service. So get better at designing an interview process that has objective metrics measuring these things. We've worked really hard over the last four years to try and pull out any level of bias. Finally, Ash Dryden taught us this early on. If you're going to focus on improving level of diversity at the company, start with making sure your environment's inclusive of underrepresented groups. It does you no good to get better at outreach and qualification if you're still a very broken company internally with regards to supporting people. Justin, when do we call it quits? So when we founded the company and to this day we do not have an exit strategy or a lifestyle business. And what a lot of our friends who founded companies, like we've seen the same sort of series of events repeat for them to where you start a company to do a certain thing. Like we started this company to get back into software development. And then you grow and you run out of time to be able to do that thing. Like Todd and I no longer get to do very much software development. And so then you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to do that thing again, which is the stage that we're kind of currently in. And it's a little bit miserable. In fact, I talked about runway earlier. The runway when we talk about it now is really like how long can we keep doing this and make it sustainable? Cause if I have 18 hours of meetings each week, my soul can only last doing this for a few more years. But if I can ratchet that way down and focus on some more like strategic stuff that's in line with what I wanna be doing, then maybe this is a job that I never need to quit that I can just do perpetually. And in fact, what I'm finding is that as we make iterative progress there, the stuff that I would do on Saturdays and Sundays, an open source and peer programming with people is starting to more and more resemble my Monday to Friday time. And so my hope is that it's just going to become something that's like a natural and grew a part of my life. And I would wish that for anyone else here who starts a business and is as fortunate and lucky as we have been. Unfortunately, we're out of time. Like I said, we're only time for 12 questions. We've got a lot more. I hope we get to share a lot of the rest of them with you. I hope we get to have some conversations over the course of the rest of the week here. At Testable, we are still continuing to aggressively, conservatively grow. And I don't think there's ever been a time in the company's history where we had like a greater slate of client projects down the pike that we're really, really excited about. So if you've ever, if you know us and you've ever thought about joining, now is a fantastic time to reach out and you can learn more about what it's like to work at testable.com slash go in. So with that, thank you everybody. We're going to be here all week. You give you a sticker or whatever and just we'd really like to meet everyone that we can. So thanks again for your time. Thanks.