 Well, we have up to the last fireside chat, and thank you all for hanging out. If you've spent more than 10 minutes with me, you've heard me talk about this, our next guest. I am a big fan of the work that Home Depot is doing, particularly the work that Home Depot is doing with the orange method. And so I got real excited when I was able to convince Anthony to come join me on stage and talk a little bit about orange method. Anthony is the technology director of software engineering and enablement for Home Depot. But most importantly, he's the one that runs the orange method program at Home Depot. And so instead of me advertising it and selling it like it's mine, which I usually do, I thought I'd bring the person that actually run it on stage to talk a lot about it and educate you on the program. So Anthony, come join us on stage. Anthony actually does it, not me, even though I like to pretend that it's my job. We love that you sell it. Thank you for that. There's a lot of people out there that are really convinced that it's actually my job, because I talk about it all the time. We love it. But I'd like to educate everybody here on the work that orange method is doing, but maybe we start with explaining what it is. What it is, yeah. So orange method, plain and simple, is Home Depot's technology boot camp. So three years ago, Home Depot found itself well down the path of digital adaptation. We had fundamentally changed how we were building products. We were adopting new technologies and tools at a rate that the company had never seen before, and the obvious challenge then showed up. How do we ensure the success of our associates through training, and how do we ensure that they can continue to grow as the company's technology is growing? We had tried traditional means. We had brought in academia. We had brought in vendors. We offered self-paced online learning solutions. But ultimately, nothing stuck. And at the same time, we were recruiting from boot camps. We were finding unbelievably skilled talent from the boot camps. And the aha moment happened. Let's create our own. Let's invest in this. So orange method would be a bi-associate for-associate technology boot camp. We launched our first cohort of 15 associates January of 2017. Since then, we've graduated 91 associates through the transformational cohort program. But we've also grown substantially. So we're now two campuses, one in Atlanta and one in Austin, 30 full-time instructors. So our instructor's jobs are full-time to build and offer curriculum, which is kind of unheard of when you try to build a program like this. So we've been excited in that. And then a year into it, we had to adapt again. And Home Depot, like many of my peers today, has been on a massive hiring initiative. And through traditional means, you're not going to hit the numbers we were trying to hit. So we looked internal. Where can we find orange-blooded associates that understand our business who have a genuine desire to change their skills? And we looked to the field. So we went to the stores. And we found your frontline associates working at the cash register, working in our distribution centers, and we gave them the opportunity. And out of those 91 I mentioned earlier, 30 of them have come straight from field roles. So we took someone making potentially minimum wage. And now they're a full-time salary to associate doing full-stack web development. Yes. So unbelievably rewarding program. It's been a cool journey for me to be on over these two years. We've got a phenomenal team. And it just speaks to the investment that Home Depot continues to make in its associates. It is. Now you can all see why I'm so excited about this program all the time. In fact, when I often get asked what is a successful transformation look like, and I talk about Home Depot, which a lot of analysts are especially like, really, Home Depot? Is that just where you're going with that? And I'm like, absolutely. And I talk about the orange method, because one of my soap boxes that I care around is about rescaling and upskilling workforce. And I think orange method is really emblematic of what that program could look like. But you started in 2017. And you've started kind of growing it slowly. And a lot of people will ask. One of the stats you actually mentioned earlier this week was the failure rate. And a lot of people ask, OK, well, I'm sure you have a high failure rate or people drop out. But actually, I was really shocked by the number. It's four. So four associates have not been successful through the program. And actually, two of those four self-opted out. So they realized early on into the 16-week immersive program that technology just wasn't the career path they wanted to go down anymore. So we evaluate on a weekly basis both soft skills as well as technical skills to help the associate make that determination. But when you look at boot camps, numbers like that just don't happen. So it speaks to the work the team's done from both an assessment standpoint, but also nurturing and mentoring the associates that come through this. Technology is changing faster today than it ever has before. And as an enterprise, if we didn't offer something like this, we would not be able to continue to grow. In fact, you've actually expanded the program beyond just the boot camp. And you've actually expanded the training program too. How many people now are going through it? Yeah, so the offering beyond just the transformational cohort now includes workshops. We've had 800 associates go through workshops. So that's a shorter course, a shorter duration curriculum. Everything from the beginning courses of JavaScript, Go, Python, to things as advanced as TensorFlow. So very exciting to see that happen. And then the thing I don't know that I've shared with you yet, you go a little off script, orientation. So when you hire 1,000 new associates in one calendar year into technology, you have to worry a little bit about what that's going to do to your overall culture. So Orange Method saw that as a challenge. We started a two week curriculum. Every new associate comes through Orange Method, and they learn about how Home Depot builds products. The second week of that for our software engineers is solely focused on CF and how to actually work within and deploy. So within their first week, they actually deployed a production. So we insured two. Wait, one more time. Their first week, they're deploying to production. They're deploying to production. So we've ensured that we're bringing individuals in. They learn our culture. They learn what it means to be an apron at Home Depot. But then on top of that, they have the technical skills to be valuable week three. So they land on their team, and there's no, now my team has the responsibility of ramping up. We've been able to do that all under the Orange Method brand. Which is such a phenomenal way. And by the way, that 1,000 number you just casually mentioned, you actually did that last calendar year, right? Correct. 1,000 new technology associates in one calendar year. Orange Method was a big component of that. Our internship program was another large component of it. And then just drastically changing how we view talent acquisition. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because actually, that's something I'm also quite passionate about. It's I think we have a very narrow aperture, the way we think about the talent we're going to hire as part of our transformation process. And you've really kind of expanded that. Can you walk us through a little bit about how you think about that? Yeah. First and foremost, we let our culture kind of speak for itself and sell itself. When you get to talk about programs like Orange Method and you get to show the investment that Home Depot's continuing to make in its associates, that sells itself. But beyond that, the technology is the easy part. And I think you said that day one, evaluating technical skills is something that we're all doing, right? We have to do it day in, day out as we're bringing talent in. It was understanding the softer skills, the collaboration, the empathy that a potential candidate could bring to the table. So we changed our interview process. Interviews weren't one-on-one interactions anymore. Candidates would come together in a group and we'd throw them into logic problems together. They weren't being evaluated on if they could be successful in those logic problems and solve it, but rather did one individual kind of take over the conversation and speak over the rest of the group? Were they listening to each other? Were they working together? Were they listening to each other's ideas? And success there meant then the one-on-one interaction with a potential hiring manager. So the assessment itself had to change. The sourcing had to drastically change. I mentioned boot camps earlier. The boot camp community and what they've been able to establish is something truly remarkable. They teach the technical skills, but you oftentimes have an individual coming from a completely different skill set and a completely different background wanting to invest in themselves over a very short period of time to be successful for the long term. And the diversity that we've been able to find from the boot camp community is unparalleled. So big, big supporters of my friends over at General Assembly, Tech Talent South. They've been phenomenal in partnership with us. That's amazing. And the diversity number. Home Depot at large does a really great job of building an inclusive and diverse culture. But I believe the, do you have the stats off the top of your head? I don't. I would say our cohorts are surprisingly diverse compared to the rest of the technology population. And I think that's largely from the sourcing that we've done throughout the stores. But every time I go to your offices in Atlanta, it's always palpable, the culture that you've built there and the values you've built there. And I get really, really excited every time I go there and I tell my team, oh my god, we have to talk about Home Depot for like a week. Because I get really excited around the way that you have values and you espouse them and you're very clear on them and they're everywhere. But you can also tell that everyone there lives those values. And that always really shines through. So I want to thank you for coming. But most importantly, this is something that I'm super excited about. And I know that this is only two years in. But when anyone asks me, what does this look like going forward? What are programs going to look like? And how are we going to build the technologies of the future? I really, this is the first thing that always comes to mind. It's what you're doing at Orange Method. We appreciate that. So any advice that I could give to my peers here? I would say, strategy-wise and strategically, I would adopt a methodology around continuous learning. It's easy to say that this is how we build our teams and this is how we nurture and grow. But the reality is you have to do it. You have to get out of the idea of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It's part of your culture. It's part of how you grow and mentor. And then tactically, it's building an organization or at least a team. Orange Method was a two-person team when we started me and one instructor. And we've now grown to something much larger. But when you make that commitment, you'll see everything else grow around it. Wise words, wise words. Well, everyone, Anthony is going to be around here all the rest of the day. So if you want to come up to him and ask him about the program. But Anthony, thank you so much for coming out and sharing this with us. Thank you. Thank you.