 Great. Well, I'm Ryan Sarama. I'm a football club. I'm glad to be here this morning. I'm the owner and CEO of Commerce Guys, a company that I founded in 2009 to do e-commerce on Drupal and here I am today, to deliver a keynote on the topic of doing well and doing good, which if you've been around is a theme that Dries Boitard, the creator of Drupal, has spoken about through the years and I'll kind of explain his perspective on how I set that plan out in my life and also a little bit of conflict that I feel about this mission. But just to introduce myself a little bit further, I'm from Greenville, South Carolina in the United States. I was supposed to get here yesterday morning thanks to slow flights and misconnections in the United States. I got here late last night instead. So I may pause for a nap session sometime in the middle of this presentation. I got into Drupal 12 or 12 years ago. At the time I was writing form HTML in my module files, if anybody remembers those days. The WordPress is still there, if you're curious. And I was also just a lone dude kind of hacking away in the apartment upstairs and since that time, Drupal's been good to me. It's afforded me the opportunity to grow a family. I have three beautiful children. I just celebrated my 10-year anniversary with my wife at Universal Studios to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. And like many of you here, Drupal is the thing that makes me, I guess. It challenges me. It's what has provided opportunity for me to grow professionally, to earn more than the minimum wage I was making as I wrote UberCard over the years. And it provides a future for my children. I think that's part of what really drives me to participate and just to go to work. I guess I'd do the same if I was slinging his breast to the Starbucks as well. So it's nice that I could do something that I enjoy a little bit more. Although I do actually have this crazy plan to retire from people in five years when I turn 40 and become a barista. That's my inverted goal. So I missed that part of college, so I'm hoping to kind of flip flop it here. But to the topic at hand, on doing well and doing good, Dries was responding several years ago to the, I guess, the criticism of himself and of Acre and his company that he founded in 2007, I believe, that they were kind of sucking all of the talent and the initiative and the wins out of the Drupal community. And that the business in some sense was antithetical to the contribution that we couldn't be both a mission driven open source project and community and create businesses that were focused on profit and revenue growth and hiring at the same time. And so he wrote a whole blog post that I do commend you to read because he is our project leader and so what he says tends to filter out downstream. That he started Acre precisely because he felt that open source and the communities that we build around it created opportunities for us to be like a change factor in the business community to create businesses that both do well and do good. And so I know that, you know, from their company and I'm not here to give a commercial for Acre the whole time but they do focus on giving back. And Dries will say that he built the company he did so that he could employ 12 people to work full time contributing to Drupal through the office of the CTO. And I think that many of us have a similar perspective. The reason that I'm re-growing commerce guys focused on Drupal commerce specifically is because the more that we sale our team the more people we can afford to dedicate full time just to contributing to Drupal. And I know that many of the companies in here have the same philosophy many of you give back just as much or more than the companies I've already mentioned and many of you individually sacrifice a lot to advance not just Drupal and not just helping our fellow man and woman here in the community but also to advancing free software, to advancing just the general principles of software freedom beyond Drupal itself. So there's a lot that we do to kind of make this work. So I'm going to kind of dissect Dries' statement just a little bit and I'm a grammar geek at heart. I studied Biblical Greek in Hebrew in college and I've forgotten every bit of it but I do remember the grammar and I always appreciated having a command of the English language because that's something that we can do in this room better than anybody else in the world. It's amazing. Okay, so Dries' formulates the statement with the conjunction of and. You can do well and do good. These two goals, I want to do better. I want to earn more money. I want to have a retirement someday. Five years from now. I'm going to become a great step. I want to provide a future for my children. I want to do well and I want to do good. I want to consider one another is better than myself. I want to help. I want to give back. And Dries is saying these things are not mutually exclusive when you use the word hand. But I found that you can also swap in a preposition if you want to and so that you can do well by doing good. If you're studying Greek, this would be the data of means that indicates the means by which I accomplish my objective. So I have grown a career around contributing to Drupal. The thing that I'm known for and the thing that I still do on a daily basis is help people learn how to use Drupal commerce. I think I might just still answer any required question here and here and again. But each step of the way in my career, like becoming a contributor, giving back, helping other people learn how to contribute, developing disciplines that allow people to work with me, aka code standards, documentation. I'm still not quite there in automated testing. But all of these things are giving back in ways that have helped me to grow personally and professionally. But what I've begun to feel lately is a different preposition. It's actually some opposition. I felt that I'm on a mission it feels like to do good in spite of or despite doing well. Because there's a real sense in my life that I felt even really critically last month that doing well has become the enemy of doing good. Because once you start to do well, you don't want to do less well. And if you don't want to do less well, then your energies and intentions get shifted toward maintaining this thing that you've built and I'll explain further on. But to explain, I'm going to go back and kind of just consider it fresh. How did I get to where I am? And I do this not just to show funny photos of me from 10 years ago, or to have my own little family slideshow up on the screen. But hopefully you can find your story somewhere in the midst of my story because it's a pretty common story in the Drupal community. That I think unlike many other software communities or open source communities in the world, many of us have found real opportunity by just contributing and giving back and building up this public thing that we all enjoy together. So try to find yourself in here. And if you can't, I apologize. My experience is not representative of everybody's. Alright, so I wanted to think, okay, why did I begin? How did I go from this guy to this guy? And it's funny too to think that 12 years ago I was short-haired and beardless and open source does a lot to change the way that you look as well as the way that you behave and grow. But I was fresh out of studying theology. I have no computer science background or training. It was a hobby that I developed, tacking on our Commodore 64 through the 80s and 90s, making computer games with my brother. And actually it would make computer games in the dorms and force everybody on my call to come and challenge me to red jumpy ball and glide fighters and a few other little things that I made that are still on the internet today. But, you know, actually Rob and I had a few things in common. Not that he likes to program, because he did not. He still doesn't program. He likes to help others. And we actually had moved into a neighborhood specifically with the mission to help other people. So it was kind of a depressed part of the city that we lived in, Louisville, Kentucky. And together we just got an apartment in a fairly dangerous place to be. This will come back up again, which is why I'm kind of describing it a little bit. That was kind of like the intense deadliest zip code in the United States for murders for a while. I knew who the drug dealers were on my blog. I knew when they were stealing my utilities. I knew when I would never see my friends again. Sorry. And we moved there because we wanted to help people. We wanted people to escape from that, the life that would lead them to dying from Oxycontin or gunshot wounds or whatever else that they were struggling with. And we could not see an impact. I mean, I lived there for eight years. And I think I have two friends that I know made it out from that area. But what I found out in contributing to open source and the Drupal and making this kind of the new center of where I would progress and develop myself was that I could quickly see impact. That was really quite the opposite of where I had been. And I think that that desire to impact other people and to really help other people positively change their lives through giving them software and the means to provide for themselves. Anyway, that I couldn't stop people out of their next year and dealt with my day-to-day basis really became rather a victim. I still love it. I'm still subscribed to the Stack Overflow tag for Drupal Congress and will come and answer questions. But I love seeing when people have answered those questions before I get there. So don't stop. But to illustrate just how fast this became part of where I was in 2006, I posted my first support request on Drupal.org. I'd never heard of version control systems at the time. I think my version control was an FTP server that I just occasionally like lost everything that I was working on. And I was trying to download the latest version of the e-commerce module which was the project that preceded UberCarts. And I didn't know how to do it other than clicking through the web-based browser and downloading the files individually. So I went to Drupal.org on my birthday actually in 2006 and I was like, hey, how do I get this? And Hina, who I don't even be here, I actually haven't seen him in years, but he helped me almost immediately. He looked at the timestamps. It was like 34 minutes later, some random stranger from Europe helped me answer my problem. I thought it was amazing. So a day later, and this is funny too, 834, 834, somebody else asked a question. I was like, I don't know the answer. I can help you do this. Boom. And Hina actually responded to this one as well. And so this individual was like, guys, you don't block me in both the things that I was having problems with. And I was like, oh, this is amazing. Suddenly this whole world opened up to me that I could use the internet to help other people learn how to use the software that could help them then develop careers that supported them and their families in the same way that I was beginning to find that I could do for mine, which was just amazing. And that eventually led into UberCarts. I was developing at the time with OS Commerce, the company that I worked at. This was kind of like the first big open-source e-commerce system. And did anybody use OS Commerce? Did anybody play MUDs, multi-user dungeons? So I actually had as many hands for MUDs as I did for OS Commerce. Those are the two things I was into at the time. And I actually hadn't really done a whole lot of MySQL or JavaScript or PHP, but when my boss said, hey, can you port OS Commerce into this Drupal thing, I think that content management just kind of in the future is like, oh, sure. Yeah, we can do this. Why not? I've never really built anything that powered any business, but I could probably create this incredibly complex rich business application. Sure, let's just do this thing. And so we really tongue-in-cheek called it UberCart because we were just being stupid. But by the time people knew it, as UberCart, it couldn't change the name. So you even like to tag on one cart to rule them all. It was just being like really like faux pretentious and stupid because Lord of the Rings would still be at the time. But we had a good time. And Lyla, you know, Lyla became part of the family. You know, he's there to my daughter's birth. We're still friends now. He's having children. And it's been, you know, really fun to see how these friendships have developed around the software of the time. I recently posted to my blog a similar story with Bojan Chavanovich, my co-maintain for Drupal Commerce. And like this is what Drupal is for me. It's like helping people, seeing people grow, being a part of their story to develop themselves and develop careers and learn more. And it's just been incredibly fun and rewarding. But I didn't encounter the Drupal community until a year later at Drupal County, Barcelona, where I just kind of showed up and gave a few talks about UberCard. And I thought nobody knew anything about this. But like all 400 people there had like used UberCard. And I just stepped into something I didn't mean to step into. I was actually dubbed Mr. UberCard at Barcelona. And then I actually went back and re-watched my presentation from Drupal County, Boston, which is the next slide. But in Boston, by that time, actually my life had sort of adopted the moniker Mrs. UberCard as well, Mr. and Mrs. UberCard. And we were just like helping people learn how to create e-commerce websites literally to run their businesses. Because like the Drupal agency market at the time was still pretty insurer. And we didn't have companies like Lollabot. Acre was just getting started around Boston. I'm sure, who had a Drupal agency in 2008? Were there many? One, yeah, two. Yeah, not a whole lot around. Some that were around were Rain City Studios, and others that have now gone funked and shut down. But I went back to watch this presentation because I remembered presenting at Drupal County, Boston. This was my first time in front of a room that had hundreds of people like this during this morning. And I wasn't like super nervous because again, part of my college had been like having to learn to do public speaking and all that kind of stuff. But I also was like completely free to be myself. I hadn't really been in the Drupal community before. Getting up on stage and presenting was really just like an avenue for self-expression, not a thing that I had to do to really make sure I had a business message or really presented my company in the best slide to open up new opportunities. Like, what was the thing about any of that? And I went back and watched my first slide. I literally stood up in front of her and I said, hey, before I even talk about anything this morning, I just want everybody here to know that I think people are more important than computers and relationships are worth more than dollars. And it's just like my value statement. Like the very first time that I spoke in a big DrupalCon crowd. And just remembering that this is where I was has been really kind of like convicting in the last month because I haven't started a session like that in a long time. And I don't know why. I guess I have some ideas, but it's just not that time in the presentation yet. So this is where I was in 2008. And then of course after DrupalCon Boston we founded DrupalCommerce to really support Uberpart at the time. I found that it was two friends that I met through Uberpart. We went skiing on a lake together and then became BFFs and started this commerce gas thing. Because why not? This is what you do when you're young and you don't have a $500 mortgage with no children. You have to be like, sure, I can start a company. Whatever, it's not a big deal. But we ran for a year. We started DrupalCommerce. We merged with the French team, the Drupal team of AF83. And then we did the whole like venture capital thing to kind of foster the adoption of DrupalCommerce and then build platform.sh. Which, yeah, is still going today. We've now separated out the businesses as of two years ago. And of course the main thing that we focused on was building DrupalCommerce, which is basically like taking Uberpart, which we did first for Drupal5, then for Drupal6, and then reimagining it for Drupal7 around the whole like fieldable entity system. And at the same time driving a lot of that change. Like DrupalCommerce was the first project that really showed that you could use the field API. To create your data model and then allow it to be configurable and remixed and whatever else. And organic groups followed. Red and CRM followed. A variety of other distributions and module projects followed. But then all contributed to this work. Some of our client projects that were built around this also resulted in Drupal Core improvements. So views is in CoreNow. And that has form functionality that was developed to support DrupalCommerce. The entity reference module is in Drupal8 CoreNow. That was born out of the DrupalCommerce build that we did for Cartier at Commerce Guys in Paris. And a lot of things from these projects we just were always trying to find, okay, how do we drive this back into the community. And even today, and this is probably pretty common for the room, but as a business owner, all of my contracts have guarantees that like any code that I write that improves or fixes an issue in an open source project must be contributable back. Like the client is saying, yes, you have my permission. And that's important. Like you do need that copyright release if you're doing work for somebody else. But it's important to secure those rights because that then is all part of doing good while we do well. Somebody is paying me to do my work, but I'm ensuring this is stuff that we can distribute back out and we can all benefit from it. And it shows in the success of DrupalCommerce. And that today, by my calculations, and these are reverse engineering some statistics that we get from Drupal.org and from payment gateway partners like PayPal and Authorize.net, like there's over one and a half billion dollars of transactions that flow through DrupalCommerce sites on an annual basis. And that's not like huge in the grand scheme of things. I'm sure Magento's up to like 10 billion by now or more. But, you know, it's still growing. And just last week, we saw the pay study come through Drupal.org where a Chinese fast food brand is now processing up to $1 billion a year on their own of, you know, food sales from all their stores because they use Drupal as the backend for their point of sale system and their fulfillment and payment resolution servers and everything else that they do. So like there's this incredible impact that's been born out of this community project and many like three years contributed to DrupalCommerce. Like I know that you have a lot of contributors like in the UK and Europe in general really appreciate it. Like it's all part of this story of doing good as we do well. And so here we are today with a Commerce Guys 3.0, if you will. Two years ago, I was able to separate the Commerce Guys and DrupalCommerce business out of Platform.sh and kind of relaunch it. And it was just myself, Boyan Javadovic and Macklom and my co-maintainers at the time. We've been going up to eight people, two of them are fully dedicated to contributing back to Drupal. Even as a three-person team we were like the number two or three contributor to Drupal if you looked at the listings on Drupal.org because we just have prioritized giving back and contributing from the get-go. And we have some economics that help us obviously. We had a 10-year foundation of doing Uber, Cart and DrupalCommerce to build on coming into the business. So I know that it's not like feasible for every new Drupal company to just dedicate somebody full-time right off the bat. But it's feasible for many of us to do more. And today, now we've been in business two years. We have our sort of war chest, our rainy day fund tucked away in the bank which if you aren't doing that as a business I highly recommend it and I highly recommend it because it's your free financial tip. But we've now scaled the point where we have additional revenue left over. And for the first time now in two years we've been like, okay, how can I use this to now continue to foster the adoption of DrupalCommerce which means helping more people use DrupalCommerce. Because at the end of the day, just because there are more sites in Drupal.org doesn't mean there's more money in our pocket. But it does mean that our impact is continuing to grow and grow. So to sum it all up, but I personally and to commerce guys corporately have prospered and benefited by giving back and really by making that a priority. And of course Kickstart 2.x was just a complete cost sink. We probably spent around a half million dollars developing what became the number one Drupal distribution purely because we wanted to help people get into DrupalCommerce easier. These tools needed to exist but they're expensive. They take a lot of time and energy and investment and we were able to dedicate people to it for months and months on end. But that investment and giving back then resulted in our ability to reach out to technology partners and to tell Amazon and to tell PayPal and Authorize and Mailchimp, hey, there's a thing here. You guys should come invest in it and so now if you go to DrupalCon in Nashville you'll see many of these people are sponsors of the event and they've all come to help us kind of grow the pie again. So we've prospered and benefited by giving back but that success feels threatening to the mission. And like last month was kind of a bad month for me and I don't know why. It's just like a lot of things kind of came to a head. And like I could probably point out some funny things. Oh, Bitcoin slid and so I lost you know $20,000 in imaginary dollars or something but like it wasn't Bitcoin it wasn't turning 35 and having an early midlife crisis. It wasn't the two all-nighters that I pulled in one week and then the one the week following and then the one last night to get here. You know like but it was some combination of the things that it wasn't the events themselves that led me to become interested but it was rather the events highlighted and gave me like room to think really soberly about like okay who am I becoming what's what's going on here. And I just want to kind of illustrate using my garden. Has anybody you know tilt you know fresh grass to create a garden before? Yeah it's really rewarding like I really love the end product to be able to see like wow this is the thing like I'm gonna be able to put tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers actually we never do get with cucumbers or squash I don't know why but we get the blight but like we'll grow so much in this little patch you know it's 100 square feet but we'll have more than enough for our family, for our neighbors it's gonna be amazing right and you quickly come to find out that well okay the fence wasn't high enough to keep this animal out the rabbits found a way in the birds have eaten the seed and the weeds the grass is coming back and suddenly like just maintaining this open patch of land where I hoped to grow produce to benefit my family and my neighbors like I had to spend all my energy just maintaining this thing and now if I had a picture of this garden it's depressing it's just like a tarp that we put down to try to kill the weeds from last year but like you know the ambition the mission the reasons that we built this thing like they didn't change but maintaining the thing kind of became what we had to do we had to spend our time and energy and effort just maintaining what we built otherwise like it would just be consumed again right and this is what I feel like a business is like you can grow it to eight people but suddenly like my whole day is okay that's in all the invoices have I reviewed all the contracts have I paid everybody this month Andras you're a saint here's two months pay because I forgot you last month I need an invoice for you because I think you'd like to get paid eventually too right oh and look at this I have three events coming up and I haven't finalized my logos yet I need to print t-shirts and suddenly like all these things come up not because like you just like want to be concerned with the mechanics of running a business but you have to do them or your business goes away and this is what I tell my wife whenever I'm looking online to get it I don't feel like anybody's pressuring me to do this but I feel like if I don't do this none of us eat next month and that would be really sad and so like just maintaining the garden has become like the thing that I have to focus on which then of course decreases the amount of time and energy that I have to do good not just within the Drupal community but hey what about within my own family because I can carve out type of family time you know 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. the sacrosanct I'll be there for dinner I'll be there for you know songs and prayers and bedtimes and then you know maybe go either back to work or trash in the couch and watch parks and rec with my wife you know any of the above but you know there's always more to do and I'm not the kind of person I guess you would ever say like I feel stressed you know I just don't really have to use that in my vocabulary but what I have found out is I am the kind of person that will say things like I'm just letting so many people down I'm just dropping the ball I should be doing better and there's just more to be done and I don't know how I'm going to escape from this hole and am I using my way and it's like it's easy you know it's easy to get lost in the weeds which here doesn't just mean details it means the things that actually threaten the mission and it's not just like mechanics of running a business it's also things like since when did I make decisions about what I would do in the event you know based on how that might profit me when did I respond to business relationships out of fear that if I like pissed somebody off I might lose a hundred thousand dollars in revenue from my company next year or create an enemy who could just consume me because they have a bigger budget than I do or something when did I let those become the things that directed how I spent my time when did I decide that like I had to have a beer or cocktail at every meal and when did going on business trips become like an habitual opportunity to have three or four cocktails instead of just a drink of conference after work and was I like on a trajectory of becoming an alcoholic or used alcohol to deal with the stress that I didn't even know how to identify I was really feeling these things last month and I'm not Catholic but I gave up looking for a lens because alright let's just cut it out to make sure that this is not the thing that is becoming to define me and in a way that I'm coping with like the weeds that are actively trying to tear down the mission of doing well and doing good and just like I kind of really just came to the end of myself last month wondering what could I possibly do to reverse this because I hadn't really forgotten I guess like how I got there in the first place so that's kind of what you know brings me to the main question like how can we maintain our values, how can we not lose it as we grow because we do want to do better I want everybody in here to do well to advance in their career, to lead teams to start businesses that succeed, I went to a conference one time and heard a guy kind of stand up and complain to the audience he's like there's money up there that belongs to you and you should be earning it and it's a very young hoe capitalist mindset but the reality is if that and it does come into our companies and we scale our businesses that does give us who are mission driven and mission focused and focused on doing good while doing well it gives us the ability to do more it gives dreams the ability to hire more people to dedicate them to giving back it gives us philanthropic capacities as donors and members of other nonprofits that we're part of to do more with them and for them to give more away so like I do want us to do well and I want us to do well by doing good I don't know if it's just to be coincidental in my life for sure and again I do have a background in theology and so whenever I'm like the things that come up in the background of my mind are these words that honestly we're haunting because I feel like I lost my script for a while and it's what is a profit a man to gain the whole world a forfeit a soul what would be the good of me becoming the best me in business leadership that I could be if I forgot like I got into this because I just really liked to help other people learn and do better for themselves so that's kind of where we are and so I'd like to just kind of make some observations then invite feedback because I don't have it figured out I'm still in the middle of trying to reset myself to reset my company to reset things with my family so that their expectations are different and that they can expect and get better from me but the first thing that I remember is that the reason that I learned things the reason I was motivated to learn how to be a better developer the reason I was motivated to establish disciplines that made it easier for people to collaborate with me in my code collaborating on a roadmap all these things are soft skills in a sense but those really matter in the open source community the reason I did that was because learning gave me the ability to help people better it wasn't just because it gave me the ability to now go forward in my knowledge in my ivory tower and charge more for my services admit that I could actually help more people better admit that I could write better new bugs next time and admit that I could incorporate people into my development process so that they could do better and they could grow and I recently posted my blog a birthday message to Boyan Javanov which I mentioned this earlier but seeing his trajectory and maybe this was part of what caused me to reflect on my last eight years just remembering his story because his birthday was a few days after mine and eight years ago he was my Google Summer of Code mentee and I was able to help him learn Drupal as he wrote in the Philean module for Drupal Commerce and then brought it into Commerce Guys saw him develop, we'd point him into the Kickstart 2.x project and then eventually after Drupal Connoisseur I made him the project lead for Drupal Commerce 2.x because Frank Vales burnt out of recreating the e-commerce system for every Drupal version the year after year and he's done so much better at it than I ever could have and so seeing him develop has been fantastic and knowing that he was about to develop and not benefiting him and he's trained now himself more agencies and more teams and more people than I ever could have myself and he continues to do it to this day, it's fantastic so as we learn and acquire knowledge and acquire skills think, how can I wield this to help other people in the Drupal community? Maybe better, how can I help somebody else? How can I go from posting my first support request in Drupal.org one day to then giving support the next day without anybody having brought me into it just because that seemed like the natural thing to do and that was unlike the old support form Stack Exchange is far and away a better venue for giving support than the old forums were, but how can you do that? So think this as the developer as the new Drupal developer the new Drupal user site builder in whatever capacity you serve your learning skills that you can use to help other people and then as you grow as a leader you stop acquiring as many technical skills I've maybe learned a few new things over the last few years of course I had an object oriented PHP along with everybody else so that we could all adopt symphony and get into Drupal 8 I learned the R for a little while to run a side project selling analytics to power companies and it wouldn't be so successful we mocked all that and I think it's just not as much as it used to be but what I am learning is like leadership skills I'm learning a lot of things about what to do and not do in contracts if you need to know what not to do come talk to me afterwards but I'm also having to learn like really aggressively learn about my own shortcomings because the blocker to Drupal Commerce's advancement today isn't does Ryan know how to use Git or CVS or whatever it's actually like does Ryan know how to consistently get up at 8am and work until 5pm and I get sidetracked by Twitter, Facebook and the news does Ryan know how to stay motivated even as his business is doing well and he doesn't have to wonder where his next paycheck is going to come from because his business has but how do you stay motivated once you actually have achieved enough success to stop working for a year it's actually like a really hard question to answer because you do have to find a new source of motivation it's not just to earn a paycheck because I have a mortgage payment that if I don't make this month I won't pay next month but like there is some intrinsic motivation that you have to learn to develop that is just like a new experience for me and sure that it will be for many of you as you continue to grow as a leader and then what you have to do once you do come into a leadership position of a small company of a team with a larger company is to really work hard to free your team up to do more good in aggregate than you ever could do on your own this is like the power of multiplication this is why Dries may not write code for Drupal anymore but he has all of these different teams and working groups and various people and initiative leads and people that are contributing in writing code and actually even many of the initiative leads and the court-mitters don't even write the code anymore but he has found ways to multiply himself so that his team does a lot more good in aggregate than he ever could if he just were still that single guy in a dorm room wearing his red sombrero you know the picture hacking away on Drupal so this is a mindset shifter it's not just about the bottom line it's not just about making my team more efficient and being more profitable and within my company at Commerce Guys we actually wrote the financial model assuming that each of our full-time billable resources would only build 24 hours a week and I think it's probably typical for a services company to peg that at 32 to 35 hours which to me sounds impossible because when I really try hard to put time on the clock I can't really get past 6 or 7 hours a day so I can imagine being in an environment even where it's like 40 hours a billable but I guess I'll just be more disciplined now I've seen me establish that's a problem for me but it's like a mindset shift not only do I need to free these people I need to free up Boyan and Matt and Andrash and Jonathan and Lisa and Milan and Steven to do more good than I could do if I was just doing everything myself that requires leadership development in its own right because I have to be able to hain things off of them but I also just need to make that objective of the business and so I think about now as a business owner what can I do to make sure that doing good doesn't fall by the wayside as we do well and what can I do not just to make the equation do well and do good but also do well by doing good and really it is to define this is basic business stuff if you went to business school but it's actually really hard to implement a practice but it's just to lead with core values to actually define core values commerce guys didn't do that until I took it over we established core values and set a mission for ourselves because we've never done this before the mission was just I know this big money with triple commerce as a business and so that allowed us to make decisions that actually weren't necessarily in our best interest that actually turned into platform.sh and triple commerce slowly after fitting until we were able to buy our way out and we create what we were building for us our two primary core values are impacting initiative and so in every proposal that I sent out I'm reinforcing to the market I'm reinforcing to my clients that that's why we're here like we want to have an outsize impact not just on your organization but also within our open source community this is what drives us and motivates us and we're twining around to the idea of adding some additional eyes but it feels kind of kitschy after a while like oh yeah it's initiative and impact and integrity and iteration so at least we know we have two core values and we can lead with those until we figure out the rest and we're kind of trying to figure out which is the statement as well but this actually comes back again to go full circle to another blog post that I'll come and do from Dries that I think was on the hard choice this guest to make every day because there's only so many things that you can do each day and part of what I don't identify as stress but what is stress is knowing that there are good things that I should be doing that I'm not doing on a day after day after day and so he actually wrote a whole post talking about it from his perspective and his solution is to basically start each day thinking about how you could optimize the things they did that day for impact, passion and purpose and trust that these things will align and that's what I'm trying to do is to optimize the business for impact even to the extent of setting short-term and long-term goals for us as a company that are not revenue based so it would be one thing to say I want Congress guys to do a million dollars next year 1.2 the year after that 1.32 I'm doing the math wrong but that's a 10% growth or 20% growth year-to-year that's the natural way to plan a company and there's some sense in which as a business owner you do have to plan revenue or else you'll end up with less revenue next year but what if our business goals were actually oriented around impact things that could appear to be vanity metrics but are not vain because they actually tie to real world impact like things like module usage for us and maintainers of Drupal commerce and once instead is the epitome of vanity metric because how many sacks are recorded in Drupal.org that they're using in the commerce module is a meaningless number when you consider that probably at least in the 20% of those are development environments and staging environments that are pinging Drupal.org as well but if I think about it as well actually this still represents tens of thousands of businesses that are able to run because we maintain this open-source software together that's really incredible how can I say well next year what we want to measure our impact in this fashion is the number of teams that we've trained so that other Drupal agencies are building and launching successful 2.x sites or is it just not even related to the project at all? Is it related to the amount of dollars we're able to give away to free software initiatives or to shy laws initiative to fight against human trafficking in India and other things so the development of women in India can be optimized for impact in those ways as business owners and leaders and I'm not just tied to revenue I'm just tied to are we making more money for ourselves and our team we want to make more money because that lets us multiply our impact but impact is the goal not a bigger house or anything so that's the end for me you know I've asked the question of myself over and over again what does it profit me to gain the whole world and forfeit my soul how do I keep the reason I'm doing the things that I'm doing to keep that my driving force and I'm just at the start of rediscovering that journey so I appreciate your encouragement to this end if you see me screwing it up call me out I'll retweet you but I also I'm happy to field questions until 10.30 but also we really invite feedback from people who have found ways to make impact the primary driver for their business not expressed as dollars and cents but expressed as kind of potential or secondary things really curious to hear how it's working for anybody else so we do have microphones if there are questions if not we can also just end it there this was a question about that thing about doing doing well by doing good I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how because I can see how in the early days when you come back and do a lot you're paying for yourselves you're more likely to come to your company but it feels like the more you contribute the more you're marketing more successful something like commerce is the more other companies can start doing it but they don't have to pay for generating commerce like you have to do with the full-time purpose so it seems like this is kind of a weird thing where the more successful you are from a business point of view in the duty community the more you can advise yourself from a business point of view or is there something that I'm missing and there are other ways that you can do well by doing good past that initial stage you really hit the nail right in the head if you do carve out a subset of Drupal like Drupal commerce this new industry that you're developing how many millions of dollars go toward Drupal commerce projects today any other business worth their salt is going to see a year and a million dollars a year after if I make that in my image and yeah if you're running a mission-driven team that's small like we were literally three people at the start of 2016 and we're trying to regrow now since separating from platform like it's easy to be consumed and I think that that actually that tension is part of what caused me to have this crisis like wow if I don't grow the business and find ways to multiply my team like we will lose the ability to build ourselves by doing good and I don't have a great answer for that because I think that's the tension that I feel I guess part of the reason we can do it is because we do practice like really conservative financial planning and expectations right so I know like 24 hours a week that's pretty easy to achieve whenever we start the business my budget for that first year is okay if we can just build 100 hours a month as a three person team so we weren't trying to grow outside of our means and then also the course of the last year we've actually done a lot better than I anticipated so we've been able to save up or make a day fund where we could just like if suddenly like the bottom dropped out of my business like we'd have like six months to figure it out and so I think that there is some sense like what's the old parallel like the ant and the grasshopper and the ant works all winter and stored foods that when winter comes it doesn't starve and the grasshopper you know started outside in the cold poor guy but by just kind of being a bit more conservative that has freed us from some of the normal things that might drive a business to make bad decisions to saddle themselves with debt you know by making payroll on a line of credit instead of having a rainy day fund you could tap into to take on contracts that you shouldn't take on because you just need the money and then they turn into a horror show which you know I still do on occasion on accident but so that's probably like the job of the business owner in this environment is how do I free my team up to just focus on doing good and giving back and then I find the way to tie that to increasing revenues so we can increase our footprint and scale our services and kind of shore up the breach if you will and prevent it from becoming a problem so not a good answer but that's the pain we have a question up front here I just wanted to ask I just wanted to ask to what extent do you make the ideals and values you've been talking about part of the company as a whole which is all of the employees the way the company as a whole behaves not just you so that's like a great question and it's something that we've been able to do really intentionally as we've rebuilt because I knew that my two core team members Matt and Boyan were aligned with me already and then they all they're men of high integrity they're men who really do value impact they do take initiative and they also value giving back and see their own careers in the same light as I see mine it's like really like a communal community success and they wanted to give back so we set these core values in mission so every day for 30 minutes we connect this is part of why I have a buildable expectation set lower so we can afford to connect on a daily basis for 30 minutes and we've done that as we've gone so we now have 8 people every day 30 minutes where we get in and have our stand up and talk about what we're doing and at the top of the week we kind of take turns every week somebody will have to restate the mission and somebody will have to restate the values and explain them from their perspective on what impact looks like changes from month to month as if things happen but we're always tying back the previous week to those values and then we also end the week with props so at the end of the week we're reinforcing the rest of the team as we pass the microphone off to the next person in the video call what did Steven do well today what has Lisa really done well today and make sure that we're reinforcing within the team these things matter I appreciate you people are more important than computers and relationships are worth more than dollars and then whenever we're hiring people I make it part of my pitch and they're like hey we'd really love to have you on our team we see you as somebody who takes initiative values giving back and contributing to Drupal here's who we are this is our mission these are our values and hopefully they would select themselves out if they don't match those values but we've used them in hiring decisions and whether or not to retain people and so on and then of course last thing I mentioned like our proposals also restate this and our clients understand this about it so we really have worked to make part of our DNA and now I want to do the next part of that work which is to actually craft a business plan that isn't just dollars and headcount on a spreadsheet but is measurable and growing impact that even grows at a faster rate than our top line revenue I hope that answers that key any other questions? yes I just want to say thanks for being such an open presentation and I think everyone it's really hard running a business as you just said but you've been so open about it I think there's lots of agency agents in the room you've probably gone through some of the things you're going through but maybe you wouldn't have been so open and it's really heartwarming to hear some of the things you've said I think you have like business development logistics finance everything I mentioned projects in a group clients tell me sometimes stop emailing us at three in the morning it's not really helpful I'm not going to go here and I was just looking out in the audience I used to be I hope I've improved as a boss and business owner I can see people I used to work with in the audience I mean Paul and John and probably John Durantz there's those people in the community I've worked with over the years and still do fortunately so I know we've only got two minutes I'm going to wrap this up the reason the question is just an attitude for sharing it and I think there's two statements really one is you'll definitely get through it there's a saying from a film that calls well in the end well then it's not the end and I've got the other thing I was going to say but I'll do that again