Make sales not features (Interview)

24:42I tell them it's a terrible product. Well, I, myself is, I worked for a religious organization in China for 10 years, Jared. And one of the things I decided when I moved back was that I was going to curse more and I've been wildly more successful than I anticipated. Um, but, um, Yeah, I mean, I end up all over their ideas. And but about 30 % of the time or 20 % of the time, I'm like, wow, this is actually really interesting. And here's three or four companies I think might need that right now. And I go make those intros, those turn into meaningful conversations for those companies. And that company comes back and says, can we hire you?

25:15You did that really fast and really easy. and, um, you know, my goal is not to make sales. I don't want to be sales guy. Uh, but I can go in and get those first few product feedback conversations. I can help you build a sales team. I can help you build a marketing team. I can help you understand what you're doing wrong. Um, but even then, I mean, honestly, a huge percentage of what these guys are doing wrong is like, they don't know that you got to show up on time to an interview, right? It's the little things you got to communicate. Yeah. Because you've been an engineer in a hole where the thing that was valued was that you outputted code and you were really good at that.

25:50And that's different than what it takes to run a company and to get people raw rod behind you and get people excited about the vision for where you're going and give people the freedom to go build on their own. And I'm talking for a long time here as I tend to do. No, that's fair. I'm having lots of thoughts. One of them was, have you seen the episode of friends where Joey tells Phoebe that she cannot commit a selfless deed? And so the entire episode, she goes about trying to have a selfless act. because I asked her about, is it pure altruism? Which is a stupid question because there's no such thing as pure altruism.

26:21Because it's like, no, but you try to do a selfless act and somehow it comes back to you anyways. Yes. She ends up carrying a baby on behalf of somebody but realizes she's going to feel good about it. Yeah, I mean, she felt good at the end of the day. It's like, no. And she was very angry. I love that particular setup. The other one, as you say, you don't want to be a sales guy, but I'm trying to figure out what kind of guy you want to be. Are you, do you like zero to one and then move on? Are you just trying to help out where you can? Like what part of it excites you? So pseudo sales is always going to be a part of my job, right?

26:55I'm always going to be talking to people. It's always going to lead to sales conversations. When there's a lot of times I end up at a new company and somebody in my network pings me and says, hey, that's kind of interesting. Can I talk to you about it? And it turns into a sales conversation, right? I don't like being sales guy because then I have to hassle my network, you know, check in, follow up. And so I usually I want to hire somebody else that's going to do those kinds of things. So it doesn't have to be Kendall hassling somebody. I don't want to hassle. I don't mind if a salesperson who works with me or for me is hassling the hell out of one of my friends.

27:28That's their job. But if it's affecting my relationship with that person, that's a problem, if that makes sense. So what do I want to do? I mean, that's the messiest part. That's the hardest part for me every time Jared is because what excites me is just solving business problems, right? Like I like getting in, finding out that there's things that are a mess and just going and helping solve it. So, I mean, to give you an example, like in the last two days, I've written job descriptions. I've come up with prospecting lists. I've interviewed people for, you know, marketing roles, for operating roles, for sales roles.

28:06I'm interviewing for a CEO right now. I'm, you know, there's, I touch every single part of the business because I'm comfortable in almost all of it. I'm not going to go review a PR. That's the one spot that I'm probably not going to be useful. Although at previous company that I was running, I would about every year go issue a PR just to scare all the engineers. You know, there's always something small, like a typo or something in documentation, but So you have your spirits company, but I'm thinking, why not apply your talents as something that you're building for yourself or with somebody versus helping other people?

28:43Is this one of the things you do is building this spirits company? So, yeah, so there's a bunch of things I do. So what I get paid for directly, I work with a cloud company called Sivo out of the UK. I work with an AI company called Tensor Lake out of San Francisco. and then I'm on the board of a company called FusionAuth. That's, you know, think an Auth0 competitor. But then I run a couple of things myself. So there's the Spirits company I have a business partner with. We make a gin and a whiskey and we're looking at some other interesting things that we may do next. Had a really crazy opportunity come up yesterday that it's too early to talk about, but it's exciting.

29:23I run a network of CTOs globally called CTO Lunches. Uh, so we have about 1600, 1700 CTOs worldwide. We put on lunches all over the world. So that's nice because that is a way that builds the network. Honestly, what I like about it is I get to fly places on the company dime, eat lunch on the company dime, and now I'm in the liquor business. So liquor's, you know, a company expense and, you know, there's all these different things, But CTO Lunches is another business that I own and run. I co-own. But I do think that CTO Lunches has the capacity to get to – if everybody fired me tomorrow, I think within six months I could make enough money off of it to make it my full-time gig.

30:07But I like touching other things enough that I'm not walking away. Yeah. So how does that work make money? We'll come back to that. There's one last thing that I do also is I do have a advisory group called grow big advisors, where I've paired together with a handful of friends to do this sort of startup advising. They have slightly different skill sets than me. One's a sales leader. One's an engineering leader. One's got the marketing background. So it's different, different things, but in exchange for a small bit of equity, we provide this kind of just advisory rather than hands-on. So that's a little different.

30:42So those are the things that I'm building for me. So you have a lot of stuff going on and you're not just helping other people with their businesses. I stick my fingers in a lot of pies. Yes.

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32:43So why the spirits pie? So we were, I had just come back into town after some time away and I was meeting with some, with four old friends and we were sitting around at a brewery talking about why can't I buy a bottle of whiskey called I did sock too. And all I got was this bottle of whiskey or, uh, you know, the list of names was immediately very long. And, um, the Rishi, my business partner and I stuck around after the other two guys left and Rishi goes, well, Kendall, I, I think this is maybe a good idea. And I said, well, Rishi, I think this is a good idea. And he goes, well, I'm not messing around.

33:23I said, well, I'm not messing around. I said, well, I kind of think we should do it. I said, well, I kind of think we should do it. And the next day I was on the phone with a distillery saying, Hey, how do I buy a whole bunch of liquor if I want to do this? And we ended up in a partnership and it's, it's worked out. So do you think that like targeting, so I've noticed this as a trend, which is why I think it's a, probably a good business and be a relatively easy one to get into is, you know, every celebrity has their tequila or their whiskey or their gin named after to them or whatever it is. It's like branded alcohol for this celebrity and aviation jet.

33:56I'm Ryan Reynolds. Thank you, Jared. I didn't want to make the connection, but since you did, I, I, we can also talk about my football team in a little bit, but anyway, sorry, keep going. No. So I was just, I've noticed that I'm like, well, this must be lucrative and relatively easy because you're basically just branding, aren't you? You're, you're not, you're not opening a distillery and you just said you went and bought a bunch of whiskey, right? Yeah. Well, so, so the, whiskey and the gin are made for us. It's not white labeled something else. So a lot of places will go, man, you don't want, I don't know if you want to get me talking about liquor, but we can talk about liquor.

34:30So the vast majority of distilleries are buying a base liquor from Indiana because that's where a huge percentage of the distilleries are for hashtag reasons. The alcohol laws in America will blow your mind that are left over from prohibition. So anyways, um this our distillery makes it from grain so uh it's not a base spirit that's just distilled again nine more times like tito's does and then brags about it nine times distilled how bad was what you started with that you had to distill it nine times uh and it's distilled once because it's a fantastic product um anyways and it's made for us it's a recipe for us so it's different it's contract distilling rather than just white labeling something else.

35:14Um, but, uh, but yes, that it's, I did not open a distillery. I do not want to open a distillery. I just handle once it's in the bottle. Uh, and I, well, I have to buy the bottle, but in distributions, a gigantic pain in the butt because, uh, because of American liquor laws. So, so I'm thinking then like your, I mean, And of course I'm target market, right? Cause I'm a nerd and like generative a rye like lands perfectly on me, but there's not very many. It's also really good whiskey. Well, that's fine. That's all well and good. But the naming is what I care about. Like you're, you're targeting alcohol at technical people.

35:53Basically, isn't that like a small cross section of the world? Are you? Well, that's why one bottle is$1 ,400. What's your tan? Oh, okay. No, I'm kidding. It's, it's. You just sell it to your CTO lunches. That's your entire market. The whiskey is$125 and the gin is$95. So it's not cheap. It is a luxury item. It is a very, very good item. So let me be clear about a couple of things. One, I would have totally done this exact same thing with a terrible distillery and a terrible end product because I think the marketing has legs. We have a fantastic product that I can't believe how good the product is.

36:30I actually think the gin is the best gin I've ever had. and I am a gin snob. And I don't feel like I can say that about my own gin, but it is so very good. And I can say it because I didn't make it. I had some input into the recipe, but that's all. And the whiskey is also very, very good. So it is a luxury product and it costs a lot of money. And I'm selling it to a group of people who have a lot of disposable income, like to make jokes like this. My thought is not that Jared will become a daily drinker of generative A rye. My thought is sometime in the next year, Jared is going to want to give a gift to somebody he knows in tech and he's going to ship a bottle of Generative A-Rye.

37:09Or, you know, director of engineering at XYZ Company is going to buy his team all a bottle of whiskey for Christmas and they're going to buy Generative A-Rye. That's my goal is that. I don't think anybody's going to buy a$95 bottle of gin. And even though it's a very pretty bottle of gin and it says force push right there on the label and it's really it's Friday deployment spirits, Jared. It's funny. It is funny. I still don't think it's going to be anybody daily anybody's daily drinker. Gotcha. Well, I just wanted to tee up your sales pitch and see how you how you do. How did I do? Can you give me a rating?

37:44I would drink it. I mean, I would I don't know if I would. Fourteen hundred bucks is that's a call order. I'm not a CTO of anything, though. It's not fourteen hundred bucks. I want to say again,$125 versus$95. Oh, I'm sorry. What did you say was$1 ,400? No, I started at$1 ,400 to screw with you so that the$125 that it actually costs would stress you out less. Oh, man. See, talk about sales tactic. Yeah, 100%. So, sell me some of your other, you know, I won't say used car salesman tactics, but just, you know, what are the winners where you can just say something and it'll work? You said you got a couple of those.

38:19Yeah. So a couple of things that I think are really interesting. If you're selling to technical people, don't capitalize their name when you send the email. Make some spelling mistakes. Yeah, otherwise it looks like it's a mail merge, right? And if you can just do the littlest thing to make it look like this was actually written by a human. And if you can write it by a human, it's even better. But you misspell somebody's name, you know how much more likely they are to respond to you? because they're like, oh, this asshat didn't just plug it into a CRM and send me in mail merge, right? They're actually reaching out to me.

38:54Don't they also think that you don't pay attention to details? 100%. And sometimes they respond with like a dude, come on, you can do better. But they responded. So first of all, there's little things like that. Even if it's just lowercase the name, make a spelling mistake in your message so it doesn't look like it was sent by a machine. Nobody wants the machine outreach. That's number one. Number two, one of the most interesting things is every company needs to know, where do I start? Founders always underprice their product. Okay. I do this myself. You weren't willing to pay 1400 bucks, but 125 seemed cheap to you once I got back to it.

39:33I probably could have sold the bottle for 200 bucks and Jared might've bought it. I don't know. I'm probably hand waving, but, um, founders always underpriced their, their product. And one of the most important things for fixing that is finding out what are people's budgets, right? So how much am I saving you those kinds of conversations, but they're really hard to have. So there's this, uh, uh, there's this tactic called the bucketing method. And so what I say is Jared, I've got a, I've got a nice bottle of whiskey here and I want to put you into it's a 2025, you're going to like the way that it drives and feels.

40:06It was a good year. And how much do you got to spend on this, Jared? You're hoping to spend$5 on a bottle of whiskey? You're hoping to spend$100 on a bottle of whiskey? Or do you have$5 ,000 to spend on a bottle of whiskey? And there's something about that last number being so big, it's outrageous, that almost everyone, almost every time, will go, well, it's not$5 ,000. I was thinking more like 50. Okay, great. Now I've got a ballpark for what was in your head. So this, this method, and you, you name a number, you name a number twice as big, 10 times as big. And that last number has to be so outrageous that it makes them get mad.

40:46Uh, and then they'll almost always come back with what was in their head. So that's called the bucketing method. That's an interesting thing. And then there's one last one, which just in general in sales, if you can ask a question, like if this was existed and it was perfect for you to meet your needs, you know, something like that, what would it look like? And now you're going to sell the product to me. And if I can sit still and shut up and let you just sell to me, the less I say in a sales call, the better you're going to feel about what I'm selling, even though I haven't told you anything about it.

41:20How do you mean I'm going to sell it to you? Cause I'm going to describe what it would be. And then you're going to say, that's what it is. Or what do you mean? Yeah. I mean, it depends on what the, you can't, you can't say, oh, well, that's exactly what it is, but you can, you can go back with, you know, how do I say this? Here's, here's a concrete example. That's, that'll be relevant to everyone in your audience, even if they're not founders interviewing when you're interviewing, you're trying to sell yourself, right? Right. The worst possible thing you can do is go into an interview and say, tell me what you need.

41:51And they list 50 criteria. And then you try to go through those 50 criteria and say, here's why I meet every single one of those criteria. You will fail because you don't. You're never exactly what they have in mind. Never, ever, ever. Right. So if you can say, hey, in your in your perfect world, what are the problems that I would solve? Not who exactly am I, right? I'm going to show up on day one. I'm going to wear this color. I'm going to talk to this person and do this thing. But what is the problem I'm going to solve? Then they start selling to you the problem that you're going to solve for them.

42:29And at the end of the conversation, you say, well, I might not be exactly what you have in mind, but here's how I'm going to solve your problem anyways. And keep it nice and short and sweet. and you convince them that what you've just said meets their criteria, now they have just sold you to themselves. And that sounds super sketchy. It's really not that complicated. There's one book on this that I encourage people to read. It's called Spin Selling. And spin is not like I'm going to spin you into it. It's an acronym for something. But the one useful thing they talk about is this bit of like, get the other person to be pitching you instead.

43:04Yeah, interesting. It's a small thing And it's easy to lose track of. But I mean, literally interviews is like the one place where particularly technical people get caught up. Like, yes, I'm exactly that. I've written Python for 17 years, exactly like you asked. And I've known Kubernetes since, you know, Wozniak was born. Please hire me. Well, you mentioned Kubernetes. I know you've dabbled in the cloud or you're kind of hanging out in like the infrastructure section of technology. Is that really where you, besides the alcohol section, what other aisles do you hang out in? Are you in the infra aisle?

43:40Are you in the cloud? Where do you hang? So, yeah, I'm currently working with this company, Sivo, which is interesting because Sivo is a cloud company. I mean, think an AWS or a Google. They're Kubernetes first. What makes them different is a couple things. One, you know, it's UK based, which right now happens to be really good for business. for hashtag, I don't know reasons. But the thing that's also interesting is they will ship you the whole software stack. So it'd be like if you used AWS for a few weeks and you're like, hey guys, this is great. Can we have it? And then AWS just shipped you AWS.

44:17So Siva will do that. You can buy the software stack. They'll also ship you a hardware appliance where you can throw it in a rack. So what's interesting to me about that is the 10 years that I was in China, I basically missed the data center world. Because, you know, in 2004, at that startup, I mentioned that built Twitter a little too early, we had some server rooms in the back that we, you know, would shut down a machine at a time and install the newest version and then shut down the next one and install the newer version. And, you know, or we put up a website that said down for scheduled maintenance, right?

44:46You remember those? And then when I came back, it was cloud and blue green deployments. And, you know, I missed the whole data center world. So it's kind of interesting to me because it's my first time touching anything data center related. And, you know, not that the customers necessarily are all doing that. Most of them are probably just using our cloud, but I find the data center bit really interesting, especially as people are starting to flee the cloud. Um, but so that's, that's one bit. It does tend to be infrastructure. Uh, about a year and a half ago, I almost two years ago, I, uh, went and raised money to start an AI startup.

45:20So I, I did plan to do an AI startup. Um, my co-founder after the VC said, we're ready to write the check. And my co-founder called me and said, so I think my wife's going to divorce me if I do this. So we shut the whole thing down. Still good friends. But that was in infrastructure because I do think there's some interesting infrastructure problems around AI in particular that are still unsolved. The reason infrastructure is interesting is because a single SaaS product with a single SaaS vertical, you either hit the market perfectly or you don't. With anything infrastructure, you get to ride the waves because what you're selling is the pickaxes, right?

46:01And it's not even pickaxes, it's blue jeans. So it doesn't really matter if it's gold rush or we're cutting down a bunch of trees and clearing the forest, everybody needs blue jeans. And so that's the fun thing about infrastructure is you're solving the problems that everybody needs to go solve their problem. It's an easier bet. So I find that more interesting. And there really aren't workarounds. I mean, you're going to need it or you're not going to need anything. Like infrastructure is going to be there, whether it's rented, bought, cloud, on-prem, like it has to be there in some form. And so, like you said, it is kind of more like the blue jeans where it's, there's not going to be really a, there might be a down market, but never a no market.

46:42Well, and there's, okay. So then the thing that's, that's relevant here that I think is interesting is part of what was fun about the Kubernetes boom 10 years ago when I was first involved in it, is it's like there's this new kind of workload, a container, and it's not really that different, right? But turns out the way that we orchestrate a container is slightly different. And the tools that ended up winning in that orchestration were slightly different. And there was a whole new paradigm in declarative infrastructure rather than having to orchestrate everything like we did in the days of Puppet or Ansible, right?

47:13It was kind of exciting because it was a new kind of workload and all the paradigms were going to change. And KubeCon in like 2015, 2016, 2017, whatever. 2015 might've been too early. Maybe I started in 2016, but early on, it was a whole bunch of nerds sitting around in a room feeling like we're changing the internet and this is fun. And I feel like that's the only place that that's also happening is in AI. And AI is inference servers, the way that we train them, the way that we run them, the way that we audit them, the way security looks in AI. It's a new kind of workload that It requires a different kind of interaction.

47:49It's not that different. It's really, you know, it's just a workload at the end of the day and you box it up in some kind of wrapper at the end of the day. But there's interesting problems because the things that go in it don't come out in the same way. And the things that come out don't come from the same places. And, you know, so auditing that, lifecycling that, et cetera, it's new, it's interesting. and the people who are working hard to solve those problems, I think are having a lot of fun. It's definitely different enough that I think there's, you know, there's MLOps community and there's these like, which is basically was DevOps or whatever you want to call it prior, like whatever operations look like.

48:30Well, which was platform engineering prior, which was, you know, Linux sysadmin before, which was. Lots of titles in the cloud, you know. If you go back far enough, it was a lot of guys writing a lot of Ock. Just saying. Oh, good point. Yeah, anyways, keep going. And they still might be the ones, the old graybeards still using their Auck where it makes sense. Well, I was going to say there's, there are differences. Can you, you mentioned security. Can you enumerate perhaps what makes it different? Why would there be a subculture that comes out of this? It's just compute and data, right? Like what makes it different enough?

49:05Yeah. It should just be compute and data. The, okay. So a concrete example, a friend of mine, And just this morning in the CTO lunches community, a friend of mine works at a very large, very regulated industry. And he's a VP at this big company. And he's arguing that their company can't use any AI products. And it's super frustrating. I think just today Shopify tweeted something like, it should be a reflex to use AI. And that is the absolute standard for all of our engineers at this point. Right. And so this friend who's a, you know, VP is like, well, how do I get to that when I'm in a company where I can't use any of it?

49:45You know, like and so there are some solutions that have come out that address it from his perspective. And I'm going to I'm going to start there and I'm going to come back to the infrastructure bit. But from his perspective, the things are who's putting what where. Right. And when you have a company like his, that's that's big and super well regulated and everything's blocked. You know what people do? They pull out their phone and they type something into chat. So now they're putting data that they shouldn't be putting into the big public models that are probably there. They've got the free version.

50:16So the big public models are training off. So that's the worst possible outcome. Right. So there's a company, an old coworker of mine is one of the early engineers that called SurePath AI. I don't know if you've heard of this, but SurePath AI sits in between almost like a proxy. for a big company like this, so that every single thing that goes to say ChatGPT, they can stop and say, oh, that has PII in it. And they redact it. So ChatGPT doesn't even get it. So when you say, hey, ChatGPT, who is Jared from the change log? It's going to say, hey, you said who is name from the change log? Did you mean to give me a name?

50:52It seems more like a placeholder, right? Like that's going to be the actual response from ChatGPT because they're going to intercept that. Yeah. And so there's those kinds of cases. Now there gets to be more interesting edge cases there that like, well, I want HR to be able to use AI and train on enough of our data internally that they can ask the AI, like, give me a list of all the sales people and it can do it because that's going to increase their productivity. But I don't need finance to have access to that. And I definitely don't want HR to have access to what finance has access to, right?

51:25So there ends up being fine-grained security there, even if you're self-hosting those models. So that's one thing. The next thing is when you're talking about even just self-hosting a model without a product like SurePath, and this is not an endorsement for SurePath. The guy that works there is a good friend of mine. I think very highly of him, and I hope they're making a kick-ass product. I've never used it, so I don't know, and I can't pouch for it. But the folks that are building something internal have to look at it, and how how do you audit what the model's been trained on? How do you audit what the model's learned?

52:00How do you audit who's had access to that model? How do you audit if a malicious actor got in and started asking questions to that model? That's not that different from just looking at audit logs of a traditional server of any kind, right? But there ends up being some unique challenges there. And especially when you life cycle those servers, those inference servers and you have a new model on it or you have a you put in some new training data who had access to the new training data when did that training data go in like now what did they have access to there it just the problems actually get pretty interesting and the the rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper i say it seems like they snowball and kind of fractal off even to now you're multiplying problems against each other Well, and when you're using AI to detect what you shouldn't be doing, and that's the other thing that AI is really good at is AI can watch you type a name in and go, oh, that's a name, right?

52:58Oh, you shouldn't be saying that. So where does that model live? Who's hosting that one? Who's auditing that one? Yeah. I mean, this is a whole new world. and the people who are missing out on the AI gold rush, because there's a lot of us are Luddites over in the corners going, this is one step farther than I want to go. Open stack was enough. We tempted fate when we, you know, trained the computers. All I need is a command prompt and awk. That's all I need. See, you get me, Jared. Now I need to be better at regex if awk is going to be all I'm going to do, because there's a, anyways. So say we all.

53:37So say we all. But this is where all the fun is. And there is a whole bunch of things changing. It's also the only companies with money right now. Right. Yeah, I was expecting you to say that eventually. It's like, well, this is where the money is. So why not be involved in the exciting thing where the money is? Just kind of makes sense. Well, so I mean, Civo has a AI offering that is actually pretty compelling. It's a private AI offering so that you can be comfortable with your data. and then this other company in San Francisco that I'm working with, Tensor Lake, that does understanding of unstructured documents.

54:13It's actually really fascinating for me. I'm learning a lot. I'm excited to be in the AI world because that is where things are moving. And I'm surprised how much I'm learning about it. I end up having conversations with ChatGPT every day. Yesterday, I was asking a million questions about MCP servers or MCP, it's protocol or whatever. Or, you know, model context protocol. Yeah, thank you. Like, how does this work? Why does it work? What are the limitations? How does it interact with a browser? How does it interact with AWS? Is it going to write this kind of code for me or do this kind of interaction for me?

54:46And it's, you know, just things, the rabbit hole always goes deeper. It does. It does. And I was just going to ask how much you're using these tools in your own work because you have so many disparate tasks, it sounds like, lined up for any given day that, do you tell the AI, please spell your name? his name wrong for me as I send this email out? Or how do you, how much are you using these tools in your work? What's, what's interesting is, so for internal things, I actually feel like ChatGPT has just recently, and I mostly use ChatGPT. I, I, um, I dabbled with Claude and a couple of the other things, uh, you know, at Civo, I use Civo's models, um, which are llamas that we're, hosting.

55:33But ChatGPT just in the last few months feels like it's crossed over from, hey, I need an outline on XYZ problem. What should I think about that I haven't maybe thought about? And it would give me one or two decent ideas and the rest of it would kind of be fluff. And now it's so good at it that I'm regularly thinking I'd be stupid not to use this, right? And so a lot of times I'll type up a few things. Hey, here's the 10 things I'm thinking about as it relates to this problem? What am I missing? And it will structure a few of the things that I put together into the same category and then give me new categories.

56:07I have it set up to be extremely obscenely brief, which is funny because I'm being obscenely verbose on this podcast. But in life, I value brevity a lot. And I have it set up to always prompt me with, here's what you didn't ask that you probably should have asked. And so at the end of every single response that says, you should ask this. And it surprises me how often it catches things that I didn't think. So to give you a concrete example, and the short answer is I'm using it all the time. It's just completely gone through the roof. But just in the last month, I kept trying to use it and trying to use it.

56:46I couldn't find times and spaces where it made sense. And now it's become a second nature for me. But I had done a write-up on a bunch of things that needed to happen in this one organization at this one company. And I fed it in and said, make this better. And it said, at the bottom, there was this one section where I said, here's some of the problems that I'm seeing. And ChatGPT said, if you want to sound like a senior executive, don't express the problems. Talk about how you're working to address the problem. Don't just bring them up. And I was like, ah, it was like embarrassing. Like I should, should 100 % know this should 100 % be interacting this way.

57:26And it slapped me on my hand before I went and took that to the person I, you know, was turning it into. And that was, that was for me, I think the like eyeopening, like I'm stupid every time I don't do this. Because it's so good. It's like an outbound filter more than anything else. It's just like before I go outbound. Yeah. I mean, it comes up with categories. I don't think about it comes up with, you know, it gives me feedback. on my writing that I didn't think about. It tells me to be more brief because I'm overly verbose in my writing. And I mean, even today, I asked it to put together a couple of lists for me.

57:59Hey, I need a list of this kind of company doing this kind of thing. And I want 50 of them. It takes 20 seconds. It's wild. It is. It really is. Now, does it name your liquors for you or you do those yourself? So thus far, we have a very long spreadsheet of potential names. I will say the generative A-Ry is amusing because in – I popped into the – so the CTO lunches, we have the free group that's 1 ,600 CTOs that all meet for lunches all over the world, right? And then we have a paid group that's a small community that hangs out at a Slack. And right before we launched the whiskey, I went to the group and said, hey, I have a couple of ideas for the whiskey name and here's what I think it's going to be.

58:44And one of the people in CTO lunches said, well, have you, you know, what about generative a rye? And that, that ended up being what we use. So, um, it was not, he's, he's asked for a commission. I think I gave him a bottle. I promised him a bottle. So if I haven't given him a bottle, uh, you know who you are, Topher, um, give him that $1 ,400, that special edition, that special edition there. Hey, I hand wrote the number on all of them. I'm holding bottle 22 right here. So that's cool. Yeah. That's cool. Gosh, you're really selling them. They're all small batch. I'm wanting one of those. Dang it.

59:18Now you price anchored me. I'm thinking 125, you know, affordable. Feels like no big deal. Yeah, yeah. Knock on the door. Would you like to buy a$50 ,000 vacuum? No? Well, great, because I've got a$100 vacuum. So can you, I know you haven't, these are probably a private spreadsheet, but can you humor us? Can you workshop a few options out there? Maybe give them a reaction. Let me see if I can. I think that I might not be willing to share. Okay. Take a moment and review. Maybe give me your bottom half, you know, don't give me any of the real good ones. Give me what you would spit out. Pull it up real quick.

59:56Let's see. Cause that's what I found specifically with creative work is that chat. GBT is so mid on everything. It's supposed to be funny or ironic or tongue in cheek. Like it's like, no dude, like the, the cheese ball factor is at 10 and they can't quite do anything funny, but you know, boring pros is fine. Okay. So I opened it up. There is a number in here that I'm happy to share. All right. So we thought about in gin earring for a gin. Say that again. I missed it. I missed it entirely. Engineering is all capitalized. Gotcha. Uh, I, one thing that I definitely hope that we do is I want to have, a vodka that we sell and it's two different labels.

1:00:43It's the exact same vodka and you can only buy them in a box set. And one is called tabs and one is called spaces because it's vodka and they're both empty. And I just, I love this idea. I like that one. I think we will get there eventually. Um, we have, uh, emergency response, um, or incident response, emergency kit. as a name. I did sock too and all I got was this stupid bottle of whiskey. One of my favorites is actually I work in computers because I think for the people who aren't in tech but want to buy a gift for their person who does work in tech, I mean, most of them don't know why force push is funny.

1:01:24It's almost too inside. Yeah, maybe it's inappropriate. They don't know what to buy. So the I work in computers as the gift to give to the tech person. I think it's really funny. Um, I do like that one. Yeah. So we've got, we've got a, a lot more. Um, yeah, I'm saving the good ones. Yeah, I would too. You know, why waste them on a silly podcast? I mean, it started with Friday, a Friday deployment was one of the names of the liquors. And we later decided that was going to be the name of the company, um, Friday deployment spirits. Cause you want to get in that Friday deployment spirit, Either you don't want to deploy on Friday or you have to deploy on Friday and you're going to need to drink.

1:02:05That's right. Might will be some gin. That's exactly right. What else do you want to talk about, Jared? Anything else that I haven't covered? I'm just wondering how you like gin, personally. I think gin's disgusting. And it tastes like a pine tree. Oh, man, that's exactly right. That's what you're missing. You like to drink pine trees. Well, you are from Colorado. So a lot of pine trees out there. There you go. Well, when I was a kid, my dad would drink gin occasionally and, uh, and he, I would smell it. And I was like, that smells disgusting. He'd be like, have a sip. And I'd take a little sip and I'd be like, that's disgusting.

1:02:37That's disgusting. And I remember growing up and being like, is that the one that tastes like pine needles? Ooh, no. And then, uh, and then I became an adult and I had some pine needles and I was like, this is amazing. What changed? I don't know. Same taste. Yeah. It's, uh, for what it's worth, Jared, our gin has, uh, some juniper in it and you can tell, but it also has a lot more going on. So if you're not a big juniper guy and you want to try a GNT that you might be really excited about. All right. But I like it. If you send me a bottle, I'll give it a try. If I send you a bottle, will you do an entire hour and a half episode where you just sit there and drink it and then give a review of it that gets increasingly unhinged as you get farther and farther through the bottle?

1:03:20Because then I will send you two bottles. I can get you halfway there. Well, I don't like the taste of gin, so I can't promise I'm going to drink it for 90 minutes, you know, but I will, uh, I will try it on the show and I'll talk with and maybe send one to Adam. We could have a drink and we could maybe do a review, probably not 90 minutes, but, uh, yeah, I could do something with it. I believe you can stretch it to 45 minutes. I will 100 % send you a bottle of liquor. If you do a review on the change log. All right. Thus closes my sales pitch. so so wait we came into this hoping to have a bubbly conversation you got a little bit of that and you're going to end with a bottle you want you want the whiskey too i mean let's be honest i actually do like whiskey whereas gin i don't like so you know why do you like rye whiskey um probably i'm not i'm not a connoisseur but what's the difference like what's what's rye specific rye is more peppery um okay it's a it's a it's a kind of different i mean you've had i guarantee you've had rye whiskeys if you're a whiskey drinker and you might just not unless you try a rye next to you know a wheat you might not notice the big differences but yeah I don't have a advanced palate I do know that I prefer bourbon and that's I don't have a refined palate either and I make liquor for a living so it's cool sorry keep going what were you saying no I'm just gonna say I generally like bourbon which I think has more of a sweetie you know more sweet than peppery, but yeah.

1:04:44Yeah. It's the corn gets, the corn gets sweet, but also a little bitter. A wheat one is like really smooth, uh, and sweet too. But, uh, a wheat makes bourbon feel, um, downright offensive. If you drink wheat, if you drank wheat whiskey for a week and you tried bourbon again, you'd be like, Whoa, cause it's got so much stronger of a kick. Gotcha. So it's way smoother. Yeah. And a rye is going to be in the middle. Uh, I mean, a rye, it depends on what the other grains are in it. The rye tends to be more like a, I say pepper in part because it's a little bit of a spice that's sort of added on to whatever the other flavors are that are going on.

1:05:20So you can have a very sweet one with a rye kick. You can have a bourbon with a rye kick. Well, I'm excited. I'm excited for these products. I'm excited you're excited. I wish Adam was here because he's actually more of the whiskey guy than I am. He's got all the stuff he just said. He would have been saying the same thing. Just make him feel guilty. Guilt covers a multitude of wrongs. That's right. All right. Well, Kendall, awesome meeting you. Great speaking with you. Anything you were wishing I'd ask you? I never did. And you're like, gosh, this guy's a dope. I've been waiting the whole time.

1:05:51I mean, I think the obvious question that you didn't ask is how can a man be so friendly and look so good and be so humble? And I just don't have an answer to that. Some of the world's mysteries will just have to be left as such. Thanks for having me. This was fun. Yep, thank you.

1:06:15Kendall is a man of his word, and my complimentary bottles of Generative A-Rye and Force Push Gin are en route as we speak. I am also a man of my word, so even though I don't like gin, we'll give these spirits a taste test with real-time reactions on an upcoming episode of Change Log and Friends. Who knows? maybe my old man taste buds like the taste of pine trees and i just don't know it yet okay let's thank our sponsors one more time thank you to fly.io to depot.dev and to notion notion.com slash changelog and thank you to breakmaster cylinder for producing so many custom beats for us that we've just released our fourth album on streaming services all around the world search for changelog beats and give the brand new after party album a listen your flow state will thank Thank you.

1:07:06That's all for now, but we'll talk to you again on Friday. That show's a little bit bonkers. Matt Ryer joins us and he's taking us to Matt World, which I hear is pretty cool, but maybe not as cool as Jared World. You be the judge on Friday. Bye, y 'all.

1:07:43Thank you.

1:08:05Game on!