Episode 1: A Million Jams and Countin…
Presented by: Craig Dennis, Dani Grant
Originally aired on March 20 @ 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT
Code Space: Hard-to-Repro Bugs
Guest: Dani Grant, CEO & Founder of Jam.Dev
Odds are you know Jam.dev . They have 175k+ users (or “Jammers”), who have reproduced close to 6 million bugs (or “Jams”) and are ALL OVER the dev community; hosting meetups, podcasts, and sharing their journey all across the web.
But it didn’t start like that. Learn how Dani and her team turned the very big, but very little understood, problem of “hard-to-repro bugs” into a one-click solution that developers love and built a thriving community from scratch.
- Follow us @CloudflareTV and @CloudflareDev
- Join our Discord community at discord.cloudflare.com
- Visit our YouTube channel @CloudflareDevelopers
English
AI
Coding
Developers
Internet
Startups
Transcript (Beta)
Dani, thank you so much for being here on Friends in Code Spaces. I am so happy to have you here on the show where we talk about people that we meet IRL and we bring them into the studio so that we can share that together because people come from different code spaces, right?
People come, my current code space is AI. What would you say your current code space is right now?
My current code space is hard to repro bugs.
Ooh, I like it. I started my career here at Cloudflare. Back when I was at Cloudflare, it was a little more scrappy than all of this, but I was a product manager here.
It's where I met my now co-founder. And we were so lucky. We got to work on the coolest team.
And this was the team that shipped net new experiments at Cloudflare, like would take risks on new products that if they worked would be huge, like now workers or 1.1.1 .1.
But also if they didn't work, we shouldn't distract the whole company with.
And so we were the two product managers on those teams.
We were both first time PMs and my co-founder was perfect, but I wrote a lot of poorly written JIRA tickets that made hard to repro bugs even more challenging to repro.
Like for example, I would write like something, something didn't work.
For an engineer. That doesn't help at all. Right. Because what is didn't work?
Right. Did it hang? Right. Did it crash? Right. Was it just slow to respond and I was impatient?
Right. Did we, was there an error message, but it wasn't built up to the front end?
Like there's a lot of definitions of didn't work. And so we ended up starting a company to help PMs like us better communicate with engineers.
And so we are now in the business and the code space of hard to repro bugs.
I love it.
And I love, I love Jam. So jam.dev, let's just name it. Let's name it. So, so we got, we got jam.dev.
It is awesome. And you are such a part of the community. You have been everywhere going around.
And I'd like to, I'd like to, this is the part where I get to gush, gush about you.
You like radiate kindness. People want to come up to you afterwards and talk to you.
You make everybody feel welcome. So thank you for doing that.
Right back at you. Oh, thanks. Um, we're going to do some games today on the show and I hope that, I hope that that's okay.
Yes. They asked me, will you be on this podcast and are you allergic to anything?
Oh wow. How does it, how's that feel?
Does it feel a little, I'm a little nervous. We're going to sting you with bees.
No, just kidding. I am allergic to that. That's a one allergy. So all right.
Cut the bees. Cut the bees. We're never going to, we're not going to do something like that.
All right. So we've got, uh, we've got three games that we're going to play.
Um, the first game. So my, my, my code space currently, we changed these code spaces, right?
I think, I think that's something that's important to think about is that like we move, right?
You were in the, you were doing some PM stuff here and you, you move into different spaces and I think that there's this perception outside that we know everything for people who are just getting started.
They're like, Oh, everybody knows everything. But that's not true. We have, we, we live in these different code spaces and I'm excited that when we get to get together and we get to talk about those code spaces, how deep we can go.
Um, so the first game that we're going to play, I'm in the AI code space.
And so I built a thing.
So of course, you know, as you do with AI, when you're like, I, I don't know if I should, what should I do?
How should I, I, my first thought now these days is like, Oh, I should build something.
I should use AI to do this. So the thing with AI is that it doesn't necessarily know everything, right?
It's, it read the web at one time.
So what I did was I said, Hey, I've got the chance to talk to the wonderful Danny Grant, the CEO of jam.dev.
What do you know about her? And you get to ask her questions.
And I told the AI to be self-aware. And so here we go. So it's going to, we're going to ask some questions.
At first I had it generate some topics.
So you're going to get to choose what we talk about on the show that AI is going to, going to do.
Okay. Fantastic. So, so, uh, so it said that it's, it's excited to know it doesn't have any prior knowledge about you, which is fine.
Oh no, it's from a while ago.
This is all of our efforts. But, but here's the thing. I think next time we're going to record this podcast, we're going to put it out there.
We're going to put it into the context window.
Next time. It's going to know all about you.
It's, it's always good to leave a little room for improvement. There you go.
So, so the AI is thrilled, thrilled to have the opportunity to learn more about you.
It hopes to gain insight into your company's goals and its team. That's which I think that you do have such a good job of sharing.
So, um, I had it generate some topics and you get to choose, um, there's, they're good questions under here.
You get to choose what direction we go right now.
Oh my gosh. This is so fun. So can you see them?
I can see them. Okay. Um, okay. It's bug reporting, company goals. Let's just go down the list.
Okay. Yeah. Okay. And then, okay. So, so, so bug reporting. So, so, and I said, this is the context that you know, and then I gave them a little bit of, I gave them some stuff, additional context from your, your webpage.
Okay. So we got a little bit in there.
So it's going to know a little bit about what's going on there.
But I think that this is great. I think that I, I agree. So we're going to go down the list.
We'll start with this first one here. And this might feel a little bit much.
So I thought I would, we're in beta. We're in beta with this, this, this podcast is definitely always in beta.
Uh, what I would like to do, uh, it was, uh, as a founder of a company that focused on bug reporting, what are some common myths or misconceptions?
Okay. Let's, let's do this, but I want this to feel a little bit more futuristic and I probably would do this, uh, later.
We're just going to talk. And there's a voice on here called Dommy. That's going to talk right now.
As a founder of a company that focuses on bug reporting, what are some common myths or misconceptions you've encountered about reporting suspicious bug reporting?
Your game show is amazing. How do you diffuse these misconceptions and convince developers of the value of your tool?
So how do the AI has that?
That's a really good question from AI. AI is so smart. It is so smart.
So are there, are there common misconceptions about, about bug reporting that it's like not needed or?
So every company thinks that it's bottlenecked on engineering.
And everyone is jumping through a ton of hoops to make sure that engineers are unblocked and able to execute.
And bug reporting is this like forgotten child of that, where what people think happens is that an engineer has a stack of tickets that they go through and they just fix the bugs and then they, you know, move on to the next ticket.
But it's way less linear than that. So engineers listening have probably had the experience that they open a ticket.
They spend an hour or even an afternoon trying to just get the bug to repro on their machine.
Oh my gosh.
All the time. So much wasted time. It's not even engineering at that point.
You're just trying to get the bug to happen. And then you can't. So what do you do?
You leave a comment in the ticket and you move on to the next one. And at some point you get an email notification that someone's responded to your comment.
So you're like, let me go see what's up with that bug.
Let me try to remember where I was at.
And so you go back and then you're like trying to put yourself in that state.
And then, but the comment still isn't helpful. So you like ask another question and then you go back.
And so that could be a whole day that I just described.
And you actually haven't started writing a single line of code. And so when people think about bug fixing and bugs in general, they think about writing code.
But actually the experience of most engineers is it's blocked way before that. That is such a good, that's such a good point.
And the misconception that like, how much time would you get back, right?
How much, if we did this correctly, if we were actually working on these and you've solved that.
I feel like you've solved that.
I saw you talk one night. I saw you talk. And I had the next day, the next day I had this bug and I was like, oh man, this is going to be so hard to reproduce.
I wish there was some way to, so like, and then I signed up for the service.
And I was able to record my screen and it did the network.
So it was a network problem. So I was able to share the network bits because that's like, that's also part of what's so amazing about this.
That's so awesome to hear. That makes me so happy. When we started working on the company, it was like, could we solve our own problem?
And now there are more than 100,000 people using Jam.
They've fixed more than 2 million bugs with Jam.
It's super, super cool. And it means that we get to add tons of like, little features that help engineers in these like corner cases fix bugs.
Like here's an example. You've probably in your lifetime run into a cores error.
Yeah. Oh my gosh. Like daily. But you probably don't run into cores errors so often that you know exactly what to do when they happen.
Right. So it starts the Googling.
Yep. So we're like, well, there are not that many cores errors in the world.
What if we just told you what to do in the DevTools network panel in Jam when you get hit a cores error?
Did you just add that? I haven't even seen that. That's amazing.
And so it's, when you just hit that case, it just makes your life a little bit faster and more simple.
Or here's another one. Okay. Most of the time, WebSockets are perfect.
But if you're building a real-time app and you have a bug with your WebSockets, gosh, don't you want a great debugging experience?
And so we had an engineer on the team just craft this awesome WebSockets debugger.
And 99% of bugs don't have to do with WebSockets. But 1% of 2 million bugs is a really significant amount.
And so for that 1% of bugs that have to do with WebSockets, there's like a perfect, prettified, awesome experience.
And so that's been such a joy.
Yes. And just knowing that like that 1% right now is so happy when they get in there to fix it.
I hope so. I love it. Let's, let's, you get to choose another one.
So, so let's, let's get, I love bug reporting, but you know, something that I would like to know more about, because you're so good at this.
Thank you. You share, you share how you build, right? You built a startup and you're so good at sharing and I think spreading like awareness and like struggles that you might've had.
I think you're like really open about that sort of thing.
There are some things in here. And I also know your leadership skills are incredible.
I can tell just by watching that. So, but I'm not, I don't want to lead you.
This is a choose your own adventure. Let's do some challenges. Okay. Some challenges, startup challenges.
Here we go. Can you share a particularly difficult or transformational moment in your startup journey and how it impacted your perspective, approach, or goals for the company?
Isn't that great? Isn't AI so good at that?
AI is so good. Um, I will say that, uh, starting a company with my co-founder has changed me as a person.
Okay. Um, and, and it's been one of the most humbling and like growing up experiences in my life.
When we started, you know, we were coming out of Cloudflare.
We were used to working very hard.
You know, Cloudflare moves fast. It's a demanding place to work. You grind. And I love that.
So we were used to that. We're used to working hard. But when you ship a product at Cloudflare, well, there's already all this trust and brand.
There's already a user base.
You've got a team at the time. It was a thousand people that you're working with to deliver something great.
So there's a team that's selling.
There's a team that's supporting. Like you, you, you've got resources. And when you start a company from scratch, the product has to be perfect to a T in order to get someone to change their behavior every day and use yours instead of an alternative that they trust.
And that was humbling because it took a long time to figure out.
So we launched the first time. We were so excited. Thousands of people signed up.
And then a week later, no one was using it. Oh. We're like, shoot, let's try again.
Right. So we launched again and same. People were excited to sign up. But then there wasn't usage on the other side.
Gotcha. We tried eight times. Whoa. Every time with a new hypothesis of how we would solve this like product and miscommunication problem.
And the eighth time it took off. But for the first 18 months of the company, we had nothing to show for the amount of work that we and this team that was putting like every day working so hard and to work really hard and not have anything to show for it and still decide to do it the next day and the next day and the next day and keep going.
It was extremely humbling and extremely difficult and a little fun, but mostly scary.
And I think changed me as a person. And how did you find that motivation to keep going for that?
You said 18 months. What was it?
You knew you had a product. People were signing up.
And the things that we were hearing from users was so much frustration.
And we knew there's something to solve. And we'd experienced it ourselves.
And we thought, how is it possible there's no tooling in 30 years of modern software engineering?
Surely we can come up with something. And so we knew that if we could get the product right, people were signing up.
The problem resonated.
The question is, could we get the product right? And so we had this like, let's just keep going, keep going, keep going.
And that of like, you know, you know that this, you wanted it.
It was a product that you wanted. Yes. Yeah, yeah.
The joy of, so I think some startups are just a success out of the gate. Like if I think about like Dropbox, I just imagine like, you know, there was Drew and he had this thing and then it started growing infinitely and now it's Dropbox, you know?
Or like the Cloudflare story is like, there's Cloudflare, they launched at TechCrunch Disrupt.
And now it is the Internet, right? And it's sort of this like crazy growth.
But because the first 18 months of the company were such a struggle, I feel so grateful every day.
I'm like, I can't believe we get to do this now.
It actually feels like a company. It's like, so that I really appreciate that time because it gives me perspective now.
That's awesome. That's awesome.
And you can feel it. And I love that you're going back and sharing. Like I see that you go out on Twitter and you share your motivation to people as well.
So I think that that's so cool.
We just launched a podcast ourselves. It's just as well filmed as this one.
Oh, nice. With the same level of setup. Sure. Imagine, most podcasts are.
This is very typical for the first episode of a podcast usually looks like this.
Yes. It's called Building Jam. And it's four of us inside the company.
And we just share what's our biggest challenge that week. Unfiltered. Nice.
And if we absolutely need to, we'll bleep something out, like people's names or like a product that hasn't launched.
Because like, I can't beep in this thing. Can't beep and get this done.
Or like, this is about to ship. Like this would be bleeped.
But otherwise, it's real. And the reason for that is like, every time we meet our users, they're also trying to change some corner of the world through software.
Like, we are them. They are us. And so like, isn't the cool thing is that we're all learning how to build software together and build product.
And so we love when we meet our users to chat with them about share insights both ways.
And so we're like, let's do this every week and do it at a scale that we hope can, like we can't meet all of our users, but maybe we can share what's actually happening.
Awesome.
I love that. You touched on something there that I think is going to bring us into the next game.
Okay, I'm ready. So the next game, this is one that is called Cold Ones.
You've heard of Hot Ones, right? Is it a game? It's a game. I've never heard of it.
You haven't heard of Hot Ones? No. So people, they bring people on and they make them eat hot wings.
Oh, no. So this is called Cold Ones.
Oh, no. And we have, you get to choose a Slurpee here. Oh, man. And you're not allergic to it.
No. We've determined. Have you had a Slurpee before? I'll tell you that this looks so appetizing.
Have you had one before?
I think last, maybe not since the sixth grade. Okay. So that's actually what I'm trying to have happen right here.
Great. I want to bring us back to the sixth grade.
Can you, you get blue or Coke? Your choice. Oh, I get to choose.
Yeah. I don't know what blue flavor is, but I think it's blue. I think we've got to try the blue flavor.
Because that's probably what you had, because Coke probably weren't allowed.
Let's go. Does that mean you get that one? I get this one, yeah.
So what we're going to do is we're just going to take a sip and we're going to, you're going to go back to sixth grade.
I want you to go back to the last time you had one of these Slurpees.
Let's do it. Cheers, by the way. Cheers. That's disgusting.
We're not going to get some. We need to get 7-Eleven as a sponsor, Dani.
We're trying to get it. Did it bring any nostalgia at all? Did it feel like you came back, went back a little bit like a hot, a hot summer day?
Where were you?
Where were you in sixth grade? Honestly, it was a really shocking experience and I really lost myself.
What was it like for you?
So I mean, this brings me back to like childhood. This like brings me back to that point.
I grew up in Arizona. You had to have these or you would like die.
Like if you didn't, you were either in a pool or drinking a Slurpee.
There was only two options. I understand. So that's that. And maybe not everybody has that.
But I'm trying to get back to you thinking about the very first time that you thought about Coke, the very, very first time.
It doesn't have to be in the sixth grade.
In the sixth grade, were you interested at all in coding or computers or no?
No, I went to such a cool college program at NYU. There's this tiny school at NYU where you get to make your own major.
And so the way it's supposed to work is you're supposed to like work with an advisor to like craft exactly like a perfect plan.
But the way that it really worked is my advisor was like, go explore. And he would sign an empty sheet that I would fill out later with what classes I wanted to take.
And what that allowed me to do is while most college students have to be really focused on their major from the beginning in order to graduate in a limited amount of time.
And it's a very expensive mistake to like not be able to complete your major.
I was able to change my mind every single quarter what I wanted to study.
Whoa. Did you? And that was so cool. Because when I started college, I didn't even, it was not, tech and startups was not the thing in my brain.
But at some point I did like, I was jet lagged one night.
I did a Codecademy class, like a JavaScript one.
And I was like, this is cool. And I took a computer science class and it changed the course of my life.
And so I like, I think it's an amazing idea to go explore and like, it's great.
And so the ability to do that was when I first encountered code.
Awesome. That's great. When did you first encounter code? Is this not how the game works?
Yeah, this is, I mean, let's take a sip. Oh, okay. We'll take a sip.
Sorry. Did it answer bad? No, no, that was great. It was great. No, but here, I got it.
We can. Now I want you to think about in college, you probably had some alcohol in that.
I don't drink. You don't drink even in college? No. Okay. Okay.
I'm fun in other ways. I just spend all my time on my startup. I don't drink anything.
Yeah, but like, don't worry. I'm fulfilled. Okay. I want to get back to that college memory of when you were first writing JavaScript code, right?
Because I think that there's a lot of people that have that and like, whoa, I want to do this.
Do you remember what you wrote? Oh, so at first it was just a Codecademy class, but then I went to mHacks, which was a 1000 student hackathon.
Yeah. And everyone's just in this one gym and it's, you know, and it's an all-nighter.
Yeah. And I don't, I think what I built was, it was like PGP encryption for your Facebook messages as a browser extension.
As your first. Look, I don't think it worked, but like, but I attempted.
And- What was the, what was the reasoning behind wanting to build that?
Oh, because, well, I was already obsessed with Cloudflare. At that time?
Yes. Wow. And Cloudflare had just announced Universal SSL. Okay. And Nick Sullivan, who was leading the crypto team at Cloudflare at the time, wrote this amazing technical blog post about how it worked.
And it took me on such a rabbit hole.
And I became so interested in this little corner of how the web works. And so when I got to mHacks, there was nothing more I wanted to build than PGP encryption for your Facebook messages.
Wow. Wow. That's incredible. Thank you, Cloudflare. Yeah.
And now you help, I also know that you like help run hackathons. You help people come and build demos.
And you've like kept that as part of what you do with Jam as well.
It's cool because- So cool. We're the first generation, or I don't know, actually, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think we're like the first generation that gets to like build products and influence the world in this way.
Yeah. Right? Like definitely my grandparents were, that's not what their work looked like or could have.
Right. But like if you think about the influence of software products, it's like who made education free in the world?
It's YouTube. It's TikTok. It's these software teams that now it's a big team, but once was just like small and mighty.
And how cool was that?
And so just the idea of hackathons and demos and it's just like, I don't know.
We live in the best time. Yeah, for sure. And I love that you help push that.
I think that like, I'm like, oh, there's a hackathon. Oh, Jam's there.
Oh, Jam's there too. Oh, there's Jam. And actually, while we're talking about that, let's pitch Jam Pizza.
Yes. So if anyone listening is hosting like dev meetups, hackathons, like getting builders together, we want to support that.
And so we've set aside funds in order to sponsor those things happening all around the world.
And the way to apply is you just go to jam.pizza. Awesome. Awesome. One more. We're going to do one more of these.
I'm sorry. Was it a bad answer? This always feels like punishment.
No, it's not a punishment. It's just we're getting into the next one.
So producer Peter, you met producer Peter, right? This tastes like when you have to take medicine as a child.
It's got like a little bit of like, it's healing.
Is that what you're saying? Maybe I take it back. So producer Peter did some digging and we want to talk about your ex.
Tell me more. You were supposed to be a little shocked by that.
Your Twitter. You're supposed to be like, I don't want to.
But you're like, sure. I would love to talk. Just playing it cool.
Yeah, yeah. I don't care. Here we go.
So we'll see up here. Here is your Twitter. The Danny Grant. At the Danny Grant for those listening at home.
But for those watching, that's a Danny profile.
So this first one here. You are number 14. Yeah, who's everyone else, right?
Yeah, who's everybody else? Yeah, yeah. It's the developers on the team.
OK. Who set up our database. OK. And I'm really jealous.
And if I had the foresight back in 2020. Yeah. I would have made sure to be the first user in our database.
Awesome. And you talked about this already.
You've passed 100,000. Yeah. I wanted to brag a little bit here and say that I was number 79,287.
That's a great number. Yeah, it feels really good. It feels really good.
That's so cool. Yeah, I love that you're doing that. You share that.
I think that's really fun. All right. So you talked about this already. But I think that this is such a great capture of exactly the problem that you were talking about where you're like, it's a Slack message here, right?
And it's like, can you get it?
And you're like, oh, yeah, wait. And then the hours add up. And you're waiting for the response.
And we talked through this a little bit already. So do you remember anything from this tweet that you feel?
I feel like it's such, this is like social media to the T of how good is this tweet?
So the thing that happens at every company is, well, companies employ helpful people, generally.
And so someone will write in a dev or an ask dev Slack channel and be like, hey, I'm having trouble with this thing working.
And it's not that now one engineer is helping them.
It's that the entirety of the engineering team has now dropped whatever they are doing to all help debug this one thing.
This happens every day at every company.
Just like the slow communication cycles about bugs, especially when it happens in Slack, just has this way of proliferating.
Yeah, it does.
And it is only because everybody wants to be so helpful. Yeah. And you know how they could be the most helpful?
They could be jam user 102,375 and record the thing, right?
Yeah. And just share it. Yes. And the thing that we hear so often from our users, which is funny, but so awesome, is people will tell us, before jam, I would create a ticket for engineers.
And then I'd expect to talk with them about it later.
And now I create tickets and I never hear about it again. And that's awesome.
And it's funny because it's like, haha, the engineers don't want to talk to me or whatever.
But that's not it. You can just action it and move on. No one wants to.
Like if I say, yay, I spent less time at the DMV, it's not because I don't want to spend time.
It's because tasks should be in and out and done and on to things that are higher leverage.
Love it. I love that philosophy that you love. I think we have one more.
Oh, my gosh. We have one more. Forta Technology. Oh, we were so young.
It's a picture of Danny. I was going to, just in case it didn't come up, bring up the fact that you were at Cloudflare a while ago and for a long time and built some of the most awesome products here, like PMed most of the awesome products here.
I was so lucky. The team here is amazing. They took such a chance on me.
My first boss out of college is Dane, who now runs the Emerging Technologies team here, and he just took such a chance on me right out of school and gave me such opportunity to run and do things.
One of the really impactful projects.
So before moving into this office, Cloudflare was in a much smaller office, just around the corner, and there were never enough meeting rooms.
And it got to the point where if you just kind of walked into the hallway, there were just rows of the sales team sitting on the floor in the hallway, each one on calls.
And it was very common for a customer to be like, are you at the airport?
And everyone's like, no, no, no, we just don't have any meeting rooms.
And so we built our own meeting room.
And that was this fort under someone's desk. And we worked with Matt in IT to make it bookable in the calendar.
So at the time, all the meeting rooms were named after airport codes, just like the data centers.
So there was like SJC, and this one, we named it OAK for Oakland, because it had great vibes.
And it lasted for one day, and it was perfect.
And sales team took calls there. Engineers did calls there.
And then we had to shut it down. Yeah, as you do. But most sports have to get shut down eventually, right?
But the website was used internally for SSL testing for a really long time.
So I don't know if Fort type technology is still around, but very helpful.
Awesome. That's so cool. All right. We are going to move into our next game.
I'm not going to make you drink any more of that Slurpee. That is a relief.
There's some water if you want to clean that out there. My mouth tastes like fluoride.
Did you enjoy this?
I really did. I kind of wanted to drink some more, but I didn't want to feel like, you know, make you feel bad, or make you want to drink more, or make you feel like you had to drink more.
All right. So our next game, we're going to play on the Cloudflare AI Playground.
Cool. And we're going to play with Llama 3.
Great. So there is a prompt here that I'm going to grab. This is protected by Cloudflare, so I need to make sure that I refresh here.
Here we go. And Llama 3 is going to ask this question.
So producer Peter is going to bring over an iPad for you.
And the way that this game is going to work... Sorry about Slurpee. Thank you for apologizing.
I'm just kidding. I'm ready.
Let's do this. All right. So the prompt is, you are incredibly thoughtful, which is true.
You are incredibly thoughtful. And I've told the LLM through a system message that it needs to be incredibly thoughtful.
And you're going to have to answer this in five words or less, which is hard.
OK. And potentially, the AI is going to be better than you at this.
Potentially. Potentially.
I don't know. I don't know. I haven't seen your... All of the knowledge of the Internet.
It's possible.
The AI will be... Yes. Yeah, yes. Yes, it will be better. And then I want it to be the best representation of your ideas as possible.
Great.
So the first question that I have for you that I lost when I reloaded the page there is, what makes a great team?
So if you could write that on your thing, and then we are going to go ahead and run that over here.
What makes a great team in five words or less?
And if you want to just write your answer here... Oh, do I write it?
Yeah, with your finger. So that will help you know if you got five words or not.
What did you...
Oh. Do I show it? Yeah, show it. Yeah, show it. Show it. Why don't we show it to the...
All has been so high tech that I sort of just imagined that the AI would like...
Pull it out. Pull it out. Depict what I was trying. Like sort of like a landscape, you know.
But I wrote aim up together. Aim up together. Great teams aim up together.
That is beautiful. And they do so as individuals and as a team.
Wow. And so... Let's see what AI thought. Trust, respect, and open communication.
Yeah, the AI was better. Well, no, no. But I like that you're bringing everybody up together.
Do you want to... Would you choose one of those if you had to choose?
Like which one to go? You said AI was better. Trust, respect sounds pretty darn good.
I do think it's a really special experience to work on teams where everyone's helping each other be better as individuals.
And also the team is like focused on how do we execute better and better and better.
Like that's a special feeling to be on teams like that.
I think that you're building that team from what I can tell.
I really hope so. That would be... So in the pits of despair of 18 months in, no product market fit, what are we going to do?
One of the really helpful things was to reframe what is this all for?
What if we never get there?
Yeah. Who knows? And we decided at that moment, no matter what, we want everyone who joined us on the journey to leave with new skills, with new experiences.
And we decided it would be important for us all to be aiming up together.
I love it. I love it. That's such a great... What a great leader you are too.
The AI did great. Next time, we'll see how it does. There's two more. We have two more of these and we'll see if it can do better than it did there.
What does it feel like when bugs are reported properly in five words or less?
What does it feel like?
Oh, you're quick.
You're like almost as many... Formula one. I hallucinate too. Serenity washes over me.
Whoa. If all the bugs are reported properly, serenity washes over AI.
I guess it's saying, I don't know why it said that. Look, I think even if a bug is reported properly, it's not a joy to fix.
Yeah. It's still a little bit of a nuisance, but less.
But the reason why I chose formula one is it's like the whole team is working together to deliver something as fast as possible around the track and then onto the next challenge.
Wow. Wow. Wow. Two words. You did two.
I love it. One is a number, so I felt like it was even. Yeah, even. It doesn't even...
It's a character. Amazing. That was great. Okay, one more. Okay. You're very good at this, by the way.
Oh, thank you so much. I was fishing for that. All right.
This is something, like I said in the very beginning, this is something that you do so well at all of the events that you throw.
What are the key ingredients to making someone feel welcome?
I don't know.
I don't know, but I'll tell you that we think about it a lot. A lot of companies are trying to find what's the ROI of our events, and all the signups become leads, and then suddenly you're getting these marketing emails, and you're just like, I'm just this lead to this company.
It sort of breaks the trust. And so we just decided from the get-go, we're not tracking ROI of the events.
We're here to celebrate builders and to show people what other people are building, to all learn from each other, and that's the thing.
And it's not about marketing jam, and it's not about lead generation.
And it just is, and we're not going to measure it, and we're just going to trust the strategy.
And so I don't know that I have a science of how to make someone feel welcome in five words or less, but it's like, don't treat them like a lead.
Oh, you did it. Maybe the AI will be better.
Kindness and open ears. What would you have said? I like kindness and open ears, but I don't think I would have said that.
Yeah, I think being just connecting.
I feel like we're doing right now, and I feel like I see you do that with people.
So when I thought about this, like, oh, Daniel makes such a great guest for the show.
So kind, and you do the same. And you do it also every time I see you do a tech talk.
It's always like these games. It's like everyone participate and be a part of this talk and shape it as we go, and it's super special.
Awesome. Well, thank you for being a part of this and shaping this as we go.
Just to do that, to take that and wrap that all up there.
Thanks for being on the show. Is there anything that we want to plug?
I know we plug jam.pizza. We plug jam.dev. What else?
And there's events. Do you have a place where you list your events that you do?
Luma's website. So it's lu.ma slash jam.dot, dev. So it's like written out. But if you're listening to this, maybe you're interested in how startups are built, and we're sharing how we're building jam every single week, the actual moments and decisions and challenges on a new podcast called Building Jam.
And we've never seen a startup do this except for the Gimlet startup in 2014 in a podcast called Startup that I'm like the number one fan of.
And so hopefully it's cathartic for those of you who are building startups yourself or at least marginally interesting for everyone else.
Awesome. Thank you so much for being here on this day of the show.
So awesome. And you can take the Slurpee with you. Oh, I was going to ask.
I was wondering. Thank you. Thank you. So great. That was awesome.