Building Teams Exactly How You Want w/Hank Taylor, Marketing at Laravel

This is a good conversation that needs to— I think that needs to happen. Uh, we just keep— we just keep chatting.

So, okay.

Uh, so did you have family in Boise, or did you—

Yeah, so I grew up— I grew up just outside of Boise in Meridian. So now I live 2 miles from my parents, which 2 miles in a state like this, as you know, is 2 minutes.

Yep.

And then I live a quarter mile from my brother. People in San Francisco thought I had a lot of kids with 3, and 3 kids sharing a room in San Francisco was a lot. My brother has 7 kids, so we're the small family around here. Yeah, but yeah, now there's, you know, babysitting. Yeah, and, you know, go on dates with my wife. It's crazy.

Crazy.

Yeah, I can, I can, I'm 2 minutes from my gym. Used to be 45 minutes for me to get to the gym.

I would never work out if I was 45 minutes from a gym.

It was hard. I had to tie it up into my whole day. Yeah. And so I would go to the gym and, and I made sure to have like a nice enough gym so that I could shower there and not feel like I was gonna get a fungus and, and all that. And, and, you know, that's— those are the times I'd work out. Um, yeah, when I was in San Francisco. But yeah, I moved here. Well, I'm pumped for you.

Pumped for your family.

Interestingly and relevant to the podcast. Yeah. So I didn't— I thought about moving here earlier, but when I was working at Vercel, that CEO really values in-person. Yeah. And so I realized it was important for my career to be there. But a few years in, I had, I had these regular leadership meetings for the marketing, DevRel, and RevOps team. Yeah. And I had a great one. But my team was all remote. I had 6 directors reporting to me.

Yeah.

CEO's in a different room in the WeWork. I'm in a different room. And we just had a great meeting. So I walked out and I was like, this is my moment. I've been checking Zillow. And I have a place picked out. So I, you know, said, hey, Guillermo, that was a pretty good meeting. And he was like, yeah, that was like the best meeting ever. And I was like, great. So turns out you can have a good meeting remotely.

Boom, boom, and boom.

I think I need— I think it's time for me to move to Idaho since, you know, I mean, nowhere here anyway, and I can come down frequently enough.

Yep.

Um, and yeah, he, he kind of couldn't say no to that. I did end up leaving 6 months after I moved, but, you know.

Yeah.

Um, it was interesting.

That's awesome. Well, y'all, good morning. You know, I, uh, I, I, I really like— my goal for this show is I want this to be a very approachable conversation for everybody involved. And I've been doing this for 4 and a half years now because I wanna give back to developers at scale. And as a recruiter for 11 years, I was having all these conversations when COVID hit. I was having so many conversations of engineers being laid off before the market ripped. And I was like, there's gotta be a better way to scale these conversations. And so what that was right now, Hank and I were just talking backstage. I was like, let's just go live and hang out. So again, Um, we'll go ahead and start the show, but good morning everybody. Um, super pumped to have the second Hank on this week. Crazy. I don't know many Hanks. I legitimately— the only 2 Hanks that I know are on the show this week. Hank Washington, um, out of Atlanta, who you guys saw on Tuesday, and now Hank Taylor, now a little outside of Boise, Idaho. And so, um, Hank, welcome to the show. Very excited for the show. We started a little early because Hank's got a bunch of knowledge. And I want to try to get all that out of Hank over the next 40 minutes. So we start a little bit early. So please say hey. We'd love to hear from you. I tell everybody this that tunes in, and I don't mean this mean towards the guests. The guests are secondary on the show. And the reason why I say that is because this is a networking show. I think networking has changed substantially since COVID I believe, was it Angie Jones that tweeted or Blue Sky the other day? I was like, why don't you attend meetups? I said they're boring as hell. Somebody in the comments said, because you have to compete with Netflix now. And I think that's very, very true. And so I kind of keep that in mind. So what this show is, is for you to be able to come hang out, have a cup of coffee in your PJs. Maybe you're between meetings and want to hear some from some good people in tech. So please say hey, would love to hear from you. The only way to be present, the only way to show up in a virtual setting these days is to say hey, is to engage. So please do that. Would love to, would love to say hey to you, and and I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. Also, ask questions for Hank. Like I said, Hank comes with a wealth of knowledge. We're going to talk about building teams, talk about hiring, talk about the job search, separating yourself. We're throwing some equity conversations in here as well. So again, we're going to cover a lot today. So hang on, drink some caffeine. I'm already in my second cup of cold brew today. So you guys enjoy. But again, Taya, it's good to see you. Chris, Matt, Richie, it's great to see y'all. But first and foremost, I do wanna give a shout out to Appwrite. I am an Appwrite hero. Great crew over there. Go check them out. They're absolutely fantastic. So blessed to be part of them. And of course, as always, Torque. We are— my goal is to build a community that's with you the entire way with the job search, right? Our unofficial slogan is welcome home. I want Torque to be the de facto place when it comes to all things career, job search content. We have a lot of work we gotta do. Most people have not heard us, but excited to build this thing in public. And knowing Hank, he obviously is a fan of that. Chris, it's good to see you. Tune in. I love it, Ricardo. It's great to see you as well. Meetups get me out of my PJs. They need to be at least. I I I listen. I'm gonna be totally totally transparent with you all here. I'm wearing the same pair of pants probably for the last week. They are great. They're from Lululemon. They are fantastic. I need to drop the link, but they are my favorites. I travel with them. They almost look like slacks too. That's not the point of the show. The point of the show is for Hank to talk. So enough me running my mouth, Hank. Let's give the people what they want, man. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there.

Okay, I'm Hank. I did panic when I saw you were streaming with another Hank. I was like, I was like, hold up, am I supposed to— is that today? Did he go live? Is he waiting for me? Um, and then I popped on, I was like, oh, that's a different—

yeah, yeah.

Um, so I'm, I'm at my core, I'm a marketer. for mainly technical products over the last, geez, more than a decade. I had an internship at MySQL right out of high school in 2007 that my brother hooked me up with. He was their marketing manager. I've done a bunch of other interesting technical tools like GitLab and Neo4j, most famously Vercel, where I led DevRel, marketing, revenue operations, and a few other things for a few years. And for the last 2 years, I've been consulting full-time. Yeah. Um, doing fractional CMO type of work, doing marketing advisory. And one of those companies, you know, recently convinced me to abandon all— Yeah, they, they convinced me. Yeah, they convinced me to abandon all the freedom and all that stuff. They enticed me. And so now I'm full-time at Laravel doing all things marketing. And actually, that was a thing we talked about before. You asked me what my title was. Yeah, I was kind of shy about it. But then I realized it's actually very relevant for this. So I'm a head of marketing now, which is actually a title downgrade.

Yeah, let's talk about—

From what I've had before. I've been a VP marketing multiple times. I've had CMO and VP offers. And what's interesting is, yeah, I took a lesser title and some people have asked me about that. I guess I shouldn't be shy about it. I think the opportunity is good enough.

Yeah.

The company's young enough that they don't have the organizational structure to support multiple, like, VPs. So we have a CEO, a COO, a president and COO, actually.

Yeah.

And then we have a couple heads of— so I'm one of those.

What, man? I, you know, I've gotten a question that night and I've been very loud about that. I think throughout your career, I think I have always said there's only so many titles you can have. There's only so— from a compensation perspective, I know equity, we can talk about that here in a second. But at the end of the day, like, I know a lot of people are title chasers and that's fine. I get it. I think titles are important, but I also think some people get too caught up on titles. Can you talk about What people should be aware of throughout their career. Obviously you took a lesser title on paper, but can you talk about the mindset around that, why people should be open to it, some things to look for? And then if we wanna get into kind of the equity conversation, we can as well. But I just kind of wanna start super high level with that question.

Yeah, titles aren't crazy important. It's one of the 3 main— I tell people when they're interviewing with me, That, okay, you've got, you know, 3 or 4 main levers. You can ask me for money, you can ask me for equity, you can ask me for title.

I love that.

And the more you pull on one, the more you gotta let go of the others.

Yep.

And I'm a— what really matters for me, salary equity, you know, what's the, what's the opportunity? Um, and you can also— then there's the other, the other levers and How you do vacation or other stuff and what kind of expectations you're setting going in. Interestingly, on this job, I also, you know, wasn't too aggressive on my salary and equity. And I told, you know, the COO I was negotiating with, because it was clear there was an expectation for me to ask for more.

Yeah.

I said, hey, I'm saving that. Because I've got people I'm gonna bring in and we wanna run lean and we wanna run fast, and I'm gonna need to give more to certain people to convince them to come in here.

Right.

Um, so that was interesting. But I think, I don't know, I think people get wrapped up in the titles and it really doesn't matter. What matters is the stories you collect and the stories you can tell after.

100%. Talk about when it comes to, I, I know obviously the job search right now, It's very prevalent for a lot of people in this market, right? Some people are having problems finding jobs. Some people, when they get the offer, they don't know what to look at. You talked about these levers you can pull. Can you kind of dive in a little bit more, especially around some negotiables? In your experience, how can people negotiate? Is it okay to negotiate? I feel like people get these offers like, okay, yeah, that's fine. Like, is it okay to negotiate? As a hiring manager, as a leader in organizations in the past, What are your thoughts on that?

Most people think of negotiation as a kind of a battle.

Yes.

And as a, hey, I want, I want more. And a lot of, I think, especially junior people, they hear advice, you should always ask for another $5K or something. And I've told multiple people who've, you know, come to me for advice, they say, I've got this offer, whatever. I'd really like $5K or $10K more. And I go, what is $5K or $10K in the long run? Like, if, if you're an ambitious person and you think that you're gonna keep growing your career, $5K or $10K for a couple years in, you know, this role now, what does that matter when you might be able to earn $30K, $40K, $50K more in a couple years if you can get that job and get the stories out of it? So that's like one angle, but yeah, that's not very— that's not what you're asking. Like, how do you act? How do you get more when you want it?

I love that. Take that and put that over here for sure.

Yeah, that's something to set aside. The other thing is, both when someone wants to give you an offer, they've decided you're, you're a fit for them somehow.

Yep.

And it's no longer You're no longer proving yourself or anything. There are some sales leaders who, they have this weird thinking where, oh, if the salesperson doesn't ask for more, then they're gonna be a bad negotiator. There are like, in sales especially, that's a thing I've heard.

Yeah.

I've, I've seen a VP of sales be like, should we retract this offer? They didn't ask for more. I'm scared they're not a good negotiator.

That's crazy. Yeah.

Yeah. And But here's where I come, come at it from. Once, once you as an employer, or once you as a potential employee, have come to the decision that you want to work with each other, you're on the same side of the table. And now there's just a problem to be solved of how do we make this work? What's beneficial for everybody?

Yeah.

I've seen people squeeze too hard. As the employee, and then they start the job with a target on their back. They start the job with their employee feeling like they lost.

Okay.

And then it's— and then that the hiring manager, their manager, their executive is telling them on day 1, this person better prove themselves in 90 days. Yeah, we gotta, we gotta go back to the market. And that happens. It happens, especially with marketing types at technical companies. Because a lot of marketers are charlatans. I'm not shy about it, because I'm not one. But—

Hot take. Talk about that real fast. I love some marketing hot takes.

I mean, I think if you're at a— if you've been at a couple dev tool companies, you've had a couple different CMOs, VPs of marketing through the revolving door. But yeah, and we can talk more about that if you like. But I guess on, on that first point, you're both at the same table and you can, instead of asking straight up for, hey, I need $5K or $10K more, or being scared to ask for it, you can approach the person as a human and just say, hey, this is what I'm hoping for.

Yeah.

I, you know, I think It's supported by this. This is what I'm hoping to do at the company. This is how I'll earn it. Or can we have a real conversation 6 months in?

Yeah.

Or can I trade some equity for that? Or can I trade some cash for the equity?

Yeah.

You know, what, what levers do you have, dear hiring manager, to help me get what me and/or my family need to join your company? Yeah, because otherwise I have these other opportunities, blah, blah, blah. And that's a tough thing because sometimes the answer is, I don't have anything. Like, I already gave you everything I had.

Yeah.

And, and then there's just a real decision to be made.

100%. I, I do want to, I do want to talk about equity. You said backstage before we went live, you know, that, that you feel like you got a pretty good grasp on it. I think that's kind of a topic that Nobody really talks about, no one knows how to navigate. Do you have just some basic tips for people watching the show now or in the future on how to figure out equity at a high level?

Yeah, so in a lot of jobs, there's a couple ways to think about it. Until you're really director level or like a senior engineer, That's early, your equity usually doesn't matter. And so it's kind of a bonus to think about. And if you want to make a lot of money in tech, then the easiest way is to go work for a huge company, a FAANG company.

Yeah.

Because that, that equity comes as RSUs. When it's given to you, you can basically liquidate it immediately. And it's like that. Whereas at tiny startups, which is where I specialize, I joined companies, uh, even as a consultant, I only worked with companies under 100 employees.

That's small.

Yeah, it's very small. I've joined companies as small as 10. You know, one of those, they're much more likely to fail. I've been at a couple companies that, you know, 6 months in, I'm like, all right, I'm finding a new job. This one didn't work out.

Right.

Um, but the equity thing, what a lot of people don't understand is, um, one, when the HR person or hiring manager gives you some valuation, they could be basing that on an FMV, a fair market value, okay, which is an IRS number. That's a number for tax purposes, okay? And that number is almost always smaller than the preferred value or the street value.

Okay.

And so your first question when, when you're given a value should always be, oh, is this the preferred value that the investors paid at the last round, or is this the FMV, or is it somewhere in between?

Okay.

That tells you if they're giving you equity on FMV, that's more generous. If they're giving it you on preferred value, Then you gotta really think about how much more can this company actually grow.

So, okay, so good question. Again, I like to get tactical on this show. So if you, if you got an offer and someone's offering you equity, you need to ask them, is this fair market value or is it— what was the other one?

The preferred price.

Preferred price. And what ideally do you wanna hear?

I wanna hear, well, I'm at a different level, so I'll get into that.

Okay, but yeah, go ahead.

Most people, you want to hear that you're getting a valuation in the FMV because that's, that's always lower. Um, and the FMV is going to be also your strike price, how much it costs you to exercise. So that's another thing people always forget is you're given equity. You might— if you're given, you know, a $200,000 grant that vests over 4 years, that's $50,000 a year, right? But if they're giving you that in the FMV, then you have to pay $50,000 a year to exercise all of that.

And when you say that, guys, explain exercise real quick for people who don't know what the word— term exercise means.

So you're never given a share of the company, you're given an option to buy the share.

Everybody got that? Cool, keep going.

So with, with an option, and then there's multiple types of options, but we don't have time to get into that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're gonna be giving eyes off.

I know, I'm gonna be like, I'm gonna be out.

I, I could go all day about this.

Yeah, I know.

Um, so yeah, you, you want to find out. So that's your next question actually is, well, what's the strike price?

Okay.

Um, because then you know this is the cost of equity.

Okay.

And this is the, um, this is the other thing. In fact, actually, you know, you post this show somewhere on LinkedIn or Twitter, right?

Yeah.

I'm happy to put a little spreadsheet that I make for people I'm hiring.

That would be unreal.

It's like you can just plug numbers in there.

Yeah. Okay.

And it kind of gives you the questions to ask. What's the strike price?

Okay.

What's the, what's the FMV? What's the last preferred price?

Okay.

And you need those numbers to understand. Now, when you're at a higher level, you want to be asking about percentages. You want to know how many shares are there outstanding.

Okay.

Because then you can, you know, then you can be asking for meaningful fractions of a percent.

Okay.

Um, okay. And, and so on, you know.

I love that. Well, yeah, that, that, that spreadsheet would be great. If anybody has any questions around equity, I know this is like Taylor— either you're like, Taylor, this is Kind of a dry topic, I understand, but I think it's important for everybody. So if you have questions on equity, please ask them. I know there's a little bit of lag when it comes to StreamYard and streaming, so please ask them, we'll get to them. Um, Roxy, it's good to see you, girl. Um, but I do want to continue to move on because there's a lot of topics. We only have 19 minutes left. Hank's got a meeting in 19 minutes, so I want to move through this. Let's talk about building teams, hiring teams. I think you said— what, what is the thing you said backstage about, um, all the people you're working with right now? Like You basically, you know everybody, right? Everyone you hired?

Yeah. So I've, I've got 5 direct reports right now. Yeah, 5 and a half. One of them is kind of in a half, half DevRel, half support job. And 3 of them, 4 of them are brand new to the company. I mean, this company is growing mega fast. One year ago, there were 10 people at this company. Right now there's Holy smokes.

Okay. All right.

Yeah. So I was brought in in large part to help build out the correct team and to build it out in a way that we know it can stay lean.

Yeah.

Because we don't, you know, we don't have to like go crazy on price rate. Like there's all sorts of stuff you get forced into that's bad for your community. We have a huge open source community. There's stuff you get forced into on pricing. And right now we have a very generous pricing model, etc., etc. So we don't want to ruin that.

Sure.

By growing too, too fast.

Sure.

And so next year we're not going to grow as fast. So part of that was hiring people that we know are going to hit a really high quality bar, have low ego, high impact, all that sort of good stuff.

Okay.

Um, so the first thing I did was go hit up The people I've worked with before. And what I told you was, I've got one great guy who I'd never met before. He was already in the interview process, basically when I met him.

Okay.

And he's doing great. He was known by someone else at the company though, so he came in referred.

Okay.

I've got one person who I've worked with before. I've got another person who I've worked with. This is our 3rd time working together. And then another person we've worked with 4 times together. And these are people I've kept in touch with for years, you know, since the first time we worked together. And those are the, you know, those are the first people you hit up.

Sure. Talk— I, I'm trying to— I have so many questions. I'm trying to figure out what, what best to ask in a short amount of time. Talk about what you look for right now. You have hired, you have scaled teams. What does Hank Taylor look for when you hire somebody? And I think this could be very applicable to the people watching the show right now if they're trying to figure out how to get a leg up in the interview process.

Yeah. This might be weird to say, but the weirder the better.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's weird because, you know, I've— at Vercel, I hired about 40 people in a year.

Holy shit.

We were hypergrowth. It was ZIRP, and we were one of the justified— we were one of the justified, you know, ZIRP companies. Like, it's still going strong, Eversell.

Yep.

But I'd never hired that fast. I had hired— I hired external advisors and coaches for myself to look around corners. I'd never— I'd never been part of a market— marketing org that big, but I eventually had, you know, 55 people under me. And that meant I also had to lay off a lot of people. Not— I was— I'm more of an aggressive person than most when it comes to letting people go for performance issues.

Yeah.

Because, and this was a constant point of tension between me and the head of HR, because the number one thing you can give to your team that will retain them and make them happy and give them quality of life is good teammates. And if you give them bad teammates, yes, they're out of there and you all lose. And yeah, preach. So, and, and just because there's some people I let go that were actually really good, they just weren't a good fit for that team at that time. And, you know, anyway, so let's bring that to today. This is the weird thing I was gonna say. I already said some weird things, but I actually wrote down every role— well, every person and role that I had to let go at Vercel and prior. And I thought really hard about why did I have to do that? Did I mess up in the interview? Did I miss something?

Okay.

Was the role just fundamentally incorrect? Or were they actually just a bad fit and it was going to be impossible to detect? So as I did that, yeah, what'd you find out? I learned a lot about— I'm not going to go into specifics for, you know, reasons of privacy, but I figured out a lot about, oh, okay, as I build this team, these are the roles that aren't necessary. They were never necessary. I hired them because somebody told me to hire them. And that's a play— and there's a playbook. And I don't, I don't typically like playbooks. But when you're asked to hire, you know, I was asked to hire like 60 people in a year, and I only did like 30 or 40, right? And that's crazy. Yeah, you know, the board was telling me to spend faster. And I was like, no, you guys are crazy. Right? Um, so as I thought about it, I thought, okay, what am I looking for now? I'm looking for really dynamic people, you know.

What does that mean, though?

A dynamic person, when you're at a very small company, they have to wear multiple hats.

Okay.

And they can't— I can't teach them. So one of the things that I realized I got trapped in at Vercel was I— had to teach too many people how to do their job.

Interesting.

Okay. And, and so, and, and that was a trap especially well suited for me because one of my mantras is teaching is the essence of leadership. So I believe that when I'm teaching people things, that's part of leadership. And I still believe that to be true. But the The fundamental change here is like, I have to protect my time in order to scale this company, right? And so I need people who, they know really well how to learn, and they know when they need to learn from me, and they know when they can just go learn from the great wild world.

Right.

And so I have the role, the roles we've hired, they're all very hybrid. Um, I have a person who's over growth and demand gen. She, she's wearing 3 hats. I put in the JD that I wrote to pitch it in my like hiring plan to my COO. I said, you know, XYZ and whatever else I can't handle. Like, that's this person. I've worked with her twice before. I know she can do all that.

Right.

There's another person. It was X, Y, and Z. There's another person, A, B, and C.

Right.

And with all these people, I said, I don't know which one you're going to focus on. Are you going to focus on the X or the Z? It's hard to know. You're going to have to figure— like, that's where we'll be figuring things out together, but I'll point you in the right way. So dynamic— I'm looking for people with dynamic skill sets. The ability to acquire skills is more important than the— let me rephrase that. The prior evidence and stories that a candidate talking to me has about acquiring new skills and fulfilling new roles is more important to me than their experience with the specific role I'm hiring for. Does that make sense?

It does. Yep. Yep.

Like, I would rather have someone who, if I have, you know, job X to be done, And I have a specialist at X who's done it for 5 years versus, well, I know someone who's learned W, Y, and Z, and they have stories about learning those things on the job with minimal input and high autonomy. You're gonna take that ego. Yeah, I'd rather just have that person learn X.

Same.

Because the same way, because then when the next thing comes up, I know they'll be able to handle it. And, and that was some of the things I had to let people go for, was I hired a specialist, turned out the job was actually over here, not here. So I had to let them go because they couldn't adapt.

Yep, I love that. Oddly, one of the— Jordan comes in— oddly, one of the best things my job has done for me is baptism by fire. You got to learn and figure it out or you're going to drown. 100%. What else, Hank? So you want somebody that's dynamic. What else?

I mean, I don't know. I guess that's the main thing I've been thinking about. Obviously, if they're kind of a fun and chipper person, that's preferable.

So yeah, I'm— so I've said this a lot in my talks that I think right now in today's market that hiring managers— and listen, I have gotten some pushback. I think there's some bias on this and I get it. But I do think at the end of the day, people want to work with people they enjoy.

You want— here's another hot take for you. This is very hot today.

I love it.

I've had people who are managers, new managers, older managers, whatever. More than ever, managers have to be therapists for people that are working for them. And we don't want to be your therapist all the time. Like, we can be it sometimes.

Yeah.

But we're not your therapist. We're, we're your boss. And at the end of the day, I need to know I'm going to get results out of you and the results are going to happen for the company. And I can be human, and I've been— I have great friends, and I've helped people through some crazy stuff.

Right.

But when I have a— there's, there's some people I've had where it's, oh, every call is some sort of new drama.

Yep.

Can't— I can't sustain that as a hiring manager, as a manager.

Yep.

And if you can detect that in the interview process, and if you can show in the interview process as the candidate that, hey, I'm, I'm going to not be a burden. I'm going to be someone you can actually talk to and be a confidant. I'd rather have a confidant than, you know, be a therapist.

Jordan, be a low-maintenance employee. Thoughts on that?

I might. Now, I guess to counter that, I do kind of like that take, Jordan, but I've told, I've told my high performers before, uh, because I had a high performer once. She's working with me now, but a few years ago when we were working at a different job, she said, I'll try and, I'll try and bug you less. I said, no, actually, as a high performer, I want to be spending the most time with you.

Okay.

Like, you should be the person, because I know that, you know, effort in gets multiplied out of you, right? And so I, I spend the most time with my highest performers to multiply the impact.

I love that.

There you go.

I love that. Um, how have you been able to know all these people? I guess that's what I'm trying to get at. I want to try to educate the people how to stay close to people long-term. You have hired people who you know. How do you recommend people maintain relationships post-job? Obviously, your networking community has done a great job. You keep up with people. I mean, listen, you go to conferences and maybe that's it, but like, I mean, you're everywhere and you do a podcast, which is great, by the way. I wanna give you a chance to shout out your podcast here in a minute, but talk about how people can learn to keep up with people better for future jobs.

So, uh, I had a friend tell me a couple months ago that they were taking spot— that they were speaking to another friend of mine. Yeah. And they said, isn't it weird that Hank calls us on the phone? And like, didn't that weird you out at first? And now isn't it like endearing? Like, yeah, I call people on the phone. I'll call them randomly.

That's crazy, dude. I call diabolical shit.

But really, I reach out to people sometimes. I'll make, you know, probably once or twice a year I'll put up a LinkedIn post. It's like, hey, if this is like something, you know, of interest to you, I want to talk to you. I take a lot of the random LinkedIn DMs I get and I'll— I just keep in touch with people. I have, um, and that applies for anybody who might hire me, anybody that I might hire, and anybody that I just think is interesting. Or am I like, um, yeah, I'm a good yapper, as Jacqueline said there.

Like, isn't it kind of weird our society shifted from thinking a phone call makes someone weird?

And, and in addition to that, I've created You know, I have, I have, you know, the group text. I have a Slack that was originally intended to be for, you know, RevOps type people. And now it's just kind of friends of Hank who are also really good at their jobs.

I want to be in that.

So we all have something to talk about. Yeah, you're not RevOps-y enough. It's, it's, you know, but you create these different circles, right? And, and you make an effort and you pick up the phone and, and I'm really happy. Somebody who was on my, one of my teams a few years ago and I haven't touched base with her for a few years. She just started a new job and she just reached out to me and I've got my Calendly ready. I have a Calendly, I have a Calendly for friends.

I love that.

So that it's like certain hours of the day, so it's not interrupting my workday so much, but Whatever. And if I'm driving to McDonald's, which I do too much, I'm calling somebody. You know, if I'm not listening to a podcast, I'm, I'm trying to talk to somebody that I think is interesting.

I love that. That's awesome. All right, I got you for 4 more minutes. I definitely want to give you a shout out. I could talk with you forever. Maybe I can bait you into coming on here the next few months again. But talk about how people can get in touch with you. Give a shout out to your podcast. I'm a big fan of it. So if you want to kind of give a quick rundown about what you got going on.

Yeah, so on Twitter I'm @thehanktaylor, you know, because I thought I was the only Hank that you had around, Taylor, but I guess not.

I'm sorry.

Um, shout out to Hank Washington earlier this week. Um, um, or on LinkedIn I'm in/devmarketer. Um, and yeah, you mentioned I've got a podcast, codetomarket.fm. It's really just for, like, technical founders and heads of marketing at technical products. It's pretty niche. It's really a way for me and Gonto to talk because we just love talking. So we're like, how do we structure this so we can keep talking? But yeah, I'm full-time at Laravel now. I don't really have much to pitch. I'm not making— I'm losing money on the podcast because Um, and yeah, I'm not really looking for anything, but I am always looking for good people. Um, if you, uh, want to chat, you know, time, time's limited, but also life's limited. So I'm always happy to chat with people. Hit me up.

All right, last question. Um, uh, and again, everybody, thank you for tuning in. The comment section is going off right now. So Hank, I believe we had a good podcast. Um, uh, wanted— so the last question I always end with, the show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now as adults we don't really have a guidance counselor to turn to and just ask for general career advice. That's what I want this platform to be. What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Hank? If you go back to Hank 10 years ago, what would you tell him?

I was thinking about this in the shower today because I was like, um, I'm gonna be on some podcasts about careers. And this came up, this same sort of thing came up a couple days ago on a call with, you know, someone I was catching up with. The most important thing I've done in my career is I've run to where the crowd is running away from. And I thought about the, you know, not to put myself on like a pedestal, but I, I had that image of You know, in, in Marvel's Endgame, Avengers Endgame, everybody's fleeing out of New York and Iron Man walks against the crowd. He's helping people along the way and he's trying to figure out what's going on.

Great reference.

And this, this thought came from back when I was at Neo4j. My COO— my CMO was let go and the COO pulled me aside. Shortest one-on-one ever. He said, Hank, Our leads are not going to increase. We're not getting more signups or anything, but we need to double sales. So you need to figure out how to do that.

Mm-hmm.

And that is like the most terrifying thing you can be told. This was my first job out of college, and I was like, I guess I'm running toward the fire here. And everything, everything good that's happened in my career has been when I take on things that nobody owns or is illy defined that the founder doesn't want to deal with or whatever. So past Hank, run toward the fires, and, and that'll, that'll set you up well.

I love it. Awesome. Well, y'all, thank you for tuning in this morning. We appreciate it. Hank, stay on so I can say bye to you backstage real fast, but thank you so much. I will attach, um, the, uh, the spreadsheet that Hank will send me. I'll make sure we get that. And y'all have a good one. We're off for the rest of the week. Appreciate y'all so much. Appreciate the community. And, uh, we'll see y'all next week. Peace. Bye.