Community Chats and Meetup.com Alternatives w/Founder, Taz Singh

All righty, good morning. I gotta get my camera angles down a little better. I don't look as good as, as Taz. Good morning, everybody. I say good morning, everybody. Nobody's here yet. Hold on, I forgot to send my— I forgot to send him a text message. Uh, all right, well, so a little story time. Woke up this morning, if you've not seen my tweet, Bluesky or Threads, since we just published all of them now, why not? Um, I woke up this morning and, um, I did not have Wi-Fi at my house, so I'm at a coffee shop. If you hear lattes being made or spills or something breaks, I, I'm sorry, but we're here. Um, woke up at 5 AM, the monitor was out, and I told my wife, I was like, I got 16 meetings today, I gotta go like now. So we're here, been here this morning. I also don't know where I'm gonna eat breakfast. I gotta eat breakfast sometimes. But this is not a podcast about me and my first world issues. This is a podcast about Taz and just community and what he's built. So for those of you tuned in, welcome, good morning. Please say hey, we'd love to hear from you. Again, what I tell people is like this, listen, this live show is a community-first live show. Like, guests are secondary, and I don't mean that mean for Taz or anybody on the show, but the reason why I have this show is for you to say hey, network with others. I've had people find jobs on this show, not through me, Um, um, because of this show, I have people found internships off this show. Um, so again, like, what, like, what I tell people is if you have stayed consistent and you have networked with every single guest on my show and everybody in the comments for 5 years— we're all 5 years this year, Taz, 5 years in March—

Wow.

If you have done it for 5 years, your network would be just as good as my network, which is a really good network. So please say hey, we'd love to hear from you. But let's go ahead. Oh, I also want to give a shout out to Sponsor of the show, Appwrite. Appwrite, you know, it's pretty cool at Torque. Uh, we have 2 Appwrite heroes at Torque, me and Jason. So I got off a call with, um, Aditya, who is on the Appwrite DevRel team. We're gonna, we're gonna plan some things because if there's 2 Appwrite heroes on the Torque team, we need to do something with Appwrite. So anyways, go check them out. Obviously a fantastic product. Jeff, it's good to see you. Couldn't miss Taz because Guild is legit awesome. There you go. Taya, it's good to see you. Sal, it's good to see you. We got people starting to trickle in this morning, which is fantastic. We are a few minutes early, but I want to get started because it's gonna be a conversation. So, Taz, let's kick it off, man. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there.

If you have 2 Appwrite heroes, that make— does that make you the Appwrite Avengers?

Oh, that's good. That's good. I may need to write— I think we need t-shirts. Yeah, it's the Appwrite Avengers. I like that. I like that.

But yeah, I guess to answer your question, yeah, I'm Taz Singh. I'm the founder of Guild. I've been running communities since I think 2011 is when I started my first community, Toronto JavaScript. I think that's over 21,000 combined members today. We've helped countless people with all of their kind of job search, entering the tech community, essentially leveling up, all those lovely things. And yeah, along the way I said, hey, why don't we make all those things into a better platform. And so here we are today with Guild.host.

That's awesome. Yeah. And again, say, say those stats one more time for Canada. Again, say those one more time.

Over 21,000 combined members. I think we have something like 30 to 50 events a year, something insane like that. And, um, yeah, so I started that in 2011. And, um, back then, I mean, fun story, it was me, uh, you know, the guy that started it, uh, one of my employees at the startup I had at the time, and then a buddy of mine. It was just the 3 of us at the very first event ever. Um, since then we've organized events. I think the biggest one I organized was 300 people. We had sponsors, like multiple displays. 300 people is basically a small conference, you know what I mean?

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, it's no longer an after-work, like, kind of an event, you know what I mean? It's a small conference. And so, um, yeah, just the, um, you know, just seeing the impact of that and hearing from folks all around the world, even like today, about, um, the impact that they've had through that community is just, you know, it just fuels so much in me, and I'm so happy to give back.

Man, that's awesome. It's good to see Paul Bishop, fellow, uh, uh, you know, former VACO guy like myself. It's good to see you, Paul. Hope you're doing well, man. Miss you. Yeah, we started people. It's 9:30 on the dot, so we're starting to get people tuned in. Emily, it's good to see you, uh, as always. Nick, we got Nick 2 for 2. 2 for 2. Nick, my man, what's going on? It's good to see you. Chris, As always, from very cold, 16 degrees Nashville, Tennessee. So, Taz, let me— we have a lot to go over this morning. Um, I, I, I, I want to start about talking about Guilds, right? So because, because what I, what I want is, is even if people tune, log off, like, I want them to know about Guilds. I think obviously we use it very aggressively at Torque. Um, you and I joked about that. Um, uh, I think there was such a need for it after meetup.com got bought. Talk about Guild, talk about your thought around building it, talk about maybe what gives it its special sauce. Obviously, I have my thoughts, but I want to hear it from the guy who built it.

For sure. Yeah. Would you mind if we take a small detour on that and talk about how I met you actually? Because it's kind of related to Guild in a way. Yeah, we just launched Guild. I was working on it passively over COVID. I'll talk a bit more about what it does and all of those fun things in a bit. But we just started over COVID and I was super excited to get back to in-person after COVID and super excited to attend React Miami. And so I said, you know what, I've been cooped up in my office all this time. I've overcompensated by buying a lot of video equipment. And so why don't I bring that to me? I'm going to React Miami for the first time. First React Miami, first time, you know, going out there to a conference outside of where I currently live, which is London, UK. Why don't I bring my video equipment and why don't I, you know, talk to people? So I bring my video equipment, I get it set up on my dinky little tripod. I'm like, you know, kind of filming myself and everything. And then Taylor rocks up. Taylor rocks up. He's like, you know, all cool. He's got like, he's got that stride going on. You know, he's got like a video guy filming him. And I'm just like, man, it is amateur hour over here. And whoever that guy is, I want to be that guy over there. And so, um, you know, like, but essentially my alarm bells were going off. I was like, okay, like This guy has got to be like, you know, some sort of hotshot bigwig, you know, type of guy. And it wasn't until I, you know, kind of like learned more about you and kind of discovered more about you that I actually discovered that you're the exact opposite. You're kind of a lovely, you know, low ego guy that just wants to help people. And I really, really, really love that. And the other thing I really liked was that, you know, you just want to, you know, help people with their careers and in tech as well. For me, I kind of saw this as kind of two sides of the same coin, essentially, in a lot of ways, in that we're really working towards the same goal. For me, from a community angle, you're leveraging community essentially from a career recruitment angle. And so it's really kind of that pairing that kind of helps elevate everyone and helps elevate the whole tech industry. So yeah, I just wanted to kind of say that.

And also too, shout out, I mean, like I said, shout out React Miami. I'm gonna try to go down. I know Jason's watching this, so he's gonna DM me and go, can I come with you? But like React, shout out Gabe Greenberg, shout out Michelle, shout out G2i. I mean, like I met you at React Miami. I met Hank Taylor at React Miami. I mean, I've met so many engineers and strengthened bonds at React Miami. I mean, React Miami is a hell of an event. So yeah, shout out React Miami. So, well, Taz, again, thank you for your kind words, my man. That means a lot. So let's talk about Guild, man. So like, what was the idea? Why did you want to build it?

I can only avoid this question so much, can't I? So yeah, I guess if I start from the top, yeah, I started Toronto JavaScript 2011. And what I found in growing that community to, as I said, 21,000 combined members today, something like almost 50 events a year. I think our volunteering team today is like 60 people. So that's probably more than most attendees at most other communities. And it's just a force. to be reckoned with, not only for Toronto, but really for the larger North American tech ecosystem. And we've seen folks all the way to Colombia actually fork our repositories and use our guidebooks to kind of run communities over there as well. So I hear from people all the time about kind of the wide-reaching impact there.

Yes.

And I've learned a lot from doing that. And so long story short, when running Toronto.js, my biggest problem was funding, you know, funding for the community.

Yeah.

And that's because if you look at tools such as, you know, Meetup, you look at things such as food and drink, such as AV streaming and all of that, such as just, you know, just running things in general, all of those things cost money, right? So how do you actually get money as a community? And that's coming from sponsors most of the time. So, okay, so how do you get sponsors? Well, you need to put together kind of sponsorship packages, find out a way to reach out to them, find a way to transact them, and actually quantify returns back to them because it's likely some sort of marketing team sponsoring you at the end of the day. And all those things are complicated, annoying, and not what a community organizer fundamentally wants to do. A community organizer just wants to get people together, get them talking, you know, have a good time. And just vibes.

Just vibes.

Just vibes, right? And all those things are a complete vibe kill. And so, and so, like, like, I guess to put it into numbers, I put $7,000 of my own money into running Toronto JavaScript. which I think is the most backwards thing in the world, right? Why is someone creating so much value for a whole ecosystem, you know, helping people find jobs, helping them reach new levels of their career, learn new technologies? Why am I paying to help an ecosystem succeed? That makes no sense, right?

Right.

And so, and so it took me a long time, um, well, sorry, like, like essentially as a developer, I knew I could make a better platform, but it took me a long time to figure out Kind of what was the right set of ingredients to do that, right? Because if I just go out and I make another like meetup.com clone and I just slap on the same pricing package, why would anyone use it? You know?

Yeah.

It's gonna be a long like kind of table of checkboxes being like, oh, you have these checkboxes, these guys don't have these checkboxes. Is it worth the difference? I don't really know. That's not gonna work. Instead, I thought we can't treat it under the same model with the same type of like methodology as meetup.com, that's clearly just not working fundamentally. We need a new model. We need a new way of thinking about things. And in fact, why don't we take inspiration from like YouTube? Why don't we take inspiration from Twitch? Why don't we take inspiration from the creator economy model that helps creators succeed instead of making creators pay? That makes no sense.

Right.

And so taking that type of model, applying it to a community platform, kind of the coupling of those 2 things is what is Guild today. And yeah, we're just getting started on our journey. We're so thankful to have some amazing sponsors already. We've paid out communities all around the world, um, and so we can— we're going to continue doing that. And yeah, we're just super excited to help people kind of grow and, um, you know, establish themselves in the tech world and tech ecosphere and, uh, kind of elevate themselves with the power of community.

Yeah, no, it's so good. And again, I don't want this to be like a 30-minute infomercial because I do want to get into the power of community and what you think makes good community. But, but, but, but I do think that like One of the coolest features I love is like you have your profile in Guild and you can join other meetups. It's just so easy to navigate. And also, I think the biggest thing for me is literally it sends you a calendar invite. Like, it's not crazy complicated, but because Meetup, you had to create your own calendar invite. And like here, you, if you sign up, so like one of the things we're doing at Torque is like, you know, we have all these events and literally we, we have We have Taz and his team literally in a Slack channel for Torque because we're doing so much. And so now you can go through and basically you can RSVP with any of the many events we're doing weekly, and then it automatically populates on your calendar. So you can like, you can time block and whatever. So I think that's a great feature, one of the many features.

For sure. And like, we wanna, you know, take that to another level. So first of all, yeah, Torque is, you know, unbelievable in the way you guys are using Guild. And I'm happy to have that Slack channel 'cause you guys You guys move so fast. It's— I want to be right there with you, you know what I mean? I don't want to be catching up. I want to be running next to you.

It's so funny. Everybody goes, we're working on it, we're working on it. Yeah, yeah, we're working on it.

And so, um, and so like on, on, on things like calendar, for example, we want to do so much more there. We want like the, the physical attend and decline buttons to work on your calendar, you know. We want it to be as integrated into that as possible so you Accept decline. It also accepts decline on the event itself. So yeah, as I said, we're just getting started. We got so many ideas and yeah, I'm so happy to be partnering up with you guys on this.

Yeah, absolutely. I love this calendar integration ability to just join groups and attend meetups and connect a simple UI. Clean. Love it. Love that. You got a few emails. Yeah, we're literally working with Taz right now to talk about if we want to hide emails or alert emails. So more to come there. All right. So let's talk about community, man. You've built a pretty staggering community. I mean, selfishly, I want to pick your brain, but like, what makes a good community? Like, I talked to Kent Dodds yesterday about like why you should build community. I think it would be interesting on like what makes a good community at a fundamental level. What makes a good community?

Yeah. And first of all, you know, Kent is a force. I love that guy so much. You know, I had the pleasure of getting to know him quite well over the years and like that guy is just amazing. So I need to go actually watch what he said, because I'm sure I could learn a bunch of things there. But in my opinion, community, it's one of those rare positive feedback loops that exist in the world, right?

Mm-hmm.

The more that you elevate the community, the more the community elevates its members, which then elevates the community, which elevates its members. And that is a positive feedback loop that just keeps on giving and giving and giving. And so if it's not for that reason alone to participate and involve yourself in a community, Maybe another one is, you know, I've never had to really look for a job in my whole life. You know, like that's kind of another positive thing there because of the community. Again, you know, the community has known me so well over the years. They've always wanted to work with me over the years. And they've always— I've always found myself having, you know, stable employment over the years, which has been unbelievably good. So those are the, I think, core reasons to get involved with the community. Kind of like what makes a good community? That's a very kind of good question. In my opinion, again, it's that positive feedback loop. It's knowing that like elevating others also elevates you. Kind of giving is giving is giving is giving is giving and kind of everyone benefits from that. I think that's the main thing. I think also not having some sort of like weird corporate agenda. Like, you know, like I'm not sure if you've heard like something like Walmart, for example, they're like, join the Walmart community and get coupons. It's like, are you really joining like a Walmart community or you just want the coupons? You know what I mean? So, and so like what are you giving into that community, you're not really giving anything. You're really giving like your personal data, if anything, and you're kind of selling that to corporate overlords to get coupons. That's not a community. You know what I mean? So a community is where— is one where you give but also receive and kind of that positive feedback loop enables everyone to do more. I think that's what makes a good community.

What do you think— what do you think like when you did Toronto.js, what do you think was your special sauce to grow it? I mean, because like, listen, like And, you know, we say 21,000 members. You listen, fact of the matter is not all 21,000 are engaged, right? Which is kind of what we're talking about at Torque, right? Do we want to look at the engaged number? Do we want to look at the top line number? But still, 21,000 regardless is massive. What did you do to get that started? Did, like, did you do— was it all in-person events? Did you do any virtual? Like, I'm trying to, guys, tap into your genius a little bit. on how you're able to grow something like that?

You know, just doubling down on what I just said. So like, like, like the thing that I saw at Toronto.js, which, which, which, um, uh, gave me the, um, uh, like, you know, uh, like, like which made me start it, was that what I saw in Toronto was, um, companies starting communities because they wanted to hire a developer. You know, like, like, like essentially let's say company of some sort of, some sort of company, they're hiring a dev, they're like, hey, we need, we need to we need a bunch of devs to come to our office. How do we get a bunch of devs to come to our office? Well, we're going to start a community. We're going to run one event. We're going to get a bunch of devs to our office and we're going to hire them. And then the community is just going to die. The incentives are just completely misaligned there because—

Right.

You're not looking to elevate people, you're looking to hire a dev. That misalignment of incentives is what a lot of people did wrong. That's what I said we're going to change when I founded Toronto.js. It's going to be by the community for the community. It's not by my company, even though I've had a startup, At the time, it wasn't by my startup, it was by Taz. And Taz founded the Toronto.js community with a bunch of other people from the Toronto JavaScript community. And together we're elevating the larger community. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

It's not because I wanna hire a dev. It's not 'cause I wanna market to devs. It's because I'm looking to literally just elevate people. And that kind of selfless attitude, it's basically intoxicating, gets a lot of other people on board. And we were able to, you know, kind of, kind of expand horizontally to more different formats. Uh, one was tech talks, one was workshops, one was, uh, socials. Um, I think another one was just like a hack night. Um, so those different— those 4 different types of, um, uh, formats were run by, you know, different, different individuals under an umbrella.

Break that down real quick, right? So you had tech talks, hackathons. What did I say?

Um, socials and, uh, uh, tech talks, workshops, socials, and, and hack nights.

Hack Nights make sense. Were Tech Talks very similar to kind of the traditional meetup setting? Have a speaker talk nerd stuff for about an hour?

100% that, yes. And then we've since kind of bridged out into interviews and demos as well.

Okay. Socials and socials. Do you guys typically do like social events? I'm assuming that's in person at a restaurant. Bar, all that stuff. Jason knows me so much. He goes, oh God, I can see the— sorry, that comment actually just took me out. That's what happens when your coworkers are on here. Yeah. So you would do it at a public place?

Exactly. Yeah. Like, you know, back in my time, because I do enjoy a good drink, we did it often at a pub. And then since then, I used to call it Beer Script. Since then they've changed it.

I love that.

The socials. And so, uh, it's— I don't think it's at a pub anymore, uh, but yeah, it's kind of same vibe. It's just getting together, you know, having some sort of beverage or food item and, and, and talking to others. Yeah.

How often would you do something monthly? Was it, uh, once a month? Was it— I mean, dude, when I was in Raleigh, when I was in the .NET meetup in Raleigh, they would get together every single week.

Yeah. And, and, and, you know, there are some guilds that do that. Like, you know, like, like shout out to Civic Tech Toronto. Like, they do that every single week. They get together. Which I think is incredible. Like for me, it very much depended. So for Tech Talks, because I was the one that ran that in one in particular, my attitude was I'm only gonna schedule an event whenever we have good content. So whenever we have like a killer speaker or a killer talk or someone's talking to me and they're like, Taz, I'm super confident about this. I'm like, dope. Essentially let's schedule that and let's do a Tech Talk around that. So that was whenever we had good content. It wasn't on a schedule. It was very much content driven. Workshops were a bit different. Workshops were on a schedule. I think it was every 2 months. Socials were monthly because there's no prep required. You just get together and hang out.

Yeah, right.

And then hack nights were kind of the same. Hack nights were monthly as well. You just kind of get together and pair up with someone else and hack on something. So essentially that one was on a schedule.

Okay. No, I love that. And then, so would you guys, would you say average once a month activities or twice a month or?

Uh, yeah, ended up being like almost 3, 4 times a month there'd be, there'd be something going on.

Okay, that's awesome. What, what do you think, where do you think communities are really missing the mark these days?

Oof, that's a great question.

Um, because I mean, literally you have a platform who, that hosts meetups. I mean, like, you see it firsthand.

Yeah, but I mean, to be fair, a lot of the folks I see do some amazing work and, you know, like, like, I mean, Each community is different as well, right? So like what's working for one may not work for the other. It's a tough one to say. I think in my opinion, the main place that they're missing the mark or like not particular to them, but just the community space as a whole is I find within discussions. I find having community discussions right now is very difficult and very fragmented. And what I mean by that is a lot of folks, you know, like Discord's a great tool, But Discord's very difficult to keep on top of, you know, like, like I'm a member of several Discords right now and it's just like, and it's gone, you know what I mean? I'm just like, what happened?

I mean, it's just, yeah, like, yeah, they gotta figure that out.

And I think that's one of the most difficult things because what we're seeing right now is a shift from public discourse to more private discourse. I'm seeing a shift from, you know, Twitter and like LinkedIn and Bluesky to more things such as WhatsApps and Discords, you know, like that's where the shift is happening. And that makes sense because people feel safe amongst their peers, people feel safe amongst people that they're more likely to know, which is essentially their local community, people that they can go hang out with at a coffee shop, people that they just saw essentially at a social event, people that they met at some sort of tech talk. That's what they feel more comfortable around. I don't feel comfortable posting about like, hey, why is undefined not a function on Twitter? You know what I mean? I'm going to get like a gajillion like, dude, you're an idiot. Fair, I might just be one, but at the same time, that's not what I want to hear.

Yeah.

I'm seeing that shift happen. However, I'm not seeing WhatsApp or Discord being a great place for more asynchronous conversation. It's fantastic if you're glued to it all the time, but if you're in and out because you got work to do, it's not the best for that. And so, um, Hmm. Something like, like Discourse, uh, the forum, um, like that, that ends up being a bit better for async. However, it kind of lacks the serendipity of real time. And so I kind of see That as a gap of the pieces are there, but they aren't.

Yeah, this is the stuff, man. This is the stuff we're talking about at Torque, right? Because it's like, not everybody wants to be— so we have a team of Latin American, like, sourcers who are just like in people's DMs, hey, come, come hang out with us, yada yada. And what's, what's, what's funny is like, you know, we literally get people go, well, I don't want to be a part of a Discord. Like, that's not me, you know? So then it's like, all right, well then how do we take care of those people? Then it's like, You know, do we consider, I'm very cautious with what terms we use at Torque, 'cause it's like, well, let's do an email community. No, no, no, we just mean a really good email drip campaign, which is good, which is what we mean when you're dealing with 400,000 people on our platform like we have, right?

Yep.

But like, that's not a community. But it's like, so it's like, so if it's, this is a community.

Yep.

Discord's a community. I've— we've talked about text message communities. What does that look like? Like, I don't know, it's just, it's hard. And, and at some point you can't— there's no silver bullet, which is why community is really, really hard.

It's why it's very difficult. But these are the things that I'm thinking about. I'm happy to hear that you're thinking about the exact same things. This is why we have a Slack channel together so we can talk about it.

Yeah, bear it right here. I remember 20 Discords, none of which I check regularly.

Exactly that, right? I got 99 problems and they're all on Discord, right? And so exactly that.

I think it's a t-shirt.

Yeah, yeah. But this is what I'm thinking about. And I think this is probably the next kind of vertical that we'll be releasing on Guild will be Guild Discussions for this exact reason in order to solve this exact problem or at least attempt to. And again, the way that I'm thinking about it, the thing that differentiates us as a community platform and a community company is that we think about like the entire pie, right? We don't think about one piece of the pie, we think about the pie. And to give you an example there, essentially, what if, Taylor, I can give you a special badge to give to people that are participating well? What if I can give you a special little emoji reaction to comment and thumbs up on certain discussions? What if you can give that to certain community members that are doing well? And so as you're kind of going around Guild, as you're participating in certain discussions, you see this amazing Torque thumbs up emoji or whatever it is, and you're like, oh, like, what's that about? That's kind of cool. Like, like, like essentially how does that person have that and I don't? Oh, they're part of the community, you know.

It's so funny, you know, it's funny you just brought this up because me and my boss literally want to talk to you about integrating Guild into the Torque platform. Like, we're just having a quick meeting right now. Like, why not? Like, literally he wants— we had a, we, we had a, um, conversation. He goes, I want to talk with Taz about somehow integrating Guild into the Torque platform. So if you go to a bunch of Guild events, you can see that in the Torque platform.

Boom. Exactly that, right? And like, again, like that's what community is. Community isn't one thing. Community is blended, which is why we have an API. We have a set of embeddable components. You can actually take our API and build whatever you want out of that. You can take our embeddable components, which is the same building blocks we used to build Guild, and build your own entire UI out of that. You can blend our experience into whatever type of experience you want because that's how communities exist. You know, I just spoke a lot about Discord, but Discord does work for a lot of people, right?

Mm-hmm.

So Guild also works for a lot of people. So wouldn't it be lovely if you could blend the two together, right? And so I think that's the kind of the nature and future of community, or rather the future of the world that we live in today. The future is fundamentally blended. And so if you're building a product, any type of product really that's touching any sort of consumer, that product, in my opinion, also has to respect that blending and also needs to be blended essentially into whatever workflows essentially those people are actually undergoing as well.

I love it. Yeah, it's so— yeah, again, this is— I love nerding out and talking about community. And actually shout out Brianna Holmes on our team. She's actually starting, 'cause I only have so much time to have podcasts. She's actually starting a community-first podcast for us. And I love the title for her. For her, it's IRL URL.

Love it.

I thought that was great. So we'll have to get you on Brianna's pod for sure. Man, this is good stuff. We're wrapping up here. Anything else, man, that, that you kind of want to— any, any community thoughts, building tips, encouragement for folks maybe who are not in a community?

Yeah, I mean, as like, like as I said earlier, um, uh, you know, like I've never had to look for a job in my career because of the community, which I think is remarkable, right? Um, and that's because I've, I've helped so many people. Um, so many people know me through the community. Obviously I've I've given a lot of tech talks and, you know, I've been deeply involved with communities all around the world for so long that that's just, you know, like that part's been quite easy for me. And so, you know, within the macroeconomic environment we live in today where jobs are difficult and a lot of people are looking for jobs, I can only recommend getting involved with the community essentially for you. The other interesting thing that I found recently, I'm gonna just butcher the statistics, so excuse me.

Do not.

I'm gonna say it and then I'm gonna correct myself. I think something like if you surround yourself with well performers, you're more likely to perform 15% better. But if you surround yourself with poor performers, you're more likely to perform about 35% worse. So I probably messed up that stat. Yeah. All to say, surround yourself with good people, you'll do better. Surround yourself with bad people, you'll do worse. That makes sense. So how do you surround yourself with constantly good people? Well, again, join a community, right? Communities are there to help everyone succeed and elevate that whole group of people together. That's the positive feedback loop that fundamentally makes the community work. If you join that and you participate in that, you will get better along with everyone else. And the best hires, the best candidates, the best people to work with you are the people that are continually improving because as you continually improve, you also bring up everyone around you at the same time. And so, I mean, that's, you know, if you're not getting involved with the community today, I mean, you are really quite literally falling behind. Yeah, because especially in tech, at the rapid rate of tech evolution, I mean, you got to stay on top of that. And the people that are staying on top of it the most are people in communities.

Yeah, I, you know, again, I mean, this— I know we talked about this a little bit yesterday with Ken C. Dodds, but it's, you know, I talk with hiring managers, and they get 15 referrals for one job. Now, they don't even go to the job postings. You know, I think in, you know, the world of AI where I think roles maybe not be stream— they're gonna be streamlined, maybe not canceled, but like you're gonna have to— I think the human connection is gonna be more important than ever. So again, that's what we want at Torque. That's— we want to kind of be your kind of home base for your career. But man, even if it's not us, like just go join something. For the love of the Lord, just go join something because your career needs it.

Completely agree. And if you want to start something, hopefully using Guild.host for that as well.

Yes.

Yeah.

You know what we need is we need— I mean, it doesn't cost anything. Oh, let's talk about that real quick because literally that's like one of the biggest things we didn't talk about. It doesn't cost anything for you to create something.

Exactly that. Guild is completely free to use and that's fundamental to our whole ethos.

Crazy.

We, you know, obviously we believe in the power of community and our fundamental kind of thesis is that everyone has done it wrong to date, right? Like, why are you charging a community? That makes no sense. I mean, a community is there to enable an ecosystem. The ecosystem has money. The community does not.

Right.

Why are you charging the people that don't have the money? Why don't you monetize the ecosystem that has all the money, right? And so that's basically what we're doing at Guild is we're helping communities enable an ecosystem. And through that process, we all benefit from that together, right? Guild benefits and the ecosystem benefits. benefits and the community benefits. And that's our ethos. So it doesn't make any sense to charge that community. It's not our vibe at all to charge the community. We don't make money off of charging communities. We make money off of sponsorship. We make money off of recruitment drives. We make money off of the ecosystem fundamentally. We don't make money off of community and we don't believe in charging that, like charging those folks at all. So yeah, it couldn't be easier to start anything on Guild because yeah, we're literally incentivized to help you because we all help each other and we all monetize each— we monetize by helping you succeed. That's how we monetize. So we're literally incentivized for your success. So yeah, if you want to start something, do it on Guild. Obviously we all care about community and we all care about everyone succeeding through community.

Yeah, absolutely. Sweet. Because I was going to say we should do like a guild to like get started. But again, like anybody can get started with using Guild, which is great. All right, y'all. Taz, as always, I kind of do a little rapid fire at the end. You know, we we are a little far out from the holidays. We're getting close to Valentine's Day, so let's just go with that theme. What's kind of your just go-to candy just around Valentine's Day? Like what's kind of your what's kind of your your guilty pleasure?

Well, I'm trying to lose a bit of weight, Taylor.

You know, same.

I see you. I see you playing hockey, and I'm so jealous as a Canadian right now that grew up playing hockey. I'm like, man, I'd love to. Because I currently live in London, UK. There's no good hockey around here. So, right, right. Yeah, like, like, shots fired, you know, like, don't come at me. But anyway, um, so, um, I think in terms of, in terms of candy though, my guilty pleasure is definitely those, like, those, those Belgian, like, seashell chocolates. Like, my God, those things are good.

Um, I don't know about those. You should send me some. I don't know about those. Does any— anybody on the chat know about Belgian candle— I mean, candies that are seashell shaped? Wow, that was That was crazy. I don't know about that. I think it's a London thing. It's an England thing.

He sells seashells by the sea. There we go. There we go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got nailed it.

Feel free to endorse me on LinkedIn for that one.

There you go. Yeah. Second question is, is what do I tell people if you were to wake up tomorrow and I told you you could not be in tech anymore? What would you do? Like you couldn't do your job now?

Well, my mom's always wanted me to become a lawyer. My dad's always wanted me to become a doctor. And so they've always said, Taz, you can be Me. Any type of doctor or lawyer you want to be. And so, you know, I don't know if I would make them happy with what I'm about to say, but what I've personally always wanted to do was, you know, I've always wanted to be a race car driver and I've always wanted to be a pilot. And so that's kind of my dream job right now is race cars or pilot. But I think realistically, I've always wanted to be a pilot. I think, you know, just flying is so cool. And, you know, every time I've been on a flight looking out the window, it's always been so entrancing. And, um, yeah, um, you know, I love taking people places, and so why not be a pilot?

I love that. That's awesome. Um, uh, last question. So show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school. I— no, hold on, actually, I forgot one question. Content recommendation. Sorry. We can go nerdy with it, we can go tech trends, frameworks, blah blah blah that you're messing with, or we can just go favorite show you watched on Netflix recently.

Well, I'm watching Severance right now, like I think everyone else is.

I started— I started episode 1 season 1, and I think I'm already hooked.

I also started episode 1, season 1 like a few days ago. I think I'm like episode 5, season 1 right now, something like that. And yeah, I am hooked in terms of that. I think more practically, I've been kind of addicted to Diary of a CEO by Steven Bartlett. There's that podcast.

Yeah, that was a good one.

He's had a few killer guests lately that I've been super excited about. And so I've been listening to that one a lot. I think Harry Stebbings as well, just to get a macroeconomic VC Pulse, um, has been interesting, although like I don't like listening to VCs that much, if I'm honest, because they talk too much about their success while I think you learn more from your failures. And so I'd like a— I'd like the inverse of Harry that talks more about people's failures instead of people's successes. Yeah, we can learn from it. Um, but that doesn't make good marketing, so I don't know. Um, but yeah, I think, I think Diary of a CEO has been quite cool. Um, yeah.

That's awesome. All right, last question. We had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now as adults, we don't really have anybody to turn to and ask for general career advice. What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Taz back in the day?

Again, I mean, joining a community, but like, like, you know, obviously I've said that many times. I think the main thing that I would say is, and I posted on Bluesky recently, essentially this, which was there was this guy called Tom Cargill that worked at Bell Labs. This was like, I think back in the '70s or whatever, they invented like almost everything that basically Apple stole from them and then made Apple out of. But he had a quote which was the first 90% of software developers, software development is developing and the last 10% takes you the other 90% of the time. And it's called the 90/90 rule, which is the first— and you can interpret that a lot of different ways.

Sure.

But the way that I would tell myself is take it to 100%. You know what I mean? Get through that first 90% quick and easy. That last 10% is going to take you a long time to get through there, but that's where the learning happens. That's where things break down. That's where things have to be adapted. That's where things have to be migrated. That's where your assumptions start to fail you and you got to rethink it on the fly. Getting things to 100% is what's gonna make it ready for other people to use. And getting things to 100% is what's gonna teach you more than anything else. Don't stop at 90, take it all the way to 100 and make sure that that's something that you wanna use yourself.

I love it. That's awesome. That's awesome. All right, y'all, again, go connect with Taz. He's fantastic on Twitter, Bluesky. He's all over the place, LinkedIn. Use Guild if you wanna start something. But again, Taz, thank you so much. Stay on so I can say bye to you backstage, but y'all have a great one. We are off tomorrow. I gotta go to the dentist tomorrow, um, so off tomorrow. Thursday, um, we have Pauline back. I had a great conversation. It's just been a— it's a community week. Did not plan this. Pauline, uh, is, is one of their heads of community at Vercel. We had a great conversation in December. So Thursday's Pauline, and then Friday's my guy, uh, Stephen Sherry. He's a CTO out of Cincinnati. We're going to talk about interviewing And how to not suck at it. So great week this week still coming up. See y'all on Thursday. Taz, thank you, my friend. Appreciate it. Y'all have a good one.