ep. 01 - first leadership all hands discussing the future of torc.dev

Monday, October 7th, 16.

It's 6:30 in the morning. We are heading to the airport. We're headed to Boston today. We're gonna be up there for a few days talking all things like strategy and yada yada yada. Crazy busy week. Excited to be back on the road. Excited to document this whole thing. And, uh, I desperately need coffee.

This ain't no place for no hero. This ain't no place for no better man. This ain't no place for no hero to call home. What's next?

We have a lot to do. You know, I'm going to basically— my entire strategy, content strategy now is going to be talking to you what we're doing, how we're doing it, why we're doing it, what we're doing, what we're building. This is like developer marketing 101. It's top of the funnel awareness in both US, Latin America, and India for developers to join Torque.dev, the platform. And then in that platform, we're going to develop communities, right? We're having to redefine like what the word community is. What I've realized is that we like to throw around community A lot of various, various ways and things. And so, well, one of my projects right now is we have to get more referrals to Torq for in the telecom space. Right now I'm also trying to like, who is out there in the Latin America world in SAP, Cisco, ServiceNow, Salesforce, because we have a lot of Fortune 100 clients asking us for that. And then also we're gonna do a lot of stuff with AI in the US. So that's kind of like high-level focus. Like it's not just engineers. But obviously engineers are always gonna be my bread and butter. But this is an exciting opportunity 'cause we're gonna branch into kind of different areas. I'm not always gonna be solely development all the time, which I'm really excited about because it kind of brings me back to my original traditional recruiting roots where I get to recruit on all the skill sets, which I'm super pumped about. So time to unpack, time to get some work done. I'm gonna hole myself up here probably till dinner.

This ain't no place for no man of men. This ain't no place for no hero. Day 1, Austin.

Day 1. I'm tired.

I need coffee.

Excited to build this thing in public. I think it's gonna be exciting. Hopefully, hopefully it's exciting. If it's not exciting, you're not gonna watch it. Well, I'm gonna make it exciting.

There you go.

That's a good answer, Patrick.

It's time to make power moves and get—

Boston, y'all water's nasty.

Things that makes life better. No foolin', SaaS rules must be clever. I'm down for whatever. I got a flow, son. It's never never.

No company in the tech space, SaaS space, is building like a build in public vlog like this.

I think it's gonna be a game changer. We should go this way.

Yeah, I think the big thing is that I wanna bring people along for the ride in this, and I want them to feel like they have a part, kind of a say, because I'm not trying to sell you a t-shirt. I'm not trying to sell you like a fashion brand or fashion good. I'm just trying to make you aware that we're building a community, and I want you a part of the community. We want you a part of the community at Torque. No one's doing it, so excited about kind of the journey and the evolution of what we're trying to do.

Shatter and find the real nice things that makes life better. No foolin' sax fools must be clever. I'm down for whatever. I got a blue sun. It's now whatever. You're whining out specs when I get busy over bounce tracks dropping lethal raps on wax.

So you don't think this is overdoing it? No, I don't. I don't think 28 ounces of cold brew is overdoing it. I wanted— I just— you know what I realized? I'm bad at math. I only saved myself 4 ounces. So this is why community is so cool. So yesterday I posted in the Torque Discord.

I was like, I have an idea for an app.

One of the issues I always have is I have all these links. Like, I want to post the link to the Torque Discord. Well, when you post the Discord link, you always have to go in and create a new like link to post it. So literally one of the developers in the Torque Discord was like, "I can build that for you." So he's like literally building it for me. Like that's the power community. Like I just wanted something done to help me, and he's like, "Actually, I would like that too." And now we're building something. So that's what we're trying to go for, people.

I like drop tops when it's hot. I like lens when it's snowy. Bank account is fat like Joey. I'm not very religious. You wouldn't call me holy. Sometimes my hair's cornrows. Sometimes it's fro-y. Spark up the you know what. Pop the moe-y.

Like the goal here is we have a thriving community. Do we need to be two million, three million, four million people? Maybe, maybe not, right? And maybe the top number doesn't matter as much as the active number matters.

I think that's that's to me the important part.

Yeah.

You know, like Lane might be an expert in Java. But he wants to move into Python because he sees AI is doing that. So he goes into the Python community as a novice, but he's an expert in Java. So ideally, like, there might be different benefits to you as you are in different levels within those individual communities. The founding message of Torque2 was if we had talent first, then everything else kind of follows, right? If you get great talent, you get talent that's happy, talent wants to be here, talent wants to work.

Excuse me. If we have 100,000 people on the platform, And we're getting 0.1%. What's that, Matt?

1,000 people?

Hell yeah, math. So 1,000 people, and then once we start doing these drip campaigns, we get to 20%. I mean, that, that would be a massive growth to show just off the bat.

Yeah.

Our professional community and the older devs, you guys aren't going to want to be in the Discords every day. You're like, I got kids, I got responsibilities, I ain't got time to yap it up with you guys. So it may be like an email About a blog on Angular that came out, right? So then it's like, how do we build that professional community, which is why we need those emails so we can start, like, loving on them in their own unique way, because not everybody uses Discord. This was a crazy experience. I was terrified. I wasn't paying attention and they yelled at me.

That's so good.

They're like, get ready.

So I survived though. I survived Al. Lunch in Boston.

Emails should be driving back. Correct. WhatsApp should be driving back to the platform.

Correct.

Looking at this slide deck right now, says Torque is an AI-powered digital talent marketplace.

What is—

what does that mean?

We have a search and match tool that allows recruiters to find candidates for jobs. And it does it in a number of different ways. We used to have 5 different ways. We're down to 4 now. Cut out one that didn't work so well. Hey, here's the profile of the person. Here's the job. Tell us why they're a good match.

Yeah.

And so it's not finding the match for you. It's after you've found the match, telling you what made that person a good match.

Taylor.

Yeah.

How you doing in terms of temperature?

You know, listen, this Torque hoodie is very warm. But my phalanges are extremely cold. I think that's your fingers, right? It's your phalanges.

I don't know.

Well, thanks, man. Well, I love you, um, and happy birthday, bro. All right, talk to you soon. So basically, Torque is a talent marketplace. So what that means is you go to our website, torque.dev, and you create a profile and you sign up to our platform. What's cool about this opportunity, what Torc does, is Torc deals with more than just developers. If you're a business analyst, a project manager, a Cisco kind of telecom— like we're doing a bunch of telecom initiatives right now, SAP, anything technical we host on our platform. But we have 4 kind of levers we pull on the AI side of things to find profiles faster and to help get you matched quicker. In the 13 years I've been doing this in the engineering space, I've never been with a company that has actually specifically hired somebody to head community. My responsibility is to like make you feel appreciated on our platform, to make sure we have enough things going on to where you can get involved, to where you can get information out of it. You know, most positions like this in the tech world are called DevRel. developer relations, and like usually they're producing some sort of developer content, they're coding live, yada yada. Like, we're not a developer platform. We are like essentially like a job platform. And so what my role is basically to create DevRel but on like the staffing side, right? So I want to hire people. We have some technical people on staff, but like moving forward, I want to hire people who know how to give back and help people and guide people through the job search process, whether it's with us or through other people. Nothing like that has been done before. I really just want Torque to be synonymous with career, career growth, job search, job stuff, right? So like, hey, I really want to get a promotion at my job. Like, I want to go to the Torque community to ask some questions on how I do that, or I want to go read some literature on their website on how to advance my career. Like, that's what I want to do. I want Torque and our community to basically be synonymous with career growth and career trajectory and be that resource for others to level up. Because I think when you can start to help people level up their careers, you get to help their family life. You get to basically get them to unlock things that they've never thought they could be able to do. You know, to buy the house they've never been able to buy or the car they've never been able to put car or be able to send their kids to school that they've never been able to. And I think that's what I want. Like, I want The TORC platform and the TORC community to be at the dinner table, to be in the conversations at the dinner table in households across the world, being like, man, I read this great thing on the TORC platform today, honey. I think I'm going to do it. That's my goal, and it's going to take time, but that's my goal. These, like a little run ad here, they're like the most comfortable pants ever. Like listen, if you're trying to travel on the road and like have like a jean type of like a look, these are great. Here's the deal, at the end of the day, content we produce is fine, the meetups we do is fine, at the end of the day, people just want jobs. Do I have to keep up the pace?