ep. 15 - navigating a 40k person conference in mexico

We are back in the airport. We made it. Lugging 130 pounds worth of swag through Guadalajara Airport, not ideal. Gotta be up in about 6 and a half hours. Anyways, I'm going to bed. Hey man, what up? We're in Mexico. Who is it? What up? Come on. All right, midday recap. The Mexico conferences, they're hype. I mean, this is a way different, way different vibe experience. People love the community aspect of it, and the vibe's been immaculate. I mean, people really, really love what we're doing. Also, look at the branding. Go Brianna! So good. Jason, what'd you think of the first day? It was a lot. It was a lot. A lot going on. I think feeling it out. Yeah. All very good. Period. I think your earrings get longer every time I see you. Yeah. No, they're just stretching my earlobes. What up, king? What up? No, that was bad, Patrick. That was terrible. Day 2, we are on this beautiful balcony of the Hilton Midtown Guadalajara Hotel. Doing some strategizing right now. I messaged in the WhatsApp things I want today. I definitely want kind of a huge groundswell, so sizzle reel, Patrick, you're gonna take care of that today. Photo from our booth. We got a brand new booth set up right now. We're gonna send out an email to probably folks at the end of the day. I worked with our Salesforce admin to get a report for all the people who signed up. So we're gonna send out an email just saying hey to people who obviously joined the platform, get them in the Discord for conversation, and then also highlight our meetup tomorrow with AWS Mexico, which I'm super pumped about. It's like 3 companies. It's like us, AWS, and somebody else. Pumped about that. Fur, our social media queen over there. Custard queen. She's, she's, she's gonna get, um— I just want us in the chat. I think one of the, one of the key things I think a lot of companies lose out on, and now that we have like all— we have so many people here from the Torque team, I want us to be like engaging people in the hashtags. I'll probably do the same too. Actually, I'm gonna go and set that up. So that's today, day 2. Yesterday we had close to about 100 signups on the platform. We're gonna shoot for like 200 today. Um, ideally we'd love to get 1,000. I don't know if it's gonna be possible. We're gonna try. Um, and, um, yeah, it's gonna be a good one. I'm excited. I don't think we really have to change much of what we're doing. People are interested in jobs. Yeah, I think that's the biggest thing. Like, I think when people come over to us, like, the big thing I say is like, hey, we're a jobs platform. And they go, oh, like Indeed or LinkedIn? And I go, yeah, but you actually hear back from us. And they're like, what are you talking about? And it's because the community team, like I tell them, like, all emails come from us. Any interaction comes from us. I think one of the things that was interesting that we found out about, or not found out about, is that like people are like, well, whenever I send out for LinkedIn or Indeed, it's a bunch of spam jobs. Yeah. And it's like, I think that's one of the key things about us is like, when you sign up, our matching team reaches out to you if you're a fit. So like, it's never, it's an actual job. And then also the community aspect. People love like the resume reviews, the networking events that we do, bringing in industry leaders. Like everybody's eyes light up with that. Again, 'cause I don't think, I mean, I don't think anybody does it. I mean, in my career, nobody, nobody is doing what we're doing. And I say that a long time, I say that a lot. But again, I've spent 13 years in this industry and no talent solutions company like us is like actually doing what we're doing. You say a lot of things a lot. I do a lot. Jason was robbed. Yeah, yeah, legit robbed. Got his keys stolen. I don't want to talk about it. You don't want to talk about it? So I mean, the goal here is like to really just spread the word of like what Torc is doing. Especially, I think there's— what we've been hearing is there's a really big need and there's a want for LATAM engineers to work for US talent remotely and not have to worry about like anything around visas. Right. And so, you know, one cool thing about us is that when companies want to hire LATAM engineers, they want them fully remote. And so again, I think for us it's just Raising awareness of what we're trying to build. Again, that community aspect is something that people really key in on. And so people are really excited about what we're doing and excited to hopefully out of this land some of these individuals jobs in the future. That's great. She speaks Spanish. Like, Brianna's great. She's killing it. I'm like, English or Spanish? And they go Spanish. Like, I'm out. So then Brianna, Brianna just goes ahead and does her thing. Brianna was rehearsing all day yesterday, so she's good to go. She's good to go. Familiar faces. Yeah, I know, familiar faces. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Getting nervous to speak? I mean, listen, I think this is interesting because I typically like don't work a booth and speak, so I really haven't even thought much about it. So I'll probably get nervous in the next like 4 hours, but right now like I've been so much like going to conferences and speaking and so much kind of in this grind or groove, whatever want to call it, that I feel a lot more calm than I think I usually would. This is Jason pretending to be Taylor, part 1. Do I really? Alright. Hey everybody, my name is Taylor. For those of you who don't know me, here's my spiel. Raise your hands if you know Torque. Ah, got a lot of work to do. All right, let's get into it. So wait, do I really lock my knees? So prepping for my talk now. T-minus 55 minutes. It's getting very busy, I can tell. Excited. I got 25 minutes to hit 5 slides, 5 minutes a slide. Gonna have to really, really hit it hard. Um, but I kind of like talking in short spurts because I can just bring a ton of energy, um, and not have to worry about, uh, you know, going a full hour. So pumped, it's gonna be a good one. I'm super, super grateful to be here, super grateful to talk. It's gonna be great. I'm very excited to be here today. Like I said, my name is Taylor Desseyn. I'm the VP of Global Community at Torque.dev. If you have not been by our booth, please do so. We're literally right there. We'd love to have you. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. How are you? Good. How are you? Hey, it's Emmanuel. How are you? I'm good. Connect with me, okay? Okay. Yeah. Hey. Yes. Nice to meet you. Absolutely. Absolutely. Good. Good. What's up? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you. For real. Thank you so much. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. We are done with day 2. My talk is done. I thought it went great. I thought today's energy— thought today's energy was great. Uh, signups were great. Uh, talk went great. I mean, there was a line. I mean, Patrick, what, 15, 20 people afterwards? Yeah, some of them. Yeah, it was awesome. So can't wait. I'm done. I'm excited. I'm blessed. It's grateful. We're building something special. People are excited about it. People want to be a part of it. Everybody wants to be part of the Discord. I mean, just the groundswell is tremendous. So grateful. Hey there. Yo, Taylor on the phone. What up, fella? What's up, Phil? How are you? Juicy. Taylor's talking to his mommy, I think. Start of day three. Start of day three. Yeah, we're working on a schedule right now. Really, you know, we talked about this on a live just now in our Discord. We're trying to do a live on the Discord, kind of a retro, make people feel a part of this thing even though they're not here. We're just kind of putting out a new schedule, really want to maximize signups. Um, so, uh, we're really gonna try to be at the booth from 12 to 8 today. Um, but then, you know, obviously allow people to have a break. So Fur and I will man the booth from 4 to 8 today, and then if Fur wants to go to, to the meetup tonight, she can. So we got the meetup tonight with AWS. Super pumped about that. Again, shout out Ximena for making that connection. Again, this is, you know, again, being a part of the community, right? Ximena made a connection with me with a guy who heads up AWS Community in Mexico. We're throwing a meetup tonight with them. I think, I think it's gonna be— I think they're expecting over 100 people, which is gonna be awesome. So can't wait to document that. But yeah, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be a good day, but we have a lot of follow-ups to do. Yeah. A lot of follow-ups. Yeah, we've been We've been kind of iterating how we're approaching the booth. I think split shifts is going to help us kind of keep our energy up too. We going, we going, man, we going. We're going to go relieve Jason, Brianna, and Ximena at the booth. So me and Fur are going to take it over for the next 4 hours. They're going to be able to come back to the hotel, take a rest, take a breather before we head to the AWS meetup tonight, which I'm super pumped to document. And pumped to partner with the AWS community in Mexico. So, Taylor, you see Juan's here? You remember him from Boston? Yeah. Nice to see you. Nice to see you. People were asking about me. Yeah. Yeah, people were feeling— hey, Taylor. Imagine my surprise when someone come up to us and they're like, hi, I'm here to take a picture with Taylor. What about the rest of us? We're on our way to the AWS/TORC/some other people meetup. Okay. We're super stoked. Caltech or, I don't know, Cal Poly? I don't know. Somewhere. But it's gonna be fun. We're excited. You're talking. I was trying to find who we're working with. It's AWS. Just put this name here. I'm not doing that. Pants, pants. There's no dog bites. There's no dog bite anymore. There's no dog bite. There's no blood. La primera de muchas colaboraciones porque nosotros estamos igual construyendo una gran comunidad de desarrolladoras y desarrolladores. For some reason, after his conversation yesterday at the expo, I got hooked. So I went to his LinkedIn and I saw a video of him getting an actual, like, a coffee at a random coffee shop. I'm like, is this guy YouTubing? And then I just immediately switched up to an actual content. I'm like, this shit is so fresh. Like, that old company slides, flippity flipping, just so wacky. So boring. That type of content this guy does, amazing. Mad respect. All right, y'all, y'all, you, I don't know, whoever's watching, my mom, my wife Jackie. Hey, Jackie. Also, shout out Jackie. I think this has got to make it in the vlog. Jackie, I love you. I could not do this without you, you taking care of the kids. I appreciate you and your support. Also, shout out my mother-in-law Pam. You're the, you're the legend for taking care of the kids. Anyways, that being said, Amazing event. As you can see here, packed house. When I got hired, there was a moment where my boss Dave was like, "Hey, we're building community in Latam," and I was like, "I've never built community in Latam," but people are people. I knew that like the best way to build community is just to start, and I've mentioned this in the vlog before. And so now, like being down here in Guadalajara three times in six months, like I I know people here. Like it's it's just mind-boggling. Like, where I used to be at my career, like, being scared to go to a Nashville meetup, now I'm at a meetup in Mexico, in Guadalajara, and I know people. It's just such a huge blessing. So, uh, shout out to the community team, Brianna, uh, Fur, Ximena, Jason. Um, you guys are wonderful. Obviously, uh, the people at home, Angelos, Luca, and Luana. Uh, I mean, what we're building is special. Tonight was amazing. Thank you for AWS and Kalen for hosting. Unbelievable. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Y'all have a good one.