ep. 16 - adding movie actor to my resume

Are we good? This thing has been dropped so much. I think it's gonna be a great start to the vlog. Thank you so much. Grips Coffee, Hendersonville. Headed to the airport. I'll tell you more about how I feel. There it is. Headed to Columbus to speak at StirTrack. Uh, first time I've ever had the chance to speak At Sturtrack, I've tried to submit an application for like four or five years. Super blessed this year's just been the year of being accepted into conferences that I've never been able to get into. So back on the road, gonna be great. Gonna document it, and we'll see when we land. Alrighty, landed in Columbus. And headed to the hotel. Gonna get checked in. Got some meetings this afternoon that I'll bring you along for. Just a lot of stuff going on at Torque right now. I think another coffee's in order. Need to get some food too. I haven't eaten this morning. Really gotta plan better on my flights. I gotta bring snacks on flights. I always forget to do that. Anyways, let's go get an Uber. I legit have no idea where I— I can't read a map. My wife usually reads the maps. If I was dropped off in a wilderness anywhere and I was forced to read a map, I would absolutely starve. Here we go, True Foods Kitchen. Let's go get some lunch. That's amazing. I love it. All right, we're back from lunch. A little hotel patio, a little work, less Twitter, but a little, a little red juice. Great patio vibes, you know. Listen, I will tell you this, I am a fancy hotel guy for sure. I'm a fancy hotel guy. But I will tell you this, the amenities of just like a very traditional like Marriott or Hilton Are really, really nice. We are parked out here for the next, to be totally honest with you, probably 4 hours just working. This is like, this is where I operate best. So very happy right now with my fancy juice and all that. A little bit paranoid all the time. So for US engagement, we have the upcoming partnership, like webinar collabs with Clerk, Kisses, and then hackathon with who again? DataStax, Twilio. And that hackathon is in New York in May, right? It's actually the end of this month. Never mind. It's literally May 1st. That's crazy. Back in the hotel room after 4 hours of work. Eating a protein bar. Time to get ready for a speaker dinner. Uh, yeah, speaker party tonight. So let's go get dressed. Let's go hang out. Let's talk to some people. It'll be a good little night. You got my fancy pants on. Hopefully I don't get bit by a dog. All right, so story time. I talk about sliding into people's DMs, going for the ask all the time. I think it's important. I think you have to do it. So I pull a lot of my inspiration from run clubs. Basically, I don't pull any inspiration from any of the tech industry because in my opinion, I don't think anybody's really doing like great branding tech industry or any— well, let me rephrase that— great storytelling. So there's a brand that I follow, uh, Cadence. The founder is Ross McKay. It's a DTC brand. They do like, um, it's, it's hydration drinks, right? So essentially, he tweeted today. He was like, "Hey, nominate somebody for a month subscription of Cadence, and I'll send it to you." So like I tweeted at him, and literally, so I recommended my CrossFit coach. She's amazing. Her name's Danny. Her and her husband run our CrossFit gym. They're the best. I think they're fantastic people. So I nominated them. So this is back and forth with me and Ross, the founder. And we— I got my coach a month's worth of subscription for this drink. So, like, it— guys, it works. Like, this is literally all I talk about. It works. Like, I did it for a friend of mine who's my CrossFit coach, and now selfishly I've wanted to try Cadence, if we're being honest. So Ross, if you ever see this, like, selfishly I want to try it, but also my, my coaches are amazing. So go for the ask, go for the DMs. Most of the time people say yes. Day two, Stir Track Speaker Day. I present in an hour and fifteen minutes. Dressed up, gotta get shoes on. Last night was a little bit wild. I didn't document it. I had to— I'm gonna really try to record this talk. Patrick's not here, so I'm gonna try to record this. So I tried to sync my mics up. Hopefully it works. Shout out Jason Torres on my team for sending me like a how-to guide on YouTube. I think I figured it out. Then I realized I forgot like the USB-C like connector thing for my clicker. So I don't have a clicker. So then shout out Braden. I texted Braden Coyier and he said he can help me out. Then found out my hockey team lost, so I was on a call with my brother for like 30 minutes last night about the game. So we're on elimination game in the playoffs on Tuesday. Today's Friday. So anyways, just it was a busy night. It was a real busy night. So didn't go to bed till late. Also, the time change doesn't help either. So it's gonna be a good one. I'm gonna bring you along. It's gonna be fun. Let's do it. Yay! Edit that out. All right, well, I just like ran basically 2 miles to get my coffee at Starbucks. Um, pretty cool entrance. Yeah, man. Hey everybody, this is Kevin. Kevin, introduce yourself. Uh, I'm Kevin Griffin. Don't get weird. Uh, I'm one of the folks helping run Stir Treks. Yeah, you are. I'm in charge of speakers, and I invited Taylor to be here. So terrible decision. How many people we got today? I think we're expecting over 1,300. That's amazing. That's amazing. Congrats, buddy. I was worried about my slides being too small, but then I realized I'm at a movie theater. It's so important for my team to post on individual pages on what Torque is doing. Personal page always. Personal page always. Okay, that makes my life easier. Yes. I'm trying to find where the line is on like all I'm posting about is like fun new feature I made for thing or like fun new blah. Yeah. And like where, 'cause to your point about like post 3 times a day as long as it's not you broke down on set. I mean, you don't have to post 3 times a day. I do it. I mean, I'd say 1 a day is a great start. But when I was like in sales, like driving revenue and getting hiring managers to use us, like I would, I talked about Recent successes we've done. Okay. I talked about what problems that I helped an engineering leader solve. Like, hey, they had an issue with hiring people. This job was open for 45 days. Here's how we solved it, right? And then, and then like the other bucket was like, well, I'm going to talk about general leadership thoughts that I have managing my own teams because typically other leaders will resonate with that and start a conversation. Okay. Right? So what you're doing is you're addressing concerns and/or talking points in the content you're putting out. So if you're trying to get business, what is, what is in your business? What are the 3 biggest issues in your business that need to be solved? And then talk about that. Okay. All right, headed back to the hotel room. Uh, got conference swag, got Torch swag in my backpack, so Just trying to unload all this. Talk went well. You know, in full transparency, it was a little slow to get started, I felt like. It's the first time I think I've spoken like at the very first talk of the day. But I feel like I slipped into kind of my typical energy about 10 minutes in. But thank you everybody who showed up to my talk. Had a lot of great conversations afterwards with people coming up. And the talk was recorded, so I did not record this talk. So Patrick, I know we don't really have a lot of video footage, but we'll get it. And it's great. So head back to hotel, gonna drop this stuff off, gonna grab a coffee at this coffee shop literally to the left of me right now, then head back and just network for the day. Good morning. Great conference this morning. Got the coffee. Went back, watched another talk, my guy Braden Koyer's talk. And then honestly, been back here at the hotel lobby. There's so much work and there's so much travel that's coming up for me that I can't wait to announce here soon. But I had to get some work done. I'm about to head back to the conference to watch the last talk and watch the movie. But we had a great Torque Live Discord. So every Friday we always go live with the community just to hang out. We went 45 minutes, talked about the state of conferences, the state of meetups, what conference sizes you should look at. Um, you know, we kind of got into like the sponsor, um, like how, like what sponsors should look at, what should candidates look at, and really just why meetups and conferences are failing. So it was a great conversation. In the Torque Discord. So I had a great conversation there, finishing up some stuff, working on some India community notes. We have some special projects going on inside Torque to build customizable hiring pipelines for companies that we're in charge of. So been kind of heads down with that this afternoon, just getting a bunch of work done. So it's been a great afternoon and pumped to go watch a movie this evening. We are back in Nashville, just landed. It's like 12:30 in the afternoon. And, uh, Stir Trek, thank you to the organizers, Kevin Griffin, Jeff Blankenberg, Samuel Gomez, Michael Richardson. I mean, there's so many people that I know were a part of that conference, but those are the ones that, uh, I know personally. So thank you. Thank you for everybody who had me. Thank you for everybody who showed up for my talk. Again, another well-received talk. First time I ever used slides. 32 slides, 37 slides. Anyways, uh, so we're off for 2 weeks and then Barcelona, Spain. Another European event. Incredibly excited, which really lines up well with Torque. We're starting to have a lot more conversations about getting involved in Europe. So, off for 2 weeks, and, uh, just thank you, Stir Trek. Thank you. We'll be back next year. Torque will be there next year. Uh, just such a well-run event. Time to go home. Time to go home. Peace. All right, so I just pulled up, stopped by to support my dear friends Patrick and Ryan for Winning Productions. They just opened up their brand new facility to the public, and so I'm gonna go say hey to them, bring you along with me, just show you Patrick again on the other side of the camera who shoots all my vlogs, and Ryan, who he and I go way back. He plays on the hockey team and it's his company, so definitely want to celebrate them. So let's go say hey. There he is. Are you straight from the airport? Yeah, straight from the airport. Hell yeah! Gotta make the vlog. There he is. There it is. Like 20 minutes later.