How to Hire And Navigate Startup Culture w/CEO, Kevin Van Gundy

All righty, dropping update in our Discord. Cool.

Alrighty, sweet. What's going on everybody? Good morning, happy Thursday. We're almost Friday. Pumped to have Kevin on the show. You know, you know, I feel like there's people— I— so I, I— one of the, one of the issues, one of the issues in what I do is I want to hang out with more people more often, and I think at the end of the day I can't. And I would say Kevin is one of those guys that I get so energized. And I'm not just saying this because I'm live with you, but like You're like one of the guys that gets so energized to see and talk to. Um, and so pumped for this. Um, pumped to hang out with Kevin for a little bit this morning. Um, so again, y'all say hey. Um, do my mic levels sound good? Because my daughter got a hold of my mic last night, so I just want to make sure.

Yeah.

She was playing on my desk. She always watches me, uh, uh, work, and so she wanted to get behind my desk last night. And, uh, you know, my 4-year-old, she was like looking at my computer and like trying to type and stuff. So, and then she like unplugged the mic and started talking to Mike. I was like, oh boy, here we go. Um, so anyways, awesome. So pumped to hang out with Kevin this morning. Again, please say hey, we'd love to hear from you. Uh, again, if you are tuning in for your first time, what this is— I've been doing this live stream now for 5 years. Um, and, uh, you know, I get to meet some amazing individuals like Kevin, um, on this podcast. But what I've realized is that this is a networking session, right? Like, this is a meetup. It's a virtual meetup. And I think that's really the thing that we're trying to do at Torque. Everybody— what's really cool is everybody wants to have a livestream. So I made a post this morning, if you did not see it, our guy Angelo is about to start another livestream where he's gonna start to talk to people in the tech industry that's not engineers. To see what other career paths there are. So again, one of the things we're really, really passionate about here at Torque is developing these live streams as a way for you to network. I tell people time and time again, please send Kevin a message after this. Just tell him you saw him on Guidance Counselor 2.0. What my goal is, is for you to network off the back of my community, right? I've been in the industry for 13 years. I would put my network up against anybody's, and I want to share that network with you. So please connect with Kevin. Please connect with people in the chat. And you will not be disappointed. And like I said, if you've been connecting for 5 years now, you would have a hell of a network. I'm just gonna be honest. A few other housekeeping things before we dive in. First and foremost, I wanna give a shout out to Appwrite. I'm gonna drop a little discount code in the Torque Discord today. We got some credits from Appwrite, so shout out to them. They're doing some cool stuff. I'm on the Hero Program there, probably the only non-technical guy on a technical heroes program, so that's fun. Also, Our community site, we got a lot of stuff going on within our community, in-person meetups, virtual meetups, you name it. I'm actually doing a 30-minute little Q&A for people who are laid off and wanna navigate the job search today. So go check that out. Also, if you do wanna get updated when I go live, 'cause I know we got a lot going on, this is actually my number. Text live, it's not some AI bot. It's not, you know, it's actually me, I promise. So would love to have you. We got some people tuning in this morning, Roxy.

Hi.

Sebastian, it's good to see y'all this morning. Kelly, it's good to see you. Christina from Vegas, I love it. Uh, let's see here. Um, uh, Stephen, it's good to see you. Jason, got my team, showed up. Angelo, again, kind of like I said, he's, he's launching that live stream. Pump for him, he's on my team. Um, let's see here. Uh, let's see here. I wanna, I wanna talk to him as a guest. Well, shoot him a DM, shoot him a DM. Kevin's great, Kevin's great, he'll get back to you. Um, let's see here. It's good to see you. Um, and then Jason or Noah as well, part of the Torque Discord. So we still got people trickling in. But all that being said, enough with me yapping. Kevin, let's give the people what they want, man. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there.

Uh, so I'm Kevin, uh, CEO founder of Hypermode. Uh, we build agent infrastructure, spending a lot of time on like multi-agent systems specifically in, um, I'll call it like complex organizations to say the least. So we do a lot of Large cap enterprise, life sciences, fed gov, stuff like that.

Yeah.

Before that, worked at Vercel for a long time, was COO there for a bit.

Yep.

I don't know, spent about a decade in open source dev tools.

Yeah.

Outside of work and things like that, I used to surf most days. Now I surf intermittently at best. Startups do that to you.

Yeah. Oh man.

I live just outside San Francisco in the Redwood City area. Um, I don't have a large Bernese Mountain Dog that really wants me to pay attention to her right now.

Is she right there?

Oh, she is.

Yeah.

And like, of course, like, this like small dog walks by, um, just like breathing on you the entire time. Um, yeah, that's me in a quick nutshell.

I love it. All right, so Kevin and I were, uh, yapping backstage, um, and, and, you know, again, I don't have any set questions, so Kevin and I— I'm gonna kind of ask Kevin some questions and I do wanna talk about startup culture, right? I've known Kevin now, he's been on my radar for a bit. The first thing I ask him, I mean, even Kevin, the last time we caught up over a year ago, AI has drastically changed, right? And obviously we talked about not necessarily your pivot, but just how you're evaluating your business. Obviously the people kind of tuning this show are definitely more, it could be job seekers, have a lot of engineering leaders that watch the show kind of behind the scenes that are in my DMs. And so I guess the first question I wanna ask you today and kind of help the audience is like, hey, listen, like, what do you— like, have you done some hiring recently? What does that look like from a startup culture? How do you approach hiring? How should people stand out in this market, especially trying to get hired at a startup?

That's a big question.

Yeah, it's multi-layered. So just start talking and then I'll kind of direct you.

Oh, cool, cool. So I think fundamentally they're like startup, or I'll call it venture-backed YC or Silicon Valley startups, those sorts of things. It tends to be a relatively insular culture where you leave company 1, you go to company 2, you bring all your buddies and so forth. And it can be really difficult for folks to kind of get into that network.

Correct. Correct.

I mean, so often folks are indexing on how do I get the team built as quickly as possible? How do I de-risk the hires that I'm making? And so I wanna hire people that I know. And so at least what I recommend folks do, and we actually try to walk the walk here, is spending extra time outside of your direct, like, one-degree network.

Yeah.

And I think it's things like the Torque community, and we were talking about kind of the React Miami community. And spending time in those ecosystems tends to be a way to at least be on the radar of a hot startup trying to grow itself. And the other piece, I mean, for engineers, we did most of our hiring for Vercel from our open source community. You submit a PR to Next.js, you submit a PR to any other open source projects. Same with Hypermode where we have a bunch of open source projects. Those are the folks we look at first. Oh, Haley, we know this person works great with us. They've already made contributions. And they don't even have to be deep kernel-level stuff. Hey, I noticed a typo in your getting started guide. I changed it. Or, hey, I saw you guys are trying to launch with the GitHub MCP server. Here's a quick example. What do you think? Those are the people we tend to hire.

I love that. People are cracking up at Meteor. He goes, the backgrounds aren't just similar. Taylor and Kevin are actually in Just across the hall. Yeah. They're facing each other on opposite walls. So you said 2 things I want to highlight. Again, this is why I don't like asking preset questions. First thing you said, and you're not the first person to say this, is de-risking the hire, right? I've heard— I've started to hear that a lot lately. Companies just don't want to take a chance on a flight risk or maybe an unknown entity. Can you talk about how jobs— I know you talked about contribute to open source, and I wanna get there in a second, but like, how can people really help themselves on the front end getting into, let's just say, Hypermode, for example? How can they show that they're not a risk? Does that make sense?

Well, and like, I think risk is like a really heavy word for it, where I'll do it in a couple layers. I think there's also like executive hiring, 'cause we can beat up on them and like—

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, beat up on the executives. Yeah, let's go ahead.

Like when you're growing your executive team or your leadership team, one of the things that's tough is there's like a really long ramp period for you hire a VP of engineering, a VP sales, you know, a head of product. You may not know that they're not the right fit for your organization for 3 months, 6 months.

Yeah.

Yeah. And of course, if you wanna be backing these people you hire and saying, hey, make big changes in the organization, And so they're gonna ossify a bunch of really bad habits and structures into your business. And then you, you know, you find the next person, it takes another 6 months to find the next person, and then it takes them another 6 months to undo.

And then you stop.

Yeah.

Just, yeah, just because—

If you're a company that's 18 months of runway, you just burned 18 months of your time trying to fix the, you know, whatever XYZ org. And so when you hear people talk about de-risking, like a lot of times it's those types of company-shaping hires.

Yeah.

But then when you think about a 10-person startup, a 20-person startup, you're changing 5% of your culture with that hire. And so that same anxiety of, I really hope this is the right person, matters even for an IC engineer, for an individual contributor engineer, for your first EM. And so you hear people talking about risk and I think that's the lens that they're approaching with of like, this is such a dramatic percentage shift of who works here. And so for folks who are trying to go in there and say, how do I prove to the team that, like, I'm in it, I want to be a part of it?

Yeah.

Honestly, I think the best hires I end up making are folks who— it's a reciprocal interview where it's not like, do I know how to do TypeScript? It's they're showing up and saying, like, hey, how do you guys work? How do you guys provide feedback? How do you guys think about working hours? What do you guys— all those pieces to make sure that the puzzle pieces go together. Those are the ways you can help show that you're a good fit for the business of like, hey, I'm interested in things beyond, hey, when you assign me a bunch of stories in Jira, I'll get them done.

Cool. Yeah.

But it's how do you help show that you're excited to integrate into what it comes to or move the culture toward You know, what both you and the hiring manager are aiming for.

And one of the things, I mean, you brought up React Miami. I mean, you know, shout out Hank Taylor, right? Hank and I, I mean, I, you know, I still remember all the people I met like 4 or 5 years ago at React Miami, right? And some of the big heavy hitters that I met. And I had the opportunity to emcee Kent C. Dodds' conference, Epic Web Dev, in Salt Lake 2 weeks ago. And he asked a question that I thought was huge. And I wanna kind of tail this into this conversation is he was like, how many people in here have found a job because of a conference? Half of the people raised their hands.

Mm-hmm.

And I feel like if you wanna de-risk, you know, coming across, hey, I, you know, it's not a flight risk on me. I think it's actually having the conversations in the hallway track at a dinner, at a coffee, and getting that hiring manager or that engineering leader. You're never gonna get somebody probably one-on-one, but in kind of a smaller environment. And I think that really helps too. Thoughts on that?

Totally. And again, like, maybe I'll say like this for Hiring Hypermode, like, It's not even like the, how, what's the longevity going to be of this hire? It really is like, again, I'll speak very specifically about like Vercel and Hypermode. Like we have a way of working where we're very high cadence. We're—

Sure.

We take a lot of pride in our craft and we like it when other people are excited about like, oh, I just wanna make the best thing I humanly can.

Yep.

And a lot of times it is in those conversations or in those indirect referrals where, and maybe I'll say what you're saying about having those hallway conversations, it doesn't need to be with the hiring manager. It doesn't need to be with the CEO of the company.

Sure, sure, sure.

Hey, I met someone on the community team at XYZ company, and then you are then being referred in of like, oh, hey, I'd love for you to be a part of this thing. Because then that, like, you're standing out above the 250 LinkedIn applicants that rolled through.

I mean, I'm sure you post one job and you guys get, I mean, everybody right now is getting hundreds and hundreds of job postings or applicants right now.

Yeah. And again, it's that, like, that, it's, and we were actually talking about this as we were, before we got on, like, I think especially in like the like post-AI world where there's just so much noise.

A lot of noise right now. A lot of noise.

Yeah. That I think human, again, even in silly formats of like, oh, we met at React Miami. I can certify that they're a real person and they're nice. That is worth so much among just so much slop on the internet now. And so to your point, indexing on in-person human interaction, super valuable.

Yeah. Talk about open source contributions. I still don't think I talk about it enough as a way to land a job. I'm not a developer. How does somebody go and contribute to open source? How does somebody contribute to Hypermode's open source? thingamajigger. Like, I don't know how to do that.

So, um, so, and like open source, like a super big gnarly topic where we can talk about like source available, open source, like what, what are actually like the orbitals of like actual openness. But for like practical conversation, if you kind of think about the like layers of an open source project, there's kind of like the core elements where you probably have to work at that company and have like a really deep understanding of where they want to take the product, those sorts of things.

Sure.

You're probably not writing a PR to React Server Components as a junior developer as your first open source contribution. But as you start to look at the integration layers and then the how-to guides of open source projects, those tend to be really good areas where, for example, so we have essentially an agent framework called Modus at Hypermode. And we support, you know, 2 languages primarily, TypeScript and Go.

Okay.

And someone says, hey, I really love this language called Moonbit. And so they started writing a language integration for that language to then be used in Modus. It's like, that was such a great contribution of it's at the connectivity layer of the project. Sure. And so it's not dependent on everything else in the business.

That makes sense.

Or sorry, in the project.

Sorry.

And so as an open source, if someone wants to, like, I would look at how-to guides and integrations as great places to, like, be able to make a really meaningful contribution to the project that doesn't need a lot of dependencies that the core team is gonna be like, oh, you know, we were trying to take the project in X or Y directions. You know, what do we do with this thing?

That makes sense. The way you explained it makes total sense for me. Yeah. Jason, my guy goes, no, Taylor does all his PRs for RSC.

Yeah. Yeah.

100%, obviously. Sebastian, documentation is a great start to better understand what the PR is. Let me ask you this. Where can people find your open source stuff? How does one go about— do I just Google Hypermode GitHub? How does that work? How does one go about doing that?

One, yeah, for Hypermode, yes. Hypermode GitHub, you'll see us. We're an open source company, so everything's out there.

Cool.

Maybe less selfishly, I would be, again, like, you're, as a developer, you're spending time in all of these communities. And I would just be looking at what are the projects that are being talked about on Medium or dev.to or any of these platforms. And I would say most dev tools now at least have some open source thing.

Yeah.

And maybe what I'll also say is transparently committing PRs to an open source project with the aim of trying to work there can come across as inauthentic.

Okay, because I was gonna ask, I was gonna ask, like, I feel like there's a line because I do feel like if you want to get seen, you— it's probably good. But then I'm sure there's probably just like networking and everything else. I feel like there's a fine line for that, right?

And so at least like my recommendation would end up being like find a project that you that you like or find interesting.

Yeah.

Because a lot of times, for example, a lot of the folks that we've ended up hiring weren't necessarily contributing to Hypermode's project specifically. It was like, oh, hey, I matched up to Pintu, who's the primary author of Modus, is really big in the JavaScript time and date community where he's trying to get standards passed of how you do datetime work.

Don't know what that means, but that sounds great.

It's like one of my favorite facts of like Hyper Mode employees. So if you've ever taken a Microsoft laptop across time zones and like it auto-increments from like 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM, that was a big part of making that happen.

No way. Okay, that's cool.

It's one of my favorite quality of life, you know, again, like these little like ounces of delight. But that also gave me a lot of confidence. Like, oh, Matt knows how to be a part of an open source company. I know that he writes really good code. He's a thoughtful contributor, knows how to communicate with code. And that was a good signal. Like, of course we want this to be part of the team. That's cool.

Yeah.

He cares a lot about datetime. And like, sorry.

No, you're good.

That passion is the important part, especially for startups. So Oh, this person cares a lot. They're contributing to open source.

Is that a signal for you guys? Like, because I feel like, I feel like, like, that's a big thing for startup culture in general is like, you got to be all in or have at least a passion. Like, that's one thing I've interviewed on a lot over my career is, hey, what are you passionate about?

Yeah.

Like, like, I'm passionate about— yeah, hot coffee is garbage. and you're a maniac if you drink hot coffee. And I think cold iced coffee actually truly makes the taste of coffee. Here's the deal, that's not tech, but I'll go to war with you on that. And that's what I want. I want people to— are you a coffee guy?

Oh my God, are you hot?

Are you hot?

Yes.

Oh, it's disgusting.

That's the whole thing.

Yeah, yeah, this is the point. If I— if you— if you and I were interviewing, ask me that question, You— let's be honest, we would segue probably in the coffee talk for at least 5 to 7 minutes and you'd be like, all right, this guy's, this guy's pretty chill. Like, like, I— he's weird with his takes, but I like him. Yeah, yeah, I know.

I, um, it's funny, like, I, I talk a lot about this, um, internally at Hypermode of we like people. Like, like, I love that, that frame of like, um, like, what are you passionate about? of where there's something about people who care a lot tend to work well in startups.

Yes.

And to your point, our team is full of so many idiosyncratic hobbies. We have a guy who's a digital nomad who chases snow across the globe.

Yeah.

But he cares a lot about building cool stuff and he cares a lot about pursuing his hobbies, and that makes him a wonderful, you know, member of the team. Correct. And, uh, like emphatically, like, we call it like hiring for curiosity, but like curiosity, passion. I call them like bedfellows in that.

Um, yeah, 100%. 100%. I love that. It's so funny.

And obviously the chat is, uh, exactly right now with coffee, and it's a much more human interaction than like, hey, you know, tell me about a time where you solved a hard problem at work, and like versus you can have a much more human interaction about like the fact that I so fundamentally believe that my hot cup of espresso with a little bit of milk in it in the morning is the best thing in the world.

Right.

And, you know, we'll draw lines.

Die on that hill. Yeah, I love it. I love it. I love it. Gilbert comes in here and says, my last open source contribution was me making raylib.com responsive for smaller devices such as mobile and tablets. I want to do more of that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, like I said, I think I think, um, I think one of the things too I don't talk enough about is, is if you're interviewing for a company you really like, is trying to use their product potentially to— during the interview or trying to do as a lead-in. Because I feel like, again, going back to passion, for me, like, if you're like, hey, I've been in the Torque community now for 9 months, I'm doing a livestream on your Discord. We had one guy that's like, hey, I want to do some streaming in the Discord. I'm doing some stuff with Laravel and TypeScript. Are you cool with that? So then if you're doing this stuff in the community and people see you, I'm much more willing to have that conversation than a complete stranger. And I think— but so what are your thoughts? I mean, I'm sure it's probably the same, but just using the product, if If that's an opportunity too.

It's funny, I'm very conflicted about this where I have a great deal of empathy for, you're looking for a job, you're probably, again, more often than not, you're applying to 5, 10, 15, 20 companies. And if I show up and I expect, hey, why haven't you built a dozen hyper mode apps on my camera phones? Is that better? Nope, still.

Still frozen. Still frozen. What's going on?

What happened?

Yeah, you sound good. Just keep yapping. Just keep yapping.

Sorry. So I have a great deal of empathy for when folks are interviewing lots of companies and me getting them to do— I don't call it free labor, but me getting them to do a bunch of stuff just for the right to talk to me. I empathize that that's really hard to do. And so that said, it does make an impression when someone shows up and they're like, oh, hey, so I was looking at Hypermode, I deployed my first app, and then I was working with your integration with Llama 3.4 and it didn't do this thing. And they show up and they clearly care about what I spend 200 hours a week thinking about. I instantly feel a connection to that person.

Yeah.

Oh, so you care too. I try not to bias, um, you know, our interviews toward, you know, hey, you know, uh, do this thing, do that thing. Um, but it, it really does help.

Yeah, absolutely. And again, for those of you tuning in, we're— Kevin said— oh, you're back, you're back, you're good. All right, there you go.

Like my very sad—

It looks good, it still looks good, still looks good. Um, so I, I finally now see— for some reason I didn't see the surfboard before. Now I see the surfboard. Oh yeah, that's great. I love that, I love that. Yeah, I think that's great. Talk about too, you know, you talked about startup culture. I think one of the things I realized, like I told my wife this, leaving my last company and coming to Torc, I just told my wife, I said, I think I now am a startup guy. Like, I think I'm a startup guy.

Yeah.

Like, I move very fast. I break a lot of stuff. I iterate, I iterate, I iterate, A/B test, A/B test, yada, yada, yada, all the buzzwords. But I told my wife, I was like, I just have realized that I think I'm a startup guy. And, but it took me 11 years to get there. So are there any advice to folks who maybe just, again, some more indicators on— there's nothing wrong with working enterprise, right? I think you get a lot of exposure on the enterprise side of things, but I'm curious, any more thoughts on the 2 ecosystems?

I Again, obviously I have a huge bias toward, I've spent my entire life working at like—

Yeah. High growth.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so I think maybe the thing that I'll name most specifically is I think you're right, like velocity, iteration, like all those pieces are critical to good startups. But I think like the defining characteristic that I've found of people who really like working in startups and people who just really don't is there is a level of like ambiguity and a lack of structure.

Yes.

That for some people is amazing where like you show up and like, oh, I love it.

They're like, we're, I mean, we're just, we're blowing and going here, man. We're just, we're moving. And I mean, I even talked over there-ish, you know, like I talked to my CEO. I was up in Boston, um, recently in, uh, in January, I think it was January. And like, I was like, I was like, hey man, like just want to make sure like you're vibing with everything. He's like, yo, I love it. He goes, the fact that I don't have to tell you what to do and you just do do it, he goes, it's great. And, and, and I think that's kind of been kind of my key success and, and indicator why I think I'm, I'm probably in a good spot for the startup life.

And what I'll also say is, um, again, this is not true of all startups, many startups you tend to be as a— again, this is something there, you tend to work with what I'll call less management and that like they're like It's that they're still learning how to do good one-on-one, run a good progression conversation, how do you negotiate salary. They're still learning all on the job. And I think to have a detailer here, like, kind of like internal locus, I don't wanna call it like controlling, of like agency of like, hey, I know kind of what I wanna do. I can set my own goals. I'm okay managing up to my manager and saying, hey, you know, these are the things I'm working on, tell me what you would change, rather than asking for what can be done. Some people thrive in that and they love that they can go, oh, hey, this is an interesting project, I wanna go work on it, I'm gonna go do it.

Yeah.

But for, again, a lot of junior folks, that's really hard where if you've not worked in a lot of companies, you're just kinda like in the big blue sea And you're like, I don't know if I'm doing a good job, a bad job. They just said make product and stuff. I don't know what that means. I don't know how to get PR approved. It can be really tough. And so just knowing that about yourself of like, are you comfortable being very clear with the help and things you need to be successful?

Yeah.

If not, it's gonna be hard for you to extract that out of a manager who is has 25 direct reports instead of the normal 5 to 10 direct reports. Yeah. Who's, you know, and I'll make excuses for a lot of my team where the crazy CEO is showing up being like, all right guys, so I saw this great product Goose. We gotta make our own ver— like, right? Like thrashing the company around. And so like, you know, middle management often has like a really rough time.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I love that, man. I could talk to you for hours. We're technically already at time.

Oh shit, sorry, shoot. Crazy.

No, you're fine, you're fine, you can curse, it's fine. Um, uh, any, any last words of wisdom for job seekers? So, so I'm gonna do 2 things. Any last words of wisdom for just job seekers in this market right now? And then just any advice for founders right now too? Just, uh, can you do both sides of the coin there and then we'll wrap it up?

Sure. Um, For job seekers, I think my headline advice, and we've talked about it throughout this livestream, would really be in— it's such a competitive market, finding ways to beg, borrow, cheat, steal your way into the network or ecosystem of the companies you wanna go work at.

Yeah.

Either go to these conferences, these virtual conferences, attend things like this. And just try to find any. It's really unfair to ask folks to do this, but—

Well, and Aaron, and I'm gonna interrupt you real quick. Aaron Francis, who spoke at Epic Web, he was like, is it fair that this is what it is now? Maybe not, but it is what it is.

Yeah. And for you, the individual, it is part of the thing we have to do to— again, I do it too as a CEO where I'm trying to get my company positioned within other ecosystems. And I am beg, borrow, cheat, steal, trying to work our way into these companies' ecosystems.

Same.

And yeah, it's an unfortunate part of trying to make these things work. And then for founders, and this is like the soapbox I'll die on, is there's this great paper, I'm blanking on the gentleman's name from Stanford, where he talks about what previous industrial revolutions can teach us about kind of like the AI race that we're seeing between the US and China and these other global entities. And the thing he mentioned is like the US was actually not, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, was not the best toolmaker, right? Like they were not the best at making industrial manufacturing materials. They simply were the most ardent hyper-adopter of these things and learned how these new systems played into like the way in which their businesses worked. And so even if you are skeptical of the promise of AI, if there's like a 10% chance this is that next industrial revolution, I would make sure that you are exploring it in different ways, both internally within your workflows as a business, all your different pieces. Figure out how to be a hyper adopter.

Yeah.

Because it gives you so much more leverage to scale. At least that's what we're seeing right now. Just spend a meaningful part of your time seeing how these systems work within your business. Obviously a shameless plug for Hypermode, but also just like for the macro boom.

Obviously. Well, also too, one thing I wanna do too is I wanna see, 'cause we wanna do more AI stuff in the Torque community, so we should probably chat too soon just if there's anything we can do, any sort of training webinar session within the Torque community too for Hypermode.

And we can make it more generally helpful for folks like, hey, multi-agent system works, here's how an MCP server works, all sorts of stuff.

Yes.

Obviously, we'll be shilling Hyper Mode really, really, really hard.

Obviously.

Well, obviously, you know, with a nice veneer of being generally helpful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. I love that.

Yeah, let's definitely—

let's keep that conversation going. Cool. All right, last, last few questions I always ask. Uh, first off, I told you tomorrow, and I probably know the answer to this, if you were to wake up and I said, hey Kevin, you can't be in tech anymore, what hobby would you pursue for a living if I would pay you the same amount of money or more?

I, I think it would probably be woodworking and furniture. Or, I mean, obviously that is not where I was going.

I thought you were gonna say surfing. I did not know you were a woodworking guy.

Oh, so, um, well, not in this background, but, uh, I, I like to build furniture in my spare time.

Are you serious?

Yeah, like it's a very like, uh, antiquated hobby.

I barely know what a hammer is, so that's great, man.

Uh, it's, I mean, it's so much fun, like where again, like you spend all of your time with like digital things Yeah, it's so much fun. Like, I made a chair today. Like, it's, it's— yeah, well, woodworking, it's coming, guys. Like, don't you worry.

Yeah. And then like doing, um, uh, you know, being on a farm, right? Like, you know, uh, it's like, you know, I can go weed eat for 4 hours and I can see what I've done, right? So I get it.

It's wonderful.

I get that. Yep. Um, second question. So Easter's coming, candy is on the shelves, so we got to ask the heavy-hitting question here. What is your go-to— it could be Valentine's too, just any holiday candy What's kind of your go-to, hey, I'm gonna indulge myself a little bit with, with a specific candy on the shelves right now?

Uh, I don't know if these are seasonal. I'll say they transcend seasons.

Sure. Um, yeah.

Uh, so 100 Grand bars, which is kind of like an idiosyncratic choice. Those are great.

I like them. I like them. People got their thoughts, but I like them.

Yeah, people have thoughts that they're not great or wrong. I'll die on that hill. That's my hot coffee, cold coffee. 100 grams are excellent. There you go. Or a good, uh, a good like just Mega Stuf Oreo. Like, I love— again, I, I'm pro the, the extra cream in the cookie.

Like, there you go. Love that, love that. If you're trying to get a job at Hypermode, send Kevin espresso, 100-gram bars, and Oreo Double Stuf, and you may or may not get a job. Um, uh, next question. I always want to— are there any other founders companies that you want to give a shout out to that you really like what they're doing, you, you like what they stand for, you think they're doing a good job right now in this market?

Oh my gosh, I, I, I wish you'd like prepared like a list.

I know, I know, everybody always says that, but I don't prep on purpose.

Uh, it's sort of been spending a bunch of time, uh, Austin Svensson over at Corey Labs is doing a bunch— I'm basically just gonna name all my customers. He's doing a bunch of really cool stuff on the, um, such like GTM personalization side. Nick Hubeker, I will not name the name of his company because he's in the middle of naming it. He's just another extraordinary founder who, again, wants to talk about passionate people where we met each other at one of these random AI dinners and we briefly like, oh, hey, you work in tech, you work in tech. Cool, cool, cool. And he just started telling me all those favorite sci-fi books and he just lit up. I read the short stories and we spent 2 hours talking about sci-fi short stories. That's how it works.

Yeah.

And I was like, I don't care what you do, but can we hang out? You're so much fun to hang out with.

Yeah.

Who else? I'm blowing it. I'm gonna feel really bad as soon as I log off though. There's 53 other companies that I haven't mentioned. You're fine, dude.

You're fine. You're fine. Yeah.

I'll leave it at those 2 for now.

I love it. I love it.

All right.

Last question. We'll wrap up here. And again, for those of you who tuned in, thank you so much. The chat's been off the chain, especially your woodworking, and that struck a chord as well. Uh, this show is called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now as adults we don't necessarily have anybody to turn to and ask for just general career advice. If you could go back in time and tell young Kevin one thing, what would it be?

I— this is such hackneyed advice, um, but I'll say it anyway. Um, I would strongly and emphatically recommend, uh, enjoying that, like, careers in life are not necessarily linear.

Yes.

And you will, you know, you spend so much time like seeing like the like glossiest retroactive storytelling version of people's careers of, oh, I did this and this and it all built and it was so perfect. Life is messy and difficult. And even the people you admire most have had these like ups and downs.

Yep.

And if I could emphasize to myself there's something fun about just like, hey, wow, I am, you know, I'm in a downward trajectory of a thing. I'm gonna learn a lot in this pit and that's okay. And, you know, life is long and we'll find the upslope.

Yeah.

Rather than being so anxious, like, oh gosh, you know, I'm supposed to be a VP at this age. I was supposed to be this at that age. And, you know, I saw these other people and they're doing better than me. And like, you rob yourself of the fun of like, you know, the different moments that you're getting in life.

Correct. I love that.

That'd be the big one, especially where, um, there are lots of ambitious people in the Tor community, um, and just like giving yourself a little bit of grace through that. Yeah, I think it's huge.

I love that. I love that, man. So good. All right, y'all, uh, Kevin, stay on so I can say bye to you backstage, but y'all have a good one. Um, Jason just posted our Discord. He is doing live resume and portfolio reviews right now, so go hop on over to Jason's. He posts that in our Discord. He's on his Twitch channel doing that, so y'all go hang out with him. And we'll see y'all tomorrow, 9:30 AM Central, special Friday edition. My guy Lawrence Lockhart found a job after he signed the offer letter 89 days after getting laid off, and he's going to talk about his tactics on how he did it. And I will tell you this, it is crazy. It is basically the opposite of what I teach, which is wild. Um, so can't wait to hang out with him tomorrow. Kevin, you're a gem. Thank you so much, and, uh, we'll see y'all tomorrow. Peace.

Thank you, thank you.