How to Stand Out In Your Search to a Founder w/Nizar Zaher

All righty, let's see here. Make sure— oh, I have to, I have to text one more thing. Good morning, everybody. When I say everybody, I mean nobody. No one's here yet. Uh, also shout out Nizzy for being here, uh, because the damn invite, uh, did not get to him. So, uh, Savvy Cow, if you're watching, yeah, you need to fix that. Um, let's see here. So I gotta send out this last message to my texting community.

Sweet.

Awesome. Alrighty, cool. All right, so Nizzy, I always ask folks this, uh, at the beginning. It's a nice little icebreaker as I'm drinking my second cold brew today. Are you a coffee or tea guy or no beverages?

I'm, I'm more of a coffee guy. I used to have 4 or 5 coffees a day, which is My man. Yeah, my man. Um, but yeah, lately I've just, you know, narrowed that down to like 2 coffees a day. And then I— matcha's grown on me a lot. Really?

My wife's a big matcha fan. Yeah, there's a few spots in Nashville that I like, but it's got to be a little sweet, otherwise you're like, yeah, grass.

I, I, I, I agree with that. It's, it's not great when it's just the matcha itself, but she makes it at home and it's pretty good. I mean, the caffeine doesn't hit the same, but Sure.

Are you so so then so then here here's the next question I always ask folks: Are you hot or iced coffee?

Oh, hot. 100% hot. Really? I'm from Canada, a cold country.

Okay.

Really have. I mean, people drink iced coffee in the summer, but sure sure. I've just grown up drinking like hot hot stuff.

I love it. My my hot take is I feel like if you're drinking hot coffee, you can't really taste the coffee. It's just hot liquid in your mouth. But that's just my like hot take.

But I appreciate it. So good. I appreciate it. Yeah.

Now you're in San Francisco?

Uh, I was. I'm back due to some visa issues.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, I will be. I'm gonna be in San Francisco.

Do you, do you have a favorite coffee spot in San Francisco you want to give a shout out to?

They all suck. They're all terrible. Uh, honestly, I was really disappointed. Okay. I mean, I go because I want to support those local businesses, but I'm just like, just like high prices and the coffee is not quality and the customer service is pretty bad. So I just make coffee.

There you go. There you go. You heard it here first, folks. Coffee in San Francisco sucks.

Maybe I'm wrong.

I do have to say, uh, when I— my wife and I did like Pacific Coast Highway, we went from like Oregon all the way down to San Diego. We stopped in San Francisco for like a day or two. I, I'll never forget, I did have a— I'm not a latte guy, but they had this like vanilla paste latte that still sticks out in my head as like— it was Sightglass Coffee. It was really, really good. Um, but typically, I mean, I'm on my second cold brew of the day. Um, so yeah, that's me. All right, we got some people tuning in. Good morning, welcome. Uh, for those of you tuning in, please say hey, would love to hear from you. You know, I talk about this with every guest. The guests are important. I go live with guests so you can get actual, real, practical, tactical information from these guests. But also too, what I've realized is this is just a virtual meetup, is what it is. Um, you know, I was telling Nizzy backstage, doing this for 5 years now. I was doing it every day for about 4 years, which is Relatively aggressive. That's kind of my personality type, um, just to go balls to the wall. Um, so we're pulling it back now to twice a week, but I've been doing it for 4 years every day. And so like I tell folks, like, this is just a really good virtual meetup. So, um, please say hey, would love to hear from you. I know a lot of people network in the comments. I tell folks like network with everybody I bring on. Message, uh, Nizzy is, is more active on Twitter, on X, uh, so message him, follow him. Um, but, uh, otherwise please say hey, would love to hear from you. To give, uh, kind of some housekeeping things as always. Shout out Appwrite. Um, I'm probably the only non-technical person on a hero program of a tech company. So shout out Appwrite, great piece of software, great crew over there. Uh, listen, we got a lot going on in the Torque community. We just launched a book club. I'm not a reader, but we have a book club now. Uh, we also are doing— we're doing like a show-and-tell, uh, type vibe for people who want to get started public speaking virtually. Um, so jump in, torque.community is where you can learn all that stuff. And if you want to know when I go live with great guests like Nizzy, um, please shoot me a text. This is actually me, it's not some AI bot, uh, it's actually my second number. So text LIVE to 615-235-5650, uh, and you will just kind of get your— it's not— I'm not gonna spam you, it just— the, the text goes directly to you. Um, and, uh, uh, let's see here, what else? I think that's it. Cool. We got some people tuned in. Alex, good morning. Roxy, Chris, Angelo. It's great to see y'all this morning. Mark, it's good to see you. All right, Nizzy, let's give the people what they want, man. Who are you? What do you do? And then we'll dive into your story.

Sure. Yeah, so my name's Nizzy. It's a nickname for Nazar. I'm 23 years old and I run an AI email company called MailZero.

There you go. I love it. I love it. I'm gonna throw up your handle on Twitter too. Nizzy, uh, ABI. Let's see here. ABI.

Sweet.

Awesome. Yeah, go, go follow Nizzy. He's, he's, he's, he's a fun follow. Um, Devon, it's good to see you this morning. So, all right, so, so I, I, I talk about networking, I talk about sliding DMs with strangers all the time. Uh, this, this is one of them, right? So I've been following Nizzy for a bit. I don't know how I followed him. Um, probably shout out to the X algorithm. And I always watch what people say. And Nizzy posted something recently where he talked about really how to stand out in the sea of applicants. And so, Nizzy, I wanna go and dive into this, but I do wanna get to your story about your career as well. But I wanna just go and start with the meat potatoes of this conversation. You mentioned about how to stand out. Developers need to do a lot of things. Obviously you hire developers, you've recently gone through hiring folks. How can people stand out right now in this market, especially in a sea of AI resumes, fake resumes, all that jazz?

It's honestly just doing a bit more research on where you're applying to. Like, we'll delve into like my first engineering job at cal.com.

Sure.

But like, I think the sort of AI applicant thing that we're in now where people are just using AI and everything sounds the same is actually an advantage to people that don't use it. Um, you'll be able to find ways to stand out. Maybe it's writing a little bit more about yourself. Um, and then more importantly, studying the company that you're actually applying to, networking.

Isn't that crazy?

Isn't that—

that just seems really simple to me.

It, it is. It just takes a bit more effort. Um, like instead of an application taking you like 10 seconds to upload your, your PDF file, You could just find a way to DM the founder. Maybe if they're in your area, you try to go to a meetup and talking to them, try talking to them. But trying to find ways to do stuff differently has always been an approach I've tried to take.

Sure.

And it's, it's such an— like you said, it's an easy thing to do, but it just takes a little bit more effort. But it goes so far. You may not get every, like, every job that you apply to, but you will definitely get a response. It won't be like blocked, or it won't at least be ignored by, by the people that are reading your applications. Sure. And that, that, that lesson can be applied to almost everything you do in life. So there's like no downside to at least trying to be different.

Yeah. Emory, why doesn't everyone ask their dad for a job? Uh, I, my, my very first job was in the restaurant industry working for my dad.

So, uh, me too.

Really?

For real? That's great.

Yeah. Yeah. Fellow restaurant bros. You know, I saw, I saw a tweet where it's like millennials don't have you're, you're more like Gen Z, but, um, you know, millennials don't have like world wars to reference, you know. I didn't, you know, serving in whatever. Um, uh, for us we have, did you work for restaurant, did you work for a hotel, or did you work for retail? So I served 2 of the 3, uh, which was retail, which was retail and restaurants.

So they're definitely war zones.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's tough.

So one of the things, one, one of the things I was at, uh, that I loved about your, your your tweet and I wanna kind of dive into it. Like, is people building stuff maybe with the product, right? And maybe I'm pulling that from another thing, but I think you said like, show what you can do specifically with the product maybe that you're applying. How do you like to be approached as a founder? I mean, if somebody like, what does somebody create an email alternative?

It's not even what you're doing. Okay, so for me, like, in— we're a really small startup. Like, we just started, we're less than 5 people, and our approach has been, can this person be a founder? Like, can they start their own company? That's like the one thing we're looking for. Are they agentic? Can they, can they take matters into their own hands and work on things and be creative and not need me to handhold them? I love that. Um, and, and looking through that approach, it doesn't really matter what they build. Like whether they have email experience, whether they have 1 year of experience, 6 months of experience. The most important thing is, are they willing to learn and are they able to do stuff on their own? So that resonates and that sort of translates to people building stuff. So why I love Twitter so much is people post a ton of content and they post things that they're building.

Yeah.

And oftentimes when people DM me, they have nothing posted. So I don't know if they're building anything. I don't know if they're doing stuff on their own. Yeah, and the people that really stand out are those that are either contributing to the repository, so just developers to open source project.

Sure.

But even just working on their own projects. I mean, I saw someone talk, I didn't end up hiring him because we didn't, we had his role already, but he worked on this amazing project. It was a beautiful engineered app, tons of users, thousands of users. And I was so inclined to hire him even though we didn't need him because he worked on something this crazy. Interesting. But like just thinking, okay, can this person run his own company? That's like, yeah, what I'm looking for.

Yeah.

That's like the number one people look for.

You know, a lot of people ask right now, you know, again, kind of throughout my career I've worked with a wide range of engineers coming outta bootcamp to staff level out in the Bay Area. And, and I feel like there's a shift happening right now where you kind of have to do the job before you get the job.

Sure.

What are your thoughts on that? I mean, you know, a lot of people are like, well, I need to work on my portfolio page and I need to, I, you know, I need to make sure I have all my I's, dots, and T's crossed there. I'm like, why don't you just build something and get like your neighbors using the app? Like, like, what are your, what are your thoughts? Because I feel like we're there, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

Yeah, I, I agree. I, I get like 5 DMs a day with people just uploading their resumes. And it's just like this page of like 1,000 words. I'm like, I can't read through this. I don't wanna read through this. Sure. It's the same thing with, with a portfolio page. Like, it's cool that you built this beautiful site, but like, I agree with, with, with your statement. Like, build something, have people use it, because at the end of the day, you're working, you're gonna be working for someone that's doing that exact thing.

Yeah.

So you might have the skills and you're gonna showcase the skills in the interview, but to get the interview, you have to find a way to stand out. And that's why I'm saying like you need to be a bit different. If everyone's doing that one strategy, yeah, your chances are much lower to actually getting an interview or getting the job.

Yeah, absolutely. Let me ask you this. Let's, so, and by the way, talk about mailzero.com. By the way, I threw it up on the screen. We haven't plugged what you're doing yet, so talk about it real fast.

I mean, yeah, it's an AI native email client, so we're still in beta. So if you guys have any feature recommendations, we'd love to hear it. But the essential idea behind it is we wanna sort of change how email is made with tools like AI and all the other cool things that we have today. We think that email is one of those things that will change in the next few years. And reading emails, responding to emails, cluttered inboxes will be a thing of the past in a few years. And we wanna be the company to actually solve that problem. I love that.

I love that. And kind of, so to dovetail on that, talk about kind of your, your career to get here. You know, where, where'd you start out at your first job search? Let's kind of talk about that.

Yeah, so I, I studied law in, uh, in university in Canada here. Um, graduated, didn't really wanna be a lawyer, so I, uh, I was a few days late to the, to the law school application, so I was like, this is perfect, I get a year off. So I just started learning random things that I was really interested in building. So, you know, I tried construction, I tried all these different things, but engineering really stood out. So I took a few YouTube courses, ended up building a few websites, and then I guess it's like 4 or 5 months later, I felt like I was ready to apply to a job.

Okay.

So I just looked around, saw what was interesting to me.

Sure.

And the one company that stood out to me was Cal.com.

Sure.

Um, it's like scheduling company. I think, I think a ton of people know about it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So their application was a 1-minute video on why they should hire you. Really?

Like, like that? Like that was pretty much it?

Yeah. No, no resume.

Just— No way.

1-minute video.

Okay.

Um, but I hacked the system and I saw that it didn't— it wasn't limiting to 1 minute. Like it could be like as long as you want.

Interesting.

And it didn't need to be like just any sort of, it didn't have to be just you talking. So I'm like, everyone applying to this is gonna be standing and just being super bored.

Yeah, they're gonna be like—

Yeah. So I downloaded Loom and I literally showed everything I built. So I built a few projects. I actually had a YouTube channel at the time with like 15,000 subscribers. I realized they're looking for someone with a bit more marketing experience. So the role was like a growth engineer.

Yeah.

Basically talking to devs, website stuff, growth stuff.

Yeah.

So I leaned into that. I learned more about the founders. I saw what they were interested in, which was like open source and they were really like hard into open source. So I showed them projects I worked at and, uh, or worked on. And like, it was like a 3-minute video.

Nice.

And I was like, this is why you guys should hire me. This is what I have. I, I could be like— I, I was like super junior at the time. I was not a great dev. I wasn't anything like that. But, um, that got them interested enough to, uh, interview me.

Okay.

And, uh, on the interview, there were like 5 or 6 people there, and it was like super scary. It was like, this is the first job. Yeah.

Like law, didn't wanna do law. Yeah. Trying to figure it out. I mean, you were, you were green, green.

I was, I was like, it was, it was a few months into my development career. Uh, and in the interview I was just myself, I guess. Like I just, I was pretty calm. I wasn't like formal or anything.

Yeah.

I, uh, I was just, you know, just having fun. Yeah. Um, and they, they asked me a few questions. I, I think I did pretty well. Um, and then at the end of the interview they, uh, you know, they said, you know, we'll get back to you in a few days. That day they, they messaged me saying that they, they want to chat. Um, and on the— on, on that chat, they, they told me that they want to hire me. Um, matter of fact, they, they chose me over like Microsoft and Google employees, which is weird.

Really?

But they just liked how I, I— the stuff I built, I was interesting enough. Um, my YouTube channel, uh, you know, my content, my engineering work, it wasn't great, But it was, there was something there.

Yeah.

So they, they took a chance on me and I, matter of fact, I was one of their, their best employees. They still talk about me. They say, there you go. There you go. There you go.

That's awesome. So, so how, how long were you there for?

I was, I was there for 8 months.

Okay.

Okay.

And then what, so golly, there, there's so much things to unpack here. I, I, let's, let's continue on, but I'm kind of, sure, pinning some things. What made you jump? Right? Like, I mean, you're working at Cal.com, a lot of people know it, pretty hot, you know, from a scheduling app perspective. Man, well, yeah. What made you jump something else and especially starting your own company?

I was honestly just like interested in it. I was enjoying my time at Cal. I was working directly with the founders, which was crazy. Like I was with them every day. Yeah, it's absorbing so much, so much like lessons that I— it would take me like 5 or 6 years to learn. And they were awesome people. Um, I just, like every founder, like you, you're attracted to your own company and you want to build something and you always want to try stuff.

Sure.

And I, I just had this idea of building some something with, with email. Uh, you know, made a few posts, got some social validation, eventually just started working on it more and more. And then I eventually just went all in on it and I was fairly confident that it would do well. I love that. I love that.

So let me, you know, Roxy comes in here and goes, someone mentioned a video resume the other day. Is that unique enough to try? I feel like you've mentioned YouTube, you've mentioned Build in Public, you've mentioned the video you did for cal.com. It seems that video is the medium that can really break down walls to get to know, get, get somebody to know who you are faster.

Sure.

What do you, what do you think of this?

So for Cal, they, they required a video. Like, sure, it didn't have any resume uploader, it was a video uploader.

Which, which honestly I love, to be honest.

It was on— it was, it was interesting. I, I really liked that idea. Um, so yeah, I definitely agree with the idea that video is, is a great medium for getting to know someone and, and And it's different enough. But I would honestly even say just being an interesting individual, building projects is so valuable, especially if you can build something that people are using. Like you said about getting your neighbors to use your product.

Yeah.

Phenomenal. Just amazing. And I think as companies get smaller and skill sets matter less because of tools like AI, these things are gonna be like the differentiators for, for like a, a job listing and, and getting a job in the first place.

You know, one of, one of the things, so I went live yesterday with a senior engineer at Cloudflare and we were talking about just staying out in interview process. We talked about having proof of your work when you, and you made a comment earlier, again, my brain's all over the place this morning, but you made a comment earlier just about how like you like to see people build in public. You know, I, what, one of my dear friends, Kelly Vaughn, she's a senior engineer at Zapier. She talked about how, cuz I asked her point blank, I said, do you wanna see somebody's portfolio site or do you wanna see what they're actually talking about on social and if it lines up? And she was like, I'd much rather read some, some LinkedIn post that somebody made. She goes, if I'm looking for an API engineer, I'd rather read some stuff that they've written about. I mean, it sounds like you're kind of in that same camp.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like you're definitely an observer of what people are building in public.

100%. Yeah. That's how, that's how I found my co-founder. That's how I found, yeah, that's how we found our first 2, 3 engineers was just—

Really?

Yep.

So, so you didn't even post, you didn't even see, this is, this is the point I'm trying to get across. A lot of people like, people aren't hiring. I, people are hiring, they're just not posting the roles anymore because there's so much out there.

And people are always hiring. Like even if there's no job posting and they say that they're, they're not hiring, like If you had a, like, if you find a $100 bill like in the, on the road, right? Just on the floor and you have money, like you're still gonna take the money.

Yes.

It's valuable.

Yes.

So it's like if there's someone that's so valuable to your company that you think will change, like change everything for you. Yeah. Like you're gonna try to hire that person no matter what.

Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if you can hear the thunder. There's a massive storm happening outside of my door right now. So let me ask you this. How, so do you think X, Twitter, like, I feel like that's like the best way to get in front of people. Like, what are your thoughts on just X as a medium in terms of networking?

Yeah, it's remarkable. It's almost like a resume post place. Like, it's not even, not like, I don't even know what to call it, but—

A resume. Let's just go with that. A resume post place. That's great.

Yeah. Resume post place. Not the best wording, but yeah, just a, People are always showing what they've built.

Yes.

And either directly or indirectly, they're— that signals to companies that, oh, this person might be like good for us. Yes. And I think a ton of more and more people are actually getting jobs this way.

I agree. And I think that's the general notion of like the market.

Yeah.

The market's like, well, no one's hiring. Well, the market, all these trends are just aggregating job postings.

Yeah.

You've hired 2 people that you never posted a job for.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Let me ask you this, like, like, do you think, do, how would you use X if you were not a founder? You, and you were just on the job search, how would you use X?

I will, I would build as much as I can build things interesting to me and what I might think would be interesting to other people. And yeah. post about it. So it would be a demo video, it would be how I built this, it would be screenshots, but just showing, show and tell, show and tell what I built every single day. That's literally what I would do for like as long as until I get a job.

Yep, absolutely. I love this. Leila coming in, drop X usernames. I love it. Well, here's Nizzy's, go follow him. So another thing. Oh, I know what I was getting at. I lost my train of thought. The Cloudflare guy I was interviewing yesterday, he talked about one of the most powerful skills for him is being able to do video and to talk about his coding while he's doing it. And he said he would, he'd like practice on like LeetCode or just different questions. What are your thoughts on that? Because it sounds like if you're able to talk about what you're building and what you're coding, again, we're kind of getting to that next level of the job search.

Yeah, I mean, as most of The audience here, like engineers.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Most engineers don't know how to communicate. They're just really good at coding or they're not great, like, or great at communicating. I think that's such a valuable thing because like a high-ranking, like a CEO needs to know how to communicate and a CTO might need to know how to communicate and, and actually code as well. And I think both are equally as valuable now. Um, it's quite rare and I advise people to just like at least learn a little bit how to communicate and actually like show and tell is the same thing, I guess. But yeah, I agree with that statement. Like knowing how to communicate is very valuable, especially working with bigger teams. Like you're communicating all the time and like if you don't know how to communicate, you're like kind of falling behind. I think. I think he cut out. Do I have to run the show? Uh oh. All right, guys, I'm gonna I'm gonna text him, but I will just mute myself real quick. You there?

Yep. You there?

Yeah.

All right. Yep. Uh, my internet— my— literally this storm just like literally dropped. I'm literally running off my hotspot right now. All right, you can't— can you hear me?

Yeah, I can hear you.

All right, hold on. Let me see if my power— oh, my power's back. Hold on. All right, this is, this is crazy. Are we here? We here? Yes, the storm took out my internet, Jordan. So we're on hotspot right now. All right, what are we talking about? Yes, the power of talking and typing at the same time. Yeah, great.

Yeah, very well, very valuable skill.

Yes, awesome. What else right now, um, uh, as we— what, what else right now in terms of your career do you think has really differentiated yourself Just in your career that maybe we haven't gotten to quite yet? Is there anything else, any other nuggets of wisdom by chance?

There's nothing like special. I think like everyone else is pretty much the same as me. Like I went to university. I'm not like a super talented developer. Yeah. Most people are probably better developers than me. But like standing out—

Oh, I'm gonna interrupt you real quick. I'm gonna interrupt you real quick. I think this is a big point. You just said there are probably other developers better than you, right? Cal.com, you said you beat out some folks, but again, I feel like it's doing the things differently.

That, that's, that's the point I was trying to get to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just like the, when, when prompted with a thing to do, you want, you wanna find ways to stand out and like, yeah, looking for ways not to be lazy on like an application is, is like the number one thing.

Yep. Talk about, um, so, uh, so as we wrap up here, um, if— do you think that people should just like cold DM founders if they have something cool to showcase? Like, like, like, like you're not hiring probably right now. Maybe you are, maybe you're not. I don't know. But like, will you always gladly look at DMs or like, hey dude, I don't know if you're hiring, but I built This, I think this could be pretty cool. What are your thoughts on this?

Yeah, I mean, there's no downside to doing it.

Yeah.

So yeah, the return is it doesn't cost you anything to actually send the DM, so there's actually no downside. So the return on that is infinite if you do. The best case scenario is you get a job. The worst case, just no response. So I look at DMs as often as I can. I get a decent amount, so I can't most of the time. Um, but when I DM—

I appreciate you getting back to me.

Of course, man. Uh, but like most of the time I'm, uh, I'm, I'm at least somewhat active on, uh, on my main threads and like the actual Twitter, Twitter posts. Yeah. So, um, but yeah, like DMing, I, I've seen people get jobs through DMs. Yeah. So, yeah.

Yep. Yep. Absolutely. All right, so that was crazy. Sorry for all the, sorry for all the, the rigmarole. This, this storm is nuts. Um, yeah, right here. Jordan comes here. I beat out people with degrees for my first job because I took the initiative to network people out. I mean, again, Like I said, and I think it's like what Nita's saying, like, I think I've said this time and time again, I think where we're at in the market right now is you're not— no one's given a job anymore, right? I think 2021, 2022, with the massive amount of hiring going on, I think really kind of set a really poor expectation for job seekers. And I think now, I think doing the things differently, leveraging video more. During the— during your interview process is huge. Um, I mean, again, right, this is kind of— this is kind of outside a little bit, but so a buddy of mine— so I play ice hockey. Um, my team won last night. Um, but a buddy of mine used to— was running content for this hockey company. He is no longer there anymore. They moved on from him. They had— they do not have any sort of content plan, and they, they've completely gone away from my feed. And it's like a vacuum. The next day he was not there. I did not see any posts from them anymore. And so for me, I think the constant building in public and even on X too, what's crazy about X, you don't need to have a ton of followers. You can just start following people that get caught up in your algorithm. I will tell you this, I engage with a lot of folks like Nizzy, like a lot of founders building really cool stuff. I follow, I repost. And the algorithm keeps feeding you more of that. So if you engage with founders, engage with senior engineers, keep following, like they'll pop up in your feed and keep following them. Like X can kind of become this like huge tidal wave if you make it in terms of getting in front of the right people.

Totally.

Awesome. All right, so again, sorry about the power. Um, all right, Nizzy, so I got rapid-fire questions here. Um, I, I use ChatGPT for it, um, uh, and I really like them. All right, so first question, outside of your own company, what is one tech tool app that you can't live without right now?

Cursor.

Cursor. Love it. Great answer. Um, next question, I know you talked about it, the very first job you ever had, the very first paying job you ever had.

Oh, that's the question. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Sorry. Yeah. What was the very first job you've ever had?

Yeah. Working at a pizza shop owned by my parents. Nice.

Was it good pizza or just kind of mediocre?

It was good pizza. It was actually pretty good pizza.

Yeah.

I love it. I love it.

It's so funny. Everybody's first job is in the restaurant industry that I've interviewed lately.

It's great.

So I know you're running a company. If you had your ideal situation, everybody on site, a few days on site, What kind of cadence do you like either personally or from a business perspective for onsite versus remote?

I typically prefer like onsite and having that sort of ecosystem where everyone's like in person. But I think, well, I know there's talent outside of just the area you're in and remote might be the move. Like we're a remote company now and I think it's a better better outcome for us because we were able to hire people from like all over the world.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it's just a, you have to put in the effort to build the culture and you just have to be chatting all the time and making sure that you're talking as much as you can. Yeah. DMing, like these are things you have to do and it's a bit more difficult, but I think we're getting the hang of it. And I think more and more companies are actually gonna be doing this remote thing.

Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. Next question. What's a career mistake in hindsight that you made that you're oddly grateful for?

Um, this isn't a career one, but I, I missed the law school deadline. So I was supposed to apply to law school on my last year of college and I didn't. And part of me wanted to, part of me didn't. Yeah. And, uh, at the time I thought I messed up by like missing out. But like looking back, I probably wouldn't have become an engineer if I went to law school.

Yeah.

Isn't that crazy?

Yeah, that's crazy. That's crazy. I, I, I love stuff. Everything works out. Everything works out.

Totally.

Um, second last question. If you weren't in tech, so let's say I tell you tomorrow morning that you, that you can't do what you're doing at mail.zero.com, but the money's about the same or whatever, what profession would you pursue?

Probably like a, a franchise, like a restaurant franchise owner.

For real? Any specific type of restaurant vibe you, you, you'd go for?

I'd probably say like, yeah, like McDonald's, Sonic, Whataburger, something like that.

Why? I'm kind of curious. Why is that?

I don't know. I just, I like fast food. It's interesting. And I think you could do pretty well if you operate it correctly.

And I agree.

I think like franchising, like McDonald's, if like all you have to do is just run it, I think you're able to make money from it.

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. I like people who like franchise Chick-fil-A. It's just like, Handle this money.

Yeah, it's insane.

Um, all right, last question, man. Again, sorry, sorry for everybody watching about the power outage. That was crazy. Um, uh, this show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0. The reason why I called it this is because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now as adults, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask for general career advice. If you go back in time and tell young Nizzy— I mean, you already are young, so like younger Nizzy—

what Like you said it, like, things will work out. Yeah. Um, I don't know, I still think like this, but whenever something goes wrong, it's like the end of the world. But I think most of us know, like, you'll be okay even if you don't get the thing you want.

Yeah.

Uh, just always being, like, grateful for being in, like, the scenario you're in.

Yeah.

Um, things can, like, always be worse. Like, we're— we all have access to the internet. It's like, that's the biggest gift. And I think utilizing that gift is like the only thing you can really do is like, just, just try, try shit. And even if things don't go your way, um, you'll, you'll be fine. Uh, you have family that can support you. You have friends that you can talk to. And I think that's like the most important thing.

Totally agree. Totally agree. All right, y'all. Well, again, go follow Nizzy on X. He's a great follow. Um, shoot him a DM, say it was good to see him this morning on Guidance Counselor 2.0. Y'all have a good one. Again, we're moving Guidance Counselor just 2 days a week. So this is it for me for the rest of the week. Um, we'll see you in the Torque Discord. Nizzy, stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. Y'all have a good one. We'll see y'all next week. Peace.