Welcome to season two of Building Infinite Red, a podcast where the owners of Infinite Red, Todd Werth, Jamon Holmgren, and Gant Laborde, share stories and insights about what it's like to build a fully remote software consultancy. In this episode, we talked about a change in leadership that had a major impact on Infinite Red and how we dealt with it.
Connect with the owners on Twitter!
• Todd Werth: @twerth
• Jamon Holmgren: @jamonholmgren
• Gant Laborde: @gantlaborde
Todd Werth: Welcome back to season two of Building Infinite Red. My name is Todd Werth. I'm the CEO and founder of Infinite Red and I'm joined today by Jamon Holmgren and Gant Laborde. Say hello, Jamon.
Jamon Holmgren: Hey everybody. It's really nice to be back, finally, for season two. I can't wait.
Todd Werth: Gant.
Todd Werth: Welcome back to season two of Building Infinite Red. My name is Todd Werth. I'm the CEO and founder of Infinite Red and I'm joined today by Jamon Holmgren and Gant Laborde. Say hello, Jamon.
Jamon Holmgren: Hey everybody. It's really nice to be back, finally, for season two. I can't wait.
Todd Werth: Gant.
Gant Laborde: Hey everybody.
Todd Werth: Yeah. It's been awhile. It's been, I don't know. It's been almost a year, I think since we started recording or we stopped season one of Building Infinite Red. Anyways, today we're going to talk about an interesting subject. A lot of people, a lot of entrepreneur, small business people, middle-sized business people, all business people go through, which is a change in leadership. You may have noticed that Ken Miller is not with us in the podcast and we have Gant Laborde, so we're going to talk about why that is? Where Ken is? Is he in the Antarctic searching for gold? Maybe, but we'll discuss that in a moment.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. There's been a lot that's changed in the, I don't know, a year and a half since we did season one but obviously having a change in leadership, that was something that we had to work through before we could start doing season two. We're here, we're here and we're finally recording which was nice.
Todd Werth: Exactly. Let me start off. Quick story is Ken left the company last year and before he left the company, Gant Laborde, I don't know why I keep on using your last name. Gant Laborde.
Gant Laborde: Well, there's so many Gant out there, Todd? I really appreciate it. It really helps my SEO.
Todd Werth: Yeah. That's true. I'm just going to keep on saying Gant Laborde through the entire thing as if it's his first name. Anyways, It's Gant Laborde became an owner of Infinite Red before Ken left. Those two things are not actually related even though they may seem so. First, I think it would be a good idea. Let's just discuss, Gant, you coming on becoming an owner of Infinite Red, your experiences with that, our experiences with that and then we'll go on to discuss Ken's departure. Sound good?
Gant Laborde: Sounds like a plan. I'm going to just say this has been a long time coming. I've have had several businesses sort of like Todd, unlike Jamon. Jamon has been on the right track his entire life.
Jamon Holmgren: Right.
Gant Laborde: I've had business partners with a myriad of skill sets and ways that we fit in ways that we don't. My very first business was creating a chess board called poop chess and an idea of it. I was in college, I was friends with the state chess champion and we thought it'd be really funny if every time somebody went to the bathroom. They played a move on a chess board rather than, I don't know, whatever else. Now remember, this is a long time ago; there weren't smartphones for people to keep themselves endlessly entertained. Believe it or not, that was, that was my first business endeavor. There were about four or five businesses between there of varying success but the truth be told, all of them were very good ideas or very fun and very creative.
Gant Laborde: The big piece missing for me was always business partners who I could look up to, that I could work with, that I could be creative with it, could be silly with. I think I finally found that when I started working here at Infinite Red.
Todd Werth: I want one thing to be very clear to the audience was it actually called poop chess?
Gant Laborde: Yes. It was. Actually, we had Rodin's the Stinker, which is the Thinker.
Todd Werth: Stinker.
Gant Laborde: He's sitting on a toilet.
Todd Werth: By the way, I've actually always thought that Thinker actually is someone who's constipated and that my guess was Rodin's was actually constipated because that's what it really. I mean I know why they call it the thinker because yeah, it's just marketing and PR but I'm pretty sure Rodin spent a lot of time playing poop chess
Gant Laborde: I think that's the great thing when you look at something like that, you project what you're like personality on it is and that's what great art is. I think that's also like what attracts people to businesses and art. They share that same similarity. I was lucky enough to see this company get formed. I was in Paris when Jamon and Todd were talking together at a conference to actually form this version of Infinite Red
Todd Werth: Ken.
Gant Laborde: Right. Yeah. Actually, all three of them went up to a room where no one else was allowed and they went over everything. I have to admit when that was happening and part of me was like, I wish I could have like bought in then. I wish I had the capital and the money and the foresight, but after working at Infinite Red, this is something I tell all the employees here is that you're never limited to your station. You actually control where you want to be at Infinite Red and where I wanted to be after seeing all that was an owner, and fortunately, after knocking on the door enough, you all finally let me in.
Todd Werth: Also, Gant so just remind everyone I had ... Ken and I had a company called Infinite Red with no space and then Jamon had a company. I think it was, jeez is that 10 years at that point that you had running that called ClearSight. We merged our two companies about four years ago. What Gant is talking about at the Paris peace summit, or just a room in ... An Airbnb we were renting was Ken, Jamon, and I discussing merging our two companies. Gant was actually the first employee of my company. Gant been there literally from the beginning and stuff. It did take me a long time to recruit him originally. He was in his job and safe and secure and I convinced him to come over here at that time. That was long time ago. Yeah. That's very cool.
Jamon Holmgren: I wonder if I knew Gant before I knew Todd, it might've been that way because we were all in the same open source community. This was prior to Gant being recruited by Todd. I think I went on a podcast that you had or some YouTube show.
Gant Laborde: Yeah. We did a really fun thing back when we're in Rubymotion days. We did a video that was like ... like YouTube just came out with a feature and we did that show. You were like one of our first guests.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. Yeah. I think Todd came right after me or something. We've been connected for a very long time. Open source. We were all coders back in the day and we did a lot of things together and Ken was in that mix as well. That was a big part of our origin story.
Todd Werth: Yeah, exactly. I was on that show, I don't think with Jamon though. Anyways, so Gant has been an integrate part. He was always a number four in our company and he had wanted to buy and we wanted him to come in for a long time and then it worked out. At the time he also became an executive. He was a pretty high position at the time, but we made him executive of the company as well. Not only is he an owner of Infinite Red, but a Gant Laborde is an executive also. I'm going to start saying that every single time. I'm going to give it a little extra emphasis Gant Laborde. Anyways, so that happened and that was pretty straight forward. I mean there's lots of paperwork and stuff and we have a wonderful lawyer which is very hard to find. Not to digress, but I've had a lot of lawyers in my time and exactly one has been wonderful and that's our current one. Josh.
Jamon Holmgren: we have an episode in season one about lawyers and accountants and things like that. Go check that out if you haven't listened to season one yet.
Todd Werth: Yeah. He did some work but it wasn't that difficult actually to bring else in as a new owner. We all had that happen and I think I want to say three or four months. I don't remember exact timeline but later after Gant came on as an owner, Ken left the company.
Jamon Holmgren: I want to also talk about why we brought Gant on because you know it's not enough to just say, "Oh he was our top employee." Because we have a lot of great employees. Why Gant in particular? I think the big reason really came down to his creativity and his passion. I know those words get thrown around a lot but they really do describe Gant. Gant is one of the few people that I know that can think of things that just sounds so like out there and wacky. But then make them happen and make them happen in a magical way that just absolutely blows my socks up. It's crazy. He's a very hard worker. There aren't too many people out there who can generally outwork me.
Jamon Holmgren: Gant is one of them. He's incredible. He really puts everything he has into it, and he's also incredibly smart. He's accomplished. He's got all these certifications and a lot of things I don't have. I think the big thing overall was not just that, but also just kind of like we want him to put his creativity. We really want Gant to put his creativity into Infinite Red. We knew that if he didn't have some stake in the game. Then eventually he was going to get tired of putting his creative, creative energy into someone else's business. Now it's not someone else's business. It's, it's Gant business and it allows him to really unleash that.
Jamon Holmgren: I'm really excited. There's already been some really cool stuff that's come out of it in the intervening year that we're going to talk about in future episodes of this season, so stay tuned. It's going to be really, really fun to listen to what Gant has created and also what he's freed up the rest of us to do, but that those are for future episodes for sure. That's, I think, I wanted to make sure that people knew why we brought him on.
Gant Laborde: Yeah. Actually I want to take a moment to say something about that. This is something that I think all developers learn. I see a lot of developers out there and they all go through a burnout and then they also learn this other lesson and so the burnout's a little bit more complex. The community's very, very good at that. The second lesson that I learned was how not to be just mercenary. One time I left a really good job just to take one for higher pay and I thought that that's just like that's the game and right now salaries are all over the place, but the ... What you need to live is very different. What you really want is control and ability to work with people who you appreciate and spend your time with. I know it's not as cool as saying I back when I worked at Facebook or Google or all these other places. I think like one of the most valuable lessons that I wound up learning that helped get me here is that I knew what I wanted and kudos to Todd, Jamon, and Ken for making that kind of company because I knew from years that that's where I wanted to land.
Todd Werth: Before we go on, can I just say I'm a little bit uncomfortable of how little this episode is about me.
Gant Laborde: That is true, Todd. Well don't forget, we have that unpublished episode that we're going to do later on where we promise you it's going to go out to that really special website where all the people will listen to it. Don't worry about it.
Todd Werth: Can I send my mother that URL?
Gant Laborde: As a matter of fact, yeah that's the website. We're just going to send it to her.
Jamon Holmgren: I'm pretty sure your mother fast forwards through our parts just to get to your part.
Todd Werth: it's funny, if she knew how to do that she would totally do that. She's getting up there in age.
Jamon Holmgren: Bless her heart.
Todd Werth: I love my mom. Yeah. Totally, we're going to have lots of exciting stuff about some of the new directions we've taken our company and talking about changing directions in the company. I mean, not changing per se our primary business is steady ... State, steady and we've made great growth in that end. We do well in that but just some new directions especially after the leadership change and stuff. We did decide to make some new changes. That's going to be exciting to talk about for sure. Cool. Gant Laborde, thank you for that.
Gant Laborde: Thank you. Todd Werth.
Todd Werth: Yes. Thank you. Gant came on as an owner and he was already involved in everything. As we discussed, that wasn't a terribly big deal. Ken leaving was a lot bigger deal logistically speaking. Ken decided to leave the company and Jamon will actually talk a little bit about that in a second. Really what we want to discuss the rest of this podcast is all the logistical issues with that. The legal issues with that cultural changes dealing with the team, that kind of stuff. Because there is actually quite a bit of stuff that goes on there and we feel that might be interesting for you all. First off, Jamon, could you talk a little about Ken leaving?
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah, totally. First off, we're all still friends, very good friends. We talk with Ken almost every day still in Slack. We have a channel with him. It was very amicable. Really, when it came down to it, I really see it more ... I mean like anything human, any decision like this. There are feelings involved in every decision where you're parting ways. Overall, like I think one is about as well as we could've hoped. Ultimately consulting is not for everybody. It's a tough grind. There are some great things about it and I'm thinking we'll talk about that, but there's also some things where it's ... There are other options out there.
Jamon Holmgren: I think Ken wanted to do some other things ultimately when it came down to it. I think we were pretty accepting of that. We understood where he was coming from. Sucks to lose a founder always. Ultimately, that made sense. I'm really glad that we did re-maintain that relationship because in these types of situations it can go sideways if you're not careful. I think all of the work that we put into building our relationship over the first three years of building Infinite Red. Including things like doing the podcast together and stuff like that. That really contributed toward having the high degree of mutual trust and understanding that allowed us to move forward with this split.
Todd Werth: Yeah. Very well said Jamon that yeah, exactly. First, I want to say a few things. One is we allowed Ken to decide when he would tell the team. He wanted to tell the team after the paperwork was finalized and everything was done, which meant we had to work on this transition for, I don't know, I'm just going to guess three months without the team knowing. It took a lot of our time and stuff. That was a challenge for me personally because there was a lot of conversations and stuff that happened.
Jamon Holmgren: We had even started recording season two of the podcast and we had to stop that. Not tell Derek Greenberg, who's our producer here, not tell him exactly why at the time just, "Hey, we're going to put this on hold for a bit." He was like, that sort of thing.
Gant Laborde: It goes to show you anytime we might look like relays, we're just working really hard behind the scenes.
Todd Werth: I like that. That's totally not true, but I love it. That was challenging for me personally just because I do a lot of team ... I deal with the team quite a bit and that kind of stuff and I'm a naturally a person who likes to talk about everything and pretty open book. That was one challenge for sure. My handling all that and starting to take over some of his duties and obviously you don't just flick a switch and everything switches over during that time. You're putting new people on things that he was working on, that kind of stuff. I don't think anyone noticed per se, but that was going on during that process too.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. I mean Ken's position he was often kind of involved in the strategic things. He was involved in financial things. He was our CFO. He was also working a bit with the technical team. That was the breadth of what we had to take on legal was another aspect of it. There were quite a few pieces that we needed to officially assign elsewhere.
Gant Laborde: Marketing as well, which is something you can't let drop. We had to work on everything all at the same time. It was quite a juggle.
Todd Werth: Yeah. There was a lot there for sure. We had this various thing that he did on the company, we had to transition over. That was a big thing. We had the team in the dark. That was a thing. We had legal, obviously Josh who I mentioned earlier, our lawyer had a lot of stuff we had to ... There was a lot of paperwork involved in this plus a lot of discussion on exactly how it would happen. Ken at the time owned basically a third of the company ... Well no they're not ... Sorry, not at that time because Gant had already bought in but before Gant bought in, Ken own a third of the company. It was significant amount of the company and that kind of stuff. What else? Jamon and Gant, what else was impact in a general way?
Gant Laborde: Well, I'll say specifically is we were looking at the mechanics of the company but also the personality of the company because that's something we really cherish. If the community was going to suffer or if we're going to have some difficulty there. I think that that's kind of key is that we didn't know how people would take things. How are people perceiving what it is that's happening? One of the things that was a key here is not only after Ken told everybody, but we had to have our ear to the ground immediately afterward to make sure everything's okay.
Jamon Holmgren: Yes. Its good because some people, for example; might go to Ken for specific things, they may ... Ken might be a voice for them in executive decisions and they're going to be wondering who's going to speak for me in these types of things situations.
Gant Laborde: Yeah. That's an excellent point, Jamon. One of the things that Ken was probably the most voiced for is the heads down, I would like to never be forced into fund developer and so while we want to be a fund company, we'd never force it. It's never forced fund. When we start to get an idea sometimes Ken was the voice of reason for that and we had to make sure that we recreated that as well.
Todd Werth: I think we do force fun sometimes. We're not perfect but it was a general concept for sure. I do know a few people on the team who were worried specifically about ... They felt Ken represented their style of work and that's a legitimate concern and frankly to be honest, after he left, it did become less that way for sure.
Jamon Holmgren: Right. Yeah. I mean every person that you removed, that's a great point. Todd, and every person you remove from a company or every person that you add to a company especially an owner, is going to change the culture in some way. We did notice that. People did notice that, but we had Gant and Gant role increased afterward. He really stepped up. That was a big deal. It became a little bit more Todd, a little bit more Jamon, a little bit more Gant, a lot more Gant and other people within the company also stepped up in various ways. That is something you need to watch very closely and have lots of conversations about. I know we spent hours and hours and hours talking with team during that transition. It was not something that we just took for granted and just, "okay, that's done. We're moving on."
Gant Laborde: As those like obligations came on. I do think that one of the really impressive things that happened there is Ken for a while was CTO. I know that I know this story, but Jamon you stepped into the CTO spot and I don't know if that happened last year's podcast season or if that's been from now, but you have basically had a lot of success in doing that. Do you want to talk about taking up that chart?
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah, totally. After last season concluded, we were having and this was ... Ken was still part of the company, but during a discussion I think this was right when we decided to officially bring on Gant. I think those in that range, I also asked if I could take on a more technical role. My background software engineering, I love coding. I got into this business because I love coding and it just felt like I was chief operating officer that I was too removed from that and doing stuff that, yeah, I can do. I mean I can do operations. It wasn't my passion. It wasn't my favorite thing to do. Yeah. I asked the team and obviously Ken was doing some of that but you all were really gracious in saying yeah, like go for it.
Jamon Holmgren: Because we're all software engineers. Everybody would like to be involved in the technical side. I got to take on that role and we can talk more about that later for sure. A few things that I did was taking it a little more. I guess, a little more technical, a little more hand on direction. Todd took on a lot of the operations side of things. Yeah. I took on some other pieces of that. It allowed me to really focus on it in a way that I don't think Ken ever really had the time for. That was also something that our team was asking for. They wanted more hands-on leadership, more involved leadership. I was able to step in there and focusing on some of the things. I'd actually like to almost do like a full episode on that because there's just so much that's happened in the last year on the CTO side of things. That's the short version.
Gant Laborde: Just waxing philosophically for a second. Do you think that that's something that we are attracted to doing because we're a technology company and we're a technology-based individuals in our origins? Or do you think that's something that's healthy for every company to keep the executives at least in touch with everybody at some fundamental level?
Todd Werth: Well, it depends on the company to be honest. I mean, I don't want to digress too much, but when you're a 10-person company you can very much do what you just said and you can be very flat and very involves everyone and everyone knows what's going on.
Jamon Holmgren: That's what I did with ClearSight, like that was totally the model with ClearSight. I was the lead developer and I had a bunch of generally speaking, less experienced developers working with me and I was very hands on. Once we merged that change very drastically for three years and it's been nice to get a little bit closer to that. Not all the way back.
Todd Werth: Yeah. I had re risk thinking I could make that same company happen no matter what size the company was. Somewhere out there in our 12 listeners someone is laughing because it's ridiculous. When you get bigger and stuff it just, you can do that as much for sure. All three of us are software engineers. I haven't done software engineering personally for three years or something like that. It would be very difficult for me to do. No matter what my desire.
Gant Laborde: I don't know about that. I had a problem the other day and I pulled you in and somehow you put your old developer hat on, it's still fit.
Todd Werth: I'm still an amazing developer and better than all of you.
Jamon Holmgren: Humble too.
Todd Werth: My humility is what makes me great.
Gant Laborde: It's true.
Todd Werth: No. Seriously it's yeah, that is a different episode. Back to Ken thing, I do want to add one quick thing to the culture. We knew the culture was going to change and we actually wanted to change in certain ways. Imagine you have a company and you have a quorum of leaders who make decisions. If you replace one person with another person, there's going to be situations where say two of us wanted to make a decision and one person did not. Then we wanted to consensus on that so we wouldn't do that thing. Obviously, if that one person's gone, we can now have consensus. Consensus shifts on a lot of different subjects.
Todd Werth: It wasn't like we are trying to maintain exact same culture. What we're trying to do is make sure all the team, all our teammates could find their place in the new change culture, which was inevitable. That was more and it wasn't that like we were trying to keep the same culture. We knew that, we knew that wasn't going to happen. Jamon you took over the legal, I took over CFO, and Gant took over marketing. There was other things too, but those were-
Jamon Holmgren: CTO as well. Yeah.
Todd Werth: Yeah. Again, very sorry. Jamon Holmgren took over as CTO. My part of CFO I can get out of really quick. This is my third company. In the previous companies I did take care of the finance stuff and my wife is an accountant
Jamon Holmgren: Really.
Todd Werth: If you don't understand that joke, go back to the last episode of last season. I think it was the last episode. I took on that role that wasn't really that difficult because we all ... Were doing it anyways. I don't want to talk too much about that other than I'm doing a fantastic job. Anyways, I'd like to hear about you taking over the legal and Gant taking over marketing and then of course the CTO thing is big subject. We should talk about that more but first Jamon.
Jamon Holmgren: Well, I think we did lean on Ken for legal for sure. Yeah. I mean I ran my own company for 10 years, but legal with a company of 10 people is pretty minimal. There's not a lot going on there. I had a naive approach to it, but with Infinite Red I needed to really dig a little deeper and make sure that I understood sort the mechanics. Obviously, we have a good lawyer like Todd mentioned before. He's been really good about giving us a very easy to understand instruction and he's very quick to turn things around. When we have a question, he's very good about turning the round. Big piece of this is knowing when to ask the question and what question to ask to get the right answer because it doesn't matter how good your lawyer is, you have to still do that.
Todd Werth: We also made a decision, correct me if I'm wrong, to have Josh our lawyer do a lot more work.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. We did.
Todd Werth: We did put in more hours and stuff.
Jamon Holmgren: Right. Because Ken would sometimes just review things on his own and use ... He's a smart guy. He would use his experience to determine where things were and we were just like, "Nah, I'm not going to try to do that. I'm going to send this over to Josh" Even if it seems trivial, like a pretty standard boilerplate NDA. I'm going to just send it over to Josh regardless and a half the time he gets back in five minutes and just with a one word reply fine and I sign it and we move on. The degree of confidence if I were trying to do that, I would spend an hour and it would ... The degree of confidence would be a lot less. That was very helpful.
Jamon Holmgren: There's still a lot of stuff that falls outside of what the lawyer can do because a lot of it has to do with what we as a business want and what we want out of things. Todd and I were just talking yesterday actually about some things that we need to tweak on our standard contract because of some situations we've run into ... With clients where our contract was insufficient. Yeah. This is a contract that's been reviewed by our lawyer and things like that, but the lawyer doesn't know the business needs as well as we do. These are things that definitely and we do try to do them together but mostly falls on my plate when there's something legal to coordinate and make sure that we get our information over to Josh and get good answers back.
Todd Werth: What if it turns out that every time Josh says, "Fine." What he actually means is if we accept this contract, we will be fined by the government.
Jamon Holmgren: Or he's talking about the fine print, like where's the fine print? We just never send it to him.
Todd Werth: We laugh but that's the stuff that literally happens in companies.
Jamon Holmgren: It's totally true.
Todd Werth: Yeah. It's hard. It's very hard. Anyways, Gant, you took over marketing and you haven't always had as much time because you're been focusing on some other directions which we're going to talk about in future podcasts. Can you tell us a little about that transition and what your experience was for them?
Gant Laborde: Absolutely. I'll even tease the other things. One thing specifically before I was actually moved in as an owner. I was ahead of our Academy which did onsite training and a lot of fun stuff that was from Jamon. Then I also which I'm sure we'll talk about in a future episode, begin a bit of a research for what we're going to be working on. That led a lot towards an AI initiative and that's part of what got me the title that I got, which I absolutely love by the way. I think Jamon you came up with it, is that correct?
Jamon Holmgren: I don't remember. I remember Todd and I chatting and kicking around some various names. I think that that definitely came out of that conversation because it really did just seem to fit. I mean on a lot of different people, it might sound like a meetup titled but to be honest that's what you do here. That's totally what you do.
Gant Laborde: I'm okay with made up title. My name's Gant. Actually, according to Todd, my name is Gant Laborde.
Todd Werth: It's that Laborde.
Jamon Holmgren: That's right.
Gant Laborde: I'm okay with the made-up stuff. I was chief innovation officer which it's the CIO which is great depending on if I'm giving out a business card, CIO looks good. Then behind closed walls, I'll tell you it's actually chief innovation officer. My goal was to take this AI stuff.
Todd Werth: Does anyone actually even know what CIOs are anymore, unless you're in the enterprise world, like chief information officer does that like a common term anymore?
Gant Laborde: I think that's the person who gets sued when there's a data breach. I'm glad I'm not that one.
Todd Werth: Yeah. It used to be. In the 90s for sure, everyone was CIOs and stuff but I thought that term was gone.
Gant Laborde: We still have a CIO of New Orleans. I'll ask her because I don't know.
Jamon Holmgren: Wait, so you know her?
Gant Laborde: Yeah, yeah. Actually-
Jamon Holmgren: Name dropping here.
Gant Laborde: No, no, no, no. I'm trying not to.
Todd Werth: New Orleans has 18 technical people.
Jamon Holmgren: That's true.
Gant Laborde: That is true. We all know each other. There's a handshake, I've said too much.
Jamon Holmgren: They have probably trained half of them.
Gant Laborde: Yeah. I did do a lot of training down here. We're growing. Okay. Come visit New Orleans, learn how to code and then drink that information away.
Jamon Holmgren: I guess we probably never said it at the beginning of the episode but Gant is in New Orleans, so clearly. I'm near Portland, Oregon. I'm actually in Southwest Washington state and Todd is over in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Gant Laborde: Yeah. It is 100% remote if you've never listened to us before. That's a big part of our way of doing everything and it works out really well for us. I'm sure later episodes we'll talk about it but we're solving some pretty awesome problems with remote work that I don't think I've ever seen anybody solve before. That's probably an episode in itself. For me though as taking on marketing, this was like putting a kid in a candy store. I love interacting with people. I love pushing our open source. I love our initiatives. One of the things that we have here is I have two initiatives. I also am the executive of our chain react conference. That's every July in Portland and it is our React Native Conference, the US React Native Conference. And I have all these really cool things and then you all hand me the T shirt cannon to get the stuff out there which is our marketing.
Jamon Holmgren: Didn't we at one point, seriously consider a T shirt cannon? Didn't we have that conversation?
Gant Laborde: Yeah. As soon as Todd talks our accountant into making it a tax write off. I think everybody needs one.
Jamon Holmgren: I agree with that.
Todd Werth: I do not agree with that.
Gant Laborde: For the record.
Jamon Holmgren: Todd, a total segues. What about your CFO hat? I do not agree with that.
Todd Werth: Not to digress, but this is hilarious. Ken was CFO and he would always be the person who would say, "Can we afford that? Should we do that?" That kind of stuff. I was the worst of the people who would just spend Willy-Nilly out of all of us.
Jamon Holmgren: Yes. This is true.
Todd Werth: Now I'm CFO and I'm now, "Do we need that?" I do this. It wasn't like a decision. I didn't wake up one day and go. I need to keep costs and that kind of stuff. It just happened naturally.
Jamon Holmgren: Because you're on the numbers, you're having to look at things. You're seeing the result of the actions that we take. You've just gotten super, super annoying.
Todd Werth: To be clear, I was very annoying before but now I'm annoying about money.
Gant Laborde: That is an important distinction.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. I'll just interject. It's a great thing though that we have one of the executives really focusing on that. We tend to be creators, makers, wanting to go out there and make things happen. Right? All of us are. Ultimately though you still need to run a business. You need to make sure it's sustainable. Todd's been doing a great job. Really. I have to say it.
Todd Werth: Not really. I really am great. It's amazing.
Jamon Holmgren: See, this is why I don't compliment you ever very often.
Todd Werth: I'm just kidding. I'm not like that normally. I'm just kidding.
Jamon Holmgren: I'm kidding as well.
Todd Werth: I'll do anything for a laugh. We're on zoom right now recording this podcast and I literally have no clothes on. I do have clothes on and by me again, laughing. I'll do anything for laugh.
Gant Laborde: Hey, we'll do anything for a laugh.
Todd Werth: I know you're dealing with advertising and marketing. Let me digress really quick. We do these trainings. I don't want to call it training sessions but hour long get together periodically where we discuss some subject that no one knows about. Normally, we talk about development and that kind of stuff. The things that are key to our business. We talk about that stuff all the time but we came this idea like let's talk about stuff that people don't know about. And again just gave one on marketing to a bunch of developers and designers and stuff and I thought I found it very fascinating.
Todd Werth: I felt that that discussion very well dovetailed into what I deal with on a daily basis which is client relations because you do a lot of the similar things that he described in marketing. Anyways, so for someone who's a software developer and not into marketing and stuff. Typically, how have you like become the executive of that? How do you get stuff done? How do you get expertise that kind of stuff?
Gant Laborde: Yeah. I tell you specifically it's ... We've been in this for a while and some things work and some things don't. So we already have a good set of data and another thing that we've gotten here is we don't hold back on our education. Infinite Red, even before I was an owner sent me around to speak at conferences, allowed me to interact with people, allowed me to really get out there and see the world. I mean what everybody says they're going to do before they go to college and they just travel the world and then they come back broke. It actually does work. Going out there, seeing what works, talking to the people. The grassroots movement of how our open source actually influences and works with larger companies, how it has worked with individuals and how it affects people's lives.
Gant Laborde: That's really helped us refine our information. One of the things that we really did is we brought in a fantastic consultant Robin Cangie. She has a world of experience to come in and compliment the strange, strange mind that is the developer kind of ecosystem. We are afraid of strong brands. We're afraid of the hard sales and Robin is like a whisper, like a master of this. She's worked setting up booths, setting marketing campaigns. I think her websites, robincangie.me, don't get me wrong on that one. She's wonderful and she's been invaluable in taking our entire process and then putting it back into something that is actionable.
Gant Laborde: For instance, marketing personas, setting up retargeting campaigns and actually identifying three months out where we plan on being. She and I kind of align on this because we were very, very organized people. The two of us working together I think has worked out really well and stepped up. If you never heard of us and then you start seeing us everywhere. That's what Robin and I have been working towards.
Todd Werth: We definitely, for some things do rely on really good outside vendors or consultants. I think we're, I don't know if everyone agrees but I think we're really good at bringing those people in as extended family and building long-term relationships. Whether it's Josh, our lawyer, Robin, our marketing person, that kind of thing. I'm been very happy with what we've been able to accomplish by doing that. Cool. Yeah. It's very interesting as you're a company that grows and stuff and you have to start becoming like more specialized in pieces of the company as opposed to a smaller company. You're an entrepreneur, you have a five person company or whatever, you have a lot of hats on.
Todd Werth: You get okay at everything and you're constantly changed the hats. As you grow bigger, you really get to a point where although we resist it. Where you start to specialize in different things and each leader starts taking on certain parts of the company.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. When we first merged, all three of us owners actually made decisions, almost every decision together. That was pretty good for a lot of reasons when we were first starting. Just getting familiar with each other's, particular ways of looking at things and things that are priorities. I think that was important. Once we get this baseline knowledge of this is what Todd really cares about. This is what at the time, Ken or this what Jamon and now with Gant coming on board just understanding what things are important for them. Now there's less need for that. Although we still, obviously we still have an owner meeting every, let's see twice a week now, three times a week actually.
Gant Laborde: Three times.
Jamon Holmgren: We're doing a meeting of the three of us and we discuss things and sometimes if we don't have specific things to talk about, we just shoot the breeze. It's important to maintain these relationships especially when we're not seeing each other in person every day because we're remote, we're thousands of miles apart. It's a really important thing for us to do and we've always felt that this is important and that hasn't changed at all.
Todd Werth: Not to be a pedantic programmer but hundreds of miles apart.
Jamon Holmgren: Depends on which way around the globe you go.
Gant Laborde: Yeah. This is a Spherical Coordinate System. You can't just cut through like that.
Todd Werth: Everybody knows the Earth's flat come on.
Gant Laborde: Our CEO, everybody.
Jamon Holmgren: Not to turn off one of our listeners but that would be a reason for firing me please.
Todd Werth: The earth being flat.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. If their earth turned out to be fat flat, we would have to fire everybody.
Todd Werth: The earth is also fat. Yeah.
Gant Laborde: It has all the doughnuts.
Todd Werth: The earth literally has all the donuts. That's very true again. Anyways, that looks that was about 45 seconds of the listeners will never get back to their life. We need discuss a few logistical issues. For example, a lot of our financial accounts were in Ken's name or ... I mean we were signers too but he was the primary person. A lot of online accounts where we did have the passwords and stuff. They were through Ken and so there's just a lot of little tiny things that emails would be sent to Ken, logins would ken's and that kind of stuff. That presents an ongoing, actually still every once while we'll run into situation where Jamon just said that Gant and him are 2000 miles apart. I do apologize.
Jamon Holmgren: Don't try to out pedant to pedant. That's all I got to say.
Gant Laborde: For our listeners overseas, how many kilometers, Jamon?
Todd Werth: Three.
Gant Laborde: We do freedom units only.
Todd Werth: We don't use that. That system that makes sense. Metric. We don't have a ridiculous system based on the King's feet.
Gant Laborde: That's right.
Jamon Holmgren: Not even our King.
Todd Werth: It's so ridiculous. I was working my Jeep the other day and it has a standard set a metric and it's so ridiculous. If you're like you're using a five, six things then you have to go up one or two. I've lived in this country for 48 years. I'm not a stupid person. It still takes me a while to figure out what's the next size.
Jamon Holmgren: I'm pretty sure we're going to alienate seven sixteenths of our audience by talking to metric.
Todd Werth: Seven sixteenths actually comes out to 2.3 kilometers by the way.
Gant Laborde: That's when it's in Celsius.
Todd Werth: Our freedom units are ridiculous. Okay. Sorry, digressing. What was I talking about? Oh, just logistics. There's tons of little tiny things. If someone does leave and stuff, if you don't have a good relationship with them and they can't just ... You can't just simply slack him and say, "Hey we can't get into the accountant or this online account. Can you help us?" It's going to be rough to be honest because there's a thousand of things. There's no way you can just go through on in the last week or something like that.
Gant Laborde: Yeah. That's a good thing because I don't know what people ... Forming their own companies, they probably have a lot of really good questions about this. This is Gant Laborde, the marketing director over here. If you're listening to this episode and you have a specific question about the logistics that we had to go through, tweet at us, we'll put it in a future episode.
Jamon Holmgren: Very smooth, Gant, very smooth.
Todd Werth: What's our twitter account, marketing manager, Gant Laborde.
Gant Laborde: @Infinite_Red.
Jamon Holmgren: Is underscore in capitals or lowercase.
Gant Laborde: It's four words. All uppercase, all lowercase and freedom unit.
Todd Werth: I'm sure we're going to get exactly zero tweets from that.
Gant Laborde: You got it.
Jamon Holmgren: One thing that we did with Ken, because we're able to have an amicable decision that came out of this was ... Why are you shaking your head about, Todd, sorry.
Todd Werth: Oh, sorry. It's the way you say amicable.
Gant Laborde: Yeah. I have to say-
Jamon Holmgren: Am I not supposed to say it that way?
Todd Werth: Every time you say amicable, it makes me laugh.
Jamon Holmgren: Isn't that how you say it
Gant Laborde: I say it the other way too but I don't know if that's my
Todd Werth: It could be a regional thing since we're millions of miles possible.
Jamon Holmgren: That's possible. Okay. I'm going to say friendly. I'm starting over. One of the things, because we had a friendly partying with Ken was that we were able to actually create a separate contract with him. We're actually paying him to be around and ease the transition for the first year. Actually, that's very helpful because it's something where we wanted the work relationship to phase out in that way and it allows to have an official business relationship during that intervening year. If something needs to happen or if like there's something going on where there's something in his name and he needs to do some work. It doesn't feel like he's constantly bothered so to speak by this thing from his past but more this is an ongoing relationship.
Todd Werth: Yeah. I want to say that viewing that was amazing. There are two things that don't exist in this world. One of them is going to Costco and leaving with one thing. The second thing is having the talks about how to properly set these things up and then having someone say, how about this? Then everybody agrees. That's exactly correct. I couldn't believe it, but I'll say that when we were discussing how to properly set things up and how things went on, Ken said, "I believe this and I think that this is how we should go about it" To my surprise like everybody just said, "That sounds completely fair and awesome." You just don't get that. Almost everybody would go towards negotiating but a good negotiation is when everybody's happy and that happened a hole in one. I have to say like part of our bonitas and our values of being friendly with one another, it continues to be a great place to work.
Jamon Holmgren: Again, just mentioned bonitas and that's actually a word, is it Latin or something like that?
Todd Werth: Yes. Latin. Yeah.
Jamon Holmgren: It's a Latin word that is part of our, we call our foundation and pillars. I don't think we have time to go into it today but that would be something that we could go into. Yeah. Because I think that was really key for us. This actually happened before Ken left. We agreed on some foundation and pillars and then it's stuck around because it really does describe how we make decisions and what's important to us.
Todd Werth: Obviously one of the biggest discussions in this situation would be money. Right. Ken owned large chunk of the company. Our company knock on wood, has a lot of value. I don't know, it has value in it. Don't want to brag too much. I'm not that type of person to say how great I am but so you know like that could be of probably the thing that scares people the most is the money discussion. There was a lot of discussion about that for sure. I think it came out well. Did you Jamon or you Gant Laborde, what are your thoughts on that?
Jamon Holmgren: There's several aspects that go into this. There's valuation of the company. What is the company worth if we were to sell it? There are many different ways you can calculate that. There are companies that purely specialize in value ... Company valuations for mergers and acquisitions and for things like this. Then there's also the terms like how are we going to pay ... Pay out his portion of it; his percentage of the company, how long does he own chairs? Do we buy them back as over time? Do we buy them back all at once? Do we use leverage? Do we use loans and things like that? All of those things were part of the conversation. We're not going to talk about exactly how we structured it. We're not going to talk about how much we paid. We paid him and he was happy and we were happy and it ended up in a good situation for all of us. That took some negotiation. We had to work through that.
Todd Werth: Well, great. I think that was a great talk. This unfortunately or fortunately happens in almost every business at some point. It's definitely happened in every business I've been in. I know Gant that happened to him as well. I don't think you Jamon ever had like a co- owner.
Jamon Holmgren: I never have. No. I mean, in my first company I guess technically my wife was considered a partner but really wasn't active in the company in any significant way. It wasn't really an issue of any sort. Yeah. I mean I always owned my own company prior.
Todd Werth: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. All things being said, it was a lot of work. It was obviously taking up time. We could have been spending on new products, new services, new marketing, servicing our clients better, that kind of stuff. That was definitely detrimental. There was a lot of motions of course, this is always tough no matter how amicable it is, it's always very draining emotionally. I'm personally friends with Ken and I imagine that Jamon and Gant Laborde would say the same thing.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah, absolutely.
Todd Werth: There's always the worry of, I heard someone say once, okay it was me. That if you have too many friends, start a business with a few of them and you'll have less. There was always that worry but ... And that's still that ... Ken and I ... Ken's actually come and visit me next week which is going to be cool on a personal basis and stuff. I'm very happy so far, we've been able to maintain our friendship, which is great.
Jamon Holmgren: I'm very happy for the time I got to work with Ken. He's an awesome guy. Really, really smart. Made me I think a better owner because of it.
Todd Werth: Yeah. He's a smart cookie for sure.
Gant Laborde: Yeah. Every conversation with Ken is always ... I have never had a conversation with him and not left with a things value that I need to go look up. Because he's ridiculously smart and so fun to talk to. I highly recommend if you see him at a conference or anything happened there, pull him aside, do a small 15-minute chat. It is a treat.
Jamon Holmgren: I'm also extremely excited about where we've been able to accomplish in the meantime what we have going forward and we're going to be talking about that in future episodes. Stay tuned.
Todd Werth: Yeah. Some super exciting stuff. Well thanks everyone for talking about this difficult process and welcome back to season two of Building Infinite Red. There was a huge gap there. Apologize to listeners who wanted to hear more. I'll just end by saying farewell Ken.
Gant Laborde: Bye Ken.