The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Make sales not features (Interview)

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Kendall Miller is a bubbly extrovert who sticks his fingers in a lot of pies. He advises tech companies like FusionAuth, positions tech products like Civo & Tensorlake, organizes tech networks like CTO Lunches, and even sells whiskey & gin to tech people like us via his Friday Deployment Spirits brand. Kendall has learned a lot since he first entered the industry and he's eager to share what he knows, and who he knows, with the world.

Welcome everyone. I'm Jared and you are listening to the changelog where each and every week we sit down with the hackers, the leaders and the innovators of the software world to pick their brains, to learn from their failures, to be inspired by their accomplishments and to have a lot of fun along the way. Kendall Miller is a bubbly extrovert who sticks his fingers in a lot of pies. He advises tech companies like Fusion Auth,

positions tech products like Civo and Tensor Lake, organizes tech networks like CTO Lunches, and even sells whiskey and gin to tech people like us via his Friday Deployment Spirits brand. Kendall has learned a lot since he first entered the industry and he's eager to share what he knows and who he knows with the world. But first a quick mention of our partners at Fly.io, the public cloud built for developers who ship.

If you ship code on the public internet, then you owe it to yourself to check out fly.io. Okay Kendall Miller on the changelog let's do it. Well friends it's all about faster builds teams with faster builds ship faster and win over the competition it's just science and I'm here with Kyle Galbraith, co-founder and CEO of Depot. Okay, so Kyle, based on the premise that most teams want faster builds, that's probably a truth. If they're using CI provider for their stock configuration or GitHub actions, are they wrong? Are they not getting the fastest builds possible? I would take it a step further and say if you're using any CI provider with just the basic things that they give you, which is if you think about a CI provider, it is in essence a lowest common denominator generic VM.

And then you're left to your own devices to essentially configure that VM and configure your build pipeline, effectively pushing down to you, the developer, the responsibility of optimizing and making those builds fast. Making them fast, making them secure, making them cost effective, like all pushed down to you. The problem with modern day CI providers is there's still a set of features and a set of capabilities that a CI provider could give a developer that makes their builds more performant out of the box, makes their builds more cost effective out of the box

and more secure out of the box. I think a lot of folks adopt GitHub actions for its ease of implementation and being close to where their source code already lives inside of GitHub. And they do care about build performance and they do put in the work to optimize those builds. But fundamentally, CI providers today don't prioritize performance.

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Get started with a seven day free trial. No credit card required. Again, depo.dev. Today I'm joined by Kendall Miller, a bubbly extrovert. So I have expectations, Kendall. Extrovert is a service, not just bubbly extrovert. Don't act like I don't sell it, Jared. Okay. How do you price such services?

Well, that's complicated because what bubbly extrovert means at every company is a little different, but it's surprisingly valuable in a world of technology nerds to have, I don't wanna say an ounce of personality. There's a lot of people with an ounce of personality to bring a truckload of personality is, um, is, is a lot. So yes. So I imagine you walk into a meeting and everything changes like there's like

before Kendall and after Kendall, is that fair? What, what, when people notice it is when I take vacation and I come back and they're like, oh thank God, because at least somebody's going to talk before the meeting starts somebody's gonna you know interrupt occasionally and Put in something bubbly and entertaining. Yeah. Yeah as a service To others it's for everybody else. It's for it's really, you know, I'm here to be a blessing to the world and We're surrounded by software engineers and product people.

And let's just be honest. I love them. I don't want to bash them. My entire world and my entire career has been in tech, basically. Well, most of my career has been in tech. Well, you wear many hats. One thing I read about you that I'm

sure you wrote about yourself is that you help builders of technical products turn them into successful technical businesses. And so I thought we'd start there. What's the difference? How do you help? Why do we need help, et cetera? Well, oh man. Um, so I work with a lot of early stage founders, almost always technical founders. Uh, I'm not the technical founder.

I have a technical background, but it's been 20 years since I've written meaningful code. I've never been paid to write code, and that's probably a positive thing. I find recursion much too interesting, which, as an aside, I do believe that recursion is our way out of the coming AI apocalypse. We just got to get really creative with recursion,

and they'll just never be able to take over. I get stuck. Yeah, see? It seems really obvious to me. How about you? Anyway, so. I thought we just pulled the plug. That's my move.

I just pulled the plug. But yours is way more diabolical. The plug is getting more and more complicated, is that. This is true. We've created these power sources that are portable, unfortunately. This is true. Yeah. Anyway, so I'm often working with a technical founder.

And technical founders have some particular quirks in general and most of them seem to be kind of common across the industry and we can get into some specifics there. But the first and most important thing that a technical founder does is they almost always think they can build their way to a successful company. And that happens occasionally, but it is definitely the exception. Uh, the, because the best products do not win. And I'm going to **** on a very large company here, but, uh,

Microsoft exists and we know that the best products do not win, right? Um, you, you win because you learn how to sell. Does having a good product help? Absolutely. But there are terrible products out there where the founder has figured out how to sell it and they have wildly successful businesses. And there is an incredibly large graveyard full of the world's best products that nobody ever used or nobody ever sold. Even sometimes they can get millions of users and they can't figure out how to sell it. So the difference between a technical product and a technical business,

a technical product is a hobby until you have people who are paying you for it. Right. And so you think sales or positioning is what it takes in order to take one to the other, because I think you're right, but you're also crushing my soul. You know I just want the best thing just win. I mean I could literally, one of the companies that I'm working with right now, the founder built Nomad and Nomad over Kubernetes, every company I've ever spoken to that used Nomad and used Kubernetes said Nomad is by far the better product. Like night and day, the better product. And I, I used to run a Kubernetes consulting shop and helped, I think the largest user of Nomad migrate to Kubernetes.

And the reason they moved, they said, Nomad's better in every way. We hate that we have to do this, but when we get online and we Google for, you know, has anybody ever run into XYZ edge case, There's nobody out there who's ever seen it before, right? And we're the biggest company running it at the biggest scale and we're sick of that. We just want to go someplace that everybody knows. And it's, it's kind of the same reason everybody still uses WordPress. It's not that it's the best CMS.

It's just that it has incredible market share. There's, if you Google any problem, you're going to find a plugin that somebody's already written that already solves your problem because it's been around for forever and it's been wildly successful. So yeah, it's not just positioning though. You can have fantastic positioning.

It doesn't mean you're talking to the right people. It doesn't mean you're pavement pounding. And a lot of founders are like, they'll build something. They put it out there and they wait. Oh, nobody found it. Well, I could do some advertising, write a few more blog posts, or I bet if I built this other feature, then they're gonna love it. And, you know, I mean, it's just so much easier to build. And I know this, I run a couple of companies myself,

and I would always rather just keep building because it's more fun than go sell. It's hard to sell, especially early on, because you're like, hey, I know you've never heard of us and we have no credibility and you don't know anyone that can vouch for us and also our product's really good, we swear, right? So it's hard. So how do you help these technical people? I mean, they hire you and you help them

or is there general advice that could apply to people that aren't necessarily hiring your services that they could walk away with and say, okay, here's, I mean, obviously getting out there, you said pounding the pavement. I don't know what else you said, but I'm sure there are other steps in there that I could write down and do.

Like, what are some actionable steps? I mean, so the first thing is, you've heard it said, first time founders build, second time founders sell. Or there's a lot of different variations on that, but it's a common thing. The selling, what makes a salesperson a salesperson is not that they've learned this trick. Oh, if I say this and this way, then they're going to buy.

Like, there are a few tricks like that. I've learned a few that I've been surprised actually are very effective, but it's not like I'm going to turn my close rate from 5% to 90% because I learned to be a sleazy dirt bag sales guy. Right. The, the truth of sales is number one, it's a numbers game. You knock on enough doors with the world's worst vacuum, eventually you knock on a door where somebody's vacuum just broke

and they have company showing up in a half an hour and they are stressed the heck out and they don't care how bad your vacuum is, they need it right now, right? So at the end of the day, it is just a numbers game. Having a great vacuum that does a great demo helps you sell more vacuums, but you still gotta knock on a million doors. What makes a salesperson a salesperson is they've knocked on every door in the neighborhood, they have no idea what to do next, and they wake up

and keep going. And that's not in the DNA of the average technical co-founder or technical founder. And so it's a thing that they have to learn the hard way and almost always by the hard way without him putting in air quotes. Uh, what that means is, uh, they failed once they built a, they built a company and they couldn't get enough people to use it or they, you know, they reached a couple million and they needed to reach a lot of million cause they were venture backed. Um,

and then they realize in the second round that they have to go bigger, harder. So what do I do? Well, so, so you asked a couple of questions there. First of all, general advice, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. Sell it before you build it. Also build something much, much smaller than you think, because a lot of companies go build a product this big, right, huge.

And then they find out after talking to everybody that the product should go this way and 10% of it is relevant. And it's really hard to pivot when you've boiled the ocean already, right? If you build a product that really should be a feature and you could build in a weekend, then when you go out and talk to the market and find out, oh, actually the interest is over in this direction or I need to build it that direction, it's not that stressful to pivot. It's not that hard.

You can listen to the advice from customers and actually build a thing that they want. My favorite companies are the companies that when I talk to technical people, they're like, why does that even exist? I can build that in a weekend. Sure, you could build that in a weekend. You'd build it poorly.

It would be not feature rich. And you wouldn't be able to sell it because you have no design sense and you don't know who to talk to, right? But if you build it in a weekend and then you add on you can add on in the right direction without being stressed about it because you already boiled the ocean. So that's the first thing build a lot smaller than you think Sell it a lot sooner than you think if you can't get somebody to pony up money for it Really early on it's not gonna be easier when it's bloated and big

and heavier and you've put 10,000 times more of your opinions into it. The other thing that I see a lot of technical founders do is they don't do the math. Like you have to build a business around something that actually makes sense, right? One technical co-founder I worked with a long time ago built a B2B SaaS product

that engineering leaders were going to buy. And he priced it as such that I was talking with him saying, well, now hang on a second, you've sold to one of the world's biggest companies and it's a $5 a month deal. Well, more engineers are gonna take it up. Okay, but how many of these do we have to sell before you can earn a living? This is a bootstrapped business. It wasn't even venture backed. He's

sitting there and doing the math and, well, I guess I got to sell about 10,000 more. Either you can sell it for $500 a month or $1,000 a month or $10,000 a month or whatever it's going to take you to actually get to the sustainability that you need within a timeframe that makes sense or you need to not sell it. But selling it for $5, padding yourself on the back that you got a success story and finding out that you could do this for 25 years and you might be making $2,000 a month, that doesn't work.

So there's a lot of things that people miss. But how do you pair these two ideas? doesn't work, right? So there's a lot of things that people miss, but. How do you pair these two ideas? Idea number one is build something small and focused and arguably because of those two things, not all that valuable and charge $500, $1,000. Like charge a lot, build a little. It takes a lot of confidence to do something like that. Like, well, I got this little thing that does one thing. It's gonna cost you a lot, build a little. It takes a lot of confidence to do something like that. Like, well, I got this little thing that does one thing.

It's gonna cost you a lot. It seems like one or the other, but are you saying you can accomplish both? So first of all, you can get people to buy something that you haven't built. And there's a difference in the conversation between is this interesting to you and would you pay for it? There's a lot of people in tech who will say, oh, that's super interesting.

I love it. But that's different from I would happily pay for that. So there's a little bit of nuance there. But how do you jive those two things? That's the hard part about picking a niche, right? I mean, there's times where you need to go boil an ocean and build, say, a cloud, right, before you're gonna have adopters. But it's not like Amazon started with a cloud,

it started with compute, right, and then found out all the other things. And so, when you're gonna go compete with the world or build something new and interesting in the world, I mean, there's a reason they call it an MVP. Viable is not the smallest I'm capable of building in minimum viable product, right? Viable is the smallest thing that I can get somebody to buy is really how you should think about that and buy at a reasonable price. But if somebody says, hey, you know, I really need x,

y, z problem solved. So what's the first bit of that problem that I could solve for you today? And you'd sign on a dotted line because it would be valuable enough to move and can I go build that in a weekend? And a weekend is a little hand wavy but you know maybe it takes you a week but if it takes you nine months the chances are more likely than not you built the wrong thing. It seems to me obvious that there are unicorns out there, but most technical people do better if they're paired with somebody salesy, designy, extroverty, perhaps. Someone like yourself. Like, perhaps you and I could team up and build a good business because I have builder

chops and you have sales chops and we jive, et cetera. That combination is really hard to find. It might be easier to find a spouse at this point. So I mean, seriously, so many people. Yeah. Is there a tender for co-founders? Probably there is. There is, yeah.

Is there? I was going to ask you. Maybe that's my next question. There's a couple of systems out there for. Where do we meet? I mean, even Y Combinator has like a co-founder matching setup, I believe. And there's a couple of different places

that do something similar to that. Yeah. But I think the hard part is, is finding the bubbly extrovert who's technical enough to understand the product at a deep enough level to talk coherently about it. Now, for a lot of those technical co-founders, they never really understand it at a deep intellectual technical ability. They understand it in the same way that you learn a foreign language. If you're around it long enough,

you can kind of sound like the other person. You're just kind of BSing, but you start to sound like a native if you've spoken it long enough. Right. And so it is difficult. But what I think is interesting is that there are VCs that back an awful lot of technical founders without that business person and just assuming that they'll figure it out. But I mean, this morning I have an old sales leader that I worked with, I'm trying to be vague here, who is working with a technical founder who the VCs told him, we will back you if you hire a sales background co-founder because we don't believe that you can make this go on your own. That is a thing that does happen.

And there's currently a lot of business people, or as I sometimes call them, idea guys, who are drooling right now over the prospects of vibe coding their way without a technical person to sales success. And I think both those routes are probably fraught. So how did you get it? How did you get into this? To say the least, yes Jared.

How did you get into this then? How did you as a non-technical person or I don't know, what's your background? Were you a computer science major? Probably not. Like how'd you get in and then how'd you eventually learn the language? So well, so it is complicated.

So my distant background is technical. I started writing code in fifth grade and my first programming language was Auck, which don't start with Auck. Nice. Would be my encouragement. I went from Auck to basic. Don't finish with Auck either.

Don't finish with Auck either. And I worked up, but I spent the most of my time with C++. I entered college as a sophomore almost entirely with computer science credits that I had taken in college classes and APs in high school, and with the assumption that I was going to study computer science credits that I had taken in college classes and APs in high school and with the assumption that I was gonna study computer science, but I made a decision late in high school, I think I like people better

and computers completely consume me and so I will fail at choosing between the two. So I do have the technical background. I worked for a startup in 2004 in Denver that built Twitter about five years too early. And then I left the field completely. I got an English literature degree, two masters in the history of religion. I moved to China and worked for a nonprofit for 10 years. You know, so wildly different background happened for a while. but when I moved back to the States about a little over a decade ago,

I was the first hire at a small startup, not realizing I was the first hire because I didn't know to ask, do you have money and do you have people that work for you? I know now, but anyways. What'd you ask them? Like, are you hiring? Yes, okay.

Uh-huh, yeah, he offered me more money than anybody else offered. And I took the job because nobody knew what to do with me. They're looking at my background in China going, what the heck is this? Right? So I did sales for them. We succeeded at sales. I hired a sales team. I hired a marketing team. I took over operations.

I actually ended up taking over engineering when the CTO made an engineer cry. And then eventually took over the company and we sold the company. So it's that experience where I did literally everything at the company over the course of about eight years that put me in a position where I could go out. Then I started meeting with other technical founders. I ended up on the board of another company in Denver that has grown, been successful,

had a big exit to PE about a year and a half ago. Ended up just advising a number of different places. And I say advising, it sounds like they're paying me in equity or cash money. And most of the time it was just me helping somebody out. Hey, I've been there before, let's talk about this. Hey, I've got somebody to refer your way. Hey, talk to this person, talk to that person. Pure altruism or what? Is it pure altruism? It makes it sound like it's ever that clear of a thought. No, I think networking has network effects. When I moved back to the States from China and I logged into Slack at this new company and found out that I was the only employee, I panicked. And I was like, yeah. And so I was like, well, I better go network because I'm going to be out

of a job in no time. And so I went out and just networked like crazy. Who can I meet? I'm going to be genuinely interested in anyone I can find. And finding out that that led to hires, the first sales hire that I brought in was that, the first engineer that I brought in was that. That led to all kinds of hires, that led to sales, that led to eventual business opportunity. I mean, a guy I hired nine years ago is the guy that I'm in business now with that,

I have opportunity to talk about this. I make a liquor called Friday Deployment Spirits. This is our generative A rye. It's a rye whiskey. We also make a gin called Forest Push Gin, focused on the tech world. Anyways, it's a guy that I hired eight years ago because I met him at a meetup.

I needed a person who did exactly what he did. We worked together great for a little while. And then years later, we ended up starting a business together. So networking has network effects. So when I'm out meeting people and I'm genuinely interested in getting to know them, which I am because I find people fascinating,

I find, hey, you need a job and I know somebody who's hiring for a you. And if I refer you to that person and you know, I don't take, a lot of people have asked me because I refer a lot of people for't take, a lot of people have asked me, because I refer a lot of people for jobs. So a lot of people have asked me like, why don't you take a recruiter fee? I would probably make a lot more money if I did.

But as soon as I monetize the network directly, the network loses all of its value. And so because I've referred a person over here, that director of engineering now owes me a favor, right? And so now I take a job at this new company, and I think that this product might be relevant to that director of engineering. And I don't mean owes me like, you know,

it's not quid pro quo, but when I call him and say, hey, would you take a look at this, he's going to say yes, because I helped him hire the last five people he's hired, right? Actually, I mean, it's a good friend of mine in San Francisco who got fired from a very big company. I actually don't think he got fired. I think he left.

I don't know. I don't know what happened. Very large company. And he's one of these guys that's too big of a big cheese, like VP at very large organization. And nobody in my network is the CEO of Microsoft, right? Like I know a lot of people, but I don't know those people. Um, so I only know one very large cloud companies execs and I wrote them and said,

Hey, this person came available on the market. Uh, he's more expensive than almost any network that I know. So you're the only place I can refer them to. Well, they just hired him. Uh, they just hired them. They just actually, I found out yesterday. So now there's a C level executive at one of the largest cloud companies in the world

that, you know, doesn't, I'm not saying owes me one, but will definitely pick up the phone when I call. And so those kinds of things just add up, right? And so what ends up happening is somebody pings me, has a question about, hey, I'm building XYZ. Here's why it works. Here's why it doesn't. Can I get some feedback? I look at it 70 to 80% of the time, I just all over their ideas. Sorry, I'm not supposed to curse here because you're going to bleep them out. I say bad things all about, you know, I shut them down. I tell them it's a terrible product. Well, myself is, I worked for a religious organization in China for 10 years, Jared,

and one of the things I decided when I moved back was that I was going to curse more and I've been wildly more successful than I anticipated. But yeah, I mean, I end up all over their ideas. And, but about 30% of the time or 20% of the time, I'm like, wow, this is actually really interesting. And here's three or four companies I think might need that right now. And I go make those intros, those turn into meaningful conversations for those companies. And that company comes back and says, can we hire you? You did that really fast and really easy. And my goal is not to make sales.

I don't want to be sales guy, but I can go in and get those first few product feedback conversations. I can help you build a sales team. I can help you build a marketing team. I can help you understand what you're doing wrong. But even then, I mean, honestly, a huge percentage of what these guys are doing wrong is like they don't know that you've got to show up

on time to an interview. Right? It's the little things. You've got to communicate. Yeah, because you've been an engineer in a hole where the thing that was valued was that you outputted code and you were really good at that. And that's different than what it takes to run a company and to get people rah-rahed behind you and get people excited about the vision for where you're going and give people the freedom to go build on their own. And I'm talking for a long time here as I tend to do. No, that's fair. I'm having lots of thoughts.

One of them was, have you seen the episode of Friends where Joey tells Phoebe that she cannot commit a selfless deed? And so the entire episode, she goes about trying to have a selfless act. Cause I asked about, is it pure altruism? Which is a stupid question. Cause there's no such thing as pure altruism.

Cause it's like, no, but you try to do a selfless act and then somehow it comes back to you anyways. Isn't what she ends up carrying a baby on behalf of somebody, but realize she goes way out there. Yeah. I mean, she felt good at the end of the day. It's like, no, she was very angry. I love that particular set up. The other one is you say, you don't want to be a sales guy, but I'm trying to figure out what kind of guy you want to be. Are you,

do you like zero to one and then move on? Are you just trying to help out where you can like part of it excites you? So pseudo sales is always going to be a part of my job, right? I'm always going to be talking to people. It's always going to lead to sales conversations. Uh, when there's a lot of times I end up at a new company and somebody in my network pings me and says, Hey, that's kind of interesting. Can I talk to you about it? And it turns into a sales

conversation, right? I don't like being sales guy because then I have to hassle my network, you know, check in, follow up. And so I usually, I want to hire somebody else that's going to do those kinds of things. So it doesn't have to be Kendall hassling somebody. I don't want to hassle. I don't mind if a salesperson who works with me or for me is hassling the hell out of one of my friends, that's their job. But if it's affecting my relationship with that person, that's a problem, if that makes sense.

So what do I want to do? I mean, that's the messiest part. That's the hardest part for me every time, Jared, is because what excites me is just solving business problems, right? I like getting in, finding out that there's things that are a mess and just going and helping solve it. So I mean, to give you an example, in the last two days, I've written job descriptions,

I've come up with prospecting lists, I've interviewed people for marketing roles, for operating roles, for sales roles, interviewing for a CEO right now. I touch every single part of the business because I'm comfortable in almost all of it. I'm not going to go review a PR. That's the one spot that I'm probably not going to be useful. Although at previous company that I was running, I would about every year go issue a PR just to scare all the engineers. You know, there's always something small like a

typo or something in documentation, but So you have your spirits company, but I'm thinking why not apply your talents at something that you're building for yourself or with somebody versus helping other people. Is this one of the things you do is building this spirits company? you're building for yourself or with somebody versus helping other people. Is this, it was one of the things you're to do is building this spirits company. So yeah, so there's a bunch of things I do. So what I get paid for directly, I work with a cloud company called Sivo out of the UK. I work with an AI company called a tensor Lake out of San Francisco.

And then I'm on the board of a company called fusion auth. That's, you know, think an Auth Zero competitor. But then I run a couple of things myself. So there's the Spirits Company I have a business partner with. We make a gin and a whiskey and we're looking at some other interesting things that we may do next. Had a really crazy opportunity come up yesterday that it's too early to talk about but it's exciting. I run a network of CTOs globally called CTO lunches. So we have about 1600, 1700 CTOs worldwide. We put on lunches all over the world. So that's nice because that is a way that builds the network. Honestly what I like about it is I get to fly places on the company dime, eat lunch on the company dime, and now I'm in the liquor business. Liquor is a company expense and there's all these different things, but CTO

Lunches is another business that I own and run. I co-own, but I do think that CTO Lunches has the capacity to get to... If everybody fired me tomorrow, I think within six months I could make enough money off of it to make it my full-time gig. But I like touching other things enough that I'm not walking away. So how does that one make money? You charge them? Well, I'll come back to that. There's one last thing that I do also is I do have an advisory group called Grow Big

Advisors where I've paired together with a handful of friends to do this sort of startup advising. They have slightly different skillsets than me. One's a sales leader, one's an engineering leader, one's got the marketing background. So it's different things, but in exchange for a small bit of equity, we provide this kind of just advisory rather than hands-on. So that's a little different.

So those are the things that I'm building for me. So you have a lot of stuff going on and you're not just helping other people with their business. I stick my fingers in a lot of pies. Yes. Well, friends, you know, I love Notion. It is the number one tool in my tool chest. It is a daily driver for me. I'm using Notion constantly, organizing everything I possibly can with Notion. And I just love it. Of course, there's other specialized tools out there that have you jumping from app to

app to app, but I find that Notion lets me do most of everything I need to and collaboratively with the rest of my team and even extend a team. And now it has AI built right in. I can ask Notion AI, hey, can you help me build this new page for this new purpose? And it goes and builds it.

So I don't have to go and build each independent new workflow by hand. Notion AI is there for me. It helps me find things, solve things, write things, draft things, build things. It's amazing. So yes, Notion combines your docs, your notes, your projects all in one place for you and

your team to collaborate on. And the fully integrated Notion AI Suite lets you work faster, smarter, easier, better, all the things. And I know because I use it every single day. You can try Notion today for free when you go to Notion.com slash changelog. Use that link to try the powerful easy use notion AI today and of course we use our link you are benefiting us and letting notion know that we work there you So why the spirits pie? So we were, I had just come back into town after some time away and I was meeting with

some, with four old friends and we were sitting around at a brewery talking about why can't I buy a bottle of whiskey called I did sock two and all I got was this bottle of whiskey called, I did sock too and all I got was this bottle of whiskey. The list of names was immediately very long. Rishi, my business partner and I stuck around after the other two guys left and Rishi goes, well, Kendall, I think this is maybe a good idea. I said, well, Rishi, I think this is a good idea. He goes, well, I'm not messing around. I said, well, I'm not messing around. I said, well, I kind of think we should do it. I said, well, Iishi, I think this is a good idea. And he goes, well, I'm not messing around. I said, well, I'm not messing around. I said, well, I kind of think we should do it. I said, well, I kind of think we should do it. And the next day I was on the phone with a distillery

saying, hey, how do I buy a whole bunch of liquor if I want to do this? And we ended up in a partnership and it's worked out. So do you think that like targeting, so I've noticed this as a trend, which is why I think it's A, probably a good business and B, a relatively easy one to get into is is every celebrity has their tequila, or their whiskey, or their gin named after them, or whatever it is.

Or it's like branded alcohol for this celebrity. Aviation gin. I'm Ryan Reynolds. Thank you, Jared. I didn't want to make the connection, but since you did, we can also talk about my football team in a little bit. But anyway, sorry, keep going.

No, so I just I've noticed that. I'm like, well, this must be lucrative and relatively easy because you're basically just brandy, aren't you? You're not opening a distillery. And you just said you went and bought a bunch of whiskey, right? Yeah, well, so the whiskey and the gin are made for us. It's not white labeled something else.

So a lot of places will go, man, I don't know if you want to get me talking about liquor, but we can talk about liquor. So the vast majority of distilleries are buying a base liquor from Indiana because that's where a huge percentage of the distilleries are for hashtag reasons. But the alcohol laws in America will blow your mind

that are left over from prohibition. So anyways, our distillery makes it from grain. So it's not a base spirit. That's just distilled again, nine more times like Tito's does, and then brags about it. Nine times distilled. How bad was what you started with? You had to distill it nine times. And it's distilled once because it's a fantastic product. Anyways, and it's made for us. It's a recipe for us. So it's distilled once because it's a fantastic product. Anyways, and it's made for us. It's a recipe for us. So it's different.

It's contract distilling rather than just white labeling something else. But yes, I did not open a distillery. I do not want to open a distillery. I just handle once it's in the bottle. Well, I have to buy the bottle. And distribution's a it's in the bottle and I well I have to buy the bottle but in distributions a gigantic pain in the butt because because of American liquor because of American laws so so I'm thinking then like your I mean of course

I'm target market right because I'm a nerd and like generative a right like lands perfectly on me but there's not very many also how many really good whiskey well that's all well and good. But the naming is what I care about. Like you're you're targeting alcohol at technical people. Basically, isn't it like a small cross section of the world? Are you limited? Well, that's why one bottle is $1400. What's your TAM? Oh, OK. No, I'm kidding.

It's it's just sell it to the CTO lunches. That's your entire market. The whiskey is 125 and the gin is 95. So it's not cheap. It is a luxury item. It is a very, very good item. Uh, it is, it so let me be clear about a couple of things. One, I would have totally done this exact same thing with a terrible distillery and a terrible end product because I think the marketing has legs. We have a fantastic product

that I can't believe how good the product is. I actually think the gin is the best gin I've ever had and I am a gin snob and I don't feel like I can say that about my own gin, but it is so very good. And I can say it because I didn't make it. I had some input into the recipe, but that's all. And the whiskey is also very, very good. So it is a luxury product and it costs a lot of money.

And I'm selling it to a group of people who have a lot of disposable income, like to make jokes like this. My thought is not that Jared will become a daily drinker of Generative A Rye. My thought is sometime in the next year, Jared is gonna wanna give a gift to somebody he knows in tech and he's gonna ship a bottle of Generative A Rye. My thought is sometime in the next year, Jared is going to want to give a gift to somebody he knows in tech and he's going to ship a bottle of Generative A Rye.

Or Director of Engineering at XYZ Company is going to buy his team all a bottle of whiskey for Christmas and they're going to buy Generative A Rye. That's my goal is that. I don't think anybody's going to buy a $95 bottle of gin. And even though it's a very pretty bottle of gin and it says force push right there on the label and it's really, it's Friday deployment spirits, Jared. It's funny.

Um, I still don't think it's going to be anybody daily, anybody's daily drinker. Gotcha. Well, I just wanted to tee up your sales pitch and see how you, how you do. How did I do? Can you give me a rating? I would drink it. I mean, I mean, I don't know if I would. 1,400 bucks is, that's a call order. I'm not a CTO of anything, though.

It's not 1,400 bucks. I want to say again, 125 bucks versus 95 bucks. Oh, I'm sorry. What did you say was 1,400 bucks? No, I started at 1,400 bucks to screw with you so that the 125 bucks that it actually costs would stress you out less. Oh Oh man, even place angry me. See, talking about sales tactic. Yeah, 100%.

So sell me some of your other, you know, I won't say use car salesman tactics, but just, you know, what are the winners where you can just say something and it'll work? You said you got a couple of those. Yeah, so a couple of things that I think are really interesting. If you're selling to technical people, don't capitalize their name when you send the email. Make some spelling mistakes. Yeah, otherwise it looks like it's a mail merge, right?

And if you can just do the littlest thing to make it look like this was actually written by a human, and if you can write it by a human, it's even better. But you misspell somebody's name, you know how much more likely they are to respond to you? Because they're like, oh, this asshat didn't just plug it into a CRM and send me in a mail merge. They're actually reaching out to me.

Don't they also think that you don't pay attention to details? 100%. And sometimes they respond with like a, dude, come on, you could do better. But they responded. So first of all, there's little things like that. Even if it's just lowercase the name,

make a spelling mistake in your message so it doesn't look like it was sent by a machine. Nobody wants the machine outreach. That's number one. Number two, one of the most interesting things is every company needs to know, where do I start? Founders always under price their product. I do this myself.

You weren't willing to pay 1400 bucks, but 125 seemed cheap to you once I got back to it. I probably could have sold the bottle for 200 bucks and Jared might've bought it. I don't know, I'm probably hand waving. But founders always under price their product. And one of the most important things for fixing that is finding out what are people's budgets, right?

So how much am I saving you those kinds of conversations, but they're really hard to have. So there's this tactic called the bucketing method. And so what I say is, Jared, I've got a nice bottle of whiskey here and I wanna put you into it's a 2025. You're gonna like the way that it drives and feels. It was a good year.

It was a good year. And how much you got to spend on this, Jared? You hoping to spend $5 on a bottle of whiskey? You hoping to spend $100 on a bottle of whiskey? Or do you have $5,000 to spend on a bottle of whiskey? And there's something about that last number being so big, it's outrageous, that almost almost everyone almost every time will go well it's not five thousand dollars actually I was thinking more like 50 and okay great now I've got

a ballpark for what was in your head so this this method and you you name a number you name a number twice as big ten times as big that last number has to be so outrageous that it makes them get mad. And then they'll almost always come back with what was in their head. So that's called the bucketing method. That's an interesting thing. And then there's one last one, which just in general in sales, if you can ask a question like, if this was existed

and it was perfect for you to meet your needs, something like that, what would it look like? And now you're gonna sell the product to me. And if I can sit still and shut up and let you just sell to me, the less I say in a sales call, the better you're gonna feel about what I'm selling, even though I haven't told you anything about it.

How do you mean I'm gonna sell it to you? Cause I'm gonna describe what it would be and then you're gonna say that's what it is? Or what do you mean? Yeah, I sell it to you? Cause I'm going to describe what it would be. And then you're going to say that's what it is. Or what do you mean? Yeah. I mean, it depends on what the, you can't, you can't say, Oh, well, that's exactly what it is. But you can, you can go back with, you know, how do I say this? Um, here's, here's a concrete example.

That's that'll be relevant to everyone in your audience, even if they're not founders interviewing, when you're interviewing, you're trying to sell yourself, right? audience, even if they're not founders, interviewing. When you're interviewing, you're trying to sell yourself. The worst possible thing you can do is go into an interview and say, tell me what you need. And they list 50 criteria. And then you try to go through those 50 criteria and say, here's why I meet every single one of those criteria.

You will fail because you don't. You're never exactly what they have in mind, never ever ever, right? So if you can say, hey, in your perfect world, what are the problems that I would solve? Not who exactly am I, right? What, I'm gonna show up on day one, I'm gonna wear this color, I'm gonna talk to this person

and do this thing, but what is the problem I'm gonna solve? Then they start selling to you the problem that you're going to solve for them. And at the end of the conversation, you say, well, it might not be exactly what you have in mind, but here's how I'm going to solve your problem anyways. And keep it nice and short and sweet. And you convince them that what you've just said meets their criteria, now they have just sold you to themselves. And that sounds super sketchy. It's really not that complicated. There's one book on this that I encourage people to read.

It's called Spin Selling. And spin is not like I'm gonna spin you into, it's an acronym for something. But the one useful thing they talk about is this bit of like, get the other person to be pitching you instead. Yeah, interesting. It's a small thing and it's easy to lose track of,

but I mean, literally interviews is like the one place where particularly technical people get caught up. Like, yes, I'm exactly that. I've written Python for 17 years, exactly like you asked. And I've known Kubernetes since, you know, Wozniak was born. Please hire me. Well, you mentioned Kubernetes.

I know you've dabbled in the cloud or you're kind of hanging out in like the infrastructure section of technology. Is that really where you, besides the alcohol section, what other aisles do you hang out in? Are you in the infra aisle, in the cloud? Where do you hang? So, yeah, I'm currently working with this company, Sivo,

which is interesting because Sivo is a cloud company. I mean, think in AWS or at Google. They're Kubernetes first. What makes them different is a couple of things. One, it's UK-based, which right now happens to be really good for business. For hashtag, I don't know reasons, but the thing that's also interesting is they will ship you

the whole software stack. So it'd be like if you used AWS for a few weeks and you're like, hey guys, this is great. Can we have it? Right? And then AWS just shipped you AWS. So Siva will do that. You can buy the software stack.

They'll also ship you a hardware appliance where you can throw it in a rack. So what's interesting to me about that is the 10 years that I was in China, I basically missed the data center world because in 2004 at that startup I mentioned that built Twitter a little too early. We had some server rooms in the back that we would shut down a machine at a time and install the newest version and then shut down the next one and install the newer version and or we put up a website that said down

for scheduled maintenance. You remember those? And then when I came back, it was cloud and blue green deployments. And I missed the whole data center world. So it's kind of interesting to me, because it's my first time touching anything data center related.

And not that the customers necessarily are all doing that. Most of them are probably just using our cloud. But I find the data center a bit really interesting, especially as people are starting to flee the cloud. But so that's one bit. It does tend to be infrastructure. About a year and a half ago, almost two years ago, I went and raised money to start an AI startup.

So I did plan to do an AI startup. My co-founder, after the VCs said, we're ready to write the check startup. My co-founder, after the VC said we're ready to write the check and my co-founder called me and said, so I think my wife's going to divorce me if I do this. So we shut the whole thing down. Still, still good friends. But that was in infrastructure because I do think there's some interesting infrastructure problems around AI in particular that are still unsolved. The reason infrastructure is interesting is because a single SaaS product with a single SaaS vertical, you either hit the market perfectly

or you don't. With anything infrastructure, you get to ride the waves because what you're selling is the pickaxes, right? And it's not even pickaxes, it's blue jeans. So it doesn't really matter if it's Gold Rush or we're cutting down a bunch of trees and clearing the forest. Everybody needs blue jeans. And so that's the fun thing about infrastructure is you're solving the problems that everybody needs to go solve their problem.

It's an easier bet. So I find that more interesting. And there really aren't workarounds. I mean, you're gonna need it or you're not gonna need anything. Like infrastructure is gonna be there, whether it's rented, bought, cloud, on-prem. Like it has to be there in some form.

And so, like you said, it is kind of more like the blue jeans where there's not gonna be really a, there might be a down market, but never a no market. Well, and there's, okay, so then the thing that's relevant here that I think is interesting is part of what was fun about the Kubernetes boom 10 years ago when

I was first involved in it is it's like there's this new kind of workload at Container. And it's not really that different, right? But turns out the way that we orchestrate a container is slightly different. And the tools that end up winning in that orchestration were slightly different. And there was a whole new paradigm in declarative you know infrastructure rather than

having to orchestrate everything like we did in the days of Puppet or Ansible right it was kind of exciting because it was a new kind of workload and all the paradigms were going to change and KubeCon in like 2015, 2016, 2017 whatever 2015 might have been too early. Maybe I started in 2016. But early on, it was a whole bunch of nerds sitting around in a room feeling like we're changing the internet and this is fun. Right. And I feel like that's the only place that that's also

happening is in AI. And AI is inference servers, the way that we train them, the way that we run them, the way that we audit them, the way security looks in AI. Like, it's a new kind of workload that requires a different kind of interaction. we train them, the way that we run them, the way that we audit them, the way security looks in AI. It's a new kind of workload that requires a different kind of interaction. It's not that different. It's really, you know, it's just a workload at the end of the day and you box it up in some kind of wrapper at the end of the day, but there's interesting problems because the things that go in it don't come out in the same way. And the things that come out don't come from the same places. And, uh, you know,

so auditing that life cycling that et cetera is just, it's, it's new. It's interesting. And the people who are working hard to solve those problems I think are having a lot of fun. It's definitely different enough that I think there's, you know, there's ML ops community and there's these like, which is basically was DevOps or whatever you want to call it prior, like whatever operations look like.

Well, which was platform engineering prior, which was, you know, Linux sysadmin before, which was. Lots of titles in the cloud, you know. If you go back far enough, it was a lot of guys writing a lot of awk, just saying. Oh, good point. Yeah, anyways, keep going. And they still might be the ones,

the old gray beards, still using their awk, where it makes sense. Well, I was just gonna say there are differences. Can you mention security? Can you enumerate perhaps what makes it different? Why would there be a subculture that comes out of this? It's just compute and data, right? Like what makes it different enough? Yeah, it should's just compute and data, right? Like what makes it different enough?

Yeah, it should just be compute and data. Okay, so a concrete example, a friend of mine, just this morning in the CTO lunches community, a friend of mine works at a very large, very regulated industry and he's a VP at this big company. And he's arguing that their company can't use any AI products. And it's super frustrating. You know, I think just today Shopify tweeted something like, you know, it should be a reflex to use AI.

And that is the absolute standard for all of our engineers at this point. And so this friend who's a, you know, VP is like, well, how do I get to that when I'm in a company where I can't use any of it? You know, like, and so there are some solutions that have come out that address it from his perspective. And I'm going to start there and I'm going to come back to the infrastructure bit. But from his perspective, the things are who's putting what where, right? And when you have a company like his, that's, that's big and super well regulated and everything's blocked, you know what people do? They pull out their phone and they type something into chat. So now

they're putting data that they shouldn't be putting into the big public models that are probably, they've got the free version. So the big public models are training off. So that's the worst possible outcome, right? So there's a company, an old coworker of mine is one of the early engineers at called SurePath AI. I don't know if you've heard of this, but SurePath AI sits in between almost like a proxy for a big company like this. So that every single thing that goes to say ChatGPT, they can stop and say, oh, that has PII in it. And they redact it. So ChatGPT doesn't even get it. So when you say, Hey ChatGPT, who is Jared from the change log? It's going to say, Hey, you said who is name from the change log?

Did you mean to give me a name? It seems more like a placeholder, right? Like that's going to be the actual response from chat GPT because they're going to intercept that. Yeah. And so there's those kinds of cases. Now there gets to be more interesting edge cases there that like, well, I want HR to be able to use AI and train on enough of our data internally that they can ask the AI like, give me a list of all the salespeople and it can do it because that's gonna increase their productivity. But I don't need finance to have access to that.

And I definitely don't want HR to have access to what finance has access to, right? So there ends up being fine grain security there, even if you're self-hosting those models. So that's one thing. The next thing is when you're talking about even just self-hosting a model without a product like SurePath,

and this is not an endorsement for SurePath. The guy that works there is a good friend of mine, I think very highly of him, and I hope they're making a kick-ass product. I've never used it. So I don't know and I can't pouch for it. But, um, the, uh, the folks that are building something internal have to look at it and how do you audit what's been, what the model has been trained on?

How do you audit what the model's learned? How do you audit who's had access to that model? How do you audit if a malicious actor got in and started asking questions to that model? That's not that different from just looking at audit logs of a traditional server of any kind, right? But there ends up being some unique challenges there. And especially when you lifecycle those servers, those inference servers, and you have a new model on it, or you put in some new training data. Who had access to the new training data? When did that training data go in?

Like now what did they have access to? It just, the problems actually get pretty interesting. And the rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. I'd say it seems like they snowball and kind of fractal off even to, now you're multiplying problems against each other. Well and when you're using AI to detect what you shouldn't be doing or you should you

know and that's the other thing that AI is really good at is AI can watch you type a name in and go oh that's a name right oh you shouldn't you shouldn't be saying that so where does that model live who's hosting that one who's auditing that one? Yeah, I mean, it's. Who watches the watchers. This is a whole new world, and the people who are missing out on the AI gold rush, because there's a lot of us, our Luddites over in the corners going, this is one step farther than I want to go.

OpenStack was enough. We tempted fate when we trained the computers. Oh, I need a command prompt and awk. That's all I need. See, you get me, Jared. Now, I need to be better at regex if awk is going to be all I'm going to do because there's a... Anyways.

So say we all. But the... This is where all the fun is and there is a whole bunch of things changing. It's also the only companies with money right now. Right. Yeah, I was expecting you would say that eventually. It's like, well, this is where the money is, so why not be involved in the exciting thing where the money is?

Just kind of makes sense. Well, so I mean, Sivo has a AI offering that is actually pretty compelling. It's a private AI offering so that you can be comfortable with your data. And then this other company in San Francisco that I'm working with, Tensor Lake, that does understanding of unstructured documents. It's actually really fascinating for me. I'm learning a lot. I'm excited to be in the AI world because that is where things are moving. And I'm surprised how much I'm learning about it. I end up having conversations with ChatGPT every day. Yesterday, I was asking a million questions about MCP

servers, or MCP protocol, or whatever. Model context protocol. Yeah, thank you. How does this work? Why does it work? What are the limitations? How does it interact with a browser? How does it interact with AWS?

Is it going to write this kind of code for me, or do this kind of interaction for me? And it's, you know, just things, the rabbit hole always goes deeper. It does, it does. And I was just gonna ask how much you're using these tools in your own work because you have so many disparate tasks, it sounds like,

lined up for any given day that, do you tell the AI, please spell Jared's name wrong for me as I send this email out? Or how do you, how much are you using these tools in your work? What's interesting is, so for internal things, I actually feel like ChatGPT has just recently, and I mostly use ChatGPT.

I dabbled with Claude and a couple of the other things. At Sivo, I use Sivo's models, which are llamas that we're hosting. But ChatGPT, just in the last few months, feels like it's crossed over from, hey, I need an outline on XYZ problem. What should I think about that I haven't maybe thought about? And it would give me, you know, one or two decent ideas and the rest of it would kind of be fluff. And now it's so good at it that I'm regularly thinking I'd be stupid not to use this, right? And so a lot of times I'll type up a few things. Hey, here's the 10 things I'm thinking about as it relates to this problem. What am I missing? And it will structure a few of the things that

I put together into the same category and then give me new categories. I have it set up to be extremely obscenely brief, which is funny because I'm being obscenely verbose on this podcast. In life, I value brevity a lot. I have it set up to always prompt me with, here's what you didn't ask that you probably should have asked. And so at the end of every single response, it says, you should ask this. And it surprises me how often it catches things that I didn't think. So to give you a concrete example,

and the short answer is I'm using it all the time. It's just completely gone through the roof, but just in the last month, I kept trying to use it, trying to use it. I couldn't find times and spaces where it made sense. Now, it's become a second nature for me. I had done a write-up on a bunch of things that needed to happen in this one organization at this one company. I fed it in and said, make this better. At the bottom, there was this one section where I said, here's some of the problems that I'm seeing. Chat GPT said, if you want to sound like a senior executive, don't express the problems. Talk about how you're working to address the problem.

Don't just bring them up. I was like, it's embarrassing. Should 100% know this? Should 100% be interacting this way. And it slapped me on my hand before I went and took that to the person I was turning it into. And that was, that was for me, I think the like eye opening, like I'm stupid every time I don't do this because it's so good. It's like an outbound filter more than anything else. It's just like, before I go outbound. It comes up with, yeah. I mean, it comes up with categories I don't think else. It's just like before it comes up with yeah I mean

it comes up with categories I don't think about it comes up with you know it gives me feedback on my writing that I didn't think about it tells me to be more brief because I'm overly verbose in my writing and I mean even today I asked it to put together a couple lists for me hey I need a list of this kind of company doing this kind of thing and I want 50 of them. It takes 20 seconds. It's wild. It is. It really is. Now, does it name your liquors for you or you do those yourself? So thus far, we have a very long spreadsheet of potential names. I will say the generative A-Ry is amusing because in, I popped into the, so the CTO lunches, we

have the free group that's 1600 CTOs that all meet for lunches all over the world, right? And then we have a paid group that's a small community that hangs out at a Slack. And right before we launched the whiskey, I went to the group and said, hey, I have a couple of ideas for the whiskey name and here's what I think it's gonna be. And one of the people in CTO lunches said, well, have you, you know, what about generative A rye? And that ended up being what we use. So it was not-

Now they get commission on that or? He's asked for a commission. I think I gave him a bottle. I promised him a bottle. So if I haven't given him a bottle, you know who you are, Topher. Give him that $1,00, that special edition. That special edition.

Hey, I hand wrote the number on all of them. I'm holding bottle 22 right here. So that's cool. Gosh, you're really selling them. They're all small batch. I'm wanting one of those. Dang it. Now you price anchor me.

I'm thinking $125, affordable. Feels like no big deal. Yeah, yeah. Knock on the door. Would you like to buy a $50,000 vacuum? No, well great cuz I've got a hundred dollar vacuum So can you I know you haven't These are probably a private spreadsheet, but can you humor us? Can you can you workshop a few options out there?

Maybe oh my gosh, let me let me see if I can I think that I might not be willing to share any of these. Okay, take a moment and review. Maybe give me your bottom half, you know. Don't give me any of the real good ones. Give me what ChachiBT would spit out. Pull it up real quick, let's see. Because that's what I found specifically with creative work is that ChachiBT is so mid on everything.

It's supposed to be funny or ironic or tongue in cheek. Like it's like, no dude, like the cheese ball factor is at 10 and they can't quite do anything funny, but you know, boring prose is fine. Okay, so I opened it up. There is a number in here that I'm happy to share. All right, let's do it.

So we thought about in gin earring for a gin. Say that again. I missed it. I missed it entirely. In gin earring. In gin earring. Oh, in gin earring. But the gin is all capitalized.

One thing that I definitely hope that we do is I want to have a vodka that we sell. And it's two different labels. It's the exact same fucking vodka, and you can only buy them in a box set. And one is called Tabs, and one is called Spaces, because it's vodka, and they're both empty. And I just love this idea.

I like that one. I think we will get there eventually. We have incident response emergency kit. As a name, we have, I did sock too and all I got was this stupid bottle of whiskey. There's a, one of my favorites is actually I work in computers because I think for the people who aren't in tech but wanna buy a gift

for their person who does work in tech, I mean most of them don't know why force push is funny and they're like, that's anything. Yeah, maybe it's inappropriate. They don't know what to buy. So the, I work in computers as the gift to give to the tech person, I think is really funny. I do like that one.

Yeah. So we've got, we've got a lot more. Yeah. I'm saving the good ones. Yeah, I would too. You know, why waste them on a silly podcast? I mean, it started with Friday. A Friday deployment was one of the names of the liquors. And we later decided that was going to be the name of the company. Friday deployment spirits, because you want to get in that Friday deployment spirit. Either you don't want to deploy

on Friday or you have to deploy on Friday and you're gonna need to drink. So, yeah. That's right. Might as well be some gin. That's exactly right. I'm actually a... What else do you want to talk about, Jared? Anything else that I haven't covered? I just wondering how you like gin, personally.

I think gin's disgusting. And it tastes like a pine tree, so. Oh man, that's exactly right. That's what you're missing. You like to drink pine tree. Well, you are from Colorado, so a lot of pint people do. Well, when I was a kid, my dad would drink gin occasionally. And I would smell it.

And I was like, that smells disgusting. He'd be like, have a sip. And I'd take a little sip. And I'd be like, that's disgusting. That's disgusting. And I remember growing up and being like, is that the one that tastes like pine needles? Ew, no.

And then I became an adult and I had some pine needles and I was like, this is amazing. What changed? I don't know. It's still the same taste. Yeah, it's weird. For what it's worth, Jared, our gin has some juniper in it. And you can tell, but it also has a lot more going on.

So if you're not a big juniper guy and you want to try a G&T that you might be really excited about, but I like it meat. If you send me a bottle Juniper guy and you want to try a G&T that you might be really excited about All right, but I like if you send me a bottle. I'll give it a try if I send you a bottle Will you do an entire hour and a half episode where you just sit there and drink it and then give a review of it that? Gets increasingly unhinged as you get farther and farther through the bottle Because then I will send you two bottles. I can get you halfway there I don't like the taste of gin so I can't promise I'm gonna drink it for 90 minutes,

you know, but I will try it on the show and I will talk with, and maybe send one to Adam. We could have a drink and we could maybe do a review. Probably not 90 minutes, but yeah, I could do something with it. I believe you can stretch it to 45 minutes. I will 100% send you a bottle of liquor if you do a review on the change

luck. All right Thus closes my sales pitch So so wait we came into this hoping to have a bubbly conversation You got a little bit of that and you're gonna end with a bottle that you want you want the whiskey to I mean Let's be honest. I actually do like whiskey whereas gin I don't like so you know, do you like do you like rye whiskey? Probably I'm not I'm not a con why? Do you like rye whiskey? Probably. I'm not a connoisseur. But what's the difference?

What's rye specific? Rye is more peppery. It's a kind of different. I mean, I guarantee you've had rye whiskey if you're a whiskey drinker. And you might just not. Unless you try a rye next to a wheat, you might not notice the big differences.

Fair. Yeah, I don't have an advanced palate. I do know that I prefer bourbon. And that's usually- I don't have a refined palate either, and I make liquor for a living. So that's cool. Sorry, keep going.

What were you saying? No, I was just going to say I generally like bourbon, which I think has more sweet than peppery. Yeah. The corn gets sweet, more sweet than peppery. But. Yeah, yeah. It's the corn gets sweet, but also a little bitter. A wheat one is like really smooth and sweet too. But a wheat makes bourbon feel downright offensive. If you drink wheat whiskey for a week

and you tried bourbon again, you'd be like, whoa, because it's got so much stronger of a kick. Gotcha, so it's way smoother much stronger of a kick. Gotcha. So it's way smoother. Yeah. And a rye is going to be in the middle? I mean, a rye, it depends on what the other grains are. And the rye tends to be more like a, I say pepper in part

because it's a little bit of a spice that's sort of added on to whatever the other flavors are that are going on. So you can have a very sweet one with a rye kick. You can have a bourbon with a rye kick. Well, I'm excited. I'm excited for these. I'm excited.

You're excited. I wish Adam was here because he's actually more of the whiskey guy than I am. He's got all the all the stuff he just said. He would have been saying the same thing. Just make him feel guilty. Guilt covers a multitude of wrongs. That's right.

All right. Well, Kendall, awesome meeting you. Great speaking with you. Anything for having me. Anything you were wishing I'd ask you, I never did. And you're like, gosh, this guy's a dope. I've been waiting the whole time. I mean, I think the obvious question that you didn't ask is how can a man be so friendly and look so good and be so humble? And I just don't have an answer to that.

Some of the world's mysteries will just have to be left as such. Thanks for having me. This was fun. Yep. Thank you. Kendall is a man of his word, and my complimentary bottles of Generative A-Ry and Force Push Gin are in route as we speak. I am also a man of my word, so even though I don't like Jin, we'll give these spirits a taste test with real-time reactions on an upcoming episode of Change Log and Friends.

Who knows? Maybe my old man taste buds like the taste of pine trees, and I just don't know it yet. Okay, let's thank our sponsors one more time. Thank you to Fly.io, to depo.dev, and to Notion. Notion.com slash changelog. And thank you to Breakmaster Cylinder for producing so many custom beats for us that we've just released our fourth album on streaming services all around the world.

Search for changelog beats and give the brand new after party album a listen. Your flow state will thank you. That's all for now, but we'll talk to you again on Friday. That show's a little bit bonkers. Matt Ryre joins us and he's taking us to Matt World, which I hear is pretty cool, but maybe not as cool as Jared World.

You be the judge on Friday. Bye y'all. Thanks for watching!