Today I'm joined by Kendall Miller, a bubbly extrovert. So I have expectations, Kendall.
Kendall Miller:Extrovert as a service, not just a bubbly extrovert. Don't act like I don't sell it, Jerod.
Jerod Santo:Okay... How do you price such services?
Kendall Miller:\[laughs\] 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 want to say an ounce of personality. There's a lot of people with an ounce of personality...
Jerod Santo:Sure.
Kendall Miller:...but to bring a truckload of personality is a lot. So yes.
Jerod Santo:So I imagine you walk into a meeting and everything changes. There's like before Kendall and after Kendall. Is that fair?
Kendall Miller:When people notice it is when I take vacation and I come back, and they're like "Oh, thank God, because at least somebody is going to talk before the meeting starts. Somebody's going to interrupt occasionally, and put in something bubbly and entertaining." Yeah.
Jerod Santo:Yeah. As a service to others. It's for everybody else.
Kendall Miller:It's really -- you know, I'm here to be a blessing to the world. We're surrounded by software engineers and product people, let's just be honest... \[laughs\] 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 a tech, but...
Jerod Santo: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? etc.
Kendall Miller:Well... Oh, man. So I work with a lot of early-stage founders, almost always technical founders. 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've just got to get really creative with recursion and they'll just never be able to take over.
Jerod Santo:They'll get stuck. Okay.
Kendall Miller:Yeah. It seems really obvious to me.
Jerod Santo:I'm with you.
Kendall Miller:Anyway, so --
Jerod Santo:I thought we just pull the plug, but that's my move... Is just pull the plug. But yours is way more diabolical.
Kendall Miller:The plug is getting more and more complicated...
Jerod Santo:This is true.
Kendall Miller:We've created these power sources that are portable, unfortunately.
Jerod Santo:This is true.
Kendall Miller: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. Because the best products do not win. And I'm going to s\*\*t on a very large company here, but... Microsoft exists, and we know that the best products do not win, right? 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.
Jerod Santo: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. I just want the best thing to just win... \[laughs\]
Kendall Miller: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 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 "Has anybody ever run into XYZ edge case?", there's nobody out there who's ever seen it before. 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." \[00:08:12.18\] And 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. If you Google any problem, you're going to find a plugin that somebody has 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'll 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." 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.
Jerod Santo: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.
Kendall Miller:\[laughs\]
Jerod Santo:Like, what are some actionable steps?
Kendall Miller:I mean -- so the first thing is... You've heard it said first time founders build, second time founders sell. 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 in this way, then they're going to buy." 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 dirtbag sales guy. 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 companies 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. 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've still got to 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 putting in air quotes, what that means is they've failed once. They built a company and they couldn't get enough people to use it, or they reached a couple million and they needed to reach a lot of million, because they were venture-backed. And then they realize in the second round that they have to go bigger, harder. So what do I do? Well, 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. 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. \[00:11:50.15\] 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 going to 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. You have to build a business around something that actually makes sense. 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 going to take it up." Okay, but how many of these do we have to sell before you can earn a living? And this is a bootstrapped business, it wasn't even venture backed... And he's sitting there and doing the math, and like "Well, I guess I've got to sell about 10,000 more..." So 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, patting 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.
Jerod Santo:Right.
Kendall Miller:So there's a lot of things that people miss.
Jerod Santo: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, a thousand dollars. Like, charge a lot, build a little. It takes a lot of confidence to do something like that. Like "Well, I've got this little thing that does one thing. It's going to cost you a lot." It seems like one or the other. But are you saying you can accomplish both?
Kendall Miller: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. I mean, there's times where you need to go boil an ocean, and build, say, a cloud, before you're going to have adopters. But it's not like Amazon started with a cloud. It started with compute, and then found out all the other things. So when you're going to 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. 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, I really need XYZ problem solved", you say "Well, 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 handwavy. 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.
Jerod Santo:\[00:16:02.29\] Mm-hm. 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, extroverted, 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 etc. That combination is really hard to find. It might be easier to find a spouse at this point.
Kendall Miller:\[laughs\]
Jerod Santo:So -- I mean, seriously. So many people... Is there a Tinder for co-founders? Probably there is.
Kendall Miller:There is, yeah.
Jerod Santo:Is there?
Kendall Miller:Yeah. There's a couple of systems out there for --
Jerod Santo:I was like "Where do we meet?"
Kendall Miller:I mean, even YCombinator has like a co-founder matching setup, I believe. And there's a couple of different places that do something similar to that. But I think the hard part 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, and you're just kind of BSing. But you start to sound like a native if you've spoken it long enough.
Jerod Santo:Right.
Kendall Miller: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. 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." So that is a thing that does happen.
Jerod Santo:Yeah. 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.
Kendall Miller:Sure.
Jerod Santo:And I think both those routes are probably fraught.
Kendall Miller:\[laughs\] To say the least. Yes, Jerod, they are both fraught.
Jerod Santo:So 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. How'd you get in and then how'd you eventually learn the language?
Kendall Miller:Well, so it is complicated. So my distant background is technical. I started writing code in fifth grade, and my first programming language was Awk, which - don't start with Awk, would be my encouragement.
Jerod Santo:Nice.
Kendall Miller:I went from Awk to BASIC...
Jerod Santo:Don't finish with Awk either, yeah.
Kendall Miller:Don't finish with Awk 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. 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 tech 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... So a 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.
Jerod Santo:What did you ask them? Like "Are you hiring?" "Yes." "Okay."
Kendall Miller:Yeah. He offered me more money than anybody else offered, and I took the job...
Jerod Santo:\[00:20:07.06\] There you go.
Kendall Miller:Because nobody knew what to do with me. They're looking at my background in China going "What the heck is this?" 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."
Jerod Santo:Pure altruism, or what?
Kendall Miller:So is it pure altruism? I mean, it makes it sound like it's ever that clear of a thought... No, I think networking has network effects, right? When I moved back to the States from China and logged into Slack at this new company and found out that I was the only employee, I panicked.
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] "Where is everyone...?"
Kendall Miller:And so I was like "Well, I'd 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... You know, 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 an opportunity to talk about this. I make a liquor called Friday Deployment Spirits. This is our Generative A Rye.
Jerod Santo:Oh, my goodness...
Kendall Miller:It's a rye whiskey. We also make a gin called Force 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 you. And if I refer you to that person", and I don'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, "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. So because I've referred a person over here, that director of engineering now owes me a favor. 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. Actually -- I mean, a good friend of mine in San Francisco, who got fired from a very big company... I don't actually 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. So I only know one very large cloud company's execs, and I wrote to them and said "Hey, this person came available on the market. 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, I found out yesterday. \[00:24:08.04\] So now there's a C-level executive at one of the largest cloud companies in the world that 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, 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 s\*\*t 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.
Jerod Santo:\[unintelligible 00:24:41.01\] Be yourself.
Kendall Miller:Well, myself is -- I worked for a religious organization in China for 10 years, Jerod, 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.
Jerod Santo:Okay.
Kendall Miller:But yeah, I mean, I ended up \*bleep\* all over their ideas... 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 a 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 they don't know that you've got to show up on time to an interview. It's the little things. You've got to communicate.
Jerod Santo:Basics.
Kendall Miller: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-rah-ed 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...
Jerod Santo: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...
Kendall Miller:Yes...
Jerod Santo:Because I asked about "Is it pure altruism?", which is a stupid question, because there's no such thing as pure altruism.
Kendall Miller:Right.
Jerod Santo:Because it's like, no, but you try to do a selfless act, and somehow it comes back to you anyways.
Kendall Miller:Yes.
Jerod Santo:So I was thinking of that.
Kendall Miller:Isn't it where she ends up carrying a baby on behalf of somebody, but realizes she's going to feel good about it?
Jerod Santo:Yeah. I mean, she felt good at the end of the day... It's like "No...!" and she was very angry. I loved that particular setup.
Kendall Miller:Yeah...
Jerod Santo: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. Do you like zero to one and then move on? Are you just trying to help out where you can? What part of it excites you?
Kendall Miller: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. 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. I don't like being the sales guy, because then I have to hassle my network, check in, follow up... 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 it doesn't, 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, Jerod, is because what excites me is just solving business problems. I like getting in, finding out that there's things that are a mess, and just going and helping solve it. 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... I'm interviewing for a CEO right now... \[00:28:10.17\] 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 a 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...
Jerod Santo: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? One of the things you do is building this spirits company?
Kendall Miller:Yeah, so there's a bunch of things I do. So what I get paid for directly - I work with a cloud company called Civo out of the UK. I work with an AI company called Tensorlake, out of San Francisco. And then I'm on the board of a company called FusionAuth. Think an Auth0 competitor. Nut 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... I 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. 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, so liquor's 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.
Jerod Santo:Yeah. So how does that one make money?
Kendall Miller:We'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.
Jerod Santo:So you have a lot of stuff going on, and you're not just helping other people with their businesses.
Kendall Miller:I stick my fingers in a lot of pies, yes. **Break**: \[00:30:52.13\]
Jerod Santo:So why the spirits pie, and...?
Kendall Miller:\[laughs\] So we were -- I had just come back into town after some time away, and I was meeting 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 SOC2 and all I got was this bottle of whiskey"? So the list of names was immediately very long. And Rishi, my business partner and I stuck around after the other two guys left, and Rishi goes "Well, Kendall, I, I think this is maybe a good idea." And I said, "Well, Rishi, I think this is a good idea." And he goes, "Well, I'm not messing around." I said, "Well, I'm not messing around." He 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.
Jerod Santo: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 every celebrity has their tequila, or their whiskey, or their gin named after them, or whatever it is. It's like branded alcohol for this celebrity, and --
Kendall Miller:Aviation Gin. I'm Ryan Reynolds. Thank you, Jerod. No, 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...
Jerod Santo:There you go.
Kendall Miller:Anyways. Sorry, keep going.
Jerod Santo:No, so I just -- I've noticed that and I'm like "Well, this must be lucrative, and relatively easy", because you're basically just branding, aren't you? You're not opening a distillery. And you just said you went and bought a bunch of whiskey, right?
Kendall Miller: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.
Jerod Santo:How deep you can go on this...?
Kendall Miller: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 \#reasons. 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 that? 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 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.
Jerod Santo:That's the hard part.
Kendall Miller:I just handle it once it's in the bottle. Well, I have to buy the bottle, and distribution's a gigantic pain in the butt because of American liquor laws.
Jerod Santo:So I'm thinking then -- I mean, of course, I'm target market, because I'm a nerd, and Generative A Rye lands perfectly on me... But there's not very many -- like, how many...?
Kendall Miller:It's also really good whiskey, Jerod. Sorry, keep going. \[laughs\]
Jerod Santo:Well, that's fine. That's all well and good. But the naming is what I care about. You're targeting alcohol at technical people, basically. Isn't that like a small cross-section of the world? Are you limited in your --
Kendall Miller:Well, that's why one bottle is $1,400.
Jerod Santo:Oh, okay.
Kendall Miller:No, I'm kidding. It's --
Jerod Santo:You just sell it to your CTO Lunches. That's your entire market.
Kendall Miller:The whiskey is $125, and the gin is $95. So it's not cheap. It is a luxury item.
Jerod Santo:\[00:36:10.15\] That is expensive.
Kendall Miller:It is a very, very good item. 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 Jerod will become a daily drinker of Generative A Rye; my thought is "Sometime in the next year Jerod 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. My goal is that. I don't think anybody's going to buy a $95 bottle of gin, even though it's a very pretty bottle of gin, and it says Force Push right there on the label, and it's -- it's Friday Deployment Spirits, Jerod. It's funny.
Jerod Santo:It is funny.
Kendall Miller:I still don't think it's going to be anybody's daily drinker.
Jerod Santo:Gotcha. Well, I just wanted to tee up your sales pitch and see how you'd do this.
Kendall Miller:How did I do? Can you give me a rating?
Jerod Santo:I would drink it. I mean, I don't know if I would -- $1,400 bucks is... That's a call order.
Kendall Miller:\[laughs\]
Jerod Santo:I'm no CTO of anything though.
Kendall Miller:It's not 1,400 bucks, I want to say again. 125 bucks versus 95 bucks.
Jerod Santo:Oh, I'm sorry, why'd you say it was 1,400?
Kendall Miller: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.
Jerod Santo:Oh man, you even price-anchored me.
Kendall Miller:See, talk about sales tactic. Yeah, 100%.
Jerod Santo:So sell me some of your other -- I won't say use car salesman tactics, but just... What are the winners where you can just say something and it'll work? You said you've got a couple of those.
Kendall Miller: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.
Jerod Santo:Seriously?
Kendall Miller:Make some spelling mistakes. Yeah, otherwise it looks like it's a mail merge.
Jerod Santo:I see.
Kendall Miller: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 - do you know how much more likely they are to respond to you? Because they're like "Oh, this, this asshat didn't just plug it into a CRM and send me a mail merge. They're actually reaching out to me."
Jerod Santo:Don't they also think that you don't pay attention to the details?
Kendall Miller:100%. And sometimes they respond with like a "Dude, come on. You could do better", but they responded.
Jerod Santo:Okay. Fair.
Kendall Miller: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.
Jerod Santo:Alright.
Kendall Miller:Number two, one of the most interesting things is every company needs to know -- where do I start? Founders always underprice their product. I do this myself. You weren't willing to pay 1,400 bucks, but 125 seemed cheap to you once I got back to it. I probably could have sold the bottle for 200 bucks and Jerod might've bought it. I don't know, I'm probably handwavy. But founders always underprice their product. And one of the most important things for fixing that is finding out what are people's budgets. 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 "Jerod, I've got a nice bottle of whiskey here I want to put you into. It's a 2025, you're going to like the way that it drives and feels."
Jerod Santo:Hm. That was a good year.
Kendall Miller:\[00:40:07.22\] It was good year... And how much have you got to spend on this, Jerod? Are you hoping to spend $5 on a bottle of whiskey, are you hoping to spend a hundred dollars 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 everyone, almost every time, will go "Well, it's not $5,000. I was thinking more like 50." Okay, great. Now I've got a ballpark for what was in your head. So this method - you name a number, you name a number twice as big, 10 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.
Jerod Santo:Interesting.
Kendall Miller:So that's called the bucketing method. That's an interesting thing. And then there's one last one, which is just in general in sales... If you can ask a question like "If this existed, and it was perfect for you to meet your needs, something like that, what would it look like?" And now, you're going to 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 going to feel about what I'm selling. Even though I haven't told you anything about it.
Jerod Santo:Hm. How do you mean I'm going to sell it to you? Because 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?
Kendall Miller:Yeah, I mean, it depends on what -- you can't, say "Oh, well, that's exactly what it is", but you can go back with... How do I say this? Here's a concrete example that's 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?
Jerod Santo:Yeah.
Kendall Miller: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.
Jerod Santo:Sure.
Kendall Miller:So if you can say "Hey, in your perfect world, what are the problems that I would solve?" Not "Who exactly am I?" "I'm going to show up on day one. I'm going to wear this color. I'm going to talk to this person and do this thing", but "What is the problem I'm going to 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, I 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 going to spin you into--", it's an acronym for something. But the one useful thing they talk about is this bit, of get the other person to be pitching you instead.
Jerod Santo:Yeah. Interesting.
Kendall Miller: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 Wozniak was born. Please hire me."
Jerod Santo: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?
Kendall Miller:\[laughs\]
Jerod Santo:Are you in the infra aisle, in the cloud? Where do you hang?
Kendall Miller:So yeah, I'm currently working with this company Civo, which is interesting because Civo is a cloud company... I mean, think an 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 \#IDontKnow 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?" And then AWS just shipped you AWS. So Civo will do that. You can buy the software stack. \[00:44:20.05\] 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 you know, 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... Or we'd put up a website that said "Down for scheduled maintenance." Remember those?
Jerod Santo:Mm-hm.
Kendall Miller:And then when I came back, it was cloud, and blue/green deployments. And I missed the whole data center world. So Civo is kind of interesting to me because it's my first time touching anything data center-related. Not that the customers necessarily are all doing that. Most of them are probably just using our cloud. But I find the data center bit really interesting, especially as people are starting to flee the cloud. 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 -- 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.
Jerod Santo:Really?
Kendall Miller: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, you know, a single SaaS product with 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. 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. 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.
Jerod Santo:Right. And there really aren't workarounds. I mean, you're going to need it or you're not going to need anything. Infrastructure is going to be there, whether it's rented, bought, cloud, on-prem... 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 going to be really a -- there might be a down market, but never a no market.
Kendall Miller:Well, okay, and 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 - it's like there's this new kind of workload, a container. And it's not really that different, but it turns out the way that we orchestrate a container is slightly different. And the tools that ended up winning in that orchestration were slightly different. And there was a whole new paradigm in declarative infrastructure, rather than having to orchestrate everything like we did in the days of Puppet or Ansible... 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've 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 -- you know, 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... It's a new kind of workload, that requires a different kind of interaction. It's not that different; 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. So auditing that, lifecycling that etc. is new, it's interesting, and the people who are working hard to solve those problems I think are having a lot of fun.
Jerod Santo:\[00:48:17.11\] Yeah. It's definitely different enough that I think there's -- you know, there's an MLOps community, which is basically was DevOps, or whatever you want to call it, prior... Like, whatever operations looked like.
Kendall Miller:Well, which was platform engineering prior, which was Linux sysadmin before, which was...
Jerod Santo:Yeah, this is one of the things... There's lots of titles in the cloud.
Kendall Miller:If you go back far enough, it was a lot of guys writing a lot of Awk, just saying.
Jerod Santo:Oh, good point.
Kendall Miller:Yeah. Anyways, keep going.
Jerod Santo:And they still might be the ones -- the old graybeards still using their Awk where it makes sense.
Kendall Miller:Still using their Awk, yeah.
Jerod Santo:Well, I was just going to say, there are differences. You mentioned 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?
Kendall Miller: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. I think just today Shopify tweeted something like "It should be a reflex to use AI. And that is the absolute standard for all of our engineers at this point." So this friend who's a VP is like "Well, how do I get to that when I'm in a company where I can't use any of it?" So there are some solutions that have come out that address it from his perspective. 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?" And when you have a company like his, 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 ChatGPT. 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 them, so that's the worst possible outcome. So there's a company, an old coworker of mine's, one of the early engineers, that's 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 Jerod from the Changelog?", it's going to say "Hey, you said, \[unintelligible 00:50:48.04\] name from the Changelog. Did you mean to give me a name? It seems more like a placeholder." Like, that's going to be the actual response from ChatGPT, because they're going to intercept that.
Jerod Santo:They're pulling it out.
Kendall Miller:Yeah. So there's those kinds of cases. Now, there gets to be more interesting edge cases there, 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 "Give me a list of all the salespeople" and it can do it, because that's going to 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. So there ends up being fine-grained 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 vouch for it. But the folks that are building something internal have to look at it, and how do you audit what the model's 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? It's not that different from just looking at audit logs of a traditional server of any kind... 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? Now what did they have access to?" The problems actually get pretty interesting. And the rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.
Jerod Santo:\[00:52:39.03\] It seems like they snowball, and kind of fractal off even, to now you're multiplying problems against each other.
Kendall Miller:Well, and when you're using AI to detect what you shouldn't be doing, or you should -- 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." "Oh, 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 --
Jerod Santo:Who watches the watchers...
Kendall Miller:This is a whole new world, and the people who are missing out on the AI gold rush - because a lot of us are Luddites over in the corners, going "Oh, this is one step farther than I want to go. OpenStack was enough." "We tempted fate when we trained the computers."
Jerod Santo:All I need is a command prompt and Awk. That's all I need.
Kendall Miller:See, you get me, Jerod. 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.
Jerod Santo:So say we all.
Kendall Miller:So say we all. But 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.
Jerod Santo: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?" It just kind of makes sense.
Kendall Miller:Well, I mean, Civo has an 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, Tensorlake, 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 -- it's a protocol, or whatever.
Jerod Santo:Yeah, Model Context Protocol.
Kendall Miller:Yeah, thank you. Like, how does this work? Why does it work? What are the limitations? How does it interact with the 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? The rabbit hole always goes deeper.
Jerod Santo:It does. It does. And I was just going to 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... Do you tell the AI "Please spell Jerod'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?
Kendall Miller:\[laughs\] Well, 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 Civo, I use Civo'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 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." 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... But in life I value brevity a lot. And I have it set up to always prompt me with "Here's what you didn't ask, that you probably should have asked." So at the end of every single response, it says "You should ask this."
Jerod Santo:\[00:56:30.17\] Okay...
Kendall Miller: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.
Jerod Santo:Yeah. It sounds like it.
Kendall Miller:It's just completely gone through the roof. But just in the last month I kept trying to use it and trying to use it, and I couldn't find times and spaces where it made sense... And now it's become a second nature for me. But I had done a write-up on a bunch of things that needed to happen in this one organization, at this one company. And I fed it in and said "Make this better." And at the bottom there was this one section where I said "Here's some of the problems that I'm seeing." And ChatGPT 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." And I was like "Ah, this is embarrassing. I 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 for me the eye-opening "I'm stupid every time I don't do this", because it's so good at this.
Jerod Santo:Yeah. It's like an outbound filter, more than anything else. It's just like, before I go outbound...
Kendall Miller:Yeah, I mean, it comes up with categories I don't think about, 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... I mean, even today I asked it to put together a couple of 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.
Jerod Santo:It is. It really is. Now, does it name your liquors for you, or do you do those yourself?
Kendall Miller:Thus far we have a very long spreadsheet of potential names. I will say, the Generative A Rye is amusing, because I popped into the -- so the CTO Lunches, we have the free group that's 1,600 CTOs that all meet for lunches all over the world. 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 going to be." And one of the people in CTO Lunches said, "Well, what about Generative A Rye?" And that ended up being what we use.
Jerod Santo:Now, did they get a commission on that, or...?
Kendall Miller:He's asked for a commission. I think I gave him a bottle.
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] That's the least you could give.
Kendall Miller:I promised him a bottle. So if I haven't given him a bottle, you know who you are, Topher... I owe you a bottle.
Jerod Santo:There you go. Give him that $1,400, that special edition...
Kendall Miller:That special edition.
Jerod Santo:\[unintelligible 00:59:07.04\]
Kendall Miller:I handwrote the number on all of them. I'm holding bottle 22 right here.
Jerod Santo:Oh, that's cool. Gosh, you're really selling me them.
Kendall Miller:They're all small batch.
Jerod Santo:I'm wanting one of those. Dang it. Now you price-anchor me. I'm thinking $125, affordable. \[laughs\]
Kendall Miller:Feels like no big deal. Yeah. Knock on the door. Would you like to buy a $50,000 vacuum? No? Well, great, because I've got a hundred-dollar vacuum.
Jerod Santo:So can you -- these are probably a private spreadsheet, but can you humor us? Can you workshop a few options out there? Maybe get a reaction...
Kendall Miller:Oh my gosh, let me see if I can. I think that I might not be willing to share any of these.
Jerod Santo:Okay. Take a moment and review... Maybe give me your bottom half. Don't give me any of the real good ones. Give me what ChatGPT would spit out.
Kendall Miller:\[00:59:54.28\] I don't know if I can even pull it up real quick... Let's see.
Jerod Santo:Because that's what I've found specifically with creative work, is that ChatGPT is so mid on everything that's supposed to be funny, or ironic, or tongue in cheek... It's like, no, dude... Like, the cheeseball factor is at 10, and they can't quite do anything funny. But boring prose is fine.
Kendall Miller:Okay, so I opened it up. There is a number in here that I'm happy to share.
Jerod Santo:Alright, let's do it.
Kendall Miller:So we thought about InGINeering for a gin...
Jerod Santo:Say that again? I missed it. I missed it entirely.
Kendall Miller:InGINeering, but the GIN is all capitalized.
Jerod Santo:Gotcha. Gotcha.
Kendall Miller: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... I love this idea.
Jerod Santo:I like that one.
Kendall Miller:I think we will get there eventually. We have Incident Response Emergency Kit as a name... We have "I did SOC-2 and all I got was the stupid bottle of whiskey"...
Jerod Santo:I like that one.
Kendall Miller:One of my favorites is actually "I work in computers", because I think for the people who aren't in tech but want to 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 --"
Jerod Santo:Right. It's almost too inside --
Kendall Miller: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.
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] I do like that one.
Kendall Miller:Yeah.
Jerod Santo:That might sell.
Kendall Miller:So we've got a lot more... Yeah, I'm saving the good ones.
Jerod Santo:Yeah. I would, too. Why waste them on a silly podcast?
Kendall Miller:I mean, it started with -- "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 going to need to drink...
Jerod Santo:That's right. Might as well be some gin.
Kendall Miller:That's exactly right. What else do you want to talk about, Jerod? Anything else that I haven't covered?
Jerod Santo:I'm just wondering how you like gin personally. I think gin is disgusting, and it tastes like a pine tree, so...
Kendall Miller:Oh man, that's exactly right. That's what you're missing.
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] You like to drink pine tree. Well, you are from Colorado. There's a lot of \[unintelligible 01:02:25.25\]
Kendall Miller:There you go. 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? Ewgh, no."
Jerod Santo:Exactly.
Kendall Miller:And then I became an adult, and I had some pine needles, and I was like "This is amazing...!"
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] What changed?
Kendall Miller:I don't know.
Jerod Santo:It's still the same taste. Yeah, it's weird.
Kendall Miller:For what it's worth, Jerod, 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...
Jerod Santo:Alright. Well, I'll tell you what - if you send me a bottle, I'll give it a try.
Kendall Miller: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.
Jerod Santo:\[01:03:21.28\] I can get you halfway there. Well, I don't like the taste of gin, so I can't promise I'm going to drink it for 90 minutes, you know? But I will try it on the show, 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.
Kendall Miller: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 Changelog.
Jerod Santo:Alright. Thus closes my sales pitch... \[laughter\]
Kendall Miller:So wait - we came into this hoping to have a bubbly conversation, you got a little bit of that, and you're going to end with a bottle... You want the whiskey, too. I mean, let's be honest.
Jerod Santo:Oh, I actually do like whiskey, whereas gin I don't like.
Kendall Miller:Do you like rye whiskey?
Jerod Santo:Probably. I'm not a connoisseur. But what's the difference? What's rye's specific...?
Kendall Miller:Rye is more peppery. It's a kind of different -- I mean, I guarantee you've had rye whiskeys 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.
Jerod Santo:Fair. Yeah, I don't have an advanced palate. I do know that I prefer bourbon, and that's --
Kendall Miller:I don't have a refined palate either, and I make liquor for a living, so it's cool. Sorry, keep going. What were you saying?
Jerod Santo:No, I was just going to say, I generally like bourbon, which I think has more of a sweety -- you know, more sweet than peppery. But...
Kendall Miller:Yeah. Yeah. 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.
Jerod Santo:Gotcha. So it's way smoother.
Kendall Miller:Yeah.
Jerod Santo:And a rye is going to be in the middle?
Kendall Miller:I mean, a rye - it depends on what the other grains are in it. 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 onto 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...
Jerod Santo:Gotcha. Well, I'm excited. I'm excited for these --
Kendall Miller:I'm excited if you're excited.
Jerod Santo: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 you just said, he would have been saying the same thing, assuming it's true...
Kendall Miller:Just make him feel guilty. Guilt covers a multitude of wrongs.
Jerod Santo:That's right. Alright. Well, Kendall, awesome meeting you. Great speaking with you. Anything --
Kendall Miller:Thanks for having me.
Jerod Santo:Anything you were wishing I'd ask you, and I never did, and you're like "Gosh, this guy's a dope. I've been waiting the whole time"?
Kendall Miller: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, but...
Jerod Santo:Some of the world's mysteries will just have to be left as such.
Kendall Miller:\[laughs\] Thanks for having me. This was fun.
Jerod Santo:Yup. Thank you.