Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Phil Reynolds, CEO and co-founder at DevStride, which is an enterprise agile planning tool that frees your team from project silos. Phil, thank you so much for being on the show. We chatted a little bit prior to the show and, and You know, got into the weeds of what it really takes to, to build at a company.

And, you know, you've had some experience. It's not your first startup that, that you've built. You've, you've been able to learn through experience, which is so exciting for, for me and my audience to really uncover the different things that are, that are necessary for building companies. But before we get into all that, what were you doing before you started DevStride?

Phil: Well, thanks for having me on, Julian. I appreciate it. Yeah, so before this I was the CEO and founder, co-founder of a company called Bright Core, and we were a core property casualty administration system. So big insurance e r p system. I did that for about 16 years or so and grew a team up to about 350 staff and 87 big enterprise customers, and really enjoyed that.

Took a company from a seed round series A, series B, exited after the series B, and have now started DevStride, which is what I'm working on today.  

Julian: Amazing. What, what, what goes into the evolution of building a company? I think a lot of people kind of have a template of what they think about it in their mind, but yeah, you know, going through different rounds of funding, probably going to different product features and, and continuing through that customer product, or excuse me, product market fit with your customer.

What's involved in that process within. That growth stage at, at every point in time or, or I guess the, the biggest milestones that you have to think of as a founder as you're building?

Phil: Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, for one, every company's a little bit different. And so I think one of the biggest pitfalls you can, you can fall into is the idea that if you go follow some template somewhere, you read in a book, that it's all gonna work out for you.

And I don't think that actually is true. I think that every company has a lot of unique you know, customers and personalities and some things are luck. Other things are skill. There are certainly some things that repeat, however one of those things. And there are things that you hear people talk about a lot.

You, you need to make sure, of course, that you have. I think rule number one, a business don't run out of money. . Yeah. So that's like number one. Don't run out of money which is surprisingly hard to do, especially as you're building a. company Yeah, so you know, it, it's one thing when you are in full swing and you've got, you know, 10, 20 million of arr.

Then, you know, not running outta money is more of an incremental motion. But, you know, early on where DevStride at right now, not running outta money is, is a major consideration. You have to really manage cash flow, so that's a big thing. It's obviously, of course, really important that you make sure that whatever product or service you plan to offer to the market, you have a strong product, market fit, and that is a journey.

It's normally a process. It is very, very rare for a founder to come out, introduce some, you know, new product and something the market just, you know, falls all over themselves with the thing that the founder originally envisioned. Normally, I think it's better advice to think about your early vision for the company and its product or its services.

As more of a, a seed that you're planting and then you know, based upon the feedback from customers and the market and all those things, that's going to evolve. And then of course there's a million lessons behind that on on staffing and finding, you know, the right staff and the right position, finding the right capital partners to help you scale and or the right big sponsoring customers.

So they're just, there's a lot of phases to all of. But I think in the early stages it's probably most important that you make sure you have a solid beat on how you're going to fund the company. Mm-hmm. , they make sure you have product market fit, and I think those are the two most important things very early on.

Julian: Yeah. Did you consider other ways of funding other than venture capital, kind of as you were growing the company?  

Phil: Yeah. Yeah, it did. And so actually we did not start out with Venture capital at DevStride or at Bright Core, either. At, at Bright Core we bootstrapped the company for about six years before we ever raised funding.

Yeah. And then we didn't raise from vc, we actually raised from a group of customers and a group of customers helped fund the next seven years of operations. So we were in a solid 13 years at Bright Core before we ever went to institutional. This time I decided to short circuit that process cuz I feel like I probably could have gotten to the same end point with Bright Core much sooner had I taken institutional capital sooner.

So at DevStride instead we found an Angel round for the company. Yeah. And we founded, funded that privately with proceeds that we'd received from Break Core and that that effectively paid for about 18 months worth of runway for an initial build phase. Did that privately to make sure we could get a product built.

We got a product. Then we raised our pree round in order to launch early go to market motion, which just happened a couple of months ago.  

Julian: Yeah. What goes into building you know, kind of product and, and as you see, you know, or I guess, what's the difference between the way you bootstrapped it initially, kind of building and focusing on product build versus now?

And, and what made you take your time for those 18 months to build the product the way you did.  

Phil: Yeah, so in, in our particular case we're, we have an enterprise customer segment, and so we're not selling software to like you know, solopreneur type. It's not really what we've targeted our software at.

We've targeted our software at relatively complex teams. Trying to make sure they deliver projects and products on time in a timely manner. Understanding while the resources are going across a bunch of multidimensional teams, that's a fairly complex problem, and since it's a complex problem, you need time.

To build the thing so that you can even demonstrate that your concept works. It's not the kind of thing you can just go like hackathon for a weekend or something. It doesn't work like that. It's not like, you know, a little bot you put on top of Twitter or something. Mm-hmm. . And so, so we needed that time and that's why we funded that ourselves.

However, scaling up and running a go to market motion for, you know, SMBs and especially enterprise requires real resources. So, you know, so we kicked in an initial about a $500,000 early angel round to fund the first little bit of runway. But $500,000 is, does not get you, you know, in front of, you know, meaningful customers pay for the travel, pay for the proof of concept.

Yeah. Pay for all those things. So we, we really, we needed institutional capital in order to do that in the, in the vacuum. A very large sponsoring enterprise customer. Yeah. And the one piece of advice I would give to anyone who had access to a big enterprise customer is if you could fund it with a big enterprise customer, that's an even better road than bc.

Yeah. But it's very rare that you find a customer who's willing to, you know, roll the dice and take a gamble Yeah. On a startup idea, whereas that's the business species are in. And so they're accustomed to that. They're accustomed to seeing an. Hearing your thesis around product market fit and the total tam and all those things, and deciding whether they want to take that risk alongside you or not.

Julian: Mm-hmm. , what, what are the mechanics of having a customer invest in your product or company?  

Phil: Yeah, so there's good and bad to it. For the good, I'll start with the good. In my personal opinion, the good outweighs the bad, which is why I said if you had that option, I would take it. So in terms of the good there, What it gives you is it gives you almost a guaranteed product market fit because you know a customer's willing to spend real money.

On the thing that you believe should exist and one of the risks of what you would call founder market fit, which is sort of where Dev Shri is at more, is more founder market fit. Where I was in my previous life, I was the primary target consumer. Of a product like DeVry. And so I, I'm, I'm presuming right now that as we go to market, I will be able to find other software companies that have the same need that I had running Bright Core, but that's not proven yet.

And so working from a customer base as your funding partner, you know you have that. So that's the, that's a major upside. You already know you have sort of a product market fit built in cuz you're building four your market on the down. There then those customers have a tendency because Earth, to get in early, you need to offer frequently aggressive discounting, a lot of free services.

You're frequently operating at something close to a loss and or, you know, living off tuna, cans. And so then when it comes time to really go to market and establish enterprise pricing, frequently, those early stage customer. Have an unrealistic expectation about the economics of the business and the subscription and all those things.

And so again, there's good and bad in both. But I would say that the customer route has fewer risks attached to it, though it is certainly a significant parachute at points down the road.

Julian: But I, I, I very super interested in this customer market fit. Cause very few founders, I think, well at least I've been on the show, haven't really gone this route.

What do companies kind of have budget for this? Do you have to do, you know, kind of a long sale cycle to get in a lot of stakeholders to convince them into taking a chance on this? What, what goes into this whole customer market fit kind of process that that, that allows it to happen? You know, like I said, is there budget for this?

Yeah. And certain companies. Yeah. What goes into it?  

Phil: Yeah. No, you're funding that way and you're funding through customers making the early investment which we recently did at Bright Core. It was multiple years of spending time in a market. Yeah. Operating in a manner I could no longer operate in.

So I, I'm, I'm 42 years old. Master turned 43 here in. A couple weeks, unfortunately. Thank you guys. And so in my forties, I could no longer work for free for, you know, seven years. Yeah. Or for $10,000 a year, for seven years. I have a family, I have a house, I have all these things. Yeah. When I was 25, however, when I started Bright Core, I could afford to just work at the company for pennies.

Yeah. And so what we really did was we more or less donated our time and services for. To establish a base of trust with a group of customers who then were willing to fund more of a scaling operation inside of, inside of a business. And so if you have that luxury, if you're young, if you have, you know, virtually no expenses and very low expectations economically around your life, then there's, there's a lot to that of going in and just sort of showing up somewhere that you're in.

And just keep hanging around for long enough until eventually you're a fixture. And then eventually someone who has money will probably look at you and be like, What do, what do you do here? And they'll probably give you money. And that's exactly how we funded Bright Core. However, at DevStride, it's totally different where I have an idea that I want to take to the market and I went into a VC and I've said, Hey, let's fund this.

They funded now after the initial Angel period, and now we're launching a go to market activity to see, to go out and try to broadcast to other companies that are like my former. Hey, we're here and here's what we built.  

Julian: Yeah. How do you go from PNC insurance to DevStride and a tool that focuses on product development and project management?

Phil: Yeah, so, so Bright Core was an interesting business on a lot of fronts. One of those is that it was the most enterprise of enterprise software. Three and a half million lines of source code. I'm not sure if you're an engineer or not. That's a very large application. It's like, you know, five, six phone books stacked on each other in the old days.

Gosh, I wonder how many people would see this. Don't know what a phone book is, . But anyway, big, big, thick, a lot of. And the I and so it was such a large application that, of course it had to be broken into multiple, smaller applications that deployed at once. And so the way we had organized our internal operations was around what we call product teams.

And a product team would be, in our example there, because we're in property casualty insurance, I would have a team for policies, claim a team for claims, a team for billing, a team, for rating a team, for underwriting. There's all these different functions inside of an insurance company. Mm-hmm. and I had a, a service, a web service that I deployed that managed that workload.

All those web services deployed together as a suite for a customer. The complexity was this. Yeah. If you are managing, as I was a little over 40 different product teams, you now have 40 different product roadmaps that you are responsible for. Yeah. And that in and of itself is a tremendous problem.

However, today there are layers you can add on top of tools like jira. There's one called Jira Align. Mm-hmm. that will give you very high level summary information. Of a bunch of different sort of like projects or programs that you're running and say, Okay, overall here's kind of what's going on.

But I, I will highlight that that is only summary information. It's not give you any detail. Yeah. I had the added complexity that we were then implementing our enterprise software, that big suite of products. Yeah. For a bunch of big enterprise customers and enterprise customers have their own timelines and their own desires, and some of them were taking all of our products, some of 'em were taking some of our products.

Sometimes there was a new integration that had to be built, and so there were roadmaps and timelines that ran this way for customers and this way for product teams, and all those things intersected in such a way that I had hundreds and hundreds of permutations. Will this thing be done on time for this customer over here and or this thing?

And so you can kind of, Today, if you spend an enormous amount of money on multiple layers of software, you can sort of answer that question. You can answer it very poorly, but you can't answer all in Any tool that exists is then come back and say, Okay, across these 42 product roadmaps, can you tell me what my cycle time is for defect for customer X?

Or can you tell me how team Y is perform? Against Team Z in this product versus this product. Yeah. And so you can't slice and dice your question set across the data in any tool that exists today. Yeah. And so we set out to solve that problem with DevStride. And so in many, many ways, DevStride is my own response to trying to manage the single largest pain point I ever had, managing Bright Core.

And it drove me so crazy trying to keep track of that problem. I wanted to go build a product to solve that problem in the future.  

Julian: Yeah. No, And I can see just how complex the, the communication was, but also the, the mapping out of it, the analytics that were driven from it. It seems like a lot of times things weren't as clear as, as you needed them to be for either your customer or, or even for yourself internally.

If somebody had brought this to you, how would it have changed your experience at Bright Core building it? Oh my gosh. What would, what would've been the actual tangible effects that you think you would've seen?  

Phil: Without, I have no doubt that had someone brought me DevStride to Bright Core five years ago, Bright Core would be a much larger, more successful company than it is today.

Yeah. There were a number of struggles we ran into in our project management that were unsolvable because existing software solutions do not allow you to solve the problem. And so there were, there were alls of knock on effects from that for like, you know, delayed launches or a product that I thought would be ready, and then it wasn't ready in time.

So you didn't get the ROI when you thought you would and all those things. And it would, it would've fundamentally changed the economics of that. I would, I mean, of course there's no way to replay history and know how things would be played out. My gut sense is that that bright core would be 400% the size that it is if it had had access to this tool because of the, the amount of, of, you know, rework that was required, managing all that manually.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Who, who's kind of the main, you know, buyer for DevStride? Is it specific individuals within a team? Is it multiple team members? Super curious about the enterprise sales process for your product in particular. Because I feel like it, it. It, it can touch a lot of different organizations, a lot of different teams, and really affect positively obviously the overall kind of development of, of products for customers, but also, you know, the efficiencies of teams who's kind of the main stakeholder or, or decision maker or whatever you wanna call them who's mainly affected by this product.

Phil: Yeah, so the people who would most frequently be making the purchase would be your cto, your C chief product officer, cpo, your cio, possibly your coo depending on how involved they are in actual product development. So they tend to be more on the admin side. Yeah. You know, every company's structured differently.

You'll also have teams where the, the company is so large that the C-suite doesn't do any management of any real products. And instead they're managing a super high level portfolio and they've delegated down to some VPs that are then managing big large groups. But generally someone that is responsible.

There's always someone in, or a group of someones in every team who's responsible for reporting back to executive management, to the board, and to the key stakeholders, which are frequently customers. There's always some, some group of people responsible for reporting. What are we doing? How long's it gonna take?

What did we do recently? How much did it cost? And are we on time ? And so all of that, answering that, that set of questions, whoever's responsible for that is the purchaser of our software. But then one of the challenges that we have is that then you then have to, our software's then utilized by the entire organization.

So all the engineers go use it, all the product managers use it, all the product owners use it. The Scrum masters use it, actual coaches use it. And so we have a large group of stakeholders. That we need to convince that this is a, is really going to be the thing we promise it will be. Mm-hmm. . But ultimately the decider will probably be someone in the C-suite in the technology of, you know, information. Product role.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And, and I know recently you launched, I think the product you said was back in August of this year which is super exciting to see that it's now out in the market and people are adopting it. Tell us a little bit about the traction. What are some of the customers that you have, if, if you're able to name any and how are they being affected?

Positively affected by DevStride. And also what is the process an onboarding, an enterprise customer look like within your company? Because I, I'm assuming it's, it's extremely involved having to not only get people to adopt and, and add information into DevStride but also to actually see the results, get them to a high kind of usability of, of the product.

Phil: Yeah. Yeah, so one quick correction on that. We, we closed the very first dollar of our funding round in August. We didn't actually close the funding round for about 60 days. So it closed in August, September. At the end of September in the very beginning of October, we launched our paywall. So our paywalls been live now for four weeks.

And in those four weeks we, we've gained a handful of customers, not a whole lot yet, . It's still really small, really early. No enterprises yet. Because again, we're so early four, you know, four weeks in, it takes a long time to build those relationships. Yeah. But we do have some early customers in some that are organic that have come to us through websites and through things just like this podcast.

And they'll hear about us and they'll, they'll click on our website and, and join and the early user to gimme this really, really positive feedback. I think one of the things that we're overcoming right now is this problem of, would you tell me what's going on across all my teams, or tell me what's going on across all my products, or tell me what's going on.

That problem has been so elusive for technology and product leaders that I think when I say, Hey, I've got this problem solved. Essentially people have a tendency to think, maybe it's snake oil, , like they're not sure you've actually solved this problem. And so, so right now I'm in the process of going to some leaders in some more influential places and saying, No, look, this really is solved here.

This will really do the thing you need it to do. So I'm expecting that in three to six months, somewhere. We'll start seeing some larger customers adopt. It's gonna take time for that to happen. Yeah. But the early feedback is super positive. People love it. They're, you know, so far we haven't anybody churn, which is great.

People are staying on the system. They like it. So I dunno, we'll just find out. It's just, it's so early. We're in the first four weeks of, of being live that I'm not sure yet.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. With the experience from, from Bright Core to now, what are some of the lessons you've learned that you feel are, are really helping you kind of, I guess I don't wanna say manage the startup more or better or anything like that, but kind of use what you've learned, the skills and tools to expedite either the learning process in the product market fit kind of customer acquisition and things like that.

Yeah. What, what are some of the lessons that you've taken from that experience and, and are really, you know, using to your advantage now?  

Phil: Yeah. So things that I'm doing much better this time. I have been incredibly disciplined this time around because I, I ran a large company before, I know most, not all, but most of the big business gotchas.

Yeah. In terms of, I know what, what infrastructure should be set up now versus later. So things like having a really button down p and l. Having a really button down payroll system, making sure they have compliance and taxes and all those things lined up. Things that a lot of founders don't think about until like year three

And they're like, Wait, wait. And then they got all these fines, it's a mess. And then their admin department explodes with way too many people. Then they have to pair back. And that's a whole thing that happens a lot. I feel like I'm really good at those things. I'm also really good now at building and managing a team.

I've managed very large teams for a broad scope, and so our team at DevStride is phenomenal. I mean, I, we barely have to. , we communicate regularly, but I, if we didn't, I think we would all walk away, come back to the computer in three months and still all be in exactly the same place, , because we're just so aligned as a team and we were able to sort of hand pick people we wanted to come work with us.

So things are all much, much better. Yes. I also have avoided the mistake that I made last time at Bright Core because our customers were our early funding source. We. Overly specific to certain customers, and then we paid a price later trying to take very particular functionality and make it more generic so that it was more broadly applicable in the industry.

Yeah, that was a real pain point for us at Bre Core, always, and we've avoided all of those pitfalls with death stride. . So Dev Sri is, you know, massively scalable. Everything is buttoned down. If tomorrow we got a big giant enterprise customer, we would all know what to do, where to go, where to run. It's, it's like, it's like the map is there, the playbook is there and it's lined out.

Yeah. Have you said that there's something we're doing worse at Dev Sri than we did at Bright Core? At Bright Core, again, because I had the luxury of hanging around in an industry for years and years and years and years and building up a customer base. Yeah. I started Bright. With a lot of customers in my, in my back pocket and this time I went to, to market with a product and now I'm going to get the customers.

And so the part that is, you know, a learning process for me right now is how to go get those customers after you have products instead of doing it the other way around, which is how I did it. The time before. And so, so that part is harder this time, but virtually everything else is easier. .  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. What are some ways you know, that's one thing as, as a founder that I'm, I think always struggling with is the client acquisition piece.

What are some ways that you found successful in acquiring new customers? What strategies are using that, that you think worked well and then what hasn't worked so well?

Phil: Yeah, Yeah. So things that work really. Almost. So a piece of advice that I, I ask frequently, What's something you wish would've known when you were younger?

And I frequently, my answer is it's who you know, not what you know. It matters more. Yeah. And so I will say that one of the things that works the very best for customer acquisition, again, if you're an enterprise, it's not the case. If you're in consumer level is totally different. Yeah. But if you're an enterprise, It is.

It's who you know and who you know has a lot to do with simply building relationships, which just takes time and presence. You need to keep being there. You need to invest in the people. You need to reach out, you need to talk to them. You need to show up to their events. You need to speak when you can.

You need to do all of those things. Mm-hmm. , because the more you are a fixture in a particular vertical or. The more respected you are, the less you feel like a, a rogue element that someone's taking a chance on. You feel like a trusted party. So that works really, really well. Another thing that works really, really well is establishing yourself as an authority with content.

And so at DevStride and at Bright Core, both we had a meaningful marketing function. That was, that was based on writing authoritative content and constantly putting ourselves out there as a thought leader, as somebody who knows what we're doing in the space and, and knows what we're talking about that's really effective and really helpful.

Yeah. What doesn't work is building a product and sitting back and hoping someone comes and uses it. That does not work at all. It doesn't matter. You could have the greatest product. You, you could build transporters from Star Trek, which, you know, should trans revolutionize the world and you could sit in your home and die in obscurity unless you go out and find customers.

So, so you really have to be active in the process of recruiting your customer base and retaining your customer base. It's not a passive thing. It's very much an act of go get them now. And that requires a whole, a whole go to market.  

Julian: Yeah. What are some of the biggest risks that DevStride faces today?

Phil: Our biggest risk would be that we built a fabulous product and we just don't get enough market traction. Because we're in a space right now where there are a lot of people in the broader project management space. No one is doing what we're doing. When I provide insight across a bunch of teams and across a bunch a lot of products what we're doing is very unique in that way.

But broadly, when someone says, What category of software do you fit in? You have to relate it to something they. And if you say, Well, you know, it's project management, but there's all these other things, project management, and there's all these other things probably Yes. And is better. So project management and also give all these dimensional insights cause oh, project management, that's Jira and Ric and Asana and click up.

And I already have five of those. You know, like you do have a work management tool, you don't have anything like this. This is different and it's better on a lot of fronts. And so, so it's that. It, it, it's, for us, the biggest risk is making sure we differentiate clearly enough in our target market's minds.

They. Why we are different so that the right customers show up and want to work with us.  

Julian: Yeah. What day to day, or I guess overall, what makes your job hard?

Phil: My job hard. Gosh, so many things. At the moment we're a small company still. We have there's seven of us full-time and another 12 or so contractors that work in some, you know, partial part-time capacity.

It's a small team relative to my former team of 350 full-time staff people. And so there is one of the things that makes our job hard is contact switching. I have to do a lot of contact switching right now where I'll jump on this podcast as more of a representative of our brand and then I'll hang this up and I'll go visit with the capital partner and then I'll come back and I'll do an hour of product design and you know, sort of that, that rapid contact switching all the time takes a lot of agility.

You know, mentally to be able to do that, and it's hard to stay sharp all the time. That, that's tricky. Yeah. Another one is because we were, we did a pree round, so we raised money before we had revenue, and now we're just going to start revenue. So of course for any founder in, if you know anything at all, you should be.

Plenty. You know, you gotta like think all the time and obsess about how am I going to go get revenue if you don't have a lot of revenue? And that's the point of your business is to go generate a lot of cash And and so, so that is certainly a hard thing too. I had already built that at Bright Core for years and years ago, and I was sitting on, you know, over that 25 million million or so in, in annual revenue by the time I exited the company.

And so it was, you know, there was no such thing as we don't generate revenue. We'd already done that. Now that's new. And so, but you know, I think both of those things, I view both of those as challenges that are exciting to work on for me. Yeah. I enjoy the solving the puzzle and meeting customer needs and building something that I feel like has value from nothing.

A lot more than I enjoy incrementally tweaking dials on something that I've already built. Yeah. How do you stay. Oh me, Oh gosh. I go, it would be a subjective question whether I am sharper not. But the for the things I do to try to stay sharp certainly I'm very involved in the day to day operations of the business.

I talk to a lot of people every day. Like I said earlier, relationships matter. Virtually daily I have lunch with a, either a capital partner or a founder or a business leader somewhere so that I'm able to think about their business as well and gain perspective outside of my own. I listen to 2030 podcasts every week.

I read a lot of books. I then, I also, I'm a musician and I play music as well, that gives me sort of a creative outlet. And then I'm a dad and a husband, and so have a family. And you know, between all those things, I feel like I get a good amount of you know, I round robin through the various parts of your brain and your person that you want to activate and, and then of course try to stay in decent shape and work out and all those kinds of things.

And it feels like right now I do an okay job of balancing all those things, though of course there's always plenty of room for improvement.

Julian: Echoed something that was super important and, and something that was discussed from another founder who had kind of, not a similar background, but you know, had a success in Yeah. And then is starting a new product and, and company and which is to, you know, kind of handle your job function, but also find a balance with, he's like, I forgot what he said.

He, he was from the uk, but he was like, you know, do your job and then do your sport. And the sentiment was just, you know, find the balance, find the interest in other things to really kind of, It's like reinvigorate the motivation and honestly content or content switch enough off of your project so that you can have your mind able to, you know, whether it's get some concrete memory kind of stored in, in your long term memory or, or you know, kind be productive in other areas.

Long term vision wise, if everything goes well. Where do you see DevStride kind of going to be?

Phil: Yeah, so I mean, assuming everything goes well I would like for us to be a, a major, major player in the project of work, work management space for enterprise. I very much want to see. Any company out there who has a lot of different initiatives moving in parallel, a lot of different key stakeholders to keep happy, selecting our, our product and our, our platform in order to help them manage that, that what I would hope for.

You know, and of course we'll just see. Time will tell whether we're able to go out and execute on that vision or not. We'll, we'll learn. .  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I know we're, we're close to time here, but a a, a selfish but unselfish question cause I think my audience gets a lot out of it. From founders, you mentioned books.

What books or people have influenced you the most, whether it was early in your career or, or currently now?  

Phil: Oh my gosh, so many of them. So one of those that I mention frequently is Thinking Fast and Slow by Danny Conman. Describes the logical fallacies. That one's helpful because I'm a, a computer scientist as a background and, and my, I'm a very analytical brain and I have a tendency to want to treat people.

Programs where if I just tweak the variables, I'll get the output that I want. And that's not how people work. And so what I loved about thinking fast and slow is that that it goes through and, and describes in detail all of the ways that psychologists sort of documented that, that human beings aren't rational and, and gives you sort of a model for the different ways human beings aren't rational actors.

So you have something to hook on into. Similarly, I read a book called The Righteous Mind that I really. That was all about the difference between people who, who take different like political stances, different religious stances, things like that. And, and it sort of makes a really compelling case that there are different sort of base psychologies that you're born with and people tend to not deviate from those very much.

And so that one helped me understand that. Again, cause I'm an engineer, I always wanted to think that if I just designed a little bit better of a mouse trap, I could get everything to fall the way I wanted it. And the book, The Righteous Mind really helped me understand that instead, people are born wired with a whole set of beliefs and predispositions that you're unlikely to unwind.

And so you need to accept the world as it is. As opposed to trying to change the entire world to bend to your creative inspirational vision somewhere, it's not really how it works. And I've been much better at managing both people and customers and capital partners and everyone since I sort of internalized the message that, hey, you're not gonna go out and change everyone around you.

You need to change. And there's a whole bunch of others I could go on for hours. , I love Peter Teal's zero to one. The process of going from nothing to something. You know, and so there's a lot of really great books out there that are just awesome. .  

Julian: Yeah, Phil. Well, thank you so much. I know we're at time and, and I think we could talk hours on length in terms of experience, strategy and, and everything that really goes into building companies.

And and, and I'm really thankful for learning from your previous success, but also you know, the honesty about the, the challenges you're facing now and how you're overcoming them. So I hope you enjoyed yourself and thank you again for being on the Behind Company Lines podcast.  

Phil: Of course. Thanks so much for having me on.

I really, appreciate it. Of course.  

Julian: Oh, last bit before I forget. Yeah. Give us your plugs. Where, where can we find and support your product? Give us your LinkedIn, your websites quickly before we end the show. And then your Twitters as well. Anywhere we can support the vision and.  

Phil: Yeah, so you can find all of that www.devrstride.com.

That's D E V S T R I D e.com. And then you'll find links to all our socials down below there. And you can also click right there on devry.com and you can subscribe to our app. Right now we have a 14 day free trial and we have a limited time offer since we're very new right now, where if you sign up for the app right now to want to do a trial.

I or one of the other founders will hop on with you personally and help you set it up and configure it all together. And it's zero pressure thing, just, we have the time and capacity right now to do it, and we want to hold our, the hands of our early customers. So by all means, please go to the website, send it for the app, click on the thing and reach out.

And if you ever wanna get ahold of me, I'm Phil, phil@devstride.com, and you can send me an email anytime you want.  

Julian: Awesome. Thank you again, Phil.  

Phil: All right, Julian. Thanks so much, man. Yep.

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