Meeting Title: Brainforge Team Introduction and Goals Date: 2026-03-03 Meeting participants: Brylle Girang, Samuel Roberts
WEBVTT
1 00:02:57.000 ⇒ 00:02:58.360 Brylle Girang: Hey, Sam!
2 00:03:02.170 ⇒ 00:03:04.530 Brylle Girang: Oh, I can’t hear you, I’m not sure.
3 00:03:08.220 ⇒ 00:03:11.329 Brylle Girang: No, there is… yeah, there, there we go, I can hear you.
4 00:03:11.330 ⇒ 00:03:18.490 Samuel Roberts: There you go, yeah, the mic… I forget the mic sometimes. It has a very sensitive button, and when I move it, half the time I hit it, and I don’t realize it.
5 00:03:18.850 ⇒ 00:03:20.820 Brylle Girang: Is that a boom… is that a boom mic?
6 00:03:21.130 ⇒ 00:03:25.000 Samuel Roberts: It’s just, I… so I’ve been having a lot of issues, so this is my webcam up here, obviously.
7 00:03:25.000 ⇒ 00:03:25.460 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
8 00:03:25.460 ⇒ 00:03:29.440 Samuel Roberts: That mic… Half the time just doesn’t work.
9 00:03:29.870 ⇒ 00:03:31.010 Brylle Girang: Oh…
10 00:03:31.010 ⇒ 00:03:38.410 Samuel Roberts: And so I got a dedicated mic just to have something, because I was getting very frustrated with it.
11 00:03:38.410 ⇒ 00:03:40.500 Brylle Girang: The sound is amazing.
12 00:03:40.690 ⇒ 00:03:41.219 Brylle Girang: It’s very…
13 00:03:41.220 ⇒ 00:03:47.590 Samuel Roberts: Good, okay, yeah, I wasn’t… it’s not… I didn’t get, like, a crazy nice one or anything, I just needed something dedicated, and it seems to be working pretty well.
14 00:03:47.590 ⇒ 00:03:51.690 Brylle Girang: Yeah, it works! Nice meeting you! I’m really happy that we get the chance to.
15 00:03:51.920 ⇒ 00:03:53.580 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
16 00:03:53.580 ⇒ 00:04:00.659 Brylle Girang: So, I just want to start this, you know, how’s Brain Forge right now? How are you with Brain Forge?
17 00:04:01.600 ⇒ 00:04:06.940 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, I mean, good. It’s crazy to think, so I’ve… I started, like, in July?
18 00:04:07.360 ⇒ 00:04:10.260 Samuel Roberts: So it’s been a while, and it’s been…
19 00:04:10.640 ⇒ 00:04:12.320 Samuel Roberts: Good. I mean, it’s been, like…
20 00:04:12.440 ⇒ 00:04:18.129 Samuel Roberts: I don’t realize how long it’s been, basically, you know what I mean? Like, it feels like we’re doing so much,
21 00:04:18.290 ⇒ 00:04:26.529 Samuel Roberts: it’s… it’s different for me, because I’m not used to client work. I… I kind of come from a startup background, more product, like, building a, you know.
22 00:04:26.680 ⇒ 00:04:41.059 Samuel Roberts: a product we’re gonna sell kind of thing. So it’s taken a little bit of adjustment to have the… kind of the context switching between clients. Yeah. But the work is great, the people are great, you know, I’m enjoying… I’m enjoying it a lot.
23 00:04:42.110 ⇒ 00:04:45.130 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, I mean, a lot of changes, you know, like, we’ve… we’ve…
24 00:04:45.290 ⇒ 00:04:50.689 Samuel Roberts: grown, people have come, people have left, like, so it’s… but it’s, you know, it’s been…
25 00:04:52.000 ⇒ 00:05:06.959 Samuel Roberts: it’s been… I’m trying to think what the word here is… like, I like… I mean, the team I’m working with, you know, like Casey Mustafa and Pranav now, like, they’re… they’re great. I like working with them. And that’s who I interact with most of the time, you know, on the stand-ups and stuff, but, yeah, it’s been good. How about you?
26 00:05:07.370 ⇒ 00:05:16.499 Brylle Girang: That is amazing. My first 3 weeks here, and it doesn’t feel like 3 weeks. I echo you there, it feels like a lot of time, and I think it’s.
27 00:05:16.500 ⇒ 00:05:17.770 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, yeah.
28 00:05:17.910 ⇒ 00:05:21.020 Brylle Girang: Because of the pace that we’re moving, right?
29 00:05:21.290 ⇒ 00:05:25.889 Brylle Girang: So much things get done within a day, that’s really amazing.
30 00:05:26.580 ⇒ 00:05:27.130 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.
31 00:05:27.380 ⇒ 00:05:31.330 Brylle Girang: I’m in the right place, I would say. I came from…
32 00:05:31.720 ⇒ 00:05:35.150 Brylle Girang: I also came from a startup. This is actually my…
33 00:05:35.420 ⇒ 00:05:44.730 Brylle Girang: my second official job out of my first company. I just graduated 3 years ago as an electronics engineer.
34 00:05:44.860 ⇒ 00:05:45.920 Samuel Roberts: Nice.
35 00:05:46.660 ⇒ 00:05:50.319 Brylle Girang: My first job was in the customer experience space.
36 00:05:50.530 ⇒ 00:05:55.649 Brylle Girang: Which is why I also love, you know, communicating with people, teaching them things, training them.
37 00:05:55.650 ⇒ 00:05:56.000 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.
38 00:05:56.520 ⇒ 00:05:59.120 Brylle Girang: just really… It’s fate.
39 00:05:59.480 ⇒ 00:06:00.539 Brylle Girang: And… yeah.
40 00:06:00.540 ⇒ 00:06:01.370 Samuel Roberts: Good, yeah.
41 00:06:01.700 ⇒ 00:06:18.039 Brylle Girang: this is… the culture has been really supportive so far, which is amazing. I really hope that we get to move in the same pace, the same… the same care, once we’re more than 20 people in, so I’m really excited.
42 00:06:18.040 ⇒ 00:06:32.909 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, I… I… I do… I also really appreciate that, because I’ve been… I’ve been on the other side. I asked the founders of various things, and you know, I’ve… I’ve founded a few different startups at different points, and the one that kind of grew the biggest…
43 00:06:33.330 ⇒ 00:06:44.449 Samuel Roberts: I think we had 40 people at one point. This was a hair care company, so not the tech side of stuff. It’s a whole… it’s a whole other story, I’m happy to get into it, but, basically, like, thinking about culture and…
44 00:06:44.600 ⇒ 00:06:49.900 Samuel Roberts: You know, people’s daily work days and what that’s like is…
45 00:06:50.010 ⇒ 00:06:53.590 Samuel Roberts: is important, and I think a lot of companies don’t think about it till it’s…
46 00:06:53.790 ⇒ 00:07:02.239 Samuel Roberts: oh, there’s already 50 people, there’s already some… and now, like, oh yeah, let’s, let’s put this together. You know, but it’s important to think about early on, and I feel like that’s been…
47 00:07:02.610 ⇒ 00:07:04.189 Samuel Roberts: Handled very well here.
48 00:07:04.760 ⇒ 00:07:08.940 Brylle Girang: I am curious, you mentioned that it’s a hair care company, is that right?
49 00:07:08.940 ⇒ 00:07:13.179 Samuel Roberts: Yeah. Yeah, I worked on a hair care company, so we made, we made hair care products,
50 00:07:13.650 ⇒ 00:07:18.889 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, it’s a weird journey. I, so, full background on me. I studied mechanical engineering.
51 00:07:19.050 ⇒ 00:07:23.850 Samuel Roberts: And physics and history and philosophy of Science. I was busy in college.
52 00:07:23.850 ⇒ 00:07:30.610 Brylle Girang: Wow. After college, I got into startups, I started my own company with a friend, I joined another company as an engineer.
53 00:07:30.630 ⇒ 00:07:46.769 Samuel Roberts: I did a program here called Venture for America that placed me with a startup in Cleveland, where I am. And then, because of that program, I knew other people in the startup world. Another friend was starting a hair care company and needed someone with a little more,
54 00:07:47.000 ⇒ 00:07:48.700 Samuel Roberts: Of an analytical mind.
55 00:07:48.840 ⇒ 00:08:08.089 Samuel Roberts: And so, I was doing… I was freelancing, doing web development at that point, and so I, I started helping her out, and 5 years later, we were running a hair care company. We grew, we did, like, $5 million in revenue one year. We got up to, like, 40 people between, production and customer service, and marketing, and…
56 00:08:08.200 ⇒ 00:08:14.259 Samuel Roberts: fulfillment, and all this other stuff. And I basically ran… I was COO, so I basically ran all the internal stuff.
57 00:08:14.480 ⇒ 00:08:20.670 Samuel Roberts: I eventually realized I don’t want to be in hair care forever, I miss the tech stuff.
58 00:08:20.690 ⇒ 00:08:22.989 Brylle Girang: Yeah. So I left that company.
59 00:08:23.880 ⇒ 00:08:26.300 Samuel Roberts: To basically get back into tech, and that’s where, you know.
60 00:08:26.530 ⇒ 00:08:41.670 Samuel Roberts: I was in London for a couple years after that, I worked in another company there, came back, tried to figure out what I wanted to do next. I, you know, I’m married now, I have a, 8-month-old, yeah, he’s 8, 8-month-old baby. He just turned 8 months, that’s why I’m trying to remember.
61 00:08:41.669 ⇒ 00:08:49.400 Samuel Roberts: And so, you know, it’s a different world, I… I don’t really… I wasn’t excited to, like, start my own thing right now, but I wanted to be in this kind of environment still.
62 00:08:49.610 ⇒ 00:08:52.449 Samuel Roberts: And so Brainforge was kind of the perfect fit, yeah.
63 00:08:52.950 ⇒ 00:08:55.880 Brylle Girang: That is an amazing charity, wow. Wow.
64 00:08:55.880 ⇒ 00:09:01.939 Samuel Roberts: It’s been… it’s been… it’s been something, yeah. It’s weird to step back like that and think about it, because it’s crazy, yeah.
65 00:09:02.270 ⇒ 00:09:05.890 Brylle Girang: So, I’m currently interested in, like.
66 00:09:06.080 ⇒ 00:09:10.890 Brylle Girang: development, too. I think this was… this was an interest that was…
67 00:09:11.200 ⇒ 00:09:23.210 Brylle Girang: a bit… how do you call that? A bit contained when I was in my previous… previous role, because there was little to no development side there. But right now, when I joined Brainforge, that’s something that
68 00:09:24.080 ⇒ 00:09:25.590 Brylle Girang: It was reignited.
69 00:09:26.120 ⇒ 00:09:32.480 Brylle Girang: I’m trying to get into it now, and I’m hoping that my main goal is to
70 00:09:32.700 ⇒ 00:09:41.740 Brylle Girang: learned full stack, you know, in a couple of years, maybe? So, you are, as a full-stack developer, like, how was the journey?
71 00:09:42.950 ⇒ 00:09:45.260 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, I…
72 00:09:45.390 ⇒ 00:09:51.770 Samuel Roberts: so I mentioned I came from a mechanical engineering background, so I was not a developer, I was not a coder, but I had done enough
73 00:09:52.250 ⇒ 00:09:53.909 Samuel Roberts: programming that I…
74 00:09:54.050 ⇒ 00:10:05.800 Samuel Roberts: I knew just enough, like, I felt comfortable programming, but not necessarily web development. Yeah. And so, my first role was an interesting one, because it was…
75 00:10:06.240 ⇒ 00:10:10.460 Samuel Roberts: It was a Node.js, Back end, which… this is back in, like.
76 00:10:11.860 ⇒ 00:10:28.720 Samuel Roberts: 2013, I think, so Node was relatively new. You know, I knew what Python was, I knew what JavaScript was, but I didn’t understand that Node was different in terms of the browser versus the server side. And so I learned a ton about how the web works, how web development works, how servers work.
77 00:10:28.740 ⇒ 00:10:32.639 Samuel Roberts: Without really getting into a lot of the, like.
78 00:10:33.680 ⇒ 00:10:37.760 Samuel Roberts: front-end stuff, and then I left that role having, kind of.
79 00:10:38.350 ⇒ 00:10:42.040 Samuel Roberts: built up these JavaScript skills, and
80 00:10:43.510 ⇒ 00:11:00.500 Samuel Roberts: when I was working on my next company, decided, okay, we’re gonna be full-stack JavaScript, there’s no reason to bounce around, I don’t want to learn, you know, two languages just because I have a different front-end, back-end kind of thing, so that’s when I got really into Node in the backend. This was kind of pre…
81 00:11:00.950 ⇒ 00:11:20.580 Samuel Roberts: maybe not quite pre-react, so I don’t know if you know, like, the frameworks, but I was building an Angular, so it was a little bit different. But I, you know, we worked on a company like that, that eventually we had to shut down, just because we didn’t have enough money to keep going. It’s a whole story there I’m happy to tell, but basically, like, I just did it, you know what I mean? Like, I knew…
82 00:11:20.730 ⇒ 00:11:34.540 Samuel Roberts: we had a lot of talk about whether or not we should hire developers as, like, two founders trying to build a company, and basically the plan was, well, I’ll build, and you’ll go sell, as my co-founder and I. And so I just kind of got into it.
83 00:11:34.790 ⇒ 00:11:40.069 Samuel Roberts: it’s, so I’m basically… what I’m saying is I’m self-taught in that way, you know, I.
84 00:11:40.070 ⇒ 00:11:40.660 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
85 00:11:41.160 ⇒ 00:11:43.909 Samuel Roberts: I, you know, there’s so much stuff online,
86 00:11:43.960 ⇒ 00:11:54.399 Samuel Roberts: there’s all kinds of resources, and especially with AI now, like, it’s a different world than it was then, so learning. What I find is it’s nice about the coding agents is that they can do things for you.
87 00:11:54.410 ⇒ 00:12:04.100 Samuel Roberts: But I… I realize I prompt them in a way where I’m trying to get… I get… I want them to explain things a lot more to me than maybe sometimes. There’s been very few times where I’ve just, like.
88 00:12:04.900 ⇒ 00:12:21.510 Samuel Roberts: let it run and build a whole little side project for me. I’ve done that a handful of times, just when it doesn’t matter, but when I want to learn something, I kind of, like, okay, why this? Why that, you know? Whereas back in the day, it was a lot more tutorials, a lot more experimentation on my own.
89 00:12:21.730 ⇒ 00:12:23.390 Samuel Roberts: And just kind of staying…
90 00:12:24.130 ⇒ 00:12:41.150 Samuel Roberts: current with what’s out there, because it’s so… especially, like, front-end JavaScript stuff changes all the time. It’s settled a little bit more now, but there was a period of time where new frameworks were coming out all the time, and do you need this one? Is it better than that one? All that kind of stuff. But, I mean, the best thing is just to do it, and now…
91 00:12:41.280 ⇒ 00:12:45.709 Samuel Roberts: And I did this again, because I… when I left the haircare company and moved to London,
92 00:12:46.130 ⇒ 00:12:47.779 Samuel Roberts: I had to get back into the…
93 00:12:48.250 ⇒ 00:13:06.809 Samuel Roberts: the coding world, and things had changed a lot. I don’t know if you know any of the history of Node and JavaScript, but, like, now we have TypeScript, which is, you know, not as big when I was first coding. You know, React became the main thing, and so I… JavaScript itself changed a lot. They added new features to the language, so…
94 00:13:07.050 ⇒ 00:13:09.150 Samuel Roberts: when I went from, like, 20…
95 00:13:09.320 ⇒ 00:13:12.780 Samuel Roberts: 15, starting the hair care company, to 2020.
96 00:13:13.070 ⇒ 00:13:15.760 Samuel Roberts: I basically was, like, 2021 even.
97 00:13:16.030 ⇒ 00:13:23.000 Samuel Roberts: I couldn’t read JavaScript anymore, because all the new code was different, so I had to relearn a lot of stuff. Even though I knew how to do it, it was just like…
98 00:13:23.020 ⇒ 00:13:38.659 Samuel Roberts: the… the mental muscle of being able to just scan code. But yeah, you just practice. I built a bunch of little apps, before I found a role in London, and yeah, just kind of experiment and play around, and I… you know, I don’t know if I…
99 00:13:39.170 ⇒ 00:13:43.350 Samuel Roberts: Have any other specifically, like, good, like, this-is-how-you-do-it kind of advice, but just.
100 00:13:43.350 ⇒ 00:13:44.040 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
101 00:13:44.040 ⇒ 00:13:45.170 Samuel Roberts: into it, you know?
102 00:13:45.730 ⇒ 00:13:46.090 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.
103 00:13:46.090 ⇒ 00:13:49.470 Brylle Girang: So he started… he started with backend, right?
104 00:13:50.110 ⇒ 00:14:01.519 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, so I was doing, the company I worked for… it was really interesting, it was founded by this one guy, he was an engineer, he… he was a mechanical engineer, actually, but he…
105 00:14:02.240 ⇒ 00:14:07.619 Samuel Roberts: The company was making… These small, battery-powered sensors…
106 00:14:08.390 ⇒ 00:14:12.759 Samuel Roberts: That could be used to do energy audits of big buildings.
107 00:14:12.910 ⇒ 00:14:19.660 Samuel Roberts: So if you imagine, like, you got an old building, you want to retrofit it, you need to initially install a bunch of sensors.
108 00:14:19.760 ⇒ 00:14:21.260 Samuel Roberts: Take a baseline.
109 00:14:21.380 ⇒ 00:14:29.199 Samuel Roberts: do the retrofit, and take another baseline, and see how it improved. And he had built these low-cost sensors, so he was, you know.
110 00:14:29.690 ⇒ 00:14:45.199 Samuel Roberts: low-level firmware development kind of stuff, but the entire backend that these things communicated through was written in Node. And so, that was my first exposure to it, was the backend for this sensor network. It wasn’t even a website, you know?
111 00:14:45.500 ⇒ 00:14:54.949 Samuel Roberts: And so I learned how JavaScript worked, I learned about callbacks, and this is before async, await, and all this other stuff, so I learned a lot, just because I… I was doing…
112 00:14:55.130 ⇒ 00:15:00.249 Samuel Roberts: Yeah. Like, JavaScript development, back-end development, but there wasn’t a front-end, it was just server.
113 00:15:00.620 ⇒ 00:15:10.040 Samuel Roberts: or sensors talking. So then when I went to work on my own company, I kind of had the back-end knowledge that I could run the server, and then I learned a lot of the front-end by doing that way.
114 00:15:10.470 ⇒ 00:15:19.319 Brylle Girang: Okay, that makes sense, because all the tutorials, all the courses that I’ve been seeing, they force you to, like, go front and first.
115 00:15:19.340 ⇒ 00:15:20.220 Samuel Roberts: So that…
116 00:15:20.220 ⇒ 00:15:21.649 Brylle Girang: Does that make sense?
117 00:15:21.900 ⇒ 00:15:25.020 Samuel Roberts: It does, and I think there’s… it’s interesting, I think…
118 00:15:25.230 ⇒ 00:15:35.629 Samuel Roberts: it’s… it’s sexier, you know? It’s what you see, it’s what you can… you know, you can go really deep in the CSS and, like, and learn all this stuff about, like, you can build…
119 00:15:35.830 ⇒ 00:15:44.259 Samuel Roberts: the same app, and it looks different, you know, you can do all kinds of things. I also think the backend sometimes is, depending on what you’re doing.
120 00:15:44.550 ⇒ 00:15:48.680 Samuel Roberts: is less exciting. You know, if you’re building a simple…
121 00:15:48.880 ⇒ 00:15:53.499 Samuel Roberts: website with a basic, like, CRUD interface, if you know what I mean by CRUD.
122 00:15:53.500 ⇒ 00:15:53.940 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
123 00:15:55.490 ⇒ 00:16:01.609 Samuel Roberts: there, you know, you can basically just, like, set that up, and you don’t need to build a backend. You know, like, my last company, in London.
124 00:16:01.720 ⇒ 00:16:16.080 Samuel Roberts: we decided to use Supabase, partly because we had to build very little backend, and I was the only developer, so I could spend all the time building the interface that we needed. But then other projects are the other way. So yeah, it’s sometimes hard to find, like, a good, like…
125 00:16:16.170 ⇒ 00:16:21.789 Samuel Roberts: Back-end tutorial, but there’s good tools out there. But digging into them is a little harder, yeah.
126 00:16:22.100 ⇒ 00:16:28.270 Brylle Girang: Okay, okay, that makes sense, that’s helpful. So, what’s your focus right now in Brainforge?
127 00:16:29.030 ⇒ 00:16:44.210 Samuel Roberts: Oh, man. So, I mean, it’s interesting, because this is the balance between the client work and the, like, internal platform work, and I’ve been kind of pulled in different directions at different times, and so, what I’ve been trying to do more recently, is kind of…
128 00:16:44.260 ⇒ 00:17:01.670 Samuel Roberts: guide the client work a little bit more, rather than doing it, which frees me up a little bit to help with the internal stuff more, which is also, like, more guiding in a lot of ways. There’s definitely development time, but I had to kind of learn… I come, again, from the startup world, I’ve been very much, like, on a team of me and, like, a designer.
129 00:17:01.670 ⇒ 00:17:09.560 Samuel Roberts: Or me, a designer, and, like, one other junior dev. And so, I had to learn a little bit more, and this is something I learned in the hair care company, too, but I didn’t…
130 00:17:10.119 ⇒ 00:17:28.220 Samuel Roberts: apply it technically was delegating and handing off tasks and trusting people to get them done, because, you know, I built… the company in London was called Moot, M-O-O-T, and we built a collaborative dashboard. So, you could have, a bunch of…
131 00:17:28.329 ⇒ 00:17:37.999 Samuel Roberts: tiles, and they were all real-time connected with other people, so you could have a shared whiteboard, and, like, a Google Docs-type note, and it was video calling. Really, you know.
132 00:17:38.770 ⇒ 00:17:45.660 Samuel Roberts: cool stuff, and we built a lot of it very quickly, and I did all of it, and it felt like a lot of work.
133 00:17:45.670 ⇒ 00:18:00.699 Samuel Roberts: But I’m used to moving quickly like that, so sometimes when I have to be like, okay, here’s a task, go do that, come back to me, we’ll talk about it, I’ll help you figure out how to do it, is a little bit of a different skill. Like, I have the technical knowledge, but I don’t necessarily, have the comfort to be, like.
134 00:18:00.890 ⇒ 00:18:07.739 Samuel Roberts: I know how to do it, but I need you to figure out how you think how to do it, especially, you know, with…
135 00:18:07.930 ⇒ 00:18:21.660 Samuel Roberts: with people that I… I don’t want to just tell them, go do it this way, and, you know, why… why not just… I could tell the AI to do that. I want someone to learn and figure that out. And so, there’s a little bit of balance there, because I,
136 00:18:21.930 ⇒ 00:18:31.009 Samuel Roberts: the guiding versus the doing versus the, like, oh, just give it to me, I’ll do it real quick, you know, is interesting for me. So I think there’s a balance. I want to kind of…
137 00:18:31.640 ⇒ 00:18:38.720 Samuel Roberts: keep this level between the internal and the client work, but I also want to… I don’t want to stop coding, either, you know?
138 00:18:38.720 ⇒ 00:18:39.290 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
139 00:18:39.290 ⇒ 00:18:46.140 Samuel Roberts: I like it. So, it’s a good… I’ve been getting there with that balance. It’s been a… it’s been a journey.
140 00:18:46.310 ⇒ 00:18:47.230 Samuel Roberts: But yeah.
141 00:18:47.680 ⇒ 00:18:51.069 Brylle Girang: Yeah, that makes sense. My previous mentor told me that
142 00:18:51.570 ⇒ 00:18:55.419 Brylle Girang: The hardest part when you become a leader is trying to
143 00:18:55.530 ⇒ 00:18:58.740 Brylle Girang: Like, stay away from the tactical stuff.
144 00:18:58.740 ⇒ 00:19:00.820 Samuel Roberts: That’s a really good piece of advice, yes.
145 00:19:00.820 ⇒ 00:19:01.900 Brylle Girang: And actually.
146 00:19:01.900 ⇒ 00:19:02.360 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.
147 00:19:03.370 ⇒ 00:19:08.750 Brylle Girang: focusing on multiplying what you can do with others, right?
148 00:19:08.750 ⇒ 00:19:18.629 Samuel Roberts: That’s good advice, because I didn’t really get advice like that early enough, especially at the hair care company, where I was doing more operations, I was doing… we were doing production of the…
149 00:19:18.880 ⇒ 00:19:25.940 Samuel Roberts: the physical products, we were doing stuff with co-packers, and so I had to learn to kind of…
150 00:19:26.480 ⇒ 00:19:40.490 Samuel Roberts: as COO, like, I had a lot of tasks, but it was also, like, I needed to figure out how I could package things and hire someone to do those, you know? Even though I was doing finances, I was doing operations, I was doing production, I was doing fulfillment, I was doing all these different things.
151 00:19:40.640 ⇒ 00:19:51.989 Samuel Roberts: I had to be, you know, comfortable saying, okay, you are now in charge of the production, here’s everything I know about it, here’s how I learned it, here’s how I know how to make it.
152 00:19:52.550 ⇒ 00:19:58.730 Samuel Roberts: But passing that off after being your task for so long can be really hard.
153 00:19:59.240 ⇒ 00:20:02.010 Samuel Roberts: And so I definitely learned to be…
154 00:20:02.310 ⇒ 00:20:09.530 Samuel Roberts: I don’t want to say comfortable with it, I feel like I learned to be okay with the uncomfortable nature of it. But I’m… yeah, that’s really good advice. I like it.
155 00:20:09.530 ⇒ 00:20:15.930 Brylle Girang: Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Thank you, thank you for walking me through, that’s really helpful. Yeah.
156 00:20:15.930 ⇒ 00:20:16.600 Samuel Roberts: Really?
157 00:20:16.600 ⇒ 00:20:22.290 Brylle Girang: Yeah, so I just wanted to, you know, also give you a sense of what I’m trying to do here in Brainforge.
158 00:20:22.290 ⇒ 00:20:23.799 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, totally, yeah, I would love to hear that.
159 00:20:24.040 ⇒ 00:20:26.829 Brylle Girang: I, I, I believe that…
160 00:20:28.180 ⇒ 00:20:39.900 Brylle Girang: I need to be the bridge between, like, AI nativity and our teams, our people here, because not everyone is yet willing to
161 00:20:40.120 ⇒ 00:20:50.149 Brylle Girang: how do you call that? To submit. Not submit, but not everyone is really willing to, like, let go of what they have been doing for the past 10 years. Yeah.
162 00:20:50.150 ⇒ 00:20:51.390 Samuel Roberts: Definitely. And try…
163 00:20:51.390 ⇒ 00:20:58.650 Brylle Girang: try to… Oh, I can’t find the right words. Try to experiment with whatever’s…
164 00:20:58.650 ⇒ 00:21:00.720 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good way to put it.
165 00:21:01.000 ⇒ 00:21:17.779 Brylle Girang: Yeah, and it’s… it’s understandable, because you mentioned you had a hard time, like, trying to be comfortable, not doing things, and then just trying… telling someone else to do that. That’s the same with almost everyone in the business right now.
166 00:21:18.100 ⇒ 00:21:22.230 Brylle Girang: Currently, we’re at a 25% usage rate when it comes to courses.
167 00:21:22.230 ⇒ 00:21:27.369 Samuel Roberts: I saw, I saw, yeah, I was looking at that, actually, a little bit earlier. I was a little mad I wasn’t in the green, but I, you know.
168 00:21:27.790 ⇒ 00:21:29.040 Samuel Roberts: Like, I’ll get there.
169 00:21:29.040 ⇒ 00:21:34.169 Brylle Girang: It was a… it was a… it was a really high standard when it comes to usage rate, because…
170 00:21:34.170 ⇒ 00:21:39.959 Samuel Roberts: I saw that, yeah, I was like, I saw where my number was in the next one, I was like, oh, wow, we’re, you know, and then Utam’s way up there, you know, yeah.
171 00:21:40.250 ⇒ 00:21:46.450 Brylle Girang: It is, and we want everyone to be green, right? And I’m pretty sure not everyone will be green, but as long as we keep.
172 00:21:46.450 ⇒ 00:21:47.180 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.
173 00:21:47.180 ⇒ 00:21:55.820 Brylle Girang: upping the standards, that’s what we want. So I’m focusing right now on delivery, and that’s why I’m sitting in as an EP for most of the projects.
174 00:21:55.920 ⇒ 00:21:57.870 Samuel Roberts: For most of the clients, rather.
175 00:21:57.870 ⇒ 00:22:02.299 Brylle Girang: Because I also need to build trust with the people.
176 00:22:02.640 ⇒ 00:22:04.970 Brylle Girang: I’m pretty sure that they won’t
177 00:22:05.760 ⇒ 00:22:07.919 Brylle Girang: how do you call this? They won’t be…
178 00:22:09.320 ⇒ 00:22:22.800 Brylle Girang: they won’t be willing to, like, follow or to listen to whatever I’m going to teach if I don’t have a sense of what they’re doing, right? It’s going to be hard to believe in someone that you know.
179 00:22:22.800 ⇒ 00:22:23.690 Samuel Roberts: Right.
180 00:22:23.690 ⇒ 00:22:25.890 Brylle Girang: even do the work, right?
181 00:22:25.890 ⇒ 00:22:26.220 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.
182 00:22:26.220 ⇒ 00:22:30.619 Brylle Girang: That’s why I’m currently sitting in for EPs, and I’m pretty sure that in the
183 00:22:31.000 ⇒ 00:22:44.329 Brylle Girang: the next few months, I’ll be sitting in as CSO, so hopefully I’ll get the chance to. And once I have enough technical knowledge, I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to be sitting in as an SL, but maybe Shadow RS? Yeah, totally.
184 00:22:44.330 ⇒ 00:22:47.149 Samuel Roberts: Cool, yeah, yeah. It’s a good way to learn.
185 00:22:47.150 ⇒ 00:22:54.600 Brylle Girang: really, really excited. I’m pretty sure that you’re not going to be one of the people that I’m going to be pushing AI right now, you’re the AI.
186 00:22:56.130 ⇒ 00:22:58.130 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, well, I don’t know about that, but yeah, yeah.
187 00:22:58.380 ⇒ 00:23:02.799 Brylle Girang: But I’m pretty sure that I will need your help when it comes to, like, figuring things out.
188 00:23:03.260 ⇒ 00:23:17.249 Samuel Roberts: No, this is great, this is great. I’m excited for the way you’re describing this, because this has been stuff Utum and I have talked about, and it’s been… it was a little bit on my plate a bit, and it’s hard, and so I… I couldn’t dedicate the time to…
189 00:23:17.250 ⇒ 00:23:17.830 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
190 00:23:17.830 ⇒ 00:23:18.789 Samuel Roberts: kind of that…
191 00:23:18.930 ⇒ 00:23:34.630 Samuel Roberts: helping people get up to speed, you know? And it’s also hard because, like, I’m glad we’ve leaned on Cursor a little bit, because I use Cursor, obviously, coding, but, like, I’ve been using it for all kinds of things, and I think Utum finally, like, saw that too, but I think getting everyone else to see, like.
192 00:23:34.860 ⇒ 00:23:37.459 Samuel Roberts: You know, it’s good for coding, it’s built for that.
193 00:23:37.990 ⇒ 00:23:43.940 Samuel Roberts: but it’s powerful for other things, but I feel like coding is such a cli…
194 00:23:44.560 ⇒ 00:24:02.249 Samuel Roberts: a clear little domain that AI has revolutionized, it’s hard sometimes to see, well, I’m not coding, I’m doing this, how can it help me? Yeah. People need to… I think people will get it eventually, but it’s definitely not as clear a, like, value,
195 00:24:02.250 ⇒ 00:24:02.860 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
196 00:24:03.110 ⇒ 00:24:06.050 Samuel Roberts: value add. But it’s there, it’s just, it’s not as clear, I think.
197 00:24:06.200 ⇒ 00:24:11.389 Brylle Girang: Yeah, totally, and when you open cursor, you’ll immediately be overwhelmed if you don’t have, like.
198 00:24:11.390 ⇒ 00:24:18.720 Samuel Roberts: That’s the other thing, I’m so used to this, I’m used to the IDEs, I’m used to how to use it, I… yeah, I feel that, I feel that, definitely.
199 00:24:18.720 ⇒ 00:24:19.859 Brylle Girang: Yeah, I’m like…
200 00:24:19.860 ⇒ 00:24:21.739 Samuel Roberts: too comfortable with it, to help.
201 00:24:21.740 ⇒ 00:24:30.720 Brylle Girang: That’s what we’re trying to solve. Like, hey, it might be overwhelming at first, but, you know, just close some tabs, expand the chats, and then you’ll be good.
202 00:24:30.720 ⇒ 00:24:36.579 Samuel Roberts: Yep. Yeah, yeah. That’s one thing I like about it, because I’ve played with some other tools. I’ve been using the,
203 00:24:36.790 ⇒ 00:24:49.739 Samuel Roberts: the Codex app, which is way more chat-heavy, and I think Cursor will get there a little bit. Like, Cursor’s not gonna lose the IDE nature, but I think they’re gonna hopefully focus a little bit more on
204 00:24:49.930 ⇒ 00:25:03.300 Samuel Roberts: chatting rather than editing, at least gives you the option to. I know they did, they’ve changed the UI a little bit here and there, but I think we’re gonna kinda settle on that, you know, managing multiple agents running at the same time, doing things, rather than…
205 00:25:03.300 ⇒ 00:25:03.870 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
206 00:25:03.870 ⇒ 00:25:08.250 Samuel Roberts: like, the way I started using Cursor was, you know, I started using, you know,
207 00:25:08.410 ⇒ 00:25:11.980 Samuel Roberts: GitHub Copilot, which was just tab completion.
208 00:25:11.980 ⇒ 00:25:12.410 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
209 00:25:12.410 ⇒ 00:25:23.129 Samuel Roberts: And Kirscher still has that, but then when they added the agents, it was chatting, changing, fixing, going back and forth, and I think we’re slowly getting to the point where way more chat, less…
210 00:25:23.420 ⇒ 00:25:33.719 Samuel Roberts: actual coding, or writing, or whatever, or running these actions, other things. But there’s still, yeah, it’s different in Cursor, but,
211 00:25:33.950 ⇒ 00:25:36.610 Samuel Roberts: It can be… it can look right if you need it to, it’s just…
212 00:25:36.610 ⇒ 00:25:37.030 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
213 00:25:37.030 ⇒ 00:25:37.650 Samuel Roberts: Oh, yeah.
214 00:25:37.840 ⇒ 00:25:47.740 Brylle Girang: Yeah, so as I’m seeing this, like, I’ll be the bridge between, you know, you, Utam, all the builders, with all the users.
215 00:25:47.760 ⇒ 00:25:58.889 Brylle Girang: And maybe, I’m going to be the ones to gather their feedback, like, their problems, their challenges, and I’ll be the one to translate it for you, and know them to build, and at the same time.
216 00:25:59.290 ⇒ 00:26:04.140 Brylle Girang: I’m going to be the one to translate it over to them, so that’s how I see our partnerships working.
217 00:26:04.140 ⇒ 00:26:04.760 Samuel Roberts: Great.
218 00:26:04.970 ⇒ 00:26:06.480 Brylle Girang: That’s a good… that’s going to be exciting.
219 00:26:06.480 ⇒ 00:26:07.060 Samuel Roberts: I like that a lot.
220 00:26:07.420 ⇒ 00:26:09.680 Brylle Girang: I am personally excited.
221 00:26:09.680 ⇒ 00:26:14.390 Samuel Roberts: I am too. I’m even more excited now than I was before, after, like, this conversation, so I’m… yeah, it’s good.
222 00:26:14.560 ⇒ 00:26:26.259 Brylle Girang: Yeah, I get to, you know, I get to expose myself for… with the development that’s go… that’s going on, with the data engineering that’s going on. I’m not going to be… this is not going to be, like.
223 00:26:26.480 ⇒ 00:26:33.299 Brylle Girang: My specialization route, but at least it’s going to be… give me enough exposure to know what the hell is going on.
224 00:26:33.490 ⇒ 00:26:34.330 Samuel Roberts: Exactly, exactly.
225 00:26:34.330 ⇒ 00:26:35.949 Brylle Girang: what I really want.
226 00:26:36.440 ⇒ 00:26:37.080 Samuel Roberts: Right, right.
227 00:26:37.430 ⇒ 00:26:43.729 Brylle Girang: So, as an SL, like, how can I help you? Like, what are the things that are…
228 00:26:44.890 ⇒ 00:26:46.510 Samuel Roberts: That’s a good question, because I…
229 00:26:46.510 ⇒ 00:26:47.810 Brylle Girang: Yeah, I definitely…
230 00:26:47.890 ⇒ 00:26:52.499 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, I have to think about this a little bit more, because there’s definitely… I feel like I’m moving…
231 00:26:52.820 ⇒ 00:27:03.429 Samuel Roberts: so much, so fast in doing other things, I haven’t really thought about the processes as much for me. You know, I’m thinking about it for other people sometimes, but not for me. I don’t… I don’t know, I have to… hmm…
232 00:27:05.080 ⇒ 00:27:10.180 Samuel Roberts: I think… Well, I have a… I mean, have you talked to Awash much yet?
233 00:27:10.370 ⇒ 00:27:11.020 Samuel Roberts: How about that?
234 00:27:11.020 ⇒ 00:27:12.579 Brylle Girang: We’ll be talking to OH.
235 00:27:12.580 ⇒ 00:27:28.749 Samuel Roberts: Okay. I think Awash is kind of ahead of me in a little bit, because I was dealing with ABC and Lilo and internal. Now it’s just ABC and internal. But Awash has more… more projects, and he’s not necessarily deeply involved in each one of them.
236 00:27:28.970 ⇒ 00:27:30.260 Samuel Roberts: And so I think…
237 00:27:31.160 ⇒ 00:27:47.959 Samuel Roberts: you know, that’s where we’re gonna get with AI, where there’ll be too many projects, and I’ll be in and out of some, and I’ll be advising on some, but I don’t have an insight into it. And so I think, Awasht… every time a waste brings up a problem, I’m like, oh yeah, I haven’t experienced that yet, because I’m dealing with less overall.
238 00:27:47.960 ⇒ 00:27:48.420 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
239 00:27:48.420 ⇒ 00:27:57.610 Samuel Roberts: Or fewer projects overall, maybe not less, there’s still a lot to do, but, I think there’s definitely some things about, you know, we talked in the,
240 00:27:57.960 ⇒ 00:28:00.789 Samuel Roberts: in the SL meeting with Clarence about…
241 00:28:01.010 ⇒ 00:28:19.340 Samuel Roberts: the Gantt charts, and linear, and keeping those up-to-date, and having, like, a weekly plan, and so I think, you know, for me, it wasn’t as critical, because I am involved in it, so I… even if linear’s not perfectly up-to-date, I knew what was happening, so…
242 00:28:20.030 ⇒ 00:28:36.180 Samuel Roberts: which is okay in the moment, but not long-term. But for Awash, it’s already a pain point, because he’s not daily act… daily involved in everything. His update is the stand-up, and he needs to know what’s going on. And so, I think he’ll have a little bit more, maybe,
243 00:28:36.320 ⇒ 00:28:45.029 Samuel Roberts: where he can be helpful. But I think that’s kind of one of the big things, is keeping… you know, we need to be in the loop on a lot of things, and, you know, we’re making…
244 00:28:45.060 ⇒ 00:29:02.819 Samuel Roberts: strides towards getting, you know, linear tickets more easily organized, and groomed, and updated, and, you know, I was working with Gabe, to get a Slack message after the meeting sent to people with the different tickets, and so I think we’re making progress there, but there’s still an element of, like.
245 00:29:02.940 ⇒ 00:29:09.079 Samuel Roberts: You know, a bunch of tickets is one thing, but, like, organization of them, scheduling of them, you know, making that easier for people,
246 00:29:09.220 ⇒ 00:29:23.439 Samuel Roberts: having checks, maybe, to make sure that that’s been done in some ways, but I think that’s what… that’s what he was worried about, was, you know, I asked people to do it, and it’s not done, and then I’m not updated, and so, you know, I don’t… you don’t necessarily want to be, like, the,
247 00:29:24.080 ⇒ 00:29:35.749 Samuel Roberts: the taskmaster telling everyone, like, you gotta get this done, you gotta… and, like, but it needs to get done, and someone, you know what I mean? So there’s maybe other ways we can nudge people and have them, and make sure there are updates, and have checks and things, maybe that way.
248 00:29:36.610 ⇒ 00:29:44.080 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, I think once you talk with Awash about this stuff, you’ll have a better sense, because, like I said, he’s just, like, a little further down the track.
249 00:29:44.180 ⇒ 00:29:47.349 Samuel Roberts: dealing with more stuff than I’ve had to deal with so far.
250 00:29:47.350 ⇒ 00:29:47.840 Brylle Girang: Okay.
251 00:29:48.540 ⇒ 00:29:54.169 Samuel Roberts: But I think… I think that’s, you know, I want to be prepared for that, and so I think that he’s on the right… the right track with a lot of that.
252 00:29:54.170 ⇒ 00:29:55.730 Brylle Girang: Okay, okay, gotcha.
253 00:29:55.730 ⇒ 00:29:56.299 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, yeah.
254 00:29:56.300 ⇒ 00:30:06.149 Brylle Girang: Thank you for mentioning your project with Gabe. I think I read about that, like, the Slack data generator. I might take some time to try to understand how that works.
255 00:30:06.460 ⇒ 00:30:16.050 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, definitely. I can, you know, there’s, I forget what branch it’s on. I can show you, like, a demo of it, it’s not quite there yet. We’ve been kind of…
256 00:30:16.710 ⇒ 00:30:36.360 Samuel Roberts: we have, like, I’m trying to remember now, this was Thursday, and I was off Friday and Monday. We got it working, it’s sending messages, I… I think it’s going back to linear now, I think that was the last thing I finally got, was that you get a bunch of messages, or you get a bunch… a message with a bunch of tickets, and the idea is you can hit either approve, reject.
257 00:30:36.420 ⇒ 00:30:40.980 Samuel Roberts: Or, reassign and send it to someone else to approve.
258 00:30:41.110 ⇒ 00:30:44.499 Samuel Roberts: That one’s not working yet, but we’re almost there.
259 00:30:44.830 ⇒ 00:30:51.629 Samuel Roberts: And so, there’s a few other functionalities I want to potentially add, but even just having that would be probably pretty helpful, because,
260 00:30:52.490 ⇒ 00:31:06.179 Samuel Roberts: sometimes… we built a ticket generator in the platform, but you have to go there, you gotta do it, you gotta, you know… and so I think in Slack, right, you know, in your face, with an update, with a notification might be better. It’s really interesting, because there’s, you know.
261 00:31:06.610 ⇒ 00:31:09.839 Samuel Roberts: The problems are… mostly…
262 00:31:10.660 ⇒ 00:31:18.600 Samuel Roberts: well, maybe not mostly well-defined, but the problems are somewhat clear, the solutions are less clear, I think. And this is what’s interesting about some of this, is that, like…
263 00:31:19.270 ⇒ 00:31:21.689 Samuel Roberts: Oh, yeah, just after the meeting, generate the tickets.
264 00:31:22.260 ⇒ 00:31:29.549 Samuel Roberts: Okay, but where? Like, who, like, now you have to get several clicks to get in the platform. Okay, maybe Slack. Okay, maybe reassign, like, there’s a lot of, like…
265 00:31:29.690 ⇒ 00:31:47.339 Samuel Roberts: UX stuff that I think is really interesting, because, yeah, you can have the meetings, generate the tickets, and, like, we haven’t changed any of that logic. It’s just, where does it go, and tying it to Slack, like, making it useful for people where they are, rather than, like, an extra step
266 00:31:47.500 ⇒ 00:31:50.439 Samuel Roberts: is, is interesting. I really.
267 00:31:50.440 ⇒ 00:31:50.850 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
268 00:31:50.850 ⇒ 00:32:03.209 Samuel Roberts: So I’m glad we’re getting there. It’s hard, again, because I’m being pulled in different directions with client work and internal work and stuff like that, but, you know, a lot of companies might not even be thinking about that stuff, so it’s good that we’re at least…
269 00:32:03.660 ⇒ 00:32:14.099 Brylle Girang: That is exciting, that is exciting. Yeah. I might talk to Gabe, like, just request for, like, a dive on what the features are, and what…
270 00:32:14.220 ⇒ 00:32:18.749 Brylle Girang: how we are right now, because that’s going to be helpful for the EPs, too.
271 00:32:18.750 ⇒ 00:32:20.020 Samuel Roberts: Definitely, definitely.
272 00:32:20.020 ⇒ 00:32:24.150 Brylle Girang: to take the bulk of updating the tickets out of them. That’s…
273 00:32:24.190 ⇒ 00:32:27.470 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, I think,
274 00:32:27.830 ⇒ 00:32:30.450 Samuel Roberts: I think Friday might have been Gabe’s last day?
275 00:32:34.050 ⇒ 00:32:36.899 Brylle Girang: Sorry, last day, like, with Brainforge? Or…
276 00:32:36.900 ⇒ 00:32:48.850 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, so he was doing, like, part-time work here, part-time work at another company, and I think it was hard for him to just kind of balance it, so, like, from what he seemed to say, like, it just… it might be right now, it might not be… I don’t know, it was a little up in the air.
277 00:32:48.850 ⇒ 00:33:00.650 Samuel Roberts: But he kind of passed some of that off to me. I have a good handoff doc from him. I don’t know where all that’s gonna end up, because I can’t necessarily run all of it, so it might fall on you a little bit, so maybe you and I will be talking more about some of that.
278 00:33:01.170 ⇒ 00:33:08.590 Samuel Roberts: But, yeah, he made some good progress with that. He and I had a good couple working sessions with it, so, I’m gonna try to…
279 00:33:09.560 ⇒ 00:33:13.719 Samuel Roberts: Try to work on that a little bit, and get it to a V1, at least.
280 00:33:13.720 ⇒ 00:33:14.140 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
281 00:33:14.140 ⇒ 00:33:16.540 Samuel Roberts: But yeah, so…
282 00:33:16.540 ⇒ 00:33:16.930 Brylle Girang: I hear that.
283 00:33:16.930 ⇒ 00:33:23.440 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, he was… he was… he was… it was… it seemed tough for him, because, yeah, I knew he was doing part-time here and somewhere else, and…
284 00:33:23.440 ⇒ 00:33:24.000 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
285 00:33:24.000 ⇒ 00:33:37.460 Samuel Roberts: He, he actually was a… his background was, like, architect, so he was, like, a building architect, you know, not like a software architect. And so I think it was… he… his other job was a little more in line with that, and it was just hard going back and forth, I think, for him, so…
286 00:33:37.460 ⇒ 00:33:42.500 Brylle Girang: Yeah, okay, okay, that makes sense. Yeah, I think we can catch up on that project.
287 00:33:42.500 ⇒ 00:33:45.400 Samuel Roberts: Definitely, yeah, yeah, totally. I will,
288 00:33:46.340 ⇒ 00:33:48.620 Samuel Roberts: Probably, I can send you the handoff doc, I don’t know…
289 00:33:48.620 ⇒ 00:33:49.320 Brylle Girang: Okay.
290 00:33:49.320 ⇒ 00:34:01.330 Samuel Roberts: who is supposed to be the… he wrote it, I think, for, like, mostly for, like, me and maybe Utam, but if you’re gonna be doing some of this stuff and be in the loop on it and helping to translate it to other people, that could be good for you to take a look at. Okay, that’s amazing.
291 00:34:01.700 ⇒ 00:34:04.869 Brylle Girang: Cool. Sam, thank you so much, it was really nice meeting you.
292 00:34:04.870 ⇒ 00:34:09.060 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, no, I’m glad we got to do this. This is great, thank you. And yeah, hopefully we can… we’ll chat more on.
293 00:34:09.060 ⇒ 00:34:12.330 Brylle Girang: We will. We will. Thank you so much, man. Bye-bye.
294 00:34:12.330 ⇒ 00:34:13.710 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, have a good one, thanks.