CTO Wisdom with David Bachowski | Beyond the Program

Tim Winkler: 00:00:00

Hey, listeners, Tim Winkler here, your host of The Pair Program. We've got exciting news introducing our latest partner series Beyond the Program. In these special episodes, we're passing the mic to some of our savvy former guests who are returning as guest hosts, get ready for unfiltered conversations, exclusive insights, and unexpected twist as our alumni pair up with their chosen guest. Each guest host is a trailblazing expert in a unique technical field. Think data, product management, and engineering, all with a keen focus on startups and career growth. Look out for these bonus episodes dropping every other week, bridging the gaps between our traditional pair program episodes. So buckle up and get ready to venture Beyond the Program. Enjoy.

Eric Brooke: 00:00:53

Welcome to CTO Wisdom. My name is Eric Brooke. This series will talk to leaders of technology at organizations. We'll understand their career, what was successful and what was not, and what they learned along the way. We'll also look at what the tech market is doing today. We'll understand where they gather their intelligence so they can grow and scale with their organizations. Welcome to David Bachowski, who we'll be chatting with today. Hey David. Hey, how's it going? Great. Thanks, man. Tell us about yourself. What's your elevator pitch?

David Bachowski: 00:01:36

I am the CTO at a healthcare recruitment firm called Trusted Nurse Staffing. We're about 140 people, 10 of which are technology. So we're essentially a services company with technology embedded within it. And here I was the first technology hire about a year and a half ago.

Eric Brooke: 00:01:55

Awesome. Could you tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming an exec, like when you're an engineer or developer?

David Bachowski: 00:02:02

Yeah, so I went to school for electrical engineering at the University of Buffalo, and during that time I was playing guitar and bass in some popular local bands. And when I graduated, my girlfriend moved to Chicago and I was kind of presented with the classic 90s movie. Do I stay with the band or do I move, you know, do I choose the girlfriend in, uh, in Chicago? And I chose the band and a plot twist. But after about eight months, um, I was like, all right, it's time to have an adventure. And I actually ended up moving to Chicago. In that process, I realized it was super hard to basically start an entire teaching guitar and bass business. All the stores there were already full of teachers. I don't know anyone, like, absolutely no one besides my girlfriend. So I, like, brought out my electrical engineering degree and dusted it off and I was like, okay, gotta finally start using this. And I thought through it a little bit and was, like, thinking through all the classes I took in college and trying to figure out what exactly did I actually like. And none of it was the electrical engineering classes. It was actually the programming classes that were my favorite. And so I made it my mission. I'm like, I'm going to get a programming job. And I applied to like 200 jobs on Monster and Indeed and stuff and got zero responses. Um, my wife or my girlfriend, who's my wife now also had given me like one month to start paying rent there. So I was kind of like chomping at the bit to find a job. And then a job listing came up that was programming mobile video games. And all of my cover letters and Applications prior to that point have been very professional. I was like using the standard professional language and doing the things that you're supposed to do as a business person. And finally, for once in this journey, I had actually been myself and I wrote a cover letter to the head dude in charge. Asking, like, I'll work for money, free candy and soda and just, you know, like, give a chance, you know. Give a chance on me. And they actually pulled me in for an interview and I ended up getting the job programming mobile video games, which was my first entry into the technical world. Awesome.

Eric Brooke: 00:04:37

What, um, so like walk us through the rest of your career. So you're an engineer now you're working in mobile game. What happens next?

David Bachowski: 00:04:46

Yeah, so a large theme throughout my career has been my personal core value. My number 1 core value is adventure. So something happens or triggers and I want to go do something new. So like, that's kind of why I'm probably in this position is because I get to do different things all the time. So after three years in Chicago, about three and a half years, my wife and I were talking and we decided we wanted to move to Europe. We had no idea how we were looking into visas and her grandfather was Italian, but not from Italy. So we're just like trying to figure it out. And we made a timeline for ourselves. We said, in 6 months, we're moving to Europe and we're going to figure out how. And I was like, what do I do about my job? And my dad, I talked to my dad about it. He's like, you cannot tell your job. Now you have to wait, you know, you have to have a stable job. You can't tell them. And I'm like, I'm going to tell my boss. I just. You know, I feel that feels right to me. And so 1 night I stayed late at the office. It was a video game company. So everyone stayed late most of the time. Um, but I brought over a couple of drinks, stayed with my, uh, with the owner and chatted and told him I was leaving the company in 6 months to move to Europe. And instead of being a problem, it actually turned into a conversation. We end up spending a late night at the bar, hashing out details. He had. A connection to the UK. And he said, why don't we open up a second office in the UK and you can go lead it. And so we went on this journey where I got a sole representative visa, opened up a business in the UK, moved there without ever having been there, uh, moved to London, had to source office space. I got a new title, like VP of business development, whatever that meant. It was just cool to have a VP title in your 20s. Uh, but I ended up being basically a lead programmer, a hiring manager, an office manager. I heard about 15 people there started an office. I was also doing business development, going to conferences, and trying to source a business, running a P& L. Uh, trying to create a profitable business over there and just worked my tail off basically while I was there.

Eric Brooke: 00:07:05

Obviously, from my accent, I've spent some time in Britain. Um, I'm kind of curious, what was it like, um, like coming from Chicago, America, and then going over to the UK at that time?

David Bachowski: 00:07:16

It was a culture shock in a lot of ways. Um, you know, you don't really understand your own country and your own culture until you live outside of it. And so it really brought me closer in a lot of ways to who, what an American is. Cause I grew up in Buffalo and, you know, my family was part Polish and part German. And you're like, Oh, you know, we're Polish and German. And the people over there, they're Irish. And you think that you're so different. And then you go there and you're like, Oh no, we're all American. Every American that's over here, you could just point them out because they're, you know, they're on the tube being super loud. And you're like, oh, here comes some Americans. But it also makes you super fiercely loyal to yourself, too. You know, you're like, oh, well, yeah, we're American. That's who we are. And so it creates this kind of love hate relationship with your country. We're like. Certain things really annoy you, but you know, they also endear you at the same time.

Eric Brooke: 00:08:16

Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. So you're a VP, you're in the UK, what happens next?

David Bachowski: 00:08:24

Yeah. So it turns out starting a business is really easy and running a business is really hard. And there was not really a point to us being in the UK from a business perspective. It was cheaper to do things in Chicago. The pound was more powerful. It was like 1. 65 exchange rate at the time. So after two years, we kind of just like closed up shop and it wasn't really a good fit. And I ended up moving back to Buffalo, my hometown, and got a real management position. Because up until that point, management was just something that I did in between the other things. It wasn't a career. I didn't even think of it as a career or just something to keep the lights on. So I wasn't doing one on ones. I wasn't thinking about employee growth at all. It was get the business done. And at I joined a company called Harris and I had a VP of engineering at the time Ryan lit and he was a really great mentor for me coming in there and taught me about, you know, like, how to actually have direct reports and step away from coding and. And project management got certified as a agile practitioner and all kinds of stuff there. Learn got my project management shops up and various management shops.

Eric Brooke: 00:09:42

Cool. What would you say, um, in the transition from being I know you went from kind of engineer VP. Um, back to kind of engineering management, but what would you say is different between, say, an individual contributor as an engineer to being a manager? You mentioned a couple of them, but what were the things that maybe you struggled with most?

David Bachowski: 00:10:05

Stepping away, I think, you know, releasing control, you know, as a engineer, you have mainly full control over what you deploy. And you want to make sure that everything that you do has a clear cut, you know, this is the input. This is the output. And I'm in control that I release my code and yeah, maybe we have pure reviews and stuff, but for the most part, I'm in full control. When you're dealing with people, you don't have any control over anything they do beyond the fact that you're the boss, but it's, it's less of telling them what to do and more of how do I convince these people that this is the right way to do it? How do I prove my worth or have them trust me that what I'm saying is actually something worthwhile to do? And so it turned less, uh, less of a hard, I can make computer do what I want computer to do into how do I convince a team of people that this is the right direction that we're supposed to be going.

Eric Brooke: 00:11:02

So you went from a control journey to an influence journey.

David Bachowski: 00:11:05

Yeah.

Eric Brooke: 00:11:06

Yeah, that'd be

David Bachowski: 00:11:06

a great way of putting it.

Eric Brooke: 00:11:08

Cool. Okay. So your manager, what was it like? Did you get to a point where you're managing managers?

David Bachowski: 00:11:15

Not in that position. Okay. Uh, I said a theme of my life was adventure after 3 or 4 years there. We decided we wanted to move to New York City. Now, um, it was better for my wife's art career. She's an artist. So, um, but like, let's go to New York City. The big city, you know, can't get any bigger than that. And in the United States, I ended up. A friend, I found a friend of a friend in New York City that I started keeping in touch with who was a software engineer and I think it was Sunday morning. He texted me or email me and said, there's a job conference in New York City on Monday. I think you should go to and it's Sunday. And I'm like, okay, I just bought my plane ticket and I called my boss and told him I need to take off the next day. And he was very understanding. You already kind of knew. Um, what was going on? And so I bought a plane ticket that day, flew there, researched every company that was going to be at this thing and found anyone that had a VP of engineering or director of engineering type role because I wanted to take that next step. And so most of the positions they were actually advertising were engineering positions. They were like, junior to senior software engineers, and no 1 was advertising VPs. But I just researched and wrote down the 10 companies that had VP roles available, and I went and go and talk to each of those things at this conference. And got a couple interviews. So, uh, one of them ended up, uh, interviewing me later. I think they actually flew me out again that next week. And I ended up getting a VP of engineering position at a social media analytics startup doing big data, totally different tech. Everything was wildly different than anything I'd ever done. I was used to doing like dips and boops, 64 kilobyte mobile phone games. And now I'm dealing with Uh, terabytes and petabytes of data in the cloud with distributed systems and graph theory and data science and new programming languages. It's pretty cool. It was very intimidating, to be honest.

Eric Brooke: 00:13:19

How did you cope with that? Like, it's a huge technology journey to travel. How did you get yourself to the place you needed to be?

David Bachowski: 00:13:29

I dove in, you know, like, if you put yourself in the fire, you have to kind of rise out of it or you're going to get burnt. So, um, this was at this point. Now I'm managing managers. And the really interesting, I dove myself into the problem that I think the company had, which was how do you deliver effective software that meets the needs of your customers, right? It's like just the product, the product journey, how do you, but how do you form teams and do it? And, uh, I didn't want to do the typical scrum thing because scrum to me had a bad name at that point. I had not had a great experience with it. I felt it was very prescriptive. Didn't leave room for a lot of creativity, at least in my experience of it and our implementation we had done. So I ended up moving to like, I was in charge of product. Well, I guess I should include the CTO after hiring me quit within a month of me joining and I ended up getting promoted to CTO. So that was my 1st. Hey, you're a VP of engineering. Now you're the CTO, which changed nothing besides my title. Kind of funny how little titles mean in some ways, but at this point I'm trying to figure out like. Let's broaden the time scope of how we deliver into quarters instead of 2 week sprints and I was hoping that this would create room for creativity. And so we gave a problem and a theme to a team that was like, okay, you're going to work on. Improving this aspect of the product, like usability in our metrics, uh, go find the problems that exist in these metrics, talk to our customers, talk to different people in the company, find these problems and solve them. You have a quarter to do it. You know, this other team is, you know, working on a brand new products. Go research how to do it, talk to product managers and figure out what you're you're going to do. So we had 3 lanes of 3 different teams. Working on different themes, uh, problems. And so for me, that was really fun. Like here I get to now it's like one level abstracted up from being an influencer. Now you're like influencing and managing how a company, um, uh, deploys its resources to accomplish its mission, right. And coaching managers on how to then manage their people.

Eric Brooke: 00:15:55

So in that journey from control to influence, you've taken another big step. Well, probably several steps at the same time in terms of now you're managing through managers. Were there any kind of moments in that journey that you either kind of figured out or that you failed and then figured out in terms of managing managers?

David Bachowski: 00:16:16

Yeah. I mean, I think who you hire and promote is probably the number one thing that a manager does. Now, unless you're a man, a CTO with, and you're the only person in the technical company, and you haven't hired anyone who you bring in really defines your culture. So promoting the wrong people into a management role can really poison the team. But that can be a really big issue and something I learned. But promoting the right person can also allow them to grow and. Do great things for your company. So that was something that I had to learn the hard way, other things. And at this, I think the next job I had a light bulb went off at some point. I was working as the CTO for a real estate firm. So it wasn't a technology company. Uh, again, it was, uh, this one was, was a services company with a technology component. And I remember thinking to myself, I wish that I had a team. To work on this problem And it was, I don't know, some sort of data problem inside the company and then something clicked and I was like, I'm the CTO like wishes. It's like that. No one's the owners of the company are not going to come to me and be like, Hey, Dave, do you have any wishes to spend more money? I heard in your thoughts that you want a team to do something. And so, like, instead of waiting for things to come to me now, I was. Something switched where like, Oh, I have the power now to do the things the way that I want to do them. And so I put a pitch together to the owners and then said like, Hey, here's the team I want to build. Here's why we're going to do it. Here's the business case. And let's basically start a new business line inside of here and it worked and we hired a team and we started building a product, which ultimately failed. But the good thing to me was like, I started to think that it switched my mind to being more proactive instead of reactive. And that was a, I had to remind myself multiple times in my journey after that point, even that I had to keep doing that. I think I'm a little bit better at it now, but I still have to remind myself sometimes that I have the power to change things.

Eric Brooke: 00:18:34

Yeah, I hear on that. So what would you say success looks like and what has helped you be successful in your journey?

David Bachowski: 00:18:46

Personally, um, finding and recognizing your core values and sticking to those I think is probably the thing that leads to the most success. Being an authentic self and finding companies that share those core values, um, I've, I've worked in some companies that do in some companies that don't, and the most successful ones are the ones where, you know, like, they're the most aligned. And hiring people, so, like, you want to hire a diverse talent. But I think at the core, you still want some of those core values to be there. Like, you don't necessarily, if your company is very tightly controlled, uh, you don't want to hire people that are chaotic and need, need freedom to, you know, like break things like that's just going to clash. If you're a chaotic freewheeling company, you don't want to hire tight control people because they're going to freak out, you know, like we're moving too fast. And so personally, like having adventure and honesty and loyalty and like really caring about people really playing to those has helped me in my journey and not being afraid to take risks. So like telling my boss that I'm going to quit in 6 months ended up being the opportunity that brought me overseas and like this amazing, cool opportunity to start a company. And so risk taking has always been something that's been core to me. And I bring that to the business side too. We have a super small team here. A few engineers, product manager, some designers, some folks, we can't compete. With really big players, billion dollar companies in our space, but we can take big risks on new technology. So instead of trying to, for example. Replicate what Salesforce does or replicate what our competitors do, we can instead find a niche and push the boundaries in a small space and provide something that none of our competitors are building to draw some of our new customers. And like, okay, well, trusted is the only brand. That allows me to do this thing or that provides this data for me, so I'm going to stick with them.

Eric Brooke: 00:21:01

Yeah, um, you talked about your core values and, um, you talked about adventure, honesty, taking risks and being authentic. Have you been able to bring, say, like a venture to your work life as well?

David Bachowski: 00:21:15

Yeah, um, one of my favorite quotes is by an author of The Little Prince, St. Antoine Exbury. I probably butchered his name. But he said something along the lines of if you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and teach them tasks, but rather teach them the long for the endless sea. And so that kind of idea that if you provide a vision over here, To me, that's adventure. You know, like strategy is adventure. Like, how do we get to this thing? And people will figure out ways to get there. And so I try to hire people that I don't have to push. I hate being a person who pushes people into places. I like to, I love to hire people that run. And the only thing you're doing is actually pulling them back and saying, like, oh, hey, it's in this direction and then it makes it a lot easier on me. I have to do a lot less work, but I can then focus my time on, you know, like, what is that next adventure for our company? What is the strategy that we should be pursuing to get there? And so a couple of times, or basically every company that I've been in since that CTO role, I've tried to put together roadmaps that are story driven roadmaps over delivery driven roadmaps. Because like, anyone can say, this quarter we're going to deliver this feature, it's a technical debt feature. And this next quarter we're going to deliver this feature, and it's going to help us do metrics. And this feature is going to do this and you're just looking at a timeline of stuff, right? There's no, if the team working on metrics looks at that, they're like, oh, cool. Yeah, we're going to deliver everything in Q2, but it means nothing to them. Beyond it's going to make maybe the product better, maybe increase in sales or something, but if instead you reframe your roadmap into a story driven roadmap where every feature that you're working on empowers you to make a new feature or capability. And then that new feature and capability allows you to make yet another one. And you put the end goal, which might be like real time. Notifications for so and so, you know, like some pie in the sky thing. It kind of provides this roadmap into. What the end goal is and give someone a person on the team, someone in another part of the company access into your line of thinking. I'm like, where are we going? Why are we doing this? It's no longer what and when it's now. Why? And I think that why is super important for roadmaps. Um, and I don't I haven't seen a lot of people do that in my career, but people like stories, you know, and they will gravitate towards those stories. So, even if I'm presenting to the rest of the company at a town hall or something, I will try to present things in a cohesive story of, like, this is why we're doing this thing. And this is where it's going to lead in 5 years from now.

Eric Brooke: 00:24:18

Yeah, why is so important? Yeah, sometimes it's forgotten. So is there something as a CTO you're trying to figure out at this moment or that you've started a new journey that you're willing to share? Yeah,

David Bachowski: 00:24:35

my current position is my favorite position I've ever had. And, um, you know, if my boss is listening to this, thank you. You know, like, I'm just buttering you up. But it's given me the opportunity to do things in the business space that I've never been able to. So for the most part, I've always been the tech person. And I'd be brought into like, I've done sales calls and like, I'll go on sales calls and help be the, a lot of times it's kind of on sales calls. I'm the, the, not the play by play announcer. I'm the person on the sports caster who like, someone's doing the play by play. And then the next person comes in and describes what was happening. So a lot of times I'll go into sales calls and someone will do like, here's what the data shows, and then I come in and give like a couple examples of like how that applies to their business. And so I've been a little bit involved in sales. And the business, but here, um, Martin, my CEO brings me into a lot of conversations that have nothing to do with technology. So, how do we structure a recruitment org and the healthcare staffing? How do we structure compensation? Um, how do we, you know, as a, as a whole business, what should our strategy be going forward? And right now we're looking at potentially starting or acquiring a business line. Um, we staff nurses and allied workers. Thank you. But we want to be able to staff doctors. So being brought into that conversation and, you know, looking at potential M& A opportunities, looking at financials, digging into like business plans is something that I've never been able to really utilize in any positions that I've been in. So, you know, it's, it's really interesting being in these conversations and being the tech person and just being like, what's your business development plan? You know, but if I think if you approach this stuff from first principles and you just think like what makes sense, it's not too hard to figure some of this stuff out. And so, you know, like, I don't necessarily want to be sitting in tech all the time. It's awesome that I can be in these conversations and help with the overall company strategy.

Eric Brooke: 00:26:52

Awesome. What does your interaction with the exec look like? What have you learned, not just for this job, but other roles where you've been an executive? And what would you say is the difference from, like, being, say, before you became exec to when you now exec?

David Bachowski: 00:27:12

There's a lot of different personalities in the executive world. There are personalities where people, um, I guess I'll call it more old school, um, waterfall ish, like, I want a deadline. I want this thing. Tell me when this thing is going to get delivered. Uh, and I need hard feature sets. And those are hard to deal with in the software world because everything has moved to this agile, you don't know what you're going to get until you get it type of world. So being able to kind of. Brain, what's your, your agile place in a way where you can actually get some deadlines that you can promote to someone is part of a job of a CTO. I think, like, just how do we manipulate this information into a way that presents it to you in the way that you want it. And some people are just super cool with, like, Hey, here's our roadmap. We're working on this problem. I don't know when it's going to get delivered, but if you foster trust, I think that becomes a lot easier with those types of executives. We deliver our software, we deliver good features, people like it. And then to me, it's very successful. People are not asking about deadlines because you've just engendered trust that we deliver things on a regular cadence and we deliver the right things. So there's like multiple, I guess, personalities that you end up dealing with, um, but for the most part, I think some of the, you're always trying to frame what you're doing from a technology standpoint. Into a story that they understand.

Eric Brooke: 00:28:42

So a lot of translation from say, technology, technical to financial, technical, business, technical,

David Bachowski: 00:28:49

right? Yeah. The, ever since I was a manager at Harris, like 15 years ago or so, we've always tried to embed ourselves in the minds of the customers and really foster empathy. So I, for example, sit with our recruitment team, probably four hours a week. And I just do my work next to them and I hear their conversations as they're talking to nurses. They're more, they know my face now. They're like, they're more likely to come over to me and ask me questions and talk about the product. And I asked the same thing out of all my staff as well to go sit with people or have conversations with them. And really get to understand their business so that we don't constantly have to pepper them questions or we already intuitively know some of the answers and it breaks down some of that communication, um, friction because you're already kind of like, like one of my companies I did, uh, cold calling. So I was like, I don't know exactly what we sell that well, and the best way for me to understand what we sell is to go sell it. And I actually, I picked Buffalo as a city. No 1 was covering it. And I started trying to, uh, raise, uh, talk to real estate developers to raise money for their large commercial projects. And I very quickly realized 2 things. 1 cold calling is very hard and nervous and nerve wracking. And two, I realized that I knew nothing about what our business was and I started to learn it. They would ask questions and I'd write them down very quickly, you know, after the third cold caller. So you're talking with different people about the business side of things and you're understanding your business a lot better. And you're making tools from a technology standpoint that make your cold calling easier, which will then make your sales people's cold calling easier as well.

Eric Brooke: 00:30:38

I love the, um, the breaking down of boundaries between you and customer service and for sales because it really does. Get us back to what we should be doing, building product, building things for our customers. Um, and I hear you about the cold calling that is, I've done it myself. It's kind of like you learn a lot of what you don't know pretty quickly.

David Bachowski: 00:30:58

Yeah.

Eric Brooke: 00:30:59

Um, and one for one technique I've used is from domain driven design. You know, the ubiquitous language building a dictionary. If the organization doesn't have a dictionary when I'm doing fractional work, that's the first thing I do. Just what are all the words associated? And you learn a lot from that journey.

David Bachowski: 00:31:15

Right. Yeah. A bunch of acronyms that people are throwing around and they're like, Oh yeah, the SDRs. And you're like, what does that mean?

Eric Brooke: 00:31:23

Okay. Um, Dave, what are you seeing in the wider technical market at the moment? Um, we're like January for 2024 at this point to give people context, but what are you seeing?

David Bachowski: 00:31:36

Well, I mean, clearly the buzzword around the days right now is AI. So I think AI is enabling our company to do a lot of things that we wouldn't be able to do. We're taking, even me personally, I'm taking some things that would take me weeks and now they're taking me days. To do with ai, you know, like just chat, chat, GPT and like you can just create custom courses or custom code for, um, a Hello world and a different framework that you would have to search for and wouldn't give you exactly what you needed. Uh, and we're starting to embed some of that AI stuff into our product as well, which you would've had to, you know, hire hundreds of people to create descriptions of cities. And now you can ask chat GPT to do it in, in an API call. You know, you spend a couple of weeks building that and now you have a new feature in your app. I don't think we've touched, even scratched the surface of what AI is going to bring to us. So I'm really kind of excited to see where all of this goes. Um, I don't, I'm not a pest, I'm not an AI pessimist. I don't think that it's coming for our jobs per se. I think it's really enabling us to do new things and giving us, it's like, I think someone on my team Heard a podcast where someone mentioned compared it to power tools, like prior to power tools, um, it would be really hard to build a table, but now any Joe Schmo with a, a power tool can build a table. It might not look great, you know, it might not be that best table, but it's pretty easy to do that now. And I think AI is kind of doing the same thing. It's democratizing the landscape on what people are able to do. And I'm just personally pretty excited about it. Awesome.

Eric Brooke: 00:33:22

Um, what's helped you grow throughout your career, um, or helps you grow in scale now, like podcasts, books, people, what are the things that really, really helped you?

David Bachowski: 00:33:34

Mentors personally, I don't read any books that I read or fantasy books. I don't like to read nonfiction and if it doesn't have wizards or dragons or something in it, I'm not probably not picking it up. So, uh, to me, it's finding people in the business world. There's a pretty decent startup scene in Buffalo. So I keep in touch with people that have run businesses and try to have coffee with them and reach out to them. Um, there's, there's a good, like. Buffalo Open Coffee Club meets every week and you can go to that and just meet other founders or other people in the startup scene. I was very active in the startup scene when I previously lived in Buffalo. I was a volunteer for a non profit Infotech, Western New York. So I was helping to organize events and like getting embedded in the community and acting as kind of like a profit shield for some of these people that didn't have 501s. And so just talking to people. Is my favorite thing because I'm a, I'm an extrovert. I'm like, one of those, uh, I think most people think of tech people as introverts most of the time. And I'm one of those people that's just like, I need to talk to people. Like, I'm just going to go walk over to the sales team. Hey, how's it going, guys? You know, and probably love to hear myself talk too much. So, yeah, people.

Eric Brooke: 00:34:52

Um, you've mentioned a couple of things that you do for fun, like you've talked about music, you've talked about fantasy books, but what else would you say that you do for fun?

David Bachowski: 00:35:01

Yeah, I have a life goals list. And we put, I put that together with my wife in my 20s, and I continually revise it. And 1 of them is to learn piano. So I previously played guitar and bass, and now I'm teaching myself piano. A friend of mine had 1, and I ended up getting it moved to my house. I think my favorite thing in the world right now is I have a four year old daughter and she loves to sing and so if I can just start jamming out some chords in the piano and she comes over and starts making up lyrics and singing to it, it just kind of warms my heart because not only is it an educational opportunity for her to like, learn chord structure and just like, it's super creative for her. It's also just super fun. It's like, yeah. You know, as a parent, it warms your heart when you see your child doing creative things or having any interest in any activity you do at all is, is, uh, is a warming feeling.

Eric Brooke: 00:35:53

That's great. And are there types of musics that you enjoy more than most?

David Bachowski: 00:36:00

I've played in bands that in probably every genre I can think of besides country. I don't think I played in a country band, but I played in like a hip hop band and R& B band, a big horn band. I played video game music for a while. I played in jazz bands. I played in orchestras. So like just tons of different musical genres, which kind of like I'm a generalist. So, you know, like what I do at work is very similar to what I do in music where I'm not super, I'm not like the best jazz player or the best classical player, the best blues player or something. But I can know enough to be dangerous to fill in gaps or, like, keep interest in something. So right now, I'm going through book one of Alfred's thing, and I'm playing, like, chopsticks and, you know, uh, random stuff. And then I'm also playing jazz songs. So I'm, like, going through a fake book and learning. Right now it's my Christmas tunes because it's Christmas time, Christmas songs.

Eric Brooke: 00:36:59

Dave, thank you very much for your time and transparency. It's been wonderful talking to you today. Yeah, likewise. Thanks a lot, Eric.

Tim Winkler: 00:37:25

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