DevRel and Economics Analogies (00:01-01:27): Swift, CEO of Major League Hacking, introduces a finance-inspired framework for DevRel, suggesting DevRel organizations should diversify their activities, allocate resources strategically, and focus on maximizing ROI.
Stages of DevRel Maturity (01:54-03:13): The presentation outlines three DevRel stagesâStartup (finding product-market fit), Growth (expanding customer base and brand awareness), and Maturity (retaining market share and deepening relationships).
Investment Strategies and Risk Management (10:22-13:08): DevRel efforts should be viewed as a portfolio, balancing events, content, and community engagement to achieve sustained returns. Swift emphasizes a diversified approach to manage systemic risks.
Active vs. Passive Investment Styles (16:30-23:55): DevRel strategies vary by organizational maturity. Startups should actively seek targeted engagement, while mature organizations may adopt indexing, akin to long-term, passive investment in reliable channels.
Future Opportunities and AI Trends (29:09-37:11): Emphasizing AI's growing role in automating DevRel support, Swift suggests focusing on building core DevRel structures before scaling. He highlights the rise of tools like GitHub Copilot as transformative in addressing common developer challenges.
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(00:01) hello debor oon how we all doing today yeah pretty good pretty good let's see if we try that again though I want a little bit more energy hello Dean how we doing today all right we'll see if we can bring up the energy a little bit with this talk um hey everybody I I'm really excited to be here I'm Swift I'm the CEO and co-founder of a little outfit called Major League hacking uh I've been spending the last 15 years empowering developers to change the world uh and to change their lives through code uh and
(00:30) today I'm here to talk to you about some of the lessons I've learned helping organizations like the ones that you work for uh reach developers in a scalable and authentic way uh but I'm also here to talk about another topic that's near and dear to my heart uh it's economics and really more specifically Finance Theory and how that actually can be applied to your deell organizations now my goal is to draw some parallels parallels between things I've observed uh wellestablished theories in the
(00:57) finance world and to show you how you can utilize them in your day-to-day devil strategies uh specifically my hope is to convince you that number one you need to build a diversified portfolio of deel activities or investments in the analogy that I'm going to draw for you uh and that you should have a clear methodology for deciding what you actually do with the limited time and money that you have those resources that we use to build that portfolio uh and ultimately I'm going to give you a framework that you can actually fill out
(01:27) uh yourself to help you maximize the ROI of your Devo org organizations returns or you know return on investment um and to do that we're going to evaluate three different hypothetical deell organizations at different stages in their Journey um we'll look at what resources they have to invest the specific Roi that each of them is actually trying to achieve and generate and the beliefs and strategies that inform what I think each of these organizations based on their stage and constraint should actually be doing um
(01:54) the first de organization we're going to look at is at the startup stage U they're on that search for product Market fit they're looking for early customers that are ultimately going to enable them to establish that they have a real business and to enable them to look at the next stage in their Journey now that stage is growth this is an organization that has a product with traction they're starting to shift their focus from you know proving they actually have a business at Works to building market share and brand
(02:20) awareness in the industry um they may be thinking about expanding into other customer verticals but they have a core group of customers that they know they can reach and they they know they a real material problem for uh finally we have an organization that in maturity um they're focused on preserving the existing market share that they have and to deepening the relationships they have with their existing customers to ensure that there's lockin and growth of Revenue um they're really just focused
(02:47) on retention rather than expansion now I just want to note that these do not necessarily mirror to the stage of your company this is actually really about the stage of your devil organization there's plenty of huge companies that can spin up new Devil teams Focus us on new products or feature sets that can start you know at the startup stage and be working towards maturity you know I would call out AWS as a great example where as they launch new products they build teams around them um that start at the startup phase finding customers
(03:13) proving the value and then ultimately they level up into mature deell organizations that we know and love and see every single day um so here's a quick preview of the framework that we're actually going to fill out as we go um this is an opinionated framework that I'm going to be telling you you know from my perspective working with tons of companies about what I think they should be doing uh and as we go along I'll explain the various Finance Theory and logic behind all the decisions that I'm
(03:36) making uh and ideally you'll actually be able to fill out the same framework for your own organization uh and I will share a link to the slides at the end where you can actually follow along with this whole thing from the beginning uh now you don't need to be a devell manager to utilize this I want to emphasize that this will work just as well for an individual in a deell organization thinking about their portfolio of activities as well as a manager of a deell team who is thinking about the activities of a group of
(04:00) professionals working on a variety of things now before we actually dive in though we should take a step back and say what business do I actually have talking about either debout or Finance well first of all I've been building developer communities professionally for about 15 years now uh I was the first developer Advocate hired at a company called srid where I helped them to build the their devell program and ultimately scale that up to about a team of 10 developer relations professionals um while I was there I actually helped run
(04:26) the only program that were actually able to directly tie back to revenue um connecting the dods between evangelism and you know sales which is an important Milestone of the company um I also founded a startup previous to Major League hacking that was the first platform for hackathons helping organizations actually organize and run them and connect with developers uh and finally I started Major League hacking uh where I've helped nearly 10% of all the software engineers in the United States alone get started in their
(04:52) careers uh we made an impact on significantly more than that as you'll hear later um and if you can't already tell I self-identifying nerd esally around developer stuff but it's not the only thing I love to n out about um every year I try to set myself a reading goal I I typically read about 50 books a year and I originally started reading all business books which I can assure you gets really really boring after a while um so I started picking themes and I pick three themes each year and I dive into books in one of those themes now
(05:20) last year I picked uh presidential biographies uh AI science fiction and uh finance and monetary policy uh thinking all these things would be extremely relevant for 2024 uh well it ends up the first two were in a lot of ways but the third one was actually really relevant to the types of problems that we solve for our customers at Major League hacking or mlh so you've probably heard about mlh you know we've been here at this conference saying that over and over again but you may not know what we do you may know us as uh the hackathon
(05:49) guys and yeah it's true we we do a lot of hackathons but we do a lot more than that I actually did get my start uh in as a developer at a hackathon I was an aspiring lawyer who quickly realized that being a programmer was a much better idea for me uh and after switching into computer science I also realized that we don't actually teach computer science students any of the skills they actually need to start their careers uh it's a lot of things that are really useful once you already have a job but it's not the Practical problem
(06:14) solving elements of of using code that you need to get that job in the first place uh luckily I was able to find things like hackathons and internships where I was able to actually get a worldclass education and Building Things uh and I founded mlh as a way to help that entire next generation of Technology Talent with their computer science student a boot camp grad or self-taught actually bridge that gap between what they learn and what they need to be able to do to be employable uh we do that through immersive
(06:40) educational programs that are free for developers and allow them to get their hands dirty with the code and tools that they're actually going to use on their Journey um they're going to build a track record and a network that are going to ultimately lead to their success of going out and Landing a job and we started with events things like hackathons and workshops and conferences uh we launched a massive collocated virtual internship program that's all based around open source uh and we do a ton more than that um and to give you a
(07:08) sense of the scale this is not you know some small side project we've working on each year right now we're reaching one in three US computer science graduates in just the United States alone and that's just one of 90 countries where we have a presence around the world uh and in fact earlier this year our community actually passed over a million community members which is was something we actually completely missed because how much it is grown yes that is pretty cool uh and not only you know these just
(07:35) aren't some email addresses in a database about 40% of those people say that joining the MH Community changed their life and they would not be where they are today without us um so we know a lot about developers and the way that we actually you know fund all of the important work we do is that we work with like Brands like the ones that you all work at who have a vested interest in the specific skills and technologies that the next generation of developers actually learn um fun fact those community members actually also have a
(08:03) vested interest in learning the best technologies that are going to prepare them to enter industry uh and so we help connect the dots by teaching those developers how to actually use your apis and Technologies to solve real world problems so when they go on to work at companies they can actually use those tools as if they were default Tools in their tool belt um we work with some brands of all shapes and sizes of various stages in fact a lot of our customers are actually here in the room today which is pretty cool we've been
(08:29) able to say hello a lot of you uh and today I'm going to share some of the expertise that we've developed when working with these companies and empowering nearly 10% of all the software engineers in just the us alone um so we're going to use a little bit of Basic Finance Theory to accomplish those goals now in finance we actually usually have one goal it's to maximize returns uh in a financial portfolio returns are just the total value of all the assets that we have you know in our portfolio
(08:56) um and while some individual assets like stocks or Bond bonds may go up others may go down the thing we ultimately care about is adding all of them up and making sure that at the very end that number is going up in general uh and in Deo while our ultimate goal is probably sales especially in this market right now uh in Deo there's actually a ton of more diverse leading indicator returns that we can care about um things like Enterprise sales as we just talked about um the trials and free signups brand awareness product de
(09:26) development and feedback relationship building use cases and content cross functional value for other teams and Community Goodwill um now ultimately we're going to build a portfolio of programs things that I'll talk about what those look like in a second that are going to help Drive some of these Roi uh now we can't do all of everything all at once we actually need to focus on some levels so in the framework I'm going to fill out I'm going to constrain us to a maximum of three of these uh Roi
(09:52) goals that we're focused on and a maximum of three strategies that we're using to actually pursue these um and the way that we actually generate this Roi to be clear is investing in again these assets using our resources our budget our time so what are the these actual resources well in finance we have traditional asset classes things like stocks bonds and cash equivalents uh in Devil our core three assets might be things like events uh content and and maybe Community engagement events are are Dynamic they're you know show
(10:22) significant returns quickly uh maybe they're close to stocks in the world of Finance hackathons conferences workshops webinars so on on uh content these kind of steady streams of Engagement that build continuous um trust over time and provide just this continuous return maybe that's something like a bond but it's you know blog posts tutorials videos podcasts newsletters uh and Community engagement this is just kind of the lowrisk always on stuff that we're doing to make sure that we're reaching developers where they are
(10:49) day-to-day this might be things like social media or stack Overflow or forums or like your Discord or slack group that you have um there are plenty of other asset classes that you can bring in when you're ready things like Ambassador programs open source work like whatever but for the sake of this talk I'm going to focus on kind of these core three uh so how do you actually go about selecting the assets the things that we do in our deell portfolio how we spend our time and money well as painful as it
(11:17) might be to hear uh the most common deell strategy is actually what I call throwing darts and it's also called that in in the finance World um basically the way that we apply this strategy is we often Empower individual developer Advocates to make decisions about how they spend their time what events they go to what content they write and when I first started in devl it was exactly the same way and every team I've you know or many team I've encountered over the years operate the same way too and while
(11:43) it may seem intuitive to just trust your hired experts the truth is that where they actually allocate their time each day is going to be variable and it's not going to be working in concert and so ultimately it's going to come down to luck more than anything else now the world of Finance also had the same problem and back in the 1950s you know portfolio managers used to think that their only job was actually just to identify the best individual stocks and pick them um you know considered on a standalone basis uh but that all changed
(12:09) when this guy Harry marwitz came around and in 1952 he wrote an essay which he later won a Nobel prize in economics 4 where he coined the phrase uh invented this thing called modern portfolio Theory or MPT um it's basically just a mathematical way to look at risk inside a portfolio and to evaluate the expected return earn of individual assets as well as a total portfolio so basically like to sum that up really all he did was give investors a formula where they could think about how to build the best possible portfolio in aggregate rather
(12:40) than thinking about individual assets I won't bore you with the actual math but the key Insight is that an individual ass asset's risk and return should not be assessed by itself but in the context of the overall portfolio and how it contributes to the overall return focusing on picking the one individual best stock is less important than making sure that we have a portfolio that is going to be the best overall portfolio so what does that actually mean in practice well to see that we need to talk about risk and specifically we need
(13:08) to talk about two different kinds of risk the first one is systemic risk or portfolio risk this is the stuff that is common to every asset that you cannot account for uh covid a tech recession uh an AWS outage uh AI eating the world you know um these are things that you literally cannot prepare for and everybody and every asset deals with the same challenges spefic specific risk on the other hand are the risks associated with individual assets they're things that that go wrong with some kind of individual program you're doing your
(13:36) staff gets sick right before they go to an event the BL your company's blog goes down a random framework falls out of favor um these are things that can ultimately be reduced through something called diversification which effectively can be used to cancel out these specific risks and what that ultimately means is by having a bunch of different kinds of assets we can make that make our portfolio way L risky than owning a single one now it seems almost too obvious to state but diversification is so powerful because it just helps
(14:05) eliminate a lot of the random noise that comes up in how portfolios return now the same thing is true for your de portfolio and what I've learned so far is that rather than picking individual Investments we need to be considering that whole portfolio of all the things we do in our deell activities and optimizing it so that it all fits together into cohesive strategy that ultimately helps us maximize those Returns the last two things we need are an investment style which is basically just a set of beliefs and philosophies
(14:31) we have about how we're going to use our resources it's often constrained by our goals and by what we actually have on hand uh and we need an investment strategy which is how we actually put those Styles into play or those beliefs into play through execution so now we have everything we need to start filling out our framework so let's start with the resources that each of these organizations have the two main resources that we're talking about here are again time and money and as you'll see they're kind of inversely correlated
(14:55) the startup has the least money and the most time the larger or more mature organization has the most money but the least time they're spending a lot of time you know going through internal bureaucracy managing internal meetings things like that um and the growth organization somewhere in the middle what about the ROI for each of these though you know what while It ultimately might be direct sales like let's talk again about those leading indicators for the startup they should be focused on activities that will get them into that
(15:18) product Market fit right it's finding use cases for their technology it's collecting feedback on what they're doing it's deepening relationships with potential customers to identify the actual problems they're going to solve in this portfolio we're going to be looking for assets like individual hackathons Niche communities where potential customers live and thought leadership targeted it that the problem that we're actually going out try to solve our growth stage Devo organization
(15:41) cares about getting potential customers in the door and expanding the spectrum of offerings that they have to ultimately be able to service them um they care about activities that generate lots of new user signups build brand awareness among potential customers and build Canon fodder for sales and marketing that ultimately power those engines uh I would expect this port folio d a mixture of events and contents and Community engagement with targeted offerings in areas of expansion and scaled programs in the core customer
(16:07) bases that we know work and finally our mature organization is going to be way more focused on maintaining their position in the market and preserving those existing customers they care about brand awareness they care about making sure that they have those customers for a long time they care about deepening those relationships and expanding the work that they do together to ensure that integration is not going anywhere and that Revenue grows over time um their portfolio is going to be the widest given the amount of resources
(16:30) they have um but they're going to be focused on maximizing the scarce time that they do have available by leveraging other external Partners uh finally we need to talk about investment style which again is the set of beliefs that we have that inform those strategies so the first thing we're going to look at is active versus passive an active investor is somebody who's actively picking the Investments they make um they believe that they can exploit their own individual knowledge or their time doing research to find the
(16:56) best possible Investments whereas passive invest in or is investing relying on an external system or or person to do that on your behalf using some kind of algorithm in the long term almost all investors mean lead towards the average which intuitively should make sense to everybody here and so what most people end up doing is use passive Investments like your 401k or maybe like a robo investor because ultimately they're going to bet on the entire Market rather than spending the amount of time in individual assets the way
(17:27) that translates into Devo is actually really interesting you know we can spend our time actually looking at individual Investments we want to make blog posts we want to write events we want to attend or we can start working with trusted partners that have their own algorithmic way of picking this and this is a really interesting place to compare and contrast working with somebody like mlh versus like an individual hackathon you know when you sponsor an individual hackathon you have the ability to actually generate significantly more Roi
(17:51) by being there you're investing a lot more resources by working with somebody at mlh what you're saying is like hey rather than having a presence at this one particular data Point like we want to actually you know work with mlh to reach hundreds of hackathons over the course of calendar year other examples of this might be like working with a Content agency to to generate your content or you know paying external community members to do support um but ultimately it comes down to are you doing yourself or are you relying on
(18:16) someone else the next bit we want to talk about is value versus growth value investors are looking for bargains they're looking for cheap often out of favor stocks cyclical things this is the type of thing that Warren Buffett is really famous for just looking for stuff that's undervalued whereas those who are focused on growth are looking for opportunities for their Investments to grow radically um usually they're looking for lesser known assets that have a chance to uh grow exponentially um a good example of this is South by
(18:43) Southwest in 2011 versus today back in 2011 a lot of deell startups were there doing Gilla marketing it was some a place where you can go and make a lot of noise and splash today it's incredibly saturated it's still a really important event but it's a lot harder to be heard um from all the noise of all the other stuff that's going on um it's really hard to be investing in growth if you're not actively investing right if you're relying on passive Investments because they rely on actually picking specific
(19:09) growth opportunities finally we have uh the size of company or size of opportunity or investment as a as a basis um large cap versus small cap you could think about this as something like you know your blue chip kind of established Brands versus the smaller up incomers um there's pretty strong evidence in in finance that your smaller assets are going to be able to grow more cons considerably by by orders of by factors of magnitude than your larger assets is just kind of the way things work but obviously you need a lot more of those
(19:37) smaller ones to be able to have that payoff um you could think about this as like name brand kind of Flagship Events maybe like AWS reinvent or Pyon versus doing like local meetups or more Community kind of aggregated um uh networks now often this is going to be constrained by your budget you know like just as an example sponsoring one event can be really expensive you let's call it 10K at a minimum between your time and and t& and all those things um but if you want to be like you know highly visible at some of these larger events
(20:06) you're talking about increasing that by own order of magnitude or even more sometimes right um so it can be really expensive so which of these should each of these Dev orgs invest in um well our startup is the most binary of the three due to their extremely limited resources they don't have the ability to run scaled programs so they need to take advantage of the unique insights that they have about their potential customers and make investment decisions actively so they should be picking the content community and and uh events they
(20:33) get involved with explicitly every opportunity should be about growth it should be expanding into to the right new markets and looking for opportunities to develop new customers they should be staying away from those type of larger Blue Chip events where they're just going to get lost in the crowd our growth Del org starts think transitioning into mixture of scaled and passive programs I'd expect to see about a 50-50 split from them their programs are still focused on growth so expanding into new potential customer bases or
(20:58) people that they can offer for solutions to um driving that funnel but occasionally when a good deal comes across their their desk they're going to take the value option um we also have the budget where we can start thinking about getting involved some of those bigger name brand opportunities but we have to be really specific about which ones we compete in finally our mature organization has transitioned into relying on external vendors for scale um they're not picking their own Investments but they should be picking
(21:22) the right partners that ultimately allow them to you know achieve a consistent always on program um when they do pick their own Investments That should be extremely rare and strategic um they also love a deal bang for our buck the more Roi we get for our dollar the better and it's not that we're going to be spending less money in those opportunities we're going to be spending the same amount we would in a more expensive growth opportunity we're just going to get more back for it when we do it um we also do have the budget to make
(21:46) a splash of these bigger events and so we are going to be looking for those bigger opportunities because we're going to use our strengths we're going to dig in and make sure that we can box out potential competitors now finally now that we have these like constraints we need to actually think the strategies we want to use for each of them let's start with our startup um the first thing they should be thinking about is what's called contrarian investing it's an investment strategy where you're
(22:07) basically characterizing purchasing Things based on the prevailing sentiment of the market often going against it um this might be something like investing in um you know things outside of hype like AI is really hot right now maybe you say okay I'm going to go after web 3 events because they're less than the the Zeitgeist um you believe that crowd Behavior can be exploited to your advantage and a startup implicitly has the ability to be able to do that better than anybody the next thing they can be doing is quality investing this is about
(22:36) investing in best-of class assets making sure that the picks that you do make since they are the most limited are the best ones you can possibly make for those resources um you can be looking for you know in in assets things like a great management team maybe you know for events you're looking for great organizers but you're using a quality bar to assess your Investments and finally our old friend throwing darts the startup stage is the only time it is acceptable to be throwing darts at all because ultimately you're going after
(23:03) unknown unknowns um this is a time where you can explore and find things that work um but we're searching for product Market fit and as soon as we find it we need to stop throwing darts now because they're actively investing you know those growth opportunities they're going to come they're going to be able to formulate these beliefs and really pick actively the key point is that they have the time to try to beat the market unlike our other two deal orgs our growth stage needs to be thinking in strategies that
(23:27) that give them leverage while enabling us to invest directly in new areas of growth they can use style or theme investing um it's which is an approach when you basically lump things into categories and best invest in those specific categories so that could be things like um maybe Emerging Markets or clean clean energy you know Ino that could be specific language communities or that could be you know maybe you want to own all the devops meetups right um in addition to that they should be doing what's called momentum investing which
(23:55) is the idea that you are doubling down on the Investments that are paying off and divesting from the ones that are not your goal is to find things that are working and can keep putting your resources into those to keep pumping the engine while reallocating the resources that are best not working as well into other things so sponsoring an event one year evaluating whether it's a good opportunity and then reinvesting it if it is or changing it into something else and in fact doubling down is the key component of that as well and finally
(24:22) they can start using satellite and core investing where they basically identify a core group of assets things that we know Reach customer customers that we already can speak to every day uh and use our passive programs to reach those while we're actively investing in expansion opportunities things that bring in new customers or markets that we haven't actually reached yet to build our expertise there so our startup has these resources not a lot of them we should be build to scalable passive programs but you know
(24:48) we ultimately we need some always on kind of opportunities our mature organization is going to do things a little bit differently their strategies involve making sure that they can maintain their lead so things like Buy and Hold where we're investing in something over the long term this is a viewpoint on Market timing you know you're able to think longterm as a larger organization and ultimately if you can stick around longer you can see the ups and downs of things until they they ultimately return in a positive direction um they can also
(25:15) use indexing like being everywhere um it's that again I talked about your 401k or you know maybe um uh like things like that where you're basically just getting a collection of every having a presence everywhere you can uh and finally lading which is this idea that we're going to have a series of Investments that have different time Horizons at payoffs we don't want to just focus on investments that are going to pay off today we need to think about some that are going to pay off a year from now two years from
(25:40) now 5 10 years it's called lading um this is actually another great example to highlight mlh but nearly 40% of our audience goes on to introduce Technologies they learn through mlh into production at their first job when they graduate um we did a 5-year longitudinal study on this that actually showed that we were able to directly impact Cloud platform buying behavior of developers over a 5-year time Horizon after they had been exposed to one of our customers and then ultimately went into the job market uh and that they were 50% more
(26:11) likely to buy the the cloud platform that they actually learned on while they were student at Major League hackings events this is an example of Buy and Hold indexing and lading all at once where we're investing in a long taale of developers who are coming online and ultimately building customers over a longer time Horizon so there we have it a concrete div Diversified Investment Portfolio plan for three different Del organizations at different stages um we started with the resources we have to spend we identified our desired Roi we
(26:43) came up with concrete uh constraints around what we believe about the market and what we can do and ultimately identified strategies we can use to effectively uh Implement these and now the one thing I want to say to make all this work is that while your Deo organization is growing there is a natural push to do more uh but there's one key to making this all work and that is to just say no if something does not squarely fit into your strategy you have to be willing to turn it down less is more and organizations that focus on the
(27:14) the specific you know implementations and strategies that they have identified are going to be more successful you may get lucky occasionally throwing darts and just trying to do a lot of things but I promise you that focus is the best way to generate real returns um so let's all practice together let me hear it let's all just say no oh my God my one-year-old at home does a better job than you guys let me hear you say no there we go okay finally I'm just going to give you a three quick uh things that I think are
(27:45) are my hot takes on the devell industry right now if you're looking for opportunities and and Investments um things to be doing the first one is to take advantage of uh the hyper focus on revenue and the United States right now every company is reinen in the market with the highest buying capacity and they're really focused on proving Roi right now the maximum that you should be advancing while your competitors are retreating is something that you can be taking advantage of by focusing on investments that don't have a
(28:12) necessarily Direct Media connection to Roi in terms of generating Revenue but will in the longtail um you should divest from anything that look boils down to glorified tech support we saw that demo earlier from Craig around where you know chat GPT is right now today it is really good at solving the types of problems that people post on stack Overflow or you know Post in your local Discord chat you should be doing your best to divest from those and focus on value that is unique that your evangelist can provide
(28:41) that is not around these basic bug triage uh and finally uh email and SMS are actually the most valuable developer networks out there the the adage that developers don't check email is complete BS I can tell you that with confidence uh everybody's phone has their email and their their SMS in it and if you can be in their hand engaging with them that's the most intimate connection you can make with the developer to build loyalty trust and connection so with that I just want to thank everybody for your time I
(29:09) hope you learned something today uh the link to the slides is up there on the screen if you're interested it's speaker.com they call me Swift it's got all of the slides for every presentation I've given uh and I want to just give a quick shout out to the dev Ron organizing team they did a fantastic job putting the this conference and uh all of you made it such the success that it actually is so thank you everybody happy Happ I'm Swift all right thank you so much um do I anything no you're good on the T okay
(29:40) cool nice uh got check every time you know those Bagel uh we have time for some questions and so I open the floor to you all any questions out there for Swift yeah no was very thorough now we got now I got some here wait I got I'll give you check check check can you just uh elaborate on your last point there about the glorified tech support just want to hear you say more about it yeah yeah so basically what I'm saying is if you look at devell activities that ultimately boil down to solving and triaging basic
(30:15) developer issues things like hey I'm trying to set up the sample app and you know this thing isn't working um you know if you hang out in the Discord channel of a lot of uh you know apis or platform companies that is the like most common that's happening a developer is trying to get started with the API or the SDK they encounter a bug and they go to the Discord and post it if you look at historical stack Overflow questions it's a lot of the same stuff right the Lion Share of of tickets or issues that
(30:42) are being raised are things that are easily addressable by generative AI Solutions right now and and they're not perfect you know they certainly have a long way to go but the trend is converging around those types of of low-level time to hello world type bugs being resolved by computer systems and so my advice is that you should be thinking about your developer relations team and the value they can provide on a level that is more difficult for technology so that's going to be like strategic advice for businesses or
(31:13) ideation and brainstorming of potential Solutions um exposing them to unknown unknowns things that they don't you know know that they have right now but if you have activities like you know let's say that you're going to hackathons and you're mentoring you know people on how to get started with your API that's great right now but there's a closing window in terms of when while that's going to be useful and the skill level you'll need to be able to do that so uh for a company that's reaching
(31:39) maturity but just getting started with Devo what's the best way to engage with mlh to accelerate our program yeah it's a good question I actually think that in almost all cases no matter how mature the organization is you need to evaluate where you are as a de organization first to be honest if you don't have the basic fundamentals down no partner mlh or otherwise is going to be able to help you get them the the failure points we see often when that stuff is happening is you know maybe they don't even have
(32:10) documentation set up maybe there's no way to actually sign up for a free account or to give somebody you know promotional credit so they can try something out um maybe the the API is bottlenecked by compute capacity and they don't have the ability to just you know bring in 10,000 people to do it my honest advice if you're just getting started in your deell journey is that you shouldn't be looking for scaled opportunities like you know the traditional way of working with mlh we do have individual events that you can
(32:35) sponsor and like be a part of where you can engage with our community directly I'd call that something like Global hack week which is a a monthly Festival we run for a week each month focus on a different technology theme those tend to be much more direct engagement opportunities where you can get up demo something provide a prompt to hackers to work on and and actually see them do it but bringing out a scaled promotion to you know 100 hack aons of something that you're really just figuring out is probably not the move that our team
(33:02) would advise you to do so you know my honest read is go you know come to mlh say hey we want to get involved in some of these events to talk to developers get them using our apis build the muscles around the basic mechanics of Deo and then at as soon as you ready to transition to that growth stage that's when we're going to become a valuable partner there's one behind you rendo oh and one in front of you too all right cool um given given what you said just a moment ago about uh generative AI being you know
(33:33) able to solve these smaller triage things uh on the counter the counter side of that is that AI got smart because of public documentation uh so do you think you should be investing more in better documentation or you should just have more content out there and less polish just so the AI can pick it up how do we how do we complement that there's a really um it's a chicken or egg problem like you've correctly identified here we are R this is like a tangent but like we're riding a wave right now where we're benefiting from
(34:01) all of the free public information that's been available on the web for basically you know a decade plus of this point that's mightbe call it two decades and that is what is making everything that's happening right now in generative AI possible and as we become more and more dependent on those systems and we're generating more things with AI it's kind of like a snake eating its own tail um we have to kind of hope that there are going to be other unique proprietary data sources that will come
(34:24) along and I would actually argue that something like GitHub is actually just like a maybe ubiquitous TurnKey solution to that in the future like if you look at co-pilot it went from zero to like 80% adoption among our community members in less than 12 months which is an absolutely unheard of meteoric rise and the reason for that is because it just has this utility that solves like a really basic problem that just about every Junior developer has and I think as they continue to like write code and and we can continue to utilize that same
(34:54) data set to like basically feed itself the one advantage we have there is that the code is guaranteed to be working if you're like building software that actually works right so maybe it's a little bit less error prone than things like stack Overflow or documentation but you know my honest advice is like you've got to do the basic basic stuff like you I would argue that Community generated content is a longer tale strategy but you have to be at a mature stage of a deoro organization to really be focused
(35:19) on you know gaming that particular system that you're talking about that ties in nicely you mentioned the longtail strategy you mentioned your fiveyear study that you did but deil as an industry is still pretty new what is your advice for selling some of these longtail Solutions and experiments that we're trying if we don't have data to back it up yeah it's a it's a really good question so you need leadership Buy in like you cannot possibly expect to be an individual contributor or even a
(35:51) manager level on a team in an organization whose goals typically revolve around quarterly or annual metri and then be like hey we need to focus on 5 years like that's not going to work you can do it and you can certainly go for the bait and switch where because like the truth the truth of the matter is like our programs do generate immediate short-term Roi just as like an example right like you work with them should do 100 hackathons over the course of a year like you're going to get signups you're going to get use cases
(36:18) and projects right that's not the like if you're really investing like again doing something for 5 years or whatever where you're like building ubiquity you're build building a lading system You're Building um trust among a community with repeat brand Impressions like that is certainly the best way to do it but there is short-term Roi that you can fall back on and do that for lack of a better term kind of bait and switch thing if you do have the Buy in though or you want to build the buyin
(36:45) like my advice is to rely on the data that external Partners have like case studies are an incredibly valuable thing especially when there's a voice like a real person that you could talk to to back it up and you know I think that if you were to uh talk to somebody like mlh and be like hey I want to bring this to my CEO and convince them that we need to be thinking on a 5-year time Horizon for Debo that we could connect you with somebody who did that successfully at an organization like AWS or Google cloud
(37:11) and you know helped sell that internally or at least give you the collateral and data that you need to be able to back that up when you don't have it yourself but in truth all Industries are like this where you have to rely you're you're not always going to have the data yourself you're going to have to rely on third parties but trusted third party Enders with a long track record of success whether that's an organization you know like the Deborah org or mlh is like going to be your best bet for
(37:35) something like that I think we're probably out of time on questions I know I went a little over if we have if we have one more question is there I want to make sure we go we okay just one one okay we're go and I'll I'll be around I'm going to be here all for the rest of the conference if you want to find me I'm happy to chat I'll be around during the coffee breaks but again thank you everybody for your time and attention I hope you have a really great rest of the Debon happy talking everybody please
