Shane Rosse is a senior software engineer at Emjay where he works on building the technological infrastructure for the cannabis startup. He also runs a consulting business where he helps clients build anything and everything software-related. Before Emjay, Shane helped build products at Griddy and TicketMaster. Shane graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in computer engineering.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanerosse/
Shane Rosse is a senior software engineer at Emjay where he works on building the technological infrastructure for the cannabis startup. He also runs a consulting business where he helps clients build anything and everything software-related. Before Emjay, Shane helped build products at Griddy and TicketMaster. Shane graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in computer engineering.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanerosse/
Hey, everybody. Welcome to what can you tell me about software? My name is and I'm currently a graduate student at Santa Clara university where I studied data science, software and technology. And my name is and I spent six years as the head of software at a tech startup. So facade, you know, the Bay area where we both grew up is known as the hub of. Startup attack innovation. Why do you think the Bay area Silicon Valley, the small region is so prolific in creating startups. I've been thinking about that a lot recently. Ever since we heard the news of a lot of these tech giants leaving the Bay area, I think what made it great in the first place is, is really a handful of reasons. You had the original technological innovation in America. Get, get created here. You had bell labs, you had Xerox park later, you had IBM and you really just have 40 years of crazy technological growth. Aside from that. I think we have some great universities in the area. Obviously, a world renowned institution that I'm a part of Santa Clara university. It's the Broncos you'll also have, I guess, close second and third, you have Stanford and Berkeley. These institutions have really just output some great, great talent into the area. Finally I think the weather does play a huge role. I mean, in recent years you've had fires and smoke, but aside from that, it doesn't really get too hot or too cold when I was living in other States I always wanted to come back home. I always wanted to come back to California. I think. I think that's really, really true for a lot of people. Well, you know, it's called something interesting, which is that there are other areas in the U S that are starting to become hot Springs of real startup innovation. And our guest today has a lot to say about that and Los Angeles. So I'm really excited to hear what he has to say about the tech scene and the startup scene in LA, the city of angels let's get into it. So I'm really excited to talk to our guest today. Shane Ross, Shane is a full-stack software engineer and has worked for several startups over the past few years. Currently he works for one of Ellie's hottest cannabis tech, tech, startups, MJ, and he also runs his own software development consulting business. Shane welcome, Tony, can you tell me about software? Oh, whatever you want to know for us, whatever you want to know. Nice. You're an open book. I mean, yeah. As long as the pages are legible, you were there for. A bunch of the learning. Right. So yeah, that's actually a great intro. So before we get into it I just want to tell people how we know each other. So we went to USC together and I think we were in the worst class at the school together. Let's keep the professor's name, let's call this professor professor Y. But yeah, professor wide gave lectures that were completely incomprehensible. Everyone just like spent the whole time on Snapchat or Facebook or whatever. But you, I noticed had an intro to iOS programming book open during lecture, and I think you were the only person who actually learned something in that class. Yes, exactly. And I saw that I was very impressed. Like this seems like somebody I should know. So it sounds like you might as caliber exactly your past my standard of friendship. That's funny. I was just more worried about how I was going to pay the bills after I graduated. So I was sitting in that class, wondering how in the world, anything I was supposed to be learning was actually going to be applicable. When I graduated and so I went and got an iOS programming book and stuff, that's how it all started. So yeah, super impressive that you in some senses are kind of at least you began as a self-taught programmer and then you switched into computer science later. I really don't think of myself as self-taught, but I was definitely self-motivated. I didn't really have anyone close to me in my life growing up, who was a software engineer or, or even really, you know new other software engineers super closely. So I didn't really even understand what it was until I was about halfway through college. And I made some more friends who were studying it and had some sort of older friends who were mentors and started to get internships and explained to me sort of how different their job was from some of these jobs that I was pursuing as an electrical engineer, which you were studying with me and really made a pretty hard pivot and graduated with a degree in computer science and computer engineering. But. Not in the normal four year way. Shane, I think it's super interesting. You're originally from Idaho, you know, it's not common that you see people in tech who come from somewhere, that's not a, one of the coastal cities, as they say what do you, how do you feel like that's colored your experience? And if you could just speak a little bit about your experience growing up in Idaho and how you really got into software. I think that'd be really interesting. Yeah, it's definitely colored my experience. Just coming from a background where not everybody thinks of things in terms of how the tech works and you know, which big company is putting out which product it's just a product that's supposed to work at the end of the day for the end user, they don't really care what the integrations are or what's shiny and fancy about it or who built it. So I, I feel like from the very beginning of my career, it's always been really natural to empathize with the end user doesn't doesn't understand and doesn't care how the product works. They just want it to do what you told them it was going to do. So in that sense, it's definitely colored it, but Yeah. It's, you know, in other ways it's kind of been the same or maybe a bit of a disadvantage, just not being aware of certain things. You don't know what you don't know. Did you have a computer science? I stumble upon it. I had one and actually that's a pretty good story. I had one computer science class and again, I won't name any teachers cause I think he still teaches there. But it was like an experimental class. I don't even know what to call it. It was the first time they ever offered his computer science elective and we were supposed to learn Java. And we got about to the point of building a little command line program that you could play blackjack against and things got out of control. Okay. And we just know when he wasn't really capable of teaching beyond. Right. Anyone big mega function in a four loop? One, one file. Like I think it was, I think it was a clips we were using it at the time. Like you had no idea how to use a clips. And then the class just started to do their own thing. A lot of really nerdy, smart kids took that class. We were sitting in the computer lab. So we learned that you opened up the task manager. You can kill the. Monitoring software then and then you could pop in a USB and fire up a Pokemon emulator, pretty much play with Pokemon. So that's what most of that class turned into a little bit about killing a process. That's honestly the way to learn. I remember in high school, I also took programming classes and, and, you know, I guess because we're like a Bay area, Silicon Valley high school The classes were really good, but the vast majority of my learning was like, I had a business like jail breaking iPhones, like I modded my week. So I could like burn pirated games on to CDs and plug them in. Like, I feel like that's where you learn the real tech stuff, like trying to get around authority. Whether it's like a piracy or school or something like that. I think that's what some real Hocking coding stuff is. I think I knew like three different people in our high school who released iOS apps before they turn 17. It's just, it was nuts. That's crazy. See, like for me as like a junior or a sophomore in college, that was like, my big goal was to release some kind of app in the kind of app, just on the store by the end of the year. You know, I think that in high school, like the most hacky thing anyone was doing that we were super proud of was. Using a VPN or a DNS proxy or something to get around the school's blocks because we're going on to YouTube in the middle of, yeah, I remember that. I remember that too. Yeah. We probably use like the same tech stack for that. Yeah. Whatever it was like a website you could go to and then that kind of got stifled. And so you had to like, again, like install a program, home computer, but Yeah, I would going back to what you were talking about though, with that sort of big and early sign of, of a lot of people that get into tech and engineering. I think really what it comes down to. It's not that you're like learning how technology works, because we didn't understand how that technology worked. But what we were doing was we were evaluating the constraints in front of us and saying what we want it to actually do this other thing and figuring out, you know, what, how could we poke it and what inputs could we make and how can we basically solve this problem in a creative way? Right. And I mean, now, is it more proliferated? Like has a, do you guys have a lot more, if you go back to Idaho now, are there a lot more computer science classes? And in fact, are your classmates from back then in tech? I like how many of them are in tech? I don't know, some of them are in top. It's definitely more, I mean, there's just more tech across the entire country, you know, it used to just be Silicon Valley and now every city with more than a quarter million people is Silicon something. Yeah. Now Utah's really trying to push itself with the university of Utah. You know, Idaho Boise has got, you know, a couple of startups that have, you know, made waves with nine exits and things like, wow, Yeah, Qualtrics of Qualtrics is the really big one out in Utah that some of my friends worked at. And then I can't remember the exact name of the company out an Eagle, but they were acquired by Intuit for quite a large sum. So, yeah, so it's definitely grown. There's probably like an actual computer science curriculum. Now, if I were to go back and see what my high school has to offer today. So yeah, it's definitely grown. It's definitely grown. I definitely got. You know, a little fortunate, you know, or, or just maybe have the right intuition jumping into tech and it didn't like fall off a cliff continuing to be a big deal across the country. So yeah, you've been you've been coding iOS now for how long, when was that? When was that class with professor Y at USC, when you first started reading that iOS book? That would have been at the beginning of our junior year, I believe 2000 late, 2014. So that would have been, yeah, almost seven years ago now. Yeah, you've seen quite the landscape and quiet the changes in the iOS ecosystem. So and you can get technical with this. In fact, I'd prefer for you to how has the tech changed since then to today? So the nonstop really? It was honestly, I felt like it was changing a lot faster when I, when I first joined, I feel like that's the most that it's. Changed in the 30 year history of iOS, the year that I started learning iOS was the year that Swift came out. So I actually started learning, I started learning objective C you know, so it was this brand new thing and no one was really even hiring for it yet. But all the big companies were starting to work on it, you know, and start to maybe try to build a new feature in it here or there. How did that differ from objective C. So if Jack could see is based on message passing principles, Swift is much more loosely typed. It looks like Python or JavaScript is strongly typed. You do declare your types and all of that, but just the brevity. Mm. Really what changed a lot of it too, is all of the major iOS frameworks like UI kit were re-released in Swift. I see. So are they still, Swift's still the dominant language for iOS programming at this point, I'd say swept is the dominant, the dominant language, and there's still a lot in objective C you know, a lot of the iOS code that runs in our iPhone is probably objective C or objective to C plus plus even. Yeah, I, I think at this point, Apple has the most objective C code under sort of, I guess you would call active development of any one in the world. Slips rapid success has almost been slightly to Apple's detriment because they no longer can readily find them. Drop-in see engineers to work. I'm sure there's, I'm sure they still find them apples. Apple's a massive company with unlimited resources, but Swift definitely took off in popularity faster than anybody expected. And the shift from objective C to Swift. Happened faster than Apple anticipated. So this first three years of Swift I'd say were pretty nonstop changes from Swift one to Swift two to Swift three the language we're not really, they might've been backwards compatible, but there was definitely a lot of changes you had to make the provided migration tools that sort of helped, but it was difficult. The, the move from Swift four and then to Swift five was a lot easier. I remember that big. Just to sort of a regular task I was able to do as a maintenance upgrade. And so that was the major development with an iOS first few years that I was doing it the transition to Swift and sort of the evolution in right journey of other products. CocoaPods pods Swift was getting its own package manager eventually. And then. Not so much in iOS development boards from the vote mobile development world and around 2016 is not when it came out, but when it really sort of became a lot more popular, it was react native by Facebook and react native really promised to change the way that everyone did native eliminate the need for iOS engineers, Android engineers, and just have this. Sort of JavaScript Kemano culture ecosystem, where your web engineers can be your mobile engineers. And if you ran node and could also be your server engineers. So let's, let's dig into that a little bit more. So you're saying that basically react came in and it said that you don't need to learn. How to program for iPhone. You don't need to learn how to program for Android. If you know how to make basically front end WebDev, then you get iPhone and Android for free. Is that accurate? Okay. So what, what, what actually in your experience has happened? So it's evolved, it's evolved. And so at the time we're talking about 2016 when react native just came out. And so it was nowhere near. A one-to-one native experience and they were, they were fairly up front with that, that, you know, features were development. Things would be added, you know, for example, the most, the biggest one that stood out because there was no defined way by Facebook to do navigation necessarily. And to. Just have all of those little native touches that when you talk about an app, you don't really talk about, but when you actually go to use an app, you immediately notice like, Oh, why doesn't this naturally scroll and have momentum when I finished throwing them for, you know, why? When I zoom, does it have a little bit of jank? JavaScript has worked really hard. Native was worked really hard. All these developers all across the world have worked really, really hard in the last four or five years to make. React native come a lot closer to an authentic experience. And it's, it probably is a lot closer, but I haven't really dived deep into that world because for what I was doing, there was always an existing iOS app. And there was existing native iOS knowledge in what I knew and what other people on the team knew. And so the switching cost and jumping over to react, right. Never, never really made sense. And then I did finally get into a situation at MJ where there was already react native in the iOS app. When I got there my boss had been developing on it and he didn't really know ILS. So we added react native as a way for him to make. Modifications and adjustments. And so it worked for him. It was the right tool for the right time to go in and, and make a job easier to do. Unfortunately that came with a steep learning curve that very quickly caught up and it, it didn't take long before the code base. Wasn't. Necessarily even buildable or getting, yeah, pushed up, pushed up to get, you know, the modifications would be made. It would be tested and run on that one particular machine where the whole react native configuration worked. If it was good, it would kind of get shipped out. And so when I came in. We fixed that and we made it so everything was, you know, steady and worked, but that required my intimate knowledge of native iOS works because react native react native at the end of the day. It's just dependency it's pulled in through CocoaPods and you drop out little JavaScript web view in the iOS app. So it's still an iOS app. You want to be an Android version. You also got to spin up Android studio and have an Android app. Right. But a little, it's just a web view. On, you know, world-class steroids. And so the idea is really slick and you can even take it one step further and just program your react app. And this is what I think is really kind of the future you program your react app so that it's mobily responsive. It's responsive on all screen sizes and it looks really great. And then you can just drop that in your mobile app. And again, you lose out on a lot of those native touches, like swiping and navigation and native experiences. But if you have an experience that doesn't really require that, then you can really get to sleep for one, and you can actually have the exact same code base from your mobile app. And if you really need to do like mobile specific things, you can start to push the envelope on how your mobile website in browser works like a mobile app and things. Yeah. Can you give an example of some application that might truly live the three code bases or just one code base? That truly live the, the react native experience? Oh, yeah. So we, we didn't know a company. Yeah. That one's actually it was at an energy company and people basically opened the app and didn't expect to have any sort of interaction with the app. They just opened it to look at their bill. They could see their monthly energy usage. They could see the price of that energy usage. And then they could see how much they were charged for that energy usage over, you know, over time. And it was just. Three tabs, a fourth tab for all your profile and your account information, and then against you could like, you know, sign up and subscribe and all that stuff. And it was a complete read, only experience. You know, you, you would drop down a little tables, see more information, but it's still read only. So. Ultimately what we did is just really polished up the website so that it had a really amazing mobile responsive experience. And then it was just a matter of coordinating the mobile apps. So that depending on which tab you clicked on, you would get sort of a different webpage loading up. So do you think that do you think that react will eventually truly fulfill the three for one promise? So I don't think react is really trying to fulfill that three for one promise. There's a project called react native web that more specifically tries to solve it. I think using react to do it in web and mobile web views kind of requires your own sort of delicate touch and compromise. Like that example that I just described, we dropped these web views into a native tab controller. So that we can maintain that native iOS navigation experience read the read, the read only components. Each component was like a webpage basically. And so we could have taken it a step further and programmed like a mobile web tab, but our mobile web experience dropped those same pages in a different navigation controller. That is actually what Android looked like. So Android is able to just be one single web view and then use a hamburger menu up top that doesn't have some sort of expected native animation to it. Gotcha. So what is the difference between react and react? Native react is for the web and react. Native is a mobile SDK that compiles into compiles down into you know, Rendering on iPhone or an Android device. So one thing that I think is quite interesting is the fact that the classical reacts which is a pretty powerful front end framework is given away by Facebook for free, you know, they could've kept that as their own secret sauce and they could have just built that as an internal tool, but they didn't. Why do you think they open-sourced it? I think they were just following in the footsteps of other. Great technology is being open-sourced so that they could accelerate the innovation and the advancement of what rack react really was. I mean, react. Wasn't what it is today. When it was an internal Facebook project, reactions become what it is today because it was open source and because of the community has so much input development. And if you look at some react code, when it was internal at Facebook, there's probably a bunch of. Resting passed around and just these massive class components with really big stayed lifecycle methods. You wouldn't see any of that now because of the introduction of hooks and so many higher order components and the way that react is written now, it's, it's really nice. It's really nice. Yeah, but, but, but that's, that's not Facebook. That's the open source community that did it open sourced it, and now Facebook gets to benefit the way that the rest of us do. And at the end of the day it is still a Facebook license. Then they get to decide what lives on react that everybody's using. Right. Yeah, and I think it's good for them from a PR perspective. Right. You know Google is always known as like, Oh, you get to work with the smartest people in the world and interesting problems and Facebook now, like you know, there, there are some there are some reasons to be skeptical of Facebook as a company, but in terms of engineers, it's indisputable that Facebook has got some of the best engineers in the world. Yeah, absolutely. I think all those fan companies, that's sort of the. The draw and the attraction is that you're going to get with these world-class engineers world-class process, world-class product managers just really worked for this world-class company and sort of see how to do these products. What people think is going to be, I think, often sort of the right way. And yeah, that's a really great way to go. Haven't really been of that same mindset pursuing it myself, but Yeah, it's hard to deny. It's a great job working on. I think it's super, super fascinating that. In tech, you have this piece of each of these bank businesses that don't even have any strict revenue models. You don't see that in any other industry, you don't go to like the food industry and they don't have a significant chunk of their internal talent working on something that's open source per se. You know, it's not really generating any revenue. I guess that's like strictly new and just intuitive for tech. Also Shane, I wanted to touch on MJ, you said earlier that you work at MJ, what's that. So MJ is a cannabis delivery service in Los Angeles. Getting ready to expand all across Southern California, down to San Diego. And there's a website, Pam jet.com and we'll check it out and make an account. Upload your identification to prove that you're old enough and border. Whenever you want. We have hundreds and hundreds of products at this point, you know, ounces of flour, every edible you can think of tinctures, bath, salts devices, accessories, hats, we'll deliver it straight into your door. Same day, a couple of hours. What sort of a technological problems are you solving at MJ? So it's pretty cool. It's, it's really sorry. I think the same technological problems that a lot of people are solving the stays, whether you're Amazon or Postmates or anyone really doing sort of e-commerce and delivering the product all the way to the end user, you know, we're a fully integrated experience. So we have in-house products that come from our farms are manufactured and arrive at the Depot, and then all those products need to be inventoried. And, you know, mid available for sale online. And then once they're actually selected, they need to be packaged sent out with the courier. The courier needs to know where to go. That prayer has their own app to then complete the transaction with the customer. The customer has the option of paying with their debit card. They have the option of paying or prepaying online ahead of time. It's a company called hyper pay to do sort of ACH bank transaction because of to it. Yeah. Is it because of the nature of the, the semi-legal nature of cannabis at a federal level, we're not allowed on your credit card networks? So the payment processing portion is probably the most interesting sort of tech thing that we have to solve. And it's really just that we can't use Stripe. We can't be on credit card networks. So we have. A system in place for processing debit cards. You know, basically the couriers will have the same debit card terminal that someone would normally have, like in, in a restaurant they'd bring up to you or cash or this spending transfer. So you guys are, you guys are rolling, a credit card and payment processing yourself. That's what I'm saying. It's kind of just the biggest constraint on the business is we can't take credit cards. And so we had to sort of go the extra mile and the offer ACH payments, which isn't something that a normal e-commerce company would do, because why would you do that? You can just use your credit card. So you got, but you guys rolled to the payment, processing yourself. This company called hyper pay that we integrated with a few months ago. I see. Right. So, so, so yeah, so all those problems, every step along the way that I was describing, there is an iPad app or a web app, or some other function, basically some other technology that needs to be built out and scaled. You know, we're a team of about five engineers and over 104 years making this whole thing happen. And that's not including the couriers have over a hundred. Drivers as well. Wow. Did you apply any algorithms that we learned from CS class? Probably. I'm trying to think off the top of my head, if there's anything that's been applied directly. Like if you're, if you're sending out courier is like, is there some like traveling salesmen, optimize heuristic type thing? No, because we have a whole team of dispatchers that are there. More efficient at doing that. Any, any sort of traveling salesman we could have yet to figure out at this point, because there's just so many variables around Los Angeles, traffic and new orders coming in in real time and things like that. I think the most classical algorithm that I've used and the most classical stance would be the lunchtime distance. And you're familiar with what that one was. No, I don't, I don't remember that one. So Levinstein, that's a string manipulation algorithm. You're looking at a cat and cop and you're saying, okay, well, you had to change one letter to get from cat to cop. And so that you assign a certain score. That's your lunch time distance number of ads, deletions, and or edits that you need to make to go from one word to the next. Wow. And so one of the. Things that we did build from scratch. We replaced an ID scanning company with our own in-house solution. I leveraged some AWS technologies like recognition and tech straps to build out an ID scanning service, where our customers will get. A little mobile web experience and communicate with the desktop, the web sockets in real time. So they say, okay, now upload your kind of your idea for the back of your ID. Like take a selfie and we match in the selfie is on the ID. And we also need to look at the driver's license and determine, you know, their birthday at the expiration date. What state is this license from? So that we can compare it to the bar code on the back, which also needs to be decoded. But anyway, It's not a perfect science, getting the text off of that image from who knows what kind of cell phones, camera quality we use. We use the live-in Shang distance to check for the word driver's license or it's nationally sort of defined by the DMV. All of the different words that can be on a driver's license that a state gets to choose from when they design that state's driver's license. So we're basically just checking for those words on a certain Levinstein listings to decide like, is this a national identity card? Is this a regular driver's license? So we can then further to kind of the rest of the information. Yeah. Actually I have a question for both of you guys, when you decide to build something house, how what's that decision making process like you're like, you know, maybe. Whoever you're contracting it out to right now, whatever service you're using is maybe too expensive. What sort of the rubric that you guys are using before you decide to build it? In-house yeah, it's a straight cost benefit analysis. We look at how much things are costing us, you know, and how well they're performing. This particular service was expensive and they weren't really doing the job that they claimed doing. You know, we had a lot of manual intervention and basically saying like, you know what, this is. This is costing us a dollar per scan, half of the scans we have to go in and correct. Anyway, you know, so can we build something better ourselves? And we thought about it and we talked about it and we're like, yeah. Okay, well, let's stop spending our time discussing it. And let's just try and do it. And let's see what kind of basic version we can get out. And we discussed, and this has sort of always been our strategy. You know, what's the part that we're. Most unsure we can accomplish. What's our riskiest assumption. We're making here and let's build that part first. And if you can build that part first and you can kind of clear out the foggiest part of your design or your ambition very quickly, you can then estimate out all the easy parts and say, yeah. And I know for sure that we can get this done in two months and it's going to accomplish this core functionality because of this core functionality or this sort of Chicky algorithm that you had to design to make it work. Yeah. I actually, I know that a lot of startups I'm out from there, we're working on something and they build this internal tool and the internal tool kicks ass and they launched that as their, as a product as well. And that that's also successful. So since you guys built, what I imagine is a fairly significant problem, which is scanning, especially IDs, like Coinbase also has that, and I think more and more companies can be using ID scanning. Have you guys thought about selling this as well as a product? Yeah. That's the plan we merged earlier this year with several other companies in the delivery space, one of which being an alcohol company. So they also need to stay on ideas. They do alcohol and tobacco delivery. So they're in the process of integrating with us right now, my latest sort of pass through the standard code base was to just continue to generalize it so that it can be deployed as its own service. It can deploy its own AWS infrastructure. The configurable, you know, the alcohol delivery service also requires a signature to verify that you are the age that you say you are just different wording of the law. So, yeah. Yeah. That's always been the plan and to really. Sort of go from being a dominant player in our space to a dominant vendor in our space. That's like the Slack dilemma. You guys are familiar with Slack story. They started off as a gaming company and then they built this internal messaging tool. And then they quickly realized that served a far greater purpose and they pivoted completed. It was Slack. Well, what is now Slack? Another, I guess like a multi multi-billion dollar company, but on that topic, on the cannabis topic, I think you just mentioned you were consolidating with other companies. Do you think that's sort of the future of cannabis? You know, eventually there comes a day where we get federally legalized and regulated. Does it become that we really just have three or four really big cannabis operators in the country, similar to how alcohol is now. I think we are, we continue to see a certain level of consolidation based on what the consumer is looking for. You know, the consumer is constantly seeking lower prices and at present, there's not a huge amount of brand loyalty because brands are sort of a new concept in general, in cannabis, you know, a medical dispensary several years ago. And there's no problems. You just respect the strain that you want it. And they pulled out a big jar and they weighed it in front of you and they clicked it in your container. You went on your way and now when you go shopping, it's all these different brands, you know, alien labs, cannibis, Biotics Shubinski is. And so you're trying to, at that point then decide between what's already similar products, but they're now being differentiated by brands, not necessarily the strain or the specific farm that grew them brands are hopefully associated with the farm, but not always. Well, that's super interesting. I think most of the mind share in the media at least is for cannabis. They really just talk about federal legalization. They don't. Really jumped into like, you know, what, what is happening? I mean, we saw drizzly just get acquired by Uber. I don't know if you saw that. Oh yeah, no, totally. That could totally be Uber. Uber could be delivering cannabis 10 years. Yeah, possibly that's something that we were discussing, you know? Cause as, as I mentioned, one of the companies that we merged with was an alcohol delivery companies. Their main competitor has been for years drizzly. So. Yeah, we talk about what that would kind of look like we would potentially be acquired or merged at the moment, just working on expanding throughout Southern California, that the addressable market here is, is massive. But obviously with the both senators in Georgia, winning their runoff for the democratic party. And Kamala Harris now being able to break the, any sort of tie that presents itself in the Senate, it really opens up possibility in the next two years for some form of passage of, you know, decriminalized, if not fully legalized recreational cannabis. And we've already seen that have a bit of an impact on sort of the cannabis industry. The amount of investment dollars started to flow in, in a way that they hadn't in a few years in the past two months let's talk about Southern California. So I think you, and Faraz both under the same school obviously, but you guys also stayed back after he graduated and worked there. You're still working there. What do you think about Silicon beach? I think that's the, that's a phrase that gets thrown around is that legit? I mean, I don't have any money now, but if I did, should I be buying real estate in Silicon beach near Santa Monica? Well, let me, let me just, let me just interrupt you. Besides you're paying$20 a month for zoom premium. So you clearly have money. So Silicon beach I think it kind of depends. Where exactly you're calling Silicon beach. I mean, you can get really, really specific with it. And just say that it's only that neighborhood in Playa Vista that is its own little municipality with someone elementary school or its own walking paths and its own security in all of that. And I worked there for awhile. I worked there twice, actually in two different offices and it's a really, really nice area. It's almost identical to Silicon Valley priced real estate already because I think it's strictly Silicon Valley transplants moving down there, or maybe people just kind of cruising over from the West side of the Hollywood on down to Playa Vista. But then you also have a really big tech campus, right in Santa Monica with Snapchat, right games. And, and that integrates a little bit more with just the already existing city of Santa Monica and then sandwiched between those two areas. You have an even larger area of Culver city. Which has itself kind of started to reach them charity and really flourished and its development. It has major companies like Sony headquartered right there. So it's definitely got room to grow. I think it's a great area to be the reason I chose to stay down here instead of going up to the Bay area into what was kind of the more well-trodden path for software news. Right. So yeah, come on down. Well at, to expand on that too, my startup, my last startup was in So all the areas that she's talking about are on the West side of LA and East side, the West side are almost like entirely different cities. So it's like an hour drive from the West side to the East side, longer in traffic which is often a in LA. So my startup was in East LA. And there are a lot of startups that are also in downtown LA. So, I mean, you can also talk about LA general as this kind of a tech hub. That's, that's growing. There's a lot of interesting stuff that's coming out of there. I'll tell you one difference between. LA and the Bay area is when you're trying to recruit talent, it can actually paradoxically be harder to recruit talent in the Bay area, because there are so many. There's so much talent, but there's also so much, so many companies who are aware of this talent who are competing for it. Whereas for me I was getting like world-class interns and world-class new grads from Caltech, from USC to join our company. Whereas when I was also going to career fairs at Stanford and telling them, Hey, come to our booth, there was just 10 times as many people who were trying to recruit them. So it was just hard to stand out as a startup. Amongst all that noise. Whereas in LA there's still, I think there's more opportunity, especially if you're near top schools. Yeah, absolutely. And that, and that was one of the main reasons why I really felt confident in staying is just looking at the numbers. You know what I'm going to be. Venture capital dollars are floating around mostly plus how many startups are there and how many software engineers are here. And the ratio is absolutely skewed in favor of the software engineers. There's a lot of venture capital money down here. Especially when you consider it relative to the number of startups, they're trying to soak it up. There's even more venture capital money up in the Bay, but there is our garden dance through a number of companies up there, all competing for it. So you're right. It really does create this sort of highly competitive atmosphere where you might have world-class talent, but you also have world-class companies competing for it down in Los Angeles. You have a more diverse blend of people, you know, doing things in Hollywood, doing things downtown and finance, doing things in East LA. You don't feel like you're in so much of a monoculture, right. Right. Which has a lot of benefits, you know, you might not get the highest salary in the world, but you get a lot of other things that can. Play out in the long run, I think along those lines too one of the benefits of being in a place where not everyone is thinking about tech, you get exposed to more problems. So w what I mean by that is problems in the sense of starting a startup. So everyone says, like, when you start a company make a, make a company that solves a problem that you've personally faced. Well, That's kind of unsaturated, right? Like we've made all the dating apps that are, I mean, maybe that will make more, but that problem is very explored. We've made a lot of social media companies. We made a lot of photo sharing apps. I mean, we've done all this stuff, right. But what about people who are working at other businesses, people who did not grow up in software engineering and are not just hanging out with their software engineers? I think they have a lot of interesting problems that have not been adequately explored or solved yet. So people in LA might be better equipped to solve those and people who are in the monoculture. You guys made a great pitch for Southern California? Absolutely because not only have I been able to have my successful career as a software engineering down here in Southern California, but I've also been able to have a successful software consultant businesses without having to do any sort of really marketing or outreach. You know, there are just so many people that have their own ideas and they legitimately want help with someone to solve it and get it done. Yeah. And it's not just your tool. You know, I don't want to say Silicon Valley problem, but it's a more unique range of things people are trying to do, whether it's for the entertainment industry or for their, their food truck or whatever it is. So what sort of consulting is it that you do? It's just general software consulting, it consulting. So any sort of technology problems someone might need solved, it's typically involves building a web app, but It's also been, you know, just rehashing not rehashing fixing bugs and rely less app managing infrastructure and making sure the certificates they are today, just so that everything continues to run. So it's anything from maintenance to almost being a rent, a CTO and interviewing and hiring candidates and staffing up our company internally until it can kind of run without me. So when did you when did you start your company, Shane? It's something that I've done since college, actually, I don't know if you remember, but when we were doing our senior project we were working on this iOS app and I'm Scott really bored with my responsibility of it really quick. Cause it wasn't very, it wasn't very in-depth, but it wasn't meant to be in depth. It was meant to be a senior project where we all learned a new skill and I ended up on something that I already knew how to do. And so the professor. Just brought some work my way and he's like, Hey, I'll pay you money to work on this other iOS app instead. And so I did that. That was the first project I took on. And then that very quickly developed into another project. I went to my IRS professor actually, and it's getting a little bit of it's help to finish up that contract. And then he offered me another contract and I came and worked for him on some stuff. And then I went to Ticketmaster. And it's just not always been a constant thing. That same professor from college reached back out, reached back out to me that app that I had fixed some bugs on, they decided they wanted me to do a whole rewrite of it now. And so I got to completely rewrite that. I submit that. And then again, While I was at gritty, new GS two little random projects in the side for friends. And currently I'm working with a friend to help launch his startup second social network for salespeople. I can't say too much more than that at the moment, getting ready to launch soon, but fairly been operating more sort of a, almost a CTO role. And I'm bringing, helping to bring on other software engineers. Helping to design the system architecture or, you know, how does that integrate operational with the business and how do we prioritize punching that business as soon as possible. Awesome. So through your consulting business, you've probably worked with a lot of different technologies. You probably learned a lot from working with so many clients. Would you say that's accurate? Yeah, definitely. I try to approach each problem with an open mind on how exactly it needs to be solved rather than coming into everything saying like, Oh, I can build iOS apps right into this. Right. Let me, rather than approaching every problem with a hammer, I approach every problem and say, okay, what, what tool do I need? Even if it's a tool, I maybe haven't. Used recently. Right. So tell me, what's, what's some of the coolest tech you've been messing around with lately. Hm. The Tesla furious. I'm drawing a blank at the moment. It's been a lot the same, been a lot of it's been, well, actually, no, I take that back. The coolest thing that I've been working on recently, it's not through my consulting company with my job at M J, but we've recently added machine learning to our platform. Through a managed service with Amazon personalized. And so that's been a really different experience setting up that entire data pipeline and feeding it with data, building some serverless architecture so that it can continue to add data in real time and then monitoring that machine learning solution and using statistical metrics to determine if it's actually. Giving us good results. So that's been something entirely new for me. It's been pretty cool and a fairly new offering out of AWS. I don't think personalized has been out for more than a year. It sounds to me like you guys use AWS a lot. It seems like you're using a lot of the services from AWS. Once you decide that, or once you've decided that AWS is going to be a serverless architecture and you're fully involved with it, how difficult would it be to switch to Azure or some other cloud provider? So I've talked about AWS a lot, but really AWS. Just offers these really unique machine learning services that we've integrated with. All of our server architecture is deploy it on Google cloud platform, GCP, but all of that is deployed in Docker containers, orchestrated through Kubernetes. So it probably wouldn't be too crazy to switch platforms if we had to, because of the way that we've built everything out. But we've integrated AWS too. Enable some of these newer products like the ID scanner or the machine learning? I, I believe Google is, has some competing products, but I was there, the decision was left to me. Could have us. Gotcha. Gotcha. So what's your ultimate career ambition, Shane. So I want to and intend to be a CTO, you know, whether it's as a. Sort of an early stage sort of founder or a larger company is a little bit less clear in my mind, but I really enjoy having my hands in every sort of, part of the stack tech stack and working with a variety of people to sort of get the most out of an entire team and see those larger goals that we've achieved together. So that's always been, my goal is to. Get a broad enough exposure and go just deep enough that I can be helpful to everybody on the team. I think the last five years of you working in your consulting business are probably are very unique. Absolutely very unique. I don't know anyone else who had a consulting business in our age range. So that's really, really valuable experience in some senses you've worked for like half a dozen startups. It doesn't start up. So at this point, Yeah. Yeah. I've definitely worked for a lot of companies. And I think that's kind of why I started doing the consulting business. And as I saw my friends who were literal consultants for EOI or the lawyer or whoever, and they would switch projects every few months and they would suddenly get exposed to a new technology stack or a new group of people and the way that they approach problem solving and. I didn't want to keep switching jobs every six months, because I liked my jobs to an extent for long periods of time. So that's kind of what I would do. I kind of looking back, I've noticed a pattern, I'll start a job or get really into it. I'll learn everything I can at that corporate position. And then about after a year, the amount of new stuff readily available to learn starts to decrease a little bit. And I get a little bit, you know, distracted. And so I can kind of refocus myself by doing a little bit outside of work, too, whether it's consulting or personal projects, just sort of keep my mind fresh. Awesome. So what do you think is the best piece of software written either recent or all time? Something actually kind of jumps to mind that I remember learning about in college and a really cool networking class. I think the greatest software of all time has been the, the combination of implementing IP TCP over IP. Really, which is really to kind of say it more layman's terms, it's the protocol suite. The internet works on IP stands for internet protocol and TCP stands for transmission control protocol. They're essentially a guarantee for getting a packet from one computer to the other, and then a guarantee for breaking up all of your data into packets and getting it there. Ultimately all together. It's like if you had a, I think the best way to describe it is if you have a book and you want to send that book to Faraz, but you're not sending it through the usual ups method, you're going to walk this book to, for, as yourself, one page at a time, and you have your address, Rouse's his address. And so you're going to just go to your neighbor's house and just check their address. And you're going to see that, you know, How much of that address matches for us, you know, and that's like the IP address, your street address. And so eventually you'll find yourself in the same city as for as, and eventually you'll find yourself on the same street. And then you'll find for the street number and we've sent out a thousand of the sounds and each one has a page of this book. And so eventually for us, we'll get all 300 pages of this book and he can arrange it and we can read it. And that's the, you know, in a, in a, roughly in his terms, TCP over IP and how all of the information in the internet is transferred globally. And that's a, that's a great answer. I think. One of the most amazing things about TCP over IP is this hasn't changed in 30 years. I mean, there have been minor tweaks, but the fundamental core building blocks of this are the internet. This is not something that you can just like rip out and say, Oh, you know what? We've got version 2.0, right. We've got Swift 5.0, who cares about backwards compatibility. You can't do that when like, All of this major internet infrastructure was built off of this. So the kinds of design decisions that the guys had to make when they were building this out to be scalable and to not collapse, when there's no way they could have known that the internet would become what it did is, I mean, that's a great answer. I like that. That truly is amazing, amazing software. Yeah. And that's why I think it's really some of the greatest software of all time is because it was built with such a simplistic elegance that. Without even needing the foresight to develop something that would scale to literally trillions of packets being sent constantly. It works about as beautifully as anyone could expect and it, and it's not like either one protocol does it. It is really good for getting data from point a to point B, but. Like eventually, maybe if you send enough packets and then TCP is really good for making sure that the entire message gets there again, if it ever finds where it's going correctly. So putting the two algorithms on top of each other, the two protocols on top of each other and layering them in that way, and then adding that layering still be so modular that every single computer in the world can take advantage of that. Yeah. Well shade. It's been amazing. I learned a lot as I always do with these episodes, but thank you so much for joining us, especially considering I, when you're in your Tesla, you headed to where? Oh, we actually just arrived in Santa Barbara and ready to have a nice Valentine's day weekend. But thank you for having me on the podcast. It's been so much fun. I love doing this. Thanks. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. I've also learned a ton Shane Yeah, absolutely. Sorry. I just had a telemarketing call come in. That seems to happen to all of us these days. You know what Shane, you've talked a lot about how great TCP over IP is, but I think we wouldn't be having so many auto robo calls if it weren't for TCP over IP, it's too reliable. Thank you so much for listening. If you could leave us some feedback we'd really appreciate it. We're trying to make this podcast increasingly better get, get the type of guests you guys want to listen to. So go ahead and leave a comment, rate us. And again, thank you for listening.