The launch of Major League Hacking

Matthew: Hello and welcome to Developer Marketing Stories. Now, in every episode of this podcast, we are going to speak to someone who's launched a product, community or service aimed at developers, and we're going to ask them to reflect on the journey that they took so that we can help to unpack some of the advice and learnings from their story that you can apply to your developer marketing programme.

Adam: I'm Adam DuVander. I run a developer content agency as well as developer marketing training with Matthew.

Matthew: And I'm Matthew Revell. I run Hoopy, which is a developer marketing developer relations agency, and also I am the founder of DevRelCon.

Adam: And of course, another reason that we're doing this podcast is the developer marketing training that Matthew and I run. It gives you six to 12 months of coaching and feedback and really the tools that you need to be a better developer marketer.

Matthew: So if you want to level up your developer marketing career, whether you're coming from a non-developer form of marketing or you're coming from more of the technical side and you want to learn the marketing side, then take a look at developer.marketing. You'll be able to sign up, get access to at your own pace training, as well as that coaching that Adam mentioned, and join a community of learners. So developer marketing. Okay. Adam, who are we speaking to this time?

Adam: We are talking to Jon Gottfried, one of the founders of MLH (Major League Hacking), which is a community of developer learners, primarily college developers and learning through hackathons and other events. And they have a really unique story for developer marketers and that's why we wanted to bring them on here because of the way that they structure that learning. And we got to dig into a lot of that from the early days of ML H's story through how they are helping developer marketing companies like your own be able to reach developers.

Matthew: So Jon, you and Swift founded MLH. Could you take us back to the time when you were both working at different API companies and you had this inkling that there was an opportunity there?

Jon: It happened very organically, swift and I was working at Twilio. He was working at SendGrid, and this is now more than 10 years ago, so we're talking 2009, 2010, 2011. We had both just graduated from college and a big part of our role at the time as developer evangelists was community building mentorship of both our customers and general developers and building connections with a lot of different local groups builders. And for both of us, community had been a big part of our stories becoming developers and getting into evangelism in the first place. And so MLH was sort of an organic extension of that.

Basically what happened was there was a small nascent group of university like Hacker clubs and hackathons, maybe five of them at the time, and we had become friends with them. Swift had been travelling around to a lot of the events to basically help them run smoothly. And some of the organisers were asking him and I about how do we build more connection between different campuses? How do we actually make this something that's bigger than just our one school? And through a lot of zigzaggy paths that eventually became MLH, but really in those early days, it was born out of a very immediate desire to just have connections between a lot of disparate groups.

Adam: On LinkedIn, it says that Swift started a few months before you did, and so it sounds like that was that time where he's sort of travelling is like, I guess this is whatever becomes MLH. Can you take us to the exact moment where the two of you said, okay, this is a thing. Swift has already left a fast moving startup. You're at one that arguably as bigger, it did acquire the other. So what's that moment?

Jon: We had a long running bet about that actually.

Adam: About which would acquire, which,

Jon: Yeah, basically which one would end up being more valuable? I think I won, but

Adam: So what is that moment where you say, okay, this is the time to leave and join this new thing?

Jon: Yeah, I'll tell you guys the sort of raw story, right? Swift and I were good friends. We were also roommates at the time, and so we spent a lot of time together. We hung out a lot, we brainstormed crazy ideas. We did hackathons together, and Swift have had a previous company with some of his friends from college called Hacker League, which was sort of like a precursor to something like Devpost, and they were in the process of selling that to mastery and Intel. And so he quit his job really to focus on that. But the real story is that we had gone on a vacation together to Berlin and we sort of made a pact to quit our jobs and start a startup together. MLH wasn't really on the table yet at that point, but we knew we wanted to work together.

We both went back home, told our bosses we were leaving, and his boss was kind of like, wow, it's been amazing working with you.

Sorry to see you go. And my boss was basically like, nah, you should really stick around a couple more months. And so I failed to quit my job, and so Swift left his job, was focused on selling his company, and in that time started MLH by travelling around and helping all of these organisers. I was sort of in those first six months behind the scenes. I would give him advice on different things. We would work together on some proposals. Often I used my expense account where we would sponsor a hackathon and he would sleep on the couch in my hotel room for free. And so there was a healthy amount of collaboration, but he started working on full time about six months before I did.

And it was in those six months that MLH really sprouted up through this organic community need. I quit my job in, I guess it was the end of March, 2014, and that was when we started working on it full time together.

But I think a lot of founding stories, it's often an indirect path that's just like when the timing feels right. By that point in 2014, it was clear that this was not just something that Swift could do alone flying around. It was clear there was a lot of excitement and demand around it. And honestly, it was something that we were both really excited about on a personal level because we loved working with students and developers and people who were building community, and it just felt right. We had no idea of what the business model would be. We had no idea how big it would become, but it felt like the right way to spend our time.

Matthew: What was the product that you were selling

Jon: In the early days of MLH? The product that we were selling to companies was effectively just packages of sponsorship. So rather than negotiating with five different events, we would have a standardised package that we sold directly to the companies. To be honest, that didn't scale very well. We found very quickly that we quickly exhausted people's travel budgets faster than they exhausted their sponsorship budget. And so even though people would sponsor five or 10 events, they couldn't even go to all of 'em. And so we had to evolve pretty quickly from that. But the early sale was just standardised event sponsorships.

Now it looks a lot more like a programmatic high scale developer marketing programme, but it took a lot of iteration to get there. But for the students in the early days, the main value prop was we connect them together. We have some shared values and we do rankings of all of the schools that participate.

Matthew: What were the steps that you took in those early days to make your brand one that would appeal to developers?

Jon: I actually think that this is one of those challenges that a lot of developer communities encounter eventually of how do you balance the needs of your community versus the needs of your corporate customers. Coming from Twilio and Srid, we both had a pretty opinionated view on what made a good developer experience. Things like even if I was at an event representing Twilio, I would gladly help someone debug a competitor's platform, or I would go assist someone with an issue that was totally outside of the scope of them becoming a Twilio customer. Because there was a feeling that as a representative of the company, you were building goodwill, you were building relationships, and ultimately you were building a positive brand impression to put it in really corporate speak. And so that was, I think a guiding principle in those early days of MLH where we were going to events representing our corporate sponsors, but we would help people no matter what, and we made sure that the hackathons themselves shared a lot of those values where it is first about the developer, it is first about learning and growing your skills.

It is first about the experience of the attendee because if you can't create a positive attendee experience where people are learning and having a good time and building something that they're passionate about, it's never going to become sticky. You want people to come back. You want them to have that aha moment where they can't wait to come to another event that you run. And if you go too far in the direction of it being a corporate event, often people leave feeling like it was a transactional relationship and not a growth oriented one. And we were very conscious of that even from the early days, and there's a lot more to that. But really it's about putting the developers first over time as we became a B Corp, we actually enshrined that in the company. The mission of the company, which is legally in our operating documents, is to empower hackers. And so we are accountable to that more than anything else.

Adam: But you do have corporate sponsors who have to then turn around and provide metrics to someone. How do you sort of balance that? I mean the philosophy that you've shared? I think Matthew and I fully are on board with that community first, developer first philosophy, but somebody has to explain that back.

Jon: The way that it manifests for a sponsor is very different. Developer platforms want to be involved with communities that are healthy, they get more value out of it, they get more ROI when they are involved with healthy, thriving developer communities. And so the ROI is really about brand awareness, developer acquisition use cases, and in some cases talent acquisition. None of those things are really possible if the developers aren't having a good experience in the first place. For example, let's say that you bring a platform to an event that doesn't have a strong self-service. Motion developers go to their website, they're going to churn immediately, right? This has to be something where people can understand how to use it. It isn't our best interest to provide tools, developers that are well understood, easy to use, easy to intuit so that the company actually gets those signups and people using the platform in a meaningful way.

And so you have to consider both sides of it, right? Neither one really exists in the vacuum because when you're doing grassroots developer outreach, you can't afford to have a sales engineer sit next to every person who's signing up for the platform, which is often how a lot of those enterprise developer platforms grew.

Adam: When you gave your notice to your boss, you were somehow talked into staying longer. Did they say, Jon, you're crazy to go off and start your own thing.

Jon: No one said I was crazy. Twilio had, I think a healthy respect for being a launchpad for people. And I had a good relationship, both of my boss, Rob Spectre, who I still am friends with to this day, but also with Jeff, the CEO, and they did the thing that good employers do of asking How can we keep you? Is there anything we can do? What are we missing here? And for me, it wasn't about that. I loved my job at Twilio and I thought it was an exceptional place for me to work, but as someone who was in their early twenties and saw, had all of this energy and sort of excitement around startups, it felt like the time was right to do my own thing with a close friend of mine. And so I think they understood really the pitch for getting me to stay was a bit more utilitarian.

It was like, you have a lot of projects in flight. Don't leave us hanging. Finish up the things that you've committed to. And that was a reasonable pitch. I did not want to leave on bad terms, and they had not put me in a position where I wanted to leave on bad terms. And so it was totally reasonable for me to stick around for six more months to see through all of these different things that I had going on and do more of a straightforward offboarding.

Adam: And so there was a timeline that you both agreed to there with that

Jon: It was loose. We didn't actually agree I will be gone in six months, but it was more like, finish some of the stuff you're working on, see how it feels, and let's talk about this later. And I think that for me, it gave me time to reflect on am I ready to go do my own thing? Right. And it's interesting because I had done a lot of side projects. I had had a lot of fledgling startup ideas that didn't go anywhere. And you see all this mythology around starting startups in the media. The reality was nothing like that.

But I still wouldn't trade it for anything. Honestly, staying at Twilio would've been incredibly lucrative. I'm sure I would've learned a lot. I'm sure it would've been a huge impact on my career in the developer world, but when you are doing something on your own, there is a forcing function where you must figure out all of the nuts and bolts of how to run a business, how to build products, how to sell, how to manage a team. And I felt like that was a huge accelerant for my expertise and career, and also something that I just really enjoyed. And I think that we did it in the best way we could have. Like Jeff, the CEO of Twilio came back as an angel investor in MLH when we raised our first round. So I don't think we did it in any way that burned bridges, but it was just a leap of faith.

Adam: Tell us about that leap then. So some time passes, you have to tell Rob that you're leaving again. What's the moment when you realised, okay, it's done. There's no turning back now.

Jon: I think it was in December or January of that year. So we had first had the conversation in July or August when we got back from Berlin, I think, and then maybe it wasn't even then. Maybe it was earlier either way. I know that I finally talked to him in December or January about leaving in April. I think he saw it coming by that point. I had been planting seeds of it for a long time by then, and they had just made some fantastic hires. So right around that time, they had brought on, I think Ricky Robinette who ended up leading that team in the future, joined Greg Baus joined around a similar time. I think Matt Mackay had just joined, and so they were hiring pretty aggressively, and perhaps that made it easier for me to leave.

I won't say I was the linchpin of that team. It was very much a collaborative effort. There were a lot of really fantastic people there, but I think it had become obvious that I was on the way out and would finish up and leave. Twilio came on as one of our first customers. I do think that we understood the current model of developer relations at that time really well and had something to offer a lot of those teams that were trying to scale their reach.

Matthew: So there was a point. So you'd left Twilio Swift had left SendGrid, and you were both now full time. Was there a moment where you realised that you'd kind of crossed a threshold? There was no turning back.

Jon: So our first big customer was Dell computers, and we had built a relationship with their team and effectively made a pitch to them as they were launching their Linux laptop, the Sputnik, to put it bluntly, developers didn't care for their brand and that Mac was eating their lunch and with a Linux laptop, they had an opportunity to gain a lot of developer mindshare and preference. I had been using the laptop, I was a huge fan of it. I had friends who were really into it. And so we made this pitch to their leadership that they should be the flagship sponsor of MLH. The amount of money we asked for was more money than I'd ever seen in my life. And I distinctly remember signing that contract with 'em and basically Swift and I sitting there saying either this is going to go really well and it's going to be a huge accelerant for our business, or we're going to get sued to death and fail miserably. And it was very, there were these two polar options, either was going to be exceptional or it was going to be a total disaster, and we were going to get sued by this massive company. It ended up being really successful.

They were a partner for I think four years, but that was the moment of no going back because we had now accepted so much money from a customer that to not execute on it would have been like disastrous.

Matthew: How did you actually set the price?

Jon: I honestly don't remember how we set the price. I'm pretty sure it was some combination of asking people in our network what they thought it should cost, looking at what an individual hackathon sponsorship cost, and then coming up with the biggest number we thought was possible, there was no science to it. Over time, we developed a much better understanding of unit economics and sales prices and all of those things, but really it was just a moonshot kind of pitch. And I think for them, m, once you really get into it and you're looking at these huge companies that do consumer marketing spend, apple could spend whatever, a million dollars on a movie placement or something. The money is silly money at a certain point. I actually think that in retrospect, we were a really good bang for their buck, but for us, it felt like just the biggest number we could reasonably ask for without being laughed out of the room

Adam: Is that you had the first ever season of hackathons that they were sponsoring and is the sort of polar ends, that's basically how well that season goes determines how well Dell's experience goes. Is that kind of what it was?

Jon: Yeah, so at the time, we were rapidly growing. So we went from five events in a year to 40 events in six months to a hundred events in six months really, really quickly. And so a lot of it was speculative about the growth of the events. Could we support that? Did we literally have the time to do all of those events? There was only at Swift and I, and maybe we had a couple of interns at that point. And would people show up for the events and would the events be successful? There was a lot of, I would say optimistic planning and not all of the events were perfect, but the underlying premise that we could be a shared infrastructure for people building developer communities and events did play out.

It was incredibly exhausting. Swift and I were on the road constantly and very quickly had to hire people to even just get the bare minimum of work done. But the real question about whether we would fail miserably or succeed was could we execute on what we had promised, not just the number of events, but at each event could we do the thing that we were imagining for Dell, which was to expose developers to their platform and make it a good experience in a scalable way. Things like if you get really deep into logistics, if does freight shipping work, how do you ship 30 laptops to an event? We had to figure that out and it was a lot of trial and error.

Matthew: So you've got Dell as a customer, how do you get the developers there to the hackathon?

Jon: Almost all of our developer marketing has been word of mouth. And this is kind of one of the magical things I think about MLH in our community is that it is highly localised and distributed. And so most people who go to a hackathon and now some of our online programmes or fellowships or things like that find out about it from a friend. And that makes a lot of sense when you think about it in the context of a university experience. How do you go to a party? How do you go to a club meeting? Usually someone invites you. The same is true of hackathons, but to a greater degree because you're committing to an entire weekend away from campus.

And so it's not as simple as come spend an hour at this club meeting. It's like, Hey, do you want to drive for six hours and go to this crazy event where you maybe stay up all night building stuff?

And so you had to have a pretty compelling pitch from someone you trusted. We saw people going classroom to classroom, literally pitching their peers on campus. Yeah, we saw people using Facebook groups to build community, to rally people from campus to campus. We saw people who were super fans of MLH, literally driving around to all of the campuses nearby to pitch this idea of hackathons and the culture they were trying to build. There was just an enormous amount of energy and passion around it. And we still see that today. It looks a little bit different, but it is all word of mouth and organic, and we've basically never spent a dollar on marketing to developers because it is such a compelling experience for them that they just keep wanting to be there. And that's been an intentional thing, but also something that is to me, a sign of a really healthy developer community.

Matthew: So you've just described, I think the holy grail for many developer marketers. You didn't spend a dollar and you got super fans who were driving around despite being college students with no money to go around evangelising on your behalf. So what was your pitch to those people who became the super fans

Jon: In those early days? I don't know that we were pitching super fans or even intentionally creating them. The experience spoke for itself. We had people where every single weekend of the semester they were at a hackathon. It was their social scene, it was their professional scene, it was their passion in life. I equate it sometimes to college sports. People do travel around following their college football team because that's the centre of their experience on campus. The same is true of hackathons.

When you say it's the holy grail of developer marketing, though, I think that that is a really interesting statement to me because I have seen other companies do similar things where they are able to create such a compelling experience that fits the needs of their developer community, that they don't have to do a tonne of paid marketing. When I say that we never paid for it, obviously we were paying our team, so there is a staff cost, but we didn't do advertising or anything like that. And I think that for grassroots developer communities, that is often how they work, that you are creating content, you're creating experiences, you're creating peer connections in a way that creates a flywheel for the business to get more developers involved. And that doesn't necessarily include paid advertising as an acquisition strategy in my opinion.

Matthew: I guess what I meant was that you're creating super fans, people who will act as force multipliers for your programme, and that is people put a lot of effort into champions programmes, into ambassadors within individual accounts when they're doing account-based marketing and that kind of thing. Whereas for you, yeah, I guess it is the holy grail, the thing that you had to offer was so compelling that the rest just came naturally.

Jon: Yes, and I think that that is in contrast to how most champion programmes function. We did not because there was no structure to our super fan effort. People could make of it what they wanted. For some people, they wanted to be a leader, they wanted to build something on their campus. For some people, they just loved hacking and creating projects. For some people it was their social experience. They just wanted to see their friends. A lot of different people got different things out of it, but really they got out of it what they put into it.

And I think the problem with a lot of champions programmes is that they end up being very heavily structured, and the best incentive is something that's intrinsic. So if you are, and I see this at Twilio too, and I've seen it, a lot of our customers at MLH, they all have super fans.

Whether or not you choose to support those people with the resources of your company is a different question. But at Twilio, it was very common for people who just enjoyed using the platform and had created something cool with it to go talk about it without ever speaking to us. And that was encouraged and often rewarded in a way that felt like a magical moment to people and not a transactional relationship. And I think we've thought similarly about it from MLH, like, oh wow, you went to 10 hackathons this year. That's really cool. Why don't we send you a T-shirt? Why don't we help pay for your gas money to another event? Why don't we go to your school and help them fund a bus to get from school to school?

All of those things were not offers. They were responses to the things that people were already doing because they loved it so much. And I think that the best champion programmes look similarly where it's about rewarding people for the right behaviours that they have come up with on their own.

Adam: I think that's going to be really compelling to folks who are probably sitting in that exact spot trying to design that champion programme. Now, if we can go to sort of that again, early days two of you, you've taken this huge check, which I assume was a large check, those sweep you two were doing so much of what you'd never done before. Was there someone who you would reach out to and have as a sounding board?

Jon: There were a lot of people we reached out to as sounding boards. I mean, basically everyone we worked with at Twilio and Srid and beyond became our advisors and sounding board. Certainly we talked to Rob, we talked to Jeff every once in a while. I know Swift talked to Tim Falls and people like that. There were a lot of folks who were experts in this that we reached out to all the time. I don't think either of us was ever so proud as to think we knew everything. We depended on advisors from the very beginning, and we continue to this day. Adam, we've talked to you before about how do we create awesome developer content for our community?

Matthew, we've talked a lot about developer relations and community building. I think that DevRel in particular as a field that is highly collaborative and not secretive, and we leaned really heavily into that and we continue to do the same in offering what we've learned.

Matthew: What were some of the things that people told you that really helped you to either overcome a problem or really just push things forward?

Jon: This is perhaps counter to what I said previously, but one of the biggest pieces of advice that Jeff from Twilio gave me is that when you're starting a company, it is very unlikely that you will be able to hire your way out of problems. You can hire people to solve operational problems, you can hire people to bring new expertise on the team, but really it's up to the founders to solve a lot of the core design and structure problems of the business. And that was a mistake we had made in the early days. We had perhaps over relied on outsourcing our lack of expertise. And I think the reality is that when you have advisors and when you have peers that you can talk to, you need to take all of that information and figure out what to do with it because it is unlikely for a small company that someone you bring on board will have the necessary amount of context and depth of understanding about your community to solve these existential problems for you. And that's not to say that MLH could only exist with Swift and I, but I do think that in the early days of a startup, it is up to the founders to figure out their existential direction and that you can't hire your way out of that. Even if you can rely on and integrate the advice of other people,

Adam: You couldn't abdicate those big choices that someone had to make.

Jon: Yeah, sales is a really good example. I had no background in sales and I kind of took it on from the beginning and we worked with a handful of different sales advisors and hires over the years, many of which were fantastic. But we found that if Swift and I didn't intimately understand sales process proposals, billing all the elements of it, that it would still not be successful because we needed to understand what was going on and where to go strategically. And that didn't necessarily look like how other companies did it. And so hiring someone, they could often be an incredible executor and strategic driver in a certain direction, but that didn't necessarily mean that they knew how MLH specifically should do sales.

Adam: Yeah, so there'd never been an MLH before, so this must those early days, it must've been a lot of experimentation. And what were some of the things that you tried along the way?

Jon: I mean, we tried a million things. I mentioned the a i standardised packages that didn't work for very long. We had this premise at the beginning that every event needed to be staffed by someone at MLH as you scale to a hundred events every six months. We didn't even have enough people time to do that. Our team was travelling constantly. And so we quickly had to figure out how do we build a more scalable workforce? How do we get more people involved in this in a way that they're representing MLH at events? That took a tonne of trial and error.

We had to figure out what are the finances of this? How much does it cost to staff a hackathon? How much does it cost to serve our organisers in the way that we want to? There's a million things that you dig into as you go on, and not all of it worked very well, but you figure it out, fail and move on.

Matthew: In the past you've spoken about there was some number of students across the world who have won an MLH T-shirt on campus, and that acts some other number of students see that. Can you tell us about some of the experiments that you did then around reaching more student developers?

Jon: One of the things that we realised really early on is that being a hacker and being an MLH hackathon was part of someone's identity. And people like to share their identity with both visual and spoken indicators. I realise that's a very academic description of what's going on here, but people have jargon. Developers have jargon when you see someone else with those stickers on their laptop that they might have some shared values and interests to you when you see someone wearing a startup, when you see someone sharing something on social media in a certain way that, hey, they're into tech too.

And so we realised that T-shirts especially were a really powerful visual indicator of belonging to a community. And this was perhaps something that we learned from Twilio and SendGrid where people would joke that they were swag companies. But MLH legitimately has produced hundreds of thousands of T-shirts at this point, and we use them as a way for people to identify with one another, represent this thing that they're passionate about and feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves. We change the design every year. We give them out in a limited quantity, and we see that paying itself back. It is not uncommon for me to walk around New York City and see people in MLH shirts. This is very much a thing that people feel as part of their story and their journey in becoming a developer. And the designs have to match that level of passion.

They have to be cool, they have to be interesting. They have to be something people actually want to wear. And I think that's just a really powerful thing. I actually think a lot of companies underestimate swag, but in order for it to be effective, it has to be something that resonates with people and actually represents their interests.

Matthew: What were some of the non-scalable things? Because obviously printing hundreds of thousands of T-shirts is a big thing.

Jon: There are a lot of things that start out non-scalable that if they work, you eventually have to figure out how to scale. So a really good example of this is the coaching that we provide to our local organisers. Like MLH is a distributed network. There are hundreds of local chapters that put on their own meetups and hackathons under the MLH umbrella. And in the early days, those people were personal friends of Swift and I, and so we were chatting with them on Facebook Messenger. They were calling us. Every once in a while we would meet up for coffee in person, and that was how that coaching happened.

Over time, as you have hundreds or thousands of those organisers, you have to figure out how to scale it. And so we basically had to build processes and frameworks and open source documented guidance for how to do a lot of those things. And I've seen the same thing happen with a lot of developer communities where your developer advocates or your developer relations folks, or whatever you want to call them, develop personal relationships with members of your community that are really powerful. How do you replicate that for tens of thousands of people? How do you build something where peers are giving each other advice or your team can give advice in a one to many format or whatever it is. But taking the core bit of we need a human to provide advice and guidance and coaching to other humans is something that often starts out very, very unscalable that if you are successful needs to scale in novel ways.

Other things that we did were, in the early days, we facilitated a lot of the transportation between events. And that's not to say that we literally reimbursed everyone for gas money, but okay, let's go to a school and get 60 people so we can fill a coach bus. That doesn't scale very well. And eventually we had to teach schools and students how to do that on their own. But that was one of the early strategies that we literally did in-house through trial and error and pure elbow grease to cross-pollinate the different campuses. And so I think that there's a lot of things that you have to try. Even t-shirts though, it's easy to say like, oh, you get a vendor and outsource that. There's a lot more logistical complexity to making it happen.

And it took a lot of trial to get it to a point where it was an easy to predict stable engine of distributing cool swag that people actually liked.

Adam: So what were some of those things, whether with t-shirts or other projects that didn't work so well?

Jon: One of the things that I think didn't work very well was the first iteration of our staffing programme. So we call it the MLH Coaches programme. The first version of it was basically like, we have these passionate community members. They want to represent MLH at events. Let's pay for their travel costs and just let them loose. We quickly discovered that everyone had a different idea of what a successful weekend looked like. People focus their time on different things, and that in order for us to make sure that all of our local communities had a comparable experience, and also that our sponsors and corporate customers had a comparable experience that we needed training and we needed structure and we needed feedback so that at least the coaches that we were sending to events had a playbook of what they should be doing. And I see this with developer advocates too.

Sometimes you go to an event and someone is there providing a tonne of value. Sometimes you go to an event and you see people at a booth where they're on their laptop and they don't seem particularly engaged. I don't think that's a malicious thing, and I don't think that's a personal ding either. I think it is more often than not a lack of training and expectation setting for what it means to be out in the field. And we've had a lot of things like that. The staffing programme is a good example. How we provided support to organisers is a similar example. And I think that as any community grows, like documentation, standardisation, resource sharing, all of that stuff becomes really, really important so that you can give people a good experience no matter where they are or where they're at.

Matthew: Were there any times where you felt as though the problems you were facing were insurmountable?

Jon: Often? I mean, I think that when Dell changed their strategy and was not a customer anymore, we had to make up a lot of revenue really quickly. That was definitely a forcing function. More recently than that, in 2020, we had a community of hundreds of in-person events that suddenly couldn't do that anymore. And over the span of weeks, we had to figure out what do we do with all of these people that were planning to throw and attend hackathons over the next year? And it's interesting because there were sort of two parallel solutions to it. One was that we had to reinvent what a virtual hackathon looked like. The other was that we had to build novel new programmes like our fellowship that served a different core need that our community members had.

So on the hackathon side, no in-person events, right? Everyone's going to get covid, let's go virtual.

Our team put a tonne of time into figuring out what did a live virtual hackathon look like as compared to a long running, asynchronous one on the talent side, on the fellowship. A lot of folks in our community lost their internships and jobs when covid happened, and we had to effectively invent an alternative to that. What could we give them over that summer of 2020 that would give them a similar level of professional experience where they could go get a job the following year? And it ended up being a distributed internship. How do we get people with a lot of disparate skills, locations, interests, match to projects and mentors, and build something that would actually get them from never having worked on a production code base before to Wow, I'm competent and can get a job. And that required a tonne of experimentation and for lack of a better term, innovation in what we actually provided to our community members. But at the time, it felt very surmountable. Contracts were drying up, events weren't running.

There were a lot of problems all at once that we had to overcome.

Adam: Given this experience now, what, 10 years at MLH, how do you measure success? What are the things that you report back to people who matter?

Jon: The thing that matters most to us is impact. We just passed our millionth developer after 10 years, which is a huge milestone that we basically missed because our team was so focused on just doing stuff. And literally someone pulled up a dashboard one day and was like, oh, wow, we've passed a million. So it was really exciting once we realised that that had happened. More importantly than that though, the thing that we consistently hear from people in our community is that being part of it is a life-changing experience for them in raw numbers. Something like 40% of the people who participate say that being part of MLH changed their life. But I hear it anecdotally all the time. I go to meetups for professionals in the industry where they say that going to hackathons, going into the MLH fellowship, being part of these clubs on campus was their formative experience as a developer.

And that's the thing that matters most to us. All of the things that we do for corporate partners is a means of enabling that in a mutually beneficial way. Why would we care about introducing developers to some generic API? The reason we care is because when you're going into the industry, if you don't understand how developer platforms work and how APIs work and how to use a lot of these bleeding edge tools, you're going to be left behind. They're a core part of a tool belt. They're a core part of being a professional engineer. And I think that all of those impact metrics tie together in a really virtuous cycle of we provide a life-changing experience. It changes the trajectory of people's careers, and both the individuals involved and the companies involved get a tonne of value out of it.

Adam: You were so focused on those people that matter, the developers that matter, that you missed the million developer Mark.

Matthew: It's true. So looking back, knowing what you do now, what would you advise yourself 10 years ago as you were starting out?

Jon: I think the biggest piece of advice I would give myself is not to look at what other people are doing. I think that there is a huge difference between comparing yourself to other companies and trying to emulate strategies that have worked elsewhere, versus understanding what those strategies are and seeking advice and then coming to your own conclusion. I think that myself personally, it was always really easy for me to see someone else and be like, oh my God, they're so far ahead of us. Or, oh wow, they're doing this thing that's so successful. Why aren't we able to do that? And the truth is that we had our own way to go about things, and in many cases it worked out better for us. In a lot of cases it didn't. But it was really important to go on that journey of figuring it out for ourselves of what is the MLH way of doing something, because that's what differentiates you as a community and as a company, is figuring out your own path forward, even if you're integrating well understood strategies and advice.

Matthew: Right. Well, Jon, thank you. That's great.

Jon: Yeah, thank you. Hopefully this was interesting and helpful for you guys. I enjoyed it.