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Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode of Nasdaq. Spotlight. I'm your host Emily Dury and today I'm sitting down with VP of Engineering at Gift Randy Shepherd Randy is here as part of the CTO Summit here at Market Site and we're excited to talk about all things, engineering and tech and here we go. Randy. How are you good? Thanks? How are you good good? So you're here. Speaking at the CTO Summit today tell us what you're gonna be talking about sure. so that's the sort of argument that I'm going to make is that an engineering brand is sort of an undervalued strategy for talent acquisition and retention. I have a couple. Why I think so I'll share some concrete metrics around ROI that show that it has value. But then I have sort of a bigger problem that I'm trying to address with the brand, which is maybe not obvious. I have a group of engineers, a bunch of people that I want to think and act and behave in a certain way that's in accordance with the needs of the business at the time and so what are the tools I have to influence behaviors and you know engineers typically look outside of their Organization to see an industry like how are things done? What's the best? For things to be done if we can get our voice into that conversation and not only does it attract good talent to give, but it also reminds our team internally what we're about and what we should how we should be trying to to build things yeah, so that's kind of the general gist of the the topic and it seems like a really good topic. for the folks who are gathered here for the CTO summit. we've got quite a range of conversations but I but I think talent is just a such an important piece of of engineering right now. so what has been like for you to to build your team at Diffee well a few things. Mine the first one as you mentioned building a team is pretty challenging, especially in New York City. we just there aren't that many senior skilled software engineers in the city compared to the demand. so you have to really stand out and if you want to get good talent, but the experience of gift, he has been awesome. It's been a lot of fun. I joined the company was about 10 people for about a hundred and almost a hundred and 50 now and watching the company grow has been a lot of fun growing. The team has been a lot of fun. I think it's a rare opportunity. Think about what gift is about, it's making messaging more entertaining which is a fun mission. It brings pleasure into people's lives. so having a fun product certainly leads to having a fun environment and the team. although we take our jobs very seriously and do some pretty cool engineering. I was gonna say what what is that? what is that like an entertainment? like for for the engineers who who work there? Oh jeez. What's it like to work under you? Yeah well, you know I think the company's. Atmosphere is just irreverent. you know we the gift itself is is often just very funny and and expresses a lot in a little I think we kind of that have adopted that persona in the company. It's just very different. We have a lot of fun. a lot of events a lot of weird creative people which makes it really exciting. yeah. So I don't know how to summarize it to be honest but it's it's it's a lot like you've done. Well, yeah, Yeah. So what are some exciting things that you and your team have coming in 2020 from the gift, the engineering team sure, so you know this year has been pretty interesting. We've released a bunch of new features an animated text API an animated emoji API. we also released Gift arcade, which is a micro games platform. for building your own micro games. It's actually a lot of fun. Everyone should try it and then just this week as a matter of fact, we released a video which is We like to say gifts with sound so it's short form 30 seconds or less branded content or I should say, official content from our cartoon partners and you can go check that out and Gifts dot com right now. it's very fun. So we're you know kinda branching out the different types of media that we that we support in our distribution network so make other ways to make conversations more fun next year, you know we have a lot of more plans to kind of keep evolving that network, but then also iterate on the stuff that we've already built our core competency is search. And certainly we need to continue to improve on our search. Yeah absolutely. so when it comes to launching these new products, what is it like from an engineering side when when the team decided to to launch video, for example, I imagine that that's a ton of back and work for you guys were where do you begin well, You know, I think it's a credit to the team and that we've built a lot of infrastructure that allows us to move quickly. over the years we've relentlessly prioritize eliminating inefficiencies whether they be in the engineering pipeline or just procedurely. Wise we're just constantly on the hunt. How do we move faster without sacrificing the quality of the software that we're producing and I think we've done a pretty good job. So now a project like video which is potentially a heavy lift becomes actually relatively short project. We bang it out in a couple of months and that's a large part because of the stuff that we build in the past. So you know if he's been around a few years now and I think we've reached a certain maturity stage where we're pretty efficient. that's amazing so 2020. what are you most looking forward to? I really do hope we get the opportunity to just keep building new products reaching new people building out the team. we're having such a good time doing what we're doing. I also I'm excited about some of the engineering challenges that we're thinking about next year. I think the application of what may surprise people the application of artificial intelligence techniques in the contents of gift. These products is something we're actively working on and we'll continue to to use next year. so that's certainly exciting and I have to ask. What is your favorite gift right now? or if if you could pick a gift to kinda sum up the year for the engineering team, What would it be and see? You know I'm a little biased Gift creates a lot of content itself and some of my favorite stickers are actually gifts are actually have me on. So what do what I gotta do to get some just come on by the office. Yes. yeah. come on by the office. We'll definitely do it. We do it all the time amazing. Well. Thank you so much for coming by the Nasdaq Market site. enjoy the rest of your time at the CTS right. Thanks Emily. Thank you. Nasdaq. Spotlight followers for tuning in and hearing all about what's happening at Tiffy and what's to come in 2020. I'm your host Emily Jury signing off now.











