Tough Decisions And Drones Wearing Fedoras

Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. It's ... We're joking through the tears now. So in the past couple of episodes of FounderQuest, trademark, we kind of just were dealing with the fallout of having to be home, in quarantine, and all of that. Just sort of talking about how it's affected our work lives and stuff. We really hadn't, at that point, stopped to figure out exactly, okay, what does this mean in terms of our business? Because there is obviously an economic downturn in progress, and we don't really know how that's going to pan out. So yeah, that's what this podcast is going to be about. Since then, we sort of went into this seclusion, we had our first ever remote conclave. We'll talk a little bit about that, and the process we used for that, which actually turned out to be kind of awesome. Yeah. So we're still here, though, right? We're still shipping errors to people.

Josh:
We are.

Ben:
Yeah, we're still ...

Josh:
Yeah, well-

Ben:
Still catching errors.

Josh:
We missed a podcast last week for the first time in a while, I think.

Ben:
Yeah, I think the doom and gloom were hitting us, it was getting real.

Josh:
Yeah, it was hitting us last week. I don't know about you, you all, but I was just kind of too bummed out to really record.

Ben:
Yeah, I was kind of in the same boat. Since we had been talking about Covid the past couple of weeks, I was like, "You know what? I just don't want to record another podcast about Covid."

Josh:
Can we record another ... Yeah. Yeah.

Starr:
Yeah, I think everybody is kind of sick of it at this point. I know I am. I was ... Last night, I was sitting on the couch with my partner, and we were chatting. I was just like, I've got to think about something to talk about other than the state of the world, other than ... Like our kid, who we're with constantly now, because she's home from daycare. It was ... Food, like cooking was, I think, our savior then. We both like to cook, we've been actually eating very well, because who knows how long that's going to last, right? So you might as well enjoy life while you've got it.

Josh:
When you got all of this time on your hands.

Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. It's ...

Josh:
That's all you have to do.

Starr:
Yeah. It's weird. It's like there is certain tasks you can do with a kid. You can cook dinner with a kid, you know, underfoot. But you can't really record a podcast with a kid underfoot. You can't really write with a kid underfoot. I don't know. By underfoot, I mean climbing on top, and hitting you with the broom, and doing all that fun stuff that kids do.

Josh:
Yeah. You did, you recorded a ... Well, not recorded, but you all did a ... DIdn't you do a Zoom session with your daycare a few weeks back, or something like that?

Starr:
Oh my gosh, yes. We did.

Josh:
All the kids.

Starr:
It was cute. But let me tell you, I had a flipping panic attack doing IT support for that call. Because I had it all set up, the computer was hooked up to the TV, so that all the little kids would be big, so that it would be ... I don't know, I just though it would be nicer. I was like, "Okay, well, I'm just going to move this laptop up here," and in doing so, I jostled the HDMI cable, which caused the connection to the TV to go down. Then that, for some reason, that caused my computer to completely freeze up for like five minutes.

Josh:
Naturally.

Starr:
Yeah. Until it just magically popped back up like nothing had happened.

Josh:
Oh, did it come back, was everyone still there?

Starr:
No, they were gone.

Josh:
Oh, okay.

Starr:
Like, I don't know if it rebooted, I don't know if it just-

Josh:
Yeah, it dropped, and then, yeah, it just came back.

Starr:
I don't know if the screen just shut off. But I was trying to force power it down and everything. But it's just like, "Nope, sorry. We're on break."

Ben:
Speaking of Zoom, I guess we could mention that we've been playing with alternatives this week, right? We use Zoom with our podcast, but we decided this week, with all of the security craziness around Zoom, we decided, "Let's try some other stuff that's out there." We tried Hangouts, and we tried Jitsi, and they're just not as good as Zoom, unfortunately.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
So, I mean, Zoom got one thing, at least, right, which might be the cause of their security concerns. But it's very easy to use. It works well. So there is very low friction. But apparently, there is also very low friction for randos to join your call, and yell at you.

Starr:
Well, the video conferencing just works better. I'm sorry, but it's like, that's ... It seems like all the web based ones all have a similar ... I don't know, they all have a bit more glitchy-ness in terms of video and it's just kind of annoying.

Ben:
Yeah, that to me is it. Zoom is just, the video is better, period.

Starr:
And I wonder if that's because they're all... The web ones, I assume all use web RTC and that's probably just running Chrome's web RTC, I don't know, stuff under the hood. I can't believe even-

Josh:
Well, Ben set up a self hosted one that used web RTC.

Ben:
Yeah, I did see.

Josh:
And had pretty similar results.

Starr:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah, I found this awesome Terraform recipe for deploying a Jitsi instance, and it was great.

Josh:
That's cool.

Ben:
It was pretty awesome. But yeah, just the video quality just wasn't there. But hey, if we ever decide to do huge meet the Honey Badgers kind of thing with our customers, then that would be a good way to go, right?

Josh:
Yeah, that would.

Starr:
Oh totally. That'd be a great way to go.

Starr:
Okay. So yeah, taking us back to last... I wish I had one of those harp sound effects for flashbacks.

Josh:
Yeah, we could throw that in.

Starr:
Yeah. So taking us back to last Friday, we did have a call that was... Normally we would be recording the podcast at 10:00 but instead we did a call because I had been looking at some numbers in preparation for our conclave and given the economic situation, I was feeling nervous about those numbers. And I think Ben had also been looking at numbers around that. And so we decided to have a serious business meeting instead of doing the podcast.

Starr:
And as a result of that, that was one of the shittiest days of my business career, guys, be...