Connecting Students with Diverse Career Opportunities in the Developer Community

Jonathan Gottfried Human Reviewed Transcript

Intro - 00: 00:01: Welcome to Beyond The Screen: An IONOS Podcast, where we share insights and tips to help you scale your business's online presence. Hosting genuine conversations with the best in the web and IT industry and exploring how the IONOS brand can help professionals and customers with their hosting and cloud issues. I'm your host, Joe Nash.

Joe - 00: 00:22: Welcome to another episode of Beyond The Screen: An IONOS Podcast. Today we are beyond thrilled to host a dynamic figure in the landscape of technology and community building, Jonathan Gottfried. Jonathan is the Co-Founder of Major League Hacking, aka MLH, a global community dedicated to empowering the next generation of developers and technologists. From its inception in 2014, MLH now boasts a membership exceeding half a million and fosters learning through hackathons and the acclaimed open-source MLH fellowship. Jon's contributions have been recognised with accolades such as the Stony Brook University 40 under 40 for entrepreneurship and being listed on the illustrious Forbes 30 under 30 in Education. Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Jonathan - 00: 01:00: Thanks for having me. I'm really excited for our conversation.

Joe - 00: 01:03: Absolutely. And this kickoff, you know, we just listed a whole bunch of stuff about, you know, where you are now and where you've been, I guess, for coming up on the last 10 years. So to really throw back to the past, could you start off by talking a little bit about your journey leading up to co-founding MLH and what the pivotal moments were that guided you towards forming this organization?

Jonathan - 00: 01:22: It's a long story, so I'll try and keep it brief. But I was one of those kids that loved tinkering with technology. I think I was probably of the last generation of people who grew up without ubiquitous internet. I had a dial-up modem as a kid, so I had access to the internet. But there were no smartphones until I was in college, really. So I learned to tinker largely out of necessity, because you couldn't do anything particularly interesting with a computer unless you understood a little bit about how it worked. And that became just a hobby and a thing that I was really passionate about. When I got to college, I realized that the academic environment of computer science was quite a bit different than the tinkering that I knew and loved. And I ended up switching to become a history teacher. Well, with the goal of becoming a history teacher, because I never actually followed through on it. And instead, ended up using my coding skills to make money as a college student, because I realized that it was a way to pay my rent and have some spending money. And I saw it as somewhat transactional. The thing that really changed everything and really led us to MLH is my boss at the time, who was actually someone you know, John Britton. This is back in 2008. So John dragged me to some of these early meetups and hackathons in New York City. And at that point in time, the New York tech scene was pretty nascent. But I knew immediately going to these events that I was surrounded by people who would probably be more likely to call themselves artists or hackers than computer scientists. And to me, that was really inspiring. And I finally felt like I fit in. And that led me directly to starting a community of my own, you know, in New York and starting a bunch of meetups and eventually starting to do that professionally at Twilio. And through that, I began mentoring a lot of students, helping a lot of different local campus communities, getting involved with my alma mater. And Swift, my co-founder, had been doing a lot of the same work in parallel. And so it was a really obvious choice for us to one day make the somewhat crazy decision to quit our jobs and focus on it full time. So there's a lot more that happened in between. That's really how I ended up where I am.

Joe - 00: 03:39: That's fantastic. Yeah, I definitely feel a lot of listeners will be parallels to the feeling more at home with the artistic, the hackery title versus the computer science one. Also the deep pain at describing the old days of getting on the internet. I think that's one thing I realized recently is like going on the internet used to be a thing you would say you were going to do. And that was a thing. And that how divorced we are from that now. For us right now, you actively go off the Internet. There's no going onto it. And so, yeah, very, very different times indeed. So, you know, finding your people as it were to like, you know, creating this place where other people could have that experience. And so that started back in 2014, when now if you're listening to this is 2023 at time recording, this is come a long way. How would you say the MLH of today, which, you know, is now empowered hundreds of thousands and millions of developers globally has I don't know if diverged is the right word, but what would you say your original vision is for MLH versus where it is today?

Jonathan - 00: 04:32: I see MLH as an organism in some ways. And what I mean by that is we certainly had a vision going into it, right? We knew that we wanted to serve people who were learning, people who were starting their careers, help them build communities and level up, right? That was always the core purpose. People have done a lot more with that open-ended idea than we might have imagined. Obviously, hackathons have grown really significantly over the last 10 years. They started out as weird niche thing that a couple of schools were doing to what is now global phenomenon. But beyond that, we see people doing creative community building all the time. People who start a meetup for the first time, people who start a support group for fellow entrepreneurs, people who work on a project and open source it and suddenly are collaborating with people from across the globe. I believe that MLH is the connective tissue and often the support network between all of those different efforts. But certainly we can't take credit for inventing all of the things that our community does. I think that's a really cool differentiator of what makes MLH special is that it is somewhat open-ended and it is BYO type of community where people can make of it what they will and we're just there to enable them.

Joe - 00: 05:53: Yeah, I mean, absolutely makes sense as a brand that's ultimately dealing with very creative people that they would take that and run with it. I guess switching on to that idea, so we're here to talk about the MLH brand and definitely a very notable brand. I feel like nine times out of ten if I mention MLH to a developer, they know immediately what I'm talking about, they've never been to a hackathon. Can you distill for us, what is the core essence of the MLH brand identity?

Jonathan - 00: 06:18: That's a really interesting question, aside from how colorful it is.

Joe - 00: 06:22: All the primaries.

Jonathan - 00: 06:23: Yeah, all the primary colors. The funny thing about it is, I'm pretty sure in the early days, Swift just hired someone like that he met at an event to design a logo and we just kept it. Sort of arbitrary that we ended up with those colors. But from an actual like brand identity standpoint, there's this word that we happened upon many years ago that I really like. It's autotelic or autotelism. And it's the idea that you get enjoyment from the process of doing something, perhaps more than the outcome of doing it.

Joe - 00: 06:56: Very big, like it's the journey, not the destination situation. Right.

Jonathan - 00: 06:59: Exactly. It's literally a word that describes that. And I think that describes MLH quite a bit. It also describes our community a lot where the people in our community that are really successful are not necessarily motivated by accomplishing a specific thing. They really love the journey to get there, whether that's building a community, whether that's building an app that is like the defining thing about what makes a MLH hacker, right? Like that is what it's all about. And I think we've tried to integrate that as much as possible into like how we see the world, how we operate, how we build offerings for different communities. I don't think it's anything that we have like written down somewhere that like auto-tellism is this defining trait, but I think it is.

Joe - 00: 07:44: Absolutely, that's fascinating. And you mentioned in the earlier question this phrase, leveling up the next generation of developers, and this idea of leveling people up, and particularly early in career technologists. That feel was very core to how I see MLH portray itself. How do you think that ethos has influenced how MLH portrays itself online especially? Which has become a more important fixture even though primarily physical events. The last couple of years, our line has had to become more of a thing, right?

Jonathan - 00: 08:13: Over, I don't know, maybe the last five years or so, we have started to think of ourselves as an education company. I think we started off and we had described ourselves as a community company, but we've evolved that self-view. It's not education in a traditional sense. We get that question all the time where it's like, “do you have curriculum? Do you have lecturers? Do you have like a MOOC?” “No”. It's the answer. It's education in the exploration sense, and I think that when we talk about leveling up developers, it's a skill that requires a lot of practice, a lot of trial and error, and a lot of real-world context for how to solve problems. The only way to get that is by doing it. Sort of the equivalent of, to go back to the artist analogy, if you're teaching someone to paint and you're like, “great, go paint a masterpiece”. That's literally impossible. Maybe someone's genius and they'll do it on the first try, but really they're standing in studio, practicing different strokes and mixing different colors and trying different techniques. That same exact thing for programmers just with code and perhaps hardware instead of paint.

Joe - 00: 09:27: I absolutely agree. And definitely, I think it's very easy, just even, you know, thing by own experiences is very easy to read a bunch of stuff, do a bunch of tutorials, I think you've got this, then get in front of a blank editor and be like, “oh wait, no, I do not”. I absolutely agree. So onto, you know, we think of yourselves as an education company and the past as a community company. Over the course of MLH's lifetime, you've done so many things from, you know, the core hackathons, hosting your own hackathons to the fellowship. Obviously, you described their transformation of viewing yourselves from a community company to an education company. How, through all those journeys on those different product offerings, have you kept the brand identity of MLH consistent?

Jonathan - 00: 10:03: I think a lot of it is the fact that we are a B Corp. So literally part of our operating documents for the company is that our mission is to empower hackers. So I think often companies have a mission or have a vision that's written down somewhere that they're like, yes, this is a thing we adhere to. For us, it really is a guiding force for a lot of our decisions. Something that when we hire people, we talk a lot about it. We talk about it in day-to-day life of running the company. And we've generalized that mission in five different core values that have become almost like memes. I think the best form of a corporate value, because it is something that people have internalized and use in conversation when they're talking about why they made one decision or another. And that's allowed us to stay true to that mission, right? Is that we have shared ways to talk about this. We have a shared understanding of what it means. And ultimately, you know, I think we have a constant flow of people from the community coming to work for MLH, which keeps us from getting too disconnected from it, right? Cause I'm quite a ways out of college now. And so it's Swift, my co-founder, and it is easy to forget what it was like to be a student and doing this stuff for the first time. And I think that a big part of what has made us successful is like having people who are closer to that experience and perhaps remember a little bit more vividly than I do now.

Joe - 00: 11:29: Sure. I think that's so, I guess another aspect of MLH's brand that I think is really unique, that I think you manage in an interesting way. So as a brand, as a business, there's a strong temporal nature, right? While people are in college, they almost universally leave the community in somewhere or another, well not necessarily, but cycle out of certain activities after they leave college. How does that interact? How you build up a brand? Do you position yourselves intentionally as like, we're a company you interact with for a certain period of time? What does that do to you as a brand?

Jonathan - 00: 12:01: That's an interesting question. For one, it keeps growing and fresh. Not only do the hackers, right, which in our world is the participants in our different programs, not only do they graduate and move on, but all of the leaders do too. Our model is that we effectively have campus chapters with different local leaders who put their own spin on this idea of MLH and hackathons and community. And those people filter in and out too. And so you constantly have new people coming in with new ideas, new ways of viewing the world, new motivations, and I think prevents things from stagnating. And it also keeps this base level of excitement. One of the things I always remind myself and I get to go to hackathons every once in a while, but like you always meet someone where it is their first time and their mind is blown. For me, it's my hundredth hackathon or whatever. And so I'm like, “oh, yeah, I know how this goes”. But seeing that experience repeat itself over and over again, every single year where you constantly have newcomers and honestly, like people filter out before they get tired of it. A lot of people leave wanting more. And that's a really special thing to have for a community and for events where you have this like natural progression. I do think I wish we did more for alumni. I mean, I think there's probably some opportunities there, but for the campus communities, that's definitely been an important factor in what's made it so successful is that you have filtering in and out that happens organically.

Joe - 00: 13:30: I think what you said about it keeps a certain level of energy high there. I can definitely imagine that. Particularly, one of the things I wanted to drill into was in your annual conference talks at Hackcon and in other media, you use the story of alumni, like people who are on the way out from the core activities, quite a lot. You're trying to level them up and a lot of them do level up and find that success. How do those stories help amplify the core message that you're trying to get across to new participants?

Jonathan - 00: 13:58: So when you're talking about communities, and especially communities with a built-in leadership structure, there is a natural inclination towards some level of status and hierarchy and our dynamics developing. I think that one of the things that differentiates a community where it feels accessible and a community where it feels like a monarchy or something, for lack of a better term, is the ability to understand an aspirational path that you might also be able to follow. So when we tell stories, it's never like, “wow, this person's a super genius, and this is what they were from birth. It's always, these are the things that they've done and the ways that they've been creative to get to a certain place in their career or life”, and it is always done in such a way that I think it's aspirational for other people, not scary. There's nothing in any of those stories that I think feels impossible. It's all very accessible, it's all very relatable, and it's both our way of recognizing and thanking the people who have been a big part of this, but also a way to actually show newcomers, here are things you can be doing to level yourself up, and even just alternate paths that you may not have considered.

Joe - 00: 15:14: You mentioned the scary, which I want to spend some time on that because I think there's a couple of aspects which that is a challenge that I imagine you have to navigate. First of all, just the barrier to entry to technology itself for folks who are already earning their career, the idea of rocking out to these events which hackathons which listeners are not familiar, thousands of students in a room, hundreds of students in a room for 24 hours hacking on computers, and then the word hacking, which I know is one that you've had to deal with. Listeners who are listening to this, maybe picturing someone crouched over a keyboard or a hoodie right now, that kind of idea. How have you navigated those different sources of fear and sought to break them down as a brand and as a community?

Jonathan - 00: 15:54: So despite the fact that I am wearing a hoodie.

Joe – 00: 15:56: Wear a hoodie. Wear a hoodie-friendly bobcats is fine.

Jonathan – 00: 15:59: The word hacking, I've done so many TV interviews with local news in the US here, where you watch the segment, and it's always exactly the same. It's always like, these students are hacking, but it's not what you think. Been there, done that, had that conversation a million times. I get it. The mainstream connotation of hacking, if you ask my grandpa, is that someone's going to steal his credit card. That being said, in the tech community, hacking and the hacker ethos goes back to the origin of computers. It's literally something that originated in the 1950s at MIT. And one of the differentiating factors for communities that are strong is having their own jargon. And so I think that it's part of what makes it work that outsiders don't necessarily understand what it is. And I know that’s counterintuitive, and there's probably like risks to how big the business can be or whatever, like, but because of the word hacking, I don't necessarily think that's true, but people say things like that. For the people in the community, it's part of their identity, and they know it means something that's special and unique, and they understand it, and their friends understand it. And if everyone understood it, it might not feel the same way.

Joe- 00: 17:18: I absolutely couldn't see that. I mean, if nothing else, you get that icebreaker effect, right? Where if you are a hacker, you are constantly having to do as you say, like go through the whole, here's what it means thing. But there's joy in that, like, you know, the different ways that people describe it and they express their creativity in that moment and get people interested. I can definitely see that effect. I think that's really interesting.

Jonathan - 00: 17:38: I know you were asking about the fear factor too. So going to a new social scene, especially as a college student, is somewhat scary. The fact that's 100 people in a room hacking versus 100 people in a room drinking or whatever, it's intimidating in either situation if you don't know anyone. I think the thing that ultimately brings newcomers in is a friend invites them. I have not really seen a better strategy for bringing new people into a community. It gives you someone to lean on, it gives you someone to relate to, it gives you someone to introduce you to other people. That's true of a dinner party, it's true of a hackathon. But time and again, that is the thing that successfully, on boards people into the community is someone they know and trust invites them and holds their hand through their first event.

Joe - 00: 18:27: Referrals of any brand, any product remain powerful, particularly it's not an in-person thing. So this change tacked a little bit and speak a little bit more about some more solid concrete ways in which you utilize the brand and deploy the brand. So bearing in mind, they've already gave us a bit of the original with the logo and maybe a slightly more improv way to developing the visual assets there. When it comes to developing MLH's visual identity, how have you approached creating this identity that is both welcoming to folks who are not yet super into tech but also needs to resonate really deeply with some of the most technical members of developer community at large?

Jonathan - 00: 19:04: For one, we have great designers, right? I am not one of them. My co-founder, Swift, is a very talented designer. We have artist and designer Vicky N, who's been working with us for many years. The first designer at MLH, this guy, Aziz Ramos, was an incredible designer. And there are other people we've worked with throughout the years, but certainly those are the folks who were around for a really long time and shaped the brand. For one, they have creative concepts that I think resonate with people. We have been really intentional in making all of our branding assets something that's fun and inviting and also clearly technical. If you go to maybe not our homepage, but some of the event websites, like global hack week is an event we run every month. That's an online virtual hacker festival. And if you go to that website, there's all of these really cute little drawings that Vic made. People who are stoked about like a monitor in front of them or like someone messing with a piece of hardware and it's cute and fun and friendly, but very, very obvious that these people are there to do something technical. And I think that combination has served us really well.

Joe - 00: 20:15: As you said earlier, I imagine that ties into the aspirational journeys by their images. People see themselves doing something technical in, right? Interesting. You also spoke earlier about MLH being a B Corp and the values and how those help you reflect what you want to do and be as a community. At the time, you primarily spoke about that being not internal, but speaking about its connection to leaders. How has that helped you foster brand loyalty amongst the larger audience?

Jonathan - 00: 20:44: In the early days of MLH, Swift or I, or soon after Nick, knew the vast majority of our organizers and local leaders personally. And we had a level of trust and understanding built up. As a community grows and you no longer have the ability to personally have a relationship with everyone in it, we work with like 150,000 people a year, possible for us to know them all. You need to communicate what you care about and how you see the world in more generalized way so that you can have that same level of trust. And the values are really good representation of that because one of the exercises that we do on the team is asking people to tell stories about how they have seen those values put into practice. We do this as part of onboarding. Sometimes we do it as part of team off sites and summits. But if you ask anyone on the team, all of them can think of ways that they've seen these values put into practice. And that gives you the tools to have that same conversation with a hacker or with an organizer at an event. Like when they ask you, what does MLH care about? You know, you have specific concrete examples, not only how the company articulates our values, but also how the people who work there put them into practice.

Joe - 00: 22:01: Sure, that's great, makes sense. So I guess where that, one of the things about MLH and how it operates is you operate with a lot of partners, both at events and during your online campaigns. That's a lot of other brands that you are coming to, some who follow a very similar community-minded brand strategy, others who do not on follow a clear approaches. How do you integrate that B Corp, company-ness, welcome-liness with these other brands and still, you know, maintain true to both brand service and in these partnership scenarios?

Jonathan - 00: 22:31: That's a great question. And for anyone listening who's not familiar, the main way that MLH as a business makes money to fund our operations is through these brand partnerships, we'll call them, right? Either helping a company gain awareness for career opportunities and talent acquisition, or helping a company build broad-scale awareness and adoption of a developer platform. So the first thing that makes those partnerships so successful is that they are optional for students to take advantage of. We don't do any events where signing up for this API is a requirement for participation. Certainly, we try to make it sound exciting and interesting and appealing, but we're not forcing anyone to do it. If you go to a hackathon and you don't touch a single sponsor technology, great. We're happy to have you there. It doesn't really affect our relationship with an individual hacker. And so that's the first part of it. I think the second part of it is we have to do a lot of tweaking and tailoring of messaging. When you look at a lot of brands, especially brands we partner with, they have probably put most of their effort into how to frame their offering for a enterprise buyer. And even though building grassroots awareness and adoption is part of their strategy, it's not going to be their main focus. And so we often have to help them rephrase things or explain things in layman's terms so that a more junior developer can understand and engage with it and still get a lot of value out of it. And I think our team does a really good job of that. It's certainly easier in some cases and harder in others, but it is something we think about when we bring a new partner to events.

Joe - 00: 24:10: Perfect. I imagine, aside from the rephrasing and so there's that strong temporal element which is a lot of these products aren't made to be engaged with in a 24-hour period either right and they need to be done quickly. Wonderful. We are coming towards the end of our time. So as we've talked a lot about where MLH has been and where it is currently, as we have you here and we look to the future, what's your vision for MLH in the next five to ten years, especially in the context of its evolving brand and the community that it serves?

Jonathan - 00: 24:38: The last four years have been a roller coaster. We've built a really robust virtual event offering. We have taken our community fully virtual and back and back and forth. I think where we're going is we want to be bigger part of the actual way that people get their first job or internship. We know that going to a hackathon, going to an MLH's programs is a really powerful way to level up your skills. We are not super involved in actually helping students connect to specific job opportunities that are the right fit for them. We often connect them to employers and those employers are fantastic. But I think we can do a better job of tailoring the match between student and job. That's something I'm really interested in building out over the next handful of years. I think the events and community are going to continue to grow. There is so much demand right now for human connection and community. I think that we're helping students find that again, either online or in person. But that is something that is well understood and operates really well. I think we are expanding beyond that to ways to help them find an outcome as well.

Joe - 00: 25:58: Fantastic. Awesome. Well, Jonathan, thank you so much for your time today. This has been wonderful.

Jonathan - 00: 26:02: Thank you, I really enjoyed it and happy hacking.

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