building for the future
and that future looks bright
my ramblings:
i know i keep saying this but it’s getting harder and harder to get these emails out. it’s basically been a month since my last email and so much has happened so ill try to be clear and concise and try not to yap too much:)
since the last newsletter i’ve been to: miami, guadalaraja, and columbus and I am currently gearing up to head to barcelona then atlanta then nyc. while these locations sound glamorous (aside from columbus not hating columbus but you’re not miami;) it’s an absolute grind. i think a lot of people think i’m out at the beach in miami or living it up in mexico and that could be further from the truth, in reality my days consist of me living in a hotel conference rooms under floresenct lights trying to shake as many hands as possible, cram in work whenever I get a second to breathe, go to a dinner or networking event then in bed early. do I love it? absolutely. is it glamorous? not really.
my recommendations:
I am back on the ‘trying new things out’ and my co-worker jason has rolled his eyes too many times at me while reading this sentence but I want to give some shout-outs:
amie - i’ve tried a lot of AI note-taking apps. i however love amie the most (shout out to braydon coyer for telling me at stirktrek in columbus). i love the way it keeps up with all your meetings, you can ask chatgpt to create a reminder invite from the meeting or create an email to fire off. it also doesn’t sit in the meeting (honestly at this point it’s just annoying if your notetaking app sits in the meetings) and just a fun little ux moment it actually leverages the notch on your mac which I love.
brick - okay so this was totally an instagram ad purchase but honestly? it works. i have caught myself (a lot recently) zoning out and scrolling on reels/tiktok and it’s been tanking my productivity. this is a great solution to blocking apps. i put the ‘brick’ on my fridge so if I want to post to Instagram I walk over to my bridge and unbrick my phone otherwise I keep it on lock. you can customize all types of ways your phone works and have different settings for different times of the day. big fan of it.
five year journal - i’m not a ‘big writer’ by any means but I have always enjoyed documenting my days aka my vlogs. but I read about a 5 year journal which essentially is one page sectioned off into 5 years so as you write in your journal you’ll be able to see what you wrote a year ago on this day. if you like journaling its a fun little thing I found.
torc community updates:
the name of the game right now is all things US engagement. when I started at torc back in sept/oct of 2024 the original focus was to grow our LATAM community which we have!! to be honest in terms of internal metrics, it’s the strongest area of our community. now, the focus has shifted to US engagement. this has our team focused on all types of conferences/meetups/engagement activities for the US. for a little ‘peel behind the onion’ with some internal happenings, our goal is to create brand awareness for over 1M individuals who were transferred into our database from existing randstad databases. so when are teams reach out to folks on our platform they know we we actually are. we are mainly attacking that through email marketing and a lot of A/B testing (and of course events). without getting too detailed one of our teams main metrics, is out of a certain region, what % of folks have completed their profile within our jobs platform.
marketing thoughts:
another lunch, another finding out that another marketing department has been laid off because ‘they weren’t doing anything’. i recently had lunch with a friend and we were catching up about our connections and I found out that a pretty large size company in my space laid off the majority of their marketing team and what’s even crazier they laid off the ‘do-ers’ and kept the leadership which is an odd strategy which strengthens my argument that in a lot of corporate environments people do not understand what moves the needle when it comes to marketing. i had another conversation with a founder around the future of community and how that sits into marketing. we talked about that there have been different stages on what ‘marketing is and does’ and that doing SEO and writing one blog post and running ads actually worked a few years ago! and for the record i’m not saying it does not NOT work but that should only be one lever in your strategy. what really moves the needle now is organic content, in person/community events, and showing up authentically in online and IRL conversations. i tweeted this the other day, ‘you don’t need to make another marketing hire you to start building community.’ more companies need to realize this.
content:
it’s been so long since I wrote this newsletter I have dropped TWO new vlogs.
^^ this one highlights my teams week in mexico at talent land a 40k person conference. so many great moments our videographer was able to capture.
^^ this one highlighted my time emcee’ing at epic web dev conf. fun fact I shot this whole thing on my dji osmo pocket 3! however our videographer did the editing lol.
i want to highlight TWO lives specifically i’ve done ^^ this one is with a founder named rae lambert who founded a community platform to easily host in person or virtual events at one time across the globe. her platform has been used by the all in podcast guys, time ferris, and bryan johnson (that weird health dude who is trying to become younger). we dove into community and how she likes to interview engineers. honestly a great conversation.
this one is with my boy james q quick ^^ james, for the most part, has been very heads down in his new role so much so the title for this live was ‘why james hasn’t been on the internet’ it was a great reminder that a lot of time builders arent always yapping online. oh and he announces something pretty awesome about his family:)
bits and bytes:
my ice hockey team just won our second championship in a row! we are like the ‘wrexham’ of beer league. we started in lower b (won that division), got promoted to upper b (won that division), and in our first season of lower a we just won that division!
heading to barcelona this upcoming week to speak at springio a leading java engineering conference in spain! fun fact there is a fellow nashvillian heading out there as well! if you have any recs or you live there hit me up!! would love to hang and will take alllllll the suggestions
i’ve had a few people ask me lately ‘so what really IS torc’ so let me break this down. we help people get jobs. join our jobs platform. we also are a community. if you haven’t check out our community page please do so.
if you haven’t done so already you should connect with my team: angelos, lucca, jason, briana, ximena and luana!!!
appreciate you reading through this email newsletter as always. if you need anything let me know! me and the torc community team are here for you throughout your career!
much love and welcome home,
love,
me
I'm intrigued by Brick. Is using a physical item different than just changing the focus filter to block apps? Does it really help? (Maybe I should be asking you this question in a month or two after you've used it longer.)