when the big mo is on your side
(momentum is what i mean)
hey friends kind of an emergency newsletter. not because something’s wrong, but more because something is right. have you ever played sports? heck even marching band on my end. do you know when you are a part of a game/event and you are behind and you can just feel yourself/the team/the band surging forward as the event goes on? then you look up at the end of the game/event etc and you find yourself ahead? well that’s what i feel like is happening with the torc.dev community. to be honest it’s happening with the entire org (we are tracking to exceed our annual sales goal halfway through the year as well). however this is about the community team and the week that happened at renderatl.
i heard on a podcast, specifically the brandfathers, that every industry has their ‘superbowl’ but you have to know what it is and how to execute on it and for us renderatl was our superbowl. for those of you who do not know what renderatl is, it’s a 7k software engineering conference held in atlanta. i knew we had a pretty good plan going into the event but what unfolded just shows momentum was on our side.
let’s talk about the first day. first off 8 individuals got the torc gear tattoos. idk about you but i’ve never been a part of anything that got a logo tattooed on their body LET ALONE A CORPORATE LOGO. the brand loyalty we have developed in such a short 8 months is unreal. heck THIS WAS EVEN ONE DUDES FIRST TATTOO EVER.
then i had the chance to speak with my dear friend and sr. manager at zapier, kelly vaughn at a pre-render meetup where the speaker list could be a keynote list. i got to share the stage with angie jones, kelsey hightower, marc backes, ace adewale, and francesco ciulla.
then the torc ambassador crew rolled DEEP after that meetup and got to all hang out with each other. to be able to get 10 folks out past 10pm on a tuesday night was wild and it was so amazing getting to know our ambassadors IRL!!
so that concludes DAY ONE!!! again while all this was planned the energy and the vibes were unmatched all day. i knew this week was going to be special after 24 hours.
day 2 started off by a heck of a live stream with me and my ceo mike morris on how/why torc is changing the recruiting industry. i would highly recommend listening to this if you want more of a deep dive on what we are trying to pull off.
then another huge momentum swing happened. sold out lunch….
in my mind we were going to throw a render lunch and just a few people would show up. the day of the event we had about 35 folks rsvp and ive run meetups enough where typically half of rsvp’s show up. on top of that, in my head i was like, ‘there is so much going on at render no one will show up’. welp…as time got closer to lunch the RSVP list continued to climb to 55 individuals. by the time lunch arrived we had about 80+ folks show up and had to turn away 15-20 because we legit didn’t have enough outdoor seating.
i finished out day 2 on the rooftop of ponce city market with these views….
and an unreal conversation with the GOAT kelsey hightower. for those of you who are not in the engineering industry he was a ‘distinguished engineer’ at google for a long time and there are only about 100 of those folks across the globe at google. not to mention he’s done so much more than this, just google him lol. i had the chance to tell him what we are trying to do at torc.dev and he loved it. he agreed it’s the future of staffing.
so all this happened and it’s not even technically ‘day 1’ yet of render. so day 3 for me officially kicked off renderatl and me emcee’ing the main stage.
this year really has been the year of ‘pinch me moments’ i remember interviewing justin samuels after his first year of renderatl and knew what he was building was ‘different’. then year two i had the chance to be an ambassador and speak with no notice and crushed it ;). i then was invited year 3 to be an emcee and this was the first year where i had the opportunity to emcee the main stage. the energy was unreal. i got to introduce david banner, justin samuels himself, and some other heavy hitters in the industry.
i also want to give an honorable mention to my dude jason torres on the torc community team and roxy rodbeck a torc ambassaor who also emceed stages. like i said, torc was everywhere, and people noticed. i legit had someone come up to be and say the words ‘i feel like torc is everywhere this conference’.
torc also had an ‘email bar’ booth and the entire time i was told we had no seats available. my team told me some amazing organic conversations happened. we had the chance to essentially ‘meet people where they are’ which is our whole mantra on the community team. we didn’t force convos we allowed folks to work and hung out with them and when they asked we had the conversation on what we did.
and finally the talk of renderatl on jersey day was our torc hockey jerseys. i love having the chance to work with my friends and my dear friend and fellow martins bbq black pigs beer league player, ryan winn, is director of marketing at verbero hockey and he made these sweet jerseys for us. we will be doing a limited drop of these jerseys so join our discord to be updated.
listen at the end of the day momentum is fleeting. yes we have it, will we have it next month? next quarter? next year? that is to be determined but i can tell you that the entire community team at torc is bought in and seeing what we are building is tangible. if you want to be apart of the journey feel free to sub to this email letter, join our discord, come drop into a live stream, repost a piece of content. all of it goes a long way.
upcoming taylors error tour;)
nyc - june 18-20 - speaking at amplify allyship and throwing a dinner/happy hour
nashville - june 25 - speaking at nashville javascript user group
denver - july 27-31 - laracon conference but a possible collab meetup coming soon;)
st louis - august 6-8 - speaking at devup conference
raleigh nc - august 11-13 - speaking at all things open meetup maybe downtown techies meetup??
internally grateful for everyone apart of this journey. talk soon.
-me
Ha. I was thinking the local drive in here!