Breakeven Brothers

Bennett Bernard (00:11)
Welcome to the first episode of the Breakeven Brothers podcast. My name is Bennett Bernard. A little bit about me. I'm a licensed CPA and accounting and finance professional for the last 10 plus years or so. I'm joined by my co-host Bradley Bernard. He's the world's best Swift programmer, Laravel programmer, business owner. And yeah, and yeah, just of course my younger brother too of about three years. So.

Bradley (00:30)
Keep it coming.

Bennett Bernard (00:37)
Here in this podcast, we're going to talk about some business and technology accounting and finance and just bring all those worlds together A quick a bit about me just as this is the first episode like I said, I'm a CPA originally from Southern California both Brad and I are and started off my career as an auditor at a big four firm Then went to eventually landed at a mortgage originator by the name of Loan Depot

that's really where I got my first taste of mortgage accounting and programming, which we'll get into in a little bit later. but then just working with large data sets and everything of that sort. from there, I went to a company, that was a mutual fund company. And then finally, I am now currently working at Zillow, really supporting their mortgage origination business. this podcast has no affiliation with Zillow. So I'll make that part very clear.

All the views and opinions are completely of my own. So Yeah, just help me get this podcast together and kind of start just riffing on some ideas So Brad anything I missed in your intro that you want to add or kind of add your own flavor to?

Bradley (01:38)
Yeah, I can do a quick intro. I'm Bradley or Brad, whatever one is the preferred choice. I'm a software engineer by trade. Been working for, I think seven years now. went to college up in the Bay and then stayed there after I worked at PayPal, doing mobile apps there and worked at LinkedIn in mobile apps. And then at Meta on the messenger app. Yeah. I started programming probably.

12 years old, I think. It's a long time ago. I got really into games at that age and then programming kind of came next. I think the first app that I ever built, which I'm not sure I would call it an app, more like a script, back in maybe 2010 or 2011, I don't want to date myself, but around that time, my fantastic brother Bennett had done a side project, which is a t -shirt company. you can correct me if I'm wrong, but...

You were working on a company and we wanted more Twitter followers. I think we had found a website to get you more Twitter followers, but to do that, we had to follow people. And so the kind of journey of me finding programming and ending up where I am today in the PHP space is I pulled up Twitter, looked at like their SDKs, chose PHP out of no understanding of what it was. And then built like a little script for him. And I was like, Hey, you should run this, like log in with your Twitter account. I kind of pieced it all together and it all worked.

And ever since then, I've been interested in both mobile and web. So I think in my earlier years, I pretty much only done web, but wanted to do mobile. And then actually when I graduated college, I had two offers. One was mobile, one was web. And that's why I made the tough choice of like, Hey, do I continue what I was doing or do I try something new? And ultimately decided to go mobile. this was 2016, 2017 around that time.

so did mobile apps at PayPal. That was my first stint and really got a, a kind of a touch of it in college when I did hackathons back in the day. Those were super fun. but yeah, since then worked at PayPal, LinkedIn, Meta really interested in mobile apps. And then about 12 months ago, I made the jump to VuxByte and VuxByte is my own company. So ever since I started programming, really, I've always wondered like what life would be like building my own things. And I did that on the side, but I hadn't done it full time.

So it was something of me building up the skills, meeting people, understanding what challenges these companies had and how I could then take all those skills and apply it in my own regard. And it was super fun to build products when I was younger, but I really didn't know what I was doing, just putting things together. And thankfully some of them worked, maybe a story for later, but I made the tough decision to leave Meta after being there for about two years and had been thinking about it for a while and then started my own company. And yeah, it's been a journey.

Honestly, 12 months has flown by in both a good and a bad way, but there's a lot to really uncover there

Bennett Bernard (04:22)
Yeah. That makes total sense. as you were talking about, you know, your initial programming and how you got started. I was going to ask you and you kind of mentioned the Southpaw Industries was the business that, I had started just a t -shirt printing business, kind of in the MMA industry. I was super into that for awhile. but it did also when you were kind of saying where your first programming experience came from, I was thinking,

Bradley (04:28)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (04:45)
of Halo mods, Halo two mods, because that was I remember like the flying warthogs and all that kind of stuff. I remember. I don't know if you consider that programing, but I remember like getting into that and like just wondering how people were doing that. And it was like, I feel like I have this visual of you and dad like sitting downstairs, like taking apart something. I don't know if it was the Xbox. Might have been the Xbox. Yeah.

Bradley (04:47)
You

Yeah, I think it was the Xbox. I think in those days, what ultimately led me to programming was the curiosity aspect is I got really into video games, saw these people doing crazy things and was like, I kind of want to do that. Like, how did they do that? I want to try that. What does it take to get there? And at that time I was young, had a bunch of time on my hands, was really passionate about it and therefore decided to try it like in all my free time. And it turned out to be something I really, really loved, which I'm lucky to say like when I got to college.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do and I still love it. There's parts of it that I don't love, but I think in the grand scheme of things, definitely lucky to have chosen a spot like that. But yeah, I don't know if I considered that part programming as much as it is like downloading applications and like almost like modding an Xbox, I guess is the right term for it. But I'm not more of a hardware guy, definitely software side. Hardware is a little bit too past my skill set and interests, I think. Although it's cool, making physical things move in the real world is pretty cool too.

Bennett Bernard (05:45)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah

Yeah. Yeah. cool. So you mentioned getting into making the jump to VuxByte before we, go there, and you know, we were kind of talking about like, you know, our intros and what's, what we've done. And we both now have mentioned, you know, even at a young age, you know, I did Southpaw Industries when I was in college. you did things much earlier. And, and again, we'll, I think we'll save that topic for another podcast. Cause it's a, there's a, there's a great story there in your case.

Bradley (06:30)
yeah.

Bennett Bernard (06:33)
but you know, before we get into the actual VuxByte in your decision to leave, you know, big tech, we'll call it, why I, and I don't really know the answer to this, but why do you think, you know, you and I both like lean towards entrepreneurship? Like, and it's not something I really thought about actively, but kind of as we're talking about it, you know, do you have any pulse on why that is? Or do you think that's just like a weird, because, you know, our mom and dad both had jobs, you know,

Bradley (06:57)
Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (06:59)
You know, our mom owned a hair salon and that was entrepreneurship, but like, I don't think you and I like looked at that as like, you know, software is a much different business than, you know, hair salon. So like, I don't know where that would have came from. Do you have any thoughts on like where that common thread that you and I have is?

Bradley (07:08)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, it's a great question. I don't know. When I look at my endeavors of building things, I've always been under the scratch your own itch agenda of like, I want this to exist. Why does it not exist? I'm gonna go build it and see what happens. And I think that part, I know I wasn't really looking at it from a business point of view, more as I wanna build this cool tool and see what happens. For the Twitter script that I mentioned,

Bennett Bernard (07:19)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Bradley (07:39)
It was not going to be a business from day one. It was how do I learn and build something for us and for you to use? And then, Hey, it turned out to be the longest running business I ever created. and so I guess maybe not business, you call it business. It's a website, sold it in 2017, but that thing had a long run I think I've always centered on doing my own thing because it's, it's fun to just build something from scratch and it's fun to have all the decision -making power.

Bennett Bernard (07:54)
Yeah.

Bradley (08:03)
where when I entered the corporate world, there's a lot of things, like I mentioned, that just aren't as fun. I'm sure you agree with that 100%. But, you know, as I've been running my own business for 12 months, I can tell you there's a lot of things that I also don't like doing, and it's my own decision making. So it's kind of the grass is always greener side for like, hey, I want to go try something and see how it ends up. Like you're going to have problems regardless of where you go. But yeah, I think for the entrepreneurial spirit,

I don't know, maybe luck, maybe chance, good support, good foundations, high passion, high interests. I think our parents supported us well and we were very passionate and curious about things and I think that can lead one to doing things if you have the means. But yeah, I'm not 100 % sure, that's my best guess.

Bennett Bernard (08:50)
Yeah. yeah. I don't, I don't know either. I think, yeah, I, you know, I don't know if it's a, I don't want to say problem with authority because that sounds kind of problem child. and I would certainly would never categorize you or I as problem childs, you know, like no, never gotten any serious trouble. Just normal teenager stuff. but yeah, I think just that, that awareness and like optionality of like, yeah, you can work, you know, again, our, our,

Bradley (08:57)
You

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (09:14)
Mom and dad, you know, both worked. and our, you know, our dad worked a normal job. You know, he wasn't like, he didn't start his own business or anything like that, but it was also like just awareness of like, Hey, entrepreneurship is, is here. It's this thing. It's really cool. you know, I think dad always would like talk about like ideas, you know, and stuff like that. And, so yeah, I don't know, but it is weird that we both kind of find ourselves scratching the same itch, you know, different skillsets, of course. and yeah, you're, it's, it's just super cool. I remember, you know, being in high school and.

Bradley (09:31)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (09:42)
So then you were in middle school, I think, or maybe it was I was just getting into college and you were in high school. But yeah, it was pretty much just predetermined what you were going to major in. And it was a great thing to major in. So yeah, those are some good skills. Yeah.

Bradley (09:50)
Yeah. Yeah, it was a good time. Yeah. And I think one, one little tidbit there is software was pretty cheap to run. So building a business in the software space, was cheaper than others. I mean, getting a server, maybe 20 bucks a month, getting a domain, you know, 15 bucks a year. And then you write code again, it's not going to serve billions and millions of people, but when you're starting things out.

Bennett Bernard (10:11)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley (10:14)
not a bad spot to be in when you can reach the masses with $30 a month. So that really helped make it a bit easier.

Bennett Bernard (10:19)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that's, and yeah, I'm super excited to get into that. more details on those projects and future podcasts episodes. Cause there's so much there. Yeah. so, you know, so talking about VuxByte now, so I guess let me set the table for you and then you can kind of just go off from there you had talked about, leaving big tech and.

Bradley (10:28)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, plenty of those.

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (10:41)
You know, I imagine, you know, and you can kind of correct me if I'm wrong, but you're working at Meta, which is one of the, you know, one of the FAANGS right. I don't know what they're called now, but, you know, one of the big tech companies in Silicon Valley that people, you know, really aspire to work at, right. Like that is a huge prestigious position. You get compensated super well. you know, free cafeteria, free food, you know, all those perks that are just make those, those companies really, sought after and

Bradley (10:56)
Mm -hmm.

yeah.

Bennett Bernard (11:08)
attractive for professionals. You know, how did when did you first start thinking like, this, like seriously considering leaving, because a lot of people would look at that position and say like, Hey, you got everything someone could want, like, why would you take this big risk? So I guess kind of walk through that thought process for you when it became a real, like, Hey, I'm gonna, I'm really gonna consider doing this.

Bradley (11:32)
Yeah, it's a pretty long journey to be honest. Like I mentioned in high school, I had dabbled in, I mean, maybe not dabble, I'd gone pretty deep in building my own stuff. And then as I got through college, continued to do things, built many websites in college. Some are useful some werent entering the corporate world. I kind of had to put those on pause. I really didn't work on too many side projects. I had things here and there. But I knew ever since I left building my own things and entered the corporate world, like I wanted to get back there.

but I wasn't seriously considering it until I think honestly, the Meta layoffs, this was November of 2022. and so this was a day where there's a lot of details to be talked about here, but let's just say in short, it was a day in which you kind of woke up, didn't know if you're going to be employed there and.

Bennett Bernard (12:08)
Hmm.

Bradley (12:21)
That was kind of the fact of it. So I think that morning I was like, okay, you know, the day before I was working on a project with my team, like building out a new feature for the messenger client, I worked on community chats. And yeah, the next day I woke up, there was tons of rumors about layoffs at New York times, hit everything you'd ever imagined. So we knew it was coming. We just didn't know who was affected. And so I woke up, got an email that I was safe and thought, like what would happen?

if I got laid off, like would I be jumping right back in the job market? Would I try something else? It kind of gave me that first idea of like, what would life be like if I wasn't here anymore? Because I'd always interviewed while I had a job, like outside of college. I'd always kind of had that as a fallback. I'm like, what would happen if I immediately didn't have a job? And since I've been dying to do my own thing, I think that culminated pretty deeply in me. And I was thinking, you know, like,

Yes, I'm still employed, which is great. Like you mentioned, the benefits are superb. The pay is great. it's an excellent place to be. There's downsides to every company. So I won't say meta doesn't have any downsides, but all things considered is a great spot. and I think the layoffs event was a big thing for me. Made me think about it deeply, maybe understand like, Hey, the tech industry is changing. and I don't know what life is going to look like. I would say there's also a lot of.

life factors involved, finances, planning your life together with your partner, all these things really add up. And it made me think like, if I didn't have a job and all these factors came into play, what would my life look like? And I thought, I could probably do it. I had many long conversations with my partner talking about like, when would I go? What would I do? What would I work on?

What would life be like? What would the finances look like? Is that going to delay certain things? And a lot in there. But I think for me, the journey from November to when I quit in June was the constant reassessment of all those things. Hey, I think I can do it. Are we sure? A few months later, or weeks later even, are we really sure? This is definitely a gamble. And just leave your paycheck on the table. And you're making good money. But what I had told myself was,

Bennett Bernard (14:20)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Bradley (14:33)
I could do it for 12 months. Let's give a stab at it, see what happens in that 12 months. And if it doesn't work, I can always go back. And I think part of that is I'm not like the best software engineer ever, but I have a track record of getting into these companies. I think if I tried hard, I could get into another one. And so that was kind of my fallback of like, hey, I really want to do this. Like I'd scratch my own itch in the highest degree of like, hey, I'm just going to send it, quit and go for it.

Bennett Bernard (14:51)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley (15:00)
But yeah, it was tough. Like I had gone back and forth so many times, I'd felt the personal pressure of kind of satisfying the craving for the dream to go for it, while my partner is like not able to do so. And I think that part is difficult. And there's a lot more difficult parts, the few months before I had finally quit meta, I was just wrapping things up. I, you know,

Bennett Bernard (15:08)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley (15:21)
A lot of fine details there also, but I would say that the underlying point is like, I want to leave on good terms where I had told my team, I told my manager like, Hey, like I knew I told him exactly what I was going to do. I'm going to go try my own thing. Like I've had a good time here with the team learning, building stuff. You know, it's a fun environment. The team was great, but I wanted to try something new. And I think everyone was super supportive, which I love. Like I would hate to be like, Hey, I'm out of here. And people are like, you didn't finish that or you didn't finish that. So I wrapped everything up as best I could.

Bennett Bernard (15:27)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley (15:51)
And even then, I don't think you need to. I think these companies can handle people leaving all the time, but I just wanted to have like a really clean slate, say this is my departure, this is what I'm gonna do. And everyone was super supportive. So yeah, June I quit. That was like the start of the journey. I remember taking my Mac Pro, back to like FedEx, which is what Meta had shipped to me for working day to day.

And I remember driving back to my house on that drive and just having this largest grin on my face ever, being like, wow, after years of doing this, being in a corporate world and thinking about leaving, I literally just and returning my computer the same day and said bye to a few people. I've just traded my problems for a whole set of other problems.

And it was a crazy day. I remember the emotions were just up and down. I was like, holy crap, like I've done this because I decided. But it wasn't like there's a difference between deciding and thinking about it versus actually doing it and telling people that as you start telling people, it becomes even more real. And you're like, holy crap, like we're going for it. So yeah, it's a crazy ride.

Bennett Bernard (16:52)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah. Do you think that, let me phrase this, do you think that getting a taste of making money online on your own pre working, so pre PayPal, you know, pre your first job out of college, do you think that gave you a bit more perspective than someone who maybe otherwise wouldn't have that experience? basically,

you've made money on your own before. So it was, you know, I don't know if your brain was like, Hey, I can do this again. or do, would you say it's not so much that, but other than, or that you've seen other people go out there and do it as well. Like, I guess what was your biggest influence you think Cause it's one thing to leave the corporate world, but you could have left, you know, big tech and gone to a smaller company that maybe,

Bradley (17:21)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (17:41)
is a little bit more better hours or a bit just more of like a right fit for you, but you decided to go out and do your own thing. And I guess I'm curious if you think that, you know, any of the past experiences that you had or if it was more of like a current influence that kind of led you to say like, I'm doing my own thing as opposed to another option.

Bradley (17:58)
Probably a bit of both. I think the timing was right in the AI boom. So this is a time when new AI models are popping out left and right. Everyone in the tech space was mentioning, I want to play with these things. I want to build products with these things. So it almost felt like a really, really good time to try your own thing. Even on my LinkedIn network, there's tons of people that I would consider very high up in positions that departed to go try their own thing. And it wasn't something I had seen initially, but I'd say over the past 12 months.

Bennett Bernard (18:03)
Hmm.

Bradley (18:27)
The amount of posts I've seen from people doing that is at least four or five times higher than I've ever seen before. So I think the environment of the tech world was looking just like there was a lot of stuff out there to try. And then my past in building products, I think definitely influenced my expectations and confidence where I said, if I could do it in high school, where I felt like I knew nothing, was just piecing things together, like copy paste.

Imagine the worst code you've ever seen and then go even deeper. And that somehow managed to make money. I've worked at companies that have had, billions in revenue. And now we're just going to go make like a little app with all the experience that I have and all the learning that I've done on the side. That can't be that hard, especially if I could do it before. And I think that comes with a bit of, overconfidence but also.

You kind of need that to go for that leap. Like you don't really want to go for that leap. You're like, I'm not sure if I could do it. Like the amount of energy and passion I had was an all time high. The, like the first month that I left, I was like, you know, this is the decision that I wanted to go for. I'm going to do it. And like, if I don't do well, that's fine, but I'm, I'm going to go full throttle. And so that was kind of the trajectory that I was on.

Bennett Bernard (19:29)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley (19:39)
Am I where I want to be? Not really, but I think I've learned a ton in the process that I think I wouldn't trade for anything. so yeah, it definitely helped influence me and push me to go for it. I think if I didn't have that experience before, I wouldn't have the taste and the desire. Cause I had that taste before I entered the corporate world throughout the corporate world. I thought, if I could get back to that in a way that I could write better code, build better products, understand deeper about the tech stack and the business side of things, especially as I've become more experienced. I think that's.

A large thing you gain as like a seasoned software engineer is like more the business side, where when you start out as a software engineer, you're understanding how to write good code. And then as you evolve, it's like, why do you write good code? Why does the business matter in this space? Like, why do I build teachers for these areas? And with all that information, I thought, like, you know, I'll try it out, see what happens, and go for it. But it's, it wasn't without a bit of confidence for sure.

Bennett Bernard (20:14)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah. There's two things that you mentioned that really stuck out. I think the first one, on confidence and maybe even overconfidence, I've been accused of being overconfident, you know, just the other day, Brooke, asked me, you know, Brooks, my, my wife, my partner, asked me if there was like 10 random people, do you think you could beat them in a swimming race? Like a swimming contest? And I was like, yeah, I think I could for sure.

you know, but then like, but I'm, but I do think I could, if you just pick random people, you know, I'm not like saying I would be like college swimmers at all, but, you know, I used to surf, like he used to be out on the water a lot. So I was like, yeah, I'd like my odds. but, you know, so that could be definitely framed as overconfidence, but. You know, maybe a different way to frame that is just a super strong belief in yourself, you know, and I don't think it's necessarily like arrogance, but like just being able to say, like, I know I can figure it out.

Bradley (20:52)
Ha ha.

Heh.

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (21:21)
You know, I've encountered a lot of problems in my career where like, I don't know something like right away or even like have the slightest clue, but like, I do feel like I can figure it out. This isn't beyond like my brain's ability to understand. and so I think, you know, just having that belief in yourself, you know, I think to go out there and do that. I think one thing that maybe is a better topic for another, podcast, like imposter syndrome is like a real, that's a real,

Bradley (21:35)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (21:48)
A real thing that people experience and I certainly experienced too. And, you know, how do you balance like being confident, but then also like being your own biggest doubter and biggest critic and being like, I don't know if I can do this. It's, yeah, our brains are weird that it, you know, manifests in these different ways. yeah. And the other thing that you, that you said, I thought was actually really, maybe under appreciated or underrated that people, you know, and I've been guilty of this before myself.

Bradley (21:57)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (22:14)
It's like leaving on good terms and like keeping that professionalism open. you know, cause it's really easy and a lot of times now, I think even more so now people, you know, can just quit without notice. a lot of times people feel jaded by companies, which I, you know, I understand if they've been laid off, you know, it's like, well, this company doesn't have my back. It just laid off all my coworkers and myself. but you know, I think just for your own person and your own brand, if you will,

Bradley (22:26)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (22:42)
Like having that ownership and accountability, you know, is super important. I think it can only serve you well. It was probably easier to just like check out and do half the work and I am quitting. And so, you know, whatever, but, there's something. Yeah.

Bradley (22:53)
Yeah.

it's funny you say that because there's definitely people that I actually had told some friends like, yeah, I'm probably on the way out. Haven't really figured out when, but try to like tie up loose ends and make sure things are good to go where I'm not departing on a whim. And I had a few friends that were like, hey, you should just like do the bare minimum, try to get laid off. Like the severance packages are very nice

And so it's crossed my mind, but honestly, I feel like I could never get myself to do that because I would hate to leave on bad terms where, hey, Bradley has performed well for the past two years, but the last six months, this guy has fallen off a cliff and hasn't done a single thing. And he's dragging his feet on everything and doesn't want to participate and doesn't want to lead anything. And so that really bothered me. you're like burning a bridge with that company because you're seen as a lower performer. They might not want to hire you back.

I think you get a certain stigma around you if you're seen as like a good performer and then you kind of flip -flop immediately and like they realize you're going to leave. They can tie the pieces together because especially when you announce that you're leaving, people always take a look, you know, like this guy's leaving. What's he been up to? What's going on there? So I never went for the like quiet quitting or like layoff approach. I think some people have done it and didn't look back. For Meta as a company, I liked it.

But again, it had its issues that I didn't agree with and didn't love. But again, that's any job at the end end the day But I had told myself, I cannot do the like slack off until I get fired or laid off way because that sounds stressful. Not what I want to be as like a professional image where people see me kind of get cut down over the next six months. it could be like.

advantageous in financials because like I quit went from making money to not the next day like my last paycheck that was it there's no you know extra health insurance there's no extra paycheck but that's the way I thought was the best way to preserve my image and kind of move forward in the way that I wanted to.

Bennett Bernard (24:49)
Yeah. And I guess maybe lastly on, on this topic, you know, you said you can always go back. And I think that's such an important, thing to recognize. Cause I think a lot of people view that jump as like, once I, you know, I have this great job, why would I ever leave? And like, it's such a huge risk. And like, it for sure is a risk that then people need to, make sure they're calculating appropriately and be planned and methodical. But you know, it's also, you can't ignore that. Like,

Bradley (24:55)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (25:15)
you know, if it doesn't work out, you can go out and get a job, you know, like you can, depending on the job market, you know, there's things that you have to really consider, but, the same skills that you're being employed for now, you'll still have, and maybe it'll be even more, you know, I'm sure you've learned a ton, you know, in programming, but then also marketing and just general business development, running your own company. And so if anything, a lot of times I think you get more out of that experience, even if it doesn't, you know,

Bradley (25:27)
Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (25:40)
work out for people in the long run, they can always go back. It's not like they lose those skills when they leave their jobs. So, yeah. But.

Bradley (25:46)
Yeah, you gotta frame it that way, I think, for partial security and mental health, because when you're doing your own thing, it can feel really taxing, and if you're not making the progress that you want, it's all on you. If you're doing something at work and you don't like it, but I gotta do it anyways. When you're doing your own thing, it's like, I think this is the right thing. You pour tons of time into it, and if it's not, it's on you. There's no one you can look at and say,

Bennett Bernard (25:52)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley (26:10)
that decision wasn't great. Why'd we do that? It's, it's all on you. And I chose to do it myself because that's the way I wanted to do it. There's plenty other ways to do it. I'm bootstrapped only me solo technical founder. But yeah, it's hard. I think finding a job in today's market is also a little bit challenging with all the layoffs, but I had told myself, yeah, let's do 12 months kind of reconvene.

And we're at that point, so we're trying to figure out the next steps, but it's been a crazy journey. And the amount of code I've written in the past 12 months is insane. Just writing tons and tons of code, building cool products. And it's been really illuminating to see how much progress you can make with one person, where in some of these companies, you have months long projects with 20 people across web, iOS, Android, backend, you name it. But again, they're serving different scales. I don't have the...

scale that Meta does for their chat apps or main apps. So different environment, different requirements.

Bennett Bernard (27:06)
Yeah, I like that different environments, different requirements that I don't know if that's ever been said, but it's got a nice, it's got a nice ring to it. That's cool. one thing that I do have coming up pretty soon, I don't know when this, episode will be recorded. So I don't know if my blog posts will go up before or we'll go after. but you know, I'm trying to blog a bit more, and just kind of get some.

Bradley (27:10)
Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (27:27)
Ideas out there around accounting and using technology And so the blog post is going to basically cover in a bit more detail a little bit about my background specifically as it relates to programming And I think this is probably a good segue to kind of just talk about My journey into programming as an accountant, which is a pretty non -traditional path I definitely would not consider myself a programmer and i've definitely leaned on on you and dad pretty heavily

Bradley (27:30)
-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (27:56)
but you know the use of it. Yeah, go for it

Bradley (27:56)
going to say, I think you picking up programming was quite a surprise to me because when I had done it growing up and just in the college and recent years, there had always been a like, that's cool, but I'm not really that interested. And then I think when you picked it up and started chatting me about it and say, hey, I've done some stuff in Python. I said, whoa, you know, like I would love to help because I'm super passionate about it. I don't know if I can answer all your questions, but I can point you in the right spot.

Bennett Bernard (28:17)
Yeah.

Bradley (28:24)
And I think that's becoming a new theme for a lot of folks is just whatever you're doing plus technology is a really sweet spot if you can leverage it because yeah, I know a lot about technology, but I couldn't tell you a thing about accounting. And if you can bring that passion and that energy and that skill set together, it's pretty powerful.

Bennett Bernard (28:36)
Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and I think too, you know, when I, so when I got out of school and started working as an auditor, I was at a PWC, one of the big four. I remember, you know, when you're an entry level auditor, you kind of just get thrown like these tasks to do. And, it's just part of the job. It's not bad or good. It's just the reality of the job. And I remember my senior was like, basically telling me like, Hey, V look up this stuff in Excel. And I remember I had no idea like what.

Bradley (29:00)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (29:08)
V lookup was, and I remember there being like this initial disconnect of like what I had learned in school and all these upper level courses on like corporate taxation and financial reporting. I wasn't using that so much as I was just like literally doing these Excel functions. But, and that's kind of, I think, a reality a lot of people face when they go from school to their first job. It's usually all the things that you did in graduate school, you're not jumping into right away. So there's always, I think that...

Bradley (29:25)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (29:37)
you know, what's the right word like disconnect. but I remember, you know, not knowing what V lookup was and it was easy to look it up. I'm pretty technology savvy. So it wasn't like a big hurdle or task, but I just remember thinking like, I didn't even know this was like what I was going to do. It was like literally V lookup things in Excel. but that was like my first taste of, you know, some of what accounting does or some of the accounting skills that, people need to have in today's environment is like just the ability to work with.

large amounts of data. And, you know, for me once I went to left PwC and ended up at Lone Depot that was where it really became pretty evident. And that's where I was really like leaning into Python and SQL, because we would have these Excel files that were like hundreds of thousands of rows of data doing like super like not like mathematically complex, but just like as far as like Excel goes complex formulas. And

Bradley (30:22)
Hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (30:30)
I remember my manager, who, who was a great manager. shout out to Sean. I remember my manager saying, you know, we have some really bad Excel files and like, they're so bad that like we turn off auto calculate on the Excel file. And once you're all done updating it, you just hit F9 and it like calculates everything and you go to lunch and you come back. You still probably have an hour to wait before it calculates everything. Yeah. And yeah, yeah. And I had like a desktop.

Bradley (30:42)
Mm.

Wow. And that's doing it all on your computer? All locally, okay.

Bennett Bernard (30:55)
in the office. Yeah, that just did that. And if something was wrong, you know, a lot of times, you know, these files are pretty complex and if something was wrong, you have to update it and then recalculate again. So it made the time suck on those kinds of tasks just brutal because I think that's where your mind starts to go. Or at least my mind did of like, I'm wasting so much time just doing this. Like I had just had my first my first kid in that time frame, too. And so there was some times I was working late.

Bradley (31:10)
Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (31:23)
just because of Excel calculating and that was like, that was, yeah, it was infuriating. So, but you know, when I was at loan Depot, it's actually funny enough, it's really odd how it works because eventually someone from the servicing accounting team just presented SQL server, like just said, Hey, we're using it for this. And yeah, it was just like, Hey, we're using it for.

Bradley (31:24)
that's tough.

like an internal tech talk.

Bennett Bernard (31:46)
You know, so in loan level accounting at like a mortgage shop, like loan Depot or like, you know, rocket mortgage, Zillow home loans, everything is kind of done on like a loan level detail. So like all the accounting, you know, you have to identify like the loan object individually, and apply your journal entries to those individual loan objects. So, you know, if a company has a lot of volume, like, like loan Depot did, certainly in that timeframe.

You know, that can add up to a ton of data and you're doing all these calculations on that data. So the servicing accounting team, I don't know how they got introduced to it, but they started using SQL server. And I just remember, the person presenting it, like he just did a query and I got like a hundred thousand rows of data, like in a split second. And it was like, you know, and part of me kind of knew this because I'd been around you and dad. So like, I always hear, you know, you guys talking about databases and stuff like that.

Bradley (32:30)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (32:38)
But to get access to it and to see other people in accounting using it, it really was like the first kind of like light bulb moment where it's like, why aren't we using this? Like, why am I instead going to another Excel file that has a hundred thousand rows and like literally copying and pasting that data in like there just has to be a better way. and then just under yeah, just understanding too, like, you know, in organizations now, like just any company, any large company.

Bradley (32:58)
Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (33:06)
You know, all this data is stored in databases, you know, like it, I think before this kind of introduction to this tool, I hadn't really like thought about that, you know, like where is the data being stored? You know, again, this is probably 2016, 2017. and it wasn't something that was like taught about in accounting, cause it's like, you're focused on the journal entries. You're focused on the financials and the debits and credits. there is some accounting information systems courses, but you know, I don't know if it was as practical as.

you know, what you experience when you get into the industry. Maybe it's better now, but certainly when I was there, it wasn't like we didn't talk about databases. You know, they talked about like Microsoft access as a database, which I don't think any company uses Microsoft access as a database. So, yeah, it was just a huge, you know, like Eureka moment just from that alone. And yeah.

Bradley (33:36)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah. When you mentioned the giant Excel files, my first thought was, Hey, that should probably be like a centralized database because it sounds like that's what you're doing. You're calculating these things. It'd be great if a beefy server in the cloud could just have all that data, have it indexed. So it's easily accessible. And like these queries wouldn't take hours. And it sounds like SQL server is an answer to that. I'm surprised they don't teach more databases in accounting. I feel like that comes hand in hand now, if, if not, you know, in the recent.

Bennett Bernard (33:57)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Bradley (34:19)
education developments.

Bennett Bernard (34:21)
Yeah. And it might, it's probably worth a look. I might look that up, you know, after the show, because, it might be teaching it more now. I don't see it like in any like job postings. You know, I work in accounting today and you know, when we have job postings for, you know, senior account and accountant at any company I've been at, you know, none of them say, Hey, SQL experience, desired or preferred. But if you look at like other finance teams like FP and a, or like, you know, strategy and biz ops, a lot of them will say like, knowledge of SQL is preferred.

Bradley (34:28)
Mm -hmm.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (34:50)
and so I think, but I think it's one of those areas, you know, this is kind of what I hope to like, just shed some light on if nothing else is I think a lot of times people just don't know about these tools. Like, you know, I was fortunate enough to be around and get a little bit of secondhand smoke in terms of programming from you and dad. so that it wasn't like a complete revelation, like hearing about SQL server and what they were using it for. But I think, you know, if you're someone who doesn't have that experience or doesn't have, you know,

Bradley (35:12)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (35:18)
this family of programmers that you've kind of just, you know, eavesdropped on, you know, it's probably such a foreign thing that you can't fathom learning it on top of your already busy day job. And, you know, I think a lot of times, you know, and especially something like programming, which I think feels to people that are not in it, like really like difficult and it's like, computer programmers are super smart, which they are, but like, you know, accountants are smart too. And you have the ability to learn things too. And there's so many good resources out there, you know, I,

Bradley (35:37)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (35:46)
Stack overflow was like the most visited page I had probably in 2017. Cause you're just, you know, you just look everything up, you know? Yeah. But like, so that, that light bulb moment was like the first one. And, you know, and that's kind of where I also, too, if you think about like what accounting is today, it's a lot of like, it shares a lot of principles with like data engineering in a way, because, you know, in data engineering, you know, you have like the ETL, like extract, transform load and.

Bradley (35:50)
yeah, me too, me too.

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (36:14)
You know, a lot of times in accounting, like an industry accounting, what people are doing is they're taking data from a system. So like just a production system, they're exporting it. The poison come in the right format that they needed to, they probably need to perform some calculations. So they're doing all that in Excel, that kind of transformation stage of like to equivalent it to data engineering. And then eventually they're loading it until like the financials or the post into the financials. And so there's a lot of similarities there. And I think once we started using.

Bradley (36:39)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (36:43)
these other tools, you know, it was like, yeah, this is just like this. And I think, you know, people thought about it a bit more that way than I think it would open up some doors to automation. but you know, the second, I guess, light bulb that really went off for me. And again, this is all at loan Depot because they loan Depot gave me a lot of bandwidth, like try these things because the data was just such a problem. And it was like, just please do whatever you can to get this all fixed. yeah.

Bradley (37:07)
That's an awesome opportunity. Cause I feel like not all jobs really give you that bandwidth. I've also had projects like that where I'm working on the mobile app, but I need to optimize like the backend. And you'd think if you're hired as like an iOS engineer, you're stuck to the client side. That's all you're doing. You're building on Apple platforms. But once you get that opportunity to learn something new, you're like, I'm going to go try that out, apply these skills elsewhere and like build like a full set of actually applicable, like full stack skills.

Bennett Bernard (37:32)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's so rewarding to solve your own problems too. And especially if it's like a significant pain point, you know, it was like, you know, to be like intrinsically motivated, whether it's like laziness, which I think is a perfectly valid, like reason, like that's totally, you know, people think the lazy, I was like a bad word, but like, Hey, I don't want to do all this work. That doesn't really amount to anything just to do it, you know, or it could be like from, in my case, like, again, staying late, I had a young,

Bradley (37:36)
yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (38:00)
You know, my first, my first kid, you know, so I had a young daughter. I was like trying to go home and working late was a huge, you know, just painting the butt for lack of better word. And, you know, so knowing that there was a better way, it's just a huge motivator to kind of push and get there. But I remember the second, you know, so basically with SQL, it was like, we know how to get the data out, but then we still have to just load it in Excel. Right. Cause we couldn't do the calculations or it didn't have the ability to do the calculations in SQL.

Bradley (38:09)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (38:28)
And so it was like, well, how do we do these calculations? And then also I still have to go in and manually run a SQL query each time. That's where there's a book. I think it's called Automate the Boring Stuff. I don't want to misrepresent or misquote the title of the book. I'll check it up after the podcast. Yeah, it's like Automate the Boring Stuff. And I think it's free under some kind of license. And it's by Al Swygart, I want to say. One of the most like,

Bradley (38:43)
That sounds very enticing already. I like it.

Bennett Bernard (38:54)
profound books or pieces of media that I've ever consumed, not even just read. But because it's basic, I think just Googling around like how to like work with Excel files in Python and stuff like that. And so basically he just lays out like, Hey, this is how you work with Excel files. This is how you work with G sheet. This is how you work with PDFs. And it's like super practical, which I think is the other reason why people really get, you know, either unaware or get turned off of like,

Bradley (38:58)
Mm -hmm. And how'd you find it?

Okay.

Bennett Bernard (39:23)
certain software tools or programming if they're not programmers, is it's like, I don't want to know what a for loop is. I don't want to know what memory management is. I just want this thing to solve for me, solve for me what my problem is. But that book was super practical. So it really just focused on, it gave you what you needed to know to not mess up your code, basically. But it was still very focused on, this is how you solve these specific problems.

Bradley (39:27)
Mm -hmm.

like it's like the right layer of abstractions. I feel like as software grows, you keep going up the stack where you're not writing like low level C code, you're writing Python. And then Python is like optimized and ran on your machine where you're not writing complicated memory management, but you're just writing like, Hey, I load a file. I pass it in this other function. It does all this stuff under the hood, but I'm writing four lines of code and in C that would be 400 and it could crash at any time. And I could break things and got to run a compiler.

Bennett Bernard (40:00)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley (40:17)
There's so much complexity in software, but when I think of Python, that's like the perfect language to just get stuff done. You don't really need to know too much. It's very flexible on like data types. there's definitely nitpicky on the indentation, but the language of machine learning, the language of automation, Python really stands out as like an approachable, easy to pick up and pretty efficient to run. Like if you're not running anything crazy.

Bennett Bernard (40:41)
Yeah. Well, and you know, most of like most of accounting, you know, the transformations that we need to do on like the data that comes from that production system, it's not, it's not complicated. Like, you know, you think about like machine learning models and like, you know, rocket scientists, right? They're doing all this calculus and all that kind of stuff. Like we're accountants aren't doing that. We're usually like summing up things based on group. So it's almost like a group by clause, like in a SQL statement or, you know, we're

Bradley (40:52)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (41:07)
doing some kind of like average and some multiplication, but it's never that complicated. So, you know, Python is a great, like you said, it, it, it is, it fits in that bandwidth of like, it does what you need it to do, but it's still understandable and approachable for people that aren't in programming. And, you know, of course, I think that's why it's really taken off a ton. You know, I think Python's become like the most used language, something like that I've seen on Stack Overflow.

Bradley (41:11)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Had you done any other Python before reading the book and trying it out? Or is that your first introduction to it?

Bennett Bernard (41:35)
So I did, I'll confess one thing, because I don't think it's relevant, but since you asked me, I will confess one thing. I did take a computer science class at when I was in school, I went to Chapman University in Orange. And there was, it was a mix of Python and a mix of Java. I'll be completely honest. I was just nothing wrong with the course, nothing wrong with the instructor, but it just did nothing for me. Like I just came in.

Bradley (41:39)
you

Mm -hmm.

Okay.

Bennett Bernard (42:02)
I did the steps and I left. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was like an interest thing. And, you know, you mentioned like when you guys, when you and Dad were always doing all that programming stuff, like I'm not, I'm not really interested in programming. The programming piece alone doesn't really excite me. It's what it can do for people and like it's such an incredible tool. But like the theory and like, you know, you post a lot of cool stuff on X, you know, about like native react and all that kind of stuff. And

Bradley (42:02)
Not interested.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (42:28)
I think it's great, but like I, it's never my interest. You know what I mean? Like I'm not into the technical side of things. so I did have that class, but like, I would say when I started doing actual, like Python code at loan Depot to try and automate things, it was pretty much like net new. and so, yeah. And, but then, you know, from there it was like, I had this programming tool I can use. It's, you know, Python's free to download. It's really easy to get set up.

Bradley (42:32)
Right, right.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (42:54)
And so eventually, long story short, you know, I use a lot of courses on like Udemy, Stack Overflow, you know, asked you and dad questions, but got to a point where, you know, we were basically using Windows task scheduler, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, but like you can, okay. So it's pretty cool. Every windows machine has it. and you basically can like set up a task. And what I did was I had this Python script that would run a SQL query, get the query.

Bradley (43:07)
I'm not.

Bennett Bernard (43:22)
save it as like a pandas like data frame, which, you know, we're getting technical, but kind of just to give the full picture. Yeah. So save it into a data frame, which is like an array object, very like analogous to Excel in a way. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a spreadsheet of data, but just within the program. So get into a data frame. That's where you can do all the calculations you need to do. And then basically save that export into like an Excel file for like uploading to our financials.

Bradley (43:25)
I've heard of that.

spreadsheet almost.

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (43:51)
in the exact format that like it needs to be because a lot of times some of the work that accountants are doing again is taking it from the production system. It's formatted a certain way. They need to just kind of rejigger it and then they have to put in a new format that uploads it to the financials.

Bradley (44:04)
Mm -hmm.

do you remember how many lines of code that was? I'm curious for a load, transform, extract, process. Do you have any, do you remember how much that was?

Bennett Bernard (44:14)
I would say probably under 200, I would say. Yeah.

Bradley (44:17)
Okay, that's pretty, that's like medium size for Python, because it's pretty like short, like you can get by with not that many lines to get stuff done. So I just say that's like not too bad. And how many hours do you think it took to piece that together?

Bennett Bernard (44:24)
Mm -hmm.

Well, I guess I'm going to clarify one thing on the lines of code answer really fast because basically what I was doing is using SQL alchemy, which is like a database relationship mapper within Python. That's a Python library. And I would have my SQL query and I would use, I was using SQL alchemy to call that SQL query. So that like SQL query alone was like, I want to say like Paul, you.

Bradley (44:35)
Okay.

Bennett Bernard (44:58)
30 lines of code, you know, just in terms of like formatting it. And it's like one giant like text block. So that was that. And there wasn't really any. I had a few like functions, but it was pretty much like kind of top down script. It wasn't like, you know, yeah, exactly. It was like a main dot pie. It wasn't like a library of a code. So but I think that's a good thing because it shows how like low maintenance these things can be. But yeah. And then so as far as like how long that took to write.

Bradley (45:01)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

One main.

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Right.

Bennett Bernard (45:26)
Pretty quick, I mean, I think a lot of the time spent was like learning, which I think is again, still value add. And we did multiple like different automations. So one particular example I can think of was like, we had this like reconciliation we had to do between like one system and the other system. And again, everything is at the loan level. So like doing like unit level reconciliations. And I was able to basically, you know, call a query to get the information from one system.

call another query to get the information from the other system and do a population comparison and do a calculation comparison. That probably took around a day or two to do. Yeah.

Bradley (46:06)
That's it. Wow. I'm impressed because I've got to say there's things I've automated in my life, both professionally and non -professionally that I thought, that'll take, you know, a few hours and days go by. I'm knee deep in it. I have this conviction that I'm going to get it done. And I maybe spend 20 hours automating something that if I just did by hand at a recurring interval would be far less than 20 hours. Cause it's part curiosity, part fun, but also like the drive to just get it done and see what it looks like.

Bennett Bernard (46:17)
Yeah.

Yeah, well, you know, I think it's so much of it is knowing what your end goal needs to look like. Because, you know, basically, and a lot of times for I think this is why programming is such a great fit for accountants as like a tool, not like as a career change, but just as a tool, because you already kind of know what you're doing, like in Excel, like you, you know, the steps, you know, like what these different tabs are doing. And so translating that into a program,

Bradley (46:41)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (47:03)
You know, it's, it's very like, it's already done. The work's done for you. You're not like reinventing something brand new. I've had, so like those ones were quick where it's like, Hey, I'm already doing this in Excel. I just need to reproduce these steps in Python. And once I got familiar with the libraries I was using, you know, again, SQL alchemy pandas. and then I think, like Excel writer, there's a library that basically lets you work with Excel files. That was pretty much it. but you know, more recently I did try to do an automation around like my email.

calendar, where, and this was actually inspired by someone I was interviewing. and it was, he gave me a great idea. And he was kind of talking about how, you know, he would have all his like client work as like individual blocks on his calendar. And then he had like made a Python script that would like at the end of the week, take his calendar blocks and had that fill out like his time card basically. So he wasn't filling it out in two places. And I was like, that's brilliant. Like I want to do something similar. I don't have a time card. I don't have clients in my, what I do, but I definitely use my calendar to kind of like block off time.

Bradley (47:49)
Mm.

Bennett Bernard (47:58)
and like focus on different things. So I tried to do it, but then as I was going through it, I realized I was like, I don't really know like what I want this to look like still. Like I'm, you know, I'm not using my calendar in that way. So like it's, I was, as I was going through it, it was harder to kind of make those design decisions and it was harder to be like, is this really what I want to do or should I change it to this? So I feel like, you know, for me at least knowing what you're going to build and if you already have like an end product that works, that you just need to get into this, you know, it's getting to code.

Bradley (48:17)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (48:28)
It's a lot easier than like coming up with like a net new automation. Because yeah, you don't have all that like you're kind of figuring a bit more out as you go in that kind of scenario.

Bradley (48:32)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah. How was it navigating that landscape? Cause I imagine being an accountant, trying to do some of the tech side was there pushback and talking with managers or technical folks saying, Hey, I'm interested in accessing the SQL server. Not exactly sure what I'm doing, but I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to make my job faster and more efficient, but I can't promise, you know, what the end results kind of look like. Was that a difficult conversation?

Bennett Bernard (48:50)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

No, I think, again, loan Depot was really good about like, Hey, as long as you make this better, like we're happy with this, you know, and it has to be like accurate. It has to be like all the table stakes that you need, of course, but like, they were pretty like agnostic to what tool I use, to make things better. I think the challenge with any accounting department, you know, in any kind of large corporate setting is. You know, permissions, a lot of times people like have issue with like, well like accounting, why do you guys need to be able to read?

Bradley (49:07)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (49:30)
the database, you know, like it's a very like unfamiliar territory that other people and even like accounting leaders are not familiar with. It's like, well, why would you need to read that? Like we have it all in Excel. Loan Depot was pretty good about that, but like, you know, other places and just hearing from colleagues too, it's like, you know, at other companies, it's like, we can't get access to that. You know, it's only for certain groups. Also to there is, and I think this is really legitimate. There's concern about.

Well, what happens? You might build this amazing thing, but what happens when you leave? And that was actually my experience at loan Depot. And again, totally valid. you know, fortunately, like I had things well documented. I just left all my Python scripts to them and said, and I remember during my like off boarding, you know, when I decided to leave, we spent a lot of time kind of going over what these things did. I don't know if they're still in use today. I'd be surprised. You know, the company's changed a lot. That was like five years ago now. So,

Bradley (50:21)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (50:23)
But, you know, there is that element of like, it has to be durable to outlast the person who just made it. and so there's probably something to be said there. And I think there's like a valid concern of like, can we build something that is scalable, but also flexible and can persist beyond just the person who made it. so yeah, I think those are valid concerns, but I think to get past that, I think accountants should, you know,

up level themselves a bit, you know, especially in this age of automation and, you know, AI, like doing more and more people's jobs. I don't think that accountants are going to get replaced by AI at all. at least not in my lifetime, but you know, people should be using these tools. Otherwise they will get like pass up from people that are using the tools, right? Like you've definitely heard that before. So, you know, I think there should be an appetite within accounting departments at these companies to like embrace these other tools. you know, a lot of times.

Bradley (51:07)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (51:16)
You know, Python's free, you know what I mean? So a lot of times these libraries and stuff, they're free, you know, there's lots of different options you can do, but, I think just a willingness to embrace and learn is super important. But again, it's, it's hard to do that when people are already super busy. That's always the trade off, right? It's like, we're so busy because we don't have these automations in place. We want to work on these automations, but we don't have enough time to learn the tools. Like that's, that's a very common predicament that I think a lot of companies.

Bradley (51:33)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (51:44)
find themselves in and it's hard to get out of.

Bradley (51:47)
I think there's something to be said also about when you mentioned making these durable, there is software that I've encountered throughout my career that everyone touches in the company or everyone has to use building a certain product that is just not easy to use. And people kind of raise their hand saying, why do we have to use this? And I think there's running jokes that people saying, this is a job security for those folks who created it because it's so complicated, so confusing, so tailored to a specific use case that one would think.

Bennett Bernard (52:00)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley (52:14)
Like why, who would construct it this way? And I've encountered those various times and it's the immediate thoughts of like, let's simplify this, let's remake it. There's probably reasons at the time they decided to make it this complicated, but if you did make a script that was super awesome and very integral to like speeding things up, gives you a little bit job security. Kind of a small little tidbit like, Hey, you know, Bennett created this.

It's a little bit hard to understand, but like it works, you know, it's something that he can contribute that other accounts might not be. And it could be an outsized contribution that could help improve a lot of things. Not saying that's what you should do, but it's something to take into note that there are times where I think, if this team was laid off or if this, you know, tool is canned, like we would be screwed. Like no one would know how to update, no one would know how to touch it. So there is some job security in that regard, but I would not advise that as your...

you know, single thing to cling on to.

Bennett Bernard (53:10)
Yeah. Well, and I think too, I think the answer, I don't think the answer is like individual Python scripts on people's like local machines. I think it's, that might be good for like little small individual tasks. Like, Hey, if you want to export your calendar and put it into like a tracker for your own, just tracking for your performance, stuff like that. I think there's a lot of use cases that people should be aware of like that. And that's a bit more, you know, again, intrinsically motivated, I think. But I think the answer.

Bradley (53:17)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (53:37)
especially for larger organizations, would be something kind of in the middle. And there's lots of low code solutions like AlterX. People are using Tableau, and people are using other reporting solutions like that. I think that for accounting, for it to be really picked up by accounting and to be useful, I think there needs to be a more formalized documentation process that goes into, OK, we have this code that does this. Now, can we get this documentation that accompanies it?

Kind of like, you know, change management, like GitHub is so good with like change management for code. Like if there was, you know, a GitHub for like accounting that like explained, you know, here's a read me. And then anytime there's changes to it, you know, it gets, there's a, you'll know what the, like a merge commit and like a message that comes with it. You know what I mean? So like accounting wouldn't want to adopt something like that. So that way there's, it's not just like these people's programs that just kind of sit out there.

Bradley (54:23)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (54:32)
But yeah, like that middle is more of like a middle layer. Yeah.

Bradley (54:33)
I'm sensing a little Python course for accountants in the mix. I feel like that would be an awesome resource to get people through the door with working knowledge on things that they care about. But ignoring some of the fluff that I think computer science degrees focus on or teach that is really not that relevant once you get down to it.

Bennett Bernard (54:42)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah. How many times have you had to use like multivariable calculus since you started working?

Bradley (54:59)
Never, not a single time. Class is kind of difficult. I'm not going to lie. It was challenging, but yeah, not a single time. There's a lot of things that I don't use in my day -to -day job. And if I do, I feel like I'm able to pick it up. I think that's the amazing part about building software is I never see it as you should know it all, but you should be able to figure it out and go deep when you need to. There's times where I've spent weeks on issues that I just feel like I'm.

Bennett Bernard (55:04)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Bradley (55:25)
gonna give up tomorrow, but I keep going and I find out some really cool stuff along the way that I would never ever have touched or figured out if I hadn't kept going. I feel like I'm one to be quite persistent to solve things and I think that's really helped me out in the long term just to be able to tackle things. Like where I'm on the job, some big issue comes up. A lot of people say, I've tried this and that, but I've kind of given up. And I can say, no, I'm gonna go super deep, take all my wide experiences and kind of apply it here and see what I can come out with.

A lot of times it works. It's a great way to really build out like the grit to keep continuing. And again, the stuff you learn along the way is way more important than the one line fix in this really deep file that, you know, you'd think, how do we miss that? But it's more like, okay, I went through so much time to spend on this. Let me write my learnings and share it with the team and improve these processes. So it never happens again. I think that really helps out a ton.

Bennett Bernard (56:16)
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, on like the middle, the middle layer piece of like, you know, needing documentation and stuff like that to be absorbed by like accounting professionals. I think to also just a culture of like trying things out and like being okay with it, not working. I think there's a lot of things and I feel like software, you know, you've worked in big tech. So, but like my perception of it is like, there's a bit more acceptance of like, Hey, this didn't.

This approach didn't work. and so we're going to try something else. I think accounting and it makes sense because it's financials a lot of times. So you got to, but you do have to be careful. I'm not saying to be, you know, half hazard, but you know, I think there needs to be an appetite and like an acceptance of like, we're going to try a couple of different options and you know, see if it works. If one doesn't work, okay, we move on to the next one, but it's not like not a failure. It doesn't mean that someone did bad because

a process didn't work or a solution didn't work like you thought it would be. And I think too, accountants need to take ownership that they can learn these things and speak to these things. Once they kind of up level themselves and get these skills. I've certainly found that in my own career, having these skills, again, I would never consider myself a programmer, but just being aware of what.

you know, APIs are and like having worked with them on my own, like time and my own projects and stuff like that. You're being aware of what databases are and like what scripts can do. Like that enables you to talk to actual programmers. You know, if you're working on like a project, you know, and collaborating with them saying, Hey, I need this solution from you guys. Like it just kind of helps you bridge the like language barrier of like accounting and technology people. so much better because sometimes it's like,

Bradley (57:51)
Mm -hmm.

Absolutely.

Bennett Bernard (58:07)
accountants will say, we need the debits and credits to be like this. And the technology people are like, well, what the heck's a debit or credit? And vice versa, the technology people are like, well, we have an API that calls this server. And the accountants people are just like, what are you talking about? What's an API? So yeah, there's a lot there. Yeah.

Bradley (58:13)
Yeah.

the same thing where at work. We're building out a new feature and our product manager designer wants this. And I think it'd be a great design, but the tech won't allow it. Either the systems are built to perform a different way or we can't do that at scale. And so they devise this solution of like, this is what the design should look like. I come back to them saying, we just can't do that, but here's an alternative that I've thought of that can.

Bennett Bernard (58:37)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley (58:46)
get close enough and feel similarly, but it's not exactly what you want. And then they ask, why can't we do that? And the more technical that person is, the more I can go into it. But at the end of the day, it's like, they're leaning on you to provide that technical expertise. And I'm leaning on them to provide that product direction and designer input. And so it's a balancing act of how much you give them, how much they're interested in it. I've found the best like designers and product managers I've worked with are on the technical side because they understand like, you know, Bradley described the system this way.

I don't fully get it, but I understand like bits and pieces and that can help me make decisions and trade -offs in the future that when we come up to these things again, it might be easier to make the design this way because I already know these things that he shared earlier. And so it's like bridging that gap is hard. And I think it depends on like how close these disciplines work together, like accounting and technology. I can't tell you a single time I've worked with any accounting team or finance team throughout my history of being a software engineer.

been on the consumer product side, so it's quite far away. But yeah, I think when you're on a team with engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists, you get pretty comfortable. And everyone seems to step into that certain domains and understand bits and pieces to make the communication work.

Bennett Bernard (1:00:00)
Yeah. Yeah. And most, in most places now, I think like large companies will have like a, they call it like finance transformation department or like, you know, finance tech, they have all these kinds of different names of like companies now that will like devote some resources to like looking at internal tools and like try to automate it. So I think that's a great step. I think it's certainly a step in the right direction for accounting. I think there's lots of smaller companies that don't have those resources.

But then also too, for the ones that do have it, I still think accountants by and large need to put it on themselves to understand the automations a little bit more. And then also take more ownership of like the final solution. Cause if you get, if you get something, you know, and say, Hey, this is the final product, or this is the final solution of like what you guys were asking for. If you don't really understand it again, you don't need to know all the lines of code, but if you don't understand like what it's doing, like.

that could cause problems down the road. Because say the person that made it on the engineering side leaves and the documentation is mediocre. Then someone's having to come in and say, OK, this thing broke. Why did it break? You could easily see that being a situation that you would not want to be in. So I do think that the ownership, ultimately, of these kind of accounting automations should reside within accounting. So accountants need to make sure that they have a voice at that table of the design decisions.

Bradley (1:01:04)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:01:24)
to at least just understand, but then also understand how that all works because that's just ownership,

Bradley (1:01:32)
would say there's even like many, like I mentioned, tools in the tech space that software engineers creating these things that these companies that are internal and ownership is lackluster at best. And then bugs pop up with these tools and they get routed internally to this person. I haven't worked on that in six months. Hand it off to this person, you know, back and forth, back and forth.

Bennett Bernard (1:01:45)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley (1:01:51)
At the end of the day, sometimes you kind of throw up your hands and say like, okay, no one's clearly prioritizing this. I need it for my workflow. Like maybe it's either time for me to do it or to use something else. And I think that could exist for the accounting space as well. Like I can imagine these scripts, if they're not handled correctly, or, you know, like you mentioned docs aren't great, that picking them up can be a nightmare and a disaster. Then you kind of just say, forget about it. Like I'm going back to the mega Excel sheet. I'm going to run it for hours. And we've kind of lost all the automation that came from it. So making like.

Bennett Bernard (1:02:09)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley (1:02:20)
a real impression of who owns it and why, and why we kind of set out to do it and like the standards going forward. I've always loved doing internal tech talks at companies that I worked at where, Hey, I'm working on this feature. This is how I built it. And getting people like within the teams and organizations to present what they're working on to like enable more cross team collaboration. I think that would be a perfect situation for, Hey, like Ben and his team built out some cool automations, like let's go on a road show and kind of talk about it and see where it lands. And.

maybe people will pick it up outside the team or like, you know, it could be shared and people could get more into it. Especially if you're learning a lot, it can influence people to say, Hey, like I want to learn some of these skills, but like I'm not on this team. Maybe I'll go try that team and see if they're like open to more learning budget, so to speak.

Bennett Bernard (1:03:05)
Yeah. Yeah. So I got up, got a blog post coming up on this topic. So, again, I don't know when this podcast will be posted, but, it will be before or after, but yeah. So looking forward to getting that out there and just again, trying to shed some light on, you know, and I'm definitely not saying I have all the, all the answers, but just for people to be aware of these tools, I think is my overall message to kind of try and get out there. So, yeah, we'll see, we'll see where it goes.

Bradley (1:03:30)
Mm -hmm. That's awesome.

And then to finish off our segment, I want to quickly talk about...

an inspiring or hot topic that you found either on Twitter or LinkedIn. So one that I found this week was from Logan Kilpatrick from Google. he announced that Google's AI studio now has caching for context. And so to explain what that means is when you're using these APIs to build out AI tools, usually sending this giant amount of data in terms of texts to say like,

Hey, my problem is this. I want you to answer like this, et cetera, et cetera. Google is one with 2 million context window. That means you can stuff in many books inside this API request for Google to look at all that and answer. The new thing they announced is caching. So this means as you create that conversation and you stuff in 2 million tokens, is what they call it, you can cache that 2 million. And then when you make the next API request, it's cheaper.

And so the important thing about this is that AI right now is like a fight for intelligence, a fight for scale and a fight for speed and pricing. I think Google has done a fantastic job, especially recently to bring these barriers down where they're 1 .5 flash API model is cheap. It's, it's pretty smart, I would say on the leaderboards. And with this context caching, the price brings it down a lot. So if you have a conversation, say you pulled in all your emails that you've ever sent, put that inside of a Google AI query.

ask questions back and forth. So the first request you make costs you like the normal amount of money. And then as you ask questions and keep going, you cache that initial request that you made with all those emails. You don't have to send it back to the API. Those prices are like slashed in half, I think, which is super awesome. So I'm excited about that. I am trying to build in the AI space. I think that is a fantastic addition for Google. I think it's only going to continue to be the trend. These companies really fight.

like tooth and nail, like they come up with this, Anthropic, then OpenAI, then Google, then Meta. And if Google comes out with this and decreases the pricing, it'll affect everybody. And so it's like a win -win for the consumer at the end of the day. So that was super exciting news for me as an application builder in the AI space.

Bennett Bernard (1:05:41)
Cool. Yeah. And I think we'll mention before we wrap up here that you do have a, an AI product out there with VuxByte. So we'll, it's definitely relevant to your, to your, domain for sure. cool. Yeah. So my bookmarks, I tend to bookmark on LinkedIn more than any other, platform. this comes from, and this will be no surprise, I think, as we do more of these podcasts, but it comes from, a fellow named Jason stats, who's also,

Bradley (1:05:51)
yeah.

Bennett Bernard (1:06:06)
CPA he's in the accounting world. I don't want to call him an accounting influencer because I think he's more than that like influencers get a bad rap But he's definitely someone who has a huge kind of presence and voice in how accounting firms run and so he did a post that was in response to I think something that Sam Altman said about there'll be like the first Solo ten million dollar revenue business. I think something like that. And so Jason basically

Bradley (1:06:29)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:06:33)
took that quote and said like, well, what does this look like for an accounting firm? And I found it super interesting because basically, you know, he talks about like, here's all the breakdowns and this hypothetical that would kind of get there. And he talks about, you know, traditional client work would be like a million dollars, which is pretty feasible from just like a, you know, time constraint. Cause if you're a solo, solo provider, then it's just you and your, you know, 40, 50 hours, whatever you want to work. But if you have the right kind of niche,

or niche, I don't know what it is, niche or niche, whatever it is, you know, if you have the right kind of specialization, if you will, then that's really not that unattainable. And then you talked about other ways to kind of fill that gap still is doing like course content. So, you know, if you're especially skilled in that specialization, like doing some courses out there and getting some like digital product revenue that way.

Bradley (1:07:04)
I'm not sure.

Bennett Bernard (1:07:26)
The other way he mentioned was like cohort based revenue. So like all the stuff that you put out with digital content do like live classes, you know, like a four week cohort or like a two month cohort or something like a paid community, essentially, which which you and I are both members of a paid community. And it's those can be super valuable. And so something like that. And then I think he had one other one. I can't remember what it is on my head and his post is really long, so I'm not going to.

Bradley (1:07:46)
Mm.

Bennett Bernard (1:07:55)
bore you while I look it up. But basically the whole premise is, you know, first of all, there's all these different ways that you can use AI to like help fill that void of like other heads that you would have had to do traditionally of like other hiring people, you know, to get help. You can use, you know, chat GPT or Claude or whatever these other providers are. It's like fill these voids to make you more efficient in your role. But then I think where it was more profound to me was.

just the acknowledgement that you have all these skills that you are getting paid for, whether you're employed by an employer and you're getting paid a W2 employee kind of situation, whether you are like you and you started your own firm and people are paying you for a product. You have these skills, it's just part of what you've been doing since you got out of college and went to the workforce. There's more than just one way to make money from those skills. And I think that acknowledgement is...

It can be pretty powerful for someone who doesn't really consider that. I certainly, of course I know that if I, hey, I was ever to leave and go out on my own, I have these skills I can charge people for, but to be able to do more than just one, it was for me at least thought provoking. Cause it's either like, you either are a course creator or you do client service work, but it's like, well, why wouldn't you just be able to do both? And a lot of times might even be complimentary. Like if you already have this course content.

And a cohort might be a nice easy add on that people would want to just get like a live instruction out of. So yeah, so that was super interesting post. And, you know, I always have notifications on when he drops some stuff because he's usually got some pretty, some pretty good ideas. So yeah, that was my.

Bradley (1:09:32)
I was gonna say, I've heard that name before, so I feel like I need to follow him more. I think he's got some awesome takes and inspirational ideas.

Bennett Bernard (1:09:42)
Yeah. I mean, most of his stuff is catered towards like accounting firms. but I think the ideas, you know, can be applied. you know, I've found in this thing will be another good podcast topic in the future, but. You know, where do you find like inspiration or where do you find like new ideas from? It doesn't always have to be like exactly in your space. Like I've, there's a certain podcast that I'll say for the, for our podcast episode, but it's a certain podcast that the person who has nothing to do with accounting.

was giving some advice and it was like, it's completely, you know, I still think about it like all the time. I completely changed my perspective on like business and, like client services. So yeah, it can be from the most random places. Yeah. And you just never know where it's going to come from.

Bradley (1:10:20)
Save it.

Awesome, awesome. Well, I think that wraps our first episode. Thank you for tuning in

You can find our podcast at breakevenbrothers.com. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube. We'll be posting on LinkedIn and on Twitter. And then for my socials, you can catch me on X Twitter, @BradleyBernard. I have a personal website, BradleyBernard.com. Check out my GitHub, my LinkedIn. All that stuff is on there.

Bennett Bernard (1:10:50)
Cool. And then for me, I have my website, BennettBernard.com or BennettBernard.CPA, if you please. And then on X, I think my handle is @TheRealTechCPA. I think if you Google or search me on there, you'll be able to find me.

Bradley (1:11:04)
Cool, and the links will be in the show notes, so should be easy to find.

Bennett Bernard (1:11:08)
All right, let's get out of here.