The Business of Laravel

Matt Stauffer:
All right. And welcome back to the Business of Laravel podcast, where I talk to business leaders who are working in and with Laravel. My guests today are Adrian Lewis, the founder of Care Portal, and Brett Pudenz, the director of engineering at Care Portal. And Care Portal, I'll give you kind of the quick initial pitch, and then they're going to tell us more. It is the first care sharing platform designed to connect agencies, churches, businesses, and communities in real time. So obviously I can kind of read that off of a thing, and that's great. And it probably sounds compelling to some people, but I would love to hear the people actually hearing

Who are you guys and what is Care Portal about? So could you guys introduce yourselves and then Adrian can kind of give us a pitch for Care Portal?

Adrien Lewis:
Sure. I'll just start by introducing myself. Name's Adrian. I appreciate it, Matt. We're excited to be here. I'm Founder President of Care Portal. We've been at this for, man, a little over a decade now. The vision for it started before that. And we have seen this crazy little scrappy startup for good concept turn into something that's, I'd say, positioned to change the culture in our country in the years to come. So how's that for a little tease?

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Matt Stauffer:
Big yeah tease it consider teased all right Brett can you do your intro too.

Bret Pudenz:
Yeah, yeah, less of a tease there, yeah, I'm Brett Pudenz Director of Engineering at Care Portal. I've been here just a little over half of those 10 years or so. And yeah, I lead a team of about 10. Most of those being Laravel developers at one point or another, some spanning into other areas now, but yeah, we've got a great team and are building lots of cool things.

Matt Stauffer:
Awesome. So we kind of know the big work you want to do in the world with Care Portal, but if somebody's never heard of Care Portal before, can you give us the elevator pitch for what's it about and why should people be interested?

Adrien Lewis:
Sure. So at its simplest form, we are trying to connect neighbors to see and serve their most vulnerable neighbors at its simplest form. We call that care sharing, right? So a decade ago, Uber started to make a splash in the world and people started to trust the idea of getting in this random people's cars who weren't yellow and giving them, you know,

Matt Stauffer:
Right.

Adrien Lewis:
take me where I need to go. That wasn't a thing before Uber really introduced the category of ride sharing to the world. And now, now, like everybody you know has been in Uber. It is the preferred way to get from one place to another, connecting a rider and a driver who have some mutual benefit and doing something together. And care sharing is really similar, except in this case, we're not talking about a transaction of transportation.

Matt Stauffer:
Right.

Adrien Lewis:
We're actually talking about how do you move resources and relationship into proximity so that people who have a need and people who want to help can get connected in real time, in real places, for real things that actually lead to life changes for both of them. And sometimes those life changes are a mom actually gets to keep her kids from going into foster care or a grandma who just took in her grandkids can keep them instead of them having to go somewhere else. Or maybe there's a dad who's just gotten out of prison, he's getting on his feet and he needs to get his house in shape so that he can be ready for his kids to come back to him. I mean these are life-changing possibilities. And there's so many people in the country who want to do good, who want to care for their neighbor. And sometimes they don't know who to care for. Sometimes they don't trust who to care for.

And what Care Portal does is we put people in proximity so they can do that in a really trusted way. And it's making a difference all across our country, man.

Matt Stauffer:
I love it. You already know I love a lot about what you are doing. But I really like the phrase you just said there by putting people in proximity, because one of the things that we've often lamented about the way that our worlds have kind of turned into these tiny nuclear spaces and we don't have the village anymore and we have a lot of things that used to connect us is that lack of connection. And whether it's on a major scale, you know, I might lose my kids.

Or even in a minor scale, like, you know, I'm having my first kid and I don't know what I'm doing and I'm figuring this out on my own. I, you know, there's so many ways where the lack of communal connection, the lack of overlap, the lack of spaces where we're actually interacting with people who are in different life stages or different socioeconomic status from us is harming us. And a lot of times the solutions are very impersonal. And so one of the things that really kind of compelled me when I heard about you guys is that it is a very personal

And it's a very communal, very connective. Again, you said just said proximity. You're just putting people next to each other and giving the opportunity for their care and their humanity to overlap. And I'm like, that's the first of all, it's beautiful. But second of all, you don't think how are we going to do that with technology? Because we usually think of technology as the separator. Right. So I will ask in a second about what role Laravel plays in this. But I still want to stick with you, Adrian. What what how did you get to using technology to solve what is such a inherent human issue?

Adrien Lewis:
Right?

Adrien Lewis:
And I love it. I love the question. And even for us to ponder a little deeper, because with the role that AI is playing in our world right now and that we anticipate that it plays in the future, people's deep fear is that technology will ruin humanity, that technology will be used to make us more disconnected. And it certainly has the potential to do that and in fact has done that in many cases already.

Right? Social media, you think connects you, but it actually leads to isolation. So, you know, we're at this pivotal moment. We're at this place in time where, frankly, God has given us this vision a decade ago. We were trying to solve for how do you increase the likelihood that, you know, people in the faith community would step up to foster or adopt kids in their community? Like the most vulnerable children.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Adrien Lewis:
in our communities and our country are in and around the foster care system. I'm a foster adoptive dad, know, three of our six kids, we adopt through foster care and on a personal journey led us to trying to do more as an organization and as an organization we started to find out that man, fostering and adopting is not the only thing that people can do to help kids and families who are struggling and...

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Adrien Lewis:
And so long, beautiful, beautiful story, maybe for another day. But one day I'm reading this document after two years of us failing to figure out how do we actually get the faith community to move and go deeper and do more. And reading this document, I got this vision. And it was from God. And some people might call that crazy, but it's just what happened. And in that vision, I saw.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Adrien Lewis:
how to leverage technology to connect kids and families in crisis with churches and proxies that want to help. And it started with caseworkers who see these kids, right? Caseworkers in child welfare agencies or caseworkers in schools. I mean, these are folks who it's their job to know, man, this family is on the brink or they're already in a bad spot and they need X, Y, and Z. And sometimes X, Y, and Z are huge.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adrien Lewis:
And sometimes they're not huge. Sometimes it's as simple as literally mom needs some beds before the caseworker can safely reunite her kids back with her. And so how cool would it be if this caseworker who knows this in a zip code puts this request into this platform, like just types the thing in and the next thing you know, a hundred people or 500 people, boom, like they get, they get access to this real need.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Adrien Lewis:
And now all of a sudden you have all these people who are like, well dude, I got an extra bed. No, you can have mine. Or I have some money, I'll go buy you one. And then everything gets connected up. And not only does the bed show up at the mom's house, but it shows up with some neighbors who are gonna be there. And they're gonna put these beds together and they're gonna ask mom her story. And when they ask mom her story, mom becomes a real person.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adrien Lewis:
where mom's a real person who's now your neighbor who you know their thing, you know what's happening and mom doesn't feel judged by you, but she's like these people don't know me and yet they're here and they're not asking for anything from me. They're actually here to help me, know something special happen you I mean Matt you had experiences. I'm sure where somebody has come alongside to help you in a way and you're just like, my goodness this this

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Adrien Lewis:
This gives me dignity and hope, like a transfer of hope, right? That's priceless. And over last decade, we've seen it happen. Over 600,000 people have been seen and served through these real time care connections happening. And dude, connection, I mean, it changes everything.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. My god. Well, my goosebumps are worn out because they just have sat on end for the last five minutes straight.

Adrien Lewis:
And we just got started. We got time for more. hope you have backups, some backup goosebumps in there somewhere.

Matt Stauffer:
Exactly. Well, the good news is I can give myself a break. I'm going to talk technology for a second. So, Brett, I know that you have said you've been here for five of the 10 years, but I still know that you are an integral role in understanding the technology. I would off the bat first, let's just talk about like what role does Laravel actually play in the day to day operations of the company or the organization, I guess.

Bret Pudenz:
Yeah, absolutely. yeah, Laravel is really a core part of multiple applications at Care Portal. It powers and provides the ability to connect all those different pieces of the puzzle, to send out the notifications, to handle our queues. And we send a lot of email, a lot of text messages. And obviously,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Bret Pudenz:
that everybody that's used Laravel knows. And it's just a joy to write. It's got a very mature ecosystem and just a strong community around it. what really brought our developers to it in the first place? Probably the documentation, which is such a weird thing because it's not the thing itself, right? But

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Bret Pudenz:
But as developers, strong documentation and documentation that stays up to date is really, important. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: 1
It goes a long way, right? Yeah. that's that's so one of the things I'm curious about is...

When I'm talking to folks, normally it's folks who are at some level of profitability and the profitability may be related to your venture capital backing. It may be related to, you you've been bootstrapped since the beginning or, you know, you're some mega corporation. You're trying to squeeze ounces of profitability out of something and it's, and it's always looks different. You know, the size of the team is the different. but one of the things that I've found that is consistent with the folks who choose Laravel is some level of scrappiness, right? There's some level of like, we've got to make do with what we've got. And I'm like, when I think about that idea. I'm like, nonprofits are usually going to be there, especially when it's the nonprofit part that is, you know, we are trying to get a really great charity navigator rating so we can make sure that the majority of the money is going to the people who actually need it rather than us and the administrative staff. It's how far can we squeeze every cent, right? Can you tell me, does, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm imagining like does

Bret Pudenz:
Sure.

Matt Stauffer:
Are there technical guidances that you make in terms of like just asking the question of how much can we get done with one developer? How much can you get done with 10? And whether those guide you towards Laravel or towards other things, like how does the constraints of trying to be really, really, really considerate with the donations and money like lead you? Where does it take you from a technical perspective?

Bret Pudenz:
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, just, just right off the bat, the flexibility of Laravel and of developers that are used to using Laravel, just, I mean, think stretches, stretches our dollars considerably. Over the years, we have hired quite a few developers that were not, you know, Laravel specific or Laravel first. if in fact, I think to date I'm,

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Bret Pudenz:
I'm the only developer that we've hired with a Laravel background even. And that's not a weird, in our team, that's not an odd thing. Like there's a little bit of pride there because that tool is so easy to learn. And if the team is structured in a way that has processes in place to kind of shepherd oncoming devs.

Matt Stauffer:
Really?

Bret Pudenz:
I mean, it's just so easy to pick up. Like if you're a decent developer in any other language, maybe you come in. Maybe there's a few that are scared of the magic. But again, from a documentation, from what tools are at your disposal, and we hear over and over again.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Bret Pudenz:
But they just have that, like that's out of the box. Like you don't need to, you know, add another package and yeah, that just, yeah. yeah, a lot of, a lot of flexibility and, and yeah, and again, some of those same developers that came in and learned the Laravel stack, might end up fitting in different, different pieces, but are still able to, you know, contribute, you know, through our Laravel code.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, uh-huh. You could just do that? Yeah.

Bret Pudenz:
week by week and not feel out of the loop by any means.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's awesome. One of the things, so I kind of talk often about how people can build productive Laravel development teams. And one of things I'm very frequently talking about is the often fraught relationships between the development, the engineering team and the product team, right? The business, the people who are defining the thing. And I've done technical work in nonprofits before, but nonprofits are not always the same. So I'm curious for you all, especially kind of from you, Adrian, like you have a technical vision.

But do you have a technical background? And if not, what is your experience like having a vision and running effectively a business but running this organization where technology is such an active part of it? Like what's that interface like?

Adrien Lewis:
Oh, Brett, so I'm going to say some stuff. You have my permission. You can challenge anything I'm about to say, right? But keep me honest if you can, right? So do I have a technical background? I have written, I can count the number of lines of codes I've written. It's actually zero, zero, total zero lines of code I've ever written.

Matt Stauffer:
Hahaha!

We're all gonna be friends after this.

Bret Pudenz:
Here we go. Here we go.

Adrien Lewis:
However, in my head, I'm writing code all the time, bro. All the time I'm writing code in my head. So sometimes that's a blessing. I mean, truthfully, we need sometimes it's really good to be able to see something that doesn't exist yet and to drive people towards something that could be and just have enough process mindset to kind of lay some steps out, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adrien Lewis:
I kind of think that way. Like I can, I can look at a spreadsheet and make sense of things and I can articulate something in a way that somebody who can read a spreadsheet can make sense out of from the words. And, and then we get, we get to where we're trying to go, but I have made a lot of messes along the way too. I have, I have also dreamt of things that shouldn't exist that people try to make exist. Cause I dreamt of them. And so it's been both beautiful and, and broken on our 10 year journey here.

Matt Stauffer:
Uh huh.

Adrien Lewis:
Um, uh, that's, but I'll tell you, uh, getting here has been no short, short of a miracle. Like it's, it's been a miracle to get to where we're getting. mean, Brett leads a fantastic team. It's like 10 people now and the organization itself, there's 155, you know, FTEs on our team and we're across the whole country. And I mean, it's getting here has been an amazing thing as a, as a business, a business

Matt Stauffer:
Wow. Uh-huh.

Adrien Lewis:
who's not in it to make money, like our profit is not dollars, our profit is impact. Like our profit is to try to make good in the world and transform people's lives through meaningful connections. That's what we're after. But the technical journey, if I can, can I tell you the origin story here? Cause Brett gave me, the origin story is pretty nuts. I mean, going all the way back to the beginning, when we first had this,

Matt Stauffer:
Yes, please.

Adrien Lewis:
this vision to do this tech. I'm not a coder. Nobody on our team is a coder. We are a small organization. And we had Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Your people are going to appreciate the geekiness here. We had Dynamics CRM. We had a WordPress website. And we found this integrator platform called It Does It. So this goes way back. You don't know about it, does it? I'm going tell you why.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. No, I don't.

Adrien Lewis:
You don't know about it, does it? Because it stopped doing it. That's why you don't know. You don't know about it, it? That's right. So we had these three tools and this vision. And so we started pulling them together and building some things in this integrator that would talk between dynamic CRM and the WordPress side. And people could submit requests via form. And they would go through our thing.

Bret Pudenz:
Not a coder, he is a nerd.

Matt Stauffer:
Because it's not here anymore.

Adrien Lewis:
stuff would happen out into the community. We called it geo radius technology, right? Like we had some zip code action happen. And the MVP, like it was super clunky and ugly and simple, but it worked. Like we were able to get a request from a caseworker out to an via email to a network of people who were in proximity, who could answer that request and bomb, we're doing stuff. And then...

So it was like March of 2015 we actually launched. In March of 2016, we get this email from It Does It. Let me tell you about this email. We get this email from It Does It saying that in exactly 120 days, they're going to stop doing it. We're done. They were done. Yeah. And they sold to...

Matt Stauffer:
No.

Matt Stauffer:
Huh? You had one job.

Adrien Lewis:
a large company called Intuit, You know, QuickBooks, they sold it into it. So they gave us 120 days, like all their customers, 120 days. And so we start scrambling, like, what the heck are we gonna do? And we get two weeks into our scramble, we've got 100 days left, and we're like, man, we're gonna have to rebuild this from scratch because no one else, none of these other integrators, Zapier as an example of one most people are familiar with now,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adrien Lewis:
None of them dealt with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. They just didn't. And so we had to start over, brand new everything. We find this other kind of platform that we can build everything in, and it's like a customizable database. We have 100 days scramble, we rebuild the thing, and we weren't huge at the time. So the risk of making mistakes was lower, but people love the vision. mean, you said it yourself, it's...

It's beautiful, this idea of connecting people. Like, why doesn't this exist? I would hear that all the time. Why doesn't it exist already? And so we went back at it. And for a couple of years, we used that thing, always feeling this discomfort, like any day now, it could stop doing it too. We're building this organization bigger and bigger and they could just pull the plug on us. And that's actually...

what led us to think we need to build something proprietary. Like we have to have our own thing. And Laravel presented itself as all the things that Brett said, like it's flexible and people can learn it pretty quickly. And we can evolve this thing into something bigger and bigger and bigger over time. And it's not going away. Like it's gonna be here for the long run. And so all of that Matt is so important to know.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Adrien Lewis:
We didn't just get out of the gate with this great idea and solution. mean, Laravel really saved our bacon, really, and gave us the opportunity to get to this level that we're at now where we're literally starting to change culture. It's beautiful.

Matt Stauffer:
I love that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. That is, I do business development calls all the time. And one of the things I tell people, I literally told people an hour ago on the call I was on right before this, said, I love working with existing applications much more than I love building something new. And not to say that we don't love building new applications. That's totally fine, totally fun. But personally,

If you give me something that's already functioning for people that they scrounged and scraped to make the thing work and it's providing real benefit to people and we get to help them provide more benefit for longer for more for I'm like, great. That's fun. And so I'm hearing the story and I'm like, dang, give me more of, give me more of these people like you who are like, look, it was working, but we need the next step. Cause I'm just like, with respect to venture backed startups with someone who just has a dream. I'm just like venture back startup with a dream.

We'll rewrite the thing five times because they changed their mind seven, you know? Whereas when you're here, it's just sort of like, have 119 days left before all these people who are currently being taken care of are not taken care of anymore. Very practical, very tangible. So as a programmer, I'm just like, this is the dream kind of project to work on. One of the things that leads me to is, and we talked about this kind of before, you know, we actually got a recording is,

One of the focuses of this podcast is to ask the question of what do it look like for somebody else who looks at you and says, that's where I want to be to get to where you are. And this is to both of you guys, because I think both of you guys are in positions that I think there are people listening who say, I would love to be doing a technical leadership at a place where it has an impact that I'm interested in. I have a vision and I would like to start an organization or something that actually is able to make the change I want to make. And it often feels like very insurmountable, you know, challenges, insurmountable from

getting your vision off the ground and getting funds and all that kind of stuff, insurmountable from getting from a position of working at some job where I hate clocking in every day to a place where what I'm doing actually matters to me. So I want to ask each of you guys questions and you can kind of each answer however you want. But I want to focus around if someone is hearing this and saying, I want to be in a position where these two guys are, what does it look like for them?

And I think there's a few different questions of, you know, how we get there. And one of them I want to just say is like baseline. If you were to say, talk to someone who asked that question, is there any advice you give? And I'll ask later about books and resources. But like if there's a piece of advice that you have to give, said, if you want to experience life where I am, here's the one thing I would tell you.

Adrien Lewis:
You're gonna go first or second Bret?

Bret Pudenz:
Hmm, you lead the way.

Adrien Lewis:
Well, Matt, I'm going to take this down a level, if you don't mind. I'm going to kind of go on the inside for this, because this is not an academic exercise. What you're asking us really is, what does it take to commit your life to a purpose and then follow that purpose? What does it take? And I'm suggesting.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Yeah, go ahead.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adrien Lewis:
For both Brett and I, I'll speak for him for a little bit and then you can add to it Brett, but you know when Brett decided to join the team, it wasn't because he was looking for the way to climb the corporate ladder. It wasn't because he was looking to make as much money as he could, right? Brett could make a lot more money other places. Not that we pay bad, but he could make a lot more money other places.

And I remember I was like at the time, this is a shame, but at the time I was his boss, right? And so we were in a hot mess with me being his boss, but at the time I was. And so, you know, trying to figure out like, why would you want to leave your career path, your company and join this nonprofit? And I got to tell you, Matt, it's about purpose. And some people, their faith gives them a sense of purpose and that's where it begins.

And other people that had experiences in their life, good or bad, that helped to drive their purpose. And I'm just suggesting for anybody who's listening, whether you're a business leader or a developer or whatever your role is, for your life to be as meaningful as possible, find something worth giving it to, purpose, and be willing, don't be a fool, be willing to make the trade-offs.

Because there are trade-offs. Like the people who climb the corporate ladder, it costs them something. Sometimes they look back 20 years, 30 years down the road and they're like, it cost me my freaking family, sometimes. And so I'm just saying, know, purpose can be anything and it could be anywhere. And the way God has made each of us is to contribute to this planet we call earth.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Adrien Lewis:
to change it for the better, for the people who are in and around our lives and across the world sometimes. And so whatever gifts that you've got, really wrestle internally. Like, what is my purpose? Do I want to look back from 30 years from now and think, I helped do that. What is that? Or you just look back and be like, I made some money and I wrote some lines of codes or whatever.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Adrien Lewis:
So that's what I think, man. I think down deep inside we're made for a purpose. Finding it, living into it, make the trade-offs. Let's go.

Matt Stauffer:
Love it.

Bret Pudenz:
That's a tough act to follow. you see why he's in the position he's in today, right? And if you also don't see why I am where I am, it's because of him. And it's not Adrian that led me to the organization. But sitting across from Adrian in an interview room and getting asked the question, what is your why, it just furthers the...

Matt Stauffer:
And go.

Bret Pudenz:
just furthers that deep feeling of, this is what I'm looking for. Just asking the question and in a sincere way, wanting to work with individuals that care deeply about the cause that you're after is just, it's different. It's just different. I don't know how to explain it to, you know

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Bret Pudenz:
to men and women that haven't experienced it. But yeah, mean, how did I end up here? I cut my teeth in a lot of different development positions. I mean, I learned the ropes and a mortgage company and building beer and wine festival apps and working at a startup and yeah, but at each stop it was, you know, I'm looking for.

Matt Stauffer:
You can keep going.

Bret Pudenz:
looking for more and what is...

So yeah, at each stop, it's it's continually searching for what, what am I doing this for? Why, why am I on this journey from, from position to position? Why am I building these skills? This technical expertise? Is it really for this one time app for this, this thing that is temporal? and it's,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Bret Pudenz:
Yeah, I mean, it's the purpose, the search for purpose, for meaning, and for...

for dedicated time in my day where I'm, you know, what is my default? Like I am putting my energy towards that thing that matters most and towards something that I deeply care about. And if you follow that, you're gonna end up in a similar spot one way or another.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So it's interesting to me. I mean, you know, you guys know that this is a this is not a Christian podcast, but you said God a bunch of times and that's fine. Right. But I think what's interesting is that there are organizations that could have brought on this podcast where their mission would not be compelling to people outside of their faith. Right. And they people would be listening to be like, yeah, I don't actually align with your values and I don't have a religious overlap with you. And I don't think that would be necessarily interesting or compelling to people. They they'd have a difficult time dealing with it.

However, if you tell me, hey, we're an organization that is trying to motivate people who have a similar religious background to us or don't to try and help the people in greatest need in our country, pretty sure people aren't gonna be like, yeah, well, but I don't align with your religious background, therefore I'm not interested, right? And that's one of reasons why I really wanted you guys on here. I'm like, I don't really care where somebody comes from. You're gonna hear this and you're gonna join me in the Goosebumps world. But when you start talking about how do you get there and you start talking about purpose, I'm very curious to...

kind of push at you guys a little bit and to say, yes, I know from having a background in the church that often we talk about purpose as being a God given thing. But again, I think that in your personal experiences and the stories I've heard from you and in the work that you're doing in a day to day basis, that purpose has as much to do with. I mean, one of the things you mentioned, as you said, I think God has sent us to do good in the world, right? You didn't, it's a lot of people want to do good in the world, whether or not their purpose feels to them like it came from a religious background or from God or something like that.

But there's so many different ways and there's so many different places. So I'm going to just kind of like poke a little bit further about like at discovering your purpose. Where do you where do you find it? How do you get to the point where you know it is? Because not every person's purpose is to work with people in the you know, in the system, right? Not every single purpose purpose is to care for children. But somebody's got a purpose somewhere. How do you how do you get there? What puts you in positions to be able to figure out what kind of rings that bell for you?

Adrien Lewis:
I think you're asking both. Yeah, I I love it. I'll, I'll take a swing first if you don't. That's all right, Brett. All right. Yeah. So look, I would be disingenuous if I didn't say that.

Matt Stauffer:
And I didn't prepare you guys for this one, but.

Adrien Lewis:
If I didn't say that, at one point in time, my drive, my purpose was to climb the ladder. I fully was chasing that. I fully expected to make more and more money and do the thing and be the guy fully. And I fortunately got invited to go on a mission trip. I mean, it was the first time I've ever done it. I was 30-something years old and I...

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Adrien Lewis:
I got invited to go on this mission trip and I just need you to know that on that trip in this field in Haiti where I was up against some of the most horrific things I've ever seen in humanity and some of the most beautiful things I've seen in humanity. All at the same time, in the same place. I was there, and I had a moment on the field where I just believed that the God who created all this stuff was giving me an opportunity to change what I was chasing and why I was chasing it. And so for me, that was the moment where purpose to live to help others see their purpose, to live to see and serve my neighbors and help others do the same, particularly around vulnerable children. That's how it was born for me, right? That was the moment in January of 2007 at a field in Haiti.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Adrien Lewis:
Now what does that mean to anybody else? Here's what it means. Here's what it means, Matt. It means that if you are sincerely looking, like if you have a willingness and an openness and some sort of discontent in where you are in this moment, and you're open, like maybe you don't even have a faith at all, but you're open like, hey, I want to live my full life, not chasing things that don't matter.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Adrien Lewis:
but actually pursuing things that matter the most. If you're really like deep open to that, it will find you. That's it, it'll find you, right? And so that's my encouragement for folks. Like start where you are, be sincere. Do you want more? It will find you.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, all right.

Matt Stauffer:
I appreciate that.

Bret Pudenz:
good. guess the flip side of the coin there is that my journey was a bunch of small nudges. Like just, it wasn't one moment or even a couple big ones. It was a lot of small things. And again, it took a lot of time. And as I mentioned before, just different steps along my path that I was searching for that purpose and that next thing.

And just answering the call, even when it's a small thing, whatever that purpose is for you, whatever the thing that matters most in your life, don't just let it slip away. It doesn't have to be this, doesn't have to be some kind of Christian calling, I guess, really for everybody. Just when you feel those passions,

When you feel that drive, write it down. Challenge yourself, tell somebody about it, and then act on it. Even if it's something small, just start that momentum to start building.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's very cool. I appreciate you guys sharing that. I mean normally in this podcast, I don't give my answers, but Adrian, when you kind of shared yours and I started me thinking and I was like, I think that the time that I changed to see the world is not just a place where I lived for my own purpose and benefit was when I got out of my hometown and it was, you know, it happened to be in the context of trying to help, you know, kids who were in difficult situations. And that was certainly valuable, but

I started feeling the change before we even met the kids, right? I was literally just, I was in Northern Ireland, I was in Belfast and I saw a different world than my everyday was like and seeing people in different situations, people in different scenarios. And then I went off to college and was intentionally placed in positions where I met people from different socioeconomic backgrounds for me and interactions with the police for me and different, it was just like bit by bit by bit. When I lived outside of my world, it required me to put myself in other people's worlds.

I feel like that is where the foundation of empathy and desire for the world to be different comes from. And I don't know if everybody needs that, right? Not everybody needs to go elsewhere to see the problem. Your life could show you the problem every day and it be motivated. But I think a lot of people who are in comfort, a lot of people who are in well-paying jobs and come from comfortable socioeconomic backgrounds, I know my camera's dying, but I'm just keeping going, a lot of us don't necessarily have that kind of that itch that comes from our day-to-day life.

Adrien Lewis:
Sure.

Matt Stauffer:
but when you interact with the world around you, sometimes that gives you that space.

Matt Stauffer:
So I know, I told you guys at the beginning, I said we're gonna get to the 40 minute mark and there's going to be a million more things we can talk about and that has happened. I have so many more questions for you guys. The good news is if anybody's interested in at least Adrian Brett, I don't know about you, but I just when I first googled Adrian's name, he's on 15,000 podcast interviews all over the world. You can see this man speaking everywhere. So if you if you want to hear the story, we'll put a couple on the show notes. We'll make sure there's more things to talk about. if a few outstanding questions for you guys. So one of the things I wanted to talk about from a from a level perspective is Brett, like what does it look like?

Actually, just what do you have to share with other people who are either doing business or in this specific space who are doing nonprofit work using Laravel? Like what tips have you learned? You have been doing this for a while. You're now a manager of 10 people. You've done hiring, you've done systems management, you've done architecture. Like what do you have to share to kind of guide somebody else who's in your similar situation or trying to get there?

Bret Pudenz:
That's good. Yeah, I mean, I'd say, you know, Laravel's, Laravel's motto, as of late, at least is we must ship. So our team really tries to, tries to live by that. We have, you know, we try our best to have daily releases and we're constantly rolling stuff out as well as we can. But in in a, in pursuit of that.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Bret Pudenz:
It's been a journey. We've not always been this way, but it's been a journey.
Adrien Lewis:
I used to be his boss, man, it was a journey.

Bret Pudenz:
In an effort to stay nimble, one thing that Adrienne and I have had some conversations on over the years has been around cutting anchors. And just with that ship metaphor, kind of double there, cutting anchors. And what I mean by that is...
Good ideas come and sometimes other ideas come. And having humility around your organization and being able to celebrate the good ones, see the not as good ones and drop them and allow failure in your business unit and let it happen quickly.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Bret Pudenz:
I've been on other teams that begrudgingly support features that they wish would have died years ago and have wasted many developer weeks on X feature that won't stick around. While Adrian is quite the visionary and quite the idea generator, he has also been great to work with and seeing and hearing that voice and that having the humility just to say, that didn't work. Let's drop it. Let's let it go. And let's pivot and use that energy elsewhere and move forward faster. And I think that has been truly a just piece for our team.

Matt Stauffer:
I love that you answered that in a way that does give value to people in your position, but honestly, I hope that message is heard from people in Adrian's position. Because the number of times I've seen organizations that are well architected to be flexible, to be agile, to change their minds at the last second, but the person at the top, the person who defines this product or feature says, no, it must happen or it must happen this way or whatever. So the idea that there is a level of respect, communication and collaboration that goes both directions to me, I'm like, that's an organizational shape that people should aspire to, right? I'm like, that's cool. I like hearing that.

Bret Pudenz:
It takes both sides. Yeah, it takes both sides. Absolutely. You have to be willing to call somebody on it and only when you're sure about it. I don't want to question everything, but yeah, and just having the humility on both sides to respond well.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Adrien Lewis:
And look, let me address that a little bit. It's true that I do think my ideas are awesome. It is true.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, you're a visionary founder. You hopefully do.

Adrien Lewis:
At least initially, at least initially I think they are. And it's easy for me to get people excited about something I'm excited about, just how God has wired me. don't, like, this isn't about my idea or Brett's code, right? It's not what it's really about. It goes back to the purpose question that you asked a while ago. And when the purpose is bigger, more special, more long lasting and significant than anything I say or do or idea or write, but it's bigger than all of that, it is much easier to not hold on to something as though it's mine and it has to be. And that is the value that we, that is the culture that we have here.

We've made some mistakes. I've let us down some paths where we've built some stuff that we shouldn't have built. And we've had to cut that anchor. And that's just kind of how it goes. And it's OK, because it's bigger than all of us.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's that sunk cost fallacy too, right? Like because we built it and therefore must be the thing we continue supporting. It's like we learned, one the we often say at Tighten is like we never know less about the project than we do on day one. And unfortunately day one is often when we're being asked to make a plan. And so if you stay agile, stay flexible, stay humble, it gets you pretty far. Okay, so I...

We talked about what are desirable outcomes of any Business of Laravel podcast episode. And it's for people to learn, people to understand what it looks like to be more like the people who are there to be able to get to situations that they're in. one thing I'm really excited about here is for people to see you guys as a, I can have an idea too and I can use my technological experience and background to build something like this. But some people are gonna listen and be like, screw that, I wanna work with Care Portal, that's amazing. I told you, I-

I met one of your employees at a Laracon, he comes up and he told me about it I was like, I must meet the people who have done this. I must have them on the podcast. I've got to hear about this. This is amazing and brilliant. So if somebody else has a similar response, which I imagine they will, what does it look like for them to be involved with Care Portal ongoing?

Adrien Lewis:
Well, for everybody listening, everyone, 100% audience participation here, what I'm hoping you'll do is download the Care Portal app. That's what I'm hoping you'll do. Go to the Care Portal website, sign up, create an account. You can do it for your curiosity, if nothing else. Like, what is it these guys are talking about? Like, how is this thing actually working? What's Laravel doing out there for good in the world? Just to be curious? Great. And, and maybe you're actually inspired to...

lean in and see and serve one of your neighbors who lives in your zip code that you didn't even know about. And that could actually happen, right? That could be part of your process on your journey to purpose. And so I just want to encourage you to do that. That's real simple, low hanging fruit, 100 % participation. I wish you could show me the data, Matt. I'd like to know what happens. And there could be some folks who are like, are there any job openings at Care Portal?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Adrien Lewis:
Yes, there are. There are some. And I just want to encourage you to go to the website, careportal.org, look at the bottom under careers. We've got a couple postings on our product team right now and things are always changing. You never know. So if you're interested, come our way and we'll see what happens.

Bret Pudenz:
Right and if the perfect fit isn't there look again later because I looked for a position with Care Portal a year before I ended up joining and there was nothing there and let time pass. For some reason my wife poked me to check back and there it was.

Matt Stauffer:
That's awesome. So normally the last question I ask people is if somebody showed up with a million dollars, $100 million today and said, here's $100 million, step away from your company, I'll keep the company running, what are you gonna do next? And I don't think that necessarily applies in this case, but I am curious if you were put in a position where you had the perfect. you know, where each of you were to step away from Care Portal and believe that it is going to continue in the way it's going and you are no longer needed in order for it to continue running and your family is perfectly provided for and you don't have to worry about making a paycheck. What do you do tomorrow? And I want each of you to answer this, whoever's ready first.

Adrien Lewis:
Brett, you want to go? You want me to go?

Bret Pudenz:
You take it first.

Adrien Lewis:
So I'm gonna give you two answers. One is that my, what I do see in my future is, you know, my wife and I being able to probably get an RV. We have six kids, I told you. I expect a lot of grandkids. We've got two now, but I expect a whole lot. And we'll just kind of travel around and spend time with our grandkids. I would love to spend a lot of time on a beach, you know, that would be, my wife loves that. That would be, that's in, it's in my head.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Matt Stauffer:
I love that.

Adrien Lewis:
But from a professional perspective or investment in the world perspective, I love sitting across the table from someone else and asking hard questions. It's one of my favorite things to do in the whole world. And I would spend a lot of time doing that. And maybe that's as a consultant in a business, or maybe that's for the guy down the street or somebody in my small group.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Huh.

Adrien Lewis:
somewhere I meet through meeting a care portal request, I would spend time asking people hard questions.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I love that.

Bret Pudenz:
It's good. I've already. So I love I love the question, but I also, you know, I challenge that question often and that I I always think that we can make small changes, you know, tomorrow and start living the life that we want to live, you know, further down the road. Like we don't need to wait for retirement. And so well, my answer is slow down. I've already slowed down significantly and and I have, you know, three boys of my own and.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Bret Pudenz:
as we've talked about on purpose, you know, it's not chasing that paycheck, but it's enjoying life day by day. And sure, I'd absolutely be traveling more. I'd probably be working on whatever I'm working on, fully remote from random spots around the globe, but I'd still be building something. That's a good question.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

I appreciate you guys answering that. And thank you both so much for hanging out, especially because this should have been a three hour long conversation. There's so many more things for us to cover. So I appreciate you being willing to be caught even though we could have gone further. And also anybody who's watching can see that my audio and video have been a problem this whole time. You guys have been extraordinarily gracious. So thank you so much. We'll make sure that y'all's information and the Care Portal website is plugged in. Adrian, some of your other podcast interviews and talk stuff about a plug. Is there anything else you guys wanna make sure that someone goes and checks out or have we kinda covered everything.

Adrien Lewis:
Yeah, maybe my parting sentence is, is what you do matters, so choose it wisely.

Matt Stauffer:
Right, feel like you have to keep going after this man and it's just unfair. You like, you go after... Now what's your parting sentence?

Bret Pudenz:
Sometimes you don't need to say anything. That's how we end most meetings.

Matt Stauffer:
You just let him go. All right, well you guys, I deeply appreciate both of you. Thank you so much for your time.

Adrien Lewis:
Right on. Thank you, brother.

Matt Stauffer:
and for the rest of you, will see you all next time.