Conversation Timestamps

• [00:21]  Jen calling in from Taipei
• [02:15]  Jen shares early life and background
• [04:18]  How she got to Twitter
• [05:07]  Jen discusses some of the projects she worked on for Twitter 
• [27:36]  How to differentiate your app from others
• [25:45]  Launching the Lunch Money app
• [34:46] Hacker News

Resources Mentioned

• Lunch Money App
• Jen's Personal Blog
• Twitter Internships
• Mint Personal Finance

Transcript

Travis: Hey Jen. Hi. How's it going?
 
Jen: Good. How are you?

Travis: Great. Are we, are you calling me from, are we talking like from Canada or Taipei or Taiwan? Taipei, I pay that's awesome. I don't even know where that's at, but I'm impressed. Well, it is a pleasure to talk to you. I'm like boy, and I have been fanboying over your lunch money app ever since I signed up and I'm so happy that I ran across it and I'm now a customer. So I'm proud to say that. Um, so good job.
 
Jen: Thank you for this part. So, I'm dying. It’s so nice. Awesome. 
 
Travis: Kind of get to know you and your husband and your story. I know you guys reside in Canada's or you're Canadian. You reside in Canada during the summers, but in the winters and you go back to Taipei, right?
 
Jen: Yeah. Well, this is definitely pre COVID, but we did this for two years now. The first winter we went over to Fukuoka, Japan, and then this winter, well, earlier this year we chose Taipei.
 
Travis: Okay. So you guys are like no meds during the winter. Just kind of like traveling around to new and exciting places. 
 
Jen: Yeah. I think the term is digital snowman, which I've really come to like, Oh, I like that. I've never heard that one. Yeah.  

Travis: That’s awesome. Okay. So you have to tell me about your story, your discipline, and how lunch money came around or came to be. And I know there's a story behind, I want to hear that sort of the listeners, but your core discipline is coding, correct? Yep. Okay. Awesome. Can you tell me a little bit about your backstory and like how you came to, to create this app and what was the epiphany and then some of those things.
 
Jen: Yeah. So I guess let's see, where do I start? Um, I feel like I've been creating like little web apps for a while. It just kind of to either satisfy my own curiosity or just for fun. And then that was earlier in my career when I had more free time and I was kind of less burnt out from coding. And so I started my career at Twitter and I quit after about three and a half years. And I started a company with my friend and then I burnt out from that. And then I just decided to go on a sabbatical for a year and I don't think I touched code or my get hub at all for like a year and a half. Um, and so 
 
Travis: Twitter for a few years, what was, how did you land at Twitter and what was that experience like as you've mentioned burnout now twice. So that's a thing. 

Jen: Yeah, it's definitely a thing. I don't know. I applied when I was still in college and I was lucky enough to get an interview and I guess they liked me and they offered a full-time position. And to me, you know, growing up in Canada, it was kind of a no-brainer to pursue this opportunity to kickstart my career in San Francisco.  

Travis: That is awesome. And what were you getting other offers at the time or was it just like happenstance? Twitter was the first to reach out and give you an offer and you're into Twitter. So you went for it.
 
Jen: Yeah. So I was, I had an internship in San Francisco at the time. And so this was, let's see, I think this was about four months before graduation. And so I kind of wanted my last four months of college to be pretty chill. I didn't want it to be kind of frazzled looking for a full-time job. And so I tried to get all my interviews and while I was still in San Francisco and I had two offers in total and the other one was for a startup that eventually got acquired by LinkedIn. But looking back, I think joining Twitter was the right choice for me because it grew so fast while I was there. I was able to join all these different teams and gain just a wide array of experience. Yeah.
 
Travis: Yeah. Well, can you speak to any of those projects that you were working on? Cause I think that is really interesting. And also what a lot of junior devs might be interested in are those that are just still bootstrapping. They haven't worked for a large company and I like that. I know inherently because I've worked corporate America for a while that you can get bounced around from project to project. And so I'm wondering what were some interesting things that you remember you were working on?  

Jen: Sure. My time at Twitter, I was pretty lucky in terms of having the right managers and also just going for the right opportunities. So I was hired initially to work on an internal team for like an internal monitoring tool. And so, you know, as drawing Twitter, I was all excited like, wow, Twitter it's used by so many people, but I ended up working on a tool that's just used by, you know, a couple of hundred engineers. Um, it ended up being a really awesome team and I think it was a great start for me to, you know, be able to work on a tool and be able to communicate directly with the people that are using it and kind of honing my skills on, you know, doing user interviews and UI and UX and all of that. It's pretty obvious how that has helped me today with lunch money.  

Travis: Because the feedback loop, when you're working on large projects that eventually get shipped to the consumer, the feedback loop is much longer, mean it could be a year before you there's that like satisfaction moment, but you were creating an internal tool for your peers and you're able to get immediate feedback. And also the Atta boys pats on the back, I imagine.  

Jen: Exactly. And because it wasn't, you know, it wasn't client facing at all. I had full autonomy. I could just push things to master, you know, if something looked wonky, like I would just find out from the user, it wouldn't have to go through intense design review or any of that. So that was really great for just moving quickly and learning quickly and just growing quickly as well.  

Travis: So I'm a non-technical founder. I would love to code. I did like HTML back in the nineties, but that's it. So I'm jealous number one, but number two, it's funny because every so often as I'm wandering around on YouTube, I'll see a video like the day in the life of a developer at Twitter and engineer at Twitter. And they'll just make this cute, funny, like chill video of them going to work at like nine having cereal and then coding for an hour and then going to lunch with friends. And then, I mean, is it like that? Cause it doesn't seem like burnout to me.
 
Jen: Yeah. I watched those videos as well. And I also very much question how real it is, but yeah. I mean I would roll into work 10 and then make myself a child latte and then start coding and then yeah, go to lunch and then keep coding, stay until dinner and then like go home. And so if you think about it, it seems pretty cool. Like, wow, you get to eat all your meals at work, you know, and we even had a gym at work. So I did that. And what you don't end up realizing is that all of that is designed to keep you at work for as long as possible. And so then that's how the burnout kind of creeps up on you.  

Travis: Yeah,...