So Adam, one of the things that you talked about there, there was this really, um, I hope no one took and tweeted pictures during this one moment of your talk. Which one? It was the moment where, can I just borrow your mic for a second? I'm gonna play Adam Jacob for a second. You were standing like, here, and you were talking to the audience,

and behind you was this giant red screen and it said hate. So, um... That was a good moment. It was a wonderful moment. But if what you did was take a picture and tweet that out and be like, this is ChefConf.

ChefConf in one slide. Yeah, yeah. That would be... That would be bad. That would be awkward for sure. Not what I meant. Not at all. So context, I guess, is a thing. You want some context. Yeah, you want some context around that slide. Sure. So speaking of hate, there were people here that have been unhappy with software.

Hate is such a strong word. But it's the word we use. We're not like, I'm unhappy with this software. It's true. No, we hate it. Damn. I hated that night. Has anyone ever told you that they hate Chef software? Yes. I'm sure people in this room have hated Chef software. You don't hate Chef the company or you wouldn't be here. Someone cheered.

Thanks, man. I'm assuming it was a man because it sounded sort of deep, but it could have been a woman. Yes. So the most vivid moment of that for me was I was in San Francisco, because this story can only happen in San Francisco. No other city in the world would this happen. I was sitting in a coffee shop, and I had a laptop open,

and I had headphones on, and it was a crowded coffee shop. And I felt someone tap me on the shoulder, you know? And I pulled my headphones off, and I turned around, and it was a stranger. And I was like, hello, can I help you? And they were like, yeah, are you Adam Jacob? And I was like, yeah, I'm Adam Jacob. And in the back of my head, I'm like, oh, it's a fan, you know?

Because that happens to me in San Francisco only, right? And so this dude goes, you wrote Chef? And I'm like, yeah. Yeah, I totally did. I wrote Chef. And he goes, I f***ing hate Chef. That is the worst software. That is the worst software I have ever used.

And I'm like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. And so I stand up, and I'm like, you know, whatever my software did to you, or whatever the thing was, if I did that, that was not why I wrote it. Like, I didn't mean to hurt you. And he was so taken aback by my response. He was like, well, I mean, it's not like the worst software.

And I'm like, well, thanks for that, but it was pretty bad. Like, you had to come up to a stranger and like, do you want a hug? And he was like, no. And then he left, because I made it awkward. And then we rehearsed this, and Nathan made a joke that was funny,

which was, you know, there's a lot more people who say that they love Chef, and come up to me and say that it's amazing, then tell me that they hate it. What was your response to that quip? I don't remember. What Nathan said to me was this. He said, well, Adam, maybe that's because most people wouldn't come up to you

and tell you they hate it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the ratio is like a hundred to one. That's true. And I was like, oh, dream crusher. That's right. But in the rehearsal, we said that I shouldn't crush your dreams while we're on stage here. No, we said you shouldn't crush other dreams. Oh, okay. Just that one?

Just that one. Because the next question was, tell me more about your dreams. Right, he was like, what other dreams do I have? Yeah, so awesome. So you talked a lot about inclusion and diversity. I think it's such an important topic for us. What are some of the biggest struggles that we have with that at Chef, do you think?

Yeah. I mean, honestly, I think the biggest struggle is we've spent, especially the last couple of years, and after talking to Jay, and listening to the folks who aren't white men, which is a preponderance of our leadership team, right?

I think we've gotten a lot better at figuring out how to build an inclusive organization that makes it safe to have voices present, that makes it comfortable to be there. I think we have work to do. For example, I use the word guys a lot, and it's hard not to, and I try.

I'm pretty sure I used it during this talk, and it was one of the things I really wanted to not do, just as a simple, small thing. And so that's sort of for inclusion, and I think we've gotten better, but it's still hard. You have to remind yourself that you need to be inclusive and build systems that work that way. I think for diversity, part of the difficulty is just that we have a tendency to have,

in our own lives, our professional lives and our personal lives, to not have built such a diverse social network, right? So when we think about the kind of plants that we can plant, you tend to reach for the ones that are closest, because you have a job to do.

You have someone to hire, and you worked with someone that you really liked at the last job, and that person, unshockingly, lives where you live, and they look just like you, and they know your in-jokes, and they are you. But you hire them because their skills are good, but it doesn't really help on being more diverse. So I think we have work to do on figuring out how to reach out, and how to broaden that network,

and how to find people who have more diverse backgrounds and find a way to include them. Awesome. Awesome. And so Habitat launched recently. You walked away from it a couple weeks before. How did it feel to get up and walk away? We know what the outcome was, but how did it feel in that moment?

Oh, it was super ridiculously stressful. Yeah, it's really fun to build software, and it had been a long time since I had been able to work on a dev team, and sort of exercise that muscle of being an engineering leader for a team of eight. Right.

And it was so much fun, and I really enjoyed it. And that team was the highest functioning team I've probably ever been on. And so working on that software with those people, it just felt so good, and it was really, really great. And it was such a blessing that the rest of Chef and the company was so strong that the whole company really rallied around it.

It wasn't just those people, it was marketing, and sales, and Barry's executive sponsorship. And Barry being so clear that that was the work I should do. Right. And that it was important, and it was the most important work I had to do, which not every CEO would do. Not to overstate myself or whatever, but I can be valuable in a lot of different places in the organization at this point,

and letting me do that was really special. And so on a personal level, it felt great, and I was really enjoying it. And it was hard to leave that at its penultimate moment. It was about to really happen, and then I was going to just take off. However, the teams that I went to help, and the parts of the organization that I went to work with,

also were amazing, and were full of great people who wanted to do great work, and that felt good as well. So it felt bad a little because I was leaving that team. It also felt good because I was going to go help out another part of the organization. And I'll be back. I'm not going to leave Habitat or leave the development of Habitat.

It was a thing I had to do in those last couple of weeks. Awesome. Well, thanks very much Adam. Yeah.