- The podcast features Jarvis Johnson, a software engineer and YouTube creator.
- Johnson gained popularity with a video making fun of technical interviews in the software industry.
- He criticizes the glorification of the software industry while also being a part of it.
- Johnson's videos aim to connect with people's feelings and thoughts, providing comedic criticism.
- He also receives messages from people who credit him for getting them into programming.
- Johnson took a break from tech videos to explore other creative interests.
- He got into programming through TI-84 and TI basic language, and later pursued computer science in college.
- Johnson interned at Google and Yelp, choosing Yelp for the mentorship he received.
- He emphasizes that failure in job interviews doesn't define one's future and encourages perseverance.

- The speaker, Paul Matzkoff, talks about his decision to leave Yelp and join a smaller startup called Patreon.
- He was inspired to make the change because of his proximity to YouTube and his admiration for YouTubers Hank and John Green, who started something called Subbable that Patreon acquired.
- Initially, he wanted to work at a bigger company like Google because he lacked confidence in his technical skills.
- However, he decided to work at a bigger company after graduating to take care of his student debt and have financial stability.
- He eventually transitioned from being an individual contributor to a manager because he enjoyed the people aspect of technical roles and had a good manager at Yelp who inspired him.
- The management experience has made him more aware of time, improved his goal setting and efficiency, and taught him the value of delegation and trust.
- He believes that the skills he learned in management are valuable for anyone, regardless of their role.

- The speaker recommends the book "The E-Myth" which emphasizes the importance of working on your business rather than in your business.
- The speaker discusses their transition from working a regular job to doing YouTube full-time.
- They mention feeling overwhelmed and unable to sustain juggling both jobs.
- The speaker talks about the growth of their YouTube channel and the opportunity they saw to capitalize on it.
- They mention having conversations with the CEO of Patreon and ultimately deciding to make a clean break and focus on YouTube full-time.

- The speaker saved enough money to be able to spend a year without worrying about making money from YouTube
- They believe the relationship between creators and entrepreneurs is similar and feel the need to build their channel at the right time
- They struggle with balancing making content they want to make and listening to what their fans want
- They use polls, social media, and metrics to gauge audience preferences, but also recognize the limitations of these methods
- The speaker believes that listening to people is important, but it is not the sole factor for success
- They learned that tech videos perform better, but they also wanted to explore other types of content
- They discovered that audience expectations and value propositions play a significant role in click-through rates and audience engagement.

- The speaker discusses the challenges of creating content and the importance of having a content strategy.
- They talk about how their channel became known for tech videos, even though it wasn't their main focus.
- The speaker expresses their desire to talk about tech but admits to lacking energy and not knowing their voice in that area.
- They discuss the responsibility of content creators towards their audience and the need to be mindful of the impact of their content.
- The speaker mentions the importance of trust between creators and their audience and the need to consider the perception and consequences of their content.
- They mention the concept of clickbait and the potential for positive clickbait, but express their struggle in finding the right balance.

- The speaker discusses the negative perception and harassment that can result from framing situations negatively.
- Content creation in the tech industry can benefit one's career by helping to solve problems and apply knowledge in different mediums.
- Creating content can also help build a personal brand, but it is important to consider whether the content should be related to tech or not.
- The speaker started a podcast as a teenager and believes that learning comes from wanting to make something rather than being forced to learn.
- Improv classes teach team dynamics, getting out of comfort zones, and feeling accepted.
- Predictions for YouTube creators and content creation include TikTok producing more traditional creators and hoping for a more supportive environment on YouTube.

- The instability of YouTube for creators is often related to the relationship between advertisers and YouTube.
- Traditional media has gatekeepers that try to maintain their power, similar to YouTube and traditional media.
- Liza Koshy's move to Nickelodeon's Double Dare is seen as interesting because she has a large audience on YouTube.
- There is a desire for more traditional media people to join YouTube, but in a respectful way to the platform.
- Investing in the platform itself is valuable for creators, but blurring the lines between traditional media and YouTube is important.
- There is concern about content farms and channels that capitalize on popular videos, creating noise on YouTube.
- The hope is to see less of this dominance and more opportunities for up-and-coming creators on YouTube.

- Jarvis Johnson, a software engineer and YouTube creator, gained popularity for his comedic criticism of technical interviews in the software industry.
- He emphasizes the importance of connecting with people's feelings and thoughts in his videos.
- Johnson received messages from people who credit him for getting them into programming.
- He took a break from tech videos to explore other creative interests.
- Paul Matzkoff, a speaker in the podcast, discusses his decision to leave Yelp and join Patreon.
- Matzkoff transitioned from being an individual contributor to a manager and emphasizes the value of management skills.
- The speaker recommends the book "The E-Myth" for working on your business rather than in your business.
- The speaker discusses their transition from a regular job to doing YouTube full-time.
- They mention feeling overwhelmed and ultimately decided to focus on YouTube.
- The speaker saved enough money to spend a year without worrying about making money from YouTube.
- They struggle with balancing making content they want to make and listening to what their fans want.
- They discuss the challenges of creating content and the importance of having a content strategy.
- The speaker discusses the responsibility of content creators towards their audience and the need to be mindful of the impact of their content.
- They mention the concept of clickbait and the potential for positive clickbait.
- Creating content in the tech industry can benefit one's career and personal brand.
- The speaker started a podcast as a teenager and believes that learning comes from wanting to make something.
- Predictions for YouTube creators include TikTok producing more traditional creators and hoping for a more supportive environment on YouTube.
- There is concern about content farms and channels that capitalize on popular videos, creating noise on YouTube.

Jarvis Johnson was previously a software engineer at Patreon, Yelp, and Google. He’s now a YouTuber.

https://www.youtube.com/user/VSympathyV
https://twitter.com/jarvis

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

https://twitter.com/craigcannon

Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year. 

Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

***

Topics

00:00 - Jarvis' intro

00:30 - Where his videos first got traction

1:10 - Being part of the software industry while critiquing it

3:45 - How he got into programming

6:10 - Moving to California

7:30 - Interning at Google then Yelp

9:00 - Interviewing multiple times at the same company

10:00 - Moving from Yelp to Patreon

14:10 - Switching from individual contributor to manager

18:15 - Learnings from managing that he applies to himself

21:25 - What made Jarvis want to do YouTube full time?

30:00 - Investing in yourself

31:05 - Making what you want vs talking to viewers

35:35 - When did things really start to click for his channel?

38:00 - Choosing to make multiple genres of video

43:40 - Nathan Allebach asks - Are content creators responsible in any capacity for their audiences?

50:45 - Taylor asks - In what ways do you think content creation can benefit one's career in the tech industry?

54:20 - Jarvis made a podcast when he was a teenager

56:10 - Octopus Blues asks - What lessons did improv teach you/who would you recommend it to, if anyone?

58:25 - Predictions for YouTubers and content creators

So today, Jarvis Johnson, who is a software engineer and YouTube creator, recently independent.

Now I'm a YouTube creator and a software engineer.

So I was first drawn to you because you were posting these software videos.

So Matt Hackett, who is Casey Neistat's co-founder, he posted 1 of your videos.

But yeah, I think when I started out I was trying a bunch of things.

And the first video that I had that got any traction was actually on Facebook, where I posted a video that was making fun of the technical interview in the software industry.

And I posted it in a Facebook group called Hackathon Hackers or something like that.

They kicked me out for self-promotion, but before they did it, it had started going viral.

There are so many things I want to cover, but this is an interesting angle because you're both the beneficiary of the software industry, but then criticizing it, too.

The way I think about it is that the software industry is extremely popular and has gotten off kind of scot-free and extremely glorified for a really long time.

And being in it and being someone who had this dream of entering the industry and being a productive, contributing member of it.

And then coming and doing that, I both was really gratified with the work that I've been able to do, but also realized that there's a lot of stuff that people aren't talking about, for whatever reason.

And just like liking to make fun of things, or liking to try and be funny and criticize things, it seemed like a good opportunity

because I was like, wow, everyone complains about this stuff and a lot of comedy is just connecting with what people are already feeling and thinking.

That's when we did Comedy Hack Day, we put out this video called Well Deserved, which was a place to sell your privilege.

But basically this was of the time when a sandwich video just happened and every company was putting out the same kind of soft music video with the big sweeping shots of San Francisco.

And it was like, put it out, immediately works.

And I think that that's what things like Silicon Valley the show do really well.

And I think I benefited from the fact that I was coming from the inside.

And so I had a lot of information that I could then condense down, hopefully, to something that was palatable to people who were both in and outside of the industry.

Leeson Yeah, but I mean, in spite of the criticism, I think you're actually doing a lot of good for the world, like getting people into programming.

I don't think that I don't think about that as much when I'm making this stuff, but I do still, to this day, get a lot of messages from people who tell me that, and I'm super grateful.

And I feel a little guilty because nowadays I'm not talking as much about tech stuff, but I think it's because I needed a bit of a break from it because I was spending all my time working my tech job and then if I was going home and working on tech videos, it felt like my whole life was consumed by this industry when really there's more dimensions to me as a person and also like what I wanted to do creatively.

Yeah, of course, which I want to talk about, but I also want to cover the software stuff too.

So I watched 1 of your videos where you're talking about programming the TI-84.

But how did you get into it, and then like how did you even end up moving to California?

So, I, you know, there's like a longer story.

I've definitely tried to dry out this narrative into a bunch of videos, But the basic story is that a friend of mine, who's still a really great friend of mine who lives in New York, turned me on to, he's an Android developer, or mobile developer at large now, he's just doing everything, But he turned me on to the TI-84, like TI basic language.

And so I started playing around with that in my chemistry class, and we would just make silly games.

I just remember making a thing where I could just move theta around.

And that was the coolest thing in the world to me, just being able to make something that didn't exist, even though it was the most basic thing in the world.

And then that was after we had already tried to learn C++.

I tried to learn C++ when I was a sophomore in high school because I listened to a podcast called Geek Nights, which is like these 2 New York tech professionals who were talking about, I think there was just 2 22-year-old guys who made this podcast after they graduated, and I found it when I was like 14, and I was like, oh, interesting.

And I tried to learn the program, and I failed.

C++ is not a great first language to learn, especially if it's just from a book.

And so then I came back to it with the TI basic, and that was a little bit easier to go down.

And then I didn't really care for, I wasn't passionate about any of the top, any of the subjects that I was taking in high school.

So when it came time to pick a college major, computer science was like a thing that felt like more palatable to me.

And then I went to Georgia Tech for my undergrad in computer science, and I just found, like, such a supportive community there that it was able to help support my natural interest, but also help me through the hard times.

Because it's not like, computer science is not an easy degree by any means.

And so was there kind of an inkling early on that you're like, oh, okay, I could do this?

Doing like CS, Following that whole path, that career path, all of it.

So the other part of the question was like, moving out to California and stuff.

I think the first moment of even thinking about, I hadn't at any point thought about career, like anything beyond college.

I was just like, oh, go to college and then you get a job, I guess.

But at Georgia Tech, there were a lot of career fairs and there were a lot of companies visiting,

of companies visiting for recruiting purposes.

And I was like, oh, Facebook is here, Microsoft is here, these are just things that I know of from my computer screen, but there are actual people that work there.

And there was kind of a culture of glorifying that a little bit, where it's like, everybody's wearing company swag, and then it becomes a thing that everybody wants.

And it kind of felt a bit like a game to me, where that was like, what people cared about, you're supposed to do.

So it's kind of like how when your parents are like, get good grades, and you're like, not sure why you should get good grades.

I was like, I guess I should go do this thing.

But I was lucky enough to get some internships and I interned at Google when I was a sophomore.

And that was my first big moment of whoa, this industry has got a whole thing happening.

And from then on, I was like, OK, I'll probably come out here after I graduate.

And so then my understanding is then you interned at Yelp, right?

I decided not to go back to Google, not for any reason other than wanting to try something else.

I had a lot of peers who were doing an internship their sophomore year, their freshman year, and then coming back over and over and over and over, and then going to work at that company full-time.

And that never quite made sense to me, because the company can never value the intern that much, and you miss out on getting a lot of experience with a bunch of very different companies, because companies at different stages, or even at exactly the same stage, can operate completely differently.

And you're never really going to know what you like, unless you try a couple of different things.

So I went to Yelp just to try something new.

I didn't like living in the South Bay when I was interning at Google and didn't want to do a big commute.

I just had such good mentorship that I wanted to come back full time.

Leeson Yeah, I think a lot of these jobs can create a scarcity mindset in people and they think, oh man, I don't know if I could ever get the Google job again.

Over a long enough time period, especially, because there's definitely false negative rates and false positive rates in the interviewing process, but There's also so many opportunities that it's bound to, even if you don't do well in the interview this year, you can try every 6 months, you can try every year, and there's so many of those opportunities that something's gonna land.

Yeah, I thought that was actually a really nice piece of advice that you gave, Because you interviewed at Yelp twice.

And most people think, oh man, once I fail the Facebook interview I'm going to be.

Because you grow so much and so much changes.

I also interviewed at Google or interviewed for the Google internship and failed it, and then got a callback for a different program, and they used my failed interview, and I didn't have to interview again.

So it was a weird situation of, That's actually maybe a theme in my life, is this seemed like a failure at the time, but it was actually not.

And so I want us to be mindful of how we frame our failures and the narratives of our lives, because they may not actually be that.

Right, I mean, like you said, over a long enough time frame, too.

When you keep doing things, you keep getting up.

Paul Matzkoff I know, well, that's really the story of it all.

At what point do you decide, okay, Yelp, this has been cool, I want to move to a smaller startup?

So it was more, I definitely could have stayed at Yelp for a long time, because I had a lot of good people around me that were supporting me and stuff like that.

My rate of growth, at least as I was perceiving it personally, was slowing down.

But it was more that this opportunity came up that was not something that was in my purview, which was working at Patreon.

I was in India at a wedding, And a friend of mine had just started working there and was like, hey, you should interview.

Because it had always been, I had been a fan of, my YouTube and tech career are very intertwined because I knew about Patreon because I'd been following Hank and John Green, who are YouTubers who've been around since the beginning.

And I'd been following them since very early on in their YouTube careers.

They had started something called Subbable that Patreon then acquired, And that's how I was aware of Patreon.

So I was like, oh, I could be working in like, I could be working on stuff that they care about and that they use.

And that value proposition was like enough for me to at least interview.

And so It was really my proximity to YouTube that inspired me to make the change.

And then that, and I felt more confident in my technical skills.

Because when I initially started out, I think I wanted to work at Google because I was afraid that I couldn't hack it at a smaller startup.

Leeson Meaning that you wouldn't have mentors?

I did a lot of hackathons and stuff in college, and I had all these friends who were just self-starters, who knew, who could really just build something all their own, the full stack or whatever.

And I didn't feel super confident in my skill set.

I wanted to work at a bigger company because I thought that I would learn patterns, I would develop a skill, something that I could then work downward from and know how things scale up for larger companies and then apply them to smaller companies.

But I had enough confidence in myself at that point.

Leeson It's not necessarily a bad idea either.

I mean, I heard you mention that you had student debt when you graduated.

Robinson, Ph.D.: Yeah, no, actually that's another good example.

I think there's a lot of advice that's going to say, oh, you might learn so much more at the startup.

And it's like, maybe that's true, but I think you should be asking, Am I going to learn the right stuff?

Am I going to learn good habits and good patterns?

Or am I going to be trying to build something with the worry that the company's going to collapse on my shoulders?

And I'm going to be doing that for far less money.

And if you've got your own personal finances to take care of, or you've got dependents, or you're helping out your family and stuff.

I think that the smart decision, I know that the smart decision for me was to work at a bigger company out of college and take care of all that.

Because, I mean, yeah, it was just like if I had student loans now, I wouldn't have been able to do half the stuff that I was able to do.

Leewy I mean, it's also a complete mindset shift.

As soon as you're in the black, you're way more optimistic about things you could try out.

And you're able to invest all that money that you're investing in student loans, you can now invest in your own financial safety net.

Because that was not something that I had, and so I needed to build that for myself before I could put on your oxygen mask before helping children or whatever.

Leeson Yeah, dude, I want to talk about this in related to creative competence and risk aversion.

want to talk about you switching from an individual contributor as an engineer to a manager.

So I always enjoyed the act of engineering.

But I had in the back of my head that there were other ways for me to contribute, to use more of my full skill set.

Because I also had this background in college.

I like breaking down the problems, and I like the people aspect of the technical roles.

And it wasn't that I felt better suited to that than anyone else, but it was more that I noticed that it was rare that I cared about that stuff, that that stuff excited me as much as the technical problems.

In my career, and in my life, I think about the rare combinations of skills that I have, rather than the absolute value of those abilities.

And I'm like, well, if I can take this technical ability and I can also spend a lot of time talking to people and thinking about larger picture stuff and also career development and stuff like that.

All that combined with the fact that I had a really good manager at Yelp, who was an inspiration for what, and an example of what a good management could do for a team.

And I was like, wow, it would be neat to walk in that person's footsteps or to try to model myself after that.

Well, I think it's 1 of these things where you're studying it in school or on the side, CS, and you think, man, this is fun, but I don't want to completely live in the console.

And I very much felt like that doing hackathons and stuff on the side.

In college, I lived that lifestyle, that sort of archetypal, What's the kind word to use?

I had my hood up, I was in my terminal, I used the cool Linux distributions or whatever.

I didn't quite switch to Dvorak as my keyboard, but I judged people who were using Macs, which was like the loopiest 1.

But yeah, I lived that life a little bit, and I just felt that I could combine more...

Well, all of that's to say that I knew that I eventually wanted to try it out.

But then the opportunity presented itself and it was at Patreon where I had already been there for almost 2 years.

And I had a lot of trust and a lot of support from the people around me and in a pure circle of other people in management.

So it felt like the right environment to try it.

And then I did it for almost a year, but leaving The tech industry was not a function of not enjoying that role or not thinking.

I think that if I were to rejoin the tech industry now, I don't know whether or not I would go for a leadership role or an IC role.

But I know that I definitely had more fuel in me for keeping going with management.

Do you think the management experience has made you a better individual contributor?

Because now my understanding is it's just you, right?

Has it improved your goal setting, your efficiency, any of that kind of stuff?

I think a lot about process, and I think that thinking about process and operating efficiency is a super valuable skill set to learn.

That was another attractive thing about management.

It would be cool to learn the types of things that would make me a good manager, whether or not I use them as a manager in my career, or I use them wherever I go next, or with whatever I do next.

I think I value my time a lot more than I would have.

I'm more likely to spend money to solve a problem as a business expense than I am to do it myself, even if the part of me that grew up poor and doesn't like spending money is thinking,

I'm better at arranging the pieces to go, no, no, no, this is the right way to.

Leeson Yeah, well that's also a dangerous trap where you think, I can do it better than anyone else, therefore I have to do this incredibly time-intensive process.

Lewis That's another thing that's super valuable about management, is giving away and trust, Not being the person to actually write the code in a lot of situations is a super valuable exercise because you have to delegate and you have to trust, and you have to know that you're, yeah, the whole thing doesn't rest on you, I think that that's like a useful skill for anybody to have.

Yeah, no, I'm not much a fan for business books, but there's 1 called the e-myth.

It's 1 of, in my opinion, the few good ones.

It could be summarized in a couple pages.

But basically it's like most people who are, say, like an engineer, want to go out and do their own thing because they're like, oh man, I won't have to deal with the bullshit of the company life, et cetera, et cetera.

And in doing so, they don't really realize that running your own business is mostly not writing code.

And the big takeaway is you need to spend more time working on your business, not in your business.

And that's what you learn when you start managing people.

Then you can abstract it and you can get better at that.

Walker, Ph.D.: Yeah, I think that's honestly what I go through a lot now with YouTube is that a lot of the time I'm spending on anything is not necessarily on creating content.

It's on essentially management tasks, and not the IC work.

And I do draw a lot of parallels between making videos and software engineering, because to me it all scratches the same itch of just making something, bringing something into existence.

My Adobe Premiere setup feels a lot like my Vim setup where I've got JKL or whatever to move things around.

Was it just like, oh, okay, I can monetize my channel to a certain amount, I can make the jump?

Or was there a particular moment that made you want to fully break from Patreon?

So I've mentioned before that I'm a very risk-averse person.

So it took me a while to think of doing YouTube stuff full-time as a clean break.

I think I had a bunch of contingency plans in my head of, well, maybe I'll work part-time, or maybe I'll do this, or maybe I'll do that.

And it took a while to say, no, I need to do this clean break thing because otherwise I'm never going to grow.

It's possible that I don't even invest as much as I can in this creative endeavor because I am afraid, I'm trying to hold on to 2 things.

There wasn't necessarily a threshold that I necessarily hit.

It was more that I had spent about a year at that point juggling both.

In some ways, I'm amazed that I was able to do my regular job and also YouTube because I would wake up at 6 a.m.

The benefit of the tech industry is that you could go into work at 10 or even 11 and it's not like weird.

And so I would try to use that to my advantage.

So I would wake up like hyper early and then like kind of

So even though it's my only job now doing YouTube stuff, I can't harness that energy.

Because the point that I was getting at with that is I hit a breaking point where I was like, this is no longer sustainable.

Because it's like I don't see my friends or anything like that.

Because the other part of that was I was also working weekends.

And while still just trying to figure out, like a lot of my YouTube stuff is like trying to figure things out, like with what I want to even make, rather than making stuff sometimes.

So I would just spend a lot of time researching stuff or in empty Word documents.

It's just like never feeling satisfied with your output is a really dangerous.

So was there any 1 particular moment where you're just underwater on everything and it just broke?

Yeah, I think there was this time towards the end of last year where when I started managing, I kind of made an agreement with myself not to do any IC work, because I thought that was going to help me transition better.

I was just doing a lot more coaching and stuff, because the benefit of switching into management at a company that I'd already been in IC at is I had a lot of context on stuff.

So I was able to use that to not actually have to write the code myself.

Then there was a period towards the end of the year where we had switched into doing work that required a lot of back-end expertise and our team load out didn't have people who had that background at the company.

A lot of people who were willing to learn, which was amazing, but what we needed was a back-end tech lead, and that was a role that I've held before.

It all takes time, so I also started doing IC work again.

And when I was doing IC work and management work and making videos, I was like, I can't keep doing this.

And so then, what also happened, at the same time was that YouTube started blowing up.

And my YouTube had gone from a thing that I could just take a month off if I really needed to, to something where I had like 300,000 or 400,000 subscribers.

Not overnight, but over a month, basically.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Software Engineer Turned Youtuber - Jarvis Johnson