Hello Everyone!

The Summer Solstice is less than a week away, and I hope your summer is in full swing. The end of the school marks the beginning of day camp and lots of children’s activities.

With that aside, great conversations don’t abate such as the one I had with WorkReduce Founder & CEO, Brian Dolan. WorkReduce connects flexible talent to the nation’s leading agencies and brands — they recruit, train and manage the talent — and then work with these firms to onboard the talent depending on their needs. As a focus of its distributed work model, WorkReduce is able to source talent from underrepresented areas across the US.

A recurring theme throughout my conversations with these leaders is that what they’re doing now is an amalgamation of all the experiences and knowledge they’ve accumulated over time. Where they are now may or may not have been what they envisioned but they are better because, not despite, it. Brian is no exception; started his career as a developer and then parlayed that experience into product management and then into sales (gasp!) All of which gave him the ingredients to be a startup founder.

What also is evident is Brian’s insistence on, not only sourcing amazing talent from underrepresented areas of the country, making giving back a part of the WorkReduce culture manifesting through their work with Donorschoose.org. Education is one of Brian’s passion-points and giving schools around the country the ability to provide for their students makes the effort worth it in spades.

“So understanding that we’re having that kind of impact on a lot of people and how I feel about education, like Donors Choose has been a really natural fit for us. And so we’re funneling a bunch of profit into there when we began.” - Brian Dolan, WorkReduce, CEO & Founder

Considering all the talk and consternation around generative Ai, more specifically ChatGPT, I had to ask Brian what he thought was the necessary skill or skills for talent to stand out in today’s world. You might be surprised with his answer.

“I think everyone needs to be proficient with basic coding techniques. And I think this is still true in the era of ChatGPT. Because I think what we see with the large language models is that they’ll write 90% of the code and it’s going to make you hyper-efficient, but you’ve got to know how it’s, you still have to know how it works because you’re going to be debugging it.”

Click to watch the whole conversation on Youtube

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit worthyforthirty.substack.com