In part two of the nGen story, Gene and Carl talk about the shift from Flash to Web Standards, the collaborative nature of a young industry, finding your people, and the birth of Happy Webbies.
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Gene: Last episode, we started digging into the history of nGen.
Carl: Yeah. Thanks to Hans [inaudible 00:02:04].
Gene: Specifically. Hans is a great guy. Never met him.
Carl: No. And he's going to punch you. He's a pacifist, but he makes exceptions.
Gene: Oh, that's the best kind of pacifist. We covered the start, where you were before mentally and the build up. I want to talk about your experience through running nGen.
Carl: Right.
Gene: We've been in business probably, I think you've been in business longer than I have for yourself potentially. I'm not sure. It doesn't matter. We're not measuring things here today.
Carl: You're going to want to watch the video for this one. Okay. Where's the zoom?
Gene: If it's anything like my experience, at the end, it is not the same company as the beginning.
Carl: Oh no. We were-
Gene: Definitely four or five steps in there where you're different companies.
Carl: I would say there were, I haven't looked at it in a while, but I would say there were six, maybe seven different seasons of nGen, like different flavors. Right?
Gene: Ooh. I like it that way. That's a good way to put it.
Carl: Yeah. I mean, and I think when you look at these transitions, you don't notice them at first or you fight them. I think you need to kind of go with it because your customers are going to show you who they want you to be. I remember, this is another thing, I was mentioning Melanie in that earlier episode. She would say a couple of things that always like, to this day, they matter to me. One would be as soon as the client's happy, the work begins, because she always wanted things to be better than the client wanted them to be.
Carl: If the client approved something, she'd be "Okay, we need to work on the way that this looks. This copy could be tightened up a little bit." It'd be like she would always want to make it better. She didn't ever want to get to this point where it was just like, "Well, the client's happy. Let's just go." It was always, there was an internal approval process that never had to go back through legal or anything like that. It was the kind of thing that if you were a crafts person, you were going to see that that detail was put in. If you were just a off the street person, you were going to be like, "Oh, that's really cool." Right? Because that was how we're were going to find new talent. That was how we were going to, all these people who appreciated the quality we put into the work.
Carl: That was one of the things that we always were going to take with us. I've totally forgotten the other one. It's going to come back though.
Gene: It was super important. It dictated your life.
Carl: It dictated my life and I can't remember now because you're making that face. See how I made it your fault?
Gene: It's okay. I'm used to it.
Carl: It's totally killing me now. Anyway, so when we first started ... Well, and then it was, Guy Kawasaki in his book, The Art of the Start, he says, "Don't write a business plan for the first six months of your company, because you don't know what it is you do. You don't know what it is people are going to pay you for."
Gene: Absolutely.
Carl: If you write this thing and think this is it, you're going to lock yourself in and you may fail for no reason. Anyway, so we start, we are a Flash shop. Right? Because flash was the hotness.
Gene: What year was that?
Carl: 2003.
Gene: Okay. 2003.
Carl: We are building entertainment sites for bars. We're doing trade show animations for big corporate. We started, the very first thing we ever released was our announcement video, announcement flashcard, which basically was us in this souped up mach one Mustang. Well, not us, but just going down the street, destroying every other car that we saw. Right? It was just like we were in this race, it was called The Race. It was original soundtrack. We had a band that we were really friendly with that got in the studio to record it. It was all original illustration, original writing, everything.
Gene: Wow.
Carl: We put that out there to kind of get excitement. We did, the problem was we couldn't have afforded to hire us to put that card out there.
Gene: Right.
Carl: It took us like five weeks. When you go back and look at everything, there's just, we set this expectation and then we would do these animated cards for every holiday. We really got well known for them, but then nobody could afford us. Right? It became this thing, even our website, which you look at now, if you could, the way back machine, it's really hard to use. Right? It was really hard to use, but it was super cool.
Gene: They all were in 2003.
Carl: If you wanted something super cool that was hard to use, we were your guys. But then we get to that next season. We basically were organized chaos. That was our brand. From the outside, it looked like we were just rock stars in the design world, on the inside if you ever came in, we were busting butt trying to figure out how to maintain this illusion.
Gene: Right. Like that duck metaphor where you see the duck just going, but under the water, it's like, "Oh shit."
Carl: Yeah, exactly. Right. Also, I would always say, we've got this illusion. We got to work hard to maintain it while we get good enough to actually create everything people think we can do. You know?
Gene: Right, right.
Carl: It's like, and that was the inside was not freaking out, but just like going and still working. We were so excited. We had this window that there were about 35,000 cars would go by our office every day. We put messages in the window. Right? This was a big thing that we would do. The very first one just said had hello and it was like a tribute to Apple. When Lost was really big, it would be "Not Penny's boat." When Heroes it was, "Save the cheerleader, save the world." We would just put these things in there. Then one day we put in "This window has performed an illegal action. It must be shut down now." Right? As a joke, a Windows joke.
Gene: Right.
Carl: The lawyers who worked a couple of blocks down came in and said, "What's going on? We'll help you guys." We were like, "Oh God, no, no, it was a joke."
Gene: Bro, it's okay.
Carl: It was a joke. But yeah, but so people got to know us from those. We ended up building this reputation for just being irreverent and having fun and doing all these things. We get to this point where we needed some support, all of our biz dev was basically stuffing envelopes on a Friday. I was a contrarian. I wanted to find new clients by sending traditional physical mail, just a letter that just said, "Hey, we do this stuff. This is who we do it for. If you ever need this stuff, call us." Right? Initially it was, we were just looking for companies of a certain size that seemed to go through growth. We'd use the Dunn and Bradstreet stuff.
Gene: Right.
Carl: And then we would just, we would send out, like we would print out, lick, stamp, all that crap, a few hundred every Friday and drop them while we're drinking, playing video games. It was, nGen Friday started as us doing biz dev. Then once business just started coming in on its own, it became just a party where everybody would come over to our place on Friday to play Rock Band and drink and do whatever. Then, we realized we're priced out of the market. Once we raised our rates, Jacksonville couldn't afford us. I looked to see where does Southwest Airlines fly? Because we can afford a round trip on Southwest.
Carl: We end up starting to do the same thing, but sending it to people in Miami, in Baltimore, in Chicago. I said, "I want us to look like the low cost alternative to their local market, but with the same quality." And we start getting clients, we landed a Bayer Pharmaceutical client in Miami. We landed The Brick Companies, which is a big real estate company in Baltimore. We started working with these really big clients. At that time, we didn't have interns. We didn't have anything like that. Travis [inaudible 00:10:23] who was this still in college or just out of college guy wanted to be at nGen because he heard about how we worked. We were kind of, if you wanted to be an interactive in Jacksonville, we were it.
Carl: They created a new category of the Ady Awards which was interactive. It didn't exist before. We won best to show broadcast one year, the first year we entered and pissed off all the big agencies.
Gene: I bet. Yeah.
Carl: They were like, "You gave it to those four guys who did something on their lunch hour?" That's what somebody actually said.
Gene: You're like, "That shit took us weeks."
Carl: Yeah. It took a long time.
Gene: Yeah. A lot longer than your video shit.
Carl: Then, the next year there was an interactive award, we won it. The next year, there was best of show interactive, we won it. Right? I said, "We'll keep entering this until we don't win best of show interactive and then our job is done because everybody's upped their game." Right? We end up going to South By, all that kind of stuff. The point being, once we started getting that good, we were priced out of the market, we had to do stuff. Travis comes in and he had taught himself standards, like web standards. He shows up and we had a thing where everybody pitched, everybody worked design on every event, on every project. Basically, we had three designers. We Verick, we had Travis, and we had Stockton. I was the only non-designer of the four. They would put together their top two or three ideas for whatever the project was. It would go up on the wall and everybody got three votes of what they thought the best three were. Each designer would pitch their ideas to the rest of us, the other three, and then whoever won would basically pitch to the client.
Carl: That was part of our new biz thing. I would be like, "Look, everybody here is going to work on your project. If you go anywhere else, they're going to slam like six folders down on somebody's desk and say, 'I need this by the end of the week'." Right? With us, people are going to put it up on the wall and we are going to fight internally over what's the best thing for you and then they're going to come off the wall. Anybody who doesn't come off the wall, anybody whose work is still up there, they basically have to clean the place. They have to do all of the other work because they didn't win your project. Everybody wants to come off the wall.
Gene: You try really hard.
Carl: And what would happen is Verick would come off the wall twice and then Bruce or Stockton would come off the wall. That's the way it worked. Travis comes in. He's standards oriented. He taught him self standards to challenge himself. He's amazing. Right? He comes in, we didn't know he was a good designer. He starts beating Verick a couple of times. It's like this thing where you're going, "Oh, okay, the kid is hot tonight." Right? Travis comes on board. We had another rule that if anybody was with the company, I talked about rules in that first episode. If anybody was with the company for two years, they either get offered ownership or they're fired. Once you hit two years, and this gets to kind of that thing Melanie had about always making things better.
Carl: I took that to the team as well. It's like, if somebody's been with you for two years and they're fine and it's working and whatever, well, if they're not moving up enough that you would, after two years, say this person deserves more and we all know it's hard for the upper mobility, then maybe they aren't the right person. Right? Travis was definitely somebody who deserved that more. Right? We started rebuilding. This goes to that second phase of who nGen was. We were a standards shop.
Gene: Well, don't go over that too quick because that's a big jump. I mean, how does that work from ... I started my company like right there. Right? I worked in the industry, all the flash and shit. Then, it's like standards and stuff. That's kind of when our entry. How does that culturally work going for him a Flash shop to a standards shop? Because that's night and day when it comes to web design.
Carl: Oh yeah.
Gene: How did Verick do, I mean, you got Travis introducing this stuff and that's a different design aesthetic too. You know?
Carl: Yeah. No. I mean, Verick was great. It didn't matter the medium.
Gene: Well, he's just dripping talent, man.
Carl: He is.
Gene: I mean, we did an event in Jacksonville and the dude sat stage left and just did a live drawing of the, the dude-
Carl: Yeah. The live sketch.
Gene: Whoever was giving the talk, he sketched them and their ideas live.
Carl: It's amazing. He used to do that at South By. They would put a huge canvas in front of the stage and Gary V would be talking and there's Verick in a beanie and barefoot, like going crazy.
Gene: [inaudible 00:15:00].
Carl: Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. I think maybe we still had some Flash sites. We probably still did some of our own cards, but for the most part we went-
Gene: Right. It doesn't happen unless you're some kind of hardcore standards evangelist freak.
Carl: That's true. One thing we did was we found our five clients we built Flash sites for who were probably suffering as a result because of the inability for search to find them.
Gene: Right, right, right. Right.
Carl: One was a company, for example, called Villa Vita, which was an Italian furniture store, a one off, not a chain. This woman would go to Italy where her family was from and find the most amazing furniture and bring it back. Obviously, she had put a lot of work into it. It was crazy expensive. We built a flash site to promote it. Well, we contacted her and we said, "Hey, the web's changing. What we built for you doesn't work. We want to rebuild it at no cost, because as we change, we also need a portfolio of this work to show people that we know what we're doing." And told her, for the first time for us, we understand the way we build is more important than what actually gets shown in order to get people to you. Now, once they get there, obviously the way it looks, the way it feels, all that stuff.
Gene: Right.
Carl: I started reading Jacob Nielsen. I start reading, I'd already read Steve Krug when I was back, or Krug, when I was back at the agency. We start really focusing on usability and standards. Start as a Flash shop, get a lot of notoriety, now rip the bandaid off and we're going to be a standards shop. At the same time, we had decided that the Ady Awards weren't a thing for us anymore. We find South By Southwest. We were like, there's got to be a place. We actually took the money we would've put into the Ady Awards, which was always around 15 grand. Because I always told, you enter the categories nobody's in, you win those. Right? Then you also make sure that you spend enough money that they want you to come back, because those are the things that tip it.
Carl: If you're in award shows, I'm sorry, but this is the way that a lot of that stuff works. We deserved when we won. We deserved when we lost, but it does give you that little push. The more you spend, they want you to come back. We took that money and Bruce and I went off to How to see what How Design was and Verick and Travis went off South By. This is another part of that second season where now Travis and Verick are contacting us saying, "We're shooting pool with Molly [Holshwag 00:17:38]." And I'm like, "What?" They're like, "Yeah. We just met Jeffery [Zellman 00:17:42]." Now, these are people whose books are on our bookshelf.
Gene: Right.
Carl: Right? Meanwhile, Bruce and I are at How, and we're hanging out with Kelly [inaudible 00:17:49] and Dave Fletcher from The Mechanism and other people, but these were already friends. We're hanging out with friends. We're not meeting new people. I don't think it was us. I mean, we were definitely, I mean, Bruce is a little more introverted, but we were definitely out there meeting people and stuff. They were just print people. They weren't really interactive. Whereas South By had the interactive track. We were like, "Okay, South By is our jam. That's what we're doing. We need something else."
Carl: Then Travis actually came up with the idea, well, the idea I guess was a collective, but Travis didn't want to do the window anymore because, well, one time he did actually have to go to the hospital because with a Exacto blade he sliced himself, his finger while he was putting the stuff up and we're like, "We don't have insurance, what's happening?" I didn't say "Travis, are you okay?" I said, "We don't have insurance." We took him to hospital. He's fine. Then I had been in Vegas for an event, I was speaking, I was starting to speak more. I came back with all those pissy bunny magnets.
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: It was a cute little bunny and the saying would be like, "You're ugly and that makes me sad." It's like things like that. Then we started looking at the bookshelf to see who the people were. We started looking at the pissy bunny things and we came up with this idea of happy webbies.
Gene: Well I want to hear about the Happy Webbies but I want to make sure we cover some of this because I don't want to do the same thing where we just assume everybody knows things.
Carl: Thanks.
Gene: Let's talk about that little bit because we forget how kind of violent it was when we went from Flash to no Flash. I mean like, Apple was like, "Nope." They turned that shit off in Safari. Macromedia flipped. I mean that stuff kind of happened really fast. It was within under a year you had to like sort of go, "Oh shit. What are web standards?" And it exploded.
Carl: You go back to the mid-90s and Authorware was Macromedia's big product. Right? I don't know the exact years. Then Authorware still exists, but kind of becomes Director.
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: Now you've got database driven design. You've got all these things.
Gene: We're like, do we make CDs? What the hell do we make then?
Carl: It's kind of, yeah, imagine Squarespace, but for software development.
Gene: Right.
Carl: Because that's kind of what Director was like, "Oh, I can do all these things. I can make an online catalog." But it's on a disc, it's not online. Right? Then Adobe acquires Macromedia. Right? Now it's Adobe Flash. I went on the, I went talking at Adobe Flash, which was a conference. Right? Because we were Flash people and all this stuff. Yeah. Then that becomes a thing where, because Google has overtaken Alta Vista.
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: Oh my God.
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: And so now flash is seen as the worst possible thing you could do. It is seen almost as a side gig. It might be fine for bands or it might be fine for a bar.
Gene: I mean like literally within months it was like, you're not a legitimate web developer.
Carl: Yeah.
Gene: If you're building Flash stuff. It was sort of like you're from the marketing shop world.
Carl: Yeah.
Gene: We don't dig you anymore.
Carl: Add this to it. I'm sure somebody listening can correct me if I've got the timing off a little bit. At the same time, Adobe releases a new version of Flash.
Gene: Oh yeah.
Carl: And they changed a ton of stuff.
Gene: Yeah. All the scripting was different. You're like, "Whoa."
Carl: Yeah. The scripting was different. The timeline was different. The way that objects interacted with each other was different. I wasn't a Flash person, but I listened to it. I heard what was going on. At the same time the world is saying, "We don't like it." It's saying, "And we're going to make it different." And so maybe a lot of people [inaudible 00:21:28]. Without Travis, we don't make that change.
Gene: Right. Okay. [crosstalk 00:21:32]-
Carl: Because he was-
Gene: Because at that point in time, it comes down to individuals inside your organization.
Carl: Yeah.
Gene: To make that shit happen.
Carl: That's right.
Gene: And it comes down to individuals not only making that shit happen, but being smart enough to sort of read the tea leaves before that stuff starts going down.
Carl: Well, and he was, Travis was the one who was reading all the blogs, who was doing all that stuff, who knew all that stuff.
Gene: God, remember when we used to keep blogs about stuff and share information?
Carl: Yeah. It was one of those things. Bloggers became speakers, became podcasters, became all the things and they're all still out there.
Gene: All those guys, like Snook.
Carl: Yeah. Yeah. I saw Snook two weeks ago.
Gene: And the ladies too who created, literally created the stuff we're relying on now.
Carl: Yeah. Amazing, you go back-
Gene: I just want to make sure we touched on that because-
Carl: Yeah.
Gene: I know there are people that are, they're starting their companies now in the past couple years that did not, they weren't around doing work during that time.
Carl: No.
Gene: It's hard to understand.
Carl: Animation got labeled as the bad thing when reality HTML5 comes along-
Gene: [crosstalk 00:22:38].
Carl: Animation. Yeah. You're like going, "Oh, so animation's not the bad thing."
Gene: Yeah. Yeah.
Carl: Because usability world, it was like, "Well, if this is moving over here, it's distracting me from accomplishing my goal." Now animation is back, but it's not always the best. Right? I think both sides were kind of right on that.
Gene: Yep. Just so you know, folks, that's not the last time this happened [inaudible 00:22:57]. We'll get into that.
Carl: We're always like, and we were always like, "You know what? There's going to be another wave. Let's just make sure we catch the next wave." Is it mobile first? Is it content is king? Whatever it might be, there's always something new that's going to be happening. We just, at one of our events, we had biz dev first, BDF is a BFG. BDA is a BFG.
Gene: You're creating things, man.
Carl: I know it's crazy. Yeah. Then we go into standards, at the same time we have that incident with the window. I had come back from Vegas with those bunny things. The pissy bunnies. Verick starts doing things just of us. Like he had one of my wife Kat and it said, "Did you hear what happened on Lost last night?" Because she was way into Lost. There was one with Travis and it said something like "Grids are good." Right? It was just these little things.
Carl: Then we were sitting around on Monday. We always had a Monday meeting where it was basically the commitment meeting. We would put everything that needed to out on the table and people would say, "Well, I can take care of that. Okay. Well I'll take care of that." Everybody was grabbing whatever they were going to manage. We started talking about the window and then we started talking about the different things and somehow I still don't know the origin. I'll have to go back and look, I know it wasn't me, but it was one of the other guys. We came up with this idea, Happy Webbies. We said, "Hey, why don't we something of Jeffrey Zellman? Why don't we create something of Kelly [inaudible 00:24:29]? Why don't we create something of these people who influenced us and see if they notice." Right?
Gene: Right.
Carl: We create it and we put it out there and Andy Budd was one of the early ones, Jeremy Keith. We had a Brit Pack. Right?
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: Yeah. We go out there and we do it. We had a Jacob Nielsen one which said "Your site's not usable. That pisses me off." Or something. Right? Whatever. I can't remember them. But yeah. It was one of these things that we do and suddenly we're in the cool kids club. That was another one of those where it's like, we really need to get good at this stuff fast because somebody's going to realize the emperor has no clothes. Right? Yeah. We create that marketing campaign for us. That's the other thing-
Gene: Where were you at then with employees? How many employees did you have?
Carl: Still just the, it was five of us. Well, no-
Gene: [crosstalk 00:25:29] important? Five or six.
Carl: At that time, it was four.
Gene: Okay.
Carl: We lost somebody due to the three strike rule.
Gene: Okay. Okay.
Carl: That's a whole nother thing. At that time, Travis had joined and didn't take that spot. We just changed. Also not being a Flash shop, it was having a hardcore Flash person. But it was the rules that had, I don't want to talk about it because he's friend and it's like, I don't want to go there.
Gene: Sure.
Carl: Yeah. I just talked to him and I'm like [inaudible 00:25:58].
Gene: It's okay. We get it. You have a good [inaudible 00:26:02].
Carl: Yeah. We became a standards shop and that was a big deal.
Gene: It is a big deal.
Carl: I would say that was kind of our second season was being a standards shop. We also, accessibility was a huge thing for us, 508 compliance, which isn't really compliance.
Gene: I think it's important to point out, at that time, like you're saying it's a second season, but it was legitimately a second season for the industry too.
Carl: Yeah.
Gene: Because that earlier flash environment was primarily agencies. Right? That's a competitive environment, versus the web standards environment, which the people working in the web standards environment were not so competitive.
Carl: No, they were collaborative.
Gene: A lot more collaborative. We wrote blog posts. We gave shit away for free.
Carl: Yep.
Gene: We would meet in person and share stories and drink beer together, and become friends. You'd be friends with somebody across, working in England doing some cool shit. You'd be over here, wherever you were and you'd be talking, and it was a cool time.
Carl: That's such a huge thing to mention, Gene, because I remember working at the advertising agency. I would know people at other agencies because I would meet them or they may have come through but we never talked about what was going on.
Gene: Much less sharing.
Carl: It was a bubble. It was almost like you had to, you had to clock out all knowledge of what was working when you left, whereas I remember when we first started nGen, I heard from some people at other shops that were just like "Welcome to the outside." But then you're right. We start talking with people. I remember when Andy Bud called the office and this was a big deal. I mean, we were, again-
Gene: Oh yeah.
Carl: Four guys in Jacksonville, just trying to figure out the best way to build stuff. We get this call and I can't remember what his was, but it did have the word wankers in it.
Gene: I'm sure it did.
Carl: It was something like "Your code's wrong, you wankers." Or something. Right? It was something like that.
Gene: But that was the thing. It was the craft. It was this communal, industry-wide care of making sure it was right. We were going to put it down in the books is this is the right way.
Carl: You need to be able to eat off the code. Right?
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: That was the kind of thing. Andy called because he didn't want the word 'wankers' in his Happy Webby because he said, "I got a kid." It was like, "Okay." And then I realized, I was like, "This thing really matters to people."
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: Then we started asking, people started asking [inaudible 00:28:45] ... But the next time we go to South By, we take T-shirts of the Happy Webbies to give away, to just give away. Then suddenly we see people wearing our stuff and I mean, it was crazy. To your point, that restricted to collaborative move, that was everything to me to be able to suddenly be a part of a bigger community that we had never had before. I mean, we started building that in Jacks with nGen Fridays where people from competitive shops, agencies or web oriented would come over and just hang out, which also is great for biz dev, all those things. Yeah, so that second season we were really standards. I mean, that was it. Yeah.
Gene: It's a great time. It was a great time. That's kind of, not long after that's when I met you, but that's a great time in the industry for me too, just to think back of the collaborative nature of it. We're getting away from that now.
Carl: Yeah.
Gene: You're doing some great things with the bureau.
Carl: Thanks.
Gene: I don't even want to use the term agency because I'm too triggered from the past, but like-
Carl: We are. We are.
Gene: This firm, this group of individuals building things on the web. It's a great thing you're doing because you're from this time and you're bringing it to everybody.
Carl: I'm a time traveler from the past.
Gene: Yeah. A little bit.
Carl: I come to you to build this community.
Gene: It's a good thing. A lot of people don't know it because they didn't experience it. It was beautiful. I would say it's sort of like the Renaissance of the web in a lot of ways.
Carl: Yeah. In a lot of ways.
Gene: Predates the iPhone.
Carl: Yeah.
Gene: That's some really good work.
Carl: That becomes the next phase. I know that we're coming up on time here, but yeah, that move to mobile, when mobile becomes a thing.
Gene: It's like we've done this before.
Carl: Oh my God.
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: That changed it again.
Gene: Let's do that. We're in another 30 minutes here. Let's do that. I want to make sure we get all these details because I think there's some really good stuff here.
Carl: Yeah.
Gene: We're not like pointing it out like so obviously, but spend some time on these because there's some really good stuff here in terms of learning from yourself and building because it's like we said at the other one, if you've been doing this for any amount of time, you are not the same person. You're not the same company that you are now than when you started it.
Carl: Yeah.
Gene: It's like a marriage man. You're not the same people five years later and you've got to be able to change.
Carl: I couldn't agree more. I'm going to leave a hot take for this one.
Gene: Boom.
Carl: You know what? As we talk about these different seasons, which there were six or seven with nGen, don't ever fall in love with what it is you're doing right now. Love it and enjoy it when you're in the moment but don't do it to a point where you're resisting other things that are happening, where change is happening. I'll tell you the perfect example of the way the web develops. In the late 90s, if you didn't put "Click here." People didn't know they could.
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: In the mid 2000s, if you put "Click here." It was bad because screen readers were going to not be able to communicate to their people what they were going to see. There's this evolution that's going to happen and it's really exciting to ride the wave. Don't just lock in on one thing if you want to be at the forefront of the web.
Gene: That's key. All right, man. Woo.
Carl: Bye, Gene.
