Ulf Schwekendiek, Founder & CEO at Centered.app

Ulf started Centered app. Before that he did tons of other things. Mostly he was involved with being part of or starting start-ups.

It is a great story of an App developer growing way beyond his/her initial technical roots.

Centered offers Flow Music & automated Productivity Coaching, Mono-Tasking, Do-Not-Disturb on Mac, Notification Blocking, Distraction Nudges and an elegant Task Management Dashboard. Also, give Centered app a try. You might really like it.

More info on Centered.app <- Promo code with free month of premium access, if their product asks for a promo code, enter APPFORCE1. 

(No, this is not a sponsored episode, I am not receiving any kickback on premium sign-ups, I just really dig the tool Centered is creating.)

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Transcript

Jeroen Leenarts: 0:45

Hi, and welcome to another special edition of my podcast. I'm sitting here with oof, Shrek under data set.

Ulf Schwekendiek: 0:52

That was the perfect pronunciation.

Jeroen Leenarts: 0:55

Cool. I really like to nail the names of my guests, especially if they're like, not distinctly English. So you're from Germany, right?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 1:03

I'm originally from Germany. But it's quite interesting to live for so long in the United States and come back to Germany and have an accent in both languages. Now, it's, you know, I feel like a mud between worlds.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:17

Can you imagine? If you, if you look at you as a software developer, and now actually, company owner, can you tell us a little bit about your story, how you got started in software development, some of the headlines, that you have stuff that you worked on?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 1:34

Yeah, it's, it's super, it was, it's kind of boring, and super stereotypical, but I'll share it with you anyways. I loved programming from a really, really early age. In fact, I got my like C 64, with like, the HF six and got to actually build a little game launcher in like, basic back then, and started building games at like, the age of like, 11 ish, and like, Visual Basic, and, you know, I'm a child of the 80s. So, in that type of time, grew up with, you know, still listening to, you know, the like, computer chaos club podcast, while podcasts and radio shows back then, and live streaming like, code over the radio waves on near data set and whatnot. It was it was really fun. I always struggled with overall general education always wanted to do programming. So I'm actually a high school dropout, somehow ended up with a bachelor and two master's degrees in engineering and UX before I started, you know, really falling in love with, with mobile development. So, so I built a bunch of like fun early games that that made it quite high in the early days of Apple, then ended up being one of the first mobile developers at Siri. Before Apple, yes, Siri was an app before it was part of iOS for for your listeners who don't know that, like fact, it was an app that it was a separate company that came out of Sri. And, and it was pretty much what it's doing right now. But as a standalone app, it was a very exciting time to see this come through into you know, acquisition, integrating it into iOS, like finally feeling how it is to work at Apple, super exciting times. But to realize that I'm a startup person, and I just love to be in small companies and left to start handful of really interesting fun mobile businesses and eventually, you know, desktop businesses like the ones we're in right now.

Jeroen Leenarts: 3:53

There's one thing that you mentioned there, that's, you're actually the first person who was able to confess that they are aware of this thing in computer history. Because I distinctly remember that my dad, he used to record radio shows in the middle of the night and then play back those recordings in our set. expectrum. And yes, you just told that you were doing the same for a combine with

Ulf Schwekendiek: 4:15

doing this same thing on my lovely data set and getting like a little demo out and just see something flashed on your screen after listening to like, beep sent and squeaks like for, you know, for like two hours straight. And you hope that the quality of your recording was good enough that it's not, you know, it's still playing back.

Jeroen Leenarts: 4:36

Yeah, that was, but you're the first person who actually mentioned this out of their own accord, which is really nice. So yeah, you you got started in software development, because that was your passion from an early age. And you mentioned that you got started with mobile development right at the beginning. So we're talking about iOS three. I think I'm if I'm correct. That's like the first open SDK that Apple provided, I

Ulf Schwekendiek: 5:02

believe, so. It's been what, like, 14 years? 13? You tell me? Yeah, it's quite a while because we still had to do memory management off our own back then. Yes, it was a lot of fun. No, it was.

Jeroen Leenarts: 5:17

In a weird way,

Ulf Schwekendiek: 5:19

in a weird, self destructive way. Why? Why you apps memory blew up half of the time and like, what the heck an auto release pool is and how they work and whatnot. Yes,

Jeroen Leenarts: 5:30

I must say that having that knowledge even nowadays with Swift and and auto reference counting, it's still very helpful.

Ulf Schwekendiek: 5:37

Absolutely. The same way why we're still teaching engineers to learn about pointers and whatnot, and you know what? malloc and Free means, yeah, that

Jeroen Leenarts: 5:47

those things can hurt you people. So be careful when you touch those. But also you were a self employed app developer in the beginning of the iOS app stores. Is that correct?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 5:59

Yes, well, self employed, I was a student during that time, and I just really enjoyed this new world of not building Symbian applications or whatnot, in a, having a completely new device that we haven't seen really before with a touch interface. It had hardware limitations, but they weren't as bad as like the, again, like Symbian or WAPP. Day. So if you remember those, and, and it was just, I saw so much potential in there, and like new interactions and whatnot. And I guess, you know, games are always the first thing to do, we build an app called snip, a game called snip with a friend of mine in school. That, that was really, really fun. It was like, a geometric puzzle game where you could cut the world into pieces, and you had to get a cat in a basket. And, and that was really, really fun to like, learn how, you know, overall iOS development worked. And then, and then I felt like I wanted to do that full time and, and sent a lovely email to the founders of Siri who, who somehow allowed me to fix the app, which was bad, which was pretty broken at that point, which is

Jeroen Leenarts: 7:16

probably due to my bad memory management. Right.

Ulf Schwekendiek: 7:18

Exactly. Actually, exactly. That another another developer, not fully understanding, you know, when to call release?

Jeroen Leenarts: 7:26

Yeah. So but is it true that like, right, at this beginning of the the app store that you could pretty much sent anything to the App Store and, and, of course, I had to do some work on it, but that it was successful.

Ulf Schwekendiek: 7:43

I think it was more successful than it is now where you really have to fight to get any attention. I think there were still some, some apps that were a lot more had a lot more potential than others. A company that a friend of mine and I started called ditto, which was also still in the very early days of, of mobile development. We built it was in the time of their social, local mobile startups. And and it was an app that allowed you to tell your friends what and where, what you're about to do next, and where you're about to go next, think about a future check in app. Which, which was very unique. And it grew quite quickly that I could have not imagined without a lot of marketing efforts this day, that would grow the same way. And so that

Jeroen Leenarts: 8:42

now also the name of the app, makes sense, because you publish what you're going to do, and then do a demo. Exactly. Okay. Now I get it for my map. I had it on my phone for a short while, but it was in this this this genre of like Foursquare, and it was like, exactly, not my thing. You know, you really had these people that were like sharing, like, pretty much like everything that we're doing everything in their life. Yeah, even the things you really don't want to know about. Exactly. Yeah. And but just to put it on the timeline, you got started after your education. So you graduated. So then you rolled into mobile development? Yes, mobile development you got started with, with the company that created Siri initially, help them get their app, not crashing. And probably you were in that company. And then Apple came by and said, this is interesting. We're gonna buy this company. And all of a sudden, you were not a Siri company employee, but you were an Apple employee. That's correct. And how big of a difference did this make for you? Because what's this company doing Siri? Where was it located in the world?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 9:51

We were we were in San Jose. So we're just down the street basically, of Apple HQ. So we weren't it wasn't far away. That's in California here in the United States. And so I always wanted to work for Apple beforehand. It was a big dream of you know, big, big Apple fan by Apple could release any product they wanted, like, I would buy it I was like the one guy in undergraduate school that you know, had a had a g4 PowerBook and ran Linux on it and whatnot and big Fanboy and then finally making it into Apple. I realized that you learn very different skill set at startups that actually sight at me a lot more than doing one specific thing I always loved, like, that's why I have like a background in design and engineering. I love designing I love building. But I also love learning how businesses work. And I love learning how to work with people. And you don't really have that option in a large company to wear all these hats whenever you feel like wearing another hat. So I love startups.

Jeroen Leenarts: 11:12

So, before we continue on this on that story, you're from Germany, but how did you end up in the United States?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 11:20

Yeah, so I did my undergraduate in Germany. And at that point, I worked throughout my undergrad I worked for Siemens, on on ATM security for for what it was, were some very, very different, like, you know, type of like engineering and world you're living in. And, and I felt drawn to words, the United States in general because of Silicon Valley, because I felt like it was a place where where it all happened, where all the like the latest and greatest new technologies came out, I couldn't really set my foot into it, it was pretty hard to get a work permit or get like a green card or any of that, in the United States. And my partner at the time, she wanted to go to grad school and study French literature. And, and I wanted to improve my English because it was really, really bad. And I want to I also want it to go to grad school. And there are not many places where you can speak English and French together in this world. And we ended actually up in Montreal, which is part of Quebec, the French speaking state Province of Canada, where there's actually quite a tech movement going on mostly in games actually. And, and I ended up going to grad school there, improve my English, like, ended up working for Ericsson research, and then Autodesk on two products, 3ds Max and Maya, which are two 3d graphics, software products and four mil see the games architecture movie industry. And, and it was actually really nice. And it was like the first stepping stone to like, get over to the United States, I ended up going to grad school again, this time to New York to NYU, to get my digital media UX degree. And that was a time where where I learned that living in New York City is very, very expensive. And I need a job and ended up working for RCA first remote, and then full time over there.

Jeroen Leenarts: 13:31

Yeah, so you were in the New York area. And then, during your time at Sierra, you moved over cross country to Silicon Valley. Yeah,

Ulf Schwekendiek: 13:38

yeah. And I felt like the moment I got here into Silicon Valley, I felt my people I felt my tribe. And besides, besides a short stint with, with my mic, with my American wife in Germany, to just see how it might be, we came back and, you know, lived our life in California. And we'll we'll stay here for good

Jeroen Leenarts: 14:00

to continue on, on your journey through your stay at Apple. And then I think ditto was the next company that you started was your time there. So how long did you work at Apple as a company, as an employee?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 14:13

The funny thing just for a couple of months, just until the time we launched su on the iPhone, and I was so it was so clear to me that I wanted to do a startup and now was the time to do that. That, you know, it's you have always these, these high hopes and expectations of you know, your dream company built like the perfect picture in your head, and then you have it and you realize that's not at all what you want it.

Jeroen Leenarts: 14:38

That's okay. off my bucket list. Okay, now, what do I do? Exactly? Yeah, just for a couple of months. So just a couple months, and then you got the idea to do the local social media thing with with data.

Ulf Schwekendiek: 14:53

Actually, my co founder, Yuri angstrom. He He is the founder. He had the idea he wanted to have a technical co founder and I loved his idea and wanted to support him and that's how we started

Jeroen Leenarts: 15:07

and and what was the what was the journey with dado because data was a company doesn't exist anymore.

Ulf Schwekendiek: 15:13

No, it does not. We, we were typical Silicon Valley venture backed company that eventually decided that we didn't grow fast enough and found a lovely home at Groupon. So we we ended up selling our company to Groupon as part of the idea of starting a new product development studio and I part of like Groupon in San Francisco It was part of a handful of other acquisitions as well that Groupon did at that point. They were already public. And, and frankly, the the most appealing part of working for Groupon was at working like early on, I like speaking to Andrew Mason, the founder, who, who was just so different than than anybody else I've ever worked with. And our our goal at Groupon was not to sell coupons or work on anything coupon related, it was about figuring out how to help brick and mortar merchants to grow their businesses. And it was like we we actually worked on an iPad based point of sale system with some really interesting, unique new technologies in there, I think of like the early days of Bluetooth Low Energy and iOS, it was quite a mess. It was very, very buggy, frankly, it still kind of is the Bluetooth stack on iOS. And we we built some interesting technologies, and patented that as well to detect presence based on Bluetooth Low Energy of people entering and exiting your store. So we could all of a sudden tell you, there's Rob who's extending a phone off your register, or like in your restaurant that sat down on table X. And you could all of a sudden charge them through their Groupon credit card assigned to it or just have a person allow them to get up from their seat and their their restaurant and walk out. And we know what we can charge them and they just see it on their phone. So you can have a really cool like a new dining experience or shopping experience. This is like the the stuff we worked at Groupon, it was super exciting.

Jeroen Leenarts: 17:35

Okay. But starting data and having an exit by being bought by Groupon, what time frame are we talking about? There was about two and a half years. So that's that's quite quick actually to create a company, build it up to such a level that it is worthwhile for another company to actually acquire it. And what was the

Ulf Schwekendiek: 17:59

product? Great team, we had a great team and and a great leader in Uri?

Jeroen Leenarts: 18:04

And was the purchase of data was that like, was Groupon interested in the the feature set of the product? Or were they more interested in the talent within the company?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 18:13

It was a talent acquisition.

Jeroen Leenarts: 18:15

Okay. And so did a cease to exist? You were working in Groupon, I think you felt like I'm back at big corporate again,

Ulf Schwekendiek: 18:25

how do you know,

Jeroen Leenarts: 18:27

from what I'm told, Groupon is a reasonably sized company. So what then happened because Groupon, I can imagine that there were contractual obligations that you needed to fulfill. And then once that was done, you could get your way out of Groupon if you'd wish. But what happened there?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 18:45

Well, the interesting part is in a great learning to, like anybody, at least for me is that no money in the world, you know, can buy you happiness. And, and no matter if you have a contractual agreement or not, if you're if you're not fulfilled with your life, you have it, you have a choice to or an option to change it. There are not many contracts in the world where you know, you actually have to be a you know, you can't have to be convicted and be in jail, and you don't have a choice anymore. But you can pretty much get out of anything you like, you just have to deal with the consequences. For for me, it was wanting to do something new, and not wanting to do a corporate grind. And I think there's a theme here in like wanting to do something great with my time and like learning more about how I can code how I can design how I can bring something to live then how to go through corporate, you know, meetings and planning and you know, how to make some shareholders a lot more money, which is exciting for other reasons. But at that time in my life in my career was the young. I was extremely excited about that back then. So I ended up I ended up leaving early, even before my contractual agreements were fully done. To work actually with the founder and CEO of Groupon together to start a new company called detour, which was a mobile tour. Mobile App mobile walking tour app. Yes. I don't know if you ever had a chance to use it.

Jeroen Leenarts: 20:38

I don't think they were active in a with content in the Netherlands but I don't

Ulf Schwekendiek: 20:43

think a Netherlands that we had Some in Spain, one in Berlin, one in the UK, one in Portugal.

Jeroen Leenarts: 20:51

So just a quick recap the detour product, what was it about?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 20:56

So the Detail Product, think of think of, you know, the, like typical things you do on your vacation where you book like a tour and you walk with a history student around in a city, and you get to hear the historic details. And that kind of fun, but there because you have nothing else to do and like a city vacation, but they're also kind of boring. Because they just, you know, rattle down the history, those people do it every day, they're not super engaged. So we wanted to build an experience of having something like a high quality podcast like yours, for instance, but having it location based. So having basically a guide in your ear that you can start the tool whenever you want with your friends perfectly in sync as well with their own headphones and their own phones that has GPS guided you go to a certain location, the quality is like a high quality podcast with a professional storyteller. That tells you for instance, like one of our like, Great Ones was Ken burns himself would walk you over the Brooklyn Bridge. And he walked over the Brooklyn Bridge with all the other tours and the all the other like walking tours, and you hear like your own very special story. And he makes you stop in the middle of the bridge, people almost run into you like they swarm around you. And he's telling you Look, all these people have no clue what they're missing. Look down right here and you see something special. And he pointed out something special about the bridge that you would see through, you know, the mesh of the ground. And you you basically get goose bumps all over you because like nobody else like notice this and you feel like Oh, I'm not a slave of like everybody else. And then you're friends and and you just look at each other, you're smiling and keep on walking when he tells you to. So that was kind of the magic of that experience. I still love that product.

Jeroen Leenarts: 22:53

So and So you started that product from initial inception with your co founder. And they had

Ulf Schwekendiek: 23:00

they had a they had an initial prototype done. And and then I came aboard.

Jeroen Leenarts: 23:05

Okay, so you were like an early part of data. And what was the what was the story of Detroit and in in a few words.

Ulf Schwekendiek: 23:16

So Detroit was in was an amazing company from from a product standpoint. Again, we, we had so many amazing tours and change lives. Turns out as a business, it was not that successful as we wanted to. And, and ended up selling the assets of it to both the headphone audio company. Yeah. And we spun out a part of that company that we kind of fell into by accident, which is now called descript, which was the tool for detour to make detours. And it was an audio text driven audio editor, where we wanted to help our content creators to make really, really quick because as you know, audio production can be very tedious and very time consuming, and and sometimes very expensive. So we wanted to figure out as part of detour early on how to make it cheaper to produce these tours. So once we learned that early on people, our producers were using it for other projects in like the audio projects that had nothing to do with tours, we learned that, oh, we actually have a real product here that can be can be sold and people would spend money on. So we sold the assets to Bose spun out that piece raised our first round of financing, and started that company. And that company is going strong, really strong right now think over 60 or 70 employees now. I'm not part of it anymore. But it's it's going phenomenal. And I love the team behind it.

Jeroen Leenarts: 25:05

So immediately we're going from from detour to D script. How long was your involvement with the scripts

Ulf Schwekendiek: 25:15

for a couple of years actually. So it was quite interesting because we started out building a native Mac application and that was described. And we learned quickly that you know, a handful of our producers wanted it to be on Windows as well. So and that was our first time we dabbled and I felt kind of dirty as you know, a mobile developer and like getting out of like Xcode and whatnot to dabble with other technologies. We actually ended up being I want to One of the most performant largest products with described that I built on web technologies using electron TypeScript react. And, and frankly, I after, after doing that for a while I, I don't want to say I love it the same way. I love mobile development. I love how quick you can iterate on on web technologies with like hot reloading and whatnot.

Jeroen Leenarts: 26:14

So you made your switch with the script from mobile technology to desktop technology. Correct. That's, that's another big important part of your current venture. Very much. So. Yeah. So and after the scripts? What was your next step, then? Because at some point, you left company? Yeah. So you had to do something else? And? Well, it turns out

Ulf Schwekendiek: 26:36

you do because you just get bored otherwise, this is enough know, like making a living and you know, supporting your family. And you know, all the typical things we need to do when we grown up.

Jeroen Leenarts: 26:48

That's true. It's got some small kids myself as well. So they are very important, of course. And yes, it is true that first thing I think about when switching careers or jobs, it's like, Okay, does this pay the bills? And can I sustain our life as a family. But descript happens? What was your next step, then looking at your story, I'd say starting out a company.

Ulf Schwekendiek: 27:12

It's so true, actually, that is what I wanted to do. That was finally and it was a tough decision. Because I loved the team, I loved my co workers, but I felt drawn into it is time to start something myself. And, and I felt like I was procrastinating on that for a while. And I felt like I needed to leave, and set myself free to come up with something new. So I did. And I could not come up with anything. It was very funny to finally having this like, Oh, I'm not I'm not employed. I'm like trying to figure out something that I want to build. And I could not come up with anything. I like wrote down some ideas. I say some markets, like obviously, we came up with ideas like we engineers, we can like come up with ideas, obviously. But none of them felt like good ideas. Well, or, or ideas that I would spend day and night over ideas that are like almost as important as my family that I can just not like that is the like last thought I have when I go to bed. And the first thought I have when I like wake up and that is the ideas that like you're calling for your own businesses are made off.

Jeroen Leenarts: 28:32

So there were no ideas that that literally grabbed you by the throat, and made you want to spend all your energy on exactly when you were working, of course,

Ulf Schwekendiek: 28:42

exactly. So So I ended up saying, Okay, if I if I'm not going to do a startup right now, I would love to have more experience in leadership. I've been I've been like a technical co founder and head of engineering at a smaller size company, but I never had to learn much, at least about how to large how to lead larger teams, and ended up getting an amazing opportunity at Postmates, which I loved, it's a food delivery company that that now sold to Uber. And is is part of Uber now. But when I was there, there were still there were still a standalone company like late stage startup. And, and I got to be in charge of the fleet team over there which is basically the careers on the ground taxation NYGH support problems, a handful of back end teams, it was the first time where I was actually not super deep and all of the technologies they use they're like a go Python back end shop. And and then obviously you had your your Kotlin Android people and and a mobile team which is the one thing I felt the most comfortable with, obviously Mr at that time, but it was the first time where I didn't get to code at all and and really fully focus on supporting my team and helping the team to grow and and be happy. And that is when finally the idea for centered struck. And and I'm sure I'm sure you and your listeners use the sentence before like of going to work early and and saying you know, I need to come here to work early. You told me before in our like little like pre brief that you have to work like very do you choose to work very late at night, because it's the quietest because you do not have any distractions. And, and that is exactly the problem I saw in like the more corporate America world of like there are these super smart, talented engineers, like you who have to somehow figure out how to be productive on their own, and how it's not really supported by like the typical, you know, work structure on how to be productive throughout the day, where you actually in most companies have to be sitting at your desk, you're spending your time with interruptions with meetings with a lot of like, useless things. And, and that bothered me a lot so that I started researching tools, methodologies to improve that type of work and came up with the idea of centered.

Jeroen Leenarts: 31:41

Yeah, and what's interesting here is that we're now at three things that you've experienced that led you to this idea of your current venture, because at some point, you were switching from mobile development to desktop type development. And then at the time that you spent with the company that was acquired by Uber, Postmates. And there you learned that software engineers, they tend to have like a challenge with but staying focused, getting into the zone, making sure that they can do their best work really, and doing

Ulf Schwekendiek: 32:17

the thing they really love doing, like we became engineers to build and not to sit in meetings and reviews and whatnot. We, we love to build and we don't get to do a lot of that in our corporate lives.

Jeroen Leenarts: 32:30

That's correct. And what's also interesting in your entire journey, is that you I don't know, for some reason you kept on starting companies and escaping big corporate life every now and then. But at this one company, you chose to actually go into a bigger company to learn something new embrace it. Yeah. And that's where you by the sounds of things you had to, you've constantly stepped away from the contributor role by moving into a more supportive role. Yeah, and actually making the change allows you to get struck by lightning, have your idea and then all of a sudden, be in your office, I think, okay. Now's the time. Now I need to get out now I need to start my my company. Yeah. Which is centered. And centered is about from what I understood from your words, it's about helping software developers getting their best work done by helping them stay focused at the times of the day that they need to be focused, according to their schedule. And but how does this work? Because centered is from what I understood, an audio app. And that's thing three, that's it, I think, in your journey important with getting to centers, because there were some companies that it's progressively more things and more complicated things with audio. And then in centered, it seems that these three things came together. So a desktop products, something with audio involved as well, and supporting software developers in getting their work done. Is that correct?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 34:00

I think I should, like, Have you have you in the room when I pitch these investors because you perfectly summarize the journey that got here. And and the key milestones that influence you know, the product that we're building, you know, very well observed. Yeah, so I love to talk about this concept of emotional software that I think, you know, suffered. Most software should not be just a tool anymore. And it should be designed with emotions in mind. And how do you because then they you can really feel with the software and experience something like that that piece and it came to me the first time when I told you about this Ken Burns moment, like looking down and getting getting goosebumps, that is to me amazing software. Can that be can that piece of the emotional design pulled over into a productivity app that are usually just super boring getting out of the way of just like it's a to do list, like who cares? And I really tried to apply this emotional design to to centered. One of the big pieces was after starting centered that I convinced my good friend, Steven Pirie, who is an old friend of mine, to join me in the journey as my co founder, who is a storyteller he he led a studio in Hollywood before he contributed to films like Independence Day and Godzilla. And he's he's purely an amazing content creator and strategic thinker. That in ways I am not. And together with him, we came up with the idea of audio As part of this of introducing you to while you work, to NOAA, our guide, it's an audio guide, similar to Siri, as a normal assistant, NOAA will look over while you work in center, look over your current applications that you use, and gently nudge you when he thinks you're getting distracted. And I'd like to recreate again that like initial goose bump moment of like, oh my God, when I code and complete a task and centered, Noah will tell me actually, I see you had a good coding session. And you get like a little bit of that, like goosebump moments were like, oh my god, somehow this application understood what I'm doing. And it's like, supporting me, instead of you know, yet another like, blocking service of just you cannot be on Facebook right now, like, we'll just Black it out or whatsoever, you just have a lovely assistant that gently reminds you that Facebook can wait or you know, your text messages can wait or crack, crack a joke about Star Wars or whatsoever to just get you reminded that, you know, you're supposed to be being focused right now. All we care about is mono tasking. To learn one thing at a time, for a certain timeframe, we follow the Pomodoro method. And really honing in on getting less distracted. Because in that way, you get all your work done, and a lot less time. And you can all of a sudden go and do your corporate meetings, or go and spend time with your children instead, instead of you know, spending hours at night trying to figure out a bug. But you know, also at the same time going on Facebook and Twitter and you feel just like oh, I can never solve this, this is taking me hours when technically, if he would really concentrate and do that one thing and only that one thing for 25 minutes, he might actually solve it in that time.

Jeroen Leenarts: 37:42

So that's, that's really lining up with with the deeper way of

Ulf Schwekendiek: 37:48

correct. So we are a deep work app, we you can call it also flow. We're trying to replicate this feeling. I'm not sure if you if you had this as well, that that's like one that really resonates with you. When you're in an airplane, and you completely shut off the internet or you have really slow internet, there are barely any notifications coming in. The airplane used to be the place where I get somehow my fastest coding work done, where it's just like, oh my god, the plane landed and I'm already like I ship this feature. I'm like, you're ready for PR for this feature. And usually this would take me twice as long. I wonder why? Because you got less distracted because you set your environment up for being super monotonous and nothing that you can do in that time. And that is like what we're trying to replicate with an app.

Jeroen Leenarts: 38:40

So and centered This is a desktop application. And what kinds of integrations with the desktop software environment does it use to make sure that you are staying center?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 38:55

Yeah, so you install you install centered on your Mac on your Windows computer. Or if you just want to check it out, you can even try just in your browser, but you're you're going to miss some features, like the nudges because we cannot track your activity that what you do on your computer. You what we do on Mac is we integrate deeply with the Do Not Disturb system. And actually the moment you start play on a task, we put return off all your notification for instance, we connect with Slack. And the moment you hit play on a task, and we put you on Do Not Disturb mode in Slack, not just Do Not Disturb mode, we put a little wave emoji on on your on your avatar and we let your friends know or your co workers now that you in a deep work session that you want to focus session was centered, which is which turns out at night gives it like does wonders to your co workers because they're like, oh, okay, like he's working right now I'm gonna let him like be for just a little bit, I know that status will change again. And then I can ping them. We do integrate now with our first task manager called linear. I'm not sure if you listeners are aware of that too yet. It's a beautiful, like new app for engineers specifically, or to track your tasks. So you get to automatically see your linear tickets and centered we have a super cool workflow where you just hit play on one of these stickers and it changes its status. If it detects that a PR came in, it actually like marks your task as complete and hands it off to QA whatever workflow you have, we can automate that basically out. It is it is a super smooth workflow if you're using that tool and we're working on you know Jira, Asana, you name it the like taper Hill tool like workflow tools GitHub, to, to get them into center to to just make your work even faster, and you have to do less of the stuff you don't care about and get to code a little bit more.

Jeroen Leenarts: 41:01

And as an end user of centered what is, what is my experience? Like? How do I operate? The product?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 41:09

Yeah. So center, it looks at a first glance, like a to do list app, super simple to do to step. So you write down a copy, paste, whatever, wherever you have your tasks, them into center, or you a link, if you if you support that bug tracking system, for instance, that you use, you can link it and you get to see your issues already in there. Then you take those tasks and drag them into this session bucket we call it. So you say okay, during this coding session, I want to work on these two items. For instance, you timebox how long you think it will take you to get these done. So we asked you to put in in minutes. What do you think you get done, there's no harm in getting rid wrong. We are engineers, we don't, we don't most of the time, get get our estimates, right. But what it does is that kind of makes you think at least about it. And over time, it showed that our users get to do the estimates better. What happens if you put your estimate and Noah, our guide will remind you when you're like halfway done when you like five minutes, and you can always change the estimate throughout the app, just type and it's like, oh, I need 20 more minutes. And he will leave you alone for 21 minutes. But basically just having another person keep you in check on what you think you wanted to work on during that time. And then you hit Start flow, which basically means enter my deep work session, the moment you hit Start flow, you get a little mini player on your desktop that is always on top, it's very small, it's like 44 pixels tall, you can move it around, drag it around, what what you see is just a reminder of the task you're supposed to be working on with the little timer, you get to see optionally, like your webcam, because we learned that sometimes especially in the states of COVID, we're getting pretty lonely and and there's something about this collective feeling of working together. So what we're doing is actually we're connecting you to other people and centered, we're also working with like a very small webcam feed, you don't get to talk to them. You don't get to chat with them, you just see like minded folks working along. And that alone will again make you feel like okay, I shouldn't be I shouldn't be on Twitter, I shouldn't be on Facebook, I shouldn't be you know slacking off right? Now, this is like deep work focus. Because you know, that's what all these other people do. It's like going to a library to like get your work done. It's it's so efficient, because you see other people and flow as well. So that's one piece. The second piece is we start playing music. And that's music that we specifically designed to encourage flow encourage deep work. It's music with a certain beat pattern, it's music that is, you know, a little monotonous, just designed to keep you into that zone longer and tune out some of the voices in your head. So that is a musical aspect to it. And then you get to experience Noah your guide was like your productivity code that helps you to get your tasks done.

Jeroen Leenarts: 44:12

And what is, broadly speaking, the feedback that you're getting on the product from end users,

Ulf Schwekendiek: 44:18

it's, it's amazing because our top 100 users are spending between three and 12 hours a day in flow in the app, we get feedback, like if I forget to hit play on a certain task, did I even do the work. And people really loving seeing all of a sudden common faces again, like a bunch of like engineering leaders and whatnot are on center to like all of a sudden feel like, oh my god, I get to like CO work with Nate named one of your like, favorite engineers that you're following. And just see them also do the work makes it feel like you're out of a sudden part of a community that you don't want to miss. So people really love this sense of community, the sense of getting their time back. The other super interesting data point that we have is usually we are pretty bad as engineers estimating our time. If you estimate your time down to a deep work session. In average, people get their work 30% Faster done. So you say you know this next coding job takes you an hour and all of a sudden you saved you know, 15 minutes on this. Because again, you said this is gonna take me an hour you're not distracted.

Jeroen Leenarts: 45:43

So that's centered the product that you're working on the company. How long? Is it in existence right now?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 45:50

Yeah. So second we 11 We're 11 employees, we're, we're around for shy of two years. And, and two funding rounds so far. So we raised a pre seed round and a seed round.

Jeroen Leenarts: 46:03

So this is it like true investors? Or is it more angel capital? That? Sure,

Ulf Schwekendiek: 46:07

it is for typical VC backed company with also a bunch of really supportive amazing angels, but both of them were, you know, priced venture backgrounds.

Jeroen Leenarts: 46:19

Okay. And

Ulf Schwekendiek: 46:22

just just joined, we raised $3.9 million.

Jeroen Leenarts: 46:25

That's, that's quite a sum of money with just 11 people in your company, which is good, I think, because that means that there's a high level of trust in the in the end goal of the product.

Ulf Schwekendiek: 46:36

We truly believe we can we can change the way we we developers work and make us all happier.

Jeroen Leenarts: 46:44

So if people want to get like, information on center, where should they look? What can they try?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 46:52

Yeah, they they can just go to center dot app, download the desktop application, try the web application, I always suggest download the desktop application just because it's so deeply integrated with the operating system. And the experience is just so much nicer. If you do it that way. I'm sure we'll leave you in your show notes, a promo code so that people can even try the premium version of the product for free. And yeah, it centered is a free to use product, you can use most of the features already out of completely for free you can our music is completely for free to you like a lot of a lot of the parts of the applications are free, once you want to customize the experience that stack and hopefully believe in what we do as a company because we do not sell your data you are not the product of us. We are deeply focused on security and safety and keeping your data safe and you use the data safe and not wanting to make any money from that. And you want to support us. That's when you become a premium subscriber.

Jeroen Leenarts: 47:55

So and what data is collected on you as an end user while you're working, then

Ulf Schwekendiek: 48:00

yeah, whatever you feel comfortable with really. So and you have the option to change that. What we collect is the application that you use. If you are on a website, on a Mac, we collect that you are on that certain website, we only save the domain though we do not save we so we know that your LinkedIn we do not know that you're checking somebody out on LinkedIn or whatsoever. Because we don't need it. I think you don't need it either. We only needed to help Noah to understand what you're doing so that he can help you

Jeroen Leenarts: 48:37

and know is that like an AI component? Of course, but is it running locally? Or is it cloud based

Ulf Schwekendiek: 48:44

our our service and is pretty much cloud based right now. So all of your data lives in the cloud is lives in Google's Firebase. So it's not like some custom back end that we've written that, you know, needs to be secured. It is secured by Google. We also hired a security firm that does annual reviews of our security, we have a bounty program, we take security extremely serious.

Jeroen Leenarts: 49:15

Oh. One thing that I was curious about during our conversation, and then then we'll wrap up is that up to the point that you started working as a as an engineering leader in Postmates, before that, you were mostly involved as an individual contributor at a small company, and then it grew or sometimes exploded into a large company, and you were still technically involved. But how much of your time were you spending on individual contributions and how much of your time was like making sure that that other people got their work done with regard to the product that you were creating?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 49:55

Yeah, the the greatest part of running a startup is that you have you're in full control of your time and and the people you want to work with too, so I'm really really glad that the people that wanted to support this movement are extremely well self organized, you can just imagine if you're building an app that helps you focus that it kind of attracts the type of people that you know I agree with that. So actually, the the overhead and like making sure that other people get their work done is non existent every we have a large amount of flow time in our company that is completely blocked out of calendars. There are no meetings there are no nothing and to actually allow our engineers to build what they want to build. So that's the one amazing piece to it. The second part is I usually spent my mornings in meetings and interviews and my afternoons coding, okay, every day. So my flow time is mostly in the afternoon.

Jeroen Leenarts: 51:06

And within centered is the usage of centered, it's complimentary on company budget.

Ulf Schwekendiek: 51:15

Of course, of course, like everybody gets us centered for free, that's the best, that's the best part of seeing. If I just look at right now I'm looking at like my slack and seeing basically like wave emojis. And most of the people in the company of being actually in flow. And that means, you know, I'll leave them alone, I cannot reach them, they all like and Do Not Disturb mode. Because I know they will do the best they can doing this time, and that they build so much trust with, with your teams. And it's just an amazing feeling to have everybody push themselves forward if you just let them. And I think, you know, especially in tech and like tech leadership, that is like a hard thing to learn to start trusting start trusting your employees.

Jeroen Leenarts: 52:03

Okay. Well, with that, I think we're there. We talked to about things for close to an hour. And is there anything that we've forgot to mention or something you'd like to add?

Ulf Schwekendiek: 52:19

Again, I just invite anybody who wants to do their work and wants to work do their work in an more efficient and more calm way to give send it a try. The other thing is to remember, when you're working late at night, and you're trying to get that last bug fixed. To take a breather, close your laptop, go for a good sleep. Remember that your brain doesn't stop when you sleep. And guess what? 90% of the time, you will have a solution to your buck in the morning, in the neck in the first 15 minutes of your day. Just remember it when you're like you know the third time and you're like, Oh, let me change this line of code. Maybe I'll this time at work. So you, you out of sudden getting from like a reasoning mode to let's just try some things mode, close your computer, you're overworked, close it, let it let it go for a bit, take a nap watch, like have time with your family. And the idea comes and the solution will come much quicker.

Jeroen Leenarts: 53:26

Yeah, that's a principle that I like to call the the shower effect. Because exactly every now and then I'm so stuck on something and then just take a shower or just do something else, and then the solution will come.

Ulf Schwekendiek: 53:40

Absolutely. The other piece is put your phone away from you. It is the number one distractor for you. Learning how to not give in and all those endorphin rushes that you get with any push notification and learning that you know your life is actually better. Without looking at every single notification without waiting for yet another email to come in. And scheduling time for your phone for your messages for you communications will make you a much more efficient engineer and be a much happier person. husband, father, mother. Wife. Yeah. And it

Jeroen Leenarts: 54:25

just makes your life better. Does Oh, with those final words? I I say I think we're there. And thank you so much for your time because we actually went a little bit over time. And for people who don't know, mid conversation, I have had to postpone a call with one of his investors, which was a first for me. So thank you for that. Oh, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and I hope to talk to you again in the future.

Ulf Schwekendiek: 54:55

Awesome. Same here.