The invitations started arriving in December, after the HN post and the daily.dev feature and the 36kr article had pushed the factory into the wider tech consciousness. Conference organizers, meetup coordinators, podcast producers, webinar hosts. Everyone wanted someone from the factory on their stage.
Jay declined most of them.
Navan accepted three.
They each had their reasons, and the reasons revealed something about who they were.
Jay declined because he preferred depth to breadth. A conference talk was thirty minutes of surface-level explanation to an audience of varying familiarity. A well-written document was unlimited depth available to anyone who wanted it. Jay believed that his time was better spent improving the factory's specifications, writing pattern descriptions for the gene library, and working on scenarios than standing on a stage repeating things that were already published on factory.strongdm.ai.
"I'm not a performer," he told Justin when the fourth invitation arrived. "I'm a builder. Builders build. Performers perform. I know which one I am."
He did accept one invitation: a small distributed systems meetup in San Francisco, forty people, no recording, no livestream. The audience was engineers who built the kinds of systems the factory's tools were designed for. Jay could go deep. He could talk about Turn DAGs and epoch-based reclamation and the binary protocol on port 9009. He could assume knowledge and skip the preamble. That was worth his time.
Navan accepted three invitations, and each one was chosen for a specific reason. The first was a Swift developer conference, because Navan wanted to talk about the factory to an audience that wasn't already steeped in AI discourse. Swift developers cared about type safety, about protocol-oriented design, about the craft of building clean interfaces. Navan wanted to show them that the factory's approach to specifications was, in essence, the same discipline they already practiced—just at a different level of abstraction.
The second was a university talk at his alma mater. He wanted to give the answer that Justin had given the CS student at the career fair, but with more detail and more time. He wanted to show undergraduates what the future of software engineering looked like from the inside.
The third was a DevOps conference, because Leash was getting traction in the DevOps community and Navan wanted to explain the containment model to the people who would actually use it.
Justin noticed the pattern. "Jay goes deep with a small audience. Navan goes wide across different communities. You're covering complementary territory."
"We didn't coordinate," Jay said.
"You didn't need to. You each did what makes sense for who you are. That's not coordination. That's good hiring."
Jay's meetup talk ran ninety minutes, including questions. Navan's three conference talks averaged thirty minutes each. Between them, they reached about two thousand engineers in January alone.
Neither of them particularly enjoyed public speaking. Both of them recognized it was necessary. The factory's work needed an audience, and the audience needed the work explained by people who lived it.
"Builders build. Performers perform." Jay declining most invitations but accepting the small deep-dive meetup is the most relatable engineering personality trait. Quality of audience over quantity.