CTRL SHIFT

Travis Griffin wanted to be a police officer, until he worked out what they get paid. At the end of a college campus tour, sweating through jeans and a jacket on a day that turned hot, his mother looked at him and told him he was going to UNC Wilmington. He had not applied anywhere else.

He came back from a year away into the IT program instead of computer science, and everything clicked. He went from database administrator at Barings to Abrigo, through cloud operations and cloud engineering, to senior AI engineer, and he now runs five AI agents to build a product on nights and weekends while keeping the day job.

In this episode he tells DeVanté about calling an investment firm to ask about his own resume before they had started reading applications, what he thinks happens to junior engineers now, and why leading his own company made him better at working for someone else.

He founded Simcha Solutions and is launching Simcha DB Studio. Simcha is Hebrew for joy, which he says is what AI gave back to the work.

Travis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travisdgriffin/ https://simchadbstudio.com/ https://simchasolutions.com/

DeVanté on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devante-pickering/

https://www.pick2solutions.com/

Ctrl Shift is an interview podcast about the shifts people make in their careers and lives, and the shortcuts they pick up along the way. Hosted by DeVanté Pickering, Founder and President at Pick 2 Solutions. Follow to receive new episodes every other Thursday.

Brent Kirby wanted to be a pilot. His grandfather built gas-powered model planes, the kind you take out to a field and fly, and Brent went along for all of it. He inherited two of them when his grandfather died and has never flown them, because he couldn't stand to crash something that took that much work.

What he did instead was take things apart. Transformers, remote control cars, anything with a mechanism, just to see how it moved. He was the art kid, completely right-brained, and math was torture, so he got his high school math credits by taking a programming class. He's been building software for over twenty years without ever getting comfortable with the math.

In this episode he tells DeVanté why he talks clients out of work he could have billed for, what it cost to keep his company small while everyone told him to scale, how loading FedEx trucks in college taught him to turn anything into a game, and what changed about his work when his mother started losing her sight.

He founded Kurb Media in 2009 on a principle that sounds like bad business: be honest with people, even when it costs you. Seventeen years later he still works with some of the same clients.

Brent on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brentkirby/ Kurb Media: https://kurbmedia.com/

Brent's mother, Judy Kirby, wrote a book. Blurred Vision collects a decade of her poems, writing and photographs, every photo her own, and asks whether blurred vision is only a physical condition. She was diagnosed with Stargardt's macular degeneration at twenty.

Blurred Vision: https://blurredvisionbooks.com/

CTRL SHIFT is an interview podcast about the shifts people make in their careers and lives, and the shortcuts they pick up along the way. Hosted by DeVanté Pickering, Founder and President at Pick 2 Solutions. Follow to receive new episodes every other Thursday.

Jeremy Abel carried a graph pad through high school, drawing specs and blueprints for buildings he wanted to put up in New York City. Then an 11th grade drafting class taught by a burned-out retired architect talked him out of it.

A friend showed him web development instead. Ten years later he'd been a developer at Bank of America, patented a model at Wells Fargo, joined Ally's first AI team, and left as Director of AI to start something of his own.

In this episode he tells DeVanté about the manager who handed him a model and dared him to beat it, what it actually took to stop saying "I got this" and let his team do the work, why the delegation skills he resisted turned out to be the ones that matter in an agentic era, and the decision he knew he'd regret forever if he didn't make it.

He's now co-founder and CTO of Ivy, an agentic video production platform.

Jeremy on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jeremynabel/ Ivy: ivy.video

Ctrl Shift is an interview podcast about the shifts people make in their careers and lives, and the shortcuts they pick up along the way. Hosted by DeVanté Pickering, Founder and President at Pick 2 Solutions. Follow to receive new episodes every other Thursday.

Welcome to Ctrl Shift, an interview podcast about the shifts people make in their careers and lives, and the shortcuts they pick up along the way.

Host and Pick 2 Solutions Founder, DeVante Pickering, sits down with seasoned leaders to trace the whole arc of a career: where they started, what changed, and what they learned navigating the turns. Every episode opens with the same question, "When you were younger, what did you want to be when you grew up?" and follows the honest path from that first answer to now.

New episodes every other Thursday. Follow now so you don't miss the first conversation.