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Bestselling author Fabrice Testa is an exponential thinker, innovator, serial tech entrepreneur, business angel investor, trusted advisor, public speaker, author, and highly sought-after mentor. He has successfully founded, co-founded, or participated in the launch of multiple companies that created hundreds of jobs and generated multi millions in revenue.
He is the creator of the Superpreneur Blueprint framework and has developed a set of cutting-edge strategies and tactics that enable super-entrepreneurs to materialize crazy ideas, build breakthrough ventures, and solve the world’s biggest problems. After helping more than 100 companies excel in their fields, Testa is making this proven methodology publicly available in Super-Entrepreneurship Decoded to help super-entrepreneurs everywhere transform our lives—and the planet.
This was such dynamic and informative chat. I highly recommend the book (which I read multiple times because it was that good) so make sure to follow the links to grab a copy yourself.
Welcome to the show. My name is Eric Wright. I’m the host for your DiscoPosse podcast. I hope that you liked this one as much as I did when I recorded it with Fabrice Testa. Fabrice is an author, an entrepreneur or an investor, and somebody who genuinely is using technology and business to bring good to the world. It was such a fantastic opportunity to really delve into his book Super Entrepreneurship Decoded. I loved it so much that I actually read it multiple times in preparation for the interview, and it was just that good.
So you definitely got to get a copy. Hit the links that are on the website episode page. You can also hit us up on the YouTube definitely reach out. I’m going to be running a contest on my YouTube channel. If you want to get a copy of this book, drop me a comment on the YouTube channel. It’s YouTube.com/c/DiscoPossePodcast and I’m going to be giving away a bunch of copies of this fantastic book. So just check the YouTube page for the details on that one. All right.
And before, speaking of, how do we make stuff like that happen? It goes without saying that the fine folks that make this podcast happen include people like VM Software who have been longtime supporters and who I support because they have a fantastic set of products. As far as data protection goes, they got you covered. Everything you need for your data protection needs, whether it’s in the cloud, whether it’s in containerized platforms, whether it’s SAS, whether it’s on premises, virtualized, even physical servers, all that stuff needs to be backed up and needs to be saved from things like ransomware and all sorts of naughty things that are going on in the world.
So, it could just be Pete in accounting that accidentally deletes a file. It could be somebody who erases a team’s message that shouldn’t have gone away. So get that stuff protected. All right, just go to vee.am/DiscoPosse and it’s just that easy, vee.am/DiscoPosse. And speaking of protection, make sure you protect your data when it’s in transit as well. Easy way to do that is you can use great products like ExpressVPN. The reason why I use VPN is because I like to make sure that I can do my best to protect my identity, protect my data.
And also it’s just fantastic for web testing. If I need to test like, remote location to make sure that it works as expected from different regions. So it’s really, really great. I use ExpressVPN for that very purpose. If you want to check it out yourself, go to tryexpressvpn.com/DiscoPosse and you can get it for yourself. All right. This is Fabrice Testa. I hope you like the show. He is amazing. Get his book.
Hey. Hello. It’s Fabrice Testa and you are listening to DiscoPosse podcast.
This is perfect. What a great way to start the year. This is fantastic. So Fabrice, thank you very much. I’ve been engulfed in the school of Fabrice now for a while. I was really pleased when I had the opportunity to put you on as a potential guest. And I really enjoyed. First, I read your most recent book, which is the Super Entrepreneurship Decoded. Fantastic book. Went a lot through the rest of your history, of course. And leading up to that book, you have so much to bring and you’ve brought so much to the world already.
But for folks that are brand new and who don’t already know you. Fabrice, if you don’t mind, let’s just get a quick bio. We’ll talk about the book and a really good exploration of this concept of the superpreneur.
Yes. Thanks Eric, for welcoming me on this show. Yes. So I’m Fabrice Testa, and actually I’m Belgian. I have also some origins from Italy. So I live in Belgium, but I work mostly. My business is mostly in Luxembourg, so in Europe and I have, of course, travel all over the world during my career. And basically I’m an entrepreneur. So I co-funded different companies in the space sector in the digitalization. One of them achieved 100 million Euro turnover, 200 people. Then this company was sold and after that I funded also a company in the satellite service company, Luxembourg.
And after three years that company was also sold. And after the sale of this company, I had no new entrepreneurial projects. So I started some new life as an investor, a business center. So I did different investments again in different technologies, space, artificial intelligence, ICT, et cetera. And then, I started also to be a coach and mentor to help other entrepreneurs because I wanted to give back somehow and to help other entrepreneurs by sharing my experience. And let’s say those successful strategies and tactics that was working for me.
I also created by that time a blueprint that I call the Superpreneur Blueprint to help entrepreneurs to become what I call superpreneur. And maybe we will discuss more about this and to solve some big problems by materializing crazy ideas. And actually I met a young Dutch entrepreneur in 2017 and he came with a crazy idea. So for me it was the opportunity to also be again involved in a kind of superpreneur venture. So we co-founded with other people in 2019, the company called Maana Electric that is also mentioned in my book.
And now this company is working well. So today I spent my time between this company as a co-founder and shareholder. I also spent time mentoring, coaching, speaking at several events to explain this super entrepreneurship movement that I launched. And I wrote a book, this book, Super-Entrepreneurship Decoded, because I think that one thing was missing in the Superpreneur Blueprint. It was a method, because the Superpreneur Blueprint gives the core pillars, the guiding principles and the key characteristic of this kind of venture, but it was not telling how to do it.
And so I try to analyze what super entrepreneurs and super achievers, how they do it. What is their secret to succeed? Why others fail? And in the book, I unveil five secrets that I think can help entrepreneurs to maximize their chances of success. Of course, it’s not a guarantee of success, but I think it’s a way to maximize the chances of success. They put all these five secrets around a method that I call the crazy method. So that’s a bit of my story and the origin of the book.
I really appreciated the beautiful use of acronyms. So, we’ll talk about crazy as a method. People think, is he meaning literally crazy? But it’s a perfect pairing because it allows us to assign a memorable name to it. And it’s not far off of, you know, these real sort of crazy and moonshot type of ideas. If we take it in this literal sense of the word and then a pathway to execution that’s been tested and proven that you’re bringing this methodology, you’re bringing a framework to the world that you’ve lived and experienced, which is, I think, one of the best things that people need to appreciate about the book.
This is not a Harvard Airplane NBA guide that you read between New York and Boston flights. This is a lived experience that’s brought down and distilled into effective, meaningful steps that you can implement with great analogous references that are meaningful and helpful. And, of course, likes to bring your personal experience. I trust it. I think Nassim Taleb says the greatest way to be a philosopher King is to be a King first and then a philosopher second. Too many times these days, when you go through the business section or these sort of self help sections, it’s a lot of people who are straight from school and their PhD year was writing from research.
And while it’s a beautiful thing, ten years later, when they go back and revisit their early work, they’re like, ‘Oh, wow. I was naïve a lot of times in what was written’. Your book, first of all, tells a beautiful story. And like I mentioned before, we talked, it is you telling the story. It really comes through as a person telling me how to achieve this from their own experience. And I said, it’s a refreshing change because I’ve read a lot of books of this style that aim to do this, and they often come back as the same three things that I already sort of knew, and it’s a little bit reinforcing, but it was very well done.
So I honestly can’t talk enough. We’ll have links, of course, in all the show notes for people, they should absolutely pick up the book.
Thanks, Eric. I really appreciate it. It’s always nice to hear nice words like this, but I think I wrote the book as I would like to read a book, because I also read a lot of non fiction books, maybe between 50 and 60 books, you know, per year. I like book support, entrepreneurship, business, etc. Some are very good, and some, I think are less good because it’s true that there are a lot of, maybe they tend to have some frameworks, et cetera. But you don’t see really how to apply it.
And what I wanted with the book is to give a very simple framework because I think the framework is very simple in essence. Now the difficulty is to apply it in real life, and it’s why I provide in the book worksheets so that people can apply, let’s say the principles of the book, try to answer a lot of questions and try to put in practice the principles of the book. And it’s also why I’m just launching by end of this month, a companion course to the book, which will be called The Crazy Method Launch online course.
And it’s an online coaching program on twelve weeks. Every week there will be a module and we are mostly following, let’s say, the method which is in the book, but I’m going really to dive deep into each of them, which of course, I could not do with the book, because in the book you are obliged a bit to scratch the surface, unfortunately. Because the book will be indigenous and will be much too big. But with the course, I think the people will have really the opportunity to go really, to dive deep into the principles of the book, to put in actions the method that I propose in the book, and hopefully like this, they can really materialize their breakthrough potential.
They can really have a solid plan if, for example, they want to launch this kind of breakthrough venture that I’m suggesting in the book.
The thing that we need to look at, too, and that’s why I appreciated the references throughout and very specific stories that are called on from other parts of the industry as well, is the proof in execution elsewhere. Right. It gives us a chance to have a reason. Why is the book built to last? One of the most popular ones is because it’s five familiar brands that we know, and that familiarity breeds the belief that I can achieve it. There’s something to be said about this, but when you get into the moonshot areas and these very big ideas, it’s a little more difficult to find meaningful, real existing references.
Looking back now, it’s funny that in two years, three years, you’ll look through those stories in the book and they’ll be like it’ll seem obvious, but at the time when you’re writing this, of course, these are still moonshots. We look at Elon Musk, not just in a single moonshot, but in multiple ventures that he’s achieved. You, of course, coming from supporting and investing in space technologies and being in that ecosystem, there’s a lot of these sort of hidden, there’s a hidden world that’s existing that most people are not going to be aware of until it’s already on their phone or wherever it is.
They just take for granted all of this other work that’s happening to support the thing that makes the news or that makes the big story. So I just realized, too, by actually coincidence, I was wearing a SpaceX shirt. My wife and I are both space fanatics. And last time I got a chance, we actually went to watch the Delta Four Orion launch in Florida. It was fantastic. There’s nothing like an in-person launch. And being aware of how seemingly unrealistic that idea is to most people and why the super entrepreneur has to and is somehow able to put that aside and say, this needs to get done.
And despite advice and despite doubt, we’re going to do things to get back to like this, it can be done. So maybe let’s start there describe to me Fabrice, what is the super entrepreneur or the superpreneur?
Yes, I think it’s a good question indeed, to start somehow the conversation. What I call super entrepreneurs are people that they want to solve some big problems. Because I explained in the book that in 2007 we enter in what I call ‘The Edge of Exponential Acceleration’. So everything is really going very fast. Mostly technology is going exponentially, which is a good thing, because today we have many technologies that have achieved a good level of maturity, and they are used by this kind of innovators and inventors to build some amazing solutions.
But at the same time, problems are also accelerating at an exponential pace of change. If you look at climate change and unfortunately, you know, these disasters in Colorado, for example, I strongly believe that this is a consequence of climate change. And we see that we have now more wildfires, more flooding et cetera. In Belgium, for example, we have terrible flooding in the summer. So I think that we must do something. And unfortunately, most of the conventional solutions have proven their limits. So it’s time for radical solutions, what we call crazy ideas, crazy solutions, solutions that initially seem impossible.
But what I try to always explain is that today at the edge of exponential acceleration, nothing is really impossible. And at the edge of the exponential acceleration, impossible becomes possible. And this kind of entrepreneurs, I call them super entrepreneurs because they probably believe that nothing is really impossible. And they are ready to dedicate ten years, 20 years of their lifetime to solve such kind of big problems and to come with some amazing solution that will solve this problem. And, for example, to give a very concrete example to your audience.
There is, for example, this guy in the book that I described, Joseph Pescounty. He is Italian but living in Barcelona, in Spain, and he discovered that he could use some technology used for 3D print human tissues, et cetera. That he could use the same technology to 3D print food and so now he’s using this technology to 3D print food. Imagine that today is, of course, still a very small scale. But imagine that tomorrow he can build machines, he can scale these machines to produce tons of food and 3D print tons of food.
This could be really a big solution for solving hunger around the world, because today, unfortunately, in the world many people, they have only access to one meal per day. So I think at the 21st century, we are always saying we live extra ordinary times, et cetera, which is true. But how can we admit that today in our civilization that some people, they have only access to one meal per day? So I think we need to come with some solutions. And it’s not with the traditional solutions that we will do it.
But with this kind of breakthrough solutions, it will be possible. And so it’s why I call them super entrepreneurs. And just to be clear, I don’t want to oppose one kind of entrepreneur to another kind of entrepreneur. I’m an entrepreneur, and I respect all kind of entrepreneurship. It’s just that these kind of people, I think they are super because they want to really solve big problems, to dedicate a big part of their lifetime to this, to work on moonshot things that others may think are impossible.
When I met this young entrepreneur, Joost van Oorschot, that is also in the book that came with this idea behind Maana Electric. When I met him first, my first reaction was also to say, wow, it’s crazy. He wants to turn sand into solar panels into a machine. This is impossible. So my first reaction and I’m also in this movement. But my first reaction was to say that’s impossible. So our first reaction, because we have a linear mind is to say it’s impossible. And if we go to an exponential mind, then we see the thing is possible, because in the exponential world, you know, if you can go ten times, if you have ten doublings, it’s a grow of 1000.
If it’s 20 doublings, it’s a grow of 1 million, you know. If it’s 30 doublings, is 1 billion growth. So it’s going very fast. And today we see with this progress of technologies that many things are possible. So I think we need to have a mind shift and to really shift our perspective and see. Okay, if I would have a magic wand, how I will solve this problem. And it’s what I recommend to innovators if you would like to solve this problem, what would you do? Don’t think that with possible solution.
Just imagine if you could do it or you will do it. Like, for example, I said this 3D printing machine, like we seen some science fiction movies, you know, that the food is printed or appears directly like this. And this is really something that we think with a magic wand that it could be possible. But today the reality is that it’s probably feasible and it will happen. I’m pretty sure that it will happen in the coming years that it will be at this time.
To take it back to this first principles thinking approach, which I think is obviously the fundamental to the folks that are achieving these sort of grand visions is because they’ve gotten rid of linear thinking. They have to shed the belief that everything is one to 1.1. It truly is this sort of zero to one. Go back to raw materials. And I think Elon Musk was recently on Alex Friedman podcast. He talked about that. The only way you can approach this is simply look at the costs of the raw materials, and the goal in the end, is always to the cost of manufacturing will be asymptotically close to zero above the raw materials.
And it’s just a matter of the work that you do to get closer to that raw material cost. And that’s ultimately what led to battery technologies. And we’re seeing this with solar. But you’ve proven it out right in that very idea that if you just said, well, we have to just make it slightly better than the current lithium manufacturing, right? That can’t be it. You had to go to what seems like a crazy idea, as Joost brings and say, okay, what if we actually could do this and then you realize you always could with the right, first mindset and then second, which is why the book is important, executing the approach in operations as well, because there’s lots of big ideas.
But then having the team, the growth, the understanding to financially survive to execution is where, it’s a long distance from idea to execution. So that’s why where do we learn this? Is it as rare as it seems to be able to have this thinking?
Yes, I think you are right, Eric. When I met again, when I met you the first time, I was thinking, okay, that’s impossible to transform sand into solar panels. All this will be impossible. But then I go just 1 minute after. Yeah, but let’s imagine that it can work. Okay. So I asked some people, do you think that it’s possible? And many people told me, look, it’s not against the laws of physics, in sand, you can find everything to transform it into Silicon and then into solar cells and glass.
So basically it’s possible from just a physique standpoint. And so this was for me, the confirmation. Okay, that’s probably possible. So now let’s dive a bit deeper into that. So I did my due diligence. I analyze more. I try to understand also the business model, et cetera. What was the plan? I was also impressed by your master plan. It’s a notion that I explain also in the book, what were the big goals, etcetera. And to be honest, we are just following the big milestones right now.
And then you are right. I think an idea remains an idea until it is materialized and so what I see so many times is entrepreneurs. They have a lot of ideas, et cetera. But they never take action, or if they take action, they take the bad action. So it’s why I always say first, you need to really know, okay, what do you want to achieve? What do you want to create in this world? What is your true purpose? Okay. And after that, you need to press your crazy ideas that these crazy ideas will really allow you to materialize somehow your big dreams and you have to dream big and bold.
Many people are unfortunately not audacious enough. These kind of super entrepreneurs or super achievers. They have dream. They have big dreams. They believe in their big dreams, and they are bold. They take the necessary actions to materialize their dreams. But you are right that the proper execution is key, because without a proper execution, without what I call a flawless execution, you cannot, unfortunately, materialize because these kind of moonshots are very complicated, to be honest, to be achieved, to be materialized. So it’s why it’s very important to have a flawless execution.
And these kind of super entrepreneurs and super achievers, they are master at execution. They really try to see anything that can help the business. And now the secret one of the secret to succeed this flawless execution is to have a good preparation. The preparation is key, but now you have not also to spend months and months just in preparation and never take action. So I think there is a good balance to have when you think that your plans are good enough, then you have to act and maybe to revise a little bit your plans, et cetera, iterate.
Of course, move forward because I see also a lot of entrepreneurs. They have big ideas. They create big plans, but at the end they have the fear to fail. Or maybe they try to perfection their plans, but at some point they never do it. And they have very nice pitch deck. Or they have very nice business plans, or they have even very nice products. But they never ask the customers about their products or they never try to sell their products. So they have fantastic products. But at some point they never question also the business case for the product.
Again, it’s nice to have big ideas, but you need to go from a big idea, from a dream to a plan and then to some execution. Again, it may seem very simple, and I think the basics of the business is simple. Business is what an entrepreneur is there to solve a problem with a product or service that you want to sell to some people and you make some profits. I think the basic of business are very simple. The realization is something which is more complicated because there are so many parameters and these kind of super entrepreneurs and super achievers, they have a holistic approach about how to manage the company and they try to minimize the flaws in every aspect of their business.
Now you bring up a very important point when without customer validation, this is quite often the death knell for product management and bringing products successfully to market, because if they wait too long before they expose to their buyer and their user and their true technical consumer, they go far down the path to what they believe is the correct thing to build or method to use. And then you have the double problem of number one. They’re now pot committed or too far invested into this. And so they then start to discount the customers ideas like, ‘oh, no, but you don’t understand. We know what we’re doing better. We built it.’
But then the counter problem exists now, Fabrice, where in moonshots, quite often the customer doesn’t exist in a way when you’ve got an idea, you have long plan as to when a customer will be able to test it. How does that gap get bridged in your experience dealing with very early emerging tech?
Yeah, that’s, of course, a good question. And it can be a problem, actually, it’s also something which is well known. And I re-explain also in the book is the technology adoption lifecycle. So initially I think for this kind of, because mostly what I describe in the book are what is called deep tech companies. So it’s really very long. Let’s say moonshot venture that will take probably 5 to 10, if not 20 years, because there is a lot of research and development up front, et cetera. And for these kind of deep tech companies, generally, what you need is to have the validation, at least a kind of validation or pre validation from early pioneers.
So early pioneers are really people that are visionary that love new things, et cetera. That maybe see beyond, they like futuristic things, et cetera. And let’s take the example of Lilium, for example. It’s a company also that I described in the book. What they want is to have a small electric plan to make inter regional, let’s say, or intercity flights. So this will be perfect. It’s a bit like also Uber Air. So it’s these kind of companies that want to make some flight taxis, et cetera.
And you are right. Is there today customers? No. But there are some people that they may question some people and say, look, if this would be available, will you take it? Will you be able to pay for it? And I think there are many people that will say, yeah, I love Uber Air. That for example, in LA, where there is a big traffic jam, maybe I would have the possibility to fly instead of going on the road. I will love it. And I will be ready to pay for it.
So I think you can always find some people that at least validate your, let’s say, your proposition. Now, the difficulty for this kind of companies is that after two pioneers or what we call the early majority that will adopt, let’s say, their product, it will be to go to the mass market. And they might be more complicated. But, yeah, it’s all the difficulty of creating a business that can scale et cetera. But there are some, of course, fully, some strategies to do this. But I think in the case of Lilian, for example, they now went on the stock market.
I think it’s on the Nasdaq, their value at 1.5 billion. So the market believes in what they do. And I think there is a strong, let’s say, thinking among the population that, yes, this kind of solution at some point will take off, which is the right word will take off as long as, for example, the barriers related to air regulations, et cetera will be removed. But early validation is very important. And I like to give a very simple tip to start up, which is the Starbuck tip.
So if you have an idea, you go into Starbucks and you ask someone, ‘Look, I pay you your latte, but you spend ten minutes with me. I explain to you what I want to do, and you just give your honest feedback about what I want to do. If you think that it’s completely crazy, tell me that it’s completely crazy. If you think that you will never pay for it or that it will never work. Just let me know if you think that it’s amazing. Just let me know, et cetera.’
But you know what? Recently, a company in Luxembourg. I met them in an event and they talk about this idea. And I said, Did you validate your idea? “Oh, no, we don’t know exactly yet. We have not talked with potential customers yet, et cetera”. And I told them, look, go into a coffee shop and do this, and they did. And they receive an incredible validation of their solution. And many people said, look, if this would exist, it would be fantastic. And since then, they just won some prices, et cetera.
And they started doing well, because now they are convinced that there is a real market behind. So I do believe that early market validation is very important. But you are right that for this kind of companies, it’s not always easy. I think they have to focus on the pioneers, the early adopters, if at least they have this validation, it’s already a good sign. But after they will have some challenges, of course, for sure.
And I think an important thing that obviously plays out in the book. And with all the work you’re doing and the upcoming courses is, I often call it framework over firepower. That the old saying goes that plans are useless, but planning is essential and being able to adjust pivot, deal with changes in inputs. But if you do not have a framework in which you can apply these methods and you’re lucky more than you’re right in the execution. And this is the belief that we can just sort of throw.
If I scale my engineering team by 100, then I will suddenly be 100 times more productive. And it’s the mythical man month, as they often used to call it a mythical person month, of course, but more politically correct now, because you cannot just throw human firepower at it or money firepower necessarily and have it scale. The framework is incredibly important because then it becomes the methodology that anyone in your team can apply and that it also comes from vision and principle of the company. And I guess when you’re creating your own framework and you’re using your own method here Fabrice or you’re looking to entrepreneurs, especially as an angel investor, what is it that you look for in that, this is an idea and I trust these people to be able to scale towards this solution.
Look, before I make an investment. I use what I call the four T’s. And it’s not because my name is Testa. It’s around the T. And again, I like acronyms et cetera. But here it’s very mnemonic system for me to remember what is important. The first tier is technology. So is this technology really something breakthrough? Is it really something unique? Can this technology really create a big value? So that’s the first tier that I look into. Then I look at the second T, which is traction. And for me again, traction means market.
Is there a big market enough for this? Now, referring back to the previous question, sometimes it may be a bit complicated, but at least, is there some early pioneers, early adopters that, let’s say, that are quite excited about this solution and it’s what I call the traction. Then the third tier is the team. Is there a team able to materialize this big idea within this big market? Because for me, this is essential. It’s the execution. Is the team available today or maybe with some other people to execute the vision?
And then the fourth tier is the timing. Is it the right timing for it? Is it too early or is it too late? It’s a notion that I explain also in the book because I think this is really paramount. And there is a famous person that, unfortunately, I forgot his name. But he did an analysis of many ventures. What were their success factors, et cetera. And among, let’s say, all these startups et cetera. I think the video is available on YouTube. He found that, actually, timing was the key success factor.
So yeah, because why? Because sometimes some people, they have a very good idea, but they come too early and they are going to burn a lot of money before the market is ready. It’s maybe a bit the case, for example of Lilium, that I was talking about previously because I think they have a fantastic solution. But today the market is not fully ready, so they need a lot of cash. And it’s why, for example, they did an IPO to have enough cash. If you are too late for the market, the market is already over, and that’s done.
I think probably you will have some late people that might, let’s say, what we call the late majority that might eventually buy your solution. But the market is over. So it’s finished. So I think the proper market, the proper timing is very important. And what I have observed is that most of these super entrepreneurs, they are able to really sense, ‘Okay. What are the moods of the time? When is the right timing for it? And they launch the solution at the right timing. For example, I think Elon Musk, he was a master in that when he launched Tesla.
I think he really perceived that there was something missing on the market, that it was a time for electrical vehicle. But there was a need for some new kind of electrical vehicle, et cetera. He was right when he launched SpaceX. And you have dealt with SpaceX. It’s also in the right timing because there was all the start of the new space, et cetera. There was many projects of multi constellation, et cetera. And he was right to say, okay, if I can have a solution, which is maybe cheaper, et cetera, I can give a boost into this new space edge.
So I think the timing is very important. So I use these four T’s, the technology, I have the right technology, the right market, the right team, and the right timing. And for me, these are the basics after that. Of course, there are many things, but I think these are the four basics. And if at least a company has these four green lines into these four pillars, then for me, I can try to investigate a bit more.
Yeah, the timing is very interesting, and it’s often, it’s difficult to know until you run the other side of it. But if we take anecdotal experience, combine it with data, and I believe that we are going to be better. And we are today better at predicting that timing and ability to execute into that market. Of course, I brought up Built to Last. The funny thing about Built to Last is most of the stories in Built to Last actually led to pretty deep failures, years after the book had come out because the markets completely shifted away.
And it was sort of the idea that while they were successful in this pivot of those companies, they then failed to pivot soon after, and they suffered because of the belief that it was now stabilized. And they languished what they believed they already achieved what they needed to do to survive. But survival, like most things, is a continuous effort, especially in business when you’ve got funding. In the end, they often say it’s like startups fail for two simple reasons. The money runs out or the founders give up.
Yeah. Exactly. Dispute between the founders, or they give up or the lack of cash. Yes, these are the two main reasons, for sure.
But the four T’s that you talk about are the reason why the second part will occur most likely, right. Because we joke about pets.com and the original.com era. They all would have been fantastically valued and successful today, of course. But we’ve now succeeded on the backs of their failure. And I think that’s what as humans and as learners, in business and in tech, if we take those learnings and we say if given the right timing, if we change the approach, if we go back to first principles, could we bring this back to the market and be successful in it?
It’s good. I like that entrepreneurship as well as being celebrated. We saw a long period where it’s a bit of a tough word when you say the Uber of something. Right. Uber was this fantastic thing. But then it became synonymous with a negative view of the founder, of the specific founder. Right. That story was unfortunate because it truly did taint the incredible thing that was done to change the market to create something that just didn’t exist. And so I like that now entrepreneurship, we’re going to see more and more people that are successful with it, because I think further down towards the school system.
They’re studying these things instead of General Motors and Vodafone and the early technology creators as the case studies. They can now use case studies from the last five to ten years, which are fundamentally different than what we had 30 years ago, which were the case studies that were put in print and treated as the gospel of schooling, at least. And I’m curious on this one, Fabrice. Is there enough further down, even like in high school and secondary education, that is being done to make entrepreneurship a viable future for people?
I feel like we’re still not there yet, but I’m curious of your experience as well, talking to especially early founders.
Yes. I strongly believe that we need more entrepreneurship and not only to create profit ventures but also nonprofit ventures. I think anyway, the same principles of entrepreneurship can be applied also for nonprofit. So we need more people with an entrepreneurship spirit. I think when you have an entrepreneurship spirit, you can achieve anything you want in life because you have some capacity to convince others. You have some tolerance, let’s say, to risk. And maybe again, to things that are impossible. Things that are possible. And unfortunately, I don’t think that today the education system prepares enough for entrepreneurship, at least at primary or secondary school.
Of course, after that, there are some masters in entrepreneurship, et cetera. But yes, when the children are very young, I think there should be more kind of entrepreneurship, which is taught to our children. So, for example, to learn them, how to make great presentations, how to maybe have a small business which can be a profit or nonprofit, but at least to try to put in place of projects. So project management is very important. How to test their hypothesis, how to make experiments. That failure is not a problem.
I think there are many, many notions that could be to learn, for example, the exponential technologies. It may seem complicated, but it’s not, you know, a 3D printer is not so expensive and they could play with the 3D printer to build stuff, et cetera. AI, for example, coding in Python, et cetera. It’s also not expensive. So I think there are many things that could be taught in virtual reality, and that are sold today. This metaphors, et cetera. Again, just simple glasses, et cetera for virtual reality is not so expensive.
So I think today again, because in this age of exponential acceleration, we also seem a decrease of many costs, et cetera. So it’s the zero marginal cost society that has been well described by Jeremy Rifkin. And so, today many of these technologies are not so expensive if you want just to experiment a little bit. So why not to create in school some kind of living lapse where children, they can play with this. They can also try to put in place some projects and to pitch their projects in front of an audience, et cetera.
Maybe to fundraise also because sometimes they ask to the parents, or they ask to the teachers, but why not to the children themselves to try to fund raise for their school. And we should also learn the principles of personal finance to children because it’s something which is also not taught. And I think it’s unfortunate. So I think there is a lot to do in that space, unfortunately.
Yeah. You are speaking the words that I think of and said so well to this idea that there are things that we do not teach. And I guess there’s an assumption that the parents, it’s on the parents to teach these principles. But in the end, if it’s not promoted through the school system where they spend the majority of their time learning where that’s the most formal part of their day to day education. By the time the parents get around to it, they’ve spent a day learning or a day in some kind of programmatic method.
The last thing you’re going to do is suddenly, hey, let’s explore creating a pitch deck. And it’s funny that when I work with my kids and I recall here that you have kids as well.
Yeah. Four kids.
There you go. I know your number too. I’m the same. And my older kids when they would come to me for money, I would say, okay, what can we do? So that if I give you this money, we can turn it into a way that it can create more money. The first thing is what’s a repeatable thing that we can do. So rather than just go and buy this thing once and at least just to introduce critical thinking and them having to explain why they really wanted something to me.
They would often become more confident, like, okay, so I’ve got this idea. I need $40 for something. But I’ve got an idea. What I’m going to do is I’ve got a bunch of stuff in my closet. I’m going to maybe do a garage sale. And so I would say, well, tell you what, I’ll save you the trouble. We’re going to donate it. And I’ll give you the money so that we can win twice because you’re going to help somebody in need. And you’ve pitched your case.
I’m now your VC is when you give them, though, that freedom to create an idea and to push to get towards it, they feel good. And you can tell in the next thing they ask you. Now they’ve got an approach. They’ve got a method, right. So I think next time they go to their teacher, they’re going to say, I need more time on this. But here’s my proposal. I’m going to run a study group. This is entrepreneurship in the smallest way. I love that spirit, and you can see it in the kids.
They know it’s in them. It’s not for everybody for sure. There are many kids who they also think and act and learn differently. And we should support that as well. But for those kids that can take that to the next level, I really think we should be putting stuff in place to help them and nurture that.
No, I like it. And I try to do the same with my kids. For example, one of my son said, ‘There is this business that I know some friends. They do it’, et cetera. I said, you can do it, but I need some capital to start. I said, ‘Look, I will make your sponsor. I will give you the initial money and then you have to try. Then if you make profit, that’s fine. And let’s see how it works’, et cetera. I like it. But you are right.
The parents, of course, that maybe are educated can do it. But many parents probably are not businessmen, or they are not entrepreneurs. So maybe they just don’t think or they don’t have the knowledge to learn to their children. And it’s why at some point, the school should try to learn this kind of principles to the young generation, because I strongly believe that we need and it’s all, you know, my mission. I try to elevate a new generation of young entrepreneurs because I think that entrepreneurs can really shape a better future for humanity.
I think it’s through entrepreneurship, through building new things, et cetera, that we will build a better world, as I always say, build the world you love. I think if you wait, that others, build the world that you love for you, it will not happen. You have to do it. So what the book is also called with more doers more builders that can really shape a new world that will be better for the next generation. I’m a father of four kids, and what I want is that when I pass away, the world will be a bit better than the one that I knew because I want my children and my grandchildren that they live in a better world.
And so I think it’s a collective responsibility. So it’s why I call so this super entrepreneurship, a super entrepreneurship movement. I hope that many people will read the book. It will inspire them. Again, it’s not a guarantee of success, but maybe it will give ideas to some people. Okay. Maybe now it’s my time to start. I will follow some principle of the book, and I will try to take my chance because I think it’s never too late and we have one life. So why not to try at least?
Now, some people will fail. And I also had some failures like everyone that’s perfectly normal. But you need just to say, okay, I fail. What I can learn from this failure. And I can try differently next time. But maybe during this journey, some people will meet some investors or some team members, and maybe the next time they will do another venture with these investors or these team members, and it will work. So I think that’s normal. I think failure is part of the journey, but it’s not a reason to not try.
And I think we need more people that try new things, try to change how things are done. So we need more game changers at all, let’s say, levels of the society, we need more game changers, people that don’t accept the status course. I think there is too much acceptance. Let’s see how things are done. And again, at this age of exponential acceleration, everything is going fast and there is no reason why we could not do things differently and change how the world is going. Again, I think there are many things that are going well.
So I’m not pessimistic at all. I think we live probably much, much better than 100 years ago, for sure. But there are anyway, many problems. And I think it’s the collective responsibility of all of us to try to find some solutions to solve these problems.
Yes. An interesting quote is from Penn Jillette of the magician duo Penn and Teller. And he says two things are invariably true. The world is getting better and people think it’s getting worse. There’s an incredible amount of media attention to negative news stories. It’s very easy for that to spread and to us feel engulfed in this. But as you said by most measurable factors, we are better off economically, better off as far as distribution of food. There are many things we have a long way to go, and it happens by people like yourself and people like the superpreneurs and the people that are ready to give whatever to give back. We can continue to exponentially affect the world and at the same time making it commercially viable to run the organizations that can create these systems and solutions that can give back.
It’s an interesting dichotomy of celebrating sort of the free market capitalism to grow a business fund, development fund, research fund, delivery of new things, and then balance that with making sure that we give back. And I’m optimistic of what’s ahead. But I’m also careful about my optimism. Nothing is automatic for sure. You brought up a great point Fabrice. I’d like to quickly touch on this, too. Failure is an important part of the process, and we’ve all had levels of failure at some point in our life.
For those early entrepreneurs, do you find, is there any risk that a lack of exposure to failure can be problematic? I’d say for them as they begin this entrepreneur journey because they’re maybe not prepared for that first hit, that first thing that could set them back. How do you prepare somebody for adversity when they haven’t experienced it yet?
Yes. Look, let’s be honest. Who likes to fail? I think nobody. I think we all like to win and to never fail, that’s for sure. So I think unless you are wrong, I don’t know people that like to fail, but for me, it’s not a reason not to try. Now, all these super achievers or super entrepreneurs are they let’s say, overcome failures is through their massive transformative purpose. So they know what their true purpose is and they are fully committed to this. So it’s what gets them off the bed every morning and they know why they are doing this. For example, to solve hunger or to try to contribute to climate change, et cetera.
And it’s their strong motivation. So with this, they know that, okay. I have to try. I want to pursue my moonshot. It will take time. I will face setbacks. I will face many years. I will have failures, but I will need just to continue, because what I do is great. What I do can be great for humanity. So I need to just continue, even if I face some fears. I think for me their true purpose is their tool to always keep the true north and to always go, even if there is snow, there is rain, there is a lot of things.
They just continue on their track until they achieve their goals. And this is what I have observed. All these guys took Elon Musk and he waited probably 20 years before SpaceX is a great success. And many rockets just crashed and exploded. So he had a lot of failures. But he just continued. At some point he was almost broke. But he continued again and again. I think it’s just the secret. It’s only the secret to succeed is never give up. Like Winston Churchill was saying, never give up.
But I think it’s true. And these kind of super entrepreneurs and super achievers. They have a relentless, let’s say pursue of their dream or their objective. They will never give up until they reach their dream. Now, at some point, if they see that really, they need to take some other route to go to any way to achieve their dream, they will do it. They are not stupid too, so pivot or to try to change a bit and adapt the plans are also possible, for sure. But generally they are very relentless.
And even if everybody around said, look, you will never succeed, they just continue. Steve Jobs was well-known like this. He was saying, no, we will succeed, we will do it, et cetera. Everybody around was saying, no, it’s impossible. Again, it’s impossible. And he was saying, no, it’s possible. I think it’s really a question of mindset. And if you are fully convinced yourself, I think you can convince others. But if the founder says things that he will not succeed, I’m not sure that it’s going to work, et cetera.
How can he convince his team that it will work? So I think the best super entrepreneurs, they have a very strong belief that what they do will succeed and it’s all. They can convince investors, they can convince team members, they can convince customers because they say no, I’m sure it will work, it will work, et cetera. It’s what I’ve observed. I have known some guys, they were incredible. Even if everybody was believing that it will never work, they will continue. No, I’m sure it will work.
And they were demonstrating why it will work, etc. And they can bring some convincing arguments. Just people follow them. Why? Because dreaming is nice too. And so you try to also believe in these dreams too, because you want to be part of the big dream, because if you don’t have a big dream yourself, but you want to help someone else, maybe to make their dream come true. So I think that’s something which is fascinating.
Oh, definitely. And the most important thing and why I will implore people to pick up the book. And I’ll say that either through the blog or through social media, I want to make sure that people get access to this. So I’m going to offer up to buy up a few copies myself on people’s behalf and make sure that I get more people exposed to this. If you take something that’s executed successfully at scale and bring it down to a human level, that’s what makes day to day entrepreneurship accessible.
If we use the practices and the successes from incredible moonshots and bring them down where there’s less risk and there’s less things but use the methods. This is fantastic. It’s much harder to take traditional business methodologies and then scale them into an area where no one’s been exposed before. This is why it’s such a beautiful opportunity to take the lessons from the book and then put them into day to day. And when I read it, it immediately made me want to revisit a few things that I’ve got active.
I’m an advisor to a start up, and I’m doing other things, and it just lit up an incredible creative spark in me to shed the unnecessary things that are being worked on. And let’s go to core principles. Let’s go to what needs to get done. So I found it to be a very inspiring read, and I sure hope that other folks do. And it’s funny just to further that one thing you talk about SpaceX landing rockets. I use this in presentations all the time recently at a customer talking about how today’s stuff that we see as normal was not that case two years ago, even because Blue Origin, they sent people to the edge of space and back, and they landed the rocket.
So they land the first age of the rockets, and it wasn’t even in the news because it’s normal now. So SpaceX has normalized landing the first stage of a rocket, which was unfathomable five years ago.
Now for sure. And if I tell you that there is a way to land rockets without using any fuel, because SpaceX is using fuel to land rockets. But if I tell you that there is today, a means to do it without using any fuel. So a very sustainable way to reuse a rocket. Will you believe me or will you say that it’s impossible? I can tell you that it’s possible because I’m now part of a venture which is a German entrepreneur, fantastic super entrepreneur. And he just demonstrated very recently with a drop test on a small scale that it works.
It’s a kind of an inflatable parachute, if you want that enveloped, let’s say the rocket and it works, but it’s not using any kind of fuel, et cetera. And so it’s a fully sustainable solution to reuse rockets. So you see, it’s going so fast. What I wanted also to say maybe about the risk is that there are some techniques also to minimize the risk, and it’s part of the good preparation. And I explained a little bit in the book and in this course, the crazy method launchpad that will start end of this month.
I will also give much more explanation about these tools, but there are some tools that exist also to try to have a very good preparation to analyze all the possible risk, et cetera. So that again, the risk of failure still exists, but at least you try to minimize it. And I think that again, maybe some entrepreneurs are fearful to do something because they say it’s going to fail, and sometimes it’s a lack of preparation. I think if you are well prepared, if you have well evaluated risk, and if you see what I like, this principle of asymmetry of risk.
Okay. There are some risk, but they are minimal compared to the reward that can be provided by what I want to do, then it should be always the decision. Okay. I’m going to do it because what I’m going to do if I succeed will just be great for the planet. By the way, if I succeed, I can even have a billion dollar company. Why not? And the risk is quite small. Or at least I know what I can do because I have some backup plans, et cetera, to minimize the risk.
If eventually they would happen.
Well, I look forward to seeing the outcomes from the first cohorts in the crazy method launchpad, so Fabrice will stay close for folks who do want to get in touch with you. What’s the best way they can reach you in order to get in contact?
Yeah. So I think the best way is to go on my, I have two websites, but my main website is fabrictesta.com, where you can find all the information. You can reach out to me on this website. I have also another website, which is superpreneurblueprint.com. I’m also available on all social media networks, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. So just feel free to connect with me if you need some advice for your startup. If you need some mentoring, coaching if you want to follow this new course, if you want anything, I try always to be available for entrepreneurs because I love entrepreneurs and I want also to give back by helping them so that we built a better world.
That’s fantastic. Yeah, I wanted to spend some time talking to mentoring, but I didn’t want to take away from what we wanted to talk about here. Mentoring is incredibly close to home to myself as well, and I’ve definitely seen the advantages that come. And so thank you for giving back to the entrepreneur community. In doing that, it’s more and more. I’ve now spoken to a couple of hundred entrepreneurs through the course of this podcast life, and invariably the successful ones always say my success is because of the lessons that were given to me by others through mentoring and effectively, we can save each other risk.
We can save each other pain. We can share. It’s not all just about pat on the back. You’re doing a great job, kid, and that’s really not what mentoring is about. Mentoring is about having a good, critical voice partner to share ideas with, and I’ve seen it myself as a recipient and also in mentoring I’ve done in the community as well, so it’s great. Hopefully we’ll come back. I’d love to have you back on again in the future, and we can talk a bit more deeply about mentoring.
With pleasure, Eric. It was a great conversation, great questions. And I really enjoy very much this conversation. Thanks a lot for inviting me.
Ladies and gentlemen, Fabrice Testa. Thank you very much.
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Charlie’s debut album Americana And Whatever’s Left is a story of heartbreak, loss and growth. We dive into the writing process, performing in a pandemic, and what inspires storytelling through music.
Big thanks to Charlie for joining me for the podcast and for performing for us as part of the show!
Welcome to the show. This is DiscoPosse podcast host, Eric Wright. Thank you very much for listening. We’ve had an amazing 2021 as far as the podcast listenership and really great response, so thank you all for coming along for the ride. This is a perfect, really neat soulful ending to the year, with the show featuring Charlie Cope. Charlie is a singer-songwriter and his brand new album Americana or Whatever’s Left has just been released. So this is a really cool opportunity to share in a storytelling experience through the power of music. I was really happy with the discussion I had with Charlie, so I hope you love this as much as I did and it even features some actual live music, or at least it was live when we recorded it. While it is not as awesome as his album, which you’ll have links to the Spotify and ways to listen to Charlie’s music, I definitely recommend. So hang tight. Listen to the song and the whole story. Charlie’s got such a fantastic story, that’s an absolute must listen. And speaking of must listen, please just take a second to think about what you need to do as far as supporting this podcast and supporting the great people that make this happen and support yourself in your own safety when it comes to data protection, to information protection, to info security, ransomware protection, this is the way to do it.
You can visit my fine friends over at Veeam Software. They’ve been super cool, not only in the amazing platform that they offer, which you can find, of course, by going to vee.am/DiscoPosse. On top of that, they’re a great team and they really are doing some fantastic stuff around cloud protection, on-premises data protection, physical servers, Cloud-Native with their CAST. And offering much more around SaaS, things like Teams and SharePoint. You need to protect your stuff. It’s real, right? Ransomware and all this crazy stuff is real. So go check it out, go to vee.am/DiscoPosse. And also protect your data in flight while you’re traveling around or even while you’re sitting at home. There are incredible amounts of risk in just your data being picked up, your identity being captured. A really great way to solve that is to use a VPN. I’m a user of ExpressVPN, so I highly recommend it and I’m really happy that they’re also supporters. So if you want to check that out, you can head over and try expressvpn.com/DiscoPosse.
Alright, let’s get to the good stuff. This is Charlie Cope.
Hey, this is Charlie Cope and you’re listening to the DiscoPosse Podcast.
So for the folks that are new to you, if you want to do me a favor, give a quick little bio. We’re going to talk about the new album. We’re going to talk about the industry in general and touring in a pandemic. And this is a lot of craziness that you’ve got to deal with right now. But, yeah, give us the elevator pitch and why people need to get your album. And I’m telling you, there’s links below. It is wicked good.
Thank you. My name is Charlie Cope. I’m an Americana singer based out of Texas, singer songwriter. I write all my own songs, and a couple of them are co writes. And like you said, I’ve been touring a lot, especially during the pandemic. And this album took me seven years to release, to write and create and live. And I’m hoping that a couple of people that have heard these songs might have lived through similar situations that may need a little bit more understanding in life, that need to feel a little bit less alone, might hear these songs and feel a little less alone in the world and maybe get a little connection between me and them and a couple of print stopping catchy songs along the way. It’s just a bonus.
It’s funny that you bring this up, right? Like the Americana style and your roots in that really come out. And it’s funny. I grew up as a kid, like just nothing but Highway Man records. So I grew up with Waylon and Willie and, like the classic stuff. My dad was really digging that the only guy that worked in the tech industry that had cowboy boots. It was kind of wild that I had this really diverse set of influences. And when I started playing my own music, it was funny because it comes out in this really strange diversity of my background of listening. And then my playing would swing and move around. Now far beyond me saying I’m a musician relative to the work that you’ve done and how much you’ve created. But it gives me a super, really good appreciation of bringing it through and maintaining your voice. But hearing the roots of it, it really just hits home to folks like me who grew up with a lot of that stuff.
Appreciate it. Yeah. I also grew up on that Willie and Waylon and the boys. When I was younger, I wanted to sing like Wayland Jennings, and I wanted to write music like Merle Haggard and lyrics like Chris Christopherson. Obviously, back then it was all country stuff. Now it’s a little bit more diverse Americana, like you said, kind of a bit of everything.
Well. And this is the thing maybe set the stage for folks that are fresh of the phrase. Right, because we went through, like, classic country, and then there was new country. And the new country is not new anymore because it’s old, new country. And you had that sort of wave of the next generation of it. And then Americana is this beautiful, sort of almost like a throwback, but it’s just a reminder to the origins of the whole genre.
So Americana music is basically just kind of everything old school, kind of put in pot and mixed together. It’s like a little bit of folk, bluegrass, rock and roll, blues, country. Like you said, I try to touch on every side of it as I could in this album, starting with, what about you obviously being a very big rock song and to use somebody, which is pretty country kind of folky, if your grandparents listen to it.
Yeah. The interesting thing of the music and the lyrics as a combination, the stories are super strong, and it’s amazing. I’ve always found that there’s so much stuff out there today in the sort of traditional, like, serious hits, one crowd, God bless them. Right. They’re making money and they’re still supporting the business. But I don’t even know the lyrics to any of the songs because you don’t need to. You just need to know the hook and it’s catchy. But what I found with listening to your songs is you really genuinely listen to the story. And then the more I play it, the more it’s you feel like that emo kid. Listen to the words, man, because it actually does have a real true start, middle finish as a storyteller. This is exciting to me that you can do it. And also, again, diversity of styles. Like you said, you got some stuff that’s more towards rock, and then you’ve got those real cool sort of bluegrass tones that are in there.
Yeah. Thank you. A lot of people ask me where the genres came from and, like the bluegrass, the rock and everything. And right now I’m wearing a David Bowie T-shirt, and that style really came from because I wanted to tell a story, like you said, but not just with the lyrics, also with the music itself. So taking What About You, the first song in the record, which is by far the most popular, is it kind of in the Kia-C? Kind of not, because I don’t want to talk to musician wise and people that aren’t musicians that understand, but it never really ends on a C major, so it never really has, like a period. It’s almost like you’re just talking for ever and ever. And I felt like that built anxiety. And that’s what I wanted to infer in that song and tell a story without the lyrics and then with the lyrics and then make them kind of come together and sometimes even make them say two different things at once.
The sort of the walking style of the story along with it reminded me even like the Stones Far Away, I was always one of those ones where it just has this beautiful rolling back tone. Like you almost picture just like the movie set going by behind them. And that’s what the music is. And then the story, and then it comes into the hook and then you’re in a song again, and then it goes back to story. I love that interplay and the style.
Yeah, for sure. A bunch of, I didn’t just want to have 14 stories. I wanted one big story and so it’s not really more 14 stories, it’s more like 14 chapters of the story. So there’s different parts and as you go through it, it gets more word I’m looking for. It gets more mature as it goes through because all my best songs are true stories. I’ve written around 1500 to 2000 songs now and all my best ones, when you’ve written that many, you’ve written them every which way but loose. But my best ones are always true stories and I was looking at them and trying to figure out what I was going to do for this album years ago and I was like, well, something just hit me. All my best songs are true stories and I’m going to sing about anything. Well then I know exactly what I’m going to sing about. And then I sent out to I think it was Prince or Michael Jackson that said if they would release an album with twelve songs, they’d write 120.
Yes.
Well, I figured I’m no Prince, I’m no Michael Jackson. So I wrote 1200 and I wanted to pick the top twelve and ended up being 14.
That’s an interesting thing to talk about the process of choosing the order because there’s this sort of this amalgam of music you’ve got in your back catalog, it’s in your head and you’ve played it everywhere and it’s in notebooks all over and snippets of recordings and to really bring it together as both individually small stories and then the real true overplay of this story throughout as a theme and it’s not easy. How do you approach that whole process with the truth?
It’s the best way to do it. I really believe in putting emotion and soul, heart and soul into what I do, really anything I do. And at first it was like I got to make a new album, I got to do this when I was younger and then I grew up a little bit and it wasn’t so much I need to make an album, I need to tell a story and that story was really the heart and soul of it and that was really just a big part of my life growing up, especially because now I’m only 20 years old and of course this has taken so long to create and that’s why I say seven years because that’s the span that I listed this from. For the most part, it wasn’t that hard getting the order down just because it was like, okay, well this happened and this happened, this happened. There was a few things I had to mix around in order to make it less complicated but that was relatively easier. But writing and rewriting and rewriting again, all these songs in order to make number two, connect with number eight more and have this come back at this and have this guitar riff and slipping away, match the trumpet riff and putting myself through and all this sort of thing.
And it all had artistic symbolism. It meant something. It wasn’t just there to be cool. It all meant something. That was definitely a lot harder than picking the order.
You’re interesting that you’ve mixed a lot of dynamics of sound, like instrument selection. You’ve got fantastic players who are supporting you through this. And I saw some of the making of recording stuff, and it’s like, especially recording and producing and mixing down during pandemic while touring and all the stuff going on. It’s a very different process than just kind of seven guys going into a studio for nine straight days and just banging, hanging it out. Like it’s a laborious process. But I love the mix of what makes you bring those different instruments sounds and those different styles in.
Well, like you said, the musicians are amazing. Most of me or the other guys, my backing band, and there’s a few extended members. We call those the other other guys. And they’re all fantastic musicians. But like I said earlier, they all have meetings. For example, the horns are more triumphant. That’s what they’re trying to symbolize triumphantness. And so, like in Big River to Cross, for example, there’s the big horn section that comes in on that song, and that’s supposed to seem like there’s a Big River to Cross being like, we have to break up and we have to in this and move on with our lives and, like this big goal that we’ve been trying to accomplish for so long. And then we finally do. And then I had also been putting myself through. It wasn’t a full horn section. It was much smaller. It was just a trumpet. But that also had symbolism with growing maturity. Same way with the rock and roll kind of. There’s sirens in my background. Living in a college town, it happens.
Yes. It’s sad to hear more often than you’d hope.
Yeah. But like the rock and roll side and let me go easy. And like, the guitar solo, in a lot of that was very kind of like a battle between good and evil. And also, depending on what part it is, it also symbolizes immaturity and growing up. And this story started when I was about 13, and this album where it ended, I was 18. So there’s a lot of immaturity there. Like I said, I try to be as honest as humanly possible in this album, and I think it definitely helped in being honest.
You’re wise beyond your years in the way that it comes through, and it’s always amazing to hear, like, just the strength and the depth of your voice. But more than that, like that, sometimes you could get away with just pure raw talent. Like, just the physical talent of singing is one thing, but there’s an emotion that’s buried inside it, and it’s hard. Like, when you think most folks you see that are blues artists, they got a few decades of hurt in them. So for you to come at it and to be able to give this kind of storytelling and to have seven years in at age 20, it’s a pretty heroic amount of work that you’ve been doing to put this stuff together. I imagine it was probably buried in you long before even 13.
I’ve always wanted to be a musician. As long as I can remember, it was pretty highly discouraged from friends and family as I think would probably be wise. It is now. But starting out wasn’t the most lucrative job, wasn’t the safest job by far. And a lot. I know I’m in the vast minority of musicians that can actually make a living and then some. And for a pretty long time, I wasn’t nothing against anybody that said I wouldn’t be able to make it or anything like that. Totally cool. It worked out for the best for me. So I’ve always wanted to be one and I just kind of put it off. I was also really shy. I’ve always had problems with self confidence. Still do. And just like, well, if they can’t make it, there’s no way I could ever make it. So I just kind of put it off for a really long time. But it was always there. And then I guess when I started when I was 13 and I kind of started falling in love with this one girl, and that was just kind of the whole story of an on again, off again relationship, especially trying to keep it under wraps, not being able to talk to anyone because it was secret.
I guess art is a great way for your own therapy. So it was almost just like I needed to get it out somehow. And a great way is to pretend like I made it up.
Yeah, that’s always the funny part. People don’t realize how much truth is buried in those words that you’re probably not supposed to reveal. And it’s like you’re like most of it is made up except for the parts that are all real. I always appreciate whenever Taylor Swift gets into a relationship, I’m all right. Two years to a new album. It’s just fantastic. She seems to be this wave of good relationship realize it doesn’t. Sadly, I shouldn’t make fun of it because it is, unfortunately, a bit of a feeder for really fantastic stories and music because that emotion gets poured into it. On that, though, the longevity of a song versus the longevity of the original emotion. What do you feel about this idea that you’re going to be playing songs that really meant something immediate and distinct when you were like 17 and you’re going to carry that 10, 15, 20 years down the road, you’re going to bring those songs up and it’s going to be a hit. Not the story of 17 year old Charlie, who is suffering.
Yeah, I’ve thought about that a lot. I think it was Joe Walsh said about one of his tunes that if I’ve known that was going to be the song I’d sing for the rest of my life, I would have written a different song. I don’t know, because the story hasn’t necessarily ended yet. So I’m kind of even though the last song, Best Thing Ever Made, that part of the story, ended when I was 18, when I just graduated high school. So it hasn’t really ended yet. And I totally thought it did but it totally did not.
Even you get surprised by the story sometimes.
Yeah. But I can’t talk too much about this, but when I was on tour, I was touring through Houston, and I’m from a really small town near Houston, so I got to be in town and I was there and kind of all hit me back. All those memories and stuff. I drove by my old school and all those roads we used to speak down in private and those 30 miles an hour roads, we all used to go 85 on all that sort of thing. And even though it’s changing a lot, that really small town in just a very short amount of time, all those memories and feelings and even songs I forgot I wrote, came back. And when I actually got to meet again with some of these people and figured out that, oh, crap, this story kept going because I actually met with someone special a few times. And I remember that night I had a show because I got into an argument with her, and I had a show in Houston, a really small joint. It was called the 202 Main just in Conroe outside Houston. And I put on probably the best show I put on all year.
It was just a little one man show joint, but it was definitely top five. And I’ve been looking back on that show like, man, I got to do that again. I don’t know if that emotion is ever going to go away. Every time I sing these songs, I think about how I wrote them, how I felt after I wrote them, how I feel about them now, at least in the short span of time, because I realized that could be a different story when I’m 40 years old. But as of right now, the emotions haven’t gone away. I don’t really see them going away anytime soon.
This is where the collaboration stuff comes into, because there’s a real emotion to pairing with somebody and co writing, and you really hear it and feel their contribution to it through that. I mean, I pulled on the old country roots, too. I remember watching as a kid, Honeysuckle Rose, and I love that movie. It’s a Willie Nelson, which is basically like a biography of him. This idea of going on tour with a girl but realizing his wife was like, I was that girl. And I see how you’re looking at that girl now. So I know something’s going on because I was the one that took you from somebody else. And I don’t want you to do that to me because it’s Willie’s band. I always loved that he would just use his guys and watching this thing of the moment that they’re on stage, and then they connect, and it’s there. That emotion comes even with just connecting with the audience, with connecting with the drive on the way to the venue. And you’re like, oh, man, that’s that pizza joint that we used to go to. And I remember having this big argument out there, and just like, that kicks in, and all of a sudden you’re on stage and you close your eyes and that’s it.
That memory just takes over.
Yeah, man. And that’s really why I’m doing this. I’m trying to connect the audience. Like I said in the beginning, it’s a big deal. So if I can carry that emotion through the rest of my career and into the audience and into the bands and everything, well, then I guess I did something right.
When you’re performing, how adaptive is the performance? Because obviously you got it set up by you guys and there could be nobody in the room, and you can nail down the songs. You’ve already got the music’s in you, the stories in you, you’re ready to perform. You guys rehearse. Everybody knows that. It’s funny. Just like any job. It’s like, I know I can pull this off, but then situationally things adjust. How much do you do? Things like move around set list or extend parts of the song. How much do you like to mix that in?
A whole lot. I actually try to never play the same song the same way twice, especially with the band. I throw in extra verses. I put in new lyrics that’s more for, like, the acoustic stuff when there’s not a whole lot else you can do. But I’ll modulate it. I’ll add in extra instruments, take instruments out. I always make it fun. I try to make it because I don’t want people to think if I wanted to hear this song, I could just listen to his album on my phone, come out to the show, and it’s always different. It’s always more fun. I’ll get people’s names from the audience. I’ll slip their names into the song just for the hell of it. I’ll even write songs on the stage with the band. They’ll be like, you give me a word. Okay? Flowers. You give me a word. Umbrella. All right. This one’s called Flowers and Umbrellas.
That’s awesome.
It’s always different. And the set lists are different every night, which makes practice extremely hard, but it makes the shows extremely fun.
I remember doing medley’s when I was in, I would never want to play, like, a whole song. We would do our original stuff. And the funny thing, actually, the story the name of DiscoPosse, where this came from, that we were in this heavy band. And we were sort of like toolish, very melodic, heavy music. So you got that style. And then what we would do is we would open our own band with our own bands, but we would put on, like, funky wigs, and we would play really heavy versions of disco songs. So I called it the DiscoPosse. And we would just play Wild Cherry and Chic and just like me, or just rocking out with a seven string, and it was a blast. And then you would just go get a couple of drinks. Now you’re relaxed and you play your original stuff, and people really kind of playing originals sometimes when you go into these small venues is a good sign. If you want to go to the bathroom, now is a great time because you’re not going to know what the song sounds like. But they would know that we were there twice, and they would really kind of dig into it.
But that was the thing is, playing stuff that was dynamic. You start to play and you see. You can see the room. You can feel it, not like just the vibe wasn’t right. And so we would switch up and just like, go with it. And you had to know. You had to be ready to kind of throw away the set list, because there’s nothing worse than if you’re just like, the next song in our list is X. And if they didn’t like the last one, and this sounds just like it, why in the hell are you playing? Figure out what they want to hear.
You got to be able to adapt.
If you were to say, the first song that you played end to end, that you wanted the room to say, check this out, I learned this song. What was the one that made you ready? This is it. I’m a performer. I learned this whole goddamn song.
Actually. You know what? I think it was an original. I do remember it because it has followed me around for years. It was a God-awful song. It’s called Angel. I didn’t really know how to play guitar. I knew, like a chord and a half, and I was 14. And so I played a few of my first open mics and that sort of thing. Nothing real. And I actually did have, like two gigs just through some people I knew. They had, like, some charity events, so I got a few bucks for that. But Angel, that was it. When I was 16, I made a terrible record. It’s terrible. You can check it out. It’s awful. I wouldn’t suggest it.
You definitely know I’m putting things into that one now.
Yeah, well, it’s not that great, but I knew nothing about music. Nothing like Americana or Whatever’s Left. But it was called Good Time Charlie. And the first song on it was Angel, and it was pretty awful. I’ve actually rewritten all those songs just to see if I could just to make them suck a little less. Actually, they don’t suck that much anymore. But the original recordings you can look at, they’re all awful. It was Angel. I was so proud of that. Terrible.
That’s the other thing, right? Evolution of the music is something that I remembered going through. Like I said, my singer in the band, he’s just got this notes, like, basically like a poetry sell book with weird stuff all over it. And he would just be like, all right, tapping into a rhythm, you’re like, okay, cool, let’s just go dig. And he’s like. He remembers a word and he’s like, all right, find some sentence, some phrase that he wrote. And then from there we would like, carry on. And we would do stuff. And I remember recording on this, like, , sorry, I’m an old dude. So I recorded on four track, old school cassettes, putting four tracks and then bouncing it down on physical tracks, which means that basically you get bleed between the tracks, so it just destroys the dynamics of it. But hey, to us, it was like, Holy crap, we recorded a song and we actually managed to squeeze in layered guitars and stuff, but we would do this, and then you would record it, and then a month later, you almost forget how that song was recorded because you’d listen to something else and it would start to adapt, and then you realize, like, oh, man, that’s the real song.
Like, it’s living, it’s breathing, it’s organic. And that’s actually one of the best things because the emotion just gets carried forward into a new vessel, I guess.
Yeah, I think that if you release it, I know that’s different. Just keeping it on a track in your bedroom. But if you release it out to the world and it’s on the radio and stuff and people hear it and connect with it, it grows even, because obviously I can’t change them now. They’re there. I mean, I could do a remastered version one day, but that’s them. I also think that they evolve and they grow and they’re living in a different sense. By the way people look at them all the time. People come up and tell me, Use Somebody is my wife’s song or whatever, and they’ll tell me why. And they’ll give me their little life story, and I’m just thinking, and I’m telling them, that’s great, terrific. Thank you. But I’m just thinking, I don’t know how the hell you got that. That’s not a great song to have with you and your wife, man. You didn’t listen to that song properly, but it has a different meaning and a different connotation to them. So beautiful that this thing that I wrote so specifically about my life could mean something so similar to somebody in a completely different situation.
And I did have that intent to give it a little bit of vagueness so that could happen. Yeah, it took off so much further than I thought it ever could.
Well, this is the interesting thing. You’re handing it to the listener for them to interpret, and you have to sort of surrender to how it’s going to be interpreted. That’s got to be a weird feeling, because he almost was like, no, man, it’s not what’s about. Like poetry, songwriting, artistry. When the artist is not there, we’re all like, oh, yeah, this is what he meant when he drew it. You could see the shades of yellow that were in the sun and the sunflowers in the side of France. And you’re like, no, just the dude’s kid really like yellow.
So that’s like yellow.
But you’re doing that. You have to effectively give this thing and then listen to how people enjoy it and interpret it. What’s that like?
It’s like I made something that’s better than myself. I don’t know. Like, I’m Dr. Frankenstein and now the monster is designing skyscrapers crap. You did a better job than I did. I made you and you can barely talk. It’s humbling and a little awkward at first sometimes. I once played acoustic show, just a little one man show, and I think it was in Fort Worth. And some people came out and they were sitting in the middle, so I couldn’t really tell who it was. And at the acoustic show, sometimes we’ll tell little stories. And I wrote this. I was on the road and about this, and that. Not all the time, just sometimes. And some lady went, no, it’s not. I’m like, okay. And I just started playing it. I didn’t even know what to say. I wrote it. I don’t know what to say.
Fair enough. Good point. You got me.
You get heckled at a show that’s definitely a new. But it is amazing to see how people can connect it to their experience at that time. Just in the same way that when you drove by your high school, you remember the car you had, you remember the music that was on the radio every morning for the last semester that you were there. Like, there’s all this connective memories that are there that are very situational, that are very specific. And then years go by and they’re there. They’re always there. Like, some of it leads and fades. But it really is funny how, now that you’re the guy that’s creating that point in time experience that you have and giving it to somebody, in 15 years, they’re going to be driving by their high school going like, man, I remember listening to that Charlie Cope album, and this was like, I got some stuff done in that car or whatever it’s going to be, right?
It’s pretty amazing. I don’t always think about that. It doesn’t always hit me that these songs could. I definitely didn’t expect them to be as popular as they are. I didn’t expect them to get on the charts, much less seven of them. And so many different charts as well, and all around the world, and I see bands that are covering it and everything, and I didn’t expect it. I knew I’d get a couple of fans by this time in my career, but I didn’t think I’d have nearly as many as I do. It’s a little weird.
Yeah, well, it’s earned and deserved and all that. Charlie, when did you know this was your career?
It’s going to sound corny. When I told the girl, this is what I was going to do. When I told someone special, this is what I was going to do. I don’t know. She didn’t really say anything. She just kind of looked at me funny, and she had this look in her eyes I’ll never forget, we were kids a million years ago. And then I started showing her all my songs. She’s like, all right, Charlie, you need to shut the hell up now. But it was a cool feeling because she knew the first song, she knew it was about her, and it was kind of a really cool feeling. And then years later, when I started seeing people, they were telling me about the songs and how they feel for them. The career grew. I knew this is what I was probably, the only thing I was actually capable of doing and then finding more and more and more reasons to it. The career itself also was also a living entity and also grew, and so did my reasoning behind it.
The business is weird, especially now. People don’t get this that you going to produce and release an album. There’s lawyers, there’s craziness, there’s leaps of faith. There are contracts that you’re going to look back on in 20 years and weep about. You know, you hear some of the stories, even just the simplest things, like co writing credits and songwriting credits, like stuff like that. I remember hearing Billy Corgan talking about it. He’s like, Be careful what decisions you make at the start, because 15 years in, when you’re the one getting the check, and the five people that are on tour with you for 15 years aren’t getting the same check. There’s a very weird thing about being the voice, the songwriter, the creator, and having a great support and crew. But you have to think about weird future stuff when you don’t even know it’s real yet as you’re like, just trying to get yourself out there. That’s got to be a strange sensation of seeing it as a business while also just being a performer.
Yeah. And especially in my head, I’m still that 14, overweight kid with the goofy haircut. So I don’t necessarily think I need to get my band some NDAs, because when I give them the schedule for the next album, we can’t tell that on the radio. We can’t tell that magazines or my mentor is like, hey, Charlie, I just bought a magazine. Your face is on it. Like, do you put it there? Put a sticky note? That’s a weird feeling. And then the whole business side, I don’t necessarily think of those things right away. It’s more of like, hey guys, you want to go grab a burger and I can show you the new songs that I have, not here’s your NDA before I show you these songs. It’s very weird. But, luckily, I have a lot of great mentors on the music side and the business side. And they’ve helped me out and I found those really early in my career. So I did have a jump start for when things start moving. I kind of already knew what I needed to go down.
Yeah. And especially in my head, I’m still that 14, overweight kid with the goofy haircut. So I don’t necessarily think I need to get my band some NDAs, because when I give them the schedule for the next album, we can’t tell that on the radio. We can’t tell that magazines or my mentor is like, hey, Charlie, I just bought a magazine. Your face is on it. Like, do you put it there? Put a sticky note? That’s a weird feeling. And then the whole business side, I don’t necessarily think of those things right away. It’s more of like, hey guys, you want to go grab a burger and I can show you the new songs that I have, not here’s your NDA before I show you these songs. It’s very weird. But, luckily, I have a lot of great mentors on the music side and the business side. And they’ve helped me out and I found those really early in my career. So I did have a jump start for when things start moving. I kind of already knew what I needed to go down.
How much of the scene sort of impacted your ability to get close to music? Because I’d say in Texas there’s definitely a very strong music scene and there seems to be an understanding of the talent that’s in the area. It’s a beautiful thing to go through there. There like Tennessee got its own scene. Of course you got New Orleans got its own style. Everybody’s got these very localized groups. But having sort of close proximity access to a real industry, not just big oil, but big music, it must have been helpful, I’d say, versus some poor guy that’s up in North Dakota just trying to make this happen.
Yeah, his neighbor lives a mile away. Yeah, it was a huge impact on me actually. So like I said earlier, mentors. I take mentors everywhere I can. I’m always trying to learn something. No matter how much I think I know about something, I don’t know much about it. And especially like we said earlier, this business is very weird and constantly adapting. So advice that I had or lived by or even gave just a year ago might not be true anymore, especially with Covid. So a lot of my inspirations came from local musicians, probably even more so than Tom Petty or Bob Dylan that I might have grew up listening to. I think those local guys, especially around Houston, I think around Dallas, but Fort Worth is a little bit more country. Around Houston, there’s a lot more blues and there’s a lot more Americana. So it’s really folky, kind of John Prine is big Townes Van Zandt is huge. So listening to those guys, that’s a lot of storytelling there. And really intricate lyrics hanging out with those guys. And like this person taught me how to write a set list and this person taught me how to put on a show other than the music.
And this person, my buddy Van Buchanan taught me how to write a catchy song, right. Actually, I met Van at JP Hops House, which is one of my favorite bars in the whole world. Weird thing to say when you’re 20 and it’s been one of my favorite bars since I was a lot younger. I don’t want to say how younger cause I don’t want to get them in trouble. I wouldn’t drink there. I would just go there to play, but some of the top singer songwriters come around and they’ll hang out every now and then. I was part of the National Summer Association. I was part of the Houston Summer Association. A few other things, too. And just everyone would go there and play. And it was just like one of the hot spots. I would go do that and do open mics before I had a bunch of gigs. I would even do, like, seven or eight open mics in one day. Just so I was like, okay, this song was too slow. They said it needs to be faster. This one was too fast, it needs to be slower. And this person did this, and this person did that.
I try to learn from everywhere I could go. So the scene around there was very big.
The interesting thing, too, is the weird transparency to the writing process. There is a lot of that, right? And some people, maybe especially later in their career, they’re like, no, ef oh, y’all. This is what the song is going to sound like, whether you like it or not. This is how it’s going out. But early on, as you find that voice, find your style and figure it out, sometimes just through that creative process, you got to test it and audience testing. It’s like comedians do this all the time, right? They go out and they just do little, like eight minute spots here and there. And even big, huge comedians. Chappelle shows up at The Comedy Store and he’ll do ten minutes, which really blows up the poor bugger who’s on after him didn’t know that he was going to show up. But then that material gets matured and tested and worked on. And then sometimes it’s the room that’s wrong. Sometimes it’s you that’s wrong. Sometimes it’s the timing that’s wrong. And then over time, all of sudden, a you’re like, all right, now I’ve got this song that’s really ready, and it’s kind of automatic at that point.
But do you like that collaborative audience style writing?
Oh, yeah. It’s called road testing. Yeah, it’s really important. I’ve done it on every one of these songs, some more than others. Yeah, that’s really important because I’m trying to connect with the audience. I know that’s different from a show to a studio, but I’m trying to connect with them. So to get their opinion on it is so huge and especially because I’m always asking everybody’s opinion, even if they don’t know anything about music. So whoever I ask, I always take it with a grain of salt. But that’s really important, especially for me, because like I said, I’ve always had an issue with self confidence. So I’m like, I don’t know, does this work? Does this work? And then, Charlie, that’s like one of your best songs ever. Okay, cool. I’m always asking them, and I’m always very cautious about my music. I don’t want to release crap that I think is good. No one else does. So I’m always road testing it, and it helps them evolve a whole lot.
Have you ever known that someone was just wrong?
They’ve given me some terrible advice. I’ve had one of them, won’t say who, won’t say who, but one person said and was telling me something. I was like, oh, well, actually, that’s illegal. You can’t do that. But I saw a TV show about it. Yeah. There’s a sitcom about a rapper. And I just like, okay, I’m not going to argue with you. He’s like, I know more than you because I watched this sitcom. I was like, okay? I’m a professional. Cool. I’ll take your word for it. I got to run, though. I’ve had people and family tell me to stop playing shows for money, start playing gigs for free. But that’s an interesting approach. Ton of people told me to quit so many times, it got so annoying the amount of times they would tell me to quit. Not every one of them, of course. A lot of, like, my grandfather on my mom’s side bought me my first guitar, and he was the first person to tell me, I can make it. He’s even on the album.
Wow, that’s awesome.
Yeah. I got him in the intro track with the clapping, so I got him on that. But yeah, a couple of them are just, like, terrible advice. Drop out of college, get a regular job. It’s like, okay, well, at least get a regular job as, like, a waiter or in fast food or something until you really make it big and just hold off on the music. Why would I do that? Even at this point, I was probably 18. I was like, make less money than I am now. Why and hold off on the career? It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s all good. You always have to take it all with a grain of salt.
Yeah. And you think about every musician, every artist, every creator has had somebody just say, like, trash, right? Like, somebody got the First Kiss album. They’re like, I’m just not hearing a hit here. That was one of the famous Joan Jett, talks about this thing of going to, like, shopping. I love rock and roll to 40 different record producers, and they’re all like, I just can’t imagine hearing this on the radio. And today she’s probably still getting six figure checks for it.
It’s a great song, but if you really think of it, like, try to step back, it’s a great song. I love Joan Jett. One of my favorites, but it’s so extremely cheesy.
Right. Yeah.
This is the interesting thing, too. Have you got songs that people love that you hate or not hate as a bit of a dark word, but songs that you’re like? I wish people didn’t like this as much as they did, because I kind of feel like it’s either boxed into a period of time or maybe the style wasn’t quite how you want it.
Breaking Down Never Felt So Good is one of mine. And that’s a great song. I love to play it. It hurts my arms to play it, but it’s a great song. It’s really fast. It hurts, especially the poor drummer, because he’s going to town on that tambourine. When we play it live, it’s longer. So that one. But if you do it at, like, a one man show or like, a two-man show or something like that, it’s not always as good that way. So I’ll get, like, people to clap along and stuff. But if the crowd isn’t as responsive, it just doesn’t work as well. So I don’t play it in that event. Like you say, you got to update the set list in those.
Yeah.
But sometimes people just, like, request it. I’ve even had people request it, like, three times in one four hour show. The crowd was so not into it. It was just a one man show. So I didn’t have the band. I was like, don’t think okay, because, I mean, I wrote it. So if I get a song request for one that I wrote, it’s kind of hard to avoid playing that, but it’s also just a pain to play, and I got to do all the solos by myself.
If I’m playing acoustically, that don’t get no easier.
No, sir. No, that’s it. The acoustic fretboard and string tension is not designed for that kind of playing. There are guys that I’m always amazed. There’s a guy who’s a subway musician in Toronto where I was raised, and I remember going through every day, and he would play. It’s like bitter cold. He’s wearing fingerless gloves, and he’s playing this crazy, like, high speed, like, Spanish Flamingo stuff. And then he’s, but then it turns out he also played, like, Heavy Duty, like, prog rock as well. And he started playing on an acoustic, and he’s like, I can’t do this, dude. You break down fast. And he plays all the time. And he’s like, no, this is not good for your soul or body to do this.
I have several guitars on the stage, but one of my main guitars, one with a lot of the pictures with Jesse. Either custom strings, so they’re really thick and they’re really heavy. Yeah, they’re hardly guitar strings. They’re more like steel bridge cables.
What’s the gauge on that from? This is where we nerd out for all the people that if you want to tap out for a few minutes, we’re going to nerd out on some guitar tech. You can even hear you fighting to bend. Like, you know that. Those are some thick strings. But what a beautiful tone, though.
Oh, yeah. Love this guitar. I named her after Jesse Coulter.
Oh, yeah. Very cool.
Yeah. All my guitars have names. Oh, yeah. We’re going to nerd out over here.
There you go. Just because I got a collection of guitars around to show you. This is when my wife got this for me and I was actually particularly proud of this one. So it’s hard to see, it’s not going to focus. That’s signed by Ed Sheeran and it says ‘Please Play, Don’t Display’. Yes, sir. I play this thing all the time. This is a Martin, it’s like a baby guitar. This is Ed Sheeran’s, like model. I think Ed Sheeran must be 4ft tall because this is tiny. It’s just like a little wee guitar. So it feels funny because I play a seven string. So when I pick up even a six string, I feel like Jimmy Hendrix’s hands wrapping around the neck. So this thing, it feels like junior size. But it’s fantastic to sound like this little tiny Martin guitar. But it’s just like just big thick sound and I love the warmth of it.
‘Please Play. Do not Display’. I like that. I might steal that.
That is. You got to put that on someone’s guitar.
I’ve signed plenty of guitars, man. It always freaks me out. Are you sure you want me? Do you want me to sign your beer can or something? I do that a lot.
That’s an interesting thing too, right? Is that there’s this different level that you get, right? Because some people want you to sign a thing. It has both a meaning in that moment and they see this longevity of the meaning. And it’s really amazing to be able to mean that to somebody, right? That’s got to be pretty well. And then at the same time you’re just like, this is like a $3,000 guitar, dude. Maybe you should, can I sign a piece of paper? Like maybe a book or something?
Yeah. One of my biggest fears is like I’m going to misspell their name on their guitar.
With a nice big thick Sharpie.
Yeah, exactly. I would feel like such a tool if I did that. You could see me. If there’s like every now and then at the bigger shows, there’ll be like a line of a couple of people that want me to sign stuff and they’ll take pictures of me and stuff. You can see the panic in my eyes.
Now this is the fun part because I know there’s nothing worse than be like dance for me. Right? Because you, come on, we want to talk. But at the same time, I don’t even know the legality of, ‘can I play your songs’? If you’re playing your songs on my podcast, am I going to get busted for a DMCA? I don’t know how that all works.
You have my permission. You can play my music as much as you like.
There you go, folks. That’s for the lawyers. There you go. Charlie, it’d be a real honor if you want to play a little bit for us. I would love to mix up. Be the first time I’ve ever had a live player on the podcast. And we can jump back into some more of the tech.
Sure. Do you have a favorite?
No. You know what I’m going to say. This is artist pick. If you had the song that you wanted people to know that this is the start of your listing journey, throw down.
Make sure I’m in tune. I’m not.
This is half the battle.
Yeah. At least I’m inside, not out in the cold.
There’s nothing worse than playing outdoor gigs. And you’re like, this is not going to go well. Temperature changes make a mess.
Your fingers turn the sausages.
Yeah, I’m in New Jersey now, but I grew up in Toronto and it was disturbing. We’d go and play outdoor games. You’re sitting around a campfire. See, your guitar is, like, hot on the front. Your back is cold from the winter and it’s a bad scene that I’ve got an old Seagull guitar, which is basically almost the same style as a Martin. It’s an open top, so not laminated. This thing has been through wars. I still have the price tag on it. I bought it when I was, like 22, so it’s like 25 years old. And I still love this guitar, but, man, it’s a miracle it’s still with me these days. And the action is still, like, super low. It’s a beautiful play. I’m a big fan of it.
I see, like, William Prince playing outdoor in the snow on New Year’s Eve in Canada. I was like, oh, God, not just the guitar, but also your vocals. I’m wearing a Carhartt if I’m outside and like, anything below 70.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, there you go. I got to say, Charlie Cope.
Can you hear the guitar okay?
Yeah, it’s actually pretty cool. The cool thing, the signal wire platform that I use, it actually plays pretty cleanly and technically I can actually talk while you’re playing. And it records both. It’s not like Zoom, where it cuts out one when someone else starts talking. It actually multiplexes audio. That’s another nerd bit for the folks that are used to networking and speedy recording, but, yeah, that’s why it doesn’t cut off as bad. Zoom is horrible to play on because any change in dynamics, it tries to auto adjust and it just blows up the dynamics.
Very cool. Yeah. So we talked about the best tape ever made, a couple of times. See if I can get work. We’ll do a little different version.
You heard that’s driving stop.
Yes.
And if we work out, our story was riddled with disaster. We were never meant to make it anyway.
I look back and all I see is the laughter. So I showed you Willie Nelson’s song.
I love it. Beautiful.
My voice might be a little bit out of tune. I didn’t warm up or anything.
No, I know that’s the worst, too. It’s one thing as a guitarist, you can always sort of mess with your fingers and get ready. Thank you for being on the spot and nailing it too. That was very cool. I tell you a perfect setup because one of my favorite questions that I love to ask people, which I’m very sure I stole from somebody like Tim Ferriss. And it is thematic to the song. What is the worst thing that’s happened to you that you’re the most thankful for?
Good one.
One worst thing that’s happened to me that I’m thankful for. It might not all be great, but I was going to say it might not all be great, but it all worked out in the end. So none of it’s terrible, but there’s quite a bit of terrible stuff. I mean, as you can probably tell if you Google me enough, look up on the magazines. A lot of people know I have my history battling addiction and I was homeless for a little while. But actually the homeless thing wasn’t that bad at all. I also don’t want to spoil any future songs.
It’s all good.
I had some problems with this girl and she had some problems in her personal life, and it just killed me to see her and her struggling with her own problems. But I think that made both of us a lot stronger. And if she didn’t have to deal with those problems, she would have been able to brace the ones that were coming. I know that didn’t really happen to me, but seeing someone that I love struggle, it’s definitely worse than anything that could ever happen to myself.
That’s good. That’s why you never open with that question.
Or end. That would be a weird ender, too.
And you shared before about your personal journey and some of the challenges you faced. And this industry, the music industry, I say this industry like I’m in it, but I know of it. And I got a lot of friends that are in the music industry and performers and everything, TV, radio, it’s just on a good day. It’s a weird life because it’s very non structured. It requires you to build a lot of coping mechanisms to normalcy. Right? Like there is no normal by the standard definition. And it’s funny when you see a lot of folks, right? People see like Dave Mustain from Megadeth, and he speaks three languages and he talks about all his philosophies, read and writing, and people are like, but you’re the lead singer in a heavy metal band. This dude’s got a lot of free time and he’s fighting addiction. So he has built a lot of coping mechanisms and things that allowed him to compensate for time. I could be on the tour bus and then going into the city copping and then heading back to the bus, or I can read a goddamn Shakespeare and really get into something that keeps me busy.
So when you go into an industry that is non structured, where you have to sort of build your own safety into your life, how does that work?
Well, I took control of a lot. I don’t really like depending on others, especially in this industry. I mean, there’s been so many times when people have asked me some other groups, some soul and pop singers and blues band, we were all going to go on tour together, and they came to me, they approached me, they gave me all the numbers, and we even had contracts. And then the whole tour kind of fell apart. I knew I had contracts, I could have done something. But it’s not like I was being taken advantage of or anything like that. So it unfortunately fell apart. So I rolled with it. I just said, no worries. Keep me in mind in the future. Let me know if you need anything, that sort of thing. Keep in touch. And we didn’t. But I really dislike depending on other people. I’m very independent. I’m a very independent person. So I did everything myself. So all the tours that I go on now, they’re my tours, and if I run in, they do sometimes intersect with other people’s tours. Parker McCollum and Lynn Clark Green and Random King and stuff like that, we will intersect.
But it’s always, if I’m on tour, it’s my tour, at least for the next few years. So when I’m the boss, I have so much more control. I don’t have complete control, but I have a lot more control. And I think the people that work for me, my promoters and agents and musicians, I think they realize that I am extremely professional in what I do. I’m also a man of my word. And so I will go above and beyond to see what I mean. I mean what I say. And sometimes, like I said, things happen, COVID happens. I don’t think anyone really has.
No one had that in their plan.
Yeah, only a couple of people really gave me a hard time. Like, why does this happen like this? Well, COVID. 90% of people are like, okay, that’s cool. No problem. Understandable. But I try to take control as much as I could and be very professional. And I also expect and ask that everyone that works with me try to do the same. I hold that very, somebody’s word means a whole lot to me. So I’m a very trusting person, but I think I am where I am because I learn everywhere I go and I get mentors and all that.
So I’m a trusting person, but I’m also going to learn. So if your word falls apart a bunch of times, I’m going to learn, unfortunately, as it may be. So I try to take as much control as I can, even if that’s not necessarily the healthiest way to deal with it.
I’ll say it’s not even as much control as responsibility. You put the responsibility on yourself, but because you’re giving back into it, right? It’s not just I’m taking controls and I don’t trust anybody. You’re taking controls, and I’m ultimately responsible for the outcome here. And I’m going to depend on other people occasionally, but I want them to be responsible. And if they fail to meet that bar, then the responsibility goes back to me. So it’s a weird thing that we still talk about the word control. And some people say, like, Charlie, you’re controlling because you do everything. There’s a very big difference between control and responsibility. Control is power. Responsibility is ownership. Big difference.
I definitely don’t have much power, but I definitely have a whole bunch of ownership.
You sure own the outcomes.
Yeah.
But it’s a huge lift because it’s not just you. You’ve got performers, AR, PR people. You’ve got contracts to uphold. You’ve got to take care of your body, take care of yourself to perform all the time. People don’t get like, if I get sick, I just call in sick. You’re out on the road, you’re sick. You’re gargling lemon and salt water and spewing it out your nose and doing weird stuff to flush your sinuses in between sets because you can’t stop. That’s nuts.
We have protocols. If any of the band members ever get sick on the road, we have protocols for that, because as a singer, that’s the worst thing that can happen. So terrible.
I remember hearing that was a funny thing. Billy Corgan was on. He was getting interviewed. I think he was on Opie and Anthony, they were in New York. They’re a talk show. And like, 40 minutes into the interview, the guy’s like, yeah, sorry, there’s water everywhere. Because I’ve been sick for two straight days. I’m just trying to stay hydrated. And Corgan just says to him, perfect. This is a great time to tell me, because it’s not like my voice is my job. I’ve been sitting in this tiny little glass room with you for 40 minutes, and you’re breathing on me, you bastard.
When I was in the Hill Country, like, Hill Country area of Texas on tour, I played 23 hours in eight days. I think it was like 13 gigs or something. I don’t know, something like that. It was 23 hours in eight days. And so I was sick as a dog because I can’t eat the day of a show until afterwards because it’ll mess up my voice.
Yeah.
So I wasn’t eating because I was having multiple shows in a day. I wasn’t eating until really late at night. And if I had a morning gig, then I’m not going to be able to eat. And I wasn’t sleeping because I also had to do all the business side stuff and soon to come and everything. So I was sick as a dog, and I got tested for COVID, and it was negative. So cool. But it was just like, you probably should try sleeping. I’m like, well, I can’t. I was terribly sick for, like, two weeks because I couldn’t get better because I couldn’t sleep, so I couldn’t heal. It was terrible.
It’s the strain on your voice. It’s a muscle, right. And it’s like people who have sore muscles, they take an Advil or Tylenol, whatever. There is no Advil for your throat. You can ultimately try it, right? Yeah, that’s right. The catch with having to do this, especially you’re doing morning gigs, you do morning radio for an evening gig and they want you to perform. It’s really hard to just be on all the time. And sometimes when you’re touring, that’s it. There is no real break.
Yeah, I’m a workaholic at this point. I have a very addictive personality. I’ve actually been awake for 48 hours, give or take. I’ve been working a lot since this will come out in December. So I can say this. We have two tours next year.
Unbelievable. Congratulations in advance, man. It must feel good to know that the road is calling again.
In many ways, yes. Absolutely love it. In other ways, like getting sick for two weeks because I can’t heal, that one sucks. The cheap Airbnb. The road is really weird because it’s trying to, like a coping mechanism. Kind of like you said. One night you could play for 1500 people. People could scream your name. You could be signing guitars. Music legends that you grew up listening to could just be hanging out in the green room and want to jam with you. And that’s just an amazing feeling. That could be like your Friday night and then your Saturday night, you could be playing in a small dive bar for 25 people. It’s such a weird, and it could be the very next night. It’s so weird. And just trying to cope with that, that just huge high and huge lows as you’re just trying to make a living and connect with people and do whatever you’re trying to do in your music or your job. And then just the ups and the downs are just so much bigger than any other ups and downs in any most normal jobs. And I think a lot of musicians try to cope with that.
And the workload with chemical dependence, it’s definitely an easy thing to get into.
Yeah, that’s the challenge. And it’s just there people say, I don’t understand why people don’t even have to be a real pro musician. I used to do Tuesday night gigs that sound like, you’re playing with four other bands and there’s 25 people and then you realize it’s because it’s the bands and their girlfriends. That’s the 25 you’re playing for, but you’re playing for half price drink tickets. You’re not even getting paid. But it was like, hey, it’s just time on stage. It’s practice, it’s fun. Sometimes people show up, you never know. And even in those situations, you could see in the peer level, it was very easy to get into much more than just the beer behind the bar. And I was lucky enough to avoid that culture altogether. But it’s a tough and active choice that you got to make all the time. People don’t realize that it’s such a weird. Like, it’s intrinsic. It’s actually buried in the lifestyle.
Yeah. And it’s free. I don’t want to give peer pressure because everyone says that, but at some point it’s almost like just excessive guerilla marketing. I almost bought a T-shirt for, like, $80 yesterday. I was like, what am I doing? What am I doing? These aren’t even ten just because I see the ad everywhere I go. I was like, you know what? I don’t have any nice T-shirts. It’s just everywhere. And when you’re on the road, it really is everywhere. And that’s one of those things that it’s my tour bus. It’s got my face on it, or at least part of my face on it, because the wrapping didn’t come out great and it’s all mine. And I don’t care what you do, as long as you’re safe and it doesn’t affect the show. It’s none of my business, but I can take some control, some responsibility for it. Again, like you said, two different things, but I can. Okay. Hey, man, at this show, I’ve played this venue before with another group. They do have a lot of things going on backstage. Also, you’re going to meet a couple of celebrities, and it’s such a weird toss up.
And I know that they’re like, yeah, let’s do some coke with the “leave his name” celebrity. And then it’s totally something I get and something I’ve done so much more than any human being should have, but at least I did it got through. It got sober, the last time I got sober. And I can use it as an experience, even if I am a little bit terrified of it now. I can look back with experience and know how. And also, I mean, you meet so many people that they could be OD-ing or getting into dangerous situations or something like that. And like, hold up, I know exactly what to do.
Yeah. It’s kind of sad that you end up having to be part-time paramedic. You almost got to be ready for that kind of stuff. A lot of people don’t get off those buses.
Yeah, we have some clauses. Like I said, it’s on my business, but I do have a van, and anyone that needs a ride is encouraged. I used to say driving under the influence is cool as long as you can handle it. I don’t think that anymore. I’ve seen it go very bad, especially with musician egos. It can go very bad, even if it’s a home gig. We do have to drive sometimes an hour or two just for a home gig, and it can go bad. 02:00 A.M.
Oh, that’s it. And all it takes is just, it’s very easy. Yeah, you’re already tired, you’re amped up, you get a couple of drinks. Even like, comedians do this all the time. Like, I’m in a plane to New York, just going to drive back to Boston and it’s like that’s a three-hour drive, even if the ultimate intoxication, you’re just going to fall asleep. No other stuff. Like, there’s a lot of dangers that are present that are not normal for most people. And you have to think about stuff that’s very different, which goes to that thing of responsibility. And I appreciate you can tell in the way you even tell the story of it, how much it impacts and it’s inside you. So you got a lot of success. And I guess there’s the fun question, when will you be able to say, I’ve made it? What’s your mark?
Unfortunately, I don’t think myself as a person, I don’t think I’m capable, and I don’t think myself as a businessman, I don’t think I’m able to figure different things. But as a person, I don’t think I’m capable, because no matter how many people come up to Walmart and say, you’re the music dude, I just can’t see myself as someone who’s like a big deal. And that’s not even how my view has made it. My goal is to connect with people. And so there’s not a number on that. I don’t think there’s any real possible way to connect with everybody. So there isn’t a number. It’s not how many people come out to the shows or how much money or tour billboards have my face on them right now. The numbers too, by the way, not right now in total, but it’s just connecting with people. So I don’t think there’s ever that number to get to. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to actually make it. My little crusade of love, peace, and Kumbayah.
I think it’s cool because even if you do get to whatever the next level is, your personal responsibility won’t let you stop. And it’s a beautiful thing when you can take your band with you, bring other people. You can support a team of PR people around to be able to actually employ people and do what you love. And I got a huge respect for you for doing this. It’s really amazing and it shows in the music. It’s really fantastic. You’re a fantastic performer and writer, and if you hadn’t done that bad album, then this would be your bad album. So you got it out of the way.
I’m hoping that ten years down the road, I’ll think the same one about this one, because that just means I grew. I got better. That’s what I’m hoping.
Well, Charlie, you got a lot more than ten glorious and well earned years ahead of you, especially you got seven in there already and you’re 20, so it’s a good start. You’re not even able to drink legally. At most these places, they got to fire you in the back door and try and hide you from the bouncers. That’s always a weird thing too, right? When you’re playing and you’re under legal age, it’s like they can obviously do it. They can furnish you getting in and out, but there’s like all sorts of weird stuff that gets wrapped around that one, I imagine.
Well, I’ve had this beard on and off, actually since I was 14. So the beard and my hair is up in a bun now, so that helps, too. So it’s so weird because the bouncers have no idea how old I am. Nobody knows how old I am, unless they look at the magazine stuff. I’ve had like bouncers and venue owners hang out with me. Because I’ll hang out sometimes after the venue closes and they’ll just be complaining about these kids trying to sneak in. And I’m like, 16, I’m like, man, these college kids and like, I’m a sophomore in high school and I’m just like, they’re terrible.
I remember going to this. I grew up in this tiny little town. It was like a farm town and everybody knew everybody, right? Literally, like it’s a 2000 person town. And there’s a place called the Village Inn which is like the perfect name for the local drinking hole. And I would go into the Village Inn all the time and I remembered going there for like a year and a half and then celebrating my 19th birthday in Canada, drinking age is 19. And watching you pull out your driver’s license for real now. And they’re like, hey, what’s the big occasion, like turning 19th day? And they’re like, wait a minute. I reckon, I know you. You’ve been going here for a long time.
It’s all good.
We won’t tell anybody’s story. We’ll save that until the statute of limitation runs out.
There you go.
Charlie, thank you very much. This has been a real pleasure. And there you go, folks. charliecopemusic.com, lots of great links down below. Get the album and if you can’t afford the album, I’ll buy you the goddamn album. It’s that good. There’s lots of ways you can get it. So do so support amazing musicians and the whole ecosystem and, Charlie, I hope to see you on the road. Hopefully one day, I’ll be able to bump into you backstage somewhere on the 2022 tour. Now that the world is opening up a little bit, It’s been a real pleasure here to chat.
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Jennifer Byrne is the CEO of Arrived Workforce Connections. Previously Jennifer was responsible for market expansion initiatives leveraging business model and technology innovation for government, healthcare, and education providers around the globe at Microsoft after joining as the Chief Security Officer for the Worldwide Public Sector Division in 2014.
Prior to Microsoft, Jennifer was a leader in Cybersecurity, having held technical, sales and executive positions at companies such as Intel, McAfee and Symantec. She began her career in technology as an Information Security Analyst and Engineer serving US Government clients.
Her first career, which remains her passion today, was in the non-profit world working with under-served populations.
We discuss how to use tech innovation for optimizing the human experience, the importance of tech access to underserved communities, and how we can all do something small every day to make a difference.
Thank you and congratulations to Jennifer on her new role as CEO!
Welcome to the show. My name is Eric Wright. I’m gonna be your host for the DiscoPosse podcast. This is a really enjoyable episode featuring Jennifer Bryne.
Jennifer. Between the time we recorded and now when we released, we can proudly say that we can say Congratulations to Jennifer on becoming the CEO of Arrived Workforce Connections. Jennifer has such a storied history in the industry, but more than anything, the reason why she’s been successful both in work and in life is because how she gives back in her approach to thinking about what can we do to give, especially to underserved communities and to the broader community.
This is a great discussion and we cover a lot of ground. We didn’t get a chance to go specifically into her new role as CEO because it was in the works and had not yet been announced when we recorded. So big thanks to Jennifer for giving me the chance to record while she’s in the throes of transition. And Congratulations again. So please do follow the link and reach out to Jennifer and give her a good shout out and a Congratulations. I got to give another shout out.
Speaking of, to the fine folks that make this podcast happen and to really celebrate a fantastic year we’ve all had together. So remember when you have anything in the world of data, in the world of compute, in the world of cloud, you need to protect those assets. How do you do it? Go to the people that have you covered for everything you need for your data protection needs, whether it’s On-Prem, whether it’s in the Cloud, whether it’s Cloud-Native. They’ve got stuff for SAAS, they’ve got your team’s protection SharePoint. You name it.
It’s really important because if you can’t go and say I got Veeam, they got me covered. You’re at risk. No risk equals a great world. If you can reduce risk, it’s easy to think that you’re in a better place. So let’s reduce risk together. Go to vee.am/DiscoPosse. You can check it out. They got a really cool campaign running, but I really and truly enjoy the team and I love the products and I’m very proud of the way they’ve approached things and they got a brand new CEO.
So let’s celebrate this together. So go to vee.am/DiscoPosse. And while you’re protecting, make sure you protect your data in transit as well. If you’re not using a VPN, you definitely need to think about why this is so important. We’re in a dangerous world. Let’s make sure we reduce the risk exposure when you’re surfing the Internet. Whether it’s out in the world or even at home, go to tryexpressvpn.com/DiscoPosse. You can check out ExpressVPN. I’m a user. I’m a customer. I really like it. So go check it out.
Oh, yeah. And buy Diabolical Coffee. All right. Enjoy the show.
Hey, this is Jennifer Byrne. I am the President of Digital Future Consulting and the former CTO of Microsoft US division and about to start a new venture as the CEO. And you are listening to the DiscoPosse podcast.
Jennifer, thank you very much. This is very exciting for me for a variety of reasons and, of course, for my listeners. But selfishly, I think I really do the podcast just so I can meet amazing people like yourself. You’ve got a really strong sort of storied career. You’ve done stuff that I find really inspiring in your approach to the way that you treat people, the way that you empower others, the way that we can use technology. And you talk so much about empowerment through technology. And this is near and dear to my heart because I’m a nerd at heart, and I love technology, and I love the Nerd Bits, and I love getting excited about it.
But I also have to see that what really gets me is what we can do with it. And so we’ll talk a lot about the path to digital transformation and the human empowerment that we can create along the way. But anyway, let me first of all, for folks that are new to you. Jennifer, if you want to give a quick introduction, and then we’ll talk about, first of all, digital future consulting and of course, much more that you’ve got going on.
Yeah. Thank you. Eric. I’m excited to be here, too. This is why I love to be on podcast because this is when you get to talk about all your favorite topics. So the big anchor in my career was the years I spent at Microsoft as the CTO, ultimately of the US division. Although my first CTO role at Microsoft was in the industry team, and I joined Microsoft in 2014 as the chief security officer for the public sector group. Because I’d spent the previous 20 odd years in cybersecurity at Intel McAfee Symantec into startup and way back when I was an InfoSec analyst working for government agencies back in the late 90s.
So that’s my career. I left Microsoft when I had felt like I’d put in my time in big corporate America and felt a calling to do something a little bit different. I had run a couple of innovation projects in my last role as CTO focused on digital skills, and it really started out really simple because we needed more people to know how to use Azure. You cannot drive cloud consumption when there aren’t enough employees in your customers environment than no Azure. But you start to pull the thread on that one, and it’s really not about Azure.
It’s about the skills that you need in order to learn Azure. And then it’s a bigger skills conversation. And all of a sudden, you’re outside of the walls of your customers environment and you’re into communities thinking broadly like, how do we get skills to happen? Because the world is getting more digital and you don’t know that any better than you do when you’re in this industry trying to make that possible. And then it just kind of occurred to me as I’m sitting in communities like Louisville, Kentucky and Houston and Syracuse, New York, that there is this unintended consequence of technology that I think, Eric, you know, and all of us who have been in this industry, we’ve been in the business of talking about how amazing technology is and all the fantastic things they can do in the world, how many problems it can solve.
And it is largely a positive passion that we all believe in. And yet the unintended consequences that it creates a need for skills that a lot of people don’t have. So how do we solve that? And by the way, that skills gap follows socioeconomic, existing socioeconomic rifts in society. And so it is a problem that takes more than technologists to solve. But it felt like a worthy thing to be doing. So when I left Corporate America, I decided I would spend a little time in the future workspace.
So I started a small consulting agency and I work with startups and advise companies. And that’s super fun. It keeps me fresh and also spend a lot of time just doing research and talking and thinking about future work, which has led to a role as a CEO and a company that is playing a small role in that space. So anyway, that’s the nickel tour around me and my career.
Well, there’s so much to, so many threads to pull on. And I think you hit this really strong thing that especially as technologists, where it’s a bit of a bubble. I get concerned about the echo chamber of raw technologists who are all on Twitter, and they’re all at the events. And we all sort of like chatter amongst each other. And that’s fantastic as a way for us to kind of like, build new things. But for people that don’t know what SoMa is in the Bay Area, and there’s so much of this country and of the world that’s beyond the very tech centric Silicon Valley, the New York Bank sectors, like all this amazing stuff in between.
As a technologist, I would go to events, and I would talk about how we’re into other areas, right? I go to Wisconsin. This is one thing that was amazing to me. You go to Wisconsin, there’s these incredible technology companies. And at first I was like, just like the stupid, arrogant guy that lived in the city too many years. I was like, That’s funny. Whenever I reference Wisconsin, I always think of like a dairy farm or something like this, like people with cheese hats.
By the way, that does happen in Wisconsin.
But it was humbling to realize that they have really done leaps and bounds of advancement in how they’re leveraging technology to do a lot of these flyover state things that the rest of the tech ecosystem kind of forgets, goes on. And I was happy when I realized I’m like, this is what matters. These are the stories that need to be told, not how I can get Bank of New York Mellon to go from VMs to containers. That’s neat. But when I can talk about people that never worked in tech suddenly becoming programmers and using no code and using the cloud.
And they were from all sorts of diverse backgrounds. That’s the exciting part to me. And I love that you’ve done research in this area as well, and you’re really working hard to broaden your audience.
Thank you so much. I love what you said about Wisconsin because the specific epiphany I had, and it happened in Louisville, Kentucky, when I was at a ribbon cutting event for a makerspace. It’s like a nonprofit and they renovated it, and they created these conference rooms, and they were really just in the business of helping very small entrepreneurs build the things that they wanted to build. And I had this, as a Microsoft executive, you’re there to stand at a podium and say kind words. We’d sponsored some of this.
I loved the project, but we give them some dollars. That was really, some total of what we did was lend our name, our credibility, give some dollars. I flew out to Louisville, and that was what we were going to do. And it was so clear to me that that was actually just in the broader context of things. Such a small contribution to the grander picture of a really healthy, inclusive digital future because the real work was being done by the people in the facility. The real work happens at the ground floor on the street level.
And I was spending all my time on the 28th floor of a beautiful building in Bellevue, Washington, thinking about programs and thinking broadly and top-down. And I got all the attention. I got all the attention, but I wasn’t really the solution. So when you get down to the street level, if you’re in Wisconsin and people have real problems and they’re vary from a technologist perspective, they’re great problems because they’re discrete problems. They’re bounded. So you can attach technology to a problem at that level and actually generate a difference.
The distance between action and reaction and a small problem is very short. The distance between action and reaction and a really big macroeconomic or global problem or something that would be worthy of a corporate initiative is very long. So if you want to measure impact, then get down into the street and start doing stuff, and that was really when I thought, okay, I can see how this stage of my career could come to a really wonderful and positive end. And I could have the beginning of something else that would be fulfilling for me and also just measurable enough for me to feel like I was making a difference.
This is the interesting dichotomy of, as you said, becoming sort of the face and voice of technology and transformation and all these things. We have to have the evangelists and the advocates and whatever the title is going to be next year when we’re no longer developer advocates are no longer cool. Whatever the new thing is going to be. And it’s this weird thing that I sort of struggle with all the time of being able to get out and meet with people and listen to them. When I do a keynote, it’s to listen to 500 people, to watch their reaction as we’re talking about something and change the way that I tell a story and change the way that I look at what’s next based on that live reaction.
Plus, after the fact we get to talk to people on the ground and you really hear what’s true. It’s very easy to get this Ivory Tower super presenter mode in. But now the advantage you get is pairing that opportunity where you can write books and be a speaker and do all these things and do the ribbon cuttings and then also really be mindful and humble about who’s really doing it. Like you said, this is the true sort of boots on the ground, the unsung heroes, the real transformation is all these other people.
So it’s just weird. I feel bad sometimes, in fact, a lot of friends of mine that are in the public speaking space, they’ve chosen just like to stop. We need to open the stage up for more people. The hard part is when you’re good at public speaking, you get asked to do more of it, and you’re sort of stuck. Like, Why is Robert Downey Jr. In a lot of movies? Because he’s a great actor. So is it his fault? I don’t, not that I’m Robert Downey Jr., for a poor example.
But I mean, I love that you’ve been able to strike this beautiful balance of being close to where it’s really happening. And I find people that have trouble. Sometimes they get a little hung on the idea of looking down from the stage.
It’s tough to find the right altitude. And I will say in defense of good speakers everywhere, that we all have to move forward together. And so it’s the three-legged stool analogy. Two legs just won’t do. So we all have to be doing all of it. And by the way, look, I’m in your podcast. I love to talk about this stuff. So it’s the daily drip of being able to talk about the things that matter, and hopefully in a way that’s helpful to other people is important for me, too.
When I got out of Microsoft and you just do a bunch of stuff and you’re trying to cycle through what I realized I was doing eventually was trying to find the right altitude. I didn’t want to just talk about the problem, but I didn’t want to get so down into the weeds that I was lost in something that felt like a passion project but wasn’t going to create some kind of impact on the world. And so then you sort of get into the problem space you’re in, what does the ecosystem look like?
A tech background really helps because it’s kind of a design thinking or systems approach to things where you’re trying to understand the inner work I was in the future workspace and am and thinking about how do we democratize access to skills, but also how do we change the power structure such that people themselves have the ability to leverage the things that make them better if it’s a skills course or whatever, into a better job, because that’s not how the job market works. It’s very top-down.
So if you’re at the bottom, you just wait for jobs to come to you by way of a job advertisement on Indeed. So if you want to go invest in yourself and get a new skill, it’s a really uncertain business model, right? I mean, that’s not how people think about it, but if you’re a business person you’re like, I don’t understand the ROI of that. That course is going to cost you $12,000 in a year, but you have no actual guaranteed return because you have no way of proactively advertising yourself.
The only platform that exists for that is LinkedIn, which is fabulous, but LinkedIn from a demographic’s perspective is the higher end of the job skills, sort of like in healthcare, treating what they call the worried well, the people who are already healthy and they just want to get healthier. Like LinkedIn is a proactive profile building platform is for people who already generally have a job and they want a better one. But we have this whole section of the workforce that doesn’t. They’re just struggling to get living wage who are very interested in building capabilities and experience that will provide a better path of the future.
But we don’t have a path for them to do so in a proactive way. And so that was when I started to understand in this skills job space what the ecosystem started to look like, where the power was, where the connection is, and then from there, you can figure out, okay, what could we do from a tech perspective to solve that? So that’s all my long, winding way of saying for me, I had to figure out what altitude I could be relevant in this process, and it took a year to get there.
What I respect about how you just described it and your approach to it was just that you have to take a hypothesis. You have to test the hypothesis. You have to live amongst the results and then bring that back to the hypothesis and effectively run it through this machine. And that’s really what makes, it’s very easy for the, I’ll say the pundits, as I call them, right? That it’s easy to sit back and talk about the future of X, but yet never be committed to saying this is how it’s going to go and then writing it down and saying, I’ll pay $1,000 if I’m wrong, like, you’re effectively skinning the game committed to the outcome because you are getting close to who will be affected by it. You’re looking for, especially a population that’s, like, under represented population.
It doesn’t even have to be such a sort of distinct niche. It is 30 plus percent of the United States as an example, and I’m Canadian. My funny accent gives me away sometimes, but I live in New Jersey. There’s so many people who, like, we take for granted. And I say we meaning the Twitterati, right? We’re complaining. Everyone’s talking about the great resignation, and it’s a proud thing. I’m like, yeah, that’s right. Because people are saying, like, oh, it’s disgusting that they’re going to make me go back to an office.
Did you go to Whole Foods today? Yeah. There’s 1000 people, that’s their office. Those people that made sure that you got your well crafted latte and your fancy artisanal steak. They don’t have a work from home option. We have to remember that as a community, it’s not just the community of, like, it’s the community of existence. It’s so easy for us to get just wrapped into, like, oh, yeah, Linkedin is for everybody. I love LinkedIn. I love that it’s a great tool, but it’s very easy for us to just say, like, oh, this box is the Earth.
Right. Yeah.
Totally. You know, I agree. That’s the challenge. It’s a big challenge. It feels like something that could make a difference. And I love when I see my own peers trying to solve the technical aspects of that problem. And many of them are whether that was the intent or not. Microsoft isn’t the only company. There are many that are trying to. IBM, as an example, are trying to democratize access to technology by abstracting the complexity out of it, which is the inspiration behind low code, no code, the abilities or capabilities and whatever platform you’re in.
And digital skills. All the companies are spending a ton of money to try to solve that problem. So I think it is something that we broadly recognize as an issue. The problem is that it is an issue that’s so intractable in its nature because it’s embedded into the kind of the economic structures of our society that you just need a lot of creativity and effort to make a difference. And, you know, I have two kids in their twenties. My daughter is an aspiring artist and works at a restaurant, and it’s tough to watch it.
My son is in his last year as a computer science major, so he’s figured out how to have a career that will pay money. But I’ve got an equally bright, hard working kid who didn’t make that choice, and she’s going to have a tougher road. And I see from her first hand how the world is not built to serve her in her needs given what she wants to do with her life, and that’s okay. Like she made her choices eyes wide open. But there’s stuff that we could fix that would make it better.
And it’s just not about handouts or anything. It’s really just about rethinking the problem in a new way. And if you can make your society healthier, everyone benefits, it is a shared infrastructure that we’re in after all. So that becomes very personal to me on that level. And trying to figure out how to solve it becomes super important.
Yeah. There’s a real challenge in that. The business world, especially the tech startup ecosystem, is very driven on quarter over quarter measurement and growth. But to have the long view, this is why philanthropy and corporate don’t line up in the pure money sense they often can, because it’s a tax deduction. And at least we’ve created a way in which that it can incent people to give back in that way. But what we really need to do is create programs and put people in front of people and show them, that story is there.
I think democratization is a great way to talk about it now. Like you can become a Twitch streamer and you only need to just do the thing that you did, right? It’s the potential is there, that is something like that. You can go on YouTube, you can learn to program through. You can take Harvard Business School courses on YouTube, right. We’ve created opportunity like as far as content and tech access, although Internet access is still not 100% available. Right. But connecting people and giving them a path.
I think this is what’s missing and like mentorship. So I’d love to get your thoughts on this. What have we got today that’s not being used, right? Because we haven’t connected people to show them how to embrace and leverage it.
Yeah. Well, I think it’s a slightly different problem depending on industry. And again, this goes back to your Wisconsin comment that we all think we understand that the edge of the horizon, as we see it, is the actual edge. And it’s not right. We all live in these universes. And so that question for people who are in whatever space where they can move toward Tuck In at Varleys, in the way we would describe it. Computing, right. Coding all those jobs is when there are things that we can do there.
And I think it has a lot to do with a bigger corporate investment and nontraditional learning skills. We could dissect that problem, and I’m very interested in it. There’s a job taxonomy of the future, piece of work that needs to be embraced by the Fortune 500s and 1000s so that HR and people managers recruiters can understand what they’re even hiring for, because once there’s clarity on what the job of the future looks like, there’s clarity on the skills required for the job in the future. And once you have that, you can start to rewrite job descriptions.
You can start to think about the way you recruit. You can start to signal out to potential candidates what they even need to do in order to be eligible for that job in the future. And I think that will sort itself out because you get smart people in that swath that understand the problem and can solve it. But there’s this other technology conversation that it’s easy for computing technologists to forget, which is that in a factory, automation in a factory means that somebody who is actually doing knobs and levers on a control panel is going to move to an iPad, and that iPad is going to require some level of digital context or fluency, that for you and I, might not be the biggest deal, but for people in industries, it will.
There’s a lot of manufacturing and light industrial that works on paper today because they haven’t had a business model to do anything else. Like the solutions factory, light industrial is really interesting if you look at it as an industry, because it’s a very long tail industry where you have a few companies that are big, but most of the revenue or a lot of it is driven through small, independently franchise. If you will branch factories or installations or smaller companies because they are providers to bigger companies, they don’t have a business model for adopting technology.
They don’t have the revenue to do it. And so it exists on paper. But as that automation flows down, you’re starting to require workers to have a level of digital skill that they don’t have. So a manufacturer of a conveyor belt technology that gets put into a factory might require a certification to use that technology. The certification, if you had, it might actually allow you to go find a job that pays $3 more an hour because it’s a little bit more advanced. That scenario exists in almost every industry and that’s technology, and those are digital skills and their digital skills importantly, that once obtained, actually provide a path toward a better living wage.
So for me, that’s the part of the problem that I’m most interested in. It’s ignored. And yet we’re talking about the people who, in aggregate, are the lifeblood of our economy. They are the people who make things and make things work. To your point, the folks in Whole Foods or the people solving real problems in Wisconsin. So I’m interested in that technology and how we help that profile of worker.
Yes. And I probably sound like a dark individual sometimes how much I sort of trash the peer group that I live amongst. But this is just because sometimes it bothers me that they don’t see beyond the rather often myopic view that they have of their frame of existence. And fair enough, it’s not even intentional. It’s just more that when you get people that are very outward about like this is what the world looks like. That’s what your view of the world looks like. It’s not really representative. The whole sort of learn to code as this trope of like, oh, that’s the future of work.
Right?
You need to learn to code like, no, it’s not possible for many people. I’m a technologist. I have a whole host of things that I probably would have had to take pills for when I was a kid ADHD and all this different stuff. And I’m also dyslexic, so it’s horrifying for me to write code. I do it, but more out of necessity. And I live with a wealth of anxiety while I’m doing it. And I have skills that most people never got exposed to. You know, I always say I grew up on a farm and I became a technologist, but that’s because my dad was a technologist who took the leap and got out of the farming and made this jump.
Most people don’t have that luxury to leave their ecosystem or their geography. They can’t leave where they live. There are a lot more limiting factors that are forgotten. I think sometimes, which is a little bit frustrating.
Agree. It’s a big problem. Anyway, it’s a lifetime of work. So I’m in an area where I don’t think I’ll ever run out of interesting things to talk about and good stuff to do. So Yay for me. Good job security.
That’s right. What’s a good example of something that you’ve really seen that strikes home, it’s like this is the power of people getting access to technology that you’ve recently seen that’s excited you.
Well, I mean, I haven’t seen it yet in the space I’m in, which is why I’m in the space I’m in, kind of thinking about the other industries where this hasn’t happened. But I’ll tell you, I follow a lot of nontraditional education providers, and I listen to their stories is kind of my daily good news. And so companies like General Assembly and there are many others, have a constant stream of success stories where people have made the leap from whatever they were doing that was not satisfying into jobs that are and, of course, those are tech jobs.
But I think it’s fantastic. So I think it is actually happening all around us. And if there weren’t a ground swell of that, however, the media may or may not be able to report on it. It’s a harder thing maybe to report on. I think it’s behind a lot of this great resignation, which itself, I think, is fantastic news. And it’s happening because people are looking around and they’re seeing their friends and their family or their peers make a leap and all they needed. It’s like all the little penguins are standing at the edge of the glacier, and they just need one of them to jump and everyone else is kind of following.
And I think that’s starting to happen. That’s behind the groundswell and the very fact that there is this great resignation, the very fact that people are, it’s kind of a take back the night moment are starting to say, yeah. No. I mean, sure, I had my unemployment benefits are out, by the way now, and I’m still not going to go back to that crappy job. Sorry. I’m going to figure it out, is exactly what is at the birth of any big social change. So I’m excited.
And, of course, because of my kids, I hear it all the time. I hear my daughter say, if you use the word gig one more time, I’m going to die. We know what that means, and we’re demanding something better. So I think there’s good news, even in the bad news, because it means that people are going to sort of accept, not stand for accepting less. You remember 20 years ago, the issues with the big box retailers, where there were all sorts of lawsuits and generally speaking, I think we all had this collective sigh like, oh, yeah.
It must be terrible to have a part time job in much of America because you don’t get your hours published. Even today. Did you know that they’re, like, 26 million workers who do not know their schedule more than a week in advance? How do you live a life when you can’t figure out what you’re going to be doing next week?
Yeah. When the alternative is you need to find a second part time job, but they’re constantly conflicting or you’re always up in the air. I remember the early days of working two retail jobs, and on Sunday you would find out the schedule for one. And on Monday, you’d find out the schedule for the other. And then I’d have to race to see if I could get shift coverage. And that was just me for part time jobs. But I was in school, so it didn’t hurt me. There are people that have families, but that’s their reality.
And it’s easy to forget sometimes that’s just so much millions. The sheer numbers. This one thing always boggles my mind is that if you just look at the sheer numbers, it’s very easy to lose track that, well, 300. That means that 307,000,000 people don’t have that problem. But there’s 26 million people that do. That’s a giant number. We should all be a little bit horrified. I love the great resignation from the idea. Somebody on not too long ago is Michelle Seiler Tucker, and she’s focused on helping people to build their business for sale, to how to get out of the business and make it viable for purchase.
And she goes through this whole program. And she says, the funny thing is we have these weird stats that we hear all the time that are like, 90% of startups fail and all this different stuff. And she’s like, Well, we’re actually lying when we say those things because according to the Small Business Administration for the past 24 months, in fact, 75% plus or, I forget the exact number of businesses, are thriving. And in fact, businesses that are more than 20 years old have a 90 plus percent failure rate.
So it’s actually the reverse that those of us who are like, I’m done, I’m going to build my own thing. I’m going to do my own thing. We are the next generation of statistics that haven’t been realized yet.
Well, as somebody who just took a CEO role in a company with not that many people in an early stage in market, but just barely, I am excited about that. That’s great. My odds are better than I thought they were.
Yeah. It’s an unfortunate trope that we take this old thing. It’s the same way that, its possession is nine tenths to the law and all these goofy sort of stats that we get tossed around almost like fortune cookie sayings that become wrong quickly, but they’re still printed somewhere. So we still call on them. I love this idea that, I’ve even seen through my own company that people that we hired as business development reps and BDRs or SDRs, their cut in basically dialing for dollars people, right? Like, they get on.
Like, they get on. They’re doing cold calling. And you see someone, you like, oh, he seems different, right? I couldn’t figure out this one seemed like he’s got something going on. And then I see him in LinkedIn, founding a new company. I’m like, oh, that’s neat. Then I see him launching a series A. I’m like, oh, yeah, that’s there. So what you’re creating now, Jennifer, is that small group of people. Those are also future founders that you’re probably empowering because they’ve seen that it can be done now. That’s magical to me.
Yeah, I think so, too. I think it’s exciting. We’ll see what that looks like in the future. If it becomes a competency to build a company. I don’t know how that works from a kind of macroeconomic perspective, but for sure, you do see your point around monetization, you do see so many more people thinking creatively about how to monetize themselves. So sometimes that shows up in our world as the founder of a tech company. But Twitch streaming the long tail of social media advertising. I think that it’s harder than it looks.
But there are a lot of people who are starting small businesses and figuring out how to effectively run them through social media platforms, which I also think is exciting. Upwork, Freelance. There’s a dark side to all those stories, but there’s a positive side to it as well that we’re starting to have a more distributed notion of what work looks like that not everybody has to work in a big company for the rest of their lives in a single career. We can do different things. So I think that’s exciting.
Yeah. And this is actually interesting that you brought that up, the idea that there is a dark side to many of these things as with anything. The hard part is that we’ve got such rapid access to that side of the story much faster than the good side. I remember when I was in Toronto and Uber was making its way into the city, and I was a nerd. I was like, that is really exciting. I can just get a car on my phone. It’s like, super cool. The people at my company, I worked at Raymond James at the time.
So I’ve got all these people that are running an investment firm, and they’re like, what is an Uber? They had no idea what I was talking about. I’m like, watch this. I hit a button and then Yukon XL pulls up on the road and door opens. Hop in, guys, we’re going to the party, and we would have this idea of, the disruption of it. And I was excited by the opportunity for disruption. Unfortunately, there are people that were not going to do financially well through it, and they would be facing challenges when it came to City Council trying to regulate it.
What ended up happening was you’d have, of course, very strong voices on either side. And you would hear people who would say, like, I’m a mother of three kids that are under six. I can get my mother in law to help me watch the kids from 09:00 p.m. Until two in the morning every night, and my husband takes care of them in the morning. So result, I get to work 5 hours a day and I make money and I feel safe.
You hear stories like this, it’s like she can’t work for a taxi. She can’t work at a regular job because it requires four till ten shifts. All of a sudden, we’ve got this incredible story again, counter. There are difficult sides of it as well. But like that opportunity, like Upwork and those opportunities now are there. I’m excited by it. But I also know that a lot of people don’t often see there’s risk and balance to kind of any new thing that we take on in this style.
Well, I think another way of saying that is that if you’re in the business of creating disruption, which is what Uber was in the business of doing and Airbnb and has become the North Star or the greatest aspiration for anybody who’s trying to be a founder of a tech company that matters, then the measure of your success may be that you cause so much disruption. You actually create unrest at social policy levels. Because I’ll tell you, I was at Microsoft when all that was happening, and I was traveling around the world talking to a lot of government leaders and ministries of finance in smaller countries.
And they wanted to know, like, the big question was Microsoft, what is your view on the uberization of work and technology. And what is the role of a tech company in that space? Because after all you’re creating a lot of this, and it’s actually causing a lot of unrest, especially in countries that have a little bit bigger of a social safety net and therefore more investment and a sense of responsibility for dramatic shifts in the way industry works. So it was a big thing to your point. I kept thinking, Well, this is a hard conversation, but if we just take the longer view, it’s probably going to end up in a good place because we are trying to solve the next generation or the next version of our problem.
But we’re making progress. There are as many success stories here as elsewhere. And let’s not forget that if you at all believe in free markets or in the wisdom of markets, there’s a reason why Uber was successful because they addressed an unmet need.
Right.
And it wasn’t even a technology, if you think about the components of the technology behind Uber, that’s not where the innovation was. The innovation was in the idea. And so personally, that’s my inspiration. If I want to go do something, of course, I want to be disruptive and make a big change. I’m not thinking I need to do it in technology. There are other technologists who will go be CEOs of companies that are in Cleantech or doing something crazy cool with AI. And that’s not me.
I think from an innovation perspective, you can just innovate by thinking of a fresh solution to an old problem and bring all the existing tech that already exists to play. And if you’re lucky, people get really uncomfortable. But you’re also making life better.
Yeah, because you hear it all the time. Like, these two sided markets are incredible. Their right for disruption. Next door really became a thing. It quietly was worth all of this money because it had such a vast growth. I had never heard of Nextdoor in my life. My mother-in-law. She’s like, I’ll go on Nextdoor and find something. We’re looking for a contractor. I’m like, what the heck is Nextdoor? Then I dig into it. I’m like, Good golly. This thing is worth billions, but it was just that, right?
A two sided marketplace. You had people that need to be serviced on either side. This is fantastic. Everything needs to be like, all it takes is a little bit of an idea, and you can close the gap. And what it satisfied for me was, I solved the problem. I needed to get a hose fixed and somebody else solved a problem. He’s trying to build his cottage and pay for his family. And so he found a little tiny gig that he could fit in in an afternoon.
And I didn’t need to write an ad in the paper for it. We’ve come a long way, and it’s magical that we can create this opportunity. I think I’m with you on Disruption. Sounds like a dark word sometimes, but it really means that in the same way that forests naturally will burn from that, you can only get new growth because if the forest continues to grow, it creates shade, which stops growth below the shade line. But it is hard to have that macro view when you’re micro affected.
And I think that’s what we become very overly attuned to is that this is affecting me now or someone I know now. And therefore I must have some kind of a feeling about this that’s bad.
Yeah. Really. Well said. We’re in exciting times, may you live in interesting times as the proverb sort of tongue-in-cheek says, right.
Yeah. And the thing that I really want more people to look at is how they can directly do things. And this is what I’d love to get your thought on. Jennifer, where can we, if we, as a people have, say, technology skills or something to share, where can we have a direct effect? Do you see the opportunity for us to empower people, to empower other people? I think this is the missing two sided market.
I mean, I have narrowed the list down to a few things. I think there are an endless number of things. It’s more of a mindset of do I take responsibility? What is my role in this problem? From there? There’s a lot of things that we can do. If you’re a hiring man, I’ll just throw it to you. If you are a hiring manager and I am a hiring manager now. And I’m finding myself saying, don’t be a hypocrite. Do what you think is the right thing to do.
Are you allowing yourself permission to look at novel skill sets when you’re looking for people? Because if we’re talking about a more I mean, ultimately, what we’re talking about is that we are going to live in a more digital world. And if we’re going to allow people an opportunity to survive and thrive in that world, but they don’t have a four year computer science degree, how are we going to address that? So looking at novel skill sets, allowing online certifications to be enough, looking at potential and broad capabilities rather than five years of Python and your previous job and a four year degree at this University, I think it’s hiring managers, the unsung hero of Middle America or middle management corporate America.
We really have a huge amount of influence on what the future of work looks like, even though you may not get any credit for it. So I think thinking about that, you have a very direct role to play in shaping the next generation of workers through your actions, and it will require risk, and it will require creativity, and it will require harder work. Diverse teams are harder to get to productivity as we know. So that’s something. I was always inspired. Microsoft was a fantastic company for many reasons, but also from a culture perspective, there was a culture of giving and giving back to communities.
I don’t know if it’s better or worse than any another company, but it was wonderful there. And I was so inspired that I had many hundreds of technical people on my team throughout my tenure there, and most of them if you ask them what they did in their free time, they were spending their Saturdays teaching robotics camps or coding skills and doing hackathons with kids and in their communities. And I think that is fantastic, especially when you get to underserved communities and communities of color or women or girls and STEM.
I think boys are just as important as girls, but wherever you find people who might need a little extra help getting yourself involved and I don’t think enough people are doing that. I would say also, I don’t see a lot of technologists in this policy conversation. We’re talking about getting really steeped into future of work, that would be something I’d rather see. And I guess my last point of advocacy would be for us to stop, to be very careful not to assume that technology is computing technology.
There are all sorts of solutions out there that are technology outside of our industry, and they are creating jobs. And if we can make sure that the people working on an offshore oil rig are adequately trained in the underlying technology concepts and the applications and use of their industry, that is a path forward in factories and event hospitality, health care, finance. There’s all sorts of non computing specific technology that the world needs to know how to use. And if we can give people those skills, we create a lift for everyone, so it doesn’t just have to be coding.
I think skills is such a great description of what we can empower like technology can be software, mechanical. It can be lots of different ways that we can create new ways to interact with systems. But systems isn’t always technology. There are people systems. There are very human systems that are out there that can be optimized, and I exploited to such. It sounds like a negative word, but exploited in, like, properly leveraged. So people in hospitality, even the simplest things. I used to be a shoe repair man, so I was a cobbler with a rare treat that you don’t get too many people that could say they’ve done that.
And I worked in a mall at the entrance to a subway and we had all this throughput. But the first thing I thought about was treat this like a system. How can I make sure that I can optimize the flow of people when it was rush hour, optimize the flow of shoes going through the system, right? Knowing how and teaching people who are not technologists, who I work with, how to think like a system. I taught them systems thinking. And I was at high school education.
I had no other than just my strange nerdish need to find optimization and everything. I got this, and I looked at the wall of stuff that we sold, and I started organizing. I’m like, what would entice somebody to come to the front of the store. And so I made the display differently. And I sort of built this journey through the little tiny store. And the funny thing was, six months later, we won a marketing award for a shoe repair by Cadillac Fairview, which is this big mall.
And they’re also pension fund as well. So the people that I worked with, what it taught them was that we’re amazing. We all have something we can do, something that we can reach for. And then the two guys that I worked with, went to get their own stores. And then one guy went independent, and he started his own shoe repair. That was entrepreneurship and even entrepreneurship with a paycheck just thinking about systems thinking and thinking about optimization and thinking of ways we can do that.
We created a better human experience for our customers and for each other, and no Comp-Sci degree required. It was pretty cool to see that we could pull that off.
I just literally love what you just said. That whole systems thinking approach, the idea of being able to discern a pattern out of chaos. If there was one higher level cognitive skill that I think in our education systems, we should be teaching, it’s that. And I’ve heard enough of these conversations that we’re all educators who agree, but I think they’re still in the minority. There’s this, I don’t know, this is going to be super geeky, so maybe not helpful. There’s this architect, a famous architect who I think was, I’m sure, a teacher at a University.
His name is Christopher Alexander, and he wrote this seminal book in architecture called The Timeless Way of Building. And I had a lead architect on my team at Microsoft who said, “You’ve got to read this book”, because what we don’t ever remember is that the underpinnings of anything we do when we’re designing a technology system are the very same underpinnings that architects use when they’re designing space or mechanical engineers are using when they’re designing roads and bridges. And they are all in their most fundamental elements, designed to reflect a human experience.
And it was a very big turning point for me to get clear on the fact that number one, technology is ultimately only ever an expression of our human experience, of the world around us. We just reflect ourselves in the things that we build, whether it’s a bridge or an application. But if you can start to cognitively, kind of grasp how to discern patterns, how to understand connections and relationships, then you’re much more equipped to understand the world, understand the problem you want to solve, understand where you fit in the world.
And I don’t think we do that enough. But that book, if you ever want to read a 400 page book on architecture. But he talked about how cities are built and how a house is built. A quick example. You intuitively know when the front door is in the right place of a house, we intuitively know this. We don’t need any training. And when it’s right, it’s when there is enough of a pathway to a front door. When it’s wrong, it’s where the front door is right on the street.
And the reason for that is that a house represents an intimate, personal space. And so the front door placement is a way of allowing us to slowly get closer to our space and allowing enough distance for people who are going to come into our space to do so in a slower and thoughtful space. You don’t want someone abruptly in your face in a first conversation, nor do you want them abruptly in your front door. And so it’s just a way of saying, oh, interesting. That’s why certain design elements in architecture makes sense to us.
It’s not because we know anything about architecture. It’s because we know everything about ourselves and technology is that way, too. But you can apply that thinking to anything. And I think then the world starts to get more understandable, like people get lost in the world of technology. We just feel like it’s passed us by or we don’t get it. And I’m here to say that you actually do get it, on some level. You actually totally understand it because it’s built on the same patterns that are echoed throughout your life.
And they’re human.
Yeah. This is the magical thing of seeing it. And actually, I always laugh at my favorite example is everyone smiles on it and will say, like bees when they create honeycombs, they’re perfectly hexagonal. Like, that’s amazing. It’s like bees know math. I’m like, I think you’ve got it backwards. These are patterns in nature that we’ve discovered, and we’ve built math to represent these things. And then we teach math as if that was the skill. But it’s actually the capturing of the pattern, not necessarily the learning of the task of measurement.
That was the zero to one thing that happened one day, the reason why the apple striking the head as being the sign of the start of gravity, whether real or not. As if the Apple knew what gravity was and just had to tell Isaac Newton, by the way, here you go, here’s an idea. It was a variety of things that suddenly was like, aha, but it was the recognition over years of looking for a pattern and then seeing it. And it can be very small things.
That’s why, even like, said servers in restaurants. A great friend of mine, he’s been working as a server, and he goes now like he has a SWAT team of servers. And they go into new restaurants like Gordon Ramsay’s little TV show where they like, ‘You’re doing it all wrong. And here’s how you do it’. And they teach people how to optimize the flow for customer experience, including the chefs and all these interactions. And he says, what do I teach people? He says, “I hand them this as the most bizarre book that you wouldn’t think you’d hand to a restauranteur.
But I give them The Goal by Eli Goldratt, which, if we are in technology, is the foundation of the Phoenix Project, which is the entire DevOps movement, is based out of this idea of how do we optimize flow. And Goldratt wrote this book, in I don’t even know, it was like the 60s or 70s. Talking about the manufacturing industry and lean manufacturing led to lean startups and lean development. And just like, we think that the bees know math, no. Here we are. So here’s somebody teaching a serving crew at a restaurant.
And then when it comes to taking on technology, those group of people, they start to look at this system now and go, you know, it’d be better is if this menu was done this way and they are now driving the experience for the developers and for the restauranteur and saying, like, ‘It’d be better if we put the system here’. And they are invested in their own outcome. But then, as a peer group, it raises us all to be able to just ask a question, don’t just come in and do it.
That’s the beauty. It’s like when your kids say, why, for the first time, you’re like, oh, that’s cute. And then it becomes very uncute because they ask why about everything.
So true.
But then you realize it’s beautiful because they are genuinely questioning it. And you’re like, I’m so happy you’re doing that.
It’s so good. I mean, we could just get super nerdy here, but it is a reminder that through our evolution, we are born optimized to understand the world at a very intuitive level, how that happens. Neurologists can have the nature nurture conversation that happens all the time in the AI spaces, you know, like, does the system have to start from scratch, or can it be built in with a few things to give it a head start? Because people are. Babies are born with the way we function neurologically is optimized to be a reflection of the world already around us.
And that’s why things make sense to people all the time. But it’s important because it is a mindset shift of, I start from a place if I can. The world is not foreign to me. Any manifestation of the world, technological or otherwise is not on some level foreign to me. It is simply an expression of the laws that I was born that were internalized in me the moment I was born, that we are optimized for the world.
And it’s just a matter of patience and understanding and study and observation that I can become more efficient and efficacious in that world that I start from a place that I can.
I’m curious, who are the people that you look to as more recent inspiration? Like we can always look to the philosophers of old and sort of our early teachers. But who do you see that you find is reflecting a new existence and doing it well, nowadays?
I think I look at people who are talking about this. So there’s a gentleman, Erik Brynjolfsson, who’s now at Stanford, and now I’m going to forget the name Stanford Digital, something other. He was at MIT, and he is an economist and technologist who talks about future work. And so much of what I understand is from his work. So I think everyone should follow him. But then there are the innovators, like the Elon Musk’s of the world. I know he’s overused, but the reality is there’s this charm of not getting so excited about the fact that he’s solving a big problem that I think is exactly that mindset of you have to get yourself into a space where you feel like if you just thought about things, use that kind of root cause analysis and ask a bunch of questions about why things work the way they are and uncover your assumptions about things that you actually can get to a very rich understanding of the world around you.
And from there understand how you can affect it. So I don’t follow a lot of people on a daily, weekly basis. But those are two. For the world itself, Ian Bremmer, I’m a huge Ian Bremmer fan. Nobody knows who is. He runs a group called the Eurasia Group. He talks about world and world politics, and I think he applies that kind of thinking to the realm of politics and policy and global affairs. And so I think maybe it’s more about people who I think use that mindset and apply it to whatever it is that they do that I’m inspired by.
I pulled over a book just because I literally wrote this down because I was listening to Antifragile. It’s Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Famous for Black Swan and a lot of things. And the one quote that jumped out of me says, to be a successful philosopher King, it’s better to start as a King and then become a philosopher. I find that it’s the practitioners that are truly creating the next philosophical discussions because before it was always from academia, then teaching the world how it’s supposed to work.
But I find this is an opportunity, we can turn it on its head. And much like you talked about Elon Musk. Right. First principles thinking even in the smallest format and things we do of like, why is it that we do this thing this particular way when you see people that are doing stuff in practice and they’re saying, I don’t want to go to an office, they’re saying I can become a gig worker. I can become my own landscaper. I can start my own shoe repair.
I can start a startup using no code and low code just because I’ve got a problem to solve. But it’s very much often people with lived experience that then just can take this and almost question the philosophers of old and say, I think we can do something here. I think where we’re going to see ten years from now, a lot of stuff going on that’s already happening, but it won’t be realized in public effectively until the next wave of startups kind of make it to whatever status is where we look for unicorns, or just the fact that longevity. We will see more longevity in small businesses, and people will see those new statistics.
And that’s the future of all of us. Actually, this is a fun part when you’re looking at the future of things, and we’ve clearly gone through very literally a Black Swan event with what’s gone through with the pandemic and what’s still continuing with the pandemic, of course. But are the things that you looked at five years ago that either are holding true or maybe even were accelerated because of the most recent 18 months that we’ve gone through.
I have to just take a second to go back to five years ago. So I’m literally like, wait, what year was it five years ago, 2017. Where was I then? I think that my understanding of how problems need to get solved on a small level kind of back at the very beginning of this conversation. That the boundaries of a problem matter that actually has a relationship to this whole democratization distribution of technology knowledge, because when you let everyone solve their own small problem, I think there’s a bigger aggregate effect than when you assume that only a few organizations or there’s a real centralization of problem solving capability and all the money and power and intention flows to that.
And I was seeing that in the context of a lot of the digital transformation projects that we were running, and if you go work for the big Fortune 50 at some level, you’ve got to get C-level people to sign up for projects that are extremely so expensive that the board has to approve. And they have very dubious ROI because it’s an innovation project. How do you know it? It’s an experiment. So it’s not that you don’t see it at that level, but they only work when they were inspired by people who are actually out in the field, whatever the field is in, whatever industry trying to get very specific about a problem.
And that was when I realized, oh, my gosh. The democratization of skills is important because you need to empower everyone to solve their small problem, and that’s going to create a shift in power. Right knowledge and efficacy being power if you let people solve problems and you give them technology, then they’ll do it. And of course, remember, I have a son who can Twitch and all that sort of stuff has been in my house for a while. So I’ve kind of seen that, too. So I’d say that would be the pattern that has stayed true, and I think it’s going to continue to shift.
I didn’t know it was going to look quite like this, though.
Having kids. I’ve got four kids and I’ve got 20, 18 and 5 and 2. So I’ve got quite a range of things that I’ve seen, and I sort of laugh now, people that have young kids, especially that we all know about sort of the YouTubers and these Blippi and Ryan’s Toy review. And there’s all these very popular things. And there’s one kid, who you look at his videos five years ago, and it was just basically filmed on an iPhone, not even a good iPhone, but an iPhone seven or six, whatever it was at the time.
And this year, he was in Fortune reporting 26 and a half million dollars in revenue.
Wow.
He’s eleven years old. There is very unicorn-like capabilities in exploiting these. Finding the pattern, exploiting the system that allows you access to uncover and use that pattern. And that’s kind of cool. The economy is so different now, but I think I’m like you. I like the democratization, and I think the last 18 months, though, not anybody in the world wouldn’t trade away. What we’ve had to go through as a society. What we have to do is find the best of what we did. And I think the great resignation startups moving to everybody’s mindset, people realizing you can just do things on the Internet and you can begin to generate revenue.
It’s a new economy, it’s a new world. The one thing we didn’t get a chance to talk to, but it’s still early on. So I’m going to have you back because I want to get your first few months of experience. So I have to say Congratulations in advance that as this is out and people are listening. You are the CEO of a new company and you’ve been involved, so, in the last couple of minutes here and I apologize. I don’t want to box you in, but just as a bit of a teaser to what’s coming up next for you, Jennifer.
Well, we’re going to go through a big rebranding renaming event, so I’m hesitant to talk about too many of the details here, but it’s a company that’s in this future workspace from an industry taxonomy perspective. You put us in the HR tech space, but I’m concerned about workers that are not in the tech industry. I’m concerned about workers who are not on LinkedIn, and I’m interested in how we can within the existing ecosystem of how people find work, which is through staffing, agencies and employers. How can we give people access to a proactive profile building capability that allows them to find work to go out and find work?
They advertise to agencies and employers based on the profile they build for themselves. So I got the advanced certification. I was making $18 an hour. My profile has changed. I have really great five star ratings from my last two employers. I’ve got a few verified skills, and now I think I could earn at least $23 an hour. How do you do that? What’s the platform in the marketplace that you build to do that? So the company is already kind of in that space and a little bit narrower because product market fit is important.
But that’s the aspiration of the company. And ultimately, I think it’s providing that LinkedIn active profile building capability to the rest of America, and then hopefully the rest of the world.
That’s amazing. And Congratulations on the big move. And I’m excited about the future there, inevitably, with you as part of the leadership team and then heading it up. They’ve got success ahead for them. And so it’ll be exciting to watch. So it’d be great to be able to see post rebrand. I know that’s always an interesting challenge for any organization, so it’s always fun that we get to be secretively leading up to it. But this will be, actually the said timing, as it were, this will probably be pretty close to when you go live.
So I’m excited about that. Jennifer, if anybody wants to reach you, of course, well, I have links to your website. And where can folks find you if they want to get connected?
Well, I think by the time this publishes, I’ll have a whole bunch of new contact information, but I am a big fan of LinkedIn. I use it and I’m on it all the time, and people reach out to me all the time there, and I always reply, so that would be probably the single best way to find me.
Excellent. You’re better human than I am. I’m the worst, because the thing I get the most at these days is people trying to sell me explainer videos on LinkedIn is particularly good for prospecting. And for whatever reason, once you have a very public voice, people see you as a great prospecting target for a lot of things.
Thank you. But I’m so grateful for that platform, so I really take it seriously. I do try to kind of be somewhat active. I post all my podcasts there. Not that everyone wants to listen to me. And I just try to be useful on the platform. And I try to be grateful for the people who reach out there because you never know any. Of course, there’s lots of sales pitches, but that’s okay.
And like you said, I’m really mindful of the effect that it can have. And really, the last job that I took, it was kind of funny. After I was at the company about three months, the human resources team, they phoned me up and they said, hey, Eric, we realized that we don’t have a resume of you. We’re supposed to have one on file. So can you do us a favor? Can you write up and send me a resume? Because that is the future of work for a lot of people that there is no more filing the CV and sending with a cover letter.
It was, somebody sort of found me on LinkedIn and they followed my blog and we met an event and I interviewed with a bunch of people. And the offer comes it was a very different world. But yet the old classic practices like, we’re supposed to have a resume on file somewhere just to say that we looked at it, which is crazy.
I know it’s kind of crazy. And when you get into the lower end of the wage scale, resumes are just not even necessary because you get people early in career. So I will say one of the features that we have is this video capability. So kind of like TikTok where I can film myself answering questions and in three minutes, a recruiter or a hiring manager can get a very good sense of. Can I show up? Can I talk? What have I done? What’s the look and feel?
What’s my authenticity? Am I real? I’m not even my actual person. So I think that’s the future, especially for a lot of those jobs where you just need to make sure, I’m going to be serving people. You need to make sure I can serve people.
Yeah, that’s right. I am very excited to dig in on this one. So there you go. Once the new name is unveiled, we can have you back on. We can do a deep dive into what you and the team are doing.
I would love that. Thank you. Such a fun conversation.
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Kison Patel is the Founder and CEO of DealRoom, a project management software for complex financial transactions. Kison has over a decade of experience as an M&A advisor and developed DealRoom after experiencing first-hand a number of deep-seated, industry-wide inefficiencies and challenges.
We cover a ton of really great lessons on the productizing of process and how Kison has scaled teams and culture. If you’re a founder or anyone in a startup, these are solid lessons and Kison was a real pleasure to chat with.
Good morning, everybody or afternoon, wherever you are, whatever time it is you listen to this. This is the DiscoPosse podcast and you’re in for a treat because you’ve got Kison Patel from M&A Science. Kison is also a podcaster, a great content creator and somebody who really has a mindful approach to his sharing of information and really wants to help people. So this is a great discussion around the process of founding his original ideas and productizing them working with the team. We talk about culture. It’s a really great, wide ranging discussion.
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All right.
This is Kison Patel. I hope you enjoy the show.
I’m Kison Patel with M&A Science, and you’re listening to the DiscoPosse podcast.
Thank you very much. This is going to be an area where we can cover a lot of exciting ground. You’re doing work through both the product side with what you’ve done with DealRoom, you’ve got more product work that you’ve done. You’re doing work on the actual activity of mergers and acquisition. You’ve got a huge important and stored background in that. And you are a prolific creator of contents both through, you’ve got your podcast, you’ve got video work that you’re doing, and thankfully, I get to share some video time with you, which is great.
And you’ve written a book. You are busy. You’ve got a great voice, not just on the microphone, but literally. I love the way that you bring content to this world. So with that, if you want to give a quick intro for folks that are new to you and we’ll talk about what you’re doing with M&A science and with DealRoom and much more.
Happy to. My name is Kison Patel and I come from a background doing M&A advisory. I did it for about ten years. Working originally with private owners of small businesses to buy, sell and then grew in the career to work with corporates on similar transactions at larger scale. Then the recession happened around 0607. We did a lot of reflection, found that out myself and aspiring to get into the software space, got involved with a start up that didn’t work out. But what it led me to was an understanding and the way that software engineers would use project management software to manage building software.
And then I took that inspiration and started the company DealRoom a bit later in 2012 as project management software for mergers and acquisitions. Then learn shortly after there’s a whole bunch of things that you need to learn that come along with it in terms of how to build software, properly build a good software, how to get market fit, how to really develop a go-to market and then rebuild your software for scale. Because once you start getting customers, you realize that little thing you originally built with wasn’t really built or stood up for scale.
So it was a lot of fun experience. I was really fortunate in that journey. A friend of mine in marketing was, hey, man, you should do a podcast. And I was like, what the hell is a podcast? Don’t worry about it, you’re the next big thing. And that was probably the best market advice I ever received. We started podcasting about five years ago with a podcast called M&A Science. I think the one thing is, I was fortunate enough to have a good marketing team that was really good at repurposing content.
We would take transcripts of these interviews, write blogs, eBooks, and then recently published our second book. And then that evolved into doing online events, which evolved into owning and operating an online school for M&A. So now we have a few different business lines today, back in a nutshell.
Yeah, well, this is what’s really sort of the key story when you talk about successful startups, and I’ve seen it. I’m lucky at the point that this will go out. We’re just past 200 episodes. So I’ve talked to a lot of founders and you’ve seen this consistency in the success is often taking real lived experience and then translating it into productizing and creating products that very genuinely map to experience that you’ve brought to that company. And it can be through as a technical founder or as a business lead founder and finding a technical co founder because of your really strong background in M&A, and then your willingness to bring it in the open through podcasting, people often say, like, Well, you’re giving all this stuff away. Why would I buy the book?
Well, I’ve read the book.
It’s fantastic, right? It’s a great read. Secondly, it’s a way to kind of continue to go back and reference like, okay, where am I at it? You hear about sort of The Magic Box principle as another popular book and the idea of where you are in the acquisition process. But then when it comes to DealRoom, I like this. You’ve brought together two important things. One, you brought business to a technical platform, and at the same time, you brought development learnings through that previous startup to how you are going to build and scale DealRoom.
So I really want to find where those two things came together. When did you know it was working, that it was going to bring these two things together, or what were those first few months in defining what DealRoom would be?
Okay. So this is a really good question here. When I look at where we’re at today and where we first started is very different. And I wouldn’t say the attribution success was so much of our M&A experience. That’s what got the foot in the door. And I would attribute 10% of our success today from that. The other 90% comes from being obsessed, being extremely, that’s our competitive edge is that we obsess over M&A. We can talk about it nonstop within our own organization. I’m constantly encouraging team members to learn about M&A, to be able to speak about it, understand the specific pain points challenges.
When we look at those early days, the problem you have when you come from the background and the industry is you bring a lot of assumptions with you. So with the experience that I worked in to, primarily worked in hospitality and small financial institutions, the experience I had in those markets is what I based a lot of the assumptions and how we should build a product and take it to market. And you’ll find out at some point either, ideally, sooner than later, that you’re wrong about a lot of those things.
And then the right thing to do is build the feedback loop really go through a process where you can validate your pain points that your problems you’re solving for. That’s a whole process of its own to be able to do that in an unbiased way because one, it’s our idea. We have some entitlement around it, and we tend to ask people for feedback that know us and they want to be nice and encourage us to follow and chase dreams and things of that sort. But that’s not what we want.
We want to identify who the cohort of customers are and we get the unbiased feedback on what are the key problems that you’re facing and understand how I see it and if it aligns. We went through that process about going through the first few months. We started with an idea of building a marketplace for M&A. We thought, here’s the lifecycle of deals. We’re going to start off with the very front end. Where do you find deals? How do buyers and sellers connect? And that’s where we found out we’re wrong about a lot of things.
We put this marketplace together. In the first year, Eric, we operated it. We had about 200 deals listed and 1200 users and realized we just build a sophisticated dumpster for deals. It wasn’t going to go very far. And it was at that time we realized we need to go back to the drawing board and step back because it was the typical thing as the founder, where you have ideas, you make an outline with what they call feature creep. You build this massive outline with 100 different features you wanted to do.
Then you’re like, all right, let’s start with the top and start building this front end stuff. We went back and took more. I think if you Google customer development interviews, there’s a lot of articles about it, and it kind of walks you through how do you validate the problem that you’re solving for. When we went through that exercise, and the goal for us was to do 40 of these interviews to really validate what we’re doing. And we realized one, finding deals wasn’t the biggest problem for the customers that we were looking to work with.
It was more on the management side. There was a lot around how do you get deals through the process, coordinate with so many different people and drive efficiency. It wasn’t so much managing the front end to find the deal, it was really managing everything in between, so close. So we shifted our focus and went through a whole other series of challenges because we focused on one market and had a lot of uphill challenges where we didn’t understand the competitive market, the legacy technology they were using, their sales model. A lot of whining and dining.
They’re just very relationship driven, and we’re trying to go to market as a light touch technology solution that wasn’t happening. You’re not competing against late dinners and nights out at the nightclub, ball game tickets with funny market.
There’s ‘no dinner at Nobu’ option on the checklist of buttons you can click, right?
Yeah. Like a free dinner with it. So it took us a little while we probably got into year two, three and realized our early adopters were actually corporates, we shifted our focus and started working with corporates back then, and our product evolved as you work with customers and continue the feedback loop where we started solving for the integration challenges after they buy a company need to integrate it. And now we’re more recently doing the pipeline management on the front end. And when I look at the product today, very little of it is from my original ideas, very little of it.
It’s 95% from customers. Or maybe there’s some little insight we got from engineers and problem solving. But, yeah, I don’t know, when I look at these companies or aspiring entrepreneurs today, it’s so much of what I emphasize is really assuring that you’re validating the problem you’re solving for and continue that feedback loop as you start modeling out solutions, even early mockups and keep getting feedback. And it allows you to show people you’ve committed to it. Identify your early customers, more importantly, give validation. So if you do go to market and raise money, there’s so much evidence that you’ve done to validate that.
Hey, I got this idea and I’ve talked to so many people. This is what I’ve learned. You know how to speak the industry language better, better speak on the problem you’re solving and how you’re going about solving it.
When you read every founding story of a company, it’s always like, this is chapter four, and it’s the pivot, right? And it’s funny that chapter one is about the founder. Chapter two is about how the cofounders meet and chapter three, this is where it was. It started in a Starbucks in San Francisco or Pete’s Coffee, I guess, is probably the more common thing. Or in Chicago, I’m not sure what the local favorite coffee joint is, but then chapter four is we realized we had to pivot, and it sounds like a shift in a timeline, like it happened on a weekend, but it’s a grueling process to be able to evaluate and make sure that you’re doing the right thing through that process.
When you began it, Kison, versus when you are on the other side of it. Where would the perception deviate from how long and how challenging that process would be to pivot into what your market approach was?
Good question. I think I remember asking a friend for advice about marketing, and he said, I don’t want you spending a dollar in marketing. I want you to go back to the drawing board because I don’t think your business model is where it needs to be to put marketing money into it. And he challenged me to go back and really validate the problems that we’re solving for. So it took some time because we really went back to the drawing board and did it in a different way.
We got out of the drawing room and went out and started talking to people, went through a whole series of interviews. I was fortunate I had interns that summer, so I had some extra help. And it’s nice when you have two people doing the interview, one person really focus on asking the questions.
Right.
And important to learn how to go about it because you want to approach it. Two things. One is being dumb, where you put away your assumptions, assume you’re wrong, assume you know nothing, so be dumb.
And then two, be curious. I think sometimes we get a little, we ask a question and move on to the next question. But that’s not being curious. Being curious is really getting in there. Like, why is that happening? Why do you have that problem? Well, why did so and so do that and digging in to really identify some root causes. I think that going through that and then being patient where you can know that, I’m not going to have a couple of conversations and change my mind or go make a big decision, like pivoting the company, but that we can make a commitment.
At the time, we committed to doing 40 of these interviews, and that’s what really led us to see a pattern from these different interviews. Then we started realizing that we needed to shift and focus in the area that matters most to the people we’re looking to sell to.
It’s a real challenging period, and especially in a founder’s life, because, like I said, you have a hypothesis and down the road, eventually, the hypothesis may not be, it’s not that it was wrong. It was just that in order to go to market, there may be something else. There’s a hidden treasure amongst the hypothesis that’s the actual marketable productized thing that you can bring. But it’s such a weird thing when someone just asks you that bold question of like, what if you just actually talk to somebody and found out whether they actually need to solve this problem.
Actually, ironically enough, in a merger with two large companies. At that time, I worked at Sunlight Financial and we were merging with Clarica, and I got brought into, they’re like, one of those, like, they tap you on the shoulder. Can you come over here and I need you to sign this paper and we’re just going to bring you in and chat with a few people. And I was one of the technologists that was in the architecture team, and we were suddenly in a room with these people like, oh, these are all these senior architects from this other organization.
Not hard to put together what’s about to happen? And so we were, as you said, right, bringing our assumptions, bringing our sort of bravado to, like, I know how to do this. And then after a couple of days, we actually brought in a fellow from Microsoft, and he was this young kid. When you say that, I’m like, I’m an older gentleman. I could say young kid proudly, he’s about 26 years old, and he was from the consulting services, and he walks in and literally, it’s like he walks in, puts his jacket down.
He looks at the diagram. He’s like, what are you trying to achieve here? So we need to bring these two directories together. And he just says, what if we just created the third directory and actually just got rid of these two altogether and just bring them up. And the brashness of that approach, like immediately, we were like, you’re torn because you’re like, I don’t like that I’ve got to give up what we just did. But you’re like, he’s probably right. And that’s what it was just like the fact that that question got asked by a third party allowed us to be free in accepting it.
And that’s what’s really hard to separate yourself from because you bring the hypothesis, you bring the team the idea, and then somebody comes from outside. And it’s such a beautiful moment when you’re like, you’re right. I should really think about this for a second.
True. You never asked too many questions.
No. And that’s it. And through that moment, I’ll say, right, you’ve been an M&A advisor for a long time. So how did it feel that all of a sudden you had probably been the person that would bring that question to many people, and all of a sudden it was being asked of you. What was that feeling like?
It’s so different now, coming from background, when you work with clients, you advise them on transactions, represent them as buyers, represent the sellers. So today we are a company that’s based on products around education and technology. So I feel like we’re the closest resemblance is to the people selling the picks and shovels to the gold miners during the rush days. We’re seeing a lot of increasing activity around M&A, a lot of interest around it. And different even, new sectors, even smaller companies are starting to think about acquisitions earlier.
For us, we provide a lot of educational resources around best practices. How do you go about doing this in a way that doesn’t disrupt the business so much that a lot of people get pissed off and quit and you lose a lot of value when that happens. And instead, keep everybody motivated and align so you can hit the goals that you originally planned with doing the acquisition. To, also the other technology part of our practice is setting up, which is now a lifecycle management solution that we can take all these.
A lot of times, there are companies using a bunch of Excel trackers and a lot of communications, primarily through email, and we’ll set it up in a nice stack. So there’s a single database to run your pipeline, run your diligence management, coordinate with all the folks you need to both internally, externally, enable good collaboration and also preparation for those integration activities and use that same environment so you can run and actually execute integration, and you don’t have any delays with team members having to relearn all this stuff.
They learned about the company already, and that’s been another great part in working with organizations and setting that up. And today, now we’re working with larger multinational companies like BP, Johnson & Johnson, Cardinal Health, Emerson. But it’s very different from going from one end where you work on a smaller transaction where you’re very hands on. You’re in the middle of the deal, directly, working with the client, the lawyers and really hands on making sure the deal gets through. Now to be on the other side, we got to work with the team, but we don’t have all the intensity or pressure that we do.
And I enjoy the problem solving part of it because you’re dealing with more, which you’re familiar with, Eric. With technical challenges combined with directories and things of that sort. And for us, we get to do it on more of the logistics through the whole process. So we don’t get into a lot of the technical integrity of the challenges with integrating companies. But it’s fun. I definitely like what we do now. I like the fact that we can come up with an idea or a way to solve a problem and scale it out, get it in front of a lot of people.
Well, that brings in the perfect sort of question around scaling. And you’ve talked in the past as a founder, sort of the right time to scale, which is probably one of the most common mistakes that people do. It’s this idea of like, going, when is the MVP ready? And that’s another one I hear all the time. People are like, if you think it’s ready, you waited too long. And also the challenge of, you’ve talked in the past about people that build for scale when they haven’t even gone to market.
And when you developed your platform, did you find that sweet spot where those things needed to line up?
I remember for us, a pivotal moment was when we had our site crashing almost every day and we had paying customers. I remember specifically, we had a 200 million dollar deal we’re managing, and it was so hectic and chaotic because they’re trusting us with managing a significant transaction. Our site keeps crashing. Bugs are popping up, and that was the point we knew, we need to build for scale. We ended up bringing in a CTO that helped re-architect, rebuild the product to follow a microservices architecture, build a team that knew how to write code for scale.
Now, it’s funny if we look back at that. I mean, remember, even Twitter was sort of famous in the early days for what they called the Fail Whale, right? And it would be down for hours at a time. Quite sometimes it was actually down for a couple of days at a time. They had active people they were bringing into this platform and it just couldn’t keep up. And it would just go down. Back then, there was no, is it down or is it just me.com, right? People just sort of generally accept it.
But now it’s funny if you launch DealRoom right now, and you had suffered that kind of an outage, the risk would be, I think, much different, the level of acceptance of people on the dependence of software and availability of that software. It’s integral. Now, what do you think if you had that sort of challenged moment right now, what would it look like to your customers and keeping them?
You know, that’s an interesting thing, because you see this thing happened in the market where companies can get hacked into, and nowadays you got to be prepared. It could be anything. Could be one employee fall for a phishing scheme and the same password everywhere. Now you’re very vulnerable. It’s a challenge of its own. It’s a challenge of its own to really manage. I think if we had to deal with it today, we’d have a lot of calls, but I think you’d rebound over it. If you look at all these organizations, like Solar Winds, some of these other firms, we have a big one with what was it, not AOL, Yahoo. That was Right-Media acquisition.
They had a big breach they had announced.
That’s right. Yeah. Worst possible time, right?
Yeah, it is. But like with the solar winds, it created a lot of awareness. I feel like it made it tougher for the startups out there that are working with large companies. Now they’re getting more scrutinized in terms of how they’re handling their security. But in terms of them, they definitely, like, bounce back. And the old saying that there’s no such thing as bad press. The older I get, the more I believe in that. You think about the news with Robin Hood and everything recently, and I’m like, unbuy their IPO.
I’m like, no, that’s all good. It doesn’t matter. It just got their name out there. And everyone in the world has heard of Robinhood. Now you can always take the bad character and become good. We’ve seen Microsoft go through it’s cycle in terms of how the market looked at it, and now they’ve completely turned it around. But as long as you’re in the news, you keep building brand equity. I think we would probably explode with our support if we had something like that to happen, but you’d recover from it.
I’m knocking on a lot of wood to make sure.
Let’s talk about going beyond product one. So you have DealRoom. You are doing a lot around the education and you’re wrapping stuff around it with M&A science, which is really cool. We’ll get into that. Actually, I’m really excited about that area. Then you sort of solve one problem, then you say, okay, well, now we’ve got to effectively build this. Everybody has a data room, right? We’ve gotten this problem solved with managing the flow of the diligence in the transaction. And so you’ve got other products that you’re developing.
So let’s talk about the rest of the portfolio.
Yeah, we have books. We look at them as products. We wrote a book called Agile M&A. It’s a fun book. The whole trend right now in software is taking Agile and making it as complex as you can with scaled Agile frameworks and things of that sort. And we did the opposite. We took the idea of Agile and dummied it down so even a high school kid could understand it. Since that’s where we got to make it for our finance folks to quickly understand as well. And the origination of it, too, was a lot of the things I noticed our own engineers were doing.
I kept correlating to my M&A experience and thought we should have done this. We should have managed diligence this way. This would have been way more efficient, made a lot more sense. I started blogging about it. I don’t think to this day, a single person has read those blogs, but it led me to interviewing Google and Atlassian where those ideas were validated. I brought up some of those examples and they’re like, yeah, we’re actually doing that. A lot of it stemming from the engineering culture.
Yeah.
That was a good wake up call that gave me inspiration, motivation to write a book, and try to put a case study behind it.
Then I remember, Christina, at Atlassian was like, don’t just write a book, make it a framework and look at our team plays. We took a lot of inspiration from Atlassian’s team plays and built around the idea of having game plans and plays and have actually encouraged practitioners in the industry to write their own little techniques. That was the bigger problem. Like even going back to starting the podcast. The idea of starting a podcast in our industry wasn’t simply to get talk time. It was aligning it with a mission where we noticed in working with these corporations, there was a lack of standardization.
All these large companies were working with had a very unique way of doing M&A, and that’s where we realized the bigger problem was the fragmentation of the industry. Everybody’s essentially working in a silo. It’s not like accounting or law, where there’s a lot of common bodies to reference and standardization. M&A didn’t have that. It’s just all Wild West. Everybody’s got their own way of doing it. And that led to the idea of, can we find what actually works? Can we throw some signs here and find where the proven techniques are, identify them, have some evidence around this.
With M&A, it’s difficult. It’s not quantitative. We’re not transferring currency, and we analyze a bunch of quantitative data. Instead, we do qualitative interviews, just like we were doing with those discovery to validate the problems we’re solving and how we’re going about the problems we’re trying to solve for and how we go about solving them. Now, it was about can we take that same approach? And we’re already learning so much around this, but interview practitioners in the industry and enable them to share their lessons learned and doing the same approach.
We’re doing a series of these interviews and identifying the patterns to really understand what are the key challenges practitioners face? How have they overcome them and what actually works? Do we see a specific way that actually works? That’s what started this whole series of building content for M&A based off of those interviews, but then creating dedicated resources to build more structured content like the courses and things of that sort.
This is the beauty of your approach is that you continue in the true Agile fashion, right? As we look for what’s the next thing? The OG sort of Waterfall approach of stuff. We’ve seen it fail in every possible angle of both business and technology. It’s been successful despite itself, I think, there’s really the truth of that early project management world. But nowadays, it’s really fantastic that you can see it come into play. We talk about Gene Kim as sort of one of the greatest voices around early movements with DevOps.
But he says I took everything from Deming and from Goldratt. I just took manufacturing stuff and then brought in here Eric Ries. Of course, Lean Startup is about based on lean manufacturing. Their human behaviors, that when you unlock the science behind it, you realize that you can have opinionated approaches to things and you see it play out in the M&A space. There are sector specific things that have to be fairly opinionated for regulatory reasons and such. But generally, like I said, there’s a playbook.
There are things that are in there, and then you can find the wiggle room around that we as humans, we almost don’t want that to be that simple. I guess it’s kind of a funny. It’s a dichotomy of the human system is that we’re like, it can’t be this easy. There’s no way.
Yeah, there’s some real truth to that. Well, humans tend to complicate everything beyond. There’s a lot of stuff out there. When you look at best practices and look at Agile, all these techniques, there’s too much out there. I think that’s what makes it challenging is there are so many things you can look at and whatever vertical, whatever industry or function you’re in. But ultimately, one common element that really drives success is a culture of continuous improvement. We mentioned Lean. I think that was my favorite part of Lean.
They used a Japanese term Kaizen, which is a word that translates to good change. But in reference to lean management, it’s continuous improvement. My youngest son actually named Kaizen because my wife had a dispute with giving my name. So somehow the compromise was Kaizen. So I was reading a book on lean management at the time. But if it’s one thing I could drive in any organization to create value is continuous improvement as a culture becoming change-oriented. Too many companies get stagnant. It just happens. It can happen in startups in various ways.
But the more you can continuously drive, to continuously influence continuous improvement, you really get something good there. That’s where we keep adding new products. We’re identifying new problems, creating new solutions, pushing ourselves to improve on all fronts. But I think that’s the one common thing that really drives a successful organization is that culture. Or if you’re in that situation, and you work in a larger entity. There is a lot of stagnant pieces that need to be awoken and revitalized with that kind of approach. And you reformat the culture and still that change-oriented values.
When it comes to doing something like this that has a financial impact, sometimes with it, is there additional responsibility that you feel in the rigor that you have to apply to the software development process and the way you run your teams because it’s dealing with sensitive financial transactions in the end, and especially when it comes to stuff like firm room where you’re dealing with really true regulatory public information. This is one that often separates people. The moment they say, like the more we have to touch money, stop developing your software because it’s a dangerous game.
Yeah, it is. There’s a lot. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could waste a lot of money, which I learned the hard way. You can waste a lot of money quickly and have nothing to show. That’s why I’m a big believer in taking the light rapid prototyping in the beginning, to really validate what you have and then have this clear expectation you’re going to rebuild what you stood up in order to have it ready for scale. That part is definitely one component of it.
I think thinking back the biggest challenge was balancing that with the security nature. Like you mentioned today, it’s a never ending thing. Every year, we’re dumping more and more money into security, dealing with adding more certifications. It’s all the SOC 2 Pen-Test, whatever other certifications more we grow as a company, we just reinvest into that front, I think especially it makes it easier now being all virtual. Then you just reallocate office expenses into your digital infrastructure, which includes security. Early years was extremely difficult. It takes about three years to really get security nailed down.
Looking back out of it, there are some deals we’ve done on the platform that we should not have been doing. We just did not have things set up the way they should have. It really takes. There’s two parts. There’s infrastructure and how you have that set up, and then there’s your actual application. What are you doing for us? Because the nature was managing highly sensitive information. We had to learn. What are the key things that help with that automating watermark so if a document does get out, you can trace it back to who leaked it out and making sure you have a really rigorous audit trail, which isn’t common in software, that every single click or interaction is tracked and logged and auditable and tamper proof at that.
There’s a lot of little things, and then you have to learn how to build that stuff. It just was a challenge of its own to really create those kind of functionality that, it’s truly secure. Like I said, you start getting things, but security is a roadmap like that thing, it’s a never ending roadmap.
For sure.
And you got to keep updating it and prioritizing it. Work with external teams to help you find out where you should be prioritizing.
You can’t treat security like a juice cleanse. This is not a thing that you just throw developers and a couple of weekends, like you said, it’s an evolving thing, especially as we see new compliance frameworks that come in new regulatory things that we got to be prepared for. But it’s funny when you say the early days, there were stuff where the systems may not necessarily today stand up where you were four years ago on this stuff. But the funny thing is, it was being done with paper being passed across tables in the past.
The irony is the rigor that we’re held to in systems technology is far greater than the failed human to human interactions of literally people talking in open hotel lobbies about a potential deal. And meanwhile, you’ve got people from some hedge fund just sending all their interns to walk around the base of every Shangri-La to see if they can find out what’s going on in the world.
Yeah, that’s so true.
Now the next piece is the idea of giving good information away and guiding through the community. And the result, whether even planned or unplanned, often of like, actually eventually leads to bringing business. And I think this is a beautiful thing. I love that you’ve got such a great education opportunity in what you’re doing, and you’re doing it through blogs and you’re doing it through your Academy. And then you probably will find by bringing this real good education to the world that those people will be like, hey, we’re about to go through a deal.
I think I know where I want to go. The folks that taught me how to do this. It’s an interesting move in business that you can educate first, and then business often comes as a result. How has that played out in how you’ve done work with the Academy?
Eric, if you’re going to build a startup today, that’s software focus, a part of your strategy should be building a media company within your company. It’s becoming a must because that’s allowed us to really position ourselves as a credible resource, trust our brand and allowed us to dominate over competitors. We have competitors bigger than us, and we’re out ranking them in Global Alexa ranking. We’re getting better speakers at our events at our podcast. We’re more in-tune with the community, and that’s the biggest driver of it is the fact that we’re running a media company within our organization.
We’re 30 people in the business now, and our marketing function is ten, in full stack. We got everything in house editors, podcast editors, video editors. We got multiple writers, full time designer just for marketing.
It is such a perfect phrase. I’m going to steal that totally from you. I love this idea that the media really is such an important part and we miss it because like I said, number one, it gets your voice out there. It allows you to create this beautiful narrative through storytelling. And that’s why the way that you write is beautiful because it’s like reading a conversation. And it’s not quite often, especially in technical companies. They treat it like technical writing, not like technical marketing, and their different things than new ones.
But technical writing is like manual creation, very distinct flow, very machine- like in the idea that simplified to the point, no fluff. But then technical marketing is show something technically, show something that’s detailed and in this case, the M&A, is the tech, the function behind it, but make people care about what they’re reading so that they stay through to the end. And like I said, I’m a fan of your content because the style of the writers that you’ve got has shown that I want to get to the last paragraph every time.
That’s great. I’m glad. I definitely got a great marketing team that drives a lot of that.
Now in going to the M&A side and your background when it goes right, it’s easy to recreate history on how it went right when it goes wrong. It’s really tough for us to visit that, but when it does go right and go wrong, how do you use your retrospective view to go to the Agile format to look back on a deal? Wherever it went and really bring that and try and find data and signal amongst what happened to then influence the way you would approach it the next time.
For us, we’re not hands on. We’re not in there engaging with the actual employees of the company that’s getting acquired. But we do spend a lot of time with the companies we work with, really understanding how their deals are going. Where do they see value getting leaked and what are the outcomes then going backwards and understanding what were some of the causes around that? I’ll tell you, this is the fun part to get into this. When we see M&A go wrong, it’s because of the people.
It is not financial or somebody screwed up the model. People having problems, communication problems, accountability problems. That’s the reason why you’ll see billion dollar deals get screwed up. We see deals where they did it for 5 billion a year later, they’re writing it down to 1 billion. A lot of value lost. Probably a lot of people left that company. I hate tattling on some of it because I don’t want to throw our own clients out of the bus. But we’ve seen it where they’ve bought a business unit for $3 billion and had a lot of aspiration on new products that they were going to introduce.
A year later, the whole executive team left frustrated with the way the integration was handled, and they end up writing down that business a year later for 1.3 billion. And five years later, there’s no innovation coming out of there.
Yeah.
What would have been probably a company that was on it’s up-and-up could have been a 510 billion dollars company today or greater, but it’s gone. It’s just going to be a small little thing that’s in a stagnant state and will probably stay there. So such a critical thing as the people experience.
And I would say the lesson learned from doing 100 of these M&A focused podcast is all about the people, align it from the very beginning. No surprises. What you have planned and what you’re going to do with that company you’re acquiring. Put that front and center. Put it to the point where there’s clarity and crystallization on what the final state is going to look like when both companies come and merge together and bring down the front. So both executives, the buying executive and the selling executives, CEOs, are aligned around it.
That’s one. That’s what that division is going to look like. From there, they can start developing a go-to-market outline and understand what that’s going to look like. I think the other thing is for those two CEOs to understand values. A lot of the problems when we talk about people conflicts and frustration are because of culture clash. We’ve seen a lot of examples of that. If you can align around that early, the way to really root it is by getting clarity on each organization’s values, then getting a sense of, hey, How’s this going to work?
Your organization has a very rigid, top down management approach. We’re a flat, believe in Agile empowerment and have our folks running their own show. How is this going to work together? And we may not want to fully integrate, maybe we can still work together but keep some of that level of independence and be open and clear about it, that it is a different culture and it’s not going to just integrate together. That stuff gets lost out the window. And I think of you grooting it by values allows you to really align.
When you do build a story and have the communication publicly to the employees, the customers, the vendors on this big event that’s going to happen. That’s going to create a lot of change and why it’s happening and then also, like, validating it. In addition to that story, we also see why we’re going to get along and can really articulate it well. And that’s an important thing. Thinking about the events that happen after you close a lot of change management, the largest amount of change management organization is going to go through.
There’s a nice narrative and everybody’s aligned around the rationale for the deal. And there’s a good story on, hey, this is actually exciting, and I want to be part of this like, heck, yeah, there’s opportunity for growth out of this. If this comes together and the organizations create the value that they see by combining these entities and creating a better solution for customers to be happier and acquire more customers. This is a great thing. And now I see what they’re doing, I want to be part of it. When you’re left in the dark and all you’re dealing with your own fear and uncertainty because you’re just like, oh, this acquisition is happening.
I know what that means. They’re going to want to cut costs.
Right.
And I know there’s not room for two lead PMS in this team or whatnot, so that fear, uncertainty, doubt sinks in and I’m going to start looking for another job. I haven’t even heard the news yet, but I’m already out there. It all comes back to the people. If you can manage the people experience from the very beginning, make it engaging. The other thing I think often doesn’t get done in M&A is a reverse diligence.
You’re doing diligence to understand if the company is worth paying for and the risk of it. But at the same time, you should be encouraging them to do diligence on your organization so they understand how it’s going to fit in as you complete the acquisition and be able to ask some of those questions, be able to get clarity, make them part of that understanding earlier. I think that empathy at the end of the day, if you can look across and we talk about curious earlier, but really spend the time to understand people are frustrated and you can see in their face.
You can always start when you interact or meet somebody and I’m doing a lot of this on video, but you could tell if they’re happy, having a good day, you’re having a bad day, something’s up, you have something you want to talk about, you can see it. And if you lean in with that, people tend to open up and really sends them out. Like, get a good understanding and some things you got to put out there and just put yourself in their view and get a sense of what are they thinking. Saying, hey, you’re probably dealing with a lot of change and a lot of extra work right now and then they’ll tell you like, yes, I am.
No, I’m not. Just by listening. That’s like, the most important thing. I think M&A, we get so much caught up in a plan and driving top down management, pushing to change. But at the end of the day, people are dumb. They know what they’re doing. You just got to level up with them. If you can take or flip the 80 20 ratio around and spend that time just to listen and understand, you’ll get a sense, you’ll know, you’ll know what they’re concerned about, you’ll know where their heads at, if they’re motivated, if they have a clear understanding about what’s going on, if they’re committed or not, until you have that, there’s no point in talking at people.
It’s really wild, and that carries into every part of our interaction with people. Right? Even when I’m in front of analysts all the time and in customer situations. And there’s a great book called The Coaching Habit, which is one of my favorite ones. I use it a lot for leadership, and it starts with the simplest things. The first thing you ask is what’s on your mind and give them the chance to immediately convey. And then the favorite thing is the second question is called the awe question, A-W-E, and what else?
Because they’ll always have a canned response and then you say, and what else? So I’ll do this even in situations where they ask about your technology, like, how are you better than or different than X or whatever? And I’m like, well, what’s the thing that really excites you about that platform that you’re talking about? And they go through? And I don’t even have to ask the ‘and what else’ question sometimes because as they’re talking up this thing to be like, you know what I really wish it would do.
And it’s like being in the therapy session. It’s so fantastic versus if I had gone in and like you said, just treated it like a diligence exercise of like, you’ve asked me these questions, I will show you the technical comparisons. If I throw data at it, I can give it all the context I want, but in the end, just be humans to each other. Like, it’s so amazing the impact it has. And at the end of that experience, especially when you’re dealing with M&A like, the amount of uncertainty, it can have a profound effect, not just on the direct human impact, but the actual value of the organization that they’re buying in the end.
Because like you said, if you have a lot of uncertainty, it creates certainty. People who are certain that they’re going to get out before they find out what’s happening. They’d rather control the outcome. He said, I don’t know the outcome yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to end this way. So I’m leaving. I see it happen all the time, especially as startups get sort of consumed. When I was at SunLife, it was a 5000 person organization that was buying a 5000 person organization. They were on the buy side of the transaction.
They were the end name and the brand would be attached to it. But it was literally mashing two ships together, and the leadership exchange was very interesting because then you would have all these people underneath. They’re trying to work out the org chart, and it wasn’t obvious who was going to do it in the end. And it’s a really weird experience, because by all matters of science, it should just, it works. Right. We know we’ve got the org chart here, the org chart here. Perfect.
Grow the business. Do this. Follow the details. Profit. Us humans get in the way of that.
I had an interview with one of the HR leaders who’s in a Global HR role at the time, Sallie Cunningham. And she said it best, where a happy workforce generates more income.
But to go to what you and the team are doing both through being able to educate on here’s the process that you’re involved in, right? Here’s how you can take best practice and bring it in there. And then it gives you the confidence that the platforms that you’ve created are built on these foundations of, like, these people know what they’re doing. So it gives us real credence. You’ve got skin in the game. You’ve lived the life before you came to start the company. It’s this beautiful flow.
And like you said, the truth is, I’ve heard you say it before. It’s like Excel is probably the number one software tool in the world for everything under the sun. And it doesn’t need to be that way. So when you show people that there’s a better way to do this, it creates that happiness that Sallie talked about, it creates the comfort that, hey, we’re using a system that’s built by people that understand what we’re going through, and it lets them focus on the matter at hand, which is retaining their culture through a merger.
And there’s very few schools on that, unfortunately.
No, there isn’t. And it’s interesting because they’re talking about changes amongst us behavior and the way we work together and think about which really stems to a lot of core leadership skills. And then the other piece, we talked about the technological solutions. A lot of people are fast to adopt, slow to adopt. That’s a whole area we didn’t really talk much about when we talked about the startup cycle, where there’s a lot of ideation going to market, getting the market fit and all these things you have to do to really prepare to have a product you can take to market.
But the distribution model, that’s actually the hardest thing to get. Right. You’ve seen it. We’ve seen it so many times where it’s the best product, but they didn’t have the best distribution model. And we’ve seen it where the lagging product actually ends up being the winner because they had a better distribution model.
Look, I’ll say this. This is my opinion and my opinion, alone, right? Microsoft has a lot of bad products, right? But yet they’re out there all over the place. I say this as running a lot of Microsoft organizations over based organizations over time. It was hilarious that we used to joke in the early days of like, well, they don’t have better products, they have better marketing. But it really was, they had better distribution. They had ways in which and it didn’t even make sense if you looked at it by the data. Right?
If you were selling Microsoft software, you made, like, one point on the deal. There was no margins, there was no way to discount it. You were literally just a pass through to write down the contract. You were papering the deal, and then you would try to hopefully wrap services around it. So by all measures of how it should go, it shouldn’t have worked. And yet they became dominant because they solved a specific problem. And then they marketed it so beautifully and created a distribution channel to make it easy to consume and get.
And that was truly it. And now, with the ability to digitally adopt most products, distribution is really different. Right? So on that basis, Kison, what’s the distribution solution? What’s the thing that you saw as your way to differentiate in distributing a platform today?
That’s the whole thing to figure out. We talked about validating your idea, validating the solution. When you’re validating your solution, you should be validating your go-to market. Really understand how is this customer, how their channels to learn about new products, get information? Who do they actually trust and understand where you should spend the time to find their influence? I think that comes in shapes as an ongoing partly, I think there’s other drivers with the startup where you start off with one view on what you’re solving.
And as you explore the market, you’ll find different areas you want to focus on. For us, we started with smaller M&A deals in the beginning, and as we now work on with the larger companies, we’re working and know that, hey, if it’s a larger company, they’re going to have bigger problems. And it’s interesting to solve bigger problems. And inherently, you get compensated better for solving bigger problems. So you sort of shift the model and start going upstream. And we went dramatically. We went from $100 a month self service solution to now. We’re selling enterprise anywhere from $30 to $150,000 annual subscriptions, so vastly different.
But I think that’s one big part is understanding that. What problem are you solving for? What market and what’s the value of it? A lot of people are familiar with that. You typically tend to go lower than you actually should. We learn that, too? We’ve been bumping our prices up every year since we started the company, and it’s always been the best where everything is always net positive results. We end up getting more clients and selling more.
There’s just so much truth to that perception of how you price your solution. You price it higher, they value it more. They’re more likely to use it, make sure they get value out of it. Or if you give it away, nobody cares. They’ll just throw it away and never use it. There’s the pricing model part. But then there’s a huge part around the language, how you talk about the product, how you position it. There’s so much that goes into it. I got to give a lot of credit to the marketing folks out there.
That’s not easy. There’s a lot of in-depth psychology to learn, and it’s a never ending learning thing. How do you pull that language you learn when talking to people about their problems and solutions? Pull it up front and really make it part of your website content, the things that people interact, the way their part of your brand. And there’s a lot to really think about. And then it all ties back together. I think your values tied back to there in your organization, because when you think about distributing your product, a lot falls to the customer experience and your values drive parts of that.
And they’re the pillars of the customer experience that you’re putting out there. So how is your team aligned around what they’re committed to on values that then transposes over to customer experience, and that turn lends into your distribution model. And one thing, where one of core key first value is responsiveness. We manage confidentiality and we could be working on a billion dollar deal and not even know it. So we just treat everything like a high sensitive billion dollar transaction, and they’re extremely responsive throughout the company.
That’s one thing. But now that goes over to the customer experience that goes into our distribution model. When you reach out to any of our sales team, interact with them. That’s the one thing I want you to be very, immediately understand, that they’re responsive. When we’re done at the meeting, you should get a nice summary follow up, and they should be prompt. They’re not going to wait around where these guys go. That’s a big thing. That’s part of our values that then comes out when it comes to customer experience that affects your distribution.
That very much is how people interacting with you, what perception they’re getting, especially if they’re going through competitive process and evaluating benchmarking against competitors.
So this brings a good question of how did you scale your culture through the changes in your go to market?
I don’t know if it’s scaling culture. The culture shifts quite a bit when you think about a company and you start with just two people and you’re like, okay, I’m going to think and design. You’re going to build and you influence each other right there, just like you see it when you have a partnership and then you add people and it’s so critical in the beginning. And I really wish I put a lot more thought and emphasis on the culture when making early hiring decisions and made that the primary driver.
Then followed by the capabilities. Sometimes if there’s a trade off, you’re going to work with somebody in a unique role and they’re going to be, maybe, quirky, and that’s just what it is. And that’s fine. But are we aligned on values? Are we committed to this? The responsiveness of him. Picking on an example, when we go through an interview process today, that’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for, how long does it take for them to follow up this interview and how well of a follow up did they do?
Attention to detail is another value in our company. So we want to see how well they wrote the follow up. Do they say, thank you. Nice meeting you. Or did they really summarize the key things we talked about? And we have one candidate, knew the values we talked about because we review them in the interview process and articulated why they would fit and be aligned with those values. It’s like done. Perfect. So when it comes to scaling it, I didn’t think of the one thing I didn’t understand, I thought it was a soft, fluffy thing.
You just put on your about page to get some warm, fuzzy feeling for some website visitor. But no, they’re really real. When you think about envision, your success and where you want to go and you reverse engineer that, it should boil down to those core values. And then you build off of those core values. When you hire people, you make sure they’re 100% aligned and let that be your leading driver to make your hiring decisions. And that’s probably how you scale your culture out.
It’s doing it like, think about the envision. Where do you want to be? How do you imagine the company operating and reverse it? Get commitment from other current team members. You have work with them as a workshop and say, hey, I really want to do this right. I want to have these core values that we all can stand for, and we make this part and we do it. First interview, you’re going to hear the core values. Second interview, you’re going to hear about core values. Final interview, you hear about core values. And it’s just constantly there, but it’s just reinforcing it saying, hey, this is what our expectations are.
I don’t want you to go through this process and find out there’s culture fit. We want you interview multiple people and get a sense of the culture. But this is what we align. We’re committed to these core values, and we want to make sure that reflects and that you’re a fit for it. If you’re not the person that’s ultra responsive in attention to detail, then maybe this isn’t going to be the right fit. Let’s talk about that. You can be missing. I don’t have attention to detail.
Maybe you have one of the values, you may be a little behind and that’s fine. Let’s see where you’re at with the rest of the organization.
Yes, it’s not just the message that’s written behind the reception desk. Culture is how they behave when you’re not looking, right? And if you’re not willing to go right to that, right? And like I said, approach it early and nearly higher. And it’s funny I used the phrase scaling culture, and I like that you sort of said, it’s not really scaling. It is an adaptive process. And I love that you’ve been able to be curious on that. In that you’ve accepted that, yes, some stuff happened.
It’s like we figured it out, but just the fact that you’ve assessed it that way. You’ve never said, like, well, here’s the original values we had, and some people deviated like, no, we’ve adapted as a company as we change. This is what builds successful culture is the willingness to listen as much as to send them a link to the corporate values page on the website.
If I were to go back and do it again, I would have introduced core values earlier much earlier and would have evolved them, too. I think as a company, all those things will evolve. Those things. The way you talk about yourself, those things will evolve. I think one key thing is try to get your positioning down early. That’s the most critical thing. We went and positioned ourselves to sell directly against the legacy competitors that were data rooms, and that pinned us down and probably stunted a lot of our ability to have this detailed positioning that we are different from them.
We’re a lifecycle management solutions, what we really evolved and shaped it to. I think if we had that positioning earlier, it would have helped the market understand where we actually sit that’s different than what they’re used to.
Right.
But I think I’ve seen that where companies, because even within, you’re in a big category, you can still carve out a niche and saying, all right, whatever, we’ve done all the organic stuff now, it’s like diapers, but organic diapers. We do custom printed diapers. That’s kind of our thing is like, the customized baby.
I don’t know, but you know what I mean?
It’s artisanally crafted. Whatever. There’s some other moniker you attach it to.
You can get that early also. I feel like it took us a little while. We were kind of battling with data room, data room plus project management jumping around with different positioning. So some of those things. Marketing team is critical again here, but get the heads together, kind of put together all the learnings and really come up with something that there’s a good commitment behind.
Yeah. And I love again the curiosity of the process and the willingness to go back and look at what went right and what could have been done differently and then letting that influence your future decisions and accepting that, yeah. It’s funny we made these mistakes early on versus most people are like, no, we’re here because we’re here and it’s very easy in that human behavior to just say, we’ve been right, the market’s been wrong.
We talk about continuous improvement, that’s the thing that’s creating that culture. I think one key thing is encouraging people to face those things is the criticism. Yes, we want positive criticism, but sometimes I don’t have time for that shit. I don’t have time to sit there and tell you the good and make you feel all warm and fuzzy.
The good sandwich. We’re like, I really appreciate how this is going. And you’re like, oh, no, here it comes.
Let me just go straight to it. But I think one key thing is brief. Occasionally, you have to brief the team. Like, look, I want to give you direct feedback, because objectively, if I can help you get better, the team gets better. And I think that’s one part, is you got to preface it. You got to mention it here and there. Remind people because they do take that communication of personal business and fuse it together. You need to remind them to consciously split that up. Put personal out to the side and take the business context I’m providing to you.
I’d say that’s one piece of it. There’s another, losing my thought on this one. We had the..
What’s it? Go ahead.
But this, Ray Dalio, really kind of became prominent in this idea of, like, the radical transparency and radical candor. And it’s funny, I’ve actually interviewed a few people that have worked there and they’re like, yeah, it’s radical. Candor is not a good thing because some people just think it’s a license to be an asshole. But there’s a way in which people have taken that fundamental and been able to say, like, you can still be empathetic but give truth and transparency. And it is about don’t dance around it. I could sit here and I could tell you, you’re doing great in your job.
You’ve had a great few months. All you’re doing is just setting them up to wait for this hammer moment versus you say, one thing we want to sort of solve right now, there’s a problem that’s been happening. And so I want to find out what’s the right way we can work together and we can get this fixed because, like, things are going well, we’ve got lots of great stuff. What can we do to fix this particular thing? Just make that the focus. Don’t try and hide it amongst a compliment sandwich.
Yeah. I think making sure there’s a ‘why’ attached is another big thing, that’s very much in conjunction with this. You get the criticism, but there’s got to be clarity on why. Like, hey, we’re doing this to specifically improve this. Other thing, anything you put in there, you should have a why to it. I teach my kids early when they start learning how to say thank you and sorry. It’s like, don’t just say thank you and sorry, because they’re very transactional words that have no meaning to it. I need you to add some meaning to it.
Tell me why. Thank you. Why? For what? And they think about it. And I remember we always go to restaurants, and it was, thank you for the great service. And thank you for the recommendations. My daughter would go to the grocery store check out. Thank you for being so quick. Thank you for the conversation. Add some context to it. Sorry for what? Sorry for bumping into you. Sorry I lost your umbrella. And same thing in the workplace. You’re going to ask somebody to do something. Add a why to it.
Make sure there’s some clarity on why. And a lot of times, people, nobody wants to be told what to do. So can you look at something and frame it as a problem and invite them into the conversation, has appeared to solve the problem? Hey, the bathroom is super dirty. Go clean it. It’s like, how can we keep this bathroom clean? Well, maybe I’ll put this reminder to myself and I’ll make sure it gets done. Okay, great. You don’t have to tell people what to do. I think if you identify it, frame it as a problem, invite them in through a question, then it creates this nice lateral positioning that you both work together to solve it.
And more likely, they’ll know what they need to step up. And they’ll own it, too, because they presented the idea, right?
Yeah, it’s the involvement of it. Boy, oh boy. I can say the folks that work with you and for you, Kison are a lucky bunch. But I really respect your approach, the platform and the education you bring. So we’ll definitely make sure we point folks to.
Let’s talk about how easy it is to be a hypocrite too. Because that’s a whole thing of its own. Everybody’s on a soapbox with some great things to preach. But the reality is it’s extremely difficult not to be a hypocrite.
It’s hard. Yeah, that’s it. There’s a real difficulty in taking the tenets and making them practices. It’s very easy for us to point to the wall. Look at the culture statements. Culture statement says we do this and you’re like. But transparency with confidentiality is an interesting line, too, because you want to be transparent. But be careful. There are certain things we absolutely cannot cross a line of transparency on. And it’s a human challenge to make sure we build a separation. I get asked all the time. Even if you go into analyst or specific customer situations and you say, look, we sign nondisclosures walking into this room.
Of course we did. But if you say you mentioned a customer name that you’re not supposed to mention outside of this room, they’re humans. They’re going to go to the next person and say, yeah, these guys are selling to X. There’s a point of making sure that you can understand that human behavior. And like you said, creating accountability and eliminating hypocrisy. It’s a challenge because we’re always forced to split the line. And as a leader, unfortunately, as the founder, as the head of the company, you sometimes have to make very difficult decisions that may seem at the moment to be hypocritical or antithetical to the values.
But there are legitimate, immediate things that need to be solved that require hard decisions. I can tell that you would approach it in a way, saying like, there’s the why I don’t like what we have to do right now, but here’s why we have to do it.
It’s creating a framework. It’s creating a communication framework that evolves into decision making framework and having your team aligned around it so that if you’re not around, things will carry on. They’ll know that there’s a flow for the way they communicate, the way they bring up the problems, the way they make decisions on how to solve them.
We need a framework for life. So I’ll look for that. That’ll be the next book, Kison’s framework for family success. My two year old daughter. She is so funny. She’ll run into something. She’ll just be running around and she smash into my legs. She goes, Sorry, Daddy. She doesn’t even almost know why she does it. But she knows, like, I bumped into you. I should say, sorry. So cute. And then, like I said, when they get older, you want them to add the context to it.
I think about four or five years old, get them to start doing it then. And you’ll be surprised. I remember going to a fine dining restaurant. My daughter, she was only seven years old, and when we’re checking out, she told the server, Andy, thank you so much for the great service and the recommendations you made. And the woman at the table next to ours just, like, cracked her head, whiplash, like, oh, my God. And she’s just like, how do I get my son to do that?
It’s funny. And it’s something that’s just good because then they can build off of it. A lot of the Ray Dalio principles are great. I actually read Ray Dalio’s principles to my daughter when she was seven. Obviously was way above the reading level. I’m done with Harry Potter. I actually want to read this. It actually does the job. It gets you right to sleep. This will be great, but it led to a lot of good conversations. When we talk about open minded versus closed minded, how do you establish these goals and build milestones to it?
And I started doing it with her ever since then. Just say, let’s talk about these goals. What are you trying to do? Well, if you’re trying to do that, what do you need to do? How much time do you need to spend towards those goals to make sure you go in that path? Let’s start thinking about what are we doing? Between once your taking up your time between proactively using and reactively using your brain and these little nuance things. It’s fun. It’s really good. That’s what actually led to the personal podcast.
We didn’t talk about that at all, but I started this year. It’s called BossMove, where I interview influencers about what are their top three principles for success and leadership.
Nice.
We can collaborate on that, but we do a little workshop, so imagine the audience are high school kids because you can’t come out and do the Gary V, be empathetic, be vulnerable.
Yeah.
Like, no. What does that mean to a high school kid? You got to really break it down into some practical how tos. And it’s a fun, challenging interview, because when you start thinking about it, you’re getting into a lot of details about what is the mindset component there.
How do you take that thinking and build it into a real behavioral pattern that becomes a part of you. It’s a fun interview.
That is wild. Yeah. I’ll definitely have to pour over that one. And that’s when I’ll recommend. I’ll make sure I get links as well as part of the show notes. There you go, there’s Ray Dalio and his authoring team. They need principles for teens. Principles for. It would be great to have principles for the five year old range. There’s definitely the ability to take that almost like parables and like, Aeop’s Fables sort of took this idea of stories and made them accessible. But they really were truly telling these big, bold, almost biblical type of things.
But then they just made it about bunnies and turtles.
I’m hoping because we have the model in M&A science where we’ll extract what we learn and write up plays. And there the step by step how tos. And we started drafting it pretty early in moves for this BossMove podcast, you learn this life lesson and do a write up. How do you turn into a practical how to? And one day, I’d love to see it evolving into something like Khan Academy, where here’s the free public school that teaches you the life lessons that you don’t learn in school.
There you go. I’m holding you to it. We’ll be back in a year with Kison to announce the moves.
The Boss Academy.
That’s it. I love it. Excellent. Well, Kison, thank you very much. And for folks that did want to get connected with you, what’s kind of the best way that they can do that?
If you want to learn M&A. We have over 350 published pieces of content. You name it. We got it. It’s on mascience.com. If you like to connect with myself, I’m always on LinkedIn. Just Kison, K-I-S-O-N, Patel.
That’s it. I love it. Well, thank you very much. And yeah, I definitely recommend people get in there and take in this content. It’s fantastic. We’ll have links to the podcast as well. And yeah, now listen to BossMoves. Go do it right now. Go click that button.
My principle is discipline. You have to have discipline to be committed. So if you’re interested in M&A, you want to learn. Check it out. I love your style. I think you did a great job interviewing. I enjoyed this conversation, Eric.
Great. Thank you very much.
Looking forward to following you and seeing who’s up next in your podcast.
Maybe I’ll be lucky and I’ll be able to get on the Moves podcast. That will be my new goal. Is be valuable enough to make it on the BossMoves.
Yeah, let me know. You can start thinking, what are your top three principles? I think that’s a good one. We talk about what lends to values. You got organizational values. But do you have values personally? And are there certain principles that shape those values? And then is that something common you have with your partner? I don’t know, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on your principles pretty soon.
All right. Mark the calendar kids, will be on that one. Great. Thank you very much.
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Craig Goodwin is the Co-Founder and Chief Platform and Strategy Officer at Cyvatar, a technology-enabled cybersecurity as a service (CSaaS) provider.
He has over 15 years of experience leading security across both the public and private sectors, building holistic security functions that combine the range of security disciplines under a single effective function.
We talk about the method of delivering Cybersecurity-as-a-Service, the reason it’s more critical than ever, and also the approach of building leave-behind process and platforms to deliver the best customer experience.
Welcome, everybody. It’s Wednesday. Or at least it is if you’re catching this when it comes out fresh because this is the DiscoPosse podcast, your weekly leading technology startup podcast, and you’re about to get exposed to a fantastic conversation with Craig Goodwin, who’s of Cyvatar.ai. Now Craig is really fantastic. He’s co founder and he’s somebody who I really enjoyed because as a chief platform and chief strategy officer, he had this beautiful mix of having lived the life of doing the things around security and now brings them to how to deliver these as a platform, as a true cybersecurity, as a service.
Really great stuff. His methods, approach, just a very enjoyable discussion as well. Somebody I would love to spend a bunch of time chatting with. And speaking of spending a bunch of time chatting with. I got to tell you that the reason I get to spend a lot of time chatting with these amazing people is because of the amazing folks that actually make this podcast happen and supporting it. So I want to implore you to please do me a favor. Number one, go check it out because everything you need for your data protection need. You can get from our good friends at Veeam Software.
I’m a longtime friend, fan, and they are really cool and that they’re supporting the podcast and making sure that as they look to bring their own message to the market. I’m pretty pleased that I’ve been able to be a part of that featuring some of the great folks at Veeam as well. So go to vee.am/DiscoPosse. They just came off of AWS re:Invent. They got a really cool campaign. It’s a comic book download, so really cool. So go there. It’s actually the landing page. If you go to vee.am/DiscoPosse, you can get your very own AWS superhero comic book.
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Hi. My name is Craig Goodwin. I’m the co-founder of Cyvatar, and you’re listening to the DiscoPosse podcast.
So thank you, Craig, for joining. I’m definitely in excited mode in what we have a chance to talk about, because when I saw Cyvatar come up on the list. You’re actually on my companies to watch. And it’s a rare treat when we can dive into, I’ll say it’s funny. It’s like this burgeoning area around cybersecurity and offering it as a service and injecting ourselves earlier in the development and operational workflow. It’s new to the world, which is terrifying because it shouldn’t be. But this is why the opportunity is huge.
So I think the best thing we can do for folks that are new to you. Craig, if you want to give a quick bio and we’ll talk about Cyvatar and the challenges that you’re solving.
Absolutely. Pleasure to be here, Eric. And thanks for adding Cyvatar to that list. I’m sure it’s a long one given what you do, but I’m privileged to be a part of that. Sure. My name is Craig Goodwin. My background. I’ve been on the end user side of cybersecurity for about 18 years before that. I was in the intelligence services with the UK government and fell out of that when chief security officer was just becoming a thing, really. And then spent 18 years building, operating, running large scale cybersecurity businesses as an end user.
So companies like Monster Worldwide, Ferguson plc, CDK Global, which is a big automotive tech firm out in Chicago and then Fujitsu before finally co founding Cyvatar with my co founder, Corey White, who is based in Orange County in California. He’s also got a long history in cybersecurity, but from the other side of the house. So he’s been building and running cybersecurity vendors for 25 years, and I come from the end user side. So the first pitch of cyberattack is always that we’ve got both ends of the spectrum.
We’ve been there and done it from an end user perspective and also a vendor’s perspective. So we know what’s broken and we know what we need to fix to deliver better outcomes for customers and businesses globally.
I think this is really why I loved your sort of mix in the founding team. It’s a fundamental problem that we have in so many startups is that we attack it purely from the intellectual like this is sort of the scientific method, and we come at things and there are points when you have to have a very opinionated resolution to things. It’s often how we succeed, is you can’t just sort of do incremental change. You have to come in and say, this is the way that it’s going to work.
We have to remap some of the processes. But because you’ve come from the experiential side, the buying side. I used to do the customer deal as well for a couple of decades, and it allows me to approach technology in a way that I know well in a pure intellectual approach. Fantastic. But will this actually get adopted and used in the way that we would hope. Really, the thing that I want to focus on, Craig, is this idea that you’ve seen it in flight. You’ve seen it in play.
You’ve actually implemented solutions, and you know that it’s much more a human problem sometimes than a technology problem, especially in the area of security and cybersecurity. So how did that two sided approach influence your choice to start the company?
Yeah. When I met Corey a couple of years ago, at the kind of founding of Cyvatar, I was in that place where the industry is going crazy right now, particularly from the VC point of view, there are, I don’t know. It changes every day, four and a half thousand plus products out there or something crazy. So I was having a lot of VC friends. A lot of founder friends say to me, you should found a business. You should do something now that you’ll be able to get the funding.
You should take that knowledge that you’ve got as an end user and create something. And I’ve been thinking about it for 6, 12, 18 months, but I wanted to find the right, and it sounds like a bit of a cliche, right? But I wanted to find the right thing, the thing that actually solve the problem as an end user. I’d fought with it for 18 years, and the kind of problems that I found were that I bought pretty much every product that existed. You could say the Noah’s Ark of Cybersecurity, but two of everything.
And that was true. You’d go out and you’d convince yourself as a CSO that your number one objective was to convince the executive team or the board to give you more budget, and you do that. And I do that really well. And then with that budget, I go and buy some more products, but still wouldn’t get to secure. I still wouldn’t get to the actual outcome that I wanted as a chief security officer. No matter how many products I bought, I still found that I needed large internal teams or my own platforms that I built myself internally to actually do the hard part.
And the hard part was actually the fixing. Actually getting into the outcome of secure. And I found that 90% of the products on the market would point out my problems for me, but simply add to that list of things I had to do. Add to the problems that I had to fix and not actually fix or solve any of those problems. When me and Corey met, he told me about his idea for Cyvatar and as a service solution, I said, Well, look, I’ve done that internally, three or four times over.
I’ve built the platform that we need to build to allow that to be successful. I’ve been the end user side consuming that. So let’s join forces. Let’s bring those two components together. He’s been running services businesses for 18 to 25 years, so he knew that one-off services just didn’t cut it anymore. I’ve been running the end user side and knew that products didn’t do it. So then things combined just led to what Cyvatar has ultimately become, which is the ability to pull to your point people, process, and technology altogether into easy to consume subscriptions that mean you’re getting to an actual outcome rather than just finding more and more problems.
Well, I remember, the thing was ADT security or something. It was like something like a physical home security company that had a great set of commercials. And it was the whole thing of there’s monitoring. And then there’s us, right? And this whole thing of like a guy, a bank is getting robbed. And someone just looks at the guard says, “Aren’t you going to do something?” And he says, “hey, he’s robbing the bank”. This is monitoring. Obviously the first layer is always discovery doing that monitoring that observability, which is sort of the new catchphrase in the industry.
But then from that point, is being able to action on it, is the gap, rather than just basically saying, hey, there’s something going on. And now it’s your fault. Your just handing it off to an operator or developer. And this is a complex ecosystem in the organization. The CSO doesn’t have effective control over IT in the same way, because they generally report up, like directly to the CEO. They report up, if anything, possibly adjacent to a CIO, possibly through legal and procurement. More so than just operational IT.
And there’s really a lot of stuff that falls under that bucket. So while they could say, there’s my aspiration to achieve a secure workplace, a secure environment, this now has to cross into seven different divisions of IT and many, many other things.
Yeah, 100%. And I could talk about that for days. I think to unpick that a little bit. You’re absolutely right. I think the trend and it’s going to continue to be a trend is decentralization of the security function. I used to joke or half joke as I was building security functions, that my ultimate goal should be to not need a budget as a chief security officer, right? Because I shouldn’t need to protect the organization. It should be so ingrained into everything we do as a business to your point, the different departments that actually, they understand it.
And I build such a strong culture of security that they pay for out of their own budget. Craig doesn’t need a separate security budget. I’ve tried to do that at the businesses that I’ve always been at, which is to put the power in the hands of the developers, for example, right? Where they have the tools, the power to be secure by design as they build their products, as opposed to what doesn’t work, which is Craig’s team coming along and acting like the police, right?
Which is definite cliche in the industry. But it’s hurt us for many, many years as that kind of outsider type approach to security. And then the other thing you touched on, which is just incredibly important and a lot of people forget is the politics associated with it. Like, how do you drive behavioral change that first day shouldn’t be about looking at technology. It should be about going to buy a Starbucks card, so you can take all the executives that you’ve got to influence out for coffee and build those relationships. Right?
Because that is 100% the most important thing. And one of the things that we’ve done from Cyvatar is enable that. The platform that we’re building or the platform that we’ve built really enables that decentralization. It enables those workflows to be created across organizational bounds and put the power in the hands of the people that actually need to fix it, as opposed to just firing a load of vulnerabilities and alerts at the security team and expecting them to do the hard work in chasing up and getting things fixed and influencing people.
It becomes the challenge. I was at an organization, and this was in the 90s through the 2000s and the CSO didn’t exist. That function wasn’t there. It was at least rare in sort of the Canadian world, particularly, we’re such a friendly bunch. We didn’t need one. Right. And all of a sudden, we see a CSO show up. And this is right around the time that Sarbanes-Oxley also was implemented. So you had, first of all, a functional change in the organization that they were separating out this role of information security officer, and also everybody that had the CXO title was signing their name on a contract that put them personally liable for the outcomes of their organization.
And it really changed things. So immediately, the first thing that happened, as we do with security organizations is they hired a bunch of VPs of security, and then they hired a bunch of directors, which are basically sort of their very high titled interns. And they began crafting policy, crafting policy. Quick. We must craft policies. And it was almost like a Monty Python ask level of, quick a proclamation. And they would come and they would post it on the board, and they would email it out and send. And immediately you’d say, “Well, we can’t do this”.
And they’re like, oh, no worries. Then file for an exception. And then they built a system to file for exceptions. And they had created the sort of process spaghetti. And I was torn, right? Because with what’s going on, I recognize what you needed to do is we need to actually look as an organization. How are we going to attack this problem? How do we recognize the problem within a medium, this is like putting a government into a functional organization and where they don’t see the outcome, they don’t see the negative side effects.
They just simply have to come in and say, policy checkbox. And then as it made it further on the organization, we would just find ways to get through the audit safely. And that was the first phase. But then from there like we’ve seen it in action. We’ve seen real. No one wants their company name to show up in the news. And it’s like when somebody has their name show up in the news and the word embattled is in front of it, there’s certain things you never want to have.
And I’ve got good friends who are solar winds, and that was a tough one to watch them go through where the reputation attached to being exposed to a vulnerability carries for a long time and has a real commercial effect on them just as an example, right?
That was one thing where they’re in the news. So at first it was like, in 2009, it was probably happening all over the place, but it wasn’t in the news. Now there’s a really significant risk that it’s prevalent that this is active in the industry, like DarkSide did it. They created ransomware as a service. This is fantastic. But how do we attack the problem and make sure that we don’t end up in the news? But most importantly, that we aren’t vulnerable. That’s the real thing. Obviously, the news is bad, but let’s actually fix the problem.
So if the ransomware has a service, then what do we do to counteract that?
Yeah. And I think you hit the nail on the head and we could talk for hours about the compliance versus security debate. But I think actually, in a number of cases, compliance is damaged, what we would call real security. Because if you think about, you mentioned the top down approach. One of the things that all those compliance standards first say is, go and get the board approval, like, get your executive buy-in all that stuff, which makes it that very policy focused, like top down approach where we create mandates and then we try and force it into the organization and actually back to that decentralization conversation.
The most effective way I build security is from the ground up. That doesn’t mean negating the executive buy, and you need the budget. You need people to understand what your objectives are, but being very clear with your sponsorship, your leadership, about what is the objective. Do we actually want to be secure, or are we just ticking a box for compliance purposes? If your answer is we actually want to be secure, that’s a very different journey than creating a ton of policies. And that’s one of the fundamental principles when we started Cyvatar, was that there’s a ton of really quick and easy ways to go and get SOC 2 compliance, for example, like, I say, 27001 compliance and will help with the operational aspects of that.
But the majority of the small to medium sized businesses and other companies that we’re serving wants is to be actually protected from ransomware, is to be actually secure. And to your point, like solar winds prevent their name from being in the media because they’ve lost data or been hacked or been interrupted or whatever it might be. They actually want to be secure, and that then differentiates them from their competitors because they’re more secure. So what we’ve done with Cyvatar is build real security in and security that actually gets you secure, which is a big step change from a policy, creating something and telling everyone that they’ve got to do it.
This is real world. How do I prevent that from actually happening and moving to that prevention? Moving to that remediation is the key step that the majority of vendors in the market just don’t appreciate or don’t help customers to achieve right now. .
When it comes to differentiation, it’s funny, I lead them. I’m not going to compare you to anybody. I’m going to compare you against the industry at large, in that you’ve chosen to price by human rather than object. And this is interesting because quite often when we think about security services, developer services, all of these services, they’re effectively marked per application per object per cloud target, per whatever. There’s always some technical target. So let’s talk about that, Craig. The idea that you’re basically working at the human layer with technology and thus you price, I’ll say differently than most folks would expect.
Yeah. 100%. And that’s another indication of number one, kind of that really customer centric approach, making the experience for the customer a lot more streamlined. One of the things me and Corey are constantly looking at the industry or taking our experience and changing the way that things should be done and making it simpler when we thought about the customer consuming it for anyone that’s ever commissioned a penetration test, for example, that horrible booklet of, like, 20 pages you get from the provider that says, and it used to take me even with a security team, four weeks to fill in the technical data to have to gather this technical data, to even get the scoping document back for a penetration test. Right?
And that just can’t be the way it is. So what we wanted to do is number one, make it customer centric, number two, make it really easy to consume. So therefore, what we do is we use the number of employees in the organization as an indicative factor for the size and scale of the organization itself. Right. And that then allows us to build those subscriptions, build those solutions based on the size of the business and scale it effectively. For example, we’ve got customers who have 500.
They’re in the entertainment industry. They have 500 employees that never touch a computer, for example. Right? And we’ll work with our customers to figure out how that subscription works and how best to address it and make it more palatable for that customer themselves. We have other customers where some of their employees have got three or four different laptops. And in the old model, that means four or five different licenses, right? We want to deliver security, true security for the customer. So we’ve build all that complexity.
And we just say, let’s base it on head count. Let’s base it on head count of the organization. As you grow, we grow, and we’ll partner with you to deliver security, whatever that means for the size and scale of your organization.
When it comes to the mapping to importance of the business, it really is a human tally, right? Because the scale of the workforce is effectively a marker of the network effect of risk, because the more people you have, like you said, they’re specific. Some employees, they’ve got seven devices hanging off them. They’re much more active, their field work, so they may be sort of more exposed than others. But then back office folks, they log into the computer only to get their morning email. And then the rest of the stuff they’re doing is they’re scanning paper into systems.
It actually makes complete sense. And you start to think like, ‘Why hasn’t someone done this before?’
That’s my favorite thing. Like, my head gets a little bit bigger because I love it when we sit down with customers. And hopefully that’s an indicator of a good idea, because we sit down with a ton of customers and customers go, doesn’t that exist already? And they’re like, actually, no, no one’s done it like this before. No one’s done it the way that we’re doing now. The reason that we built what we built is because the business model exists elsewhere. The likes of Netflix and the B2C space, the likes of Trinette and others within the B2B space for HR.
Why would you not have that model for security? And that’s what we’ve built with Cyvatar. We always use the example of why would I bother building a HR function at this point and even our revolution? I wouldn’t. I’ll go and outsource it to Trinette because they’re better at it. It makes sense. It works for the scale of business and how we operate. I don’t want to be a HR professional, just like a lot of these businesses don’t want to be security professionals, right? They want someone who can do it for them and actually get to the outcomes of secure.
So that’s why we built the business model that we did for sure.
When you looked at, obviously, the first thing we have is we have team, the three T’s. Right? Team, TAM, technology, as they call it. Right? You’ve got your co founder. You have to address on the technology side, you both come at it from each angle and see if you got a good sense of where you in the technology stack will be able to attack a problem. When assigning TAM, this is really about choosing your first market. What is the ideal customer that you wanted to begin with? Because it literally could be anywhere from SMB up to global enterprise.
There’s a lot of potential. And if you’re a VC, of course, there are like trillions of TAMs. They want this Gartner Esker type of up and to the right quadrants everywhere. They want to see a lot of that stuff. But you, as a founder, you have to be pragmatic about your first market.
Yeah, 100%. And you’re right. There’s a ton of opportunity in terms of even larger enterprise organizations. I’ll talk about that in a second. But if you think about the absolute target market, it’s those Greenfield organizations that haven’t built a security function yet. And what that normally means is probably 500 employees or less in the technology space where the ROI, the return on investment, associated with the model that we’ve created is quite frankly, a no brainer. When you talk to customers and you spell out what it takes to build a security program these days, with the cost of talent, with the complexity of tools, with just everything that’s out there.
And back to that original point about the CTO, and the startup really wants to be focused on making their products great, not doing the cybersecurity stuff. You come in and you take that pain away. And the model from a Greenfield perspective, just makes absolute perfect sense. And even a lot of our customers have got a single contributor, the first CSO hired, like you mentioned before, or the first security person hired into the organization. Even then, what they’re not going to be able to do on day one is justify another ten resources.
And that’s relatively lucky, right? So to have a solution that enables them to be successful and deliver those outcomes as well in a cost effective way, that’s number one target. Right. And also to your point, from the vendor perspective, it’s just a massively underserved market. We talk to a lot of our partners who say anyone under two and a half thousand employees. Our VCs are telling us not to touch because the economics don’t make sense when you get to a certain scale and we throw the term democratization around.
But it’s true. We’re taking these best-of breed technologies that perhaps wouldn’t be accessible to that smaller end of the market and making them accessible, making them consumable because you don’t need those internal resources or expertise to get them in and operational quickly, which is what we’re able to do.
Yeah. It’s kind of funny. Like I’m in the tech space and I meet with large organizations all the time, and they have more developers at most North American banks than the vendors they buy from. So it’s really difficult to go in there and sort of say, all right, we’re going to do a ground up development of this service approach because they’re just like, well, we’re going to use you for six months, and then we’re going to take a team and make them shadow you and then build the thing you do.
So it’s actually often a dangerous thing, especially for a start up to go in with a great fundamental challenge solver because they’re just going to go in. Tech companies are the same way. Right? Large social networks are famous for this one, right? Where they’ll buy a company, buy a product for a year and then not renew. And you’re, like some people on the sales teams are like, I don’t understand, why didn’t they renew? Because they are filled with amazing technologists. And they just watched what you did for a year. That’s all they needed, they needed to be close enough.
I think one of the real differentiators that we’ve got is that we started as a platform player. Right?
So we’re not a product led company. We are true platform. And you see it, we all see it. There are many businesses out there that claim to be platform based organizations. The problem that you’ve got is particularly with the larger businesses. They’re tied to their own products as well. So if you’ve got a shitty antivirus product and then you go and build a platform, well, guess what, which antivirus products are going to be the one you use in that platform. Right? And that’s the problem. What you’ve started from is a very blank canvas that we’ve started from a point where we’re building the platform first.
And therefore, if you want to integrate with us, we will be picking the best-of breed technologies. We’ll have a selection. We’ve got three or four different partners in each of our solution areas, and our member services team is constantly assessing what’s the best out there, what’s going to get the best value for our customers? What’s the best solution? And the customers are subscribing to a flexible subscription, which means if one day AV number one is the best one on the market, we’ll install that. If next day AV number two completely outdoes them and gets to a better state of prevention than number one, we’ll change it out for them.
And that’s all part of that subscription. So it’s focused on the subscription outcome as opposed to the particular product or technology that you’re driving.
Yeah. One of my favorite platform stories. And like, I’m in product marketing, I know, it’s always like, you’re not a tool. You’re a platform. It seems like better marketing. But Dave McJanett, who’s the CEO of HashiCorp, and I said, I described to him and I said, it’s great because you effectively got all these layers and it ultimately makes a platform. And he goes, well, we describe as it, if you squint hard enough, it’s a platform. But it really is a separated set of tools that integrate very easily.
And it was funny that even he was unwilling to use the word platform for fear that it would have this connotation of something that is easy. It’ll be automatic, you have to buy one thing, and then you have to buy the other four things. Their goal was ultimately interoperability, which is, again, this is why I wanted to pick on this point with you, Craig, by being able to know that you’re looking for the best of capabilities, the best-of breed. And you are handling the integration since the interchange.
It means that I don’t, as a customer, have to get locked into going to antivirus A and looking for the best deal, because, effectively, they’re going to tell me why I need them, and then they’re going to suddenly become the one that wants everybody else to integrate with them. I want to have a platform approach where that I can think of it as a framework that I fit things into. And then it gives me the comfort that I can negotiate with those vendors now, because before, especially an antivirus vendor, it’s the easiest thing in the world.
We have 3000 endpoints. How exactly do you think you’re going to change that over? It’s one step away from, it would be a real shame if something were to happen to your car, now, wouldn’t it? Like that’s almost a Mafia-esque type of way. But I’ve worked in organizations where we’re like, I actually had 22,000 endpoints and yeah, we got it done because we threw humans at it. But it was a huge expense. It was a huge lift. It was a huge risk. So if I can offload that risk and that assessment of the right current set of platforms to you, that’s a huge win in my eyes of why I would say Cyvatar is like, all right, this is a true platform play.
Yeah. And you got two things, I think. Number one, you’re absolutely right. A lot of those businesses, like I said before, four and a half thousand products out there, like, what startup wants to come wade through all of that.
The periodic table of things.
All Eric’s product marketing. Who wants to go wade through that to find the one problem. Sorry, the one tool that’s actually going to fix your problem, right? No one can. No one does. Right? So, yeah, that’s number one. My own member services team are experts in the field, have been doing it for 100 plus years, whatever the combined number is, and they will pick the best-of breed, right? Agnostically and build them into the partner framework, build them into the platform. And like I say, we’re not afraid, right?
When partners aren’t performing or it’s not the best tool anymore. We have the capability and the wherewithal to change that out. Because we’re so customer focused, we want it to be about the customer and delivering the right outcome for the customer. The other big deal here, I think, is really important. We went on this evolution, I think you mentioned it earlier for inSecurity from technology, and then we’re definitely focusing on the people right now. But the process bit for me, is probably even more important than the people, right?
Because you can have the best cybersecurity experts in the world. You can have the best tools in the world. If you haven’t got the process that makes those things successful, you’re still ultimately going to fail. And what we’ve built with the platform that we call the operating system for cybersecurity is the process of security, what we call, we’ve got proprietary methodology that we call ICARM, which is installation, configuration, assessment, remediation and maintenance. So you go from all the way from installation of the tools, all the way from maintaining a full security program.
But essentially all it means is the process of security. Like, how do you get from a point where you have nothing or a very immature security function to the point where you’ve got something that’s functional operational and you’re maintaining the organization in a clean maintained state and the tools can be interchangeable. The people can be interchangeable. But that process remains constant. And that’s what we built in the platform. And that’s why I think we are so successful in such a short space of time in terms of getting those outcomes for our customers.
We’ve got that experience, we’ve got that knowledge. We built those processes into the fabric of what we do. And that’s why we’re driving this speed and easiness of security that just amazes people to the point where they don’t believe us sometimes, to the point where people go, how do you do that? And it’s because you’re taking that fundamental approach and you’re building the processes right.
And I don’t want to talk about people leaving the platform, but the subscription model opens the door to a sense of freedom in that they’re not locked in to you, which is a strong thing, right? It’s sort of illegal and functional lock in is difficult, and people don’t want to take on a new thing because there’s sort of a risk there. What’s the thing that, what they say to you, Okay, Craig, I like what you’re doing, but let’s just say for whatever reason, we have to change gears in six months, and I stopped my subscription.
What does that mean for my organization?
Yeah. So we built ‘cancel anytime’ into all of our solutions, just like any other subscription but don’t like using it so much. But back to the Netflix example. For as long as you’re getting value out of Netflix, you’ll continue to pay your subscription. And me and Corey, and the whole of Cyvatar, is not afraid of that model. We truly believe that with those process components, with the people components, with the way that we’re driving value for our customers, it challenges us to continue to continuously drive value across that lifecycle and that lifetime value of that customer.
And we’re not afraid of that challenge, right? We haven’t had anyone canceled yet, and I’m hoping we’re not going to in the future because we are driving that consistent value. We all know my favorite quote ever. I don’t know who said it, so I might just claim it as my own. Security is a condition to be managed. It’s not a problem to be fixed. And that is absolutely true. It’s not a one-off engagement. This is about growing with the customer, partnering with the customer, and being that continuous source of security for the business.
So the short answer is, Eric, as long as we continue to deliver value and the customers see value from it, we’re not scared of it, but we’ve built-in’ cancel anytime’ so that customers, if they really don’t see the value, can make that break.
And I love this idea that you talk about something to be continuously managed. This is not like a juice cleanse to suddenly make you healthy. Security is something you just sort of throw a tool at it, and then by magic, it’s fixed. It really and truly is an operation, because even if the choice is right today, it’s not to say that that particular product or some process that you’ve got won’t be suddenly vulnerable just because of a change in the ecosystem or change in process in a month or two months or six months.
So that’s why it does need to be the subscription and the service model really makes sense to me, because this is something that I want to make sure is maintained. And we think about maintenance as SNS on a contract, right? Like, oh, I can phone 1800. I’ve got a problem with something, but that’s really not what maintenance is about. Maintenance is about maintaining the health of the ecosystem, right?
Yeah. I love the hygiene and health analogies. I think they’re really helpful when you’re thinking about cyber hygiene and cyber security. It’s that continuous process. Corey always gives the example of, I don’t know whether this is true or not, but always gives the example of doing the dishes, right? Doing the washing up, you leave it for three or four days and you’ve got a massive pile and it’s a hell of a workload to get through. Whereas if you do little bits on a daily basis and you could do the same analogy a million times over, whether it’s automotive maintenance or whatever, it might be doing those little things and keeping up with it means that actually over time you’re continuously maintaining that state of hygiene.
You’re continuously maintaining that in a clean state, which makes your job much easier over time, means it doesn’t cost you as much. We talk about another good example is always the developers building code. And if you wait until a vulnerability or whatever is out in the wild, it costs you 50, 60 X, the cost that it would be to fix it while it’s in the development lifecycle. The same is true for general security across the board. Fix it while it’s being happened, build it in, make it a maintenance. Again, back to process.
Make the process continuous, and you’re in that position where you’re getting much more value out of your security program. Pentest is another great example of that. How many organizations just do a one -off pen test every year? How many times have I done a one-off pen test next year. They come back the year after and say, why is it the same as it was last year? Yeah, of course it is. And that pentest somehow makes you secure. But no one does anything about it. It shouldn’t be one-off, it should be continuous.
And in our threat and vulnerability management program, that’s what we’ve done. Yes, you get a pen test every year, but also you’re continuously scanned all year round because you might do your pentest on the coming Monday. But who’s to say six months before that, you didn’t have a vulnerability that’s been hanging around for the last six months. So, yeah, I can’t say enough about the ability to be continuous in that program. And that’s what subscription brings.
This is the funny thing, right? Like you said, compliance and security, while seeming to go in the same. There’s an ampersand between them, like it’s attached to most people’s resume in that way. But it truly is separated functions because compliance is the annual or the quarterly checkbox to make sure that you’ve passed a test. Security is an ongoing operational process to make sure that that’s happening. You said pentest is one that’s interesting because as we develop more active testing, it teaches us to make antifragile systems as well, much more than defensive.
But truly, I’m going to build a system so that it can withstand continuous penetration testing. Actually, at this one place I was at, we used a product and they would do, like, regular scans. So every night, it would go and scan all this stuff and it would wipe out half of our homegrown applications because it would just basically batter them like a denial of service. And then you’d have to restart all these services. And I was like, they said, well, can you stop scanning the system?
I’m like, no, can we start developing to be prepared for it? Like, it was funny that integrating, the tooling changed the practice of development.
Yeah, one of the things that I always liked. And I was talking to someone about it the other day. I was used to just talk about, security is another facet of quality, right? Developers, a lot of development organizations understand the concept of quality. They’re constantly scanning the code for quality. They want to create quality products and quality code. But security is somehow some kind of outlier from that. And when we started to take, and one of the tips I always gave to kind of CSO as they were going into large product based or application based organizations was borrow from what’s already there.
Like take the quality scoring mechanisms and just add security in as a facet of that, because they’re building quality code. They wouldn’t, for the life of them, send out bad quality code. So security is just another facet of that. You can’t build a quality application or product if it’s not also secure. So borrow from that language of the existing business instead of trying to be a special snowflake on the side.
Yeah. Now let’s talk about the Forbes Technology Council. So this is a rare opportunity to be invited in to be a part of this. You’re involved, which it’s a testament to, obviously, your history and your skills and your involvement in affecting the industry, not just purely from your product perspective. What do you feel is a real strong opportunity with something like what the Forbes Technology Council is able to do?
Well, like you said, the name Forbes is one of those things you grow up with, I think, isn’t it? You go through school and you think about Forbes and who do I want to talk to and what’s the goals for me? So, yes, incredibly privileged. I think it’s a great group of people. There’s a great online platform where we share ideas. And to your point, Cyvatar has always been for me, about fundamentally changing the way the industry operates, not just about creating a product, not just about solving a spot problem.
Like a lot of the current solutions do. It’s about fundamentally changing the way we consume. So I think both ways, number one, giving to the Forbes Technology Council, sharing my 18 years worth of CSO experience with other members, helping them to understand how you build security programs, how you do security effectively, what you should be focusing your investment on, but then backwards as well. We get a ton of feedback from those council members about what they want to see, because ultimately, one of the things that we built with Cyvatar is we wanted it to be a business tool as much as a technical security tool, right?
Our audience in startups, particularly is CFO sometimes, it’s CEOs, it’s cofounders, who are not necessarily the most technical savvy people. They want a business outcome, not a technical outcome. So taking feedback and you see a lot of security vendors will take feedback from the technical security communities, which is great and valid. And we do that as well. But also, there’s a massive advantage to taking feedback from senior technology leaders, senior business people who can say, you know what, Craig? I don’t want to see a cross-site scripting vulnerability in an application.
Quite frankly, I couldn’t care less. Tell me how and when it’s going to be fixed. Tell me what it really means to buy business. Tell me how much it’s going to cost me to sort it out. Tell me how I can solve it in the future. Those kind of things, those ROI business based conversations is what we want to solve as a business. And therefore, hearing that feedback, having the opportunity to share that with Forbes Technology Council. Senior technology leaders really benefits Cyvatar and really benefits the way we’re building the platform and the business.
So, yeah, it’s a fantastic opportunity. And I’m proud to be a part of it.
When you’re a certified CSO, which is quite often, the CSO, sadly, is a role that they’re like, it’s like the CIO, which at one point when I was in first getting into tech, CIO used to stand for career is over, right? It was just somebody from the business unit. They were just like, you’re the CIO now. And they’ve served their two years to ride off into the sunset as they headed to retirement. Now it’s an active function and then CSO sort of fell into the same thing, like somebody has to be a CSO.
You, you’re the CSO, right? Make sure no one picks up USB sticks and push them in their laptop. And there was a sudden, you’ve heard a wide eyed thing of like, how do I be an effective CSO? And it’s because it’s a burgeoning role. Certification is something that I think had been vastly missed. So what is the path to certification and what are ways that professionals can look at working towards that?
Yeah. Well, I think that particular qualification is interesting. I think more widely the question around kind of experience as a CSO, to your point being thrust into a role where you’re told to stop USBs being put in computers, for example, I think ultimately comes back to it. And a lot of the responsibility falls on the individual. I did a talk a number of years ago about challenging CSOs as to whether they really are CSOs or not. And what does it really mean to be a CSO? And quite frankly, I don’t have the answer.
I don’t think anyone does. The answer no one likes is it depends. But what that means is when you start that job, you need to fundamentally understand why the role was created and what the executive and the business expects you to do and make sure that’s compatible with what your skill set is. And that’s what needs to happen more in the industry. It’s the same with, I always say, ton of CSOs will join a role and won’t have had a budget conversation for the first twelve months.
They just plow on, on the understanding they’re going to be allowed unlimited products and tools, right? Getting those things upfront, what is my role to our conversation about compliance versus security? All right, you’re hiring me as a CSO, but does that mean you just want us to get top two compliance if it does. And you’re happy to take that you approach that in a very different way than a role that says, actually, I want you to be the technical knowhow, I want you to work with the development teams to embed security into the development lifecycle.
Or I want you to be the strategic leader that is the figurehead for security across our business and drive sales cycles by being better at cybersecurity. All those roles are roles of the CSO, but in different organizations of different maturities and different expectations, and you’re ultimately setting yourself up for failure. If you don’t have that conversation up front with the executive team, with the business. It’s a long way of saying it depends. But as long as you’re clear up front what your role actually means, that’s the only way you’re going to be successful.
Yeah. And I think that’s the ideal thing, even like the CISSP, if you look at the foundations that it tests, it’s very wide range. And it’s everything from physical security to low level programming, understanding all the way up to much more high through technical cloud and networking. It shows you what it takes to really be a security leader in an organization or CSO. It is much more than just one aspect of it. And quite often it’s counter to what we’d expect if we make things more difficult.
If we make things technically challenging, that’s not always securing the environment, it could influence poor practices, because if you make everything super complex and people are just going to write it down, they’re going to write down their passwords. They’re going to do things that will then move against the policy setting, and it becomes, you’re effectively working against yourself by coming with this top down of you will not pass approach.
Well, the advice I’ve always given to anyone kind of early in their career or moving through their career that wants to ultimately become CSO in the end, is wider rather than deeper. It’s becoming more and more a business role. It’s becoming more and more about strategic leadership, about business leadership. There’s been a trend in many large organizations where CSOs aren’t coming from technical backgrounds anymore. You’ve seen people come from the risk function or the project management function or the program management function into CSO roles. And for me personally, I think that’s a really positive thing, bringing people in with that wider business experience.
That wider kind of programmatic experience and strategic leadership, I think, is really important because you get that separated agnostic view like boys and their toys tend to get excited about security technology and AI and all that kind of stuff, whereas someone that takes a business centric approach and says, what’s most important for the business, what is it we’re trying to protect? What is my job here? Like, all of those things contribute to being much more successful than diving in and going, oh, I need to buy this product.
So I think that’s really important. Back to SIT phase, it’s incredibly wise. I think it’s a great certification that you have, out of all the ones that exist to get you that kind of width in terms of understanding when you’re ready to do that. But I think as your career progresses, you want to know a little about a lot of different things. I’m no technical expert. I have technical people who do that for me. You can’t do everything. And it’s about having a little of a lot. I think as you grow up as a CSO.
In the world of tech, especially community is incredibly important, and the ability for people to find a peer group. We’ve talked about the Forbes Tech Council, which I primarily is savant at the C-suite. There’s a lot of folks that are there that they can really look at the leadership level. There’s others that go further down in New York. But then you’ve got the bottom up, sort of the SANS and even the BSides and those types of conference opportunities. What is if you’re saying, as a Cyvatar founder, what’s your community of practice that you feel is effective in helping your team both empower as well as to stay close to what’s really going on out in the world?
Yeah. I think it massively differs depending on the team. Right. So for me and Corey as co-founders, it’s entrepreneurial organizations. It’s learning from other founders, people that have been there and done it. And actually, one of the things that I’m really passionate about is not in cybersecurity. I’ve got some great friends who are founders in cybersecurity, which is fantastic. But you’ll see from the way that we’ve built the business, we haven’t learned from cyber, we’ve learned from other business models, and we brought that into the immature space that is cybersecurity.
So therefore, when we’re learning from other businesses, subscription based businesses like ourselves or SAAS businesses or whatever. So me and Corey have been very conscious to take those learnings from other areas. And the other thing to remember is we read a lot of books. We listen to a lot of audiobooks, get ideas from those things, but don’t prescribe to one single thing. There’s millions of different ideas from different theories and different books all come together to create a strong business model. So I would say, for me and Corey, that’s important.
But then, obviously, like our member services team, they’re heavily embedded in the ethical world of security. It’s their job to know what the best products are on behalf of our customers. So they’re absolutely interacting in the black hats of the world, the cybersecurity conferences of the world where they can hear have their ear to the ground so that ultimately our customers don’t need to do that themselves. And we’re taking that burden away from them. And then we encourage everyone. One of the things that we have all done in the business is go through a course called Scaling Up, which is a methodology for building businesses.
And we’ve been really open with the whole team from the beginning. It would be easy just to have me and Corey do that because we’re building the business. But actually, we wanted everyone to understand that methodology. The Rockefeller methodology for building a business. We wanted everyone to know what that meant, how it operated, so that as we grow, we can be completely transparent with the whole team. And everyone understands that they play a part in it. Everyone understands that they’re a part of the growth of the business. We do KPI stand up calls every day where everyone sees what the business is doing.
Are we failing in certain areas? How do we change that? And we have those open conversations with the team where everyone shares the learning and we build the business together. And me and Corey think that that visibility is incredibly key. So to your point, there’s definitely external communities, but there’s also internal communities where we bring all of that together and we grow as one team.
And I think this is also a testament to your approach in that when I choose a vendor, why we say the three T’s begins with team, I have to depend that the company that I’m buying from has viability, and it’s really difficult, right? If you’re like, they look around and know that, I’ve got twelve series A technology companies that look exciting and you know that they are close enough in their messaging and in the end, in four years or six years, there will be three series D company. But I have to lay that bet.
And your approach is beautiful, right? It’s differentiated because this means that trust that you will grow with me as an organization, as a customer versus like, yeah, we got a widget problem, I get to solve your widget problem. That’s fantastic. There are pure specific problems to solve, but being consultative and not just looking at like, all right, I’m just looking to get the CRC and get bought by Accenture like, whatever the thing is, not that that couldn’t happen, but you’re looking at growth. You’re looking at building a foundation on which you can grow with customers.
And again, like I said, the weird thing is I called on the pricing and the subscription model early because it’s such a rare treat that, you know, that the sense of freedom gives you the ability to be free to adopt. It’s such a funny thing, but it’s a welcome change, especially in the world right now, where we have to be able to adapt. We don’t know what four months from now is going to look like, and just that sense that you could buy as you need grow in a consultative approach, learn from experts who are, their economy of scale is knowledge scale.
I can’t possibly, with an 800 person organization or 4000 person organization, trust that I can hire 25 people that I’m going to send to conferences every week and make sure they’re on top of things and that they’re doing their bloody job. That’s why I love the approach.
100%. And I think that’s why it’s so important for us. If you look at me and Corey, you look at many VC funded businesses, ostensibly, you have a very technical founding team. You have a team that is focused on product building the widget, whatever it is. And that is what the team is really highly focused on. They’re very good at doing that. And then you get a ton of sales people who go out and push that with you and push that product, right? Our business is fundamentally built on the experience of the customer, where we add value is in that people and process space, it’s not necessarily what we’ve got some solid technology in the platform.
It’s not product led, and therefore it’s really important to us that the customer and the customer’s experience is at the heart of everything that we do. And that means that we approach it slightly differently. That means that all of our team members are highly skilled in what they do, highly skilled in making the customer experience incredible. And second to none, not necessarily highly experienced in selling a widget. Right?
Which is not what we’ve built the business to do. And to your point about cancel anytime we fail, we fail as a business. If the customers aren’t seeing the value and the fundamental value proposition that we deliver, so that’s where our heart is at. That’s where we focus. The business is all about that experience.
Yeah, because there’s nothing worse when you buy a product and you just look concerned. It’s always the matrix is the same and look like I said, I’m in product marketing. I know the dance we do. You’re going to have a three column thing and most people will land in the middle. You want to edge them towards the far right. You want to put them in the enterprise plus, or we call it platinum or unobtainium. We call it some exciting new thing, and it’s always like basic bronze, iron, cobalt, whatever. We try and make it like no one buys that thing.
But the fact that you’ve got a freemium entry point all the way up through effectively scaling on consultative additions to what you’re doing. You’re using a human based counter on the engagement level. Like I said, it’s a refreshing change. And I was excited by the approach, and I’ll be excited to have you on when we announced your series D as well. So mark your calendars, kids. You’ve got a lot of really good stuff coming ahead. I’m sure.
Yeah, we’re super excited as well. Thanks for having me on, Eric. Yeah, I think you mentioned it there. We want to take that consultative approach. We’re not afraid to say customers, don’t buy this. It’s too advanced for you right now. Don’t go buy APT protection against AI threats when you’ve got, you haven’t done your basics of building a threat and vulnerability management program yet. You don’t know what assets you’ve got. So we take customers through that journey. We don’t sell them something they don’t need, and we really help them to build a program that’s strong enough for where they are in their maturity in their growth phase.
But then, from a Cyvatar perspective, we grant super quick. Really excited to be on this journey. I say to the whole team, we want to enjoy the ride as much as the destination, if not more. So we’re having a great time doing it. Team is incredible. Customers are incredible. And yeah, looking forward to updating you on series B, C, and D, hopefully.
Definitely a lot of good stuff. And as far as the building approach, too, this is something we can actually, I’d love to have you back on, and we can dive into the founding team relationship of a technical founder and a nontechnical, is always such a, it sounds almost like a pejorative, but in that you’re not purely technical as a founder. It’s such an interesting mix and finding that match, it’s kind of hilarious. I’m sure when we look back on it, it’s always like chapter one of every book where you’re like, here is Craig.
And then he was sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco.
It was a pub in San Francisco instead. I said, it super fast. The story of Cyvatar is just, the founding story is an incredible one because there were so many factors that might not have led to it happening. I lost my father a month before RSA in San Francisco. I nearly didn’t go. I was very tired at the end of a long week, and I nearly didn’t grab a beer with Corey. All those things just capitulated. And I eventually did. And the rest is history. Corey would say it was the universe.
I’m English, so I’d say it was luck, but whichever one it was worked out in the end, and like I say, the rest is history. But yeah, there’s a good story for a book there one day.
Yeah. And it’s hilarious that when you look back on it, you realize how many of those opportune moments that really, truly like I said, it’s luck of occurrence and somebody else as well. I literally just went into an Apple event and I happened to be sitting next to somebody. And next thing, they were backing my start up that I had never thought I was going to build four months later. It’s like just by the happenstance of sitting in a seat, never know what can occur. But it’s much more than the luck of the moments.
It’s the gumption and the choice of the team to put the time and work into it. So it’s pretty amazing see it come together. Good stuff. So, Craig, if people want to reach out to you and get connected, what’s the best way to do that?
I love the social media. I’m all over it, Eric. So hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m on Twitter or obviously Cyvatar.ai for Cyvatar stuff, but I’m pretty easy to find online, so feel free to reach out.
Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Craig. It’s been a real pleasure. And there you go, folks. The links will be down in the show notes and such. And yeah, this was great. And sure enough, just like I said, history always tells you that if I say I’m going to have technical problems, we had technical problems. But we got through it. And this was a really great conversation. Thank you very much.
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Specializing in strategic planning for multi-location and franchise SEO campaigns, Steve Wiideman, of Wiideman Consulting Group, considers himself a scientist and practitioner of local and eCommerce search engine optimization and paid search advertising.
Wiideman has played a role in the inbound successes of brands that have included Disney, Linksys, Belkin, Public Storage, Honda,Technicolor, Skechers, Meineke Car Care Centers, Applebee’s, IHOP, Dole, and others, with emphasis on strategy, planning and campaign oversight.
Welcome to another episode of the DiscoPosse podcast. You’re listening to a conversation with Steve Wiideman. Steve is the founder of the Wedding Consulting Group.
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All right. This is Steve Wheatmann. Enjoy the show.
Hi, this is Steve Wiideman. I am the founder of Wiideman Consulting Group, an adjunct professor at two different universities here in California and the author of SEO Strategy and Skills. And you’re on the DiscoPosse podcast.
Now, this is the fun part because I also made the critical error up front, Steve, that I mispronounced your name right out of the gate, which is probably like, the worst thing you could do. So thank you, Steve, for joining. Yeah, it’s always the trick, too. When there’s two Is next to each other in a text. You’re never sure. Like when you type something into Google, it’s always like, I think you meant wide, man. I’m like, no, it’s Wiideman. It is Wiideman.
You know in high school, I was Wildman, and in the army, my peers just called me Weed because it was shorter and easier and lazier. But, yeah, it’s all the things. But the W-I-I is like the game system, right? You call it the Wii. So if you associate it with Nintendo, you have Wiideman.
So the chat today, we’re going to cover a lot of really interesting ground because we’re in a digital cornucopia. And as such, you want to make sure that you’re eating from the right side of the funnel. When you’re trying to make sure that your content, your voice, your persona, your company gets to people in a meaningful way. This is one of the things that everybody struggles with and whether it’s just somebody they’ve got a little side hustle and they’re looking to up their game. They’ve got a Shopify store, perhaps a coffee company as one would have as well.
It’s a really seemingly black box world to a lot of folks who are just trying to figure out how to get an idea to the market, and they probably aren’t able to really fund a strong SEO person. So just, like many things, we kind of go it alone, and as a result, they learn bad habits. It’s like I’m going to learn how to swing a golf club, and I’m going to learn how to swing it badly. And then when I go to try and learn how to do it properly, it’s going to be really hard to unlearn the bad things I’ve learned.
Anyway, I’m excited about the chance to chat and learn from you. You’ve got a lot going on. So, Steve, if you want to give a intro to you, we’ll talk about Wiidman Consulting. We’ll talk about the work you’ve done, your courses, everything and get into the fun stuff.
Absolutely. I’m just a digital marketing nerd, like the rest of us. Been in the game 22 years. Started as a freelancer, I got to work from some exciting companies like Disney. I ran the paid and organic for Disneyland.com and Adventures by Disney back in the 2000s. I left the corporate and agency world in 2010, decided to be a family man, be closer to home and see if I could develop my own business and went through that scary entrepreneurial transition. And fortunately because I was already freelancing, I had some existing work that could carry over into that so I had a bit of a handicap.
And having worked for Disney also made it a little bit easier to get new clients. But yeah, so since 2010, I’ve been helping multi location brands like Public Storage and myNike and Skechers and E-commerce brands also Sketchers and Bob’s Watches and some other really fun companies. Belkin and Linksys to develop a strategy to make sure that they’re appearing more often in search results, not just in Google, but in Bing, in some cases YouTube and Amazon as well, and to develop a strategy and cadence to make sure that we’re continuously growing and improving our visibility and search.
A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to look back at what my dream was ten years ago, and it was to teach, and I’m like, Wow, I’m getting close to that ten year Mark. I better get out there and start doing it. So I started doing some adjunct teaching for certificate programs at UC San Diego and Cal State Fullerton and even at the community College here in Fullerton. So I’ve enjoyed that process. I’ve kind of curated my own content to create our little Academy of search that we created to help business owners that are struggling with figuring out what’s in that black box.
So we’ve sort of uncovered everything that a business needs to do to create a plan, whether they do it themselves or whether they hire someone to do it. At least they know the what of what needs to happen, and they let the resources manage. The how. So that’s been an exciting journey. About a year ago, I got tagged to help write a textbook for Stukent and support the courseware building for certificate programs. So not only will you get to read some really organized SEO content with the textbook, but you’ll also get some cool courseware and lecture slides.
So if you’re a teacher and you want to teach SEO, talk to the folks at Stukent, ask them about the SEO textbook if it’s something you’re interested in teaching. And then you have the vision for us for the next year or two is really just to continue developing courses and programs that allow us to scale outside of just being on the phone, consulting with clients and we’ll see how it goes. But the journey has been great. I get to hang out with cool people like you and talk search and geek out on nerdy technical web design topics and have some fun.
Well, this is the fun thing now that it’s becoming part of curriculum. It’s such a great thing, because quite often I remember taking, like I was already in tech, and I said, Well, I better have a high school education. I sort of snuck into tech at the timing. You and I actually came into tech around the same time frame. So I was finding myself suddenly working at Sun Life Financial doing desktop support and then working up the server support and then really launched up into it.
You were playing Oregon Trail and Odell Lake on your Apple II, just like me.
So I had this, like, sort of getting through there. And I said, I better go back and actually back up. The luck of getting into the hotness of tech in the late 90s because nobody had accreditation. There was no course for doing what we were doing. There was no Windows support, no Vale support in universities. So I said, while you went to Ryerson University in Toronto, and I started taking a certificate program, but they were teaching stuff like old networking that was long since dead. And I work day to day at Sun Life.
We have some of the oldest systems on Earth, and they’re newer than the stuff that we’re learning in this textbook.
Wow.
It really taught me that, like, the fundamentals that make it through as part of curricula do not get updated very often because it’s hard to keep up. You can’t just keep swinging with the latest moves and fads. So there’s always this gap. So now it’s great to see that, like, true digital marketing and SEO, and it’s making it there where people can learn this instead of just getting out to the world and having to find a peer that can say, all right, come, let’s sit down. I’m going to give you a fire hose of information over the next couple of hours.
Yeah, that’s unfortunate. And it happens more often than not even in the contract that we have right now with Stukent. We’re required to update that book every year now. So I’m like, maybe we should update it every six now, let’s just do every year. But it’s tempting because Google just made a round of four updates just over the last couple of months. So it’s so dynamic and changing the results look different every year. They’re moving things around, adding new features and elements. You’re seeing videos now with the different time sections in the search results in a web search, not a video search.
So, yeah, it’s a very dynamic field to be in, and any information from three years ago should be scrutinized for sure.
It is interesting to see that shift is like I go to look for something I had the other day. How do I drain my dishwasher when it hasn’t drained properly and you just type in. How do I drain this model of dishwasher? And it comes up in the first result. it is like four minutes and 17 seconds into a 22 minute video from some rando who just posted this thing. It has literally like, 117 views, like this isn’t even, like viral videos that are getting indexed, but it somehow said, like, at this mark, you got what you want, and I clicked it and they’re like, by golly, I just learned how to do this.
And what an incredible opportunity for emerging brands that are trying to build trust and credibility and drive remarketing. We did this in public storage. We actually created twelve different videos similar to what you’re mentioning, like how tos such as how to store impact glassware, how to move your refrigerator, how to store a piano. All these tough questions that people were asking. So we got with a local college and got a fun little team of sort of not necessarily amateur, but in training. Folks help us with this really creative, funny videos.
We created pages for them, and we were able to see $0.01 cost per views on YouTube and other video networks because nobody was really using that kind of upper funnel content to build brand awareness. Like you said, it’s your common Joe’s video that’s showing up, not these branded videos that could have a little bit better production quality and benefit from a paid element to that. Instead of just being organic, they could augment that with paid and organic and have double visibility. So for cheap, because there’s not a lot of competition for that type of content.
So I’m with you. I think there’s a huge opportunity for every business to take a look at and look beyond that lower funnel myopic view that we have around just get customers to, let’s build a brand. Let’s get people to know about us and how we work and what to do. Let’s provide as much helpful content as we can possibly come up with and optimize it so it shows up in universal web search results, in Google Video Search, in YouTube, and Image Search. Just make sure that all those elements of this content we plan to create are optimized so that they can be found.
And I see a lot of business owners that are just like, I just want customers. I don’t want to waste any money on anything that’s not going to drive immediate customers. And it’s like, well, this content is going to drive a ton of customers for you in two to three years from now. If you can have the patience to build that foundation, it’s going to drive a lot of brand visibility and trust. It’s going to help with your remarketing and your marketing automation process. And you’re going to generate a lot of business.
But you’ve got to get over it. You’ve got to decide, I’m going to create really good helpful content. I’m going to use tools like AnswerThePublic or SEMrush’s question filter or Conductor Searchlights buyer journey phase tool to find some of those opportunities, map them out in a big list and then just start chipping away at it. But I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s amazing that some guy with 117 views was able to displace brands that have millions of dollars of budget and they’re not even paying attention.
Yeah, when this is the company that makes the bloody dishwasher didn’t even show up in any of the searches like that.
The bigger the brand, the less of the branded type marketing they do. We’re doing that right now, and I don’t want to put them on Blast, but both Applebee’s and IHOP, neither of them have a blog. Neither of them have content marketing. You could use a site operator in Google, site:applebees.com, site:ihop.com. And all you’re going to find are menus, news releases about new items and specials and promos. But no how to, where to, why to recipes. None of that. In fact, some of the branded questions that people ask about those brands, if you just search for them, that show up in the questions people ask, they don’t even have content for.
So other websites are getting their branded traffic. So we’re working through a plan right now to address the branded first so that somebody does do a search for anything that includes our name, that we’ve got a page of content that answers it or a section of content on a page that answers it. And then we’re going to go into some of those non branded opportunities. So you’re right. You hit it on the nail. The larger the brands, the less resources they put into digital because they don’t think they need them.
My boss at Disney said that he said we don’t need SEO, we’re Disney. None of our pages are showing up in Google search results because you have one page with a big Flash feature on it. And Flash can’t be crawled by search engines. And there’s no pages for all these different, travel to Ireland, family travel to China type pages. So it’s convincing stakeholders that the brand itself isn’t powerful enough to be number one for search terms that we need to augment our digital marketing strategy to include really well, keyword rich, optimized content.
The funny thing. Yeah. There you go. So somebody searches out for an Apple-tini, and they’re going to get some mommy blogger with, like, how to make an Apple-tini at home because they are 100% aiming at, like, question and answer content, recipe stuff, menu stuff, especially every industry has its own struggle in the end. Like you said, Disney, in effect, is fighting property management and travel sites who are saying, like, get to Disney, stay at Disney. They’re going to own that, like the behavior of the person is not to go to Disney.com and work backwards, they’re going to Google or go to their search engine of choice and say, “When’s the cheapest time to go to Disney?”
Like finding Disney blogs and so forth. And none of the actual Disney owned content. It’s incredible.
Well, and this really, there’s two key areas that I want to drill in on. Number one, you mentioned it in the early part. There is patience. So the patience of SEO, what’s the formula to understanding the path to success in SEO? And obviously, what we’re saying is not the ultimate like, do this thing and it works every time. But what has worked because it is a moving target. It’s not just keyword stuffing. And then showing up in Google the next day, there is a path. that’s a lengthy one, but it has a long and beautiful thick tail on it.
Right. I think it’s a two part question. Part one is setting expectations of what’s involved and how long it takes. The second part of it is building that strategy you mentioned so that you’re not just doing SEO, but you’re following a prioritized roadmap of areas to focus on. So the first part, and having so many years of experience in it, I’ve had to get better and better and better at it, is setting expectations. As we do start to work on a single page to get that single page to show up in search results.
The first thing we want to make sure that we’re doing is addressing the needs of what the visitors looking for. So we look at those top ten results that already appear for the keywords that you’re thinking about optimizing for, and we look for themes. What are they showing? What are they displaying? What are the questions that we see in the People Also Ask section. What are the related keywords that are used in the search results? What other search terms of those pages receiving traffic from to help us to create an outline of how that page could be written, that’s the first part, is getting those top keywords where they need to be.
So that initial crawl when Googlebot and Bingbot are crawling your website, they find those search terms and they go, okay, I’m going to test this page for those words because I saw them emphasized in the title, in the heading or in subheadings. Once they’ve done that, that keyword part, that keyword component is almost a mute point. It’s not about that keyword anymore. Once they’ve already identified those words and they’ve cued you up to see how your page performs and their results for those words. Now it gets into that second phase.
So let’s just say that content itself. Once it gets on the website and Google can crawl from your home page through your navigation links to get to that page. It’s not just orphaned in a place where they can’t get to it. They get to that page, it gets indexed, and now you’re on page. I don’t know, three, maybe within three months, you find yourself at the end of page two of the search results. Now they’re going to look at off page factors. They’re going to look at what they find across the Internet about your brand and how it correlates to those keywords or other people across the Internet using those words when they’re searching for you.
Are they searching for your brand and those words and those words in your brand? Are they just searching for your brand? So getting people to search for you in correlation to those search terms and getting crawlers to find the search terms that you want to rank for adjacent to your brand name. And of course, the obvious links to your page. PageRank that Larry Page created back in the late 90s was what drove Google in the first place. They said we don’t want to just use what’s on your website.
We want to use what other websites are saying about your website and your content. So if you go out there and do a little bit of research and you find who’s linking to those top pages, you look for creative ways to get other industry websites to share your content and link back to that page. And there’s this nice pattern of links coming in over time. Think of a line chart and you’ve got this. Over time, more and more links coming to this page. Google is going to recognize that.
And we’re going to say now, we’re on the tipping edge of page two, page three. Those links help us move up to page one. Now we’re at the number ten spot on page one. Within about six, seven months or so, we see ourselves on page one at the bottom. How do we get to the top? How do we get to that number one spot? That number one spot is the issue that a lot of SEO agencies get fired during that period because the clients just don’t have the patience.
You said I was going to be number one for this keyword. Spend six months. Forget it. I’m done. There’s this trust factor. Those pages that already rank, a lot of them have ranked for that keyword for years and proven to Google through their history that they’ve been good results. You can’t just make one of them go away. There’s only ten, right. You have to earn your way there. So the links help you, the content helps you. But what’s going to help you move up to that number one spot is how users respond to your page.
Let’s say in a search result, Google has 100,000 searches a month happening for a certain search term, and your page has been on page two and page three is now on page one. They’re going to show you higher and more often, we’ll just say 10,000 times out of that 100,000 times and they trust it like, hey, it’s actually performing really well when I display it. Now I’m going to display it 50,000 times out of 100,000 searches. Now I’m going to display it 75,000 times. So you start to show up more often and more higher as they begin to trust that people are clicking on and staying on your website.
So the action item here is to pay attention to the user behavior signals of getting people to want to click your listing because it stands out because it’s got rich results or thumbnail next to it or star results or questions and answers that are attributed to that particular page, maybe even in some industries, getting creative and using emojis and call-to-actions and titles and descriptions. And then once they do, click on your listing because that’s the goal, right? With user behaviors, get them to click you more often.
Don’t just call your friends and say, click on my listing because it’s not sustainable and it doesn’t follow that lying pattern of behavior over time. It’s going to raise a flag if you have it all of a sudden and then drops. It’s making sure that it’s a natural, organic thing, not trying to get in the search results. Then they get to your page. If they go back to the search results and choose a competing listing, then Google starts to infer in being that maybe that listing wasn’t very helpful and they start to demote you over time.
So how do we get them to stay? We get them to stay by using common web design best practices, mobile web design best practices, and maybe following some hints from Google’s guidelines. So we’re going to pay attention to things like security and using a valid SSL. Privacy, is there a link to Privacy Policy? Is it updated? Is there an updated date? We’re going to pay attention to accessibility because some of our users have impairments, we’re going to really focus in on our mobile user experience. Do we have a floating call to action so that we know the users know what they should be clicking on without having to flick the page up and down to find a button somewhere?
Did we make it usable for them? Can they search our website? Can they call us? Can they verify that we’re a real business and trust our site without having to go back and do a search for your brand name? Plus the word reviews. So all of those things play a component and it could take up to a year or more. And it’s really funny how often we look at our results for a single page that we created and what happens at that one year point? If the keyword is, we’ll just say medium in terms of competitiveness, right?
It’s somewhere in the middle range. Right at that one year, our little line chart that’s been growing slowly suddenly turns into a hockey stick, right around one year. It’s really interesting, and that hockey stick just kind of continues for the next part of the following year. It’s really exciting for a competitive search term that could be two to three years as long as every month you’re chipping away and having better, more helpful content, earning more links and mentions off your website and continuing to test different ways to get more people to click on your listing when they see it in the search results.
If you’re focusing on those three things every month, even for a competitive keyword, like credit card or online casino or whatever, you could see yourself on the first page or higher within three years. But that’s the expectation, right? That’s the thing that business owners typically don’t have the patience for. But then you look back. You’re like, man, if I would have done this ten years ago.
That’s right.
If I would have done this last year. I’d be in hockey stick right now. I’d have my best December ever if I would have done this a year ago.
And that’s the mentality I’d love to have business owners be thinking about next year when they remember this podcast and go, damn, I should have just, it went by so fast, I should have just done it.
As the proverb goes. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now planning to do things. And look, I’ve been a victim of this myself of like, yeah, I should build a content plan, and then you get behind. And then you spend more time doing the planning than just carving out content. But you look at, especially when you get into the areas of capturing inbound content and affiliate marketing processes, it’s exciting to watch that world, because the whole thing is just, like, just keep consistently putting content out that’s going to eventually get in there.
And I’ve seen the conversions where all of a sudden I’m like, oh, wow. You go from showing up in no searches to showing up in searches, but no click throughs, then showing up in searches with click throughs. And then, like you said, all of a sudden there’s this thing and you’re like, this random page that looks like it should have just sat there and gone away is suddenly getting some heat. And then, conversely, I actually bought an existing domain that had a lot of traffic and sort of let me try the other side. Game the system.
So I actually started taking the original inbound URLs, which are now four-folding because the site had been gone and I was moving them to other pages, and I was getting click through, and I was actually seeing results. But then I let that site wane in the activity and the content for, like, six months. And I go back and the hockey stick turned down because it’s a consistency game. It’s doing all of these things together. But it’s hard to explain to people, especially in an organization they say like, I work at flood dergulon.
No one could possibly know more about Flug dergullian than I do, or we do. So of course, they’re going to end up on our website. And I would tell them, like, when you search plug dergullian, the first thing that comes up is your competitor, and it’s a paid ad. So, Congratulations, you’ve got a competitor who wants to own you, but guess what. You’re a target for them, and they’re winning, right?
Yeah. That happens more often than not. And the second part of that story, that expectations is important because it gives you a better picture of how long it takes. But the second part is, what you mentioned is, actually having a plan. And one of the things I tried to do when I started teaching at Cal State Fullerton and started kind of borrowing some of my own content to create our own little simple training program was to try to fold in the specific audits and the specific strategies that you need to follow to be successful in search for all the things we just mentioned, the keyword research element and building out what that content map should look like and how the pages should be optimized the off page visibility features you just mentioned broken links.
We recovered somewhere close to 5000 broken links for one of our restaurant chains that had 15 different URLs for this promo they ran every year. And they four-folded every year. There was Veteran and .gov and these other big websites that were linking to these pages that are no longer there. We finally helped them create a permanent URL, redirected all 15 of those and recovered thousands of really helpful links that Google is going to use when they’re scoring our site, holistically. But, yeah, having that plan.
So we put all our templates in there, the same templates we use for those brands I mentioned. So if you wanted to do a technical audit and follow the 72 different things we recommend looking at from page speed and accessibility and all those things we mentioned, they’re all in there with a little video on how to do it and the Google developer link that you’ll need when your webmaster comes back and says your SEO person doesn’t know what they’re talking about and you can say, Well, it’s not them, it’s Google. Here’s the link.
And they’re like, Fine, I’ll just do it. Developers and SEO don’t always play well together. That’s the component. I wouldn’t jump into SEO cold. I would definitely start with a strategy, map out all those URLs you already have on your website, put them in a Google sheet, and then go column by column on different SEO focal points, such as titles and headings and image names and page names. How many internal links from other pages on my website do I have pointing to that page?
And what words do I use in those links to help the search engines as they’re crawling? Sort of define what those pages are about before they even get to them. So I would start there. Build that strategy, get that tech audit squared away, get your content and keyword research ready to rock in a Google sheet somewhere or in a project management system. Figure out where you need to be getting links, where competitors have them. Get some creative ideas going on ways that you can build links by getting other influencers and subject matter experts involved in that content process so that they feel somewhat obligated to participate in the visibility of that content.
And then lastly, get a baseline report going. So that in a year from now, when you’re like, hey, check out how great my organic traffic is going and how well we’re doing with our SEO. Well, great. Where do we start? I don’t know. We didn’t create a baseline report. I don’t know, but we’re doing really good. So it’s good to have that and pay attention to it for sure.
Let’s get into the fun. What are the myths and truths of Core Web Vitals? I’ve struggled with this one because I sort of have a poke at the folks at Google. God bless the folks at Google. But they drive me a little nutty sometimes because they’ll have something like they introduce this idea of Core Web Vitals and the idea that you’re going to get effectively deranged based on the performance of your page. And then the bitter irony of it is that the blog that Google wrote on their developer site about Core Web Vitals doesn’t pass Core Web Vitals.
I know we were laughing about that, too. Some of my students were doing that, and I’m like, you guys are brilliant. That’s so funny that you use the actual site. And we did the same thing on the accessibility for the ADA Accessibility Guidelines doesn’t pass ADA Accessibility Guidelines. So much for, practice what we preach, right?
Yeah. So the thing I really want to separate for people is a guide. It’s a factor, but it’s not literally like you fail CWV and you’re off Google. That’s my hypothesis. So correct my people that are not smart and they listen to me.
I always try to focus on being principle based, and the principles we’ve already talked about, right? Is be relevant to the search term that someone’s searching for be visible off the website and be helpful when they do find you in the search results. And when they do get to your page. Like we said before, if you’re nurturing those three areas, you’re probably going to be affecting your Core Web Vitals in the process because you’re trying to make your page faster and better over time. So I would say if you’re still focusing on those three things, you’re going to worry less about little things like a Core Web Vital or one of the many tools that you could use to sort of test or audit your website.
But I know John Mueller made a point about this recently at Google. He said that it’s more than a tie breaker. My first thought about it was just one of those tie breaker things where if our content is just as good and our links and visibility off the website are just as good and our click-through rates are equal, then they’re going to choose the one that loads faster for mobile users and looks better for mobile users as a tie breaker. But he came back and said, no, it’s more than that.
And then the conspiracy started coming in from my peers, right. And they’re not always wrong. One conspiracy theory is that Google is trying to save some money. And if websites are faster to crawl and to navigate to and to collect data about that, it’s going to save their servers a bit of money and having to wait for things to load and to render assets that take a long time, like images. So they want to make the Internet a faster place. And with 60% to 80% of your users being on mobile devices. For our restaurant chains, 84% of them are mobile devices.
It makes sense that they’re continuously pushing us to provide faster and better user experiences for mobile users. They’ve been telling us about that since the early 2010s. They started putting information out about it in 2014, and we saw the Pivot in 2014 from more people going on mobile than on desktop. So it just makes sense. It’s a natural evolution of how we want to improve experiences overall for users, not just for Google, but for our visitors. And if you haven’t, since 2014, been working to provide a better mobile experience, that’s not Google, giving you a penalty that’s you being somewhat ignorant to the fact that your users care about their mobile experience.
You want to tell people, like, ‘When’s the last time you waited until you got home to search for something?’ No, you’re standing outside of the store and you’re looking at a chair and you Google, how much is this chair at Target or wherever? And of course, that’s the pattern of usage. It’s funny. Like you said, we’ve got this dichotomy that there’s better bandwidth, faster networks. And we obviously are putting more rich content in there, but it’s counter to what you would imagine. You would think that with the level of streaming capability we’ve got with all of the work we can do that now is when Adobe Flash should be taking off, because the ability to do really high res, rich media experiences should be there.
But because it is client side versus service side processing. There’s a lot of other reasons where we’re moving towards. And also searchability. Right? Like if I put that up there, it’s an effective black box even putting myself like I’ve use Vimeo.
Yeah.
So I use Vimeo for hosting a lot of content that I have on a couple of different websites. I’ve got because I can sort of control the end user experience better. But then realizing, Dang it, I’m getting just ravaged on searchability because I’m not doing the right things versus if I put it on YouTube, it’s like auto chaptering for me. It’s doing a lot of really neat things that now, I’m like, okay.
Yeah. Exactly. They’re huge boosts for potential. So I’ve got to merge with the way the systems are moving versus the way I would like to run my operation.
Right. Yeah. But just big picture wise. Like we talked about, if you have a strategy and you’re paying attention to those principles that we know are going to help our visibility. And I have to tell you, these marketing students that I’ve been working with, I think I’ve taught probably close to 400. Now they are dying to get practice for free. A lot of them. So if you feel constrained, like you mentioned earlier, Eric, like all these things I want to do. I want to do my content map, but if you let go and you delegate to somebody who’s really interested in learning digital marketing, like one of these students, thousands of students across the country that you could talk to that are in digital marketing certificate programs.
Reach out to the teachers and say, hey, you have any students that want to volunteer and do some SEO work for us? You have the teacher is going to be a guide. I never recommend a student go to a client and not stay to some degree to make sure that they’re doing a good job and that they have what they need because I want to see them successful. So not only do you get the student, most time, you also get the professor. So something to think about if you are kind of feeling overwhelmed, like, hey, there’s a lot of stuff here.
I just want to run my business. I don’t want to have to do all this digital marketing stuff. I suggest talking to a digital marketing student and seeing if they can get involved. Have them take a course that’s holistic across everything that we do in search, whether it’s our Academy of Search site or a LinkedIn Search Academy or a Yoast Academy or Distilled SEO Academy, there’s all these different certificate programs that are available that go through the gamut. Ours, by the way, if your listeners want to stick our $600 course for free, just use my handle SEO Steve, and I’m happy to give them that opportunity to kick the tires.
And all I ask is that you give me some feedback and let me know what you think and what you’d like to see changed or improved. But just go to Academy of Search. Use SEO Steve or send your marketing intern or marketing student to that course and then have them contact me if they want a second set of eyes or anyone on the team here.
Nice. Well, thank you for that. I’ll definitely do what I can to load people into there because I think this is like you said, it’s a rich opportunity there. It often feels like joke. You’d go to the community mailbox, and on one side of the mailbox that says, ‘Lost Dog’ with missing part of right ear, answers to Lucky, whatever it’s going to be. Then you go on the other side and just says, ‘Found Dog’ with no collar or missing part of ear. And you’re like, literally there’s on opposite sides of the same box.
But if we just connected you two folks together, we could do some pretty incredible things. And there are students who, they want to get real world implementation and stuff. And you may find your next employee as a result. Right?
That’s our team. They started as interns here, some of them five years ago, and now they’re creative directors. Now they’re web analytics experts. It’s just giving them a chance. One of the reasons I like this idea versus hiring a veteran. I don’t want to beat myself up since I’ve got 23 odd years of experience is that the students aren’t ingrained with practices that are outdated. They’re not going to do something that isn’t really beneficial to SEO. They’re using fresh content, and they’re thinking in today’s world, they’re not going back to 2002. 2003 and reading ebooks.
So there’s an advantage, not to show this my peers. But I can tell you that.
You mean my Sam’s Publishing guide for SEO from 2004 is no longer valid.
My ebooks, too, are floating around out there. And when I see one, I’m like, hey, why don’t I give you the updated version of that or whatever? So yeah, I think that’s an advantage that you’ll have over some of the competitors who are working with some older SEO folks that aren’t staying up to date with trends and tests that could be ran to improve search-in today’s search results. Right. So lots of opportunity there and lots of students that would die to have a chance to work for free for you just to get their hands dirty.
Because in effect, these folks are most likely the next economy. Right?
Like this. As we look at today, we’ve gone through, like, just such a, I don’t even know how to describe what the world has experienced in the past 18 to 24 months now. Bizarre is an understatement of just how unexpected so many things are. And as we see people looking at this kind of, the great resignation as they’re calling it, because they really want to control their outcomes. And there’s potential to do this. And these are the ideal folks that they can start a true digital-only organization company, product, blog, whatever it is.
When I started in blogging, it was never done with the intent of running it as a business. I did it because I was just some goofball assistant man who kept bumping into weird problems. And so I’m like, I’m just going to write this down because it forces me to document it. And then the first time I saw this little boost of like, this is a tiny little post on how to fix one specific thing with VMware virtualization. And so I’m like, okay, so I just kept writing these things.
I kept writing these effectively, like, how to articles and how to fix this thing. And next thing you know, you’ve got 40,000 views a month just because I wrote down what I was doing once in a while.
It wasn’t even purposeful or intentional.
You’re documenting your own resolutions to problems you’re finding. I love it.
Yeah. And then I was like, okay, now what if I was actually purposeful with this? Then I met a lot of folks who went that really to the next level. And they’re like, I’m going to begin looking for the questions that need to be answered, and they effectively, were able to go completely independent because they just said, I’m going to do this. I’m going to go with the advertising route. At that point, it was potential. So it’s really interesting. And we’re now at that new point where you can make this foray into a self starting world.
It’s got to be done with purpose. It’s got to be done with a plan. And hopefully, as the side hustle economy, it’s not just about GaryVee yelling at you that you’re not working hard enough. It is truly about the opportunity of, if I just took a couple of hours a week and I always tell people, like, I posted this the other day as a joke on Twitter. Everybody keeps telling me they don’t have time for a side hustle. I said I found it, and I sent a screenshot of the screen time part of your iPhone.
Like, if you took an hour off of social media or off of something and just wrote something down, answered a question, found a way to engage a world that you don’t even realize it’s out there. Next thing you know, with purpose and with intent and schooling. Right. So there it is. You go and you get involved in the Academy and just take that and put it into action. It’s such a beautiful opportunity for so many people right now, for sure.
I know a lot of my students, even people who have been to my meet up groups over the years, have developed businesses, in some cases, just selling technical SEO audits. Like, hey, do you want to know what’s wrong with your website and why it’s not showing up in search results? For $500 or whatever, I can run an audit and tell you. And then they outsource the outreach to local businesses like the Philippines. Then they outsource the actual audit work to the Philippines, and all they have to do is the quality assurance.
And it’s like, how much money you’re making a month right now. One guy is like, I’m making $8,000 a month selling $500 audits. I’m like, oh, my God, what am I doing wrong? I can retire. There’s so much to be made in this industry because it is like you mention, like, a black box. And starting with an audit gives clients a plan. Here’s what you need to work on and whether you hire a developer to do it or bring someone at house or work with an agency, at least you know what needs to be done and let them worry about the how.
The path to here. It’s interesting. Like you said, I’m going to counterpoint your point earlier. You said it’s good to grab somebody who’s kind of fresh eyes, right? That they’ve got no, how it’s already been done, baked in. How do you make the path from OpenVMS to SEO specialist? You’ve got a lot of history, a lot of stuff that you’ve had to be very good at and then shake as you move into the next thing. So you progressively became new in a lot of things. So, Steve, how do you make that jump?
A lot of late nights in the beginning, not long term. I get home at a normal time now, but there’s a time where I worked a lot of late nights. I volunteered. That was the biggest thing. Like, hey, can I do your website for you? Hey, can I be your SEO person and do some SEO stuff for you? Because I’m playing around with all this knowledge that I’m learning. I’m really interested in it, but I don’t want to get paid to do something when I don’t have a lot of experience.
So can I just do it for you for free? Help your DJ business, your local locksmith business, or your florist business? Can I do some work for you for free to get some experience? I did that as a freelance while I was working full time at IBM and just got more and more passionate about it. I went back to school. Like you’d mentioned, I got a degree in ebusiness management, where I got to touch all the different areas of digital marketing, from setting up the server on Windows and Apache to learning about how databases work to graphic design and web design and user experience, and then project management, pulling all those things together into a project plan.
So the freelance hours up till two in the morning, sometimes no sleep, just digging in and getting my hands dirty with it, to building processes on how to get better at it. Each time I did it, I was like, all right, I’m not going to do that mistake again. I’m going to put that into a process and then eventually going back to school and deciding this is what I want to do as a career. That was the transition for me. Was one, acknowledging that I had a passion for something that wasn’t running bash jobs on an open BMS system to something that was really fascinating to me, which is the Web.
And you don’t have to go through all of that again, because those of us who’ve already been through it for you have created lists and guides and helpful training programs so that you don’t have to go through that journey. So I would start there. One of the things that we do here at Wiideman, is every morning, when we’re getting our morning coffee, we spend 10,20 minutes reading through our Feedly account, Feedly, F-E-E-D-L-Y. And after the call today Eric, I’ll actually share a link to the file that I use, and it’ll give you basically a newspaper of what’s going on in digital marketing today.
I like to look at the news feeds first from Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal Marketing Land, all of those. What’s happening right now in the industry first. And then below that, it’ll be blog feeds from some of my favorites authors on topics such as local SEO and multi location search, e commerce, usability and conversion rate optimization. All of those are bucketed into their own little groups. So whatever you’re interested in, you can view it that way. And every morning, we sort of sharpen the saw and we find what’s being talked about in those industries.
And as you start doing that, you start finding rabbit holes and you dig into them and you learn. So every day you’re learning for 10 to 20 minutes while you’re getting into the office. And it’s a great way to start the day, because now you’re thinking about what you learned throughout the day and getting smarter and better at digital marketing.
And just as a practice of life, it’s such a great way to do it right. Enrich your mind first and your body with a little tasty coffee. Nothing wrong with that. I like that. This is definitely putting it into passion. And I’m always seeing the interesting, again, sort of split of people that say, follow your passion is the best thing or the worst thing you can do, but it’s follow your passion towards a viable future. And I really think that’s the thing that you’ve done. It wasn’t just like, oh, I’m really excited about reading websites or learning about the thing.
You probably had a plan of, like, I want to be able to do this and have this be the thing that I do. And it gives you that sort of very purposeful outcome. And it gives you a bit of a goal setting process to head towards something.
Yeah. You become kind of like a futurist. You start to think about where things are going to go. And if I were to start today and I was brand new and really curious about this SEO thing, I think where I might start is becoming a voice search expert. I think I would start by sort of coining myself as a Google assistant or an Alexa voice search expert, and I would start mastering the different areas that you want to focus on, from voice to text APIs with Google to playing with the Google Action console and Alexa Skills consoles, getting into those and really kicking the tires around how people are using voice search.
With 180 voice search devices going out every minute now to different homes and offices, it’s going to be the next evolution of how we search as we start to untether ourselves from our mobile devices. So I think if I was going to start today, I would learn the basics of SEO, but I think I would focus my energy around things that are to come, such as voice search. When I got into it and I decided I want to be in digital marketing. It was because I had this idea that all businesses would be online someday and all businesses would have a website.
And I’m glad that came to fruition. Because of it, I’ve created a career.
The old famous Gretzky line of, you skate where the puck is going, not where it is now, right? And there’s a certain element you have to be able to make sure that you could do a thing that’s viable financially for today. And I think this is where people often get sort of stuck. They’re thinking about SEO. They’re thinking about their website. They’re thinking about a few different things, and they either think, it’s too early to think about SEO. I just launched this company. We just came out of stealth.
It’s too early to think about SEO. Alternatively, they say, Well, there really is no SEO because Google keeps changing the rules and changing the game unpack those two myths.
Sure. Well, the latter is leveraging your paid search data. Right? So if you’re unconvinced about SEO, look at your paid search insights at what search terms are actually converting and what placements in your display targeting are generating business for you. And have that be where you start. Start with your own data from what you learn and using the paid search side of search to augment what you’re doing on the organic side. That way you’re optimizing around what’s actually converting not necessarily what’s driving the most traffic. So I think a data driven SEO strategy can not only make sure that you’re driving the right visitors to the website based on how you’re optimizing, but it can reduce your costs on the page search side, because now because you’ve edited your web pages that you’re sending traffic to from paid ads, they’re going to give you better ad relevancy scores.
They’re going to give you better landing page scores, because now your keywords and your ads match the copy and the words that are used on the page itself. So I think that’s one myth of, organic doesn’t work anymore, it’s just paid. And if you believe that, then start using paid and leverage the data to create a better organic strategy. And either way, you’re going to see better results in paid. And I think the other part is you mentioned there’s a lot of myths, I think with search. Just getting started with it, it can be like you said, overwhelming like a black box a little bit.
I think what I’ve noticed successful business owners do is they reach out to somebody who’s a seasoned consultant and get a score. Ask, how am I doing in this area? I do email marketing as part of our business. How’s my email marketing doing on a one to ten scale? Hey, SEO person, can you take a look at my overall SEO and give me a score from one to ten? How am I doing?
How much can I improve? I’m doing some paid search. Hey, paid search expert who used to work for Google. Could you take a look at my Google ads and my Bing ads and my Facebook ads and give me a score? How optimized? How much more could I be doing? How much better could I be doing, go to the experts, spend the 250 for an hour of their time and get them to put you on the right path of where you could be improving. And maybe depending on your budget, you only do that once every six months.
Hey, help me recalibrate. How am I doing compared to six months ago when we talked, I did those things you mentioned. It looks like I’m getting better traction. What can I do next? Just do a little bit at a time if it helps you. But don’t try to figure it out yourself. If you’re overwhelmed by it, go to somebody who’s a seasoned expert on it, have them build a roadmap for you, at least get you started. So that way you don’t feel like you’re just winging it.
This really is the thing, too. And also I tell people all the time. Don’t ask the people that work at your company how your company is doing on visibility. Like it’s the way that people who don’t know about you are refining you that I did an email campaign for an organization that I’m an advisor to. And it’s hilarious. The only people that don’t open the bloody emails are the ones that have the domain name of the company. I’m trying to sort of say, we’re doing this really neat thing.
And in the end, I realized, well, all that matters is that the people that are prospective customers are making it all the way through this customer journey and their conversion ratios are lining up. The fact that I can’t get the sales people to read the bloody emails because they’re already sort of bought in and it’s captive audience. They’re not my target audience, really. But it’s hard for us because we look and we’ll say you’re going to come into our organization. They’re going to say, hey, this is Steve.
Steve is going to tell us how we can do our SEO, and then that person is going to go and the head of sales is like, no, the way we do this is we grind it out on the street. I remember having this funny, not an argument, but sort of an interesting back and forth conversation with somebody one time. And he said, in the end, marketing sales greater than marketing when it comes to business drivers and business growth.
Interesting. Okay.
And I said, Well, it’s funny, I said. It’s actually got to be a plus, not a greater than. And in fact, without marketing, there’s nothing to sell.
Right.
And I said, I’m just curious, how do you think that that salesperson gets the prospective customer list? And he says, by hitting the streets. And I said, how do you think he got the addresses to go to? It’s email list. It’s Pixel tracking. It’s customer journeys. It’s all of these things. But depending on your, I’ll say your sort of anecdotal experience, it’s very easy for people to lose sight of. It’s a group of things that come together beautifully. Certainly, you can’t just shed your sales team and be 100% successful with just a bunch of landing pages.
But put these things together and think about it as a machine. And I think that’s kind of where you need to be.
I think we might have actually found a benefit of this whole great resignation, too. Some of those folks that were furloughed and aren’t coming back, we hope, are those that are sort of tied into their old ways. And some of the new people that are going to be coming in are going to look at things and go, why were you doing things like this? Hopefully, some of those smart new people are going to come in and help reinvent the way that we approach everything in sales and marketing.
And I’m already seeing that. And many of the enterprise brands that we’ve been working with over the last couple of months have brought in new people that are interested in being involved in MarTech that have questions. And that’s amazing, because now we have buy in. Now we have a partner and we’re not trying to consistently convince our clients of why we need to do something. They’ve got these new people that aren’t set in their ways that want to know, why are we doing this? Ask me why eight times in a conversation.
And I know you’re somebody who I want to work with. Anyway.
The way we do things, what I do think that we’ve gained as a benefit was that every organization that said there’s no, sorry, you can’t work from home. It’s going to break up the team dynamic, and we will be ineffective as an organization because of that. Well, you all learned some hard lessons and we adapted. It was bought by choice for sure. And I would gladly trade everything away to go back to the angry office worker lifestyle, just to know that we could avoid what we’ve all gone through as a society.
However, the fact that you immediately went back to first principles like, okay, everybody’s working from home, how do we keep them connected? How do we make sure that we rapidly responded? And then we kept waiting new things would happen. And we’d have to go back again to sort of very Socratic first principles approaches to things over and over again. And when you start with a company, the first thing they do is they say, What’s your 30-60-90? What’s your 180? At 90? It just is like, no, we should always have a 30-60-90.
We should always be questioning and rethinking and looking at what’s out there, going to your feed late in the morning and seeing what’s happening in the world. Adjust your day, your week as a result. Like, life is a series of sprints, not a well planned marathon that goes with it.
Yeah. I think a lot of us that are in dynamic industries like SEO, really feed off of new things, new apps. We nerd out over different ways to try things. Hey, let’s try this Agile process. Let’s try this new project management system. Let’s switch from the spreadsheet program thing that we’re using, and let’s experiment with some templates in Google sites since we’re already on Google workspace, and we’re constantly open to the idea of testing new things for the appointment betterment. And that mindset of let’s see how we can do better this week than we did last week.
Let’s see how we can do better. Like you said, 20-60-90. I think it’s something that creates an amazing culture. I think people who don’t fit into those cultures, working from home especially, will find their way out quickly on their own because they’ll see everybody else engaging in conversations on Slack and in projects that we’re working on. They’ll see them interact and be part of our weekly meetings and discussions and those that are quiet, those that don’t participate, those that kind of do their own thing, those that, like habits and routines and not interested in trying new things.
They are going to be part of that great resignation or find an older type business to work in. That isn’t as exciting and vibrant as what we do in digital marketing.
Yeah, the opportunity is incredible for folks that want to grab onto it. And by no means, there’s obviously a lot of people that this type of thing is tough to wrap your head around. It’s the idea of going it alone or whatever. It’s certainly not for everybody, but in the same way that, there’s people that have a thirst or they need a little nudge. Oh, wait a second. You mean I can go and I can say, SEO Steve, and I got a free course. All right. Let me give this a whirl, right?
Like, just give them that little nudge and make sure that we can do this. And that’s what I have a huge respect for your approach to it, Steve, because that is right. We’re blessed that we are able to do these things. And then when we do a little bit of a give back, like you say, next thing you know, that person that took that free course is like, hey, I’ve actually started my own little mini agency, and I see that you’ve got a job posting. That’s where it all comes together.
Or even just making a connection. And you don’t have to be the one that gets the direct benefit. But you connect to people that need each other, a business and a platform, for example. And they remember that the platforms will come back and say, you’ve send a lot of business at our direction. We want to do something, give back to you. And next thing, you get some free marketing and get invited to some fun events. So it’s great. It all kind of plays together when you give and you don’t expect anything back I think the universe recognizes that and reward you down the road.
Yeah. The most rewarding, monetarily rewarding things, have been things that I gave away for a long time with never thinking about what’s the outcome to this. It was purely just it. I wrote a little ebook. I’m like, all right, let me try this. I was that guy. I saw a neat thing on Instagram. I’m like, okay, let me give this a whirl. And it was actually a company called SamCart. My shout out to those folks, they’re really slick. They had a really great, I want to be a student of how they did it, like, how they pulled people through, because I’m like, I know that this works.
So I want to see how this machine works. And it was worth the $300 for me just to see it in action. I was like, okay, so this is it. I got to do something with this now. I sort of joke. I said I rage road a book in a weekend. I was like, I’ve spent $300. I need to do something about this. So I wrote a book in a weekend and then used another company that they recommended called Beacon, and I had it done up in a PDF in, like, a day and a half.
Amazing.
And I put it out there, and it got just gentle. Every once in a while, people would pick it up. But it was just for me to test the process. And what it did was I went with that immediate thought. I went to my meeting from the marketing team at work, and we’re like, hey, we’ve got some new campaign we’re running. And I was like, you know what you need? Let’s try and do a landing page with basically a seven step flow. And I took this, like, SamCart methodology.
And by golly, it worked. Right? And like I said, I work with you and we do things. And next you know, I’m like, okay. So Steve says we should try this. I’m like, let’s just pick this page, do this, do these things, run this checklist and the fact that you’re excited to give it a whirl. And then what happens now? Many, many months later. I’m like, over a year in it’s like, I’ve sold a couple of 100 copies of this book without ever having to go back and revisit it.
And it’s great because then people now will come back and they’re like, wait a second. I think you wrote a book that I read, and it’s fun, because then those are people that you can do other things with. And that’s really the connection that I wanted. I’d rather give the book away. And so I literally just dropped it to $5. I’m like, I don’t care about making money out of this. I just wanted to pay for my annual membership. I’m done.
I actually had somebody go to one of my meetup groups in the 2000s when I was still SEO Steve, as kind of a brand who actually had me sign my first ebook, the Four Layers of the SEO model. And I’m like, I think you don’t get the idea of why it’s called an ebook, but okay, I signed it. I drove 50 miles from North LA to come hang out with you. And I’m like, awesome, good to have you. Can you sign my ebook? And it’s just an ebook.
It’s so weird. Yeah, that was strange. But the fact that you write something that people find value in, whether it’s a blog post, an ebook, or even a textbook gives you that sense of posterity. I’ve left something behind the people that will help them on their journey to get either where I am today or hopefully even above that.
Yeah, that’s what it is. So there you go. So you’re doing, number one, congratulations. Just in what you do on a daily basis as a company, you’re doing well, you’ve taken the right approach. And like I said, we could probably spend 4 hours nerding out about everything from OpenVMS and all the craziness we went through. It’s hilarious. That, like when I started, and this is just my last little closer. When I started at SunLife, all of the people that I worked with were like, AVP of system unit or whatever it was.
There were VPs and AVPs. And I would say, like, how did you get here? Well, they all worked there for 23 years, and they started in, like, the print shop. And it was like they literally were mailroom people that were now VPs. I’m like, this is like that Secret To My Success movie with Michael Keaton.
He took some shortcuts. Let’s be fair.
That’s right, he did. But here we are. And then 15 years later, I said I had a good friend of mine who worked in the mailroom, at the company that I worked at. And it was like, all I could think of is, you know where this guy is going to be in 23 years, he’s going to be the senior mailroom guy. He won’t be the AVP of a business unit. It’s a fundamentally different organizational style. And we don’t do that sort of progression through. But what you can do is you can take a skill and then apply it to maybe inside a business unit, and then maybe you go to a competitor, and then maybe you end up coming back.
And this sort of leapfrog effect now is possible. And nowadays, maybe you just do this a couple of hours a night and three nights a week. And you don’t have to worry about leaving your job. You just keep your job. And then next thing you know, this thing’s generating 30% of your income. And you’re like, okay, if I did it more, than you can.
And now you have a choice. And that’s the best feeling in the world is knowing that you know what? I don’t have to be here. I’m making enough money with the other things that I’ve been doing with my free time, that I can leave here and get a couple more of those other clients and do this full time if I want to. So sometimes it’s not just about the job. It’s about having control over your choices. And so many people feel imprisoned. If I leave this, I don’t know if I can get another job somewhere.
I don’t know if I can get my job back or if I’m going to be paid the same, or if I’m going to retain my seniorities and so forth. So they’re so worried after working that many years for a company that they feel entrapped. And I think it’s reasonable to feel that way. But there’s enough people who’ve survived. That if you believe in yourself, enough like you said, start doing it on your free time, prove to yourself that you can do it. And if you still like your day job and you want to keep it great.
But at least now you know that you don’t need that job. You can be more confident with your boss and your manager and make bigger decisions. And if they fire you, you’ve got something on the side that you can fall back on.
It is a great potential for many people. All right. And I hope that we can see more and more folks to reach out. If you want to find out about this kind of stuff, people are always, I do appreciate it. I would get a lot of good emails from folks who are like, hey, listen to this episode. I’m curious, and we get to dig in on stuff, and we’ve actually helped a few people take on new careers. And on that note, Steve, what’s the best way for people to reach you if they wanted to get in touch?
Sure. I’m SEO Steve everywhere. We also have the guys on my team, folks on my team that if you just want to ask a day to day question just Wiideman everywhere. W-I-I-D-E-M-A-N. We love to help small businesses. We do a lot of free work to try to give back. So if there’s a question we can answer, why isn’t my page ranking? Why is this competitor beating me?
Ask us. We’d love to help you, so hopefully we’ll see you on social media. SEO Steve or Wiidemen. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to hang out with you, Eric.
This was a lot of fun. I could go all day. Sadly, I’ve got another meeting. Still got that day job, so I got to. Thank you very much, Steve.
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Tyler Browder is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kubos, the world’s first cloud-based mission control software.
Kubos’s “Major Tom” software is a cutting edge mission control platform for low-earth orbit satellites.
This very fun chat delves into the challenges of creating a true “mission control”, the lessons of a founder, and also lots about how to build both products and a company. Super fun discussion and thank you to Tyler for sharing time with me!
Ground control to major. Oh, hey, sorry. This is Eric Wright of the DiscoPosse podcast.
And the reason why we started in that fun little way is because this is a great conversation with Tyler Browder, who is the CEO and co-founder of Kubos. They are doing really cool stuff around creating cloud based mission control software.
So this is like the nerd heaven for me as a space fanatic and a startup fanatic and also just, Tyler is such a great human. We talked about Kubos. We talked about the approach to the problem they’re solving.
Why it’s so unique and how they got to this level.
The pivots of the company, their background to some of their open source work and also TechMail. Really great stuff that Tyler worked with around incubation in the area.
So anyways. Let’s just listen. This is a really great conversation.
Tyler is a super cool guy, but in the meantime.
Let’s make sure that you also help to make this podcast grow and continue to bring these amazing conversations. Number one, you can head on over to our YouTube channel, go to youtube.com/DiscoPossePodcast. Click it on subscribe and make sure you get signed up. Hit the like button.
Do all those things because we’re now launching, simultaneously, on video and audio. Really fun. Beyond that, of course, head on over to make sure you support your data because your data needs to be protected. And the only way to make sure that that’s going to happen is to get everything you need for your data protection needs. With our fine friends at Veeam Software, Veeam have been huge supporters of the podcast.
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All right, let’s get to the good stuff. This is Tyler Browder from Kubos.
My name is Tyler Browder. I’m the CEO of Kubos. We build mission control software for spacecraft operations, and you are listening to DiscoPosse podcast.
This is really cool, Tyler. I want to thank you for first of all, doing what you do as a fan of things that leave the Earth. I really enjoy. When I saw your name come up, I thought, oh, all right. We’re in a cool space, literally. So for folks that are new to you, Tyler, do you want to give a quick intro a bit of a bio? We’ll talk about Kubos. We’ll talk about what you’re doing, what the team’s doing?
This is it. And I feel like you have, like, acoustic guitar playing, Major Tom, as we’re going through it. People will get why, what that reference is about in a few minutes.
Yes, there’s a lot to cover there. Let’s start with Kubos. Kubos is a software company, right. We live in a hardware world, though. Space is dominated by hardware, right? People did not get in this space to put little bits and bites in the space. They got in to build a physical thing and launch it and communicate with it. But we decided to come at a different angle. And so we built a product called Major Tom, which is a mission control software for spacecraft. So it lives on the ground.
It’s a cloud application that we use to track our satellites to understand the data coming down from the satellites and then tell the satellites what to do. Right.
So it’s the primary tool once the satellites in orbit that people use to communicate and understand their satellite. Right. So it’s a pretty critical, not to beat on this mission critical piece of software that, it’s a window that customers use to understand their spacecraft. So it’s a lot of fun. We don’t actually send anything to space because we’re on the crowd side. Right. We’re listening back from it. But we’re pretty close. My background, though you asked about is, I got quite a non traditional background into aerospace.
So most aerospace professionals getting in to the business because they dream to be an astronaut or something along those lines. And it was a passion from early on. No one stumbled into aerospace by accident. Except for me. So my background is primarily in just entrepreneurship, business development. I grew up in an entrepreneur family and so I’ve done healthcare. I’ve done music industry. I’ve done property rental companies, and I got an opportunity. I became friends with a guy who was a software engineer who had worked in space, and he was looking to start a new company, and he needed someone to handle the business aspects of the new venture.
And he would handle the technology. And, yeah, and I said, yes, I didn’t know what a satellite was. I was never like a big space kid growing up, I didn’t dream of being an astronaut, I dream of being a rock star. So, yeah, I was fortunate enough to stumble into the industry.
One would say that these days they’re one and the same. You see, the way they do the walkouts. It’s not like on WWE. You just expect someone to be walking with a flag and people cheering. And it’s amazing to think of just the amount that’s going on with both commercial and public sector stuff that’s happening in space. And then the private sector, there’s an untold number of things that are going on in this area of development that are almost, they used to be more hidden. But now let’s just say it right.
Elon Musk made it kind of cool to really sort of push the envelope and make it more of a spectacle to observe and enjoy that we are doing some incredible development in the world of space. And then we start to see what people are doing with the CubeSat side of the world and all these small commercial stuff and almost hidden behind that, too, is. That’s amazing. But what we’re doing with the technology that we’re putting there is even more amazing. Right. So this is why Mission Control, mission critical is big, because it’s not just about getting it up there.
It’s about, we’re building systems on this technology that require us to now treat it like, this is big. This is really amazing.
Yeah. There’s a lot of different ways you could go with that. From the industry standpoint. Historically, space has been a government playground, right. Like only governments have the resources and the appetite to go after it. And that’s all obviously changed. Right. And that’s good. But that’s created quite this, like change in cultures in the industry because government-run programs were very secretive. It was all about national security. And so there was this culture of not talking publicly about what we’re doing, except for a very select few propaganda type things or big name things.
Elon has definitely done more than his share to move the industry into the public light. And so we’re seeing this really interesting, when you get down into it and talk with people, there’s still this culture of keeping things quiet, not talking about what we’re doing. And there’s other people who are trying to fall in line with what Elon did, talk about their projects and be very vocal. And so we’ve seen that from a lot of different, really interesting angles. But on the technology side, when it was a government program, everything was really special. Right.
Everything was custom built to achieve one objective and up and down the stack. Everything from the spacecraft all the way down to delivery of the data, including Mission Control. It was a custom program that was designed just for the operation of that particular spacecraft. It could not be transferred. What Q-Set has done is give us some standardization and allowed us to build more in bulk. Right.
And build more spacecraft than we ever thought. Instead of really big closed crafts, we got lots of little ones. And so the way we really like to position our product is that we’re an infrastructure play. Every piece of machinery in space has the same core components. They all need power, battery, solar panels. They all need a computer of some sort of to control, and they all need a radio. They need to be able to communicate back to Earth and then they need some way to do whatever it is they’re wanting to do. Right.
And that’s where all the custom stuff comes out, there’s the camera, the pictures or if it’s some sort of censored measuring, some sort of data in the atmosphere or whatever. And so what we focus on is the generic part. So the radio, the computer, the battery power, what they call the telemetry of the spacecraft bus, as opposed to the actual payload. Our platform does not support payload data image processing. We don’t do that. That’s what our customers want to do is they’re secret sauce. That’s why they built the spacecraft to begin with.
But we handle the satellite operation itself to help assess where it is, where it’s going, communicating to the payload to take a picture over Cairo next Tuesday, whatever the command is. And so we facilitate that whole communication chain to the spacecraft.
And you’re doing it. And speaking of public in the open. The fact that you’ve actually open sourced a lot of the work. There’s a lot of interesting things. I’d love to get your take on what stuff is very sort of community, world driven, and how much is interior special sauce, even in what Major Tom and such is delivering?
Yeah. So it’s a great question. I think, actually, to answer that question, I have to back up a little bit. When we started Kubos, we actually started with a different focus. We were focused on flight software, basically creating the operating system of the actual spacecraft. And that product was called KubOS, and it is open source. And it was very much modeled after the Android operating system. And so we would have a Linux kernel. We have middleware that we built and a bunch of APIs so that customers could build their own custom applications on the spacecraft to do whatever they’re trying to do.
It was hardware-agnostic. We could really shift around, went to bus providers or satellite manufacturers and got them to distribute it. And we built that all on the open. We had an open source community. The code was all open source, and we did that for a couple of reasons. One, we believe in that that was kind of the ethos of where my partner, who was a software engineer, came from. I came from Mozilla and Red Hat and big open source commercial companies. And so that was part of who he was as a person.
But also, the truth is from an export control standpoint by making it open source, we got around a lot of the export requirements of the software, and we could distribute it without having to verify who was using it or having to keep tight controls around that. And as a small company, that was a really heavy burden to do the export control. And so open sourcing gave us a weight around that. Major Tom, we shifted to that last year heavily, and Major Tom is actually not open source.
It is just a web application that we control the source code. And there was a couple of different reasons for that and why we’ve done all that and we could get into that if you like, but just for clarification, Major Tom actually is not open source, and our previous product KubOS, it still exists. It’s still there being used by people today.
Yeah. And that’s what I wanted to show. That interesting split of the line. I do a ton of work in the open source communities and a lot of different ones. And I’m a huge proponent for open source and open communities. But I also recognize the challenge in running a business and also commercializing on open source. There’s a lot of real challenge around. You have to at some point add opinion into software. You have to have an opinionated approach. And it’s really hard to do in a purely 100% open community.
And there’s a lot of great proponents for, well, they call it cost commercial open source. And then Open Core is another one. It’s hilarious because you’ve got these little, like, Occupy Open Source, Occupy Open Core. There really are, like, hardened, really strong minded leaders in these specific types of communities. And they’re also arguing over who’s more open, who’s more DevOps-y, like, there are all of these things. And in the end, while that’s going on, we’re trying to run a business to employ people to get commercially viable software out there that can then power other companies and deliver this.
This is why inside Major Tom, there’s probably open tools amongst it, but nothing wrong with in my mind, the front end needs to be purely opinionated, pragmatically built and delivering to solve specific problems.
Yeah. I completely agree with you. Sure. Inside of Major Tom, we do have open source elements. I’ll be honest. I don’t know exactly all of those. I won’t name them but we do use them. Right. And I think most companies, software companies use open source at some level. Right.
Everybody thought they didn’t until there was heartbeat. That was like, one of the most hilarious things were like that’ll teach you open source people to use open source stuff. And it’s like heartbeat. And then all of a sudden, 12 hours later, Cisco, Microsoft, VMware, every major company was like, you need to patch your stuff. And they’re like, why I thought we were using commercial software. We’re like, well, guess what it’s built on open source software.
Yeah. Right. Exactly. The problem with, I completely agree with you. We still have to make viable businesses and employees that generate revenues so that we can hire people and have economy and all these things. Right.
But the problem we had with open source in our industry is we were selling support contracts. So that was our main business model, is you would use our software, we would sell you support. And that works really great for Red Hat. But that really is a challenge for us. So we were going after companies that were building large constellations. So they wanted to launch a lot of satellites, hundreds of satellites. And then we’re going to use our software on all their spacecraft. Awesome. Let’s do that.
So for the first satellite, they happily paid us for support and we support them through it. We built some, reported to their hardware if we need to, we do some services in there to generate revenue and we were successful. We launched some satellites on it, and then they would be ready for their next 2nd, 3rd, 4th spacecraft, and they’re going to try to increase the speed, the scale of it and bulk up a little bit. And we had taught them everything they need to know about the software, and they really didn’t fall on to purchase sub-port for anything because they didn’t change anything.
They weren’t intending to change anything or anything significant. And if you imagine once the spacecraft is in orbit, you have some limited options about what you can do to change that. If you have a bug that is in your spacecraft software, how do you fix it? You do a software update. Now it’s more common. When we started, assume that you were able to do a software update, but it’s very risky, right? If you do have to do a whole new update to the kernel or to the OS, that’s a lot of risk if you make a mistake, that’s it, the things done.
There is no hold down the reset button.
It’s gone. And so it is not something that companies traditionally have been wanting to do unless under the most dire situations. Right now, we’ve gotten better as an industry, we’ve gotten better at testing and our procedures and our backups on the system so that there is a failure, we could do it. But especially at the time when we started, that just wasn’t the norm. Very few companies have been building and architecting their system with the intent of updating the OS. So there’s some limitations, right? There were some risk involved, big consequences.
And so anyway, it was a very hard model to get in, and then they sell cycles. It was other than we’ve given in the business side. But anyway, there’s a lot going on here. But anyway, open source is still part of us. There’s still that flight software called KubOS. Still up on GitHub, and I think the next launch is on is next month. I mean, it’s still being used by people, even though we’re not actively developing on it. I think the next launch that someone’s using it is next month, I think.
I guess it really brings the ultimate question before Major Tom, what did the stack look like? What was the previous solution that needed this to solve a problem?
Yeah. So there was a couple of different flavors of this, but they all were based around being on a server in a closet there locally at your station. And they were all focused on particularly one spacecraft. They were not going to handle 100 spacecraft. They were really good at two, three, four, maybe spacecraft. But if you were going to do more, they were really not going to be built for that. And they were expensive. You had to have the hardware and you had to have at least a skill set to set up the hardware, manage that.
And they were real, particularly focused on again, the single use case as a single spacecraft. And so that’s really where we as the industry started to move from big and expensive to lots of little. Right. The mission control didn’t keep up, right. We couldn’t scale the way that the industry was needing us to scale. We couldn’t be generic, we couldn’t be spun up quickly and we couldn’t be updated very well. If it was in a hardware, if it was in the hardware over there in the corner. No, we want to touch it.
So there was a lack of innovation. Satellites, as you deploy more satellites, you continue to tweak and evolve them. There’s different generations trying to push it. But your mission controls stay flat. So we need a way to update and upgrade the software to keep up with the demands and the needs of the ever changing system. So that’s really where we came in to fix. We built it on the cloud to give it that scale, to build it in a redundant, safe way. We built it within mind of operating lots and lots of spacecraft.
We’ve done further than that. So not only just operating a lot of the same kind of spacecraft, we designed it so you can operate a lot of very different types of mission control systems. And then the other thing we’ve done that we’ve really gone out and integrated third party services that you use on the ground. Best example is talk to satellite. You need a physical ground station somewhere in the Earth that will collect the radio signal and also beam up the radio signal. There’s services you can purchase.
You can basically rent by the minute of these ground stations. And we, it was always on the operator our customers to spend the resources to integrate these systems. And they were done poorly. They were done slowly. They were done costly. And so we integrated these systems out of the box. So there’s just a simple login and then you’re integrated with this. So we’re lowering barriers. We’re going faster. We’re developing new features for our customers for these use cases that we can roll out and not have to do a full new reboot of the entire system and lose valuable time on their spacecraft.
So that’s where we’re coming from.
Well, this really becomes the value of centralizing and giving opinionated outcomes to solving a problem, because you can look at five customers and then find the Venn diagram of crossover and then start to merge the diagram a bit more. You start to see more commonalities, but they individually are building a standalone system for each part of the operation. It’s just such a, there was a point where we all had to do it. There’s always the first time someone built a car. You didn’t start by building a factory.
You started by putting a garage in and then building the bloody car, but eventually goes, hey, the guy down the street is building a car, and I’m supplying parts to him. And it looks like you guys use the same parts. Okay.
One of the things that we bring is the aggregation of all the different data sets. So we’re not looking at actual people’s data per se. What we’re doing is anonymizing it so that we can better understand spacecraft operations. Right. And really where we’re trying to apply this is in the communication optimization. So, example, you have 100 satellites orbiting the Earth. They’re all moving around. Right.
They orbit every 90 minutes. And you have ten ground stations across the globe. Right.
And the connection time between a satellite and a ground station is about ten minutes. Right.
And so you got minimum windows and they’re always moving. These are walking orbits, right. If it flies over New York at 02:00 p.m.. 03:30, it will be 50 miles east of New York. Right. The walking. And so what we are building is the optimization on how to communicate. And so we could tell our constellation. I want a picture of New York tomorrow at 01:00 p.m.. Major Tom will say you need to send it to this ground station to the satellite at this time and get the data back down to optimize the network, to get your data, your command up there to tell the satellite to do get the data down in the appropriate time and really optimizing the network.
So we’re moving away from spacecraft being these pets that we love and are part of our family, to cattle, to herds, to big networks. We’re really more network administrators than we are satellite operators. And that’s the way we’re moving the industry to adopt those practices and apply them to the space environment.
Yeah. I tell you, when you get to the numbers, it’s pretty incredible if you think about what’s up there in the different layers of atmosphere. And I saw something that’s funny to me because I recognized this is such a, like, get off my lawn type of old person yelling at the clouds situation. It was like these photographers who are like, it’s really bothering me trying to get night star photography because there’s all these darn satellites floating around, you know, that the Internet that you’re putting your awful angry tweet on is powered by those very little lights that you’re complaining that are crossing your photograph in a time lapse.
Yeah. That’s a really interesting conversation in the industry that we don’t know what to do with yet. Right.
We’re going to launch more satellites. We have to launch more satellites. We have to launch more infrastructure in space, not just satellites but space stations, and we have to build more habitats and we have to move out there. But there’s also some consequences to that, right? Not only with photography and a nice guy, that’s one. But there’s also the risk of collision, these things hitting each other and causing damage. Right. There’s that risk. There’s risk of, I’m a big fan of, I just went blank the, Apple Moon show from on Apple+.
For all mankind.
For all mankind. Yeah. And the militarization of space, right. This is a thing that is not that far away from us. Right. And then we got to get into governments and we got to get into laws and policies and treaties in space that we’re not well equipped to deal with right now in our current geopolitical environment. And so there’s some fascinating things and some really hard decisions that are going to have to be made in the next ten years to really set up our humanity to expand.
Yeah. The policy side of it is wild. And you think of because today we think of geography. We’re so just bound in geography, even just the fact that as a North American, the raw arrogance that everything that most companies do is in English only. And we base it on Eastern time zone. It is just crazy that that’s like the standard of belief as we head into just internationally on the Earth, we’ve got a broad set of audiences that are so underrepresented and under acknowledged. And then we can’t even argue over the height over a skyscraper that is considered owned real estate by that developer.
What happens when you go a lot higher? Does it belong to the country because it’s over North America? Does it belong to the country because it’s over El Salvador? That’s my satellite right now.
Right. It’s really hard that things can be solved. And then you go to the moon or Mars. And how do we break that up? Should we break it up? Should we not break it up, right? Asteroids are the same way in different countries, making different laws and not doing it as a planet as an entire group of people instead of just individually as our own countries. I think it’s really interesting. I really do. And how do we solve these problems and who’s going to take leadership in these problems?
They’re going to stick their neck out and want to talk about space policy, because right now, it’s not on the mainstream, right? It’s not being talked about at a high level with people who could do anything about it. It’s just professor somewhere arguing about it. And so we need to bring that out. We need to talk about that. Anyway.
Most people’s exposure to this is just they’re like, does Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck available and can Aerosmith do the soundtrack? That’s our understanding of space for the most part.
That’s right. That’s right. Well, in America, saving the day. Right. And that’s not how this is going to work. There are more countries over the last five years gotten into space, being coming space faring countries than there were ever seen. Everybody come play. The countries that had never had a space program now can have a space program. And it’s not just for the United States. It’s not just for America. It’s all global. Space belongs to all. It’s really interesting, but there needs to be some structure there needs to be.
If somebody’s doing something with their satellite, how are you going to know what they’re doing, right? Or should, you know, right? Do you even have a right to know? But that’s a different thing. And that’s really fascinating to me. We can track where satellites are, but we can’t always tell what they’re doing and sometimes by the behavior of the satellite, what it’s doing. I remember when I first got into the industry, there was a story about geo. So this is where the big communication satellites live, and they’re locked to the spin of the Earth.
So they always are focused on a particular spot over the Earth. Right.
So they’re locked in geostationary orbit. And these are very coveted spots. These are very big spacecraft. This is big spy stuff, encryption, military, but also other types of communications. And I remember there’s a story about this Russian satellite just walking around out there, getting in between the communication channel and you can see it. You do it as a Russian satellite. You know what they said publicly. We were the same way when we said publicly, we’re not really saying what our satellite was doing. And it was really interesting.
I think it’s going to become more and more happening whether or not we hear about it or not. But it’s going to happen. It’s going to continue to happen.
Especially just like, it’s hard to imagine that if we go back to the days of before this decade is about. We commit to getting somebody on the moon. And you’re like, that’s crazy talk now you’re like no one would even question. They’re like, why aren’t we already there? Why are we going back? Why did we stop going?
I think the tough part we also see with the sort of publicity of space touristy-ing and stuff that’s going on. On the back side is an incredible amount of research, like the work that you’re doing. This enables incredible amount of real secondary effect stuff that’s going on. And going on the moon wasn’t about planting the flag, it was about learning about science beyond our Earth that’s enabled an incredible amount of things that is just we forgot. We forgot that’s what we did as a result of it, even the sort of the rich man space race that we’ve got going on right now.
The result of those advances will mean that as a government organization, especially at least in the United States, they’ll save billions of dollars because of the work that’s going on in commercial and private sector work. And we all personally will feel that benefit because it means that things will come that are advanced as a result of this work.
Yeah. So we do that in a slightly different way. But it’s the same idea. Right. We borrow a lot of technologies, best practices, not from the space world, but from the software world, from the general, from what Google and Facebook have developed as standard practices for how to develop large data sets and manage those data sets. So we’re applying those just like that Google had to develop in order to build theirs we get to use in a space. It’s all how this works, right. The space race is happening with Elon and Branson and the other guy, Bezos is ultimately going to be, at least to the industry, at least from the economics, it’s going to be beneficial. Right.
They’re creating technologies and they’re training people, right. Giving them new ideas. There’s this whole, like, flood of SpaceX employees, not flood. Floods not the right word. But there’s a group of SpaceX employees who are spinning out new companies now, right. This is the benefit of what he’s really built. Is he built a big company to do something really amazing and trained and taught these engineers how to build really amazing things. Engineers are going to go build amazing things for themselves, and they’re going to create new companies.
Well, every major company has done this. And now we’re going to see in the space there just hasn’t been anybody, like, break through that, right? We’ve all been government contractors working in classified missions and couldn’t talk about these days. But now that’s over, right now, that’s ending. And you’re going to see a lot of that’s where the real next push is going to come from. Right.
SpaceX has done amazing, great things. It’s very impressive and pushed the ball forward. But now you’re going to see a different ball being kind of moved away. So they really focus on solving launch and then getting people into space in large bulk groups of people, mass movement of people, the people coming out of SpaceX employees who are spinning up their own companies. We’re not even sure what they’re going to do yet. And it’s going to be really fascinating what they do, right? They already did this. We’ll think what else they can accomplish, right? When they want to.
That’s it. And it’s like the accessibility of this stuff now is huge. Right. And I always enjoy everything we have now has, like the sort of ice cream flavors of, like, one scoop, two scoop, three scoop pricing structure. Can you imagine, say, ten years ago that you’d be able to say, I’m going to create a mission control software that I can offer on the cloud in a distributed format, API accessible. And I’m going to be able to offer it at, like, pricing to you. It couldn’t have been imagined that this was possible. And yet here you are.
Yeah. Well, ten years ago, who knows what I was doing ten years ago. So that’s even crazier, right? I don’t even know what I was doing ten years ago, but, yeah, there’s just pull and push in the industry, right. We’re pushing the industry towards cloud adoption, to using, borrowing from the software industry into space to move the industry forward, move innovation forward. There’s still resistance to that, right? The truth of the matter is we’ve talked a lot about commercial entities and commercial business models in space. Really taking off the largest payer of space services and applications is the US government, right.
That’s the largest payer. And so it’s still driven by requirements in that very waterfall manner. And so that’s what we’re trying to do. Educate and move the industry in a different direction so that we can continue to innovate faster and not be put in these boxes that were built for 1960 technology and practices. Now we can move it forward. But, yeah, there’s this really interesting pool. The commercial companies want to go talk to a commercial company about using Major Tom. They get it. They understand what we’re doing, and we’re moving forward them when I go talk to the Air Force about it. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t.
So there’s an education that’s happening still in the industry about what not just what we’re doing, but what is the bigger picture. Microsoft and Amazon have over the last couple of years really put their money where their mouth is and got in this space and are building a space building services in space, educating the space industry. So it’s coming. The cloud is coming to the space market, which we’re part of the leaders of that movement.
Now, when it comes to that sort of ideal customer, this is a really interesting one because you have a very unique customer set. What does the profile of somebody that you, now your average person goes and fills out a form for a free ebook, and then you ran off with an SDR, right?
Yeah. Well, we’re not doing TikTok ads. Not yet, anyways.
So our customers are, there are different ways to top up or categorize our customers. Our customers are very educated people who are very passionate, motivated, and technical, which means they’re not really interested in fluff, in marketing design. And they really want to know what’s underneath in the details and the architecture of our system. We have to provide that we have to be technically proficient in our software to explain it to our customers. And so that is something that is not unique to our industry, but it’s part of what our industry is, right? Made of technical engineers who are running, who have a lot of say in what technologies get implemented on their missions.
Pass that, most of our people are not software engineers, too. Most of our customers are electrical or mechanical engineers or system engineers. They’re not software engineers. We have to make sure we’re designing Major Tom in a way that is accessible to non software engineers. Right.
So we have APIs. We have some customizations you can do with our system. We have to make sure that we’re building that so that it’s accessible by someone who doesn’t know how to code, which is great, which is just acknowledgement of who our customers are, right. It’s not unusual to go to a space company and they not have a software engineer on staff. That’s changing, it’s becoming more prevalent in the industry that we have software engineers on staff, but it’s not a guarantee. And so we have to build Major Tom in that way.
From a different angle, our customers really, what we’re doing right now from a mission perspective, is we’re really going after two buckets. The first one is new companies who are wanting to launch lots of satellites to do some sort of business application. Right. Or even if it’s not, even if it’s a government program, just wants to build lots of satellites, wants to go quickly, wants to scale, wants to be able to update and manipulate and configure and integrate it into their system. Right.
So they don’t have an architecture for their ground segment to really establish it. So that’s where we really fit in really well and start building out the architecture around Major Tom’s APIs. The other segment is actually the exact opposite. It’s those who are running long term missions in space who are wanting to lower their costs. Right.
It’s gotten too expensive to have this server farm or whatever over here. It’s got too expensive to maintain this 2015 year old software application that nobody else works anymore. And so there’s a whole lot of risk that it goes down or there’s some sort of issue. And then obviously, COVID is changing the mindset of where we need to do work. A lot of these older programs, you had to be in that office only. And then now, that is changing. And so Major Tom really can insert itself in there.
So we are lowering the cost by moving it to a cloud architecture, pay as you go type thing. They don’t have to deal with the infrastructure from a hardware standard. We host it all. And then it gives you that flexibility of remote access to your spacecraft. And so that’s another where we’re going and using the flexibility how we design the back end, we can really insert ourselves into preexisting infrastructure, as opposed to building a new one around us. We can be flexible enough to integrate. Those are the two big Buckets new ventures and those who are actually the exact opposite.
Older ventures who are trying to be more economically driven, right. Or reducing the risk because they have a single point of failure.
Yes. In the world of tech, I often, we use the phrase legacy, and I always joke, you call it legacy, I call it production. Like, this is stuff that can’t go away. But like you said, wrapped around a traditional architecture littered with single points of failure. And they’ve basically built it so it can be asynchronous, we’ve got opportunities. And then you build the right abstraction in front of it. And this is what’s neat. Now, when we talk about abstractions and cloud as an architecture, it’s fantastic. Because now we can basically trust that you are going to do more than just fire all your services in the US-East-1 on AWS.
Like most people do, whenever people say to me like, yeah, we’re using the cloud for resiliency as to how many regions are using. Sorry, what? Oh, no. When Route 53 goes away, the whole kit goes down. We see these weird little things like, I don’t understand what just happened. All of my caching just went away. All these sites went down around the world. Like, what happened? Somebody is just like they typed in a bad command on some software update. So you’ve got the ability that you can architect for scale resiliency versus the traditional architecture people that they should be focusing on their outcomes, their business, what they want to do with their hardware.
But now they can say, hey, Tyler has a lot of customers that care about this. So if Tyler gets it wrong, a lot of people get angry versus if I get it wrong, I’m just the only one that’s at fault.
Yeah. So from our world, we have to take it one step further, considering those. So we still are governed under export control. So we live in an evolving policies place like everything else. We’re governed under the Commerce Department on export control, which is what it is. We’re also under certain situations covered under the State Department, under the ITAR regulations about arms traffic. And that’s a whole different level of scrutiny and consequences. To be frank with you, and so we do run an ITAR secure clouds, which does, we use Microsoft right now that we’ve built on top of the Azure government cloud.
We also live in the public cloud. We also can and have done air gap. Now that is a little bit. And the reason is because I described this push and pull in the industry, and I have to live in this industry. And so while I’m pushing the industry forward with cloud adoption and using best practices and moving this way, there are still missions that deem Major Tom from just a pure feature standpoint, but need and have to have it in a military encrypted. Sorry, air gap environment.
And so we do deploy in those environments. It’s not something we particularly like doing. And you are losing some of the benefits of what we built, but our feature set for the satellite operators in particular, for the actual day to day operations, not just the architecture, but the actual features are valuable enough on their own, and they’re willing to use it without the cloud infrastructure. So we run in lots of environments for better or for worse. We do have non US customers who prefer to have their stuff, not in the US.
They don’t want the data in the US. So we have to do EU deployments that works better for us because the data is not actually coming in and then back out of the United States export control. Where things live and what environments and deployments, it’s a constant challenge that we have with trying to make sure that we’re on the same deployments, that we’re all being upgraded the same time, that we’re all maintaining it. And yeah, that’s one of the challenges that we face kind of on a regular basis.
I’ll say it’s the economies of scale or one thing, and also the economy of innovation at scale. Right.
So like every organization that would come to you, they would have to do this from ground up.
That’s right.
You have a vested interest in becoming particularly good at doing stuff at scale versus they’re just trying to solve a specific problem and then having to build architecturally around the infrastructure to support that problem. You are truly this sort of the cloud computing of mission control, because you can say, you don’t need to care about where it is. Obviously, we do. And you have to be transparent about that. But they don’t have to run it. They don’t have to have this network operations center with 25 TVs and people up 24/7 watching screens and listening to bleeps and boops and wondering what’s going wrong.
Yeah, that’s right. Some of our customers still choose to have those 25 TVs and everything going on. They like it, but they also want the benefit of what we’re bringing. So, yeah, we’ve talked about the kind of architecture into the actual application itself. We rely heavily on automating a lot of these process so that we don’t have to have person sitting in a monitor 24/7 because satellites don’t sleep, they don’t take holidays. They’re always constantly collecting and transmitting data down to Earth, and there has to be a system in place to collect that, right?
So Major Tom can fly. It can be your autopilot, right. For these satellites where you used to have to have teams 24/7 operations, we can now reduce that human intervention at cost from both from the employees and from the individual. Nobody wants to be up at 02:00 a.m. flying a satellite. Right.
That’s not a sustainable model. So that’s really where we’re moving into the application side, giving these tools and automation, both from internally in Major Tom, but also giving you the APIs to automate your own workflows for operations. And so that’s I think that’s really another angle that we’re coming at this problem at.
It’s funny that because you’ve been very focused on this is where you run. This is where you operate. There’s no Edge in any of the nomenclature around what you’re doing, because you are truly sort of the cloud, like Mission Control is the cloud for the Edge payloads, the actual workloads that are physically swimming around in orbit. But it’s funny that everybody is kind of like, I call it the edification. Like, it’s really just everything and anything new. And like, these glasses, they’re Edge glasses.
Now everybody is just, like, latching onto it. First of all, thank you for not just jamming Edge all over your website to try and be exciting to the Edge world, not to detract from them. All of my amazing friends who are into the Edge.
Of course.
Where do you see that sort of next layer of compute coming? And is it something that you’re interested in as a company?
Yeah. So we have thoughts around this and trying to understand what our role is in this wave that’s happening. Right. I think one way that we’re looking at it is as we continue to develop Major Tom and we continue to build out new capabilities, being able to optimize this network, right. For communication that we’ve talked about. At a higher level, I think one thing we’re trying to do, which I don’t know if this completely answers your question, but fine, is erase the differences between space and ground. Right.
It’s all just one network. It doesn’t matter if you’re satellite or if you have a server down here or you have an IoT node in the Sahara. It’s all just a network in erasing that there has to be some sort of division from a network perspective. And so we’re trying to move the reliability and the communication of space to where we have on the ground so that we can run Edge processes anywhere, whether it’s on the Earth or on the ground, be able to shift these things around, manage this from this perspective.
There’s also a lot of push right now for satellites to become smarter that they’re not just simple machines, effectively. Right.
Really complicated, simple machines. Right. We want it to be intelligent. We want them to make decisions on their own and not be dictated from the ground. Right.
That’s a movement that’s happening. So getting the compute power on the spacecraft to allow it to do the computation, apply the AI or machine learning in real time at the data source, and then be able to make decisions and execute from that without ground interference. So there’s really two trains of thoughts on that, we’ve looked at because of our experience in flight software. We know how to go play in the satellite world, right. We know how to go put stuff on orbit. And there’s an element of that long term that has potential there.
If you control the satellite software and the ground software, it’s a really powerful ecosystem that we’re building. So using containers, we can really push the security profile, the new application on the spacecraft, and allow Major Tom to manage that system. So we’re looking at where we fit into this whole thing. It’s still new. We have different restraints with compute power on orbit with just actual energy. Right.
And so these are constant fighting, and then the heat that they create and getting distance. There are a lot more complications. So it’s not as fast evolving as it is on Earth, but it is there. You’re definitely going to see space companies with Edge computing all over their websites. We’re not one of them. But there are those companies. And so we’re working with our customers to understand their needs, what they’re doing so that we can be a part of their ecosystem moving forward.
Well, the irony is that you effectively, you’re like Edge hipsters. You were there before it was cool, like Kubos, in effect, is the Edge OS, right? Like you could almost say, you’re tagging to be, we’ve been to the edge and back, right. It’s like because you realize the problem that you could have the most impact in solving was that mission control. Right. But you’ve understood the other side. You understood the payload, you understood the Edge requirement, and that allows you to be so focused and very pragmatic and fanatical on solving this problem with Major Tom.
So at down the road when someone says, hey, we want to take this a little bit further and we want to move it to another location. You do air gap, you do all these things. You’ve had to think that stuff out and execute on it. It’s pretty amazing that the company could go in interesting places, for sure.
Yeah. We have the technology and the experience to go a lot of different ways right now. In the short term, we’re all steam ahead on Major Tom. Right.
Building this product to really manage the ground infrastructure for your spacecraft operations. This is where we are, where we go in the future. We have a lot of different visions that we want to see come to reality. And it’s pretty exciting that what we can do. Software is really going to give new life to these missions to this hardware. Once you launch the hardware, that’s what it is. With software, we can constantly when we build that infrastructure and do it in a safe way. We can give new life and new missions to old hardware.
And I think that’s going to change things. There’s a case we made that they’re just new server farms in space. Right.
Amazon is just going to move all there. And you don’t care if it’s on Earth or it’s in space as long as we can increase that communication to make the latency go away. But anyway, there’s complicated problems, big problems at stall here, and where Major Tom fits in the future. We’re focused on communication, communication bandwidth optimization. That’s always going to be a huge problem with FCC frequency allocations moving forward. People experimenting with laser communications. This satellite-to-satellite communications is now a thing that’s happening. And so I personally believe that the communication bottleneck that’s going to be happening here, that we’re already filling the squeeze up is a major place that we want to plant our flag, that we’re part of this solution.
We’re part of the optimizing and really the communication channels of this network.
Most people would just even think about that, and they would get out of their business. You’ve chosen some hard problems to solve. And I want to say hard or difficult or challenging, but like, making it commercially viable, this is a pretty incredible thing that you and the team have taken on. What made you think this is a problem I need to solve. And I think we can do it.
Yeah. So KuBOS is how we got in the industry. My partner really had the idea for the flight software because he built satellites, and he was trying to integrate these different subsystems that were built by different manufacturers to talk to each other, and they weren’t standardized across any sort of platform. He had to build it all from scratch. Right.
There’s a better way we could build a better system that already is integrated with the system or make it easier to integrate these systems. So KuBOS came from when we spent time in the industry understanding the customers and our partners in this industry realized there was a huge need for how they were doing operations. There was a need for the scalability for new practices, new architectures, new development speeds that we weren’t seeing. And so we saw an opportunity to build Major Tom.
We had the networks. We had the relationships to present this product quickly to people. And so we did. And we’ve had success doing that so far. I didn’t come from the space industry, and so I had to really dive in and learn it, kind of from an outsider’s perspective and operations. You have three major phases of a spacecraft life. Right. You have the development phase where you’re building it, design and building the spacecraft, testing the spacecraft. And you have launch. That’s a big moment of itself. And then you have operations.
Out of the three, the longest time period is operations. Right.
But which one is more costly? What’s the most expensive bucket? And so it used to be development and launch as the most expensive bucket. So the industry created CubeSats, they created, also, Moore’s Law created cheaper components and faster components. So we lower the cost of development significantly. Obviously, SpaceX has come in and focused on launch problem. Lower that. But other companies like Rocket Lab have come in and done this to lower the cost of launch and the reliability and the speed of launch cadences. But no ones touched operations, operations of this long term expensive bucket.
And now is disproportionately more time and money than the other two buckets. So that’s really what we’re trying to solve. We do have tools for development and testing. But we’re really looking at lowering that so that if we lower all the cost of the entire life cycle of the spacecraft, then we will make space more accessible. And while that’s kind of a token thing right now that people want to democratize space, it’s kind of almost becoming cliche. Say, the truth is, if we can get the price down, right, this is going to increase development if we use skill sets that already exist in the world.
Like software engineering is a huge skill set that has changed our world completely, and we apply it to space, and we give them more accessibility to these skill sets, see what else we can do. There are more software engineers entering space, more software engineers building software or building software companies in space. So it’s just great. Anyway.
It’s a beautiful empowering loop. Right. And if you don’t mind, we got a few minutes left. I want to touch on TechMill and the ecosystem and your participation because, like you said, you weren’t born in the space race, but you’re in it now as an entrepreneur, what are the ways that you see excitement in that startup community and where we can give back?
Yeah. So TechMill started before Kubos. It was a nonprofit in the town in Texas where I was living. It was a bunch of technology and entrepreneur enthusiasts got together and decided we need to create some sort of organization nonprofit to help other entrepreneurs give at least a community feel to us. So we did events. It was actually the first co-working in our town, started a coffee shop. And we moved to an actual co-working space, and it spun off and done its own thing. That’s actually where I met my partner who started Kubos with.
He was the President of the organization. I was the Treasurer, and we started working. That’s how we met. That’s how we started working together. Kubos was born out of TechMill to some degree. And so it’s a nonprofit that’s still existing. They do like developer evangelist, education community, building a community of people who are interested in tech, who are interested in startups. When Kubos was taking off, when gaining traction, I stepped down from the board of TechMill so I could focus on Kubos and I’m now no longer in Texas.
I’ve actually moved to Portland, Oregon, at this point. So TechMill is doing great. But I don’t have any involvement in it and haven’t in a couple of years.
But it is amazing if you think of communities of purpose and there are so many out there, it is a beautiful thing. Ultimately, you are exactly the success path that any community of purpose should have, is that you shouldn’t be running it for 30 years like a lifelong member. If you can contribute and be a part of it is one thing. But you ultimately create something. You sort of parachute out of it into a new thing and prove that the value was there. And then somebody else says, hey, check it out. Tyler used to be our guy. Now that gives them something to aspire for, right?
Yeah. TechMill was a really interesting point in my life. I was coming out of another company that I just shut down. Wasn’t technology driven. It was a service based company, and I was looking to get into tech. It wasn’t space for today. I was looking to get into tech, and I needed new networks, and I needed new people to meet than what I had been exposed to. And so, TechMill, I went to just a community event being put on about people just wanting to share big ideas, right?
Don’t matter the context. I went there and they talked about creating this conference for technology people, for software engineers. And they were looking for volunteers to help run a conference. And I volunteered. So I think that’s a really great line in my life, is that I’m not afraid to do things I don’t know how to do. I didn’t know how to run a conference, but I jumped in anyway, that led me to start a nonprofit, which I didn’t know how to run. And it led me to meet Marshall to build a space company that I didn’t know anything about space.
It’s just a continuation. But you’re right. So TechMill has thrived and has done a lot of great things and support a lot of different startups. The company Kubos being one of them. So we have a special place in our heart for TechMill, but that is really what it’s supposed to do, incubate a little bit, give you some resources and connections and then kick you out. So that’s what we did. I did it with myself. And so that has worked out so far.
Yeah. And those things right there. And I think for folks that are listening, too. It’s just a reminder that there are great communities of purpose like that, that you can go out and whatever it is, they’re out there. And it’s very helpful, at least just to find people of the birds of a feather sort of opportunity, and it gives you a chance to share your ideas, to let them out with people. And if nothing, you just meet amazing people. Obviously, the in person thing has the lack of in person opportunity has drastically changed how we develop and nurture these communities, because it’s a lot harder.
Like we’re tired of staring at bloody Zoom screens and everything all day long. The last thing you want to do is like, hey, I spent all day on Zoom meetings. I’m going to go to a three hour evening Zoom session with people. I hope that we get to the other side of this all soon, and we can get back to those things. And you’ll see a lot of interesting stuff come out.
Yeah, I agree with you. It’s been a challenge, but yeah.
So I guess for folks that want to find out more and want to get connected to you. Tyler, obviously, we’ll have links to. First of all, there’s so much that’s going on, and I didn’t even talk about the super launch sequence you’ve had. August was a huge month for you. You’ve got customers that are doing incredible stuff. I feel bad that I didn’t open with that because I was excited on your behalf for all of the stuff that you were involved in, and that’s really cool. But for folks that want to get connected, what’s the best way to do that?
Yeah. Our website is www.kubos, K-U-B-O-S, .com. So that’s a great place. We also have a podcast there that you can listen to. We’re interviewing other, our customers or our employees and giving you an insight into kind of pushing the cloud adoption in our industry. Yeah, that’s great. I’m on Twitter if that’s a thing, but I don’t talk a lot, but I’m there. So. Yeah, our website is the best place to get a hold of us.
And students as well. Right. There’s a great opportunity. You’ve got the academic access path. There’s different ways that people can get involved, which is pretty cool. Thank you for doing all that you do.
Yeah. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Giving me the opportunity to speak to your audience and share my story and what Kubos is doing. I think we’re really in an interesting place right now.
Onward and upward, it’s going to be. I’m excited to see the future where you got a lot of good stuff in it. Thanks very much, Tyler.
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Rob Hirschfeld is CEO and co-founder of RackN, leaders in physical and hybrid DevOps software. He has been in the cloud and infrastructure space for nearly 15 years
This is a special episode with Rob returning as the guest for his 4th podcast and for the commemorative 200th episode! We discuss how to unlock the power of multi-cloud automation, the challenge of human ops, and how we are finally reaching an “overnight success” of true bare-metal provisioning and multi-cloud automation and operations.
Wow, that’s right. 200 episodes. You are listening to the 200th episode of the DiscoPosse Podcast. My name is Eric Wright. I’m your host and holy moly. This is really kind of crazy and awesome. I really just want to say a big, huge thank you to all of you who’ve listened and to all the amazing folks who make this podcast happen, including the amazing friends over at Veeam Software. So give a shout out to them and drop a visit. Go to vee.am/DiscoPosse. They’ve been fantastic supporters of me, my whole community of creators here.
So thank you to the Veeam team again, vee.am/DiscoPosse. Not just because they’re great. They actually have the best data protection platforms in the entire universe. That’s my opinion. So go check it out. And on top of that, if you want to celebrate 200 amazing podcasts, you’re going to need to stay awake. How do you do that? You drink diabolical coffee. That is because it’s the most devilishly good coffee and we’ve got the most diabolically awesome swag, including really cool stuff, which is coming up for the holidays.
So get on in. Some really cool slick mugs their showing up there. So go to diabolicalcoffee.com. And one last amazing thing because not just your data needs to be protected, but your life, your data in transit. The best way to do that is to make sure you use the fine folks at ExpressVPN. I’ve been a fan of VPNs for a long time for a variety of things. First, functionally to protect your data in flight, in transit, wherever you go, because I travel a lot.
And on top of that, going one step further by making sure that you can do cool things like testing for different locations and locales and testing latency in your network when you’re doing web testing. I’m a big fan of doing that. So do that. Do that thing. Go to tryexpressvpn.com/DiscoPosse. Again, that’s .tryexpressvpn.com/DiscoPosse That’s it for the live reads for this one. And speaking of live reads, this is live and awesome. Well, it was live when I did it. I guess technically every recording is live when you do it.
But this is Rob Hirschfeld. Rob is a good friend. He’s also the founder of RackN, the inventor of Cloud. Oh, yeah. You’re going to hear about that story. So I think this is really worthwhile to jump on in. Thank you to the folks who do this thing and support this podcast. Make sure you share it. Click subscribe. Go to Rob’s site at RackN. Check out the 2030 Cloud podcast. Also fantastic. And with that, actually, the funny thing is it’s just the episode for yourself. There you go. Rob Hirschfeld on the DiscoPosse Podcast.
Hello, this is Rob Hirschfeld and you are listening to the DiscoPosse Podcast.
This is the fun part because I get to do the intro. You’ve actually done your voice for Binger before. I’ve been lucky enough, Rob. Now we’ve talked a few times on this and I wanted to have you on because this is super special for me. First of all, to thank you. You are one of the inspirations to why I do this. I kind of go back to sitting in Austin at OpenStack Summit and me with my crazy weird USB dual mic set up, just trying to put something together, and we got to first sort of meet and spend time there, actually at the summit.
And obviously we’ve run a lot of miles, both in the tech circuit and quite literally on the ground at these events. But this is 200th. I had you on for my 100th episode, and this is 200th episode. So that’s why it was perfect that we got a chance to put this together. So thank you for inspiring me both in business, in life. And of course, the podcast is the third piece of that. It’s been a wild ride.
You’ve been a valuable friend, and I’ve been enjoying. It’s fun, because with podcasting, you get to listen to people talk vicariously. And I love what you’ve been doing with the podcast and sort of where you take it like conversations you have.
I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time with you. But for folks that are new to you, let’s have you do a reintroduction and I’ll tell people go back and catch. I think we’re at, like, four podcasts we’ve actually record together on my side and a couple on your side here and there as well. But let’s give them the full meal deal on Rob Hirschfeld.
It’s interesting because I’m about to celebrate 20 years of inventing the Cloud. That’s one of the claims of fame. I sort of keep on the downlow, but Dave McCrory and I need to get out and tell people a little bit more about it. We started a company over 20 years ago now, where we were the first people doing virtualization in the data center at any reasonable scale, and we filed some patents on it that are about to be expire. We won’t have to worry, but we never made any money from them.
They got locked up by startups and then the Quack acquisitions and things like that. But yeah, so I’ve been doing the data center automation and virtualization business for a long, long time. So it’s very true to the theme of what it means to do virtualization and data center operations at scale. Like you said, I got really involved. I was at Dell and got really involved in OpenStack at the time when everybody was worried that VMware was going to take over the Cloud and Amazon was a nuisance, not necessarily the Juggernaut that it’s become.
And then, well, believe it or not, seven years ago, RackN is now seven years old. We left Dell with this sort of idea that OpenStack was going to have trouble because there weren’t good operating paths, which is sort of what we’ve seen play out. This was pre-Kubernetes, like, I was involved in Kubernetes early on, and actually, I saw the same thing with Kubernetes and was concerned about the operational patterns, too. And so the theme sort of for me, career wise, and then RackN specifically, is that companies aren’t running infrastructure well.
RackN set out to say, all right, how do we help companies run infrastructure better? We always had this idea that you’re not smart enough to run a data center is amazing marketing from Amazon’s perspective. What’s crazy to me is that so many people in our industry just go along with it. The HP’s and Dells turn around and be like, oh, well, I guess our customers are too stupid to use the gear that we sell them. And that’s always insulted me at this sort of foundational level.
Even the OpenStack stuff that we were doing always sort of got in the way of, like, oh, of course it’s going to be hard to operate. That sort of goes with the territory. And even with Kubernetes now, I was just listening to Brian Gracely with the Cloudcast, and he’s like, Well, Kubernetes is really hard and complex, and we accept that. And so it strikes me as a problem in our industry that we allow infrastructure to be so hard to operate. And we spend a lot of time talking about, like, needful complexity versus inherited complexity versus collaboration cost.
That’s, my bad. So we’re at a point now with RackN, sorry for the long intro, but we’re at a point with RackN, after seven years where we’re doing significant business, global scale operations, we’re breakeven profitable on the business, which is great for a startup and sort of seeing things working the right way. And now we actually have to tell people what we’re doing.
Yeah. You’ve got three more years and you’ll be an overnight success. The typical is the ten year mark where you’re suddenly like, ‘Why haven’t we seen this before? We’ve been here the whole time’. You should have seen us. We’ve been at every event, we’ve been contributing in code, we’ve been contributing in community. We’ve been contributing in our voice.
And there’s a perseverance that’s required to do this and a bootstrap on top of that. So that’s a big deal for people to do that.
It’s been crazy. I think some of it comes back to letting people catch up with your vision.
Yeah.
There’s definitely things that I’ve watched us do that make our vision as more accessible. But I’ve also watched people catch up to the vision and that’s, I think a lot of times with startups, if you’re having trouble communicating the idea, it could be that you’re wrong or it could be that you’re ahead, right? I mean, that’s what my virtualization experience was. We knew VMs were going to be essential for running a data center in 2000, but we spent so much time telling people hey, these VM things are real, and you should use them, and they’re better than hardware infrastructure for this purpose. That by the time we’d won that battle.
We lost the war from a startup perspective.
And talk about another bootstrapped example in the VM world, right? Literally vMware. I hadn’t even realized until not even that long ago that VMware was originally bootstrapped. They didn’t go get VC. I was like, what? But we look back on it now, and it’s kind of funny that just as a momentum that they have today, that everything started with sort of breaking the mold on human belief in technology viability and the trope of we can’t use virtual machines because we need hardware performance.
We can’t use the Cloud because we need data center protections and security and controls. We can’t use Kubernetes because our applications can’t live in any femoral environments. You show me a can’t. And I’ll show you a start up opportunity. It’s really wild to see this transition over to your point. The vision is there and the perseverance to maintain that vision and execute against it for long enough for the industry to finally understand that. Okay. Yeah. This is a thing, and it’s tough to find people. Erica Windisch is one of my favorite examples.
Erica has gotten to the 90-yard line of 100-yard dash, like five times in a row and then finally got to the finish line because for a variety of reasons, had never been able to see something to fruition. And she was able to do that with IOpipe and went to a successful exit. And I actually haven’t caught up with her in a long time I should. Again, because she’s just such a fantastic person.
Yeah. I remember this at OpenStack Paris fighting an early Docker and saying, this is a big deal. You need to pay attention. And the struggle of being able to explain why something is important. And this is to me, part of my journey from being a technologist to being a CEO is understanding why and how to explain the business value of what you’re doing. Because as technologist, we all want to be like, this is shiny and pretty, and it makes this easier. And that’s enough of a reason. But it’s not enough and we need to accept that just because something better or easier or the new thing, it’s not necessarily, what going, to actually become a success.
That’s always a challenge for us. It’s taken us a long time to be better at expressing how much the complexity of what people are building is a actual problem. You run around in tech circles, and it’s like how things are so complex. I’m scared of the complexity. I’m worried about the complexity. I started doing this stuff about a year ago on Jevon’s Complexity paradox. You’re not familiar with Jevon’s paradox. It’s org technology thing that we need to understand better about when you make something easier or cheaper.
People use more of it. And so about a year ago, I was convinced that we have a complexity paradox going on where we’ve made it super easy to use cloud services or things like that. There’s no downside. There’s no apparent cost in that. But we’ve now made that hiding complexity has made it everything much more complex and complexity starts bubbling to the surface. And like the Amazon downtimes where one service fails and the Cascades to their whole infrastructure, we see this pattern over and over and over again.
Or then you offload your services to a third party who uses the underlying services in Amazon. So you’re hosed anyways, right?
We are like one step away from Amazon going down because they had a third party that depended on a service that was in Microsoft that depended on a service that was in Google. And the Google service failed because the time got out of sync or the certificate. The certificate wasn’t updated when it was supposed to be updated.
Certificate. That’ll be what takes us all down. It won’t be DNS. It’ll be some goofball who didn’t set his calendar to renew an SSL Cert.
We can actually predict this with 100% certainty. It’s going to be an SSL Cert that expires. That depends on a DNS entry where the person no longer has control of the DNS, do the record that’s necessary to sort of create and renew the certificate. And so that’s going to be this cascading failure. But it’s totally conceivable that the Clouds actually have interdependencies on each other that they don’t fully don’t anticipate. And that should scare everybody. The challenges that being scared of the complexity of the problem and understanding the actual cost of that complexity and why somebody would, from a business perspective, pay money.
But it’s really more simple. It’s really take action on the problem. This is what it always comes back to. If you’ve identified a problem, how do you motivate somebody to take action to fix the problem or to change direction or things like that? Right. And that’s super hard. People are busy.
We need to come up with assisted menu heuristic. This is the ability to relate to them. That the problem that they’re creating by adding with a DIY solution is actually greater than the value. And ROI on investing in, like, technical debt is just such a throw away phrase that we attach to something. But it gives us a free pass to ignore what’s actually happening and identify it. And it’s sad because you and I talk all the time about this stuff and we see it in real environments, day in, day out where you just celebrate the heroics of complexity.
And some of it. I’m starting to think about terms like complexity budget. So, you know, I do this. We actually have 2 hours a week where we have people come together and talk about DevOps or the future. So this Cloud 2030 discussion group that we have that I started, like as a pandemic hallway track, and we’ve been going over a year, and then we turn them into podcast so people can listen to them. But we.
Sorry, my dog is, hold on.
Let’s talk about that after. But like the fact that what 2030 Cloud is now versus how it began, that’s actually quite an interesting path you’ve taken.
It’s stunning because we have a dedicated core. And then people come in as they want to talk about topics, and we identify topics. And what’s amazing is when you get a group of people talking about the future and infrastructure. Also week to week to week. These themes emerge out of those discussions that are just stunning. Right. So we talk about complexity or coupling or the legal ramifications of jurisdictional changes that could impact how technology is formed. The threads here are crazy. And there are some things that are super impossible to talk about.
Like we tried to talk about networking. Networking always double clicks down into infrastructure or persons or technology or jurisdictions like security is the same way. It’s super hard to sink into a simple security problem. And then the complexity comes back, comes in over and over and over again. And this idea of having a complexity, budget and understanding what you’re doing. The point that you were making about the sysadmins and the technical debt, though, is that a lot of this is organizational bias towards Siloed behavior, and it’s actually not just the organizations.
It’s actually the tools play to that, because that’s how you sell into market. So we are so used to operational silos, and then to sell a tool or a platform or product into an operational silo. You build tools that work for operational silos. One of the things that RackN’s done that I didn’t even realize we were walking into this trap is that we built tools that crossed operational silos, right. Because our goal, our customers goal was end to end operations. And I see this in conferences all the time.
You get people, the CEO or whoever is in charge of the conference. The big speaker stands up and says, I must have an end to end single pane of glass, one, one ring solution. Right. And you know, the ISO flashes in the background, and everybody sort of watches and they’re like, yes, that’s what we want. And then they leave that session and they go talk about their siloed tools and how they’re not going to act, how the network team is the enemy, and we have to fix it without them.
And so we’ve created this interesting situation where it’s very clear that you want an end to end solution. You need zero touch operations for us. Somebody’s reeling a rack in to a data center. Right. We do this for banks a lot, and we’re software. So the banks are doing it. We’re just making it possible. But you reel a rack in to a server in country somewhere and they turn on that rack, and they want that event to turn into working productive equipment inside of an hour, and then they want it to be completely the same process that they use every data center.
Right. Or if they need to reset the data center because they’re worried about ransomware or something like that, they can push a button, you’ll get a coffee and then come back and have the system all set, which sounds simple. But to do that, you’re actually talking about crossing 15 bank, 15 or 20 different organizational silos to get all that stuff to work. Right. And it’s a super hard problem, not because you can’t do all those things. It’s a super hard problem because each silo resists integrating with the other silos. It’s one of things that made Cloud a big deal.
It’s like, oh, my developer can set up a network because the Amazon APIs have networking. My developer can set up a compute system. Yay. Doesn’t mean they’re doing it in ways the networking wanted.
Right. Yeah.
The thing that you think about from all those perspectives, though, is that we’ve incented the industry to build silo, silo, silo, silo and tools to do silos, and then we haven’t created the incentives to connect the dots. Right? I mean, DevOps conferences are full of people crying on each other’s shoulders about how misunderstood they are.
I’m sorry to be pejorative. I’m not trying to be pejorative about DevOps conferences, actually. The way it goes, it’s like we need to talk about the culture that would allow me to work with another team. And then they have say that, and then they go in the next room and they’re like, these are all the reasons why I can’t work with the other team.
Right. You tell them that you’re an ops-focused person, and I pulled this thread the other day, and it had the precise effect that I thought it would. I actually said that your GitHub heatmap is actually a meritocracy, right. Because I meant it in the way that I’m often presented by people all the time, that if I’m doing infrastructure as code, and I’m dabbling, that the moment that I go to a DevOps conference and pull this thread. Pull that. It’s not, again, not talking negatively on the DevOps commerce, but the audience there, the community that’s there, GitHub heatmap is sort of like a great vendor T shirt to them.
It’s a thing they wear proudly and a thing that they show off. And so when you get there and you don’t have that, you don’t necessarily have the skills to walk into the room that screams about inclusivity, and then you get shoved out the back because you didn’t write a Perl script, and you don’t know who somebody else was at one point in time. I feel that sort of battle, like Gartner at their recent event. They talk now about XOps, which was, I rarely see something that I find kind of cool about some of the Gartner stuff because they have to be careful and generic with a lot of things.
They’re talking about predicting ship building, which it’s a really tough thing to the level they’re working at. So they talk about XOps just like DevOps, AIOps, MLOps, ITOps, NetOps that each of these silo breaking methodologies has created its own silo, and we need a cross breaking silo create, like, we need an abstraction layer for the silos that have really been meant as abstraction layers to silos.
And this is actually a hat tip to Gartner because they’ve really been doing something that we think is a good description of this and thought Werks has done it too, but they call it infrastructure pipeline or continuous infrastructure automation pipelines. We consider them automation pipelines. They’re actually showing all of these things fitting together, and it’s different than value stream mapping, which is similar. It’s like I need all my teams to work together and understand how I generate value. It’s important, but they’re actually elevating it to say if all these silos they need to be connected in the pipeline like a CI/CD pipeline.
But for infrastructure. And we found that nomenclature incredibly helpful for this. The difference being that what we’ve been doing with RackN and Digital Rebar, our product, is we’ve actually built the infrastructure pipeline as a platform, whereas the.
There’s thunder going on in the background, you can probably see the lightning in the window.
You’re in the midst of a good Texas storm.
I got my UPS and I should be set, but definitely much needed rain.
But the idea here that I can run a workflow all the way across all these pieces as a platform is actually a critical thing. When Gartner shows that they’re like, and I’ve got 20 different tools I have to use to connect all these dots together. And the lift on that organization is super high, and the complexity that you create is super high. So we’re excited to see a name for it. The infrastructure pipelines concept, which people seem to sort of get intuitively.
Like, okay, I got CI/CD pipelines for code. They don’t really work that well for infrastructure. We can talk about get ups and how that’s sort of this very narrow band of things, but it doesn’t really work for infrastructure. So I need a pipelining system that connects all these tools I’ve got for infrastructure.
It’s like Jenkins for your hardware. When you can give it a name and a relative example. I’ve totally stolen your infrastructure pipelines. When I talk about stuff through the stuff my team is doing at work because we’ve got the app pipeline, which people are totally they get like, it makes sense. There’s both application and infrastructure pipelines, and when it comes to doing things around decision automation and infrastructure automation, that’s where we’re seeing the more of it come into play, which is originally it was like, just do the thing like the hypervisor manager will be the layer that people work with, and so we’ll attack it there.
But we’re finding more and more is that no, they’re using some kind of a pipeline to manage that abstraction layer, and they’ve moved away and they realized the true control plane is the human control plane, which lives in pipeline, and pipeline is manifest it’s physical human run books that we’ve played out for all this time, and now we can actually relate it into product. And this is why I’m on team RackN. I’ve been for a long time on this.
Thank you. It’s interesting to us, and it’s useful to bring up the human run book piece of this because we do want this end to end component. And one of the things about the pipelines for us, because we’re a product company. So us building a platform that gave somebody a pipeline would be a pat on the back, but it’s not our objective. And actually, this is worth explaining. What we try to do is we want the pipelines we build to be reusable and standard. And I watched this, and this goes back to RackN formation history. We used to do in time with Sheff, switched over to Ansible. Right.
And all those tools are great, really good, actually, but they aren’t designed for reuse. What we see in the industry is and Terraform has the same thing in spades. It’s really a challenge. We see people using the tool, but in similar ways, but not with shareable components. Like you get a Terraform provider, but when people build like a plan to talk to a piece of infrastructure, those plans are not typically reusable. They’re not decomposable. Right. So you might have three teams using the Terraform to interface the same Cloud, but doing it in different ways and nobody can audit it, nobody can check it.
It becomes really a problem. And that’s where the pipelines breakdown. You can’t build a pipeline easily. If the things that you’re building the pipeline on top of don’t have a degree of standardized interconnect between them.
This is the one thing just stick there to pull on the Terraform piece, like even in their own docks, they’re very clear to tell you this is a bad idea. If you are doing data interplay between external systems, it’s not going to go well. You’re creating rigidity and things can change, and then your run book will no longer be valid. I respected that they put it in there, but like any good stuff, you put in a documentation, it’ll never be read, and people are still going to try and work on it.
And you and I have talked about this before, right? The pattern in Terraform is it is a single source of truth and Terraform easy to pick on in this case. They designed a tool that has a single source of truth embedded in it that assumes it can actually control the environment, which is handy if you have to build an environment. But infrastructure changes outside of before and after your tool runs, and even in between the runs of your tool, the infrastructure changes. The idea that the state is controlled by Terraform is a failure at the pipeline level because pipelines are part of a flow, and so things happen before your tool operates. Things happen after your tool operates.
And so in building a pipeline, you have to have this idea of an incremental state and your state has to be adaptable. So if you’re messing with the infrastructure, you have to expect that something might change outside and you can take that information in and say, oh, look, I just learned this, and there’s a ton of cases, especially in configuration where you like you build a cluster, and the keys for that cluster aren’t known until the cluster is built, right?
You might get a token or security or generate a certificate. That’s what makes Kubernetes so hard to install. It’s not Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a simple go binary that could run as System D with ten line install command. But what makes Kubernetes hard, it’s the fact that you have to generate services for every if you do it right for every service that interacts with it, and then distributing the TLS infrastructure is actually what made the whole Kubernetes the hard way was because of the TLS infrastructure you had to build, not because of the binaries.
The binaries are the least of your concerns.
Yeah, communication between nodes is like the simplest possible thing. The scheduler out of the box does what it’s supposed to do. It’s actually creating a proper, secured, and operational infrastructure. That’s resilience, too. Right.
That was the one thing I’m probably the only person who talks about Nomad who doesn’t have a hashicorp.com email address, and I’ve even got two Pluralsight courses on it, which are lightly attended just because it’s still early days with a lot of that stuff. But I’m banking that there’s more and more people are going to dig. I like that it has stuff that solves a lot of these problems. However, it just moves the problem goalpost a little bit to a different area.
At the end of the day for something like that, your development team or whatever is going to use a tool that should abstract out how the containers are operated. And so we see this, like when we use Terraform for our pipelines to do cloud provision because people are used to it. The cloud interfaces are actually pretty good, even though they’re heterogeneous. We deal with heterogeneous stuff pretty well because that’s what infrastructure is, but at the same time when we do it, we designed it in a way that doesn’t require Terraform to be the interface.
So if somebody says, oh, wait, I don’t want to use Terraform anymore, or HashiCorp becomes hostile. And Terraform isn’t a good utility. We could switch because at the end of the day, not whether you want to use Terraform or not, just like, Nomad versus Kubernetes. It’s not whether nobody cares, as long as your containers running and schedulable. So the idea is you want to break it back into what that unit of work needs to be done at that phase in the pipeline. And then you can start substituting, which is exactly what CI/CD pipelines do.
It’s like. Yeah. Look, I started with code. I needed to deploy it, whatever you got. And then over time, you keep adding new things into the middle of the pipeline or you switch tools and you’re like, oh, here’s a better security scanner. I’m going to swap it. And nobody. Pipeline keeps going just you swapped out a segment that does the job better. And that abstraction becomes a really useful thing to building all these systems. You have to have that connective tissue. You have to have a way to move state across a pipeline.
It’s been fascinating for us. Yeah.
The thing that I really want to pull out of this is you mentioned it. HashiCorp had to be example, right. What if HashiCorps becomes hostile? And we always have this thing like, even Kubernetes. People are like, oh, there’s such a vast group of people worldwide who are supporting Kubernetes. How can they go sideways? One word, Docker, right. To the point now where we’re questioning whether it’s even viable to maintain now that Docker desktop is licensed and it is entirely possible. Look, Mirantis was a good example, like the largest ever funding round in open source history, $100 million.
And I have not actually heard Mirantis mentioned, except in historical reference for quite a while. They’re doing stuff now. They were the Kubernetes company, and they are originally the OpenStack company. They’ve had to pivot and adjust, and the world has not necessarily been friendly for them. As a result, it’s tough. So Docker went through the same thing when you wrap a business around an open source product. And then there’s a divergence of belief systems in where it goes. We see now played out now and now they have to make it commercially viable.
And so all of a sudden, we have to unattach, like, this is the AWS risk factor of in Open. So Kubernetes, no matter how large it is, I have to think about what’s the risk pattern. This is sort of the lock in myth in a way, but as a methodology I need to think about preparedness.
If 2020 hasn’t taught us anything about supply chains, then you’re not paying attention, right. We have learned about physical supply chains. We’ve learned about going back to solar winds, about software and virtual supply chains. These are absolutely critical things that companies should be considering in how they look at building their software. And innovation is part of that supply chain. One of the things that we talk about with a cost of complexity is that when you build systems that are very complex, they end up being tightly coupled or having unseen coupling.
And that coupling actually makes it harder to innovate. Right. We just liberally talked about CI/CD pipeline, where you swap out something that works better. I could easily see, actually, it’s very pragmatic. So if you are, I’ll stick in Terraform, but you use us to provision with Terraform. We build a template, you like our templates or use whatever Terraform. But you could come back and say, you know what? I’m not using the provider that you’re using. The version I have is further back because it hasn’t been tested.
There’s a new feature that I have to use in a Cloud that isn’t exposed in the provider yet because they lag. And so it is essential that your automation right, for us, the pipeline has an extension point that says, oh, wait a second. If I need to make a call to an Amazon API or a Cloud API or another tool that’s not factored in. I can add that into my pipelines without breaking other things. Right. And it’s subtle, but it’s so important. This took us a long time to realize and longer to get right is that even though I’m using a completely standard process, all of our cloud interfaces use the exact same pipeline, but all of them have extension points.
I actually just gave this talk in ADDO, and I wish I had more time to show it, but each cloud has its own layer of, oh, these are the things that I have to do to service that Cloud through Terraform. Same actions that I run in Terraform. But the way you do the work not just plan differences. Like for Linode, you have to open a firewall port for Google Cloud, and it doesn’t work. Right. So you have to SSH and Ansible to join the machine.
Each one has some wrinkle, and you can easily imagine my company makes this additional call in Amazon that isn’t in a Terraform plan, or I can’t put in a plan. The sequencing is wrong. And so you’re like, how do I add in my unique wrinkle into that work? Normally you would fork it, you would have your own version of it, or you’ve read a Bash script. What we worked out with the pipelines that has been game changing for us is that there are extension points and how pipelines are built.
It allows you to infrastructure as code wise, extend the pipeline. And then from that perspective, have a very narrowly defined, oh, here is where I have to open up network ports in Linode because they don’t have a firewall in place like Amazon does. Same inputs, different actions or slightly different paths. But I can go back and see exactly how it was different than the standard path. And then we do that, like for Linux installs or VMware installs, that pattern of standard with known extensions plays out in incredible ways.
This is about protecting innovation.
Yeah. When it comes to drift management, and this is the other thing that we have to help them. Right? There’s provisioning. So stuff that’s particularly good at provisioning, and there’s stuff that’s particularly good at continuous configuration management and never the twain shall meet. This is part of the problem that we bump into. Now, where does drift management come into play now, in how you’re approaching this problem.
Drift management is tricky, and there’s a couple of ways that you can slice it. Are you thinking that the system is drifting out under the configuration, or are you thinking the actual?
First is the infrastructure itself moves with the right level of abstraction, the right level of change that can occur. I used to bump into this with just Terraform, like just a simple Cloud, a persistent Cloud workload, and all of a sudden for no real, particularly good reason. 22 days into me running my infrastructure, it gets reprovisioned because there is some drift, and Terraform sees it and says no, and it responds to my workload because it saw underlying drift in AWS, but I’m like, I wouldn’t even have noticed the workload was exactly the same.
But somewhere a host, an identifier, something changed. That was enough of a drift that it triggered a Terraform.
It could actually be a change in the provider that you’re using. One of the reasons now that you can lock the provider, so you don’t get an updated provider that then interprets a value in a different way. The way we deal with that is that our state information is designed to be incrementally, extended, and incrementally updated in very practical terms, like we embrace Patch as an API, as opposed to put, which means that we expect people to make changes to individual parameters or individual values in objects rather than expecting somebody to replace the whole value.
Anybody making changes to a Terraform state file, you’re like they’re doing it with tweezers, and they know they’re doing something dangerous and crazy, right? It’s a bomb defusal. Sometimes you have to do it, but you’re going to wear as much pattern as you can. And so for us, we know state changes all the time. So from a drift perspective, we work to item potency and not doing bad things and telling you, hey, this value isn’t what I expected. I’m going to stop and not try to fix it.
Rule number one with infrastructure, stop if something isn’t what you expect, don’t just keep going.
Works the same with fiber cables when you’re racking a server. If you feel resistance when you’re shoving the server back into the rack, you should probably stop and think about why there’s resistance.
We have this fight all the time, and actually we ended up adding retries in as a programmable option, which is nice, so I can be like, hey, this thing always fails. One retry and it fixes it. But by default, we don’t do retries, because if something didn’t go the way you planned then it’s wrong. Stop figure out what happened and fix it. And sometimes people are like, I don’t like that. We’re like, look, it’s much better to realize that it wasn’t what you expected. Fix it.
One further on that one, if you don’t mind Rob, the timeouts is also one of the biggest areas of issues I’ve seen with people that, just, like, manually blow out timeouts into their, Terraform is a great example. I’ll run exactly the same build. I like fully automated an EKS cluster. And everybody said, Why would you do that? It’s the simplest thing. Just use Cloud formation. Assume that I’m going to do it on Azure too with AKS. So I want to have a separate way. So I did it whether I’m self annihilating my belief in the world by doing this stuff all the time, but I do it and I build it and it runs.
It takes like 17 minutes to have a complete EKS cluster. Fantastic. And then I go on a webinar and I go to do it. It takes 42 minutes, because just some weirdness inside Amazon takes longer. And then if one thing flips beyond five minutes or ten minutes or whatever the default timeout is in Terraform, the whole thing just fails. And now I can’t just pick it up where I was. I have to basically unwind it. But now there’s timeouts on the unwind because there’s this weird interdependencies.
So you end up with this weird sort of like ladder of dependencies. That time can change the ability for a dependency to exist or not exist. That’s the one that I’ve raw retry. But even within that, just the infrastructure could take longer for some unknown reason. Something won’t reply back in time, and then a perfectly working manifest will not work the next time.
Yeah. And it could be something that is not actually, it’s a dependency chain that you don’t actually have a real dependency on or something that was misconfigured that’s never going to recover. What we did with infrastructure pipelines is we saw patterns like that where you’re like, using a tool to do a whole bunch of stuff, and because the tool is biased towards single source of truth or very atomic actions, Ansible’s like this, you build these men’s playbooks and you run them, and then they either work or they don’t.
I’m wondering if it’s impossible. What we have done is go the opposite direction. So when we build a pipeline, it actually decomposes into very small units. And a lot of times we’ll leave units in and just say this is a no-op because we know that in a different circumstance, you might want that in and you can turn it on later, or you can just make sure that it doesn’t impact the type of infrastructure you’re working with. That could be a whole our conversation about how subtly and powerfully that standardization works, but what we do because we end up running each component in what you described as a pipeline is that the system would actually go in and say, oh, I’m running cluster with 100 things in it.
Yay, the cluster or even multiple clusters are going to have their own management thread that you can track and see. And it’s a pipeline that’s doing its work. But it’s coordinating actions on separate pipelines running on the different pieces of infrastructure you pulled in. And then that actually. And this is one of the big things that’s coming in the next release that actually pulls in this concept of resource brokers, where instead of the cluster running the plan, the cluster actually talks to a system that is responsible for providing resources in a generic way.
So that becomes a generic abstraction point. And then that is actually what runs Terraform. You’ve got this place where with what you’ve been doing, you’re like, running a Terraform plan, and then it has to go to Amazon and build a whole bunch of resource and do all this stuff. And if someone gets stuck, that plan now is you’re locked there. And then the state for that plan is all of your infrastructure and unteasing that becomes like, all right, I got to unwind it and try the whole thing again.
What we’ve been doing is actually decomposing that into all the units, and then letting each unit be its own pipeline. And then that means that you could actually say, oh, I’m building a cluster. And here’s all the resources I got spun up. That’s great. And now here’s all the downstream work I have to do. And if something breaks in that one task, you might actually be able to fix that one task, reassert it, and then continue. And then the other things waiting for that to happen would get triggered when they’re supposed to trigger, which sounds more complex.
This is why complexity is so hard to describe. Pulling us a little bit full circle. Complexity is not bad. Everybody’s like, oh, I have too much complexity. I have to get rid of my complexity. I’m going to move everything to Amazon and just use their tools. Or I’m going to only buy from this one vendor. I’m going to use Terraform for all the provisioning. The Terraform doesn’t do some types of provisioning very well. And so they end up looking at it. And so what we’ve done is we’ve stepped back from and we started as a bare-metal automation company.
Complexity is not avoidable in bare-metal. You can’t say, hey, I don’t think I like raid controllers anymore, you shouldn’t use them. But I’m just going to buy giant SSDs and be done with all that. But the idea here is that you need to manage complexity. So there’s times when you decompose stuff into small units of work, because once the unit is a small unit, it’s reusable and you can track it. And if something changes, your blast radius for that change is small so you decoupled the actions.
You might have more moving parts, but they’re easier to manage as a unit. And this is the frame that we’ve really been helping people see. It’s not about eliminating complexity, it’s about managing structures, code. Go ahead.
I’m saying you’re introducing us the problem that we fail to talk about that. I see, because I, maybe decided to spend way too much time in business continuity, design and stuff. So I have a very systems thinking approach to all, like, always thinking about dependencies and interdependencies and lifecycle, including duration. Right. So what you’re creating effectively is long running ephemeral infrastructure. It’s the idea that you could rip and replace. However, we also know the pattern of consumption is not to use the stuff like ephemeral, like seconds long containers.
We do not, despite the ability to do so design applications and infrastructure to be treated like a bunch of cattle that we gun down in the field, apparently, which is whatever the reference we want to choose. Right. The reality is that I’ve got containers, I’ve got VM, I’ve got hardware that has to live much longer than what was originally anticipated to the point where things inside it. We’re looking for clean, deprecation options. You are creating the ability to have that long running yet ephemeral pattern so that you can ultimately get the best of both worlds.
So that when the time does come to, there is some kind of an underlying adrift of deprecation that needs to occur that you can look at it from the pipeline perspective, which is the right abstraction. The human abstraction is to treat it as a pipeline, and then life cycle and duration become variables that you apply to that pipeline.
And that’s what’s been powerful for us. Once we started thinking about things as these pipeline segments, it took me some mental lift because our CTO, he’d be like, no, you’re not thinking about pipelines. And I’m like, what do you mean? I get it, I get it. We keep taking me down the path further and further. And it is about the human understanding of how the pipelines work and the intent. The pipelines have intent and what constitutes a pipeline. When we talk about a pipeline, it really is like, oh, I need to build a cluster.
Okay, great. That cluster is composed of pipelines that need to build a Kubernetes worker or Kubernetes leader. And then the cluster’s job is to then connect all those things together. And so you end up with an intent, and then the intent gets piece together out of other pieces. And then one of the things that’s fun is you actually end up with standard units in that process. So when you build the pipeline, you might have a pipeline. That the difference between the hardware and the virtual pipeline might be a whole bunch of stuff in the middle, but all the stuff at the end is the same, which is amazing.
So now you’re just like, okay, I got the standard, I’m just dropping it in and it’s going to work. And then that falls what we have been trying to solve for a long time, which is how do we stop reinventing the wheel every time we have to provision a server? Right?
Yeah.
For us, it matters because we want our customers to be able to repeat success across every one of our customers. It’s a big deal. Right now. We have a ton of VMware deployment stuff for banks, media, and hosting companies and telcos and stuff like that. So we’re doing a ton of this. But we’ve gotten to a point now where they’re all using the same pipeline. It doesn’t mean they’re using the same hardware or the same network or even the same version of VMware. All those things are extensible, but they’re using the same pipeline.
And so when VMware changes something or we improve something, that pipeline can be shipped to them as a new code unit. Their extensions are against known points, so they can reuse that. And we’re seeing the same thing coming up in the way we’re doing Terraform work and the way we’re doing Cloud interface. So for us, it’s a customer to customer thing. But instead of our customers, it’s a team to team thing or a data center to data center or a Cloud to Cloud fix.
So you can be like, wait a second. I’m going to build a pipeline and use that on Amazon. Right. And then you can say, well, I need to use that same pipeline on Google. We know where the deltas are, that reusability is really important. But then two teams can actually share the components that they can share. That’s the thinking that’s so hard in this, right. The tools are designed. We were talking about the Terraform ones. Terraform isn’t designed for people to share their plans. Even if you use Terraform Cloud or Terraform Enterprise, it’s managing the stuff better and letting a team work together.
But the idea of everybody in your company using the same plan, that’s where things get more interesting from our perspective.
You’ve actually created a pipeline marketplace. In effect, that innovation in one area allows you to feed it back and then share it with the rest of the community, which is where the bring us back to perseverance, the seven year and beyond period. Right. Your vision is being realized now because you had this. What you needed to do is get people to come along for the ride. And then the network effect sort of begins to come in. It’s a really difficult thing, like customer one through ten to get them to see that down the road.
And so there’s some stuff you don’t know, right? As you said.
This is a matter of laser focus because it’s been super hard from the start. My co founder and I wanted to build a software, not a consulting or service company. And because what we wanted to be able to do, what we heard really clearly is nobody feels like they’re improving their business by installing RAID in BIOS configuration and laying down operating systems. Like I said, this is something that the industry should just have working. It shouldn’t be a creative exercise at any company, and there’s no business value created by doing it in a creative way.
But that’s the way it’s been for the whole time. I’ve been in industry, and we could have taken our expertise in those areas because we know more about RAID-BIOS configuration and PXE booting servers than really, I’d stand up my team against anybody but selling those hours would have done no good. And we walked and made it harder for our journey as a company we walked away from. Hey, can you just build something for me in my data center so that I can do this better and we would come back and say, no, that’s not what we do.
We have a software platform and a product, and it does it this way. And if that will benefit you if you adopt it. And we had plenty of customers, there was $1 million account that we were basically like, We’re not going to patch your cobbler infrastructure for you. We can’t pull the plug on it. It runs 100,000 servers and we’ll help you migrate it. But we’re not going to fix it for you because fixing it would have entrenched you in this bad pattern. And, yeah, that was from a startup perspective, being true to we’re doing software that’s repeatable patterns that can become a marketplace and have shared what we usually talk about is curated content.
That’s the value, rather than going up with people in parachutes into your data center and fixing it so that your 20 year old infrastructure designs can live another five years.
Something Cloud.
For you only. Like this is what we saw this with the application development pattern that’s with the team at the Cloud Foundry, they said, let’s go in as a pattern development and coaching program. And so it’s far more consulting heavy. And as a result, how many times have you seen a Bosch implementation lately because they didn’t lead with products and then use consulting as a secondary revenue stream? In fact, the best thing you’ve done is said, no, we could genuinely make money by putting consulting hours in and pulling together a SWAT team of people and growing this whole stable of consultants.
But what you’re doing is delaying the inevitable, and you’re empowering them to do things that are counter to the vision that you have to be able to do. End result, you survive, you persevere. And on the other side of it, people are like, this is it. It actually works, and it’s always worked. It’s just that now they’ve got social proof and customer proof, right? The NASCAR slide is now something that people can, okay, well, if Company X is doing it, then I better get on this train business value I almost wanted to do for any super technical startup founder.
I’m like, you almost want to say do a spoof like a B of A quarterly investor call. It’s never like Jamie Dimon getting on saying yes, this week we updated the RAID firmware on all of our servers on our private Cloud. And so it’s gone very well. We’ve got a strong group of folks that are working on it, like, now they’re talking about business outcomes that they’re doing, and then this stuff that has to happen, you got a choice of how you’re going to let it happen.
Are you going to let the Cloud drive you or are you going to create the Cloud and you’re delivering. This is what Alex Polvi talked about, like, Giphy, right? You’ve done it.
Yeah, that’s right. It’s one of those slow, methodical things focusing on for us, customer autonomy at the end of the day, but, yeah, it’s hard. It is definitely a journey. It’s fun to watch customers pick it up, by the way and then see it spread virally inside of an organization, which we typically see that. Or we had a customer like, all your stuff was working great. We usually don’t have any trouble with any of your stuff, and they’re like, but we’re seeing something. And a couple of hours later, they’re like, oh, yeah, we had some configuration on our end, but you help them through that.
And the fun thing is when they’re autonomous in that perspective. But it’s the opposite of what a lot of people are doing right now. They’re all telling you to outsource. They’re all telling you to manage service. We’ll take over. We’ll run your data center for you. The hedvig of hey, if Kubernetes is too hard for you to understand, let us do that for you. It’s a good business model for people, right? Yay. But we saw this with OpenStack, and it was really bad. The idea that our software is too complex for somebody to learn how to use.
So just let us take it over. That’s our new business model as we’re going to keep it complex so that you don’t have to worry about it. The industry isn’t going to grow. That’s not a growth model for the industry, especially with edge and things like that coming in. Right. We should have the underlying hour on this of thinking through, what would it look like if we had small data centers in everybody’s house or in municipality? And what would it look like to make that stuff go?
That’s game changing all this cloud stuff. It’s great. It’s amazing. It’s powerful, and people should use the heck out of it. But at the end of the day, be careful about the autonomy that you’re losing, in a lot of cases without even realizing it.
True that. Tell you about my one close in complexity and I don’t mean to make fun of the folks at Microsoft because Microsoft Ignite, of course, is happening as we’re recording. This is actually fairly rapid that’s going to go live. I saw the Tweet and it had this thing. It was like as your arc deploying Kubernetes on vSphere, I was like, wow, it’s just a list of things that I would love to do as a science experiment, but nothing I would want to run into production. However, there’s a thing, so bless them for gluing together a lot of bits, but there’s a reason the patterns are out there.
In the end, one thing that we need to do is do Cloud as a practice, treat infrastructure as commodity. And like I said, it’s beautiful to see it realized in what you’re doing. And the cheat is that as we close up this part of the podcast, I get to get a real live demo with this stuff, but we should definitely get you out more and more. Now you’ve got such a fantastic audience as well. Cloud 2030 is amazing. It’s really wild to see how that’s continued to gain momentum.
And at first I remember telling people that I know Rob Hirschfeld. It didn’t take long because your reputation and the respect you’ve gained in the industry for asking the right questions when sometimes people are a little afraid to hear the answers, the fact that you’ve done it and people realize it’s for the solution, not just the guy that asks the questions.
You’ve just defined what Cloud ’30 is all about in various succinct terms. It’s asking questions that we’re sometimes afraid what the answers will be.
And it’s great to see that more and more as I bump into folks, I say, yeah, this needs stuff in RackN. They’re like, oh, Rob Hirschfeld, right. Yeah. All right. The association is there and the respect is earned in what you’re doing, which is cool. So I’m glad that one day we’ll do some more work together in the world be, it would be neat to pair up on more stuff like this. It’s been great. So with that, Rob, what’s the best way if people do want to find out more, of course, about RackN, Rebar, all of the things? Cloud 2030 we’ll have links for folks that wanted to get signed up and how do they reach you?
I am very consistently Zehicle, Z-E-H-I-C-L-E. Goes back to my electric car days pretty much everywhere. Some reason people don’t like Zs and handles, but I’ve been very happy with it. So you can find me on Twitter and everywhere. I’m very active on Twitter and that’s a great place to interact. RackN is rackn.com and at this point that’s the best linkage point to get to everything Digital Rebar if you’re interested. And the Cloud 2030 is the2030.cloud is the website for that, so you can catch up on episodes or see what the schedule is.
We stay about four weeks ahead if you want to share pick topics, but just drop in and it’s a discussion. It’s a hallway track. They’re just amazing.
Yeah.
That’s what we desperately need.
And the funny thing is, the people that you meet in that hallway. I’ve met them in other commercial opportunities. Now it’s hilarious to see that it really and truly is a small world. And this is why you see repeated voices come up. Then you see them on Twitter, and then you see them in other engagements. This is community, the real true community. This is not about patting ourselves in the back because we built one thing. Well, it is really about finding people that are in a community of practice.
We are practitioners of things. I’m not team OpenStack or team Kubernetes or team VMware. I am team people doing fantastic things with infrastructure and applications. And as a result, community truly transcends the ecosystem that we maybe were born in or lived in at the time. It’s kind of cool to see it all.
Yeah. After 20 years, I’ve seen these products come and go and come back again. Patterns and the people. And sadly, some of the problems that we solve haven’t changed too much.
Was the old joke, right? They said that every time we’re building a better mouse trap, at least that used to be the design of build a company, build a better mouse trap. And there’s, like, more patents for most traps than there are for, like anything else in the world. And in the end, you go to Home Depot or Lowe’s or wherever you happen to go to Home Hardware, if you’re Canadian. Then what do you find? A slab of wood with a spring on it and a place to put cheese?
The most simple possible thing is really the best thing for it. But, hey, we’re going to create disaggregated hyper converged mouse trap infrastructure somewhere. And in the end, just grab a piece of wood.
With blockchain.
Exactly. Awesome. All right. There you go. Rob Hirschfeld, 200th. Thank you for celebrating 200 amazing and fun conversations that I hope to have many more. So I’m going to have you on for 300th. Just give me the heads up right now. So mark your calendar. However long it takes to get 300 more of these. We’re going to do this again.
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Jarod Spiewak is the founder of Comet Fuel, a boutique, strategy-first, agency that helps businesses run sophisticated ROI-positive marketing campaigns to fuel long-term growth, without all the typical agency BS.
We discuss the no-BS way to build your marketing presence, the challenges of products and automation that every entrepreneur and business needs to solve, and just explore lots of fun parts of marketing techniques and platform automation.
What’s happening? Eric Wright here. Host of DiscoPosse Podcast. Thank you for listening, subscribing, hopefully and doing all sorts of other things like that. Wow. This is really going to be a fun episode because I get introduced to somebody new and so do you. This is Jarod Spiewak. Jarod is the lead strategist and founder of Comet Fuel. He’s a really interesting character. And first of all, his approach to things, somebody who if you actually go to his website, jarodspiewak.com, it’s actually hilariously awesome how he puts his stuff together.
We talk about growth, we talk about automation, we talk about the human integration, with marketing. Really great stuff. So definitely you’re going to want to check out Common Fuel and much more. But in the meantime, speed of things you do want to check out. I am going to ask you a little favor, because if you have data out there, you’ve got systems, you’ve got anything. Make sure that you look at our amazing supporters, like the folks at Veeam Software who have you covered for everything you need for your data protection needs, whether it’s on premises, in the Cloud, whether it’s Cloud Native stuff.
Yeah. You thought it was Cloud Native, thereby it is safe. No, actually, it’s just a new way of deploying apps that are going to get ransomware to not go away. Not cool. But you know what’s cool ransomware getting fixed because you used Veeam software. So get on it. Go to vee.am/DiscoPosse. It’s literally that easy. Go check it out. And they’ve got some really great offerings. So whatever you got, they can back that SaaS out. Oh, that’s right, SaaS.
Don’t forget, Office 365 teams, all sorts of good stuff. And there’s more new stuff coming. Wink, wink.
All right, cool. Second piece. Speaking of protection, what about the data that’s flying around on your Wi-Fi when you’re sitting in a Starbucks or, sorry, I don’t mean to make a fun of Starbucks, just the first one that came to my head. But when you’re out there, do you really think that you’re safe in the wild on someone else’s Wi-Fi? I hope not, because you’re not. The best thing you can do is use super easy things like ExpressVPN.
I’m a user. I’m loving it. So if you want to check it out, go to tryexpressvpn.com/DiscoPosse. It’s just quick, easy. You get a little deal. And on top of that, you protect your data in-flight, protect your identity. All right. Oh, yeah. And go to diabolicalcoffee.com because I love the coffee. Oh, I’m the founder. There you go. Full disclosure.
All right, let’s get to the good stuff. This is Jarod Spiewak. Enjoy.
Hey, this is Jarod Spiewak. I’m the founder and lead strategist of Comet Fuel. And you’re listening to the DiscoPosse Podcast.
Jarod, this is really cool, because when I saw your name come up on the guest list, I did a bit of background, and I always love to dig in. You are prolific in a lot of ways, especially for somebody who you seem to have about three decades of business sense in you, even though you haven’t got three decades on the ground. So we’ve got a lot of really cool stuff we can cover. If you want to give a quick intro about yourself before we get started for folks that are new to you, that’d be great.
We’ll talk about Comet Fuel. We’ll talk about the problems you’re solving, and also this is super close to me because I’ve got more and more folks who are really often struggling with how do they make the jump into better engagement. How do they get conversion. And really what’s the science and the techniques that we can wrap into them that we’re kind of unlocking a lot of just regularly good old-fashioned human behavior. But for whatever reason, we fail at it all the time.
There’s a ton that we could talk about that I think would be really interesting. But for anybody that doesn’t know me, my name’s Jored Spiewak, as hopefully you know by now. When you say that I have a lot of experiences because I got my start when I was 14, I decided that I was going to graduate early. So I started college at 15, graduate high school at 16, went to college for my marketing degree. I finished my degree a month after I turned 18. I was working in a corporate marketing job at the time, about a year into the corporate job, I was like, all right, cool.
I’m done with this. Just really not for me. And I signed up for a website called Upwork, which is much smaller at the time. Just after their merger of oDesk and Elance started working for about $5 an hour with the goal of, hey, let’s find another job somewhere. Did a bunch of interviews. No one wanted to hire me even as I was building up a portfolio, so that obviously didn’t work out. But pretty soon after, I had essentially resigned to, well, this is going nowhere. I got a full time job offer from a marketing agency which kind of transitioned me into, okay, great time to take this seriously.
I started off as an on page SEO. Within a couple of months, I was promoted to the lead SEO strategist. Over time, I freelanced more and more, went from full time, part time to no time at that agency. And then I was sitting with all these clients. I was like, okay, great. What’s next for me? Started my agency, Blue Dog Media in 2018, February 2018, and then throughout 2019 and 2020, planned the rebrand over to Comet Fuel and then early 2021, publicly launched Comet Fuel.
Now this is the fun part of, when you talked about Upwork and coming through that, I love to actually tap into that the transition from going from gig work to then agency to then effectively being agency. Right. So now you’d think that this could be a natural transition, but I find a lot of people get jammed up at stage one, and they’re still kind of grinding it out at Upwork. Or maybe they’re not even sure how to market themselves. And this is probably why you made the rapid transition from phase one to two to founding your own team on this one.
So maybe talk about how you started with gig work. What was really cool about it, but then how you made that jump to kind of go beyond.
Yeah. So I think that there were a couple of things that gave me an advantage over perhaps some other people. One was that I had a lot of agency experience going into this, which is that I worked for an agency. I had corporate marketing experience as well. So I had the more corporate refinement type of structure that anyone that’s worked in corporate is kind of used to. So I had that as well. So I had that sort of business sense. But I was also when I was freelancing, working for a lot of other agencies at the same time.
So it’s taking a lot of effort observing as to how things were run so that I would have an idea of how things would need to look once I went on my own, whether that was only freelancing in a more business minded focus or if that was to start my own agency. So I took a lot of observations there. The other thing that I did was I made sure that I had as large of a nest egg as possible where I was pulling in as a freelancer, multiple five figures a month in revenue, which made it a much easier transition than being like, okay, great. I have one or two clients, now let’s make this work.
So I was very slow in that transition on one hand. And then once I decided, okay, great. I’m going to make a shift here. I went from full time at that agency down to part time. So I had that extra levy that not everybody may have where I was half and half essentially. And I could build that up, make sure. Okay, great. This is sustainable. Cut it down to a couple of hours, just providing support over at the agency where if I needed to, I could have been like, hey, actually, my bad. I need to come back full time.
And luckily, I had a good enough relationship there that it would have been possible that transition part was kind of slow. But then once I officially left the agency, I took about two months to figure out what exactly I wanted to do, whether I wanted to keep freelancing or if I wanted to start an agency. And then once I decided, okay, great. It’s going to be an agency. I had that background, experience and knowledge to go this is what it needs to look like to a certain degree.
And then once I had actually been in the saddle for about a year, I then said, okay, great. I’ve followed what I saw from other people. Now I feel comfortable. Let me now follow what I think I want to do in my own way. So I would say, because of my experience, it was an easier transition. I had the opportunity to make it a somewhat smooth transition that I know that not everybody would have that opportunity or an employer that was understanding enough to be like, hey, go do your own thing.
We understand. But I was lucky enough to be in that position.
Well, I think part of it is you set yourself up for that opportunity in a lot of ways. Quite often we hear about sort of the Tim Ferriss’s four hour work week and his approach and a lot of folks that have adopted that style. It is actually okay to go to your boss and say, hey, I’ve got this thing like look at this, I’ve literally got a row of coffee beans behind me because I have a coffee company that I run and I have a full time job and I have a podcast.
There’s a way in which you can go to your boss and say, hey, I do these other things. And then somebody say, and these other things are actually starting to generate revenue. I’m here and I like this. And then quite often they recognize that you are going to go anyways, the best thing they can do is keep you and sort of leverage your skills and strength while you’re there, and they’re kind of more prepared instead of just suddenly going, hey, all right. I hear Jarod just had started his own agency, and he’s leaving.
More and more people are really embracing the fact that the best thing you can do for your staff is to make them successful in life, not just in their job.
Yes, I would agree. Unfortunately, I don’t think every business agrees with that. So some people will be in that position. Other people. Unfortunately, there are some people that go, oh, you’re thinking about doing your own thing. Okay. Well, you’re fired, and we’ll just find somebody else.
And depending on what state you’re in, sometimes they can just fire you for no grounds just because you said that other States do have laws against that. But for some people, it will be easy for other people. Unfortunately, they’re in a much more difficult position, and it might be where what they have to do is.
Okay. Great. I’m putting in 100 hours a week because I need to make sure this other thing is sustainable while also making sure it doesn’t impact my job, because I know as soon as they think something is up, they’re going to be hiring my replacement.
Yeah. I guess if I think of the captive audience, I’m probably calling on a select group of people who have been successful in it. There’s actually probably a lot of folks who don’t have that opportunity, but opportunity being created is much more self directed. And like you at 14 years old, you are suddenly on a different path than most people at 14 years old. And I bet that’s actually not the start. I’m betting there is a lot of entrepreneurial spirit that you probably were heading into preschool and thinking about selling the other kids some good lunches. There’s got to be.
You’re not entirely wrong.
So going to your origins. Jarod, what got you started on the entrepreneurial path?
Yeah. So I think some of it was I was just born that way. To be completely honest, I’m not intelligent enough to talk about this in detail, but I was just learning about how just basically scientifically, how chromosomes work and how 99.9% of us is all exactly the same. But that 0.1% of us is designated by birth, and some of that makes us less prone to being injured in accidents or more prone to being better at sports or whatever it may be. And so I think I was just programmed in a way that I was just always fascinated by business and management and making money where I’ve always been a big gamer.
But some of the games that I enjoyed the most were around resource management or tycoon business games like the old flash games I used to play all the time, and I was always interested in wanting to work in some weird way where when I was in, I believe it was fifth grade, I was allowed to watch a lot of movies that people my age generally weren’t allowed to watch. So I was watching a lot of older horror movies with my dad, like the old Child’s Play movies, Cube, Saw.
I was really big in the Saw at the time, a bunch of other movies like that. And so what I would do is I would go into the school library and I would basically just copy the plot of the movie into one or two pages, but have the setting, be the school and have everybody who died be my friends and everybody wanted to know how they died. So I would get paid one dollar for every copy of the story that I gave them. And it would take like an hour, maybe two to turn this out.
There was no story building. It was just okay, great. We’re at the school. We’re in this classroom. This person died because of that, whatever it may be. And it was just the same exact deaths in the movie as I could remember it. And I just did that. And then on the way home from school every day, I would go in to the corner store, and I would just buy a swim gym for one dollar. And then my mom was like, Where is he getting this money?
Because we don’t get allowance. And I think at one point she was like, ‘Are you selling drugs or something?’, which we weren’t in an area that would really happen. So it’s kind of funny, but yeah, I just kind of had that kind of nagging. I was always interested in it for some weird way.
I guess the more and more and talk to folks too. And you hear this. It’s not often necessarily the business itself. Like, people are not born to be business people, but they’re born creative and they’re able to use that creativity towards things. I hear the great quote it was from Jordan Peterson. Love him, hate him, people are on either side of that. But what he did say is that creative people tend to create a lot of wealth, but rarely for themselves. And it was a funny thing to hear.
It’s true, because I think of a lot of people that they would go to a job and they would get a great job and people love them and they do amazing creative things. But they lack that next ability to kind of take it to doing it on their own and kind of owning their outcome. And that’s why I loved your origin story is pretty amazing, because that then sort of gets amplified as you go and you take on, you see Upwork and you don’t just see it as a way to get a salary.
You probably went into it seeing an amplification opportunity much more than just I can get X number of hours of work done. You were probably immediately thinking like, how can I get 5 hours of work done in 1 hour? Can I get seven clients at the same time? That creative mind then the sort of tycoon lifestyle comes together in a really beautiful way. Is there anything else do you think, Jarod, that kind of prepared you for that?
So for me, a lot of it is just learning a lot. I mean, other things that I did across the time was I also signed up to Craigslist and I was doing gig work on Craigslist. And so I was meeting strangers at, like, 14, 15, sometimes going into their house. And there were literally times where I was getting more often than not, we would agree on payment, but people wouldn’t pay is like, okay, great. Here’s my business idea. Come into my house and hear it out and pick it apart.
Or if someone needed a math tutor. I guess I’m a math tutor. If someone needed a writer, I just happened to know English so I can put some words on paper for you, whatever it may be. So I just had that sort of knack, but I wouldn’t say it was necessarily skilled nor intentional with a lot of it. I think honestly, a lot of it was just luck in the way of probability, where luck isn’t necessarily random chance. But it’s just statistics. If you roll the die six times statistically, you’re probably going to hit six at least once.
Maybe you need to roll ten times, whatever it may be. So I was just taking those opportunities. And I think over time I started to realize what I had, which was that when I got on Upwork, it was because I was just frustrated with my job. I started trying to work for $20 an hour. Nobody hired me. I lowered it to ten, nobody hired me. I lowered it to five. I started to get hired. Once I got that, I moved it up a little bit on the platform.
I was like, okay, great. Now I have a thing or two. What if I add this to a portfolio and I try to go get a job somewhere else? Okay, great. No one else wants to hire me. Maybe I’ll look at this Upwork thing a little bit more seriously, and then, oh, wow. This can actually be something. So a lot of it was kind of stumbling into it that I could make it sound like I knew exactly what I was doing. But I honestly didn’t. But what I have always done is absorbed knowledge, like a sponge.
And when I got into SEO, which was kind of what cemented me within the marketing world for sure, was I created a custom RSS feed for, like, two, three dozen different websites, and I read every new article that came out over a weekly period. I did it once a week, but I would also go back retrospectively and over time read back about everything that happened over the course of about two years, and I would join all the forms and I would get really engrossed with it.
So what I didn’t have naturally, I would try to learn from other people by just absorbing a disgusting amount of content.
I could ask you the question. I remember getting asked this one time by somebody and they looked as I did a lot of weird. I’m always looking for things. I’m always doing extra stuff, and it’s partly like, I really respect your approach. What can I do to learn to be better at this, to learn more about it, learn the background to it. I was always sort of just enthralled by the idea of not just knowing something but knowing how it worked and it can go into everything.
I used to take stuff apart all the time, and I remember one time a friend of mine, he asked me, what would you do if you were suddenly broke and homeless? Like, just like tomorrow something happens and that’s it. You lose your apartment, you’re out on the street. What do you do? And immediately I think, okay, well, I live out. I was in Toronto at the time, like, I’m not far. I can actually run or I can bike down to the Eaton Center. There’s buskers there. I want to have a guitar.
But if I spend the day, I actually know a few things I could do. And I got to make enough money. There’s a coffee time and it’s open 24 hours, and they’re okay with people staying there overnight. I just kind of went through this whole scene of, like, I’ll do that. And then I know this place that does second hand guitars. If I have to, I can just make enough to rent it. Whatever.
And in the end, he goes, that’s why you won’t be homeless tomorrow, because the moment you were thinking about it, you weren’t thinking shelter. You weren’t thinking, oh, goodness. What am I going to do? You immediately go into response mode of like, let’s start taking action. Let’s start thinking about things we can do. And that’s why I really dig your personality and your approach to stuff, because I think more people, it’s in them. But maybe they haven’t unlocked. And it doesn’t have to be, like, big, but there’s introducing adversity almost like an immunization, is something I think everybody needs.
We have this problem that people don’t prepare for it. But it seems to me like you are automatic, but you just think like, okay, what if it all went away right now? I had to start again right now. I bet in five minutes you’d be having a pretty solid plan.
Yeah, I could probably have one right now. Personally, what I would do is I would probably go down to the local library, get a library card, and I have access to the computer there for, I believe, an hour or two at a time, unless they changed it since the last time was there. I’d probably go back on the site like a worker similar Fiverr and over one to 2 hours a day or whenever I can get access to that, start working on that, find any sort of job that pays anything.
Just so I have some amount of money. So I don’t die from hunger or thirst. And then at the same time, we’ll try to find another place in which I can do either overnight work or some sort of office work where I don’t have a lot of supervision. So what I would do is, for example, let’s say a hotel clerk overnight, like, it’s the desk job where not a whole lot of people are coming in, not a whole lot of supervision. Maybe one or two other people there.
I’d find a way to make enough to have a laptop, and so I’d be working on both at the same time, building up the income on the other side of things to eventually make that job redunting because it would be for placing the income. So I’d essentially find a way to work on both at the same time while building up something where I’m more comfortable with, which would be the online stuff, but have something a little bit more stable to make sure that however long it takes on one front, I’ll be at least somewhat fine.
And that really is amazing to hear just that thought process that goes in another thing that I really like. And let’s take into Comet Fuel a bit. One of my favorite things about meeting and reading about an organization and about a team or a person, anybody, whether it’s just the fact that when you go there and you say this is what we do, okay, of course everybody has that, right? This is the stuff that I’d love for you to pay me to do. In effect, that’s what a lot of businesses have.
But you’re a rare treat in that. One of the most prominent things you have is this is what we don’t do and immediately going to the market saying this is literally my niche, and this is where we’re going to be fantastic for you. So it gets that out of the way. It probably saves a ton of, oh, Jarod, hey, now that we got you on the phone, can you do this? Can you do this? I like that approach.
Let’s talk about what Comet Fuel does and let’s dabble on that what we don’t do. I love that you’ve given good edges.
Yeah, sure. So in a nutshell, Comet Fuel is a boutique strategy first agency that helps exceptional businesses fuel growth through Google ads, PPC, as well as SEO. And I, at least, like to say without the typical agency but yes. In terms of what we don’t do, it’s something that I see as a bit of a moving target because it’s something that we find out more and more over time. But it’s very hard for the average consumer being a business owner marketing professional to look at an agency and know how are they different from everybody else.
Because a lot of the stuff sounds the same, especially if you don’t have hands on experience with that particular marketing channel. And so I’ve tried to, over time, understand what the greatest advantages as well as the greatest pitfalls are. And some of them are much harder to put into words than others. But I do try to make it as clear as possible, and whether that’s through content or whether that’s through a discovery call or through the proposal process of our style of doing things. It’s one of the reasons why I like going on podcast so much is because when people want to potentially work from, with us, I don’t say go look at our case studies.
Go look at our testimonials. Go look at whatever. I say, go listen to a couple of podcasts because that will give you a much greater understanding. You’ll be able to hear me. You’ll be able to see how we approach things. Do I talk technical? Am I talking about a bunch of stuff that you go, that’s all really basic. We’re way above that. Okay.
Maybe we’re not at the level that you need to go work with someone that’s at a higher level, or maybe look at you here. And you say, wow, I didn’t understand any of that. What are these metrics? What are these KPIs? What does that strategy even entail that I can’t even imagine how much that cost. Okay, then maybe we’re at a level that you’re not ready for it, it wouldn’t make sense for you to be for. So I try to push the content a lot, because no matter how much time and energy I put into what goes on the website, as much as it’s informative, there’s still always going to be some effect of like, hey, we’re pushing you to sign up to a discovery call, whereas on the content, it’s much softer and say, Listen, if you go, hey, I don’t like that guy.
Okay, great. Then don’t reach out and we’ve just saved each other a bunch of time and money.
I love that. It’s funny, too. Like a website is always like a resume like, you want to put everything in there, but then you realize you can’t because it won’t get read. And then it’s always this really intricate sort of balance of detail and specificity to making sure people know you’re not just kind of one thing, but another area as well. If we could talk about this is, who’s your ideal customer, like somebody that’s thinking? All right, I’m digging Jarod’s story. I’m digging your approach. Am I a good customer or a good client for you and the Comet Fuel team?
Yeah. So this is something that’s been a very interesting point of ours, which is that when I initially started, everyone talks about niche, usually in terms of here’s the industry that we work with, or here’s the one service that we provide. So they’re either the SEO company for whoever or they’re the dental marketing company or the dental SEO company, et cetera. And that’s how we kind of started off because my background was in law firm marketing. So I started off very specific with law firms at the time, contractors.
And then it kind of expanded to service based businesses. And then over time, what happened is we’re running into more and more instances where it’s like, okay, great. Here’s a national company, which now means we can’t even work in this industry anymore because we’re working with one business. So it doesn’t really necessarily make sense. And I would rather, in my opinion, work with one business that’s like, okay, great. Here’s $50,000 a month budget. We can be really aggressive. We don’t have to worry about this content writer cost $0.12 per instead of $0.10 per word.
Is that going to work? And we have much more ability in scale for growth compared to working with maybe 50 companies on the same industry at two grand a month, which would be double the amount. But the progress is much slower and the retention is lower, et cetera. So over time, what I started to look for was more of a personality. And what I forgot to just mention is also there’s a big difference between a small company industry and a large company in the industry in which they can’t really be compared.
So what we tend to look for is businesses who are usually at the seven figure or eight figure mark, or they’re below that. Usually they tend to be high margin, which their profit margins may be roughly the same as companies that do more money there. And usually they have an intermediate understanding of marketing and both business, so that if we go into a situation and we’re looking at the lifetime value of a customer and maybe where the lifetime value is $100 and it’s $10 a month, but it’s going to cost us $20 to acquire a customer, then we start to have discussions around gross margins, net margins, operating margins, burn rates, because if you’re taking a loss at first, how long are you actually going?
Do you have the cash flow to support this loss for how long? It would take six months to be profitable in this campaign. Can you actually afford that? Or did you just look at the lifetime number values and go, yeah, it’ll work out eventually. We’re able to have these discussions. It’s an indication that we’ll be able to move forward while also considering all aspects of the business, which is something that we like to do, because with my background of marketing, business and finance, I tend to bring that to the table.
And us being a boutique company, we only work with about 25 companies at a time, and so I’m still able to be very heavily involved, which I enjoy with the actual clients. So we can get on a call and we can talk at a very high level about the business as a whole, the numbers, et cetera. And so we can’t have those conversations, it tends not to really work out. So I’ve been making strides to be able to explain this in a much simpler way, but a lot of it comes down to, I can usually jump on a call with somebody and then understand through the mannerisms in their voice and through the way that they talk about their own business, whether or not there’s somebody who is what we’re looking for, and what we also try to look for is just companies that we actually want to see succeed, which is something I’m pretty big on.
If I don’t believe in the company, if I wouldn’t be a customer of the company, or if I’m not already a customer of the company, because sometimes that happens, then it’s just not somebody that I want to work with regardless of what their budget is.
It’s amazing in that discovery call when you really do walk through that and you get them to explore what’s your customer acquisition costs, what’s your current strategy? Because that’s often the biggest thing is just knowing where they are on their journey of taking on and you get to very quickly ask critical questions that they won’t ask themselves of, like, is this an area that is new to you? Are you comfortable? Do you feel like your YouTube spend is working out like, do you really need to go to seven networks?
Do you really think you need TikTok right now? You can ask questions like that that they are afraid to bring to their own team because they’re just sort of looking out at the world going, I need to unlock every channel I can. Meanwhile, it’s actually counter because they may be spending so much in each channel that CAC goes hugely high. And then long term value and customer long term value is sometimes not even measured correctly. It’s really cool when you can just come in and say, all right, where are you at right now?
Where do you need to be? What do you consider success at the end of this discussion today?
Yeah. There’s a couple of really core questions that really break it down. And one of those when you mention, how many marketing channels are on and whatnot. A really nice question I like to ask is, how are you tracking Omnichannel now? A lot of that is honestly built into Google Analytics. We can be very simple as. Okay, great. Someone clicked onto Google Ad converted on Facebook. And now depending on what sort of attribution model you’re using will depend on how much money actually gets attributed to each channel.
If I’m talking to someone that doesn’t understand that, then that can sometimes be a really big pain when we’re running through a Google campaign and it’s, hey, why is Google only made $20,000 in revenue this month?
And we’re looking at, yes, but your Facebook remarketing has recaptured the people from Google, which we can see through analytics or an Omnichannel, two of one is being used. And if you look at it from a first quick perspective, Google Ads has brought in 80,000 revenue. If you look at it from a last click perspective, it’s brought in 20. If we look at it from this perspective, et cetera. And then do you understand how to really model that and understand that and look at that and allocate budget accordingly?
Or is it just very binary with what I see in the Google Analytics dashboard or the Google Ads dashboard? Is it? And okay, great. Let’s turn it off and then not realize that how it’s going to affect the Facebook ads because the Facebook ads were making $60,000 a month in revenue because they were remarketing to the targeted Google audience.
Is there a common set of problems that maybe we can try to unpack for people because if they look into their own current strategy or their current tactical approach to stuff, there’s probably some really fast things that we could love to light people up and have them go like, oh, man, I’m totally doing that.
Yeah. So what’s kind of funny is a lot of what I see usually I can go into almost any account of any size of business, of any marketing sophistication and usually find one or two basic things that aren’t aligned. Not because people aren’t smart enough to notice that, but usually when you become used to something, you stop reanalyzing every little thing. But when someone new comes into it, they have to look at everything they need that full perspective of everything that’s going on. So there’s a couple of things that I’ll see.
One, very basic conversion tracking needs to be set up within Google Ads. A lot of people that are experienced marketers will have at least the basic set up. But SEO isn’t always tracked. Those goals aren’t always pulled back into Google Analytics, where you have a central dashboard tracking everything from every channel together. Also tracking various types of engagement. Okay, great. You’re an e-commerce store. Somebody bought. Well, what happened in that process? How many people that clicked on this keyword versus that keyword added the product to the cart, versus made it to part way through the checkout page or whatever it may be.
So you can see where that breakdown is and not just go, okay, people from this keyword convert at 2%. People from this keyword convert at 1%. Let’s turn off the 1% and spend more on the 2% where maybe you realize that the people that convert at 1%, a lot of them make it to the final checkout page, and then they stop because it turns out the coupon code that you’re promoting to your ads was no longer valid. About three months ago. People are really frustrated because they enjoyed the deal, and that’s why they’re not converting because they feel so that they’ve been cheated.
When they expected something to be $70, they get it to the end of the car and say, hey, coupon Invalid. Please pay us $100 or whatever it may be. So really tracking everything end to end, if possible, gives you much more clear perspective as to where the breakdown is and not just where do we make money? Where do we not? For lead generation businesses, what you’re able to do for most, I would assume most marketing channels, I can’t say for all, but I know for Google Ads you can. For SEO is a lot more difficult.
It’s just how search works. But for Google Ads, you can pull in offline conversion, and you can pull that and tie that into your actual funnel stages as well. And so what you’re able to see is not just who filled out our lead capture form, whether you’re a software company going after a demo or whether you’re a service based business, going after some sort of consultation or whatever it may be, is what percentage of these people actually showed up to the demo or consultation, what percentage of them actually made it to the next step?
And then paid us whatever your funnel looks like. We are able to do is use a hidden form field to capture URL parameters, such as the GCLID, which is the unique tracking code that Google uses. And then when someone makes it through your funnel, export that into a CSV, upload it back into Google Ads, and then retroactively, you can go, which of these clicks actually went to customers and go, okay, great. Keyword A converts at 12%, but only 1% of people actually convert to customers where keyword B converts at 2%, but 50% of people convert to customers.
Clearly, one of those is way better, but you would only know that by pulling everything in end to end. So that’s one thing on conversion tracking. The other thing that I’ll see a lot, which I find annoying as a consumer. And so it’s one of the biggest things I look for for anybody that is e-commerce or software related or online education related specifically is stop remarketing to existing customers, especially if you’re on some sort of retainer like a software. I can’t tell you how many times I am using a software, and then I get an ad to sign up for a free trial of things, something that I already pay monthly or yearly for.
Very easily, even if it’s on the back end. Whatever page people log into. If they make it to the back end, have your Google Analytics tag on there with same property, and then just add that as an exclusion to your remarketing list. So people who have logged in are no longer on that remarketing list. If it’s e-commerce and you sell a product. Depending on what you sell, it can be too complicated to do this if you sell a bunch of stuff that people might buy again the next day or like, if you’re Amazon, it’s impossible to do it.
But if you sell a couple of products, let’s say you sell shampoo. How long does it take your average user to go through a bottle of shampoo? Let’s say it takes two weeks. Okay, great. If someone buys today, don’t remarket them for two weeks. If you want to remarket people over the course of two weeks include only people who have been to the website who have not purchased within the past two weeks. After that point, you can remarket to people to get them to try and buy again.
Simple things like this can save a lot of time and money. It can save money on clicks. It can save money on, especially if you’re doing any CPM bidding where you’re just paying per impression, it can save a lot of money there, but it just makes the data a lot cleaner. And I would say those are some of the easiest things to fix. But I also see in, like, 90% of the accounts that I look at.
I’m with you on this pet peeve, because every once in a while I’ll buy something, and it’s a very specific product from a very specific company that is not a repeat buy, and there’s no upsells beyond it. I did it. I literally am the perfect conversion. And then for two days after I’m getting ads for the thing that I literally bought, it just blows my mind. I’m like, sometimes just because I want to punish them a little bit more, I click the ad just like, I’m going to spend your CPMs then.
If you’re going to keep blowing up your own marketing budget because you failed to acknowledge that I completed the conversion. But it is easy, I guess, for folks to just think of it as like, we’re going to remarket and retarget. That’s not the goal. It’s like the quality of the retargeting because every penny spent becomes dollars. And then hundreds of dollars then thousands of dollars when you get to any kind of scale. When you go to a company and they’re ready to engage you, Jarod. How often do you go in?
And like you said, they think they’re doing okay, but they’re not questioning stuff like that. I would imagine it’s a pretty, it’s an easy hit. And people probably appreciate because they don’t have time to go get really good at this stuff. They’re just like, I’ve got Omnichannel marketing, I’m doing. I can’t know every single one through and through.
Yeah, I would say it’s probably 95% of the time, and we probably do it, too. I’m sure there’s tons of stuff within our processes that we just haven’t noticed that could be done better just because we’re used to the same thing and doing it the same way every time that it’s become automatic. A lot of it, in my opinion, is just having a new perspective kind of come in and take a look at things and go, why is this like this and someone go, oh, well, I never actually thought about that.
We set the remarketing list because we needed to get it done. So we just set it up and ran with it, and we saw that it was working. And so nothing in our tool said that, hey, this remarking list is performing under average, so we need to take a closer look at it. So it just kind of sat there. But one of the good things of the economies of scale is that if you’re spending a million dollars a month in ads, getting the same result while being able to lower your budget by 1% is quite significant.
That’s an additional employee that you could’ve hired by somebody potentially spending five minutes looking at your account. I was just looking at an account the other day that spends about $10,000 a day or so. Their goal is to kind of scale that to about ten times of what they’re doing now throughout Omnichannel, throughout Google Ads, probably about tripling what they’re doing now. And that was one of the things I saw was like, wow, you have such really sophisticated campaigns. There’s so much going on here a lot of this is functioning incredibly well to the point where I’m kind of jealous of it because I know internally that’s not their background.
And I’m like, how are you doing this? Well, in some of these areas without a background in this, like, this is really impressive. And then I go through and like, oh, here’s a really easy way that you can improve everything they’re doing, probably across not just one channel. But you probably use the same list across all these other channels because the list were created through Google Analytics, pulled in through Google Ads. And I have to assume most channels would also integrate with Google Analytics pretty well.
And so you’re probably using the same remarketing tactics. And if it doesn’t pull in, you’re kind of making them the same way, so that one observation could have saved a whole bunch of money across every channel, just kind of regardless of what’s just being seen in ads. So it’s quite common. And I don’t think it’s necessarily that someone intentionally overlooks on it. It becomes so automatic to see the same thing every day that a new perspective is going to question things. It’s going to take a little bit of closer look, because that understanding of how everything is set up, how everything works has to be built from the ground up.
Yeah. I think the new phrase we could always use is there’s no greater lie than one batch by Google Analytics. If you dig deep enough into those dashboards, you can put together some charts that always go up and to the right. But as you said, it’s the optimizations that especially at scale, they can really, really have a material effect, first of all, on just the cost. But just the efficiency, right? Conversion rates. And that’s one thing that people often forget is when we talk about conversion rates, we’re talking about 1% to 4%.
So if you’re spending money on 96% that aren’t going to convert, that 4% has got to count. And if you have to scale to continue to reach that four to five, like, there’s no way to get to 20% conversion. You just have to get really good at optimizing to scale to get to 4% with a larger push, right?
Within certain industries. And it also depends on what your offer is. For e-commerce direct transaction, Yes. For service based or lead generation, generally looking for 10 to 20%. Some of the accounts we’re working on will push 50-60% just because it’s been refined over such a long period of time. But what you’re looking for is not only a conversion rate, but anything that’s a percentage based is going to always be a very misleading metric. Anything that is an average or a percentage needs way more context for it to be valuable to you, because we’re not just looking for conversions.
We’re looking for quality conversions. Now, obviously, with something like e-commerce, you’re going to be able to see what the revenue was made or revenue wasn’t made. For lead gen, this is one of the big pitfalls is, okay, great. A conversion happened.
Let’s spend more money here because that’s not necessarily a quality conversion or one that’s going to be more profitable. And so looking at the bigger picture in those instances, such as okay, great. It’s a construction business, and they have a higher conversion rate in this area. But that area is 50 miles north. And so what happens is they’re going to have to increase their bids to account for travel time. They’re going to be able to do less jobs in a day because they’re further away from where most of their jobs are.
And not only that, but they’re probably going to be bidding higher than their local competitors who don’t have to factor in the travel costs nearly as much. They’re less likely to win those jobs in the first place. So even though Location B has a 15% higher cost per conversion, it’s actually more profitable to spend more money here because the bids are going to be lower. It’s going to be faster and easier for them to get there. So it’s less resources on their end. They’re more well known in this local area.
This is where the corporate headquarters are, et cetera.
If anybody doesn’t hire you on the spot from just your explanation of that, then they’re really not thinking about their priorities, right? Because again, I love this. The thought process that goes into the approach is really important. I work with a lot of folks that you can’t see outside of, I just need to create a chart so that every Monday, I’ve got something that goes up and to the right, and we fall victim to that. That becomes the thing you measure. And it’s really tough because like having gone through work with ads and I’ve used Facebook Ads as my primary channel for my coffee company.
And if you don’t measure it right, I’ll say I’ll spend $400 on an ad which is very simple small thing. Like first thing, I spent my 1st $400 on an ad and conversion rate was really cool. And I made all of my money back with no problem at all. And then you go and you toss another $400 at that with the same ad and then you get like, 3% conversion. I’m like, okay, so if I were to look at one versus the other, it’s not going to be a good sampling.
If I take the average, it’s really going to water it all down. But then like you said, what if I took the existing customers and then I did stuff like retargeting close to the cart customers and I did retargeting. And then I see that. And then customers that buy. I send a follow up three weeks later because I know they’re going to run out of coffee and give them a coupon that shows up in their mailbox three weeks after they buy and the conversion rates are incredible.
There’s like, that approach now that I tested them like, okay, this is where I know if I can get them to the checkout and get them to click buy. I know I’ve got good follow on and I’ve got good other things, and there’s physical retargeting. Actually, I’d actually love to get your thoughts on that one. When does physical remarketing and retargeting come into play with companies?
So to what extent if you can define that a little bit more?
Yeah. So like, sort of the postcards like a real material follow up because I get it when I shoot a recent guest on. She was fantastic. Michelle Seiler Tucker, and I have her book on my shelf here because I just read it and she sends, like, a postcard, a handwritten postcard. And I’m like, this is awesome. Even if somebody gets a service to write the handwritten postcard, it doesn’t sends me to then go back and double check your website and find out when the next book is coming out or find it when the next thing is coming.
Where do you get involved in that? I guess first I should ask Jarod, and where do you find that being effective?
Yeah. So difficult question to answer for that do we get involved. Because I try to be very specific about what we do, but at the same time, try to be as much of an asset as possible with clients. So in terms of do we provide that service? No.
But we consult with clients about a ton of different marketing channels and give our feedback where we can. So for something like that, I would look at it from a couple of different perspectives. One would be retention because there are some things that you just can’t measure, and those tend to be some of the most profitable things out there. The reason being is that everybody is way too focused on being data driven to the point where it’s causing a lot more harm than good. And so, in my opinion, it’s much better to be data informed, which is more complicated.
There’s more pushback. It’s harder to prove things, but in terms of being people, I think it performs better. Now on the matter of being more data informed, I know that if I take a more personalized approach, it’s going to drive a better experience, even if people don’t outright tell me that. For example, we were working with a company that we’re no longer working with, and they were an e-commerce company, and we kept finding various small issues, sometimes major issues with various aspects of the business that we were genuinely concerned about.
I’ll do this for some clients, but I never tell them that I do. So I went to their site and I ordered one of their products. So now I’m on their actual post sale process, and I get to see everything end to end. So the email marketing, very generic, and this is a product that is something where there’s not a whole lot of, a lot of the people buying are not generally informed about it and are kind of hesitant to try it. And so there wasn’t a whole lot of education happening in the email or anything special for being a new customer.
The SMS messaging was very boring and kind of generic. As a new customer, I didn’t feel any different than somebody who has bought a thousand times before. I didn’t feel as though there’s anything really standing out about this. And then I got the package in the mail and it was a general, like, flat rate envelope. I completely forgot what I ordered at the time. So I was like, what is this? I opened it up and the products inside. There’s no box, there’s no branding. There’s not only that, but the way that the product was described on the website didn’t really seem to be aligned with what I got.
And also the one that I ordered was the wrong time, but with the right label on it. And so from end to end, it was just a completely poor experience where it’s one of the big things as to why we no longer work with them is that I would never buy from that company again. It was just such a poor experience, and they’re not necessarily going to get that feedback from people because it’s just easier to go. Okay, great. That’s $20, whatever. That was a waste. I just won’t order from here again.
And so just by sending something like a handmade postcard, you won’t necessarily be able to track like people are. I mean, you can put tracking codes like oh, they’re ordering more. Maybe you A/B test, like, do people order more? We send this versus we don’t. And that’s all fine. But I know that long term way pass being able to easily measure this over the course of several years. People are probably more likely to tell their friends about me. If I’m sending out handwritten postcards, people are more likely to probably order for longer periods of time, which is harder to track, especially when you have so many different touch points happening and so many different.
Was it the emails? Was it the events that we’re doing? Was it the TV et cetera? And so for something like that, I would know it would probably work out in the long term. But for smaller businesses that have to be much more careful with every dollar that they spend, it’s something that would be very cost conscientious about because it’s something that maybe it helps over the course of three to five years, a lot. But maybe it slightly increases orders over the course of, like a year or two where it’s very hard to measure what’s happening.
So be a little bit careful there. But I always like to see how things can be tracked as much as possible, such as. Okay, great. We can track from a data perspective, when was this sent out? Roughly when they would have received it? And when was their next order compared to people that haven’t sent to sell? If you have enough customers, you can do an actual split test, make sure you’re actually running the test properly and you have enough that you can actually get a real sample size. Otherwise it’s just going to be data that doesn’t really mean anything.
But also, if you put a special coupon code, maybe on that, put a special maybe a website link, so you can track how many people actually visit from that website, or if you have a customer support number where it’s like, oh, thanks so much for your first ever order. We’d love if you would call us directly and even we’re not available, leave us a voicemail. Let us know what you felt about it. Or here’s an email that you can respond to, et cetera.
How many people actually contact that specific email or call that specific number? CallRail will cost you an extra dollar a month or Twilio, if you have a more technical background, it will be a lot cheaper. So I think it’s a good idea. I think it’s one of those things really difficult to track in the long term. And because of that, it’s probably incredibly profitable. But for a lot of businesses, that’s where it also becomes very scary when they go, okay, great. This is a very limited marketing budget.
How do I explain to myself or how do I explain to my boss that this is working? Sometimes you can’t. And a lot of that comes down to the data-informed side of things, which is that reasonably of the ten different coffee brands that maybe they’ve tried within the past year, how many of them have personally reached out to them?
Yeah, it’s funny. And it becomes a thing of measure what matters. And also, like you said, there’s the personalization. There’s the period of time over which it would be effective. I just need to get people and get that first customers and then work on the customer delight experience from that point forward’ there’s no point in like I said, thinking about how do I retain an 18 month customer when I have zero customers or 20 customers? I’m like, I just need to get to 100 customers, and then we can begin to backfill and do some of that post sales delighting type of thing.
And again, using data and anecdotal information to be able to inform that like you said, it’s data driven. It’s just been washed out as a phrase because people say, oh, we’re data driven, like, I can take any set of data and make it tell the story that I want to. But are you actually merging it with true anecdotal experience? And then, like I said, data informed as a much better thing. On the Google side of things, and I guess in general, Google is a moving target.
Everything is. We all saw the introduction of the Core Web Vitals in around July timeframe that kicked in leading up to it. Everybody was freaking out because they’re like, I’m going to get punished for my web speed and it’s going to affect my search ranking results. Is this going to affect my SEO and my ability to do CPMs? The irony was the blog from Google about Core Web Vitals fails Core Web Vitals, like the actual product blog from Google doesn’t pass their own test. So number one, is it real as a worry?
And number two, how do you stay on top of things like that? I would assume, Jarod, that nothing is done in your world. We have to keep revisiting. Am I right on that assumption?
Yeah, you’re absolutely correct. So for a little bit of context in 2018, maybe 2019. Don’t quote me on that. Google announced, I believe again, don’t quote me on this. It was the only time they’ve announced how many updates they’ve made to their search algorithms over the course of a year. And it was over 3500 changes over the course of a year. Most of these changes will go completely unnoticed. If you were to use a range tracking tool, which if you use a phone and we don’t, nowadays. It’s not going to be the end of the world.
But if you look and you see that fluctuation, we go from anywhere from five to three, depending on the day. You’re not going to be able to look at that normal fluctuation go, what happened? Where? Oh, maybe that was a Google update. And that’s why we’re now four more often than we were five. Or maybe it was just that you did something and then the way that Google’s indexes work is that they can come and crawl your website and then they render different parts of the website at different times.
It takes anyone with a technical background knows it’s much easier to parse HTML than is JavaScript. It’s going to take a lot longer with how much code is on websites nowadays. It’s going to take Google a long time to understand that long time in terms of Google. They just crawled half the way. It takes time to do that. And when you look at tiered indexes and when you look at ranking and reranking, look at all the sophistication that’s built in. It’s really hard to understand exactly what every little nuance is and what did or did not affect you.
What I’ve learned over the past ten years is that there have been very few updates that I have been worried with for the types of businesses that we work with, which is not something that are in very dangerous niches. And what I mean by that is your money, your life type stuff like if you’re in weight loss, if you’re in a very, if you provide a lot of financial information, especially on the more sketchier side of things like crypto, penny stock stuff that tends to be pump-and-dump happening all the time. And that kind of stuff like you’re, a lot of medical advice, things like that are very scrutinized.
Those tend to see the biggest fluctuations also on the affiliate marketing side of stuff which I have various sites in that those are always wildly fluctuating. But the average business I see barely move unless something has been done wrong over a long period of time. In which case then we’ll get a little bit nervous where sometimes we’ll be working with a client that has done some sketchy stuff in the past for links, and every time that there’s a core algorithm update, it’s like, well, this tank, who knows it’s possible?
Stuff that you did years ago can really come back to bite you. Which is why I usually recommend people be very careful with SEO much more than any other marketing channel, because literally stuff that you did five or six years ago could come back and punish you tomorrow. So when it comes to specifically Core Web Vitals. We all know that we need fast websites. It’s not rocket size. If your website takes 20 seconds to load, nobody wants to buy from you. This has been known for years.
I think 2014 or 2015. A study was done that showed the average person like 40% of people bounce if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load on a mobile. Page speed has been important for UX for a long time. In terms of getting past Google scores. It’s something I haven’t really worried about too much like it’s something where it’s like we do want to try as best as possible. Now that Google has officially made it a ranking factor, is trying to be in the good zone as much as possible, but also page speed is a very complex topic where it also depends on the connection that people are using the browser that they’re using.
How it’s actually being rendered will affect the user apart from how it looks at Google. And there was a point in time where it was just page speed insights. I took a flat HTML site that I built that was very clean code that loaded in .2 seconds based on every test you’d ever run. If you load it in mobile or your desktop, it would always load instantly, and it had like a 12 out of 100 and then a much slower version of that site. Objectively like you try to visit, it would take about a second and a second and a half to load, would have like an 80.
When it comes to speed, I focus much more on the UX side of things than I focus on the Google side of things. And realistically, if everybody else in your industry that is also ranking for the same terms as you loads in 4 seconds and you load in three. And Google says that your scores are bad. Chances are there’s a worse. So in terms of that factor, you’re winning. How much of an impact of that factor is how heavily weighted it is.
If you want to dive into the algorithm side of things, it’s always a question how much it affects on a ranking versus a reranking basis. There’s always questions in there. Maybe there’s a little bit more detail in the patents. Or if you look at Stanford, has a lot of documents that will detail how algorithms can work just because that’s how they can work doesn’t mean they’re necessarily in use. But for something like Core Web Vitals specifically, it’s something I went, okay, cool. That’s interesting. And then just carry it on about my day and then look at the stores when they come into search console.
But aside from that, I didn’t really worry about that. The only things that I’ve really ever have to worry about with Google is when Penguin 4.0 came out in 2018. I believe that was something that had been anticipated for quite a few years, and so I was very interested to see what was going to happen with that, because Google went from punishing you for bad links to being able to ignore bad links, which made things both more difficult and easier at the same time.
Right.
And then where I’m much more concerned right now is on the Data Privacy things.
We just saw Facebook. It absolutely destroyed with iOS 14, where you might be getting the same result. But now you’re only being able to track, like, 70% or 80% of the conversions, right? Google was originally going to get rid of third party cookies in 2022. They now push that off to mid 2023. And with that, the question is, well, if they don’t find out a solution why remarketing has gone because they haven’t found a solution for that, FLOC or the Federated learning of Cohorts is heavily disputed.
WordPress is saying they’re going to block it by default. Google has a lot of stuff that they need to do right now. There’s very little insight as to what the advertising world will look like in terms of digital. Come here, mid 2023, assuming that the deadline doesn’t move again. And out of everything that’s happened within the past couple of years, that’s the only one that I’m genuinely nervous and hesitant about, because I think that one’s going to be tough for the advertising world, but also even tougher for the people who are paying advertisers who aren’t marketers themselves.
They don’t necessarily have the acumen to understand that you might be getting the same result, even though we can only make a report on 80% to 90 of what it was before, especially for those accounts that are just barely making it through where they need to be. That may now show that they’re underperforming below their baseline, even though that’s the same. In short, Core Web Vitals, whatever like it’s something, not really too worried about it. I’m more concerned about the Data Privacy changes we’re seeing right now.
Yeah. It’s amazing that you think about that. When I saw what’s potentially and it could happen both quickly and slowly in weird ways. And Google, if there’s legislative stuff that comes down, you can see very rapid, strange changes, because part of the problem is that they’re effectively the only game in town as far as the major game in town. Facebook obviously same story. They’ve got a significant presence. These are the champions of ad media. It used to be the signs you drive by on the highway, and it’s long gone now, right?
No one does TV advertising the same way anymore. If we see this some shift, the trick is what’s on the other side of it, we went from print media to television media and radio media like you got what the change would mean. You got how you could measure it. This is the first potential change where we have no idea what’s on the other side of it. We are almost taking it back to the billboards where you’re just saying, hey, I see 20,000 cars drive by this an hour.
I can’t tell you what the cars are, what the demographics are, the people driving them. But I can tell you that 20,000 cars drive by it every hour. That’s all we’re going to be that level of lack of knowledge on the digital front, which is kind of weird.
Yeah. There’s a big consumer movement towards massively limiting data to the point where some of the more, I would say extreme groups want there essentially to be no data, no tracking like you shouldn’t know who does or does not purchase from your own website, even first party tracking, let alone third party tracking. And what makes it quite challenging is things like view through and click through conversions, in which case, you might find that a YouTube video that you’re running doesn’t convince anybody to convert. But what it does do is help educate people of your brand.
And when you look over a 90-day period, you can see that people who viewed this ad ended up more likely in a different segment that you’re tracking? Or are they more likely to engage with your ads on another platform? And then without that, you might just assume, okay, well, YouTube doesn’t work. So let me turn that off completely. So on one hand, allegedly, by the way, before, I don’t want to stand alone bills for everybody. But allegedly, from the last I’ve heard Google saying that FLOC would have about 95% of the same performance as of right now.
But what people are nervous about is that you don’t really know until you know, and if you were to know it was only going to be 60% the same, you definitely wouldn’t say that, because then everybody would freak out. And Google makes about $140,000,000,000 a year from just ads, I believe. So, there’s a very heavy incentive for them to get this as right as possible. But what we might see is that ad costs may actually go down because the tracking is less there. So people are going to be less likely to spend as much money.
And so that’s also the potential counterpoint to that. Which is that, okay, great. Well, if you can only track things 90% as well, we want to only spend 90% as much as we were per click or per impression as we were beforehand to kind of try and even that out. I think it’s a bit of a good time. Some of the changes are needed. Data is kind of like the Wild Wild West right now, but I am fearful that we might go from very far in one direction, which is collect any sort of data you want.
Like, no one is really going to know how it works unless they really dive into it. No one knows what you’re collecting. Some of it’s pretty shady. Like is my smart home device, like listening to me right now and transmitting that to a humans reading that is potentially personal information, et cetera. To the other side of things, which may be very little data, in which case, honestly, it’ll hurt the smaller businesses out of anyone. Target can afford to spend $100 million on an advertising campaign and go, you know what people know our name.
They’re going to buy from us, a small company that no one’s ever heard of needs a lot more data in order to know that this is actually working for them to use that money effectively. So in my opinion, is going to hurt the smaller businesses and the smaller advertisers more. Unfortunately, which is something that I don’t see being talked about a whole lot.
Yes, that’s a tough one. And it’s funny, like the assistants listening to us. People, often, I want to do just a podcast with nothing. Just every ten minutes, just say, Xbox turn off, Amazon order, you squeeze those things in. And that’s the stuff that I dislike. I don’t mind retargeting for ads. I kind of know what’s going on if I need, I use VPNs for a variety of just like, for web testing and for just general safety as I move around in strange Wi-Fi. I do stuff like that. And I know it will lock down some of that, but I accept that retargeting is a thing and cookie tracking is a thing and it will occur.
I know how the machine works, so I don’t mind. Like I said, there’s no listening assistance in my entire house for a reason. I don’t like that part of it, but yeah, I’m with you. This is kind of a wild time that’s ahead. And look for folks that are listening now, it reminds you that very few people are going to care as much about this as what you and folks like you are doing, Jarod. This is why it’s good to reach out to folks that do this.
That’s your focus, because my internal team, I can’t afford to have them care this hard about it. I need them to be good at knowing my business and then taking it to this is why comment feels important. And I think people got to head there. All, of course, have links to the website, and people should definitely reach out because this is the time now to leverage this capability. We’re still in a very weird spot as far as human movement in the world. So all of the traditional media, all of the traditional approaches, they got wiped off the map 18 months ago, and they are not coming back.
And this is the digital forefront. We thought the digital forefront happened already, but this is a chance more people don’t have to go back to work. They can start their own side hustle, they can use you and use the techniques that you’ve got, and they can unlock a really cool new feature for themselves and their families and their organizations. I’m excited in a weird way of like how strange it’s been because I want to find the good in all the craziness that’s happened. It’s out there.
It’s out there somewhere. Obviously, I would trade every positive outcome to not have to have the world go through what we’ve gone through. But, it’s happened. Like, let’s try and find something good out of it.
Yeah. And I mean, luckily, what it has done on the good side is, as you mentioned, from the technology side, it has pushed a lot of people to embrace technology. And not only that, realize how inexpensive a lot of it is. Go back 15, 20 years and okay, great. You want a basic website? Every tiny, every character had to be coded from scratch on more archaic systems, with a lot less automations and automatic press tab. And it finishes the line of code for you, et cetera.
So, okay, great. You want a really basic website, please pay me $15,000, $20,000. And now that same really basic website, you can just sign up to WordPress, which is free and open source, and then you select a theme or Squarespace, Wix, et cetera. Where if you’re looking for something basic, great, that cost is gone. So many businesses throughout the past year, almost two now have developed like, apps. I got contacted by a laundry mat, and they were like, hey, we just developed this app. And so now set people coming to our laundry mat.
We now have TaskRabbit like contractors especially. Basically the Uber of laundry. Locally, we just go to their house, we pick it up, and then they bring it to the laundry mat. They put in the machine, and then it runs its cycle. And when it’s done, somebody else comes and they bring it back there’s like a butcher shop in New York City that I can’t remember the name, but they absolutely exploded in growth, and they had to develop, like, an online ordering system and so many restaurants around me.
I’m in New Hampshire, which is not the most tech friendly place in the world. There was like, ten places that we would order from, because these are places that we can order online from.
Great. Aside from Uber Eats and DoorDash and whatnot. And almost everybody has their online ordering figured out. They realized that, oh, this isn’t this thing that has to be built from scratch. It’s going to cost tens of thousands of dollars, like it did when we looked into it ten years ago. But now our hand is being forced. Now we have to find a way to do it and a way to do it cost effectively. And, oh, we don’t have to build this from scratch. There’s literally an API that cost $5 a month that has already built the technology for us.
We just need someone to build us a nice looking interface for it.
It’s an amazing thing to watch occur, so it’s not slowing down. There will be more changes like this. And this is why, as I said, go to the experts. So there you go, Jarod Spiewak. What’s the best way if folks want to reach you? Of course they can go to cometfuel.com, if they could find out about you and the team if they wanted to reach out personally, what’s the top way to find you?
Yeah. So if you want to reach out personally, I’d recommend connecting with me on LinkedIn. And what I’m trying to do is slowly over time. When I have time is build up my YouTube channel. So if you just look up Jarod Spiewak on YouTube, there’s not much on there right now, but I am trying to make a much bigger push for it, so I’d really appreciate anybody engaging with me there.
I like your agency is Devon. That was really. But your contact is really cool. Like you said, we can look at websites all we want. Just spend some time with the person. And it’s been a real pleasure to learn from you today. And folks, inevitably, they should lean in because this is the kind of stuff. That’s why I love podcasting so much more than just like, even going long form too. Everybody said to me, like, don’t go long form. Like people don’t have the attention for over 30 minutes.
The data has not proven that out. I can tell you without a doubt that being longer for number one, list ability is higher. And number two, every single person has a can set of responses for the first 20 to 30 minutes. And after that, you’re actually having a real personal discussion with somebody. And it’s cool because they get to hear your nuances. Your character comes out, and it’s so much more effective than just like, here’s the three things that we do really well, I’m like they could go to your website and find that out.
This is why I love going longer. Well, if I’m lucky, I’ll be a client as well someday soon. So with that, Jarod Spiewak, thanks very much.
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Scott N. Schober is the President and CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems (BVS), a forty-year-old New Jersey-based privately held company and leading provider of advanced, world-class wireless test and security solutions.
Schober also invented BVS’s cell phone detection tools, used to enforce a “no cell phone policy” in prisons and secure government facilities. Scott is a highly sought-after subject expert on the topic of cybersecurity.
Scott shares his story of his own recovery from identity theft, techniques we can all use to protect ourselves, and the challenges that are faced by everyday people in a growing increase of cyberwarfare and cybersecurity attacks.
Hello, and good morning, good evening, good afternoon wherever you are.
This is Eric Wright, the host of the DiscoPosse Podcast. You’re in for a really great episode. We talk about cybersecurity, online security, personal security, ransomware, and much more with Scott Schober. Scott is an author. He’s also the founder of Berkeley Varitronics Systems. He’s a well adored voice in the InfoSec and cybersecurity world. He’s been featured all over the place. So it was a real honor to share time with Scott, and it’s a lot of great lessons in here. You hear about his own journey through challenges in having his identity stolen and how he recovered from that.
And he shares a lot of the practices that will allow you to do that really compelling story. Plus, he’s just a very good speaker, definitely somebody who I would love to see on a stage somewhere in his presentation mode. And of course, speaking of ransomware, how do you stop ransomware?
Easy. You use our friends over at Veeam Software in order to make sure that you’re protected for everything across data protection, including ransomware protection, because ransomware is about making sure you protect your assets, whether they’re in the Cloud, whether they’re Cloud-Native, whether they’re On Premises, you are vulnerable. Unless, of course, you use the good practices and the great software at the fine folks at Veeam. So go to vee.am/DiscoPosse, and you can get hooked up with that. And if you want to stop ransomware as well, make sure you try and ease up the in-flight traffic that you do and that’s protecting yourself using things like VPNs.
I’m a user of ExpressVPN. I highly recommend it because it allows me to ensure that wherever I go, my traffic is protected in flight. It’s part of an overall practice, so easy to try. Head on over to tryexpressvpn.com/DiscoPosse and that’s the easiest way to get set up and you get a little bit of a bonus. You get a free month, you get some neat things. Do that head on over to tryexpressvpn.com/DiscoPosse.
And of course, one last thing. If you want to be able to stay up late to be able to fight your ransomware and think about better security practices, then do it by drinking fantastic, devilishly good coffee, like diabolical coffee. So head to diabolicalcoffee.com and you can get set up there.
All right. Anyways, let’s go back to the show. This is Scott Schober. He’s really cool. I enjoyed this. And this is the DiscoPosse Podcast.
Hi, I’m Scott Schober, President and CEO of Berkeley Varitronics, cybersecurity expert and also author. And looking forward to a great conversation with the DiscoPosse Podcast.
Scott, thank you very much for joining today. This is especially enjoyable as I’ve spent a lot more time now in the security and cybersecurity community. Been diving back in, and naturally your name pops up and your content tends to pop up just because you’ve got, number one, you’re a very prolific voice in the community and in the industry, and it’s just super high quality. So you are CEO of an organization. You’ve actually got your own company. You’re an author. So we’ll talk about Berkeley Varitronics. We’ll talk about your book, and this is one that I definitely will recommend.
We’ll make sure we have links as well for folks that want to hear about Hacked Again. And more than anything, you’re just such a great, respectful voice in the community. So thanks for joining. If you don’t mind for folks that are new to you, give a quick little intro and a bio, and then we’ll jump into the challenges that we all face right now.
Yeah, absolutely. I have the honor of running a small company. We’re a wireless security firm. We’re in business 49 years. I’m actually next generation. It was founded by my father. And over the years, we’ve kind of changed what we do as a company. But we’ve always had the unique challenge where people come to us with complex problems and we try to provide a simple solution. Oftentimes it’s tied in with wireless. And that really blossomed for us. In about the mid 1980s, we developed the first wireless test tools, and these were receivers, transmitters and propagation software so you could actually plot out and look what the cellular coverage was and have an idea where in the world to put cell towers.
A lot of the offshoots of that in the 90s and the 2000s were understanding how cell phones work and providing more advanced tools and the offshoots of all that were a lot of security problems and solutions. And a lot of the solutions we came up with was because we understand how bad guys think and the vulnerabilities that are inherent in mobile phones. And hence we launched a bunch of different security tools and products and provide services and expertise and knowledge base. And in the process of doing all of this, the education of it, especially in the past ten years, I found out I had a target on my back, and these were the cyber criminals going after me to basically silence me.
That’s really kind of the Genesis of my story, Hacked Again. That was my first book was what happened when I got victimized and targeted by these cyber criminals. And a lot of it is really the mistakes that I made. And it’s kind of embarrassing because here you are as a CEO, running a cybersecurity security company to help with physical security and cybersecurity. And here we are, we’re a victim. We’re getting repeated DDoS attacks, Twitter hack, debit card, credit card. We had $65,000 stolen out of our checking account, became a federal investigation.
So I kind of detail all of my misfortunes and all the things that I’ve learned from the community, and I try to share and give that back so others don’t go down the same path that I’ve gone down and hopefully can learn from some of my mistakes. And in the process of that, it obviously gets a lot of attention in the world of cybersecurity, on the speaking circuit from books. So I launched two other books. As a result of that, I focus a lot in the world of media, TV and radio, and blogging to share and provide tips that people can use to stay safe, whether it be just from a consumer side, a small business Fortune 500 company, but really trying to harness my knowledge base to fight back against cyber criminals.
And that’s kind of become my mission.
Well, if anything, in fact, I’d find that those who’ve been on the other side of it effectively a victim of this situation are the ones that I would most likely have a greater trust in because you’ve actually genuinely experienced it. You’ve understood the recovery process, you’ve really seen the exploit in action. The challenge we often find is you end up with a lot of pundits and experts, right? And I use it as someone who gets asked all the time to do things as an influencer or as whatever.
And I’m like, I can speak about a lot of things, but I can’t speak with truth and conviction about everything. I can read about a thing and then speak about it versus you have lived experience. You have skin in the game in actually going through this. And so I find that just the credibility is so much stronger also that you’re willing to share in the challenges you faced, because that’s also another problem everybody kind of wants to say, oh, I would never. Countless financial advisors who are bordering on bankruptcy, countless bankers who haven’t paid their taxes in nine years.
There are all these people who do a job and yet have sort of fundamental issues in their own handling of the very same thing that they are supposed to be experts in. It’s an odd world in that way that sometimes the voices are the loudest, but not necessarily the most ideal that you would have.
Yeah, I think you make a great point. And I always joke around with my wife, and there’s kind of an old adage, you always say that the electrician house always has electrical problems and things like that, and there is some truth to it, and it can be embarrassing. And I’m the first guilty of it, especially when I look back and was targeted and hacked. But as I talked to other cybersecurity practitioners and some of these guys, I learn a ton of things about. But yet I see they themselves are lacks in cybersecurity often, and they’ll send me a password by email and say, Well, I trust you. It’s okay.
And I’m like, no, stop, please don’t text or email that or they’re not using multifactor authentication or whatever it is. So we, as a community in cybersecurity sometimes are not setting the best example for others. And I’m hoping that we can over time, break that trend. And most of the things that I tend to talk about are not items that are big spends are super complex and technical. And I think that’s kind of a misunderstanding industry people hear cybersecurity. And at least years ago, when I first started talking about it, people would look at your deer in the headlights.
What in the world is this guy talking about? Acronyms and this word and that word. Now it’s become a little bit more mainstay. And people understand if they hear ransomware, they hear fishing attack, they hear multifactor authentication. It resonates with them. They get it. Maybe they don’t practice it or utilize best practices, but they get the sense of those terms because every day you turn the news on, we hear about these things. Cyber attack, ransomware attack. It happened with phishing, it happened these credentials were lost.
So it’s become kind of the norm. And hence the reason why I wrote my second book, cybersecurity Is Everybody’s Business. I kind of had to pivot from understanding from a technical standpoint. Here’s what it is with a CEO wireless security company compromised. But now when I talk about cybersecurity, it does affect my grandmother. It affects my kids, my family, my business colleagues. It affects everybody, and we have to do something about it, or we will be victimized. And hopefully that resonates through some of the pages there and the stories and things that I share because I think it is important for each person to take control of their own security, just like you want to secure your home, secure your car.
You want to have some type of strong cybersecurity stance just so you can fight back and not be victimized because the cyber criminals are winning. That’s the part that bothers me so much, despite the effort of what I’m trying to do and a lot of other great people out there men and women, countless hours trying to fight back and defend people and define good security practices and make things simple. In a sense, I feel like we’re losing. And it’s not just on the personal level, but even as a global level.
Look at what’s happening in the United States with countless ransomware attacks, especially that seems to be an area that now the government is stepping up, which is good. You’ve got the Biden administration now talking to tech companies, and these are the guys that really are embedding security into their products, especially the IoT type of products and mobile phones and things like that. Hopefully this will start to make a difference and resonate through the community or through the United States and get us all safer. And that’s important.
The interesting thing is sort of the adage of we have to be right all the time, and the intruder only has to be right once. We are basically holding up a shield and hoping it doesn’t fail. And at best, it’s a shield that we borrowed. We cannot be experts. They, this proverbial sort of The Royal They. This is all they want to succeed at is just trying and trying and trying until a small way of breaching that armor, it’s a small data breach. And we have this real unfortunate problem that I agree with you.
I love that the government is moving towards at least raising it because it has an incredible impact that they’re there. The downside is often the first step will be to somehow legislate it away. And that is very much not the way. And in fact, sometimes can hobble real true technology organizations and companies and groups that, like many of us are doing, is trying to fight, trying to create ways in which to hold off these breaches, hold off these attacks. And we get sometimes hamstrung by the very same legislation that is designed to protect the rest of the greater good that it’s like, oh, now you’re on the wrong side of some code by law violation or something or another, right?
Yeah. There is truth to that. And I think to some degree that adage, it is pointed and it makes sense. And then I often also think about the counter. And if we look at cybersecurity and I have to say nothing is 100% secure. I think that, I always put that out on the table. So when people are unrealistic, it kind of balances it out. However, when you look at the government and some of their failures or misgivings of the past endless breaches that have happened from pretty much every agency throughout the government, it doesn’t mean going forward.
It will be constant failure, because if they start implementing these best practices and you’ve got private and public working together, communicating, sharing vulnerabilities, sharing weaknesses, then you can start actually blocking them, stopping them and working together. So there’s kind of that silver lining I look at when that communication is there the sharing of information. It doesn’t matter that we don’t have to get it right every single time. But when we do is start implementing best practices and don’t just throw our hands up because I hear that all the time.
When I present at these security trade shows often, a lot of times I’ll interact with the audience and I’ll hear a little bit sense of why bother. I don’t have anything that’s that valuable to steal. They’re going to get it anyway. The government can’t secure it. No company can keep my information secure.
So why bother?
And that’s not a good way to approach cybersecurity, but rather, if each person takes some personal responsibility, do what they can. And it starts at the simplest level. Sometimes it doesn’t mean you have to go out and spend a ton of money, but creating a strong password. This is something I’ve talked past ten years until my eyes are blue. And yet people look at you and say, yeah, very important yet then you question them or quiz them. Well, how many characters is your password? Six characters.
Well, why is it six? I can’t remember more than six or eight characters. And is it a common name? Well, yeah.
Do you use it across multiple logins? Well, yeah, because that way it’s easier to remember. So right away, they start to break down their security. And these are things that we control. So if you don’t reuse the same password across multiple websites, that just takes you to another level, because guess what? More than 50% of all people still reuse the same password across multiple websites. But when we start looking at odds and these security breaches, we wonder, why does it keep happening? Because of us. People are the problem.
Human weakness, and we’re complacent. We’re laxed in cybersecurity. I always ask people and challenge them and say, do you use multifactor authentication? And most people say, oh, yeah. Do you use Gmail? Well, yeah. Do you use multifactor authentication there? Well, no, I have nothing private there to share. And I’m like, well, yes, you do, because before you know it, you’re sending a password, a Social Security number, bank account information. At some point you will. Do you think that that email is truly encrypted private, and Google never reads any of the content of it?
Well, they do. Because you’re paying nothing for it, when you pay nothing for it, what are you doing? You’re trading your privacy. So they’re not going to write Scott Schober bank account number. However, that metadata, data about me will make that correlation. And that’s where it’s really powerful. And we have to realize these companies are selling us as the product, and we have to use caution. So when we do use multifactor authentication, encryption, are cautious about what we share through our email, which is the most common way.
It’ll give us a much better cybersecurity posture.
Yeah, a lot of people sort of take that approach that, well, I used to fax this stuff, and it literally sits on someone’s desk on the other side. But you knew whose desk it was, right. Even if you didn’t know, at least you knew it went to a physical building, and they had a responsibility to shred it. Gmail. Not only did they not shred it, but they’re using it to design other things. They can sell to you via selling your information and meta-information. As you said, they’re not taking the content of your email and directly giving it away.
But they’re developing metadata about you as a persona to then sell to subscribers, vendors, et cetera. And there’s a reason why you get amazingly targeted advertisements. When you go to a website you’re like, oh, that’s funny. I was just looking up something about Subway sandwiches and also I’m getting ad for Subway, or I’m getting ad for Jersey Mike’s because they are buying competitive positioning against advertisement. And you’re like, how did they know so much? Well, you said or wrote it somewhere. Most likely or did a quick Google search.
We literally call it a Google search, right? Like at that point, you know, it by trade name.
And it’s true in so many other ways to your point. We’re so accustomed to what we call it a Google search. And I use Google. It’s great search engine. However, I also used DuckDuckGo. And there I can do searches. Not as good as Google. Honestly, they’re not as good, but they’re pretty good, but it gives a level of anonymity and privacy because again, they’re bouncing around the IP address. It’s encrypted and probably more important, they’re not selling my information, and hence other companies pushing ads toward me.
It really does is it allows me to control my digital footprint. I talk about that often each of us has a digital footprint. The more we put out on social media. The reason for social media. So we can be social. Talk about the trip we went on, share pictures of the kids or whatever else the case may be. But sometimes we’re too social on social media, and we’re giving little tells about our private lives that people can put together a picture of us and perform identity theft, hacking into computers.
All of those things are combination of things socially engineered, where they pick up a phone and garnish a little bit of information from the Secretary, maybe someone in our house innocently, slipped something. And next thing you know, they use all that to get into a computer network. That’s how a lot of these big breaches happen. Third party access, weak passwords, socially engineered phishing attacks. There’s lots of different ways. All the culmination of all of those together are effective means until they can get into that network, and then the game starts and they can really start accumulating stolen personal information and use it to their advantage.
And of course, that all ends up on the marketplace, the dark web, the underbelly of the internet, where they can sell these things and they can do it effectively, make money, stay anonymous and grow the criminal Empire.
You can tell when you’re sitting next to a security person, when you hear them, and they ask the question, like, what’s your mother’s maiden name? Metal four underscore underscore star, even the security questions. This is one of the challenges I often tell people. I’m like you want a basic to transpose the real thing. You don’t want to always use your actual mother’s maiden name. You want to have a key phrase that you may use and maybe add an Identifier to the particular service. There’s different ways you can approach it.
Scott, maybe if you want to talk about ways that we can protect ourselves, especially around those challenge phrases because they feel it’s secure automatically, but they can still be pretty laxed about it.
Yeah. And I think that unfortunately, the concept of security challenge questions when it initially came out was really good. The negative side is probably the specific questions are not unique enough to us to make it a true authenticator or another level of security, because really, security is achieved in layers, and that’s really the intent of it. I always use the analogy. We secure our homes. We don’t just have a simple doorknob lock that we turn, we have a deadbolt, we have an alarm, we have camera, we have those fake stickers that the place is patrol, so on and so forth to do what, to deter the thief, to move to the next house where the window is half open and they’re going to go rob that house.
Same thing in cybersecurity. We want to have these levels of security. So when a security challenge question comes up, what high school did you attend? Anybody can do a simple Google search and see. Scott Schober attended Edison High School, and that’s probably the answer he would use. I actually claim that it would be safer to use password 1234 as my high school that I attended, as opposed to the actual high school I attended. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but guess what? Somebody trying to hack into my account would not put password 1234 in there.
They’d be trying all the different high schools if they looked. Oh, he grew up in Edison. He probably went to Edison High or this high school or this high school, and they would guess it. Case in point, similar to this, a couple of years ago, I was presenting at a, this was a government security conference down in the Virginia area, and I had a keynote there. And also Kevin Mitnick, the world’s most famous hacker had a keynote. He actually invited me up on stage and he wanted to perform identity theft on somebody.
So he picked me out of this crowd of 400, 500 people. I was a little embarrassed and a little nervous going up on stage thinking, oh, gosh, what’s he going to do here? So I just said, Kevin, please go easy on me. I’ve read his books. I certainly follow him. He’s a great guy. He’s done some amazing things, good and bad, but any event. To start off, he simply looked at my badge and said, Scott Schober got on his computer, entered it in, pulled up information. He said a couple of simple questions because you just got to answer yes or no Scott.
Do you live at this residence? Yes.
Do you have another house here? Yes. Are you this old?
Yes.
Is that your mother’s maiden name? Yes. Now I’m getting scared and he goes, okay, the final thing, I got to get your Social Security number pulled it up. Is that your Social Security number? I said, yes, that cost me one dollar. I got nervous. I said, oh, gosh. And then he goes the final piece to perform identity theft on Scott Schober, his date of birth and he goes, does a search and pulls up a screen. All said about 20 or so different entries for different dates of birth.
He goes, is that your date of birth? I said, no. Is your date of birth on the screen at all? I said yes. And one instance is correct, I’m not telling you what it is. And he kind of laughed. And he says, “You’re ruining my routine here”. I said one trick that I’ve always done is every site that I sign up for. I use a different date of birth, so I get different throughout the year, different reminders, Congratulations or happy birthday on all these different dates.
But that is used actually as something that I can control, and it helps keep me secure. So if somebody was going to do identity theft or say, take credit out in my name, they call the issuing bank, there’s a stolen credit card, this and that. And at some point the bank says, what is your date of birth? And the cyber criminal responds with the wrong date. Guess what? Conversation over phone hangs up. Security is in my control, and not all of us can do that. So simple things we can do that will help keep our cybersecurity posture much, much more secure.
Now, obviously, I have my credit frozen. I recommend that for everybody. Do it with the three major credit monitoring agencies. They talk between one another. Is it a pain? Yes.
And there’s always that trade off between security and convenience. If it’s not convenient, it’s probably more secure. And that’s what I do in all my cases when creating a password, when freezing credit or dethawing credit. Making cybersecurity decisions. I balance that. How secure is it versus how convenient it is? And I always try to err on the side of security. And that seems to help to keep me secure for the most of the time. However, that being said, as I mentioned, Eric, nothing is 100% secure. Despite my best efforts, I’m constantly targeted.
I have been hacked. I still receive repeated attacks. It’s just I got to keep up in my game and doing a better job to fight back. And we all do.
This is the challenge we face. As you said, it’s an opportunity crime like bicycle theft is purely about convenience of the availability of a crime. It is very rarely do they want to go out of their way to break into your garage to steal your bicycle. What they want to do is they wait by a place where a lot of students go for lunch. They are likely to forget their lock. They ride up, they lean it against the wall, they walk into the restaurant, they come back out three minutes later, no bicycle.
Especially even if it’s on the dark web. All this stuff like you said, they have to do it in bulk. It’s a systemized approach to the hack. So if your mother’s maiden name is password123. Even though, like I said, it sounds insecure, it’s not, because no one’s mother’s maiden name would be password123. So it will fail on a systemized hack. And unless they really want you in particular very badly, and they’re individualizing the attack, which. Let’s talk about that.
Scott, especially once you’ve been breached. Unfortunately, you go on a short list that often also gets shared, that hey, we have one. And they can show how you were exploited and then ultimately, at that point, then they begin to go a bit deeper. So talk about your own experiences there.
Yeah, a fair amount of security. The way I implement it, I call it security by obscurity, making it a little bit more challenging. In other words, I don’t do things that the normal person does. And again, I can’t recommend this for everybody, but I often will put it out there so people can just reflect upon it and think about it and make the personal choices that work for them to help them stay more secure in the world of this crazy cybersecurity. So since I’ve had my debit card compromising reissued a million times, I don’t use a debit card.
It’s inconvenient. It’s a pain, but I try to find that balance. I don’t have an Amazon account, but if I want to buy something for Amazon, I have other people that have an Amazon account that I will just pay them cash, reimburse them. So I do some things, too. I call it staying off the grid a little bit to keep it a little bit more secure. And I try to mix up my digital footprint, as we were mentioning before, using multiple search engines. I’d like to put in random things that have absolutely nothing to do with my interest or my desire every once in a while to throw curves out there.
And why? Because I always like to keep myself in check. And when you see a crazy ad pop up on your smartphone because you did a search on Google last week for a kayak. Now you’re getting pitched with kayak ads. You make that connection and say, yes, it’s still happening. So I even do things. And this is maybe the next level. I balance it on paranoia, maybe a little bit, just because of the things I went through. Yes, I shred documents. Maybe to a fault. I use a micro cross cut shredder that’s going to obliterate a 2000+ piece as the same as NSA groups will use to really make sure it’s impossible to take this confetti and put it back together.
I use when transporting files via computer to another computer. If I’m using it on a USB stick, I’ll actually use an encrypted stick. They’re cheap, they’re effective. They can have one that holds three terabytes. Works between Mac and PC. You don’t have to put a driver on there. You have a unique code that only you know, you enter it to lock and unlock the stick.
AES 256-bit encryption is on there. Somebody else tries it if I drop or the stick is stolen, it does a mission impossible and erases it. You can implement things like that. That’s about $60 for a base stick with enough memory on it to hold lots of documents. I’m controlling my cybersecurity. Do I use anti malware virus scanners, anti key loggers? Yes, I do. In reality, they only stop about 10% to 15% of the threats coming in because the threats continually evolve and there’s zero day threats. You can’t stop everything.
I patch all my software as quick as I can. iOS. I’m careful not to use a lot of different sites that I surf. I have different computers for different things, especially because I go out on the tour and go on the dark web. I’ll use a VPN to make sure my information is encrypted. Traffic is bounced around, so law enforcement doesn’t knock on my door and lock me up. Not that I’m doing anything bad. I do it more for research a lot of times finding stolen credit cards, identity and things like that.
I’ve even worked with several different media outlets. When we find that information, we’ll actually work together and report that to the authorities, number one and to the individuals that were compromised so they can take some solace that there is something they can do about it. And that’s important. Another tip I recommend a lot of people don’t do this that I think is very important. The dark web, I’ve mentioned that a few times. That’s where all this information, stolen credit cards, debit cards, bank account, passwords. That all ends up on the dark web in volumes that cyber criminals are selling.
They’re using cryptocurrency Bitcoin digital money, basically, so they can remain anonymous. And the dark web things are encrypted. The IP traffic is bounced around, so you don’t know where the criminals working from and the sites are not indexed. So it’s really hard to find the criminals. So when you think about those types of things, we have to be aware of it. And what I do is every month I scan my email addresses. I have about four email accounts that I primarily use. I send them to a company. It’s called Cyberlytics.
I am on the board of advisers there. They got a great product and they have an engine that basically crawls and is in the dark web looking. So if it sees my email account and it’s correlated to any of these breaches, it will alert me. And why is it so important? When you know right away that your email, your possible personal login, credentials to a particular site, say LinkedIn is compromised and you see the date of that breach, how many were affected and that you’re part of it.
Guess what? I go on to LinkedIn and I change my password and I think that’s more effective approaches being proactive as opposed to what many people have recommended. Change your password every three months. Statistically, actually, when you change your password every three months, it doesn’t actually make you any stronger. From a cybersecurity perspective, I argue and counter and say, actually, it creates a situation where it actually may be worse. It gives another opportunity where somebody could intercept that password where it’s being stored. You have to write it down, record it, put it in a password manager.
Again, another opportunity for somebody to hack in there, be it the conduit wireless, through the Internet, email reception part of a breach. Who knows? So just because you’re changing your password more frequently doesn’t make it more secure, but rather make a really long, strong password. Both characters or more will take a long time to compromise. And if it’s so obscure, you can’t remember it. My rule of thumb is that’s a good password. I write it down a physical black book. And again, layers of security as I was talking about Eric, lock the book in a safe, in a locked office, in a locked building with an alarm with cameras, layers of security.
Unlikely my little black book is going to be compromised. I also use keychain passwords for less secure accounts, but I need convenience when I’m traveling and then also, I’ll use a password manager. I personally use Dashlane. Great product. Good balance between security and convenience. It’s not too hard, it’s affordable, but it’s secure one password to remember your information. Your password list is encrypted, and hopefully it does never get compromised and someone can hack it and get your master password. So don’t ever write that down on a sticky note or leave that lying around because that’s the golden key to basically everything you own.
So you got to again balance and manage your security. And I always say, separate your really strong passwords, bank accounts, stock portfolios for US government login sites that’s kept near and dear to me, where I control that. Other ones that are more common and useful when I travel to speak or different events and things, they’re on a password manager. So again, I can control it. And I’m controlling the device that it’s on, and that device is secured and encrypted and backed up, which is very important.
So again, we need to unfortunately, spend a lot of time keeping our stuff secure.
There’s small things even to, like you said, the master password. Quite often. The issue we have is that somebody says, hey, I’m trying to protect my passwords. I’m going to use a master password that I definitely won’t forget, which is ultimately one of their actual passwords, which is probably floating about the dark web. And my suggestion to folks is often take a complex pass phrase. And like you said, don’t write it down, don’t put it in a spot, but put it in three spots or even two spots.
And you can even email part of it to yourself. And then in another area, get the other half. I used to do this in an organization that I was at. We had the top level root password for active directory as an example. I would have three different people create the password. I would create the first six characters. The next person would create the next six. Then the third person would create their six. We would each put our six characters into an envelope and then do this for three instances and then put them in different locations.
One goes to Iron Mountain, one goes to the opposing office, and one goes in a secured file cabinet. And when I first implemented this practice, people are like, this is a little crazy. I’m like, no, you can at any point in time. If I leave, you can recover a password. And if I leave, I don’t have the password. It’s ideal. So none of us have the complete understanding of the way to get in. Yet we all know how in a pinch we could collectively come together and get it effectively.
It’s like turning the two keys at the identical time in order to unlock the nuclear codes and such. But I had a greater responsibility to that corporation. But then I took those practices, and I kind of use that for my own. I’m a fan of Dashlane myself and the other one as well, and I won’t mention the name but people can click on the links below if they watch the YouTube. One of the supporters of the podcast is a VPN. I won’t say just because I don’t want to be like, Scott Schober supports this. Well, like, no.
So lots of VPN products are out there and people say like, well, I don’t look up things on the Internet that people, I wouldn’t be comfortable with people seeing him like, that’s not the point. It’s other things that go in transit with it, it’s other man in the middle attacks for just simple password. Simple.
You log in the email wherever you go, you go to Starbucks. So I have it on my phone and I have it on my laptop. And like you said, it seems like a hurdle. But once you do it two, three times, you just know. On my phone, it’s always on. As soon as it initiates the network, it’s automatically on the background. So I don’t have to be as concerned. Like you said, I love this layered approach. And in practice, when we do it, I think that starts to allay the fears.
Like I said, the same way that people know what ransomware is. If you, three years ago said, ransomware is a thing, people will be like, they just look at you strangely.
You’re going to take my child. Wait a minute.
Exactly. I’ve seen that Liam Neeson thing. Is that what you’re talking? That Liam Neeson movie? I searched about 17 Liam Neeson movies. But if we introduce these practices, it’s actually not terribly complex to do. And then it becomes part of your, you think harder about the next time you write a password somewhere. You think maybe I should be thinking about how I manage this and it becomes pervasive to other secure things. Like you said emailing. How many times do you do this right? They sent, a bank sends you a DocuSign, and then. Well, not a bank.
But somebody could send you a DocuSign to sign a job form, and then they ask you to email back your PDF unencrypted with your Social Security on it. Like, why did you make me DocuSign the thing?
Wait a second.
That’s supposed to be secured and marked and protected. But yet then you asked me for an incredibly powerful piece of information about my life over unencrypted email.
Yeah, and that’s why I tend to like to kind of work in the realm of that security by obscurity by doing things maybe a little bit unorthodox and different. So if someone is targeting me, it’s not going to be that clear what direction I’m going. And I like your analogy there about kind of dividing the password up and keeping it secure and having a way that you could still gain access to it. And then if you do leave the company, it doesn’t go with you. That’s a good balance.
That’s a brilliant example of why it’s so important to just think these things out, and I often encourage it till it becomes habit forming. Some people, you wash your car once a month. We need to do cybersecurity things that we make sure we follow that habit. Maybe you do a data backup. It should really be daily. But if you’re not doing anything once a month is better than nothing at all, especially if you’re a victim of ransomware attack. So implementing systems where you could be disciplined to follow structure that works for you so you can maintain it.
If it’s too complex. I’ve learned quickly people don’t do it. People are lazy, and that seems to happen again and again. I always comparing complacency with cybersecurity and trying to help people realize once you are a victim and hacked and compromised, it could be anything. It could be DDoS attacks. It could be your social media account, your credit card, or debit, your checking account. Once you go through the pain process of it, and it happens again and again and again. You say, I’m never going to go through this again.
You don’t want to go through a federal investigation when $65,000 is taken out of your checking account. It is not fun. It is time consuming. And if you’re running a business like myself, it’s taking away from that. So your whole sole focus is to get that money back and secure it. So it doesn’t happen again. And people don’t sometimes realize they hear it and say, oh, that’s a shame. Well, you were targeted that’s what you get. But you can prevent that. And then you can implement certain things to prevent it from happening again.
Like in that particular case, I sat down with my bank and understood through the investigation, who got the money, how much they got, which accounts they got it for, what it went for. I asked those questions and they’re required by law to tell me under a federal investigation. So it’s interesting understanding. And then how it happened through the bank, how they had access to my account. Somebody impersonated a teller, in a sense and digitally, how they can manipulate and take that money out from a wire transfer.
What did I do in response? I said, Well, from now on, no wire transfers can go out of our bank account unless I’m there in person signing for it and proof of my ID. So suddenly it puts up again, not convenient, but secured. Never had it happen since then. So sometimes you have to look at your personal situation and put in some security layers to make sure it stays secure. So you don’t fall victim to the cyber criminals, and they’ll just move on to the next target.
It’s not that they’re going to give up. They’re lazy. They will move on to the next person that has a password with a sticky note on their computer that doesn’t have a secure account that shares passwords, that doesn’t use multifactor, whatever the case may be. So I encourage everybody to do those things, but just realize once you start doing that, you’re not going to be targeted and victimized, they’re just moving to the next target. It’s a numbers game.
They prey on the fact that humans by nature, as you mentioned. Right.
And we know this, unfortunately. We don’t like friction. We don’t like additional rigor and processes. And yet when we are the victim of a breach or victim of anything. Right.
I know a lot of people that give up drinking every Saturday morning, but then they take it up very effectively on the next Friday night. So when you’re on the direct impact, other side of a personal breach or a fearful thing, and usually they think it’s some complex thing, like somebody with a balaclava and a mask over their face, sitting in a data center and like, no, it’s floating out there. It’s a list. It’s very easy. You get a text message and look, I get them all the time.
And it’s kind of funny because I know what it is. I know this is a phishing expedition, right? I know I get the email, but sometimes they’re good, and even I want to like, I’m going to make sure this is very well done. I want to just triple check how well this was made because they pick a bank that you’re a member of or a cellular phone company that you have an account with. And if you don’t know, it’s just very easy to, oh, the first thing that hits you is, oh, my goodness.
This thing says I’ve been breached. I need to change my password right away. And I used to test this with people all the time. In the Kevin Mitnick style, when I was at one organization, I would pick up the phone somewhere in the office, and I would say, hey, this is Pete from the help desk. I just need to double check if you shared your mainframe password with anybody recently, and they’d be like, no. Okay. I just need you to confirm what it is right now because we’ve seen it, and it looks like it may have been compromised, and they’d be like, and of course, you would use almost always something very simple.
But even if it wasn’t because they are now in fear that they are at risk. They say, it’s Pete from the help desk. It’s Monday123 or whatever they give to me. I’m like, okay, thankfully, that’s not what it is. So you shouldn’t have any problem. If you get any weird issues, then just change your password and photos of the help desk again. But they just see internal number. They save them from the help desk. I’m in fear that my account could be a problem.
I’m going to help them help me. And it worked every time Scott, that’s the scary part. I’m like this easy to do. But human nature was very easy to exploit.
I say it in a weird way. The beauty of social engineering. Since we’re creatures of habit, we’re trusting individuals. When we hear familiar terms and acronyms, especially in a particular space, we will divulge information very innocently. I look back a couple of years ago, we had a vulnerability assessment, done a penetration test at our company after we were hacked and compromised. And it’s interesting going over some of the stuff with the company. I thought, Jeez, we were hacked. Compromise, we take all these great stances and do this and that we’re 100% secure.
We’re going to get through this flying colors. There were still little areas that we were too close to that were identified. And one thing that they brought up, and I said, I’m curious when you guys go into other companies, typical company. How do you get in what’s your most effective way? And they said, well, for example, when they do a lot of work for law firms because they have a lot of personal information. They say, first thing we do is we don’t even go in the company.
We don’t even try to hack. We don’t even do anything. The first thing we do is pull up in the parking lot with some of our wireless tools, and we try to do a Wi-Fi hack, a lot of free tools. And there’s some that are very low cost you can buy. And oftentimes we start with a simple phone call. We spoof the number, we pretend we’re another law firm. We call the receptionist and tell her and say, oh, I’m so glad you got there. Hey, we’ve got this really important proposal.
We got to send it over right away to whatever the senior lawyer is there, Mr. Smith, but we don’t want to tell him we’re a little bit late. We’re so sorry, but this is important to him. Could you just give us the password for your Wi-Fi network so we could email it right over? This is really important. And you’re talking fast and you’re moving through it. And next thing you know, they’re like, he needs a password. Well, I know what that is. It’s password123 or whatever it is on a sticky note on the desk.
They innocently give it to him, even though that has no connection with emailing them this fictitious proposal. Now they’ve got the password to get into the Wi-Fi network, plant malware, work laterally, start gathering up personal information so that they can go to the CEO and say, hey, look, not only we get in compromises information, here’s the weak spot and how we got in sometimes we don’t realize it, but people innocently will give information to just somebody. That sounds very convincing. And that’s a huge caution. What’s the way to counter that?
It’s really just with security awareness training companies like KnowBe4 and many other companies educating people, having that formal process, making somebody an example or sharing some of these silly stories help them just to think and stop before they give out information. We’ve been targeted with them. One employee came up not too long ago and said, Scott, I got this strange email you’re giving gift cards out to all employees. And I heard about it by accident through this person. Are you really doing that? And am I really supposed to give them?
No, stop. Thank you for reporting. Even in security companies, it doesn’t matter. The company we can all easily give in if there’s certain things that sound very credible. And that’s to me when you got to stop right away, pause and say, Hold on, let me investigate it. Make a phone call, text, email, knock on someone’s door and say, hey, do you want to confirm this? And especially if they’re targeting an older population, seniors, the elderly are more prone to being targeted for things like that. Scams on the phone.
Email phishing attacks sounds too good to be true. It’s probably too good to be true. It’s not real. So we want to really pause and have a trusted individual where we could ask the question and just validate it to see if it’s a scam or not.
When a bank phones me or when I phone a bank or when they phone me, especially. And they say, hey, we just need to confirm your identity. And I say, okay, give me a number that I can phone back to get you. And I will do that. And they say, Well, it’s a collective bank. We can’t do that. I’m like, I have no way to confirm your identity, and they’re like, but you’re the one we need to confirm. I’m like, no, you see, that’s the interesting thing.
I know who I am, and I don’t know who you are. So if we can’t meet in the middle on this, no one’s getting confirmed today, and we’ll meet at another time. And it’s funny the resistance they have because they’re like, this is just in the same way that it’s irritating for me to have multifactor and write a password and multi parts and separate it. But it’s what I have to do. It’s what I’ve set. And in the same way, like you said, it goes beyond just raw technology.
This is not about hacking the Wi-Fi and breaking down keys and doing this stuff that we see sort of the Hugh Jackman Swordfish spinning around on a chair with 14 monitors and breaking into the mainframe, which I always laughed. It’s always the mainframe. But the truth is, technologists like yourself, like all your smartest engineers on your team, they’re fantastically good at what they do in the technology space. But if they get an email from what looks like their bank, ask them to fill out a W138 A, and it needs their social.
The bank teller knows as little about encryption key as you do about a W138 being not even a real form, right? The same way those lawyers, if you tell them, hey, you’ve got whatever some judgment thing coming up, you try and use their lingo at them. They will immediately say, hang up the phone. This is a fake call, but you tell them I need to get the Wi-Fi password because we haven’t been able to email you. They’re like, this is a thing I don’t know about, but it’s critical to my business.
Let me get you that password, and it’s very easy. Like I said, it’s just natural human behavior. I’m enthralled by the ability to exploit it, but frightened at the same time. It’s such a weird dichotomy of knowing that you can do it. But then knowing that there’s just so much we have to do to protect against it.
Yeah, it reminds me of a colleague in the space, a slightly parallel space. Frank Abagnale Jr. You’re probably familiar with the movie. A lot of people have seen that. I think it was Leonardo DiCaprio or whatever is the main character. And Tom Hanks in there, too. Loved the movie, but I had the privilege of going down to a security event. I won’t mention the company, but at this event he was the keynote speaker there, and he talked for a good hour plus, and afterward I got to go up and meet him and chat a little bit, and we exchanged contact information.
In fact, he was nice enough to write some praise about my second book, Cybersecurity Is Everybody’s Business. But I learned a lot from him from the standpoint of social engineering, not just from that movie, but understanding how it works from the mindset and understanding kind of who your target victim is going to be and understanding the key phrases, the word, the look and the feel and a sense of urgency. When you give a sense of urgency and authority to anything, you can breach right through. And nine out of ten people will let you through that secure spot.
We’ll trust you because we’re trusting individuals, and that’s good to say that. And I like that value and quality in people. But from the pessimist in the world of cybersecurity, that’s not a good thing. I always tell people trust nobody, unfortunately. Even those that are closest to you because those are the ones that are going to give little tells about how you can be compromised. And it’s a shame the world we live in right now is filled with cyber criminals, but they’re using that to their advantage.
So let’s not make it any easier for them, so they can socially engineer information out. Double check everything I often say with phone scams. If somebody calls up as you mentioned there and they claim they’re the bank fraud department and questioning transactions, you say, hold on a second. What’s your name and phone number in case we get disconnected, that’s a fair question to ask. What did you find out? Nine out of ten times. Click phone hangs up. Guess what? It’s a scammer. That tells you right there.
So simple things you can be proactive. Put the onus on them to give you a little bit of information. They’re not giving you anything proprietary or confidential. My name is John Smith. I’m with the Bank X-Y-Z fraud department. I could be reached at this extension. Okay, you jot it down. It’s probably more likely the bank if that’s the case, if they’re divulging some information and now you have something you can check and verify. I’ll go on Google and do a quick check, go on LinkedIn, throw their name up and say, oh, they do work at Bank X-Y-Z.
Okay, the number is not spoofed. Okay, this is legitimate. I did make this transaction. So you start to go through the process before you divulge anything that’s personal or private.
And I guess it’s probably apropos. I’m going to take your question. I’m going to give it to you, Scott, because I love to hear your take. What keeps you up at night? We’ve talked about a lot of things, and I love your content, especially Evan Kirstel was one of the ones the episodes I like. Evan’s a great guy. I really appreciate his content in general, as a good human. But what’s top of mind in your concerns these days?
Well, I do have so many one that kind of concerns me because I have gone down this path as everybody else is. I constantly go back to the world of IoT. I love innovation. I love technology. I love wireless, love cybersecurity, but I’m kind of at crossroads a little bit, because as I embrace new IoT, the latest camera, the latest watch, the latest iPhone, you name it and bring that into my home and to my car. I’m adding all these additional conduits for hackers to target myself, my company, my family.
So I’m always trying to think of ways. How do I prevent this from becoming a conduit from a hacker getting into my world? And it’s hard because with IoT products in general, they don’t bake the security in in the beginning because they’re focused on cost. Keep the cost down, not going to worry about firmware upgrades later. Make it secure when a vulnerability is discovered a year later in my Nest Thermostat or my Wyze camera or whatever else. So it’s hard to stay on top of those things and keep it secure.
So that’s kind of toward the top of my list. These IoT things. I have probably another ten items that follow, and I have some paranoia with some of the new smart cars of all 50 plus automobile manufacturers globally. They all put cellular modems in there.
Right.
A cellular modem is a great conduit to download malware into a car. And the average new car off the lot has over 100 ECUs in it. Engine control units that could then be used if they could commandeer and take over.
That scares me to death when you’re realizing that there’s the capability to do that. And only because I know researchers and I’ve talked to them, interviewed them and heard how they’ve actually manipulated or found back doors to some of these very secure smart vehicles. Those type of things are the things I think that keep me up at night. I don’t think I can solve them all. Some of the tools and technology that we do develop within my company is putting a dent in it, and I’m proud of that.
And I’m excited with that. And when it changes people’s lives, I’ll share a really brief story because I’m always very proud of this. This happened earlier this year. We develop one tool it’s used for hunting down cell phones not tied directly to cybersecurity, but security and really life and safety more toward. And we still sell these around the globe for various things, getting contraband cell phones out of prison, securing government facilities. But more recently, search and rescue because everybody carries a phone on us. We’re glued to our phone while in France earlier this year, French Alps at the base of it, there was a terrible avalanche.
Family escaped from it except the father. He got trapped and he was pinned up against a tree, had enough airspace to breathe for a while and had his mobile phone on. So he was safe, partially injured, but he had 2.5 meters of snow on top of him. They sent out a rescue team, 130 people in the village with sticks and calling and trying to find them in the ground. They searched for two and a half hours and couldn’t find him. They sent out search dogs to sniff.
Snow pack was too thick. They couldn’t pick the scent up through that deep thing. They walked right past the guy, through the whole area that was under avalanche. Somebody had the smarts to pull our tool out and said, hey, I got one of these Wolfhound-PRO used for search and rescue. Let’s try it, lit it up and right away. Boom signal. Pick up the guy’s phone, hunted it down with a direction finding antenna, called everyone back. The guys over here, dig, dig. They dug him. Miraculously, they found the guy, saved his life.
And it was a wonderful story. So sometimes when you hear about technology being used for good to stop the problems and tragedies that happen in life, it makes you feel good. Same thing about skimmers technology. We were talking about that earlier. A couple of years ago, I started investigating and reading articles. Brian Krebs does a great job, a reporter talking about a lot of the skimmers and how they get into gas pumps and ATMs. So I really took it on as a passion and started doing research.
And one thing I came across was all these problems are reported on and talked about, but nobody seems to have a solution for it. I sat there and said, this is frustrating. There’s got to be something. So we started developing and getting the engineer team involved here and did a lot of trial and error and research and different tests and things and then getting educated with National Weights and Measurements group, local law enforcement, Secret Service FBI and kind of brainstorming all that together. And I came up with a couple of different solutions we developed that are now we’re selling as tools.
And one of them is a simple tool called a Skim Scan. It’s a few hundred dollars. You slide it down the neck of a point of sale terminal that reads your debit card or credit card. And we simply look, if there’s a second read head in there. Green light, red light. Simple beeps and let you know, second head in there. Stop. Don’t use that ATM machine because there’s a skimmer in there. Same thing with a gas pump. So as I start to learn and investigate, I find out not just the vulnerabilities and weaknesses, but how to counter them with tools, sometimes, that are effective.
Same thing in the world of gas pumps. As I got educated on this, I realized how easy it is to be a cyber criminal. You buy a Bluetooth skimmer for very little price. You go on eBay, and then there’s six keys to open up a generic lock on the millions of gas pumps throughout the United States. You take the simple Bluetooth skimmer, plug it into the top of where the point of sale terminal is. You lock the machine 20 seconds. You’re in business.
Now, every time somebody pulls up to the pump and search their card. A second read head reads off that information, stores it in a buffer. Bluetooth set to be within 75 foot proximity to the cyber criminal. Now they go home and hundreds of credit cards each day from each gas pump. At each gas station, they burn them, they sell them on dark web and so on and so forth. They’re in business. So when you understand the inner workings of these cyber criminal gangs, you quickly learn why it is a multi billion dollar industry stealing credit cards.
And instantly we go to the gas pump and put our card and we buy $50. A gas transaction goes through. We move on. We never think about guess what? That’s where the credit card was compromised. Most people I talk to and this is funny. They say, Well, Scott, no, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve got a chip and pin card. Look, it’s secure. And I usually counter that and say, okay, when you go shopping and you stick your chip and pin in front of the terminal, it is more secure than just a mag stripe alone.
I agree with you there. However, how often do you enter a pin in? And out of a room of 100 people, one or two people say, I do at Walmart or Target, I enter an actual pin as another layer of security. But guess what? Most people don’t. And just about all our cards still have the mag stripe on them. So when you put a mag stripe into anything and there’s a second read head, they got the CVV data. They got the golden key to compromise our information.
So just because there’s a perceived security measure on their chip and pin, which again, it is more secure, but it’s not fully implemented. Instead, what we have in the United States, I call it chip and signature, right? Because what are we still doing? We stick it in. It makes the connection secure. Encrypted this and that, and we sign for it. I could sign Mickey Mouse and guess what transaction goes through. Nobody’s validating that signature. That’s a problem. Yet look over in Europe and other countries, ten years ago, they were properly implementing chip and pin credit cards.
We are not. Still slow. Why are we doing it now? It’s because of the legislation. It’s because of the rules, the point of sale terminals. It shifts the liability down to the actual processor of it if they don’t upgrade the chip and pin. And that’s why we have it now. So for all the wrong reasons, it was implemented and it really started the conversation in 2013 with who? Target. Irony of it is Target was the first to actually test chip and pin technology. They were also the first to abandon it years back. Why?
Because it took a little bit longer to check out at the lines. So again, they chose convenience over security. And then they were the first major data breach as a result. So it’s kind of funny when we look back full scale. And in hindsight, we learn a lot of things about security and the importance of using layers of security and not being so focused on speed because you may pay in the end and the result of a data breach, it costs you for years and a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of rebuilding of your brand.
Yeah. If it’s inconvenient to use a chip and pin, how inconvenient is it to reopen bank accounts and cancel every credit card and reinitiate every auto pay every bill pay. My favorite thing of this one to pull the thread on that story, too, is I’m Canadian. And so we’ve had chip and pin for eons, and it’s been kind of natural prior to that, though, when it was just purely signature card.
I actually went into a place one time and I got a brand new card, and so I go and the cashier says, oh, sorry, we can’t take this because it’s not a signature. You need to sign it. And I said, you can’t take it because you can’t validate the signature that you’re going to watch me do. And then I’m going to sign the second piece of paper the same way. And that’s validating what exactly. So what I would actually write on my signature section of the card was ‘Show ID’.
Yeah, that’s what I do on mine, too. Show photo ID.
And they would get really weirded out. They’re like, this isn’t the signature. You’re right, because you have to validate by my photo ID. I worked at a police station when I was younger, so I learned about a lot of things of how easy it was to. And I worked in retail. And so I knew sort of the regulatory boundaries they’re under in and little tips and tricks. But this is great.
I tell you, Scott, thank you. It’s been a real pleasure. You are a pleasure to chat with, and it’s really great. You’re prolific in so many ways. So of course you do daily radio. You’ve got three books. You’re a CEO of a company. Your a keynote speaker. Hopefully, the world opens up a bit more. We can see you on a stage again soon. But if you want to actually give a shout out as well for your radio spots, because I’ll have a link as well. But just let people know what it is you do around that.
Yeah, absolutely. I’m on Cybercrime Radio. It’s 24/7, 365 days a year, constant updates in the world of cybersecurity security. And I do several different segments. But one of the main ones I do every morning is really just the headlines. I take one story that kind of stands out, and I simply break it down and just kind of give a short minute and a half blurb about what the headline is, and it can be anything from ransomware, crypto, cyber attacks and I slip in their little tips and stats here and there also so people can stay safe. And it’s really enjoyable and it’s fast paced and you can even listen to it in the background on your computer if you do Internet radio and things like that.
But it’s Cybercrime Radio. So I’m a host of that segment and I do about two or three other segments as well. So throughout the week you’re going to constantly hear my voice sharing different tips, knowledge, headlines, you name it. Anything in the world of cybersecurity.
That’s great, and especially for folks that are getting into it. And I find this is, there’s a lot of people that are obviously leaning into the industry. It’s a burgeoning area of technology, lots of employment opportunities and learning opportunities. So I wanted to call it out. It’s a great place for folks to get in and make it a part of the routine and sort of introduce the nomenclature and start to get tapped into what’s going on, and it, hopefully, will lead them to ultimately get into.
Like I said, maybe we can see them at a BSides or other things around. There’s lots of great community events. And actually, if you don’t mind, Scott, I’ll add one more question, what’s a great place for people to go or if they wanted to get started in the world of InfoSec and cybersecurity, what are some sort of freely available or community accessible resources that you’d recommend?
Tons and tons of, if I may encourage people if you want to just meet individuals, get a knowledge base. The headline Cybercrime Magazine, part of that on their CSO and chief media commentator. But there’s tons of information that you could download videos to watch radio segments that you can hear. It’s a really good educational part. I’m a part of a whole bunch of other shows. Also, I do a monthly show on Computer America where I spend 1 hour dissecting different cybersecurity breaches and discuss that. It’s over video so you can look back at past episodes, that’s Computer America.
I think there’s so many endless sites and a lot of the events I’m associated with FutureCon, SecureWorld. You name it. RSA, Black Hat. I go to those events, so hopefully our paths will cross somewhere we can meet in person somewhere. Great sources to learn things, and even some of the smaller shows like you mentioned. BSides, ShowMeCon. I’ve been to shows like that and I’ll do presentations there. I really enjoy it. Next week I have one out in Iowa. It’s called CornCon.
It’s a little strange name, but interesting. They do a lot of hacking events, their education for children starting at a young age. I think that’s really important, the math and science aspect that young ones early on learn that and especially for women. Women are really needed in the field of cybersecurity because we got a lot of great, brilliant women doing cybersecurity stuff, but it’s only a tiny portion of it. So I always shout out there and say, women, if you’re interested, looking for a great career that you really needed, you can do well financially, but especially the challenge.
Think about cybersecurity. There’s so many great niches there where you can actually lend a hand and actually make a huge difference in keeping this world safer.
Yeah, that’s a great point. And especially now, I think we’ve learned and we’re beginning to act better as a community. The technology community has not always been very welcoming, still challenging for folks, especially women, folks from underrepresented communities. But there’s so much that we’re doing to make that better, and we just have to keep on it. So as you said, great opportunity. Scott, thank you very much. And for folks that want to reach out directly to you, what’s the best way they can get in contact?
They can certainly check out the stuff we’re doing in my company. It’s simply our website, dvsystems.com or my name scottschober.com. In there, there’s tips that you can download for free. I have white papers there, information about books, speaking appearances, interviews, you name it, feel free to peruse that, and hopefully it’s helpful in keeping you safe and feel free to reach out to me. There’s a fill out form there. I do actually respond. It’s not a robot that responds. I actually respond in person and get tons of requests for advice on products, recommendations, good versus bad in the world of cybersecurity.
And I’m happy to share anything there at no cost. If I can be encouraging to people, I just put that out there. I’m used as a resource for many people and companies around the globe.
Excellent. Well, thank you very much. It’s been a real pleasure to share time.
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