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Don W Long is a successful entrepreneur, mentor, and best selling author. His WCBS (World Class Business Systems) method has led world-leading companies to new levels of growth. Don joins to talk about the state of business and entrepreneurship in 2023 and to announce a fantastic new opportunity for a new community that I am proud to be joining for coaching startup founders.
Big thanks to Don for this great conversation. A real inspiration! Visit Don at https://donwlong.com
Does your startup need strategic technical content? The team at GTM Delta is the leading Technical Marketing-as-a-Servcie company creating SEO-optimized, compelling technical marketing content that connects your company with technical users to help grow your credibility, and your pipeline.
Derek Videll is the founder of Social Bamboo and someone who aims to make business and life better in many ways. Derek’s approach and integrity are noteworthy and you should definitely check out his free course to learn about leveraging and monetizing social media.
Beyond that, he’s just a fantastic human and really taps into some meaningful things to me which made this an amazing and enjoyable conversation. Thank you for a wonderful chat, Derek.
Does your startup need strategic technical content? The team at GTM Delta is the leading Technical Marketing-as-a-Servcie company creating SEO-optimized, compelling technical marketing content that connects your company with technical users to help grow your credibility, and your pipeline.
JR Butler and Anthony Flaherty unpack what is the most powerful opportunity ahead as we head into a high risk period for so many companies. Startups are especially vulnerable as the market shifts. This is also the most critical time to hire the right people to sell into the downturn.
A must listen for anyone in tech startups or any business for that matter. Thanks to JR and Anthony for a great chat and don’t forget to check out the Las Vegas Event Experience coming up November 28-December 1st, 2022 which you can stream live at https://gtmdelta.com/live
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Sponsored by the Shift Group – Shift Group is turning athletes into sales professionals. Is your company looking to hire driven, competitive former athletes? Shift Group not only offers a large pool of diverse sales candidates from entry level to leadership – they help early stage companies in developing their hiring strategy, interview process and build strong sales cultures that attract the best talent for early stage companies.
Sponsored by Diabolical Coffee. Devilishly good coffee and diabolically awesome clothing
Does your startup need strategic technical content? The team at GTM Delta delivers SEO-optimized, compelling content that connects your company with technical users to help grow your credibility, and your pipeline.
Yasmin Rajabi is a product leader focused on building products that empower engineers to move the business forward. She is currently VP of Product at Stormforge, responsible for Product Management, UX, and Docs.
We talk about the multi-variant challenge in Kubernetes Ops, the evolution of Ops, Platform Ops, and SRE, plus the real human experience that drives effective product building and adoption.
Yasmin is a rarity in the level of empathy and curiosity she brings along with her fantastic coding and product management and engineering skills.
Sponsored by our friends at Veeam Software! Make sure to click here and get the latest and greatest data protection platform for everything from containers to your cloud!
Sponsored by the Shift Group – Shift Group is turning athletes into sales professionals. Is your company looking to hire driven, competitive former athletes? Shift Group not only offers a large pool of diverse sales candidates from entry level to leadership – they help early stage companies in developing their hiring strategy, interview process and build strong sales cultures that attract the best talent for early stage companies.
Sponsored by Diabolical Coffee. Devilishly good coffee and diabolically awesome clothing
Does your startup need strategic technical content? The team at GTM Delta delivers SEO-optimized, compelling content that connects your company with technical users to help grow your credibility, and your pipeline.
Tim is CEO of Redmond Growth Initiatives (RGI), an organization designed to help you grow your profits, grow your business and grow your life through Tim’s innovative coaching process. He’s proven himself in starting, running, and growing businesses and is sharing that knowledge through his coaching and mentorship.
It really was an honour to share time with Tim on the show.
Check out Redmond Growth Consulting here: https://redmondgrowth.com/
Sponsored by our friends at Veeam Software! Make sure to click here and get the latest and greatest data protection platform for everything from containers to your cloud!
Sponsored by the Shift Group – Shift Group is turning athletes into sales professionals. Is your company looking to hire driven, competitive former athletes? Shift Group not only offers a large pool of diverse sales candidates from entry level to leadership – they help early stage companies in developing their hiring strategy, interview process and build strong sales cultures that attract the best talent for early stage companies.
Sponsored by Diabolical Coffee. Devilishly good coffee and diabolically awesome clothing
Does your startup need strategic technical content? The team at GTM Delta delivers SEO-optimized, compelling content that connects your company with technical users to help grow your credibility, and your pipeline.
Rick Taylor is an internationally known software architect with over 25 years experience in developing next-generation networking products. Rick is an active member of several standards organisations, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) where he co-chairs two Working Groups.
Sponsored by our friends at Veeam Software! Make sure to click here and get the latest and greatest data protection platform for everything from containers to your cloud!
Sponsored by the Shift Group – Shift Group is turning athletes into sales professionals. Is your company looking to hire driven, competitive former athletes? Shift Group not only offers a large pool of diverse sales candidates from entry level to leadership – they help early stage companies in developing their hiring strategy, interview process and build strong sales cultures that attract the best talent for early stage companies.
Sponsored by Diabolical Coffee. Devilishly good coffee and diabolically awesome clothing
Does your startup need strategic technical content? The team at GTM Delta delivers SEO-optimized, compelling content that connects your company with technical users to help grow your credibility, and your pipeline.
Matt Munson is a CEO and Executive coach with Sanity Labs, a boutique leadership coaching firm he founded in 2019 that provides coaching to dozens of venture backed and bootstrapped companies.
Matt draws on his own experience as a venture-backed CEO, as well as a variety of coaching disciplines, to help others navigate the perilous journey of leadership and organization building.
Check out Sanity Labs here: https://www.sanitylabs.co/ You can get in touch with Matt here: https://www.mattmunson.me/
Sponsored by our friends at Veeam Software! Make sure to click here and get the latest and greatest data protection platform for everything from containers to your cloud!
Sponsored by the Shift Group – Shift Group is turning athletes into sales professionals. Is your company looking to hire driven, competitive former athletes? Shift Group not only offers a large pool of diverse sales candidates from entry level to leadership – they help early stage companies in developing their hiring strategy, interview process and build strong sales cultures that attract the best talent for early stage companies.
Sponsored by Diabolical Coffee. Devilishly good coffee and diabolically awesome clothing
Does your startup need strategic technical content? The team at GTM Delta delivers SEO-optimized, compelling content that connects your company with technical users to help grow your credibility, and your pipeline.
Elliot Shmukler is Co-founder and CEO of Anomalo. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Elliot’s been leading a small but growing team since Anomalo being founded in 2018. He’s had previous roles as a Product and Growth leader at tech companies like Instacart, LinkedIn, and Wealthfront. This is a great chat packed with lessons on startup growth, finding quality in your data, and much more.
Welcome back. This is Eric Wright, the host of the DiscoPosse podcast. And you are listening to another fantastic conversation with the one and only Elliot Shmukler. Elliot is the CEO and co-founder of Anomalo, and they’re doing really fantastic stuff around understanding data cleanliness and data issues. This is the data quality platform. Super cool stuff. Elliot’s got a really fantastic background in what he did in early days with LinkedIn and then much more around the rest of his career. But I really dig his approach, which reminds me to go back and listen again to a couple of spots because there’s stuff that stand out lessons here in how you can help to build teams. Think about product market fit. This is like another classic example of super startup lessons. All right, speaking of other startup lessons, learn some lessons without learning on the hard way by making sure you go to the amazing partners that make this podcast happen. Of course, like the fine folks over at Veeam Software, everything you need for your data protection needs, wherever you got it, whether it’s on premises, in the cloud, cloud native, even SaaS stuff like Office 365 Team SharePoint.
Yeah, you can hit delete button. Bad things happen. So, yeah, hit the go to Veeam button, vee.am/discoposse. Let them know old disco sent you. And on top of that, this is a fantastic platform. So go check it out. All right. Now next up, of course, this episode is brought to you by the folks at the Shift Group who are turning athletes into sales professionals. So if you’re looking to hire super cool, driven, competitive former athletes, or maybe you just want to build your own go to market strategy efficiently and effectively. The Shift Group team has an incredible diverse pool of candidates, whether it’s from entry-level all the way up to leadership. Plus, JR and the team are helping early stage groups just build that strategy. Start with culture, start with success. Take the drive of an athlete, bring that into your organization. Fantastic, folks. Go back and check out JR’s episode used recently on the podcast. So head on over to shiftgroup.io or just drop an email right to JR. He’s JR@ShiftGroup.io. Yeah, he’s really cool. Oh, by the way, if you like coffee, go to Diabolicalcoffee.com. Did I ask you that too fast? Go to diabolicalcoffee.com There you go. That’s better. All right, let’s get to the show. Here we go.
I am Elliot Shmukler, co-founder and CEO of an Anomalo. And you are listening to the DiscoPosse podcast.
All right. I feel like that’s always my moment where I tell people that’s like the on air light just like turns on like. All right, we are live. Although we’re not live, it’s live to live to tape or live to right. Live to MP4. I’m an older fellow, so I still say live to save. Elliot, thank you very much for joining today. I was really excited when I saw you come up as a guest, first because you’re doing exciting stuff with the team at Anomalo. And secondly because you’re a friend of Amber Rowland. And if I take great problems, complex problems being solved with platforms and then seeing somebody who’s standing by the story, it is a great pairing. So I’m excited to chat. So if you don’t mind, Elliot, for folks that are new to you, if you want to give a quick background and bio on yourself and we’ll get into the Anomalo’s story.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Eric. Really a pleasure to be here. In terms of myself, I’m a long time Silicon Valley executive. I’ve worked at some companies that hopefully your listeners know about – LinkedIn, WealthFront – recently in the news and Instacart, also recently in the news with the pandemic. So have been a product and growth leader. I had a bunch of companies like that for a while before founding Anomalo.
It’s amazing how many LinkedIn alumni I found recently. And it’s definitely it’s funny. Some have come from different phases in the company, and I always want to feel like, hey, do you know Patrick Baines? He uses LinkedIn, too, but that’s like saying, oh, you’re from Canada, you must know Pete. He’s from Halifax. There’s a lot of people that work there. But you definitely have a storied history, proven history at that in the industry. And then it comes to today, which we’re going to talk about Anomalo. You’ve got some really great stuff. Obviously, announcements are live and you’ve had some work that’s happening. So let’s talk about the problem that you’re solving and then the how, which is actually super exciting.
Yeah, absolutely, Eric. And I’m glad you’re running into a lot of LinkedIn folks because it was a pretty special time when I was there. And it really actually began a lot of my journey toward Anomalo, where LinkedIn was one of the first places in my career where I got exposure to having a lot of data and trying to use that data to make decisions and in my case, to make the LinkedIn product better, to make it grow faster and ran into a lot of the issues back in the day. This is ten plus years ago now. So even more issues than there are today. But ran into a lot of issues with being data driven and trying to use data. And over the subsequent years, a lot of those issues got solved. For example, LinkedIn at one point had 150 people managing our data warehouse.
Wow.
Right. And today, you just don’t have to do that. Right. Today you can spin up a great Snowflake data warehouse or in a few minutes or data bricks in a few minutes and off you go. You have a world class place to store your data, query your data, analyze your data. But the issue that I’ve seen, despite these amazing improvements in the data stack is that the more powerful your tool, the more powerful your data warehouse, the more data you’re pulling in, the more use cases you’re building on top of data, the more cost you bear if your data is wrong one day or incomplete or missing or inconsistent with what you expected it to be. Right. And so that’s the problem that a lot of them solving is how do we give teams that are working with data, they’re trying to make use of their corporate data, their enterprise data, trying to make decisions, trying to get inside. How do we give them something that helps to make sure that their data is actually right, that they don’t have issues with their data, or if they do that, they can detect them and resolve them quickly before it impacts decisions or other work?
Yeah, it’s amazing. We get so wrapped into the buzzwordy lifestyle of talking about being data driven, and everybody’s got data Lakes and data warehouses and data puddles and data, whatever you want to call them. There’s all these different things about data is the new oil in the same way that data is the new oil? Say data is the new crude oil. And in fact, there’s a lot that needs to be done to make that data really enriched information and gather signal from the noise because data in and of itself is not valuable. It’s the cleanliness of the data and the sort of trueness to the signal you need to find in order to then gather insights and info. All these folks are focusing on the automation side. But if you do not trust the data that’s going into the machine GIGO. Right. Garbage in, garbage out.
Exactly right, Eric. Exactly right. And it’s actually much worse today than it’s been. Think about using machine learning. Right. That’s another buzzword. Everyone talks. Everyone’s trying to deploy their machine learning model, do great things, use those technologies in a way that a Google or an Amazon or Netflix might to improve their product. Guess what happens if you’ve trained a machine learning model on a particular set of data, particular characteristics, and suddenly today the input data that it receives is wildly different, right. That model doesn’t produce great results for you. You’re essentially getting a random out of that model because you’re exposing it to data that it wasn’t trained on. It doesn’t know what to do with it. It has no constraints on what outputs it gives you. So it’s even worse when you have machine learning deployed and you’re expecting to feed us the data that’s coming in and expecting to have great results.
One of the things that stood out when I look at your platform story, I don’t mean to pick on one phrase right now. We go into the entirety of how the platform works, but automated root cause analysis.
Right.
And this is one of the things that near and dear to me. I’ve been doing this as a business for a decade, and it’s one of the most difficult problems to solve because the speed at which the data is moving, the ability to do real time and automated root cause analysis is almost an intractable problem because by the time especially when it gets into anything that’s around system design, the old class thing is by the time you figure out what the real root cause of the problem was, you could have just rebooted the system. Right. But when it comes to data, there’s no reboot the system option. It means you have to understand the forbidden fruit from which the data was gathered, and then now to be able to go back and there’s data reconciliation. So there’s a fantastic problem in the bigness of what it is that you are able to solve. So when I saw that, I was like, okay, we’re going to dig in hard on this one, but let’s actually just talk about the platform in general and how it was put together to solve the problem of data.
Absolutely, Eric. And automated root cause analysis is something we’re very proud of and something is very unique to what we do in our approach. But to step back and give you a sense of how it works fundamentally, what you do with Anomalies, you connect it to your data warehouse. We’re taking advantage of the fact that companies these days are putting up these big data warehouses in the cloud and are stuffing them full of all the data that they care about, centralizing all their data in one place so they can connect it together, analyze it together, and use it for all the various use cases that they have. So Anomalo just connects to your data warehouse, and then within your data warehouse, you select the tables of data that you want us to monitor, and Anomalo goes to work. So one interesting part about what we built with the product is that we’re a machine learning first solution. When you tell us, I want you to monitor this table that has my sales information. We don’t ask you to tell us about the data in that table. We don’t ask you to configure rules for that data or to give us parameters for what that data should be.
We, to the extent possible, learn all those automatically how we connect to that data set. We query your data warehouse, grab some samples of that data, we look at it historically over time, and we actually train one or more machine learning models for each data set that you have us monitor that really seeks to understand the structure and pattern of that data set. That way, when new data comes in, machine learning model can say, hey, this new data that came in, is it somehow different from the structure that I learned from the data set history? And if it is, well, now that may be an issue in the data that we should tell someone about this.
Is the point where if it wasn’t for the fact that I have to stay in camera frame and my microphone arm is not too long, I would stand on the chair and say, oh, Captain, my captain. The idea and this is the core of next generation systems architecture and design is ultimately the system needs to be responsible for its own outcome. And by letting the data drive its own like the understanding of the data itself versus what we believe is the creators of the table that is actually in there is such a fundamental shift, and it’s taking all those assumptions and turning them upside down, which is amazing, because time and time again, we hire a sea of DBAs. And I’ve worked in massive insurance companies, worldwide companies, investment firms, explosive companies, all sorts of exciting stuff. And there’s just we’ve got clients, we’ve got DBAs, we’ve got all these people. And they’re coming in trying to make the data fit into a thing that they believe it should fit into. And every time you’re five years into that project, the diagram is like monstrous, UML, diagram that’s on someone’s wall that they printed on, like five pitch font.
And it’s the size of the entire room. Well, it’s dead because the moment you went live with the system, everything changed. The day in the life moved. And from that point on, the best thing you can do is hope to keep up.
Yeah.
So you’re basically saying you can shed that wherever you are today is, in fact, the beginning of forever because you are now adaptively understanding the data.
That’s exactly right, Eric. And in fact, I would argue those old school approaches which you’re describing, they worked up to a point. Right. We have customers where they spent 2030 years with that approach. They made it work, and they have 100 people doing this work and all this kind of stuff. But at the scale that folks are ingesting data today and with the different types of data that are coming in and the number of applications that they’re trying to run on top of the data, there’s just no way that you can continue that approach. I mean, we have a customer right now Anomalous, that has a table where they’re adding 24 billion records a day. Right. There’s just no way that they’re going to come up with any sort of manual process or rules based process or schema based process to fully make sure that all those rows are conforming to something. Right. They can take some cuts at it, but there’s no way they need something that’s adaptable. And more importantly, they need a machine. Right. Our machine within an envelope has no problem going through 24 billion rows or a sample of those rows if it needs to.
And looking for patterns. That’s going to be pretty challenging using any kind of manual or human driven approach.
Now, I guess this is where the thing will come in, where, as he said, there are purposes and requirements to sort of define the standard by which data is stored. And ultimately, because there’s front end applications that need to understand the schema, there are sort of bound things to the behavior of the data within the structure. But as you said, we’ve got much more that’s coming in. Whether we call it IoT, whether we call it whatever kinds of many sensors, and those sensors could be anything could be 15 different application signals that are coming through that each has their own sort of structural form that’s different. The fact that you could then it gives you the freedom to be able to co locate disparate data, and then ultimately that data, you can find me observability as a practice. We talked about it six, seven years ago. Observability wasn’t even a word outside of physics and chemistry. And then so shout out to charity Majors, who I still will always say she is the creator of the word of observability as a practice. But observability is about bringing unstructured data together and then looking for patterns and signals within it.
And the problem is a high cardinality. Data is incredibly difficult to be able to pull together and then make decisions on and systematically even refine it, let alone get to the point where the data can ultimately create its own structure through having your platform look at it. I don’t mean to wow over this because the computer science folks are just like, there’s no way this is real. It’s a seemingly intractable problem. And I say that because it was intractable up until now. The technology and the capabilities are there where it’s more accessible to do this. But it’s a very unique challenge that you’re solving.
Yeah, absolutely, Eric. And we see ourselves as very much an extension, kind of the observability movement. Right. And they’re great Serbia tools for other dimensions of operations. Right. Data observability is actually even more challenging problem, say operational observable. Is my server up. Right. Those kinds of things. Because data, by necessity is chaotic. Chaotic. To a large extent, what my users do with my product on Fridays might be dramatically different. But what they do with my product on Sundays and even more so different if Sunday is part of a long weekend or Friday is a holiday or we just launched the new product on Monday. And so there’s a lot of dimensions of variability, a lot of chaos in actual data that’s coming in. User data, third party data, those kinds of things. There’s a lot of chaos there above and beyond, sort of the classic conservative data. What is my machine doing? Is it up? Is it down? Is it processing transactions? So definitely a challenging problem. But, yeah, the technology has also improved traumatic. Modern machine learning techniques can do a lot. And modern data warehouses are also incredibly powerful. You can ask them to summarize a lot of what’s going on with the data quickly.
You can analyze it.
Yeah. I think the biggest battleground that we are seeing in the industry is this idea of putting data into a place. And then because right now we know that the technology is arriving, if not has already arrived to do really amazing things with our data. And the one thing that think of the early application design, it was like, this is the data that we’re going to need in order to make decisions around future architectures. So they basically throw away everything but this. It is purely wheat versus chaff, except that they threw away the chaff. And then at some point, especially when you get into retail and you get into all the industrial, there’s so many use cases where they say, like, we got to keep the chaff, hang on to it, because we don’t know, there may actually be a different seed hiding in the chaff. And the economics of storing data have gotten significantly better. And then again, what’s happening now is really people are sort of holding onto it and saying that this may be useful one day and I can’t risk that I throw it away and find out that it would have been useful.
It really is a ripe opportunity for what you and the team are doing.
Yeah, exactly right. It’s really a sea change. And I saw this first template years ago when I was at LinkedIn, coming back to the beginning of the podcast. We were collecting everything, every bit of data that we could, and we were maybe using 5% of it. But it was a cultural thing that the team had picked up from other companies like PayPal early in the Internet history that we got to collect everything because it might be helpful in the future and we would regularly discover new ways to use that data that we weren’t using. We regularly found ways to take that data that maybe in the old days you would have discarded and actually innovate with it and build new product features based on it. That’s exactly right. And that’s been a cultural transformation throughout the enterprise world where now when we talk to customers, they’re almost always storing all the data. Right. They’re not throwing data away anymore like they used to. They may not be using all of it. Maybe they’re on their way to trying to use more and more of it, but they’re definitely storing it and they’re centralizing it and they’re making it accessible.
Yeah. I say as a guy who gets hard to see an out of focus view, there’s about 35 decks of cards over there. I’m not going to use all of them, but you never know. I buy three of each packet again. I’m a bit of a collector in that way. And really in the data world now, this truly is what we’re seeing. More and more companies are realizing. It is a combination of many things. But I’d love to talk about this idea that many people believe today is the beginning of a lot of this, when in fact, this has been a well formed idea for quite some time. It’s just that it was maybe not broadly accessible or broadly understood outside of like a core group of, obviously, people in financial services. We’ve got insurance stuff like there are organizations that have long held that their data needs to be used later. So let’s just keep holding onto it. You never know. But it’s always a funny thing, just like when any band suddenly becomes very popular. I saw them ten years ago in College. I don’t know who you think is brand new, but these folks have been around for a while.
This concept, I think, is probably more widely understood in some circles. Where has this been prevalent before?
Yeah, well, I kind of trace it, at least in my experience of it is really a Silicon Valley phenomenon, at least to the extreme extent that we see. Obviously, financial services companies have been storing data using fraud models and that kind of thing for a long time. But this idea that all of your data needs to be in one place. Right. And even if you’re not using it, eventually I may want that connection for something. It’s, I think, a very Silicon Valley phenomenon. Silicon Valley companies that I’ve been at always kind of strive to have the central one place with everything. So we’re using a third party tool. That’s not okay. We got to import the data from that third party tool into our one place. Literally, engineers would come to me and be like, Elliot, you can’t put up this tool. We’re going to lose that data that goes into the tool. We need an API to get it out. And that would be a hard requirement to using a third party tool for something. And so I think that was the core of it. And that enabled companies like the Google, Amazon and Netflix to do very powerful things.
And now everyone’s kind of realizing that that was a really big advantage. We work actually with a lot of financial services customers. They’ve always had this idea of using data. And they have some amazingly expert teams, frog modeling, and all this kind of stuff. They’re still in silo mode. They have data all over the place. Right. They never really bought in until very recently into this idea of centralization into putting all of it in one place.
And I would posit that still today, the most widely used tool for data analysis is Excel. It’s just bizarre. It’s 2022. And if Microsoft should have divested Excel, it would be worth more than Amazon right now.
Absolutely. And if you think about it, Excel is the most decentralized type of data you can have. I literally have my own copy of the data in my sheet. Right. And there’s ways to sync it now. And all this kind of stuff, but it really is a very different world from the one, I think, where we’re heading to them.
I’ve seen this for having supported big financials for a long time in my own career in the tech side. And I remember getting these calls first and you’re like, oh, I need to restore this Excel documents. What, did you delete it? No, it just got corrupted. Like, how did it get corrupted? Well, I don’t know. And you look at it and it’s 2GB Excel file. You’ve stretched the limits of this platform. This is not meant to do this. And that was pre understanding of what the data warehouse opportunity was many years ago. Then. Now even today, they’ll put the data centrally. But then a lot of the offloading of the processing is done very client side, and then more and more, but at least the centralization of data has become data goes here first. It’s funny you mentioned this thing about Silicon Valley. Many Silicon Valley folks have always understood that the data has intrinsic value and so we should always keep our data close. Conversely, a lot of organizations are being told by those very same Silicon Valley companies, you should offload everything as a service. So it’s an interesting sort of dichotomy in the approach.
But I see more people are saying we’re going to use the service, but we want the data to stay centralized or at least keep a copy of it centrally. And that’s a fairly recent shift in some of the customers that I’ve talked to.
Yeah. And we see that as a very common pattern. For example, if you’re running transactions through Stripe, big Silicon Valley company, right, where you’re outsourced your payment processing, well, very often we see it in our customer data set. You’re going to pull out that data from Stripe, you’re going to get the full log of everything that’s happened, put it in your data warehouse, how you can connect any transactional events on your product, on your ecommerce website to that Stripe payment. And now you can also analyze that Stripe data. What percentage of my payments fail? What is my credit card distribution? Right. How many folks got the special discount? So we see that pattern quite a bit. And in fact, when we started on Outlook, we were counting on the fact that this is going to become the norm, that more and more companies were going to use these hosted managed services, but we’re going to pull the data back into their data warehouse so that many companies would end up with a copy of Stripe data sitting in their data warehouse. And that would allow us to do a better job because our models would see many instances of Stripes data sitting in many warehouses that we could learn and generalize from.
So we were counting a little bit on that. And in fact, we were seeing that play out.
So let’s talk about Anomalo Pulse, and this is exciting stuff. Let’s dig in a bit on the product side, on what we have there.
Yeah, absolutely, Eric. So Anomalo Pulse is a new kind of visualization dashboard product that we launched as part of Anomalous. And it’s in response to a question that we’ve been getting to a lot from a lot of our customers. They deploy normal. They start monitoring some of their tables. They have issues that come up that they resolve very often. We talk to the VP of data, the chief data officer, and their question is, Elliot, how do I know how well my organization is doing monitoring my data in terms of my data quality? What can I look at that says you’re improving based on all the stuff you’re doing, or you’re not improving based on all the stuff you’re doing. You need to do more. You need to focus on this area. And sometimes it’s even a team based and accountability type question, which is how do I know which of my teams are doing well in terms of the quality of their data and which teams are not really managing the data quality? So we need more help or need more focus in that area? And so we built an envelope post, really to answer that question.
And so you can log in and you can see an organizational view of how you’re doing that on data quality. So how many data tables do you have? What percentage of those are actually actively being monitored for data issues? Right. If that’s a small percentage? Well, there’s probably a lot of issues that you’re not catching. If it’s a big percentage, you’re doing well of the tables that are being monitored, how often do they have an issue, which ones have issues all the time versus every once in a while that can give you a sense of, well, where are the trouble spots in your data and where our successes in your data, which things are sort of clean, in which things regularly have issues? And then, of course, you can break that down by team or schema in your data warehouse and all those kinds of things. So that’s Pulse, for the first time, you can start to develop a sense of how are we doing overall in terms of managing, monitoring the quality of our data.
Now dive into the tech a bit, because I know a lot of folks would ask things like what’s the sort of impact and capability mix where you talk about sampling, taking first samples, then ultimately training, and then throwing it at the entirety of the data set. There are different phases in which you would see adoption, but then also what sort of the processing impact? Where do I fit this in my life cycle of data when it comes to because all these applications get this weird thing where the data part of the organization quite often is a very standalone group or a bunch of standalone groups, and then the application groups are functionally separated, and then you’ve got the CIO, who sort of has responsibility for it. There’s a lot of intermingling, and that’s why where does it fit in? Who would own Anomalous?
Right. Great question, Eric. So what we often see and again, this varies by organization because this is also kind of a new area. Right. How you become more data driven and transform yourself. There’s still a lot of thinking and evolution in terms of how these various teams and roles are structured. But what we see emerging at our most sophisticated customers is a kind of data platform team inside the organization. And so the data platform team is kind of responsible for what are the tools we have in our data stack. And the data platform team, in turn, has internal customers, which could be the business teams, the application teams that want to use data. But they go to the data platform team to sort of get the tools for accessing and using data. Very often the data platform team is the one that owns the data warehouse. Right. They made the selection of which data warehouse it is. They kind of own its access and organization. They may not be the team that feeds the data warehouse with data that might be distributed or that might be a data engineering team, but they kind of own the data warehouse and how it exists and how it works.
And then they might also own things like Bi tools. How do we build dashboards on top of this data warehouse data. So Anomalous fits into that most easily, which is the data platform team that’s responsible for what are the tools that we have as an organization to manage and work with data.
The thing that I like that I believe the industry has finally gotten around to is that there is no such thing as a single pane of glass. We’ve learned that it was a sales pitch for a lot of organizations, that you’ve got 47 tools. I’m going to say the tool that will get rid of the other 47. And in the end, you now have 48 tools is what you’ve got. And it’s true, because even if you get it right, even you say, okay, good, we’ve got three disparate data warehouses. We’re going to merge them together, put them in one fantastically, huge, single, beautiful spot, and then you’re all good. No one does that. But even if you do, let’s just hypothetically say the magic occurred. And then they announced that you’ve just acquired another company. Well, guess what? They have seven data warehouses. They’ve got some on Prem. They’ve got some in the cloud. They’ve got three different clouds because they just acquired two companies. Like, there’s never a final resting place for data. Where does this make the Anomalous story important? Because it seems to me like this is where you can really shine, that you’re not saying you got to put all your data here so I can go get it.
Yeah. I mean, we are counting on it’s going to be in the cloud. Right. And so I think the migration to the cloud is a free train that’s not going to stop. And we are counting on that, Eric. But we do support multiple different places that it might be multiple different platforms that you might set up in your organization to query that data. And you can view all of them in one space in an online set of monitoring for all of them. So we have folks that have snowquake and they have a Google BigQuery. I don’t know why they have to. Maybe it was an acquisition, but it happens. That’s okay. You just connect the download. Right. And as far as you’re concerned, all of your data is now in one place. So absolutely. I do think there’s a pretty big push to centralize to get to one. And of course, that’s tough. And I don’t expect everyone to do it perfectly. This is actually one area where Silicon Valley companies start out having advantage because they’re building from scratch. Right. You start out seven data warehouses that you need to combine. You start out with the one you choose that you need to grow over time.
And so there’s a little bit of an advantage to newer firms. But I do think there’s strong pressure and kind of strong momentum to get unified and get centralized.
Yeah. And even if not for continuous real time, at least the centralization for offline and near real time processing has to be done that central location, because what UI? I often see this pattern.
Right.
Well, they’ll have an app stack that’s Google centric, and then I’ll have another app stack that’s AWS centric. And maybe there’s legal or other requirements, like business requirements that drive those decisions, like architecturally, no one would say it’s a great idea. But then now you’ve got the challenge of centralizing that data to a place for processing. And I think they’ve pretty much accepted. Like I said, the cost of doing storage of this data is not significant compared to the continuous precedent, even like a Snowflake. It’s funny you mentioned somebody I’ve got data inside BigQuery and then date inside Snowflake, which if I were to look underneath covers, probably runs on top of BigQuery or like there’s whatever it is they’re running on the same stack that you’re running on. It’s just that they’ve abstracted it to do additional things. So we will see still those patterns of multiple spots. But the central, like one pool of common data, I think, is where people are heading, whether it’s that real time online. Sorry. Like old school mainframe batch and online, we will see that stuff happen where you’ll have a lot of stuff that’s moving to that batch style, but it’s going to be held in a central spot.
Yeah. And in some cases, you can get there fast if you do a daily Lake type approach where your data is stored in the cloud. Right. But it’s just stored as files and cloud storage somewhere. And now multiple different warehouses can process that data. You can hook it up to Snowflakes, you can hook it up to BigQuery, you can hook it up to data Break. You choose which tool you want to use to process that data, but your data actually is in one place. And so we also see that as well, which is kind of a way to skirt around the unification to say, well, my data is in one place, but I might have multiple tools to query it.
Now let’s talk about the team, because I know we’ve talked about some of your background, and I’d love to dig into the rest of the founding team and what your collective view and approach drew you all together.
Yeah, absolutely. So my co-founder is Jeremy Stanley. We were together at Instacart. I was the chief growth officer trying to get Instacart to grow faster. And he was the VP of data science for Instacart and actually had been a data science leader for many, many years. He tells stories about predictive models for mining companies to predict the mine that was going to have an accident, those kinds of things. And together we’ve recruited a lot of our favorite technical folks for a majority technical team, and have also recruited some of our favorite data scientists, folks that we knew would need a tool like Anomalo that are actually now building that tool essentially for themselves. So Vicky, who was the lead engineer on the Pulse product that we just talked about, is a classic example of something like this. Someone Jeremy and I worked with and someone who in a different life would have been the user of and now is building the products she would have wanted to have years ago. So that’s how we approach building the.
Team when it comes to this.
Right.
You’ve been through different organizations, and especially given that your role is chief in the growth side of things. So you’re like a very friendly, nicer version of Chimath Palpatia, but the human aspect merging with the systematic aspect of growth, you’ve seen it at the growth phases. So how does that influence the initial phase of seeding the company? But having an eye on growth gives you an interesting sort of split of how you have to look at things.
Yeah, I’ll be honest with you. They’re pretty different world. Right. And folks ask me for growth advice all the time, as I’m sure they do to Chamois. Or maybe he moved past that. And the truth is, the early days of a company finding product market fit. Getting those first few passionate users has nothing to do with what we used to do at LinkedIn and, wellfront, Instacart on growing. Once you’ve found your core set of users and thinking about, okay, how do we make this much larger, much faster? So those are very different worlds, and it hasn’t been a huge adjustment for me. But it’s a little bit of adjustment to realize that in the early days you’re not operating with a lot of data despite being a data company. Our own in the early days, our own set of data that we could use was really tiny. Right. As we were trying to get to those first initial users in a low product. So there’s an adjustment where you realize that you don’t have a ton of data. You don’t have a ton of things that you figured out that you could double down into.
Right. A lot of growth mechanics that growth leaders that larger companies use. They just figure out what already works and they find ways to do more. You don’t have that at the early stage. You don’t know what’s going to work. So that’s an adjustment. But the thing that’s universal is the idea of experimentation, whether it’s in the early days of a seed stage company or it’s in the growth context of a larger company, you should constantly be experimenting and learning, trying new things and seeing if they work right. And in a larger company, you can direct your experiments more. You know, the characteristics of things that have worked in the past, that you can be very selective in your experiments. In an earlier stage company, you’re kind of trying everything. You’ve got your gut a little bit more. But that idea of experimenting and learning is definitely still a universal thing.
Yeah. It is funny, though. Need you realize how lucky you are when you’ve got the pool to draw from? And it’s why you see building teams, founding teams, building teams, growing teams are often like the stages of a rocket where they truly just will say that the first stage of the rocket gets us to this altitude, and then we shed the stage. And I’ve seen that. So it’s now interesting that you coming in as a founder. You are going to have to survive different stages that were previously not experienced. It must be an exciting and interesting world to now really see this from zero to one phase of the company.
Yeah, for sure. Eric and I’m actually super cognizant of the phases you’ve talked about because I want to make sure I adjust. I have many experiences in past companies where I came in in the growth stage as a growth leader, and I have this portfolio of techniques and strategies. But the founders are still in the foundation stage. They haven’t made the leap. They haven’t realized yet that you have data. You have a base from which to build. You can double down into things that have already worked. You can be selective. Right. In those situations, I’ve had to convince folks that my approach is a good one, demonstrate results, prove that my approach is the right one for that stage. Of the company. And so I’m very cognizant of that and making sure that when that stage comes and I think we’re inching into that growth stage now in our company’s trajectory and all those trajectory, I want to be very cognizant that. I kind of make that switch in my head and say, okay, we can start to use some of those growth strategies now.
Yeah. Now that you have those levers available, you expose those levers to the business all of a sudden, but you have to build and discover those levers to begin with. And how did you find that very early phase in seeking product market fit? You talked about the customer centric hiring in that you’ve effectively built a team on people that would be consumers of the product. So that will very strongly influence the way you engage with those early prospects and customers. So what was that first phase of finding the development partner customers and such like?
Yeah, you know, to be honest, it was easier than I thought because precisely because of the team we built, we could go to our network and we could find customers from our network. So all of our initial customers, all of our initial design partners were folks that we kind of got connected to through our network, and we had a relationship with, and they agreed to help us out, and eventually they became paying customers a phenomena. And so that’s a pretty powerful way. If you have a network or if you can recruit a team that has a network into your customers and has access to your potential customers, that’s a pretty powerful way to get started. Even LinkedIn back in the day, Eric actually started like that. The first folks invited to LinkedIn were in Reid Hoffman’s network, invited all of his all the PayPal folks and his VC friends, and that formed the core of the original user base. And he could get them to accept because he had a relationship with them and he was Reid Hoffman. Without that network, it would have been a much harder road.
Yeah, it is very interesting. And as far as the product market, fit is often a challenge to find, depending on the friction in which you can consume the product. And that’s why I admire your approach in that, obviously, data has to be in the cloud. All right. It’s kind of a binary thing, but you’re not saying that you need to relocate your data in order for us to be able to make use of it. That is the big thing. There’s a much lower friction to bring Anomalo in which versus many other companies, they find this thing of like, yeah, we’re going to do strict Mason stuff with your data. We just need to move it all over into our data warehouse in order to do it in networking. I used to struggle with this all the time, especially on the consumer side. Every single product you’d buy that has fantastic network monitoring these different tools. Oh, yeah. All you need to do is make sure that we’re routing all your data through this endpoint like we do that seven times already. For all these other things, I can’t continue to reroute my data. And eventually they learned that thanks to software defined networking, you can put virtual taps all over the place, but it easily be physical like it.
That’s how Gigamon became a business, because the idea of aggregated span ports so that you could monitor data flow, that created an opportunity. And now if you told somebody, I need you to route your data through something, they’d be like, you’re nuts.
That’s right, Eric. Lowering friction is a big deal. I would argue lowering friction is one of the most innovative things we can do in many years. And you’re absolutely right. Anomal doesn’t require your data to go into our data warehouse. In fact, we will often to point out where we just sit in the same cloud environment as your data warehouse. Right. So your data never even has to leave your cloud. We just push our application to your data rather than your data having to stream to us or anything like that, or us having to query it and send some results back to our cloud. We just sit where the data is. And then the other element of friction that we reduced, Eric, is just the setup friction because you don’t have to set up rules or tell us what to look for when you set up an ammo. That’s another thing that our customers really resonate with. You can do a few clicks and you’re monitoring your data now, right. And you can fine tune it and customize it if you wish, if you want to go deeper, but you don’t have to get it up and running.
You don’t require a $180,000 professional services engagement to go through proof of concept, then, which is no, not at all, not at all. And I say it, I partially ingest, mostly tongue in cheek, I guess, because I know that’s out there. Right. Like the complexity of the problem that you’re solving usually would require a lot of human interaction and a lot of human development of understanding the business, understanding the policies, understanding the flow. God, I hate to say this word because it came to mind right away. It’s game changing in that it is fundamentally changing how easy it is to get started. And then at that point, now, platform, implementation wise, what’s the most common time frame that folks expect if they say like, hey, alright, I saw Elliot on LinkedIn doing something, I’m going to reach out. I want anomaly in my environment.
Yeah, pretty fast. Obviously there’s legal things where we have agreements and security stuff and all those kinds of things. But deploying an on low in your partner probably takes about an hour to get it up and running. And then maybe another hour to get some things configured and you’re up and running. Right. So we literally when we have a new customer, we book two 1 hour meetings, one to install the product and one to onboard you into the product. At the end of that onboarding, you already have it configured and monitoring critical data in your data warehouse. So that’s all it takes.
You’ve won the friction game. Absolutely. The most friction free implementation. And what I love about this is I can be way more excited about your product than you need to be because for folks that do listen to the podcast, they know no one comes on here because they say we need to talk about our products. In fact, usually I’m the one that’s pulling it out of people because I am excited about what you’re doing. Again, seeing my own experiences in this type of implementation and the complexity that we’ve usually faced, it’s pretty big. And really it goes to the core of the team and your approach, which means that future growth, future development will carry that model forward because that culture seems to be like ingrained in the ethos of the company, which is refreshing, right? That’s where it needs to be. Instead of having to take old methods and then gently refactor them like, no, we’re throwing about the old game plan and this is how it goes now. It’s kind of refreshing.
Thank you, Eric. I mean, we’re definitely trying still an early stage company, still small, so still a lot of things to build and a lot of work to do. But we’re definitely trying and we’re pretty excited about the momentum we’re seeing and how well the product is working for our customers.
I guess I should ask one important question. Really? Who is your ideal customer that will be able to quickly find that fit and value out of the Anomalous platform?
Yeah, absolutely. Anyone with a cloud data warehouse, that’s the first step, right? If you haven’t set up a data warehouse yet, then probably you’re a little too early in your kind of data maturity, data lifecycle. You have a data warehouse. That’s great. We also look for folks where they built out a data team. Right. So again, if you have if you don’t have much of a data team, probably you just aren’t powering enough things with data yet. Experience the paint, update issues and data quality. But even once you have a data team of five or so, well, now you’re probably feeling that pain and we can definitely help you.
Odds are once you throw the first person at it, there’s a reason it gets to five fast. They start feeling that pain pretty quickly. I remember back it used to be like ETL people, and that was the whole big thing. It was just like just getting data between places and they’d have teams doing ETL, then you got DBAs doing the back end. It’s like all of this thing we’ve moved the function and the roles a bit. But in the end, there still is a lot of that really understanding where business logic comes in. And this is why this agnostic, data driven and literally data powered approach that you’ve got makes the move to taking on the platform a lot easier because it’s time and time again, it’s like you come in, the first thing you have to do is set up 17 interviews with product people, and they’re even arguing in between about how it really should go. They sort of unpack this awful family history of where the data came from. You can just be like, okay, no problem. Just plug this in. We’ll be back in an hour, and then we’ll talk about what your data really says.
Yeah, exactly right, Eric. And what a lot of companies are doing is because of this issue, because of how difficult it is to kind of get to ground truth synthesize. They’ve actually just decentralized the management of data. Right. So product managers, well, you own this data set, right? You figure out what’s going on here, and it’s actually another reason to get a tool like an envelope. We are no code, low code tool. Right. You set us up and it goes and we’re going to root cause things and visualize things for you in a way that almost anyone can understand. We don’t require you to kind of understand obscure error messages or parse logs or even query the data yourself. Right. We’re going to do a lot of that work for you. So we’re actually accessible to anyone in the organization who cares about a particular data set. And so we’ve actually helped a lot of our customers kind of complete that decentralization or democratization to sort of be able to push the responsibility for that data set to the product manager or to the team that cares about that data set, rather than having to have folks and data engineering and other functions sort of synthesize all that information from all the various parties.
One thing I’ll ask and I hate to ask a question which I know can be a tough question is how do you deal with things like data separation for regulatory stuff, you’ve got role based access control, lots of different access control lists that are spread throughout these data sets. Where does that come into? How it interacts with an omelet?
Yeah, we’ve had to build all that, Eric. So we have a financial services customer right now, actually, two of them, where data is heavily restricted. If you’re in the mortgage group, you cannot see the data from the banking group and vice versa. And so we have to build that functionality. We have separate teams and organizations within anomalous Nomalo itself can see everything. But if you log in from the banking team, you only see the banking data. Right. And if you log in from the mortgage team, you only see the mortgage data and so we’ve had to build those access controls. And, of course, we integrate with things like Octa and other tools that the enterprise might have to sort of appropriately associate users with teams and with the access that they should have. Good.
That wasn’t so much of a curveball then. I was like, this is probably not the question. You just sneak in at the end of the podcast. The hardest possible question. Let’s talk to the CISO right now. So it’s good. Yes. And another thing that we definitely are seeing more and more of is this where the ethics of data usage and the ethics of data storage and the business rules that are wrapped around that and the legal and regulatory stuff, it creates a real challenge. The truth is, most of these teams, they do their best, but quite often, they don’t even realize how exposed some of those data are to each other. Because what we believe is this true data isolation. There’s many Internet connected systems, so there’s always a path to get from one place to another. But it is, I think, top of mind for CSO and Chief Data Officer. Right. I guess. Is that a role that’s really becoming a.com like CISO got it right. That came in with Sarbanes Oxley and other regulatory requirements. They’re like, you need an officer who is charged with this function, but the Chief Data Officer, it’s still kind of a fuzzy function.
Yeah. I mean, it’s not as well adopted, but it’s coming. We see it all the time. Right. That’s typically we typically interact with a chief Data Officer or someone who’s active at that officer. Maybe they have a VP of Data title or something along those lines. But, yeah, it’s coming. There’s enough complexity in the data the company is using in the system, powering that data in the data teams are large enough where you need an executive driving your data strategy. Data is critical enough. As you said, Data is the new crude oil well. You need an executive who’s going to mine that oil, if you will, and figure out how to process it. So we see it happening quite a bit. And even at older companies that have been around for a long time, or maybe Data was part of their It team, and the CIO used to be in charge of data. Now they’re either opening up or they have data Officer. The other aspect of this, Eric, is folks have realized that managing data systems and getting value from data is different than engineering. Right. It’s different than building other systems, different than building applications or setting up networking.
It’s a different skill set. And so that also kind of created an opportunity for the chief Data Officer to emerge because they can truly have that Data skill set. Rather than starting with an engineering skill set and learning about data, as folks used to do in the past, well.
They effectively become the F one driver to a fantastic F one car team.
Right?
The engineers that build that car will never be able to drive it and get it to perform. So they have to have a specialist that’s like, this is your singular function is get the most value for the least expense and least risk out of these assets and allows them to shape the strategy for it. It’s kind of funny. If you think like 20 years ago, especially you’d hand somebody a business card, it would say VP of Data to be like, no, seriously, this is a joke, right? What does that even mean? This is not a real thing. How many people do you have on your team? You’re like, oh, I’m in charge of the data. We’ve come a long way in a seemingly short time, as far as the dawn of Earth, at least.
Yeah, you’re definitely right, Eric. And I love the Formula One driver analogy. I’ve been even surprised that they’re now product managers of data. Right. I was in product manager for a long time, and normally product managers are for features. You can be the product manager of this page or this flow. Well, data is so important and so integral to product works that we see a lot of customers where they have a product manager. Right. It is kind of coordinates and orchestrates and strategizes a lot of the things that they do in the data work.
It’s where we’re going. And I say, it’s where we’re going. It’s where it’s already going. And I think this is even any organization at least should have a sense of what their strategy is, whether they’re tactically moving towards it as different things. It’s kind of like sustainability. Every time somebody says to me, yeah, we’ve got a sustainability initiative, that’s fantastic. What have you done in the last twelve months to enact things towards this strategy? Like, oh, we’ve got a steering committee. Okay, perfect. But data is a very real thing. Not that sustainability isn’t. I shouldn’t pick on that, but it’s like people say they’ve got a data strategy. What have you done about it? And this is a place where you can find a great fit. All right. I am so happy. Thank you. So again, Elliot, if you want to give up, what’s the best way? If people want to find out more about Anomalo, obviously have links to the website and such. If they want to reach out to you and maybe dig in a little bit more on the platform itself, what’s the best way to do that?
Absolutely. So just go to anomalous.com it’s A-N-O-M-A-L-O. It’s kind of like anomaly, except with an O at the end instead of a why? Check it out. There are demos there. There’s documentation, there’s all kinds of resources on what the product can do, and feel free to contact us there if you want to try it. And, Eric, thank you. So much for having me. It’s really been a pleasure.
I got to say one quick thing too. For people that are about data, you got bloody good designers like your website is just very captivating. I really enjoy the user experience of the way you do your so for people that are living in data you’ve got a bloody good design mind on you.
Well, we’re big believers that you can’t get insights out of data unless it’s visualized in a really compelling way, right? That’s been something we’ve learned over the years and so yeah, we have great folks that are not just great designers but great visualizers of data that contribute their expertise to the product. So absolutely thank you.
If visualization didn’t matter, people would drink sushi smoothies. We don’t it’s even disturbing for a moment to think about it, but yet when given the right visualization fundamentally different and this is it. Well, Congratulations on all of the recent successes and on future successes that you and the team are going to experience. Elliott thanks very much.
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Scott Danner is the CEO of Freedom Street Partners and the author of Freedom Street. We discuss how to unlock potential in yourself and to define and create your path to freedom. What does freedom mean to you? We delve into mentoring, Scott’s personal story that led him to his current role, and much more. A must listen for sure!
Thank you to Scott for the inspirational conversation.
Hey, everybody, this is the DiscoPosse Podcast. My name is Eric Wright. I’m gonna be your host. And this is a conversation featuring Scott Daner. Scott is the author of Freedom Street. He’s also the CEO of Freedom Street Partners. They’re a fantastic financial services team, and we really explore a lot of the core of what people define as freedom and ultimately finding that personal path to whatever you need to define as your freedom, your future. So Scott’s a fantastic person to chat with, and we don’t go into his own history of what drew him to helping people unlock what it is they need to find their personal freedom. So it’s a fantastic story, and it was a great conversation. If you like this and other amazing conversations, of course you can head on over to youtube.com/discopossepodcast and you can see the video version of it as well. And this is made possible by the amazing folks like our friends over at Veeam Software. I got to give a shout out because if you’ve got data, if you’ve got applications, if you’ve got content, it needs to be protected. So everything you need for your data protection needs head on over to vee.am/discoposse. Check it out. They just had their really cool VeeamON conference, and they had a lot of really great announcements. This is stuff that you need. Look, ransomware is on the rise. We got craziness going on the world. Stop the craziness, get yourself protected with Veeam. So go to vee.am/discoposse and check it out. Speaking of startups and protection and growth, and what do you need to do? If you want to grow, if you want to think about what’s next, then you want to think about bringing on a sales team that has driven, that has culture first. And this episode is brought to you by the amazing folks over at the Shift Group who are turning athletes into sales professionals. So if you’re looking to hire driven and competitive former athletes, or how to architect a real successful go-to market strategy that can scale both efficiently and effectively, head on over to shiftgroup.io. They’ve got an incredible group of candidates, whether it’s entry-level all the way to leadership, and they’re going to help you build culture first sales organizations. So shout out to JR and the team at Shift Group, go to shiftgroup.io and see what they can do for you. With that also – oh, that’s right. You like coffee? Go to diabolicalcoffee.com. With that, here comes Scott.
Hi, everybody. I’m Scott Danner, author of Freedom Street and CEO of Freedom Street Partners. And I’m here on the DiscoPosse podcast today.
Fantastic. That’s like my I always say it’s my on air lights. The moment you hear that, it’s like you press the button and it’s on. So, Scott, thank you very much. This is a fun meeting of employment history. It’s a hilarious thing when I see folks that come up on my guest list. And I think, number one, you’re a great content creator, you’re a great presenter. And I’m excited on that side. But we actually share some background in companies we worked for, which is always a funny – it is a small world, after all, as they say. But for folks that are new to you, Scott, if you don’t mind, let’s do a quick intro. And obviously, we’re going to talk about the book and we’re going to talk about your own history and what brought you to bring that to the world. I’m already wishing it was longer than the time that we’ve got allotted because I’m looking forward to this.
I’m excited to be here. And as I said in the intro, I’m author of a book that just came out at the end of last year called Freedom Street, how I Learned to Create a Rich Life, live my Legacy, and Own the Future as a financial advisor. And I promise it’s way more interesting than most financial advisor stories because it brings in real life childhood, all kinds of stuff that I think makes it relatable to people in all facets of work. And number two, I’m the CEO of Freedom Street Partners, which is a financial advisory company. We clear through Raymond James, and that’s our mutual work history. And it’s a great company, a great entity. And we are in seven States. We have just under 50 advisors, and we manage about just under $3 billion in assets. So I’ve been doing the financial advisor thing for almost 20 plus years, actually over 20 years now. And it’s been really great to me. And what I love most about it is honestly finding the connections between people and helping them solve life’s biggest issues, solutions, problems, whatever it is that pops up. And like you mentioned earlier, it’s always nice to see that there’s usually one thing in common with just about every human out there. So being able to find that and start there is usually a really great spot. So I’m very grateful to be here and looking forward to the conversation as well.
If you don’t mind, I’m going to start off with a big question. And this is always the fun part. I’m going to put you on the spot early. Define freedom. This is one that we often really get stuck on. We use the word, but you’ve got such an experience and history in bringing it in various forms to people. So, Scott, when someone comes to you and they say I need freedom, what does it really mean?
Yeah. So we always say, what does freedom mean to you? Right? What does freedom really mean? And ultimately it starts with what lights you up. What makes you feel good, what makes you happy, what’s a perfect day for you. Where do you want to be, who’s surrounding you? What are the things that really drive you to add more of this in your life. And when you can start to find that you can actually build a life around freedom. I think freedom stands for a lot of things. And I’m always very grateful because I’m always amazed that I could come from very humble beginnings and build something so great and so wonderful with so many amazing people. And so much of that lies in the freedom to create the freedom to be an entrepreneur. I think freedom to me is doing what I love every day with the people that I love doing it with and always putting my family and our friends and our relationships first. So it’s such a big word and it has such a different dynamic to so many different people that I think freedom is individual. And it’s something that you define and hopefully you have the ability to get it.
It’s always interesting. So fellow who I was lucky enough to work with, ironically enough, through Raymond James, his name is Andrew Johns. He is actually currently with a company called Canaccord. He switched teams along the way, but Andrew himself was fantastic. And I remembered him putting a tweet out and it was like just a picture of him. And it was like the classic sort of like nerdy. It says $0 assets under management, zero weeks experience, first day as a financial adviser. And this was, however, many years later, he says, looking back on that, he’s like amazing to see this journey from humble roots to growing. And he had a very strong business and has continued to build a team as well. Which is always interesting in the ability of not just being individually successful, especially as an advisor. There are lots of fantastic individuals. But to also be ultimately a leader of a team to help support a client base and a community. And I think that’s the one thing that genuinely separates. And I don’t want to use the word successful or not successful. I’ll say prolifically successful in that they can scale the success of their clients. When there’s a different mindset that comes into play, you bring that mindset and you’ve developed a team to carry that vision. So it’s always that very just an amazing mix to me of like that entrepreneurial capability and then leveraging a machine behind it so that you don’t have to worry about the clearing house. Ultimately, you bring people towards their freedom and you have tools and techniques and products that help them get there. But it’s vision mapping and delivery on it. It’s quite amazing.
Yeah. Well, you hit on two really big points, I think. Number one, nobody hits success alone. You are successful for a multitude of reasons, and it’s usually an army behind you. And if you don’t realize that truly successful people are very quick to realize that. We have a mentality here at our company that we say we’re better together. We’re building something bigger than ourselves. These are internal cultural taglines that we use every single day. And the truth is, I cannot be anywhere near as successful as I’ve been able to become without the team behind me. And I think that’s the first big point that you’re making. And then you talk about the word partnership. I’ve always used partnership because anytime you’re meeting with a client, you’re creating a relationship to truly understand what freedom means to them. Anytime you’re in a friendship, a relationship of any kind, the goal is to help the person that you’re surrounding yourself with kind of live a better life, have a better experience, enjoy each other’s company. But if I don’t know a little bit more about you, I can’t ever actually have you want to know more about me. And so it’s kind of a mutual respect. But when you talk about prolific success, prolific success comes from actually understanding you did not do it alone. That is really important.
Humility is one of the strongest traits of great leaders. The ability to do stuff when no one is watching, and the humility to understand that you are powered by the adjacent humans that get you there. It is something. It’s funny. I always love the merger. People get like, you know, I work for 20 years across financial services firms in tech. But for me, my success, this came from deeply understanding the nature of the business and what made the business successful and what made their clients successful so that I could develop technology solutions that would then help that company deliver success to its customers. That’s my purpose. That’s my goal. And then in technology now I work for a technology vendor, and I got on the technology space and startups. We use this word. This is phrase all the time, and I was laughing at it. It’s the goal of everybody is to become the trusted advisor. And I say, you misuse that phrase all the time. It’s kind of like the Princess Bride. You keep using that word, but I don’t think it means what you think it means. Right. Like it’s an overplayed phrase.
But the truth is that it really is a genuine connection of their goals and their limitations and their comfort. There’s a reason why we have KYC. As a technology marketer, I have a KYC program that I run people through. What is your ability to be comfortable in this type of marketing and this type of sales situation? I have to understand the profile of investment in messaging and marketing and sales. It’s funny, and I learned this from literally working beside trusted advisors who are regulated to KYC and what that means. You already have this mindset, Scott, of being trusted. What drew you to this as a field in the beginning?
Yeah, a couple of things. Number one, trust is earned and authentic trust is about building relationships and developing that trust. Trust is something that builds over time and gets stronger and stronger and stronger as long as it’s not about the transactions. Trust built on transactions are weak, and they’re weakened every single time the person realizes it’s just about a transaction. And I think that I was blessed in the sense that I was working for the state attorney general here in Virginia, and I was assistant director of crime prevention. And my job literally was to travel around the state doing PR type events in crime prevention for the attorney general, especially in the places where he was less likely to go. And so I ran a lot of senior and law enforcement events where I would bring the law enforcement community in and teach retirees how to not be taken advantage of. Identity theft was fairly new at this time, and I was out there really teaching about what to be aware of, and I was educating all the time. But I saw a major gap in trust, in helping people in the financial areas. It seemed like the people that were being taken advantage of were people that didn’t have trusted advisors, didn’t have great family foundations.
I also have a really great backbone of a great family. In my book, I started out by talking about The Lion King and how Simba was held up and hung over the mountainside for the entire village to see. And when I was born in an Italian Catholic family to a Sicilian grandmother and five aunts and an uncle, I was a firstborn grandson. I had this feeling of great confidence and so many people behind me. One of my aunts, who I was extremely close with, I happened to call when the AG did not win the governor’s office, and I didn’t have a job. And I said, hey, I don’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up and I need help, and I just can’t figure it out. And she said, I think you’d be really good at this job that I see these guys coming in and doing every day. She was working as an admin assistant in one of the offices at Edward Jones, where I had worked prior to founding Freedom Street. And she said, I feel like you’re young and you’d be great at this, and it falls right in with what your mission is of trying to help people.
And I remember fighting her a little bit on it. I put in an application. Two weeks later, I was hired, and I had to learn. And I started from the ground up almost exactly like the story you defined where the guy was standing there with zero assets under management. I had no family money. It was one of those things where I was knocking on doors in cold calling. But I was willing to work because I came from a very, very hard working family without a whole lot of extra, and I was willing to learn the story. The last part is I got lucky, Eric, because I came into the business at a time where it was very difficult in the early 2000’s, the 1999-’02 time frame, the majority of people that started, fail. Because not only were they failing because of September 11 and all the stuff that was happening in that first financial crisis, but ’08 and ’09 happened right at the meat and potatoes of when they would be actually finally getting going in their careers. And today we have more 80 year old financial advisers than we do 30 year olds in our industry.
And the reason is, most of them were so transaction based. The old school way of doing it was so transaction based that I learned within the first months of my career. If I don’t build a relationship with these people, nobody’s going to stay with me when times get tough. And when times get tough, that’s when trust elevates. That’s when you develop the next level of trust. And by being able to really have been an expert in something I didn’t even know I was an expert in, it was just really connecting with people and building something that had nothing to do with the business but had everything to do with the success of helping the other human across the desk from you. And so whether it was the early stages of the AG’s office or my aunt and the family confidence, or it just happened to be hard work and hustle of understanding, connecting with more people would get me there. It kind of led me in that path.
It’s one of the most interesting challenges because especially you talk about the timing of it. Right. Like between the financial crash, which was much more prominent in the United States, I happened to be in Canada while it was going on and working at a financial advisory firm and interestingly seeing things begin. I remember signing the deal and closing for a condo in Vancouver, BC, which was sort of known for the sort of disturbing prices of real estate because you’re surrounded by water and mountains. The only way you can, the prices go up and so do the properties. Right. Like they’re all condos. There’s a fixed amount of property. So it’s perfect market economics for the market, not for the people participating in it. But I signed in Halloween of ’08 and people said this is like we were losing a bank a week at that point. But I had luckily, the insight into the way the market was moving and being adjacent to seeing it happen because we knew, the news was figuring out that this was going on. But the financial world, we were already playing it out. It’s sort of the famous scene from the movie Margin Call where it was meant to be this idea of like, imagine. So what you’re telling me is that everybody’s moving around, we’re all dancing and the music is coming to a stop. And then the quant who’s at the table, he says “No, imagine that actually the music has already stopped”.
Right.
And we’ve just realized it. And so it was interesting that it could have been the worst thing I ever did. And it worked out to be good, that it was actually the trough of the pricing. But to see that the resilience of good relationship based advisors and relationship based selling in anything to survive those troughs is differentiating, right. Because it’s very easy to get in the game. And like I said, we can do transactional business. And that happens. There’s still a huge piece of that in every business. But the true relationship sellers I’ve learned now in technology, like it’s – you see them and they’re different. It’s like that kid that plays soccer and you’re like, it’s an eight year old kid, you’re like, that one’s different. You can tell. And then now, years later, I’m an older gentleman. I’ve witnessed it in action with folks like yourself or I’m like Scott’s different. He’s got a bigger picture in mind. But it seems like it’s been there for a long time. It started early with you. Now when you moved in and now you’re doing the business, what was your focus when you bring a client on board? What is the thing that said, I’m Scott, and this is my goal for you?
I think it was first connection. So the first thing I wanted to understand is really understand the human behind the money. Our tagline today is life wealth optimization. And we say constantly that life comes first and really prioritizing life all the time first. So it’s like going on a date and they start talking about all the things that have nothing to do with getting to know each other. You have to get to know each other. And that was always my objective, to connect with a human first. The next thing was to establish what was most important in life and help them attain it. Sometimes it’s actually helping them go back on things that they never thought were possible. I used to say that I’m a life coach that specializes in money and people would laugh. You really have two types of people, the people that immediately shut off. It was the perfect elevator pitch because people would immediately shut off if they don’t believe in that. If they’re straight, transaction driven or hyper analytical, they literally are lost in that first phrase. I’m a life coach that specializes in money. But the people that we really served well immediately go, wow, that’s interesting. What does that mean? And I would say, well, I obviously do investment management. It’s something that I have to do every day. The next thing I do is really scenario planning. If-this-then-that. If you do this, then what happens here? And it’s just true financial planning. And the third thing is vision coaching. And they would say, what’s vision coaching? And I would say, well, it’s really identifying what lights you up what are you going to do in your next chapter? What are we working towards? How do we actually measure success on a grander scale? It’s going back to the term freedom again, right? What is your freedom and how can we help you work towards that? And when you go into those types of conversations, it really changed the dynamic of everything. And that’s one of the main reasons that I wanted to put a book out. That’s one of the main reasons I wanted to put all these ideas into the world was because I felt like there really still are not enough of those soccer players, as you define, which is a great analogy because I have a 12 and a 15 year old son who dedicate all their time to soccer, and we love the sport and you can tell the difference.
But I really felt like we needed to change the game. The game needed to go back to connection and humans and relationship driven advice. And it’s any business. And when you can get that vibe and that energy that goes with the right relationship and the right connection and someone actually caring about shaking your hand and looking you in the eye, not robotically doing it because they know they’re supposed to, you start to really tune in to who those people are, and they stand out immediately. And I love that analogy that you gave because it’s really everything we believe in.
The interesting thing as well is the idea of optimization as a word, both in technology, in finance, in life, and anything. Optimization is much more about the scale on which you measure optimization. So there’s local Optima where if I’m driving and I want to get there a little faster, I’m going to just kick it up and I’ll go 10 miles over the speed limit for a little while. Maybe I’ll go to 15. Right, because I don’t see any police around. But if it’s a seven hour drive and there’s only one stretch of highway that I can go 15 miles an hour over, that local Optima is actually risk inducing because you’ve got a higher chance of getting caught by police in this corridor because they know they’re using aerial radar or whatever. Right. So having the broader view and understanding the scale and the timeline allows you to optimize. And this is one of the things that people have trouble seeing because they’re simply thinking now, just the same way that I buying real estate in October. It’s a fundamentally bad idea by any measure of most people. Right. But when I looked at my optimization was a 20 year timeline, I said, this is either the bottom or near the bottom, and I’m willing and able, luckily, to maintain the risk level. It did net longer term benefit. But I had to view the timeline. And for me, most people can’t see that timeline. That’s why I loved your idea of life-wealth optimization. And it’s so much different because you can give them the broader view, but then help them map to it. So, Scott, when you meet somebody, what does that discovery process look like?
Well, I think the first thing that we try to do is we try to make sure that we’re understanding again the things that stand out. So the discovery process is going to be just like meeting for a cup of coffee. Who are you? Not what do you do? That always draws me bonkers. And I know you probably go to a ton of these things, Eric. We go to events and everyone the first thing they want to know is what do you do? And I want to know who you are first. I want to know what you stand for. I want to know more about you as a human. And so all the surface area questions that I don’t care about, I start going deeper and deeper. And a lot of times people walk out and they’re like, I haven’t talked about that ever with anybody. And that’s always been a goal. The goal is not to get people uncomfortable, but to balance the uncomfortable with the comfortable. What are the things that they’re going to think about when they walk away? You mentioned something super interesting to me, and that is – think about the long game. If you made all your decisions on a long-term basis, how much better would most of your decisions be? Even as a young teenager. I have teenage boys and the bottom line is we all were teenage boys or teenage girls at some point in time in our lives back in the old days. And as a teenage boy, I always thought pretty long. I made bad decisions, but I was always playing chess and not checkers. And so the objective is to really make long. You would have still bought that house in Vancouver if you were thinking as you did long-term. Now for the short-term, it was a really tough decision and you questioned it. But in the end, knowing that you were there for the long term. Every time I make decisions, every time we help people make decisions based on a longer time frame, they tend to come out ahead. I always do this drill and I love this when I do town halls. I started doing town halls when I was early in my career because I found that the same phone calls, the same questions would pop up over and over and over again.
And there were two things that really helped people. Number one, knowing that they weren’t in it alone. So knowing that other people had the same questions as that made them not feel stupid for asking the question. And it also helped us answer it once and not a thousand times the same way. And the second thing was, everybody needs when you’re playing a long game, everybody needs a little love. You need a little bit of understanding that it’s still a long game and it’s going to work out and things will be better if we just are all in this together and we talk through it. And I started doing these town halls and I like to play this game where I will ask, any time things get a little bumpy, I ask people in the room how many people have been married for more than 25 years? And then I go all the way up and believe it or not, we often get to just this past week, I did one and we got to 60 years. Okay. They were married for 60 years. And sometimes it’s more than that. Okay. They got married super young, highly successful.
Here’s the point. I ask all those couples how many days were rough? And they all laugh and they say, tons. And I say, how many weeks or months? And they laugh and they say tons. And I say, some of the time they’ll interrupt. They’ll say they were actually very bad years, tough years. And I say, but you’ve been married 60, 65 years. When you look back, what was the long game worth? And they said, well, all those bumps in the road just helped us build a stronger relationship. They helped us build more trust in each other. They helped us serve as a beacon to the next generation of what relationships and long-term success really looks like. And it’s commitment and loyalty and understanding that there’s bumps in the road. And I think understanding that in the process, your question was process driven and what someone goes through. But understanding what we’re really looking for, I think is even more of an interesting part of that process because we’re looking for people that really understand that. They’re working towards that level of freedom. But they’re understanding that bumps in the road, a short real estate blip in the market usually ends up playing to your advantage if you stay long enough. Vancouver is a hot market. Mountains and water, you can’t go wrong with that.
Yeah. And that is always the interesting thing that I’m not sure whether it’s like going through adversity as a kid and watching my dad go through a difficult – he was in the tech market. In the tech job market when there was no such thing. Right. This was when comdex was new. Like that’s the age that he’s at. Right. So here I was watching him through the 80’s lose a job, which meant months of no work and newspaper ads to apply for jobs. So fundamentally different. So I have this really interesting challenge when I see stuff these days that exposure to adversity and an understanding of the longer game and that there’s Optima over time are played out differently. And so I kind of feel blessed that I got that exposure to that experience because it taught me down the road and I’m so lucky. My wife is a great example, she says, I had a financial surprise which my taxes got re-assessed. And they’re like, oh, yeah, it’s like Monopoly. It’s a banker in your favor. It’s never in your favor. It was very much not in my favor. This situation. I was horrified. I was just like, this was a real shock to the system was going to be a financial impact.
And I was worried to bring it down. My God, how do I say this? And I said, this is what happened. And I’m not sure what to do. And she says, well, it’s easy. We just pay it and we work through it. Because she had that ability to see long term, and there are difficult times. And versus you could focus all your attention on that situation. And so living through cycles of market, cycles of jobs, cycles of exposure to adversity for me was healthy. I always say I’m jaded, but the truth is I’m blessed because I’ve come out the other side of it. When you’re in that town hall, those are people that kind of get they’re closer to getting what you’re bringing to them and what you can give, what you can help them to achieve. Let’s talk about the people that are not in that room. What do you see as the risk when people don’t have that insight? How do we give them? Like, how do you put Freedom Street on their map?
Yeah, well, I think, first of all, we have to always have a growth mindset. And so if I’m trying to educate myself and grow myself in any capacity, I’m always learning. And so putting out information that was putting out Freedom Street as a book was part of that mentality, launching all the videos that we do on positive mindset. I think everything starts with mindset for the most part. For me, mindset is everything. I have one of my son’s high school soccer teammates. He had a little injury, and he’s been texting and keeping up with me. And I’m literally like, hey, keep your head up. Just keep doing what you’re supposed to do. Everything’s mindset. Because the minute he gets down on himself is the minute that it starts to change, it starts to feel heavier and feels like you can’t do it. It’s building those good habits to make discipline easier versus because, you know, discipline equals freedom. We all know that. But discipline is a hard word, but habit is an easier word. So we help them establish the habits that end up building the discipline that help them look in the long term.
And I think the insight that really helps people is just starting with that growth mindset. Starting with putting stuff in their brain that helps them think bigger. I also always believe we should always reset the environment that we’re in and look at who you surround yourself with. Eric, you have great conversations, 200 plus of these great conversations. Just think of all the things you’ve learned from talking to a boring financial advisor or a CPA or some of the jobs that other people don’t realize the depth of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it because they shut off because they have one mindset of what that looks like. And the reality is, for 20 plus years I’ve been sitting across from people in an office learning stories, hearing challenges, understanding business fails and business wins, helping guide people towards their biggest successes and being there when they’re not so successful. And the reality is it’s like sitting in and learning and learning and listening. It’s just helping. Developing that in other people and then sharing it with the world so that more people can think in the way that gets them there. And having an abundant mindset doesn’t hurt.
Not thinking in a scarcity mindset is very valuable and it’s something that probably is one of the biggest indicators of success is are they able to shift from there’s only so much of this to there’s so much of this that I need to share it with the world and the world will give it back to me. The universe is there to share amongst each other and build something bigger than ourselves.
Yeah, it is interesting that you say that like the mindset and the I’m selfishly doing this podcast is because I love learning from people and people. I had chat with a friend of mine recently and I said everything I do is to make my grandmother proud. She’s long since passed, but she always said I was a shoe repair man and then I was a landscaper and then I worked in retail and everything I did, she was proud of me because I was proud of it and I wanted to be the best at it, whatever it was. And my ethos has always been whatever I’m doing right now, whatever I’m learning. What if I needed to make a living and support my family doing this thing? That’s how much I want to learn about it. And like you said, I look now, I started this as like a tech podcast. I’m going to talk to my nerd friends because I know how to speak that language and I’m excited by it. But I wanted the story underneath it. And then now to speak with amazing folks like yourself and people who are CPA. I’ve had folks who are sex and relationship therapist way outside of the vein of this text.
But in the end, to hear people react to those stories and say that I would have never known that I needed to listen to this person, but they’re fantastic now that I’ve heard it. Like I said, that’s Freedom Street as a mindset in showing people the opportunity ahead and mapping the path with them. It’s important. Partner. We mention that word before and you talked about the strength of that word. Partnership has been early on for you, obviously in your advisory team. Partnership is incredibly important because it is a journey you map together, not you don’t create a journey and then you hand it, here’s your playbook, do these things and you’ll get there.
That’s right.
Let’s talk about what does partnership mean to you?
I think a lot of what we mentioned when we said the relationship really correlates to partnership, because partnership is sometimes a closer relationship. It’s even more dynamic. And I have partners in the business that we work with. I have partners every day. We also everyday in our affiliate businesses and our other components. And it’s really interesting because when you mentioned the word freedom street, when I wrote this book and I came up with some of the pathways to kind of having a better partnership, not just with the people in your life, but with yourself. That’s something that doesn’t often get explored. We often look at how we’re doing in the world to other people. We spend very little time internal. And the average age of a financial advisor in my industry is 62 years old. Successful financial advisor. I mean, not someone who just came into the industry and is successful because they’re not fired, but somebody that genuinely is making a pretty good living in this industry. The average age is 60 something years old, and it fluctuates 58, 64 depending on what article you read. But let’s just use 62. Here’s what I found.
So many advisers had helped everybody else with their continuity plans. How were they going to step out of the industry? How are they going to sell their business? How are they – they hadn’t done it for themselves. Almost 70 plus percent of independent advisers had never had a continuity plan or a succession plan. And so one of the reasons I put this book out there that triggered us to put it out there was a partnership with the community of which I work in. And financial advisors are somebody that are just like attorneys and doctors and all the other professions, tech professionals, they build this baby of a business, but they never think about what happens when it’s time to move on. The tech world does a really good job of this. I mean, maybe they do it too early. Sometimes they go in and they basically build it, sell it, build it, sell it, build it, sell it. And in our world, it’s the opposite. And what I found was the reason the sub line is to create a rich life, live my legacy, and own the future was three things.
I found that, number one, living a rich life had nothing to do with money. And it was really important to help people define what living richly really meant to them. That’s part of the process. Whether you’re selling a business, whether you’re in the tech industry, it’s not just about a number, okay? Because every time you get a number, if you’re a tech industry professional and you have a start up and 10 million is your number. I can guarantee you that the minute you hit 10 million, you say 20 is now your number. And the minute you hit 20, you’re like 50. If I can get to 20, I can get to 50 and the numbers change. But what are you doing to live richly? Making an impact, living a legacy versus waiting to leave one really important to me. I talk a lot about the daily habit of impact. What are we doing every day that’s leaving an impact, an imprint on the world that my kids and my family can look back and say, hey, dad did this. Dad was working on this. Dad was always trying to, hey, he didn’t have any time the other day, but he spent 45 minutes on with the local board trying to help them revamp so they can provide something in the community.
And I want to have that as something that’s important because here’s what we find. People that are too tied to their businesses, their legacy is all tied to their business. And so selling the business is almost something they can never fathom, because everything their impact relies upon is in the business, not outside of it. And once you can live richly and you kind of get into that, living a legacy versus leaving one, you own your future now. You could set the core, you could set the course, you could set the blueprint. But if you haven’t established those couple of things and what you’re doing to your question is you’re partnering with yourself. You’re actually identifying what makes you click. What am I doing that’s working? What defines my future path of success? Who’s with me, and how can I go ahead and dive deep into this path so I’m set up for success in the future.
It is interesting that partnership begins with being your own partner. And I often think of this idea of, like, goals versus execution. The latest topic that I’ve got a lot of because I say it’s almost rolling my eyes I shouldn’t because I genuinely believe in what it is. What I don’t believe in is people that set these sort of big, hairy, audacious goals. There’s nothing wrong with setting the BHAG, as they call it, right? But sustainability is a big topic in life, in the energy sector, in tech and everything. We should be concerned about the impact we’re having on the world, on the Earth, on our communities, on each other. And everybody says, like, all these press releases come out, that company X has developed their sustainability plan to hit a target by 2030. And we joined the 2030 project, and we do all this stuff. I remember that in 2025, LA was going to have no gas powered vehicles on the roads. 2025 not far away but we’ve kindly hidden that press release, right? So when people say they’ve got sustainability goals, when I get into discussion with them, I don’t say, what’s your sustainability goal?
I say, what have you tactically done over the previous twelve months towards this goal? Let’s not talk about what’s ahead, but what have you already started so we can amplify that. Like, this is you partnering with your goal and then executing on it. And as you said, right. It’s small things. It’s habits that we create. And it’s very easy for us to just say like, yeah, I want to make a million dollars a year. Fantastic. What does that mean to you? Why is that a number? There’s always one thing. But secondly, what’s your habit forming path to reach that? And that’s the piece that’s always missing. I mean, I struggle from it myself, but that’s why I’m excited. I’m emotional hearing you describe this text. I’m like, I’m going to leave this conversation. I’m going to write stuff down and do things. I’ve got to exercise. I’ve got to call my wife. I got to do it. Everything I do is to that long term habit creating opportunity to reach that goal.
Yes. When you talk about making a million dollars. I just did a video on this yesterday, literally on the exact topic. And I used that example. I was like, okay, so you want to make a million Bucks? Can you quantify how you’re going to get there? Can you actually lay out the path? Most people say things like this and they never actually believe that they’ll attain it. They actually say things like this, and they never formulate the real vision. They immediately switch off in their brain that it’s possible. That’s the first problem that people do. Right. We do this on lots of things. I mean, we all do this. Sometimes you go into a new room and you think, I’m the smallest guy here. I don’t know anything. And then everyone starts sharing ideas and you jump right in and you’re like, wow, this is great. I belong here. But you had to remind yourself you belong there. And I think everybody every level, I’m sure Bezos and Elon Musk go into an occasional room and they’re like, man, this is a big room. I don’t know how big the room can be, but there are definitely things.
But charting the path of what you can control is really the next thing. So get your mindset right. But then what are the things you can control today? What is the word? Practice is a word that I love. I have a twelve, almost 13 year old son. And the kid practice every day, right? And he executes upon something in a game. And people are like, oh, my gosh, how does he do that? I can’t believe he just did that. And I go, I mean, he does it in the backyard literally every day. Like, the guy tries this every single day. And we kind of lose the habit of practicing the older we get. We forget that if we want to get to a million dollars, we have to practice million dollar habits. What does that look like?
This is one of my favorite, sort of like a bit of a time waster every once in a while, I’m sure is I scroll through Instagram for fun and just a bit of a distraction. And one of my favorite things is sort of like motivational things, because once you click on one of them, it’s all over. That’s going to be your feed, which is actually probably pretty decent, but I don’t know who the voice is behind it, but there’s an audio and people put just videos in front of it. They reuse the audio. And so fella, it’s almost like a preacher. Practice, practice, practice. What does practice make? And you hear the audience go, perfect. He goes, Absolutely not. Get that mindset out of your head. That is not the case. Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes better. What are you better than yesterday? Do it, right. And that whole idea. And I say even the simplest thing, I always joke on camera. It’s like just like goofy little things that I do because I’m a big fan of card magic. And so I sit there every day and I just fan cards and I look back and the first time that I tried to fan a card set and people look and they say, how do you do that? If I hand them this deck of cards, it’s the same physical set of cards. The difference between me being able to do this now is that I’ve done it 25,000 times. And I literally can’t do it bad now. I say it’s like I’m broken. I cannot show you how to not fan a deck of cards because I’ve taught myself the habit and the muscle memory. So this is the new every day it gets smoother, it gets better, and I can do it quickly. And it’s hard sometimes to impart that wisdom and create that path for people. Because when you have money, when you have career success, when you have whatever, this is what I’m always interested. How do you give people that inspiration and guide them through that journey when you’ve already practiced it so much. You may not remember how hard it is difficult at times and such, because that’s it. It’s very easy to say, like, I’m going to make a million dollars this year. And people like, that’s fantastic. But helping them reliving that path to a million with them. I love this idea. So, Scott, how do you teach when you already know but teach in a way that they can adapt and learn?
Yeah, you said it earlier. You’re very grateful that you had adversity because adversity taught you that you could do harder things. You could actually overcome challenges, and then you happen to marry the right person who, when something adverse pops up, you do it together. So now you’re seeing another skill that’s extremely important. And that is being surrounded by people that make you better, that lift you up. There’s some fundamental things that never change. No matter how great you are, no matter how big you become, if you’re surrounded by the right people and you understand that on the other end of adversity is often success. Unfortunately, it’s sometimes fortunate and sometimes unfortunate. So I had this conversation. We have a Sunday night dinner at my parents every Sunday with our whole family. And it’s a wonderful time. And we were talking about the challenge of how children and young adults struggle with anxiety and adversity. They almost get to doing hard things and stop and pull back now. And what they’re not realizing is that on the other side of that uncomfortable feeling is really good stuff. But you have to actually feel the uncomfortable feeling.
You have to change your mindset. My boys, every time they have a soccer game from the time they were two years old, I would ask them if they were nervous, and they would say a little bit. And I was like, you’re not nervous. You’re excited. Remember, you want to change the words to match what it’s truthfully doing to you. Can you wait to play? No, I can’t wait to play. Do you love playing? I love playing. Then you’re excited. You’re not nervous. See, when you tell yourself you’re nervous about something, you’re giving yourself a negative connotation to something that doesn’t need to exist in your brain. And so when you talk about adversity, the first thing I do is remind people that you want to do something that’s not easy. And that means that it’s going to take work. And work is sometimes really uncomfortable. It hurts. You’re going to fail. Get used to it. If you take a basketball and you take 25 shots and you haven’t shot a basketball before, you are not good. But the more you fan your cards, the more you recognize and level up each time. And I think, honestly, this is where authentic advice comes in.
Being in a good relationship, relationship advising relationship, good quality relationships in general require truth. Trust requires truth. So you also have to be willing to tell somebody when they’re lying to themselves, because that also is something that’s difficult. And we also live in a world sometimes now where people are really afraid to say truth. We don’t want to say that. We want to blame the spoon for eating the ice cream, not ourselves. Right? It’s the Spoon’s fault. It’s the box. It’s so big. They didn’t put it in a big box. Like, there’s always a reason why it’s someone else’s fault. But if you look in the mirror, you’re bringing the spoon to your lips every single time in that really big container. And you know how good it is. And it’s okay. It’s your choice. But the reality is just know that if you want big things, if you want to build the next big, great tech company or you’re building a great financial advisory business or you want to be the best CPA. It’s going to take a lot of uncomfortable adversity and you work through it. And on the other side of that work is usually some level of high performing success.
It is amazing that truth. And that being with them while they’re going through the journey and giving them the little nudge that like, hey, I saw you yesterday or I saw you last week and I can tell it’s coming together. They can’t necessarily see it. Right. It’s often lost in that thing. And like those incremental changes are not visible when you’re the one incrementing. But the honesty and the partnership of going through that with them lets you be on that journey instead. Remember two years ago you said this was your goal. We’re two years in and you’re 20% there, and that’s 20% more than you would have been if you hadn’t mapped out the goal and started the plan and then introducing adversity. That’s why I’ve never been a fan of the sort of the helicopter like, I mean, I’m a helicopter parent. I have four kids. Certain amount of helicopter. You do you’d want to protect them from things, but I also purposefully don’t protect them from everything. You don’t want them to experience real negativity, but you want to expose them to it a little here and there. So that almost like an immunity response that they know how to get on the other side of it.
And you could say, remember like that. Remember how that felt? That was tough. You don’t want to feel that again. Right? We want to try this BMX trick, this snowboard trick. My oldest daughter is a Championship snowboarder for slope style, and it scares me every time I see her doing a backflip off of a 40 foot ramp. I’m like, but what I gave her early on was taking her through a tree run when she was five on skis and having her bounce off a tree. But it gave her the ability to say that I’m willing to test the edges. And I think that’s a real big thing. Scott, you talk about this. So when people go and they want to find Freedom Street, their Freedom Street, what’s your sort of first layer advice you give?
I think the first is we have to ask the question and the questions all lie in what does freedom mean to them? And you start there and a lot of times it’s too big for people and I’m a big picture person and so I’ve got to work it down. So we talk about what’s the perfect day for you? What are you doing? Where are you at? All those types of things are important. But really the recipe is in the book and that’s living richly, living a legacy and then owning the future. And what does that future look like? If we’re going to live long term and we’re going to think long term and we want to have success, it’s not immediate. Anything given immediately is usually something we don’t appreciate. We have no idea where it really came from. It’s why most lottery winners are broke within a couple of years or months because they have no concept of what it took to get that amount of money. So it’s just easy come, easy go. It’s way better to create something of substance. And I think really identifying it when we identified I mentioned earlier, 20 plus years of being a financial adviser.
You know what I’ve been my entire life as I’ve been a coach, I’ve been a consultant. And the reality is I’ve done this for a living, working over and over and over again in this space. But it’s something I feel very comfortable in, something I love doing. Watching the impact Watching your success makes me as happy as watching my own level of success. And when you learn that about yourself, you’re really able to give a lot more of yourself in those types of things. And that’s what Freedom Street was about for me. It was about giving people the recipes to really create each part of this book of creating a rich life on the road to riches, tell stories of things that I failed at. Moments where I thought I was going to get a promotion, and it was the most important thing in my life, and I didn’t get it. And my wife has two glasses of champagne and a bottle waiting for me that evening to celebrate. And I didn’t understand what we were celebrating. But again, surrounding yourself with the right people, having the right dynamic, knowing the path you’re working towards all made that a better situation.
And a learned experience helped me two years later, define the next path, which has been great for lots of other people who have now followed us and built something bigger. And that’s why we created the coaching and consulting practice was to help business owners in any industry really go through these challenges because life is full of transitions. So Freedom Street is really helping to navigate those transitions with ease because you define the most important attributes of what you’re living for.
I’m getting excited because I think I said at the beginning it’s to be able to learn and hear and get inspired by it. And knowing that there are people out there that we can impact through these conversations, people sometimes ask me, like, what do you consider your greatest success? And I say, it’s the success I’ve created for somebody else through a lesson that I’ve given them. So the greatest thing I can do is help somebody achieve the greatest thing they will do. And it’s such a fantastic feeling, and I can see it and hear it. Your background is quickly before we finish up, because if you don’t mind, they’ll just stretch a couple more minutes on this one, because your entry into advisory and financial advisory and this side of the world was via crime prevention, which is very interesting, but your choice in how you targeted it was really about empowerment in community, empowerment in things. And so you went that route. It really genuinely seems to me, Scott, that from very early on, you had that. What can I personally do to empower my community to be better? So how do you go from crime prevention as a practice to where we are today?
I think it really ties with self awareness, understanding what you’re great at, what you’re good at, and what you’re not so good at. And I’ve always had a tendency to lean heavily in what I’m very good at and great at and surround myself with people that are better than me at all the ancillary things, just like we talked about in the beginning. I am the person at Freedom Street that you want to bring in, to talk big picture, to dive into the weeds on your vision, to break down the challenges, you know, to look at, okay, here’s where we want to go and here’s how we’re going to get there, and we can chart it all out. When we get into some of the analytics, I bring in the experts and I have an input, and I’m a part of all those decisions, but I get to have experts that are better at it than me. And I think what I really wanted was I wanted to build towards strengths. I wanted to create a company and a culture that was built around people that were great at their space and putting them in the space that they love doing.
So when someone comes on, I’ve hired so many people that we’re looking for X job, and we find the right human, but the right human doesn’t fit the exact job we were looking at. So I’ll change the job. I’ll change what we’re going to be utilizing this human for if it’s the right person for the culture fit. And we’ve really done that. It’s interesting, to your point just a second ago, when you talk about making an impact. I have been doing these videos on YouTube, and we just launched a new channel. But ultimately I’ve been doing these videos on Facebook and LinkedIn and all these different, different facets and putting things out. And the person that started helping me is a phenomenal PR person. She’s really great with video. And she used to come to me and say, are you getting the ROI you need? She was trying to quantify every single thing. We talked about it yesterday, and I kept saying, no, it’s a long game. I’m not here to make money on this today. I’m here to get better at doing it. I’m here to provide more impact. And you know what I love more than anything? Is I love getting the feedback and the loop back that this conversation gave someone the ability to think bigger.
It gave someone the tools. In the book, at the end of every chapter, I literally have a set of questions that evaluate, do you see yourself as this person or that person? Do you see yourself doing these types of things? What can you practice every day? What gets you to that millionaire mindset? Whatever it may be, it’s about that process. And I think to directly answer your question, after spending almost 15 years at a great company where I was growing and learning, I found out that I was in a box, and I needed to break out of the box and do my own thing. And the reality is that’s where Freedom Street partners came from. I told everyone we were a tech startup. So it’s funny because the connectivity between what your startup is and what we were, and that’s who we were. We started with nothing. We built up this business. We have offices in seven states today, and we’ve developed a path where we’re building something bigger than ourselves.
And it was the vision from the beginning. We had a vivid vision. Cameron Harold wrote a great book called Vivid vision, and I’m in a couple of groups with Cameron. He’s a phenomenal person to talk to. But we created a vivid vision in the first three years, and we knocked everything out of the park, and we did so because we kept putting the right puzzle pieces of human capital in the right spots. And all those people are better at the area they’re serving in than I am. And again, it’s that teamwork mentality that bigger and better together mentality that really helps people understand. But it’s about the impact and part of there’s a deeper thing, and we don’t have time to go into the depths of it. I know, but here’s what I could tell you that I find really interesting. In the beginning of a journey, a lot of times you start out, maybe scarcity leads you to abundance. Maybe my fear of losing it all because I didn’t come from anything in the beginning kept me from spending any money. So that when the bad years came, I was always in a better position. And then when my abundant mindset kicked in, I happened to be in the right position. The same thing goes for failure and affirmation. I think what I found is, I found a lot more comfortability helping other people be the greatest version of themselves early in life because I was trying to find my own way.
I was trying to figure out how to get myself where I needed to be. And what I learned is I just needed to continue to learn from other people. And all that coaching and learning and teaching was actually bringing leveling me up every single time. So I very rarely turn down conversations like this because I learned just as much from you as hopefully you’ll learn from me. And each day we get better and better at this. Right. And so my mindset of just this open learning, open mindset, really learning from the things that I might not have been great at very early in my career are the things I want to be best at at the next chapter.
That’s amazing, yeah, great. And vivid vision, fantastic. Cameron is a great writer. I seem to remember he was in BC as well, another Vancouver. There was some presence he might be Canadian. I’ve read so many bloody books these days, it’s hard to keep track of who’s who, but I do. There’s a fantastic, fantastic book. Cameron seems like a really great human. And Scott, you are, you are doing great things. And as I say, the greatest mentor has a great mentor. And it’s an important lesson that people don’t. They forget. They think that once you are reaching a certain level that you are now at the top of the chain, like, no, you are looking – you get there by your peer group and you get there by your mentors. And it continues up. Even therapists have therapists. That’s how it has to go. Because if you stop receiving knowledge, it’s really not fair in my mind for you to give it out.
Yes. If you’re not growing, you’re dying, right?
Yeah. And they sound like witticisms that you would put on an Instagram post or something. But when you see it in practice and you hear about the people that are being successful at helping people be successful, I’m turned on by that. That’s my thing. If you came to me and said, what’s the thing that makes you wake up and get this? It’s like I’m on this microphone for an hour a week, an hour and 20 minutes a week, and it’s the greatest moment. It just lights my week up because I learn something and I try to put it in practice. And then I share it and it’s so great. Scott, your passion for this is palpable. It’s obvious, and it’s earned. And the success you get from it is deserved. So I’m going to tell people, get the book, get involved, learn. So thank you for spending the time today. So, Scott, if people do want to get a hold of you and of course, we’ll have links to the book and to your team at Freedom Street Partners. So what’s the best way they can get in touch?
The easiest thing to do is, ScottDanner.com, and you can kind of see all the links there. I really encourage people. What I’m extremely passionate about is this YouTube channel we’re building, and it’s just in the infancy stages. But the reality is it’s all about hitting the next algorithms. And I think putting more positive information out there to people is really something that we don’t have enough of. There’s too much of the algorithm that’s putting negativity into our feed on purpose. I’m a Duke basketball fan and taking the loss to UNC last weekend was challenging. You would be amazed at every single UNC fan I’ve ever known in my entire life was in my feed. It’s like they knew how to make me feel miserable and I want the opposite. I want to create stuff that helps people feel great. I want them to look at something that we’re doing and see that we believe in them, that I believe in them that your conversations are there to help people be the best version of themselves. ScottDanner.com the books on all major things. My wife ordered it from target and it was delivered to the house.
Amazon.com audible, we just love for you to get the message out and don’t be turned off that it says financial adviser. I think what you’ll find is that the story is something that was written for anybody and I think that’s the value takeaway. I hope it’s something everybody finds good information and reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you.
That’s amazing. There you go, Scott Danner, thank you. Absolutely. This has been a real pleasure and everybody needs a little bit more Scott Danner in their life feed I can tell you that.
Eric, thanks for having me, man. Such a great conversation.
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Danny Allan is the CTO at Veeam Software and shares updates and news that we will see happening at VeeamON in Las Vegas May 16-19. On top of that, we cover why system-level protection is a fundamental need, plus some great discussion on why data protection for containerized apps is the new normal.
Oh, yeah, that’s right. Welcome to the DiscoPosse podcast. Thank you for listening. And hey, thank you for watching. If you’re heading on over to youtube.com/discoposse, make sure you go get a like, subscribe to the channel because we’re spinning things up in big way over on the visual side as well. And this is a great chance for you to see the one and only – someone who is fantastic, love having him on the show. This is Danny Allan. Danny is the CTO at Veeam Software. Also got to give a shout-out of course, because Veeam are some of the supporters of the podcast. So this is cool because I get to talk, shop with Danny. We talk about the Ransomware challenge because, hey, Ransomware is a disaster. And I mean literally, if you’re not ready and thinking business continuity and disaster, we talk about methodologies and real stuff that I remember from the field. So this is a good exploration. Plus, of course, they have their VeeamOn -their annual conference, which is going on in Vegas right now. It’s super cool to see that they’re back in person and doing some really neat stuff. So big thanks to Danny, of course, for coming on.
And of course, like I said, if you want to check out more about Veeam, you can go to vee.am/discoposse and you can get all that you need for your data protection needs because they got you covered in all sorts of ways. Actually, it was just a bonus. I had Danny on just because I wanted to talk to Danny. Just so happens that he’s from Veeam. And speaking of great supporters, of course, I got to give a shout out to JR and the team over the Shift Group. Because if you are running a company and you need to bring on a sales team that’s going to make the difference, Shift Group is in turning athletes into sales pros. So if you’re looking to hire driven, competitive former athletes or even thinking how do you build a go-to market that can actually scale both efficiently and effectively? Shift Group is not only offering a huge pool of really awesome diverse sales candidates from everything – from entry-level to leadership, but they’re also helping you to develop your overall hiring strategy, interview process, and truly building a culture of success and talent. What you need in those early stages. So get on in, head on over shiftgroup.io and you can find out more about that. And while you’re at it, of course, one last little shadow. Do you like coffee? So do I. Go to diabolicalcoffee.com. It’s super good! It’s tasty, it’s devilishly good, diabolically awesome. And hey, we support a bunch of podcasts. Oh, by the way, it’s me. Full disclosure, it’s my coffee company. So check it out. All right, this is Danny Allen from Veeam.
My name is Danny Allen. I’m the CTO at Veeam Software. Very excited to be with you. And you are listening to the DiscoPosse podcast.
Another all Canadian episode. It’s a rare treat when I get to have fellow Canadians on. We actually had a fun one. There was a team of folks that do a podcast called The Produce Stand. It’s actually for a very Canadian show called Letter Kenny. And the amount of Canadianness that came out in that episode was laughable. It’s so funny how we all kind of like, especially if you talk about something that’s really based in Northern Ontario but has sort of Eastern Canada roots. We all very much adopted good, strong Canadian accents by the end of the hour.
I’ve watched all the Letter Kenny episodes. They’re awesome.
Nice. So, Danny, thanks very much. This is great to have you back because we’ve been apart for a while as humans, as society and as technologists. We’ve seen them move towards virtual for a couple of years for very obvious reasons. And we saw a real fundamental shift in kind of how we engage with people. And I was lucky for the podcast has been greatly successful because people are tapping into this type of learning and exploring these conversations. But at the same time, good golly, it feels good to know that when you were talking before we started to record here that we got plane tickets booked, we’ve got VeeamON, which is live in Las Vegas. So you’ve got a real in-person event coming up. So maybe if you want to just first of all, give a quick intro for folks that are brand new to you, and then let’s talk about VeeamON and kind of the excitement around that right away.
Sure. So my name is Danny Allen and the CTO at Veeam Software. We’ve been in business now for almost 15 years doing data protection. Which I point out is not just backup, but also recovery, recovery at scale, doing it instantly and doing all the things around the management of that data over its life cycle. Along the way, over the past decade or so, we have created and been privileged to have behind us a green army that loves the Veeam software. And one of the things that we’ve done since 2015 is an industry conference. And so coming up next week, it begins May 16th. We are having an in-person event in Vegas for the first time in three years. But I want to highlight for people, we are going back to the in-person event, but it will be hybrid. There will also be a virtual experience. And one of the things that we’re very focused on is making sure we have an equitable experience for those who can be there in person and we can shake hands and have fellowship together. We plan to do that. But also we want to make sure that the information and the content we’re providing is equally available for those who are attending virtually. So we’re very excited to have this event coming up.
It also brings up as excited as many of the folks in the industry are to get back together, there’s still a lot of trepidation around travel and personal risks like this. Everybody’s got their own sort of their comfort level with getting back, especially in big crowds. So I do like that you’re taking the hybrid approach. And it’s a tricky balance like to have information be broadly shareable, but then have an experience that like you described to make it an equitable experience so that people in the remote situation have almost their own show that we can add other elements to it. Because it’s been a real challenge I think, as an industry, for us to have meaningful engagement through conference experiences because we’ve often turned them into 7-hour webinars. Which it’s tough, like good golly, 1-hour webinar is enough to put anybody into a nap mode. So it’s been tough to maintain meaningful engagement and meaningful collaboration as well. So that will be one thing. Danny, I’d love to get your experience, like looking back over the last little while, how have you and the team stayed really collaborative with both customer and just general industry peers?
Well, one of the things that we have certainly gone deep on is online meetings, virtual meetings. Starting out, I told everyone I want your video cameras on because I want it to be like we’re in the office together and seeing one another. And what you learn over time is you mentioned something very important. Everyone is different. Some people like being together. Some people don’t like being together. That’s true. Not just across the industry, but within a company and within teams. We have people who are more comfortable than others being together. And you need to or I would argue you need to. Some people say you want to. I say you need to accommodate for that. That’s why the hybrid is so important. But to share with you one of the learnings that I learned, we switched to video meetings all day long. I sat in front of this webcam, and this is what we did for 8 hours a day or I did for 8 hours a day. But even that, I learned over the past two years, sometimes that is exhausting for people. And so I actually change the models. If I do one-on-one meetings for example, I still have the camera on. But if I’m doing a one to many meetings, I don’t require cameras to be on.
And what you find is everyone is different. Everyone adapts a little bit differently. And the important thing is to seek to understand the person on the other side of 100 milliseconds of latency and help them to be the most productive that they can possibly be. And so whether it be meetings within Veeam or industry conferences, I do believe that this is the shift, the 2020 shift that happened. And as we go forward over the next decade and decades, I think the norm will be this hybrid experience that does its best to accommodate individuals where they are.
And it speaks to the power of empathy. Right. We’ve kind of over injected that phrase into, you know, it’s like customer centric. People say it a lot. And it looks great on a brochure or, you know, a header on a web page. But it’s activity and action that prove empathy in real life. And actually seeing it in motion the way you just talked about it is important because we’re now seeing the return to work and return to office wave and you can see that it’s having a pretty significant impact on people’s sense of what the current culture and future culture they want out of their organizations is. Both as the organization leaders as well as the broad base of employees. They don’t want to say rank and file, but especially you think if you’ve got a thousand people that are normally coming to an office and then out of those pretty significant numbers are going to say that, yeah, we’re good back here. I’m just going to be at home. You call me when you need me. But it’s a real shift, which is, I mean, it’s exciting to see us navigate it and I think we’ll get to something unique and new, but I think it’ll become as normal as normal can be described these days.
Yeah. If you think about the generations that have come out of college in the last two years, this is all they’ve ever known. They have learned to be productive in this world. And so if we don’t seek to accommodate that and empathize with that, then we won’t have a bridge or a place to start. One of the interesting things that has occurred for me in the last little bit as we started to go back to in-person meetings, they don’t tend to be in an office. It tends to be at a coffee shop or at a restaurant. And even when I have team meetings now, I don’t look to sit around a table and hammer out our strategy for the next year. Typically my team meetings are let’s get together and have a meal and establish that relationship. But we don’t focus on the tactical things. So it really has changed every organization is my belief.
And let’s just hope we all take the good lessons and the tough lessons and merge those together into new ways of doing great things together. Because it’s a very empowering thing when you can now enable remote workforce and embrace it because look, we remember how many companies have I worked for and talked to over the years that just said straight up like no, we can’t support a remote experience for our employees. It would impact the business too much. Now we didn’t have a choice and, good golly, we’d have all in the world traded the reason for the result. But now that we’ve had to live through it because of lack of choice. Now all of a sudden when choice is brought upon us, we’re like, oh wait, we do have choice and we can tackle it a different way.
Yeah, and I would push back on the, it hasn’t been successful because, well, if you take when the pandemic first hit and people started working from home, we had over 30 releases of products within the first year. I would argue that our research and development at Veeam and I know this isn’t Veeam, but we were even more productive when employees were working at home. The cadence and of the product releases that were coming out was incredible. And I do think the key to all of this is data, which ironically, of course is what would be protects because organizations will be able to go back and look at that data and examine how people operated and what made the most productive. And so I think we’re going to find those nuggets of information within the data that we’re creating or have created over the last two years that will help all of us within the industry to evolve and increase our productivity.
I think it brings up a good, I’ll say a parallel topic on the new way of doing business. And I see you’ve got a cast and logo on and looking at the evolution of application architectures, the evolution of the way that we run businesses and build IT services and applications now, obviously now it’s been a while since cast and been integrated through acquisition so, congratulations again on that continued success and seeing the growth there. But early on, we got a lot of I’ll say “we” as an industry, there was a lot of push back on data protection doesn’t belong in containerized micro services architectures because the thrust behind the architecture is that it’s completely immutable. But it was really like saying security doesn’t belong because you could just destroy it and rebuild it again and it would be secure when you rebuilt it. You’re like, no, that’s not how it works actually. And we have data persistence, we have legacy. So Danny, I’d love to hear about now, especially that you’re further in, what is the impact of new application architectures and now seeing where data predictions being recognized as critical function.
Yeah. Well, two things I would point out. I’m a big believer in containers as the future of architecture and we see this just from results. I mean, we had 900% growth with our Kasten K10 products last year and that’s because containers are taking off. No question about it. There’s not a lot of migrations, I’ll say, from traditional applications to the new container-based application, but all the greenfield opportunities, every organization that I’m talking to is building on containers and they’re doing that for all of the benefits that container based architectures give, which is elasticity and portability and it’s more modern, it’s more resilient. All of those benefits come into play. So all the greenfield opportunities are going in that direction. But the other interesting thing that I’ve seen, and this connects with the data. When containers first came out, everyone said I’ll put all my stateless workloads in there and I’ll connect it up to some stateful location. Stipulate for a moment that that is true, you still need to protect the container architecture because the configuration at any given point matters when it’s talking to that data warehouse or data repository, whatever that happens to be.
And we’ve seen multiple kinds of repositories. We see structured data, we see a lot of unstructured data, we see message queues, we see object storage, lots of stateful data that is offline, I’ll say, from the containers. But the most fascinating part of this journey to me is in the last 12 months-18 months, we’ve actually beginning to see more stateful data pools end up in the containers themselves. People are saying I’m not going to run RDS over here on the side, I’m going to take PostgreSQL and put it inside the containers. And I expect that to continue as well. So people who say it’s for that stateless environment doesn’t need protection. I’d say wrong in both cases, you still need to protect it if it’s stateless. But we’re seeing more stateful environments too.
Yeah. This is the intellectual view of it is that, persistent data and especially distributed data architectures inside a container is an anti-pattern, and we’ve long held on to this. So the researchers in the industry have said that the architecture is not designed for it because in fact it’s designed against it. However in practice, we know it’s going on and then if it works in practice, at some point you have to say, it’s like the old picture of UI versus UX, this 90 degree sidewalk and then the dog path that goes 45 degrees across it on the grass. If eventually enough people are doing the thing that’s the anti-pattern, it’s no longer the anti-pattern. Right. If every hipster wears a Monocle and rides a unicycle, then they’re no longer unique.
Right. Do you write code, Eric?
Enough to consider myself happy. I don’t do it full time, yeah.
So the reason I ask is because I write code. I try not to, I’ll be honest, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. There’s a problem I need to solve, and I often will put my structured database in containers. And the reason I do that, it’s so simple. I have a container infrastructure. I don’t have to call up a DBA and say, hey, can you carve me out a piece that needs to look like this and perform like this? I just spin up the database inside the container because it takes me 2 seconds to do and it’s completely ephemeral. I use it, I might destroy it afterwards. I might not. But the simplicity drives me as a developer to want to do it and like you say, I think that anti-pattern is becoming the pattern for the norm within the industry now.
There’s that interesting thing that is, we see adoption and adaptation, and those are two very important distinctions that just like when we saw I often talk about private cloud. Like, here we are. I’ve been a private cloud advocate since I was on the customer side of the world building private cloud architectures, doing bizarre things like getting OpenStack fronting of VMware environment when they weren’t really meant to play together at the time. And successfully deployed a private cloud architecture for self service for my development team. Well, here we are. Now it’s ten years later, twelve years later, and we’re finally arriving at private cloud democratization. And it’s really neat to see. And same thing as what was told to me at that time was like, well, why would you put a different front-end on a legacy back-end? Well, that’s because it’s solution oriented, right. My solution was I needed a developer self service front-end, and I wasn’t going to re-architect my applications and my virtual machines to run on OpenStack and with a different hypervisor. So I made something work that some people think wasn’t really a slick idea. But here we are, same thing. It’s like many years later. Well, what do you think that all these products are? It is merging of traditional architectures with fresh, new, available technologies to solve an actual bloody problem. Which is really what we’re here for, right?
Yeah. It is definitely about solving the problem. We tend to think of it, or at least and I’ll criticize myself in this. We tend to think of it from an IT perspective of I’m here to protect the data or I’m here to make sure that the data is secure. That’s not the motivation at all. The motivation is that the company makes money and we deliver a service that makes people more productive. And recognizing that and fitting in within that pattern is far more important than saying “thou shaltl not put state in containers or thou shall not do this”. And if we facilitate the business because it is about the business, then we will ultimately be successful. My only hope is as we go forward, we don’t forget the lessons that we’ve learned. And we often do that over and over. You know, we learned about the secure development lifecycle. We learned about the essential need to protect traditional physical systems. When we went to the virtual world, we forgot about it for a period of time. Then we brought it in a broken way. And as we go forward to not just containers, but serverless and Lambda-based architectures, we can’t afford to lose the learnings that we’ve learned over the last 50 years.
Yeah. And I often find, especially if you get into very developer centric technologies, that they have their sense of understanding of protection and mitigation. And we’ve talked about you know, as an industry, DevOps was meant to sort of release the reins of the BOFH, right? The old school operator, that’s just getting the way of innovation. But it didn’t take away the need for the practices that still happen on the offside. It just meant that the deployments and the life cycles moved into this more fluid cross team method. And I was using things like get ups and using ways in which that we could have lifecycle management, version control. But version control is not data protection. It’s point in time state capturing. But what’s protecting that? Every once in a while you meet somebody, you grab them by the caller and say, well, what’s protecting your version control? And they’re like, oh, yeah, I never thought about that. And like, well, I’m sure someone has got it on their laptop. That’s not data protection. That’s luck.
We can’t depend on luck, clearly as a strategy. But you find people that say, just use the infrastructure as a model of data protection. Snapshots are backup. And same thing. You see that in Kubernetes, too. People say, well, just take a snapshot of the data at any given point and you have data protection. But unless you think of it, backup is more than that. Thinking about the system in the context of that application or service, which is far more complex than a single VM or a single database or a single snapshot on a storage array. What are all the components that have to come together to recreate the environment at any given time? Because that’s really what the business needs when it’s going to recover. And we see this more than ever now, these massive ransomware attacks that are hitting us, they’re not just hitting a single database or a single component. It’s the whole thing that goes down. And all of a sudden you need to bring up something that is not just multiple terabytes. I mean, approaching petabytes. Sometimes these systems that have to come back online at scale quickly to what it looked like at a given point in time, that’s never just a single system. It’s a very complex array of environment that you have to bring back.
Yeah, this is the challenge. I did disaster recovery and business continuity for a long time, and it taught me this idea of system level thinking in that protecting the data was only as good as the matching protection of the application code, because I’m protecting my application code every 48 hours or every 24 hours, but my data is being snapshotted every seven days. Or maybe it’s completely other side where it’s like I’m getting data protection every 2 hours or every 15 minutes really, like near real time stuff. But none of the other adjacent protected systems align with those schedules. Well, how do you recover the whole system? And it’s this complex symphony of scheduling. And that’s why system-level protection now is finally sort of hitting us. That as much as we like the idea of decentralized IT. The applications are system central and it’s a very tough mindset for people to adapt. They kind of think of it as like, oh yeah, we’re a distributed team, so all we have to worry about is our stuff. You’re like, well, there’s somebody out there who has to know all of the stuff and protect all the stuff and be able to actively recover all the stuff. And I think that backing it up is one thing, but actually recovering it in practice is where the rubber hits the road.
Yeah. There’s two folks on my team that are far smarter than I will ever be, who always say ransomware is a disaster. Melissa Palmer and Jason Buffington, they all repeat that all the time. If you’re looking for the silver lining in ransomware and some of the cyber threats that we’re facing now, it’s causing people to think more in terms of the system than in terms of a VM gets deleted or an array goes down or a computing server goes down because you do need to think of it in terms of the holistic system to bring it back. So if you’re looking for silver lining and ransomware, people are thinking more about business continuity and environments where we mentioned Kubernetes earlier, you can have a multi-cluster environment that spread not only across multiple clouds, but you can have clusters that are on premises, too, on Tanzu or Rancher or OpenShift. In these complex environments, you want to bring it back to the point that it was when it was targeted by a malicious attack or whatever happened.
Yeah. It’s exciting to see the work being able to be done now in these like, they’re multi-disciplinary Ops teams now. And we’ve gone away from like, yeah, VMware was the sort of Ops-centric and Ops-focused community for a long time. And now we used to sort of poke fun at HyperV, but if they’ve got a pretty broad adoption public cloud. And what’s happened now is that same 12-year VMware V expert is now AWS certified and learning Kubernetes because we have to. The industry shifting on our behalf whether we want it to or not. And with that, they have to adopt new practices, bring over the lessons of the previous generation, but also not just try and shove those on top of new technologies. So how have you found the sort of human understanding of adopting protection practices across shifting infrastructure patterns?
I guess one of the things that I’ve seen to be very successful and you see this in verticals more than anything else. Financial services certainly come into play here. Technology comes into play. Those who take the approach of my development teams are going to focus on the creativity side of it. So it’s true that they shift left and there’s DevOps and they’re going to agile and new models of development even within Veeam, for example, Kasten K10 team, they drop code every two weeks, we have a new release of our product. So you want to allow the freedom of that creativity to shift left, move faster, deliver code, be more responsive in the service delivery. But the companies that have truly been successful have not told that team, hey, you’re now responsible for performance and backup and security and all the things monitoring and all of that. What they’ve done is they’ve created a team, I suppose the evolution of the IT team, but Platform Ops is what I call it. There’s a team that enables them to turn those capabilities on for the creativity teams while they’re going through their process and not be a burden. Don’t slow them down, don’t go back to the old waterfall way of doing it. So the most successful companies are companies that still have two different teams, the DevOps people shifting left and being faster. But they still have a team that thinks about the architecture and resiliency and building in the properties that we’ve learned over the last few decades.
Yeah. And I guess it’s the thing, if you look at standing up an RDS database does not relieve the need for a DBA. It just changes the way in which they apply their practice. So the act of getting access to the resources is significantly faster. But the requirement for true design still exists. And so that’s another example of that sort of merger. And it’s funny, but we’re also sticky humans, right? We really kind of resist change, but I think once changes around us long enough, we get better at it. I’ve definitely seen even my own adoption of new things. My habit was always like, okay, stand up a VM, run a local instance, build my Ruby on Rails app, deploy my SQL. And also I’m like, let me learn PostgreSQL. So I learned Postgres. It’s better performance, easier to get at. And then also like, okay, let me containerize my application and like, pushing away the crutch of like, I’ve already got a template that I can spin up really fast with Vagrant, and I could be up and running in no time. Like, no, no, I’m going to take a week and I’m going to do it in a new way. And then at that point, I’m like, okay, I want to do it again, but faster. But it’s hard for me to necessitate it for myself. I think that’s on the human interaction side, Danny, how have you found the love of learning of these new technologies? Because people have finally accepted like, that’s it I have no choice now, but they are enjoying the transition.
Yeah, I am by nature, myself personally, just very curious people. How person, how can I do things easier, faster? I mean, I remember the transition you spoke of standing up databases and then making that easier and easier. I remember going to the Lamp appliances because how easy it was to deliver a Lamp appliance and turn things on and now it’s a home command to do the same thing. And so I’m always looking for those opportunities to make it easier for myself. Selfishly. But then to communicate that with other people. That’s why I think containers present such an interesting opportunity, because we can make it easier for the industry. And so it’s not about the technology for the technology’s sake is my own thought on this. It’s how can I make the life of people around me easier? And this is true of everything. I mean, we used to grow all our food in the backyard. Actually, there might be a little bit of going back to that, but now we go to a grocery store, right? We move generate our own energy. We don’t do that anymore. And so on a personal level, I just find it exciting to learn about what the future is bringing and then share it with customers and partners and everyone, because that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. So it makes me excited.
Yeah. I always say, like I love organic food, or as my grandparents used to call it, food. Never had to go out of your way to certify it as organic. There was just no choice. That’s just how it came.
Yes. But on a personal note, as you denoted, I am by nature a curious person. And then the extension of that is I’m an excitable person because I see the benefits in the new ways of doing that. And frankly, that’s a big role of what my job is here at Veeam is to communicate externally where the industry is going and making things easier for everyone. Making it easier for that DBA who had to spend half of his day doing pointless, repetitive tasks that really provided no value. Can we eliminate those things and let him focus on the things that makes him great at his job?
Yeah. And I think, to me really, that’s where, maybe it’s just because I’m at this point in my career, I’m far more excited by that outcome. Like watching somebody’s life gets better because of a new process they take on, and especially bringing new generations, people who’ve been exposed to technology so early in their life, but then bring use cases to it where they can make a career out of it. That’s what makes me tick now, because I realize, like, I could learn it and I enjoy the process of learning. But there’s nothing more beautiful to me than empowering somebody else to find their journey and help them along it. It’s just something that maybe it’s because I’m an older fellow now. That’s the thing that makes me smile a lot more than just me learning Kubernetes.
No, it’s the same for myself as well. I have six children and thankfully a number of them, I shouldn’t say thankfully. Thankfully, they all follow their passions, but some of them are very computer centric. But I don’t take them back to what I learned in COBOL, and mainframes, and Banyan VINES network. I mean, I want them to focus on the now and the possible of the future. And so, languages for example, my son started learning programming languages. I didn’t start them back on Basic. I said, no, you should start with Go and modern languages and figuring out how to use existing frameworks, don’t go back to assembly. And so I am excited that a lot of the things that we had to figure out are just inherent properties now of the platforms that the future will use.
Yes. It is amazing when you can unlock that with your kids where they can, you can give them that option now that we didn’t have. Like, I remember when I was a kid, like my dad brought home, he bought Sinclair ZX-1000s. And these were like little tiny black things, and they actually had an integrated keyboard. So it was like pressing on a calculator button kind of thing. And it was a 16K expander in the back. Clearly dating myself here when I came up in technology. But just like I have a picture of me as a kid, like just sitting there with this little tiny tube TV plugged into my ZX-81 and my ZX-1000. My sister Ad and mucking around with basic because that was all it was there at the time. And then now to be able to have kids use Scratch as a programming language or use very visual programming languages and no code stuff. And they’re learning process thinking and system thinking so much earlier, I think, or the opportunities there more so, which is exciting. So that when they get to the point where they take it on as a career, they’ve had much more exposure versus, like, we had to grind it out and just say you could do stuff that you didn’t necessarily know you could do and just hope you could pull it off. And now they’ve got opportunity there.
Yeah. And the no code, low code, Scratch type models. The benefit, of course, is that the line of business can focus on delivering what they’re trying to deliver. Because really, do you want your value to be on writing if-then-else statements? Probably not. You want to focus on what it is you’re actually bringing out to market. Now there’s going to be some people that need to focus on the core fundamentals. The challenge that I see, of course, is that the stock is getting so much more complex. It used to be that you could get a Full Stack developer who understood everything from the top to the bottom. These days, in modern infrastructure, there’s not many people. I confess I’m not one of them that can fully understand everything from the top to the bottom the way there used to be 20 years ago.
The sort of mythic Full Stack developer, because I’d say the phrase came because it meant you could write PHP and do MySQL queries like, that was pretty full back. And now it’s like the work that goes on in Visual and just JavaScript frameworks, you can’t sneeze without hitting the JavaScript framework and eleven of its neighbors. But every single one I want to learn, I kind of get overwhelmed because look and say, oh, I should learn Angular and so perfect. Let me stand up something in Angular and then it says, oh, you also need React and then this framework and then you need a package manager. And then I’m eleven products deep and I still don’t know what Angular is versus like, I just do Ruby on Rails. It’s one of my favorite frameworks. It’s just like it’s a beautiful DSL. I know enough Ruby to be dangerous. Stand it up really quick, set up the back end. Understand enough about choosing my JavaScript front end. You know, use something simple like Tailwind or whatever. And that’s enough of my full stack. But true like end-to-end full stack engineers, it’s a tough thing to find. They’re very unicorn-like.
That is true. And even more so with modern platforms that exist today. And truly, can you have a full Stack developer if you’re writing using Lambda functions where you don’t even see or know what is writing on the back end? Probably not. You’re only getting a stub to an API that does something for you. But that’s not to say it’s a bad thing. I go back to the exciting thing about the industry right now is, data is driving all the value within organizations. That’s even more true, I would argue, after the last two years, because we couldn’t be together in person, we didn’t have physical value to drive in the same way. And so data became even more valuable if it was possible. And so protecting that, enabling that, facilitating that, managing the life cycle of that. It just it’s what makes things so exciting for where we are right now in history.
And as we move to ephemeral and immutable being standardized as patterns of infrastructure and application deployment, I’m glad to see that protection, at least at some layers. We hear about the shift left idea of introducing security and protection. Well, like I said, ransomware is a disaster. If we think about disaster recovery and business continuity, ransomware, security, these are vulnerabilities. These are risk components to an organization. I’m in the risk business. I love mitigating risk. It’s probably one of the weirdest things to say you’re in love with, but understanding where the edges are and then mitigating for the edges and then finding that edge. It’s effectively theory of constraints in the risk world. So as you see, chief risk officers and chief data officers, they’re introduced in security and data protection in their mandates now for the organization. Right. So what are you seeing as an evolution on the executive team’s understanding of the impact of protection?
Well, we’re certainly seeing the emergence of chief data officers and risk officers, because there is a balance there and an anti-pattern between two things that you just mentioned, Ephemeral and Immutable. Both things are needed. Sometimes you want to keep things for a little bit of time, sometimes you want them for a lot of time. We just did a study on ransomware, we’re actually releasing it at VeeamON around ransomware specifically, and 94% of attacks now are going after backup repositories because it is the last line of defense they want to delete that, right. And so Immutability becomes really critical. But I think what we’re seeing is kind of two things at a board level. One is how do we balance things being Ephemeral that we use them only for when we need them and keep the things that we actually need to keep. And then for the things that we need to keep, how do we manage the privacy of that? We focused on security now for 20, 30, 40 years. Privacy is coming to the forefront of executive senior leadership teams or board teams. In fact, there was a recent framework just released between Europe and the US around privacy and exchanging of data.
And I’m excited for that because, frankly, there’s been a hodgepodge of different regulations. There’s GDPR and CCPA, and we’re going to see more of those. And that fragmentation kills organizations. So two things that I would say we’re seeing within the enterprises. One is the policies that enable the balancing between Ephemeral and Immutable. And secondly is, okay, now that we have the data that is Immutable that we do need to keep for whatever period of time that is, how do we delegate down access to users if they own the data, that they can control it, and they have some say in the data that we’re collecting about them?
I think we’re probably at the verge, if not already happening, of what we saw with Sarbanes Oxley. Right. So when SOX compliance came in, and I remember being in the financial services and the insurance organization, and we talked about the implementation, and it’s a fairly loose framework. It’s loose and tight at the same time. Very specific, but also general in its specificity, like a typical lawyers speak.
Yes.
But what was important about the actual implementation was it meant the executive team and the board actually signed a declaration that they hold personal responsibility for maintaining compliance. So you are very personally vested in the success of a program wrapped around compliance in that. And I think we’re going to see that in the data Privacy Arena soon that we are I mean, we already are to a degree, but I think we will see a much more formal standard where you will have officers signing a declaration and saying that we hold this to be true, and I’m to be held responsible if it’s not true.
And that’s a good thing for the industry, of course, because as the saying goes, if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product, which means that organizations are collecting more and more data. And we want to give people the ability to control what is held about them by organizations. So I am grateful and thankful for the elevation of the criticality of this topic. And while SOX was both loose and tight – Serbanes Oxley, I believe, that same model would be very appropriate for data retention as well. Because I have six children. Do I want an organization that I am not paying money to start collecting data about them, their birthdays and their health information and shopping habits and whatever it is that they do? No. I want some degree of control over what is permissible and what is not permissible.
When it comes to then designing protection systems. Now, this is interesting when you think about like right to be forgotten and this is why I’d love to sort of hear your view on the approaching it systematically across the whole environment now. Because as the right to be forgotten and the right to be protected are now system wide. The interlinking and using sort of centralized platforms is much more critical now. Right. It’s no longer I’m going to protect my VMware with this, I’m going to protect my containerized stuff with this. I’m going to protect my cloud with this. The system level understanding for data awareness and traceability now is critical because you have to be able to get rid of it systematically on demand, but also be able to recall it systematically on demand. It’s a really complex challenge.
It is. And it’s one that Veeam has been very focused on from the very beginning. If you go back a decade, people don’t realize this often about us. But if you take security for example, before we get to privacy, we were leading the industry in a lot of the capabilities now that people just take for granted. Immutability for example, or tagging data. The first step of the NIST cybersecurity framework is identify your data. Right. And that capability we have carried forward from security to Privacy. So with GDPR, we would tag data that this data belongs in Germany, can’t leave Germany. This data is in the US, it can’t be recovered elsewhere. And so those concepts of securing the data, identifying, classifying the data, knowing who can have access to it, where it’s allowed to be spun up is something that we’ve built into the platform from the very beginning. We’ve been very thoughtful and intentional about. Now, I know the latest hot topics are zero trust this and whatever the buzzwords are around those things. But we’ve been building this into our platform for the last decade, and it’s why we have such a large customer base and so many passionate customers coming to our conferences.
I always tell people that I’m a firm believer in zero trust security and that I have zero trust in your security. The thing that I had to learn through business continuity was both the systematic level of managing business continuity and data protection and application protection, as well as the human element. Because this was an interesting thing that we saw play out because it was active in a huge multi-million dollar program. And I covered, distributed my 1200 servers that I had to do protection for. And this is everything, every organic service that was everything that was oxygen from up like DNS and active directory like the order of recovery. I had to have this all done at a systematic layer. Like, can I recover it as much without human touch. But also then, understand the availability of humans for it. And we’d often like, I feel bad in hindsight, right? You get a little bit gallows humor, but say, okay, so imagine the data center blows up. So it’s just a big smoking hole, right? You start to create these images and then somebody from human resources, can we please not say that? That’s really not appropriate.
I’m like, oh, yeah, sorry. But imagine we lose access to the building. So we had to understand the availability of human elements because if, let’s just say we lose access to the entire environment or a major attack occurs or a power outage, you also have to weigh out availability of human resources like actual people. And so when we again thinking system approach, how have you seen the change in automating recovery and adoption of more automation in these protection systems?
It’s exploded in the last few years, Eric. And the reason I say this, we have a product orchestrator that does exactly this, that stands out in the industry because it orchestrates complex environments. What I say by that, I mean by that is anyone can spin up a few VMs or any good backup vendor. Of course, that does back up can recover a few VMs. But what they can’t necessarily do is I need to spin up 46 VMs in this specific order, create some VLANs. I need you to move this from here to there. I need you to change DNS. That is a very complex, orchestrated workflow that I argue that organizations will need to do, whether it be for natural disasters, whether it be cyber events, because you’re going to have to prove to your cyber insurance company or to your board of directors that you can actually recover. And the events of the last four months have highlighted this more than anything. We had a development team in Ukraine, for example. So you can imagine the types of things that we had to think about at a people level because your systems can go offline. But what happens if your people are no longer available to work on a project? So automation not just of the technology stacks but of the people involved becomes absolutely critical.
Yeah, this is the and it’s automation by people. So we’re taking people processes and automating it. Not eliminating the need for them but ultimately freeing them from those extreme situations where you need it. Because that’s exactly it. Right. These are complex, multi-tiered, multi-faceted systems. And it’s just not feasible that you would have somebody who’s got anecdotal tribal knowledge to do recovery. Not at any decent scale. It’s tough. And that’s why I’ve always liked that your approach through Veeam has always been like the core out versus a lot of folks that have kind of like, folks that focus purely on disaster recovery. But then they had to build data protection and then try to build continuous data protection. But it was never their focus. It’s much easier to go this sort of Spider diagram outwards to like if this is your core and you always go back to the core while adding containerized complex recovery in a second environment. We already have all the images, we have all these, all the data. We’ve got a second cloud. It speaks Kubernetes, do it. Right. That if you didn’t have the core nailed down, you’re writing the whole system top down, which is a horrifying way to build a company.
Yeah, you’re speaking my language now because the core of what Veeam has always focused on is – protect the data and recover it as fast as humanly possible. Right. That is the essential core of what Veeam does. And we’ve done that for virtual systems. But over time, we expand that into physical and into cloud and into SaaS and into containers and all of these different models to protect and recover that data. But you don’t stop it at protecting and recovering the data. You want to orchestrate complex workflows and migration and copies of data for other people. And what really gets me excited, and I think that Veeam is positioned better than anyone else in the industry. Of course, I’m biased. I work for Veeam, but we own all of the data. You know, an interesting thing, Eric, people come to us and say, I want you to tell me where I have malware in my environment, where I’ve ran somewhere. And I think, why would you do that on a secondary system? Like, why don’t you do that out at the edge in your IDs or your IPS or your firewall? Why? If you’re discovering it in the backup, it means you’re already too late.
But here’s the interesting thing. It’s because we have every piece of data that they have in their entire estate, whether it’s in the cloud, on premises, I shouldn’t say “or”, it’s “and”, right? In the cloud and on premises and in SaaS, we have the best data warehouse lake pool that is possible to have. And from that, you can of course protect it and recover it. But you can also begin to use that data for new and interesting things. And that’s what’s really interesting. If you own all of the data that you generated in the last two years during COVID, where are you going to go to to find out, how do I make my company more productive? What are employees actually doing? You’re going to go to the person who houses all of that information, which is a man, you’re going to spin up copies, and you’re going to begin applying TensorFlow and machine learning techniques and artificial intelligence to make the business smarter about all of the data that it already has.
Yeah, it’s an interesting thing. Right. Like you said there’s at Ingress and Egress. Right. So that’s where IPS ID systems come into play. But any true sort of CISO worth their salt will tell you assume you’ve been compromised. And how do you do that? Right. Well, it’s going to be data at rest or data in flight during process -internal processing. So assuming that you’re not going to it’s already in here, and it could have come in by a USB stick or by a laptop that accidentally plugged into a Starbucks and connected to a WiFi pineapple instead of an actual WiFi. Right. Then it goes in and it bypasses ideas, IPS, and it gets backed up. And that data now is in some beautiful static Immutable repository. You can do all sorts of exciting intelligence on it at that point. But again, to the core story being first, do that fantastically. So, you know, that’s what you can do things on top of versus go figure out how to build a machine learning company to go through data. But like, what data you’re going to go through? There’s all sorts of assumptions where you’ve eliminated the assumptions because we own the data.
The edge should be informed by the core, right? You don’t want your Tesla, self-driving Tesla, going down the road figuring out what a stop sign is. That’s already been figured out in the cloud and has been instructions have been given to your self driving vehicle. This is when you stop. This is when you go. And so it’s not that IDs and IPS and data loss prevention systems and all of these security tools are going to go away. It simply means that they’re going to be informed and configured by the Core where you have all of your data. And so if you know what all of your data looks like, you know what’s in there, what’s normal. You can begin to do the heuristics and anomaly detection that actually does the configuration because you don’t want humans doing that if you can avoid it. You don’t want a human programming the Tesla and what a stop sign is. The Core is telling the Edge how to configure itself. And so in my mind, all of those platforms become more critical, but they’re configured by the central repository of your data, which VeeamOn is all of that.
Yeah. And again, it’s that thing that assume you’ve been compromised has to be the default state of any offset system security person. Because even if you’ve got incredible endpoint protection and DLP, all it takes is for you to be one signature late. And I’ve seen this in practice where you start to get weird errors. Like, you know what? We’re getting a weird error. The signatures aren’t updating. Tell you what, just hit OK on the error message. It’s all good. 4 hours later, found out that we’ve been ravaged by a system which was ultimately trying to become a botnet. And then seeing all this stuff, which is doing all this phone home stuff. So all of those edge systems are coming into play. So what do you do? Well, we shut down the edge, we literally closed the door. Well, now what do you do? How do you find where the data lives? How do you go back to the most recent immutable backups and ultimately find the origin, build the heuristic and enable the end point? It’s an orchestration of all these incredibly complex systems. But again, if you don’t have safe origin, immutable source, everything is a variable and you cannot, it’s the traveling salesman machine learning problem. It’s impossible to solve, but yet we get stuck on like, oh yeah, just put up better firewalls.
Yeah, it’s owning the data, managing the data, tearing that data. In my mind, it’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. And frankly, a lot of that comes from our customer base too. It’s not just Veeam engineering and isolation. We’re constantly talking to partners and analysts in our customer base. And we have an unfair advantage because of the size of who we are, perhaps. But I think the best is still out in front of us.
Unearned advantage, I would call it. Because it’s proof in staying a core mission, delivering a product and a method by which people can adopt it that it’d be successful. Right. The stuff doesn’t happen by accident, for sure. And we know we’ve all every company will. There are things you never want to be in the news, and certainly a victim of ransomware. It’s like my only goal in life is to never be referred to as embattled. I don’t even know what it actually means, but it seems like when you get that tag, it’s a problem. And these affect shareholder value when somebody gets affected by ransomware. So we have a vested interest in succeeding in adapting the ways in which we can do it because the systems are changing.
And the mindset there should be, we should just assume that we are going to be compromised by ransomware. Then what? Now, clearly we don’t want to be. In that study that we just did recently, 76% of organizations had at least one ransomware event in the last year. And I would argue that probably the other 24% may not be aware that they had a ransomware in the last year. But you should start from that as the starting point. Okay, what is our plan if we get hit by ransomware? Do we start at the firewalls, at the edge, at the core? And I’m not here to dictate you, do this or do that, but you should start with the plan of managing your data and operations and business continuity from the expectation of we’ve been compromised. Now what?
Yeah, I always as a track cyclist, we have a famous saying we have there are two kinds of track cyclists, those who’ve crashed and those who are about to. And that’s exactly it. Right. 76% say they acknowledge they’ve been hit by it and the other 24% are just closing their eyes and hoping that it’s not true. So that’s it – “assume compromise, now what?” And build system to be prepared for it. And it’s good. So I’m excited. I’m going to be watching a lot of the content for VeeamON. What are the big ticket items that people can be watching for as far as, like, cool sessions and stuff that’s happening on the ground at the event?
So the core is as many organizations right now are very much highlighting security and our security capabilities that we’ve been developing over the last weekend. So you’ll see, in the technology sessions, we go deep on security and hybrid cloud and multi-cloud and containers. But if you’re really interested in the sessions, everyone loves our flagship product, Veeam backup and replication. We’re going to be giving a sneak peek at version twelve of that.
In that long already, it’s amazing to see the growth in the product. And then the version numbers are indicating how long we’ve been at this.
A very significant footprint. I mean, we have over a million installations, real installations out in the wild now of the flagship product. But then everyone is really interested to hear and see what we’re doing on our cloud products. We have a cloud-native product for AWS, Azure, and GCP, and we have new releases of all of those coming this quarter. So as you might imagine, there’s some really good sessions on that. And then you started by asking how we were doing during the Pandemic. We’re communicating via teams. Everyone is. So our Veeam backup for Microsoft 365 product. Very excited about that. We’re going to be demonstrating that on main stage and what we’ve done to reduce costs and make it more self-sufficient for users to go in and recover their own data. And the one that I am personally most passionate about probably is our orchestrator product. We talked earlier about a systems mentality. We’re going to be talking about recovering from ransomware. So taking that security concept and applying it from an orchestration point of view to bring organizations back in line. So we’re going to be breaking news on coming features within product, but also focusing heavily on security and hybrid cloud incoming products.
Amazing. Yeah. As a long-time person trying to hack together systems to do what orchestrators are able to do, it’s amazing to see every time I would think of like, you know, what I would have needed to do and see it show up in there. And the fact that it’s being created as a framework, more so than a pure core product that people are sort of writing SDKs against. I like that it’s flexible in the capabilities. And then we’re going to see, thank goodness for API bi-directional API access to so many things now that it’s very easy to trigger really clean workflows and you don’t have to depend on you building it as a Veeam core function. But now I have the ability to adapt my own systems, add my own chat Ops, add my own external integrations. Super cool. So framework for the Win as far as I’m concerned.
Well, it’s easier for those people who haven’t registered and are listening to this. You’re going to see on main stage and the technology keynote using APIs to do something really interesting. So an API, we discovered some ransomware. What can we do? So that’s a teaser for people. But yes, API is for the Win. We have a very modular framework, of course, that connects together so that you can start with whatever component you need, but you can expand beyond that across your organization to do all the things that your organization needs to do.
I like that. And I can’t remember if I told this to me before, Dave Mcjanett, also a fellow Canadian CEO of Hashy Corp. And I talked with Dave at one point about you’ve got this beautiful, sort of like multilayered set of frameworks that can tie together beautifully, and it truly is a platform. And he’s like, if you squint hard enough, it’s a platform. But we truly treat it as a framework more than a platform, because platform indicates that you require interdependencies, and that’s actually not the case. Their frameworks with layers. So happens they sell you a thing at each layer, but you don’t need to be using that thing at that layer. So that’s why the flexibility of this framework approach in where Veeam core platform still exists. But then having framework extensions, that is a fantastic approach for as a consumer, it means that I’ve got flexibility. And flexibility is something I’m willing to pay for, for sure.
Yeah. My single controversial statement would be, I don’t like platforms. Single glass of pane. Single pane is a single glass of pane. Because the release of that is painful. Right. If you can create a framework with small modular components that are right sized for the environment and there’s a framework for communication, that’s a far more effective solution, I would argue, for every organization, from the smallest all the way up to the largest. And it’s actually why we have the same product. I installed the product in my basement. I have six use of compute. I know most people may not have racks in their basement, but I do. But that is the same software that actually protects our largest service providers with hundreds of thousands of machines or the largest financial institutions with hundreds of thousands of machines and petabytes of data. Same software because it’s a modular framework.
Yeah, I can say that truly. People often ask like you know, you talk a lot about beaming. And obviously, I’ve known you and the team for a long time, and they actually do support the podcast and my blog as well and have been fantastic partners on that side. But I legitimately use it. I actually took a Synology that I loaded up with all of my podcast episodes. So this is the trust. And I just like, unplugged all the drives one by one. And I was like, oh, boy, how this works. Go to the second Synology and all right, start the restore process. And as if by bloody magic, there was all my data. And so the proof is in the pudding at that level to use it and succeed so easily. And then knowing at the enterprise layer. Yeah. The scale that MSP stuff that you’re targeting is incredible.
Yeah, it really is. People don’t realize what a significant part of the business that is for Veeam. We’re the largest as a service provider in the world. And I think I can say that backup as a service provider in the world. I think I can say that based on data, because if you look at the accounts of VMs and users protected from Microsoft 365, we’re in the millions. We’re not small. We’re going to be sharing more numbers of this at VeeamON. But we have a massive business. We drive definitively if you do the mathematical analysis on this, Veeam drives over a billion dollars of revenue in the same as a service space. Forget about the direct to customer sales. These are now cloud service providers delivering services out to market. We drive over a billion dollars of sales in that.
And it’s amazing. They said, well, people may look and it’s so funny, too, because, you know, the logo and we sort of have like, oh, yeah, I remember it’s like, even when I remember doing disaster recovery, my favorite thing is I built the first VMware environment in one organization and then we did disaster recovery on it. And people were like, this is fantastic, right? And so we were using Veeam and very early adopter of Veeam. And it was funny because then all of a sudden it was like five years later. And people just said like, oh, how long will it take us to recover? How many servers do we have? What about 30? I’m like, we have 480 servers now. The last time you counted, apparently was the first time I showed you at work. But to see that growth and the platform adopt and the company grow. And like I said, cast and doing some huge growth numbers. So, yeah, I’ll be watching for sure from afar. Unfortunately, I can’t make it to Vegas, but I look forward to good luck. Have a great trip. Enjoy the event. And for folks that wanted to connect to you, Danny, and find out more about what you and the team are doing. What’s the best way they can do that?
Well, Veeam.com is always the best place for information on Veeam. I’m happy to connect with anyone on LinkedIn or Twitter. On LinkedIn, I’m Danny Allan. @dannyallan and then on Twitter, @dannyallan5 is my handle. I’m semi-active. Not as active probably as you, Eric, but I always enjoy meeting new people so please reach out.
And I imagine you’ll be not watching Twitter for the next week except for seeing your notifications light up and grow because people will be announcing lots of stuff and live-tweeting everything so it’s going to be a great event. There you go, folks. Go check it out. Links down below of course. What’s happening and yeah, excited. So we’ll catch up after. I would love to hear. I’m going to pour over the announcements and watch sort of the analyst view of it and I’m excited on your behalf of what’s coming up.
Excellent. Well, thank you, Eric. I appreciate this time to chat about it and look forward to everyone being able to join us either in person or virtually.
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