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Learn more about Intel at: www.intel.com

Find Steve Orrin on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sorrin/

JC: Welcome, everybody to another episode of TheFuture of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have another fantastic guest with us on the show. And if you end up loving this episode at the end, please show that love and appreciation, go and follow the podcast, wherever you’re listening right now give it a five star review, put some comments. And that really helps the algorithms of course, because that is how other techies like you and I find cool podcasts like this. And today I have the absolute pleasure of interviewing the federal CTO of Intel, Steve Orrin. Steve, thank you so much for coming on the show here. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself. And you know what it is that you do specifically at Intel.

 

Steve: Sure, thank you for having me today JC, I’m really, it’s a pleasure to be here. As federal CTO for Intel Corporation, it’s sort of my job to understand what the federal government needs from a solution technology architecture and roadmap perspective, what their use cases are, and help them to adopt the current technologies coming from Intel and from our ecosystem, as well as what’s coming down the road, what’s going to be in two to five years that they should start planning for today. It’s also part of my role to help solve some of those big problems. So when they’re looking at whether it be security at the edge, or being able to do enterprise transformation and digital monetization, how can Intel and its ecosystem help them achieve their big goals. And then the final piece, which I think is really the the fun part is translating all of those use cases. And those problem sets back into Intel, so that our engineers and our architects can build for those future use models and build technologies that keep our customers happy.

 

JC: Well, that’s really cool. And let’s talk about real quick here. You know, the first time I’ve heard this particular job title, federal CTO, right, so you talk about your work with the government. So how, I guess, is that structure of Intel? created where you’re over here in a C suite specifically for the government? Or do you do anything? Do you have anything else on your umbrella other than that?

 

Steve: So that’s a very good question, JC. The way to think about a federal CTO is, well, I am off in a specific division. It’s the federal division for Intel, where we focus on engagement with the federal customer and its ecosystem. So the integrators and the Federal divisions of other software and hardware companies, my charter is much broader. It’s really about understanding all that Intel does and providing value back to the mothership. And so as the CTO, I’m the Lead technologist for all government engagements, but it also means I’m the voice of the customer back into the organization. So just like you would have a cloud CTO, or you would have a memory CTO or client CTO, the Federal CTOs role is really to represent that entire market back into the business units and to help the business units to get reach into that customer base to and so that their technologies and their new innovations and incubation projects are on the radar of the various different government procurements for government programs. And of course, the larger the ecosystem that’s adopting technology for the federal government.

 

JC: Okay, and then so how does the government, via Intel work with like, maybe small businesses? Is there? Is there a path there? You know, how does that work? How do businesses fall into your umbrella when it comes up via the government? Or is it just straight with the government and they handle the rest?

 

Steve: So essentially, if you think about how the government procures things, or how the government buys or deploys technology, very rarely does the government go directly to a software developer and say, you know, give me your software. It happens. But oftentimes, there’s an integrator or a solution provider that pulls together the software packages in the systems and builds it on behalf of the government. And it could be large primes like Lockheed or Northrop or Raytheon that are building a lot of the weapon systems or building planes or boats, or you get the large contractors, the building IT systems, the lighthouses, the Booz Allen’s, the khakis that are building sort of the ERP systems for the VA or for the IRS. And so the the ecosystem that supports the federal government is is different and diverse. At the same time, when you pick up small business, it’s really interesting, the government has a special set of programs they call SBIR, so small business investments. And what it does is for many of the big contracts, they actually have language in the contract that an SBIR small business or minority on business, small business, needs to be as part of that program, or in some cases has to lead.

 

Steve: And so there’s an actual whole market of small companies that serve as the federal government that basically helps that small business, get into federal contracts, get those dollars, employed people at the small business side, and then can tap into the larger primes and tap into the larger ecosystems to help fulfill or to provide the technology. So you may find companies like Microsoft or Amazon or Intel or others that are partnering with a lot of small companies on these specific opportunities and contracts that have that carve out for small business or for minority or veteran owned small businesses. At the same time, one of the things that Intel provides because the reality is most people don’t buy things direct from Intel, you go to the OEMs you go to Dell, HP, Lenovo, or what have you to buy a laptop or a server or you’re getting services on Amazon, or an Azure or Google Cloud that runs on Intel, you don’t necessarily buy direct from Intel. And so our relationship with the federal government really comes down to being more of a neutral party, if you will. We’re not vested in which one of the OEMs or which cloud provider you purchase, or you go with. So we help them provide the right the right choices around the architectural approach. And we bring our large ecosystem, both the big players, as well as small, nimble rabbit companies that are doing innovative things with hardware technologies. And we can expose that ecosystem of small businesses and startups to large customers like the federal government, or financial services or healthcare organizations, because we want to really, we really want to show the best of what you can do, not necessarily just what the current server box can do today, we want to show what the advanced capabilities are. So we spend a lot of time and we have a very rich ecosystem of small and medium sized companies, startups, as well as well established ones that do interesting integrations, build unique and pretty awesome software, especially if you think about today in the areas of like AI, and 5G, and cloud services and micro services. There are a lot of amazing little companies; and we then highlight those and bring them along as part of our ecosystem.

 

JC: Well, I mean, like it says an Intel inside of everything. Right, so but let’s talk about that here, too. So, you know, obviously in the news here lately, we keep hearing about chip shortages. Right? So helped me understand, you know, what is contributing right now to the chip shortage, and what industries other than tech, for example, is affecting the most right now?

 

Steve: So you bring up a good question. And this, let’s just say, face it, the semiconductor supply chain is very complex. But if we get to the heart of it, and it’s really not a particular, you know, like high end chips that are really the key shortage right now, whether it be Intel, or other modern state of the art technologies, there are actually lots of supply available today to meet the demand. The challenge, oftentimes, and you hear about it all the time with like the automotive industry, or appliances industries, it’s not the state of the art chips that are actually the ones that are constrictive right now in the supply. These are the really cheap low end chips, the legacy chips, or what they call the legacy process nodes that do things simple things like power regulation, voltage, regulation, do network switching. So these these micro processors that are still absolutely crucial. If you think about every laptop, you plug a power cord into, there’s a little chip behind that, that regulates the voltage and controls the power distribution across the board. Those are the chips as for example, that are in short supply, and that are almost exclusively made overseas. And without that chip, you can’t build the laptop, you can have all the state of our processors. But if you can’t, if you don’t have the cheaper chips, if you will, the lower end chips, that’s the ones that we’re seeing affect a lot of the spy chain. The automotive industry is a very good example. They chose as an industry to stay on certain legacy chips because they serve their needs. They didn’t need the higher end chips to control their voltage regulation across the alternators.

 

Steve: So they stayed with a legacy chip that was easily available and very cost effective. And those were the chips that were hit most hard by the Spicers. Now it’s across the board, I’m picking on the power regulators. There are multiple chips in this class of low end, cheap chips that are currently supply constrained, it’s getting better in two levels. Number one, we’re starting to see visibility into the supply chains, they’re starting to tick up. It’s still a long lead time. But I think what you’ve seen in the news in the media and coming out of the federal government around things like the chips act, and other executive orders is focusing how do we deal with this supply chain issue at a global scale, we need to pick up production locally. And that means investing locally investing in small and medium and large companies. And it really has to go across the board, large companies like Intel and others as well as small manufacturers that are building the components, those little cheap chips, or the substrates, which is the platform that you put the chip on too, and making sure that those are built domestically. Same thing we’re seeing happen in Europe, Europe is also looking at how do they help with the global supply chain issues, to bring manufacturing back to the Western Hemisphere and also to be able to have diversity so that you have availability in the US, in Europe and in Asia, so that wherever you need the chips, you can get them that by having sort of critical path or single points of failure. I think COVID pandemic really illustrated that our global supply chain can be very fragile. And so we’re seeing a renewed investment here. 

 

JC: Yeah, it was a hell of a stress test. Right? I mean, I think we I think we found a choke point?

 

Steve: Right, indeed.

 

JC: So what’s Intel doing about that? Are you guys building, manufacturing plants in the US or in Europe so that you can solve your own problem and you know what that shortage?

 

Steve: So our new CEO who came in in February, Pat Gelsinger has really taken this under his is better has made it a key strategy for Intel. He’s called it IDM 2.0. And they’re sort of multiple parts to the strategy. Part of it is investing in locally and being able to have increased production in the US and in Europe. And to that end, we’ve already stuck around on new fabs in Arizona, as well as there’s work going on in Europe as well in other places to be able to increase our production. But that’s only part of the conversation. The other part around IDM 2.0, which is a big shift for Intel, is it’s not just about building like I said, it’s not building only Intel chips, we actually have really good supply, it’s about how do we help the broader ecosystem? How does Nvidia and Microsoft and Apple and others get access to be able to build their chips on our foundries and in our fabs, and that’s the big shift. So it’s not just about building more capacity for us, it’s building that capacity to be able to support the ecosystem, and the OEMs. And the other end, and nowadays, even companies like Facebook, and Microsoft and Amazon have for certain parts of their workloads, their own custom chips, their own ASICs, accelerators, and giving them the ability to build those domestically is going to help them to meet the future short supply chain issues of tomorrow. So the good news is, there’s an answer, and it’s being worked on. But the thing to remember with anything in the semiconductor industry, this is not, it’s not like software, you can bring out a new piece of code in six months.

 

JC: Yeah. Well, let me ask you this. I mean, you know, I’ve always wondered this about Intel specifically, you guys are so good at playing nice with others. Right? Like, like, you’re like, you’re like that that kid in high school who could hang with any of the cliques, right? And I got, I have to ask you, how have you guys managed to not only work with so many other big tech companies, but how have you guys avoided all the you know, political stuff, and the scandals and everything like I mean, just if I feel like every day, we turn on the TV, and there’s another tech company that’s getting just chewed out by the media or by other tech companies. And it’s like, and here’s Intel over here, like Switzerland, just super neutral. likes everybody. No one has a problem with them. You know, even the supply chain shortage of chips. Nobody was blaming Intel. It’s amazing. If there was one time that you guys were not going to get away with this, this would have been and nobody is going, “How dare Intel not have figured this out before?” Like, how would you guys stayed so clean? And then how do you guys work so well, with others? I guess is my point. 

 

Steve: So I think it comes to two, three things, I’ll give you three answers. One, it’s a bottoms up and the tops down, having good leadership that sort of drives that we need to be the enabler of technology. Whether that technology is in, you know, our OEM channel, our cloud channel, even, you know, even with our competitors, or coopetition, as they like to say, it still needs to run on Intel, they may be using their own accelerator that are using our GPU, they’re using their GPU, but you still need an operating environment, you need to still need a CPU to drive the server to drive the client. And so understanding our role there about how we enable the entire industry, and it comes down to the like I mentioned the bottoms up we have really good engineers, I think one of the things I’ve been with Intel 16 years, and there are people at Intel that have been here for you know, there’s someone I know who’s retiring after 32 years at Intel, he spent his entire career. We have lifers here. And it’s not because they have nowhere else to go. I mean, the industry is you know, that the talent has been pulled left and right, is that we are enabled by engineers, for engineers. So the engineers are driving technology. And so you don’t get a lot of those politics when you’re trying to solve big problems. They give you a really good example, when I came to Intel, I came from the startup world, I had done multiple successful startups in the security space, one of them got acquired by Intel. And when I thought about, well, what should I do now that I’ve been acquired, I’m gonna go find my next startup. My most successful company, we had 500 of the Fortune 1000, using our product, which is a huge success for a startup. I mean, that’s half fortune 1000, they were using our product, it was great. The first technology I worked on it, Intel went to 40 million PCs. And so the impact you can have, is that much bigger. And so when you’re an architect, or an engineer, or a program manager, working on a product that’s going to change the way people compute, that sense of pride and a sense of accomplishment, you really can’t find another place. And so we understand our role and take it very seriously.

 

JC: You guys have just seen bulletproof man, I mean, you don’t, you’re not even coming up when they’re talking about, you know, hacks, right, you know, and you know, like information being hacked. And, you know, no one’s saying, oh, yeah, well, we found a way to exploit the Intel chip. And that’s how, like, like, well, you just are bulletproof in this. And I just find that fascinating to be completely honest.

 

Steve: Well, I mean, let’s face it there, there have been some published vulnerabilities in some of the firmware, some of the hardware, it happens every no one is immune from that. I think what makes it a little bit different is how we handle it. So we’ve been very advanced in our proactive nature of working with external researchers, so that when a bug is found, or when a vulnerability in our systems are found, we’re proactive. We’re already working with those researchers so that we’re taking in their input and working on those fixes, and working with them so that the industry can get updated, fixed. We’re not hiding things like some other companies are trying to make a big deal about it. We’re just our goal is that if something is found, we want to make sure that all of the OEMs can find, fix their products in time, so that there isn’t a vulnerability for the end customer. And so working together with the ecosystem and the researchers is something that was built into our DNA from a very early stage.

 

JC: That’s very cool. You know, I’m a Bay Area boy, myself, my dad worked for Sun Microsystems, like 20 years, you know, I was, was running cord between walls because I was small and I can still remember the, I can still hear the hum of the server rooms, right? So like, this stuff fascinates me. I love this and I think you guys are great. I have a question. So let’s talk about the future, right? This is The Future of Biz Tech podcast. Let’s have a future question. So where do you see and we talked a little bit on this earlier regarding, you know, building supply chains locally, right, like nationally, here or in Europe so that we don’t have this issue of that again. But where do you see your industry going? Or even you know, in the next 5-10 years, whether it be through technology or legislation, you work with the federal government, obviously, so that there’s a lot that happens with that, you know, where do you see Intel, and that next five to 10 years, and the industry as a whole?

 

Steve: So I think one of the big things that’s happening right now, and it’s subtle, that everyone hears about the buzzwords, AI, 5G, those big technologies, but there’s a reason why those are happening. And it’s really about the proliferation of the edge. What is edge computing, you know, we used to call it just IoT, but IoT was too narrow, because it’s, you know, you think about, oh, it’s my spotlight, or it’s a camera. Edge computing, it’s really about the diversity of devices and things out there in the world that are both connected, and creating or syncing data. And then trend processing and transport. When you think about a car, the stoplight, the smart city infrastructure, the cloud, all working together, where you’ve got distributed processing, so everything is doing some process, everything is sensing and collecting. Your phone is an amazing sensor platform, your car is a driving data center, a plane is a flying data center. So you have all this data to be collected, that’s got to be processed, got to be transported, and results and actions have to be taken. That’s why 5G and AI are really that the forefront of what’s driving this next five years of evolution is because we need AI to make sense of all of this data that’s coming at us at real time. And we need 5G to be able to have that data move between systems and to the cloud and back again, and be able to do it efficiently..

 

JC: With fast enough speed right like..

 

Steve: Exactly

 

JC: Real time basically..

 

Steve: Real time and high definition. And so that’s why 5G and AI are so important is because they are these if you think the fuel that’s going to drive this next generation of compute, and when you see the trends, people talk about the cloud is, the cloud is this thing in the sky, and everything is going to go to the cloud. Under the covers when people have recognized now it’s that it’s not just in the cloud up there at Amazon in Seattle, or in their different regions, the cloud has been extended all the way out to the edge. And so whether it be things like Amazon outpost, or Azure Stack as examples of this, of them taking their cloud capability, and dropping it in racks that then can be deployed at an enterprise, or deployed in the field. So you think about energy distribution, you know, inside there, there’s a rack of servers that every one of those energy stations that’s processing, sensing data about the flow of energy, it’s a mini data center, it’s an extension of the cloud. And that data, of course has to be analyzed in real time so you can respond. So those, those transformations are the key drivers of innovation. So we look at what are the next five years, we’re gonna see continued acceleration for what AI can do, and the places that will touch us. In some respects, that’s already happened, we just don’t realize it, yet everything that you do on your phone, on the web, in your business operations are affected by machine learning and AI, you know, when you make decisions about what where to purchase your products, or how to build your systems, or how to get better efficiencies, into your development processes, all that is informed by machine learning, because the products you use are leveraging them, that’s going to continue to accelerate. The other thing that we’re seeing is as Moore’s law continues to climb, as we see more and more computing being able to be done at a lower cost and lower power, we start to hit a point where we’re going to see transformation in the kind of activities we can do. So we’re seeing people talking about quantum computers, they’re probably still good 10 years away before we have functional, you know, commercial quantum capabilities. But before we get there, we’re going to have exascale capabilities in the next year where we have supercomputers that now can perform functions in days or if not hours, that used to take weeks, if not months, if not years. 

 

JC: That’s kind of always how the technology goes, right? I mean, we talked about how there used to be, I took a whole room to hold one computer and now we have 100 times the capacity in our phone than that, you know.

 

Steve: Exactly, exactly. And so when you start thinking about that kind of scale, it applies to everything if you’re designing the next generation car, and you have to do sort of the you know, the temperature models, the flow models, you know, the risks on how it will handle in a crash. You can do those designs much faster now. And so what maybe took you weeks can take you minutes and you can make design changes in real time. That means that whole innovation cycle speeds up and so now cars can get designed to build and customize more quickly. That changes the business model. So now the Auto industry starts thinking about what can we do custom car to make or on demand delivery, like the PC industry does. And so now you have transformation in business that are enabled by technology. So technology is not going to change your business directly. It’s an enabler. But now that you have that at your disposal, that business can now operate like technology does. And so you start getting transformation of industries, whether it be, you know, classic brick and mortar, industrial, oil and gas, automotive, or, you know, b2b software and ERP systems changing now, in the past, you had to go buy a big software to do your ERP. And then maybe you brought something onsite, and now you can do some of it in the cloud. But with micro services, and distributed multi cloud strategies, you can basically distribute your ERP across all the best service providers out there and get exactly what you need. And what that means is A. it reduces the cost and overhead of the maintenance of the actual system, but also means you can innovate your business without having to change the way you do ERP, if you want to be able to go try some new business model, or new revenue stream or new licensing approach, you can get a micro service that will enable that into your systems without having to re engineer the whole thing. That means you can have the ability to be agile in your business structure, again, changing the way businesses do business. 

 

JC: Yeah, and that gives us such an exponential curve up too. And that’s I think that’s something that people maybe don’t even understand or appreciate sometimes, is that once some of these things you’re talking about, like with the AI mixed in with 5G, just speed plus, you know, intelligence, when you combine those, people forget that that’s a hockey stick move right there. Right, that’s going straight up. And, you know, it could be unrecognizable, you know, in 5-10 years, right from where we’re at today, for example, and then and then we look back, you know, and becomes kind of like that, uh, that Amazon idea like, you know, you know, next day or two days shipping, you know, we’re so used to that now. And one day, it’d be like one hour shipping. Like, how did you get that? We get really entitled about it too, you know? So let’s talk about what’s coming up for Intel, my audience loves the inside scoop. And you guys are, you know, such a big and well known company, it can be within within your division, or just in general, what is something that people maybe don’t know about just yet that Intel is going to be releasing? Or showcasing or advancing here pretty soon, what do you give, give us something give us give us a little, little bit.

 

Steve: I’ll give you a little bit. So recently, we showed off at the Intel innovation conference, which just happened a couple of weeks ago, some amazing new technologies that are coming to market. One is our latest generation of client platform. It is unbelievable the amount of power and computing that we’ve been able to pack into the system into the what’s called the alder Lake platform. The other key thing, the thing that’s exciting for me is all the security features that are now built in out of the box inside the Intel platforms. And it goes across all areas of security from being able to make sure the system is intact. So when you boot the system, you know, it’s all good, and nothing has gotten inserted on it, to protecting your data. In light of the threats that we deal with. If you think about right now, we always hear about ransomware and data breaches and all these different problems are happening on a constant barrage. Part of the problem is the data itself is not being protected wherever it lives on the PC in the cloud, in the data center. And by having technologies built into the clients and the servers and the network stack where Intel lives in all of those places, that can protect the data end to end and I think that’s the big game changer is, when you can protect your data end to end. That’s the game changer. And that’s what Intel’s building into our technology, into our CPUs available now. And then the last thing that I think is really interesting is we’ve also taken a look at those vulnerabilities. So software vulnerabilities have been a bane for 30 plus years, every time you turn it on, there’s another operating system attack an application attack. So what Intel has done to start looking at ways where you can use the hardware to either detect or to close those vulnerabilities. And so two technologies we announced just now, one is around closing a class of vulnerabilities in software called return oriented programming, and being able to basically use the hardware to block it. And so if your application or operating system is taking advantage of that hardware feature, those attacks no longer work. And so it’s like eliminating entire class of vulnerability just by running on the latest hardware. And for me, that’s very exciting means we can affect the day to day lives of everybody.

 

JC: Now, that’s huge. I mean, that’s absolutely you hear about ransomware and stuff and happening even just to individual people, you know, they sit there, they lock up their computer and you got to you know, give them bitcoins or they can unload it something from a consumer standpoint, I think that’s fantastic. And I can’t even imagine how big it’s gonna be on the federal side for the government side, which you know, you’re where you mostly operate. So I think that’s really cool. I’m glad about that and thank you for telling us that I think it’s really cool. That’s coming out what the keep an eye on that. I’m going to switch gears here for a second though. I want to just ask a personal question, right?

 

Steve: Sure.

 

JC: It sounds like the cliché personal question. What did you want to do when you grew up? When you were a kid, right? Like, what was your dream? And then how did you get to where you’re at now? And are those the same thing? Like, did you say I want to, you know, be high up at a big software company or hardware company, you know, tech. So like, what did you want to do when you’re a kid? And then how did that transition?

 

Steve: It’s a very good question. And it’s a fascinating story. So when I was younger, I had two loves — computers and really hacking, and the other was biology. And so as, as I was, you know, so sciences in business, for me, it’s about solving problems, whether it be figuring how things work and hacking things, or understanding biological processes. It’s really about how do you solve problems? How do you answer those hard questions that’s always fascinated me about the time I need to sort of figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up and go to college and actually have a career. Computer Science wasn’t really a exciting option at the time in the late 80s. And so I went the bio route and actually did a research biology degree, I did graduate research and biochemistry, and I was going to become an MD PhD, and I work in a lab for the rest of my life. That was my career, I was going to publish papers and, and do really cool science. And right before I was gonna start med school, I had sort of a period of time where my grant with the government, you know, government grant had run out for some research I was doing. And so at some time before I was gonna start med school, and a friend of a friend had some money wanted to do a startup. Now remember, this is 19, early 1995, pre Netscape IPO, early days of the internet. And so he said, Hey, you know, you want to help me, you know, this hacking stuff, can you help me with this idea. And so I said, You know what, this would be a good idea to save some money for med school. Well, three months into doing it, I fell in love. And this was, again, the exciting early days of the Internet, did my first startup in 95, grew that startup, and then in 98, decided to go do my own, and started my own company and did that one, and then just it’s serial entrepreneur, through the 90s. And into the mid, the mid 2000s. And loved every minute of it really got the opportunity to work with some of the luminaries in the security field. My mentor, Bruce Schneier, and others have taught me the keys to understanding cryptography and understanding applied security early enough in my career, where I’ve now been able to pass that along to people I mentor. And then doing the smart thing, that’s what I, that’s where I went, I was like, I’m going to be a smart guy, I’m going to start companies in the security space and solve hard problems. And then he got acquired by Intel, in 2005. And like I said, earlier, I was going to go off and do another startup after six months. And they gave me the opportunity to run security pathfinding, which in Intel, what that meant is looking at the two to five year horizon, what are things we could do with our hardware as it exists today, or it’s coming, that would be innovative for security. And so for eight and a half years, I ran some of the advanced research around software usages of security. So things like anti malware, antivirus technologies, leveraging hardware, web and cloud security, virtualization security, fascinating stuff, that again, as we built these features, they affected the entire industry. And so I did want to become a doctor at one point. But I went, you know, stage left and became a technologist and really got to use my hacking skills and my security background, you know, and the things that I did in the 80s have served me well throughout my career.

 

JC: That’s awesome. I would like to ask that question because just hearing that journey, and it’s always a different path, right? And it’s almost never like what someone wanted to do, like when they’re a kid, right? And so I think the best part is like, okay, well, how did it get there? How did it work its way to where you’re at now. Alright, so last question for you, you know, you’re a tech guy, I’m sure you do a lot of research and reading, if you could give one recommendation to the audience of maybe like the best book, right? Whether it be audio book, or regular, you know, and you can pick your your theme of if it’s tech or not, but what’s kind of a must read in your world?

 

Steve: It’s interesting, there are two books that I go back to, and one is not a technology book. But it is a book that has really taught me so much about how to run businesses, how to run teams, and how to work within an organization. And that’s Good to Great by Jim Collins, one of my early CEOs that I worked with, in my startup days had recommended I read the book, and she you know, and he, she was friends with him. And so he came in to talk to us, and just had such an impact. But that book, it really was understanding the dynamics of what makes businesses work and what what your job there is to do. Whether it be surrounding yourself with people smarter than yourself, or understanding the core of what your business really is, has advised me to throw out all my technology as well, he talks about it from a business sense, it applies equally to the technology sense. So that’s one that I live and die by a night still still go back and look at it. And as far as the technology books, there are so many right now. But the the one that I read first, and that I still point to is sort of the one that got me started was Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier by my mentor, they sometimes referred to as the big red book is about yay thick. But one of the key things and he’s had multiple books that have followed that have all been great, but the key thing is, is that it’s not about the math. A lot of times engineers say I’m going to build the perfect crypto algorithm. I’m going to build the perfect compiler. And really what it comes down to it’s about the application of that technology. That’s why it’s called plied secure so how do you apply cool technology to a problem? And that’s I mean, that’s the theme that sort of writes throughout the book. And throughout his talks. It’s not about the just the math, it’s not just about the code. It’s how do you solve a problem? How do you solve a customer’s problem, or a business from or your own internal development problems? Using technology, it’s not about the technology as the end but technology as a means. And I think that’s the key thing that I learned that you learn from that. And Applied Cryptography is really about how do you apply cryptography to email to network protocols? And that’s really the lesson learned there.

 

JC: Yeah, I really like the application part of it. Because you know, I’m more of a practical type of person. That’s how my brain works. I’m like, Okay, well, that’s great. But how do I use it? These guys like, how is this gonna make my life better? Right? So how can it listen, by the way, Steve, thank you so much for being on the show here. But how can people reach you, normally, I would say, how do they find the company website? Well, it’s Intel, we get that we know where to find Intel, okay. But if anyone listening is on that more higher level, and they feel like reaching out to you for like a really big enterprise style conversation, how can they contact you?

 

Steve: So the best way to get a hold of me honestly, is through LinkedIn. And so it’s S-O-R-R-I-N, on LinkedIn. So linkedin.com/in/sorrin/ is the best way to get hold me just reach out with a connection request. And I’ll accept and that’s the best way to get the process started. And this way, you don’t get stuck in a spam filter. So it’s, that is the best way to get a hold of me. And again, it also is where I publish, you know, so when I’m doing conversations, when I’m putting out articles, that’s where you can see the greatest, you know, the latest of what I’m talking about these days.

 

JC: That’s awesome. And listening for everybody here listening out there. Again, if you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, give it a five star rating, put some cool comments in there. So other techies like us can find it and enjoy learning about all the cool, amazing b2b software and tech like Intel here on the market today. Steve, again, thank you so much for being on the show. And I really look forward to publishing this and I think I have to call my dad and be like, Hey, I just talked to Intel today.

 

Steve: Thank you, JC. It was a pleasure being here today.

 

JC: Have a good one.

Learn more about Nobl9 at: www.nobl9.com

Find Kit Merker on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kitmerker/

JC: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Future of Biz Tech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have another fantastic guest with us on the show today. And listen, if you end up loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by following this podcast, wherever it is that you’re listening. And be sure to give it a five star rating, hopefully with some nice comments on there. Because that is how techies like you and me can find podcasts like this. So today I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing the COO of Nobl9, Kit Merker. Kit, thank you so much for being on the show. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself. And what does Nobl9 do? What do they do it for?

 

Kit: Hey JC, thanks. Great to be here. Well, let’s see I’ve been in the software business a little bit too long, like 20 years. And Nobl9 is really all about making it so that software teams can make better decisions about reliability. And I don’t know about you, but whenever I use software, it doesn’t always work 100% of the time,

 

JC: Oh, no, mine always works 100%. No failures, no downtime, no bugs — no, we’re perfect.

 

Kit: You might have the magic touch, right? So whether you’re, you know, streaming a video or trying to upload your check to your bank account, or if you’re trying to order food, you know, and actually, it’s crazy, because all of us are so dependent on software now, you know, we use it for everything from how we eat, how we do money, how we find love, you know, it’s all software. And it doesn’t work 100% of the time. And that’s because it can’t. And so what we tried to do at Nobl9 is we made a set of tools that help you embrace failure, help you manage the risk. So it doesn’t actually completely ruin your day, but helps you decide which things you need to pay attention to and which things you can ignore. And that’s helping software teams sleep better at night and run their operations in a way that makes our customers happy. So that’s the mission we’re on. It’s something I’ve been passionate about for a long time. And it’s really cool to have a company completely focused on it.

 

JC: So let’s talk about real case use right. So first of all, who’s like your perfect client like, of all that, because we have a lot of techies that listen, a lot of software companies and things like that. So which segment of our audience do you think is like, “Oh, yeah, I mean, this would make my life so much better”, right? And then after you answer that, then it’s you know, give us like a like, like, let’s paint the picture of what it would be like to actually utilize what you guys have and how it helped them. 

 

Kit: Sure. Well, the people who use it, or benefit the most are people who are carrying the pager or dealing with the fact that their software is unreliable, the people who are, you know, basically trying to make sure that the system is up and running. And when it isn’t, then it interrupts their life. I call the industries the downtime equals dollars industries. So we’ve been helping out a lot of financial services companies, you know, if the markets open their software needs to work, right, or they’re dealing with customers, retailers, and e commerce, you know, you can go buy from somebody else, right? video streaming, media companies, communications companies, video games is a really big segment. For us. So basically yeah anywhere where the software being down or your system, your cloud being down equals dollars for you, this is where the benefit is. In terms of the before and after, you know, life without Nobl9, basically, what it looks like is, you’re either ignoring problems that are facing customers, you’re finding out about it too late, and you’re kind of in a reactive mode, or in other cases, you’re too proactive, you know, think about where you know, the pager goes off, it wakes you up to go look at something and by the time you get to the you know, login and check out the server, it’s already recovered. And that feeling of frustration that a lot of engineers face, you know, they’re having to build on their software. And then for the people who are maybe less on the technical side, but on the business side, their frustration comes because their engineers keep telling them they got to re architect refactor, pay down technical debt, you know, do all this other work. And the product managers, the business stakeholders, well, what do they want to do? They want to get features, right, they want to get more customers, they want to get more new capabilities out to the market, right? And so that’s where their frustration comes in. What we do after you deploy Nobl9, you get your first service level objective. That’s really what our system is all about service level objectives. Once you have these goals set up, what it lets you do is balance between focusing on fixing your reliability issues, or shipping features, helps you focus on you know, staying asleep versus responding. And these goals, you know, it’s really just a matter of understanding all the different systems relative to reasonable goals for the service. And by having that in place, everybody kind of gets to relax. And that’s the I think the biggest thing, you refocus your energy on the productive work that you want to do, as opposed to fixing all that broken stuff.

 

JC: So we know what you do, but how do you do it? Like for example, I mean, you know, software engineers and people in software companies, for example, to you know, they’re like, “Well, yeah, I mean, that’s what our goal is too” so how are you doing what they can do? Why is it that how is engaging with Nobl9 ensure that they don’t have that downtime? Like what is, what are you actually doing for them, whether it’s been integration, is it like a redundancy kind of, you know, backup system that can jump in or I mean, you know, what is it how you doing it? How are you saving their life from downtime?

 

Kit: Yeah, it’s a great question. So the interesting thing about it is, no one can guarantee a lack of downtime. In fact, you know, quite the opposite. In fact, the trick to the whole game is instead of defining reliability goals, what we do is we set unreliability goals, okay? So if you think of it as, instead of saying I want something to, you know, work at least 99.9% of the time, we say, well, 0.1% of error is acceptable to unreliability goal, okay. And that means that over achieving the goal is actually a bad thing as well. And what that lets you do is to define an acceptable amount of error, and then engineer your system for that. And there’s all kinds of interesting engineering techniques, which I won’t bore people with, but you know, kind of summarizing, right, you can add caching so that you’re not dependent on external systems, you can add queues so that you can keep track of the work that needs to be done and process it as soon as it’s available.

 

Kit: You can add retry logic with exponential back off, so try it every hour, or try to every second and then go to a minute and then to an hour and the retries, don’t add up to more load on the system, these techniques can be put in place if you understand the reliability characteristics of the different parts of the system, okay? So what you’re really doing is defining the goal, not just looking at the data, because the data is meaningless, right? I have all this monitoring data. And I’m staring at you know, we call it watching the matrix, remember from the matrix where he’s like, staring at the greens?

 

JC: Yeah all the greens in the screen..

 

Kit: Yeah, we don’t need a better dashboard. Okay, what we need is a system where it has a defined goal. And then if it looks like that goal is at risk, then we alert automation and try to recover, maybe we throw more servers at the problem, maybe we wake up a team. And by having that defined written down goal, as part of the code, right, actually encoded in the application, the system can be engineered to be more resilient. Now, we didn’t invent this set of practices, this whole service level objective, error budgeting, resiliency, reliability engineering, this has been developed at big software companies like Google, and Facebook, and Amazon, etc, all we’ve really done is productized it, we’ve turned it into something that any organization can adopt very quickly, we’ve based it on open source standards, we’ve made it very intuitive to use, we’ve made it integrate with all these different places in the market. So yeah, it’s not a magic wand, you know, just like, you know, the fad diet or gym membership isn’t going to make everything magically better. But it gives you a framework and a set of tools that makes your efforts much more predictable, and much more likely to succeed. 

 

JC: So which types of software companies or any kind of, you know, company in that space are like, Who does this benefit the most? I mean, is it like, server farms? Is it social media companies? Is it like MarTech? Like financial systems? I mean, instead of saying all of them, like give us like, one good example of like, Hey, listen, this company we worked with, or this type of company we worked with, you know, their systems do this, and this and this. So any downtime costs, I mean, we talk on Wall Street, like, you know, who does this really help the most? Because it cost them the most when it goes bad.

 

Kit: Yeah, and getting into some, you know, specific, specific-ish examples, unfortunately, I’m not really in a position to disclose who some customers are. But you know, some of the use cases I think are really interesting. Like, let’s say you were doing high frequency trading, you know, you’re watching the stock market and placing trades, and you do that with very, very high frequency. And what that means is that if your system goes down, while that’s occurring, and it doesn’t have to be fully down, even a small, you know, 50%,30% delay to the latency of that system could have a massive impact on, you know, millions, if not billions of dollars, right, there can be a huge, huge amount of impact, because you miss the opportunity. And the opportunity doesn’t resume, right? And so this is where, when you’re designing the system, you need to think about all the contingencies that would equal that risk. But guess what, we all have limited resources. Even if you’re a giant financial institution, you only have so much time in the day to build software to build infrastructure.

 

Kit: So you need a way of prioritizing, and this is really what it comes down to setting these goals, the service level objectives, SLO, they really set the prioritization. So you can say, you know what, given the challenge, do this, and not that, because it’s going to have a bigger financial impact for us. I was actually talking to a site reliability engineer at a hedge fund. And he told me that there are basically two SLOs. When the markets open, it needs to be 100%, when the markets closed, it can be 0%. And that’s kind of the way to think about the reliability is that it’s not the same at all times, you know, some retailers…well, guess what, Black Friday, you know, the holiday period – significantly more important than the rest of the year. So instead of saying, you know what, the system needs to be up the same level all year, instead, you want to recognize their seasonality, right, that certain days, and certain transactions are more important than others. Another great example from the retail space, you know, imagine you’ve got a website where you can buy some shoes, you like shoes?

 

JC: I love shoes. I use them every day.

 

Kit: You use them everyday, exactly.

 

JC: I’m wearing one right now.

 

Kit: So think about this, you’re going to click on the catalog, right? You’re clicking on the catalog, looking for what shoes you want to buy, okay? And many of these other click this special click where you actually purchase the shoes, right? Put all those clicks in one big jumble of data, you’re gonna see the catalog clicks, which is a high volume, but low value clicks, right? If the catalog doesn’t work, you’ll click it again. Now on the other hand, if you click the Checkout button and it doesn’t work, it’s a very low volume, relatively speaking, right? You might do 100 clicks on the catalog for every one click at checkout.

 

JC: But it’s a high value..

 

Kit: But super high value. Well guess what if you put that on one set of data, and you set a goal for the whole thing, you’re going to overbuild the catalog and you’re going to under build the checkout right? So you get the point. So what we do is we help you divide that into two different sets, we say, Hey, you know what catalog clicks go over here. And we set a specific goal on the speed and the reliability that you know what percentage of the time it has to work. The checkout, we set a different-  set different goal, and we separate it. Now as an engineer looking at the system, I can see these two piles of clicks, right? I can understand them relative to the goal. And if there’s a bug, I can prioritize which one to fix. This is what’s so important is bringing this level of understanding and also connecting it back to the business in the user, the customer, right? How do we know what’s going to cause the customer to complain in the forums can be another great example. There’s a particular gaming company, which offered free user experience and a paid user experience. And they wanted to separate between the free and the paid so that they could create a better experience for the paying customers, get them connected to the servers and everything in a much more reliable way. And encourage the freebie users to upgrade. by managing it with SLOs, they can define these different populations, right, they can define the goals for those populations. And it can set an experience based on you know, the number of servers and the application that drives the right behavior from those end users. Right. So all of this is about connecting the software systems back to the business, right back to the things that actually drive happiness, loyalty, upsell, conversion, retention, right? All those things matter to business users. 

 

JC: Yeah

 

Kit: It’s all exactly right. It’s all about these user experience, and also about the gross margins. Because if we all go try to build the perfect software system, it’s incredibly expensive, incredibly expensive. So this, this is really, hopefully, it’s kind of makes sense. The people who benefit from this concept are struggling with this issue where they’ve got really tough decisions to make, right? They’ve got competing priorities. They’ve got business stakeholders and say, I want it to be perfect. We got to make it completely secure. It can’t ever go down. And then “Oh, wait a second. At some point, I got to make some trade offs. Right. At some point, I got to decide, look, do you need the system to work like Black Friday level every day of the year Really? Or can we maybe save ourselves some money by not building it for those times and reinvest that energy into the times that really matter”, right?

 

JC: Yeah, I like that too, because you can reroute funds where it’s necessary, when it’s necessary.

 

Kit: Exactly right.

 

JC: It’s a blanket statement, you know, you can be, you’re bleeding cash, you don’t even know it, you know, so I like that. And for the audience, just in case, some people don’t know what SLO stands for.

 

Kit: Yeah, Service Level Objective. Okay. And it’s similar, people are familiar with service level agreements. Okay. SLA is a really common thing. And SLO is similar to an SLA, but it has a couple of key differences. Okay. The key difference between SLA and an SLO is that the SLO actually has two goals built into it instead of one. an SLA says I must be at least this good, right? Hey, I want to I gotta get the pizza to the house within 30 minutes or your money back. That’s an SLA. Right?

 

JC: Yeah.

 

Kit: Well, what if the pizza comes within 30 seconds? It’s within the SLA, right? It’s bad for business. What if I designed my pizza delivery company to always deliver pizzas within 30 seconds when the SLA is 30 minutes?

 

JC: Sure.

 

Kit: I wouldn’t be overspending. I’d be hired, I’d be building a pizza places every two blocks, right? Yeah. So what we do instead is we say, look, if I want it within 30 minutes, well, it’s really between 30 and 25 minutes, right between 25 and 30 minutes is what we would do within a slot, we’d actually define like, what slightly overachieving it looks like, and that the gap, you know, between perfection and that that number, we call it an error budget is the amount of error the problem that we’re anticipating, it’s the risk that we’re accepting in the service. And we know that if we set it correctly, we’re not going to lose customers. If I have a 30 minute guarantee, I don’t have to deliver within 30 seconds to keep the business right. And by the way, even at 35 minutes, I got a way out. I come in at 25 minutes every time, maybe I’m cutting it close, but I can run a business effectively, right? Yeah, this is the idea of the SLO. It’s about setting a goal that both comes from the bottom must be at least this good. And from the top, where it should not exceed this level of goodness.

 

JC: So it sounds like you know, you’ve got that old saying of it’s a game of inches, but it sounds like what you’re doing it’s a game of millimeters. You know, like, that’s short, like every little bit counts. And you know, and and but that’s kind of why I see this of what you guys do. You made a game of inches, no game of millimeters to optimize for optimization.

 

Kit: It’s a great way, if I’d never heard of it that way before.

 

JC: That’s free.

 

Kit: It’s like yeah, like that one. That’s great.

 

JC: That’s your one liner. Well, we’re recording this so you got this. That’s great. I’m gonna keep it and well on that note that you know, I’m such a marketing guy, right. That’s how I seem to be the lens because yeah, my agency route 11 years now. So let me ask you the next question, which is, you know, it sounds you guys got a really specific great system in place for you know, software engineers, you know, data farms, maybe you know, software companies, how are you getting the word out? What are you doing for your own marketing? You know, for the audience listening, what have you done that’s worked, what have you done that maybe didn’t work, you know, people kind of piece that together and kind of help them figure out maybe what they could do? 

 

Kit: Well, I’ll tell you one of the things that when you’re marketing to developers, I feel like it’s a very specific challenge. Okay. There’s a few interesting challenges with developers. I don’t know if you’ve worked with developers, I used to be one, you know, they’re very cynical. They want the facts. They want to know what’s really going on. And they have very low tolerance for BS. Okay, right? This is.

 

JC: No bluff, give me the stats. It’s a very logical process with most of them anyway.

 

Kit: That’s right. At the same time, what’s interesting is that every engineer, I know, is interested in learning. They’re interested in problem solving. And they’re interested in building relationships. And so what that leads us to is actually building community building technical community. And that’s where we focused, I would say, the vast majority of our, you know, quote, unquote, marketing efforts has been on building a community around this practice of SLOs. Not the company Nobl9, but the practice of SLOs. And also the broader set of practices around Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE okay, and this is the discipline that we mostly work with. So we created a SRE meetup, which has grown now to over I think it’s just shy of 800 members worldwide, we meet monthly, started at zero about a year and a half ago, and started in Seattle pre-pandemic, and it’s really grown into something pretty phenomenal. We’ve got, you know, great diversity in the group, people from all over the world, you know, we have tried to do 5050 gender balance for all of our talks, a really cool group there, and some great leaders that are helping organize and run that. So that was one big thing we’ve done is build that group, and it’s all about understanding reliability, understanding the practices and challenges.

 

Kit: And in case, we also launched an online event called SLO com, or slow com, and that ended up being a much bigger thing than we expected. And it says slowcom.com. And I was just literally today asked if we were going to do it again next year. And I hope we will, we’re trying to figure out if we can do it, if there’s an in person version, or an online version of it, but we had 50 speakers, seven hours of content, over 1000 people, 1000 hours viewed that content. 2400 people showed up to the event, just an amazingly engaging experience. And we had just such a fun time doing.. Oh, not to mention the 17 sponsors and the media coverage, everything else we got. So really cool thing we’ve done there. And it’s interesting is that if you go on a journey of learning and educating with the people in your community, inevitably, they start to come to trust that maybe you know what you’re doing, and that you can build a software product that solves their problems. And if you’re not pushy about it, and they come to you and they say you know, I think we’re ready, right? We’ve been studying these practices, we’ve been trying to figure out if it’s going to work for us, we think it makes sense. And now we’re ready to get some, you know, professional help supply the platform and get things up and running. And that to me is a very, very honest, fair way to build the relationship is to kind of lead it through the education. You know, we do some of the traditional a little bit the traditional marketing stuff, we buy some search ads here and there. And we have some webinars, things like that. But you know, especially during pandemic, the thing that has been the biggest has been content and community and the virtual events are tough to do, when they’re done in a way that’s really about learning and connecting, it works pretty well.

 

JC: Well, that’s really cool especially that community building part there because a lot of people they look at marketing is very one dimensional, you know, they think it’s just ads or it’s just blogs, or SEO or you know, emails and stuff like that. And what people don’t realize is you can have the outrage, but you know, you want to and that that’s one side you have to because you know, you got to get eyeballs on it, right. But when they get the eyeballs, they got to have something to look at. Right? You got to have a good quality thing to look at once you get their attention. And sounds like you’ve gotten that part. So that’s really cool. So the Future of Biz Tech being the title of this podcast. So we’re going to ask a two part question here. First part is, you know, where’s Nobl9 going in the next, you know, six months, a year, two years? You know, is there any cool features coming out? Any inside scoop that my audience can get? And then also, on top of that, where you know, no company is completely original, my opinion. So I know you have competitors. So between you and all your competitors, as an industry, what you do? Where do you see the industry going in that kind of five to 10 year mark, do you see any advanced, you know, AI or any other or shifts in the market that are gonna affect it? So whereas Nobl9 going in the short term, and where’s the industry going in the long term?

 

Kit: Well, I’m not supposed to talk about our short term roadmap, but I’m going to anyway. 

 

JC: Oh yes!

 

Kit: Yeah I know. It’s so exciting. Well, you know, one of the things about Nobl9, and what we’re doing right now is, we’ve spent the last bit here getting all the integrations and this has been such a big part of our platform is that we know, especially in the software industry, you know, no company can exist on their own, we have to fit into the developers existing toolset, you know, how they check in their code, how they collect their monitoring metrics. And so we’ve been building a lot of those data integrations and partnerships. Well, now we’ve gotten to a point where we have so much data, we’ve built a new capability, that we’ll be launching relative really soon, I don’t think I’m allowed to say the name of it. But essentially, what it lets you do is take all the data from the source systems and auto generate reasonable SLS from the data lets you take the existing data as you have it, and then use that as a starting point. So you don’t have to invent your own goals. It says, hey, look, you’ve been able to perform at this level, we’re gonna go ahead and make that your starting point goal, and you can refine it over time, make it better, you know, or maybe loosen that goal if you’ve been overachieving or getting lucky, which is usually, and that’s going to make productivity go through the roof for taking especially large organizations that have you know, hundreds or 1000s of different services and developers make it so they can get started super fast. You know, right now, developers get up and running in about 10 minutes on noble nine. And if we can do that across a whole organization and have them set up their reliability environment quickly, I think it could be a game changer. That’s one thing we’re working on right now.

 

JC: That’s cool. So here’s something that I’m that and tell me if this is the right analogy to this. So I keep seeing these Domino’s commercials coming out of they have this new thing. So Domino’s I think.

 

Kit: I got you thinking about pizza, I got to think you about pizza.

 

JC: Yeah you did? Because I’m hungry now too. I want pizza. But I remember I believe it was Domino’s who did this Originally, I could be wrong. But back like in the 80s. It was like it was that whole famous. It’s what happened to your door? 30 minutes or it’s free, right? Yep. And that was something they had to create a you know, and there was times you know that there was a big marketing campaign. And they did the math, and they said, Listen, we’re gonna probably end up having to refund X amount of pizzas. But this marketing campaign will get so many people ordering based on that. But they’ll make up for it. Right? That was their plan. Now, they eventually stopped that at some point. But it went on for years, right? It was like a whole thing. And now no pizza company does it really. But everyone still says that because it’s such a famous tagline. Now Domino’s has this thing where I saw them come back into this where they said basically curbside pickup, you pull up in the second you pull up and you hit on the app that you’re there, that if it’s not in your hands within two minutes from like that, they will come out and bring it to it in two minutes, then it’s your next pizzas free right? much. Here’s my question with what you do – this new feature coming out, Is it safe to say that it’s this kind of technology that would allow a smaller company than dominoes with all the resources, or even just big ones like Domino’s or other companies, where your algorithm could say, listen, here’s the window of which this is actually viable? Like, like the software would have told them two minutes is from all the data we have, you need at least two minutes to get out there so that you’re not taking this hit, if you’re gonna give them the next piece of for free, like is it your software? And what’s coming out? The ability to take the data and spit out? Like you said, a service level operation or an operation I’m sorry.

 

Kit: Objective.

 

JC: Objective, thank you. Where it could have been the one to tell them rather than having to spend all this time money experiment, because you know, they probably experimented and these little test markets, right? They probably lost some money here, if I made some money there until they figure it out. But your software could literally tell them that almost on the spot? Is that kind of what you’re going for.

 

Kit: You got it, I mean that maybe not for the pizza delivery scenario. But if you had, yeah, if you had a system, and it was you were asking yourself the question like okay, well, you know, maybe we think we need five nines, or four nines, and people throw around these big numbers, but we just look at the data you have. And we say, hey, look, make it as good as it’s been historically make that the goal, just set a starting point. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do here so that you can look at the data, and we can look at the data for you and just generate the starting point, I suppose. And then you can make it better from there, in this pizza example would be like, you know, hey, somebody has this harebrained idea this two minute, you know, campaign, they run the data and they go, “Oh, I think we only really guarantee five minutes”. Or we could even say maybe a better way to put it right. With the SLO concept. It’s really a percentage, you say, Oh, well, you know, one out of 1000 is going to happen within five minutes. And you know, one out of 100 we can get done within you know, longer than two minutes, right? You can start to see the bell curve, right? Because really what you want understand is the customer experience in a statistical way. It’s not about one customer’s experience of two minutes, it’s what percentage of the time Can we meet that goal? 

 

JC: Yeah and what acceptability is there of not meeting and having to give away that free next pizza?

 

Kit: Exactly you got it. This is exactly the concept of being able to understand what is a reasonable level of customer service. And we do it in a digital context. So if you think about it, as, hey, I want to see, you know, how long should somebody have to wait in the lobby before they get added to this multiplayer game? How long should it take to upload a mobile check and get the cash into your bank account? How long before the email from your trade confirmation shows up? Right? How long should it take to price the discounts on my shopping bag full of clothes, on a retailer website? Right? All of these scenarios are what we’re talking about here. And we’re just gonna make it easier to understand not based on guesswork or wishful thinking, but actually based on the data, right, which is what we want ultimately, what we’re going to do, so.

 

JC: That’s really cool. So I’m gonna ask a question, I usually ask them the beginning, but I am curious. You’re the CEO. Are you one of the founders? And if not, or even if so, what what was your motivation to either join the company or start the company?

 

Kit: Well, I’m technically not a founder, but I kind of get to say I’m like employee one. Some people think I’m the third founder, which is kind of fun, but I’ve known the founders for many years and I had originally planned to join a little bit later. But I came in pretty much right at the beginning. You know, look, I had worked at Google, I worked as a product manager, there I was, I understood how the operations were there, I worked at Microsoft, I wasn’t totally happy with how he did software operations there. And from being in that space for so long, and seeing how people struggle to run their software in a reliable way. Their cloud infrastructure, their applications, their mobile apps, you know, it’s so challenging, and it’s so important. And so much of it has to do with not setting good goals. And when the idea of this company was really about taking this tried and true method that we saw in these big cloud companies like Google, and make it so it was super simple, that it was an easy user experience, it would fit into the way that enterprise developers worked, it would take all the math, and just hide it, just hide all the math, so people can click some check boxes. And guess what all the math just happens, right? Just make it easy. And that concept to me became really, really powerful. And then on top of that, you know, my experience doing developer community working on Kubernetes. And, you know, those kinds of projects. When I was at Google, I love building developer community, I love working with developers, I love helping them adopt new ways of doing things. And to me being able to do that was a really exciting part of of the job. So that’s really to me, I mean, you can tell I’m super excited by it. It’s like building companies from nothing. It’s a fun, and sometimes stressful thing, but it’s really rewarding. Going back to your question, though, about what are the industries going? Because this is an interesting angle too. Okay so.

 

JC: I would like to know, like just said that long term like like sports, yeah. massive shift. Where do you see it? See new technology popping up? And you know, what’s, what do you think?

 

Kit: Yeah, I think there’s a paradox. This is actually to me is one of the most interesting parts of this puzzle. And I think it applies more broadly, because you’re asking about AI, for example, right? There’s this technology space we call AI Ops, right, which you hear a lot of people talking about this idea that you’re going to hand over to your software operations to robots, essentially to AI. Okay. And one of the things that I’m always intrigued with is this thing called the paradox of automation. Now, if you’re not familiar with this, I’ll explain it very briefly. So paradox of automation says that, the more you automate some process, the less humans are involved. Make sense. However, when humans are involved, the criticality of their involvement increases. What does this mean? You’re driving in a self driving car? Everything’s good, right? You’re on autopilot. It’s great. You’re not involved in the driving process, right? Until a, you know, what is it the the Harvest Moon shows up, and the car doesn’t know what it is with the truck pulls out in front of you or something happens, you got to grab the wheel, so you’re less involved, which is great. However, your criticality of involvement goes up to a point where, you know, you can have very severe incidents, the same thing happens in our software infrastructure, and our data centers, and cloud computing all this other stuff. And so when we think about automation, and we think about artificial intelligence, I think it’s really important to put it in the context of the humans in control, and having awareness of how the system works.

 

Kit: And there’s a difference between delegating, understanding the system versus delegating the authority over the system. And so this is one of the I think one of the challenges that everybody in this space, you know, whether you call it DevOps, site reliability, engineering, observability, you know, all of these different areas that are, you know, some amazing companies growing in the space is if they lean too far toward artificial intelligence, in the sense of giving authority, as opposed to getting artificial intelligence to help the humans, right? Build better systems and automation. So the struggle that’s in front of us, and it’s gonna apply to us, it’s going to apply to our competitors, and our, our integration partners and other people, and most importantly, to our customers. Because a lot of our customers are on this mindset that I got to automate everything. Sure, right. I got to automate everything, because I got all these people and I got my cloud operations, and everything’s got to be automated, and the people will focus on higher level tasks, right? This is what the mindset is. And I think that’s true to a point. But there’s a limit. And there’s a limit to how much software can really help us if we don’t ingrain in our mindset that we have to have the visibility, the control. The power has to lie with humans who ultimately, you know, the software is here to serve us, not the other way around. Right? So I guess that’s my dystopian future kind of view. I don’t want to give the power to Skynet, right?

 

JC: I really was just gonna say.. until Skynet takes over, which is we have a whole different issue on our hands so

 

Kit: Exactly, let’s not have that happen.

 

JC: Last question for you. If you if you could pick one book that you’ve read or listened to that you think is an absolute must read for for technology or anything else, you know, what would it be what what book could the audience go pick up the you’re just like, you got to read that book.

 

Kit: Two books popped in my head if that’s the right the one the one book that as a marketer, okay? I think the book Obviously Awesome by April Dunford is probably one of the best books on marketing that I have personally ever read. And it completely changed my point of view and how to position Nobl9. And she also, you know, does speak quite a bit about Tech Stuff too, which, you know, in marketing books, it’s kind of rare. But the one that I was thinking, that’s my like very practical one. The other one I was thinking about, though, and I was I always talk about this to my CTO, Alex Nada, is Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance. And the reason why is that book to me is about the journey for quality. And to me, this is like, when you look at the higher level pursuits, you know, there’s practical stuff. But when you really think about the bigger picture here of how we want to build businesses, and build quality into our systems and software into our systems, Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance, to me may have inspired and challenged me more than any other book I’ve ever read about the idea of the pursuit of quality. So there you go.

 

JC: Sounds like something that Harley Davidson would have inspired. You know, because they started off with they got so big, from World War II, actually, by making their bikes, not only quality, but easy to work on in the field, right? And that’s really what separated them from the competition for getting those military contracts was, you know, they’re like, Listen, this is so easy. We can literally show your people how to do this, if something breaks out out there, because all the other ones before you had to contract them to come out and fix it. And it’s like, that ain’t gonna work on the front line. No one’s putting in an order and someone can come up with a toolbox. It’s like, uh-ah, like, you got it. Like we got to do this here. So that’s interesting. I like that. I’ll check that one out. So how can people find you guys online? How can they reach out to you specifically Kit if they have some higher level deal or question?

 

Kit: Well, we’re at Nobl9.com, and I’ve mentioned sloconf.com (S-L-O-C-O-N-F.com), sloconf is our conference. I’m on Twitter at Kit Merker. I’m on LinkedIn, pretty easy to find. But yeah come check us out Nobl9.com and you can sign up for a trial and we’d be happy to give you a tour of the product if you want to see how it works.

 

JC: And it’s noble with no E right? Nobl and then number nine, correct?

 

Kit: That’s right. But if you put in the E, you’ll find us anyway.

 

JC: Okay, so you bought the domain, that’s smart. That’s smart. Well, that’s for everyone out there listening. Again. If you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe to this podcast, give it a five star rating put some cool comments in with it. So other techies like us can find it. And we can learn about all these amazing software and services that are out there on the market today and specifically the inside scoop which we were able to pull out of Kit today. So thank you Kit so much for coming on the show. And I look forward to speaking with you soon again, sir.

 

Kit: Thanks, JC It was a lot of fun!

 

JC: Goodbye!

Learn more about Upflex at: https://upflex.co/

Find Christophe Garnier on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cgarnier/

JC: Welcome everybody to another episode of the future of best tech. I’m your host, JC Granger. I have with me here the CEO of Upflex Christophe Garnier. Christophe, thank you so much for coming on the show. Tell us a little bit about what you do and how does Upflex work.

 

Christophe: Thanks, JC. Thanks for having me. Well, Upflex is a company based in New York City, which we created about four years ago, we are a PropTech company in the flex of space. And what we’re doing is we are helping employers leverage the large available inventory of flex workspace out there in order to provide flexibility to employees. 

 

JC: Okay,so now and you know, the obvious question I’m going to have obviously, you know, because you guys have a platform that- and tell me if I’m wrong here so you have a platform where people who have open space not being used can upload it so that other people can rent it is it is it something like that is like a broker-user relationship platform? Am I getting close? 

 

Christophe: It’s a marketplace. So I guess, you know one of the easy analogy would be, we’re building kind of an Airbnb, for the flex office segment with a class pass kind of economic model to it with a lot of memberships. We don’t do only memberships. Membership is historically the first revenue model for the company and maybe the largest at this point of time. And with a very uber-rich, UX and consumption, kind of interface.

 

JC: Sounds like ease of use then…

 

Christophe: That’s right, we’ve tried to take a look at multiple models, and kind of steal and inspire ourselves from companies that have proven models, proven interfaces and things like that.

 

JC: Yeah, we can always we can use inspiration, we can’t say steal, so inspire. So um, okay, so let me ask you a question. So, you know, with so many companies, you know, we talk a lot about Tech, so we’ll just use tech companies as a example. Tech companies were you know, famous and notorious, for they get funding, they get this big office space, they got ping pong tables, they got arcade, you know, they got open floor plans and all this stuff. And then of course, the pandemic hits, right? People are going remote. There’s all this space just sitting there. So here’s my question. A lot of tech companies are starting to kind of go back to the office in some ways, but there’s a lot of people, they’re gonna let stay remote. Right? So is your, let’s say I owned, you know, a large office space, I had 20 offices, but let’s say only 10 of those are actually going to be used again, because the other 10 people, we have said that they can be remote, and we’re hiring maybe nationally, instead of hiring locally, right? If I have this office, and I got these 10 spaces, and I don’t want to get rid of my whole office, can I kind of upload so to speak, like go on your platform and say, okay, you know, take pictures, and this is the office space and everything. And then people could come in and out and use those office and I make money from that, like, how does that work? If I have extra office space, you’re sitting there, but I don’t want to move? 

 

Christophe: Good question. So let me tell you about what’s the model today versus what’s going to be a model. You know, the evolution of the model tomorrow, what we’ve done with Upflex is we’ve created an aggregator where aggregating, unused and unsold inventory of mostly co working business center and executive center brands. We have over 700 brands of co-working totaling 5500 co-working/business center locations around the world in 1600 cities in 80 plus countries that we are aggregating under one platform and one booking system, right.

 

JC: Okay.

 

Christophe: And so right now, as far as supply is concerned, which was the question the supply is really by 98% of it composed by actual professional spaces that are receiving employers and tenants on a very specific economic model, because that’s what they do for a living right? Tomorrow, I mean, in the future, we do want to leverage the platform that we have, in order to start rewarding different types of inventories and allowing the startup or corporate that doesn’t use its office anymore to become a host, just like Airbnb. It’s gonna to be possible. But we are going to defer that in time, based on you know, different dynamics of the market related to supply and demand. Right now, we don’t think that we need to do this yet because there is a ton of supply from inventory. partners that we have, but that’s definitely something that we’re already in planning to launch sometime.

 

JC: Got it. Okay, so you have a phase one and phase two, your phase one is essentially that you’ve got you know, we work you’ve got Novel, you’ve got Regis – all these big companies have tons of space. They’re not selling them. So you’re saying, hey, what’s that?

 

Christophe: Not Regis.

 

JC: Oh not Regis. Okay, well, but but those types of companies. You got all these companies that have a ton of unsold space and you come in and say, listen, it’s still unsold. Let us do it, you know, kind of like a like a hotels.com, in a way, right? They try to offload that unused or unbought Hotel inventory. Now theirs is more on a timeline where yours maybe isn’t. But so you’re creating, you have a platform where I can go in so for example, we have some remote workers, right? I can go in, I could say, Okay, I can use it for maybe it’s something as small as a meeting, I imagine. But it’s something is maybe more long term. If I have, let’s say, a salesperson in New York, where you guys are I’m actually I do have a salesperson in New York, where you guys are some asking realistically here. And let’s say he want to have some meetings, I say, Okay, I can go rent through your platform, an office for him to have that he can go back and forth to to have meetings and things like that. I could do that from Denver, where I’m at, right? Is that kind of what you’re saying? I could go in and I can go to your platform and and pick where I want and I can is there short term long term? How does that work?

 

Christophe: So one, we’ve got multiple inventory types on the platform, we’ve got desks, private offices, and meeting rooms, those inventories can be booked for a day pass for a week, for a month, or for multiple month engagements. So very flexible. The way to consume it can be via our app, open an account for yourself and your team. And then you can configure on your platform as an employer, the way you want your employees to be consuming, whether it’s a credit to buy and that’s a credit for the whole company to be used against any inventory type at any time. Or you want to adjoin some very, very specific memberships to employees, you can do either or.

 

JC: Ah so they can pick on their own right? So my sales manager, he could just, I could set a permission. And he can just say I want this one on this day. And it just comes out of the account basically right?

 

Christophe: It depends on the account, if you haven’t created base account, or you’re just going to have access to whatever membership your employer as a point to you. If that employer has fixed memberships for you know, certain employees.

 

JC: Got it, now that’s cool!

 

Christophe: And then the employer can actually do a mix, he can have a pool for these employees, because he doesn’t know really, when they’re consumptions that bit about. And he can also have memberships for this other group of employees, because they might be you know, power-users. 

 

JC: Yeah, like for example, yeah, I like that, because it empowers them to do it on their own if they need to. And then the company can decide maybe, well, we only want these types of places because if you’re going to be, you know, presenting on our behalf, we want it to look this way or whatever. But if it’s like oh, hey, we don’t really care, you guys can pick. So I like that it’s flexible like that. So who’s your perfect client? Like right now, if you had to pick, you know, I know you can do for any company, but like, who do you find gets the most use out of your particular model, right now, while we’re trying to come out of a pandemic?

 

Christophe: So it’s interesting because it has changed tremendously during–because of the pandemic. Before the pandemic Upflex was this small startup trying to figure out a way to create a cool benefit for forward thinking and nimble companies that wanted to provide a better quality of life to their employees, make them more flexible, and give them more choice. And so that’s what we were targeting. We were targeting startups and fast growing companies and SMBs and things like that. And we were onboarding quite a few companies like that when the pandemic hit, and we lost everyone. We lost all our customers, and the demand being reduced to zero. At that point. We also saw that the demand was suffering, obviously, but our supply partners were also suffering because they were losing everyone. That’s when we created an endeavor called safe spaces.

 

JC: I’ve heard of this. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. What tell us about safe spaces. How does that work?

 

Christophe: So safe spaces is basically an endeavor we created internally by hiring an epidemiologist that worked with the CDC, and we created a protocol and the goal of that protocol was to create a suite of guidelines that the spaces could follow in terms of cleaning and hygiene and health, in order to earn a stamp, that would say that that space is taking the right measures in order to welcome people, you know, in a health and safety manner during the pandemic. And that allowed us to grow from 2500 spaces to 5500 spaces during the pandemic, so the demand was dying, in our business – dying out, but we managed to leverage the safe spaces and never to, you know, skyrocket the size of the network by trying to be useful to our space partners, by creating that endeavor, in order for them to exist, in order for them to tell their members and the prospective clients we’re doing something. And we’re becoming a part of this coalition of workspaces around the world trying to, you know, be of service in a safe manner. It’s been great and we created a lot of marketing around it, it allowed us to not only get that new size of the network, but also to get very large companies to knock on our door.

 

JC: So yeah, I mean, especially now that because they wanted to be able to be in an office, but you know, they had, they had to, obviously consider health protocols and, and insurance, they don’t want to get sued for putting their employees or their prospects or clients into a, into a health risk area. So that’s a really interesting pivot.

 

Christophe: It was actually twofold, those companies started contacting us because one, they love the safe spaces, and never and because they needed to, obviously, for liability reasons, make sure that their employees were going to be hosting in a safe manner. But two, because of the size of the network now had grown to a much, much bigger level, be medium to large sized to, you know, very large enterprises as customers started being interested in our network because we provide something called the one MSA one contract-one bill feature, which allows for a large company to have just one contract with us and have access to 5500 co-working locations across the world through one legal agreement.

 

JC: Yeah.

 

Christophe: This is the procurement dramatically, and allows us to, you know, streamline their procurement process and act as a clearinghouse for all the money flow define the process of together.

 

JC: Yeah, it sounds like a win win win, right? I mean, the suppliers, they’re hurting, you can go out there and bird dog for them and get more people in there – all be applied at a discounted rate from there, and but that’s higher than zero. So they can offload some of that on you guys obviously.

 

Christophe: And also what’s interesting, and I’ll finish there, what’s been interesting is to see that now, some of those smaller (inaudible) players that couldn’t before work with (inaudible) enterprise companies now have a new flow of users and visitors that are coming from some of the largest companies in the world.

 

JC: So out of curiosity, then you obviously you pivoted, you created safe spaces, which was really smart during the pandemic. How did you I’m a marketing guy at heart, right? I have an agency, that’s all we do. I’ve been doing for 20 years, or more. So I always have to ask question, you know, what are you doing marketing wise, like, how do people even hear about you? What are some of the cool marketing things you guys are doing that are successful? And then maybe what are a couple that maybe didn’t work out so well?

 

Christophe: So I’ll be honest with you, we’ve been investing a lot into technology, we have a great technology platform, very robust, very well architected, there is a lot that we are, we’re doubling down on technology now, even more. And the second thing we’ve invested a lot is in the network, the size of the network, and the inventory. But we haven’t done much marketing. Aside from the safe spaces endeavor, which has been kind of our baby for a bit. We haven’t done much in marketing, we’ve been trying to have a limited amount of customers to really understand what works, what didn’t leave for we, you know, start really going aggressively after more customers. I think we are starting, I mean, we actually hired the head of marketing just like a few days ago. So we are going into that right now.

 

JC: Yeah, good.

 

Christophe: That’s gonna stop now. And it’s just going to stop now because he didn’t really make sense to do it before and also because of the pandemic and the variant and all that. But we are getting ready for a full scale marketing campaign that’s going to take time to build this is gonna be a multi channel thing is going to be International. And so we’re going to start really seeing the fruits of this in the next few months.

 

JC: Well it sounds like you gotta have a pitch either way. So let’s pivot to something else here. You already touched on it earlier a little bit, but two part question; being the Future of BizTech, as the title would imply here, where do you see, I know that you touched on this a little bit. But again, to reiterate, where do you see A- where do you see Upflex? going in the next year or two, or three? And then also, where do you see the because you know, you have competition? You’re not the only company that does this. So where do you see all of the companies like you? Where do you see that going in, you know, five, six years as their technology, you think that’s gonna come out? Is there a certain type of model now with what’s happened? That’s gonna be more successful? Just where do you see the future of all this?

 

Christophe: Yeah. Well, you know, we’ve already evolved a lot. And from what we thought we were creating, initially, and I don’t think it’s the end of the, you know, it’s the end of that process of figuring out who we are, and what is our purpose. But I think what we are trying to do is to become more and more of a technology company rather than a service company. Servicing clients ourselves, is not necessarily something we are good at doing. And that we want to do, eventually, we’re trying to build more technology components that will allow us to actually plug into bottlers that actually aggregate that demand and have that perspective of being a stripe or an Intel inside of the flex surface industry in order to empower companies that actually are the true service providers and the true demand aggregators out there. So I think that’s where roughly who we are trying to be. Right? If that makes sense. As far as the industry is concerned, I think, number one, it’s a fascinating time to be doing what we are doing. And I mean, we the technology, flex player, you know, such as, also the data centers and the best parts of the world and, and hopefully, in the UK, and all those companies are creating fantastic offerings. And I think we’re, you know, I think we’re all very passionate about what we do, because it’s such the right time to be doing what what we’re doing here.

 

Christophe: There’s going to be there is changes operating right now, in the way people consume workspace, obviously, at scale. And we still don’t have answers on how we’re going to be using space in the next year, two years, five years. So all we know is that flexibility is going to be, you know, Top of Mind, for all employers out there. And it’s going to become really a competitive advantage to hire and retain great talents. And so I think we have a huge opportunity in understanding the crossover between prop tech, and HR, and figuring out how we can be useful to those companies in creating assets that allow them to do to to create better life environments, and better work life balance for their employees, we’re eventually going to be those companies, we’re going to, we’re either going to empower, you know, some of those largest companies that are servicing those employers, or maybe some of those tech companies will be able to replace some of those those service providers and components, there will be two categories. As I said, well, if we Upflex will be on that category of being a technology provider, rather than replacing anybody out there. But you know, a lot is still to be defined in terms of, you know, usage habits and consumption before we can say exactly where we will be.

 

JC: Sure. Okay, well, let me ask you this. You’ve been in business a long time, who is probably the most like inspirational or influence on you personally, when it comes to business. You know, is there an.. did you have a mentor was there an author that you read him, he kind of just like what who out there was it was a big driving force in who you become today with what you’re doing?

 

Christophe: I’ve had few mentors throughout my career. And mentors change with time. I actually have one mentor, who’s been with me for 23 years.

 

JC: Wow.

 

Christophe: He was my first boss and CEO back in 1999. And I still, I still talk to him from time to time for advice. But I tend to not be fixed on just one mentor or two mentors. I have different people in different advisors that I go to, and I have been, you know, cultivating new relationship with new mentors every time I have a new obstacle or a new a new issue to resolve. I’d like to try to continue evolving with different feedback as I develop in my career.

 

JC: So it’s funny to say like an old boss, I have an old boss too, that I still talk to every now and then I’ve owned my company for 11 years, you know, it goes far back. But, you know, there’s definitely a benefit to especially if someone just kind of you met, you know, the had that influence on you realize that they just got it right, you know, especially at a time when you didn’t know anything, right kind of thing. So I think that’s really cool. That is one of your old bosses, because I’m similar. I have one that I keep in touch with every now and two. All right, last question here then is, what advice would you give to the audience based on your experience with your company from how maybe you had to pivot? You know, things like that? I know, that’s really hard for companies to do. But if you had to give one piece of advice to the audience for just from your experience, and what’s all been happening, what do you think that would be? 

 

Christophe: Whoa, giving advice to the audience.

 

JC: I’ve put you on the hot seat. So that’s..

 

Christophe: I mean, you know, I think I still have a lot to learn. And so not so much in position to give advice to anyone, I’ll just say that, you know, when you’re an entrepreneur, and you’re passionate about what you do, it’s very easy to just get caught up, it’s important to always take a step back and try to see what’s out there. I’ve been, you know, you’re talking about mentors, something that I’m doing more and more is just to ask for advice around and surround yourself with the right people. This certainly the most important thing that, you know, over time, I feel I’m doing better and better is to run myself with good people, you know, reliable people, and the right people for the business because you can’t come up with everything.

 

JC: Yeah, I like that one. I always tell people, if you’re the smartest guy in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

 

Christophe: That’s right, exactly.

 

JC: You can’t learn anything. So how can people find, so tell people real quick, how can they find Upflex online? How can they find to maybe reach out to you personally, if they’re a bigger company who wants to do some sort of deal? How can people get to you in the company?

 

Christophe: So Upflex.com all the information is there “U-P-F-L-E-X” .com. We also have an app, which you can download on both the App Store and Android store. And if you need any further information, you can email me at Christophe C-H-R-I-S-T-O-P-H-E  at Upflex.com

 

JC: Perfect, perfect and for everyone listening out there. Again, if you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe to this podcast, give it a five star review, preferably with some writing behind it that always helps with the rankings. So the other techies like me, and you can find it enjoy all these amazing helpful b2b softwares and services on the market today just like Upflex. Christoph, thank you again, so much for being on the show. And I plan on actually doing a little deep dive into your website here soon because we have remote people too. So this could be a big deal for us as well.

 

Christophe: We’re super happy to set you guys up. No problem.

 

JC: Wonderful. So talk to you soon.

 

Christophe: Thank you. Bye JC

Learn more about Victory XR at: https://www.victoryxr.com/

Find Steve Grubbs on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-grubbs-4708825/

 

JC: Welcome everybody to another episode of The Future of Biz Tech. I’m your host JC Granger. I have another fantastic guest on the show today. And listen, if you end up loving this episode, please show your love by, you know, following subscribing, you know, give a five star review preferably with something nice maybe about what you heard on the episode because that is how techies like me and you find podcasts like this. And today I have the founder and CEO of Victory XR with me, Steve Grubbs. Steve, thank you so much for being on the show. tell the audience a little bit about yourself. And what is it that Victory XR does.

 

Steve: So I’ll start with Victory XR. So Victory XR is a company that creates curriculum and more interesting, a synchronous learning spaces in virtual reality. And we can break that down a little bit later. But we believe that the future of education rests in the type of work that we are doing. And we hope to play a major role in the future. As for me, I am a founder of multiple companies, I enjoy companies that are sort of on the cutting edge of technology back in the late 90s. I started building websites and then e commerce and then mobile apps in ’09. And so you know, because I have a particular interest in education and I love technology. I married the two together and we founded Victory XR.

 

JC: That’s awesome. So who is your, like, perfect client? You know, I mean, if you know who is this really for?

 

Steve: Yeah, so could be a high school, middle school, or college or university Higher Ed. But also homeschool parents frequently buy our curriculum, and also will provide the headset, so it’s an all in one package. And by doing that, you know, we solve a lot of problems for any of them. So for example, take Fisk University and HBCU in Nashville, Tennessee. They don’t have a medical school, but they have Pre-med students who they were sending to Vanderbilt for certain classes. So along with our partner, T-Mobile, and HTC Vive, we built them a cadaver lab, and a cadaver lab that now other universities and colleges are buying. So it’s pretty cool. If you stop and think about it, most people have probably not had their hands in the human cadaver, thank goodness. But apparently, if you are going to be taking care of other people as a doctor or whatever, it is important. So what we did was we built a human cadaver with the organs inside. And so now students will put on their VR headset gathered in the cadaver lab with their instructor, even though they may be in different states, and the instructor will do traditional teaching about human cadaver. See, imagine your professor taking their hand, putting it down into the cavity of the human cadaver and pulling out a human heart. And now that, you know, this particular professor will teach about it, and then hand it to the student to his or her right, that student might be 1000 miles away. But in the cadaver lab, they’re right there, they take that heart. And as they do they feel the touch of it through through the haptics that are built into the program.

 

JC: Oh, wow!

 

Steve: They take that heart, look at it, examine it handed to the student next to them. Now that student says okay, I don’t want to just look at it, I want to step inside this little heart. So they take it and they expand it. Seven foot tall. And then they step inside the human heart, the instructor steps inside, and they look around and they learn about the cavities and that type of thing and they shrink it back down, hand it to the next.

 

JC: That’s a huge advantage. I mean, obviously, you know, in some cases, you could say, you know, you can never replace the actual touch and feel of one. But what you’re talking about is in the education process, not only do you get to you know virtually have have more people come in and get that education, but what you might lose in the physical realm of it, like the little things about, you know, feeling and whatnot, you can gain by like you said, you can expand it and walk into it. You can’t do that in real life, or they can’t do that with a physical heart. And this gives that point of view of the understanding spatially of where things are, is that kind of like where you guys are going with this, you know, having that advantage of the technology to give different angles and ideas of anatomy or just or whatever it’s being applied to?

 

Steve: Yeah, that’s exactly right. If you think about it, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. You know, one of the significant advantages is it’s dramatically less expensive and reusable. And there are no issues about needing people to die to to get one. So that helps. But beyond that, there are other very significant advantages. So for example, in the musculoskeletal part of this, the student can remove every single muscle in the pecs and the you know, the facial muscles and the muscles on the fingers and remove them all and then put them back together. And and if it matters that you know where each of these muscles should be, maybe you’re studying massage therapy, or maybe you’re going to be an orthopedic surgeon, either one, you need to know about the muscles. But this can be done and it’s something that cannot be done. On the real thing you can’t just remove the muscles, you get them and then put them back. So yeah.

 

JC: Yeah that’s incredible.

 

Steve: Yeah, it’s a great exercise to both learn and to understand. And because we have haptics as a part of it, there is that sense of touch when you are learning in the human cadaver lab.

 

JC: So let’s switch a little bit here because you said something earlier that I liked you were talking about for like homeschool parents right now. That’s more B2C side. In this podcast, we typically talk more B2B, but let’s talk about it from the B2B angle. Tell us a bit about our schools or school districts – are they you know, kind of leaning into this, you know, are you speaking with, you know, the corporation or, or like, you know, the the organizations in order to provide this as an opportunity for parents who maybe have issues with, you know, sending their children to school with COVID, or maybe just in general, they like homeschooling their children, but they want to be able to give them a little more impersonal thing, you know, what does that been like, trying to pitch, you know, these organizations, or the school districts or schools themselves higher education or not, as far as adopting this in a way where they will allow students to inbound from it?

 

Steve: Yeah, so first of all, a lot of B2B parents now have their kids at home, right? And they’re trying to figure out how do I put them into a classroom with the teacher when they’re sitting in the room next to me, or maybe in the room that I’m in. So that has, this has become a solution for many of those parents. So that’s, that’s number one. Number two, there’s two models that schools in higher ed take with this. So for example, at Morehouse College, the students will check out the headset at the beginning of the semester and return it at the end of the semester. And so then from home, or whatever the case might be, they can put on the headset, and they can enter class with other students. At Fisk University where they have the cadaver lab. Instead, they keep all of their headsets together in one location on campus, that when students come in together now put on the headset, and they explore the cadaver lab together in the same room on campus. So different approaches and you know, I think they both have advantages, but but that’s how schools are approaching it. And and the other thing is, if a student does get to check it out for this semester, you might not have one for every student to check out. But you might.. so I can remember when I was in high school, my best buddy, came down with mono. And he was not allowed to go to school for like three months. And so I think it’s different these days. But still, there are illnesses and sicknesses that keep children out of school all the time, and especially last year, but even moving forward. So to have a set of headsets, the students can still step into classes with live teachers and other live students, the social while you may be confined at home. It’s a great solution.

 

JC: Well that’s fantastic. So let me ask you a question here. So I was going to ask this question. I’m a marketing guy by trade, right? So I see through this lens of marketing, especially when it comes to B2B. So what types of marketing are you doing to get your VR company into organizations or schools and whatnot? Also, is there any government style applications who they’re going after? Are you trying to stick into that education industry? So you know, what are you doing for outreach? You know, because this usually helps our listeners who have their own businesses, as well to kind of see what’s working, what’s not what gives them ideas.

 

Steve: Yeah, so great question. And I’m a marketing guy at heart as well. So first thing is thought leadership, I write columns on medium that are cutting edge that sort of pull back the curtain and help people understand what is coming. And so once I have an article on medium and creating great articles, great thought leadership requires more than just words. You know, we integrate a lot of great images, we’ll integrate video, we link to people and things. So they’re dynamic articles, then, of course, we push those out through LinkedIn, our email list of 30,000 people, Facebook, etc. And sometimes I will boost them so that people see them. Because, you know, my thought is we want customers at the bottom of the funnel, more than the top, you know, if they’re just, if we call up a school and say, Hey, have you ever thought about VR?” And they say no. And we say, “Well, we’d like to show you because we think you’ll think it’s really cool”. We show up and they do think it’s really cool, but they’re at the top of the funnel – they’re a year to two years away from pulling the trigger. So right now, as a startup, we need quicker sales than six months, a year, two years. So we tried to find those. So if I can show 30,000 college administrators an article about Fisk University’s cadaver lab, and have those 30,300 of them, click through to read the article. And of those 300, 150 of them complete the article. Well, then at the bottom of the article, they have an opportunity to reach out to myself or others on our team to to learn more about this particular solution. And so you know, that if they click through and they get to the bottom of the article, it might only be 150. But that’s a pretty good lead generation process. And even more, no matter what, they walked away with a lot of very good information, the article is not salesy. The article is really just pure, entertaining information. And so that’s pretty powerful. Beyond that, I have a full time videographer, and we produce at least one promotional video each week. And so of those, we push them out through all the various channels, of course, we hit YouTube, we have a software program that helps us to optimize YouTube, which is very important. And you know, as you know, once it gets on YouTube, then if you have optimized it for search, then it’s just going to always be ringing up new views. And every time it rings up views, A – you build brand, B – you have the potential to build leads. And so you know, we have global customers who reach out to us and fill out our little quick quote, form. So you know, on our website Victory XR.com, you’ll find very easily a quick quote form. We don’t ask a lot of information, name, email, phone is optional. And then just a little box, what do you need? How can we be helpful. So we want to make our quick quote, form the hurdles as low to the ground as possible. So there are very few friction points on them clicking the submit button. So you know that there’s more than that, but, but that’s a pretty good start to the types of things in our LinkedIn strategies, fairly extensive, as well.

 

JC: Good, see I love LinkedIn, I’m a big fan of LinkedIn, especially in the B2B side, you know, that’s where the market is. And if you understand you know how to talk to people and you do your process, well, it can be really lucrative. So again, with the podcast being named The Future of BizTech, let’s talk about the future stuff here. So first off, what are some things that victory VR is looking for in the future? What are you guys doing here in the next, you know, six months to a year to two years, where’s the future of your company going, specifically, any new hardware coming out, any new software stuff, any new, you know, demographics are gonna be going after?

 

Steve: Sure, there’s a lot there. I’ll talk about some of the really big stuff. First, you know, we currently we’re primarily in virtual reality headsets, and we do some phone-based augmented reality. But with the number of new augmented reality glasses that are coming out, we expect that 2022 will be the year that we roll out with some major corporate partners, our augmented reality learning lesson, so you know, might be a cadaver lab, it might be a, you know, for example, one of the fun things that we have another non-education company that works in AR-VR called chalk bites. And so one of the things that we’re currently talking to a municipality about his, if you use your phone, or you put on the glasses, when you look at an old building, like you hold it up, or you the glasses, look at an old building, it shows you the historical view of that building from 100 years ago.

 

JC: Oh, wow.

 

Steve: Yeah. So it’s a cool way to tour, do history tours of communities, or whatever the case might be. And you know, because it’s AR, you know, you take it off, there’s a new one, you put it on, oh, there’s the old version, so you can see the old cars and that kind of thing. So, there’s a lot of that there’s, you know, our short term roadmap includes what we expect to roll out in September is our civil rights journey. So students will have an opportunity to tour the slave ship La Amistad with the slaves in the cargo hold so that one of the things that we believe is important about virtual reality is the chance for students to make an emotional and empathetic connection with history. So you know, when you were a kid, and you read about slavery it’s like, okay, that’s, that’s bad. But when you can really feel that impact and you understand it to a deeper level, you have greater empathy, and we think that’s important. And then the journey continues on to the Underground Railroad, and then finishes up on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where of course the Civil Rights marches from Selma to Birmingham began. And that’s where the song Bloody Sunday from YouTube comes from. And so the students, all of these headsets, from the same class where they can be in different parts of world can all hold hands and March across that bridge together, just like in 1965. So that’s the type of thing that opens up a lot of opportunity for learning and understanding history. And we do the same thing with lots of types of history as well.

 

JC: Well, that’s really cool. Let me ask you then about the industry in general. So we know, you’re obviously taking more an educational angle to it, right? Where do you see VR, in general, going, let’s say even in the educational space, or even just in this kind of remote work type of space, in the next, you know, two to five years? Where if you had to guess, where are you seeing those, those trends?

 

Steve: So the world of simulation will become a big deal and workplace training. So if you think about it, we all fly. And We sure hope that our pilot was successful with the airline simulator before they got the pilot’s seat. So but also, if you stop and think about the piece of equipment in the American workplace that causes the most damage, both to humans and to property, is the forklift.

 

JC: I was just gonna say that, yeah. And only because you see some of the YouTube videos of it going bad, like security cameras.

 

Steve: Yes, that’s exactly right. And so we built a forklift simulator. And it’s based around the, you know, the federal standards, the OSHA standards, but even more, you know, you got to learn how to drive it yet learn where all the safety equipment is, and then you have to pick up some pallets and safely put them away. And we’re in the process of gamifying that so you and a partner can race through the warehouse, but you lose, you gain points by successfully putting cargo away, but you lose points by breaking safety violations.

 

JC: ..yeah or dropping stuff. Yeah.

 

Steve: Hitting people running over people, you know…

 

JC: So that’s really smart. That’d be really big in the warehouse industry. I could see that being huge, especially from and I bet insurance companies would really wouldn’t really promote this, because, you know, they don’t want to pay out, they can avoid it. So, you know, you could probably even get them to help promote you and into these companies that they’re in because, you know, they want these forklifts to not, you know, fail and hurt people and stuff, you know, and obviously, companies don’t want to deal with that either. You know, I mean, that’s a huge toll on them, manpower wise, money wise, you know, and just even just that ethical and moral, emotional toll it takes when, you know, one of your people is hurt, you know, and maybe could have done something. So I think that that’s fantastic. I really liked that angle from the corporate side, because, uh, you know, companies like Amazon might take on what you’re doing right there, you know, because I’ve got tons of stuff in there. So that’s really cool. All right, personal question, right? We’re gonna bounce to something outside of work just for a second here. What did you want to do when you were a kid? Like, what did you want to be when you grew up? And then and then like, how did that transition to what you are now? Or is it the same thing? Right, you know.

 

Steve: So it’s interesting, when I was very young, I was an entrepreneur. And then when I got into high school, I decided I would like to be President of the United States. So as a young man, I got into politics, ran for the legislature, was elected and became chairman of the education committee, and passed the first technology funding bill because I was always about technology. And so we hooked up all the schools to the internet and few other things. But I ultimately came to conclude that it is a very slow and arduous process to make change in the world, through politics. And I came to conclude that I will make change a lot faster, if I can change things as an entrepreneur. And you know, I always ask people when they think about that, because most people expect government to make positive change. But then I asked them, you know, who has done more to address pollution and climate change, a world leader or Elon Musk?

 

JC: Got it. So it’s gonna be your your corporations more or less just because they specialize that they have the.. they don’t have to ask anyone for the money. They already have it.

 

Steve: They can move more quickly.

 

JC: Yeah, faster. Hmm.

 

Steve: And so I know that what we are doing, the entire world will learn at one level or another through AR VR within the next five to 10 years. And it might just be a footing, dipping your toe in the water. But it might be like American High School, where they have opened the world’s first global virtual reality High School and students from around the world put on their headsets and they go to class in this virtual reality high school now. So I know that this is going to happen. And I know that we can be a catalyst for positive change. So I know that we can continue and we can make those lots of positive change and the world will be, it’ll bring greater equity because it’s more affordable to learn this way. And I know people say, Oh affordable, there’s got to own these headsets. But if you stop and think about it, a VR headset costs $300 – a really good one, this iPhone of mine cost $1200. So at 1/4, the cost, and almost not everybody spends $1200 on their 

 

JC: Sure

 

Steve: But I can go to Africa. And most people now have phones. And it doesn’t matter where you go in the world, people have phones. And so technology when it becomes important enough people adopt it.

 

JC: Now I agree with that. And of course, obviously, then you know that the cheaper it gets to the more people that buy it, the more volume the cheaper gets, you know, the better technology and then it compounds on itself. So last question for you. What’s the best piece of advice that you can give our listeners today, just from your experience in business? Or what is the best advice you were ever given? for being an entrepreneur in business wise?

 

Steve: Yeah, here’s a couple of rules to consider. Rule number one, that the law of small numbers, so people don’t, don’t think about this enough. So if if I capture 10 minutes of downtime, while I am in line waiting for something, and that 10 minutes of downtime is not flipping through my Reddit. But it is actually, you know, launching a new marketing campaign on my LinkedIn or my Facebook, that only takes 10 minutes to do. And I get it done. And instead of wasting that 10 minutes, I grabbed it, and I used it, it’s like building a brick in a wall. And let’s say that you have that opportunity four times a day. So 40 minutes a day that you reach out, you capture, and you put it towards building your company, well, in 10 days, that’s 400 minutes, in 100 days, that’s 4000 minutes, and then a year, that’s 12,000 minutes, that are now building your company, because you captured a small piece of time, and you use it productively to build and move to the next step. So that law of small numbers adds up.

 

Steve: Same thing with expenses, it’s the same thing with employee productivity, you look for the small things that are costing you at the margins that are happening over and over and again, then you have to train your people to understand that this matters. So that’s rule number one. Rule number two is, and this is a little different, but I believe in trying, not putting all your eggs in one basket. In other words, like I always read like, Oh, you know, I maxed out my credit cards, and this one big idea. And if it didn’t happen, then then nothing was going to work. You know, I like to put a little bit of money in 10 ideas, test them all. And the one that works all the money and put it in there. I’ll do the same thing with marketing with ads, I’ll start five ads. And three days later, I’ll shut three of them down, and I’ll shift money, but the two that are working. So those are two things that to me, matter. Try not to put your eggs in one basket because most gambles fail. But small bits

 

JC: Well, I love the advice and for everyone listening out there. Again, if you liked what you heard today, be sure to describe to subscribe to the podcast, give it a five star rating, so that techies like you and me can find it. And if you’re in the B2B software or services space, and you’re struggling to drive consistent laser targeted leads for yourself or your sales team, be sure to reach out to my agency infinity marketing group, because that’s what we do our website’s, www.InfinityMGroup.com. Or you can call us at 303-834-7344. We are based here in Denver. Steve, thank you again, so much for being on the show and sharing your business expertise with us and what you guys are doing there. How can our listeners reach you guys? If they want to either reach you personally or your website so they can go and check it out? How do they contact you?

 

Steve: Sure email me directly Steve@VictoryXR.com or visit our website. VictoryXR.com – very easy

 

JC: Awesome and then are you Steve or Steven Grubbs on LinkedIn, because you mentioned LinkedIn a lot so..

 

Steve: Yeah, that’s right. I’m Steve Grubbs on LinkedIn.

 

JC: Awesome. Thank you so much for being on the show. Steve. I look forward to speaking with you again soon.

 

Steve: Thank you, JC

Learn more about McGaw.io at: https://www.mcgaw.io

Learn more about UTM.io at: https://www.utm.io

Find Dan McGaw on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmcgaw/

JC: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Future of Biz Tech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have another fantastic guest on the show today. And if you end up loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by following this podcast wherever you’re listening, be sure to give it a five star review, preferably with a cool comment, because that is how other techies like you and me find cool podcasts like this. So today, I have the founder and CEO of McGaw.io, and UTM.io, which we will talk about, Dan McGaw, thank you so much for being on the show. Dan, tell the audience a little bit about yourself. And what is it that you guys do?

Dan: Yeah, well, thanks so much for having me. And thanks, everybody, for listening. I’m Dan McGaw, the co founder of McGaw.io and UTM.io.  You know I’m a marketing technology and marketing analytics executive, I’ve been at this for over 20 years. So I got my start back in 1998, sending mass emails since before there was mass email. So I’ve just been around for a long time doing this type of stuff. Before starting these companies. I was the head of marketing at kissmetrics, one of the pioneers in marketing analytics. So I’ve just been around the block. I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff based here in Orlando, Florida, where it’s a super, super hot day today. But you know, I wouldn’t live anywhere else, so..

JC: That’s awesome. You know, it’s funny, you bring up email, which we’re gonna come back to here and a couple questions. But the first thing I want to ask is, you know, let’s talk specifically about UTM.io. What is UTM.io you know, who do they serve? Like, who is your perfect client? And what problems are you solving with that software?

Dan: Yeah, so UTM.io is a campaign link management products. So basically, whenever you’re making campaign links, whether they’re going to be an email, they’re going to be in social media, you’re going to put them on a billboard, right? Any of those campaign links, you basically build inside of our tool, and then you’re able to use them wherever you want. You know, we typically I mean, we work with all sorts of companies. So our freemium version, which is unlimited free, is super awesome. So we have 1000s, and 1000s, of users to use that. So from small agencies to freelancers, even big companies that still stay on the free one. But we primarily sell to large companies. So where I spend most My time is working with big multinational billion dollar corporation marketing campaigns that they need to be ultimately able to track. And the real purpose of UTM data was making it so that anybody on your team, whether it’s a small team, or a large team has the ability to build UTM tagged links, so that way, you can effectively track your marketing efforts. Because if you’ve ever made campaign links, and you’ve used UTM codes that go on the end of the URL, even capitalization will throw things off typos, will throw things off. So making sure your entire marketing team is using the same taxonomy, the same UTM conventions is going to be the big difference between knowing whether a campaign was successful, or knowing a campaign failed.

JC: Okay, so this is where I nerd out because I’ve own my marketing agency for about 10 years now, I’ve been doing digital since 2000. So you got me beat by a little bit. And I also started off bulk email, because I mean, you know, what else was there? Right? There was no social media, there was no real SEO right? You know, you didn’t have paid ads, you know, back then you had nothing except for what? Angel fire websites, rocket mail..

Dan: Geocities

JC:  …geocities. Oh, man, are we’re ageing ourselves right now. And you know, in your email, right. And so I’m a big fan of email, a lot of people said it was going to die and go away, it never did, it just got smaller. And when it comes to B2B, there’s no scenario where being able to send a message with you know, an attachment or whatnot is going to is going to go away. At some point, even if you start in social media, or paid ads, eventually, when that relationship happened, you got to send them something, right? So that platform, I think, will always be there. So I think it’s really cool your email, guys. So then let me ask you this, because it’s something that we’ve been coming across here recently, right? Because, you know, we specialize in cold outbound campaigns, right? So what this whole change now with Facebook and Apple going at each other, of course, and fighting, you know, and we’re all hoping that they kiss and makeup soon, but until they do, what is your take? How does does UTM to help with the new disabling, you know, features for tracking when it comes to Apple and Facebook and Google sometimes doing and third party cookies, like, you know, how are you guys getting around that? How are you benefiting agencies like myself, I guess, you know, because I want to check this out, too. How is that working out?

Dan: You know, at the end of the day, the great thing is, is that UTM ‘s are not going to get stopped, right? So they’re not a part of Apple’s intelligence tracking. So UTM is are always going to work, the query parameters that you use are still going to work. So the tracking is ultimately even more important now having UTM because that’s the gonna be the only way that you can really make sure things that tied together. So UTM is just becoming even more and more popular because of this, you know, the next issue that people are going to have to face and you know, we have some time because third party cookies aren’t going away entirely. Yes, I know, iOS is trying to block them. And yes, I understand that Google has said they’re going to get rid of cookies, and I think it’s 2023 now, we have to understand that third party cookies, no, that’s not first party cookies. So at the end of the day, you just have to be able to step up your game a little bit and understand how to build a first party cookie for your website. How do you make it so that your first party cookie can relay that information to your analytics products or anything else. So that way you can effectively track you know, the internet’s already in the process of moving forward with this. So like, it’s not like the world is over. Yes, Facebook and Apple are in a pissing match to see who has more world domination, Google as well as in this pissing match. Because at the end of the day, the thing that I think that what I get frustrated about is, at the end of the day, this is simply a power play for Apple, not to secure a privacy, but to make it so that they’re the ones with all the data you have to realize is that whoever has the most data is the most valuable. So the only way that Apple is going to be able to slow Facebook down is to chop off the knees by getting rid of their data. So that’s where this really comes into play. You know, Apple could care less about your privacy, to be quite frank, while they tell you that they care about your privacy, you have to also realize they track every single thing that happens on your phone, and they save it, they just don’t sell it to somebody else, but they definitely use it for their own purposes. So when it comes down to UTM is and being able to track UTMs are one of the things that Apple has said we’re not going to block these like these are really, really important things that everybody uses. So while you’re losing a lot of the intelligent tracking that Facebook’s gonna offer, through their cookies and their Java scripts, you can still get the same analytical data by using UTM codes and doing your own reporting. I just a little bit harder now.

JC: Okay, so now I don’t pretend to assume that every single listener in our audience knows everything techie. Right, we knew we know this stuff. So two things. One is, can you tell people what UTM stands for? Right?

Dan: Yeah.

JC: And then secondly, the second part of the question is, can UTM codes be used? If you create them from your end? In everything and all your links, whether it be in your in your Facebook, like if you’re doing ads can use UTM codes, outbound and everyone your avenues? So what is a UTM, specifically as it’s defined, and then cannot be used in all the platforms at your marketing?

Dan: Yeah, really, really good question. So UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. So before Google Analytics was bought by Google, it was called Urchin and it was a really, really popular web analytics product. And it was really the first web analytics product out there, and Google bought it and then made it free. So UTM comes from Urchin and UTMs are now patented and owned by Google, because they of course, bought the company. But they are definitely one of the most proliferous tracking methods on the internet. So anytime that you make a link, and it is not on your website, and you’re driving traffic to your website, that could be emails, it could be billboards, it could be social media, Facebook, ads, whatever. If you’re driving any type of traffic to your website, you should attach a UTM campaign a campaign parameters to it so that way, you know where the traffic came from, you know, what campaign was a part of, and you can really make sure that your analytics stays organized. So but the great thing about UTM is, is they work with almost every single platform on the internet, every single analytics provider accepts UTM, every marketing automation tool, except UTM. They are the standard of tracking for links on the internet. And it’s been like that for almost 20 years. So you can really have a lot of faith and knowing that it’s going to work. So much so that UTM are so kind of prolific is the fact that even Apple accepts them. So when you’re looking in your app store metrics, they’ll tell you the UTM codes that actually drove a download, right? So UTM is are everywhere. Honestly, we use them on tons and tons of links, and they work with every platform. And that’s one of the reasons why when we looked at the problem, we were like, Listen, we need to get into this space, because they’re used everywhere. nobody’s doing it really, really well. There’s only three or four companies in the entire industry that focus on UTM management. So it was definitely a no brainer. And you know, it’s a hard problem to solve. And you know, we’ve done a pretty good job at it.

JC: So what debt, taxes and UTM codes, right, top three things in the world right now? 

Dan: Yeah, right? Yeah.

JC: So on UTM code. So let’s, let’s also define one more thing here. So this is another thing that people have, that I find struggle understanding the difference off, and rather than me just talk about it, let’s have you do it from your end here. Define the difference between a first party cookie and a third party cookie? And is there a such thing as a second party cookie?

Dan: Well, it’s a good question. You know, I’ve never actually thought about if there’s a second party cookie, but I don’t think there is but first party cookie is a cookie, which is created by your website. So a cookie whenever it’s loaded on your website usually has a domain and a subdomain linked with it. So third party cookie is a cookie, which loads on your website, which actually sends its data to another website, so known as cross device tracking kind of situation and stuff like that. So Google Analytics would be a very stereotypical third party cookie, which is installed on your website, you install Google Analytics and put their JavaScript on your website, when it loads, it’s going to load its own cookie, that third party cookie is basically sending his data to a third party, which would be Google Analytics. The difference is when the first party cookie is that it’s from your own company, it’s your own domain. So if your domain is, let’s just say as an example, Apple.com right, your cookie would be from apple.com or maybe go.apple.com. And that’s what a first party cookie is. Which means that the site I’m visiting, the cookie is there so it’s not somebody else’s. Yeah, and this is really, really important because companies like Facebook, Google, and many, many, many other companies install JavaScript in your website, then install cookies. And sometimes those cookies aren’t necessarily using the best possible way. If you do some research, I used to be the head of marketing at a company called Kissmetrics. There was a massive lawsuit against kissmetrics, when they first started the cookie about some things that they did wrong with the cookies. So there is definitely some interesting stuff. So cookies can not only be extremely, extremely helpful, but you’re always gonna have a bad actor that does something stupid. And cookies sometimes can also get you in trouble.

JC: Yeah, so is it safe to say that for people listening, that as long as they’re the ones initiating the tracking, and using it for themselves for their own data, then these things that are happening with Facebook, and Apple shouldn’t really affect them too much. Is that accurate? Somewhat accurate? 

Dan: It’s pretty accurate. I mean, it just gets a lot more complex, right. So like, you definitely need to build a cookie, right, you’re definitely going to need to develop or you’re going to need know how to how to use local storage. There’s definitely like a technical feat that you have to overcome. And you know, companies like Google are really trying to figure out how do they make it so that this stuff works, because the big difference that happens now is like and to help bring people up to speed, you basically have the client side of a website, and then you have the server side of a website. And the client side is what we all see, right? When you look at a website, that’s the client side, the server side is this the part that none of us see. That’s in Houston, right? Like that’s where somebody’s server is, the client side and the server side are communicating with each other as you’re doing things. And the big difference that’s about to happen is that now what we have to do is we have to take that information on the client side from our first party cookie, and then we can send it to whoever we want on the server side, right? So we can still enable Facebook conversions, Google AdWords conversion, all of that stuff is still possible via server side integration. The problem is, is you have to know how to create a client side integration on a first party basis. And then how do you make that client side integration then communicate with a server side integration, that’s where the technical stuff comes in. That being said, plenty of companies are going to solve this problem, when it really happens. The difference is, is it just hasn’t fully happened yet, like so we have time to worry about it. Google’s already working on solutions, Facebook’s working on solutions. And you know, if you sign up for UTM.io, we don’t have a lot of these intelligence tracking things built right now. But these are huge things that we are actually building behind the scenes to make it so that you don’t have to worry about this stuff in the future, because our first party cookies that will help you basically create, will track all of that for you.

JC: That’s fantastic. So now come back to email stuff. So you’re an email guy, I’m an email guy. We both know that the ever changing rules of email inbox deliverability. The nightmares the flashback to both have right now. I’m sure I’m having flashbacks. I’m going through an email nightmare right now. So I totally understand the trauma set in, talk to us about how because I know that you know, like Google and different email service providers, and even internet service providers, whatnot. deliverability is highly dependent on many factors, but one of them being tracking links, some email servers, and service providers do not like that in there. So where does UTM codes fit into a good cold outbound email marketing campaign? For example, if you need to know, you know, if people are clicking on something, or opening or whatnot, you know, the difference between like a pixel, for example, and a UTM code? How do people know the difference between the pixel, which tracks certain things, and a UTM code will track certain things? And how do each of them affect deliverability? Because a lot of people in the B2B space, make their marketing, you know, money off of email very heavily, because it’s more relationship based. So can you help the audience understand the difference in those two technologies? And which one is safer? Or are they you know, our UTM is getting knocked down a little bit like, where are we at?

Dan: Yeah, good question. You know, UTM links are not looked at as bad, right? So you can use a UTM link in an email and you’ll be totally fine. Where the problem really persists is when you come down to tracking links, like Bitly or anything that’s been shortened. And the big concern with that is, there’s these people on the internet called Fishers and fishers ultimately are sending you fake emails that look like they’re from Amazon. And when you click on that, it takes you to a page that looks like Amazon, and then you put in your password and your email, and they fish like that to ultimately steal your information. And people do this with credit cards, you do this Amazon, they do this bank accounts and anything like that. But a common strategy for fishers is that they have to hide the end URL where they have that landing page. And the only way to do that is by basically shortening it using another service and then shortening using another service. So whenever an ESP or excuse me whenever an ISP would be your internet service provider, whoever has your email, sees a shortened link in an email like a Bitly or any other domain UTM.io, we have our own link shorteners. And we deal with these hackers on a daily basis. When they see those shortened links that have a redirect to it and maybe have more than one redirect on it. They start to then get worried it triggers the spam warning because that’s a common thing that you see fishers do. With that being said though, you can use UTM in an email and you’re not going to have problems. Now depending upon the email delivery of your ESP Depending upon their IP, and depending upon how much spam they’ve seen in the past, their domains, if it’s going to be a click on their link drive to their website and then redirect to another website, you know, your ISP is going to then test and say, Hey, listen, there’s this link that’s in here is coming from a domain that has a bad score in regards to spam. So you know, we’re just going to flag that as spam. But if you’re working with a reputable ESP that has a good domain, right, like a Marketo, or a MailChimp or anything like that more the big companies, they’re not going to get flagged for spam on a redirection link, because they have they’re known to have a better IP address, it’s going to have better warning. So a UTM and itself doesn’t matter, that will be totally fine. That’s not going to trigger any spam warnings, it’s really going to come down to Did you shorten the link? Okay, great. That’s nerve racking. Never shorten a link in an email, it will be clear with that, don’t use Bitly. Don’t ever shorten the link going into an email, highlight and then make a hyperlink, right. So and then also never link a naked domain to something different. So like, if you’re linking to somebody google.com and an email, do not hyperlink that in the HTML and make a Google.com, and then with your UTM parameters, because that that, again, is seen like you’re trying to trick them. So that’s going to be one of your biggest areas in regards to like when you have these tracking and deceptive things like that. But just to go back to the pixel verse, The UTM, at the end of the day, that pixel on the email is an image, right. So as an example, as a CEO, I don’t load images in any of my emails. And the reason why is because it takes my computer longer to load an image in an email, and I have to process two to 400 emails a day, there’s literally two of us who manage my inbox, and we still can’t keep up. So we don’t load any images. So that pixel in there is what ultimately tells us that the email has opened, because the AI or the ESP or whoever sent the email, just so we know. ESP stands for email service provider, whoever sends the email that pixel if it loads up, tells their server “Oh, this person opened that email”, you know, those pixels aren’t bad, they’re extremely common. I mean, emails are sent with images all the time. So I’m not too worried about IPS. Those are used for open tracking, though in your emails. And then of course, click tracking. Once again, they click on it, they sent to a redirection, and then they go to whatever your website is. That click tracking, of course, is how they tell that somebody clicked on it. But the click tracking is where people get a little befuddled on, like what is good and what is bad. But really, what you just want to do is limit the number of redirections that somebody is going to have. So never shorten the link in an email. Because that’s two redirects, they’re going to click on the bitly link, that’s going to send them to another redirect, which is from the ESP, and then they’re finally going to go to their destination. That is a huge red flag to ISP, Internet service providers, or inboxes. That’s a huge red flag to them, that you’re trying to hack them or steal them. And I’m not gonna, I deal with this at least five to 10 times a week, Amazon sends us automated alerts when people are getting fished. So we deal with these fissures all day long. And it’s a bad problem. And it’s really, really frustrating. But hey, listen, when you’re in Indonesia, and you have no money, and you can hack, do it steal some—

JC: Well, you know, I can’t judge. You know, I was a kid in my dad’s basement, hacking AOL when I was 12 kind of thing. Right? But in my defense, it wasn’t that hard.

Dan: Yeah, I wasn’t gonna admit to it either. But I totally hacked some stuff when I was a kid on AOL as well, you know, I did some stupid stuff. You know, I was a young teenager so I made some mistakes.

JC: What about a.. Okay, so don’t shorten URLs. But what about. what if we were to do a redirect one time, a regular link? And it redirects to, again, a normal web page that has UTM? Because I guess my question is, if someone uses your UTM, it adds more on to the end of the link, right? Now, obviously, if you hyperlink the text, it’s not a big deal, right. But some people have only plain text emails that come through. So they see the URL, and then they see the UTM after and a lot of people, you know, this, this is a weird thing. People will delete that, just to so that they’re only clicking on that. And there’s something weird about the psychology of that, but it affects tracking. So here’s my question. Let’s say I have a good reputable domain. That’s not my domain, right? Let’s say I’m doing a cold outbound campaign. And I want them to add up on my website, but I’m using an alternate domain to send out and for that link. Now, if they click on that link, it just forwards to my actual domain. How safe is that? From a deliverability standpoint?

Dan: Yeah, I mean, usually, you’re pretty good, good in regards to that, right? Like, it’s very rare that you’re gonna run into issues because at that point, they’re judging the IP addresses that they received the email from, and they’re judging the IP addresses, which they’re sending people to inside the email. If both of those are pretty clean, usually, you’re going to be pretty good at that point that they’re then going to start looking at what is the content of that email? And do we have a lot of spam complaints about it, but usually the situation that you’re talking about, you’re totally fine. And you know, people don’t like being tracked. So they’re gonna delete UTMs. And there’s Chrome extensions, which are dedicated solely to the fact that when I load a link, it deletes the UTM is off the end of it. Yeah, people are always gonna get frustrated. But what you have to remember is that a UTM is a query parameter. So a query parameter is the way that you run Amazon. If you ever go to amazon.com, and you look for a product, and you look at the URL, you will see a question mark. And then many things after that question mark, including a bunch of code, that’s a query parameter, they’re not going to go away. That’s how the internet works. So a UTM is just another query parameter. So they’re really not all that bad. The problem that obviously you’re seeing with like Facebook, and stuff like that is Facebook ads query parameters for cross-device tracking. And that’s what Apple is trying to get away from is that intelligence tracking.

JC: But if you forward to a UTM code link, it’ll still activate it right? You don’t have to click on one, you can just as long as you end up at that URL, any way that has UTM..

Dan: Yes as long as as long as your website loads in the UTM, or on the link, when it loads, analytics is automatically going to track it and store it.

JC: That’s awesome. Yeah. And that was kind of a loaded question. I already knew that answer. Because we’re getting you know, like 50, 60%, inbox, you know, our open rate, I should say, yes, wait on cold for cold campaigns. And we’re doing that. But you know, a lot of people listening don’t know that. And I think a lot of people are very concerned about this app on Facebook stuff and trying to figure out how we’re going to track how we’re going to track. Even my own email marketing director came in, she was like, oh, what are we gonna do? And I was like, it’s okay. All we got to do just let’s for the domain, and let’s just add you to at the end of that, it’ll reverse track itself, because we’re keeping the data, we’re not giving it to anyone else. You know, it’s our own internal marketing practices. Now, another last marketing question for you, as an email marketer, and obviously, someone who’s been probably expanding your horizons, I imagine by now, since you’ve been in the game for so long, how important is it to the success of any given marketing campaign to have tracking that UTM provide? Overall? I mean, like, Can someone just throw money at it and still be successful? Or, you know, and not track anything? And just saying, let’s just hit all these angles and send it to the website? And what is the difference between doing that, versus that same amount of money? Or even half of that? If you have UTM, as part of that equation?

Dan: Yeah, you know, there’s the old adage, you know, I know 50% of my marketing is working, I just don’t know what 50% it is. UTM is gives you the ability to have a better understanding of what marketing is actually working in what is not. You know, I’ve been very fortunate in my career to work with some amazing companies. And I’m not going to drop any names here. But, you know, I’ve worked with billion dollar corporations that have no tracking, I’ve worked with 10 million ARR, SAS companies, when I get them, like, you guys have no product analytics, how do you even know like this is working, they’re like, we just we don’t really know, the numbers just keep going up. So, you know, I always say people can throw money at a problem. And it works, right? And some people are just building the right thing at the right time, they don’t have tracking. So you know, naturally, it definitely works. And a lot of big companies we work with that are growing super fast, their tracking is not great. But they’re focused on like little micro sections where they can really like iron it out. But if you have good tracking, ultimately, you’re going to have better success, because you’re going to be able to know what’s working and what’s not, you know, at our consulting practice, McGaw.io, you know, we do a lot of work with companies trying to get them to clean up their data and organize the data and UTM ‘s are always the biggest thing that we have to talk about. Because marketing attribution is one of the most important parts of marketing, if you don’t have UTM, you don’t have marketing attribution. So it’s pretty damn necessary, in my opinion.

JC: Well, that’s a boil down, that tells me UTM equals more ROI, right

Dan: Absolutely. Yeah.

JC: You know where your money’s going. Because, you know, people forget, you know, a penny saved is a penny earned. You know, if you stop spending that 50%, your marketing that wasn’t working, and you double down on the 50%. That was you’ve literally just doubled your ROI like that. Right. And all you had to do was track it. Right. So I think people really under value, the, you know, where UTM codes and other types of tracking, you know, that they’re still working come from? So let’s talk about the future, right, the future of business, that’s the podcast. Okay. So first, let’s talk about your company. I want to hear about the future of UTM.io. Do you have any, you already lightly touched on? You said you have some cool stuff coming? tell the audience about what’s coming down the pipeline that you can give us kind of an inside scoop on right now? What are some new features or things you guys are going after? If they were to sign up with you guys?

Dan: Yeah, you know, I think over the past couple of years, we really have focused on making it so that a team of people can effectively build links in our platform and be able to clean up their analytics, the big the big thing that we’re working on right now, we’re actually in the process of redeveloping the platform on the client side, we’re switching from Angular, and we’re moving over to react, which is just a different coding language. And we’re doing that so we can make it a little bit easier in the product to basically build a WYSIWYG builder. So what you see is what you get. So we’re making it a little bit easier for people to be able to customize the way that they build their links and the way that form of the link builder is built out. So that’s something that’s coming that’s happening, like in the next couple of weeks. So that’s going to be launching in the platform. But the next major movement for us is we’re doing a ton of little improvements. So we work with a lot of customers, and they give us like little ideas that we implement. The next major thing that we’re doing is we’re now integrating with over 150 different other platforms. So the big problem that you have when you build these links is like you build the links on our platform, but then you have to go look at Google Analytics or Hotjar or something else to go see these metrics about the analytics and all A lot of customers have said, “Oh, we want you to have analytics” and we’re like, “we’re not really in the analytic space, we’re more in kind of like the creation or data governance space”. But we’re building an integration right now with a company called Five Tran. Five Tran is a big ETL company. So they allow you to move data around. And what we’re doing is making it so that from inside of our platform, you can basically import in your Google Analytics data, you can import in your Marketo data, your Salesforce data, your part our data, whatever it may be, and then add that to your link table. Because if anybody in this is listening is using UTM, chances are you have a UTM tracking spreadsheet. That’s the historical way that people make their UTM zones in a spreadsheet.

JC: I cringe when I hear spreadsheet, just use at all.

Dan: Yeah, so and we’re the spreadsheet killer. But the thing is, is in our product, we still have a spreadsheet. And the common thing that we want to be able to our customers want to be able to do is they want to be able to see the campaign that they’re running. And then they want to be able to see the conversions, the revenue and all that stuff. The problem is, is that these conversions many times happen in Salesforce are these conversions happen, and they’re able to be seen in Active Campaign. So what we’re now enabling people to do is basically say, Okay, great, well, you have data in all these different places, why don’t you just import it into our platform. We’ll automatically tie it together with your campaigns, the links, you have the term the content, whatever it may be, and you can actually see the full performance of everything you have in your campaigns in our products. So that’s the big next evolution is that you will be able to pull in all of that data into our product. And that’s going to be coming out in the beginning of 2022. So, it’s going to be a huge initiative for us, but it’s going to be a lot of fun, and our customers that are helping us design it and build it are super excited.

JC: That’s awesome. All right now let’s talk about the industry as a whole. Where do you see? I mean, obviously, you know, with this whole Facebook and Apple stuff, do you see any future conflicts with other companies? Do you see things getting better? You know, where do you see this tracking ability? Where do you see the balance between privacy and marketing tracking? Which makes the world go round? Like nobody will. You don’t need to see diaper ads? If you’re a single guy, right and you don’t have a kid, right? And you don’t want to see Ferrari ads if you can only afford a Honda, right? So there are advantages to having these tracking so that we get served.. listen, Instagram has got me dialed in man, I have to like not be on there because I will buy every damn thing I see. Because they get me they totally get me. So that is the benefit. Right? I’m believing showed ads. But where do you see that balance of tracking for those, you know, laser targeting purposes to show you stuff you really care about and may want to buy? versus privacy? Where do you see this in like three to five years any conflicts or solutions coming down the pipeline? From your point of view?

Dan: Yeah, you know, over the next few years, I mean, it’s gonna be really interesting, because privacy is becoming more and more of a concern. And you know, I don’t really necessarily care as much about my privacy, I’m pretty open with all this stuff. So like, track me all you want, because the only reason why we’re tracking you to make the experience better, right? So I think privacy is still going to become much more of a concern, especially as the baby boomers start to retire and start to realize that they’re being tracked. But you know, honestly, like the the next generation Gen Z and all that stuff, like they don’t care that much about it, right? Like they’re kind of like not on it. But at the same time they do, right? I mean, Snapchat serves a purpose, right? It is privacy enabled. So you know, there’s going to be a hard toss up, that’s going to happen over the next few years on like which way that it goes. And I don’t exactly know. But what I can definitely tell you is that I’m going to continue to get paid money. And I’m going to continue to get paid more money to make sure that I can track you whether you want me to or not. At the end of the day, these are billion dollar corporations that are going to make sure that we know what’s going on because we have to help our customers. So there’s always going to be a new way that we find a way to track you. And you know, artificial intelligence is now helping us get better at tracking you and also predicting what you’re going to do with limited information. So, you know, I just don’t think tracking is going to go away. Yes, I think there’s gonna be more rules, you’ll be more regulations, and there’s going to be different things that we have to jump through. But at the end of the day, you know, GDPR definitely had an impact on businesses, but we’re still doing the same shit. It’s not really changed everybody, we just have to tell you, we just have to tell you that we’re tracking you. And if you don’t want us to track you, I’m sorry, your internet experience goes down. Like that’s the trade off that I think is just as hard is that if you ignore cookies, your experience gets worse. It doesn’t get better. So people have to understand that trade off. I think

JC: What’s happening with the newer generations, I think that they are concerned about their the privacy of their content, and their own information. But they don’t really care about their behavior. Right. And I think there’s a balance in there where everyone can win, right? Obviously, we want to make sure we protect people’s phones so that someone can’t hack their pictures that are private and take that that’s content, right? You know, Snapchat exists because you want to send something one time and you don’t want it out there. So you’re protecting content. We obviously want credit card companies to protect our damn credit card numbers. Now, granted, it’s insured but it’s still a hassle, right? We want our passwords protected. So I think we want our data and our information I should say, and our content protected. But I think that where the marketers can win without having to go into that realm, is I think we need to do a better job at telling that showing the difference between tracking behaviors, and likes and dislikes, so that we can serve you content and things that you want to see, versus tracking your information and your content that you own, that we don’t need or want. And I think that’s maybe some of the biggest issues with when people get the privacy conversation. They’re not splitting those two out. And it’s a really big difference between the two. Mm hmm.

Dan: That’s a really, really good point. You know, I didn’t really think about it that way. But you’re 100% correct. That is definitely a big delta and the way that people think about the tracking, and you know, going back to something you said, which I think is kind of interesting, you’re talking about credit cards, like we want to be able to secure that and all that stuff. At the end of the day, the people who are really selling your data, it’s the banks. And it’s not Facebook, like Experian is literally selling your data all the time. And they get that from the banks, the banks sell it to them. So like, if you really want to talk about selling data, look at the privacy sheet that you get from the bank, and they have to mail it to you like annually, you’d be quite surprised what they what they’re allowed to do with your data. I mean, it just doesn’t matter.

JC: That’s why I was telling a couple marketing friends who work core freaking out about the Facebook Apple thing I was like, I was like, Listen, even if they go toe to toe, trust me, that’s not really worth the data. Like if you want data to be able to serve ads to the proper, like, just go to that credit card companies go to the you know, these third parties that they’re still databases out there, this is just me nothing more small businesses that are going to be affected. I don’t think the bigger businesses or the tech companies are gonna be as affected because they understand this more. But I think unfortunately, small businesses, mom and pops and people were just getting into paid ads who are just doing the simple version of it. I think that’s unfortunately, it’s gonna affect them more than anyone and they need that, that revenue more than anyone you know. So that’s my opinion.

Dan: I agree with you.

JC: So last question for you. And let’s see, I’ve got a few I could choose from here. I’m trying to think of a good one, because we already talked a lot about how we grew up. So I got I got that one down. I already know that one. Let’s do this. Two part question, actually. One is, what is a must read book that you would tell the audience like you’ve got to read this book. And it could be in your industry, it could be just in business general, it’s up to you. And the second part is, you know, what is the best advice you’ve ever been given when it comes to business?

Dan: Yeah, so it’s a great, great, great question. So the one book I would always try to get people to read there’s a book called “Principles” by Ray Dalio, you know, it’s a little hard to read, because it talks about his biography in the beginning, but then it talks about his business practices. If you don’t know who Ray Dalio is, he is the most successful hedge fund manager in the world. You know, they’re fund manages $165 billion in funds, when you’re talking about most hedge funds, or a couple billion, maybe 10 billion, he’s 10 times the size of most people, right? largest hedge fund period, and they don’t even take clients. His book is really, really good. It really gets you to understand that, hey, listen, running a business is not just performance, it’s also culture, it’s also values. It’s about building out the rules of the business and understanding the psychology of people. So I think the book principles is really good, I believe a lot and a lot of Ray’s principles in the book. So I think that’s a really, really good read for anybody who’s in business. And then on the flip side of that, you know, the best advice that I think I was given was honestly from a book called “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”, which is by Ben Horowitz, one of the guys from a 16 Andreessen Horowitz, the big venture capitals. In the book they talk about, you know, at the end of the day, being an entrepreneur sucks, right. But the entrepreneurs that they invest in in Andreessen Horowitz, one of the things they say is like, hey, how did you get here? Like, what made you successful? What made you finally get in front of us? And they said, the entrepreneurs that tell us that they had some great strategy, and they did all these things, you know, those are the ones that they don’t typically invest in. The entrepreneur and the founder that comes in and says, No, I just didn’t quit, like, I just had to keep trying, I just need to keep moving forward, and I’m not gonna quit. Those are the entrepreneurs that you want to invest in. So the big takeaway that I took out of that book is, you know, being an entrepreneur sucks, and I just have to get over it. And you know, death is always one day away. But at the end of the day, we can’t quit. It’s the quitters that are the entrepreneurs. They’re not the entrepreneurs. Yeah. And don’t get me wrong, businesses fail. I mean, I failed multiple times in the past, and I have walked away from ventures. But I didn’t quit on the idea. I didn’t quit on the project. I just had a lesson I learned I failed. So that was the one big lesson I learned in life is don’t quit. And that’s the reason why I mean, I still own two companies today. I’m still the CEO of two companies today, because I’m not going to quit on my dreams. I’m going to keep moving forward.

JC: Well, I love that. And I’ve always said it’s a trail of tears to the golden kingdom. There is no good story to a self made man or woman. You know what I mean?

Dan: I’ve got a river of tears behind me.

JC: So how can people find your website? How can people get a hold of you directly? If they you know, kind of meet that demographic of enterprise level? And they really, you know, reaching out for partnerships, would it be a client? Oh, how can people contact you guys?

Dan: Yeah, for sure. And you know, I would love for everybody to get a chance to get a free copy of my book “Build Cool Shit”. So you know, the best way to be able to do that. 

JC: Show us how you got video to show us. I like the cover.

Dan: Yeah of course so Build Cool Shit. So it’s a blueprint to creating your modern tech stack. I wrote the book last year, it’s really, really helpful. So if you if you pull out your cell phone, right, what I’m going to have you do go to your text messages, you’re going to text this number, the word MARTECH. And you’ll be able to get a free copy, our bot will take care of all the address and help you out. So the phone numbers 415-915-9011. So that’s 415-915-9011, just text the word MARTECH. So M-A-R-T-E-C-H, and you’ll be able to basically work with that bot, you’ll get your name, your number, all that stuff to make sure that we can ship you a free copy of the book. But if you’re interested in being able to learn more about the stuff that we have going on, you know, anybody can use UTM videos, you don’t need to be an enterprise company, we have single freelancers using the product all day long, you can definitely check it out at UTM.io. If you’re interested in learning more about marketing, analytics and marketing stacks, in general, you can go to McGaw.io. So M-C-G-A-W just my last name.io. We have a ton of resources, which is really going to help you understand how can you build marketing analytics and how can you take advantage of that. And if you ever have a question for me, the best place to reach out to me is on LinkedIn. I’m Dan McGaw, I’m on LinkedIn, super easy to find. I’m the cute guy that’s always hiring. So definitely go check us out. And I’m always happy to answer questions. So just send me an InMail. If you spam me, I will of course reject it, but naturally send me a good question, don’t be an idiot. And I’ll always accept your InMail.

JC: I want to see your headers say the cute guy who’s always hiring that. I want to see that change. Dan, thank you so much for being on the show. And for the listeners out there. If you are a B2B tech company, and you are looking to track your email marketing a lot better or any other type of marketing really, because UTM codes are cross platform usable. Go check out UTM.io. And if you’re not sure how to do your cold outbound marketing or you need good LinkedIn lead generation, contact my agency, you can find us at InfinityMGroup.com that’s infinity with wide letter M as in marketing group.com or you can give us a call. We’re based in Denver 303-834-7344. Dan, thanks again so much, sir. I look forward to checking out your site and I will talk to you soon.

Dan: Thanks so much.