Hello, and welcome again back to another episode of Adventure in DevOps. Today, I'm joined by our guest Ben Johnson, and unfortunately Will, my fellow co host, would not be
able to make it, but he sends his regards. Apparently they may have pushed something at the end of Friday last and well we probably know not to do that, but you know, maybe he's a little bit tired because we were last week, we were talking a lot about having really long careers, and so I'm really excited this week to talk with Ben, who actually joins us for the second time.
Who has just I mean, it seems like you've been in and.
Out a lot of different companies for a very long period of time.
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm the CEO of Particle forty one, and we have expertise in software development about engineering devopsn sipos sees term DevOps anymore, I guess. And then data science, which of course includes AI solution for clients.
Yeah, of course, right, you know that's the newest trend of course.
Yeah. Yeah, we'll try not to talk about that too much.
Why not use the term develops anymore.
So it's been this debate DevOps versus platform engineering. I love these articles because they do really talk about the kind of the issue with DevOps as it was widely adopted as it became the new cloud it and so we love this internal discussion, especially since I'm selling these services. I want to be clear that our job is to
actually engineer ourselves out of a job. And so we've started to use that term platform engineering and try to create that conversation where we're talking about the good and the bad of DevOps and what will we all believe it to be this kind of eternal definition definition thing that's in the community so prevalently.
Yeah, you know, I definitely was one of these warriors at the beginning to try to maintain the purity of what DevOps was, and I think for a lot of people that means different things. And over time I definitely lost that battle, and I sort of gave up because my vision is that it's a mindset change for organizations on how they approach things.
And I have.
Noticed now it's pretty much a replacement instead of calling team release engineering team.
Or actually a long time ago it.
Was called platform engineering teams, I think what we have now is something slightly different or sre are often known as DevOps team, and they spend a lot of time right now, I think working on Kubernetes more than anything.
Sure, yep, we're in that daily, daily battle, or not really a battle, but we love to help. So we just don't want to be like the what was it the episode of Lost where they had to push the red button every five minutes or something really bad happened. We of course want to work our way out out of out of that type of situation. The business shouldn't be in that kind of situation, so we want to take the magic red button out of the equation as much as possible.
Have you so you transition to using the term platform engineering because you found that like a lot of your clients had a wrong impression of.
It or was more progressive.
DevOps is still the right marketing term. So that's still what people understand. But we kind of have that conversation readily about Okay, you know cloud I T is what we're doing. If we automate some more things, then we're creating a platform that's resilient and working for you. You're not working for it, and so yeah, we try to do some of that.
Vocabulary makes sense A lot I do have a question here because a lot of our audience obviously focused in the devas space, like what sorts of problems do you see yourself and your company coming into helping clients with.
Yeah, so we're really big on that app modernization at monetization part of it. So since we have a robust software development team, we're usually and some of my best partners, partners in crimeer MSPs MSPs are kind of hoarding the legacy tech and that's what we really want to do is replace the world's legacy tech with modern services of modern cloud services. And so we're kind of coming into some older things that were built as as pets and
we're converting them to cattle. So what that usually looks like is containerizing. One thing we're working on as a payment solution that was provided and the original engineers use Seapanel as their means to virtualize. So we thought, well, okay, you provided Spanel, does that mean that you're in customers
are logging. Nope, Nope, we are using Spanel as our virtualizer, and so we showed we're showing them and we've showed them how converting that to containers with the c c D pipeline eliminates the cost for c panel and it's actually way easier to use. You just interact with the repository and Bob's your uncle. Sounds overly simplified, but it's
really not. It's like just you know, huge reduction in price to support the all that virtualization and then we've kind of converting it to cattle, so it's it's it's going to be a n PCI scope, so we don't want to have the pets to do all that security work with and so like, yeah, a lot of containerization and then we're not afraid to touch the applications like most managed service providers might be.
Yeah, so yeah, I was going to ask you about that. So MSP is a managed service provider, and we're talking to like ones that had come in and delivered their own software as an application that your clients were running previously, or help them to build something, or gave them the technology. We're talking on prem or post a lift and shift into one of the cloud providers.
Yeah, all of that, those are the kinds of projects we're getting like readily involved in on prem to cloud, the cloud migration. And then what does the application, how does the application need to be refactored to support that movement.
Do you still see a lot of organizations on using on premise solutions when they don't need to be still or has that really died down a lot in the industry.
No, it's still there. It's still there, and it's surprisingly in really important, like really important industries like banking. Not like, so we all know Capital one super vocal in the community, a lot of we know a lot of Capital one people are friends and they were kind of the pioneers. But you think about all these little credit unions where the IT folks were a little bit scared of the cloud, right, like a little bit like, well, it's maybe not secure,
and so they kind of never made that shift. So there's a lot of still fairly critical things that are on prem and then once they invested in those data centers, they they had to kind of stick with that investment. And so now we're seeing all of that tech age out. And then not to over beat up AI, but I think their desire to use AI is also driving them towards cloud services so that it's a little more available
to them. Whereas you know, setting up all that in an age data center just doesn't is really not like, Okay, that's why we should have been part of this move.
Yeah, we have the whole rest of the episode to beat up on AI if that route.
No.
I think it's really interesting that we still see so many companies running on prem things, and I think you really hit it pretty on the nose there that the more secure, the more requirements regulations that companies have, the more likely to be on prem, and almost it almost seems more ridiculous, like I would those are the companies that I sort of want to be in the cloud more likely, because like those are more critical services in most cases.
Yeah, we also see a weird kind of on prem which is more of like an instance model, so they were giving they were actually giving a box to their customers and say, hey, put it in your store. We see this in kind of retail type environments, restaurants where
brick and mortar existed. There's this kind of distributed on prem and now you know the like now they want to centralize, so really go to the SaaS model rather than all these distributed nodes, and then you know, getting data out of all those nodes to do BI solutions was a challenge. There was a lot of interaction with
those brick and mortar locations. Yeah, all the kind of like hang ups between being distributed I call it distributed on prem, you know, really starting to show and they really want to take the benefit of the cloud and centralizing and all the data things that they can do for customers, so that I wasn't really expecting.
No, I totally got it.
Would you say that it's being driven from the like software application providers who want to transition to the SaaS moll I mean, I'm sure they're going in some cases, but or the end users. The companies that have were responsible for running their own sort of IT department in order to build up a hack data center, which was a couple of machines sitting under their desk.
Where do you see the poll from?
It's both. It's both that the customer wants new features. Those new features are going to be deliverable from a centralized location. The barrier of entry is reduced using cloud services, so the cost of manage is lower. What ended up happening is that then the service provider ended up having access to those on prem servers to better support them. So certainly the IT departments that are trying to run like point of sales and do the things that they're
supposed to do to run those environments. Are wanting a better solution. So yeah, I mean there are a few in restaurants we definitely see this on prem footprint that is required because when you're in a restaurant and you're looking at the like in the kitchen, there's this ticket management screen that shows the order. You know, some people have looked behind the counter and see see it your favorite fast food place that they're looking at the order,
they're preparing the ingredients. It's super fast paced, and if that restaurant were to have glitchy Internet, that would disable
the whole service. So there are practical applications, and then those practical applications we're looking at like little Kubernetes clusters with you know, surprisingly fault small footprint machines, but you know, taking three nooks and turn them into a Kubernetes cluster allows you to have some on prem presence for like super low latency and fault tolerance, but you still need to have everything backed up to the cloud for corporate analytics.
And so you know, you're running a franchise of restaurants, of course you're not going to go talk to all those locations at once to understand revenue and things. So we are seeing these kind of hybrid environments and Kubernetes is making that, of course a lot easier to serve them to rent the ICD to then so they get updates and such. But there are a couple of applications where on prem makes a lot of sense.
I'm sort of curious there on where the burden and responsibility for managing those physical machines that are on prem comes from.
Is it being managed by the.
Third party provider who's offering the service an application, who then like sends the knocks to the individual locations and manages maintenance, et cetera, patching, et cetera. Or is it sort of a shared responsibility model.
It's very similar to I mean, like an iPhone or something would be very similar automatic updates, but the shared responsibility is that, yeah, if you miss use the device, then you know, we'll have to give you a new one. And so yeah, it's I would say it's a shared responsibility model because the physical device is in the location, so somebody has to give it power, somebody has to plug it into internet access, you know, somebody has to do that and hopefully they don't put it right above
the fryer. Hopefully that has.
Happened, you joke.
But there's a non truly number of times where I've seen an issue with the company on site not knowing how to manage the data center effectively and putting it in a place which is problematic, not just in the building, but choosing another building that's maybe close to an airport or difficult to get to in case there's an issue, or not well managed, like not like not following appropriate codes because they're using a building that wasn't scoped out to actually be a data center in some way, and
then they're being a fire or a flood and having a real issue.
Yeah, So the on prem IT or in these franchise situations, there is a facilities management function that already exists. I mean even the point of sale machines that that you're ordering, or the devices that the service staff at the restaurant is carrying around to take the order, the things on the tables to because sometimes we're doing self ordering now where people are ordering their drinks directly from the table.
So in these cases, there is an IT services company that can follow an sop you're sending them the device with everything embedded on it that you need, and you're giving them some instruction and you're hoping that they will follow those instructions so that then you can be responsible for keeping the software updated. So I think mobility is a great metaphor for what's happening there.
And it's your company. Particle forty one is facilitating making this happen.
We're writing the software and we're setting up the DevOps routines. But yeah, our client is the kind of the parent provider providing that software to all the restaurants, and then of course they're interacting with different franchisees in that particular use case. But we've also seen it in retail where there was inventory management solution that was on prem that's
being centralized. So in retail, centralization is possible because the loss of Internet doesn't completely bring down the whole place. We can just cash up some things locally until Internet is restored and do some queuing on prem inside of the point of sale device. But we don't have to be so fault tolerant that we're shipping a whole Kubernetes cluster to the location.
Yeah, no, I got it. If it's all right, I sort of.
You know, one of the really interesting things that you mentioned pre show and looking at your pro was the number of times that you've been in a position where you've had to stand up on your team, like I imagine, especially with multiple customers, it's not just one engineer.
You're not just body listening.
You're really the bining their whole process, potentially doing the shift for them. That's a lot of teams that I imagine you may have created from the ground up.
Is that accurate?
Yeah, that's a great So we use a special operations metaphor here, so we think of ourselves and this sounds grandiose, but it's really a great metaphor. The more you know about like Green Berets, so green Berets will go behind enemy lines and they will recruit from the local militia,
so from the local people. So if you're a Green Beret, typically you know a language, like a specific language like Mandarin or something, and then you might also know explosives, or you might know you know some kind of offensive skill. It's very much similar to that where you are trained in training because you are going to be working shoulder to shoulder with other folks that maybe don't have the same skills as you and are looking to you for
your expertise and your advice. So our selection us as super rigid. You know, sometimes you would even look at somebody, we might turn away and go like, well they look great, their backgrounds great, and you kind of have to trust our process because similar to the special operations, like if somebody didn't make it to selection, there's a reason and
you just kind of trust that. You know, you don't judge a book by their cover, and so yeah, our selection process is really rigid because we know we're going to get into a situation where we need to be trained in training, we need to be ready to pass on you know, pass on those skills. And then we don't have any long term agreements. So we we love to come in and help and the way we earn, you know, more time with the client is to do do good work. And you know, a reward for a
perfectly executed sprint is another perfectly executed sprint. So for us, like pressure is a gift. So that's something we kind of say across our teams. And each team member has two concentric circles that they're operating in so they're operating in a team engagement that has a clear mission, clear objectives.
You know, it's an agile, multi multi disciplined team with developers QA, maybe a DevOps person or project manager, front end, back end engineers, whatever the particular objective that the client is trying to reach needs. And then they're also involved in a squad, and a squad is really for them and their professional development, and so squad leaders are helping people be what we call T shaped, so not only
have good hard skills, but good soft skills. And then we reward heavily for self training, so like if you go get AWS certified, we incentivize you and we love to so we really use this kind of special operations before where training yourself being elite is is what how you move up and how you're rewarded. And you know, we really lean into, you know, how can we be the agent that helps a team fill in all those gaps?
And when I say that, when I use team in that context, like the client's team, the broader mission team that we're engaged in. But people still have a place where they can go and say, man, I'm stressed, I'm my capacity is getting stretched, and we don't use the word capability. We use the word capacity. So a lot of times in our self talk, we're like, man, I don't know if I'm capable of this. Well, that's a good indication you just don't have capacity for it yet.
That's a good way of looking at it. I've come to a similar conclusion about using the word capability. It always felt off in some way.
I am.
I am sort of curious though, if there's something you're doing during the recruitment or hiring process that really stands out as really the most impactful part of the review or overall for identifying which candidates will be more successful in this trainers trainer role.
Yeah, it almost always involves looking at at code, looking at at work product, and handling some kind of problem together and seeing how the candidate performs in that. So whether they bring up portfolio of code that they've worked on before and you know, get into it and explain it and we are impressed by that, or we do have a series of take home projects we also use code or byte But what we're really trying to assert
is is what does this person like to work with? Like, what will they be like when they're on our team? And then once you once you're in, then certifications are mandatory for advancement. And so between a combination of those things, we feel like we meet the selection criteria that would be successful behind enemy line, so to speak, and and that you have the skills to help and train train the client's team in areas where they're where they haven't
flushed in. If you've been working on a legacy system and now we're going to work on modern cloud service, there are probably gaps that we need to be prepared to fill, and we want to do that in a super open way so that there's always this like we can we can go work on something else at any time, Like we're constantly keeping you informed as to what we're working on and why so so that you don't feel like you're just moving all your expertise to an outside team.
We want to feel like an inside an inside team.
No, I mean, that's a pretty healthy perspective to have.
I've seen a lot of consultants come in and try to encourage after work follow ups a long period of time where they're engaged with a company, And at least from my own perspective, when I worked in a resulting model, I had a very similar expectation that realistically, I like the day that you don't need me anymore is sort of a celebration, like we achieved something so that you know clearly you had a need and now you feel like you don't, like something must have changed.
Yeah, I think we celebrate that. We celebrate that we can get into a position where and a lot of our clients we work with them for a long time because that partnership is there and they know exactly what's going on, and so if that's the case, why stop. So yeah, I think I think it works to our benefit large percentage of the time. But yeah, you have to take that risk. I mean, relationships are about risk, right If you don't if you don't risk yourself, you
won't get to know anybody. And so there's there's always that inherent risk that Okay, I don't need you anymore, but it just doesn't really play out in reality. Like if you're meeting somebody's needs and relationships and you've taken that risk to show them that you're to be vulnerable with them and share yourself, then that's where magic happens. But if you never take that risk and you hold on to things you're not vulnerable, then then you won't have any powerful relationships.
Yeah, no, I totally, I totally agree, definitely right on the money there. I do have a I do this question obviously, if building up teams is a common thing that you're doing, I have to ask how you see whatever is happening in the market.
Today, Yes, this is this idea, this is that's an interesting question I have too, Like I, it has always been, there's always been this catch twenty two of people who are just starting their journey. I want to get a job. Okay, well you need experience. Well how do I get experience without the job? It's like this kind of circular logic. I feel like AI is going to make that worse because the usually the entry level jobs are the ones
that are heavy typing but low unknowns. So if AI is helping us with those the kind of the typing work, then the demand for expertise should increase, but kind of the number of people that it would take to run a successful project should decrease. I don't have it like the magical answer for that person who's just starting their career, other than to take some time to think about the abstraction. So One of the things we interview for in DevOps
is like network topography. Well, more often than not, most of the folks have not ever configured a Cisco switch. It's just you don't do that anymore because you're not running on prem So to understand like why is an IP address numbered the way it is? What are internal ranges versus external ranges? You know, why do you use a slash eight versus a slash twenty four? And just asking some of those questions to see what is their
networking expertise. So the people who still know the context of why things are the way they are and think about the abstraction of how should we work. I call it working on the business versus in the business. And as you move up the like up the corporate ladder,
you probably work more on than in. And I think there's just going to be a greater demand for thinking strategically about what we do, not just the details of what we do right and and kind of getting all into the details of the syntax, and so I think it's going to become easier for sure, But the demand on the higher level knowledge I think will be, uh,
you know, be a lot higher. It's totally opposite of like when when I started, probably when you started, you know, knowing how to do memory collection and C plus plus was just like like that's solid. But if that is kind of obfuscated now, like who's going to know things like that? Right? So knowing kind of some of the weeds, but just really knowing like how to run a successful project and what is good architecture that's going to be that's going to be key.
Yeah.
I mean I'm sort of with you where I took a moment and really reevaluated the advice that I was giving to early engineers or ones that haven't even started their career yet, because what I have been saying historically may have been, you know, we have this idea of being T shaped that means sort of understanding a lot
of things, but being deep in one area. And I do feel like the sides of the tea are sort of crumbling a little bit because the barrier for being able to deliver on them is now much lower.
But I don't think the as.
You put it, the expertise is still needed and so still figuring out where to go deep is super important and figuring out like I hear a lot of people say oh yeah, I want to go into like cloud security, and I you know, think to myself like, well, I feel like I'm in cloud security and there's like six different fundamental areas, like whether you're red teaming or blue teaming, and there's you know, purple teaming, green teaming, yellow team. I think there's a lot in there with a whole
bunch of different things. And do you want to prefer attacking networks or trying to defend them? Are just an easy way of breaking it apart, and a lot of people don't have answers to that. They're just like, you know, they hear some words or see some job titles and say, oh that's cool. But I feel like trying to figure out where your expertise is going to be as you put it, understanding, you know, dive into the networks, understand what's going on there, or how to set up these tools.
Someone has to do that. You mentioned the C plus plus memory management. Yeah, no one has to do that anymore, but someone is building. Someone is building Rust compilers, and so understanding how what important aspects are for memory management still is absolutely a thing and just being like oh, yeah, I'm going to learn some programming language, like that's no longer a barrier for entry, an obstacle or a benefit. You need to find something that actually you care about and want to dive into.
Yeah, I think the debate there is generalism versus speciality, and I don't know if this settles the debate at all. Like generalism will absolutely be of higher reward than it was before, but so will speciality. Like you know, here's this, you know, ten thousand lines of AI generated code that's been probably you know, several user queries into a chat, GPT or a copilot or whatever, and now it's all
come together. But if the architecture was wrong to start with, then did we really do did we really accomplish anything? And then let's say the architecture was okay to start with, but there's issues. Who now digs into that? I mean certainly not the person who kind of clumbed it together asking copilot a bunch of questions. So there's going to be this reward for being able to go deep and this reward for knowing multiple things. And I don't know if it's in either.
Or Yeah, no, I'm totally with you.
One of my favorite interviews ever has been really asking to get someone to design a system, and I still feel like the code is bad for lms that are generating stuff, let alone trying to describe what the appropriate components are that makes sense for the business problem, not just like oh yeah, I hook up the like these network devices with these block stores and I have a solution like no, actually understanding what the domain components are
that are relevant and asking about how you would design that system, because I feel like that's the sort of thing where you still really aren't able to get any sort of automated created solution that matches perfectly what your business is and then be able like okay, well why would you do it that way? You know, what are
the trade off there? And then trying to understand that even the code being generated, well, we were always generating code in some way, you know, we were generating binary or then assembly, some sort of machine language, and then some still higher level abstractions.
But this is another one on top.
Yeah, A couple of things come up there. One is we have a team that I'm super proud of. They've won multiple awards in their ability to create VR experiences for a client who's in the safety space, and so they can't use any form of AI for code generation because the physics engine is all proprietary to our client. So we really need to fully understand that the environmental engine that we're working with, because the company's value increases
as we increase the capabilities of that core engine. And then the experiences are just kind of the assembly of it all into the relevant experience, you know, safe gun handling, safe, safe forklift operation, these kind of like high risk training environments, and and so there are going to be cases where you don't even you don't even want to put a line of that code into a GPT because that is
proprietary and that is irrelevant to the public. And so yeah, you still have to know what you're doing, so that that definitely comes up there that there will be a lot of use cases where the button is is not not applicable. What we are seeing though, is the evolution of id E integrated with you know, with the and that is just speeding up typing like phenomenally. Well, so hey, rite the controller for this right the and it's kind of adhering to the framework, it's adhering to best practices
as best it can. So yeah, you still need to be asking it the right questions. We're just excited about the reduction in typing the and so then the reduction in possible errors, and that feels very cybernetic and feels like really cool, right, That feels like a hood or something that's giving you intel in real time. So we're excited about that, but cautiously optimistic as well.
It's not super critical to understanding how to do the job more as just a tool that you can bring to execute effectively.
Yes, and and that we like, like the idea of less keystrokes. I think as programmers we've always liked those ideas, right, like, helped me bang on the keyboard less cool? But when it's telling you how that seems problematic.
Yeah.
I mean for me, it's always there was always a struggle where the bottleneck was never the speed at which I could type. And maybe that's just because I'm a terrible hands on engineer and that I like thinking through problems.
Now, you're right, the actual business problem or the you know, what should it do totally is more more important because yeah, you can create it. You can create a mess or a bad user experience faster. That doesn't really kind of cancels each other out.
Yeah, It's not like a thing getting to the wrong answer faster is somehow better here because you don't necessarily know that it's wrong without really diving into and evaluating it. So there is this trade off. For sure, you almost need to be an expert to know that it's bad, and at that point it sort of reduces its viability and it's not even the right answer in some circumstances. So I do want to ask if.
You know, since you're building so many of these teams, both on your.
Side and also on the client side, I assume you're pulling from the market a lot, you're pulling from recent graduates. Maybe you can settle the age old debate like how critical are having cloud certificates to prove you've learned something from one of the cloud writers before having a job, or.
The experience matter for hiring them. So Special Operations is all about selection criteria, so if you had the ability to go, get it. So I use that metaphor as a guiding almost like adding principle. So it's not that the certifications are really this must have good to have it. It's more around why not have it? So in a competitive market space, in a market space where we want to give objective measure to our expertise. I think certifications
serve an amazingly good purpose. And in the AFS world, the professional certifications, like the higher up certifications are really difficult. They require a lot of so a lot of understanding of the different things and the different vocabulary, and so we love that we give significant rewards to people as they get certified and move up, our partnership with AWS is increased and leverage. So there's a lot of business reasons, and that's why we do incentivize certification because it is
my aim is for me and for them. But I want to be honest about that. You know, anytime somebody's aim is for you and for them, but you don't talk about what you get out of it, you feel like it always feels like a sale or a space in And so we're really clear, like it does help us as a company for you to spend the time, and so we want to reward you for that. But that's how I feel about it, like why not get them for an objective measure of something that you've learned.
I don't totally like secondary education around computer science really needs to improve, really needs to improve, because a lot of people are coming out of school not understanding some of the fundamental things, and so that's where I think. I don't necessarily think a degree over experience is the same as a certification. Of course, it's experience. The way I would see it as its experienced certifications degree in that order is how I feel.
I think I will like maybe fight you a little bit on this.
I'm not a fan of the education system in humanity today. I almost want to go push for like a full apprenticeship sort of strategy, although I see there's a lot of downsides there as well. The one thing I'll say, having hired a lot of engineers from different backgrounds, is the lack of understanding data structures and algorithms that come out of let's say boot camps or have only gone through the certification route. That's like the one thing I
think was super valuable. Everyone who goes through some sort of education based higher academic career does sort of force to learn about Like I don't care if you know how to write a function to do a binary search, or what a red black tree or a nested spanning tree or basically graph like whatever.
But you've heard what those words are and if.
I say, like linked lists, you'd be like, oh, oh no, not one of those, but you would know that it's a thing that you could go look up. And without that, I do feel like there is a missing sort of foundation that makes some conversations difficult because you'll see, oh, you know, why is my program so slow? And I'd be like, well, you know, test it. It's like, well, I'm not sure how like I'm not sure how to actually validate that or why it's so slow, Like how do I dig
into that? And I feel like understanding that there are some tools out there and asymptotic complexity and I just said a lot of words here, and you know, I think that's the sort of thing that you get.
More accustomed to those.
But yeah, I think I over agree overall there that there's like the certifications are not a replacement for experience, but the professional ones they do carry this sort of you had to learn those important concepts in order to pass those sorts, not like the associate ones. So like, you know, forget about the associate ones form aws. The ones that make the difference are for sure the professional.
Uh yeah, I agree with your like, I agree with what you're saying those fundamental courses are yeah, those are big. Those are big.
So I wish I wish I could have a better understanding of macroeconomics here, because I don't understand why there
have been so many layoffs recently. And I think my theory is a lot of companies messed up in the last few years and over hiring, not having a clear business model or a business strategy, or understanding how money is going to come in, and went down the path up hiring and proving that you could somehow turn around have high revenue and also high expense and that's you know, maybe a little negative whatever someone will pay for it. And now the money's not coming in and they have to let.
Lots of people go. I don't know that. They're like, I don't think AI has really anything to do with that.
There are something I would agree with that, I don't think it has anything to do with it either, But the power of the raised interest rate, I feel like it's collapsed VC almost altogether. And so now startups are you don't like, the startup community is super criticled right now, and so where that would take some really, that would take on some innovative folks that maybe had a lot of experience, We're willing to take a risk for equity. I just think that part of the market is really
missing and languishing right now. And then that tail, the startup becoming a medium sized company or becoming like that tail is now injured for quite some time. So yeah, I think we just we had it really good for a long time with with money being available and a lot of people willing to take risk because the cost of money was so low, and yeah, the tail here is going to be an interesting tale to live with.
And then what is the additional impact from AI? So I mean, we're I don't like to operate out of fear, and so I'm not I'm not afraid. I think what we're using this opportunity to do is is just improve our expertise, improve how we work as a team, to be as elite as we POSSI can be, and and then see just really hone in on the kind of customers we want to work with and just really doing our absolute best on every engagement.
That's a really good perspective, I think because historically you could maybe like maybe you've had less debt coming out of university and so you could maybe sit in the you know, right into a startup job and then it was funded for a while, so you had enough to pay off debts and then get some equity and then you could make it. But without the equity coming in or the funding coming into the companies, the equity doesn't work with anything anymore.
I think we see a lot of startup companies.
Realizing they can't sell people on getting equity. I think I think a solution here could be just less like lower software engineering job, pay over time to put it in nine and then it would be much easier to hire people and it wouldn't be the glamorous role everyone saw it to be in the past, but I think would be way more sustainable.
And I think you saw a very similar trend in legal, Like there were a ton of lawyers and so now lawyers have had to provide a service they you know, like that the market was flooded with all these folks thinking that they could that that a law degree ensured success, and now they've all had to figure out, well, Okay, what what is it that I really want to do to add value? Like being just being a lawyer isn't enough.
I need to figure out my my niche, and I think that's the same for technologists, like you got to kind of figure out like what your what your value prop is. Passionate Programmer, like Chad was written in a time, was written in a time where it was kind of pre this VC craze, and so I think Passionate Programmer is still a really great book. And then I think we'll see bootstrapping resurgence in bootstrapping where startups really need
to validate their idea. But I do think that since the barrier is reducing, as salaries come down a little bit, as as things kind of scale back, we'll see that scrappiness research. I just I have this optimism in in innovation and ingenuity that we'll probably see more of the Hey if I if I built a thing that was so much like this other thing, but it had this
extra feature. I think we're seeing that with the the AI enabled you know, little video products or little uh writing products, We're seeing just like, Okay, well I can be as good as that thing with an extra feature. The getting to as good as is really reduced, Like I can be as good as some other service really quickly. It's then happen by differentiate and steal market share. And I think we'll see a lot of startups get super
scrappy about about that. So the fear of the startup was always that, hey, with no encumbrance of trying to maintain revenue and maintain overhead, could you come up with a better idea. I think that'll still be there. It'll just be from people who know how to really evaluate their core audience and just target exactly what that small group of people need. Music very much the same way. Now you don't really see the big, huge monster band
that everybody loves. You see these folks that are probably making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year as a solo artist or as a scrap but they're marketing themselves on social media and they're getting known and they're accumulating enough of an audience to have concerts at big venues and make a living. Music's been benefiting that for a long time. Where now there's a bunch of smaller, just smaller artists that feed our eclectic nature for differences. And I think that's really cool.
No, I mean that's a really great perspective actually, because it really makes me think that there is no giant corporate job that you're a musician of a large you know business. I mean orchestra may be the one that comes to mind, or some sort of marching band, or if you work for a sports team, right, you know, they usually have large sections, but it's not that big compared to tech organizations.
And it may mean that.
You know, we've seen the limit and personal brand identification and then also really pushing that brand forward, like what is your thing? Being a person on LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever you want to post and having a blog that explains what you're doing, Like it seems like a personal entrepreneurship change that it really will be the innovation in the tech space going forward.
Yeah, I mean if you could make us small software that served a particular niche of people, like you know, you made something for physical therapists that just really made their lives easier. Sure, you might not get rich, you might not go Ipo would be my example of that, but if you had a stable base. I think thirty seven Signals in a way has kind of been this where you know, they have their their base camp subscribers and there you know, their kind of area that they've covered.
People who love their software, and they've never taken a ton of money, they've never gone into a ton of debt. They just kind of, hey, we're we're fine operating in the amount of subscribers that we have and seeing what else they need, right and kind of building into that demand. So the bootstrapping model, I think is going to come back. And then the importance of listening to customers and being willing to take ris for your your million subscribers rather
than trying to go super big. I think that's going to be really really interesting.
It may not even be that big, honestly, Like I was thinking about this recently, Like think about where you are a physical location that you have access to that no one else has access to because it's where you
are at. And so there's some small area and there's some number of software engineers or entrepreneurs technical entrepreneurs per per capita that are distributed amongst the world in some way, like there are like not every physical therapist office of physical therapy office needs your software, maybe just the ones in your city or some part of your city, and that could be your specific niche And like really it's like who do you know, Like, like what do your
parents do, What do your friends' parents do, what do your friends do?
Et cetera, et cetera in your network?
Just of those people you know, and I for sure there's someone there who already has some need and that could be your your job to build and maintain that piece of software.
Yeah, I think I saw. I think it is one of the thirty seven signals. Guys. He absolutely hated his HOA software because they would they had parking reservations, so there was some kind of app for managing parking, and like every time he had to use it, he just like died inside a little bit. And so he rewrote that and sold it to his HOA to replace that help them get it at a much like what he built.
He sold to them at a much lower price, and wherever they were getting that software from they could discontinue that and then he could continue to add the features for them. And then that grew to a couple other Hoas and it became a kind of a positive investment right for him. So I agree with you. I think like maybe that that micro niche We built dock works
a few years ago. We built the software called dockworks, and it was you could if you were worked on marine you're in the marine service industry, you really couldn't find a CRM that allowed you to model the boats or the boat inventory. You could go use like shop Monkey or some of the other workflow management softwares, but in shop Monkey it was a car, so you couldn't you can put like some boats have four engines, you know, like tons of engines, so that the modeling was all
wrong and you were like kind of shoehning it. So we started talking to these marine service companies about like, what do you need that's unique to marine services, And so the core of it was still workflow management, invoiceeing, work orders, that kind of stuff, payment, but to make it tailored for their business. And we ended up selling that to dock Master, who is a really great home for that because they helped marinas manage the the slots
for the for the boats. So it had a great time learning all about marine language because boating is a boating and sailing is a whole other vocabulary. But it was a really fun, you know, little adventure to build a SaaS tool and find a really good home for it, and I think overall it was a success.
Yeah, I don't think anyone looked at their ERP system was like I love this, right, I mean, I know a lot of people are using something, and I think SAP is the you know, the enterprise, big one out there, but there's it had been an explosion of micro ERP is usually built by the company itself, like we need something probably from Excel sheets or even a word document or what's the worse emails often and yeah, I mean that's a really good example of just even managing that
automatically and using your network to find and then build that. And you didn't even have to be an expert to start, right, you know. It's like, hey, you know you're suffering in some way. How do we how do we turn that around?
Yeah?
Great story.
Yeah, I love that. And I think at the at the core of this, it's like, what is your mindset? If your mindset is like based on a scarcity, like oh no, there's you know, there's very few clients in my space to work with, then of course you will operate as if like it's scarce, right, But and it may seem cliche to certain folks, but this abundance mindset of like there is plenty of opportunity. I just have
to apply myself to the opportunity that I find. I think it's just an all around healthier mindset and and I would argue more true, there's tons of opportunity. But if I hear this a lot from CEOs, well, my particular group of users is super hard to market to. Like, Okay, well, if you believe that, then that will of course be true. Your your audience will be super hard to market to. But re asking the question, well, where are where is
my audience? What are they looking at? How can I be there when they're when they're thinking and consuming content is opening folks up to a whole new kind of marketing that usually involves some form of content creation or like you said, founder branding. But but it just takes that like that belief that they are there. My product is meeting a need. That's why I built it, that's why I love it, and I just need to find the right way to share this with them. And being
understood is my responsibility. It's not their responsibility to understand. It's my responsibility to get in front of them and share my product or service as many times as it is needed for them to for them to see the value.
Yeah, no, I think it's a really great piece of motivation, motivational wisdom. Mine the one, the one that stuck with me for a while is like, it wasn't always Google that was the you know, best known search engine in the world. And I hear way too often that, oh, you know, I can't compete with this company who does it way better than what I have right now. And I'm telling you, the company you're competing with isn't Google. So like, you know, you could be the one, like
that could be your thing. You know, you weren't the leader and then you became the leader, and understanding what that difference is, uh, and what it has to be is really what makes the product successful. And if you believe that you can't beat them, then for sure, then you're you're not going to do.
That, right right, Yeah, I mean yeah, And there's so many levers for you to be to be different. I mean, for us, we're in a super competitive space, but I understand that our relationship with a particular person, a particular client is what really matters, because then we'll we'll get the referral, the warm referral, We'll so we're not going to worry about what would other people are in the space.
We're going to worry about what we do and do well and like really double down on our culture and make sure that we work with people who are the right culture fit for us. And I think in that way, the world is really big and we'll we'll we'll find those we will find those people that we can treat really special.
Yeah, I hear you're.
Talking about all these different topics that you putting words to a lot of the thoughts that that I've had. I wish I had an excuse being someone on prem or using Kupernetes that we can go it by Particle forty.
One's help here.
But you know, that's a good good reminder that really you don't even have to be a fundamentally tech company focused in order to find opportunities for pulling in technology or changing something that you're doing to reduce costs or stay ahead of the game, et cetera.
Well, that's why I add I did fractional CTO Services or CTO Advisory, And I don't mean for that to be a plug. I just mean that, like I love working on the mindset around entrepreneurialism and the mindset around business growth and the process for that. As I meet entrepreneurs, so many of them are hustling. So things like having a plan on the page, understanding your mission and values,
what are your ninety day goals? How are you applying those nineties Just even some time compression from the annual planning cycle to a quarterly planning cycle can be such a game changer, not only for the leader but for the team too, like, hey, what are we trying to Like, yeah, we set those annual goals, but so time compression. There's just a lot of things that I'm really passionate about that I get to expose in that fractional CTO area.
Whether the end result is to many of my fractional CTO clients, they already have vendors that they're quite happy with, but they need help with the language. So they want to speak in results language. The vendor wants to speak in solutions language. We need to have good currency for how to bridge that gap, and so like, yeah, I just love working with folks on really the strategy and the business at large, and then how technology accelerates that.
Has there been one particular vertical that seems like it's been coming up more and more, And say the last year than historically that you've focused then.
So by design, I love legal services. I built a company and sold it to Legal Zoom. I love industries that are a little more on the aniquated side because there's just more opportunity for things like robotic process automation or just things that folks feel is going to be not possible, and so I love that. My first business in travel, you know, travel was all on a green screen and so to you know, to do automate automate travel ticketing, and that just Snowbay thought you could do that,
you'd had to punch into the green screen. So yeah, I love some of those more antiquated industries that still need still need love and can get to the next level.
I absolutely think that's great.
I remember working at some regulated industries and when it came to software processes, hearing so many times we can't do that.
We have some regulation.
I like I having known the regulation, I'd like point me to the line that says that we can't as an aerospace or healthcare, because for sure there is nothing
like that there. We can build the process which matches the regulation, but you do need someone to come in from the outside that has that mindset has worked either in and around it, or really had the fundamental knowledge about what the regulations are, what works in the industry as a whole, to apply it to that specific business to help them over the hurdle.
Yeah, online advertising has been a really key space for this because as the privacy is the desire for privacy has increased, the ability to target dynamically has decreased. So then there's a lot of like privacy people who can help you anonymize, like understand that you're anonymizing the information you're you're still making reasonable decisions on where to where to show, what ads, how to make the match, but you're just having to be a little safer with it.
So there were a lot of dark arts going on in online advertising for a long time, and it's cool to see folks kind of clean that up. I still want email to get fully disrupted, you know, something at the intersection of like calendly and spam email and like what products and services am I open to hearing about and some kind of you know, match make there. I think email is super broken.
Do you mean for the getting emails between like in your personal network or from businesses like transactional.
Stuff like orders.
Yeah, it's just for advertisements, yeah, all all of the above. Like what I'm experiencing is that I hand out my calendar link to anybody who I want to speak with, and I would love to exchange value, like exchange value, not even a transaction, but just exchange value. But to have to meet new people through email is just like everybody's trying to meet everybody through email and it's just a big cluster. So some kind of some kind of mediary there where I can say, hey, I'm open to
this type of conversation. You know, LinkedIn has probably taken some of that where everybody's now spamming LinkedIn, But it seems like some kind of pay at play, like hey, I am open to talking to the cloud providers if you would, you know, if you'll pay a small hourly rate, then you can come pitch me. You know, something like this.
I just read this. I don't remember what it is.
There is for sure this product that is like subject Matter Experts for sale where people can actually search for that. I don't recall what the product was that was doing it. It's one of the fractional spaces that I'm in. Suggested that as an option. I haven't really checked it out,
but that's what that sort of reminds me of my company. Actually, we've gone down the whole part like middle area, like not quite the advertisement, but giving out personal like individualized email addresses to people per product they log in with, so like we're a login provider and also everything else for in the B to B space and for the end users, individual email addresses for them, so that only that particular target can email them with the things that
they are expecting from there, and that I think really cuts down on some of the noise.
I mean, obviously we're not their only email provider.
In that regard, but it does help eliminate when that email provider gets popped or you know, our customer who is set up somewhere and they s build their whole database of email addresses. Well, like we can just shut that off because of a unique idea in.
Each one of those.
But yeah, there's they're for sure a bunch of different levels here that just don't have good solutions for Yeah.
Yeah, a lot of noise.
Yeah, So I think that's probably a good leaving off point rather than opening that can of worms to go further in.
And I'll say, should we do some picks?
Sure? Sure, yeah, I think my pick for today is a book. The author's name as Byron Katie and the book is called Loving. What is the kind of the gist of it is? We all have thoughts that are
kind of stories we tell ourselves, you know. Maybe the little edgy metaphor is like when my wife pulls the pillow up in front of her in between us at night, like, well, my life, my wife doesn't like me, so that may be a thought that I have at that particular moment, and so she goes through a somewhat of a meditative diagno, like a meditative process of asking like what is the thought? Is that thought true? Like can you know for sure that that thought is true? And then what would your
life be like without the thought? And then a turnaround, which is you kind of say the thought, well maybe I don't really like me or you, you know you you try different possibilities around around that thought, and what you're trying to arrive at is like a more to observe reality, being a lover of reality, rather than these stories that we tell ourselves. If you can't take a picture of it, it's not actually true. It's this meaning that I'm interpreting from the events around me, the story
that I tell myself about that. And I find that, like our problems, our problems become problems because of the way we think about them. And so I'm just really
enjoying this book. I'm kind of savoring it because it's this uh you know, it's really helping with like negative self talk and just like, well, is that really true that you know I have horribly critical I think in the past I've had a horribly critical self talk, and so kind of grabbing those thoughts, those negative self talk and then going through this four question process has really helped to transform my self talk into something more true than the meanings that I was, you know, more an
appreciator of reality rather than than the man, you're such an idiot, you know you were you missed that meeting again or or whatever, like so like is that true? And I know for sure that that is true? And yeah, so Loving What Is by Byron Katie.
Well, it sounds like definitely on the road to enlightenment there, it's a good book. Yeah, I mean the things that come to mind for me on that are people project a lot like you don't know how it is, and you often substitute what you own, what you think you would do in a circumstance for what is actually happening.
So it comes from internal.
The other one, I think the life lesson that I learned a long time ago was it's probably not about you. And that's sort of a hard one to get through because you know, it's my life, like everything's about me, and realizing that, like, whatever is happening, especially like people responding to emails or messages, like it probably literally.
Has nothing to do with you, of why someone's not responding.
Yeah, I had a calendly link. I give it to all my clients like hey, but you know, really inviting them to any of my free time if they want to discuss something. And I love that. But one particular client, I just like I was dreading the meeting that was coming up that they had kind of spontaneously booked, and so I a journal to kind of work through these these thoughts like why am I dreading this meeting? What
is it that? What is the thought? First off, like oh, they're they're probably going to complain, and like, well is that really true? And is there is there anything about our performance. That's really sure, there could be, but I don't see it. And what I came to was that they probably just need help. So for me, I went from, oh, my goodness, I'm dreading this meeting because they're probably going to complain. I was already getting ready to be defensive.
I was even processing what they might complain about and how I was going to defend that. And I was in the super defensive cycle and the meeting hadn't even happened yet. So then by kind of processing through it and going through those four questions, I was like, you know, what's what's actually true is that they need help. They've they've scheduled this meeting with me because they need help. They're investing in technology, they want to make sure that
there's ROI they need help to make sure. Wait, that's what I'm here for. That's actually my purpose, that's that's my mission. And so then I got really excited to tend like a complete turnaround to like, Wow, I get to go to this meeting because I get to help this client figure out, you know, their concerns. And you know, maybe two percent of that meeting was constructive criticism. The rest of it was just helping them move just strategically
through what they were what they were doing. And yeah, so to be able to turn that feeling of dread into feeling of excitement was was kind of what I picked.
Up from this pick amazing.
Okay, so I actually have two picks for today. The first one is, I think as a show, we're thinking about adding sponsorships for anyone that's interested in having their little blurb be something that we.
Say and share with our audience.
I don't know if anyone's actually interested in that, but I'll drop that there. Something will And I decided and the official pick for today will be a book by Adam Grant called Give and Take.
It's about how the world is made.
Up of potentially different kinds of personas that fall into givers, takers and matchers, and who is most successful in different sorts of engagements and environments and what that means and how you can recognize who is which one and what kind you are and what that means for your relationships and how you can work efficiently.
I love that. I love that. Given. Yeah, I was once in a group exercise. It was about thirty people in the group, and we had been in the group for it was like a multi day event. We've been in the group for a couple of hours, right, had
the opportunity to and to introduce ourselves. And the exercise at the end of the first day was to go around the circle and as you went around the circle, you would either call the person a giver or a taker, and then the number, the number of givers that you got was tallied versus the you know, so you didn't get any points for the takers with the number of givers. And then we stack ranked ourselves and I was I
was like at the end of the list. So the way I had shown up at that particular event within the first you know, hours of the event was more like a taker than a giver. And it was this really interesting objective measure. The people who were towards the top of the list were the folks that arrived early.
They talked to everyone, they made sure that they you know, introduced each other, and it was really like a pathway to understanding that introversion is more of a mask that we wear, you know, that there's this choice to engage that they had taken more seriously, maybe because of their natural personality, maybe that was comfortable for them or more natural for them, but that my reserved posture did give an impression and then when pushed into a binary decision
that I I didn't rank, well, I love that. I mean, I didn't love it at the time. It was kind of, you know, like, but it was great to get this subjective measure of like how I show up in the first moments, so that group activity.
Yeah, no, that's actually sort of a good conclusion there. I mean, my realization was a little bit similar. I tried to own mine, which is I consider myself a disagreeable giver and that's you know, I will fight you on whatever and the opposite. And I feel like that's a much better place for me to be in because it also is really difficult for people to see the difference between an agreeable taker and a giver. And I feel like that's where the book really helps to dive
into understanding what those patterns are. Because we often associate people who will help us, who want to help us, who will want to collaborate with us, based off how agreeable they are, rather than what they actually care about and how they go about the process, what the end goal is. And so I highly recommend the book for anyone who works on any team or cares about personal relationships.
I think it's hugely helpful though cool.
So that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much Ben Jonson for joining us and talking about teams and automation and going to the cloud and all the challenges there. It was really a great show to have you on today.
Yeah. Thanks, Warren appreciate it.