Top Tech Companies of 2013 Part One

some of them are actually really small. Yeah, and some of them you may not have heard of because they're not necessarily companies that average consumers would end up interacting with. They're more like companies that enterprises interact with. And we managed to get this list. It was from an article that was published in Business Insider by Megan Rose Dickey, who put together an amazing list of twenty five companies.

We're looking at the top ten. Business Insider does this list every year, and I think a competition this year was a little but stiffer the lowest ranked. Okay, so so what this is looking at. It's based on at least twenty company reviews on glass door um from from a certain date, range from from from a good year

long range. Yeah. They look over a stretch of twelve months end of the year, and then an extra from the beginning, and in case you want to know what glass door is if you haven't been searching for a job recently. Glass door is a job seeking kind of tool, and it'll lets you not only look to see what jobs are available, but also gives you some insight as to what it's like to work with those companies based

on actual employee comments about those companies. Right, employees can go on there and give some pretty honest and sometimes brutal and sometimes wonderful reviews of what it's like that what corporate life there's like. Right, it might say something like the benefits are amazing, work life balance is fantastic, I really enjoy my work, and others might say things like I really wish that my my supervisor would stop buying a new whip every week so that maybe the

old whip would start feeling less painful. Yeah, obviously that second type of company would be the one that I think most people would wish to avoid most people most people. I'm not going to paint as with a completely broad brush on that one. So, but so, these company ratings are in a five point scale, with with one being the worst in five being the best and uh, this this year, the lowest in our top ten is ranked

four point one. Last year the winner was only a four point four, So there's there's been a lot of upsets, right, And we're going to look at the top ten, but in this particular part, we're gonna look at numbers ten through six so that we can really kind of give a little bit of an overview of each company, because we could just tell you the name and the rating, but you could read the article for that, and you

should go to the article. Like we said, there are other entries in there that we're not going to cover. I'll give a little honorable mention at the end of the next episode for some of the companies that you may have heard of that that made the list, but we're not in the top ten. But we wanted to actually explain kind of these companies were and uh and what they do. A couple of them I hadn't really heard of before, had only heard of kind of in passing a couple of them, I had not Not only

did I not know what they were. When I read the corporate speak for what they did, I still wasn't sure what was happening. And I had to keep digging to figure it out. Um full disclosure. Years and years and years ago, I worked for a human resources management consulting firm and uh, and I learned the the art of corpse speak. But it has been a long time and I have lost a lot of that ability. And also different corps speak is different, I mean you get I mean the ones that I was kind of like,

what does your company do? Or the kind of new marketing sort of yes, where I just like, so you do colors on websites that are really shiny and I don't understand what's going on. And and yeah, back when I was working for a consulting firm, cloud based was not a thing. That was that So everything now is cloud based apparently. But last year a couple of the companies made it in included Miter and LinkedIn and Google,

Apple Yep, yep. And some of these also made it into the list this year, but in different rankings than they did in years before. So let's kick this all off, Lauren. What company came in at number ten? Number ten would be Orbits. Now, this was one that I was familiar with. I think anyone who has done a lot of travel

is familiar with this company. It is of course an online booking agent system for all kinds of travel stuff, you know, from from the hotels to the tickets themselves, to entire packages like cruise, ships or articles, vehicles, car rental, yeah, all that kind of stuff. And then you know, this is one of those things where it was like a no brainer for the internet, right. It was something that allowed you to have access to all the tools that

a travel agent would have for the average consumer. And once you had some companies put that together and really organize it, it really made a great deal of sen gave empowerment to the consumer. They had a lot more choices, they got to see, uh, some some great savings as well. Sometimes the savings are kind of hidden behind a veil, right, Like you, if you book with a certain amount, you're you might get a great deal, but you don't know what hotel you're going to get until after the deal

comes through. All right, if you've got flexible travel plans or don't mind that element of surprise for for slightly anxious people like me, I'm like, please just let me pick the thing that I want to pick. Um For people like me, I'm like, where's the cardboard? Box. Okay, as long as I can get there. But yeah, So so the company was founded back in and, um, that's by a group of airlines. Yeah. In fact, American Airlines was one of those companies. Yes, uh that yeah. In

addition to them, we've got Delta, United, Northwest, and Continental. Yeah. Not all of those are around. Some of them, like Delta acquired Northwest for example. So there, But at any rate, it was kind of cool these airlines all got together and said, let's try and create this this tool that would be really useful. I mean, obviously it's served them as well as the customers. It's not like it was an altruistic move necessarily, but the benefit was incredible for

everyone certainly. They the website launched in two thousand one, and then the company was acquired by two thousand four by another company called um Sant. Sendant, I think, yeah, it's a C E N D A N T. And I have obviously I never have heard that words spoken aloud, so I'm assuming Sendant, but I don't know things that we should have looked up before he came into the room. Um and they had an I P O in two thousand seven. Yep, so this is a publicly traded company.

Some of the ones we're talking about are publicly traded a couple or private, and then some of them are subsidiaries. Technically this is a publicly traded company that um that hasn't a parent, uh kind of company. The scendant would be the parent here. But um, yeah, the company was rated pretty highly. As you said, it's the lowest rated of all the ones we look looking at four point one and they're CEO approval percentage rating. That's for Barney Harford.

So yeah, that's not bad. That's not bad. And the CEO percentage approvals UM bounce around. You'll hear in the n or so. Yeah, you'll hear as we go on that some of them that the company may be rated higher and a CEO may be rated lower. But you know, it happens. Uh. It turns out that the employees say that there are a lot of learning opportunities to work when you're working at Orbits, and that there are good

benefits and lots of room for growth, which is great. Uh. And then you know, I decided that it would be kind of neat to look in the news because, first of all, this article that was written for Business Insider came out in the summer of because it was looking over the past twelve months, which actually started in the summer of twelve obviously, so since then I thought it'd be neat to look and see what kind of news

articles had popped up about these companies. So with the Orbits, there were some there's some you know news and some bad news. Um. For instance, there was a bit of a kerfuffle, you might say, a couple of counties in Maryland had brought a suit against Orbits claiming that had

not paid taxes properly in those counties. And the taxes in question were in response to booking fees for hotel rooms, something that the Orbit says it should not be held accountable for, and things the county say you should totally

be held accountable for this. And actually the article I read was pretty um, kind of cynical, because I was talking about how a lot of governments, specifically like local governments, county governments and city governments, we're looking at companies as a potential revenue source by going after these things that you know didn't exist before because of the online world is so stills wherein right you're doing business with people all over the place, right, So it's almost that same

sort of mentality, at least according to the person who wrote this article, the same sort of mentality as someone who would claim that the police force in your local area is stepping up uh roadblocks and and speed traps in order to fill a quota. It's that kind of same message I was getting. Whether or not that's the case, I can't say, but that was that was certainly the

implication that I was getting from this particular author. But another interesting bit of news, so Orbits also suffered a twenty percent drop in their share prices after an earnings call back in November of That earnings call revealed that company performance fell below projections. Uh. They said that it was mostly because there was a drop in airline revenue. Even though hotel revenue is increasing, there's been overall this

year a pretty drastic drop in airline Yeah. So, but but the good news is that executives say they feel there's there's a very optimistic chance that revenue growth will return, maybe not quite at the level they had projected originally, but they they're seeing an upswing, so it's not all bad news. So yeah, that's ah, that's our number ten, So I guess we need to move on. Yeah, number

nine would be Exact Target. Now this is one that I had never heard of or I was completely unfamiliar with, and partially because again, this is a company that is a tech company, but it's not creating stuff. Yeah, it's not like it's coming out with a video game console or a smart watch or even a website that most people would go to. This instead is a digital marketing software as a service company s a a S. Right.

They do they do software for for email, mobile, social media, and web marketing specifically, so you might if you're a company and you don't have your own marketing department, then you may work with a company like Exact Target to handle the marketing strategies for your company. Um, this is

something we're seeing more and more of today. Like you think back in the old days of business, where you had this monolithic building that housed dozens of different departments that never talked to each other and had terrible, uh competitive relationships with one another. I've been in actually a couple of couple of companies that worked like that. I

just think of things like mad Men. You know, you watch shows like that and you're like, Oh, that's what a marketing company is like, right, because it's you know, everything is very siloed and competitive and cutthroat. H Well, these days, a lot of companies are looking to other organizations to handle certain things that they need to do but they don't want to do with under their own

roof because it's not their focus. Right, particularly with startup companies, You've got these big startup companies where they might be engineers who are behind the startup company, and the engineer is really good at making something that people want to use, but not necessarily so good at everything else that's required to run a business, right, And frequently the kind of people who are really good at talking up a product are not the same kind of people who necessarily created it.

So I think that that exists across many industries. Oh yeah, yeah. So this particular company was founded in two thousand. It started on a two hundred thousand dollar investment, and specifically they offer a quote cloud based marketing software in quote to help brands reach consumers. So cloud based meaning that you would be able to interface with this no matter

where you happen to be. If you were a customer of exact target, you could end up logging in and using their tools, includes analytic tools, which are really important these days to make sure you are doing the right thing right, that you're reaching the people you want to reach, and that your message is having the intended effect right.

And since since exact Target does more software than the implementation of of a marketing campaign for its for its customers, that's a pretty important thing to have those analytics built in right, right. So there they're doing is they're giving all the tools that your company would need in order to get your message that you have crafted out to your customers. Because it's one thing to create your brand's identity,

it's another thing to get that identity out there. In fact, we're gonna be talking more about that a couple more times in this list. So yeah, uh, an interesting company to talk about because again it's one of those that otherwise I don't think I would have ever mentioned. I wouldn't have been aware of it because I don't own a huge company that needs marketing. But but yeah, they've got a really high rating, this kind of same four

point one that Orbits has. But it's CEO approval of of Mr Scott D. Dorsey is yes, and I believe Mr Dorsey is also one of the co founders of the company. So that's another thing that we're gonna be You know, a lot of these companies were talking about here are relatively young, and so the people who made the companies are still very much an active part. You know, there are some legacy companies out there. I'm gonna go ahead and give you a spoiler. Guys, there aren't very

many on this list. You're not gonna hear HP, You're not gonna hear IBM, You're not going to hear Intel. These companies that have decades and decades of history. So a lot of the companies are very young, still very flexible and and and able to make big changes. Plus they have some of the original people still very much involved on a day to day basis in the operations. Yeah,

going through this list, it's interesting. I found that. I mean, it's just easy to see where where that kind of environment would lead to happier employees than the kind of thing that gets so huge, right, because once you get to that level, you have to put systems in place, otherwise you just have chaos. Right. Although there is one mega mega mega company, actually a couple of mega companies that will be talking about in this episode that you

know are still pretty good at keeping everything organized. Yeah, but this one is pretty small. It's only about two thousand employees or so. Um and uh, it sounds like one of the perks of working there is that they let their employees be pretty independent. Um, but that comes with the caveat of you're expected to keep up. Yeah. Yeah, you are given a lot of autonomy, but that company

with great power comes great responsibility always. Yeah. So they also have listed core values on their website, which includes pretty simple things. I mean, these are kind of like the Golden Rule broken down into a corporate approach, So things like treat people well and be easy to do business with and uh and make clients look like heroes. These all seem like very you know, obvious kind of things.

But when you when you make it a core part of what your company is all about, and you and you truly try to stick with that, then obviously that that can trickle down into other elements that make it a great place to work. Um. They also have a philanthropic arm, the Exact Target Foundation, which was founded in twenty eleven, and they that's dedicated to doing lots of stuff like helping with hunger relief, increasing educational efforts, and

even supporting entrepreneurship across the world. So it's a company that involves itself in multiple ways with its community. So that's good. Yeah, it was doing so well for itself at Salesforce dot Com announced that it was going to acquire the company for two point five billion in June of this year, yep, and completed that acquisition in July. So technically this company is now part of another company.

It's kind of funny because when I was looking at this list, Uh, some of the other ones further up the list above number ten are companies that now are the same company. I think it was like numbers fourteen and thirteen or something like that are now part of the same company. So yeah, salesforce dot Com also was number nine on last year's list. And uh apparently you know, uh exact target has actually boosted the sales forecast for

sales force dot Com. So salesforce dot Com had a certain number that was projected out by its analysts right saying, this is what we expect to hit by the end of the year. By acquiring, uh this this company, they've actually managed to boost that up, so now they're performing above what they had projected. So in fact, exact target has really been a benefit to Salesforce already in the

short term financial scale of things. It remains to be seen how this plays out over time, because anytime you have an acquisition there are some issues to work out with cultural differences between the two different or two or more different companies different entities. But one would hope that since Salesforce has been on this list before and exact

targets on it this year, that it wouldn't change too much. Hopefully. Yeah, although definitely some of the some of the reasons that people gave for enjoying working at some of these places varied hugely among different companies on the list. You know, some people said, I love this company because you get to act like a crazy college kid, and others are like, I love this company because they don't make you act

like a crazy college kid. Right, so yeah, So it's also one of the things that really benefits you when you do your own research, because you have to take into consideration your own ideal working situation, right, Like, if you're one of those people who really thrives on collaboration, and you you have to be around other people, and you love working on projects with people, and maybe maybe even working on projects with different groups of people throughout

your career, so it's not like you're part of a team that's really cohesive. You your team changes, you know, project a project. Then obviously one type of company is going to be a better fit for you than some other company where you're sitting at a desk and you're always doing the same thing all the time always. However, if you like stability, that other version sounds way more your speed than some crazy one where you have no idea who you'll be working with from one day to

the next. I'm I'm kind of in both camps on that one, but I mostly work with the same people from data day, so I guess I have that benefit mostly. I mean, we've got a wide team of similarly crazy people running around. Let me put to you this way, if Josh Clark ever comes up to me and says, hey, Strick, I need your help with something, I ask a lot

of questions before I agree. The last time that I ran into Josh Clark on the elevator, he was carrying like like three packages of rope, like industrial rope and I was like, Hey, good morning, Josh, how are you doing. Yeah, so it pays to ask questions around here, that's what we're saying. Let's move on to number eight. Number eight is is another digital marketing company called Responses. Yeah, this

one again. This was another one. Both Exact Target and Responses were companies where I had to dig a little deeper to really understand what they do because Lauren and I do a little bit of marketing on a very surface level, very surface. We like to interact with people on social networks, which technically falls under the category of marketing, but we think of it as being able to like share awesome stuff with our fans and find out what they like, so we don't really necessarily think of it

in the same terms as a marketing department would. So a lot of this is like foreign language to us. But Responses is one of the companies that will do more of this stuff for you. They also work in you know, email, mobile, social, and web, but with a full like software planning and implementation kind of package. Yeah, and they were founded in n Their headquarters are in

San Bruno, California. It turns out California is a great place to work if you're in tech weird right you never thought of it in Silicon Valley and all that kind of stuff. Um, So they also do a lot of research on what are the most effective means of reaching consumers. Uh that if you go to the website, one of the taglines on there is your customers want experiences,

not campaigns. So the idea being that, you know, it's not just not just the delivery method, but also what's the actual message, what what are you trying, what's the effect you're trying to get besides just people interested in your product, and they they try and construct an entire approach from attracted the consumer, making them aware of who you are and what you do, getting them to purchase the whatever product or service you offer, and then getting

them to repurchase later on. So the idea being that you convert a customer into a loyal customer. That sort of conversion is obviously really important for a lot of businesses. I mean, it's great if you can make a sale, it's better if you can make a lifelong customer. So that's kind of what their approaches is to try and

help their customers, their corporate customers achieve that. Another thing they actually refer to their strategy as marketing orchestration, which if a marketing company can't come up with really goofy like taglines like that, but they're not a very good

marketing Yeah. So those another way, those where I was like, huh, But again it was this idea of a customized experience, a personalized experience, so that uh, the idea being that if you are a customer of of responses, they will craft their their approach in such a way that every one of your customers will get a personalized experience, which will make them feel valued as a customer and therefore improve the chances of them coming becoming a repeat customer. Say, yeah, so,

I mean it's important work. It's one of those things where you know, again a lot of us just sort of take it for granted because we are on the receiving end of this marketing more often than we're on

the generation. And unless you have to work for a marketing sure, and and it's easy to tell where marketing has gone wrong, but it's a little bit harder to identify when it goes right, because then you just have good feelings about stuff that things you know, stuff that people want you to feel good about, which is I don't know. It can be swell and it can be terrifically creepy, it can be It all depends on the

implementation and the message that you're making. UM. So Yeah, so they had their I p O in twenty eleven and raised seventy nine point two million. Not bad for for a small company, although they are no longer quite so small. They have grown to have offices worldwide and they seem to be UM just really writing that changing marketing industry really well, because it's a space that a lot of companies aren't sure in these you know, brave

new digital times how to reach people? And so how did they come out in this um in this this test, like what what was their rating? It was a four point two point two four point two and point one better than the other two. Yes, stiff competition and CEO approval rating of Mr Dan Springer at they're really good. Yeah.

They actually had a lot of employees giving comments to things about you know, there's a lot of growth opportunity, but sometimes according to some employees, the starting positions might have lower salaries than what you would find in competing companies. Yeah, a lot of people were saying that it's, you know, the company is still growing and so a lot of the problems are still kind of being ironed out, and

some sometimes communication gets lost in between different management tiers. Yeah, I mean it's it's tough when you are a small startup and you're really nimble and then you're making that transition and then all of a sudden you're global. Yeah, that's that. There are huge challenges that come with that, just like the challenges that you know, an acquiring company gets when they get this awesome new property and then have to figure out how to make it work within

their own culture. These are these are big issues and it's been big growth, hasn't it. Yeah. Yeah, Actually, uh, Wall Street Journal reports that responses had twenty seven percent growth in the third quarter of UH and they also did a survey responses to the survey, they were the actual ones conducting the survey and discovered that marketers are

not leveraging mobile platforms as effectively as they could. They were looking at how many people were starting to use mobile platforms to do some shopping, which is something we'll talk about in an upcoming podcast. But uh, it's you know, they said, you know, considering how many people are using this. We are not leveraging our marketing money nearly well enough

across multiple industries. We've got to figure that out. And so that was more of a you know kind of I mean, it helps drum up business for am marketing firm, obviously, but it also is something that's true. You know, the mobile, the mobile browsing world is relatively young, and just as marketing departments were starting to finally get a feel for the web, now you've got this new implementation that you

have to worry about. Yeah, it's very tricky. We we talked a little bit about that in that mobile ads episode that we did. And I think that the shopping episode that you're talking about is coming up on forward Thinking not TEXTFF. Actually, it's one of the number of predictions that we made for that. I'm thinking, oh that one our annual wrap up. Yeah, it'll be a small

part of it. Well, before we get into the last couple of the the first section of the top ten, let's see how many propositions I can throw into one sentence because it's a preposition. Now, did you know, I know, I saw that It's actually exciting. Okay, grammar geeks, right, here we're gonna geek out, but before we do, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, we're back. Let's see we're up to number seven, I think right, yes, and that would be a company workday, work work day? Okay,

what is work day? This is another one that I had never heard. Yeah, they do HR software. Okay, alright, well, all right now I got it because I worked for that human resources management consulting firm. So now we're speaking my language. Okay, so let's a build as cloud based. They lost me. That didn't exist when I worked in that world. But human capital management and financial management, human capital management is like you know, no, no slight against

work day. But that particular phrase is not one that fills me with the warm fuzzies. What about you human capital managed? I can't imagine anyone other than like Cat Birch saying, where you talk about not employees but their assets. These are things that can be treated and sold and bought on the market. However, I do appreciate the insinuation

that employees have intrinsic value that you want to um love. Yes, that part makes perfect sen and yes it's hard to say this in a succinct way that doesn't come out too touchy feely, but it's also really easy to say in a way that makes you sound like a robot. I would I would be a lot more offended if it was called like like human marshmallow or I don't know, I'm gonna make that my next my next title on my next business card. I certainly need to make one

so you can do what you want. Yeah, it's true. What this actually means is that the company uses creates tools for other companies to use to monitor everything from financial department type stuff like expenses and pay roll and all of that kind of thing, to the human resources side. So you're talking about talent management, organization, UM benefits, all that kind of stuff, all the things that these different

departments would. You know, we talked about that mega company from way back when, where it would have all the different distinct departments. In this case, it's this company workday is trying to kind of fill the roles of finance departments and human resources departments. Yeah, just just doing that saying hey, we do this really good, let us do

do it for you. Yeah. Because again, if if Lauren and I decide that we want to start a company together and we end up raising the capital somehow because kickstartered went nuts, and uh, we haven't even figured out how we're gonna build the thing we're gonna build, but we've already got like millions of dollars. Here's the thing we're gonna have. One day, you just wake up and go, Lauren, do you do you know how to fill out any

of these forms? I don't even know what quick books is. Yeah. Yeah, See at that point, we were like, we need to hire people who know what they're doing so that we do everything correctly. And that's again what work day does.

They're looking at the finance side and the human resources side, and and again all these tools are involved on the cloud so that you can access them from anywhere and you know, yeah, which you know makes great sense if you if you are these days really Yeah, if you're a mobile executive, if you're moving around doing lots of meetings and stuff and you want to be able to check in, uh, you know, and and see things on a granular level in whatever department, whether it's finance or

human resources or whatever, then tools like this make that possible. Where you can you know, you even have like smartphone app implementation here so that you can see and and maybe you're doing a presentation for a potential client or maybe even a potential partner, and you can pull up real time information and analytics and say, look, here's here's how we're doing, here's what we're doing, here's what's working, and this is why you should be working with us.

So uh, you know, again, not a company that's going to be providing anything that you and I as average consumers are going to see, but maybe the company you work for would be. Yeah. Um. They were founded in two thousand five from a group of people from people Soft, which had been been hostily taken over by Oracle. Yeah. Now, the people from Oracle came in pitchforks waving torches blazing and said this is ours now. Uh, and a group of folks from People's Soft said you know what and

left to found this company. So uh that actually was well, it will become a bit of a thorn in a in some employees sides, according to one of the comments. But uh. They They also held an I P O in October two thousand twelve, so it is a publicly traded company in its own right, um, and has done quite well for itself. So this one also rated pretty high. Uh yeah, they are a four point two and um CEO approval rating of Mr and Neil Mercy, although we should point out he is a co CEO and a

co founder. Okay, yeah, it's it's not on the list there. But yeah, did you notice that the list had a couple of percentages that had a little asterisk next to him? Did you find what the asterisk meant? As far as I could tell, it was an asterisk to nowhere. Yeah. See, that's what I thought too. And then when I actually looked at work days organization chart, I saw that it was a co CEO. So that's a potential answer to

that question. Well okay, and so so employees say that there are lots of incredibly smart people working there and that you know, for for all of the hard work that those smart people are doing, their their voices are appreciated and heard. Yes, yeah, they actually say that the organization there is very flat. In other words, you don't have this level of mid managers in between you and the people who are actually making the decision. So your

your voice is very important to everyone. However, like we were saying, some of the complaints going on are are just that if you weren't part of that people Soft transfer, that there's a little bit of a clicky sort of problem, like people like the people who came over from people Soft are in a slightly different echelon than everybody else, and that your your prospects for getting promoted or getting a raise maybe affected by whether or not you happen

to be one of the people Soft elite. So even though the organization is pretty flat, it can be difficult if you weren't in that ground floor exactly. And as for recent news, there's some interesting recent news. The other co CEO, Dave Duffield, who was another one of the founders of this company of work Day, sold off most of his stock in the company back in November. Specifically, he sold three hundred forty eight thousand, one twenty six shares.

He still retains more than fifty nine thousand shares, but obviously he sold most of them and that was worth a cool twenty seven point eight million dollars, so not a bad haul there. Yeah, And that same day, Yeah, CEO ce all right, you gutta say the name, because I'm going to giggle if I say Michael Stankley. No, No, there's no L there. It's stank I just imagined the whole L. Now, that's fine, I mean I would do no. Michael Stanky also CEO, sold forty four shares but retains

more than one hundred thousand shares. So that's nonetheless, that's a decently big upset of share trading. Yeah, it was a lot of there's a lot of shares that were unloaded. Um, and and it doesn't mean that the company is doing poorly. In fact, the uh, the amount that they unloaded it, I think it was like somewhere around the mid seventies, like around seventy five dollars something like that at the

share price that they sold their shares off of. But they had done that just before there had been talks about the share price rising up to be between seventy nine and eighty five dollars per share, So in reality, it's not like they were Yeah. So I and obviously I can't speak to what their motives were or you know, if they were trying to do this to get new investment in the company. I don't know. I I honestly

don't know. Uh, they clearly have done quite a lot of work to get the company valued at what it is now. So, um, we'll see how this plays out and an interesting thing to watch. Um. The next one on our list, number six is a SAS Institute. Yeah, is a little bit more familiar. Yeah, s a s is what we've called it in a previous podcast, But turns out you're supposed to call it SASS. I did not know that until I happened to read it on the website. We we've mentioned SAS once before, not just

as a company, but as a way of life. Well obviously both Jonathan and I lived the sas. Yeah, we're a little sassy, But no sas we talked about because I remember specifically because we loved the CEO's name, right, James Goodnight Goodnight. Yeah, this is the company we talked about when we were talking about the richest tech billionaires we were we mentioned James Goodnight. I think he was

number of fifteen or number fourteen on Forbes list last year. Yeah, he's one of the co founders of the Company's still the CEO. Yep. And this is a company that, according to the website, has turned a profit every single year of his thirty five year existence, and that has incredibly low employee turnover. As for what does this is a

business analytics software company. And if you remember our discussion from the the The Tech Executive episode we did months and months ago, they started off by creating software that helped agricultural companies analyze huge amounts of data. The thing was that the agricultural industry in the United States had amassed huge, huge amounts of information, but it was really hard to organize it, or to format it, or to

to make any real use of it. And what happened was you had some engineers who came up with this way of creating a software that would very effectively go through all this and make it meaningful. So the data that you had was actually useful. It wasn't just that you had lots of it, but you could do things with it. And that was just the very first major customer that SAS had, and after that they started to branch out into doing analytics software for various industries and

businesses and for lots of different applications. So again yet another company that works with other companies, not with right, right, but yeah, it's it's a lot of really smart and scalable stuff that can help companies of basically any size, you know, look at look at look at an analyze their statistics and visualize that data and all of that important stuff that, right, I mean, give you meaning to

the information that you're gathering. Right, I mean again, I know we keep saying this over and over, but you just think about the amount of information that your typical large businesses is generating, whether it's sales figures, customer loyalty, uh, you know, the company value. These are concepts that are are really important and sometimes they're a little difficult to

get a grasp on. So if you have a company that can analyze that data may make it meaningful, create data visualization where you can actually see what it means. That can be a huge benefit. And and apparently, according to Sas themselves, it is a very large benefit. They say that their customers represent ninety of the top companies on Fortune's Global Yeah, so n scent of the top one companies listed by Fortune in that global list. That's I mean, that's a great resume. Yeah, so, I mean,

that's that's important there. Uh And yeah, apparently working there is is, at least for some employees, kind of awesome. Now now they have offices all over the place. But their main campus looks pretty amazing. Is I mean a huge campus. It's kind of I mean it's the sort of like food and recreation and bringing your your work life and your life life together into one giant, happy

college like maths. Yes. The idea being that if you can make the experience of going to work pleasant and uh and uh and and be able to offset some of the things that a lot of people have to sacrifice when they go to work full time. You know that things like daycare or even having a gym on site, these are things that can make a big difference in a person's life. I mean, my excuse for not going to the gym is that we don't have one in this building today. That's a very convenient excuse, and I

mean I'm sticking with it. Look, just because there's one a whole two like like like half a mile dout raining outside Lauren, it's raining, I'd get I'd get wet on the way to the gym. Anyway, Do we have any news about about that? So SAS Institute has, like we said, it has a global reach. It's it's not

just in the United States. Uh. They held a survey in the u K and it was a survey where they ended up the findings said that they it's really important that we find ways to educate people about big data and how to handle it, how to analyze it, and finding new ways to do that. I mean, this is the business that SAS is involved with. But they're saying not just don't it's not just come to us

so that we can fix your problem. It's we need to make sure that this is something that we stress in curriculum, in school curriculums, curriculum, I guess I should say, um, so that we can make sure we're raising the next generation of analysts so that we can take advantage of this huge opportunity. And so SAS was actually saying that the UK is poised to potentially being a leader in

this space. That if they were able to encourage this kind of thing and maybe develop these kind of curricula, then students would be able to really become experts in this field that's an emerging field, and thus you have a new generation of analysts that can really take advantage of this incredible amount of information his big data. We've

been talking about that a lot too. It's it's got a huge amount of potential, but it's also comes with, you know, enormous challenges because you're just generating so much every single day. How do you manage it? How do you make me have anything to make sense of it? Right? Yeah? I mean you know, it's like it's like throwing someone into a library that's completely unorganized and saying, bring me a book about such and such, and it was just like I'm just I don't even know how to sort

through all this, right. Um. They also are engaged in an effort in Nigeria along with a company called Resourcery, to help fight fraud, which you know in that particular country is a big issue. So um, they're you know, they're looking at opportunities to not just do business but to help people. Um. And and actually we totally forgot to give the company rating. Um oh yeah, so that they are at a four point three and their CEO

approval of Mr Goodnight is so um. You know again, it's one of those things where people say, like, there are a lot of interesting benefits, including one of the ones I saw was food. Food. Food. There's food everywhere. Food is awesome in general. Just if you give people food, they'll love you. Forever. I think. Yeah, that's that's why occasionally I will go across the street and buy a dozen cupcakes and bring them back to the office. And that is a true story. Yep, that that is that

has happened. I can tell you Jonathan is not lying right now. Well, we've got five more companies to talk about. In our next episode, you'll get to hear what the

top five are. And if you have any requests, like there's some topic that you think we should cover, maybe there's a company on this list you would like to know more about, or maybe there's another company entirely different company that you just are dying to have us cover, or technology concept, whatever you like, let us know, write us our email addresses, text stuff at Discovery dot com. And hey, here's another thing. We're social people. We're on

some social networks. I wouldn't call us social, but yeah, we are on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumbler. Our handle at all three of those is text HSW. Yeah, so get in touch with us because uh, you know, we'll we'll read it, and we'll we'll enjoy it. And then once we crawl out of our corners, uh, in which we call our safe zone, we'll be happy to respond to you as a social person. I'm the only anyway, So get in touch with us. Guys. We want to hear from you, and we will talk to you again really soon.

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