The First Customer - Building Knowledge Empires with Guru CEO and Co-Founder Rick Nucci

[00:00:27] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer podcast. My name is Jay Aigner. Today I have a very, very, very, very, very special guest, Rick Nucci, CEO and co founder of Guru. I've been chasing Rick around forever. Rick is a pillar of the Philly tech scene. He's right up there with all the greats. if there was a Mount Rushmore of Philly tech people, he would be front and center.

Rick, how are you, my friend? 

[00:00:51] Rick: Oh man, you're way too kind. I am, very well. Thank you. Thank you for asking. Excited to chat with you. 

[00:00:57] Jay: I do want to just bring up the fact that I saw you first at the founder factory event by Philly startup leaders, which is a fantastic organization in Philadelphia.

you were doing a talk, and, I believe it was based around operations and there was this part. In there where you revealed your Jason Kelsey Jersey, which I think half the crowd got, and maybe I'm being generous with half, but I got it and I loved it. And I got what you were going for. do you want to tell us a little, like, tell me that story of like, what, how did you come up with this idea?

And like, how did you feel like it landed? 

[00:01:35] Rick: Yeah, this is my, is this like my redemption story? 

[00:01:40] Jay: This is your chance. Yeah, get it back. 

[00:01:43] Rick: I don't, I should not be doing sports references and this is a great example of that. And, I even like sort of did a dry run of it, with a friend of mine who's into sports as most people are.

He's like, yeah, maybe, you know. Maybe skip over that one, you know, but I stand by it. I stand by what I was trying to do. I mean, look, I, the talk was about operations people. I think operations people are, you know, about to have a moment. You know, I think AI is coming into the workplace very fast and I think it will be transformative to enterprises.

And, my belief is that operations people are at the intersection of Understanding the technology to the degree they need to, but really understanding the part of the business that they are trying to make run in a scalable and efficient way. They, to me have the combination of ingredients, So I wanted to talk about operations people because that's my belief.

Right. and the thing about operations people is, if you compare them to, if you look at a typical company and you think about a company versus a sports team, like they're not the roles that are putting the points on the board, right? They're not the reps that are closing the deals. They're not the engineer that built the hero feature.

But if you don't have a good offensive line, you're never going to win any games, right? and so I think about Jason Kelsey and how many centers in the NFL get the level of attention, admiration, love, and respect that guy gets. I would argue no one there. Then again, I'm not a credible source of that knowledge, but I live in Philadelphia.

Hugely admire the guy and what he's done for the city, not just his contribution to the sport. And I'm like, he is this perfect analogy to where these ops,roles are going, where they will be getting the visibility attention impact that they have had, but I think are going to get it.

Kind of get put on a main stage very soon. So that was what I was going for. Right. But in my talk, of course,I kind of overly focused on just, you know, as you said, I kind of did the Jersey thing. And I think most people in the room are like, why is he hot? Maybe he's just hot. He's just taking his shirt off so that, you know, he can have something short sleeve on.

It was a misfire, but that was what I was trying to say. So there you go. 

[00:04:03] Jay: I loved it. And I think, I think it will be one of my favorite reveals of all time. it just was great. And I think for somebody who got what you were doing and I got the reference and that, but I also got to see other people who didn't.

I just thought it was brilliant. It was just great. It was like, it's, you know, it's, I'm not going to, it was definitely not like watching a, you know, a train wreck or a car wreck or whatever people say they can't take their eyes away, but it was like, it was just this moment. It was like an event that had, it was like such a thing.

And like, I got to see all the perspectives and it was like a cool thing to just watch. So congratulations on trying it. I think it was successful enough and your talk in general was just fantastic. It was, I have a great operations. lead at our company. And she, like you said, kind of is the glue to everything and kind of keeps everything moving and it's fantastic.

So it really, everything you were talking about kind of resonated with me is going, being, you know, going from a solo founder to hiring my first hire was an operations person. And so she's been like, just. Just it forever. So you're talking about how important they are and just like the cross functional nature and just all the stuff they do was absolutely a hit home for me.

So, I wanted to make sure we covered that. so we got that out of the way. So tell me, Rick, where did you grow up? And did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur?

[00:05:13] Rick: I grew up in like rural Pennsylvania near, Lancaster area. I wouldn't say the location impacted me, but I would definitely say my parents normalized entrepreneurship because both of my parents ran businesses through kind of my, high school years.

and, actually,the first thing I ever did that I would sort of call a business was like a DJ, you know, getting DJ gigs. I was like. DJing weddings and stuff as like a high schooler making like obscene amounts of money for a high school kid, you know, like getting, you know, 50 an hour to DJ, which is by the way, very inexpensive price for DJing, but for me, it was like an infinite amount of money.

So it definitely was normalized in the sense of, Oh, this is sort of. thing that, people do, I feel, very appreciative of, you know, looking back, seeing my parents operate that way. And when I sort of like took the first plunge, I was only 24 and I was only working for two years out of college. and that moment, there wasn't a moment where I was like, Ooh, this field, you know, it's.

it was all excitement and energy to kind of jump in and start something and try it. and I do attribute that to kind of my parents and their careers as I was growing up. 

[00:06:25] Jay: Was that Boomi? Was that the first one? 

[00:06:27] Rick: Boomi was the first one. Yes. in 2000, yes. 

[00:06:30] Jay: I mean, talk about. A home run on your first at bat.

I mean, at least what it is today. If that was any, you know, if that came from that effort, man, that was a, it was a grand slam home run, whatever sports analogy you want to use. That was incredible. So tell me where did Boomi come from? Where did the name Boomi come from, by the way? And where, you know, where did this company come from?

[00:06:50] Rick: it's a, Hindi word that means from the earth, has absolutely nothing to do with what our product, what Boomi does or did or does now, I think we liked the sound of it. I think it was a memorable name and, We kept it and I think it, definitely does have the memorable brand checkmark.

And so I think we just kind of never looked back. yeah, that was where the name come from. 

[00:07:16] Jay: How did you start the company? Where did the idea come from? Did you have co founders to start? Like what was the Genesis company? 

[00:07:22] Rick: Yeah. I mean, it was, like Guru. I mean, it, was a born, you know, an opportunity born out of pain that we observed.

So, we were working in a software company, me and two other co founders of Boomi. We were working in a software company, a logistics software company in Philadelphia. oddly enough, there weren't many software companies in, you know, 90s, 2000s in Philadelphia. And, you know, every time we were deploying this, you know, supply chain logistics software to these businesses, integration was always the thing.

It was always the problem that the customers ended up having. It was the thing that held up the deployment of the software. It was the thing that always made the project late. You know, it was just a sort of like constant pain. And we were looking at how it was getting done and it was, You know, a lot of custom coding and very brittle techniques and felt like that could be a product.

Like, this isn't something that you should have to write custom code about. And that was really the genesis. And, you know, the thing with Boomi, it was never the macro learning. it was never a question of, is this an enormous must solve problem? It was the very first mistake we walked into when we got into the market was, yeah, it's a huge problem.

And there's like a hundred companies like trying to solve this already. So like we are, you know, radically undifferentiated and have customers with way more capital and ability, therefore ability to execute. You know, head count, et cetera. and we retrenched and refocused completely into the Boomi that people know of today.

But yes, that was the start. and it was this sort of observed pain that we lived, you know, 

[00:08:57] Jay: do you remember who your first customer was at Boomi? 

[00:08:59] Rick: I do, Saddle Creek, which was a logistics company in, based in Florida and, we, had a relationship with them and, you know, zero competitive stuff, like meaning the company we were at, we left and started Boomi, that company ended up being a partner of Boomi's, which was quite nice, but they were a customer of that company we were working at.

So we had gotten to know them and we saw their pain firsthand. We saw them. You know, really struggling with integration and they were like, listen, yeah, if you can solve this, you know, and they basically became a design partner for us, which was really terrific. And I think looking back, it happened.

One of our co founders, it happened because one of our co founders, you know, have built a good trusting relationship, of his. You know, sort of his expertise because we didn't have customers. We didn't have case studies. We, you know, we were just three people with a little bit of funding. but that, first customer having that design partner, let us really build, you know, build and validate.

Relatively quickly, kind of our first viable offering. 

[00:10:06] Jay: So tell me about the, you mentioned the retrenching and the pivoting and, you know, that's just like the most bastardized word I think of the 2010s is probably pivoting. but like, what was your experience? Like, what did you end up with? Where did you kind of turn to, and what was the successful, you know, foot in the ground that you guys pivoted to?

Like, where did you turn to and what was your eventual. Successful product. 

[00:10:28] Rick: Yes. Yes. Yes. you know, interestingly, I would say like the problem we were solving was the same, but we made a bet that there was going to be a big change. And so this is sort of 2006, 2007. And you're starting to see cloud companies, SaaS businesses, salesforce.

com, NetSuite, a handful. Salesforce was. Probably the becoming a household name, but even they were still pretty small and you know, we were,it was a, healthy, but slow growing business at this point. And we were like, look, like we're not here to grow a. You know, a slow growing business.

We want something that we think can be big and exciting and solve a big problem for a big market and let's innovate. You know, that, was kind of the backdrop. And, we had recruited in, who became Boomi CEO, my partner, Bob Mao, and he and I sat down and we're like, look, if we sort of bet that the world will move to cloud, meaning like there will be this, what people today call digital transformation.

Of course this all happened, but I think this was, you know, It was a bet then if the world moves and things get transformed, rebuilt, rearchitected, the way that integration is solved, we'll have to fundamentally change. There will need to be a new architecture. You won't be able to take the on premise integration products that existed and just sort of put them in a different data center.

You have to think about the problem in a new way. And so we said, all right, let's imagine that future and let's build from scratch A product that is meant to solve that problem. And that was effectively what we did. And that is, you know, what is now known as integration platform as a service or iPads.

this category was officially sort of crowned by Gartner in, I think 2010, maybe 2011, right, before Dell acquired us. And,really helped, you know, of course, validate the category and really help with traction. but that was the big shift and that was the big bad. And it was a bad.

I mean, it was like a burden ship strategy, meaning that we kind of just said, look, like. You know, this is like a swing for the fence thing. So we're either going to, you know, build something that's going to hit right in this street spot, or we're going to wildly miss as, you know, cloud drives off the wrong way of the hype cycle.

And we're sitting here with a product that no one cares about. and I would say we were early to market, but it ended up being a bet that, worked out quite well, I think. 

[00:12:56] Jay: Right. And Where did that end up? Like where, I mean, we're like, when we were talking revenue and I mean, it was, is it, there's big numbers, right?

I mean, you guys were like, you prove like a lot of revenue through Boomi. Like, so from this bet in an office with you and Bob, where did that kind of ultimately take you guys to? 

[00:13:15] Rick: Yeah, there, it is running with great leadership. You know, I left long ago. It is, you know, quickly approaching a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue.

it is a big business. it was acquired by Dell in 2010. it was then reacquired from Dell by private equity, in. 2020 or 2021 ish for, over 3 billion, just over 3 billion. And, I think that, you know, that, was a phenomenal opportunity for Boomi, that sort of second acquisition to put.

New capital in the business really kind of take advantage of this market space, still being hot and still being a, you know, a fast grower. And Boomi has this, you know, continues to have this amazing opportunity in the enterprise with the great brand and traction that they now have. So yeah, it was interesting in that it was kind of this multi chapter thing, where it was acquired and kind of reacquired.

and, you know, my part of the chapter ended after Dell. I left in 2013 and started Guru. Dell was a great acquirer. Dell, you know, took, you know, fulfilled the promises they made about when they were, what they were going to do after they bought the business and they, continued to fund and grow it.

And. I think it was, I would say I am very happy that it was a protected product business team that was able to continue to grow and now has, you know, now I think has sort of enormous continued potential. 

[00:14:41] Jay: yeah. what in a business like that? It kind of reminds me of like, Disney, right?

When I mean, I'm a converted Disney dad. We took five kids, five of the six down to Disney and I did not want to go. And I was dreading the trip and I was like, this is going to be awful. We have two kids under two. It's be hot. It's gonna be miserable. And I went and I was blown away just from an operational perspective.

I'm like, this is the most impressive machine I've ever seen run in my entire life, from the buses to the people, to the whatever, but then I was going, you always get back home and you like. Research stuff. And I'm looking up Disney and like, I'm wondering about the Genesis and everything. And he died before Disney land or world or whatever the one in Florida is before it even broke ground.

But like hit whatever he created in that initial company has carried on for, you know, almost like a hundred years or whatever the hell the number is. It's feels the same with Boomi. Right? Like, what did you guys inject into like the DNA? Okay. Of Boomi to create this thing that kept going long after you guys left, like what is the core stuff that they still have that they're this profitable billion dollar company that started with you and Bob having a conversation in a room, like something is still there from your foundation that you kind of built, at that company.

what is it? what makes it. Still tick to this day. Is it the core group that believes in the ideals that you guys put in there years ago? Is it something else? Like what makes a company run like that for so long, even when the founders are gone? 

[00:16:11] Rick: Yeah. Yeah. you're disney. Yeah. Jim Gaffigan does this hilarious disney bit except, you know, he's not converted, right?

And he's like, you know, my favorite ride was the air conditioned bus on the way back to the airport. Well worth it 

[00:16:25] Jay: Yes Big Jim Finn. Yes, absolutely. Also talks about how the kids didn't give a shit about the giraffes at their window, like the second or third day they were staying in animal kingdom.

They're just like, Oh yeah, there they are again. Like giraffes in your window just like very quickly normalizes this crazy experience, but yes. 

[00:16:44] Rick: Yes. But, yes, to answer your question. I mean, I think a couple, I think there. If I were to say, an intentional thing was, that I didn't want Boomi to be like about, me or the founders and what I mean by that is like, what, when I trained, I did like this six month transition out of the business, I really wanted that to be minimally disruptive.

Cause look, a founder leaves a company, it's like a thing, it's a moment and like, you know, whatever. And so, I would say that I sort of set a goal and I remember sitting down with, at the time, John Swainson, who reported to Michael Dell and ran all of the software businesses for Dell. And I was like, look, I'm leaving, but my goal is to make this a non event, my transition out of here.

I'm not in a rush. It was like January, like, let's say like by the summer I'm leaving, you know, I have a successor in mind, you know, so that was the first thing. Succession plan teed up. you know, there is this great arc of growth. Chris McNabb took over as CEO after I left and, grew the business to, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in ARR and, did a wonderful job scaling it, but we had already been working together for a year.

So, we had recruited him in as a VP product at the time. And he had great product and engineering DNA, but he also had good, you know, strong business acumen had been working in software businesses for 20 years. And so like, you know, succession plan check there wasn't, you know, so that wasn't going to be a thing.

We sort of easy, like pass it over. I'll hang out for three months. You'll transition in. And so I think that, Worked in that. I do think it was a pretty easy, seamless thing, from a transition perspective and the business kind of kept rolling. So I think that's a good one. I will also say that we, had a, culture of innovation built into the business.

That sounds vanilla. So to get really specific, what I mean is I was describing it before and I was saying, you know, this burn the ships thing, like nobody said. Yeah. No customer said to us, Hey, you should build a cloud native integration platform. No one was saying anything about that. Right? Like, like we were listening to, and I have this belief today.

I think customers are great at telling you their problems. I don't think they're always the best at telling you the solutions. but we were seeing them adopt Salesforce and NetSuite and these other SaaS tools and, you know. We were like, look, we're going to build this thing that no one is asking for or not remotely the way they're asking for it.

And that was such a, a bet that ended up paying off. I think it just empowered so many people at Boomi,way beyond any contribution I had to be like, that's okay. it's okay to like, do these like things that might feel a bit radical. In their, you know, innovative, you know, focus or whatever.

And I think they have sort of stayed on that train. and I remember even like, you know, two years into my Dell run, I think I was there just about three years. at this moment of like, it's time for a second product and Mitch, who's my co founder of Guru now, but ran engineering back at Boomi, he and I were like, look, there's this, you know, tangential domain, second product, you know, It doesn't matter as much what it is.

The point is Dell was like, yeah, cool here. Like let's fund that, like get after it and like apply the same kind of pattern thinking of, you know, reinventing that in the cloud architecture. So I think that, that permission to innovate sort of carried through. I don't think Boomi is ever going to be a business.

That's going to have an innovators dilemma problem, unless there's some radical unintentional culture shift or something like that, but you look at what they're doing today, They're all over the next transformation, you know, which is AI. 

[00:20:23] Jay: Right. Beautiful. I love that. And it makes a lot of sense. all right, well, let's talk about Guru.

I mean, it's a great segue because everything I know about Guru other than, you know, some cursory research, and I always tell people I do about as much homework for these shows as I did in high school, like just enough to pass. So I know what Guru is. I obviously, you know, it's a big presence in Philadelphia.

first of all, tell us where Guru came out of, and where the name came from again, I would love to know, and it just, what is the product first? Like, what is the product, where'd it come from? And then we can talk about the name and everything else. 

[00:21:01] Rick: Yeah, for sure. I mean, the core of the product is to, enable employees inside of a company to instantly find the information they need without having to dig through multiple systems, messaging tools, document repositories.

Or, you know, ask a teammate, they can kind of instantly find that information. Our customers will often describe it as creating a single source of truth, for their employees to quickly find what they need. And so, that's broadly what the company does. and it also has evolved quite a bit as, you know, we're now in our kind of like, I think there's a ton of analogies to cloud and what was happening in, you know, the late, you know, 08 to 2010.

As there is now in AI, some differences too, but you see a lot of similar patterns. the name is born out of,the feeling of, you know, knowing the feeling of having confidence that you're able to find what you need to do your job. It is, you will never meet an employee at a company that, doesn't feel dragged down by the work to do the work.

Problem where you're having to dig around and find all this stuff. And,it's just zaps energy, but more importantly, it zaps, you know, bottom lines, it impacts everything from responsiveness to customers, to, you know, ability to execute across any function. It just creates this drag inside a company when you don't have this trustworthy kind of source of truth to go to.

And so, you know, that's the feeling we want to inspire is that, You know, any employee can, you know, have the feeling much like a knowledgeable teacher would,on knowing your role, knowing your job, knowing your purpose, being able to find that information. So that's sort of what led us to the name.

and, yeah, similarly have, you know, 10 years later, you know, really embrace the brand. 

[00:22:50] Jay: Iit's rare. I mean, you're like, you're in very exclusive company from just, A success. Like there's so many multiple, you know, serial founders and they may have started a couple of agencies or a couple of SaaS companies.

And, you know, but to run, to found and run companies that just become their own machine and become this behemoth and have hundreds of employees and deliver all this value and you have all these customers, like it's a very rare thing. It's cool to see, man. It's cool to see in Philadelphia and it's cool to see in general.

Who was your first customer Guru? 

[00:23:26] Rick: Yeah. it was, Pantheon. which is a, web hosting infrastructure, company. the VP of sales there, Scott Crawford brought us in, Scott Crawford and I worked together at Boomi. And so, you know, we lived the pain of not having Guru at Boomi. He lived the pain of not having Guru at Boomi.

We used to joke about, you know, the dumpster fire of a, you know, Google drive, disorganized Google drive. And, he brought us in and was number one, Boomi themselves was customer number, you know, five, I think. but, but yeah, he was number one. 

[00:24:03] Jay: I always call it the friend, the friends and family plan, like the networking, and it's just great.

I mean, it's. Like I said, it's one thing to hear that about smaller agencies and smaller businesses and, you know, nothing against those, obviously, but when you hear that was still the genesis and still the beginning of these bigger things, it is about the network. It's about who, you know, it's about, you know, building that network.

So who was the, so I kind of knew the customer was the beginning. How has that customer shifted over those 10 years? Like, who was it then versus who it is now? Are you going after the same kind of companies? Are you going after them the same way? Are you meeting these people the same way? obviously, you know, the size of your company is a little bit different than when you first started, but, who is the customer today versus who it was to start?

[00:24:44] Rick: it's definitely evolved quite a bit. Yeah. And I would say one of our biggest learnings through those shifts, was around, you know, the differences between, you know, people who are buying technology to solve a problem for a business function versus people who are buying technology for their entire company.

Right. you buy zoom, you're buying zoom for your whole company to be able to do meetings together. you buy salesforce. com and so your sales reps and your sales leader can forecast sales more effectively, right. To use two very classic examples. And so when Guru started, And I feel like 1 of the hardest things and you know, you were saying it earlier when we were chatting is like, you know, effectively, what becomes your product market fit, but like, what's your 1st persona that you're going to lean into and really embrace from a product feedback standpoint and a targeting go to market distribution strategy and where we started after, you know, testing a couple of different paths was sales teams.

And so, obviously pan Pantheon's a perfect doc connect to that, but you know, we were like, okay, listen, like. There's a couple of great things about selling to sales teams for this kind of problem. if their reps can't, onboard quickly because they don't have a smooth way to get the knowledge they need around the product and how to sell it and position it and all of the things, well, you're costing the company money.

And you can actually measure that because reps are hired and they're not. Cool. That's great. but also you can look at things like win rates, like reps that can respond faster and be more knowledgeable about the products they're selling sell more. They just close more business since we're like, all right, great.

Let's lean into this buyer. And so that's what we did. And,you know, a bunch of tests and fails, but where we got that initial traction, where we got to that, like first million in ARR was sales teams, growing sales teams. And we're like, look, once you get to more than 20 reps, you're going to have a chaos of knowledge sharing problem.

And, this is right as Slack was coming out. So, but whether you're, you know, without something like this,you're doing internal emails or you're. hammering each other on slack, right? You're asking the same questions over and over again and just slowing everybody down.

And so, that was where we started. That was our first buyer. there was a lot we liked about it. but, you know, effectively, if I compare it to today, Guru, You know, might still land or begin with solving a problem for a sales team or a customer support team. but it's really an operational problem that the company has.

It, there is nothing at the end of the day, unique. There's some nuances, but at the end of the day, that shoulder tapping problem that I need to quickly find my answer problem happens, whether you're an engineering sales support, HR, IT. It doesn't matter marketing. It happens across every team. And so today, and what we've really spent a ton of time figuring out is,how to enable that customer journey in a frictionless way for a company to deploy Guru across all of their teams, recognizing that there is some nuance.

There might be some integrations or workflows that are unique to each team. but in a way where Everybody has access to this technology because, it's not a departmental problem. and frankly, you know, if you sort of just use any product in this space, not just Guru in one department, you're in some ways exacerbating the problem.

Cause you're creating a, another silo, another place where someone has to remember like, oh yeah, I go to this wiki. If I want to know about this, I go to the intranet for that. I go to these slack channels. If I want to know about that cognitive overload. Drags everybody downwhat you want to be able to say to the employees, you know, you just go to this one place and it doesn't really matter, you know, all those other things get integrated in.

so that's been the biggest journey. And so now the whole focus of the company is enabling teams to get started in a very easy frictionless way. and get some wins and. And get some first projects, but then be able to deploy Guru across their whole business. Cause that's really where we can add the most value.

[00:28:51] Jay: Is one of the problems or barriers to entry for you guys, companies worrying or wondering how they're going to get all the data into Guru? 

[00:29:03] Rick: It was for a long time.and, about two years ago, that exact thing, combined with the Rasa generative AI. Led us to say, we are going to remove that as a concern.

And so, you know, you go into a company today and, you know, marketing is using notion and engineering is using confluence and sales is using, you know, some sales training tool and support is using Zen desk. For their customer help center, but they're also trying to make it work for their internal knowledge.

You know, that's the environment you walk into today. Oh, and then there's, you know, amazing knowledge being shared in meetings that are getting recorded, but lost, amazing conversations that are happening in messaging tools, that can be hard to find. That's the situation. And so we said, all right, that's the problem solve, which is.

You're never going to convince all those people to move everything. I think historically we thought about this space when people say things like single source of truth. They thought that meant you have to literally move everything into one storage place.it's actually, I actually think that is completely redefined now.

And the single source of truth is, An access point of view. I want to go to one place to access everything. If it's in slack, great. Keep it in slack. If it's in a zoom transcription, great. Keep it there. If it's in notion or conf, great. Keep it there. And so, you know, using a lot of our integration background from Boomi.

we built a ton of infrastructure around connecting into all these different sources from customer data to document repositories to messaging tools, so that you can create this one place of access, regardless of where this stuff may live. And I think that's been, I think you framed it perfectly.

It eliminates that friction that happens otherwise up front of, Oh, I got to go do all this work, you know, before I can start seeing value. 

[00:31:01] Jay: Right. that was my thought. I was thinking through, like, if we implemented that here, but I love the access. You guys made of the perspective being like, it's an access point, not a repository.

And that seems like a really powerful shift because then you can, like you said, you can lean on, not only can you lean on integrations, but you can also lean on integrations that you guys are really good at. Right. So it's like a double whammy. Like you get the benefit of all your experience, layering that into a platform.

It's beautiful. I feel like I can talk to you for about a year. I think we're up against it right now, but we'll definitely do this again sometime. I have one more question for you. Non business related, non Boomi related, non Guru related, just Rick related. You ready for this? 

[00:31:44] Rick: I'm ready. 

[00:31:46] Jay: If you could do anything on earth.

And you knew you wouldn't fail. What would it be?

[00:31:56] Rick: it would be in the world of music. that, brings me the most joy, I would say. you know, my family and my friends bring me the most joy, but in terms of like, like pursuits and To your question, It would be something around, it would be something around music.

it's such a broken, there's so much broken with it right now. In some ways it's thriving and the artists have come out of COVID, zero to 60. and I was really worried about that during that time. And it has so not only back, but arguably like. than ever. And it's really wonderful.

but there's still this business side of it that is just such a, you know, disaster or tragedy or kind of pick whatever word you want to use and like greed, you know, whatever, right? Like it, there, just appears to be a ton of opportunity around, you know, Artist first,product offerings, experiences, things like that.

that I think that is what I would pursue because, of your point where, it wouldn't fail because I would never want to do anything that ruined, you know, my like love of music. Right. But. but then you told me it wouldn't fail would definitely work. Then that risk is off the table.

And so, yeah, I think that would be, something that would be like, you know, massively, fulfilling and awesome. 

[00:33:13] Jay: Yeah. I love that answer. When is DJ Rick's next show. 

[00:33:18] Rick: You know, I'd tell you, man, I'm like trying to get gigs. It's, I've hit a bit of a dry spell. from being honest, you know, we do town halls every month and I insert, a song at the beginning of the town hall.

And then I play one at the end. So that's like the closest thing I would say I have now to these songs. 

[00:33:36] Jay: I've actually, I don't know if it was LinkedIn or somewhere. I heard something about these songs that you play. So they have, you're definitely, you know, I think there's a comeback. I think DJ Rick is going to do a, Hey, look, man, if you book a show, I will be there.

I promise you, 

[00:33:48] Rick: I appreciate you. I appreciate, 

[00:33:50] Jay: I would definitely be there. All right. Well, Rick, if you want to reach out to you directly for anything they heard today, what's the best way to reach you? Is it LinkedIn, email, et cetera? 

[00:33:59] Rick: LinkedIn, if you search my name on LinkedIn, you'll find me. I spend most of my, of the different social things, most of my time there.

[00:34:08] Jay: Me too. I don't know if that's fortune or unfortunate, but I too. And how do we find Guru? Is it Guru.com? 

[00:34:13] Rick: GetGuru.com. 

[00:34:15] Jay: GetGuru dot com. 

[00:34:16] Rick: G U R U.com? Yes. 

[00:34:17] Jay: We'll link that in the show notes. Rick. 

[00:34:19] Rick: Thank you. 

[00:34:20] Jay: Let me tell you, man, it has been a pleasure. I legitimately, just love everything you do. you've got a real genuine, streak that I think has carried through at least the stuff that I've seen you post and talk about and just like, a, you're a great human being.

You're a great business guy. You seem to be a great, you know, owner of companies. And I think everybody I've talked to that works at Guru or anywhere, you're Anybody that's ever worked you, has been positive and just love everything about you. So thank you for what you do for the city of Philadelphia.

keep up the great work and we'll catch up again soon. All right. 

[00:34:52] Rick: Well, thank you, Jay. You're too kind. I love chatting with you. Thank you. 

[00:34:55] Jay: See you, buddy. Later, bro. 

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