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BOLL&Branch.com today. Exclusion Supply, seaside for details. Here's a cool fact. A crocodile can't stick out its tongue. Another cool fact? You can get short-term health insurance for a month or just under a year in some states. United health care short-term insurance plans are designed for people who are between jobs, coming off their parents plan,
or turning a side hustle into a full-time gig. Underwritten by Golden Rule Insurance Company, they offer flexible budget-friendly coverage with access to a nationwide network of doctors and hospitals. Get more cool facts about United Health Care short-term plans at UH1.com. Welcome to the Mr. Beacon podcast. It's great to have you here. It's been a while since we've
done one of these shows. We've taken a break. Today, we're going to be talking about IOT infrastructure, the gateways that connect these trillions of things that we expect to go online over the next few years and the way it's managed. These are the details that really become important when you start to deploy at scale. So I'm really pleased to have Steve Gorettor of Ricardo. We've had Ricardo on the podcast before, but things have moved on a lot since that
episode. It's time for an update. This is episode 199 of the Mr. Beacon podcast. We're coming up for the 200 episode. If you have any other subjects that you want to see covered, if you have companies that you think we should be talking to, then let me know. We're here to share information and to learn and to have fun in these conversations. This is a conversation that was great. Steve and I get into strategy. What's happening in IOT? We do a thorough explanation
of the Ricardo offering and we look at where it fits and what the use cases are. So it's a good one. Enjoy it. The Mr. Beacon Ambient IOT podcast is sponsored by Williot, bringing intelligence to every single thing. Steve, welcome to the Mr. Beacon podcast. It's great to have you on. Thanks for having me, Steve. I'm looking forward to this. Really enjoyed listening to episodes before me and always welcome a conversation like this. Well, you may have even heard your colleague on the show.
I don't know how long ago it was probably two or three years ago, I guess. So I'm pleased to have Ricardo back on. Full disclosure, Ricardo and Williot are working together being deployed as we speak here, a very large retailer. But we started talking before there was any partnership and I think what you're doing is super interesting. This whole business of how do you manage very large networks of IOT infrastructure is really critical as we scale from the Internet of Expensive Things to
the Internet of Everything to Ambient IOT. I think you guys are really smart. You found a very interesting niche and you have a really interesting strategy, interesting product. So let's dive into it and tell us what's today's pitch on what you do. Sure. So Ricardo provides a connectivity solution in the form of software and hardware. In some cases that helps connect all these millions, billions, someday trillions of endpoints in IOT to the cloud and also makes that manageable.
We like to think that we're making IOT more like an IT service. IT managed service just like you would have for Wi-Fi and other connectivity applications. IOT has been kind of the wild west with not enough standards and a lot of implementations that have may have security vulnerabilities or might not scale. They sort of stall out at the concept phase. We like to bring this layer of management and connectivity flexibility so that not only do the solutions work but their future proof or
additional use cases in the future that customers might want. Excellent. Well there's a lot to unpack there I would love to talk a bit about. That whole standards question and the way the management frameworks are going generally. What do you see in that landscape? We've got giants like Cisco with spaces who are moving in this direction and where you fit in and where you see the industry going. Let's make sure we do a thorough update review of the offering. I liked and was interested
in the point you made the fact that you have a hardware solution but it's not always there. It's also a software solution. Why would you sometimes have your hardware? Why not other times? We like to talk about unified networks. Unified IOT networks meaning you can have multiple types of endpoint sensors, electronic shelf labels, different devices that are all running in one common
network infrastructure and in some cases that means a dedicated gateway and IOT gateway. In our case we work a lot in Bluetooth low energy so we have Bluetooth gateways that customers use but more and more we're seeing customers want to leverage existing network infrastructure that might already have a Bluetooth radio or have some other IOT interface that they want to take advantage of.
Really every implementation is different even within a customer and some sites they might have Wi-Fi access points that can run our software in a container and facilitate all these capabilities and other cases they might not have something or they need something new that's a dedicated network to do that. In our case what we really focus on is what is the topology that they're going for?
What is their IT policies allow? What type of devices are they connecting and then in some cases they might use hardware from us in the form of our cascade gateways but increasingly they might just take software and deploy it on their existing devices or even a telematics gateway and the trucks that are moving around the country for their product. What cascade has a very northwest field to it? What do they look like and tell us a bit about
what the features are of the hardware? Yeah, old one up here for those that are actually seeing the video. This cascade gateway here it's about the size of the smoke detector smaller than a Wi-Fi access point and this particular model typically connects to the cloud to the internet using Ethernet or LTE could use Wi-Fi as well but most of our customers use it with Ethernet because you
can power it with Ethernet as well so you sort of get a two per one there. And then it connects it basically works as a Bluetooth connectivity device for all the sensors in the network so it can connect thousands of different endpoints whether they're willy tags or electronic shelf labels, leak detectors, motion detectors, air quality detectors. So it has edge compute on it that we run our software on obviously out of the box and that it's managed by a cloud application
we have. So many customers will deploy this cascade gateway in spaces where they are deploying these new IoT use cases if they don't have Ethernet handy and they want to use LTE that's an option as well.
Okay and a simplest level it seems like the gateway is a way of converting Bluetooth traffic to internet protocol traffic and but you have some different connectivity options and you kind of it sounds like there are multiple you can be a gateway for multiple things so you could have an infrastructure that has electronic shelf labels tags to do asset tracking or inventory tracking and I'm assuming you can also be a gateway for condition monitoring sensors that are looking at
refrigeration units or motors. How many how many different protocols or devices do you support? It seems like you've almost got like an app store for those different things that need a gateway. Yeah there's a there's all library that we've worked with. We call them recipes, device recipes, sort of similar to device drivers or apps and a lot of is based on the OEMs of partners we've worked with that have deployed in customers and they come to us with the device and say hey here's
our sensor and the customer wants this can you help us onboard it. What are the value that we're bringing here is there's really two things one is taking these kind of unmanaged BLE sensors and devices that don't have any real intelligence on they're just passing packets up into the cloud and we're helping to to throttle that to make sure that it's not you know sending so much data that it adds a cost element into the cloud or over the the mobile connection
if that's the case that gets out of control. So we help optimize the amount of data that is being consumed by those IOT use cases and then we also bring flexibility to to have a variety of use cases though the economics of IOT especially this commercial IOT space that we're in don't
typically just hinge on one use case really what customers want to do is be able to deploy this technology maybe they have a couple of use cases in mine right away refrigerator monitor and asset tracking but they also want to see you know a future proved solution where they can add
things you know down the road and just by creating a new software recipe from regato and rolling that out into their installed base of gateways or or other network infrastructure get that value so that that's really what our special sauce is we don't build sensors we don't make
the application that is you know displaying sensor data in front of the end users anything like that we're really a data on-rand or those devices into the cloud and then we make sure that it's all managed and IT ready we're all to compliance things we know that those IT teams
love to have so what does it take to write a recipe who writes it how many do you have so typically we often create the recipes on behalf of a customer because we're really good at it we we've been doing it a long time there are tools that customers can make their own and we've started
to see some of that is we've gained momentum in the market but they're pretty straightforward you know they're think of them as sort of configurations of behavior you know how often should we send data into the cloud for this device when should we report certain health metrics or what metrics
should we alert on if there's a problem so the thing it's you know depending on the complexity of the device a recipe could be very simple might just be temperature data or if it's something that has more complex configuration or we need to send data down to like a electronic shelf label
it can be more advanced and in terms of how many we have I mean there are dozens and dozens of devices different flavors that we help customers install so think of it on that on that order the good thing is there's repeatability typically OEMs will have a family of devices and the recipes
will be similar between them but we can adjust them based on the make a model and what those things do what are they written in you mentioned a container what what's that all about oh so the container is our software we call edge connect which is this piece that actually sits on the
edge and and helps bring all this data you know from the edge into the cloud and that runs in Docker typically so more and more you're seeing edge compute devices things like Wi-Fi access points telematics gateways larger edge compute platforms that support Docker where you can run a containerized
software like our edge connect into and we've done a number of those integrations and that's great because you can take a very robust IT qualified solution like a Wi-Fi access point in the enterprise that is you know highly controlled secure and add this type of capability from
regatta without having to do a complete requalification of of every aspect of the system a lot of times they like to do that anyway but Docker provides that kind of sandbox for us to run in and we manage all that through a network management application we call edge direct which is akin to how
you would manage say a Wi-Fi network you know you have a list of devices and policies and profiles you can upgrade them you get health alerts there's an API to send it to a single pane of glass upstream and so like I said we've tried to bring an IT managed nature to IoT here with with our solution
very good so what what does the landscape look like in terms of Wi-Fi gateways and other devices that are supporting Docker I mean it seems like we're going from appliances that kind of had a monolithic firmware stack to kind of another compute platform that's available to to kind of
offload things and make things more flexible sounds like a good idea but it also sounds like it might make things more expensive on the edge devices is could you have a Docker container on a Wi-Fi access point or do you have to have like a little computer that's acting as a controller where are
those sitting I would say a lot of the the biggest function point that we saw was Wi-Fi 6 you know the Wi-Fi 6 standard and the updating of a lot of networks to Wi-Fi 6 over the last couple of years has brought in a new generation of hardware platforms that have tons of compute power and can host
you know can run Docker and Docker images and the infrastructure providers that the leaders and the Wi-Fi a PSpace wanted that so that they could try to turn that equipment into basically a an app store you know something more than just Wi-Fi access and Internet connectivity so we're
definitely writing that way it's but you know that that those deployments take time right it can take years to turn over all the infrastructure and so it's that that's why it's been a mix of companies that want to deploy dedicated Bluetooth gateways for instance dedicated networks because it's just
faster to get you know that hardware out there sometimes but those that have updated and have access points that support Docker are definitely seeing the benefits they see how easily they can just add this in software and you know the cost to deploy a new network a dedicated network is
quite high if you have to run you know Ethernet or run power to to an end point versus just using something that's already in the ceiling so it's gradually happening but but I think Wi-Fi 6 most vendors seem to have embraced that with Wi-Fi 6 and most of them have low power wireless capabilities in the hardware already typically Bluetooth flow energy which which we like to use.
Yeah that seems to be pretty ubiquitous now the Bluetooth and the Wi-Fi access point which is always a bit confusing when you're explaining this to people who aren't familiar with that but so does Cisco the big three Cisco Aruba Juniper do they all support Docker containers?
Yeah and some in some form or fashion they all do it depends on the particular models and I don't want to you know speak to talk about their road maps necessarily but they all have varying degrees of what they'll support and and also different policies in terms of how open it is
right it's one thing to have a framework that you can run code and it's another thing to really try to become a an application store and have a partnership program that allows for that so what we find is that a lot of this tends to be heavily customer driven meaning that
you know that in the end it's the enterprise that either the retailer or whoever you know whoever's campus that device sits on that ultimately is going to control what gets installed on their devices and and so all those Wi-Fi vendors there are different stages of their evolution
in terms of opening that up and inviting partners in and so we have you know relationships with all of them and we're in the early days right now of this unified IoT network and as you are finding the right fit for the use cases and the return on investment for deploying those solutions.
Yeah I was amazed what a difference it makes having one of the largest customers on your side I mean I guess intuitively we all understand it's good to have a big customer asking for something but I compare the months even years spent on business development calls between us you know 250
person company and these massive Wi-Fi access point vendors and we had cordial conversations for years but then you have one of the really big retailers pick up the phone and say we need you to improve your support for this vendor and you know what would take five years can take five minutes
with the right phone call it's incredible yeah I nice if with I mean I've been on that side of it I was at Cisco and I've been at other networking companies and I understand you know how their priorities work as well and and it's nice to partner and do interesting things together but at the
end it's the customer that's going to win the day and so I've I've experienced both sides of it and the exciting thing is that there are enough catalysts now in the market to actually deploy these new type of smart technologies that we're getting you know customer traction behind it and
the vendor ecosystem is starting to come along and that's that's what makes us really exciting So I do want to talk about the practicalities and what you see the landscape for some of these big deployments what does that look like density of units and so forth but before we go back there
one of the things that's been on my mind is where are we at in terms of standards around management because I remember way back when it was all about SNMP simple network management protocol and then there were a set of network management tools and if you supported SNMP you could fit into that
framework and you could have interoperability between some of these big management consoles and other vendors what's happened there and what are the standards that are people using today can you blend what you're doing in with a Cisco spaces or how does it work yeah you can a lot of it you
know and I yeah I was I was there in the days of SNMP and then on the broadband side of transition over TRO 69 and different standard ways of managing and devices in the IoT space it's certainly been more of a free for all there's there hasn't really been an overarching standards body that's
coming and says here's how devices should work now some of the the major cloud vendors have stepped in and created you know their own version of that right you had AWS with green grass and Azure has created their own device you know device interoperability device certification program
and we certainly jumped in on on both of those because you want to be compliant and working that ecosystem and that's actually been very good for us but I think a lot of it is actually just moved upstream Steve I mean what but what we see is we have our device management system
that talks to our say our edge connects software our cascade gateways and it can see the sensor devices on their behalf but more and more a lot of that control is moving upstream into either you know vendor owned or a lot of times customer built solutions where they have their own
you know control their own operational OSS tools and the standard is really become security you know the the info sec testing of your platform to make sure that it's not going to get compromised and make sure they have an API that can get the data northbound into their system so we spend less
time worried about a endpoint a standards body for an endpoint management system and more so about reliability resiliency of our platform that is collecting data over a standards a MQTT but is also feeding information northbound I think I think that's just how things have evolved
there's never going to be one real IOT management standard you have to be flexible because in the in the meantime customers have created a lot of their own management platforms and they just want to see it all in one place so do you interface with Cisco spaces or is that essentially a competitor?
we can we've done work with Cisco spaces you know there there's a there's a lot in there and that portfolio for them you know they a lot of that is focused on I would say the enterprise Wi-Fi management and command and control Wi-Fi client endpoints and they've just started touching on IOT with it
but certainly if you we've had customers that had used that solution and said hey we would like to you know co-lake locate that with IOT sensor data and of course the answer is is of course but one thing that we're mindful of what we've seen is that large enterprises often have a multi vendor management solution and access point solution nobody just buys one brand of access point because they want to have some vendor you know they want to have leverage they want to have flexibility
and and de risk and in certain look you know certain geographies that may be advantageous to have one vendor or the other so we've actually added capability to send the sensor data and the management data different places at the same time or depending on what location it is we can send it to one
management system or the other and we call this you know multi pipeline capability and it's been a good selling point for us because it allows you again to have that flexibility of vendors and whether it's on the access point side or on the cloud side.
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to lose one to two pound per week individual results may vary. Do you see BMC doing anything in this space they've you know have a legacy of systems management yeah so some of those systems managers yeah there is a there's a big move I would say two or three years ago we were in more in the smart
building space and in the smart building space you had this kind of interesting intersection of a lot of wired technologies and building management systems you know jobs and controls and those you know Schneider that had a lot of income and see in the buildings and we're starting to put
sensors and actuators in on wired interfaces and then companies like regado and other you know wireless companies were coming and saying actually there's a different way to do this you should you should consider this and so we've actually done some integrations with those buildings control systems
but honestly that market has moved more slowly you know there's you know there's a bigger picture issue obviously with a corporate real estate and offices and yeah and where the investment is going in there versus what we see is a real big growth area which is retail and grocery so it's yeah
we're kind of skating the world we see the puck going right now I agree that is where the puck's going and there's just such challenges in terms of food safety legislation compliance FDA FISMA 204 labor shortages the need to have more effective omnichannel better one shelf availability
I mean it gets to both the top and the bottom of the financial reporting saving and making money and you can do that if you have real-time visibility of inventory and if you're going to do that then then you're going to have a lot of infrastructure in the store so let's go back to that and
talk about what does a deployment look like if I'm going to have a big box store a best buy a Walmart or something like that how many of your gateways am I going to likely need and what does it look like to deploy them yeah it looks a lot like when you're deploying a Wi-Fi network you
know you size it you know okay here's the square footage of the of the space here's the type of space it is is it is it fairly open is it closed how many floors is it and Bluetooth low energy actually has a fairly similar range profile to Wi-Fi you might not think so because we think of
Bluetooth audio in your headsets and you know you can go very far but Bluetooth low energy has you know fairly longer range and it's a low bandwidth you don't need as much bandwidth as say Wi-Fi and so you know every a few thousand square feet we'll get covered by one Bluetooth gateway
and so you know depending on the size of the store you might you could have a few hundred gateways deployed around to create really good coverage that number goes up if you want to get into location services because then you're talking about using multiple gateways to sort of triangulate
the location of a device and so you tend to add more for that but for just typical coverage to see all the devices you would look at it like a typical Wi-Fi x point which is going back to the ap side of things which is why it also makes sense to sometimes use that existing infrastructure but
as you mentioned we're we have a deployment going on right now in a very large retailer and you know it could be 200 gateways in a store 250 gateways in the store just to be safe very interesting and you touched on the mobile piece which I think is fascinating
up until now the state of the art has been all about tracking the tractor the front bit of the truck and and then the trailer you know where are all those trailers but now we're talking about having real-time visibility about what's in the trailer and it's and it's on one hand it's
like that's a big step to start illuminating and seeing every single thing that's in the back of a trailer but once you do that you end up having this incredible platform that you have so many use cases you know misloads have I put the right thing on the right truck
am I taking the thing off at the right stop if I'm delivering to multiple stores multiple restaurants then if I have store number ones or to go to store number two then the repercussions are like threefold store number ones customers are really unhappy store number ones manager is really
unhappy because less revenue lifetime value of customer store number two gets product they don't know what to do with so that's a bunch of expenses on manpower and then they have probably wasted issues if it's perishable product and then the distributor doesn't get paid because no one that
ordered it got what they wanted and so and and then we haven't even started talking about what's the condition of the things on the way from the the DC to the store and then your in some cases your ability to start to measure the yield and utilization of the truck and the fact that
you can suddenly get ground truth as to is this truck running full or empty or half full and in some cases that can drive you to completely change the way you manage the transportation network and that has implications in terms of smaller trucks less trucks shorter distances less labor power
less fuel so I really think it's one of these things where the initial case is kind of hard because everyone looks at the single app that's going to be the one that justifies putting the infrastructure in the truck but once I see a kind of inflection point where suddenly all trailers will be
connected and you'll be able to see everything in a trailer and everyone will think well I can't believe there's a time when I couldn't see where the item was and but I don't know so I'm giving you a very positive view of this use case do you want to agree disagree qualify the picture
I just painted well I certainly agree I mean we we sort of take the granted that you know as consumers we can now track a package from its source to destination and you know when it gets delivered to our house and bringing 10 more levels of complexity where you want to start to see
not just where it is but also what is the temperature of it has it been moved has it been moved accelerated in a fashion that could damage it you know and what's the air quality been where where that says produce where it's been the whole time so we got into this years ago with with vaccine
cold chain monitoring we had large farmers farm clients that were starting to use this technology to take for instance a COVID vaccine every point from production to the point where you you receive that vaccine it is monitoring multiple times a second to make sure that it doesn't go through
temperature exclusion so I kind of always felt like that was there but what I would I still I was still impressed and surprised to see the first time where we actually had some of these large trailer trucks with a bunch of goods on them and location information and and all the
the data from thousands of different pieces in those trucks coming into a dashboard that you could just sort of get a sense of of help of it and there's so much work that has to go into getting business value out of that data but it's pretty exciting for us to be in the middle of that as a
conduit for it to to get online and then also you know look at other aspects like the truck itself you know there's there's a whole telematics industry that looks into tire pressure and you know cab safety and all these different elements but those things don't need to be completely
distinguished from each other they can all run in a unified network and we're starting to see some some interesting cover burdens there as well yeah very good well we've covered a lot anything that we haven't covered that we should have talked about in terms of what you're seeing
in this internet of things landscape well I just wanted to add on to you you mentioned you listed about seven or eight things that are happening in the retail supply chain market that I think are just really fascinating and you ever got a we we are not as I mentioned we don't build
like the end-to-end solution for anyone vertical we play in hospitality we play in pharmaceuticals retail and grocery is sort of pulled us in as a center of gravity because of those things you mentioned there's so much going on there but I'm really fascinated to see what happens in the next
eight to ten months as some of these deployments actually start and there's particularly in grocery there's just so much happening there so much focus on food waste so much focus on prices right even you look at you know people's perception of the economy so much of it comes down to you know
the price of milk that they buy and that gets impacted by how much waste occurs so it's it's really exciting for us our team is really energized by this and you know you will you to have done a lot of work to bring this to the forefront there's some exciting technology there
and works out to be a part of that yeah well it definitely takes an ecosystem and what you folks do is a really important part of that ecosystem you know from my perspective the bit that is still very much up in the air is the application side of it in my opinion because a lot of the
deployments we're doing are with the very largest most sophisticated companies who essentially write their own software and if they don't have the software they often just buy the company that it's cheaper to buy the the company than then have the completely maxed out ridiculously large
software as a service charge that they would get for the scale that they're at and you know that's great but I don't think I am not seeing the packaged enterprise applications that are really ready to scale this to beyond the tier zero the very top tier to the tier one and the tier
two and I think that for me one because it's all at the end of day it's all about apps we can have the best network the best infrastructure the best smart tags but until you have apps it's very difficult to simply unlock the value and in my opinion the first move is there around food
food safety so that's an area that we've focused on you have it's a it's a great point Steve I mean for while I feel the IoT industry was really centered around these builder platforms right you can you can here's an IoT platform you can go in you can create your dashboard you can you know
set up a data endpoint and here you go you've got a you've got a proof of concept you've got a pilot ready and a couple of days and we were a part of that motion but a lot of them stall out at the proof of concept because those application don't they don't really scale that well and the
people building them were not people that manage a grocery store day to day for example or manage a warehouse or a construction site and and so there's definitely been I think it's sort of all dressed up not yet ready to go for some of the the data that's coming in in the sensors but we need the
applications and companies that can come in and that's really what I look for when I go to some of these shows like NRF and grocery shop is I'm always curious to see there's actually building the applications that are going to leverage this and certainly a lot has been made about AI
and how that's going to impact that I think that there's an interesting convergence between IoT and AI obviously that we could probably spend a whole other show on but I agree you know we're we're we're trying to do our part which is be that data on ramp and make it easier for customers to
to get those things ready but you know someone has to be there to actually take that data and turn it into some business value yeah I think it's fascinating and my thought is some of those food safety apps may end up having a lead because they have a way of monetizing something
there their apps are being driven by legislation and today it's about tracking shipping events receiving and shipping events to satisfy the FDA but in doing that they then also have a platform that can potentially report on the cold chain which is about reducing waste
and you know maybe they can layer on other applications and much of the rest of the application industry is not down at the certainly not down at the item level or even the case level they're tracking at the palette level so I think there's an opportunity for the smart app developers
to you know build a position of strength and then land and expand out before the the monolithic giants the SAP's and the Oracle's get there but who knows maybe one of them is watching this show and has a project that's going to be ready to go to give us a call right yeah
yeah we're happy to help very good well Steve thanks for for this I think we know a lot more about your product but beyond that the landscape of ambient internet of things where which is seeing this this huge growth and I feel like we just finished the main course and next bit of our
conversation is is dessert which dirty secret wonderful you recorded so thanks so much for for for for a really interesting discussion and we'll move on to the next chapter sounds great thanks Steve so Steve you're based in Portland Oregon one of my favorite cities I live there for
for 10 years started off just off of the Pearl District on Flanders yeah right area where where your offices based we're on the other side of the river just and on the east side uh sort of neither convention center the motor center uh and I myself also in southeast but you know
Portland's a pretty small small town you can you can almost walk around the whole thing in afternoon so it's it's pretty easy to navigate that's what I love about it it is small enough to be accessible but big enough to be really interesting and uh have all those fun neighborhoods
so how what's the state of the city these days it's had a lot of bad publicity every time I've gone there then yeah there's been issues but I still love it um where is it in the uh the upswing downswing do you think as far as the growth of high tech and the livability that was that part of
that magnet for people coming to uh to the city to set up startups when they were kind of in uh Bay Area recovery mode yeah certainly isn't where it was say five or six years ago where you know Oregon was one of the most moved to states in the country for a couple of years and
a lot of friends and colleagues were moving up here low cost of living you know high quality of light and you know that that all changed you know given some some changes to the Oregon tax code on corporations and the pandemic and things really kind of took some of the wind out of the sales and
where one point Portland itself downtown Portland was a recruiting tool for companies if you had an office in downtown Portland you know you would recruit off of that and now it's as it adds to the flows now it's kind of out towards the suburbs where there's more space you know it's
easier to um put in a manufacturing or a data center something like that and uh some of the challenges with the the downtown scene and retail have really hit so it's it's a bit of a downswing I think eventually hopefully it'll come back uh as as Portland often has in the past
and um in terms of startups there are certainly you know still a good startup culture here in Portland companies doing interesting things I like to include regato in that conversation and uh there's always um you know a need for talent and that's you know what we're always looking for
and uh companies that are maybe larger entities that want to a satellite development center or want to you know pick up a company that's doing something interesting um still look to Portland I think yeah I I have a huge amount of respect and affection for that city so let's get into the music
choice uh it was the hardest part for our guests sure what were the three songs that you chose and why yeah so my my my three songs I'm gonna go through a couple of different eras actually so as uh as growing up in the 80s I wanted to start with something from that era as a kid uh love the
movie back to the future and uh hit song from hewie Lewis and the news power of love uh came out it you know sort of a typical 80s song with the classic 80s movie um lot of fun great way to kick off a movie and uh hewie Lewis really cool guy by all accounts uh and uh so wanted to start off
with something fun like that I love that and um that that delorean is uh still iconic and um I saw it when I was at uh universal studios um yeah about two weeks ago and I feel like it's getting a second life through the Tesla cyber truck it's essentially the delorean I'm Leon steroids um so
I'm very glad that you had an 80s track there what what's your second one okay so second let's let's go back a little bit uh and I know you've had folks on you know a lot of a lot of good Beatles mentions I love the Beatles love British invasion uh a lot of those bands but I wanted to counterbalance
that with something from the beach boys uh so we'll start you know we'll go in with the beach boys and I get around which is you know one of their big hits from uh the 60s and I I you know love the sound love the harmonies uh it's another one that's you know pretty catchy and also sort of kicked off a little bit of a rivalry between the Beatles and the Beach Boys I think it's mostly friendly but uh I thought it'd be nice to to balance that out a little bit it just every time that song or for a
song from those albums comes out it just kind of feels like summertime on the west coast and and uh so I want to pick that one yeah that that rivalry was was real by by all accounts and it kind of you know that creative competition it's a bit like the creative competition that we have in our
industry I certainly look at what other folks are doing and it inspires me and uh uh tries me to raise our game so very good and number three uh nor three will go more recent and something I consulted my my kids on which is uh panic at the disco nine in the afternoon
and uh I really you know this is from kind of the mid 2000s but they you know a hit they had which I actually took my daughter to her first concert a couple years ago they're final tour uh they played the song you know again another catch you won probably made famous in the rock band
video game people were playing that all the time uh modest hit on the radio uh but uh just a a good good song fun song and and you know you always have those memories of taking your your kid to their first concert and seeing their reaction to live music and how you know how it
just enthralls them and so decided to go at that I yes I have deep in my memory banks I took my youngest son Sam to a depeche mode concert up in LA and we were the only people that weren't wearing black leather uh and he was so young that he actually fell asleep in the middle of an incredibly
noisy track but it's been a bonding experience for us as well um so I I completely get why you chose that one uh two well those are three great choices Steve thanks very much for those and thanks so much for coming on to the show Steve thanks for having me on it was a lot of fun being touched
well I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did I always think um these podcasts are good when I feel like I could sit down with our guests with a martini and an ice meal and continue the conversation and that's definitely the the case here uh I want to thank Aaron Hammock for
editing the episode and thanks and farewell to Brooke Ellsworth in trepid intern who has done a lot to help me in organizing the distribution of these books uh gone back to finish her college and we wish her well and thank her and most of all we thank you I really really appreciate it your
interest loyalty engagement especially if you've gone this far in the podcast is something that I really value and I hope you continue to support us with your active listening until next time and see you on decent! What a Warby Parker dot com slash covered to try five pairs of frames at home for free. Warby Parker dot com slash covered. Do you ever feel like your brain is on overdrive and your mind is constantly racing? The plans, worries and to-do lists are never ending.
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