Mike Anderson - Founder and CTO at Tealium

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) If you want your team stacked with humble, outcome-driven, technically capable people, then you'll want to set up a CLEAR review. CLEAR stands for Complimentary Leadership Evaluation and Review, and we created it for teams and technology leaders just like you. So here's what you'll leave the CLEAR review with: a clear step-by-step plan tailored to your exact situation, tactical insights on how you can apply these skills immediately, and a review of your leaders' abilities so you can see how your team stacks up to 500 other teams that are just like yours. And we'll answer all of your questions about how to create better leaders faster.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41) Remember, great leaders grow companies. Visit leaderbits.io/clear to set up your CLEAR review today. Today we are talking to Mike Anderson, the CTO and co-founder at Tealium, and we discuss how tribal knowledge is vital in engineering, tips for having candid conversations with your team members, and how to achieve bigger goals than you ever thought possible. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:13) This is the Modern CTO podcast. Hi, Joel, how are you?

(Mike Anderson at 00:01:28) Fantastic. Fantastic, buddy. How are you? You're looking sharp.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:29) Thank you. I'm getting ready to roll this morning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:32) I love the green screen background of the hotel room.

(Mike Anderson at 00:01:37) Of the Minneapolis downtown hotel, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:41) So first of all, I'd like to compliment you again on the offices. Your offices are by far the most beautiful thing. They're like art.

(Mike Anderson at 00:01:52) That's good. That's really good. I mean, when we started the business, we were only three people. We were pressured by our first venture team to move to the Bay Area. They said, "You guys should move up to the Bay Area," and we said no, we want to try to do this thing in San Diego. And San Diego is a great town. But we designed our first office, and our first office was a little stiff. It was very functional, but it was kind of if an engineer had designed it. And then the second time around, when we were growing so much, we moved into a second building. We thought, "We're going to spend the extra time." We had some designers. We had a lot of people just put in their input as to what we wanted, and yeah, we tried to build something that we thought would be really nice and really appealing for people to come work. And then we started taking advantage of, in San Diego, we're hosting events now. We just did a Girls in Tech event last week, and we've hosted job fairs and things like that. So it's, I'm really proud of it. It's a great place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:05) Yeah, well, it's absolutely beautiful. Is there a way people can, do you have pictures on your website of it?

(Mike Anderson at 00:03:11) You know, I think we do in the job area. I mean, I think we use it as a recruiting area. But I know we were showcased in Tech Cribs a couple years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:24) Oh, I never heard of that before.

(Mike Anderson at 00:03:26) Yeah, yeah. Look it up. Tech Cribs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:30) It's pretty self-explanatory if you grew up.

(Mike Anderson at 00:03:34) Especially where you are too, right? There's a lot of cribs out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:38) Oh yeah. Because, you know, it was funny watching that show. So many of the celebrities would buy houses in Miami or Florida, on the coast, on the water. And so, yeah, definitely lots of really cool cribs out here. But the way your office is set up on that hill where you can see the other hill, it's just, it's like out of a movie. It's pretty neat.

(Mike Anderson at 00:03:59) It's pretty cool. Yeah, I'm happy with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:01) So that's where you guys are today, but let's take it back to you and your first experience with technology. How did you fall in love with technology?

(Mike Anderson at 00:04:09) So I fell in love with technology because I needed to figure out something to do after I realized I wasn't going to be a professional musician. And I got tired of living in my mom and dad's house and thought I've got to do something else. So I actually took a programming class at a junior college. And I mean, again, I'm probably 26, 27 at this point. Took a programming class, was pretty good at it, had a flair for it. We had a competition within the class to write a program that would play Battleship against another student, and it would have to try to pick what the best algorithm was to detect where the ships were and blow them up. And I won the competition. So it was something that I started to get pretty passionate about, and I thought, "This could work." And so I went to college for it.

(Mike Anderson at 00:05:14) And then everything just happened so fast. My senior year of college, the second semester, there was a company nearby that was hiring some junior people. And so I applied, ironically got the job, and started working as a junior engineer. I hadn't graduated college yet, but then it was literally probably six weeks later that I got a speeding ticket driving into work. And I thought, "Traffic school is something you could do in the state of California." There's probably other places around the country that you can, but it was always detention for adults or time out for bad drivers. And you can get comedian ones, and they're fun sometimes. But I thought to myself, "This would be so cool if you could do traffic school over the internet." And a guy was sitting right next to me, and he said, "That's a really good idea, and we should start this business." And so I went from immediately working as a junior engineer to becoming a founder within six weeks. And that's been the last 20 years for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:25) Wow. That's exciting, man.

(Mike Anderson at 00:06:25) Yeah, so it was a great, the traffic school was a great company. You know, it had that startup energy where it was literally coding around the clock. I would get up at 7:00 a.m. and be in the office by 8:00. I would code all day. I was the only one running the business. My two partners kept their jobs, and then they would show up about 5:00. And me and another guy, we would code until about 10:00 at night. We would go home, I'd wake up with insomnia at about 2:00 a.m. and code till about 3:30 and then go back to sleep. And we did that seven days a week for six months. The only change we made was that we cut out on Sunday nights at 8:00 so we could go home and watch The Sopranos. That's what we did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:22) Yeah. Now did you shower at the YMCA like Musk?

(Mike Anderson at 00:07:27) Yeah, yeah. It was probably a lot of bad dietary choices back then.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:35) Yeah, I understand that. But you did what needed to be done to get to where you wanted to be. And that's super respectable. Now the company that you founded, that's been around since what, 2008?

(Mike Anderson at 00:07:48) 2008.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:49) 2008. That is not the online traffic school. That's Tealium. What was the inspiration behind Tealium?

(Mike Anderson at 00:07:57) So I left the traffic school after about four years, and I had made the decision that I was a really good startup CTO, startup entrepreneur, and this company needed to grow. And so I bowed out. I like to think I bowed out gracefully and told my partners, "We need to bring somebody else to take this the next leg of the race." And I took a year off. I didn't do anything for a year. I got a dog and pajamas, and that was it. And so I tried to figure out what I wanted to do next, and I started researching this San Diego company called WebSideStory, which did real-time analytics. And I thought, "That's very interesting for me," and I felt like that was where the puck was going, and so that was where I wanted to skate to. So I went there, got a job there, and did that for a number of years, was very successful there as a normal contributor. I was just on the engineering team, but I quickly made it onto the architecture team, did that, and then all of a sudden, our competitor, a company out of Utah called Omniture, comes in and buys us, right? Very, very unexpected. And this was probably around October 2007, and I thought, "This is, first off, it's hard when you get bought by a competitor because you've competed against them so much." But the second piece of it was they were based out of Utah. They were going to run everything out of Utah, and I like to be kind of a heartbeat kind of guy. So I like to be where the action is happening, where the decisions are being made. And I thought, "I'm from San Diego. I'm not moving to Utah." So that was an easy choice to kind of look at something else.

(Mike Anderson at 00:09:59) And then I started looking at some of the strategy that they were thinking about doing, and what they were thinking was this was really going to be a rip-and-replace strategy where they were going to have me in particular, because I knew both software platforms, have me rip the WebSideStory software out from their existing customers, which was about a thousand customers, and just put the new Omniture software in place. And I thought, "This just isn't very customer-friendly."

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:42) That never works.

(Mike Anderson at 00:10:42) It doesn't work. And the thing that worried me at the time was I did not think that, ultimately, the combined entity got bought by Adobe for about 1.7 or $1.8 billion. I thought that they were going to get bought, but I didn't think, I would have never guessed Adobe, but I thought Oracle was going to buy them. And then I thought, "Here's a company that has an extremely fixed schema because of their relational database platform." And I thought, "I'm just going to be doing this again with the same set of customers where I'm going to be doing a rip-and-replace. I'm going to rip out the Omniture code that I just spent a year putting in place, and then I'm going to put in place some Oracle code." So I didn't think that was good for customers, and I didn't think that was a good plan. And you're right, I don't know that it ever works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:17) Oh, it's always expensive, and it takes a lot of time. And then it's, just change the logo and make the UI slightly different, but don't rip out everything. I mean, just buy them for the revenue and the brand.

(Mike Anderson at 00:11:30) And then you get to the point where you never quite get to parity either, where it's, you know, "Well, with this solution, I had this and this and this. Where do I see that? Where do I get that?" Oh, and then it's just a big letdown for everybody, and they don't focus on what they're getting, but they really heavily focus on what they're missing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:48) And that's after the data team rips their hair out with the ETL for six months.

(Mike Anderson at 00:11:53) Yeah, yeah, exactly, right. And the technology people are pissed, and they're upset about it. So we tried to devise a better way that we thought would be more customer-centric, and so we created Tealium to really insulate and future-proof customers from having to do this rip-and-replace by, instead of using proprietary deployment techniques for a software vendor, they would just use their own sort of germane dataset and data definitions, and then we would use mapping techniques to map the data to where it needed to go. So I think it's held up, and I think we were right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:37) So you leave WebSideStory after the acquisition instead of doing rip-and-replace. You go over to Tealium, and you start building this empire. And what's the core function of Tealium?

(Mike Anderson at 00:12:56) So when we started Tealium, I had an affinity for the customer side of things. I was an engineer at WebSideStory, but I was always on the edge of getting on customer calls and going and seeing customers because I was helping them with their deployments and their implementations. So I always had that customer-facing gene, so to speak. You know, not many engineers have it. I think more engineers need to have it, but it's a switch that flips somewhere in your career. And once it flips, it never goes back. And I think some of the most successful engineers are the ones that can sit in front of customers and actually, I mean, I'd love it when an engineer can do a little bit of a sales pitch. I think that's just amazing. But my strategy there was I was looking at these other businesses. I was looking at the way that they had done things in the traditional, you know, "Oh, well, at Oracle, we did this," and "Well, at Salesforce, we did this." And I thought, "I want to do this a little bit differently. I want to reinspect the factory on this." And the first thing was, normally, customer success and sales are very tethered together, and I didn't like that model. You know, sales guys are sales guys, and they have a great job, and they're very important. But you don't always want to talk to somebody who was trying to sell you something, especially when you're dealing with software.

(Mike Anderson at 00:14:27) And so I thought about it, and I wanted to couple customer success with engineering. And I thought, "This is going to give me much better feedback into the product. This is going to let me know what the customers are thinking, and it's also going to bind engineering to the customer success organization knowing that they're part of the same team." And so when a customer's unhappy or software's not working quite the way that they want it to or they want some new features, I have engineers to fall back on. And so for me, that was maybe the big core strategy that I put in place early on was that I wanted to own all aspects of the product and how the customers use them, and then we would figure out how to link sales and customer success when it came time to do upsells and renewals.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:18) So why do people buy from Tealium? What's your core offering?

(Mike Anderson at 00:15:25) So if you go back 10 years, people had bought into this idea that they needed analytics, and they needed to have insight into what was going on on their website, on their mobile apps, maybe even some of the advanced people in their stores. And that was sort of the de facto solution. And we really helped pioneer that market, and so we understand it very, very well. Then what you've seen is you've just seen this explosion of vendors that provides technology solutions that use that sort of same data collection technique, which is sort of the direct pixel that's making a web request back to some sort of collection system and then compiling and putting all that data together for analysis. And so what we saw was, and you wouldn't believe the growth. It went to where there were 500 companies in a year, and now today, there's probably 7,000 or 8,000, maybe even more. And there's these LUMAscape slides that people have put together that have, they're not even an eye chart anymore. You need a microscope to be able to see all the vendor names on it. But they just shoved all the vendor logos into this, and it just kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller, the logo sizes. And so there's just a lot of vendors out there. And as you would imagine, the world is starting to get to where it runs on data and understanding who your customers are and trying to build a better experience for them that requires you to understand that data.

(Mike Anderson at 00:17:02) And so everybody's doing it. But everybody wants this data. And so now you get to a situation where the deployments or the launching of all this software is a really difficult task. And so when you go back ten years, people had one or two, maybe three software vendors running on their websites, running on their mobile apps.

(Mike Anderson at 00:17:27) Now it's like 90 that they're using. And it's incredibly complicated, and it's typically driven by the marketing and the BI and the data science and the data analytics areas of the team, which don't necessarily always have the engineering capabilities to deploy, especially on the client-facing products. So our software comes in and helps companies just do data orchestration, build a solid foundation of data, and then orchestrate where that goes to any and all of the vendors that you need. We help companies build their data stack.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:08) I've noticed a couple companies that are similar, at least from the sales website, like yours, come out and come into the market in the past two or three years. I know you've been around since 2008, but this data collection, universal data collection idea—but what I see is that they're mostly like services because you have to have a lot of understanding of how to collect the data. So if I'm like a company and, let's just use LeaderBits, for example. Right?

(Mike Anderson at 00:18:43) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:44) And you can tell me if I'm wrong. This will just be for fun. Right? So we've got these things where guides get downloaded, people visit the website, like, all these different events happen everywhere. And it's been ridiculously difficult to tie everything together because we're using Zapier, and we're sending stuff everywhere. And it's like, so is that something that you guys solve?

(Mike Anderson at 00:19:10) It actually is. It's exactly what we do. The idea is all of these solutions that you're trying to use, they need data. And so we say, listen, let's put all the data in one place, and let's make that data available to everybody. And I joke—my CEO hates it when I say this—but if we get the data wrong, at least it's consistent across all your systems. But the idea is let's get all the data in one place, and there's all kinds of benefits of that where engineers have to do a little bit less work, and it's a little bit more understandable for them to get this data foundation in place. And then, hopefully, what we start to do is just sort of breed this culture where companies realize, okay, I know that I need to do this. I know that I need to measure it. I know that I need to interact with my customers, so I need to have a data foundation that describes the application, the customer, the product, whatever it might be. And so that's where we sit to just help build them this foundation of data. And then from there, it's how do I share the data with the vendors that need it? How do I provide a single source of the truth for my visitor profiles so that I don't have a definition of a customer in System A and a definition of customer in System B? We want to have a definition. If I were looking at LeaderBits and I just built a very simple identity capability of, like, what a VIP customer is—maybe someone that is a subscriber of LeaderBits is a VIP customer—understanding who that customer is and that they are a VIP customer across all of your various systems is important. And there's a lot of companies that can't even do that. But then the idea is if I talk with your email targeting team, they may have a different definition of who a VIP customer is. And if I talk to your social or ad tech teams or your on-site personalization teams, they all may have different definitions of who a VIP customer is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:11) And so do you find that when you go to do these integrations and work with these companies that you end up smoothing that out for them?

(Mike Anderson at 00:21:18) We really do. We not only smooth it out, but then we start to accentuate and we start to add on to it by doing persona exercises and saying, okay, well, let's look at the types of customers that you want to interact with. And in most cases, what you'll see is you'll talk to, even in some cases, some very, very large and some very well-funded retailers. As an example, let's say that before Tealium, we were able to create four audiences, and we were able to target those four audiences. And that's what they had done for the eighteen months before Tealium was in place. When Tealium became in place within the first six months, they had taken that audience up to 96. This is an actual example of a San Francisco retailer. Multi-brand, very, very big store. They closed the gap on clothing. Let's just say that. But the idea is it's really great to see when you see the marketers and the data people struggle to understand their customers and define who their customers are and only be able to get a certain number of audiences created. And then after our software is in place, it's exponential what they're able to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:35) I'm going to look more into that because it's just been really interesting. It's funny because I'm an engineer. Right? So I grew up writing web code mostly. And then when I—some, I don't know. It just happened. Life happened so fast. Now I have, like you said, I've got like 20 JS files for each different little thing I need, and I tried piping data back and forth, but yeah. I'll definitely look more. One of the other interesting things I was looking at was video percentage watch. Like, I want to be able to develop, like, alright, this person downloaded a guide. They visited this site three times. They've watched 60% of these videos. But the thing is, everything's so proprietary. Wistia has it, but Vimeo doesn't, but this company does. And then you're having to change your video service, include their stuff, Zapier. It's just a lot of work.

(Mike Anderson at 00:23:28) It is absolutely a lot of work, and there's continuity challenges. And you're right. No software solution is going to have everything that you want to have. And that, honestly, some of the benefit that we have at Tealium is rather than putting a sort of proprietary implementation technique directly in your web or mobile properties, you put a generic one like Tealium that's very self-describing. And then, you know, you may decide, hey, this is the best video analytics company for me today. But in two years, they've stopped innovating, and there's a new company that's coming that you're really, really excited about. The idea to go back and change, to rip and replace that proprietary code on the page and put a new one—with Tealium, you just go in and flip a switch and say, I'm done with this vendor. I want to add this vendor, and then this is the setup. This is my account, and you're ready to go. It's literally a number of clicks to get something up and running.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:25) So you guys a billion-dollar company yet?

(Mike Anderson at 00:24:32) Depending on who you ask. You have a little unicorn going on?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:33) Baby unicorn.

(Mike Anderson at 00:24:37) Yeah. You're right. We're like a quarter horse unicorn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:43) I like it.

(Mike Anderson at 00:24:44) Yeah. No. We're close. I think we're close.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:48) So you're right in the middle of this growth scale phase. Right? You got the startup, growth, scale phase. So when you—the team that you had when you started in '08, right, did they have all the qualities that you need today? Like, how does that difference?

(Mike Anderson at 00:25:05) So yeah. This is now starting to become my sort of mantra that I firmly, firmly, firmly believe in. And I learned a lot of it with my first traffic school business because I realized very much that I was a startup guy, and I was not a growth guy and not a scale guy. It's an interesting part of tech in that when you look at a sales or comparatively to a sales organization or comparatively to a marketing organization, the continuity is not as required. Right? With sales, you get a guy that comes in who's a scrappy sales guy, and he helps start your sales team and launch it and get it ready to go. Then you bring in a little bit more polished guy that's run this much business at this kind of a company, and then you bring in somebody big that's done it at Salesforce or Oracle or SAP or something like that. But the continuity is not essential. You can ramp a rep, and you can get them going, and you can put them in at the right time. Marketing is very similar. Right? You can take some of the marketing slogans from four or five years ago, but they don't really mean anything today. They feel a little bit stateless in comparison to tech, where in tech, you just can't say, hey, I'm just going to reboot my entire engineering team and start it all over. Right? Tribal knowledge is valuable in engineering. So the idea is how do you look at engineers and hire the ones that have those startup skills that you need in the early days? And then how do you invest in those employees to make sure that they understand how they need to change their behaviors to become a growth technologist and then to become a scale technologist? And that's an area where I have some very candid conversations with my engineering leaders, even my individual contributors on the team, and I say, listen, we're—you're great for this portion of the company, but we're moving into this next area. I need you to start doing more things like this. I need you to read these books. I need you to sign up for things like LeaderBits. We just, you know, we're a customer now. Thank you. But we're investing in our technology people because you do need to have that continuity. I'm fortunate that we started the company in 2008, but we weren't really funded until 2011. And so I'm coming up on about eight years of funding, and I'm going to be celebrating a lot of eight-year anniversaries with the technology guys that I hired as soon as I got that money. So I've had guys with me for the entire ride.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:05) So some of these individuals have been able—when you sat down, you had these candid conversations with them about their areas, where their walls are, where their boxes—they've been able to read the books and learn the skills and grow themselves to stay on the train.

(Mike Anderson at 00:28:21) It is. Now it hasn't always been a first-class seat on the train. There have been times where their head's been hanging out the window and the wind's been blowing pretty heavily. But yeah, it's my job, I think, to take these guys and to use some of my history of where my skill set broke down and sort of capped out to just be transparent with these people and say, look, this is what we need to do, and we can't do things like this anymore. We have to do it this way. And, you know, not all of them make it, but I've been very fortunate that most of them have made it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:07) The thing I like about you is that you had these direct conversations and you visualize with it, you know, by drawing the box and showing them where the company is at and where you believe their experience is at. You gave them the option and the insight to then go—you put the ball in their court where if they wanted to put in the work, they had the opportunity. And the reason why I like to call that out and point that out with you is because I've seen a lot of inexperienced leaders not know how to articulate that or identify it. And instead, they just say that person will never be, and then they move on or they try to look for something else. They don't even bring up the conversation or have that opportunity presented.

(Mike Anderson at 00:29:51) You know, there's some of it that's maybe—there may be a little bit of cowardice in the way that I do it, in that when you start a company and you—I can't even afford to take these people out to lunch in the early days. Right? I mean, it's just like, just get them on the phone, and I'm begging them to come work for my company. And I'm telling them it's a risk. And I know you've got—I know you've got a wife, and I know you've got kids, and this is a big risk. And I can't pay you. I can just promise this stock option future, which is going to take a decade to pay out. First off, you get good at sales at that point when you start trying to acquire talent. But the idea behind it is that a lot of these people took a big risk and took a bet—they bet on me to come over, and I owe it to them to bet on them and invest in them to keep them around as long as I possibly can, even if it means moving people to other jobs. And that's kind of the beautiful thing when you're in a growth phase of a company that a lot of times you can just create new jobs and say, you know what? You're going to be really good at this, so I'm creating this job because that's where your passion lies and that's where your skill set lies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:09) No. I love it. I love—I first started reading about that from Netflix, about how they were doing that really well in their culture, and that was one of the—I know they have that, you know, infamous deck, right, with all these things about them. But the coolest thing I've taken from them or that I've seen the market sort of replicate or start to do is this idea that you can go on these different missions. Your job is flexible within the organization if you speak up. And I like that because I think that's a good way to keep people on board.

(Mike Anderson at 00:31:41) It is. It really is. I had a guy—there's a guy that I worked with at WebSideStory. He was the QA engineer for my component. So we worked very closely together for the last sixteen years. And he was one of the guys that I didn't have to sell to come to work at Tealium. He was begging me about every month to give him a job because he wanted to work together again. And so a couple years in, he came up to me and he said, man, he said, I've got to tell you. He said, this is absolutely the most perfect job I could ever want. This job just fits me so perfectly. And I said, yeah. That's because I made the job around who you are. Right? It's not like I wrote up a job listing. I thought, oh, man. This guy's going to be perfect for this. It was I knew what your skill set was. I knew what your value proposition was. I knew where your passion lied, and I built a job around that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:30) Do you find—and so you're a founder and a technologist, and so you have that founder mentality. Do you find that it's hard to get other people within the organization to take risk or to act in that type of fashion? Or—

(Mike Anderson at 00:32:51) You know, I don't actually. It is very infectious. But it's like, you know, it's, again, it's a switch that you have to turn on. So you have to spend time with people, and you have to get them into this—once you get them into that mindset, you can't turn it off. I've just hired a new head of product. I have not been a guy that's built out traditional product management organizations. I wanted to own it myself. But, again, in scale fashion, I've built up a product team now. And really smart guy. I mean, I'm so thankful that he's here.

(Mike Anderson at 00:33:32) He's a fantastic talent. And so he said, "Listen, I really want this job. I really want to work at Tealium. I'm super excited about this." He said, "But for us to fast track this, you and I need to do like a road trip together. We should go to Vegas or, you know, we should go out to Palm Springs or something, but we need to spend a lot of time together and find out if we're complimentary and we can handle each other." And brilliant idea. We did it. We came out and hung out for a long time.

(Mike Anderson at 00:34:06) And I'm already seeing from him that entrepreneurial fire, that founder fire where he's just—one of my mantras is reinspect the factory, and he really is. He's looking at stuff and saying, "This is not right. I think we should do it this way. I think we should use this differently." And these are some fundamental changes about how we're doing things.

(Mike Anderson at 00:34:31) So I think people have it. I think the right people have it. And it's exciting for me to engage with them and sit down and kind of excite them and just kind of give them some of my founder energy. And hopefully they absorb it, and then they start to use it in their job. Because I think it's important. I think founder energy is essential for success.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:52) I agree. And most of the companies start to die out when the founders are gone after, you know, what is it? Like 30 or 40 years is the average Fortune 500 company length? It's like, not incredible.

(Mike Anderson at 00:35:03) My, some of my VC investors—the ones that, you know, ones that have been around since like the A round and the B round—just recently, probably in the last six months, pulled me aside and said, you know, took me out for—we had the board meetings together, but it's rare that they'll go and say, "Hey, let's go out for drinks." So we went out for drinks and, you know, immediately it just turns to, "So how are you doing?" You know? And it's like, oh yeah, feels like I'm talking to my mom. But the idea, he said, "You're over that 10-year mark. And a lot of founders get kind of itchy right now, and they think, you know, they want to go and they want to go do something else. How are you feeling about it?" And for me, I don't know what else I would do.

(Mike Anderson at 00:35:56) I love this stuff, and I love the—I don't have that much desire to go start something over. I like what we've built right now, and I love the people. And then there's this investment that I'm making in them, and I know that they've put their trust in me, and I've made my investment in them. And it's too good of a thing to move on and do something else. So I'm constantly reenergized as a founder to keep going out and doing this every day, and I don't see myself doing anything differently for the next 10 years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:31) It's like if you've got momentum, that's the most attractive thing you could possibly have.

(Mike Anderson at 00:36:36) Yeah. Yeah. It really is. And you have, you know, it's a blank canvas with what we can do in the future. And, you know, in some cases, the startup stuff is really fun, but for me, you know, now there are different challenges out there. Now there's like, there's different summits that you want to hit. I, you know, I'm looking out the window of my hotel room, and I'm looking out at the Minnesota Twins ballpark downtown, which is very cool. In San Diego, we have a really cool ballpark downtown, Petco Park, and I want that to be called Tealium Park.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:15) Yeah. There we go. Come on now.

(Mike Anderson at 00:37:18) That's the goal. That's the naming rights are up in 2026. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:24) Oh, you've looked into it. This is amazing.

(Mike Anderson at 00:37:26) Yeah. Yeah. It's a funny story. I went—I was playing at a golf tournament, and the president of the Padres came up and was doing a presentation. It was one of those, like, kind of like financial things where they give you a free round of golf, but you've got to listen to their financial pitch beforehand.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:44) Mm-hmm.

(Mike Anderson at 00:37:45) And so the president of the Padres gets up there, and so he gives a speech. And he starts asking, "Does anybody have any questions?" And people are asking—I didn't want to ask any questions, but people started asking questions that I didn't think were too bright. And so then I felt very comfortable. So they're like asking, like, "Do you think baseball cards will come back?" and, "What do you think about steroids?" And it's like, come on. These are not good questions. So I raised my hand, you know, and I just said, "Hey. Listen. When does Petco lose their naming rights for Petco Park?" And he gave me a double take. He's like, "That is a really weird question." And I said, "Yeah. I want to know." And he said, "Well, why?" And I said, "I've got a business here in San Diego, and we're growing like crazy, and I'd love to put my company's name on that park when it's available." So, yeah, that's a big goal. I mean, it's a bit of a vain goal, but that's a goal. But I would say the other—the big goal for me that truly drives me is when I look at all of my employees—and every employee at Tealium is a shareholder of Tealium stock—one of the big things I look at is this concept of new car, new house, and new life. And everybody that works at Tealium, when Tealium goes public or whatever we do, is going to be able to get a new car. Some of them get a really nice car, some will get some more modest cars. But it's how many people do I get into that new house and how many people do I get into that new life category. Right? How cool is it to say, "I started Tealium and I turned out 50 millionaires out of San Diego. I turned out 100 millionaires out of San Diego." Right? That's what drives me now because these people invested in me, and I want to invest back in them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:21) Yeah. And that's why I like you. That's why I like you because you like me. Yeah. But that's the thing that really drives the greatest people ever because it's like you can only get so much money. It's like the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Right? Like, you can have your house. You can have your car. You can have your food. You get those things covered. And then it's just about doing something very difficult, very great, and helping out a bunch of people. And it actually doesn't take that much work in life to get to that point where you're like, the only other thing to do is just to do something great. Because I've covered all of my basic needs. And that's why, you know, I listen—I read the stories of all these billionaires, and I read their books, and I just constantly am inundated with their content. And some of the greatest people, they say that some of their biggest regrets were not setting their goals big enough because they got what they set out for. It took 20 years, but they—the 80/20 rule. The 80% of the time, they get what they set out for if they put in the work.

(Mike Anderson at 00:40:28) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:29) Yeah. And so you're going to get your—you're going to get the stadium. That's easy.

(Mike Anderson at 00:40:34) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:36) Then you've got to get like 100 people, you know, into your three stages through your three stages.

(Mike Anderson at 00:40:41) Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever seen—there's a leadership thing where they put quadrants up there, and there's like a happy quadrant, there's a cozy quadrant, a boring quadrant, and a stressed quadrant. You ever seen that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:54) No. But there's three I don't want to be in. Yes.

(Mike Anderson at 00:40:57) So imagine like the top right is happy and the top left is cozy and the bottom left is boring and the bottom right is stressed. And the idea is, you know, you get people that get in that cozy quadrant. You've got to figure out how do I get them back productive. You get people that are in the boring quadrant. And so I find that life is best right between that line between stress and happiness. Right? I always want to be stressed because then when you tackle the stress, you're really happy about what you've accomplished. And then you go back, and it's just sort of a ping-pong game between stress and happiness. And so for me, having, you know, we're 450 employees now. Having that many families, having that many people that are tied to us, that keeps the pressure on. It keeps the stress on because I know that there are a lot of families that are counting on that stuff. And I'm competitive in nature, and I want to be successful because I wanted to be successful, and I think we're doing the right thing. But you take on that extra pressure of all your employees, and you think, I've got to go out there and do a fantastic job because these guys are holding down their job and I'm out doing mine, and we're a team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:12) Yeah. Before I was leading—and I would hear like, before I was a leader, I would hear that whole like, "Oh, you don't work for the—you work for the team. You work for the—the leaders work for the team." And I was like, "Yeah. Okay. You know, whatever." Then you get into the position, you're like, "Oh my goodness. Like, you actually do." Like, I exist to find incredibly great people and work very hard for them to make sure that they can get their paycheck and yeah.

(Mike Anderson at 00:42:34) It is. You become an offensive lineman real quick. Right? I mean, it's like, you guys are going to be carrying the ball. I'm just blocking and getting things out of your way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:44) Yeah. And then when you're talking about that quadrant with stress and happiness on that line, I'm living in that world. Yeah. And I didn't realize that I haven't been in the bored quadrant or the other quadrant in a long time. Because for me, it's like this—it's constantly stress, happiness, stress, happiness. But then what I found, though, is that as I go through this rhythm and I like mentally track it, I'm always like, "What zone am I in? Where am I?" You're never stuck. You're always going through something. So I'm like, "Okay. Right now I'm in the happy moment, so what I need to do is, like, need to, you know, enjoy the happiness, but don't let myself get too happy because I've got to, you know, focus and use this energy instead of running around being happy. I could use this energy to apply towards something." And then when the low comes, I'm like, "Okay. The good news about the fact that I feel horrible right now and that it's never going to work out and the sky is black is that the moment I realize this, this is the lowest point of the trough. This is the worst part is when I realized that like, this sucks and I want to die." So that means it's only going to get better, and I'm going to be on my path to a high, so then I get all positive again.

(Mike Anderson at 00:43:52) Yeah. No. It's exactly what it is. I mean, that's—it's every time you see a challenge, it literally is just an opportunity. Right? I mean, the world's not going to end tomorrow, so it's like, I don't have to fix all this stuff by tomorrow. It's just an opportunity. Right? Somebody comes in and something goes wrong, or we have a customer that says, "Hey. We don't like the way this works," or, "This is..."—we have big challenges at Tealium with scale, and we're unfortunately unlucky with the idea that we launch a new product. And then it's like, "Okay. Okay. Well, who's going to be the first customer to use it?" And it's like, I would—and, honestly, I would love it. I would love it. And, again, we'll work this out after the call because I want to get Tealium working with Leaderbits. I want to get you guys using our software. But I'd love it if Leaderbits was the type of company that was rolling out some of our new features and trying them out from a beta perspective. Because the problem I get is that I roll out a new product, and we say, "Who are the first couple companies who want to use it?" And they say, "Oh, Microsoft, IBM, the Gap, Facebook." I mean, these are all of our customers, and they all have like massive, massive volume. I am very proud of this. In 2018, Google handled 1.2 trillion searches. Right? That's a lot of volume.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:13) Mm-hmm.

(Mike Anderson at 00:45:13) We handled 3 trillion events, two and a half times more than that. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:20) That is really awesome.

(Mike Anderson at 00:45:21) It's awesome. So, so yeah. So we have to come back to the drawing board. Sometimes we'll build a product and then realize, man, we've got to do some refactoring on this stuff because it's got to scale, and it's not scaling horizontally the way that we want it to. And that's like one of the lowest points in your career when you make a design and you build a product, then you realize you've got to go switch the engine out on it. Right? I mean, like, we bet on this software platform as our database, and now we have to move off to another database. And that's like major surgery. And so those are some very stressful low points, but same thing. They're just opportunities. You get through them. And when you get out the other side, then you get to that happy phase where you can say, "Hey. Hey, Google. You're two and a half times smaller than I am from a volume perspective."

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:11) I love it. I love it. No. And so let's get you some exposure to talent. I know you have a fantastic team, but you're growing. You always need great people. You're dealing with a large volume of events. So is there a specific industry or type of person that would be a good fit for your company?

(Mike Anderson at 00:46:30) You know, that's a really good question. The gamut of employees that we have is really, really broad. I mean, from—I think if you look at the way that the industry is going, I think it's around software usability. It's around being open to customer suggestions and being able to listen to customers and be able to turn that out into requirements. I do believe that engineers, traditional engineers, need to get a step closer to the customer, and I think they need to understand the customer more rather than just having a 19-page PDF thrown onto their desk that says, "Go build this because I say so." So I think it's—I think around, you know, around the UX design, UX research, I think the world is—the world is going to be decided on usability and ease of use. And so I think if you build products that are always easy to use and easy to understand, those are going to be fantastic. I think information architecture is a big thing too. Not so much like, what do I name my documents, but how the documentation and the support documentation around content on how to use the product. So I think more video is going to come into play. And so I'm interested in people that want to take risks on product design and want to build cutting-edge usability and new design patterns, as well as people that understand that while engineering's job is to get software out of the factory, there's a whole other line of business out there that has the responsibility to put it out on the showroom and polish it up, make sure that it's well described, very usable in nature, you know, well marketed, well organized. Those are the kind of people. I mean, the creative people, people that look at apps and say, like, "Wow. I really like the design of this app. I really like the flow or feel of this app," you know, versus this other one.

(Mike Anderson at 00:48:42) And I'm going to move off of software solution X because I'm going to go to Y because I just like the way it feels. And we all have that. We have our to-do list software, and we have our calendar software, and we have our note-taking software. And we all choose different stuff because that software just connects with us.

(Mike Anderson at 00:49:01) And so I like people that are passionate about connecting software to people. I guess that's the long-winded answer, I think, in a sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:10) Well, no. I love it because I know exactly what you're talking about. Like, I will choose products over design. Like, I would choose a specific product because of its design, because I have to spend time there. It's like the building you want to spend time in. Right? But one of my favorite, just as a side note, one of my favorite docs that I have ever come across, Stripe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:34) Like, payment processor, their docs are like, beautiful.

(Mike Anderson at 00:49:38) Really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:39) Oh, yeah. I've been following Stripe since like, the first year Stripe came out because I was using this horrible thing called Authorize.net. And I was complaining about it because you had to, it was just ridiculous to use. And somebody told me about Stripe. They're like, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:55) And I literally did not believe that it was the way it was. I was like, what's the catch? You know? Like, you could just sign up and just do it. There's no, like, you have to meet with a person, go through underwriting, you know, like, all this stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:06) And then I was like, and they're built for developers? I was like, get out of here. And they won an entire industry through the hearts of developers.

(Mike Anderson at 00:50:16) Yeah. That's why Stripe won. And that's what developers want. Developers want to be able to solve their problems on their own, and that's where that whole documentation and video presentation stuff, where to showcase to developers how to do something. And then in some cases, I think you take the next step, which is to start to understand based on what the developer does in the tool to start to recommend.

(Mike Anderson at 00:50:40) Hey. These are some videos I think would be interesting for you, as new capabilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:46) And again, I want you to use more of my software. So that's the goal. That's the goal there. It's just better engagement. Oh, that's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:55) Like, personalization of how the developers are using the platform, yeah, dictating the content that gets deployed to them.

(Mike Anderson at 00:51:04) Right. Right. And that's because the idea is that in most cases, you look at software and you think, Salesforce is an easy example to attack. There's a billion things that that software does. Right?

(Mike Anderson at 00:51:17) I don't scratch the surface on it. But if you understand my usage patterns to be able to start clustering that and recognizing that other people that do what Mike does, they also do this, this, and this. So I'm going to showcase that to Mike to try to get him to use more of my software. Because at the end, I'm building a stronger advocate. I'm building a stronger champion, and I'm hopefully building better retention.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:40) Is this like a spin-out project Tealium is working on?

(Mike Anderson at 00:51:42) No. No. This is what we do. I mean, we do this a lot for like, B2C companies, but when you start to get into subscription sort of models, which, again, the world is going to subscription.

(Mike Anderson at 00:51:55) I mean, you know this. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:57) Um, you—

(Mike Anderson at 00:51:57) You know, we're looking at, you know, the subscription model vendors looking at just like churn prevention. Like, looking at somebody and saying, hey. This person has stopped watching Hulu over the last six days, and that's an indicator based on their watching patterns leading up to this. That's an indicator that this person is going to churn. And again, with machine learning, we can get down to the point where we say, this person's going to churn in seventeen days, twenty-one, and twenty-one minutes.

(Mike Anderson at 00:52:31) To react to that signal, to get that prediction, say I've got a confidence score of 85% that indicates this person's going to churn, and now try to get in front of it by reengaging them with, and I'm just using Hulu as an example because I was watching it last night. But the idea is, you know, I want to reengage, and I want to reengage with more content. Now then the idea is, what do I watch on Hulu? Like, for me, I can't sit down long enough and watch a movie, so I just have to have sitcoms cycling in the background so I can pick up jokes for my onstage presentations. And so it's a lot of Seinfeld.

(Mike Anderson at 00:53:10) It's a lot of King of Queens. It's a lot of Sunny in Philadelphia, stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:13) Come on. Yeah. Yes. We are going to hang out now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:17) I've seen every episode of Seinfeld, like, three times.

(Mike Anderson at 00:53:19) Yeah. So it's so I just have that, like, cycling in the background, but the idea is Hulu should know, and they do know that those are the things that I watch. So don't recommend a documentary on drug trafficking out of Mongolia. I'm not interested in that. Right?

(Mike Anderson at 00:53:39) You know what I watch. I watch comedy sitcoms. So those are the things. And so that if I start to disengage with that brand, with that product, whatever it is, bring me back. Right?

(Mike Anderson at 00:53:51) And bring me back by looking at what other people that are like me enjoy. That's something that we will see happen more and more. We're in a wonderful time as consumers because businesses have to get good to keep and stay with our, to keep our money and to keep our business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:12) Yeah. Well, we do that with, we got LeaderBot. And so yeah. LeaderBot, like, we have a, I don't know if we've done this customization for you, but you define like, a threshold, and we will watch the leaders as they engage in their momentum. And then when they start to fall off, like because it happens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:30) Right? Because you get busy. There's projects. There's things. LeaderBot will start sending you emails that are like, motivational and then including past entries that you've done, like when you had real big success with, like, you're giving credit to a team member and it turned out awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:43) You're really surprised. And it'll, LeaderBot will say to you, like, hey, Mike. Remember when you did this, like, with Susan or John or whatever? Like, keep up the momentum and take ten minutes and click here. And so we reengage, we call them reengagement emails.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:56) Yeah. Yeah. LeaderBot will get personal with you and motivate you. And then we have, like we designed it out, like, where he gets more in, well, I say he because it's anthropomorphic. But like, he'll get more intense with you, and then he kind of like, eases up and like, you know, then he gets more intense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:12) And so we designed this cadence for like, maximum engagement because we're just sitting back here looking at the data. Right? We're just like, how do we create better leaders faster? And that's like, our mantra here. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:25) And so when we look at, when we look at the customer, like, as much as I love the company, and I know it may be wrong to say in some regards, but like, I don't look at you, Mike, as the customer. I look at the individual as the customer, the individual using the product. Yeah. Because I know that as long as I keep making it the best possible product for that human, that everything else will come together because the company that's like, reporting features and things like that. But as long as we focus the product on being the best it could possibly be for the individual, then they'll stay engaged and continue to improve.

(Mike Anderson at 00:56:01) It's, we are going to hang out because we think very much alike. I've said to my, I say to my employees on every onboarding, and I've said this for the last ten years, if you stay close to the problems of the customer and the challenges of the customer, you're always going to build a great business. And that's, that's the way it is. And like you're saying with the LeaderBot thing, you know, I mean, one industry that needs to do this, especially with me are like, gyms. You know, like, hey.

(Mike Anderson at 00:56:31) Remember when you were working out this many days? You lost this much weight. You know, you felt good. You were improving your cardio capabilities, whatever it is. That's I think that's the world we're going to, where it's going to be encouraging people to come back and do the right things, whether it be better health, smarter, you know, remember last month when you read this book, you know, you should, this is another book that you should look at reading.

(Mike Anderson at 00:56:56) It's going to be sort of that suggestive content or suggestive action that, that I do think people want because we're so busy, and we want to be, in some cases, we want to pick and choose everything we want to do. But in some cases, it's like, listen. Just make it easy on me. Just tell me. Tell me what my next workout should be.

(Mike Anderson at 00:57:12) Tell me what my diet should be. Tell me what book I should read. Tell me what show I should watch. Because the, and then I have the choice to decide, yeah, I'm going to trust it or no. I'm not going to trust it, but you're putting more content in front of me, and that I think is key.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:27) Yeah. That, now I just need something for like, my spouse that figures out what dinner is.

(Mike Anderson at 00:57:32) Right. Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:33) I don't want to think of it.

(Mike Anderson at 00:57:33) Just let me pick.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:34) Just let me pick.

(Mike Anderson at 00:57:35) Yeah. That's right. Exactly. Right? Yep.

(Mike Anderson at 00:57:37) We could, we could make it rather than me getting you something and you being disappointed with what I get you, let's change the model a little bit. Why don't you go pick ten things, and I'll surprise you with the one that I choose. But you know that you're going to get something you wanted.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:52) So—

(Mike Anderson at 00:57:52) Yeah. No. It's a good time. It's a fun time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:56) I love it. Well, I respect your time today because it's, it's 10:30 now, EST. You have some amazing new customers to go start working with, so I'm super excited about that.

(Mike Anderson at 00:58:08) Yeah. Joel, thank you very much. This was an absolute pleasure. I'd love to do it again. This is fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:15) Thank you, buddy. Talk soon.

(Mike Anderson at 00:58:17) Take care. See you. Bye. See you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:24) Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]. If you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout-out on the podcast, whichever you prefer.