Brad Sousa - CTO at AVI Systems

(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 Brad Sousa, the CTO at AVI Systems, and we discuss how different generations consume technology, the most important factor in selling your team on change, and the promise and perils of early adopters. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) This is the Modern CTO podcast. How have things been since our little lunch?

(Brad Sousa at 00:01:27) Things have been good. I mean, really busy. We're coming up on our big annual trade show. We just finished a trade show, and then we've got events that we host. So there's a lot of that coming on, and I just submitted another article for Forbes. So that'll be coming out here in the next couple of weeks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:46) What was that on?

(Brad Sousa at 00:01:47) So the topic on that, the title is "The Promise and Perils of the Early Adopters." It's the idea that if we listen to early adopters, we really won't create wide-scale adoption because what early adopters are looking for is very, very different than what knowledge workers are looking for. And the result is you won't get the broad-scale adoption we've learned.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:17) That's interesting. You're right. And also, early adopters product-hop like crazy. I mean, that's their thing.

(Brad Sousa at 00:02:23) Right. Yeah, they're willing to put up with weirdness in the product to learn something new, and knowledge workers won't tolerate all that little geeky stuff. And the result is you need them to get the energy to launch something new. Early adopters are super, super critical to the development and innovation process. But if the objective is wide-scale adoption, then you need, we think, to design more towards a knowledge worker.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:58) That's interesting too, because as we're talking about this right now, my brain is thinking there's different types of early adopters. How do you differentiate between if I do a product and I put it out for a freemium model and get early adopters versus the first customers of Leaderbits? How do you look at it? Is there a difference? I haven't thought about this at all. This is brand-new thoughts from you right now.

(Brad Sousa at 00:03:23) Let me put it this way. Our experience has been that early adopters are really loud voices. They're highly passionate. They appreciate the messiness of innovation and what it takes to try and create something new. They're all bought into that. And so they provide a lot of really critical value in the early stages. But because they're more interested in what it does rather than what they can do with it, the result is that there's a pretty big gap when you're trying to really address something that's really focused on how it gets consumed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:00) Yeah. Lots of new thoughts for me. By the way, this, just so you know, this is the podcast. We just time. We talk. This isn't pre-talk banter or anything. I like you. The first time I felt that I liked you—this couldn't come off more awkward—it was when I read your article on, I think it was Forbes, about the multigenerational users having the same product. And that was like, will you give me the 90,000-foot view of that?

(Brad Sousa at 00:04:36) Yeah. The idea, the awareness came, the moment of truth for me came when I was having a conversation with the CIO of a large university in the Midwest. I've never worked with him before, never met him before. And my company, our team, had never worked with him. And in the first 10 minutes of a video call, he says to me, "So Brad, why doesn't this stuff ever work?" And I hear that from time to time. And so I went down this little exercise and said, "So from my side of the video call, let me describe what I think your environment is." And I explained it. He said, "Yeah, that's right." I said, "Well then, I would say to you that your system is actually working just fine. It's designed for the wrong generation." And he looked at me and went, "What are you talking about?" And I said to him, "Here's the deal. We've learned that most organizations have a minimum of three. Today, it could be as many as five, but four is pretty typical. You'll have today, unless you're in higher ed or healthcare, you'll typically have a Traditionalist, a Boomer, an Xer, a Millennial, all of those demographics in the same place. And how each of those groups or demographics view technology is super different, and the way they try and solve problems is very, very different." And that's kind of where this whole thing started. I'll share with you from my perspective, our company, we have four generations actively working together trying to solve problems. And I'm a Boomer, obviously. And as a Boomer, you're taught that the way to solve a problem is somebody gives you the problem, and you go hide away someplace and research it and come up with your best idea and bring the solution back to the team. But a Millennial, as an example, a Millennial's first action tends to be to crowdsource the solution to that problem and immediately start collaborating. And in our space, because we're all around communications and collaboration, the distinction between how people solve problems drives design. And that was kind of a big—now, yes, for a 90,000-foot, that's probably more than you wanted, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:55) No, no. That was beautiful. And actually, I think it's the first time somebody used Millennial in a sentence that I enjoyed. It's like, finally, something we actually do, because we're not breaking all the markets in the world. But we do crowdsource. It's the most natural thing for us. Like, okay, I have a problem. Let's go do some research, figure out who's experiencing this, who can I talk to. I guess we do the research. We're going for it, but we're not going for it alone. I go to research about who I can talk to about the problem and how I can get people involved that are credible as quickly as possible.

(Brad Sousa at 00:07:39) Right. And the result of that is that a Boomer will generally say, "I've researched this. I'm right. I need to convince you to change your mind." And a Millennial will say, "I'm right because many of us have arrived at the same conclusion at roughly the same time." Right? And so the interdependency on communications and collaboration and all that other kind of way people talk and communicate and work together, especially across distances, the dependency is so different. Can I tell you another story about this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:15) Yeah, please.

(Brad Sousa at 00:08:16) So think of a prototypical conference room. Two monitors in the front, camera, microphones, something at the table to control it. A Traditionalist will walk into that room and say, "That looks expensive. Why do I need that?" A Boomer will walk into that room and say, "Wow, this is complex. Who can I get to operate this for me?" An Xer will walk into that room and say, "Wow, this could really help me. I'll change the way I work so I can use this." And a Millennial will walk in that very same room, look at the same gear, the same design, and say, "This is too hard. Can't I just FaceTime?" And it's the same stuff, the same technology. It's just how is it designed differently so that different people's perspectives on how to consume technology can be adopted. That's really the driving point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:13) Now what are you saying? You're saying Xer? Because that's a term I don't know.

(Brad Sousa at 00:09:17) A Gen Xer. So that between us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:20) Yeah. Okay. I gotta look up the—I don't know. I know I'm not a Boomer.

(Brad Sousa at 00:09:28) I'm deaf.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:29) But Millennial is really large. Like, it's a really—

(Brad Sousa at 00:09:32) Super huge. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:34) Yeah. It's too big.

(Brad Sousa at 00:09:36) It is. It is. It's unfair, really, quite honestly, to label any particular group. But if you're looking at it from a demographic perspective, that kind of categorizes. When we talk about this with the market at large or customers or others, I almost always have to kind of define what I mean by the terms. And so I will say a Traditionalist is somebody who can remember, maybe if they were, if they're a younger Traditionalist, they can remember World War II. Right? Or they'll remember the Korean War, and their idea of technology is TV. Right? And then a Boomer, they remember when man walked on the moon, and they remember when TVs were wireless and phones were wired. That was kind of their view on technology. And an Xer remembers 9/11, and their view on technology is, "I used to have to go down the hall to a special classroom where they had boxes on tables that connected to this thing called the Internet." And a Millennial views this as their computer and will be absolutely fine writing a proposal on their phone and sending it to somebody. And the perspectives around accessibility to technology and what it means to move their life and work forward is so different based upon those different experiences and age groups. So that's kind of how I define it when we talk to people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:11) That's kind of how you at least give the stories, right, so that people don't get hung up on the labels. Because I can imagine Traditionalists now, your version of them. I can imagine the Boomers. And I guess I'm just in that awkward in-between Gen X and Millennial by your definitions, because I mean, yeah, I'm right in the middle of those two.

(Brad Sousa at 00:11:29) Right. And it's interesting too. Right? Because your age chronologically doesn't necessarily translate to the behaviors that most people associate with those demographics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:42) Right. That's so true, because I was super early because my father was an engineer in technology. Right? So while I had this experience of being on the Internet right when we started to get color, right when browsers came out, but my peers do not. 80-plus percent of them do not have that experience. They didn't get it until we started getting the Nokia block phones. Like, that's when they started getting technology in high school. I got it in elementary school.

(Brad Sousa at 00:12:09) Right. So, yeah. So interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:12) Yeah. I like that, though. Millennials: "Can't I just FaceTime?" So, "Can't I just Zoom?" Yeah. Right.

(Brad Sousa at 00:12:19) And that drives a lot of the innovation today, at least in our space. But I think it's true in just about any tech segment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:27) One of the things I like about meeting guests before they come on the show and developing relationships with them is, like, cool, I get to learn all of your little stories. And it's just so great. I just want to be like, "Tell that one and tell that one." But before we talk about the engineering design, before that, why don't you share a little bit about what your company is, what it does, the market you serve?

(Brad Sousa at 00:12:51) Yeah. So AVI Systems would be categorized as an audiovisual integrator or communications integrator. We've been around for 45 years, and we were literally that company that would push the overhead projector down the hallway and sell film transparencies back in the day. Right? That's kind of how we started. Today, we're a national organization. We do business in 25 countries, and our focus is really around how people collaborate visually with each other. So that includes conference and meeting spaces and all the things around AV, live venues, big outdoor environments, stadiums, that kind of thing. It includes unified collaboration and digital media and broadcast and all that kind of stuff that goes along with it. It's a great industry to be in. It's probably the most fun I've ever had in a career or in an industry has been this particular industry, and I've been in it for a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:46) You ever work with Live Nation or any of those types of companies that do the huge outdoor events?

(Brad Sousa at 00:13:54) Sure. So we just finished Texas Live, which is a really big venue. It's in between the Texas Rangers baseball field and the Dallas Cowboys stadium, and it was turned into this big outdoor live event with bands and media and food and drink, and just a great big social and gathering there. And so we were actively involved in that. Matter of fact, it was listed in one of our industry magazines. It's one of the top 10 projects for 2018. We do a lot of that. We do a lot of NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball stadiums, instant replays, media around that. So large venues, live venues, that's a big part of our industry, and it's certainly a part of what we do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:43) So help me paint this picture, because I'm getting nerdy about it. I imagine, I've been to stadium events, and I see all the people on the equipment, and who is—how does—what role does AVI play? Are you providing the equipment? Are you providing the people? Do you do the design? Like, what role do you play in that?

(Brad Sousa at 00:15:01) Yeah. So in a large sporting venue or an eSports venue, our role is typically not on-air. In the smaller markets, we might be doing the media production truck, the TV production truck, and going on-air. In the larger, main markets, that's probably not what we're doing. But what we are doing is all of the instant replay, the ISO videos. So as an example, I was hearing a story from my practice manager that manages the digital media practice, and he was explaining one of the baseball fields that he recently won and delivered a project to. He's integrating all the instant replay to the analytics on-field, so live analytics. So you're watching a baseball game and you're looking at the speed of the pitch and the rotation of the ball and the trajectory off the bat, and all of that's animated, and it's got a lot of analytics that they're sharing in stats. He's integrating video with the radar systems and the media analytics systems and putting all the AI together, and then that becomes the instant replay package that somebody in the production booth plays on-air or plays in the suites there or plays on the Jumbotron, the big screen, or whatever. It's all integrated into that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:22) So they buy, like, a plug-in type thing. Like, it's like a package. They will buy this feature of this—

(Brad Sousa at 00:16:27) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:27) So if you're going to make a sales video for the product you're selling, you're going to actually just show the instant replay that you can provide.

(Brad Sousa at 00:16:34) Exactly. And if you want to get—no, I'm going to get geeky on it. So, yeah. So we're working with a customer last week, and the idea that they're asking for from us is that they need to increase the amount of their on-air production, their web streaming production by about 20 or 25%, but can't do any additional headcount. And so what they want to do is they want to be able to, through AI, glean the news of the day from all the social and on-air sources. They want to be able to use AI to pick the media sources that they want out of the universe of available sources. They want it to then provide software that picks the best clip and then does the rough edit so that the first time human eyes actually see the video file is after all of the video selection has been made and the first edit has been attempted. All that's being done via AI.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:40) So the AI will pick the story.

(Brad Sosa at 00:17:42) Pick the story, pick the clips, pick the editing sequence, and do the first edit. That's what they're asking for from us. And then from there, they can tweak it and move it and say, "I really want this one instead of that." But instead of humans going through all of that work, humans now can focus on the storytelling part.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:03) Oh, that's brilliant.

(Brad Sosa at 00:18:04) Can work on the assembly and the discovery part. So it's pretty cool, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:10) I have an idea for you.

(Brad Sosa at 00:18:11) All righty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:12) Okay. So I worked on this project a while back, and what I was doing was analyzing news, like large sets of news, to find different stories and watch how they go and they trend. But the solution that I arrived at that I thought was pretty unique was to detect trending stories prior to them trending. I would look at the rate of how quickly the information spread between trusted sources. So think about it. If a news story comes out and it gets written about by other trusted sources, the distance in time is equal to the popularity of that story.

(Brad Sosa at 00:18:59) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:59) The most important stories, you drop everything and write. So when really big stories come along, we can tell because these stories are moving really fast through the most trusted networks. And so that's how we were figuring out...

(Brad Sosa at 00:19:11) And you did this? You created this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:14) Yeah. And then what we did was we took patterns. So we started tracking stories and networks. So I could tell you the rhythm of what's going on with how stories generally flow. And then this story will flow, and maybe you'll be a day behind or maybe six hours, maybe 20 minutes. And so we knew the rhythm of how stories flow throughout these trusted news sources, and then we could detect when they—based on the average times—when the stories would spread really fast. If they would hit, we would have a good shot. Like if a story came out on one and then hit the other in 20 minutes, that was huge because the average was like a four-hour delay. So now we knew they had a really good shot of trending. Then if they hit a third within 20 minutes, it was like 99%. Like that thing would definitely trend through the other 12. But then if you start to look at the media like eyeballs, because that's what it really is—them spreading through the sources is they're actually hitting their distribution channels.

(Brad Sosa at 00:20:09) Right. So that's really cool. Similar kind of concept we're talking about. And then you tie into that things like active speech-to-text and then doing meta-tagging through the closed captioning and doing... There's AI today that can watch the video in real time. So the software watches the video and then picks out the most prominent elements in the video and then defines for you what's happening in the video. This is a new car announcement. We're 98% sure it's a Porsche. We're 99% sure it's a 2019 Porsche Turbo whatever. And the background scene is someplace in Germany, and labels it and whatever. So all of those meta-tag data that used to have to have somebody watch and then interpret and put in is being done now through AI. It's pretty cool. And your idea around looking at metadata and trends, it's a really cool idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:08) Yeah. Because before, the only way people were doing it was like, "Oh, it's trending." If you go to write a trending algorithm, you look at your own data. How many people on my site are viewing this? How popular is this becoming on my network? And I was like, "Well, that's not going to tell you because overall in the whole industry..." So that was how we solved it. We used the Bing News API...

(Brad Sosa at 00:21:29) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:29) ...to track stories because Google and everyone else shut down their news APIs to track stories. So we used them. And yeah, it was a lot of fun project. I'm so interested to see what it looks like when it comes out. Like, are you guys—did you already take on the project or are you just talking about it?

(Brad Sosa at 00:21:46) So the elements that are needed to create that, I would say that probably three-quarters of those elements are already available. Finding ways to integrate them together is going to be the challenge. And then there's the last 15 or 20% that are going to need to have something custom crafted. So they're doing about half of what we've talked about. They're doing that today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:10) Mm-hmm.

(Brad Sosa at 00:22:10) They need us to kind of push them over the edge to get to the other place. And, you know, we love it. Those are the kind of customers that help transform who we are. And then we turn around and take that discovery and innovation and package it so that we can take it someplace else, which kind of goes back to our first topic, which is around they're the early adopter. And if we try and repackage that and just deliver it like we deliver it to them to everybody else, it probably won't work. But if we can figure out how everybody else wants to consume it and design towards that, then now we have a really cool solution there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:46) There's a guy named Bruno who's on the show. He had a company called Oru, and they're in New York. And they did advanced tagging of real-time video and replacement. So yeah. And they got—I think a month or two after he came on the show, they got bought by Adobe.

(Brad Sosa at 00:23:05) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:05) Yeah. So Adobe has some really bright people now in the video tagging space. They started out doing it because if I'm running ads on, like, let's say Facebook video...

(Brad Sosa at 00:23:19) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:20) ...I don't know the ad that just came before mine. And there are certain ads that you don't want to follow each other. There's pretty much no great public example that I've come up with. All the examples everyone's had, they go really bad. You definitely don't want certain ads like medication ads following dating ads. Like, things like you don't want certain things happening. And so they built a platform that would analyze all the objects to identify the context and where it was. And then they would allow that data to be shared with Facebook so they could make sure that ads weren't conflicting with each other in a negative way.

(Brad Sosa at 00:23:58) Yeah. So what we're talking about right now is in this kind of broader media, live media kind of environment. We spend a lot of time in what would seem to be pretty mundane conference rooms and meeting spaces. But we're seeing a ton of energy there. We introduced a concept last summer. We're kind of bringing it to product fruition, we think, maybe before the end of this year. And the idea is that when you walk into a room, the camera that you're going to use for conferencing and collaboration is also doing facial recognition. And it's looking for the person in the room whose facial identity matches their Outlook meeting invite organizer or the meeting host. And when it sees that person in the room, then it enables voice control. And then you talk to the system and tell it what you want it to do as opposed to trying to find a button or a remote or whatever. And the early versions of that have proven out to be pretty cool. There's some interesting challenges with it, but it's kind of the holy grail that everybody's looking for. You just want the system to understand what you want it to do and talk to it, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:13) You want it to know you.

(Brad Sosa at 00:25:14) Yeah. You want it to know you. But you don't want the mics on all the time, and you don't want to be storing stuff in the cloud—language in the cloud. It has to kind of stay on-prem for security reasons and all that other kind of stuff. So figuring all of that out while making it pretty natural is what we're trying to work on now in the conferencing space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:31) That's really cool. Yeah. Keep me up to date about that other project because the 10 or 20% that I think is going to be hard and unique is how you actually integrate with the video editors and processing and building those interfaces to select the clips and how that human interaction goes. I think that's the part that's not clear. All the other pieces seem to kind of be there.

(Brad Sosa at 00:25:53) Yeah. So when we get to a place where we have it operating, I'll ask our customer if we can do a podcast from there with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:03) That'd be cool. Yeah. All right. Because I'm telling you what, I like being around people who are innovating and pushing the envelope, and that sounds—I don't know, some things get me more nerd excited than others, and that one sounds really cool. Probably because we do a lot of video editing here.

(Brad Sosa at 00:26:19) Sure. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:20) And it's actually—watching Alex, our video editor, work, it's like there's a lot to video editing.

(Brad Sosa at 00:26:27) Yes. Yeah. It's very nuanced. It's highly stylized. And hopefully, through machine learning, you can pick up on some of those style choices. But those are the kinds of things you have to pick up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:39) One day, the apps will just see the same type of edits he makes over and over and start automating them and helping, right? Like, you always—you don't even have to—it doesn't even ask you. When you just come in, it's made a template of your style that you just happened to use, like the aggregate of your style of all your edits. Like, that's kind of neat, right?

(Brad Sosa at 00:26:58) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:58) Then we're in the Iron Man movie where we're working on the car. Some people ask us. Yeah. So speaking of that, there is a lot of cool design in that movie too and engineering. And you have some great ideas and thoughts on engineering to design. Can you share that with me?

(Brad Sosa at 00:27:16) Yeah. So our industry has been traditionally very engineering-focused, centered around a design-build model. Customer talks the same language that we talk. It's all around specs. And so our job has traditionally been to engineer a solution and bring that back to the customer. And what's happened over the last—it's probably been happening five years. We've become aware of it about three years ago. And the customer persona has really changed. It's changed from a user that understands our language to a person who has no idea and doesn't even care about the specs. They're just trying to get something accomplished. And when that customer's need transitions like that, what we've realized is that our value and process needs to change from engineering to engineering and design. And so the role of engineering in our industry, or at least at AVI, has transitioned from creating a solution and delivering it to really being responsible for stability and robustness and driving anything that's fragile out of it. But it's the design that really aligns the technology to how people want to consume it. And that's what's driven the growth that we've had. That's what's driven some of the innovation and changes in the practices and individual technology segments that we're in. Because it's all around how people consume it now. It's not really "Can I get this done?" It's "How do I do it?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:56) No. That's like—you're blowing my mind over here. I didn't get that the first time you described it, but this is awesome. So what's happening when you're describing that—and you summed it up perfectly at the end—but growing up, when I started in technology, it was all about, like, "Can we design this chipset? Is it even possible? Is the speed possible?" Let's talk to the engineers. Everyone was focused on—everything was about engineering and "Can we get it out the door and shipped on time?" And that built our base layer of these technology and components. And now it's more like, "How do we put things together?" Because I don't need to know the super-low-level details. I know that—like a normal person, a normal intelligent person can see the technology existing over there and over there and be like, "It needs to come together somehow."

(Brad Sosa at 00:29:49) Right. And what's interesting about this is that the way this used to work in our—at least in our technical space—the way it used to work was a person would say, "I need to get this thing done." An engineer would say, "Here's how I'm going to put stuff together so that you can get it done." And you would deliver it to somebody typically within the IT stack, the CIO's office, and they would figure out how to care and feed for it so that it's sustainable. But the idea around how broad is it actually being used wasn't even part of the concept. It was, "Can I use it?" not "How well can I use it?" And today, what's happening is that business leaders are making decisions about technology, and the CIO's office is hopefully ahead of those decision-making, those asks, or often running to catch up. And the result of that is you don't have things that are well integrated into the normal workflows that just a rank-and-file worker at some organization wants to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:00) You mean to tell me that sometimes technology companies say they have something that they don't?

(Brad Sosa at 00:31:07) Shocking. I know. It's shocking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:08) It's like a feature that's coming soon.

(Brad Sosa at 00:31:13) Yeah. Shocking. But that's the world we're finding today—that business leaders want to consume something, and they really don't care what the makeup of it is. They just want to get something done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:26) And they want the outcome.

(Brad Sosa at 00:31:28) Right. The outcome. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:29) They're focused on the outcome. And that's not a bad thing.

(Brad Sosa at 00:31:33) No. It's not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:33) It's only a bad thing if not everyone's focused on the same outcome.

(Brad Sosa at 00:31:37) Right. And it becomes a challenge when the people that are supplying the solution are talking about specs, and the people that are asking for the solution are talking about outcomes, and they don't have the same language around it. You know, there's a high potential you're going to deliver something that's different than what they expect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:58) That's like—and lots of change happening, right?

(Brad Sosa at 00:32:00) Right. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:02) So with all the change happening, you're CTO, large company, lots of technologists, lots of engineers, and with your customer persona changing, everything changing—how do you help your teams deal with change?

(Brad Sosa at 00:32:16) Yeah. So I think one of the first messages is to help everybody understand we don't have to be perfect. We just have to be progressing. And if we wait until it's perfect, we'll never get there. And I would say to you, as engineers, we all want it to be perfect. And it's hard sometimes for engineers to say "I'm close enough." But getting into a useful state that serves the current expectation, that's where we're really shooting as opposed to having a definitive set of specs. It's really around is it meeting the expectation. Sometimes those expectations are hard to quantify. And I would say the second thing is I'm constantly having conversations with our engineers at large, the team that reports up to me, to our customers and our sellers, that the product life cycle in our industry is six months. So if you don't like what you have, it's probably going to be an iteration or two away in six months, which is difficult because when you're designing something new, you also at the same time have to design its obsolescence and what you're going to do next. And if you don't do that, then that's when you get stuck.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:33) With a legacy product that's expensive to maintain?

(Brad Sosa at 00:33:36) Yeah. Right. Or figure out a way to iterate it, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:43) It can't be magic. Like, you have to have some direction with it.

(Brad Sousa at 00:33:52) Right. And the idea for us in our particular space is that it's constantly evolving. We need to embrace that, and we need to recognize that there's always, always, always going to be gaps. So let's find ways to close those gaps and try and keep things moving forward, not get too stuck in one place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:19) Yeah. You know, I struggled—well, I think everybody kind of struggles with it at some point. When you choose to be great, usually one of the first hurdles you struggle with is perfection. Like, you—because you kind of—right? It's like the moment you choose to be great, it's like I did stuff for a long time. I didn't write tests. I wrote sloppy code for, like, first several years of my programming, and then I was like, I got so frustrated by that. I chose to be great, and then I got stuck in perfection. Then I'm like, alright, now I'm over that hurdle. But yeah, the—I guess when you're balancing perfection and getting stuff out the door, one of the things that's helped me a lot—for some reason, you know how there's, like, some things you read, they just kind of stick with you?

(Brad Sousa at 00:34:58) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:59) I was listening on Audible to one of Bill Nye's books. Yeah, you know, the science guy, right? And that's—by the way, my entire, like, elementary education science class was essentially just playing us those videos. So he had this one thing in one of his more recent books where he said—he's talking about how, like, the DNA evolves and changes over time through mammals and animals and everything. And he says it doesn't have to be perfect, but it always has to be good enough to get to that next generation. And that's a really interesting concept of, like, you're right. Like, life doesn't have to be perfect, but it has to be good enough to get to the next level. Because species die out—like, they just do. And so whenever I get—feel like I'm getting stuck on perfection, I'm like, okay, this is good enough.

(Brad Sousa at 00:35:48) Yeah. And it's hard, I think, for those of us who are engineers—it's hard to accept the term "good enough."

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:57) I know.

(Brad Sousa at 00:35:58) And the thing that we constantly talk about is around the user expectations. And whether it's really well refined or not isn't really relevant to that user. So I was at a trade show here a couple of weeks ago in Vegas, and everybody was talking about 8K resolution and 16K resolution and all that kind of stuff. And, wow, I'm telling you, you're looking at it, it's awesome. It's brilliant. Does the normal meeting room user, conference room user—does it matter to them? No. 1080p is probably good enough for most users. Now if I'm talking health care, yeah, 8K is killer because I can make critical decisions about how I care for a patient based upon that visual information. But for the typical user, I don't know. Is it really important to them? Maybe "good enough" is enough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:54) Yeah. I don't even rent my movies in HD. I mean, I don't watch a lot of TV. But, like, honestly, I'm like, SD looks good to me. Like, I don't—I think it's—I don't know. Some people really care. But for me, I just—I don't know.

(Brad Sousa at 00:37:11) Yeah. So "good enough" is related to—or success is related to—how enthusiastically the user embraces it. Does it satisfy the expectation that they have? And if it does, then it's actually not good enough. It's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:27) Yeah. Good. And that's also important—it's like, little disclaimer, right? Good enough doesn't work for lazy people.

(Brad Sousa at 00:37:33) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:35) Because their "good enough" is not good enough. "Good enough" works for perfectionists who are trying to justify stopping themselves from being perfectionists.

(Brad Sousa at 00:37:44) Clearly. Clearly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:46) So how much—I like you as a leader because we got to spend some time together. I got to see how much you care. You have the qualities of the greatest leaders on Earth, and so I like to point that out when I come across these people because I just have a high volume of people I interact with. And so I'm curious to know how much—how much time or how you go about—we'll start with how much time. How much time do you spend growing and mentoring your executive team?

(Brad Sousa at 00:38:19) Oh, I would say half to two-thirds of my time is really spent in developing others and helping us really accomplish something together that's striking and remarkable—worth having people talk about. So most of my time is really spent doing that with other people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:44) That's good. That's, like, a lot of time.

(Brad Sousa at 00:38:46) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:47) That's important.

(Brad Sousa at 00:38:48) It is. Because you'll never—somebody once told me, you know, Brad, if you cross the finish line, great, you've done something. But if you bring other people with you, now you've led. I'm like, okay. That's where my focus really needs to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:08) I like that. There's a company out near you called Telium, and they do, like, analytics. I don't know if you've heard of them or not. But their founder, Mike, or their co-founder, Mike, was on the show earlier this week, and they're actually a customer of LeaderBid's. He was talking with me about the thing that he's most excited about because their company just hit—they did, like, over $100 million, and I think they're, like, worth, like, $300 million or something like that. But because I said—I said, are you a unicorn? He goes, no, we're like a quarter horse.

(Brad Sousa at 00:39:45) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:46) Right? So I'm just guesstimating based off of that conversation. But he said the most exciting thing about it is there's, like, fifteen, twenty people that are going to be, like, financially set for life when their company goes public or sells or whatever—private equity, whatever they're going to do financially, I'm not sure. But he's like, I'm counting that number of people I'm going to make, like, multigenerationally wealthy on my team, and that's what is exciting to me. I was like, that's—

(Brad Sousa at 00:40:17) So what a great story, right? And we're an employee-owned company—100% owned by the employees.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:24) Oh, wow.

(Brad Sousa at 00:40:26) And one of the core values that we carry is this recognition that wealth in America doesn't come from working really hard. Income does. Wealth comes from owning something that has an appreciable value. And so what we've discovered is that this employee ownership thing has changed the culture of the company because those who have been at the company more than a few years recognize that they're building wealth for themselves and their families, and that that's a multigenerational outcome of the work effort that they're providing. And there's—out of our organization, I want to say close to 10% of the employee population that's the general workers are well over a million dollars in their retirement plan and stock value. And most of those carry no VP title or are not part of what you would normally consider the executive leadership team. They're just good people that do really well at what they do and contribute to the value of the company. They, as a result of that, gain the wealth from it. It's a great observation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:46) I love it. And when I first—like, now that we're talking about wealth—when I first started talking to some wealthy people about, like, you know, how do you do it and that type of thing, right? What tactical—I don't like the "how do you do it." Like, I don't typically ask that question. I usually ask the question, what tactical advice do you have for me?

(Brad Sousa at 00:42:06) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:07) And this one person told me, they said, like, take the first money that you make—like, the first time you make a good amount of money—if you're going for it, take that money and buy income-producing assets. Because wealthy—the difference between wealthy people and rich people is rich people spend them. When they make a million dollars, they buy a car and a house and they spend their million dollars. When wealthy people—what they do is they take that million dollars and they buy something that produces X amount of income a year or X amount of income a month. Then they live off of that money or spend that money on the things that they want. And if they do that enough, they're never spending their principal. They're only ever spending the interest it's earning. And I was like, boom. Mind blown.

(Brad Sousa at 00:42:55) Yeah. It's around this idea that the assets where I'm putting my time should create assets, and those assets should create wealth instead of just looking at what am I earning and how do I get by. And I'm going to speak for us as a company—the fact that it's 100% owned by its employees drives a really, really cool culture where we're looking at the customer satisfaction first, and we're looking at how we're elevating each other through the organization, either in terms of what your skill set is, what your role is, or your personal wealth. It's really a cool idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:42) Yeah. And I like what you said too because a lot of people, when they think about investing or money or wealth, they instantly think, oh, what product—like, investment product—can I buy? Where can I put a savings account? And I'm always—the way I've managed my finances is investing in myself because—yeah, because if you have time, like, you can make yourself more valuable. Like, that is an option in this game. And so I'm like, alright. What can I do to make myself more valuable? Because right now, like, buying a huge real estate property and the rental income, like, for me, that just wasn't, like, an option. It was, like, I have some extra money. I just need to invest it into something that's going to pay off long term, and making myself more useful—that has been an investment that I would make, like, a thousand times over.

(Brad Sousa at 00:44:31) Yeah. Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:33) Also, Warren Buffett's investment advice. I was like, that guy's pretty smart. And he said, like, if you don't have, like, a bunch of money, he goes, invest in yourself because even when you have a bunch of money, those people—like, there was actually this, like, formula. People started investing, like, 2% of their net worth in themselves per year, and then they go 5%, and then they just consistently make more money. I was like, yeah. I believe that.

(Brad Sousa at 00:44:55) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:56) Yeah. I don't know how we got—we don't ever talk about that on the show, by the way. First time we've ever talked about wealth on the podcast.

(Brad Sousa at 00:45:02) There you go. It's relevant to how our organization operates, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:08) So how do you—because you have so much good information, I'm just going to pepper you with every broad array of topics. Recruiting the next generation, talent, bringing in talent in the technology area of the company. Do you work with recruiting? Do you go recruit talent? Like, what is your recruiting talent look like from your perspective?

(Brad Sousa at 00:45:31) Yeah. So recruiting across the company is a challenge because there's a strong—or really broad, I should say—variation of skill sets that are required. We have a lot of positions in the company that are kind of skilled labor and workforce entry kinds of roles. And then we have, you know, highly sophisticated engineering roles and classified environments around national security. So, and everything in between, right? And so there's some really specific plays that we try and work with. One play is really around creating connections to local colleges and internship programs and how do we bring in people who have the right character and have a level of skill set that demonstrates to us they can accomplish something. And as a result of that, because of the character and the skill set that they have, we're willing to invest and help them grow and mature. But we've done other things which are hiring workshops. And, you know, we recognize maybe in certain markets that there's a significant population of people that have the kind of skill set that we need that are unhappy maybe with where they're at. And so we'll just hold a recruiting workshop, and we're surprised at how many people might come through something like that where you can have a real meaningful conversation around where we're headed and why we're a little different than others in our industry. And if that story resonates with you, let's, you know, get you on board. And then we do use recruiters from time to time. And those recruiters tend to be helping us focus on people that have a really well-defined skill set, and maybe the universe of people that are available that fit that skill set is pretty tight. So we might use recruiters to help us get there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:37) And then you do events too, right?

(Brad Sousa at 00:47:41) Yeah. Always, always recruiting and events that we have out in the open with customers and vendors, constantly having conversations around, not necessarily recruiting, but just what life at our organization is like, what life at AVI is like. And I remember I was recruiting an executive position a couple of years ago. And this person that now works for us, they could have gone—they could have written their own path and gone any place in our industry. And I asked them, so what's your interest in us? And he said, well, this competitor, they're the largest in the industry. You guys aren't. It's true. This competitor, they've got a great story around global, and you guys are more national, but not quite as global as they are. Yeah. That's true. So you guys have the culture that everybody wants, and that is the common conversation that we have with the people that are looking to join us. It's really around culture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:48) How do you shape culture?

(Brad Sousa at 00:48:52) Yeah. So I'll tell you a story. Our CEO took us on a journey a couple of years ago, and he was incredibly courageous on this. And it paid off really big. And what he did is he started with the executive team, the team that reports directly to him. And he said, you know, culture—let's read this book on culture together. And the basic premise behind it was values that you create for your organization define what you aspire to. But culture is the expression of what people really think about who you are. And so what we decided that we wanted to do is we wanted to change our value statements and have our company, our employees, across all disciplines at different levels in our organization define for us what our culture is because the culture is how you actually behave. You can't really—I don't think you can actually force a culture or define a culture. You can define values, but culture is how your workforce and the people in your organization naturally behave. And so we turned to them and said, can you tell us how we behave as an organization? That's a pretty gutsy move.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:13) Yeah, it is. I love it.

(Brad Sousa at 00:50:14) Instead of the CEO saying this is who we are, conform to this, he was willing to say, this is what we aspire to be, but you tell me who we are. And across the company over several months, most of the year, different voices collectively came together and redefined what we think our culture is and then put that together in a set of core values that defines who we are. And that's where some of these things like elevation—the whole idea around how I elevate our customer, how we elevate each other—that's core to our core values. And we said that's our culture. That's what we naturally do. Leave us to ourselves, we're going to find a way to help elevate each other. Crossing the finish line is one of our core values. That's another cultural statement, which is really around this idea that if we have an idea, that's great. But if we put the idea to work, that's better. And then if we actually finish what we said we were going to do, that's the best. So how do we bring all of that together? There's a number of different cultural statements that reflect who we think we are as a company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:27) I like that. Do you post that on your website?

(Brad Sosa at 00:51:30) Yeah, it's on the website. It's all over our offices. It's things we talk about on a pretty regular basis. When we in management at different levels of the organization, certainly at the executive team, but I hear it at different levels in the organization when we're struggling with what's the right thing to do, how do we make a decision in this challenge, those talking points, those cultural values enter into the conversation and provide guidance as to what we think the good path is in this particular situation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:05) And I like it. It kind of reminds me of, you ever come across Ray Dalio, Principles?

(Brad Sosa at 00:52:11) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:11) Yeah. He is like a, he went crazy with it. Right? He really got into that. But yeah, that kind of reminds me of, like, if you're going to make a decision, now you have some values to help guide that decision.

(Brad Sosa at 00:52:24) Yeah. And that's how you create scale. That's how you do more than just create uniformity, but really create unity across the organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:33) I heard a public speaker say culture is what happens when, I think, the boss leaves the building or something like that. Right?

(Brad Sosa at 00:52:41) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:43) That kind of reminds me of that. So as we wrap up here, I'm curious to know, if you go back and talk with the version of yourself at, like, ten years into your career, maybe, like, let's say, like, twenty-five, thirty, what is the one piece of advice that you'd give that individual?

(Brad Sosa at 00:53:02) Wow. So I think I would say to that person, give yourself time. I think we run ahead of the changes of seasons in our life and the changes of seasons in our organizations. And I probably would encourage my younger self to give myself more time and not be so concerned or stressed about... Deadlines are critical. I'm not suggesting that deadlines aren't important. But in measuring who we are against a perceived set of goals or values or accomplishments, give myself a little bit more time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:46) Well, you're doing awesome.

(Brad Sosa at 00:53:48) Well, thanks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:49) Yeah. I love what you're doing, and you've been fantastic to get to know and hang out with and talk with and meet. And Jake, who's editing the podcast, Jake, we met him where we got you the shirt that you wanted. What was the name of that place?

(Brad Sosa at 00:54:06) The Dallas Point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:08) Dallas Point. Yeah. Yeah. You ended up getting him a hat, but yeah, he liked it a lot.

(Brad Sosa at 00:54:12) Yeah. Good food. And that was some good beer too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:15) Yeah. It was a great place. Right? Good food, good beer. Yeah. San Diego.

(Brad Sosa at 00:54:20) Yeah. And then we went to San Clemente. I don't know if I'm saying that right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:23) San Clemente?

(Brad Sosa at 00:54:24) Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:25) And we did some drone shots and some video. Yeah. It came out really nice too.

(Brad Sosa at 00:54:32) Nice. Joel, this has actually been a pleasure for me, getting to know you, having the conversations. It's enjoyable. It's a lot of fun. It's provocative. I really have enjoyed it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:43) Alright. Have a fantastic day, Brad.

(Brad Sosa at 00:54:45) You too, man. Thanks. Yeah. Be well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:53) 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.