Mads Mihailescu - CTO & Partner at Georgian Partners

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. I've got some exciting news to share today. We have a leadership challenge called Know What You Don't Know, and this week one of our customers completed this challenge and it resulted in saving their company 80% on server cost. This is why I get so excited when talking about LeaderBits.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) LeaderBits is an action-based leadership development program where you take action on the advice from the greatest leaders in the world. Visit leaderbits.io to learn more. Now get excited, because today we are talking to Mads, the CTO at Georgian Partners, and we discuss ways to build trust with your customers and partners, what it means to focus on high leverage activities, and two key ways to supercharge the productivity of your team. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Are you in Canada right now?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:01:03) Yeah, in Toronto.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:05) How's that? Is it hot, cold? What's it like there?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:01:08) About 20 degrees Celsius.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:10) Wow. Here it's like hot. We're in Florida.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:01:15) Well, actually I was in Florida over the weekend. I think when you emailed me, I was in Miami the other day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) Oh yeah. What were you doing down there? Just personal, hanging out?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:01:24) Went there for the weekend. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:25) Yeah. It's nice though, right?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:01:27) Yeah, it's pretty nice. Which part of Florida are you guys?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:30) We're just south of Tampa. So we're in this town called Sarasota.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:01:33) Got it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:34) And we're a big tourist destination for the beach. We have the number one beach in the United States. Every other year we get that award.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:01:42) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:43) And so, yeah, that's why people come. They come for the beach.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:01:46) I enjoyed that beach a couple of times. One of my friends used to live there. He recently sold his house, but I visited him a couple of times. So the beach is really nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:56) Like in Sarasota or Tampa?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:01:58) I'm talking about Siesta Key. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:00) Oh, you know Siesta Key? Come on, dude.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:02:03) I'm a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:03) I'm a native here to Siesta Key.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:02:05) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) Yeah. So I've seen the town change drastically over 30 years because it just got more popular, and then the whole city exploded, and it's just very large amounts of growth everywhere.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:02:20) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:21) Yeah. And you play tennis, right?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:02:23) I play tennis. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:24) We've got IMG Academy here now. So you got a couple world-famous tennis people that live in Sarasota because of that.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:02:30) Really? I didn't know that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:32) Yes. Popular for tennis. I didn't know it either until about last week. Somebody told me.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:02:37) Do you play tennis?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:39) I have played tennis, not competitively, but just socially. Yeah. I can play. I'm not fantastic. What about you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:51) Did you win a world championship?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:02:52) No, no, no. I play with my wife primarily, so we enjoy playing with one another.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:58) Oh, nice. Yeah. That's a good social. Some of the people that do the tennis stuff, pretty social, and they do the couples and they—you guys do that stuff?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:03:06) Yeah. That's exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:08) Nice. Nice. I'm excited. So have you ever done any tennis technology work at all?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:03:16) Tennis technology? What were they doing with that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:18) Has tennis and technology ever crossed your path?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:03:21) Yeah. Not really. That's an interesting question. I think the closest tennis and technology have intersected was I had an attempt at buying a Babolat racket with a sensor in it, but then I ended up not purchasing it. But I think the question is interesting because I think there's a lot of technology being brought to tennis these days, both in terms of equipment—so sensors embedded in rackets, tracking your moves and giving suggestions back in terms of where you should improve your skills, be it your serve, be it your forehand, backhand. But even if you look at all the analytics that are going on in a tennis match, and not to mention the whole vision system that is tracking the ball movement, there is plenty of technology in the sport.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:09) That's interesting. As you go to prepare against somebody, your opponent, you could have vision systems tracking them and know their styles and learn all their data.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:04:20) And give me some suggestions as to how to beat my opponent, probably.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:24) Yeah. That's interesting. I met AVI Systems as a company, and they do many things in video. But one of the things that they do is—when you see baseball and you see all the swing speed, mile per hour, all the analytics—they package that up and then will sell it to the ESPNs. So other companies are putting together the sensors; ESPN is not doing that, right? And so I was wondering who's doing that for tennis, right? Because it's super useful.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:04:55) Yeah. I don't know. I mean, IBM is a big player in the space from an analytics perspective, but there must be technology vendors behind the scenes helping with gathering the information in real time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:07) Or someone who has a really smart dad—or parent—they put a drone up over the match for the high school invention contest.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:05:17) Yeah. That's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:20) Sorry. I'm off topic. Today has been a really good morning, and so I just have a lot of energy today.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:05:27) What's your day like? How many podcasts do you have scheduled today? Or how do you schedule them? How do you plan?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:33) Well, so usually I do Tuesday and Thursday. I try to do one on Tuesday and Thursday. But for special guests that stack up, sometimes I'll do two on Tuesday and two on Thursday. So today is a special Thursday where I have you in the morning, and then in the afternoon I have the CTO of Reddit.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:05:51) Got it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:52) Yeah. Very nice. So you were the special one. You were referred to me by Mike Anderson from Telium. Do you know Mike?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:06:00) Yeah. Really? Yeah. Did you have Mike on the show? Yeah. Because last time I looked, I didn't see his name on the list. So maybe it was a recent podcast that you uploaded recently. Yeah. Mike is a great guy. TLM is one of our portfolio companies. Mike is a fabulous guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:18) Yeah. I was out—he's a customer of ours. And so I was out in LA meeting with him, and he was just really cool, likable, sharp person. And I was like, dude, you have to come on the podcast. And he's like, absolutely. And then he said, you gotta meet Mads over at Georgian Partners. And then he introduced me to somebody else over at Battery Ventures. He's like, you gotta meet these people. They're really cool. And so I said, let's do it. I said, Chloe, prioritize. Let's get them on the show.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:06:52) Yeah. Happy to be here, man. This is nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:54) So what's your background? Where did you start? Where—how did you originally fall in love with technology?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:07:03) Sure. Yeah. So where do I start? So I hail from Romania, born and raised in Romania. Moved to Canada about 15 years ago. So I did most of my studies in Romania, including undergrad, and then I moved to Canada for grad school. And I think when it comes to technology, I probably fell in love with the application of technology, more so than technology itself, I would say. It probably starts with my primary school days, programming on a—so back in Romania, programming on a Commodore knockoff that the Romanian folks created, manufactured, and sold to young kids like myself. And I programmed in BASIC, and I think it was a nice moment when I saw some graphics projected on a TV screen based on my BASIC code. So that's probably the early days. I did my high school in computer science and math. So the high school curriculum was very focused on computer science and math. And then undergrad was computer science and engineering. And then my PhD here at University of Toronto was in computer science as well. So starting with primary school, there's a nice progression to more advanced topics of technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:27) And then what was your first professional experience after college?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:08:32) So after college, I worked for a year actually on a large-scale distributed system supporting the CERN LHC.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:45) Oh, yes. Yeah. So I love that thing.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:08:47) Yeah. It is very interesting. So we had a team back in Romania that was collaborating with the team at CERN. And the Romanian team was primarily in charge of building this data collection system that would support more complex analytics. So basically, ingesting data at high frequencies, high speeds, and supporting analytics on top of that. So that's where I spent one year after I finished my undergrad. And then immediately after, I moved to Canada to start my grad school, to start my PhD in computer science. And then during my PhD, I spent a year at IBM building cloud computing software. So another form of a large-scale distributed system, if you will. I also spent a bit of time at a company called NetApp, Network Appliance. Yeah. They're a pure play data storage provider. So I spent time in their advanced technology group, which is—think of it as an industrial research lab. Basically, the mission of the group is to look at technology trends, software and hardware, and bring those trends into the business to advance business units, to advance product lines. So I spent a bit of time there during my PhD, and then after my PhD, I spent about two years in the advanced technology group looking at software trends like NoSQL databases, cloud computing, but also hardware trends, the advent of nonvolatile memories. So basically, persistent DRAM and flash, at the time, was still in its nascent days. So that's the progression from schooling to industry. And then following NetApp, following two years in NetApp, I joined Georgian Partners about five years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:33) But how? How does that happen? Was it a relationship? Did you meet some cool people? How did you get involved? At what point were you like, I want to go into the VC world?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:10:43) Yeah. It's a great question, isn't it? So I think throughout my career, I would say I was always open to interesting opportunities. And I think recognizing how important relationships are throughout my career so far. I think the move to Georgian happened, I would say, somewhat organically. So I was working for NetApp. I was living in Toronto at the time. I still live in Toronto. So after I moved from Romania, I always lived in Toronto. But while I was working for NetApp, I was based in Boston. So I used to commute on a weekly basis from Toronto to Boston. And it was a lot of fun, but after a couple of years, I was thinking probably better to move to Toronto. And I saw a job posting by a guy by the name of Herschel Harris, who used to lead the Toronto lab for IBM. And he was also the VP of Engineering and VP of Product for some of IBM's core products, flagship products, like DB2, for instance, their database product, and WebSphere. So the posting was on behalf of a venture capital firm, but obviously the guy had a very different background. So that piqued my interest. I reached out to him, and then we got together. We connected, and we clicked. The job description, while very different than the work I was doing at the time at NetApp—basically applied research work at NetApp—I think in abstract, there are a lot of transferables from the work I was doing at NetApp to the work I've been doing at Georgian. Essentially, looking at technology trends and helping various business units at NetApp and portfolio companies, in our case, adopt the respective trends, is somewhat similar. So the move was primarily driven by my lack of understanding of venture capital, but my interest in working with a very interesting group of people that have a very strong technology background, starting with Herschel, but continuing with the rest of the team. So it was obvious to me that the company had a very strong technology pedigree, not a finance pedigree. I'm not a finance guy. I like numbers, but I'm not a finance guy. And then this notion of Georgian helping companies with the adoption of technology trends resonated very well with me, and it mapped my interests in terms of looking at interesting research trends, technology trends, and bringing them into product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:18) Yeah. And that's one of the things that really stood out to me when Mike referred you. As I started looking into it, and I said, okay, you're a CTO out of a venture capital fund. Gotta be helping these companies, either doing due diligence or helping them do something on the macro. So that's what you're doing on a day-to-day, right? You're helping these companies understand these trends, adopt them, and work with them.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:13:41) Yeah. Pretty much. At a high level, that's the core of the job. The way we're helping our companies at Georgian—so probably some context would be useful there. So we've built since day one at Georgian what we call an impact team, which is a group of individuals such as myself that are helping our companies with the adoption of this technology trends. This is the team that I lead, the impact team. Historically, we started by helping our companies in a more consulting-type fashion, more advisory. Over the past couple of years, we've created a research and development team within the impact team. So today, we help our companies in an advisory capacity. Whenever a company needs advice in an area such as machine learning, AI, or privacy security, we offer that help.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:14:32) We spend quite a bit of our time, though, building software libraries for our companies and together with our companies, primarily at the intersection of applied research and some core business problems that we see across the portfolio when it comes to things like bringing ML into production. So that's where we spend most of our time developing these software libraries. And the skills we have on the team and the skills we will always have on the team are very much aligned with these trends that we see as changing the face of every industry and every business software company out there. And the trends that we're focusing on today—I mentioned security, privacy, AI—we have three main trends that we emphasize when we talk to our companies, and we work with our companies after we invest to adopt the respective trends and create value. Applied AI is a big one.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:15:21) The notion of bringing machine learning into business processes to augment decision-making, to automate certain customer processes—that's one big area we're spending our time on. A second one is the evolution of interfaces from websites, web interfaces to mobile applications to conversational interfaces. This notion that software companies, business software companies, can expose their capabilities through a voice assistant or through a messaging interface to create high user engagement. That's another area of focus for us.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:15:54) And the third one is what we call customer trust, which is really this notion of building customer trust along the journey as a way to create value, from the first interaction points—so from sales and marketing to customer onboarding to basically product adoption and then upsell—is something we spend quite a bit of our time with our companies on. Security and privacy definitely play a big component as part of this customer trust journey because data management is a big topic when it comes to trust. But that's how we operate. So we identify these trends, these big trends, and then we make sure we have capacity internally to help our companies adopt the respective trends.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:16:39) And the support we provide is advisory-type support, more like a consulting style, and also R&D applied research type support in the form of software libraries, software assets that we develop for our companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:52) That's super unique. I really like that you're doing that. I haven't seen it. I have yet to see a VC firm do that. So that was unique for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:02) If it's commonplace, I guess I'm just inexperienced with that. But—

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:17:07) As I like to say, unique is great. Unique is not enough. It has to be valuable as well. The story resonates with companies, so we're happy about that. The story really resonates with our companies.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:17:18) It's on us to make sure that we always identify the trends that matter, and we build the software libraries that create value across the portfolio. So that's our job, and basically, we bring a product management discipline when it comes to prioritizing our investments in R&D. So unique is fine. Valuable is more important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:39) You mean to tell me that if I just build something that's really cool and exciting, that the market won't just pour out value to it?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:17:45) I'm not telling you anything new.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:48) I love it, though, because what happened was it was a lesson that as humanity, we learned so hard so many times over the nineties and two thousands that you just can't build something cool. It has to be very valuable to the market. But I want to go a little bit deeper on trust because you seem to have a lot of knowledge there. You said you spent a lot of time there, and you spoke about a customer journey. And so while you were describing that—

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:18:14) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:14) The thing that—the question that was burning in my mind was, how do you do that? Like, if imagine I'm a portfolio company of yours—

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:18:22) And I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:22) Don't understand this concept of trust. Yes, we have a customer journey. Yes, we have everything that's in place to generate revenue, and we have a market that's responding. But tell me about how I create trust.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:18:34) Yeah. Great question. Typically, with all these thesis areas of ours—trust being one of our thesis areas—these big trends that I'm talking about, we create some frameworks. So we develop some thought leadership in the respective area. So for trust, we have a white paper. We have a set of principles which constitute a framework that our companies can use when guiding their developments around trust. But specifically, when we engage with the company around trust, we start by running what we call a trust workshop. And the format is quite simple. So we typically bring in the key leadership from the company in the room.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:19:16) And Alex, who's our chief security and privacy officer—used to be the chief security officer at Hootsuite—he's the person who typically runs those workshops. And we try to map out the entire customer journey with the company. And then we brainstorm with the company. There'll be some opportunities where we can increase trust or some risks where perhaps we're losing trust, and we have to find some solutions to make sure that trust battery, if you will, with your customer, with our company's customers, is maintained. So the format is really mapping the customer journey with the company and then identifying—it's a brainstorming session to identify opportunities along the way, and then prioritizing those opportunities on a value-effort type of matrix where you have the Y axis is the value, the X axis is the effort.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:20:10) And then we try to make sure that the company prioritizes the opportunities that are in the high value bucket, if you will, starting perhaps with the high value, low effort ones, if there are any. That's one of my favorites. And then moving on into high value, medium, high effort. And then we help companies along the way execute on these opportunities. So to give you an example, we have a couple of companies in our portfolio that are doing a great job at trust in general with their customers, but they're not taking advantage of it from a thought leadership perspective. So that becomes a marketing exercise. Can you as a company bring trust into your marketing message and basically lead the market with this notion of customer trust?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:54) Just taking some notes. This is really good stuff. I actually—when I was researching originally when Mike referred, I went to your website and then you had a PDF that was about your principles and different things of that nature. And so I was like, this is cool. I'm getting marketing, thought leadership marketing from a VC. I've landed on many VC websites and I've never seen that. And that's what I'm most interested in because if I've taken anything from all of these conversations with these great leaders, it's that the culture and the people are the most important aspect of the organization.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:21:30) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:30) And so I downloaded and read the guide, and I was like, this is some good stuff. You guys put a lot of work into that.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:21:38) Yeah. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:40) Was that part of the impact team or—

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:21:42) It is part of the impact team. It's a collaboration between the impact team. In general, it's a collaboration between impact and marketing. So the way we're structured at Georgian, we have all the functions that you would see in a typical software company. So think of the impact team as the research and development team.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:21:57) We have a business development and marketing group as well. Then our investment team really acts as our sales team. As we invest in high quality companies, those are competitive deals. Not only do we have to do due diligence, but we have to sell. So the investment team basically becomes the sales team.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:22:15) The white papers that we create in our thesis areas are typically a collaboration between the impact team and the marketing team. Often, we have investment team members participating in the effort, and that's a nice way to include them in the creation of the material. So that's basically an organic form of sales enablement, if you will, because they take ownership in the materials. They understand the white paper very well. So the next time the investment team goes on the road and talks to a potential investment opportunity, they can talk about trust much more naturally because they were part of the creation of the trust white papers. So that's the process at a high level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:53) Well, it also gives you the benefit because what I found is that your vibe attracts your tribe. Right? And so by you putting that out there, it allows me to read it. And then I can actually get—I can identify with that. I'd be like, that's who I am, and so that'll naturally make me want to work with you. And then it's—and then so that occurs. And then for the people who are the opposite to you, right, they are like, we don't like that style, and then they don't waste your time at all. So it helps build that relationship prior to even knowing you.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:23:24) Yeah. I like your point. Yeah. So, basically, you're creating that vision lock between a potential prospect or potential person and Georgian before we even engage with the respective company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:36) Yeah. You can have a pre-portfolio company fall in love with you without ever actually having consumed any of your in-person time.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:23:45) That's the utopic state, I would say. I mean, we've been talking about getting to a point where all the best companies in the world are adopting our frameworks, our assets before we even talk to them. That would be—that's the state we're pushing towards.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:03) Well, and it also helps because when I looked at it, I saw your thesis and your requirements. You guys start your investments around companies that have—the minimum is like 6 million ARR. Right? And so we're not there yet. But the cool thing that I found is I said, well, I can follow this company, and I can learn what they're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:24) And so that I can implement some of these concepts in my company to have the greatest chance of getting to that stage. So it's almost like a pre-funnel or like a funnel for you guys by putting your thought leadership out there and saying this is what we're doing with the companies that are coming in. We're looking at trust. We're looking at these different areas. And then I can say, oh, look at those best practices that they're using. I should implement some of those in what I'm doing today.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:24:46) Yeah. Maybe that's the right thinking. It's a pre-funnel. We call it nurture. I mean, we have a nurture program, and this falls under the nurture bucket, if you will.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:24:55) So you have an early stage company that is adopting our assets that basically follows your thinking, which is great thinking. Yeah. That becomes nurture for us. And we don't have to put any time and effort. It's scalable nurture because we create those assets once and then all the companies adopt the respective assets.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:12) Yeah. It's a very smart group of people over there. I like it.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:25:17) We try. We try, Joe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:19) So this impact team—so you have a couple direct reports from this impact team—

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:25:24) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:24) And you lead them. So I'm curious. You've seen inside a lot of companies and a lot of cultures both at NetApp, your experience before that, and then now evaluating companies and working with your portfolio. You as a person, as a leader, what are some of the trends that you see across the more successful cultures or the most successful leaders?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:25:49) Yeah. It's a great question. I would say, I think it's always going to be team dependent. You know, in my case, I'm blessed to have a team of very smart, creative, collaborative individuals eager to make an impact. And there's certain traits that I think I observed over time that are typically valuable when it comes to leading a team of very smart, collaborative, creative individuals that are eager to make an impact.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:26:22) I think this notion of making sure that you have strong relationships with every person on the team and you basically have the trust with every person on the team is important. And I think of that organically. I mean, at the end of the day, I care about my team very much. And I think if you're a type of person that leads a team and cares about people a lot, then that will happen organically. The notion of building relationships and building trust with your team, that will happen organically.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:26:52) Listening to your team is crucial, and I don't think I'm saying anything new here, but I think taking that a step beyond just listening—including the team in solutions and finding solutions to problems—is also very important. I think that's probably—going back to my early days, I think I was probably thinking too much in terms of everything is on my shoulders, and I have to solve everything. And that's right up to a point. I mean, I don't want to be distracting my team with every single problem or every single thing that I need to address or to solve. But I think picking areas where the entire team brings their perspective to solving a big problem, I think that's very valuable from a coming up with a better solution perspective, but also from a team building perspective and bringing your team along.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:27:44) And also aligns very nicely with having a very strong relationship, very strong bond with your team. I like this notion of leaders thinking a lot about supporting individuals and supporting their team. So being in support mode and empowering people and trusting that people will deliver given the empowerment, if you will, and people will step up to the opportunity. So that's the mindset we adopted at Georgian in general, and that's working very nicely with the smart group of people we have. And I think that's a great way to build a team and build a company around those types of principles.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:28) I like it. Yeah. Empowering others. Right? Allowing them. And I like that you point out that we set the baseline of I have hungry, driven, talented people.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:28:39) That's important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:41) We get a lot of questions from the podcast, and I'm like, let's start talking about who are they? Because you can take people who are running and you can point them in the right direction, but you can't make people run.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:28:52) Like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:53) It's very difficult. It takes a lot of energy. We get some questions from the audience and one of them that's been popular recently is about reflection.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:29:03) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:03) So taking time to process what's been going on on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. So I've been asking a couple of the most recent guests, how do you approach reflection?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:29:16)
Yeah, great question. I try to allocate—I mean, the simple answer is I try to allocate time for reflection. Typically, mornings work pretty well for me. So I try to listen as much as I can to what everyone has to say on my team, but also across the company, across the organization, and then allocating time to think about kind of what's noise, what's signal, if you know what I mean.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:29:43)
I kind of try to understand what steps we need to take or what's kind of going on in one area. So what can I do to improve the operations of the business overall? But I think dedicating time typically works for me, and I think it should work in general. The other way maybe to think about it is in terms of high leverage activities.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:30:09)
So I don't know if you've read the—it's a famous book, High Output Management by Andy Grove, the ex-CEO at Intel. And he has a nice way to kind of enable leaders and managers to think about their daily schedule in terms of activities that are low leverage versus high leverage, meaning activities that kind of increase the productivity of your team or activities that are not, period. So being thoughtful about kind of your schedule and basically being in control of your schedule and making sure that there's enough kind of high leverage activities on your schedule is also very important. I kind of consider this area of reflecting and thinking about everything that's happening with the company as a high leverage activity because that can result in certain actions that one may take—maybe some training program as an example that can make everyone better, may make everyone more effective.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:31:06)
So that's kind of how I think about it. It's probably easier than I'm making it sound because given the nature of kind of today's business environment, I think everyone has a lot of meetings on their plates, and I often find myself in days where I have back-to-backs. But it's something that I try to pay attention to, to make sure that I have enough time to reflect and to think about what I can do to improve things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:33)
Are you an early person, early morning person?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:31:35)
I'm an early morning person. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:38)
How early?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:31:40)
I would wake up at 6 a.m. or so. I'm probably in the office by eight.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:44)
Okay. All right.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:31:46)
So it's probably not that early, maybe?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:49)
I'm like a 5, 5:15, then I work out, and then I have breakfast around 6, 6:30. And then I will write or do something. I try to structure my day before it starts.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:32:03)
Got it. Yeah. I'm probably the same, and I also try to structure my week on a Sunday evening before it starts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:09)
It's super useful. It's actually really interesting when I made the transition from just battling it out every day to—it was almost hard. It was almost like you didn't want to or, at least myself, it was like it requires a certain amount of trust that it will work to do it because you have to plan out long term. And then I started—the reason why I started doing that was I was hearing a lot of these great leaders with these concepts of like thinking in terms of decades and thinking in these really long-term plans, and I started doing that and it gave me a sense of—it felt right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:47)
And so that's usually what I do. I go off of a little bit of data about how I'm doing, a little bit off my feeling. I'm like, okay, this is good. It works. Let's continue it. And so, yeah, planning on Sundays and then early morning stuff has worked well for me.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:33:00)
So what's the next decade looking like for you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:06)
Very good. If not, I would need some vision exercises. No. But to your point, I don't know if you looked it up because you said training program. But that's how I met Mike is we ended up having all these leaders come on the show and sharing their advice, and then we created these things called leadership challenges and then deployed them. And then the first most interesting thing was when people were asking for it, I said, Okay, I built an MVP in like ten days. People who did ask for it, I deployed it to them. They said, Okay, this works, it's good. I said, Okay, now let's sign a contract and become a customer. And some of them did. And so I was like, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:44)
Great. Yay. Like, not only is it something cool, but it's something that's valuable. And then I didn't know how to do sales at all, so I started watching some YouTube videos on how to make a sale. And then I sold like, you know, $100,000 in annual recurring revenue in three months.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:34:03)
Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:04)
I know. I was very excited. And so I went up to Tampa, and I found a VC firm up there, and I said, hey. This is what's happened. I want to build a sales team that can sell this, and I want to build out engineering because I wrote the code on the original application.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:22)
Yeah. That's my background. And then they said, okay. And then we did that. And now that was like in October.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:31)
And now we have about 11 people.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:34:34)
Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:34)
And, yeah, we have great customers like Mike. And so I was very excited. So what are you most excited about right now? Like, what's going on right now that is really pumping you up?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:34:48)
Well, all these great questions made me think. I think there are a few things. So maybe let me talk about them in terms of abstraction levels. So I think from a big industry trends perspective, we've been talking recently at Georgian about this notion of industry digital disruption. So if you look at the Ubers of the world, the Airbnbs of the world, that is one form of industry digital disruption.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:35:15)
So, basically, software companies evolving from selling software to established traditional enterprises. So a software company selling software to the hotel industry would be the traditional way, to a technology company taking over an entire industry. If you think of Uber dominating the taxi industry. We made a recent investment in a company called Beam Dental that is doing that for dental insurance. And I guess if you look at insurance as a space historically, all the software companies were selling to large traditional insurance companies.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:35:54)
Beam Dental is a different breed in that regard in that they're providing insurance to end consumers, to end customers, and they're technology enabled. So they have a very strong technology stack. They're a software company first and foremost, but also an insurance company. So we're quite excited about that model where there's an evolution from software companies selling to enterprise and traditional companies in a respective industry to software companies providing the functionality, whether it's insurance, whether it's financial services. We're quite excited about that big trend.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:36:35)
We're spending quite a bit of time these days trying to understand how that trend might play out in other markets, other segments. I'm still very, very excited about the applied AI as a trend. I think applied AI has been around as a big trend recognized by everyone for the past three years. I think we're just still in hype mode, if you will. But I'm seeing adoption in every company we meet with, which is amazing.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:37:03)
Or I'm seeing the desire to adopt machine learning as part of business process into every company we meet with. So that's very exciting. Every company has different challenges. Some companies have human-generated data. Some companies have machine-generated data. Data quality is an area that companies—probably especially workflow software companies—probably have to invest a bit more time in. But that desire to bring machine learning into business processes, we're seeing it across industries, and that's very exciting. From an applied research perspective, I mentioned that a lot of the work we do with our companies has an applied research form. There's some very interesting trends. One big one is one trend called transfer learning.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:37:47)
This notion of taking one AI solution built in one domain for one task and applying it to bootstrap another task, if you will, the automation of another task. Where this becomes very interesting is with enterprise software companies that sell to businesses, to enterprises. So imagine basically taking one machine learning model that was trained for one customer to provide some predictions or to do some automation, and you use it to accelerate onboarding for another customer without even waiting for data from the new customer, from the second customer. So that's an area we're spending quite a bit of our time on—transfer learning to enable this kind of cross-customer transfer of information in a private way. So those are probably some big areas that are keeping me excited these days from a technology perspective, from a business perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:40)
That's huge. That would do incredible things to the speed of deployment and margins within a business.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:38:48)
Exactly. So speed to value is what that area of applied research is enabling. And, I mean, we've done some interesting work with a couple of our companies. One company based in New York, WorkFusion. They're in the robotic process automation space.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:39:06)
So they go into large companies like banks, and they would automate away—they would build these bots that take away mundane human effort. So if you're a bank and you have people doing invoice processing manually, why not train a bot and let the bot do the invoice processing with a bit of OCR in the middle? And the interesting thing is to be able to train a machine learning model, to be able to train such a bot, such a robot, if you will, to take over the mundane human effort, you need enough samples of those invoices being processed by humans. So if you can take a model that was built for one bank or for one insurance company that was doing a task that is similar across all these multiple enterprises, and you basically take that model and deploy it for a new enterprise, then you accelerate speed to value as you say. And the new customer gets immediate value from the product.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:40:09)
Taking that a step further, there's a way to basically bring all these models together and aggregate them for the benefit of everyone. So not only you can accelerate speed to value on onboarding times through transfer learning, you can also improve everyone's performance of their bots by bringing all this information together. So that's a very exciting area for us, and our companies are recognizing the value from all the work we're doing with them in that area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39)
I'm interested to see the platform that you have, or at least the proposed platform for how you'll organize these models and distribute them and learn from them because you built a huge picture in my head of these layers and how it would interact. And I guess just me being me, like, I'm very excited. I was like, I want to see. But okay. So for you as an individual, one of the questions that we get a lot is the cadence of one-on-ones with their team. Now I know you mentor and you grow your team, but do you have the concept of one-on-ones?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:41:16)
I do for sure. So I do have formal one-on-ones, so I do have them scheduled in my calendar. They're typically biweekly or weekly. In some other cases, they're monthly. So it's a cadence myself and the individual agree upon.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:41:36)
And in addition to having those meetings scheduled, I try to make myself available to every person on my team. So if someone wants to come and have a discussion outside of the one-on-one, I'm there. So we share the same space. We have an open space. I'm available, and we can have a discussion outside of the one-on-one setting.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:41:56)
I believe the one-on-ones are very, very important, very valuable, and they are the employee's time, not my time. So I try as much as I can to make sure that the employee is empowered to come up with an agenda and an agenda that helps the respective individual. So that's kind of how they're designed, and I find them very, very, very useful. I try to have them with people outside of my team as well, just to make sure that as we grow as a business—so we are 20-something people a year and a half ago. Now we're 40-something people.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:42:32)
So as we grow as a business, I think it's important to make sure that we're not isolated, and we keep the communication channels open. So I value them a lot. I know I'm giving you a long answer, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:45)
No. This is great.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:42:46)
I like one-on-ones, and I would encourage everyone to have them in a formal setting. But I think making one-on-ones available to the entire team is also very important outside of those one-on-one discussions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:02)
You bring up a good point. Like, what I hear you saying is something I experienced. The one-on-ones act as like the anchor, the pillar, like the scheduled area, but that doesn't excuse you from needing to be available and involved with what's going on.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:43:21)
Yep. I think that's a much more succinct way of saying what I said. It's a much better way. Yes. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:27)
I'm just making sure I understand.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:43:28)
Yeah. That's exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:30)
Because I see some leaders who are like, I've got a—I get—let me back up. I get from people sometimes that their leader only magically appears when there's a one-on-one scheduled. And I was like, I don't know what type of company you're working at. But if you open up that door, there's about 12 people sitting right there at this long—we took a couple dinner tables and put them together. But, yeah, you just you have to be available.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:52)
But then even when I'm available, like, the problem is I didn't have—at first, I didn't have scheduled one-on-ones anchored in there because I'm so available. I realize that sometimes people see you and think you're busy, and so you have to do both. Right? I don't want to bother them. They're busy, and so I can't just assume that they're going to walk up to me regularly. We have to do both, and learning that was something new for me this past year.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:44:20)
Yeah. We all learn and grow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:21)
We all learn and grow. So I'm going to run a hypothetical past you. It'll be fun, though. A new company that you guys are doing due diligence on.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:44:31)
Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:31)
They're growing. Guess who the CEO is? Elon Musk.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:44:36)
All right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:37)
All right. So a new company, Elon Musk. Right? He comes to you, and he's got a new product. You go. You fly out to meet him. Right? He's got his new product. It's a time machine. Okay?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:51)
You go, you try this out. Here's the thing with this time machine. You can only go back to the beginning of your career and give yourself one piece of advice.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:44:59)
You—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:59)
You spend ten minutes with yourself. You can only give yourself one piece of advice. What would it be?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:45:04)
So first, I'm going to invest in the company. That's going to be part of the question. Yeah, time machine, going back to the beginnings.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:45:17)
I think I would emphasize the inclusion element. So when it comes to basically realizing that no one person is an island, and I think the more people include others in solving problems, in figuring things out, the better the individual is, the better the outcomes are, the better the team is. And I would apply that thinking at all levels. I don't think it's just a CTO level thinking or a manager level thinking. Even a developer, even an engineer, scientist can apply that thinking as well.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:45:55)
I think there is a balance. I mean, for every problem, you cannot just include the entire team for every problem. But I think getting that balance right is important. But I would stress the importance of always be thinking about including people in the conversation when it comes to solutioning problems. It's probably one piece of advice I would give to myself. I will just say I was blessed along the way of having some great mentors, thinking of the IBM days, the NetApp days, and Georgian as well.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:46:30)
So I had some great mentors along the way that kind of accelerated my learnings, if you will, or they accelerated my thinking in terms of approaching new situations, so that I made mistakes, but I didn't make so many mistakes at the end of the day. So that's also valuable—finding people that you can relate to that are role models along the way. And I think there's, I mean, at different stages of one's career, I think there are different types of mentors, role models, and one can leverage and develop a relationship with and leverage the help from that person. So I think the two go hand in hand.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:47:14)
So leveraging the help of others, whether it's a mentor, whether it's your team, I think is very important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:19)
I love it, right? It's like we're all little computers on this network, and if we leverage the team, we can get more processing power on the problem.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:47:27)
Yeah, and it goes back to the baseline I said. Smart, creative, collaborative, hungry individuals will give you amazing ideas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:33)
Yeah, you don't want to be a part of some P2P music file-sharing app. You want the smart AI systems on your team that are driven. Awesome. On the intro, when we do the intro for the podcast, you want me to call you Mads, or do you want me to—

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:47:52)
Mads is perfect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:52)
Mads is perfect?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:47:53)
Yeah. I mean, if you feel comfortable saying my first name—I mean, how do you pronounce my first name?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:00)
I have to hear you pronounce it.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:48:01)
It's Madalin. Yes. But Mads is much simpler, much nicer, resonates very well with people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:09)
It's cool.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:48:09)
Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:10)
Right? I like it. I think it's a pretty sweet nickname. I was so relieved actually, too, when you signed your email. When you responded to me and it was signed Mads, I was like, thank God.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:22)
Because I'm—

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:48:22)
You need to butcher my name, my first name, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:26)
It's because I can never do it in the native tongue. I will never be able to do it as well as your neighbor that came when you were a kid could do it. I just can't, you know?

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:48:35)
Yeah. I didn't have the nickname coming into Georgian, and I was lucky. One of our team members, Mary Claire, she came up with a nickname for me, and it was great. I said, yeah, this is it. Prior to that, everyone was struggling with pronouncing my first name.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:49)
I bet you a lot of people called you Madeline.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:48:51)
That's exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:54)
Oh, man. This has actually been a fantastic call. I'm really glad to get to spend time with you and meet you.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:49:00)
Same here, Joel. Very nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:01)
If you need anything from me, just send me an email. And then maybe one day our paths will cross at a conference or something like that and we'll say hello.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:49:08)
For sure. It's my pleasure. Have a great day, Mads.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:10)
All right, thank you very much. Bye.

(Mads (Madalin) at 00:49:11)
See you, bud. Bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:12)
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