Derick Schaefer - CTO at Trintech

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Derek, the CTO at Trintech, and we discuss effective ways to grow and mentor your direct reports, the evolution of the CTO role, and how Trintech is making use of an innovation portal to get closer to their customers. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) How many kids do you have?

(Derek at 00:00:35) One in 15. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) What technology? What are they into at 15?

(Derek at 00:00:40) So in school, officially, he's taken courses in Python, is currently in a course in Java. And he, independently on his own—I've provided him some guidance and assistance—has just submitted a patent to the US Patent Office around some technologies related to sports, which is kind of exciting. I can't talk about it until we get that official acceptance from the patent office to put it in patent pending. But yeah, he's got a pretty inquisitive little mind. He's a good athlete as a part of that as well. Kicker for a football team that just won state and plays baseball and soccer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:20) Nice, man. Active guy. Right? Yeah. Does he get that productivity or that drive from you? Or?

(Derek at 00:01:27) I would say he's a combination of my wife and I. My wife is an executive as well, and she is, she's definitely got an element of productivity about her, but she's also got a calm demeanor, which he has. And if you can imagine being a place kicker on a football team, being calm is what it's all about. And that's, uh, that served him well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:50) That's a powerful combination. Now, did you get involved in technology when you were younger? Like, what age did you get into it?

(Derek at 00:01:56) Yeah. So 11 years of age. 11 years of age, getting a hold of a computer was not anywhere near as easy as it is today. Began programming in BASIC, 6502 assembly, and just fell in love with it. And it's been literally a part of who I am ever since then.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:18) So you fall in love with programming, and then did you have formal education? Where do you go from there?

(Derek at 00:02:23) Yeah. So it was really an interesting road. So at the time, I went to the University of Texas at Austin. And at the time, their programs were very much geared—which is ironic for the industry I work in today—but their programs were very much geared towards financial services and accounting, which was pretty much a track of COBOL and mainframes. And the world had already changed significantly at the time that I went to university, which was in the late '80s, beginning in the early '90s.

So I actually took a track of liberal arts, which freed me up to do the technology electives that I wanted to, and also allowed me access to labs and computing resources. Actually sold my car, I want to say my sophomore year in college, to buy a Mac SE/30. And the SE/30 signification means it had a math coprocessor. And my mom told me point blank, you're crazy. And it, once again, it proved out to be a good decision. And went ahead and finished that liberal arts degree with some good computing skills, came out as a programmer in the financial services industry for two years, learned a ton about business, about leadership, as well as technology, and returned on a scholarship to the University of Miami.

Where, out of the school of business of all places, there were two telecommunications programs in the United States at the graduate level. One was in a school of engineering, and the other was in the school of business. That, plus the fact I got a full scholarship, took me to the University of Miami to finish out that business degree with a focus in telecommunications, and that's where we kind of added the infrastructure component to this. And shortly after graduating in '92 and a half—no, it's actually '93—yeah, the Internet took off, and it's all been kind of a blur since.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:13) I'm curious about accounting because I have background in financial services, but for financial advisors. You know, things like life insurance policies, annuities, those types of things, retirement planning. I was in that space for quite a while. But I saw that Trintech, you guys are modernizing accounting. And it seems like there'd be a lot of opportunities for automation. Are you guys doing really interesting things over there?

(Derek at 00:04:39) Yeah. So just to give you a quick background on Trintech. So first of all, we're a company that not only pioneered, but we're a market leader in what we call cloud financial services close software and solutions. And we have two flagship products. One is called Cadency, which really focuses on large enterprises.

And the characteristic that a large enterprise has in the financial function is they tend to have a large number of transactions to deal with. And we'll talk about what a reconciliation of a transaction looks like here in a moment. But the second is their back ends are complex. They tend to have multiple enterprise resource planning systems or ERPs. They tend to be global and have very diverse businesses.

So Cadency is our financial close solution that focuses on that complex, high volume customer. On the flip side, really exciting area of our business is Adra. Adra is our mid-market solution. And why it's fun as a technologist is it's geared at harnessing all of the financial close power and functionality that we offer to the larger enterprises, but really focus on simplicity, which means ease of implementation, being able to get it up in hours, if not just a few days, recognizing ROI in the first month of usage, and having users that can kind of intuitively work their way through the system and derive value. So that's what Trintech does.

The interesting thing about the company is we are actually almost 30 years old. We've got global origins. We are a global company, offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. But we got our start in Dublin, Ireland. Loosely associated with Trinity University, hence the "Trin" in Trintech.

And our original innovations were around commerce transactions, which led to e-commerce transactions. And we kind of came to the realization that when you have a lot of front-end transactions that need to be matched up to a statement—so for example, imagine an online retailer or an e-commerce system today that might have 100,000 credit card transactions in a given month. How do you reconcile those back to a credit card statement? How do you reconcile those back to a bank statement to say that we actually took in all this money and got it in the right buckets in the right places, including refunds and split transactions and all kinds of other things?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:00) Yeah. I have a Terry who does that, and she asks me lots of questions.

(Derek at 00:07:04) Well, so accounting—accounting is a fascinating industry. I don't come from an accounting background. I do have a little anecdotal story I'll tell you here in a second. But if you think about the fundamentals of accounting, it really hasn't changed over the decades, but the complexities of our business world—right, the variety of payment rails, how we transact, the speed at which those transactions take place—have drastically changed.

And what it has done to the office of finance is put the office of finance into kind of a ratio mix of 75% of their time being focused on the yesterday, making sense of what happened yesterday, whether it be closing out this month's books, this quarter's books, or even this fiscal year's books and understanding that. And with all of those transactions and the requirements of getting those transactions reconciled and getting the balance sheet in a proper state and getting the journal entries and everything that they've got to do to make the books work out and make the numbers work, is a ton of work.

And our goal at Trintech is to flip that and say, if we can use automation, if we can use technology, if we can use the business knowledge that you've already created over months and quarters and years of accounting work to have automation do that for you and give you back 75% of your time, what can you as a bright mind do by analyzing the business and looking forward into the challenges the businesses might face in these really dynamic economies, you know, in light of the innovation that's taking place today? How can you be a forward-thinking financial asset versus kind of being mired in the drudgery task of the past?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:46) No, we have similar minds, I think. And we're on the same page here, my friend. I'm curious, though. Adra, that sounds like a cool name. Sounds very modern and reminds me of "Ad Astra." But how did you come up with it?

(Derek at 00:08:59) Yeah. So we actually acquired the Adra business unit out of Europe. It was a company based in Norway, and we still have that leadership intact. And in fact, my leaders who work on not only the engineering of that product, but also operating that product, are based in Norway today. Yeah, it is. It's a cool name. They've got cool graphics that were originally associated with it. If you've ever been to Oslo, Norway and know kind of the coolness of that city, as soon as you hop off the train, the offices are in walking distance and you can see the logo up on the building and you walk in and, yeah, there's this coolness all about it.

But what is really rewarding about that solution set is they have built that using some really great technologies, continue to evolve it. And so as a user, when you hop into the system and begin to do your work, there's kind of a funniness about it. And we've gotten great feedback from our users in terms of the usability, and we continue to invest in that and evolve it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:03) You're super sharp. You speak very well. I like you a lot as a person. I'm curious, do you have any mentors or how did you progress yourself in your career?

(Derek at 00:10:13) Yeah. So I think we all kind of land in our career in kind of a blind way and get introduced to a variety of business situations. And I was fortunate when I came out of the University of Texas. I worked for a guy—I'll call him out by name, his name is Ben Wills—one of the best leaders I've ever reported to. And Ben was the guy who taught me some of the general guidance as a leader, how to deal with failing fast, how to deal with challenging situations, how to lead people along, use communication as a tool.

I'll never forget, we were in the back-end processing of the US mortgage business. And so there was a lot of opportunity for you to harness computing power and get rid of paper. And I'll never forget, one day I was 22 years old, and he sent me to go meet with an SVP in another part of the business. And he said, "Hey, I need you to go explain to him what we're doing, what the business value is, the benefit to the company, and what it's going to do to us from a revenue perspective, and try to lead him along."

And I looked at my boss, who was senior to this guy, and said, "Well, why do I have to go explain that to him? Can't we just go tell him this is what we're going to do?" He said, "We could, but he's not going to be a part of the team then. He's probably going to fight you on it, and I need to build this team across the organization, and I need success here."

And I can tell you that lesson alone, I use on a daily basis. In my current job, I've used it in every job since then. So yeah, Ben introduced me to other inspirational sources such as—he gave me my first Michael Lewis book, "Liar's Poker," which was about the mortgage industry, and it came full circle with "The Big Short." Obviously, Lewis has written a ton of great books in between those. And yeah, he just opened my eyes to the world of business and the impact that technology could have on business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:07) So as a CTO, how do you see the role has evolved or how do you see it continually evolving?

(Derek at 00:12:14) Yeah. So the CTO role can be a nebulous one. If you were to go out to an Indeed or LinkedIn today and look at postings for a chief technology officer, it could range anywhere from a very hands-on person that is side by side coding with developers, all the way to a position like we have structured the position here at Trintech, which is a leadership role.

And so at Trintech, as a part of the executive leadership team, I've got end-to-end responsibility for our software engineering capacity, both in large enterprise and mid-market, as well as our SaaS operations in both our private and public cloud operating environments. Infosec is a part of the responsibility as well, and I've got a really, really competent and progressive infosec team that reports to me, as well as is our internal IT function.

And I think each one of those areas is evolving so dynamically that a CTO today, to be successful, needs to—and I'll borrow kind of some guidance from a chapter in a book by a woman named Shanna Waller. It's called "The Team Success Handbook," and she really talks about who we are. Right? It's kind of three things. One, your CV or your resume of the past is going to have all the great things that you've done. And yes, it's a fact that I worked for Microsoft for a decade, and yes, it's a fact that I've worked in a 12 million end-user SaaS solution based out of Silicon Valley. But those are really just kind of tools on the shelf.

And if you are building who you are based on that past, that's not the right way to look at it. As a leader and as a CTO, you really need to be focused on two things. One, can you hire and retain and guide leadership and individual contributors underneath you? And the key is guide—not micromanage, not do their job for them, but guide them to success in the goals that you set out with as a business. Right?

And the second aspect of that is if you look at when things get rough, when we get into uncertain waters, can you pull those tools off the shelf to help provide confidence and even more prescriptive guidance to steer an organization through it? And I think that that is key. And I think that any CTO stepping into the position today probably needs to check the "what I've done from a past" attitude at the door and treat it more like a toolchest. And realize, if you have more tools on the shelf—right, any job is easier with the right tool—you'll be able to leverage those.

But come in with an open mind, come in and listen more than you speak, and work with your teams and build the right teams to come up with a strategy that works for what you need to accomplish as a business. The technology trends, the way that we organize and deliver software, the way that we operate, regulatory compliance and infosec requirements are so rapidly changing that you can't come in with a cookie-cutter approach and say, "Yeah, this is going to work. This worked for me in the last two jobs. Let's do it here. It'll work here." It'll never work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:15) As you're mentioning building teams and people, what are some of the traits that you look for as you're building teams?

(Derek at 00:15:23) Yeah. So first and foremost, I am looking for leaders that can do a couple of things. One is good communication skills, and the number one aspect of good communication skills is listening skills. And we look hard for that in any kind of interaction we have, including formal interviewing. I think it's really important.

(Derek at 00:15:43) The second is, at the end of the day, technology is what we do, and there are certainly a variety of roles inside of a software company that are more business focused and less about the technology. And some of those are becoming just, you know, more important than the technology themselves, which is great. But if you want to be in technology, well, you kind of have to have a fire in the belly and some sort of acumen for technology. And if it's not the kind of thing that keeps you up at night, if the books on your shelves don't lean toward technology, if when you take a little downtime and want to do a little extra reading, if those aren't involving technologies or you don't gravitate towards that, you know, it might not be the right role for you. So we really look for that.

(Derek at 00:16:26) We want passionate people. We want smart people, and we want great communicators.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:32) I love it. This is great. I get excited when people like—I get to interview so many different people, and some people are, it's rare, but they're like you and they have, like, just great answers, and they're succinct and they're articulate, and you can just tell that they're incredibly professional. And then I'm always like, man, I need deeper questions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:56) But this is an absolute pleasure.

(Derek at 00:16:59) Well, good. No, I'm appreciating the dialogue myself. Yeah, don't give me any deeper questions. Yeah, I might change my opinion of me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:06) Okay. So let's talk a little bit about what you're pumped up for for 2020. We just had the new year. What are you really excited about this year?

(Derek at 00:17:13) Yeah. So there's a ton at Trintech that I'm excited about, and there's a ton in the industry. And before I go into that, I kind of want to level set a view I have on innovation. We are in an era where because of technology, because of past investments in technology, the ability to innovate is becoming easier. We're having shorter innovation cycles. We're able to see the return on investment from innovation faster than I think I've ever seen in my career. It's a great thing. It's also a dangerous thing as well, because at the end of the day, innovation needs to be not just about "wow" to you who innovated it, but it needs to be "wow" to somebody. And in our case, we're B2B software. Yeah, it needs to be "wow" to our end users, to our end customers, and we need to be changing businesses for the better in a way that our end users are actually doing that versus us saying, "Hey, you're doing it all wrong. Let's go do it a different way," and trying to fix what isn't broken through technology. So with that said, there are a couple of big themes that I see out there. One is, we've been talking data since the beginning of time. We've looked at data in hierarchical databases, relational databases, unstructured data. And it's all been a great evolution. It's all been a great conversation, but we finally got the computing horsepower. And through both the commercial software investments as well as the open source communities, we finally have what we need to derive value from big data. And so if you think about a company like Trintech that is in the middle of the financial transactions of each one of our customers, we have the ability for our customers—we don't aggregate data or anonymize data or try to do anything from a data perspective that would be combining multiple customers' data for value. We've got enough data in any one individual customer to work with them and provide that data back to them to, first and foremost, help them be more efficient with their financial close process. But the second is our ability to detect anomalies in the system, whether something's changed, whether a vendor has misbilled something, whether we're treating this differently than we had in the past, or whether there might be an element of fraud in there. That power is here and it's now, and so I'm really excited about data and what we can do with data. If you take that data and then introduce artificial intelligence to it and be able to look for trends across financial data inside of a company, there's a lot that we can do to partner with our customers, and we're doing that in both our roadmaps for Adra as well as our Cadency large enterprise solution. So we're really excited about that. Last, automation is key. So if you think about that flip from 75% of your time going through matching things up and posting things and making the books right, to flipping that to 25% doing that and 75% analysis and strategic work, automation is your friend. And with not only the investments in bots and automation technologies that you're seeing just become horizontal mainstream in the market today, but when you combine that with our view on AI and risk intelligence, that makes for a really powerful solution. So you will see Trintech as a leader in risk intelligent robotics and how we apply that to the financial close process and make businesses better, make them more effective, make them more accurate, make your closes quicker, and most importantly, enable those great minds in the department of finance to do even more strategic work and further improve their businesses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:05) And you can gain a lot of insights by spending time with your customers. Do you personally spend time with some of your top customers?

(Derek at 00:21:12) So I personally have always been a very customer centric person, and I was raised that way as a kid. Well, I think one of the great matches that I found was this is a very, very customer centric company. I've got a peer in product management. His name is Michael Ross, a great product management leader. And we really rely on a fact base. We rely on customer input, customer led innovation, and kind of subscribe to that nothing important really happens inside of these four walls. You've got to get outside these four walls to understand how to make our product better and how to better serve our customers. So, for example, we have in the Adra space—we launched shortly after acquiring the company an innovation portal where our customers are able to submit their ideas on how to make the product better. And one of the fun things in the SaaS software business is even if a customer submits something that is a tactical, maybe incremental change to what you're doing, it can spark ideas from us, allow us to collaborate with them and say, "Hey, we hear you that you want to do A, but if A gets combined with B and C and you've got the option as to how you use that, can we implement that in the SaaS system across a variety of use cases, a variety of customers, industries, locations, languages, et cetera, to really make for some powerful innovation?" I think we've had 60 ideas submitted since its inception, and we have delivered upon them. All of those are accounted for in our product roadmap in upcoming releases, which is really exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:47) No, it's a great way to stay close to the customer. And do you have a specific software that you like for that, or?

(Derek at 00:22:53) I believe we use Aha! Portal, which is kind of standard in product management. I know in previous roles that I've had where I've actually owned a portion of product management as well, we've used that. But at the end of the day, I would say that listening to a customer is not technology centric. It's more programmatic. And do you have the ability to build a fact base, right, based on what the industry data is showing, based on what your customers are saying? And sometimes that customer—amassing that customer data isn't as pretty as saying, "Hey, I'm going to get on a plane and go take a customer out to lunch and listen to them." It could be through win-loss data. Right? So anytime we lose a customer, they decide to do something else, we follow up with win-loss data, specific interviews, and we're finding out what made their decision. And in many cases, there's a lot of value that we can get from that and say, "Hey, we're actually losing deals because a customer had this perception, or we're not strong enough in this area, or it's a part of our ecosystem that we just haven't focused on. And we need to invest in that." And that's really important as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:59) Yeah. I found it's almost never, like, entirely obvious. Like, it's always something you didn't see, but once you see it, you're like, "Oh, man. How can you not see that?" Yeah, at least for me.

(Derek at 00:24:10) That's super important. So I'll tell you a little anecdotal story. I don't come from an accounting background, but I grew up in a house with a father who was, for all intents, a manufacturer's rep, a sales guy in the office products industry. And in the '70s, he took a look at the way accountants worked and found a flaw. One is they tried to use a 12-inch ruler to navigate ledger paper. And second, the double underlining process, when they were in a hurry, didn't always work out, and you couldn't tell whether it was a single underline or a double underline. So he invented a ruler that was metric based and it actually equated to 14 inches and some change that would traverse an entire side of a piece of ledger paper. And one side of the ruler had a squiggly line on it so that a single underline was a single underline, a squiggly underline was a double underline. This took off in the US. When I got to the University of Texas, which had over 50,000 students, a really, really large and robust business school, big accounting program, it took about nine months for people to figure out that I was a kid on campus that actually had access to these rulers. There were common requirements for internships with, at the time, the Big Six. And there's an example of, technology aside, looking at the accounting process, looking at how people work, looking at their frustration and listening to them and saying, "Can I make you more accurate?" Right? It's clear what's a double underline versus a single underline. "And can I make you faster at what you do? Can I make you be able to use a single line across the paper versus trying to move a ruler and going from line 43 to line 44 in the ledger and actually making a mistake on your numbers?" And innovation can be that easy. Obviously, accounting has changed. We don't use ledger paper anymore. The Wiggly Green Ruler, as it was branded, is—I've certainly got a few boxes in my house, but that's no longer how we do the financial close process. But the themes haven't changed. We're still looking at how to make the accountant more productive. And the best way to figure that out is to sit with them, watch them work, and listen to what their input is on how to make their job better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:17) Preach. I love it. How did you meet Trintech? Like, how did that come about?

(Derek at 00:26:24) Yeah. So, it was actually a nice, a unique story. So I've been literally working since I was 12 years old. Cut lawns, worked during high school, worked during college, worked during graduate school, and was with a company based out of Silicon Valley that was acquired and spent three years with them. And the tail end of that was a part of an integration that we were moving functions, including my function, to the greater Atlanta area. And we worked through that and made that transition happen. And I actually decided to take for the first time in my career a few months off. My wife actually—she plays in the private equity space and she had just done the divestiture of a company and was in a similar situation. So we decided to take the summer off. And, you know, just kind of getting a little bored a couple weeks into it, flipping through some email. And I saw this mentioned Trintech, went to the website, and I thought, "Trintech. I know somebody from Trintech." And it turned out to be a father from my son's school. Our kids are in the same grade. When they came to the school, he actually came to the Dallas area for Trintech, and we'd taken them out to breakfast just to get to know them. And I said, "Ah, I do know Trintech." And I gave him a call. We went and had a coffee, sat and talked a little bit, and I said, "You know what? I'd like to meet the CEO. I'd like to talk to her. Her name is Teresa Mackintosh. And I said it'd be interesting to have a coffee." And my demeanor walking into it was, let's go have a coffee with Teresa and see how this goes. That coffee lasted two and a half hours. I was almost late to a flight that I had to catch later that day, and I'll never forget calling up my wife and saying, "You know, we kind of talked about taking a few months off this summer, but the plans kind of changed because that was an awesome conversation. And I want that job." And we're going to take a hiatus on the hiatus and went through the process. And lo and behold, a couple months later, I joined the leadership team here. And I will make another statement about Trintech that is sincere. When people ask you, you know, "What was the kind of highlight of your career in the software business as a technologist, high growth, exciting times?" For me, it was in my mid-20s at Microsoft in the decade that I spent there. It was a great time. That answer has now changed. In fact, Teresa knows not to ask me that question because she knows it's right here. It's right now. It's Trintech. We are just scratching the surface of, let's call it, a set of processes and solutions that the majority of the world today runs with a complexity of Excel spreadsheets and business functionality that is built on "reply all" or "forward" inside of their inbox. And what Trintech has done to revolutionize that is not only really exciting and we've got a ton of work left to do, but it's also exciting to be kind of in that infancy of what we're doing in the industry and the ability to change the industry as much as we are. So, yeah, couldn't be more excited than to be here at Trintech and be in the industry at this timing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:40) Oh, man. You got me excited. I want to help you out. So who is the customer? Like, who buys the product?

(Derek at 00:29:46) Yeah. So in the office of finance, right, you have got departments of people who are responsible for the financial close process, and finance is generally divided into what I would call kind of the FP&A side. Right? Those who are dealing with the daily, monthly, and quarterly financials, and then the controlling and accounting side. And so depending on how those departments are structured, it could be one. It could be both of those that are utilizing the product. But if you think about any tool that is a collaboration tool that is a pure end-to-end solve, you're going to have end users whose jobs could be just a specific part of a specific number of accounts, a specific limit to approvals, and that gets tied together with their peers, whether they be in the same office, different parts of the world, different divisions, and rolls up into financial leadership that will generally sign off on the books to close a period and certify the accuracy of that financial output. So there's a variety of users. We have customers who have upwards of 700 to 1,000 to 2,000 users of our product inside of a single company. So it's that broad.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:06) So if I'm, like, CTO, co-founder, and, you know, we're growing, maybe we've got anywhere from 100 to like 2,000 people. Would I just, like, tell my CFO, "Hey, take a look at this. It looks like it could help us automate some of our transaction data," or?

(Derek at 00:31:23) Yes. So, you know, it depends on what space that you're in. But so, for example, in a mid-market company, which ADRA is just a great solve for that, you know, I think the conversation is, what is our financial close process and what are the pain points in that? And literally, if you go to trintech.com, first page is going to ask you, are you a mid-market or large enterprise? And we have got some great walk-through videos that talk about the kind of solution space.

(Derek at 00:31:48) And so, you know, what are the typical problems that the Department of Finance is looking to solve with a solution like ADRA? In some cases, they could have good processes around reconciliations and how to handle their balance sheets, but they really don't have a task management solution. So for example, our task manager is something that is not only set up to help people create repeatable financial tasks on a period-by-period basis and ensure that jobs are done. If they're not done, for you to be able to see what's the blocker, who's not getting that work done, what do we need to do to alleviate that, and ensure we stay on time and on track. But they make for a great solve when it comes to audit time to be able to have the evidence and the controls of who checked off on what, what time frames, and that things were actually done.

(Derek at 00:32:37) So, yeah. There's just a couple of examples.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:41) Are you looking for, like, engineers too? Are you guys hiring, looking for technology people?

(Derek at 00:32:46) Yeah. So Trintech is, we're growing employee-wise. We're just over 500 employees today, and we'll continue to grow that. And so, yeah, we're always looking for full-stack engineers, front-end engineers, DevOps engineers, operators, infosec types, but the company across the board. And I think one of the really interesting things about Trintech is we've built in as a part of the business some really dynamic training and career growth opportunity type programs that allow people to build their career.

(Derek at 00:33:22) So for example, one of my peers runs an APO program that literally, we see anybody from kind of a high-performance entry level type to somebody who might be coming out of the accounting world and has no SaaS software experience be able to go through a program and learn how to be a product owner, which is just an integral part of any scrum team. And we've got a really big program that helps people through that. We do the same in the engineering side, and we certainly have structured approaches to marketing and sales, customer success, and professional services, other areas of our business. So yeah, great place to go check that out is on the career section of our website, and make sure to get your name in the queue if you're looking to make a career change.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:08) Is it, like, just in Texas or remote global?

(Derek at 00:34:12) Yeah. So we tend to be co-located. We're kind of big in the office culture, and it really works out for the way that we collaborate. We have a ton of fun in our offices too, which is kind of an added bonus. We've got offices in the Baltimore area. Our headquarters is here in Dallas, Texas. It's actually a little town called Addison, Texas. We've got an office in London. We've got an office in Norway, one in Stockholm. We've got a remote office in Asia-Pac, Australia. And though we don't necessarily have a work remote, work from home program, we do have a few employees that do work from remote areas. But all the locations that I've mentioned are great areas to live if you're looking for a venue or geography change. Yeah, it's, we've got some great offices.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:03) I'm a fan of, like, Sweden, Malmö. I know it's, like, more south than Stockholm. But have you gotten to go over there?

(Derek at 00:35:10) Yeah. So I've got direct reports in the Oslo office as well as adjacent team members in Stockholm. The Scandinavian culture, it's fascinating. They're really cool places to visit. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:23) Yeah. It is so different. I had Ben from BemObject on, and then we developed a friendship. And then I actually went over and spoke and hung out with them for a week in Malmö and, like, Copenhagen area, like, right across the bridge from each other. And getting to experience that culture, having never experienced anything other than the different cultures in the States was just, it's so different. It's really cool, though. They have their own, like, pros and cons, but it's, like, beautiful.

(Derek at 00:35:52) Yeah. Well, one of the things that I love, and this is going to sound tactical, but the water out of the tap is just so good. Right? It's the kind of stuff you pay, you know, $3 a bottle for in the store here in the States that I just find myself just drinking water nonstop. Right? It's almost addictive. It's just so good. You just go right to the tap and open up the faucet, put it in a glass, and drink it. And that's just, yeah, it's good stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:17) Yeah. And the public spaces are all, like, clean, and it's like a lot of people congregate out in public. It's very friendly. It's awesome. Yeah. I'm curious, though. You know, you got these offices. They're co-located. They're around the world. But how do you, as leader of the technology, the divisions that you mentioned, how do you make those people, like, all feel connected even though they're separate physically?

(Derek at 00:36:42) Yeah. So I think one of the keys to the software business and developing software is to adopt a working protocol, if you would. In the software development space, you will hear the words agile thrown around. We're actually a SAFe agile shop at Trintech. And it's interesting when we acquired the ADRA business, the ADRA business is also an agile shop. They more gravitated towards what's kind of called a Spotify framework of agile. And ironically, it was invented by Spotify, publicized by Spotify, and that came out of Norway as well. And so as a part of how we kind of evolved our culture and what we're doing here today is actually blending some of those concepts into our SAFe framework. But regardless of whether someone's in the office, whether they're dialed in on a remote call such as the one you and I are having, whether they're dialed in on an old-school telephone call, or just trying to reply or interact with their peers on Slack chat or the various technologies that we use, everybody understands their role and everybody understands what they're responsible for on a daily.

(Derek at 00:37:55) I could use words like weekly and monthly, but we actually have different words in the agile space to refer to our sprints and our product increments. But everybody understands how that works. So when you bring somebody new on board, they're going to have an understanding of how that works generally. But there are a ton of software shops that I've been exposed to, I've been brought into, that will say they're agile and they're kind of agile, but not really. And here at Trintech, we really, really subscribe to those frameworks. And it's really cool to watch people work because it's like athletes lining up on a basketball court, on a football field. Everybody kind of knows their role and knows what they're responsible for. And it really takes a lot of the stress and confusion out of the working environment and allows people to have confidence in what they do, allows us to get things done for our customers on time, on budget, and on quality, and also allows us to have fun in the environment. We have a ton of fun in this environment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:54) Yeah. The common language thing is incredibly useful.

(Derek at 00:38:57) Yeah. No, it's a must. It really and truly is because if you aren't talking a common language and if you aren't marching to a set of plans and know how to pivot in the right way when you have to exercise the agile component of agile, you know, you can be back into the waters of failed software projects and stressed software products and quality issues, and nobody wants to be there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:21) So as we start to wrap up, I'm curious to know, like, how do you go about, like, mentoring your direct reports?

(Derek at 00:39:27) So I'm a believer in kind of learn by experience, and it might sound old school, but I actually spent some time with Gartner this past year. An individual actually who kind of heads us up for Gartner, his name is Brent Castle. And we talked about what people today, whether they be newly graduates from college, people who are going through the mid part of their career, or even people with more experience and are looking to grow, what really resonates with them? And the concept that Gartner uses is called a brokered opportunity. And it's how do we work together and how do we take some of the business as usual or maybe some of the business as not usual, tasks, projects, strategy work that come up and be able to say, hey.

(Derek at 00:40:17) You know, every year, I'll give you an example, we go through budget at any software company. And the way that you budget in a software company is distinctly different than the way you would budget in a manufacturing company. And there's a lot of evolution that the accounting industry has had over the past decade as we've gravitated towards SaaS software. And so how do you work with a really up-and-coming direct report or even somebody who's a couple of clicks down that wants to be a part of that? How do you let them drive that budget process with your guidance? How do you teach them some of the tricks of the trade and work with your finance departments in terms of how we structure things and do things at the company? And what we find is walking out of an experience like that, somebody not only learns a bunch, but they've also kind of earned a tick on their resume and say, yeah, I took a budget for an engineering department end-to-end. And there's an accolade for you. Back to there's a tool on the tool shelf that we kind of referred to in an earlier conversation in this interview.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:23) Yeah. The finance thing is a component that I've seen not a lot of people have, and that education and that experience is, like, absolutely critical, like, P&L responsibilities or budget. I call them P&L responsibilities. But that's just an invaluable progression in your career.

(Derek at 00:41:40) Yeah. But, I mean, I think it goes well beyond finance. You know, I'm a technologist at the end of the day, and I've had the fortune of working for big companies that did things in ways that were good then. I've worked in the open source communities. I've had a successful startup. And so to be even able, you know, from a technology perspective and sit and work with somebody who maybe the majority of their career has been spent in commercial software and hasn't had much exposure to open source. To be able to introduce some of those concepts, the way things that, you know, that those things work, the way that we position things, or even introduce open source technologies and work with those, is a lot of fun. And I certainly enjoy that aspect. And I'm still very hands-on from a technical perspective. Believe it or not, you'll find me from time to time in a bash shell.

(Derek at 00:42:28) They don't let me put anything in production anymore, but I certainly am engaged enough to go through the paces and have an engaging conversation with any of the technologists here at Trintech, and then we'll let them polish it up and do something that is production worthy. But I think employees enjoy that. Let's, you know, let's get out the whiteboards. Let's roll up the sleeves. Let's hop into a shell, write a little pseudo code. You know, let's explore the challenges that we face and solve them and solve them with technology. You know, that's the way I looked at it when I was 11 years old. And, you know, now that I just turned 50, I really haven't looked at it any different way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:05) I love it. You like to get things done. This is amazing. We did it. We made a podcast. And, man, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on and hanging out and talking about technology with me.

(Derek at 00:43:15) Nah. Not a problem. I appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:17) Thank you so much, buddy. You have a wonderful day.

(Derek at 00:43:19) Yeah. Thank you.