Andy Sen - CTO & Co-Founder at AppDirect

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Andy Sen, the CTO and co-founder at AppDirect, and we discussed the transition to a subscription-first world, creating a personal connection in a remote environment, and how company culture impacts your products and services. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) It's Andy. Hey, how's it going? Amazing. I love the background, man.

(Andy Sen at 00:00:38) Oh yeah. The funny thing is I just took this background straight off the internet, and I guess it's supposed to be Manhattan. But the funny thing is it looks very, very similar to the actual background from our office in San Francisco. So we have a building just like this, and then you see the bay. It's obviously the bay, not the river, but it looks very much like this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) So is that why you chose it? Yes. Well, it's beautiful. I always am curious about what it's like without that. We actually were just talking about in our production meeting today, like, changing my background. We've been talking about it for like a year or two, and we've been trying to come up with ideas about, like, you know, do we use an image? We didn't like the green screen idea. So like, our challenge to our team was to post in Slack tomorrow morning their favorite podcast background from their Google searching, and then we're going to kind of look at what everyone's favorite is and narrow it down and come up with a new backdrop for the video.

(Andy Sen at 00:01:37) Got it. Normally, like every single day, I work out of my backyard. I pulled in an extension cord. I've got Wi-Fi set up, so I just sit in the backyard and work. But of course, for this, you know, I can't guarantee there won't be any cars going by or a plane going by or something like that. So I took over my son's bedroom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:55) Oh, nice. So is he the one that plays the piano?

(Andy Sen at 00:01:58) He is the one that plays the piano. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:00) Did you get into that at all or just him?

(Andy Sen at 00:02:03) It's just him. I'm a listener.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:05) Have you given him that app on the iPad called Simply Piano?

(Andy Sen at 00:02:10) He's got an app on the iPad, but I'm not sure if it's Simply Piano or not. What does that do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:16) It kind of scrolls and you can play along with it, and it teaches you to sight read, and it goes as advanced as like full-blown classical professionals.

(Andy Sen at 00:02:26) That sounds really good. I am taking a note of that right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:31) Oh, this was useful already. Yes. I use it. I'm a huge fan. I'm like a third of the way through, and it's a fun—I do it twice a day for like fifteen minutes, and it's amazing because it helps me be new. Like, I started it because it was helping me be new at something, be like completely green, and I always try to have something in my life that I'm completely inexperienced at because it reminds me about, you know, how I learn and all of this. And then as you start to make progress in it and it becomes a skill, it becomes more fun, and you can push it and grow it. And yeah, it's just a fun part of life.

(Andy Sen at 00:03:08) That is very interesting. Yeah, I like learning new skills as well, something totally different from my day-to-day. And during these crazy COVID times, the thing I tried to pick up—I'm sitting in the backyard all day. Well, let me try to grow some plants. I'm going to try to take up gardening. And I think I successfully killed off every plant I tried to grow. So definitely a rough start.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:34) You know, we got this like little egg carton where you just water it regularly and you measure it. It's like a project made to do with the kids. And, you know, in the different egg spots, it's got like two or three different types of plants in there. And we got to the point where we grew it to where we needed to pot it, right? Because we grew it inside just on the countertop and, like, but then we just got lazy. And if you don't act like really quickly on potting it, they just die. They grow out of it and they die. And so we let all of ours die.

(Andy Sen at 00:04:10) Yeah, it's definitely harder than it looks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:12) Yes, it is. It takes a lot of attention and a lot of time, and it takes consistency on a daily basis. It's like a pretty involved hobby. That's a new podcast. We're actually rebranding. We're going from technology leadership to gardening and piano playing. So I'm so excited to have you back on again. Like, this is amazing.

(Andy Sen at 00:04:34) Great to be back.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:34) Yeah. It's been two years. Like, that blows my mind because I feel like I—I mean, I think about you all the time with your concept of individual ownership. It became after our conversation, it became a core value of the company. We don't have many of them. We have less than ten. But the way you described individual ownership stuck with me, and it stuck with the culture of our company since the moment we talked.

(Andy Sen at 00:04:57) Oh, wow. I had no idea. Well, I mean, I'm glad you found it useful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:01) Yeah. Big impact. What's changed with you in the past two years?

(Andy Sen at 00:05:05) Well, I mean, I think it's a pretty recurring theme. I mean, 2020 has been pretty crazy for everyone, from a business side, from a personal side, from our employees, our customers, everything. I mean, I still remember I guess it was February I was supposed to fly out one week later to Australia to meet some of our clients. And then just everything just shut down. And so since then, I mean, it's been interesting. We've obviously gone to a 100% remote workforce. We were one of the first companies which did that. And then using our technology to kind of help businesses because we're in the business of selling and distributing cloud apps. And helping our customers use these cloud apps and use it even more in this age of COVID has just been a very interesting experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:59) Yeah. Can you give for the people that didn't hear your first episode—we'll have them go back and listen to it, we'll put the links in the show notes—but can you give like the thirty, sixty-second overview of what AppDirect is?

(Andy Sen at 00:06:10) Absolutely. AppDirect is a lot of things, but the thirty-second version is that we are a subscription commerce company. So if you're a business and you want to either sell or monetize any kind of app, it could be your app or it could be somebody else's app. So for example, some of our clients include Comcast. And Comcast uses our technology to sell Microsoft 365. And AppDirect provides the technology to let people both buy as well as use cloud applications.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:43) Amazing. And it's a pretty big app store. Right? How many apps do you have in there?

(Andy Sen at 00:06:47) So we have thousands of apps on AppDirect. Some of them are specific for an individual customer. So as I said, it could be Comcast or an ABB or a Telstra putting their own apps on the marketplace. And some of them are kind of universal network apps like a Microsoft or Google, which multiple of our customers resell. So we have hundreds of these network apps and thousands of just private apps which we offer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:16) And so what's the benefit on like the consumer side to go through that app store?

(Andy Sen at 00:07:22) Oh, that's a great question. So there's a couple of things. One is from a consumer, and in our case, the consumers are always small businesses. So the first benefit is the idea of bundling. They don't have to go to five different vendors to get, you know, five different applications that they need. They're going to one vendor anyway, let's say, for broadband or let's say to get their tax software. And now they can get all their cloud software in one place under one bill. So you start off with that benefit. And of course, you know, along with getting a bundle, they can get a good deal. But the thing with subscription software is once you buy it, you have to continue to manage it. As you get new employees, you need to give them new seats. As your business grows, you might want to upgrade your subscription. You might want to try something different. And the AppDirect platform gives one place for businesses to go in there and use the applications that they have. It gives you a common portal where they can single sign on in. They can add licenses. They can upgrade, downgrade their subscription. They can get data visualizations across the apps that they own of what people are doing in them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:33) Interesting. Have you worked with any payroll companies before? So like, you integrate into the payroll company so when people get hired, it will trigger like new licenses or anything like that?

(Andy Sen at 00:08:45) So one of our biggest customers is actually ADP, who is the largest payroll company in the world. And so they have a very extensive add-on store, which is all powered by AppDirect. So, you know, if you're using ADP for payroll, but along with payroll, as you said, you want to integrate that to your HR system. And maybe your HR system is done by PeopleSoft or Workday or someone like that. So you can go to the add-on store on ADP, buy the PeopleSoft plugin, for example. And once you buy that, you'll have the integration between your payroll and your HR system. And that entire marketplace experience is powered by the AppDirect platform.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:25) That's so cool. It's like in my head, it's like these apps combined with like a little bit of automation with the billing benefit. There's like a lot of little benefits there. I like it. I think it's smart. Like, engineering-wise, it gets me nerdy too, because I'm like, I'm a big fan. We just set up a lot of our automation with like Zapier to help our sales teams. And so we've been like really deep in what automation can do for the business, because it's quite unbelievable once you finish an automation and you're like, okay. Well, that recurring block on my calendar, that was a ninety-minute block that I've done every day for ten months is just gone now. It's a weird feeling.

(Andy Sen at 00:10:06) And the interesting thing is, I mean, you're obviously a very sophisticated consumer. You know about technology. You know about people like Zapier. Now the average small business is just not that sophisticated, but they have to deal with the same challenges. Some of these challenges are accelerated by the work-from-home environment with COVID. So they need a more packaged one-stop shop where they can get this. So for example, one of our customers is Vodafone in Europe. So when the lockdown started hitting, Vodafone, they're already working with AppDirect, but they essentially spun up a new AppDirect marketplace, which was only for giving free tools to businesses who were impacted. So businesses who could just go there and then get free either trials or discounted licenses of all kinds of collaboration products like Microsoft and other productivity and security tools, antivirus tools. So quickly, we could spin that up and let all of Vodafone's customers access these tools, you know, during these crisis moments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:13) That's pretty cool. Yeah. That's exciting that you guys got to play a positive role in such a big shift that occurred in such an unforeseen way.

(Andy Sen at 00:11:24) No, I mean, it's obviously been a challenge, but as you said, it has been exciting. You know, from a technologist point of view, I mean, there's nothing that gets me more excited when you see people using and appreciating the tools and products that you build. And there have definitely been examples of that to happen, like, you know, in a small way, we're helping in the crisis.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:46) Yeah. I was talking a little bit about—and I'm curious to get your opinion on this—talking with Chris Wright, who's the CTO at Red Hat. You know, everybody, I don't think they need an introduction. But we're talking about open source software, and I was curious like, what your thoughts were on open source.

(Andy Sen at 00:12:05) Well, our entire stack is predominantly open source. I mean, from the operating system, which is running on Linux, we run on open source Java, open source JavaScript, like using React frameworks. We pick up large frameworks, you know, like Kafka, for example, for doing data processing. So I mean, we are essentially an open source shop. So from that point, from again, from a technology point of view, we're definitely bought into the open source model. Was that your question, or your question was like more how does open source play a role during these times?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:42) It was pretty open-ended question. So no. I was just curious about the first question, I guess, would be, you know, how much open source is involved in your business, and it seems like there is a good amount of open source. And the second question is just, I guess, just your general thoughts on open source, and I guess, how has it prepared companies to deal with this COVID situation? Are people using open source tools right now to help? I mean, I was talking with one of the machine learning people at Stanford the other day, and they're open-sourcing a lot of their algorithms and their research, and that's being used to help process data faster.

(Andy Sen at 00:13:26) That's interesting. I don't have any direct knowledge about how open source is helping, but what is absolutely helping is cloud software. So even in 2020, there's a ton of critical business being run off someone's desktop in their office. And people knew about it. They knew they had to transition to the cloud, but they just weren't doing it because it wasn't critical. Well, it just became critical in a matter of hours. So I see a lot of benefits. I mean, the classic example here is Zoom. Right? We're using Zoom to do this meeting. Whether it's Zoom, whether it's Slack, whether it's Teams, whether it's, you know, Google Apps for collaboration. I see a lot of online collaboration software and online tools, which are definitely helping. I think this transition to a work-from-home environment would have been much harder, if not impossible, even ten, fifteen years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:24) It's true. Was it crazy for you guys to move everybody to remote, or did you already have that set up?

(Andy Sen at 00:14:31) No. To be honest, it was a lot easier than I think we anticipated. I mean, we moved faster. Even before the states mandated lockdowns, we were 100% remote globally because we have offices all over the world. And because we both build on the cloud, you know, our software is deployed at AWS or Azure, and we use extensive cloud tools and every tool we use internally is cloud-hosted. It happened pretty smoothly. So I'm glad to say that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:04) Are you noticing any trends of technology emerging right now that's important for you guys?

(Andy Sen at 00:15:13) Couple of things. From just the process of creating software, especially now that we're in a remote environment, I see a lot of emphasis on software which really not really measures, but kind of coaches and helps engineers and developers be better at their craft. So, you know, we've used a company called, or product called GitPrime to—yeah, GitPrime. Yeah. I mean, I think after I got a shoutout from them at one point in their book, I mean, we were one of their first customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:51) Oh, really? So do you know Travis?

(Andy Sen at 00:15:53) I do not know Travis.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:55) They're just like a company that you guys do business with that you're close with. You were an early customer.

(Andy Sen at 00:16:01) Yeah, absolutely. And I see more of that trend of really figuring out how teams are doing their work, how do you measure their outputs, how are you getting them to collaborate together. Like, everybody uses some kind of a collaboration software. Everyone's got video conferencing. But how do you really make sure that a virtual team is working effectively? So any kind of tools which help in that aspect, I think their adoption is being accelerated pretty quickly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:32) There's a couple other ones that are cool out there. GitPrime—they just sold to Pluralsight about, I think a year ago. And those guys, from what I hear, are some pretty savvy business people at Pluralsight, so I would bet on their company doing well long term.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:48) And I've got some other softwares for you too. There was one that blew my mind, this guy out in Seattle, and he actually flew down and I met and had lunch with him. He was making sort of a competitor to GitPrime, and the name escapes me right now. But it was just fascinating what they ended up doing when I researched it, about how they quantified down to the level of line impact was the word that they use. So they came up with this formula.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:17) They call it line impact, and it basically measures the impact of any given line of code. And the way they come up with this, I dove really deep into it at the time, but it was probably eight months ago. But I was just thoroughly blown away because I'd seen GitPrime, and Pinpoint's also fantastic, and they're out in Texas. So GitPrime, Pinpoint, and then GitClear, and the guy's name is Bill.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:42) Yeah, GitClear. His name is Bill. So this guy, super interesting individual, really composed and structured in his time. And so he owns this other company that does pretty well. They're a marketplace of some sort. I think it's a competitor to eBay, but they're pretty big, called Bonanza or Bonanza. And then he needed—he was an engineer and built that product from the ground up, that marketplace from the ground up. And he had the problem that we all have of how do you measure developer productivity and how do you really figure out who's the most impactful person, because it's not just straight commits, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:25) There has to be some detailed logic behind it. And he's an engineer, full-time engineering type person. So they came up with this whole internal project and ran it for a couple years inside, and then they spun it out as GitClear. And now he's growing it. It's in its earlier stages, but I was pretty impressed with what they had done. And then Pinpoint is by the guys that did Appcelerator. Remember that thing?

(Andy Sin at 00:18:49) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:49) Like, back in the day? Yeah, Appcelerator. Yeah. So they're totally—go ahead.

(Andy Sin at 00:18:56) Do you know that Appcelerator was one of AppDirect's first customers? Really? Yeah. We powered their add-on store.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:05) Oh, that's amazing. I remember because when they came out, I tried to build an app with it, and I didn't end up using it. I ended up just building it natively, but because it was for a larger company, and I wanted it to be done where we could hand over the source code and they just negotiated the contract like that. But, yeah, they are really cool guys over there. Jeff Haynie, and they're out in Texas.

(Andy Sin at 00:19:35) So, you said Jeff Haynie is now part of, is now Pinpoint? Is this company?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:40) Yeah. He's the founder. He has a co-founder, and yep, he's a fantastic individual.

(Andy Sin at 00:19:46) Yeah. Absolutely. I met him. I mean, it's supposed to be ten years ago, during the Appcelerator days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:52) Oh, you did? You got to meet him? Nice. Yeah. He was trying to decide because he was in San Francisco, and he was trying to decide—he was constantly taking these four-hour-plus flights to New York back and forth, and he's like, I need a place that's in the middle, so it's a half flight either place. So they settled on Texas to be the headquarters of Pinpoint.

(Andy Sin at 00:20:15) Very interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:16) Yeah. Check them out. They are doing some cool stuff with developer analytics, and they're nerds too. So I think we're all kind of nerds, but any other cool things that are going on? I've got lots of information. In the past two years, I've been very busy talking to everybody about what they're building.

(Andy Sin at 00:20:35) Well, I mean, look. We're building a lot. There's a—I mean, subscription commerce is such a massive field, and especially when you're talking about pulling multiple products from multiple companies together, there's how do you sell them, how do you pull data from them, how do you visualize the data. So there's a lot of interesting things going on, and the field just keeps expanding. The other interesting thing from an AppDirect point of view is, you know, the name is AppDirect.

(Andy Sin at 00:21:06) So since we started selling and distributing apps or applications. But as everything gets digitized, everything can be an app. You can think of as an app. Everything from your financial product to energy to a telephone service. I mean, frankly, even a physical product like a laptop or an iPhone is now sold on a subscription basis.

(Andy Sin at 00:21:30) So in a way, it's an app. So from my perspective, you know, I'm the technology guy. I'm helping build a product. But I feel like I'm getting a front-row seat into seeing the world become software. You know, that phrase "software is eating the world"? Sometimes I feel like I'm sitting in the front row and it's just happening in front of my eyes as industry after industry, product after product gets digitized. And, of course, we see it because once they get digitized, the next thing is, okay, we're now a digitized subscription-based product. How do you sell it? How do customers use it?

(Andy Sin at 00:22:04) How do you combine it with the other products? So it's—yeah, those last two years have definitely seen an acceleration of that trend.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:12) I like to think about the future a lot in that regard. Like, so what you were talking about with subscription—I've done this project several years ago, and one of the biggest things that I learned from that project is how margins adjust in different economic scenarios.

(Andy Sin at 00:22:28) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:29) And so one of the patterns that I subjectively picked up through just going around in life was that it seems like as the margins get consolidated or crushed, whatever terminology we want to use, they get squashed down. It goes subscription first, almost like subscription. You'll pay $50 a month. And then it's highly detailed usage of resources. And so that's—first, it starts with subscription, then it gets more granular with your AWS where you're paying by the second or the minute or the hour for what you're processing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:01) And then so I took that thought experiment, and I said, okay, let's bring this to the farthest extreme. And so the farthest extreme is that we would go through our lives, and we're only paying for exactly what we're using when we need it on demand. And it's a good future visualization as far as where your business is positioned, right? Because you're positioned in the middle of that. But it's just an interesting thought of taking something from subscription to extreme, and it doesn't seem so extreme anymore because my life is essentially—I can view it through the lens of subscriptions. I have a power subscription, you know, energy usage subscription that's detailed. Some things aren't subscribed yet, like my air conditioning isn't—the unit itself isn't necessarily subscribed yet, but I could see in the future that I wouldn't put out $6,000 to $10,000 per unit. I would just rent one at $50 a month.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:56) Right? But it just seems like the whole world is going that way.

(Andy Sin at 00:24:00) Absolutely. And it's funny you brought up air conditioning. I'm here in California. I mean, the summers are pretty hot. Not to plug them—it's got nothing to do with AppDirect. It's just a pure personal story. I went and got this product through Tesla Energy where they put these solar panels on your roof, and they put these giant batteries in my garage. So not only do I get solar power, they're also stored in the battery. So at night, the house runs on the batteries.

(Andy Sin at 00:24:29) And, you know, if there's a blackout or anything like that, I'm still covered. But the interesting thing was the whole buying experience that Tesla took me through is I was buying an app. I have an app on my phone which manages this, and I have a subscription. So every day, I put in my credit card, and they charge me an amount of money for this equipment that they've put up. So it's energy. It's not the air conditioning, but it's what's powering my air conditioning in my house. And some pretty serious and very good looking hardware in my garage, all digitized and sold as a service.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:06) I've been thinking about that a lot, by the way. Whenever I'd see in the mall, I'd see the Powerwall. What do they call it? The Powerwall, I think?

(Andy Sin at 00:25:13) The Powerwall. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:14) Yeah. I was like, that looks so cool. Did you get the—you didn't get the tiles. You just got the panels, right? I don't think the tiles are really out yet.

(Andy Sin at 00:25:20) I don't think the tiles are out. I wanted the tiles, but I was on a huge waiting list, so I just got the panels. I got the panels of the solar, the solar walls in the garage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:31) Nice. And so and then does it—can it charge your Tesla directly?

(Andy Sin at 00:25:36) So the funny thing is I don't even have a Tesla. I use it to charge my house.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:41) How much can it hold?

(Andy Sin at 00:25:43) So this summer, I don't think I've ever used power on the grid. It can, if it's a nice sunny day, it can easily hold enough power for the next couple of days. So if you've got a sunny day and then the next couple of days are cloudy or rainy, it pulls you through that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:58) Really? That's pretty cool. And so you get to monitor it all on your phone?

(Andy Sin at 00:26:03) Oh, yeah. They've got a beautiful app on my phone with—you know, it's very similar to on a car—on a, I've got an old Prius, and even there, that technology was there saying, how much of your power is coming from your gas versus electric? Well, this works the same way. So it's nice visualization showing is the power in your house coming from your solar panels? Is it coming from the battery, or is it being pulled directly from the grid?

(Andy Sin at 00:26:27) And there's graphs, there's charts, there's historical data, all kinds of things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:33) Have you done any other technological upgrades to the house, like, get the Nest thermostat or anything?

(Andy Sin at 00:26:40) I do have a Nest thermostat, and I do have a bunch of appliances, all powered by Alexa.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:48) Oh, what's your favorite Alexa-powered appliance? I've got David Isbitski coming back, one of the heads of Alexa in a couple weeks. I want to talk with him about it.

(Andy Sin at 00:26:59) Well, I mean, obviously, I have the Alexa pod itself. I have the Fire Stick, the 4K for my TV. I love that. And the rest are just smart plugs. So I can do things like, you know, turn on the backyard lights or things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:14) Oh, nice. Yeah. We have a smart plug, so we can turn on the lighting for the—we've got these plants and we've got light. When it's Christmas time, we call it the Christmas tree. It's not a Christmas tree. It's just these fake plants that have Christmas lights that are white. And we could say, Alexa, turn on the Christmas tree and it goes bing and it turns them all on.

(Andy Sin at 00:27:33) Yeah. And again, I'll pull it back a little bit to kind of more the relevant work conversation. It's this experience which I almost now take for granted on the consumer side. It's not there on the business side, and that's essentially what AppDirect is trying to do. So as a small business, wouldn't it be cool to have a dashboard like the way that Tesla offers where you can see all the apps that your business is using.

(Andy Sin at 00:28:02) You can see all the employees, who's using what app, how they're using it. You can get a visualization. You can get a news feed, and you can see how much you're being charged for it in one place. That's what we do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:13) You could do that today? That's not like the future?

(Andy Sin at 00:28:16) No. That's today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) Oh, that's pretty cool.

(Andy Sin at 00:28:20) Yeah. And it's interesting. It's kind of like cheating because, you know, I'm looking at what's happening on the consumer world, and it gives you kind of a preview of what people are using, what people are expecting, and then you've got to think, well, okay, that's the experience on the consumer side. How do you take that to the business or the enterprise side of the world as well? And, of course, the enterprise side of the world has its own unique challenges, but it's an interesting problem to try and solve.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:49) Yeah. You've got me thinking. And so your marketplace is large enough. You have enough users. You can actually see when companies are doing well and growing based off of tracking their usage. That's actually pretty interesting data.

(Andy Sin at 00:29:03) It is. I will say right now that we are just beginning to look at that. There's a couple of ideas we have on what we can do with the data. Again, we are never in the business of selling that data. We're not an ad company. That's not our business. But there's a lot of interesting products we could offer to potential customers based on the data. We could offer—I mean, obviously, we could know what, how things are trending. But because we're a subscription commerce company and we see how their subscriptions are going, how their business is trending as well, we can offer potentially financial products geared right towards them. So we're exploring a lot of ideas as the world is getting digitized and more and more products make sense to be sold via a platform like AppDirect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:58) Yeah. I like tough conversations. Like, there are certain conversations that are hard to talk about, or at least they feel like they're hard to talk about for me, partly because I don't necessarily speak a lot in those areas. But it's interesting when you have data on your platform and then you kind of have the acknowledgment that, like, oh, we didn't do this intentionally. We just slowly built stuff over time to help, and now we just happen to have this benefit. What do we ethically do? How do you handle ethics? Do you have an ethics person? How do you approach that?

(Andy Sin at 00:30:33) We don't have a dedicated ethics person. What we do have is, because we started in the subscription commerce space, for a company our size, we have an incredibly strong culture around compliance and data privacy. It's almost like we didn't have a choice. We work with companies like Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Telstra, all over the world in countries and jurisdictions which have far more data privacy requirements than the U.S. We're transacting, you know, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars through our systems.

(Andy Sin at 00:31:12) So we've got all the credit card companies involved, and they've got all their own regulations. So we're very cognizant of the information that our customers are giving us, whether that's their payment information, whether that's their behavioral information. And, frankly, in the end, our main goal is to enable subscription commerce for the people who are going to sell and provide value for the people who are trying to buy. As I said, giving them a common dashboard, letting them buy multiple products together. As we grow this data and we can use this data to provide value to either side of the marketplace, we'll do that.

(Andy Sin at 00:31:50) But, again, that's not our primary focus. The data is there to enable us to offer a better service to our sellers and buyers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:59) I like that. That's a good position to take. Let's just use the data to continually make a better service. That's a really solid position. I'm curious too, speaking of tough conversations, I was reading online this morning about the tech CEOs that are going in front of Congress.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:16) Have you read about that at all?

(Andy Sin at 00:32:18) I knew they were going out in front of Congress. I saw the news yesterday, but I don't know if they've already gone there. I saw that Jeff Bezos had sent over this prepared statement. Very polished statement, but I haven't actually read it or looked into it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:33) Yeah. I haven't looked into it a whole lot either. It actually came up on my radar this morning, and in one of the articles I was reading, they kind of snipped some of the opening statements and some of the opening arguments. And I was like, they're pretty good arguments for anti-competitive behavior, but, you know, it's one thing. You have to hear all sides, right? And just reading the opening statement of the CEOs, of course, it's going to be in defense of their position. So I'm interested actually to see the counterarguments to what they're doing. But maybe we'll have a policy expert on.

(Andy Sin at 00:33:12) That would be interesting. So I'm not even aware what the counter argue—are the people who are bringing them in front of Congress or the Congress people talking about breaking up potentially these large tech companies? Is that their focus?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:23) I don't know if it's to break them up or it's to get them to address the anti-competitive claims. I'm not exactly entirely sure, like, the root of it.

(Andy Sin at 00:33:35) Got it. Now, clearly, I'm not a policy expert by any means. I don't even pretend to be one on a podcast. But it is interesting because, you know, some of these anti-competitive laws and tools were built over a hundred years ago, and the outcome was more obvious. You wanted to break up a railway monopoly. Well, you break them up by region. Same thing with the telephones, with what they did with the old AT&T. In the nineties, when they were talking about breaking up Microsoft, it was like, well, there should be an operating system and an apps. It makes sense. But now when you've got these kind of hyper-scaled networked companies, whether it's a social network or an ad network, it's not even clear what the remedy would be. Like, how do you break something like that up? And I think people underestimate the outcomes or the effects you could have if you're going to use the old model on the new. Like, even if you win the argument or even if the argument is valid that you need to break them up. Well, break them up how? You obviously want to do it for the public good, but changing them to affect that public good, I think, is not obvious at all. And I'm suspicious of anyone who says that they have the answer all figured out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:52) That's what I don't understand, and you bring up a valid point too. We'll call this the amateur conversation, and then we'll go check all of our thoughts against actual intelligent people on this subject. But I think you bring up an interesting point of conversation, and that is that back in the day, a geo or a regional breakup would make more sense. But now with the way that companies are run, you can run a company anywhere in the world, period. If you break them up and they were different companies, I mean, wouldn't they still be reporting up? What would prevent that from happening or prevent them from, you know, okay, let's say one of the big guys, they split off one of their organizations. Like, they make—let's just say Facebook takes Instagram and spins it out, right? Well, whoever they spin it out to or whatever that is, like, why wouldn't they have a direct connection and want to work with Facebook towards whatever plan they're going towards anyway? Like, how do you actually enforce that on a larger scale? I don't know.

(Andy Sin at 00:35:54) Right. And in this case, again, I think some people have an emotional reaction like, oh, Facebook is too big. Facebook has too much power. And I'm not saying they're wrong. I mean, that's a very valid thing to say. But you have to think about, well, what is the consumer benefit that I want? I mean, is it that you think Instagram is a monopoly? There should be a dozen other valid sites where you can upload and look at your images. And is that what you're going to do? And if so, what's the barriers to it? I mean, the tech barrier is minimal. If you get a bunch of good engineers and create a photo-uploading site pretty quickly, it's not going to go anywhere because what's important is the network effect. It's not that Facebook will crush you. Oh, sorry. It's not the technology which is important. It's not the fact that Facebook is out there trying to crush you. It's that you need to build up that network effect. And that network effect as a consumer is incredibly valuable. It's extremely valuable that all my contacts are on Instagram. So as an expert, when you're proposing some kind of a change, you've got to bring that back and say, okay. How is the change I'm proposing going to actually affect the public? Because in the end, I mean, that's what you're trying to do. Was I breaking up a little bit?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:10) Let's see. Okay. So I found out the problem yesterday for the first time in, like, 300 episodes. My AirPods, they just blanked out mid-episode. And I was like, that's never happened before. I checked the charge before. They were at 100%, and then they just did it again. And it's been, like, forty minutes. So what's happened is the batteries have gotten worn out. They don't last anymore. What do you use for your headphones?

(Andy Sin at 00:37:38) Oh, these are the Bose noise-canceling ones.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:41) Yeah. They're great for flying.

(Andy Sin at 00:37:44) I'm a big fan. Yeah. No. I actually bought them exactly for that, for the plane rides. I was doing a lot of traveling last year just, you know, visiting clients, visiting our offices. We now have offices in Buenos Aires as well as India. So a lot of flying last year. Not so much this year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:04) I know. It's tough. How are you handling it?

(Andy Sin at 00:38:08) Again, it's been surprisingly good. Again, from my perspective, like I said, we have employees all over the world, and some of those places, their lockdowns are much stricter. People are having a harder time. Here in the US, here in California, it hasn't been that bad.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:27) Yeah. I miss it. Like, I definitely do. It was hard at first. It was really hard to adjust because, like you, I was, you know, in different cities every other week, and it was a different pace that you're moving at, and then you realize that you're stuck and it actually changes the dynamics of your interpersonal relationships too. Like, I just noticed between my family and I, it's like, oh, this is just different. It wasn't necessarily bad. And just to not go anywhere for such an extended period of time started to feel pretty weird.

(Andy Sin at 00:39:02) It does. I mean, what I miss the most is definitely those personal connections, and this is something that, you know, I've been thinking about as well. When we moved to an all-virtual environment, we saw that it didn't affect the team's output or productivity at all, and that's just not right after. I mean, I think, universally, that's been the case. But a lot of that is because these are the people that we have met before, that we have worked with before. And to move to a virtual environment, you still have those interpersonal relationships. Now at AppDirect, I mean, we're doing well as a company. We're expanding. We're hiring people all over. And it's a totally different challenge when you onboard someone remotely. Now there are remote-only companies who have been doing this for years very successfully, but it is a different culture change because now you're hiring people who are remote. You've never seen—you've never even seen them during an interview. And now you have a mixture of people on your team, some of whom have seen each other, have had interpersonal relations before versus people who are completely virtual from day one. And I don't know what exactly the answer is, but we're looking at that trying to figure out, like, how do we integrate them into the team? How do we make sure everyone's on the same page? How do we make sure that people are comfortable? And we don't get into this weird situation where there's people who used to be physical versus the, you know, remote—the native remote people. But how do we actually merge them together so they work effectively as a team? It's an interesting problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) Where are you at right now with trying to solve it?

(Andy Sin at 00:40:42) So I don't think we have—we're conscious of it. We have the managers making sure that new virtual people are put into kind of virtual meetings. They're included. They're onboarded. That they're not just kind of forgotten about. That's number one. As a company, we're doing a ton of events to try to get people together. So two of them, which I thought was kind of fun—I think one of them was just last week. You have a "bring your kids to work" day. So we turned that on its head and had a "bring your work to kids" day, where it was like a virtual session. We had our CEO reading stories to kids. We had kids doing things. We had a virtual visit to a farm. And, you know, you kind of got to see into all your coworkers' living rooms. You got to see their families. You know, that was fun. We have done, like, kind of virtual wine nights where everyone's in their own home. You get your bottle of wine, and it's not just a happy hour. You have, like, wine experts come on, talk about various things related to wine, talking through tasting notes. And, you know, we're trying as much as possible to have these kind of events which bring people together. Another thing which actually we have—this has helped with this virtual environment—is we have these programs where you are just matched up at random with people in the company, and you meet for coffee for fifteen minutes in a week. Just get to know what they're doing. But that was obviously per office. And now we have those same programs. So since they're virtual, I mean, it could be anybody in the same time zone, like anybody in North and South America. So you meet up with the people selected at random. You have a short conversation. You get to know who they are, and you get to kind of build those personal connections.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:38) That's actually pretty cool. Do you use a specific software for that?

(Andy Sin at 00:42:43) We do, for these meetups. I don't know what the exact software is. That's pretty bad because they've integrated it so well into Slack that it's just a Slack bot. So every week, I get a Slack message saying, hey, you've been matched up with this guy. There's a link right there. Do you want to schedule a Zoom call? And you do it, like, a little twenty-minute Zoom call. It's been great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:06) That's actually really cool. It's amazing because then, you know, your business is relying on it and you're using it, but it's just kind of integrated right into your flow of life. They should just name the bot better to, like, be the brand name of the company.

(Andy Sin at 00:43:24) I know. I was just thinking, like, what's—it's so good. And, you know, we've got a little funny name for it internally, but I have no idea who the company is who did it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:35) What do you call it internally?

(Andy Sin at 00:43:37) Donut be a stranger, where you have a bunch of donuts for the person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:40) So it's like the donut app.

(Andy Sin at 00:43:42) It's the donut app. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:44) That's actually pretty cool. So what are you doing right now for fun to unwind? Like, how do you decompress from work and get back to Andy?

(Andy Sin at 00:43:58) So a couple of things. It is kind of fun spending time with the family. Because of these circumstances, we haven't actually gone anywhere or we had vacations planned. We kind of canceled them. You know, the places we were trying to go, they were under quarantine. I mean, it was a mess. So definitely, the plus side of that is getting a chance to spend more time with the family. That's interesting. We talked about a little bit before for me, just spending more time outdoors. I think I've spent more time outdoors in the last three months than I have in my entire life just because I'm sitting outdoors most of the day, you know, trying to do a little bit of gardening, just walking around or bicycling around the neighborhood. In a way, you feel a little bit more connected locally to what's going on, and that's interesting or that's—I think that's important because at work, it's all virtual, and you're, you know, talking or interacting with people all over the world. I feel like it's important to keep yourself grounded to balance that out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:00) Yeah. And I like how you mentioned connected locally because it was this really interesting vibe, like, the first two weeks, two or three weeks of the lockdown where, like, everyone was outside in my neighborhood. You know, look at all of these people and their families and, you know, different houses are doing different chalk drawings on their driveways. And it just was like, whoa. It felt so cool. And all I could think of was, like, it's like a movie. It's like, why doesn't this happen all the time? And it's because everyone's so busy doing something, going somewhere, you know, moving on. Like, we don't have that local community. There's just too much to do. There's, like, too many things happening. And it definitely went away after a couple weeks, right? But in those few weeks, I very much appreciated them. My runs were—there was more people on the streets than cars inside of our neighborhood. And it was just a cool—as, you know, it's horrible the way it happened, right, with the whole COVID thing. But it was a really cool moment. And in that, I felt very connected to my neighborhood, something that I had never felt. Last time I felt that way was when I was a child and I got free play, you know, where, like, you come home from school, you go outside with the neighbors, we'd go play in the woods, we'd go around. Like, I hadn't felt that sense of, like, there's other people in the neighborhood like that for, you know, over twenty-something years. And so that was—it was a pretty exciting feeling.

(Andy Sin at 00:46:35) Yeah. I totally agree. That local connection, I think, is really important. It's also important because I think studies have come out—as people have told me this. I haven't verified it, but it sounds likely—that looking at a screen and having these meetings actually tires you out significantly more than sitting across a table and talking to people. I think they've done actual studies showing, you know, eight hours of Zoom or Google Meet versus eight hours of sitting across a conference room. But the virtual meetings are significantly more taxing. So it's important to kind of take a break once in a while. Like, just take your eyes off the screen, look around, walk around the neighborhood, and kind of stay grounded locally, both because the world's a kind of crazy place and you need some grounding, but also to kind of balance the way we are using the tools that we need to use to do our day-to-day business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:28) Yeah. There's definitely—it's amazing looking back at my schedule. Like, when I was doing the speaking and traveling around, the amount, like, the length of my days and the hours, it was a lot to think about. But there's something about getting energy from people. Like, when you're traveling, there seems to be, like, energy, and then you're, you know, you're talking to a group, and then you get energy back from that group.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:54) And it's not always amazing, right? But you meet with individuals and you pick up and it's like—we even have words for it—feed off of other people's energy. That's right. And it happens way, like, a million times stronger in person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:12) And that's really, really interesting to see. First, how you quantify that scientifically. And secondly, will we be able—whoever cracks the nut on being able to emulate that by being not in person? And here's the thing, I don't think it's as simple as just like a hologram. I don't think that's it. It might be something that you can only get in person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:37) You know? No one said that it can be persisted online or transmitted online. But I'm really interested in what that X factor is. Like, what is that quality? What is happening on a particle level or on a physics level when two people are in the room engaging and going off of each other's energy versus the same two people but not being in the same room?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:00) It's an interesting thing for me to think about.

(Andy Sin at 00:49:03) Oh, absolutely. And I don't know if that's your hypothesis, but I also suspect there's something to do with the actual physical nature of it. I know when this whole thing happened, we initially looked into, well, does it make sense to try doing some kind of conferences over something like an Oculus to get into a fully virtual environment? And, you know, I think a lot of people looked at that, but it just didn't take off. The cost-benefit ratio just wasn't right for something like that.

(Andy Sin at 00:49:34) It didn't give you the benefits of in-person, and it's not as easy to set up as the Zoom meeting, for example.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:39) You're exactly right. When you compare Oculus interaction versus the Zoom interaction, the Zoom is just a simpler, faster, easier way and less hassle. You're gonna get a similar result. And, you know, I've played with the Oculus. I've gone to the conferences and put on the future tech. And, you know, I just think that the fact that I don't have to wear an apparatus is such a benefit. Like, the moment you get to that point where you're putting something on and the field of vision is less than your available field of vision, it just doesn't feel right. When they solve that, when what I'm seeing is—because what happens is you see these videos, these animations of the Oculus and the 3D stuff. But then when you go and you put it on in real life, if you get the chance, like, even the Magic Leap. Right? Have you gotten to put the Magic Leap on?

(Andy Sin at 00:50:30) Yeah. I've tried both the Magic Leap and the Oculus. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:33) Yeah. They're—I like to describe it as they're exciting and disappointing at the same time. They're exciting because this is the future and they're pouring money into it and it will get better and it is progressing and I'm so happy to be alive right now. But it's disappointing because it's not close to where it needs to be in my imagination.

(Andy Sin at 00:50:50) No. It's not there yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:51) Yeah. Yeah. I think we'll get there with—I don't even know if that's the method. I mean, who knows? You might see Neuralink advance, right? And then at this—and then they kind of merge, so you get—you can use all the software and animations that were pushed forward and all the content that was pushed forward by these VR systems. But then the actual implementation is going to be more of a, you know, Elon Musk-type Neuralink.

(Andy Sin at 00:51:16) Well, I mean, I think he tweeted just a few days ago that, you know—he likes to tease these things out. He's like, "Well, there's gonna be this Neuralink announcement in a month." I'm like, all right. Well, I mean, you know, he's obviously gonna hype it out, but I'm definitely keeping my eyes open for that announcement. I'm really excited just to hear how that's going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:35) Did you—have you been following their previous announcements?

(Andy Sin at 00:51:39) I followed some of them. I don't—I'm not sure which one you're referring to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:43) Well, I think there's only been one other big one. The company came out. It was quiet for so, so long. And I think about a year or a year and a half, maybe two years ago, they did this YouTube one where they had all the researchers. They—yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:56) Yeah. They had researchers come on and show—yeah. And they said that it wasn't about—it was—the focus was recruiting people on these technologies, not necessarily saying we have the biggest, greatest thing in the world. But I watched that whole talk and all those people discuss it just to understand, you know, where the state of this stuff is. And I thought it was brilliant because they have this vision, but it's also associated with the business model where they can make money today, which means they'll just keep growing and growing, and then eventually, the vision will be achieved.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:24) That's the hardest thing. Like, you can have big visions, but being able to boil it back down and associate it with a business model today is a hard, hard thing to do.

(Andy Sin at 00:52:33) Absolutely. And, again, finally bringing it back to something that I can claim a little bit knowledge about. Yeah. I mean, that—in fact, I mean, that's essentially what we've done. We've had this incredible vision since day one, since the CEO started the company. But I think the challenge always has been—one path you could have taken was just a Magic Leap or something like that. Just raise a whole lot of money and just go for the vision and see if you can make it. But I think we've done a different tack, which is, you know, which is even more interesting, which is making sure every step on the way to that vision, we come out with a product which can be used, is making actual positive benefits to the people who are using that product, and fulfilling our business model so we're making money as we go along the path. That's the journey we've kind of always been on at AppDirect, and it seems to be going pretty well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:29) Does your CEO have a statement for the biggest, farthest vision of the company?

(Andy Sin at 00:53:37) I mean, Jeff Bezos has already taken on the everything store. So I would say sell all digital services. And, you know, the definition of digital just keeps expanding every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:50) I love it. Pretty soon, you'll have air conditioners you can buy and solar systems on the AppDirect store.

(Andy Sin at 00:53:59) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:00) Yeah. Can we do that? Can we get Tesla on there?

(Andy Sin at 00:54:05) Someone's gonna have to speak with Elon. So that might be a hard sell.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:10) I'll work on it. Boom. Mic drop from Andy. Dude, you crushed it.

(Andy Sin at 00:54:19) All right. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:20) Yeah. Yeah. I'm really excited. And I wasn't kidding earlier when I said that the individual ownership thing that you brought has stuck with us since the moment I spoke with you, and it's something that we, you know, recognize each other for in Slack when it happens. And it's really shaped the culture of the company, so I'm very grateful for you for that.

(Andy Sin at 00:54:40) Yeah. Thank you. And it was great having the chance to talk. I mean, I've already taken notes of a bunch of these apps that you recommended, both for employee productivity as well as piano playing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:51) Yeah. No. They're good. I'd definitely check them out. And let me know how they go, and we'll catch up again in another—we won't let it go two years. Maybe next year, we'll catch up again and figure out what's happened post-COVID. The zombie apocalypse is over will be the title of the episode.

(Andy Sin at 00:55:10) That's right. I'm really looking forward to going in the future and seeing that as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:16) Excellent. Have a wonderful afternoon, Andy. Thank you so much.

(Andy Sin at 00:55:19) Great. Thank you, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:22) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or a colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.