Yoav Kutner - CEO at Oro, Inc.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Yoav, the CEO at Oro, and we discuss his biggest takeaways from multiple successful exits, how Yoav used an open source strategy to build a successful suite of B2B business applications, and why empowering people to do great things is the key to experiencing growth. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) Hello, hello.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:00:41) Hello.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) Hey, Yoav. How are you, my friend?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:00:44) I'm doing great, Joel. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) Good. Am I pronouncing your name correctly? Is it Yoav?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:00:49) Yes, that's perfect. That's as close as people get.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) Nice. Whenever I see a name, right, and I'm like, how would the person butcher it? And I was like, everyone probably calls him Yoav or something.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:01:03) Yeah. Well, it is like Yoav, which comes from the Bible. So I think the English pronunciation is Joab. So yeah, that's why it's Yoav. But you got it. I think that's close enough, like I said.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:23) Yeah. Joel is actually a chapter in the Bible as well, and I was curious to research it and read it, and I did. And he's like the guy that is just talking about the apocalypse. And so I was like, okay, is that the character I get?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:01:43) Well, and it is actually my dad's name as well. So it is pronounced like we would pronounce it Joel rather than Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:51) Very cool. Yeah, nice. He's a good man then.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:01:54) He is a good man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:57) So one of the things that I really liked about you when I was researching was that you founded so many companies, that you've always been a founder type mindset. And I was just curious, like, was that from a young age? Or how did, like, what inspired you to become a founder?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:02:16) Actually, it's the complete opposite, believe it or not. Once I decided that computers is where I'm going to stick — and that's a different story right now — but I went to school. I actually was attending UCLA for computer science, and what I wanted was actually to work in a big company. I thought, you know, I want to go into a corporate environment, learn a lot from a lot of people. I was interviewing for big companies like Xerox and IBM, stuff like that. And luck of the draw or whatever, my friend and partner at Magento, Roy — we went together to school — and when I graduated, it was just after the 2000 crash and all that. So a lot of companies were just not hiring. We actually had the smallest job fair when I graduated, and it was very pathetic, unfortunately. And Roy had some home business that he was running, and he was like, "Do you want to join me?" And I'm like, "Well, I can't find anything else. Let's do that." Right? And make that story short, so I would not say I was born an entrepreneur. Right? I am not a good businessman and stuff like that. I really just, like — well, maybe my biggest talent is actually surrounding myself with really great people and really talented and smart people. I think that's, if I have to nail down why I'm founding so many companies, is my ability to find the right people to work with and let them be great at what they do. And I'm always there, so I get some of that benefit of being around those smart and talented people. And I guess that's why I'm more of a founder. It's the same thing with Oro here now today, and with Akeneo, another company I founded or helped found. They were just great guys I knew from the Magento time. And when they pitched to me the idea, you know, for me, the idea was secondary. I knew the team there. I knew their abilities, and I trusted them to build an amazing company, which they did with Akeneo, which is an open source product information management, if nobody heard of them. Great company, great culture, great product, et cetera. So again, I just almost just like attached my name to great people and then build great stuff. So I guess Magento will be a bit different because I really was more involved in building it from zero. But it's really, I guess I was pulled into it rather than that would be my background of wanting to be an entrepreneur and start a company and all that. So I love it now. If I look back, I'm so lucky to be where I am right now. I would never go back and work in — I actually got the chance to do that after we got acquired by eBay. So now I know what I was going, what product I was supposed to or wanting to go in, and it was definitely the wrong one for me. I really love this creativity, this smaller companies where the impact is immediate and you can build amazing stuff from the beginning and not just be part of this big machine. So today, I'm just finding myself extremely, extremely lucky that the path that was laid in front of me and I just capitalized on that and did the best I could with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:18) So when you were starting and you were early, let's say like the Magento project, right? How did you align yourself with great people? How did that happen? Or when did you have the realization that this is the thing I'm good at?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:05:31) So it actually started from — so Magento started from a services company that was just two people, myself and Roy. We had a few pretty fast, we added some contractors from all over the world to help us, and we were just doing services on anything that people would ask us to do web related. So we were creating web applications. We got a — I'll just give that quick backstory. So we got pulled into the e-commerce space, and we started doing more and more projects on e-commerce. We used a platform called osCommerce at that time. But again, that's what we were doing, and we were just building services on top of it for customers. What happened was when we started growing the company, we started really focusing on e-commerce. We started getting bigger and bigger customers. What platform we're using actually became secondary to our abilities. That's when we looked around and said, "Look, we have an amazing team. We know e-commerce. We have amazing talent of developers." We actually started creating, and you'll call it an offshore, but we actually, part of our company, we just opened another subsidiary in Ukraine. And looking, you know, when we hit the wall with osCommerce and said, you know, what can we do next? What other platform? Where can we grow? Because we were getting bigger and bigger and more complex projects. Where can we grow with that? We looked around. We couldn't find anything. But looking internally and looking at our team and capabilities, that's what made us feel, look, we can actually build it ourselves — for ourselves initially — but we can build the product because we have an amazing team around us. So just acknowledging who we're working with, being able to trust them to do this, I think that's what caused us to create Magento in the beginning. It was started just from an internal project for us to serve our customers, improve on what we know, but it turned out to be an amazing product on its own.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:15) Yeah. I was really excited because we were doing all the research on Oro and everything, and then we switched guests because someone was going to come on, then you came on from Oro, right? So we started researching you. And in the show prep, Adam put that he founded a company called Magneto. And I misread it, and I was like, "Oh man, I thought it was Magento." And he was like, "No, it's Magneto." And I was like, I was like, "That would be really cool." And then our other producer went and looked on your LinkedIn. He's like, "No, no, no, Joel's right. It's Magento." And I was like, that's so cool because I remember, you know, back when I was using osCommerce before any of the big things came out. Now, you know, so many different large softwares, but I remember, you know, osCommerce and that. When you said that, I haven't thought about that software in so long. And when you said that, that old, like, the CLI dashboard, like where you would install it, you know, came up in my head, that image. And I was just like, "Oh man, what a back in the day thing." And, you know, so I got to watch the progression of that over the past, you know, almost like 15 or something.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:08:20) Yeah. Yeah. Wow. We're getting old.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:23) We're getting old, especially in technology. We're really old. I know, right? It's like if you know osCommerce, you've been around for a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:34) Did you feel really good when — so then I was like, "Well, they just sold to Adobe." And then he's like, "Well, in the prep it says that they sold to eBay." And so I was like, "Okay, well, maybe eBay grew it and then sold it to Adobe." Is that what happened?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:08:46) Yeah, kind of. So we sold it to eBay. And again, that's a great potential and partnership that we thought we were going to create there. That didn't work out within eBay. I left about eight months after their full acquisition to start Oro. And then eBay sold it to a private equity that sold it to Adobe. Yeah. So they went through the — but it's again, just kudos to everybody that's running it there. They really built on top of what we sold to eBay, taking it to the next level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:18) It must feel good just to see a fire that you started, you know, just take off like that.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:09:23) Yeah. It's, I think the — it's more similar to in a strange kid that's very successful, right? Because we don't talk anymore. But it's funny. But seeing them grow on their own and doing well, but yet we don't get on the phone anymore and talk about it. But yeah, it still makes you feel proud. And of course, there are some people still over there, and they're doing great jobs. So it's still amazing to see it. Yeah. And having the brand for so long, I'll be honest, I mean, you know, it does talk to how powerful the brand we created there. And I think that's something we really feel proud of. And the fact that Adobe didn't just turn around and rename it immediately, right? They kept the name, kept almost the logo, which actually has in it our initial company, which was Varien. The part of the logo is still there. So just seeing the sister evolve for all these years is, it is proud. Then you feel proud and a pride, I guess, and it's really great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:18) So how did the industry related experience in doing that project prepare you or inspire you for Oro?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:10:27) Yeah. So we learned so much at Magento, I think, from the good stuff and a lot of the bad stuff we did. We also learned what industries are underserved in this general term e-commerce, right, and or as we like to refer to it more as digital commerce today. So we really took everything we learned and said, "If we do it again, if we really" — and I was a bit reluctant to build another company, to be honest. That was exhausting. But when I saw again, the people I can get together and do this again, I got really excited. I didn't even take a week off, I think. So six months later, we had the company up and running. But the idea was that we took everything we learned at Magento, saw what we did well, what we did badly, and fixed on that. And prepare what we learned and do that again. It comes from the technology, like how we approach technology. You know, in Magento, we were much younger and much more confident. So we said, you know, we can do a lot on our own. We don't need to use the stuff that's out there. And we ended up with a big chunk of what we did that was created by us, right? And we owned it. And for good and for bad, because it did allow us to do a lot of stuff that we didn't feel that existed in technology back then. But when we built it, we also owned it, right? So performance issues, security issues, even use cases, we didn't see everything. But again, we were much younger, had too much confidence, I guess. When we came to Oro, we looked at that, and we said, "Look, if we do this again, there should be really good products out there, right?" So even from selecting Symfony as our framework rather than building a new framework from scratch, like we almost did in Magento and what they did in Magento 2 right now, I think that's like a big lesson we learned, because we wanted to tie into the biggest ecosystem of developers we could so we don't start them off learning from nothing and learning our technology and the way we want to do the same thing. But we use something that we really thought had already a really great ecosystem community around that that will learn and just benefit from the business use case that we're building on top of it. So that would be my biggest, from a technology standpoint, lesson learned. You know, some people are doing something better than you. You better look why they're successful and use that, right? There's no need to go and invent every time the wheel from scratch. And I think that's something we got more humble about, and we appreciate everybody that's out there. And we learned to reuse as much as possible rather than build from scratch.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:01) And what about from like the human leadership side?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:13:05) Oh, so I do think we did a good job in Magento, maybe even too good of a job, motivating people to work in Magento. I think the personal work balance didn't exist. It was all work 100% of the time. It was regular for everybody in the company to work twelve hour a day, sorry. Weekends were, you know, for work. So I think we did learn that we need to invest into people to have a more complete — it's a long marathon, right? It's not a sprint, right? And we can't keep everybody running at 100% all the time. So we did learn that lesson. We're really investing in our company — sorry, in our employees in the company. And one of our, one of the basic things we believe in is that we want our employees to grow. We want them to have an environment where they come and feel that they're growing, that they are part of it, but they also have their personal growth as well. We also try to have much more social events. Again, in Magento, absolutely, it was 100% work, work, work. That's what we were about. Wake up in the morning, you go to work, you don't know when's the next time you're going to see the bed. But with Oro, we wanted to have more balance. We're still working hard, don't get me wrong, and we are pushing our product as fast, even faster than we did. But we definitely want to have more of a balanced approach to how we build the team. A lot of the team actually came from Magento, so that's like, you know, we all matured together. But now when we're hiring new younger people and extending the team, it's definitely the new culture that we build around the product. So definitely more of a balanced approach, more of a personal approach. We want to have people feel like they're growing with the company, growing and finding their path, even if it doesn't end up to be with the company. So if they grow somewhere else, that's great for us. And we stay in touch with a lot of the people we work with. But I think that will be the biggest difference that I look. Another big one was, which we were actually pretty good at Magento with keeping, but we're really now put as a rule here, is to stay flat as possible.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:15:08) So any person in the company can reach out to anybody else in the company with any piece of, if it's negative, positive, if it's questions. And we're very transparent. So we share everything, including our financials, with every employee in the company on a quarterly basis. During the pandemic, we were doing it even more often, every couple weeks, just so they know exactly where we're going. So there was full transparency in the company.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:15:32) Everybody knows everybody, what they're doing. We have great insight. We do demos. Everybody shows what they're working on and stuff like that.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:15:40) So really trying to keep everybody together even as we grow and see how long we can maintain it. And Magento has exploded. I think I had at one point under me reporting about 400 plus. I think it was 480 even people. So we decided maybe we can keep it a bit smaller.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:15:55) Right? I mean, that was too big, too fast. So we are trying to keep the size and still stay efficient and see how we kind of scale up using the ecosystem rather than building everything internally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:07) So what's the problem that Oro solves?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:16:10) So great question. So we started from two problems that we saw from Magento. The first thing was, what we looked at in Magento was that a lot of the Magento merchants that were trying to go online or going online with Magento looked for a tool to manage the customers. And we had some of that baked into Magento, but it was very basic. And when we started learning what they were asking for, the term CRM started coming up, like client relationship management.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:16:38) So in Magento, we would say, yeah, we can integrate with Salesforce. We can integrate with SugarCRM. That's another old company from back then. So we would say, yeah, we can integrate with those.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:16:50) But when we were actually working on those integrations, we saw, you know, it's not a really good fit because most of the CRMs on the market at that point were mostly kind of funnel management or pipeline management. Right? They were not necessarily managing the relationship with customers, especially when we were talking about multichannel, omnichannel companies that had multiple types of customers, multiple types of interactions with them. So what happened was that we really tried to build a tool in, with Oro, Oro CRM, that would give this kind of flexibility to manage the customer relationship and actually manage the customers, not manage the sales necessarily to the customer. Because it can be that the customer opens a sales opportunity through your sales team, but it can also be that they're writing a review about you somewhere.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:17:38) Right? And you want to see all this data in one place and have access for the marketers, the sales team, the customer support, everybody to have a single kind of repository of all the customer data. That was the approach that we were doing. We called it a multichannel CRM, and we launched it with a good integration to Magento. So actually, any order, any customer that will come in, you would create a customer account, and then you can connect it to everything else that that customer would do if we would find them anywhere else and across channels as well.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:18:06) A lot of our customers have multiple websites. So you could see in one single point all their orders, all their interactions, or their actual value to the company. So, you know, the fact that they bought something for cheap doesn't mean they didn't buy on a different website or different channel something that they're worth a lot for you. So you would see all this in a single point and then allowing your marketers to create real intelligent kind of campaigns on top of that. So that actually worked really well.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:18:32) And we started growing pretty good just from this integration with Magento and started getting more and more customers on the CRM. But then we started hearing a recurring request from our CRM customers as we started onboarding more and more of the B2B companies or true multichannel companies that were not only in ecommerce and B2C. And they were asking us for more and more transactional features, meaning that they can actually put an order in the CRM for their customers, meaning that they can set a price that the customer then can use on the storefront or answer a quote or an RFP and stuff like that from the system. And that's something that we kind of started seeing that's lacking in the CRM world. So we started thinking maybe that's one thing that we should build on.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:19:17) The second, just putting that together with another point that we learned from Magento was that more and more B2B companies, companies that sell to other companies, were trying to go online or become digital. Right? And the term was ecommerce. So they would search ecommerce. Magento was number one.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:19:31) They would come to Magento and say, look, we want to go online. We sell to other companies. And again, our egos and everything said we can do it. It's no problem. But we learned at Magento that it's not true.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:19:40) It's a completely different use case than the B2C use case when you want to help B2B companies go online and become digital. So that was, putting that together with what we learned with our CRM customers, led to our second product, which is called OroCommerce, which actually has the whole CRM built into it. But it also has a complete front end and a way for companies to interact with other companies in a digital form. So that enables your sales reps to kind of set pricing for their customers, have the customer log in and put in an order or connect to their procurement systems, stuff like that. So really focused on B2B and their needs in the market.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:20:17) And a lot of times we were pulled into B2B companies that also had a small B2C channel. So we now do B2B and B2C in a single system and stuff like that. So really solving the need for B2B companies to go digital. I think that's, if you have to sum it in one word.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:33) And so you were talking about the different, what you were learning from your customers and that driving your product. I'm curious for you and your role, how do you connect with the customers, or how do you gather that feedback at scale? Are you meeting directly with them? Are you talking with account managers? Do you train your team to look for this thing? Like, how do you get that information about what the customers want back and then make decisions on it?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:21:00) Sure. That's a great question. So at Magento, I'll start from the beginning. At Magento, we had a huge footprint. Right? We had an ecosystem, a community of developers, users, merchants, partners, system integrators, third-party solutions. So we have this huge ecosystem and that's a huge echo chamber. You could hear so many opinions and requirements, but that also allowed you to kind of start spotting trends. Right? When we start hearing something more than twice, you have to start listening to it again.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:21:30) Right? But when we hear it 10 times, it's maybe a new trend. And B2B was that. We saw that, you know, it started trickling in like, okay, a B2B company asking to go online and the use cases, this and that. So we said, yeah, we can customize that. No problem. But when we started hearing it hundreds of times, thousands of times, we knew that there's a big gap in the market. And when we actually tried implementing, we learned that that is something that needs to be addressed. That's the same thing we did with the CRM because we had, and this all relates to being open source and allowing an ecosystem to build around that.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:22:00) But we actually had a great ecosystem around our CRM products. So we started getting feedback from our CRM users telling us, look, your product is great. It does everything we wanted it to do, but we want more. Right? And so that kind of removes the guessing work for us because once we start seeing a trend and more and more customers are asking for something, then we kind of try the Venn diagram approach and say, what are they all asking for? Right? What is the features we need to build into our system? Right? And take that. So it's, again, removing any guessing work for us.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:22:31) And we really build those features. So our goal is to build 60 to 80% of the product that everybody needs for a specific use case and allowing them to customize or configure the 20%, you know, or the 40% in extreme cases that they need for their specific use case. But having this echo chamber where we hear all this feedback and hear and interact with this ecosystem of developers and users and partners really allows us to kind of build a solid roadmap with almost no guessing. And it works amazingly well because every time there's a new trend or a new fad in the technology, we don't have to guess if we need to work on it or not. We actually listen, right, to our users and developers.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:23:14) If they really need it, we'll hear it more than once. Right? And then we know that that's something we have to put high priority on the roadmap and incorporate into what we're building.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:23) So is it like in the sales process, your sales team is hearing these requests or things, and then they're talking about it in their sales meetings. They identify a trend, and then they bring that up in the product, or how does that work?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:23:35) Yeah. That's the traditional way. Right? And, of course, we have that. We have, like, bimonthly meetings with our sales team that give us feedback. You know, the product has been great, but this is what we're hearing that we don't have, or we cannot demo nicely, or, you know, we lost because we didn't have this feature or that integration or whatnot. That's, I guess, the traditional way that everybody's doing. For us, we have even a better feedback system because we have community users, right, that are using our product and developers that are trying to build on top of our product. So we really get a much larger feedback than a traditional kind of enterprise company, right, that maybe works on a hundred, five hundred deals at once. We have thousands of people giving us feedback.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:24:17) If it's directly, if it's through GitHub, if it's customers that are using our community, they're not even paying us, but telling us, you know, this is great, but we want this improvement as well. Right? So customers for us get higher priority for sure. So we actually have meetings with our customers. We actually present to them our roadmap. We get feedback from them on that. But we also really use our ecosystem, and that includes developers and end users. So we really get kind of a lot of information. Like I said, we use kind of the "what do we hear the most" kind of approach to prioritize, but that's why we do that.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:24:53) So definitely sales guys and the sales team is part of it, but they're just one part of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:58) So let's take, I like that you mentioned that we were talking about the traditional route, and then you also mentioned that you have the community. So you have things coming in through GitHub and of that nature. Right? Now when something, let's just run a hypothetical because I'm just really curious on the details here because you're the right person, and I'm really interested to hear how it happens. So let's say some suggestions come in from GitHub. You see some things happening, and then maybe one of your, you know, the project maintainers of the GitHub project. Right? I'm sure you have someone that's responsible for that, who owns that, as they decide like what gets, you know, merged in from the community and all of that good stuff. They start noticing that there's this repetitive request for something. Do they, are they empowered just to do it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:45) Or like, how do they go about deciding what to build? And then who do they need to talk to? Like, does the team lead or a project lead, like, someone who owns that specific project make the decision, or do they bring it into a team and the team makes the decision? How would that happen?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:26:02) So like I said, we're pretty flat. So they can actually reach out to anybody and start bringing this up. And we, the same way we meet with our sales team, we meet with our developer team, we meet with our services team. We actually still do some services, not only product. So we really have multiple points of feedback, right, and where we're getting this information from.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:26:21) If the product team, they're working with GitHub, they're getting a lot of feedback from other developers and community developers. If it's our services, that's working with partners, working with actual customers. Right? So we're getting feedback from them, sales team on sales calls. Then we kind of put it all together. Right? So we have these separate kind of meetings with each part of the company. But the product guys, which is myself and Michael, our VP of engineering, and Dima, our CTO, we actually sit together and kind of take all this information, right, and collaborate together, put it all together, sorry, and then collaborate on prioritizing our roadmap. That's how we do it. And like I said, it's very little guessing game.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:26:59) I think it just gives us the power to build what we know that we need next. Our best example, our most recent example is, for example, our CMS approach. We had one approach. We learned that the market needs it completely different, and we heard it across the board. Right? So that was an easy thing for us to prioritize because we had it down, you know, maybe a year or two down the roadmap, but we were able to prioritize it and deliver it at the beginning of this year. Right? So because that's something that was highly requested across the board. And that's how we do it. So the three of us kind of get all the data, get all the feedback, and it can be directly to me. I have developers reaching out directly to me, the CEO right now, and telling me, you know, you need to improve this feature.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:27:37) It just doesn't work. You know? Or I heard on one of the forums that people have different approaches today to doing this. Can we incorporate that? And we allow people to investigate. So people come to us and say, look, I have this idea. We say, go for it. Right? Try it out. Sometimes we put a limit. Sometimes we don't if we like it, but we do these experiments. So if the question is, how do we actually go and do it? Yeah. We allow, if it's an experiment, if it's not just a feature, if it's an experiment on technology, if it's a completely different approach, we allow that person to own it. Right?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:28:08) So a lot of times, you know, they actually come up with the idea and then own it so they can actually show us what they deliver, do a demo, and try to convince us that that's the way to go. And if we accept it, it moves on. But we're very collaborative. I mean, it sounds more like, you know, only three of us make decisions, but we really listen to everybody. So we just need to kind of put it all together and then say that's the highest priority. We heard it the most times, and that's what we need to go with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:33) Yeah. I like that you mentioned earlier about the great people because I'm making notes. You know, you've got great people. You're relatively flat. You have a sense and a culture of like empowerment and taking action and doing things. And so I just like to identify the different trends as I get to talk to so many different people. And it's amazing just like it's the same experience. I'm having the same experience talking to all of these leaders as we do as entrepreneurs listening to the customers. Right? By just listening, you gain all of this amazing insight and knowledge, and then things become so clear.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:11) And the best thing I can think of is that it's like we're machine learning algorithms. And if you have a high volume of high-quality data, then you're going to be able to see the trends pretty easily.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:29:23) Yeah, absolutely. And I think, again, your access is exactly the same thing. We're getting just more specific through our field, but absolutely, if you're hearing all these opinions, right, once you're starting to see a trend, you can kind of push on that one and go and explore that one more, right?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:29:40) And I think that's absolutely—and I'll just tie that to—you have to listen, right? You have to enable—I mean, in our world, I mean, you're just collecting the data for yourself and for your listeners. But for us, we actually have to act on some of it. And if we don't—if we just listen and don't act and don't respond—we will lose this feedback.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:29:59) Right? So people will stop giving it to us. So we have to be very responsive. And that's sometimes communicating, well, this is gonna wait, but explain why, right?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:30:08) And we have to do it again. We have to turn back and explain it to a large group, right? So that's the downside of that because we can't just keep our cards to ourselves once we get all the information. We have to share how we came up with the thought process to why we prioritize something or deprioritize something else.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:30:25) And we have these discussions. So I think investing in that, then that starts from a developer, right? They had an idea, and we have to explain to them, look, it's a great idea, but we have to deprioritize that right now. And we don't just say no, right? We have to explain it. Otherwise, we won't get the feedback the next time. That's true for our customers, for our developers in the ecosystem, in the community, et cetera.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:46) Not only will you not get the feedback because they'll feel shut down, but you lose the opportunity to teach them about the business perspective as to why it's deprioritized. And that'll even make them smarter, and that'll give you a stronger team.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:31:00) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:01) So what's the origin story behind the name Oro?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:31:06) That's a pretty funny one. So we had the Magento, which had its own story about the name. With Oro, we knew that we're gonna create multiple products, right? We didn't know exactly still which products, but we knew the CRM would be one.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:31:24) But we also started from something called the Oro Platform, which is a business application platform for companies to build their products on top of it. So we wanted the name that will be able to be attached to something, so like Oro Commerce or CRM, et cetera. And then what happened with that was that one of the founders here worked for all these open source companies, right? And his wife, which she overheard us when we started the company—of course, we started from home. Everybody was on Skype at that time, right? And she overheard us starting to come up with names. And she's like, "Stop with all these complex names like Magenta and Alfresco. Give us something simple. Can we do something simple?" And they spent a few years in South America, so they speak Spanish. And she came, "Just do something simple like Oro," and it stuck. They said it—she said it—and we were like, "That's the one. We got it." And we can attach it to other things. It was pretty available. I think oro.com is still taken, but everything else we were able to own. So that was great.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:32:26) So I think that's how we did it. I was dreading that moment because I remember how hard it was to come up with the name Magento. But when she just said it, it stuck, and that's the name we went with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:39) What's the English translation of Oro?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:32:42) Gold. Oh, there we go. Yes. Now that is all aspects. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:49) I like that. That is actually really neat. And so, all right, since we're talking about origin stories and names, the other company, less easy to say, Akeneo? How do I say that?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:32:59) Akeneo. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:00) Akeneo. Okay. Akeneo. And what does that mean?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:33:04) That's like a bud, a flower bud of some type. So, yeah. Because again, it's not a very widely used, but it's the name for one of these flower buds that exists. And again, I didn't name that. That's their name.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:33:16) I was going for Oro PIM, but they didn't want that. They're actually using our business application to build their product as well. So some of their components are built on top of our platform as well, which was kind of—yeah. So, no, I'm joking about the Oro PIM. But yeah, they came up with that name, and it's a flower bud.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:37) And then why did you decide to make this open source?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:33:42) Oh, open source? The question is, why not make it open source? I'll say that. And that's something I actually get this question a lot from companies that call me and ask, "Should we open source our product?" And again, what I tell them is, ask yourself why not to open source your product, right? If there's a reason not to do that, don't do it. But if everything else is—there's no downside almost to being open source. I think that just helps your product.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:33:59) You know, we used to both in Oro, but in Magento and actually in Akeneo as well, we look at the open source product as our biggest investment in marketing for the product—for product marketing, right? Because that puts the product in so many people's hands, right, before you even talk to them once. Because it's the kind of organic marketing that you can do for your product. And the brand name comes with that. So you kind of build your brand on top of the open source product. So just from a marketing standpoint, it's like, why wouldn't you do that?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:34:26) I think what we did learn is how to work with open source, right, and how to actually make it successful because it had so many bad reputations from history about, you know, it's not safe, it's low quality, stuff like that.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:35:00) What we kind of liked was what we call the commercial open source approach. So we really own and maintain the product, right? And so, yes, people can contribute, and there's a way to contribute to the product. But we really own, like any other commercial company, we own the product.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:35:17) So we enable the ecosystem and community to contribute, but we are responsible for what is in the code. And once something is contributed, if we don't contribute it as an extension—if it's part of the core product as we call it—then we're responsible for it moving forward. We don't rely on somebody that we've never met or don't know. And that goes through some kind of acceptance process for us to accept it into the core product. So really kind of putting together the good of both worlds of commercial development or closed source and then open source and putting it together.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:35:52) And that kind of assures our customers that they're getting a stable product. They're not getting, you know, fingers that they don't know who's typing on using them to create code that might be malicious or not. We go through all product development cycles that any commercial company will go. Plus, we're benefiting from having a huge ecosystem around the product that, again, like I said, teaches us, gives us feedback, and actually finds a lot of bugs or fixes bugs or security issues if we have and report it back.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:36:25) What we did want—I mentioned it, so I'll just pause on that a bit—what we did want is to still maintain creativity around that, right? So not limit stuff that can be done in the product. And that's why we love the extension model, right?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:36:34) So if you cannot contribute it to the product, because, like I said, we'll have to support that if it becomes part of our product. But you still have a feature that maybe works for a small segment of our customers, and you really think that's a great idea as a developer, you can just create it as an extension and put it on our marketplace, right? So then people that want it, they can extend our product using those extensions that third-party developers are creating.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:36:58) So we can extend the product both in the core, but also through the ecosystem and our marketplace of extensions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:04) That's pretty cool. I like that.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:37:07) Oh, again, I think open source is cool. I, you know, I've been saying it a long time already, but it's not a philosophy. I love the philosophy for open source. I think everybody gets better and grows, et cetera. I mean, everything moves faster.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:37:22) But put that aside. We actually put it as a strategy for our company because, again, it's what made Magento grow so fast and what made Oro an international product. Even though we started very small here in Los Angeles, we were able to have installations in Japan, in Southeast Asia, in South America, Eastern Europe, Europe, from having this kind of ecosystem around our product that's translating our products, solving issues for local markets, et cetera. So open source is very powerful.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:37:54) Again, I think it's, you know, if you wanna get into the way to that point, we can argue how powerful it is from a developer standpoint. But in terms of licensing, in terms of having this kind of community and ecosystem around it, I think it's extremely powerful and just benefits the company. Again, like I said, ask why not, not why should I go open source? It's like, why don't you go open source, right?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:38:13) Why don't you open source your code, et cetera, and allow people to be creative with it? I think that's what we kind of learned.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:20) It's also interesting because, you know, I started programming very young, and so pretty much all the projects I would interact with were open source. I wasn't spending money at first for a long time. I wasn't buying software. I mean, I would just be finding open source projects that were close enough to what I wanted or go explore some that had a feature and see how the developers did that feature, or a design I liked and see how they made the CSS do that. But, yeah, it was so useful because you have an entire part of the market.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:55) Like, let's say you've got, you know, 15-year-olds, right? In seven years, they're gonna be, like, really in the employable market, full-time career job, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:09) Developing. And if they're learning these tools and they're understanding these ecosystems, and then they get to know them and they, you know, you typically find one tool that solves your problem that you like, and you kinda stick with it for a while. Then you move on to the next problem, and you just collect tools over time. But, you know, knowing those tools is business. It's revenue for you because now you're creating demand. There's going to be job descriptions listing, you know, those types of skills. That's going to create more awareness.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:41) People are gonna be searching for jobs. You're like, "Oh, I've been seeing this pop up everywhere, and I don't know this," you know. And then it's just going to snowball. I really like it. I think it's right for very specific businesses, but I love it when it's right.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:39:57) Yeah. I think even Microsoft learned that, right? They're starting to open source some stuff. So, again, the question is, why not, right? And the benefits are—you know, there's a long list of benefits of doing that. And I think one of the most, like, proud moments I had with Magento was that people—we would have these events, and people would reach out, and, you know, people that I might have just known by their username or something in the community. And then we would meet in person eventually. But the stories are amazing.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:40:25) Like, how—like you said—they started from a developer that was sitting in an apartment somewhere in South America and creating websites, and they grew into businesses and jobs and training new developers. So it evolves and it takes its own kind of life, right? And that's the nice thing. It's this feedback where somebody comes and tells me, "I was a, you know, unemployed developer, and I found Magento, and I started learning it. And today I have, you know, 25 people working for me, and the company is growing."

(Yoav Kutner at 00:40:54) And he told me, "You changed my life with Magento." So, again, it's not me. It's everybody. But definitely it's, you know, gives you some pride to hear that you created something that helps somebody that you had no interaction with or knew about, right? And you still were able to change their world, their life, and now 25 other people, they have jobs now. So it grows on its own, and it's a beautiful thing to see.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:15) Yeah. And the ecosystem, like, reinforces itself because anyone who's new that comes to that provider, they're gonna put them onto Magento and onto Oro, right?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:41:25) Yeah. It just keeps on growing, keeps on growing. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:27) Do you have companies yet that are making, like, their business model is making third-party additions to Oro?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:41:34) Yes. We have a couple companies creating extensions for the product, but we also have partners that are building on top of it. I mentioned the—but we also have a company called Marello. They're building a complete kind of order management system on top of our platform. So we have—out of India, we have an HR system that was built on top of our products.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:41:55) So it's just amazing to see how companies are doing it. We have companies that just internally build tools on top of that, right? And they couldn't find off the shelf and using our products to develop. So just amazing to see that. It's what, you know, my passion is to hear people say, "Look, you helped me solve a problem, right?" This problem, I couldn't find a good starting point. Your product took us there, and that's what I love to hear, to be honest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:19) And what's the business model? Is it, like, long-term contracts? Is it software as a service?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:42:25) Right. So that was the biggest question is how do you monetize a successful open source ecosystem, right? If we go and look at that—and there's different avenues that we tried. And eventually where we ended up is that we went with what we call a dual licensing model or a commercial open source, like I called it before.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:42:42) That means that we have one license for the community edition and then license that we actually have a business relationship with the company. So they actually pay us for a subscription, yearly subscription. And they get access to our software, to upgrades, to our support, developers, et cetera. The SaaS or not SaaS—we actually try to have a deploy anywhere approach, right, with everything we create. And that actually comes from the type of companies we're working with.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:43:12) A lot of them are going online for the first time, or even technology is very new to them. I just came literally came off a call right now with a company from Canada that has no digital footprint. We were kinda questioning if they're fake or not, right? If they actually exist. Because we couldn't find anywhere except, like, on D&B if they actually exist. So it's amazing how many of these companies—this is the first time that they're going digital, right? From the pen and paper world to actually going digital. And it's a leap. It's not a step, right?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:43:38) So just being able to lower the bar for them to enter so they can test, maybe create some kind of proof of concept, right? Try it. And then they contact us for the commercial side of it. That's big aspect of open source, right? And then just having a commercial relationship so they can still trust that there's a company behind it. They have support.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:44:00) They have somebody to pick up the phone and kinda choke if something goes wrong, right? They still have good at the throat to choke. It's huge. I mean, that's what kinda gives them the confidence so they can be successful with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:11) Yeah. That's interesting because when I first started getting into the business side of things and growing my knowledge in business, for me, it was like, well, if it's not online, it doesn't exist. Right? Because how could you not exist online? How would you find a customer?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:25) But then I started to understand how these relationships work and these different industries are at different points in their technological progress. And really, business is something that's just done between humans. We're just exchanging goods and services. So there's no requirement to be online. You can just be the person everybody picks up the phone and calls, and you've just been doing it for twenty years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:47) You have the relationship, and your sales team does the same thing, and you can be just transacting business left and right. You know? So that to me was fascinating because what it did was it helped me understand the basis of business better.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:45:04) Yeah. I mean, in technology, a lot of times, we feel like everybody's running at the same pace as us, but it's not true. I think, you know, that's a big one when we kind of looked at the B2B world and said, okay. How do we kind of address their needs? We were surprised how low the bar, the starting bar is right now. It's truly amazing. There's another quick story I'll tell you. We were so surprised. It's like a company where the whole executive team doesn't use email. So when we kind of talk to them with email, we're actually corresponding with their secretaries, and they print out the page, give it to their person, they write their answer, then they go back, type it to us in the email.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:45:43) It's just amazing that the world is not necessarily on everybody in the same space of technology. And we, again, it really humbled us because, you know, with B2C, we're old cutting edge. Everything is the latest technology. We were talking about stuff that doesn't even exist yet. Right? But with B2B, we had to slow down a bit because we really overshot the product. Right? We kind of created too much too early for a lot of these companies because they need very simple things. And a lot of times, it's going online for the first time, having a catalog searchable and indexable, you know, things we were talking in the early two thousands are still relevant for them.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:46:19) Right? They don't understand what it means to be indexed by a search engine. Right? So we're talking basics, really going back to basics, doing very small steps to getting them there.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:46:31) But I'll say it starts moving faster and faster. As the new generation is starting to take over, right, from this old school kind of people, we're seeing that this is accelerating now. And a lot of companies are understanding, look, it's either do or die for us, especially in our industry. If we don't have a digital presence, if we cannot answer new customers digitally, we're going to miss out. We're not going to continue this kind of business.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:46:55) So it is evolving for good or for bad. Again, it's something that we, you know, it is a culture thing. A lot of times we see how the pushback is not from any requirements or anything. The pushback is culturally. Like, I like talking to my customers on the phone. Right? I know all their kids' names and all that, and I don't want to lose that. So we're trying to teach them, you know, it's not all or nothing. Right? You can still pick up the phone and talk to the customer, but focus on their kids, not on the order.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:47:21) The order is taken care of. They can log in and see the status. They can change and modify the order if they need without picking up the phone. You can still maintain a relationship with them, but optimize everything else. And as the new kind of generation is coming on, they're expecting that. Right? That's their skill set that they're bringing with them. They're doing everything digital. They know how to interact better digitally than face to face or on the phone. Like, my daughter always tells me, don't call me, just text me.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:47:45) Right? I mean, it's not like, why are you presuming that I should pick up the phone? Right? It's a different generation, different approach. So this is how the business world is evolving as well.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:47:53) So I think that's why we like being here. I think this is an exciting category for us right now because we're seeing all these companies evolving and changing, and we're really taking these old school companies and putting them back on the race and in front of where they should be. So it's a great place to be right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:10) Yeah. Well, I guess I was first made aware of this when I was talking to several different very large companies, like hundreds of millions to billion dollar companies, and they all seem to be doing the same thing. And that was helping people go from on-prem essentially into the cloud. Right? And I was blown away by that because, you know, at the time, I was raising capital.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:34) And so I was, you know, meeting with all of these investors, and there's so much fear. Who are your competitors? Like, all this competitive, as if there was like the scarcity of customers. And then I look into the marketplace, and I'm like, look at all these massive organizations, and still they're putting out stats, like 75% of the companies are on-prem, and they're not moved to the cloud while you're seeing all of this business happen. And so I'm just like, the market is so much larger than we really imagine. We're going to have so many other companies. There's so much business to be had out there, and there's so many unique situations. And as the technology becomes more accessible and as we get more people into creating technology, we'll only be able to create a higher resolution solutions to everyone's problem.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:49:22) Yeah. And that's a great point because with Oro, what we discovered was we were going to go cloud based, and everybody's going to go into our cloud. Again, that was we were pulled back because a lot of the companies said no. It fosters a requirement that we will be able to run the servers. And again, I'm not kidding you that we still go to companies, and they're showing us the server room in their office. Right? So, again, it's a reality. They are not going to change necessarily everything overnight. They don't necessarily trust the cloud.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:49:52) It can be requirements from their industry, privacy issues, whatnot, that are still not caught up with us. Right? So like I said, we have this approach of deploy anywhere. We have our cloud. Our cloud works, and we take care of everything for you, but we have enough companies to say that we still need to support an on-prem solution or use any other private cloud that you want, right, or public cloud that you want.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:50:16) And that's our approach. We have to adjust to that, just learning the industry. They're not ready for this leap into the, the way they talk about it is, like, we're giving everything to a third party. We don't know what they're doing with it. They're very suspicious of that. Especially in Europe, there was a big pushback. Again, I think now it's caught up a lot. But initially, when we started in Europe, it was a big thing not to use cloud. Right? Companies did not want to give their data, and they didn't trust Google and Amazon to have their data, especially in ecommerce.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:50:45) So we had to kind of pull back a bit on the cloud, but now we have this deploy anywhere. So we have our cloud. If you're ready and willing, you can go there. Or if you want to host it on your own, you can do that. And what we were able to do is actually the price is the same. So it shouldn't be a cost question for you. It's just basically what is appropriate for you and your industry to go cloud or on-prem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:07) I actually got really fascinated by it, I think, like about a year ago. And so I had a series of interviews where I really dove down deep to these people who are doing these digital transformations within companies, figuring out, like, what is it about why they're doing this. And there's a lot of different reasons, but one thing that I wasn't expecting or that was really interesting was trying to get people to do something new is really difficult, just alone regardless of what you're doing. And these companies, they'll have, you know, their entire processes for how they deploy within their infrastructure, and that's usually very different from cloud, like how we deploy in the cloud world. Or, like, for me, I don't know the difference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:53) It was explained to me. I don't have firsthand experience with the difference because I grew up cloud native, and I would just build stuff and deploy it, and then build teams around it. But the, you know, filling out a form and getting approval for a new instance or something like that, and just going through the red tape, and this person's entire job is just approving the instances and then going over there. So you don't want to get rid of, you know, John or Sally. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:17) And so it's a little bit of everything, including the tool sets are slightly different. So the cloud tool set, so one of the interesting things was somebody was telling me about when they have a company that does want to do it, like, the drive is there from the executives and they're going to do it, they'll actually take a team and put that team on-prem with the people and so that they can start teaching them essentially on the teams about these technologies and how these deployment processes work and how to do these things. So it's this large undertaking to actually reeducate the people that are in this way of deployment to these more modern practices and tools. And I was like, well, that's, I never even thought of that.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:53:01) No. It's a different way of thinking. Right? It's, again, and I won't tell you my kind of response, but I thought this company that was taking me to the server room was kidding me. Right? I haven't seen that in years. And until I was holding back not to laugh, and then they opened up the room and sure enough, there's a server rack, and they're showing me how they're holding the server right here. And I asked them, what's your disaster recovery? He's like, oh, we have a clone that we can run from the CEO's home. You know?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:53:32) So right? That's like, what? 1998? But it's amazing. It again, just falls back to we in the technology sometimes just have to look back and see if everybody's following us at the same path at the same pace because we sometimes outrun everybody and we forget and lose a lot of people on the way. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:57) Yeah. Because we're serving the market. So it's really important for us to know that there's an entire group of people because it's a pretty easy solution for us as, like, founders or business people. We can just boot up a sales team that's expertly adept at helping them make that transition and holding their hand through the process and understanding it and just, you know, inch by inch by inch. Like, you're not going to get rid of everything. You're just going to have this, there's this one tiny problem we're going to solve first.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:25) We're just going to put the system in place, and then they're like, oh, that's great. And then there's one other thing we could do to help a little bit. Here's some notes so you can see the kids' names on the screen when they call, and it automatically pops up when the phone calls because it knows their number, and they're like, oh, that's kind of cool. And then you get them hooked. They're like drug dealers.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:54:42) We just give them a little bit, a little bit, get them hooked.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:44) And now they're clawing at our door. Give me more. Where's the AI robot?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:54:53) It's like, where's the on switch to give me AI? Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:57) Yeah.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:54:57) It's unbelievable, and it does work like that. I think you kind of describe it exactly how it is. Because once they get the feel for it, they love it. Right? I mean, it does make their life easier, and we know that. But it's something that definitely is a process, and a lot of times, you know, we find ourselves as psychologists more than technologists in a lot of the deals we're working on because we have to work with them. And I'm not kidding you that part of what we kind of get asked on when we get our fees is, like, how do we change the mentality of our sales team and our customers to start using these systems? Right? And we have to come up with answers to that. And how do we kind of hook them on?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:55:38) Right? The first, first time, you know, it's free. Don't worry. You'll come back. Right? But we have to come up with these ideas. Right? Because a lot of times, the business decision makers, they're worried that nobody's going to use what they're investing in. So a lot of times, it's to come and show them, no. We did that with this company. They had the same thoughts. Again, there was a company that was so worried about the data part of it because each sales guy had this price sheet that he negotiated with the sales manager. Right? And they would have it in a locked drawer next to them on their desk. And they were so worried that once it goes online, everybody can see the pricing.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:56:17) Right? And we don't want to share the pricing we got. So we had to convince them, no. That's not the case. And you see, when you log in, you don't see Joe's pricing. Right? And it's really going down to that level of, like, a psychologist telling you, don't worry, guys. It's okay. Don't freak out. Nobody can see your data. It's still locked in. It's just not in a drawer. It's online. So it's just doing all these experiments of how to kind of get people to start getting hooked on this. It's what we're doing today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:42) Yeah. And building that trust, right, and positioning yourself as the expert on the transition so they really feel comfortable doing it.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:56:51) Yeah. We're finding more and more that that's what we have to also know. Yes. It's not only technology. It's not only our software. We get asked to do more than that. It's a plan of how to onboard people, how to train them, how to incentivize them to use this. We actually came up with gamification stuff to help people start using the system. You know? So we really have to help with these transitions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:13) Yeah. I also saw that you guys have a podcast for B2B ecommerce.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:57:18) Yeah. We do. I think, again, something that we saw a bit lacking, but I think now it's catching up. We see more and more content for B2B as more and more companies are looking for it. So we saw a bit of a gap in the market, but I think now it's something that there's a lot of content today. I think, again, too much content too fast for a lot of people, but they need to make sense of it. But I think that the B2B is starting to be addressed. When we started this company with Oro, the B2B market was completely underserved. We really found that there was a big gap of what they need in terms of where to start, what to do, because it didn't match, you know, a shopping cart is not necessarily the term that they use in their industry, right, when somebody puts in an order. Wish list is not a term that associates with a project.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:58:07) Right? So all these things that just the language is different, they had to start kind of building the relations through their world, right, from commerce and ecommerce and digital commerce, to make sense for their industries. Right? So that's something we thought was really lacking, but I think now, again, there's more and more experts that kind of address the B2B world today when it comes to digital and commerce.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:30) So do you host the podcast, or do you have somebody else?

(Yoav Kutner at 00:58:33) No. I don't. I'm a very bad...

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:36) Very bad host.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:58:38) Yeah, very bad host. A very bad social guy and stuff like that. So I get interviewed and I do that more, but I'm not good as an interviewer or running a podcast. You're doing an amazing job. Listening to some of your podcasts, it's really—you get into it. You're hooking us too. It's just different hook, but really great conversations, and I really love listening to that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:01) Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate the kind words. Yeah, we just try to be useful to the audience, and it's amazing. You know, it was cool year one, year two, but just the graph—it's very similar, I'm sure, to how you felt with Magento. Just watching it, and it's like every month we have more listeners, and I'm just—it's just blowing away. I don't know. It's exciting. I feel good. Before COVID, I'd give talks, and people would come up to me after I give the talk and ask me questions about my kids and stuff and different guests, and it's a lot of fun. So I mean, I absolutely love it. You're a fantastic talker, by the way.

(Yoav Kutner at 00:59:42) Oh, thank you. I really don't think so, but I appreciate it every time. So I'm doing it from necessity. It's not my first choice. But again, a lot of people just want to hear the story. I hope they find some things that they can learn from it. You know, I'm just sharing what happened. I don't think I had the magic map that showed me the way. But if other companies learn from it and create tools that are beneficial for the community and the world, I think that's great. So we're all collaborating in the end. Right? We're all trying to make the world better—us in commerce right now, but I think everything kind of impacts everything else.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:19) A hundred percent. And that's why I like it, because it's an easy way to get to meet other great people who are doing something, and we have something in common with the technology and building and understanding these conversations. And I found just getting together and talking—that's why when I did it, it started as me having conversations about this book I was going to release. And then we took those conversations and I wanted to keep them going, not just be a one-time thing and then publish the book and stop the conversation. So then we turned this into a podcast, and I hadn't really listened to any other podcast before. So I just did what I was doing in the phone calls with the technology leaders, having discussions about these topics. And it wasn't until after two years of doing this did I find this other podcast called Joe Rogan Podcast, and I started to listen to another podcaster. And then I went on other podcasts. And that was such a crazy experience. So I mean, you do it a lot, it seems. But I was blown away when they read your bio. Like, we're sitting here talking, right? And they're like, I'm going to read your bio and all these great things about you, and then I'm just going to change my voice. When you come in, we're going to be talking, and then my voice will change slightly. I'll get into my announcer voice, read the bio, and then just hit you with a question. And it was like a glass of cold water to the face the first time it happened to me. And I was like, maybe this is why everybody tells me they like coming on the podcast, because this is not a good feeling.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:01:53) Yeah. No, look, it's just having—with you guys here, it's just having a discussion. So it's amazing. I forget that we're actually going to maybe be listened to by thousands of people, but it's just—

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:03) No, no, just making—

(Yoav Kutner at 01:02:05) A discussion. Yeah. No, you get some good listeners. I saw that. So that's great. And look, going back to Magento, I think what you're doing, right? You were doing something for yourself and it worked, right? Because other people needed this content, wanted to listen to this, and it's growing. It's the same thing with Oro. It's the same thing with Magento. We're just creating or solving a problem or addressing a problem that so many other people have the same problem, right, or looking for something to kind of help them with that. And with Magento, I'll say we didn't intend for it to become a product that thousands of online stores would use. We really built it as an internal product for ourselves, right, for our customers, for the ones we were giving services to. But once we really understood the industry or what's needed, we created something that other people found useful. And I guess that's your podcast the same way, right? You did it for your book, but a lot of people started looking for this content and getting engaged and liking it, and it starts building up. And once you get this momentum, it's amazing. It takes, like I said, life of its own. It grows. You get feedback. You kind of improve on it, and it just makes it a lot of fun. It's a live entity, right, that's actually growing, and it's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:24) And then we start to get addicted to when people reach out to us. Right? They'll send us LinkedIn messages. Hey, I heard this advice from this leader or story. I applied it, and it helped me with A, B, or C. And so we'll screenshot that, share it in the company Slack. And for us, it's like that's the drive. That's the dopamine or the serotonin hit. Like, that's the thing. It's like, let's measure our success based off of how many people reach out and thank us. Right?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:03:51) Yep. Yep. And I would give this piece of advice, because in my world, it was a bit different, both in Oro and both in Magento. And I'm kind of trying to teach everybody around us in our companies that that's how it is. But I'll tell you my experience, especially working in open source where we get tons of feedback from everything. Almost all the time, I just hear the negative feedback. And that's the one you want to hear. Don't get me wrong. I mean, because if you want to improve, you want to learn what you're doing bad, right? But sometimes you have to lift your head up, look around, you know, and actually see the success of it and people that are already telling you the good things about it. Because sometimes you just focus on everybody's just telling me how we suck and how it's slow and how we have this bug and we should improve this feature and that feature. But at one point, you have to go and say, okay, okay, let's look up. And then, oh, people are actually using it. People are liking it. There's good things here too. And that's something I had to learn because I was getting so frustrated initially with Magento because I just was getting all this negative feedback. And then the first time we had an event, then people were thanking me. And I'm like, wow, okay. So it's not so bad, right? People like it. People don't only see the bad in it. So I think something in my experience that helps is to sometimes take a breather, look around, make sure everything is going fine. That's not only all the negative responses that you're getting. So I like that you're getting only positive stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:13) Oh, no, no, we are not only getting—we only screenshot and share the positive stuff. We have Intercom chat on our website, and I think anyone who has an open chat on their website gets crazy messages from people. But yeah, I got this one long email from somebody about how I didn't ask these more aggressive questions on an interview. And I was like, well, bro, I didn't bring this person on to fight with him about something they did twelve years ago that you happen to care about, but I don't even really know about. I came on to help understand who they are and extract the best knowledge that they could possibly have to pass down to the next generation so that we could all live life a little bit better and just maybe repeat the mistakes a little less.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:06:00) Yep. That's what—

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:01) We're doing here. It's not—we're not grilling people.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:06:06) No. And I think that's exactly the experience you gave me. I've had interviews where it was all why you did this bad and why you did this bad. You know, it's—yeah. That's—and that's fair. I mean, again, I can answer it, but having this kind of approach, I think that's what makes you successful. I open up, right? I give you more and more of what I want to share with you, and you know, sometimes you get more bees with honey, right? So it's how you do it. Right? And the approach is definitely what will make it successful and grow. So I want to say again the same for us. So the fact that we were not fighting these negative responses, right, we actually listened to them. Because we had haters. I mean, we still have haters with Oro. We had haters with Magento. But listening to them and saying, okay, we hear you. You know? There's a reason why you're saying it. They actually become your best supporters in the end. If you kind of show them that you're listening to them, addressing their needs, and not just knocking them down and not allowing them to voice their concerns. I think that's important.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:11) And then I'm curious to know, in the thought of helping others and passing it along and being open and real with people, what are you personally—as a leader, you're a leader of this company—what are you learning as a leader right now?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:07:28) I think to allow people to do their work, right, and not micromanage anybody. I think once you—like I said, it comes from believing that you have the right team around you. But once you assemble this team, it's allowing them to work. Right? So you know, it's another way is you can look like you're just over-delegating everything at one point, but the flip side of that is that you're actually allowing people to learn, do the mistakes, and grow. I'm there anytime somebody wants to ask a question. So if it's just, you know, what do you think? Look, this is the situation. It can come from working on a feature. It can come from closing a deal. It can come from pricing. It can come from negotiating a deal with Google. It can come from anything. And I'm here if they want to ask, and I give gladly all my experience, but I don't make the decision for them. Right? I allow them—okay, that's my feedback based on what you told me and my experience, but what are you going to do? And allow them and empower them basically to make the decisions for good and for bad. I mean, they all make mistakes. Everybody makes—I make mistakes. You know, nobody's perfect. But allowing them to feel that they're comfortable and they're owning what they're doing and they can make mistakes. It's not going to—we're not going to kill anybody for making mistakes, but also have this kind of conversation. They don't have to take it on their own, on their backs, and run with it and then feel guilty if something went wrong. We can collaborate, but in the end, they own it, and they're the ones that are going to make the decision. And empowering people, I think, is the key to building a successful company because you cannot take it all on your own. It's something that we learned at Magento. It blew up so fast. If we would continue gripping everything, both me on the product and the technology and Roy on the marketing and sales, if we would continue putting our claws into it and making sure everything runs the way we want it, it would not scale. So we quickly learned that we have to enable people, empower them to make the decision, run with their—even if we don't like it, right? We, again, we can voice our opinion. We can give our experience, but they have to run with it and make sure that they are backed up by that and not going to be shut down if they fail.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:32) And what's the best leadership advice that you've ever received from somebody?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:09:39) I think the biggest one was open line of communication. I think that's—you know, I did spend some years in the army, and that's the exact opposite of that, right? It's only top-down instructions. You cannot voice your concern. You cannot voice your opinion. I mean, there are ways, but you don't want to get into that. But learning to do this the opposite, where it's complete open line of communication, stay as flat as possible, empower people. I think that's how we do that. Right? If we have this line of communication and transparency, you know, it didn't come naturally to me. I'll be honest. It's something that—you don't want to share if the company is not doing well or if we're going through COVID and we have to do some cutbacks and take more risk and stuff like that. But once we kind of communicate openly and transparently, that builds trust. Right? And that lays the ground for everything else. People feel that there is trust. They know what's going on. They know what they need to do, right, on a personal—what they're responsible for. And when we went through COVID right now and we told them, look, there's a slowdown in the market for a short couple of weeks. We don't know how long it's going to last, but we need to change a bit how we operate the company and where we invest. And once we tell that to people and they understand that, they actually understand that they're responsible for delivering what they have to deliver because now it's more important than ever. And so I think not lying to the company, not just saying everything is rosy and we're doing great, everything—we're hitting all the projections. But actually sharing the good and the bad makes it real, makes it relevant for people to understand where they fall in. You know? So I'll be honest. Some people got up and left and said, look, I don't want to risk my life. And that's great because they're not sitting on the sideline and waiting for us to fail or expecting it to blow up. But very few people did. The rest were trusting us to come out of this, and we did, and we did wonderfully. I am actually very happy with the results that we did through this. But we were transparent completely. And anybody could reach out and say, look, I have to support my family, right? And I'm worried. Will there be a salary in two, three months? And to answer them—and we gave a full answer, not just a yes or no. So having this way that anybody in the company can reach out to anybody, that there's no walls and then open line of communication, transparency—I think that was something I was taught. I didn't believe it initially, but I grew to believe it, and I think it's something that really benefited how I run companies and stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:03) And what's your favorite thing to do at the company? Because earlier, we were talking a little bit about doing interviews. You're like, oh, I don't know. Not so much, even though you're a great talker. But so okay. So maybe not interviews, but what's your favorite thing to do at the company?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:12:16) Product. I love product. I love product. I, again, I think—you know, it's very evident that I'm a product guy because this company, we created an amazing product. I'm not just saying—

(Yoav Kutner at 01:12:33) We overshot, you know, we overshot the market because I had to pull back a bit. But product is my passion. I did write a lot of code in my day and stuff like that, but where I kind of transitioned was more for product. And I love it. I really love going through the features, and I still love sitting in with customers and listening to feedback so I can make a better feature.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:12:58) And if I had my choice of what to do all day long, it would probably be product. Yeah. I think that's where I love being.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:05) And then I saw that in your history, it was a lot of, like, co-founder, CTO. But then on this company, title CEO. I've seen this happen a lot, like, a lot of CTOs go into CEO, and I was just curious. You know, you're on the executive team, so there's already a lot of responsibility. Right? So we're already familiar with that and leadership skills and budgeting.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:26) But what's, like, the subtle differences between the transition from CTO to CEO?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:13:32) Right. So if you think about a CTO, and I know a lot of people who have this discussion between VP of Engineering and CTO and all that, but let's put that to side for a second. But if you're the tech guy, let's call that. Right?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:13:43) If you're the tech leader of the company. You know? And the move is from just thinking code and technology to thinking code and technology and business. Right? You're starting to put the business hat as well.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:13:54) And the discussions are not only on when you can deliver this feature and what technology is going to be used, et cetera. It's now what is, how does this tie into everything else business. Right? So if I'll have to kind of describe the transition you do is, and that happened to me in Magento, and that's kind of what led to where I am at Oro, I started getting pushed more and more into the business side of it, right, and less and less the technology side of it.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:14:17) As we grew, as the company matured, I actually found myself levitating towards the business and less of the technology. So as much as I would like to think of myself as a technologist, I'm probably already outdated. Right? Everything moves so fast. So I had to kind of put my ego aside and let the right person take over the technology.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:14:38) And Dimas Roca, our CTO, is an amazing technologist, and Michael Basalov, our VP of Engineering, another amazing technologist, and they're much better than me. So that kind of pushed me into the more business role. Right? So it is a transition. But I think especially for a product company to have this background of technology and understanding how it works, what's possible, and everything's possible.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:15:02) What's possible with this budget? What's possible, and what will it take to get there? I think having that just benefits me in this transition to having the business side take more of my time today. Like I said, I try to still play with the product. So I try to stay in touch with that, but definitely the transition is almost natural.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:15:21) Like you said, as the companies that you're with as a CTO grow and grow and grow, you find yourself more and more in the budgeting discussions rather than the technology discussions. Right? Fortunately or unfortunately, more and more discussion with sales guys, more and more discussions with the marketing people. Right? So you get into that more.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:15:37) And that's almost like a natural transition unless you don't give it up. Right? Some CTOs just will never give up the technology, and that's good. I mean, works for some companies, and some companies need that. Right?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:15:47) Some companies need the CTO to stay in the weeds and in the code and write code all day long, and that works great. But I think once you grow and especially to the size we grew with Magento and the size where we are with Oro, it's important to start levitating towards the business side of it. And it was kind of almost a natural kind of progression for me.

(Joel Beasley at 01:16:03) Yeah. Well, I mean, it's great too because it's like we're in a car and we're driving on a road trip and fuel is very important, and fuel is the money. It's like a tool. And if you don't manage your fuel, your car can end up on the side of the road, right, and you not get to the destination you need to get to, and then everybody's stuck in the desert. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:16:23) And it's no fun then. So, you know, for me, I hated it at first. I was like, this is so frustrating. But then what happened is I didn't quit, and then I got better at it, and I developed some skill, and then I had some opinions and thoughts. And then I realized that, okay, this is something if I get this right, then it can grow and I can hire, like, the authors I read about.

(Joel Beasley at 01:16:50) You know? I can, like, hire the best people, and then I'll get to be in an environment working with the best people in the world while also, you know, being the entrepreneur that I am and running the business. And so for me, it's like, okay. This is the thing. Just like when I was first learning communication, I was like, alright.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:06) This communication thing, I'm no good at it, and this is a barrier to my next step in my career. And then with the financial aspect and the revenue and the sales processes of the business, learning that was, like, the next hurdle. And now I feel like I've got a pretty good portfolio of stuff. The business is operating. You know, we're in business for, you know, more than three years now.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:28) So we beat the statistic, right, of, like, the 99%, which I think is a good milestone. And then, you know, you step back. You're in it. You feel like nothing's really happening, but you step back and you look at, like, revenue numbers year over year, and it's like, my jaw just hit the floor. I was like, we're, like, doubling and tripling.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:44) I was like, this doesn't, it happened so slowly. Right?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:17:48) No. It's again, when you're in the weeds, everything is so slow. Right? Even at Magento, which was like a rocket ship. Right?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:17:55) We didn't feel that. Only when you start looking back and the distance you went through, that's when you kind of notice the achievements. Right? But when you're every day in the weeds, it's a different story. Everything seems so slow and moving.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:18:08) Can't move fast enough. Right? But definitely something looking back, you see how much progress you've made. So again, kudos to you. It's really a high.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:18:18) Right? When you have a successful business, it's almost the ultimate high. I really say it because when everything starts falling together, it's amazing. And, yes, I'm again, I'm very proud of the companies I'm part of, and fortunately for me, all of them are successful. So I'm yet to experience, I'm not saying that we don't experience the downside.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:18:39) There's, you know, it's ups and downs. It's, like, crazy. Right? It's a roller coaster every day. But I want to say that I'm extremely fortunate to have this streak of success, and I'm just fearing that one day it ends there.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:18:52) But maybe that makes me work harder. So I'm not sitting back and just waiting for everything to work. I know that it takes a lot of hard work to become successful, and I'm not taking it for granted, to be honest. I think that, you know, success is just hard work a lot. And I'll say this.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:19:09) I do get this question, right, of, and I don't know if you do, that people come to me and say, okay, what's the magic? Just give me the one liner of how do we create a successful business. And I'm like, there is no one liner. There's no one secret. Right?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:19:24) It's hard work. It's day in, day out making it happen. And I still do it. And, you know, I'm dreading the day where I lose this passion, but as long as I have it, then I can keep pushing. I think that's what we need to do.

(Joel Beasley at 01:19:37) No. When I hear that question, I'm like, oh, you haven't. You know?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:19:42) What's the...

(Joel Beasley at 01:19:42) What's the one piece of magic? I was like, well, you haven't done it yet. I know that because you asked that question.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:19:47) Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 01:19:49) But, I mean, you know, not giving up is one of the things that I've learned because, you know, if you give up, it's over. Like, that's the failure moment, and that's something that you just you can't do. Like, I can get down. I can get frustrated. I can get upset.

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:05) I can learn from mistakes, but giving up is just, you just have to make it work. And if you go into it with the mindset of, I don't know if this is going to take me a year, ten years, my entire lifetime. I'm not going to give up, and we're going to figure this out. And you just, you know, I always go back to this one talk I heard where this guy was making, like, a $100,000 a year off of a blog about ketchup. And I'm like, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:30) Alright, people. That's possible in this universe. You know what I'm saying? People sell Q-tips and make money. Like, all of these products around us, there's so many different things you can do. It's really just being able to learn from your mistakes and not give up and to keep putting in the hard work. Consistently, I think you have a high work ethic.

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:50) I think a lot of it probably came from, you said you spent some time in the armed services. Right?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:20:56) Yep. Yeah. Three years. Yeah. Well, I think it's Dad, and I'll have to give credit to my dad.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:21:02) He always told me it's going to be hard work. You just have to work hard and it comes. And I think he kind of instilled in me this work ethic and just work hard for everything you do and make, and it's not only that. It's do the best you can. Right?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:21:17) I mean, think of who's going to use your product. You know, my dad was not a product guy, but he always told me if you're creating something, make sure, or if you're working, make sure you do the best you can because you're giving, you're asking people to pay for it. If they're paying you salary, if they're paying for your license, doesn't matter. But if somebody is paying for what you deliver to them, make sure that they're getting the best that you can do because they're trusting you enough to pay you to do that. So I think that's something that kind of puts a responsibility, I guess, that we really have to create a good product.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:21:47) We really have to have as the least problems possible for our customers. Right? If they have a problem, we'll jump in and help them out. I still have customers call me on my cell phone. Right?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:21:56) And they're amazed that I picked up. And I was like, why wouldn't I pick up? You're my customer. If you're having a problem, you know, it's like, of course, I'll pick up. And I think that's something, yeah, probably have to give more credit to my dad than the army, but yeah, army for sure kind of molds you into that kind of way of life. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:22:14) Yeah. Well, definitely credit to your dad. Right? Like, my dad would say, if you want to be successful at something, just do it for a very long time and, like, do it well. And then as I was having kids, I was trying to figure out, like, my wife was asking me, oh, would you be upset if, you know, Arya became this or Lachlan became that?

(Joel Beasley at 01:22:31) And I said, after a lot of deliberation, I said, you know what? I don't necessarily care what they do as long as they do it well. As long as they do it well and they do it with a high level of craftsmanship, because that's the one thing that will transcend any work. Like, no matter what, whether it's charity, whether what, no matter what you're doing, you can choose to do something well and you can choose to get better at it regardless of where you start.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:23:03) Yeah. I completely agree with that. That's a really good way of putting it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:23:09) We did it. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:23:13) Great. Yeah. Hopefully, it came out well.

(Joel Beasley at 01:23:15) Came up. Was there any specific call to action, like, tell people to go to oro.com, and it's not oro.com?

(Yoav Kutner at 01:23:20) That actually would be, yeah, anything we can. So it's oroinc.com and orocommerce.com and orocrm.com, all the websites. Oroinc.com, of course. Those are the websites that you can learn a lot about what we do and be part of our ecosystem.

(Joel Beasley at 01:23:39) Amazing. And we'll put links in the show notes so that people can access it and find it really easily by just going on our site and clicking on your episode. And so we'll drive as much traffic as, we'll drive a ton of traffic.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:23:52) Oh, that's great.

(Joel Beasley at 01:23:53) Everybody get off the podcast and get off the phone roaming.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:23:57) Link. Great.

(Joel Beasley at 01:23:58) Alright. This is fantastic.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:24:00) Yeah. Joel, this was, yeah, actually amazing experience, Joel. And you have a great name, like my dad. So and you're living up to that name. So...

(Joel Beasley at 01:24:08) I will do the name well. I promise.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:24:10) And do you want to know the meaning of the name?

(Joel Beasley at 01:24:12) Yes, please.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:24:12) Do you want? So, uh, anything with Jo or Yo in Hebrew is God. So that's one of the names of God. And El means God. So your name is double God.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:24:23) It's like God is God. Okay? Mine is God is the father. Av is father. So...

(Yoav Kutner at 01:24:30) We, yeah. Just so you know.

(Joel Beasley at 01:24:32) I like that. That's cool. Yeah. I just recently got into, like, reading about, you know, like, religion, different religion and the Bible and all of that. And I've honestly, it's amazing how the stories can translate so well and they were written so long ago.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:24:48) Yeah. Look, I'm not a religious guy by no means, but it just, yeah. I just know that. So, yeah. Another piece of useful information.

(Joel Beasley at 01:24:59) Thank you so much. You have a great day.

(Yoav Kutner at 01:25:00) Thank you. Thank you for the whole team. Thank you very much.

(Joel Beasley at 01:25:05) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd 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.