Ben O'Donnell CTO of BIMobject

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) I am so excited about our conversation with Ben O'Donnell today. He is a visionary CTO who is changing the world. I'm also excited because two weeks ago, when I was in San Francisco, we made the first announcement about Leaderbits. And wow, I'm completely blown away. Over 50 companies have reached out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) So pay close attention because in the next 90 seconds, you're going to get a peek inside over 50 companies that have 30-plus engineers. Now, this is incredibly valuable research for any technology leader. And this, guys, this is really inside information, so pay attention because it can really help your business. Number one: all over the world, companies are competing against banks for technology talent, which really surprised me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:48) Companies are using Leaderbits as a competitive advantage when hiring. This way, when they're hiring, they can say, "Well, when you come work here, you'll have a great salary, a great team, and we'll grow you professionally to become more." So what this does is it attracts the people who are intelligent and want to grow versus the people just looking for more money. And if you want the people with a growth mindset on your team, the way to do that is by showing them you have a way for them to grow and become more inside your company. Number two: every one of the companies that I spoke to has no formal leadership pipeline.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:24) You have massive untapped potential inside your current technologists. And so here is the key takeaway: as a leader, if you don't believe in your people's ability to grow and become more professionally, they will leave for a company that does believe in them. I know there are a lot of holidays this weekend all over the world, and we forget at the rate of one bit per neuron per second. So here is what you need to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:49) If you're running, you're on a bike, take a break. If you're working, if you're driving, just make a voice reminder note with your Alexa or your Siri or whatever it may be. And take a moment to go to leaderbits.io and put in your name and email. We'll set up a meeting after the holidays to see if Leaderbits is right for you. And the reason that I am so passionate about this is because it works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:12) Speaking of leaders that believe in their people, today we are talking to Ben O'Donnell, the CTO of BIMobject, and we discuss his journey from architect to CTO, the need for innovation and disruption in the construction industry, and his experience using Leaderbits to grow his people. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:02:37) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:38) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:02:50) Good girl. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:53) Man, I am so excited. Here we are. Are you in a hotel room?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:02:57) No, I'm actually one of our conference rooms.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:00) Oh, nice. Yeah. It looks beautiful, though.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:03:02) It is. It's awesome. You know, we have one and a half floors in this building. We moved here about, well, it's almost two years ago. And we were actually sharing an office with three other startups. And it was kind of, I mean, it was cool. You know, we had really nice exchange in that, but we were always competing for conference rooms and meeting rooms and things like that. And it was like, it's so nice to have our own place. So we have one and a half stories, or one and a half floors here. We have the ninth and half of the eighth floor where I have my team.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:03:31) And it's nice. Yeah, it is. And it's, you know, Scandinavian architecture—it's very minimalistic. So it's really nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:40) That's awesome. Yeah. You know, I was in San Francisco last week, meeting with a bunch of great people. And have you heard of those bikes? They're called the Peloton bikes.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:03:52) I have, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:53) Have you been on one yet?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:03:55) I haven't, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:56) Okay, they're really cool.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:03:58) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:58) Yeah. So they had them in the hotel. I haven't gotten to the point where I would buy one yet, but it was just cool because I've seen their ads and things like that, and to actually sit on one, play with it, was really cool. But I'm riding the Peloton bike, and it's like a view of the city, right? And then pulls up. I get a little email about you from my system because I have some internal triggers. And then I look up, and I'm thinking about you, right? Just because I was reading the email. And then, up at the stoplight, pulls up one of those VW buses.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:04:33) Oh, really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:34) Yeah. So I tried to take a—I tried to fidget my phone out real quick to unlock it and get the camera going and everything like that to get a picture of it, and I missed it because I was going to get a picture to text to you, like, "Dude, look at this."

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:04:48) My dream car.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:49) Right? It's awesome. I'm so excited.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:04:52) So how was San Francisco?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:54) It was good. You know, it's cold there in the summer.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:04:57) I know. Yeah, that's weird.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:59) Isn't that?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:05:00) Yeah, it is. So all of these scooters and that, it's a huge thing in San Francisco at the moment, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:05) Yeah, they even have them parked on the sidewalk, and they'll say, like, "Start it for a dollar," and you pull out an app, and you can actually just start a free-standing random scooter and drive it.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:05:16) Right. And it seems to be a huge business. I read Ben Thompson's blog, Stratechery. And he writes a lot about it, you know, about this whole electrical bikes and the electrical scooters and that in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it seems to be huge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:32) Yeah. Also, something that was big that I hadn't seen before is it's essentially the ride sharing, the Ubers, but they're like these buses or these vehicles that can hold probably 10 to 15 people. I think one was called Chariot, and it's essentially a step up from a specific Uber by yourself. It's like a mass transit Uber. Have you seen those?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:05:54) No, I haven't, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:55) Yeah, so that was new for me too.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:05:57) That sounds super exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:59) Yeah. You're DevCon. How did DevCon go?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:06:02) DevCon was awesome. You know, I love them, and I think, you know, we get really good feedback. And it's something that's necessary for us to do because we're spread out all over the world. I mean, we're a global company and, you know, especially being European. We have development here at HQ, mainly front-end guys. We have our back-end primarily down in Budapest in Hungary. And we have all of our AR and VR stuff in Poland. So we're, you know, it's a great opportunity for everyone to get together face to face, discuss challenges, you know, visions, missions, and where we're going with the company and all of that sort of stuff. So it was really successful. And the guys loved it.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:06:44) But, you know, there are challenges, and one of the biggest challenges are the cultural challenges. So, you know, at a very high level, you've got your front-end and back-end challenge. There's, you know, the developers are like, "Front-end, back-end," you know how it is. But with cultural challenges and, you know, especially language—these guys, and even here at HQ, you know, English is not their mother tongue. So that also presents a whole bunch of challenges. But it's great fun. You know, we go out and we drink some beer and talk about different things. And I thought, yeah, it was great. So it was really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:16) Yes, I saw the pictures you sent. They were building or playing with something. I was like, "These paper tubes," or it was something. What was that?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:07:24) Yeah. So, you know, as we're digitizing the building industry, so we kind of like to have that in our vision and our mission, of course. So we like it. Even the guys that are working on the platform that we're developing to kind of, you know, go back to the building blocks of what we're doing and what our company is about. So they had a challenge to build a bridge, and there was a little marble that they had to roll through it. And the actual pipe wasn't allowed to touch the ground. And it was all made out of paper. So with paper and tape that they got to do it with. So that was the challenge. And it was really interesting.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:07:53) And we mixed everyone up. And, you know, I think when we spoke last time, I talked about our whole tribe concept. So we just formed five new tribes, and it was all the new tribe members. So they hadn't worked with each other before. Everyone knows who each other is, but they hadn't worked with each other before. So it was their very first task to do together. And, you know, we were putting little things in all the time, so they got one task to do. And then, you know, obviously, the product owner came in and changed things. So he put new things. So, you know, and they had to go and reiterate. And I think that happened about three or four times during the period. It was a 40-minute period, and it was really, really interesting to watch and see how they solved it and how they got together. And again, you know, one of the biggest challenges was the language barrier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:36) Well, that's interesting too, because it's like, let's build something physical in a world where everything we build is digital.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:08:42) Exactly. Exactly. And it was, I mean, it was good to see the way that they were thinking together. And it was, you know, a little bit of architecture and a little bit of construction and, you know, all that sort of stuff. So it was cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:53) Well, and that's—and they always say the company takes on the personalities of the founders. And I love your story because it is very different and unique. Rather than developer to CTO, you went architect, like, actual building architect to CTO. Tell me about that.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:09:10) Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, I realized pretty quickly that most architects, when you start at university, you want to become a star architect, a starchitect. And there are people like, you know, Renzo Piano, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry, all of these guys. And I realized pretty quickly that I was never going to be one of those type of architects. So when you come into an architectural office, you either go to the right-hand side or to the left-hand side. So the right-hand side being, you know, the guys that are very artistic that do all of the designs on their napkins, and they give it to us on the left-hand side. So the kind of technical guys that go into all of the construction drawings and do all of the documentation. And I found that that whole process was extremely cumbersome.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:09:54) So when I was at university, we did everything by hand. Everything was done by hand. And then there was—I wouldn't say it was a digitization of the drawing board, but it was more of a computerization of the drawing board. And that's been one of the biggest challenges for our industry as well, because it wasn't a true digitization. So basically, what Autodesk did, which is one of the—well, I think they are the biggest developer of CAD software in the world—they took the drawing board and they computerized it. And it meant, you know, there were some benefits of that. You could do changes quickly and, you know, you could reiterate a lot more quickly, but it was very cumbersome. So they actually came out, I think it was around—oh, yeah, it was the first version of AutoCAD where they had a programming language called AutoLISP, which is based on LISP. You know, I was really interested in doing it and started learning it. And that's kind of where, you know, the whole programming kind of thing came into it. After that, I moved to Sweden, so I'm originally from Australia. I moved to Sweden in—actually, in two days, I've been here for 20 years. So I'm kind of coming into a point in my life that there's only another four years and I've lived in a foreign country longer than I've lived in my own country. So that's another story.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:11:04) I moved to Sweden, you know, doing architectural work here as well, and was introduced to another BIM system or a CAD system at that time called ArchiCAD, which comes out of Hungary. So that kind of ties back to why we set up operations down there. They have a programming language that's built inside of that system called GDL, so Geometric Description Language. And our whole business is—it's kind of a hybrid. So you have three-dimensional geometry, and you have the programming language on top of that as well. So that it adds another layer of complexity. So, you know, if you look at what we do, content for us is not just images and text. It's this 3D object as well, which presents a whole another level of complexity in what we do in the platform that we develop.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:11:49) And then I was, you know, I was here. I was working as an architect here in Sweden for 15 years consulting and kind of started getting introduced to something called Python, which was, you know, really cool. Then I could start automating a lot more. It was a lot more powerful. And then I started, you know, hearing about this thing that was called web development that I didn't have a lot of knowledge about and saw that Python fitted really well with that. The guy who founded BIMobject, he's a really good friend of mine. He gave me my first job after two weeks, you know, moving to Sweden. He said to me, "You have to come and work for me." And I was like, you know, at that stage, he was doing a lot of 3D stuff. He had a game development company as well. So he's kind of been all over the place. And he was the one that introduced me to ArchiCAD and this whole, you know, GDL programming language and all that sort of stuff that really got me interested in development. So, you know, web development for me was totally foreign when we started up BIMobject. It's been a huge learning curve for me. It's been one of the biggest challenges for me in my life.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:12:52) But I've learned so much over the last seven years. It's been an interesting journey. It continues to be an interesting journey and will continue to be an interesting journey. There's a lot of challenges, you know, not coming from a developer background, not having that traditional, you know, computer engineering, computer science type of education. So I've learned on the job. I was thrown into the flames, and I'm loving it. I'm loving every day of it. So for me, this is not a job. This is a lifestyle, and this is a way of life for me, which is—I think I can pretty much speak for, you know, the whole management team at BIMobject. This is kind of more of a lifestyle for us rather than a job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:35) Well, that's what you want it to be. You want—I mean, we spend more than a third of our lives working, so you want it to be pleasurable to some degree.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:13:44) Yeah, exactly, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:44) So at what point did you decide that, like, BIMobject, this is the company, this is where I'm going to hang my hat? Like, how did this all come about?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:13:54) Yeah. So if we go back to how it all kind of came about, so this is Stefan Larsson. He's the founder of BIMobject. And this is kind of, I would say, version four or version three. So he's done this before.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:14:10) He started this in the early — so he's this entrepreneur, and he just has all of these crazy ideas. And he tried this back in the early nineties when the infrastructure for the Internet was nowhere near where it was today. So we actually started creating these 3D objects, and we were distributing them via CDs, CD-ROMs. Obviously, there were a lot of challenges around that, you know, with updating and maintenance and sending out new CDs all the time and sending to architects who didn't have time to get interested in what we were doing.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:14:45) So he kind of digressed. He went and did something else. He became the global sales manager, actually, for this BIM system I mentioned earlier, ArchiCAD, which is developed by a company called Graphisoft out of Budapest in Hungary. He was the global sales manager for Graphisoft for about ten years, and I think he had over like 200 days of travel every year, which is way too much for him.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:15:12) And he came back — you know, he was meeting a lot of architects and a lot of design professionals in the construction industry, and they're like, "Where's the building product manufacturers' products? We want these 3D objects. We want to be able to procure them. We want to be able to purchase them. We want to be able to see what they look like. We want to put them into the context of our building, and we want to be able to reach out to someone and actually be able to buy it." And that's kind of where the idea came for BIMobject. So honestly, when I met him and he told me about the whole BIMobject idea — five minutes. Five minutes. And I'm —

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:51) Well, it makes so much sense, because the only other option you could have is by having these fake 3D objects that you can't buy. And then now you just have this huge need to source product that looks similar. And for the architects, you know, I've happened to — my parents did commercial real estate, so commercial real estate building. So I've had the experience of actually going in and being in a room with an architect and watching them pitch the plan and show them what they're thinking and the sinks and everything like that. And that all adjusts the cost of the building.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:16:25) It does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:26) Based on what sink you use and all the different bathrooms and all the different everything that you could possibly use — the light socket covers. I mean, everything adjusts the cost of the entire building project. And so you have to make decisions on these things and ultimately sell them on going this way with this specific set of features. So if you can't buy it, it just makes it all more difficult.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:16:50) Exactly. And it's so refreshing to hear — and this is, you know, someone, people like you, younger people like you that are in the tech industry and with web development, everything — the construction industry needs people like you. The construction industry needs to be turned upside down. I mean, we're in the process of disrupting it, and I think we're doing a pretty good job. But we're a company, we're a global company, we have 200 employees, but I mean, we need a lot more people to get onto this train and to help us. And, you know, in our last conversation, our why is to save the world, or at least to help save the world. You know, just in Europe alone — where, you know, we have operations in the US, so we're looking at those figures at the moment — just in Europe alone, there's over 800 million tons of waste every year from the construction industry, and that's because there's wrong decisions made early in the process. So, you know, going back to what you're saying, with these agnostic objects that you can't go and procure, an architect or a designer, they'll place them into the context of their building. Everyone will say, "Yep, that's what we want." But when they actually start going into procurement, they find, "Oh, okay. What's that? Where do we find that?"

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:18:07) So number one, either they have to custom build it, which is an absolute waste of time. So you see where I'm going with this. The construction is totally upside down. I mean, it needs young people like you, and that's one of our challenges as well. You know, people ask what we do, and we say, "We're digitizing the building industry." And it's kind of like, "Okay. Doesn't sound that exciting." But it is. It's really exciting, and there's so much —

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:34) That's a big industry. I mean, it's like the containers for humans. You think containers for code is cool? Containers for humans are even more cool.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:18:44) Yeah, it is. And I mean, you know, it's a $15 trillion business yearly. I think it's the biggest industry globally, and it's the biggest industry that, you know, if you look at it from a digitization perspective, it's even worse than agriculture. Agriculture's come a lot further than what the construction industry has.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:11) So I was in San Francisco doing an Uber, and I do the most affordable Uber because I'm 100 trips back and forth. So I get this $8 Uber, and this brand new Range Rover pulls up. And usually they're in the higher class, the more expensive vehicles. So I start talking to the guy. We start sharing, and he does it for fun when he gets bored because he travels from city to city, from continent to continent, and Uber's in many places. And so what he'll do is wherever he's at, he will go out and run some Ubers just to meet some interesting people and to hear some stories. And so I was like, "Oh, that's cool." So his family owns this massive agriculture technology company, and he sits on the board, and he goes and does different deals in large cities. And then when he's not doing that, he just will drive for Uber. And he was telling me about — they just did this big investment in these weed-picking machines that are solar powered and autonomous. So you put them on the crops, and what they do is — he says it's very hard to automate the picking of the actual berry or the byproduct, the fruit, whatever it may be. But he goes, "It's very easy for the weeds." So rather than having groups of people go out and pick the weeds, they built these little automated pickers to go automatically de-weed the crops. And so they, as the agriculture company that owns the crops and the fields and everything, they started buying and investing in these small technology companies that allows what they're doing to be more efficient.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:20:58) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:59) I was like, "That's an Uber ride."

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:21:01) Yeah. Wow. That sounds awesome. And I mean, that's exactly what the construction industry needs as well, Joel. That's exactly what it needs. It needs these type of disruptive companies, disruptive technology. You know, there's a lot of tradition in construction. It's very local as well. You know, and I think even if you look within the US where you are, there'll be regulations that are different to, you know, West Coast US. It's also a challenge within itself. So, yeah, there's a lot of interesting opportunities, business opportunity in the construction industry for IT people as well. And it really needs to be disrupted on a huge scale.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:44) Well, one of my — you'll be happy to hear this. I have a childhood friend named Chris, and I saw him go — I think it was in Tennessee — and he joined a startup. It was like two or three people, and it was called Built. Have you heard of them?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:22:00) I have, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:01) Yeah. So they were very excited, and it was like one of his first — I think it's his first big product jobs. I think he had done some small product stuff, but he's the — I'm looking on LinkedIn — he's like the head of product there. And so it was just like him and a couple other people. And then I saw them grow, then they grew a little bit. And over the course of two years, I think they're at like 40 people, and they just raised like $21 million. But they do a platform that streamlines construction lending. It's like fintech for the construction lending. But apparently, this process was very cumbersome, and they have since streamlined the paperwork and the platform and the whole application process. But yeah, it was really cool to see the growth of that happen for them. And you're right. It's just even the most basic stuff — like, you would imagine that there's a platform that streamlines the loan process. I mean, from a product standpoint, it's such a simple product.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:23:01) It is. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) It's like you need money for a loan, and you need an easier way to loan the money. You could build an MVP on that in like a week or two and just streamline construction lending. But it takes the right people coming together at the right times in order for it to really take off. So I was very happy to see that. So we're making some progress.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:23:22) Yeah. That's awesome. I mean, that's really cool to hear. I'm going to reach out to him. If you can send me his contact details, that'll be really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:29) Yeah. What are you excited about most right now with BIMobject?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:23:33) I'm excited about our platform, where we're going with our platform, what we will be able to solve for the construction industry on a global level with our platform. It's really, really exciting. At the same time, that's what keeps me awake.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:48) I would like some clarity, though, because I've been talking about you a little bit to some different friends, and they've asked some great questions. And so the first question I have is — I know you make the objects, but do you make some sort of other system? Do you build some tools that make it easier to make the objects? Like, is it more than just the objects?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:24:07) That is a great question. And actually, the answer is it's multiple level. Yes, we do. So we have a tool that creates the objects. We have an online — it's a web configurator. We call it Mosquito. You might — yeah. So it was actually a project name that kind of stuck.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:29) Everyone liked it.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:24:29) So it wasn't intended to be called Mosquito, but it — yeah, it's like I say, it stuck. So it's an online web configurator where you can create content very simply and very easily. So our primary customer, building product manufacturers — we also created a tool out of necessity. We got in a huge content contract with the largest sanitary ware manufacturer in the world. They're actually out of Barcelona in Spain. They're called Roca. They own a lot of brands in the US as well. And I think American Standard or Armitage Shanks, I can't remember. Anyway, yeah, they have a lot of brands in the US. They have 60,000 products that need to be digitized.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:10) Get some coffee out, man.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:25:12) Exactly. So Stefan and I — so Stefan, the founder — we went to our developers. And again, this is kind of a very specialized type of developer. So they have a lot of experience with CAD software, with the 3D stuff. You know, it's really — it's very low-level C, C++ type of programming, and you need almost to be a mathematician to be able to do it and have a lot of experience with 3D geometry. We went back and challenged them and said, "Look, you know, we have this contract. We need something. We need to automate or semi-automate this process." And they just laughed at us. They said, "That's impossible. We can't do it." So, I mean, we're all about externalizing as much as possible. So, you know, I mentioned this system called ArchiCAD — it's a BIM system. So BIM is an acronym for building information modeling. So it's all of this data-rich geometry within the context of that BIM system. So an architect will draw walls and windows, and they'll model a building within context. Now there's many different BIM systems out on the market. There's Revit, which is developed by Autodesk. There's ArchiCAD, there's SketchUp, which is kind of not a BIM system, but it's very popular amongst early design phase for architects. And there's a lot of other BIM systems as well. And, you know, for a building product manufacturer, it's really time-consuming and costly for them to go and contract all of these different people to create content for all of these different systems. So obviously, they want to provide content for as many platforms as possible, which totally makes sense. So what we try to do at the moment — and again, you know, we're succeeding very nicely with it — is that we're externalizing everything. So you're not reliant on these individual systems. So you don't have to go to a content creator for ArchiCAD or Revit or for this other system, system C, D, and E. We actually created a scripting language, and the script — which is based on C, but we've really kind of simplified it a lot — we looked at a couple of different things to do. I mean, it was, you know, kind of — we really need to scale the content creation. We need to get it done as quickly as possible. Obviously, 60,000 products to digitize, it's going to take a long time to do. So we first of all had a look at taking a developer, so a C++ developer and trying to teach them how to 3D model. And then they can go and put all of their scripting on it. And that part of it, you know, that part of the process, they can get done really quickly. And once that's done, you know, once they put their script on it with the 3D geometry, they send it up to our platform and the rest is done automatically. But we found, you know, it was quite a funny journey. And we found that to take a C++ programmer and try to teach them 3D modeling was almost impossible. It was really, really difficult. So what we did is that we looked at 3D artists. So, you know, people that are using systems like 3ds Max, AR, and all of these that film and game studios use, and taught them how to do basic scripting in our BIM script language. So the language is called BIM script, and we found that that was quite successful. So that's what we've done — we've created BIM script. As of today, it's an add-on for a 3D system called Rhinoceros 3D. And then we've actually ported it over to Fusion 360, which is half web, half desktop app that's also developed by Autodesk. We're about to develop for some other systems. Unfortunately, I can't go down — like, you know, we're a publicly traded company, so I can't go into details. So basically, what the people do in Rhinoceros — they bring in their 3D geometry or they can create it from scratch. They put the script on it. It's sent up to our platform, and it creates the content for all of these differences. So we have our black box technology on our platform, and we keep adding black boxes, and that's where we can really scale the content creation part of it. And there's actually been a lot of nice kind of side effects of that. And that's, you know, something that's really taken off over the last few years — AR and VR. So, you know, AR and VR, you need 3D geometry.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:29:08) So that's what we, you know, we have a lot of really smart customers. So our building product manufacturers were coming back to us and saying, "Look, you guys, you have the BIM models, right? And that's 3D geometry."

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:29:18) We do. So we're looking at, you know, doing something with VR and AR. Can we consume that content? And we're like, "Yeah, you can, actually."

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:29:27) And that's, you know, what's really the beauty about our whole BIMScript technology is that it's future-proof. So as soon as we add another black box, it's a simple click of the button, and they support that specific file format. So that means that, you know, any AR device that consumes that type of content will be able to consume it. Any type of VR headset or device or platform can consume that content from within that context.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:50) Oh, it's amazing, too. You have to have, like, a HoloLens or Explorer so you can, like, show off your different objects to your customers. Be like, "Of course you can. Here." And, like, when they see it through that headset, they're like, "Whoa."

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:30:03) Exactly. Exactly. Which we do. I mean, we've done a couple of our prototypes and a couple of proof of concepts where you can actually place kitchen sinks if you want, or you can place a faucet, or you can place a toilet. So it's beautiful.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:30:17) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:18) So Sweden is like this new tech hub. It's like the Sweden Valley or something. Like, it really is. The amount of—first of all, it's one of our most popular audiences for the show.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:30:32) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:32) That is what got us—first on the radar. Like, or I'm sorry, that is what got Sweden on my radar. The analytics from the show. I'm like, "Okay, you know, we've got Florida, or, you know, we've got the United States." Of course, you get the New Yorks and the Californias and the Seattles. And I was like, "All right. Well, then we've got some Greece, we've got some Sweden, we've got some Brazil, and we got a lot of India." And so I was like, "Well, that's really interesting," because I have some friends that are from Sweden here locally. And so then you reach out, and then some of the nicest, sweetest people in the world, like, were reaching out. And every time I clicked, I'm like, "Sweden." I'm like, "What is going on there? They're all technologists, and they all seem to be, like, really happy and very nice." I want to know more.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:31:26) Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting. And I think one of the main reasons there's a lot of technology companies coming out—it's always been like that. Half of the year, it's dark, so there's nothing else to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:41) Really? Oh, it's like Alaska or something.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:31:45) Yeah. I mean, because you're so far north. So where we are, where our HQ is, we're in the very southern part of Sweden. So it's just across the sound from Copenhagen. It's not as bad down here. So right in the middle of winter, I think we get about six or seven hours of daylight, and then it's just pitch black. But if you go further north, it's black twenty-four hours a day. At the same time in the summertime where we are now, it's twenty-four hours of daylight. So, yeah, you have this contrast. But so coming back to your question, yeah, I mean, education in Sweden is free, all the way up to university. It's totally free for everyone. It's totally democratized, which is fantastic. So there's a lot of intelligent people here, and there is no reason for you not to go to university and study. And as you know, with globalization, the world has become a lot smaller. You know, everything's much more accessible. There's always been a really rich game industry here in Sweden.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:43) I knew that. Yeah. I was aware of that because I used to—about twenty years ago, I was—oh, man, I'm getting old. About twenty years ago, it was when I was, like, playing Xbox a lot. And I specifically remember I was getting a lot of people from Sweden in there.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:32:59) But even from creating games as well, so from game creators.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:02) Oh, yeah.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:33:04) So there's Ubisoft. They own a company here in our town. So this is one of our challenges for looking for developers because we're competing for the same profile. It's a company called Massive Entertainment. They just recently won, I think, a ten-year contract for the Avatar franchise. So they—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:20) Oh, no way.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:33:21) Yeah. So they, you know, they're looking at the moment for 200 developers. So, you know, from 3D artists all the way to C++ developers for their own gaming engine. Another really interesting company that was started up here, I think it was around ten years ago, is a company called DICE, and they did the Battlefield franchise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:42) Oh, nice.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:33:43) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And they were later acquired by EA. So they're part of EA now. And the guy who did the Frost Engine, he's a Swede. Skype—Nicholas Zennström, he was the guy that started Skype. Spotify is from Sweden.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:02) Spotify?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:34:03) Yeah. Yeah. It's a Swedish company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:06) Oh, that's right. Where were they? I think they're from the Netherlands. Is that near or close?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:34:11) Yeah. I mean, the Netherlands is, like, literally a stone's throw away. I think it is from the Netherlands.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:19) I know it's brothers.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:34:21) Yeah. Right. Right. Cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:24) Yeah. And I remember when I first saw it, I came across it. Before that, all there was was Authorize.net, and that was horrible. And when I saw Stripe come up, it was just a single basic page, you know, for developers—payments for developers. And then I was like, "Oh, this is awesome." So I integrated it. It had a beautiful, like, Ruby gem and an awesome API. And then I just watched them grow, like, year over year. I'm like, "Oh, their site's better. Oh, their site's bigger. Oh, they're doing more." News articles: "Stripe hits a billion dollars." I'm like, "Oh, there you go. Nice." I mean, they built something we loved, right?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:34:57) I know. It's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:59) Yeah. So, you know, what's interesting is, I took a little peek at the entries for your Leaderbits people. They're using it, man.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:35:08) Yeah. I know. I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:09) It's exciting. Yeah.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:35:11) I mean, I love it. You know, this whole Leaderbits thing really got me intrigued. When you reached out to me and said that you wanted to talk about it and that, and I'm like, "Okay. Yeah. That sounds interesting." But when you presented it to me and the way that you presented it, what intrigued me the most about it, which really hits home with, you know, with my developers, is that it's actually done by a developer. Right? You know? You're talking the same talk. You're walking the same walk. And it's like it totally hits home with them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:41) Yeah. That's what I wanted because all the leadership stuff is so salesy and cheesy. I wanted something that it's like, "Look. Here are the skills." You know, the biggest piece of feedback I got from my book that I put out was that you just said exactly what happened. There wasn't fluff. It was just direct, and then I was able to take something from it. So, you know, you were one of the first people to join, and we announced it on the Microsoft episode, I think, which aired last week. We've had, like, twenty-five companies that have reached out from individuals. So we've got, like, individual engineers at large corporations like HP, and they're like, "You know, how do I climb up? Like, I heard about it on the podcast. I wanna grow, and there's no way for us to grow here at HP." And then all the way to, like, ARM. They make these microchips inside of, like, cell phones. They have, like, 8,000 people. And they're in Cambridge. And so then I heard from ARM, and it was just unbelievable that all these companies are reaching out. So now I'm like, "Well, it's just me." You know, setting up some meetings. So I'm like, last night, I'm here at the office till, like, 11:00, and, like, bringing my wife and everything because I'm filming Leaderbits in the studio. And then, you know, writing some code, and then I'm waking up and doing meetings during the day. And it's just, like, it's that very rewarding, just constantly moving aspect. The challenges are the most effective. Have we talked about that yet?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:37:11) No. We haven't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:12) Okay. So I put out the initial set of Leaderbits, and I watched how people responded to them. And then I noticed that one of them happened to have, like, a challenge at the end. It was, like, a very specific interaction, like, "Do these four steps," right? And then I saw the engagement on that one be tremendous. So what I did was I went and tested, and I made—I reworked some of the previous ones to be challenges just by changing them slightly. And when they're presented as challenges, the engagement, like, triples.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:37:43) Yeah. I could imagine. Yeah. It totally makes sense. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:46) Yeah. So rather than them just being cool thoughts about leadership, it's a cool thought about leadership with a specific challenge. And then they go and they gain experience. Like, we had one where it was identifying sort of the energy on the team as the ebbs and flows and the momentum. And it's so great because, you know, before the call, I went in and peeked at one of the ReflectDB entries for one of your people, and they were talking—they were identifying it. They're like, "Yeah. This happened at this point in time, and then this is what changed, and this is how we went from the low to the high." And I'm like, "The fact that your people are learning to think like that and become aware of these things and then have tools to actually adjust the momentum in the team is, like, through what? Through a three-minute video? Like, come on."

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:38:32) I mean, it's so perfect. And I mean, you know, with the leadership part of it, I've actually been guilty of taking a fantastic developer and turning him into a really bad leader. And that was totally my fault. And this is, you know, that's what's really intriguing about the whole Leaderbits platform is that I wanna avoid that because it's not fair. It wasn't fair on him. It's not fair on the company. And it's not fair on me either, you know? It's not fair on anyone. So that's, you know, it takes that whole subject. So, you know, for me, and this is part of my learning curve, you know, being the CTO of BIMobject, for me, it's kind of been more like, you know, that guy's really successful. I have a gut feeling that, you know, he wants to climb. So, you know, career is very subjective. What is a career? Careers are very different for people. You know, a career for someone could be sitting, you know, hacking code all day, day in, day out. That's their career. That's what they wanna do. But other people, you know, like you say, they may wanna climb. And for me, it's kinda been like, you know, going on my gut feeling. Does this—you know, it seems as though he wants to be a leader. So I'll go and say, "Okay. This is all yours." Not asking him, you know, not empowering him, or anything like that. Just saying, "You know, this is yours. Go and do it." And, you know, it didn't work. And that's, you know, that's what intrigues me about this whole platform is that that whole subjectiveness will disappear. I will be able to, on, you know, based on facts, go and say, "Actually, you know," like, we had our first conversation about Leaderbits, which is that it could very well be someone that I had no idea was, you know, would be a leader, that doesn't seem to be a leader at face value. But when you go in and read and, you know, what they're doing with all of the challenges and, you know, in ReflectDB, it's like, "Wow. This could be someone totally that I had no idea wanted to be a leader or had that capability."

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:16) If you saw me ten years ago, you know, you would say, "Wow." I'm very quiet. Like, I was a leader, but I was just so—I was so inward and quiet that, you know, the only people who really knew I was a leader were the people, like, I was directly leading. And then before that, you would just say, "Oh, he's just a quiet engineer." And it's just like, "Well, I'm leading myself right now. It's like, hello. It's like I have to learn to lead myself first, and then I can lead others." And so that's why when I was, you know, I probably did a hundred Leaderbits videos to figure out, like, exactly how to do it right, because I wanted to be able to hit both the current leaders and have relevance to them as well as the upcoming leaders. And so the recurring concept in there is any of these challenges, you can apply to yourself. Like, notice your own momentum, right, and what gets you on fire, and then craft that. If you can't deploy this concept to the team, deploy it first to yourself and do what you can in the state that you're in, and then you'll grow and be able to do more. But I'm so excited that it's useful. And so thank you so much for being one of the first companies to walk down this path, man. It's amazing. What advice would you give to your previous self? Like, ten years ago. There's some constraints for the creativity here. It's gotta be ten years ago. Okay? Elon Musk time machine, right? So you had to go back in time. You get to give yourself one piece of advice from ten years ago. What would that be?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:41:57) I knew you'd ask this question. I would have to say, well, even if we could go back a little bit further, I'd say never become an architect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:10) Oh, no.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:42:13) Yeah. No. I—you know, and it's easy to be, you know, when I've come this far. You know, it sounds so cliché, but if I knew what I knew now back then, things would be very different.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:28) Well, it wouldn't be as fun.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:42:29) Oh, it wouldn't be as fun. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. That's a good point. Good point. I didn't think of it that way. But yeah. No. But yeah. I think it would be—it definitely would be don't become an architect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:38) Don't become an architect?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:42:39) No. Don't become an architect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:41) Go straight to BIMobject with all the experience of an architect.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:42:44) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:45) Now that helped, though, somewhat, right? The architect's—

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:42:49) Absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:50) Because you learned what you didn't wanna do.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:42:53) Yes. Exactly. Exactly. I did. It just took me almost twenty years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:58) When are you gonna be in the States next?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:43:01) I'm stateside quite often. Hopefully, I'm on vacation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:09) Hopefully, it's a vacation visit.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:43:10) Well-deserved vacation. But hopefully, May—yeah. At the absolute latest in November, we have a huge event in Las Vegas. So it'll definitely be no later than November.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:22) Oh, nice. What is—that's, like, the big conference for the AutoCAD stuff? I don't know if I'm saying that right.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:43:30) Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So it's called Autodesk University. So it's Autodesk.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:43:33) Primarily for people to gather. So they have 15,000 attendees over three days, and it's primarily for people to go and learn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:42) That's brilliant.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:43:44) Yeah, it is. It's really good. So we're going to have a big presence there. We did last year as well. It was really successful for us. So yeah, we're really looking forward to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:55) So you're actually a publicly traded company?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:43:59) We are, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:00) I can go buy shares of BIMobject right now?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:44:03) You can. Yeah, absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:05) How do you do that?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:44:07) We're actually on the Nasdaq. So it's not the New York Nasdaq. It's here in Stockholm. And it's a bit of a sub-Nasdaq. It's called First North. So it could be a little bit difficult for you to find it from the States. But we've just started the work to change to a different list. So we're moving up to mid-cap.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:32) Oh, nice.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:44:32) Yep. So that work's already started, but it's probably not going to happen until either the end of 2019 or the start of 2020. And that means it'll be much easier for international investors to invest in BIMobject.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:46) Well, that's exciting.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:44:47) It is. Yeah. It's super exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:49) How long has this whole process been going on? Like, when did you first become publicly traded?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:44:54) We became publicly traded here in Sweden on January 17th, 2014. Wow. Yeah. And it was really successful. It's been, you know, our journey has been—and it goes back to our CEO, his vision for the company and the way that he runs the company. I mean, you know, it's not just one person, but without him, we wouldn't be where we are today. That's for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:19) Yeah. And we've got to give some credit to you as a leader, right? Come on. Your team is doing awesome. The pictures you sent me—you can talk about team all you want, you could have strategy meetings—but when you see those pictures, you're like, that's a good team.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:45:38) That is. Yeah. And you can achieve so much more as a team than as individuals.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:42) What are you most excited about tomorrow when you wake up for BIMobject?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:45:48) I can't tell you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:50) Yeah, tell me. That's the best type, right? That's the best type.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:45:54) I wish I could.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:57) It's okay. We'll leave it at that. That's fantastic. I love it. It's like, "If I told you, I'd have to kill you."

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:46:04) I didn't want to go to that industry. Kind of. We went there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:09) It's the extreme underground industry of BIM objects.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:46:13) Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I like it. I like it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:17) This has been fantastic. So what can I do for you? Is there anything else I can do for you?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:46:24) Oh, there's lots. Where do you start?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:27) I don't know. I'm just so excited. This went so well.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:46:30) Yeah. I mean, it's been awesome. It's been awesome. I need to get my butt into gear and really get more engaged with Leaderbits. So just one question: I can't find where I can see the entries into ReflectDB from my team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:49) Okay. I'll send you a link.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:46:50) Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:51) Yeah. It might have gotten left out of the navigation or something. If it's not obvious, then it's a huge problem for me, right? I need to make it obvious.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:47:01) I can see the guys that have done the entries. I can't see the entries. I can manage the team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:08) You just can't see the specific entries?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:47:10) No, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:11) Okay. I will get you a link today to see them, to make sure that it's there. Yep. I built that—that's how I was able to see. But I might have just left it out of the navigation or your profile type. It must have been a super admin thing or something. But I will make sure it's there and send you the link today. But yeah, I could see your people actually responding.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:47:35) Oh, that's awesome. I'm really interested in seeing what they've written.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:39) And then just so you know, I'm setting it up as well this week in my tickets. Right now, I'm doing—a company in Florida actually approached me called Florida Founders, and they invest in technology companies in Florida. And they heard about what we are doing and heard about it on the show and things like that. And I said, "Yeah, it'd be really great," because right now I'm writing the code, I'm recording—I'm doing everything. And with the amount of leads that we've had come in in the past week, I need someone sitting there writing some code for us so we can be improving the platform further, rather than me just chunking my day into these three-hour blocks and doing everything. So we're working on that over the next week here. But I will get you that link. And then on the to-do list for this week is to have it actually send you the emails of who's doing what, so that the whole core of the system is designed for you to never have to log in. So I need to write those email notifications of sending you the information so you just sit back and say, "Oh, you know, Mike is doing some Leaderbit stuff. Look how active Mike is and look what he thinks," so that you don't have to be in it.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:48:53) So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:53) I'm going to continue to improve the system every day.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:48:57) I have to say, Joel, I really admire and am almost a little bit jealous of your energy and your capability to keep everything together. How do you avoid burning yourself out?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:11) I burn myself out, and then I figure out where that edge is, and then I extend it a little bit farther. And because of this one right here—

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:49:19) Oh, she's so sweet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:21) Yeah. So I'll get down—it doesn't happen often, you know, pushing the growth of limits. But about a year ago, I stopped all concept of outside media. So I don't consume any sort of TV or anything. My routine involves me waking up, I spend some time with my family, I exercise and eat. And then I instantly begin writing before anything happens. So I write Leaderbits every single day. And then from there, I'll go into the office. I'll do the show or respond to anything that's happening with the show. And then lunch, go home, eat some dinner, some family time, come back to the office and work for another couple hours, and then go home, fall asleep, and then repeat. I'm able to get everything done in that. But the whole concept—and it's very important for me to mention that I absolutely love it.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:50:22) Yeah, yeah. Of course. Yeah. I mean, you can tell.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:24) Yeah. I very much enjoy it. Whenever I was working on projects that I didn't enjoy, my productivity was 10% of where I'm at today.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:50:34) Yeah. Yep, exactly. Yeah. It's the same here. No, I really admire what you're doing. And with the podcast, I mean, I love it. I've been a fan since day one. I still can't remember how I found you. I think it may have been on Facebook or something. I may have liked something. Yeah. It's awesome. I'm so happy for you, and it's, you know, massive congratulations. You do a lot. Obviously, there's a lot of work. You have great people around you, but I admire your tenacity and your drive. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:04) Thank you. Yeah. I mean, it's cool getting to meet people like you every day. This is very rewarding, right? And if there's any CTOs that you want to know—like a CTO of Autodesk or whatever it is—you let me know and I'll have them on the show and then I'll introduce them to you.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:51:19) Awesome. That would be fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:20) Yeah. So anyone that'll help your business or whoever you want to network with or you just think is cool, just because you happen to think they're cool, let me know who you want, and because we've had such big guests, we can get anybody to talk to us, and then I can just introduce them to you.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:51:34) Yeah. That would be totally awesome. Autodesk has a couple of different CTOs. So one of them is for their Forge platform, which is—I don't know how to—it's like, you know, they're shifting from a perpetual desktop system developer, a software developer, to full web platform. And that's really exciting. We're actually a big—yeah, we're a big customer of theirs as well as a developer. So that's really exciting. So yeah, Jeff Kowalski, he's their main CTO. He's a really interesting guy. And I think it's kind of interesting because—correct me if I'm wrong—but the majority of the CTOs that you've interviewed thus far are pretty much web and app development, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:25) Web developers to CTO tends to be the most. Yeah.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:52:34) Yeah. No, I mean, you know, these guys don't have a lot of web development—more the C++, low-level type of stuff that, you know—

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:43) We find a lot of embedded systems people.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:52:45) That's right. Yeah. The guy doing the rockets. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:48) Yeah. One thing you just brought up to me: I don't think we've ever had a game developer on.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:52:53) Oh, you have to have a game developer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:55) Got to have a game developer on.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:52:57) For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:57) And then we'll get—and so you know Jeff, right?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:53:03) No. I can't say that I know him. I know of him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:05) Okay. So I will have Jeff on, and then I'll be like, "Oh, you've got to talk to Ben. He's the most amazing guy in the world."

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:53:12) Cool. I mean, I've said hello to him, but he wouldn't know who I am.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:15) Yeah. Well, he will soon. We'll get him on the show.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:53:17) Yeah. That would be awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:19) And he's the main CTO or the Forge CTO?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:53:22) No. He's the main CTO. So there's another CTO who's responsible for Forge. So he's the main CTO. I think he's based in San Francisco.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:32) Oh, cool. Yeah. Any other cool CTOs? Because if you give me two or three, then I can definitely get one of them. I can't always guarantee that people want to talk.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:53:43) I mean, it was really interesting that you got the CTO from Microsoft. But these guys—are they allowed to appear on podcasts and stuff like that? There's no problem from their company?

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:54) We've had Microsoft, yep, VMware—

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:54:00) And Alexa.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:01) Alexa. Yeah. Williams-Sonoma. That hasn't aired yet, though. You know, they're a kitchen company, right? They're buying AR companies like crazy.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:54:09) Oh, a kitchen company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:11) Okay. Have you heard of Williams-Sonoma?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:54:13) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:14) Okay. What's their other brand? They own multiple brands. Pottery Barn? Have you heard of Pottery Barn?

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:54:25) Yeah. The name rings a bell.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:27) Okay. So they're kitchen and indoor living and furniture, and they own a lot of brands in that space, decor. They would be like a higher-end version of IKEA.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:54:41) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:41) You know, furniture, kitchen stuff, but they—very smart CTO. And they saw the need to keep digitizing these concepts, so they bought this 100-person AR/VR company that—rather than spending so much money with them, rather than just continuing to be their client—they bought them. And they're letting them operate independently. But yeah, I spoke to him last week, and he's in San Francisco, and he was a guest on the show. But yeah, they're a really cool company. They're a multi-billion-dollar company. But yeah, I think their parent one is called Williams-Sonoma.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:55:21) Okay, okay. This is actually really interesting. And this is, you know, with our platform—so we didn't really get into that earlier, but we have a content management system as well. So you can upload existing content. When I say content, I mean the 3D objects. But I'd really like to—if you could introduce me to him, that would be really good because I think there's a lot of business opportunity for both of us. Because for them, even though they've gone and acquired this external bureau and they're internal now, they're still creating something that's totally disconnected from their main business. So what I mean is that they're creating 3D content, they're putting it into the context of an AR or a VR app. But if they need to add any new products, they have to go back and put those products in and recompile and then redistribute. And that's what we totally eliminate with our content platform. So I mean, we have APIs and everything. So they can still build within their own environment, whether it's with Unity or the Unreal Engine. But they can consume content that they already have with us from our platform. And they don't have to go back and, "All right. Now we have to go and put this piece of content in, and then we have to recompile and redistribute." That's all done automatically.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:32) That's brilliant. So this guy is very similar to you—intelligent, visionary. I will connect you both on email. You guys are working on amazing things and you should get together and talk about what you're working on, because you both have great behind-the-scenes stuff happening. And then I'll just leave it real simple and high-level like that, and then you can go from there.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:56:51) Fantastic. Thank you so much. That would be really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:54) I am off to get a haircut and then—

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:56:57) Thank you so much. It was really cool. Thank you so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:02) The best ever, Ben.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:57:04) I'll talk to you soon, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:04) Talk to you soon, man.

(Ben O'Donnell at 00:57:05) Fantastic. Thank you very much, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:06) Take care, Ben. Bye bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.