Maarten Wensveen - CTO at Cimpress

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) If you've been hearing about LeaderBits and still aren't sure, I recommend you visit leaderbits.io/testimonials and see the success that other technologists just like you are having. Today, we are talking to Maarten, the CTO at Cimpress, and we discuss creating an atmosphere where an individual can make an impact, learning new areas of the business when you transition into the CTO role, and how to get your point across effectively. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:45) Tell me about what's going on in your life.

(Maarten at 00:00:47) Well, you know, in my life there's lots of things going on. We're expanding. We're continuously getting bigger as a company. We're buying, we're organically growing, and it's a cool time to work at Cimpress. And we're really deep in this sort of almost technical transformation where we were always really good and still are at the manufacturing efficiency, bringing really that eCommerce thing together. But really injecting much more data-driven tech and all kinds of the sometimes buzzwords, newer stuff in there—the AI, these kind of things in there—is an awesome new kind of wave that's going on inside of our company where we see the first, well, actually financial returns on it, but also just the leeway that we still have on this is exciting. So yeah, I mean, we can dive into 50 different topics on this particularly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:44) I'm curious, what was the series of events that led you to Cimpress?

(Maarten at 00:01:49) Well, that's a good point. So it's been a long adventure. I sometimes say this is my first job because I've always been actually more in the startup-y kind of world. But yeah, so originally, to very specifically answer that part of it, is that in 2011, Vistaprint at that time, when the—Cimpress is the parent company of also company better known as Vistaprint, of course, that most people might know out there—bought my company called Albumprinter, which is Albumprinter in Europe. And we still, it's basically a photobook manufacturing company. There's an equivalent of that a little bit here in the States—would be Shutterfly, these kind of things. But it's European, and in Europe there are a couple of them actually competing with each other. One of them is Albumprinter, and that ran from a startup with three people, which I wasn't the original founder of. I didn't come up with the idea, but I was one of the first technologists. They said, "Hey, we got a problem and we need a lot of tech to solve it, but our customers really want this." And it just, you know, grew so quick, and then Vistaprint acquired it. And that's how I ended up at Vistaprint Cimpress.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:00) That's awesome. Because Vistaprint, or, so now technically it's Cimpress, right?

(Maarten at 00:03:05) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:05) And they own a number of brands?

(Maarten at 00:03:07) Yeah. So Vistaprint started buying companies. You get this brand illusion a little bit, right? Like, who is what company? And that's why we came up with the Cimpress name on top of it. And why is that important? Well, if you go, for instance, with a company like Amazon, you buy products at Amazon that you know Amazon doesn't make, although they do a little bit of customization here and there. But if you buy a game console there, it's the game console of that particular brand that you bought at Amazon. If that game console breaks, you're not mad at Amazon. They're just the supplier of this thing. You're mad at that particular game console provider, right? So with us, it's like we make those products from scratch. So there is definitely, between some of the brands, a quality difference aspect, right, where we have amazing customer care, we will go to the nth degree to make everything happen for you, and we got a couple of brands that are a little more on the, you know, you get amazing price and yeah, a little bit less customer care. And that's a choice. It's a choice that the customer buys into. It's clear, right? And so that's why there are different brands, and they're also very separately managed by us and Cimpress. We see it really as a portfolio of brands with their own managing directors that are actually executing on a daily basis, specifically for that customer segment that they work with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:28) And so then how does that shape your job?

(Maarten at 00:04:31) Well, that's a good point. So it's actually a little bit of an interesting, but sometimes slightly complex story. The simplest way is to say it, Cimpress is the central parent company, and we invest in three strategic things centrally in our organization. First, procurement. There's just a lot of raw procurement going on throughout all of our businesses that just makes sense—buying paper, buying raw T-shirt stock, buying all these kind of things, buying raw things for pens, all these things that we customize, right? And buying it centrally makes a lot of sense. Second is talent. There's just talent rotation within these businesses going on, which is awesome, actually. So people can have a career rotating throughout these businesses. Financially, it's of course governance and control, which could be the third thing, but it's not an opt-in thing. That's just a must-have, right? We could essentially do this eventually. And then there is my group, Cimpress Technology, which is actually the biggest group from the central group. So it's a little bit around 300 engineers and technologists, basically. And what we do is we invest in the most common, but also most expensive and risky parts of what we call mass customization—a.k.a. making these products, right, at near mass production efficiency, but they're all unique. Every order is unique from our customers. And so there is a couple of common technology problems that every one of these businesses faces. We do them centrally, and we do them efficiently, and we do them actually with a lot more extra whistles and bells to it, like adding AI, big data, all this kind of stuff to it, which a company that does $30 million in revenue can never have been affording it. You need an engineering team of 20 people just to do one of these things' functions. So I do them centrally, and then all the other businesses step into it. So we got almost an internal, best way to describe it, an internal AWS kind of a thing for all of the businesses out there, which is proprietary and closed today still.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:33) No, that's brilliant because yeah, it centralizes all the development, right? And then you get the scaled benefit of it. So I love it. I don't want to be repetitive of what you said, but me being repetitive is in awe about how beautiful the business model is.

(Maarten at 00:06:55) Yeah. And keep in mind, every business has their own CTOs, and I do a biweekly CTO roundtable. So all these businesses have their own technologists, and they have varying degrees of eCommerce stacks—homegrown, the Magentos, the headless CMSs with other kinds of middleware things in it. So there's a whole gamut out there of the businesses, how to use it, and we help, we advise. There are some common rules that we do use. We all want to have the RESTful JSON APIs. We want to have certain amount of security standards built in, which is a little bit of a law that goes through the land of Cimpress. But there's a lot of autonomy for these businesses to say, "Listen, we're going to go up to this particular market in this particular way." I basically, I want to prevent having to say, "Are we going to overhaul our checkout shopping basket, or are we going to invest in this new technology?" I do not want to sit at that roadmap and decision table of that particular business because one person's head would explode if you have to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:00) Now, is that shirt made by Cimpress Technology?

(Maarten at 00:08:04) It's one of us, one of our businesses, yeah. Yeah, I make a lot of them, but I also order a lot with some of the competitors, checking it continuously out, what everybody's doing on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:17) You've got to. You've got to stay—because you don't want to hear it from a lost customer.

(Maarten at 00:08:25) Exactly, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:25) So Vistaprint's one of the more well-known ones here in the United States. What's the second most well-known one other than Vistaprint?

(Maarten at 00:08:32) Well, in Europe it's almost a little bit per country, right? As Europe tends to go with different languages, there's some very different cultural aspects. Now, of course, every state is slightly different here living in the States. Now, for a while, I've noticed that there is big differences between a Massachusetts, a Texas, or California. But in Europe, that's of course way further. And so in Italy, you would have Pixartprinting is a big one. In the Netherlands, EXAPRINT. In France, there's—every, we're Vistaprint in Germany. We got, in every major market, we'll have some pretty good players out there. But maybe even a slightly different angle towards how they approach the market, because for instance, we also have, and that's more internationally, another brand, which is National Pen. And maybe they do a big part of them actually with traditional telesales, with sending silly envelopes from a marketing perspective, and then they do an eCommerce side of it, which is like two hybrids which is going on there. So it's different all over the place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:37) Did you see that billionaire that's going to go to the moon?

(Maarten at 00:09:39) ZOZOTOWN? Yeah. I love the suit, 3D scan guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:46) And you work with his company? He's in fashion.

(Maarten at 00:09:50) Yeah. Well, I have—a guy worked for me, he's really awesome. He does a lot of this far-out-there-in-the-future research of stuff and technology goes on, and he was like, "Check it out. I got this polka dot super suit. This is from my phone. Check out, these are my sizes," blah, blah, blah. And it was three weeks before, and I love following what Elon is doing with SpaceX. So I'm like, "Here comes, here comes you," and he basically, "I'm going to the moon with artists." And I'm like, "Oh my god, that's the guy who's pretty soon—" that was an interesting thing. We were immediately on Slack going, "You gotta be kidding me. You were just pitching that stuff to me." But, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:31) That's amazing.

(Maarten at 00:10:32) Yep. He's a fashion—fashion is actually more and more going to customize too. I mean, if you think about fashion, traditionally, there's crazy mass customization, long run, within big stock units going on. But more and more in fashion, there's actually short-run possibility where you can just make one garment. I mean, that's our latest investment—one of our latest investments also with VIDA, which is doing awesome things on that front.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:57) You just make one garment?

(Maarten at 00:10:59) Well, I mean, this T-shirt, right? Dye sublimating or these kind of techniques there, they're on the market much longer, but it's now starting to happen with HP and some other big manufacturing manufacturers. They actually do the pattern that you would have on your shirt, right? Any type of pattern that is, which almost feels like it's in the fabric itself, is usually also printed, but in large runs. Now you see that going down to very short runs, and I think that will completely also disrupt some of the textile and clothing industry when you think about even the big brands out there. And we definitely keep a close eye on that at Cimpress with what is going on, because that's what we love to do is make single units with mass production efficiency.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:53) So I'm curious, what do you think—and you know, nothing has to be—I'm not going to hold you to it. What do you think buying clothes is going to look like in 10 years?

(Maarten at 00:12:01) Well, I think, actually, from a consumer perspective—yeah, okay, this is just me, by the way, this is not my field of expertise, but I'll give it a go there—but I think people still, you know, go to main streets and shop because that's an experience in itself. It's fun. Get a drink afterwards or a bite to eat. You—what was already going on, of course, is you will shop online. I love that too. Do that often. I think it's more the back-end part of it that is probably going to be disrupted. Having some mill in some country with low costs make 50,000 of the same pieces that end up first at high streets, then go to discount depots, and then end up in some other place or something. It's just a very inefficient process. And again, VIDA is a company that Cimpress just invested in that is exactly trying to disrupt that particular side of the market where, you know, why not print only 50 of it, fly two pieces only to all your high street locations, see how quick it sells, use that data from your, you know, pay at cash register, and just see, do I print some more of these particular garments, or do we even make variations? And then it becomes a much more direct kind of interaction with what the consumer wants versus what you can create. And you can even imagine that the whole, what is for the summer and for next year, the season, that stuff might get disrupted—that whole seasonality of clothing, if you can produce and have it in store within a month or a month-and-a-half time frame. My guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:39) I'm curious to know how you keep the engineering team close to the physical hardware product capabilities, right? Because there's always that connection between, you know, you're building some software that's ultimately leveraging some physical device to manufacture. And are those devices in your office? Do you take them on-site? How do you keep them close so they can touch and have some other side of the experience with interacting with these machines?

(Maarten at 00:14:07) Yeah. So I mean, there are some machines that are simple. Every competitor is using them, and that's not so complex. I mean, it's just really cool tool to play with. You like software, you like that machine even too. It's just the hardware to play with, all of it. But there are some complex processes, like even embroidery. How do you fill up the different color threads with the pattern that that needle, automated, has to go to get that logo stitched onto something? But even bigger, more integrated processes with prints, right? If there's lots of extra steps with it, you need a lot more mechanical engineering, need software, these kind of things. That's why I said in the beginning, I compare this with Emerson a little bit, although that is doing critical things where things really go bad. And for us, we'll get an order too late, which we find really, really bad for the customers, but no power plants or such things. But we do get a lot of people with mechanical engineering stuff. It's not for nothing that we're so close to Boston, MIT, and we got a lot of people from that site working actually with us. And every one of the businesses, like Vistaprint, has an entire department dedicated and devoted to the machines and the flows of manufacturing and how that actually goes. And we work very tightly with them. Now, the end cell of what we call a cell, where a machine has a certain amount of output, and how do we as quickly and efficiently, just-in-time, bring it then to the next cell in the factory—exactly, something that I do not do, but there are very common manufacturing processes. This works almost with any other manufacturer out there, practically the same. So I try to keep very tightly connected with those groups.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:57) You got me really, really interested. I want to—I've got to know your day, right? You've got all of this stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:05) You've got multiple brands. You've got a centralized team. I'm assuming you assign some people to each company maybe, right?

(Martin at 00:16:15) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:15) Yeah. And then—

(Martin at 00:16:17) Well, no. It's more of a SaaS model internally, what I said. So it's AWS internally. Although, the bigger the project, the more impact it can have, then we will send also people to swarm over it. But yeah, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:30) So then what is your average day? I'm assuming it changes based on how things are going. But yeah, how do you divide—if you're going to divide your day into a pie chart, what would the three big areas be?

(Martin at 00:16:41) Well, it's a lot of talks with the businesses and the people of my direct leaders and what we call Tribe Leads, which is—we used, maybe that's an interesting side note—we used a lot of the Spotify terminology. There are some great Spotify movies out there. I recommend everybody to watch them. We made it a little bit to our own, but we use the tribes and squads kind of model. I've got like 12 tribes that are divided in logical sort of areas where people can really sort of divide themselves into where there's knowledge necessary. Like a product catalog, which is like how do we deal with mass customized products where the permutations are literally in the millions and billions in some cases? It's interesting to talk about that maybe later. But then it goes all the way to how do you deal with all the imagery and artwork that's coming in, because every order has like a logo, a pen, or like complete photos or these kind of things on it. So all of these are tribes, and they all have roadmaps. And all of these businesses have potential opportunities out there. And what we nonstop do, and what I'm nonstop tracking together with my leadership team, is to figure out what are the biggest opportunities out there, what are the biggest opportunities long term versus short term that will just create, you know, more growth or more cost savings in a particular business.

(Martin at 00:18:01) And then say, okay, are you guys promoting as a tribe, are we putting that or not on your roadmap? We put it on their roadmap, which is very agile, but every tribe even does it a little bit differently. We have a couple of tribes that are practically waterfallish and some others that are completely—they do whatever they want within their particular squads. The squads have squad leads, which is an actual engineer that has max 10 people, a couple of engineers, maybe some DevOps, QA, sometimes actually a business person, like a financial person in there to make sure that, you know, they actually make a good product. And they start building it, executing it, deploying it, and working directly with the business to get that implemented. And so my day, to come back to that, is nonstop going round robin from these 12, seeing what the opportunity is, and it gives me also the best insight on what's going on throughout Cimpress.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:55) So as a leader there, it's your responsibility to identify emerging leaders, right?

(Martin at 00:19:00) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00) To be able to bring them up and identify who's emerging and then resource them. What behavior stands out to you? Maybe an example—you can leave the name out, right? But like, what behavior was an individual expressing that you said, oh, I'm going to keep an eye on them for leadership?

(Martin at 00:19:17) Yeah, yeah. That's a good point. For me, I mean, it's the key is always for me really the enthusiasm to do good by the company and figure out where you can, with how you can have an impact on the company. So at one side, I try to create an atmosphere where an individual can really make an impact, not just four leaders high up in some org chart. We completely dismantled that. All these squad leads out there can really make an impact. Now it comes down to the grabbing, right? And we've built career tracks where you can be an individual developer contributor, really rising up the ranks and making as much as a vice president out here without having anybody report to you.

(Martin at 00:20:01) But on the other hand, you can also work as that squad and try to make as much business impact by saying, wow, this business could save millions of dollars if I make this particular change for them and help them implement it. So I would literally like keep track of the people that make those first scores out there. And this can sometimes be fresh college hires out there that I'm already like, wow, they have the spark, right? You see the light in their eyes. It's like, I get it. I get what the impact is. And again, I don't want to judge anybody that says, hey, I just want to solve amazingly complex problems pure in code. I love that as much too, because I need a lot of that too. But sometimes you also have the people that want to elevate and then apply it also to it. And it takes both of those types of traits to, you know, run the organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:54) I love that. Do you find that you have to—I guess the best way to ask this would be team motivation, right? Everybody moves and has highs and lows.

(Martin at 00:21:06) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:07) I'm curious to maybe some tricks that you have or some, you know, techniques. We'll not be like clickbaity, right? What are some professional techniques you have to sort of raise the energy of a team that may be a little down?

(Martin at 00:21:21) Well, I mean, you can imagine, like, especially being at the central group that isn't directly a P&L, as they say, right? Profit and loss, right? Like, we are essentially in the first sense a cost center, and our impact needs to come from the businesses. So a big thing that we have done is to make sure that the businesses together with us work on what was their cash impact and how do we measure it. So we measure usage by the end customers, and we measure the cash impact based on, you know, profit growth or like, you know, cost savings on it. And I see most people get motivated by it. I mean, it's because it distills to one simple thing now—are people using my software? I mean, there are lots of examples, and I've seen it even at other companies also. And every once in a while here too, that something doesn't work. And there's nothing more disappointing than when you slave away for so long on something that you truly wanted down there, and then it doesn't work. That is just, you know, the most disappointing thing. So celebrating the successes together and showing the business impact that you actually had is one of the more key motivating things. And again, it's possible because we have these small groups that individually deliver—an API can be a software product, and we celebrate it already at that level. It's not like, oh, these 400 people had success. No, these 15 people had success. They did project X and it did Y. Yay, applause for you guys, right? And that's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:55) Well, that reminds me of like how Jeff Bezos talks, right? Everything he's ever done that's great started small.

(Martin at 00:23:00) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:00) And you start something small, you get the first person to buy in, you get the second person, and then before you know it, I mean, everyone's doing it and everyone's using it. And I really like that. It's a practice in patience, but I love how you brought something to my attention—how you position a measurable point of success for the project on the micro a little bit too. Like, you know, it's not like a macro as a whole organization where it's like, yay, we hit the company goal, right? It's like very real to them when they see those API requests coming through and firing out and the logs or whatever maybe. I like that. I haven't—that's actually, that's unique. I haven't heard anyone bring that up.

(Martin at 00:23:48) Well, I stole it a little bit from Amazon, I have to be honest there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:51) All right, here we go.

(Martin at 00:23:52) And I mean, this is just a distillment of being inspired by a couple of great leaders in Amazon, but also just, you know, reverse engineering things that you read at like, you know, High Scalability, Martin Fowler blogs, these kind of things. I distilled it a little bit together. I mean, I wouldn't say I'm the most original thinker. I just, you know, scrape and scrape a lot of this together and try to bring it to the team. But I do believe in that individual celebration of an impact with people as you can all name by their first name because you know them well, right? And that's the best feeling you can have always when you score it together as a group.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:34) Yeah, I dig it. That's not—I like it because you creatively put stuff together from your experience, which is what humans do, and you're here today sharing. And that's to me why that stands out, is because it meets all the qualifiers in the back of my mind. It's easy to implement, logical, it doesn't cost anything to—and then it has a high potential for return immediately with your groups of people. So yeah, there's so many listeners that they may say, oh, I could easily come up with some measurable point of impact for the team. And then now I've got a technique to have them have additional buy-in and care more. I remember specifically, when we hired—we hired, I was the original engineer on our company we're working on now. I made the—yeah, made it in Ruby. And then I hired Nick to come and work for us. And he said the thing that he was most excited about was he was coming onto a project that already had customers. He had spent the last four years building code bases that ultimately weren't used outside of beta. They were like funding things that didn't get used, and he was just working at the company. And the fire and the passion that I saw in this guy, I was like, wow, he's been starved for working—like being able to see the users on the platform, watch the database fill up, see reports, exactly, you know? Like, it's fun.

(Martin at 00:25:55) You did it for something. And I mean, and there are like literally tangible things that—well, maybe maybe a tip. What is important, especially in bigger companies, is that besides the technology organization, like Robert Keane, the founder and CEO still of our company, Cimpress, he's also very much in tune that, like, technology is one of the driving forces throughout Cimpress. Not the only one, but definitely one of the driving forces. And more and more, we're recognizing that there are tangible results financially very often, but also just in usage and the happiness of the customers that we just have quicker turnaround for that. He's like, we need to share that very broadly with everybody in the organization. Now you can imagine for a publicly traded company, that means everybody has a lot of information in our organization, and that requires also trust. So this actually is also an extra cool thing. There is a lot of information that's being shared if you work in Cimpress with these kind of impacts that some of these services can have from the actual financial results, even from the individual impact on it. And yeah, that makes it that you can celebrate it, but you also need to be willing to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:10) I like what you're saying. You're innovative in how you're running your team, but print might not—like printing objects might not seem like the sexiest or the coolest. So what are you doing to overcome that attraction other than just being awesome?

(Martin at 00:27:27) Well, I mean, awesome and holy only goes so far, right? And I wouldn't say that that's the main attraction for them. Yeah, I think it is definitely—it gets really sexy when it's at massive scale. We're talking about millions and millions of packages in high season, like in the actual unique products that go out of it. And then the individual problems that we actually get to solve inside of this giant amount of orders, data, and that kind of stuff. That's where the real technology kicks in. And I think it's a little bit interesting. Every time when we have candidates coming in, they always think, you know, ah, you are the guys with the business cards in Vistaprint in Europe or some other brands that they know. Then they come in and they see the complexity of the workflow systems. They see the problems that we have solved with a product model where everything is attribute-based generated. How do you do search around these things when there are billions of permutations possible, and how do you keep them responsive? Like, there are tremendous, tremendous technical problems—or challenges, I should say—that we have solved or are still solving further ahead. And then people are like, okay, sign me up. Where can I start? Oh, and I can also do it in an individual team where I can have impact instead of work on a, you know, multiyear big project. And that's sort of like how we get people a little bit more excited on these things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:51) I like it. And then you've got like—you have some like Roombas running around the office that you can program?

(Martin at 00:28:58) Well, we do got these sort of driving around iPads on wheels around the office here, which is like, I forgot the name of that system. But like, we've got a lot of locations. So, you know, people, you know, skate over to others' desks, and you see a face coming through the hallway with somebody from another location that's driving to see if somebody's sitting behind his desk. I still think Slack is an easier way, but sometimes people like to just, you know, poke around with these things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:27) How many of those do you have?

(Martin at 00:29:28) I don't know. I think there's like two or three over here on the floor here in the Boston—in the Waltham, Boston office. But yeah, people hook up on that. Like in our internal internet, you can find one, and if somebody's not already piloting them, then you can drive them around here on the floor.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:42) Have you never seen those things? Oh, I have. I'm curious to know your actual experience with how cool they are. I've seen them on TV and stuff.

(Martin at 00:29:50) Yeah. It's actually, people like it. It's like I want to join a stand-up, which might be physical. Now you can do this around the screen or somebody just drives here inside of like an office or something. I think there's some gimmicky, but there is also a little bit of the, you know, you get the vibe a little bit more from the office when you're driving around and you look through the hallway. You can go, hey, how are you doing? when somebody comes back. So that's kind of interesting with it too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:17) Now I have to say, your LinkedIn picture, I just—I knew we would be best friends when I saw it. I was like, I have to find out where he's located because the next time I'm in that—I go to all the major cities like to say hi to the guests and everything like that. And we'll get a dinner together with like two or three of the cool like CTO technologists in the area, and we'll just—it'll be like three or four of us, right? But when I saw your shirt, I was like, yes, yes, yes. I took a picture of the screen and texted it to my wife. I said, check out who's coming on the show.

(Martin at 00:30:53) Yeah. I love wearing those kind of T-shirts. I got a whole collection of it, and it's like, you know, every once in a while, I wear a shirt because my wife makes me really go to a fancy restaurant, but that's about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:06) So for people who are listening, you want to describe the shirt for them?

(Martin at 00:31:10) Yeah. You got like your prototype blue, like blue color kind of thing going on. It looks like you go to some fancy lawyer office anytime soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:20) No, no. Describe the shirt that you—that's my shirt.

(Martin at 00:31:24) I thought you meant describe yours. It looks like you're going to pitch in front of investors, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:27) I think so. I didn't wear—fair enough. Yeah.

(Martin at 00:31:33) Then I wear it too. Although last investor day, I wore my Stargate Earth address shirt for the Wall Street investors. But I wore the blazer on top of it, which was already—my CFO was like, "Really? You're gonna wear a Stargate sci-fi shirt?" Well, today I wear my Firefly shirt with a slightly pixelated cast of the show, which I love, the Firefly sci-fi show, and they're all slightly pixelated that they look a little bit like Minecraft characters or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:03) And the one in your LinkedIn profile was like this cartoon dinosaur, and it said, "All my friends are dead."

(Martin at 00:32:11) Yes. And keep in mind, the dinosaur looks very sad.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:16) You came up with this, or no?

(Martin at 00:32:18) No, no, no. This is actually from a comical children's book. There's a lot of things are dead, and that is the end conclusion of every page. You can Google it, and there's a little book on it. It's pretty fun. Although think about the appropriate age when you would actually show it to your kids.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:38) Okay. So CTOs that are at startups versus large corporations, what are the big differences? You're at a large corporation right now. So what advice would you give startup CTOs that are either growing to become large corporations or will be at a large corporation in the next couple years?

(Martin at 00:33:00) Yeah. When I came from originally the photo book company, I was very much that technology vision guy, but operational tech manager. Right? Because that's what every startup CTO actually is. Especially at that time, AWS just came out. I mean, I was one of the first S3 customers on it. I jumped as quickly as I could because I hate standing in server rooms screwing in that stuff. But you have to do everything. Right? And then all of a sudden you catch success, and that's when focus on the people and the team around you is the number one to number eight priority before anything else comes, because it's all about making sure that the people around you are making the right decisions every day while you, for the first time, have to learn to sit at the management table. And welcome to going to the financials, and welcome to marketing challenges, and welcome to manufacturing, in my case, challenges with, you know, we can't just blow all the orders of the night into effect. We have to actually be smart about it and all these kinds of things. So you have to learn all of a sudden five new complete areas that you were with some basic knowledge and reading one book is okay when you're doing like $10 million, but all of a sudden you're doing a $100 million company. This stuff is real now. And then when I got acquired, I'm really in a company like this. That's why I also wanted to stick around, and I wanted to learn, like, what does it really mean in a multibillion dollar company that, at that time, wasn't actually a multibillion dollar company, but it is now. And yeah, it's really about how do you motivate and inspire large swaths of people, which was super alien for me, and I had to learn that. Luckily, I have great people here around me that also helped me with that. But it's like, how do you reach 400 people to go into the same direction? It's just mind-boggling when you think even about it and still is. But it's about, be over-communicate, communicate, communicate, share everything, be genuine, and set very clear goals of what you want to reach. That's the key things around it. Communication and the goals, and then endlessly repeat it until at least the first 60% of those people get bored by that message. Then you know you have reached the last part of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:29) Yes. And I found that, from watching politicians, right? The smaller and the lighter the message, the faster and farther it can travel.

(Martin at 00:35:40) Exactly. And that's actually maybe a good actual point of what you make, and you trigger me there. Personally, my biggest challenge was always talk less. I mean, I'm definitely not an English native speaker, and so for me, having still my Dutch accent, which probably is quite clear—sorry, listeners. No, it's I know it's true. I'm trying to do better on it, but being able to just control the speed and the message and just have, like, what are really the three main points instead of the other eight points that are flaring through my head, which I think are great points too. But if I dump them to you, it's not gonna make those other three points any clearer. So stop it. Zip it. Right? And I'm still struggling with that every day, but got better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:29) So one of the little tricks I have or techniques I have is I train myself mentally. Whenever I'm going to go into a meeting, I ask myself, what are the three points and what's the outcome? And that way, like, I will forget about it. And then as I'm like five minutes or when the meeting alarm's going off, like ten minutes before the meeting, I just quickly jot it down in a note on my phone or wherever I have, and I just put a bullet point outcome and then the three things I want to communicate.

(Martin at 00:36:57) Yeah. Great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:59) And that's how I handle, because like I'll go in and speak with, like, even at the companies, a CFO or something.

(Martin at 00:37:06) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:07) And all the conversations I try to do that.

(Martin at 00:37:14) It's a good way to ground you and make sure that you keep on track, and it's also very measurable. And one of the things, if any of my people are listening to this podcast, they're gonna recognize it. Like, a week later, we always send a super simple SurveyMonkey out saying, what are the three points that you got out of it? Which is just literally to verify that the three main points landed. Right? And we just do it a little bit more—we do it open-form, but we just want to hear, "Oh, these are the three main things that we focus on," because then at least if you get the majority of the people with that, that is—yeah, it's key. And that's how you can measure, are you moving big groups of people, actually?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:54) I love it. No, that's the measure of success. I'm curious to know. Okay. If, you're a fan of Elon Musk like myself. Right?

(Martin at 00:38:02) Yes. Although I'm worried for him lately, but I think it's a phase. Hopefully he'll pull through. I'm rooting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:10) We're only worried for him on the larger consciousness level, like as a mass of humans, because you know if your friend went on some show and did that or was just messing around with people on Twitter, you'd be like, "Oh, that's just Jill being Jill or Bob being Bob."

(Martin at 00:38:25) Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:27) Yeah. I've literally had people ask me, "Hey, is Elon okay?" As if I'm, like, friends with him.

(Martin at 00:38:34) I don't know, dude. He's probably just looking at people on Twitter. There's different echelons to knowing somebody. Yes. That's for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:42) Yeah. But you're in technology. It's like, I don't know.

(Martin at 00:38:47) I don't know. I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:49) But alright. So let's say Elon calls you up and all the podcast Joe Rogan podcast nonsense has calmed down, and he's no longer in any issues. And he invites you over to his house. He's built a time machine. Right?

(Martin at 00:39:02) Oh. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:02) And you're tested out because, you know, he sends other people on the rocket first.

(Martin at 00:39:09) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:09) And you get to go into the time machine and give yourself one piece of advice, but only one, then come back.

(Martin at 00:39:15) What would it be? Oh, wow. First off, I'm sorry. I'm a big sci-fi movie fan, so I'm first gonna completely mangle your question. First off, if the time machine is a true time machine, you can also go to any place. I would set it to alien planets first on the brink of real civilization and just be myself, not to myself, but to another alien civilization and just to be able to get that back clear for myself. That was what I would do with the time machine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:43) Back to the beginning of your career, and you can only give advice to yourself. Okay. Fair enough.

(Martin at 00:39:51) I think the key thing that I would say to myself is, again, pace yourself in your communication. I have, excuse my French, screwed up a lot of opportunities in coffee spaces by just going in there, blah, and talking too much and going way too quick on things. So, again, get those core things that you really want to get out of it, and then trust that if the intent is right, if it's right for the company, and it's right for the party that you're sitting across the table with, then take that time and get that point across instead of thinking that you have to come up with so much more around it. So yeah, I mean, I'm an extrovert quite clearly as people are, and it's like I have information overload possibilities towards somebody. So just pace yourself would be my main advice towards it. It took me like fifteen to twenty years to get better at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:49) I'm working at it every day. We were writing sales pages the other day. I'm like, "Oh, they gotta know this. Oh, but they gotta know that." And I'm like, because what happens is—and I found out too. My brother and stepmom are both physicians, and so I was actually having this conversation with them. And when we have an idea and our neurons fire and our synapses fire off, we actually get rewarded chemically for the idea. Like, we're built to have ideas and be rewarded in our physiology to continue to think of ideas. So what happens is we think of that idea. We're like, "Oh, yes." But then it's the law of diminishing returns. It's never as special as it is the first time.

(Martin at 00:41:29) Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I did not know that. So basically, nature is playing a trick on yourself thinking, "I'm gonna share this great feeling that I have about this idea," but you're not helping anybody actually with it, including yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:43) Well, what it does is it gives you a baseline to understand that that great idea that you have, you can just take that and say, "Alright. That idea clearly communicates what I wanted to communicate," and just let it be there. Versus what my default state is, is to just keep coming up with new cool ways to say the same thing.

(Martin at 00:42:06) And then it just pours them down. It's like, "I get it. I get the sentiment. I understand the concept." You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:12) It pains me, but because I recognize it so much. Yes. Me too.

(Martin at 00:42:19) Thank you so much for coming and hanging out with me. This has been a fantastic podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:23) Loved it. And if you're ever in Boston, come by for a drink or a bite, and I'll wear that T-shirt.

(Martin at 00:42:29) Oh, for sure. Yeah. That's great. If there's a link to purchase it, let me know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:38) We got a couple of brands where you can make those T-shirts too. So, yeah, check out Vistaprint, baby. There you go.

(Martin at 00:42:44) Yeah. Vistaprint.com. Boom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:48) Vistaprint.com. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. We're all wrapped up here. People want to find out more and get to know you. They would visit your LinkedIn profile. Are you active there or Twitter?

(Martin at 00:43:00) I am getting more active on Twitter, which is my intent a little bit of it. And LinkedIn also, definitely. Although, lately, I'm receiving a lot of spam kind of requests there. So I'm actually figuring out what is the best new channel to go on this, because LinkedIn is not that clean as it used to be for me anymore. Just endless recruiters and companies that try to sell their software product to me. Maybe the title doesn't help, actually, as you might know. What's your Twitter handle?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:25) My Twitter handle is at Martin, my full name.

(Martin at 00:43:40) Okay. Very cool. Yeah. You know what? I noticed a kick up about three months ago. Like, they—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:46) I don't know if it was me getting more popular, but then I saw other people posting about it too. And yeah, I see it like six or eight a day. Well, I know they have some smart people over there because Kevin Scott, who's the CTO of Microsoft, one of the people that was early at LinkedIn.

(Martin at 00:44:06) Yeah. And you interviewed him. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:08) Yeah. Yeah. Kevin's awesome. Yeah. And then I know that they have a lot of bright people over there in general. So what will probably happen is just out of the nature of enterprise. You know, I think they kicked it up three months ago or people—yeah. In the next six months, they're gonna get a grip on it because they're a huge company, and they tend to respond pretty well to the market in the past. So—

(Martin at 00:44:31) Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And they're Microsoft now, of course. Yeah. For sure. Maybe they're—maybe it's just you and me and a couple of other people that are caught in some AB test or something. Just a different engagement. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:45) Awesome. Alright. So I'm gonna go. But yeah, when I'm in Boston next time, I'll send you an email, and we'll—I'll just stop by and say hello. Maybe we'll grab a drink or something.

(Martin at 00:44:55) You're super welcome. Cheers. Thank you. Thank you so much. Bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:59) Bye.