Doug Brent - VP Technology at Trimble

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(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) That's leaderbits.io. Now get excited because today, we are talking to Doug Brent, the VP of Technology and Innovation at Trimble, and we discuss deploying a strategy throughout your organization, insight on where to apply yourself as CTO, and the importance of setting a culture of technical excellence. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:05) Doug. Oh, you got the earbuds.

(Doug Brent at 00:01:07) Yeah. Why not?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:08) Dude, I love them. They're in my pocket permanently now.

(Doug Brent at 00:01:12) It works pretty well, and it's nice. You know, the ritual of untangling your phone headset gets a little bit boring after a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) Yep. As I was doing it, putting these on, but I got these, I don't know, two months ago, and my life has just changed.

(Doug Brent at 00:01:30) Okay. What's the pink, purple pony behind you there?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:35) Oh, that's a unicorn.

(Doug Brent at 00:01:37) Okay. Now the pink unicorn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:39) Yeah. We got a unicorn, and then we have the elephant in the room.

(Doug Brent at 00:01:45) Nice. Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:47) An ampersand.

(Doug Brent at 00:01:48) I don't—

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:48) Because I like Ruby programming languages, and I happen to use it a lot in there. Uh, Mr. Bezos. Right?

(Doug Brent at 00:01:55) Yeah. Very nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:56) Yes. Uh, Simon Sinek, one of my favorite leaders.

(Doug Brent at 00:02:00) Okay. And how about—

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:03) Well—

(Doug Brent at 00:02:04) What's the upper—you know, my upper left? Yeah. That, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:08) That's the Princess Physicist, my friend. It's a princess who gets stuck in a tower, and she uses physics to get herself out.

(Doug Brent at 00:02:16) I gotta check that out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:18) I'll send you a copy. I mean, it's my family's foundation. We have a charity, so I wrote the book.

(Doug Brent at 00:02:24) Oh, very nice. Yeah. No. I'd love to see that. That would be great. I'll tell you what's going on. Excuse me one quick second. What's going on in California right now is this fire stuff is intense. You know, I'm in Silicon Valley where, obviously, we haven't been touched by that, but it's like Beijing in the winter out there right now. You know, just really smoky. It's really bad. And, you know, lots of people—I had two family members evacuated, another one that, you know, the fire line was 30 feet away. It's really serious business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:55) My sister lived in China for three years, and she told me that—well, first of all, y'all have these masks that you wear all the time. Yeah. And they design them. It's a fashion thing because it's a part of your wardrobe. And secondly, when you want to go outside, outside, you check the weather channel to see the smog report.

(Doug Brent at 00:03:12) Right. Right. And I did that. I went out for a run this morning. I'm actually a little bit hoarse from doing it. It's been up close to 200 air quality index where healthful is below 50, and we just got to 75 or something like that today. It's really—I mean, it is exactly like being in Beijing where you can sort of see the air all around you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) Are you typically an early morning person?

(Doug Brent at 00:03:36) I am. But, you know, the company I work for, Trimble, is a—I call it a big, medium-sized company. You know, it's about $3 billion in revenue, 13,000 people, but very global. And so I'll often—I do a lot of work with guys in sort of plus 10 hours from here, so I'll do a call at 6:30 in the morning, then with the Indians at night at, you know, 8 at night.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:01) Nice. I'm an early riser. I'm up, and I usually go for a run around 5:30. And then I eat some breakfast, and I'm in the office by 7:30, get two—you know, an hour and a half, two hours work done before my team gets here. Yeah. And so I'm ready to go.

(Doug Brent at 00:04:17) Yeah. That's great. And I gotta tell you, you know, I hadn't been aware of your podcast before, invited by somebody on your team to be on it. But I've listened to a couple of them, and, you know, funny you mentioned Ruby because one of the ones I picked up was by a guy doing Ruby framework and—you bring a lot of energy to it, and it seems like a fun gig.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:39) It is. Thank you.

(Doug Brent at 00:04:40) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:41) Yeah. I kind of created it.

(Doug Brent at 00:04:43) Yeah. It's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:45) I thought, alright, well, I want to help people, right, talk about these things. And then I also want to—you know, they say the average of the people you're with—you're the average of the five people you spend time with. So I said, alright. Well, how can I position myself around a bunch of great technology leaders? Well, providing them value by covering topics that they care about, and then doing that in the form of a show allows me to spend time with them, you know, virtually every day.

(Doug Brent at 00:05:09) That's great. Yeah. No. It seems like a cool thing, and I'm happy to be playing—you know, happy to participate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:16) So I'm curious. I saw your videos of—and I don't know if this is the only thing Trimble does. But I saw the videos of the construction workers with the HVAC systems. Yeah. And they could see the digital layout prior to them. Was that prior to the HVAC system existing, or was that—were they seeing through the wall?

(Doug Brent at 00:05:36) Really good question. And actually, what they're seeing is the model of the HVAC system as it will show up in the building. Awesome. So it really is—I'll tell you, Trimble's been a partner with both Microsoft and actually a neighbor of yours, Magic Leap—oh, yeah—from earliest announcement days. And I actually got to experiment with HoloLens or experience HoloLens would be a better way of saying it, when it was, you know, still this gigantic piece of machinery where you had to wear a backpack and you got to see it. And I think all of that augmented reality technology is still early. You know, it still feels a little prototypy, both HoloLens and Magic Leap. But it was one of those moments, you know, that I've seen in four years of computing. You say, this is a new thing, and it's going to really change the way people work and live and entertain. So, yeah, I think augmented reality is especially in the industrial world incredibly important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:37) Well, here's what I like about it. First of all, it's a very legitimate use.

(Doug Brent at 00:06:42) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:42) It is perfectly suited for the rendering capabilities and quality that we have today. Right? So when people will say, oh, AR isn't there, VR isn't there, what they really want is to be in a different world with no equipment on their body.

(Doug Brent at 00:07:00) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:01) That's the level that they're judging it. And it's like, but where you—where that HoloLens is at with what I saw, I was like, look. This perfect quality graphics, it solves a need, and it's not in the future. Like, you're selling these units today. Correct?

(Doug Brent at 00:07:19) Right. Absolutely. Yep. And in that particular one, it's integrated with hard hats. Actually, integrating HoloLens with hard hats so that you can wear it on a job site. We have a bunch of those kinds of—you know, can I just tell you quickly a little bit about Trimble? Because I'm guessing you probably don't know much about it, and I'm hoping I'm betting anybody listening to this probably hasn't heard a lot about Trimble. But—tell me about Trimble—but I'm hoping by the end, everybody wants to send me a job application because it's the coolest company that I've ever worked for. So Trimble got—Trimble started out as a pioneer in GPS, and that was 40 years ago. We actually had our 40th anniversary just this last week. And today still is a major player in precision—what's now called the generic form GNSS. It's all the satellite systems, BeiDou, you know, the Russian system, etc. And that is a focus, but today, it's really how do you take position, which has certainly changed cell phone world, you know, changed consumer world, but position in the industrial world and take that for automation and autonomy for, you know, this idea of visualizing digital data in the real context, sort of like an IoT idea, but we really like to say connecting physical and digital worlds.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:37) I love it. So you will span the spectrum of connecting the physical and digital worlds. It's not just in construction.

(Doug Brent at 00:08:44) No. So the big businesses we participate in are agriculture, which actually is sort of an interesting one to talk about, building construction, road construction. Transportation is a big one for us and primarily long-haul trucking. We talked about that. And then the last one is geospatial, sort of the collection of geospatial—you know, precise geospatial data for mapping or survey or other purposes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:07) Yeah. We went from three meters to three feet. And now for this to work properly, you're three nanometers.

(Doug Brent at 00:09:14) Yeah. I mean, it's funny because people think GPS or GNSS is accurate in their phones, but that's mostly because what we do is we're looking at where we are on a map. The actual accuracy of a phone is about five meters on a good day in a benign setting. The precision GNSS stuff that Trimble's involved in is, you know, a couple centimeters of accuracy. And just to give you an idea of how that can be applied, already 80% of farm tractors are automated—guidance of those tractors is automated.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:46) Yeah. No. I was driving by a construction site five, seven years ago, and I saw these new things on the vehicles, and they look like a pool floater or something like that. Right. And I was like, what is that? So I looked it up, and they got the string coming out. And I looked it up, and I was like, oh, they're GPS guided—they're putting the GPS on the actual vehicle that's paving the road or whatever it may be. And I thought that was brilliant.

(Doug Brent at 00:10:11) Yeah. And one way to think about this is, essentially, that bulldozer or that tractor becomes a 3D printer. Right? You're sending it a 3D profile of what you—of sort of the desired outcome, and it does it for you. And the benefit, like you talked about, paving a road, imagine you're a contractor and the municipality says, hey. You have to pave that road to a certain depth. You're never going to try to hit that precisely. You'll put some margin above that, and now you take the—you integrate the volume of that over huge road. That's a lot of money and a lot of waste, really. And so with these highly accurate positioning systems, you can do that and, you know, hit that margin and save material and cost and, you know, a lot of good things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:58) So what was Trimble doing, I don't know, let's say 10 years ago? Were they in the construction business doing that?

(Doug Brent at 00:11:05) Yeah. So it's—so Trimble has changed a lot. Actually, our biggest one recently is building construction and transportation and sort of an evolution to a software company has happened in the last 10 years. But, really, like, this idea of precision farming is a 15-year-old idea. Automating construction equipment is a 15-year-old idea. So but it's—you know, I've spent most of my career on software side, and I think as people look at technology, they sort of say, wow, this is such a fast-moving space. But, really, you know, a computer language lasts for 30 or 40 years. You know, software products never die. So it's—you know, it really is sort of this technology has been around for a while, but now, particularly in the context of consumer vehicle autonomy, it's sort of taking on a new life and interest. And if you want to talk about it, I'm a skeptic on consumer automobile autonomy, but there's a lot going on because of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:00) You're a skeptic, like, as if it will not happen?

(Doug Brent at 00:12:03) It'll happen, but it's a long way away. I think it's a 15-year, 10-, 15-year journey to get that—fair enough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:12) And do you think it's a technological roadblock or a human and governmental roadblock?

(Doug Brent at 00:12:18) I mean, I think it's all of the above, but I think the technology still has a long way to go. Have you ever ridden in an autonomous vehicle?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:25) Well, no. Not a fully—I've—one of my business partners had one of the Teslas and and, like, autobraked as we came up to a red light, but that was my experience with it.

(Doug Brent at 00:12:35) So I've done it twice, and I won't say whose. But each time, there's been some—I mean, it's as a technology guy, it's amazing. You know? It's—yeah—you know, it's freaking amazing that it works, but it's a little bit of a parlor trick. I mean, it's great work. I'm not—I mean, the people are doing fantastic work, but I still think that the difference from that to a fully functioning system, you know, it's a—there's a long way to go and a lot of problems to be solved.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:05) I'll buy into that. Yeah.

(Doug Brent at 00:13:08) Yeah. And but what I—and I think to a certain extent, I resist the current thinking about consumer automobile autonomy because, you know, they talk about level one through level five autonomy as if it's, you know, monotonically increasing. You know, it's just a nice step from one to the next, and I think that's not—that's not the way it will turn out. And if I could get a fully autonomous vehicle today, I would pay three times what the car costs. There's no value problem with autonomy. I think for driver assist, which is sort of where the industry is today, I think there's very limited—like, I'd pay something for it, but not a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:49) I mean, Tesla wasn't charging much. I think they're charging, like, $5,000 as an add-on for the car.

(Doug Brent at 00:13:55) Yeah. And I honestly think once you've—you know, I've had a car that had, you know, fancy, like, self-parallel parking and adaptive cruise control. Did it work? Yeah. It works pretty well. But then it's like the—the value proposition. It's, like, great for your friends. It's a great demo. So the Tesla—your Tesla friends have a great demo. But I don't use it all the time, and I think that something like GM Super Cruise is actually a better product promise if you're, you know, thinking of it, which basically says, hey. If you're on certain highways, we can mostly take over for you. But, yeah, I think the—that where we'll really see autonomy first are in these industrial applications like the ones, you know, Trimble's involved in today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:38) Yeah. I like it. I'm excited to see—I'm excited to see the mowers. Like, I think at some point, there's going to be, like, essentially a call center of people that are operating lawnmower machines remotely. Because I don't think it'll go fully autonomous at first. I think—I think the—and you mentioned this level one through five, which I have to research because I haven't heard this, but it reminds me of the Kardashev scale or whatever where they talk about the energy consumption of the civilization. Yeah. But I want to look at the one through five because that's probably a really good indicator, something for me to learn.

(Doug Brent at 00:15:15) Well, and I think I guess what I'm saying is I think there's a discontinuity from existing driver assist technology to really fully autonomous. And, you know, the social problems you talk about are real, but I think also just the technology—you know, there's just a lot of problems, a lot of problems to solve. But I like your lawnmower idea. I think it's—you know, the other thing about autonomy that's sort of interesting is if you and I have consumer cars, we are the mission. The mission is to get us from point A to point B.

(Doug Brent at 00:15:51) Right? If you think about lawnmowers, the mission isn't really to get it from point A to point B. It's mow the grass. Right? So a lot of the tasks, we tend to apply that consumer thinking of, oh, it's getting the vehicle from point to point, which is our problem.

(Doug Brent at 00:16:08) But for most work problems, that's actually not the case. You know? So if you're farming a field, it's not getting from point A to point B. It's actually doing the work on the field. It's irrigation or whatever.

(Doug Brent at 00:16:22) So I like your mower example because I think that that fits this sort of task automation model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:28) And then, well, so we'll do two things. The first thing I'll say is I like the paving the road one because there's a lot of money involved and it's government money. So, I mean,

(Doug Brent at 00:16:39) I don't care who

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:39) you are. Government money is just, it's government money. And thankfully it is. I mean, NASA and the amount of technical sharing we've had and all of that great stuff, we get amazing benefits from it. But when I see, like, the visual in my head when I'm driving down the interstate and it's the evening and I see a crew out there, large machines, expensive projects, lots of people carefully moving very slowly. The machines pave very slowly. This is an ideal situation. Like, I feel like to automate that, there's a lot of, you're not going 80 miles an hour on the interstate with someone cutting you off. So you have more margin of error there. It's a more controlled environment where you're moving slower and less is happening to really, you know, hammer down and harden these processes.

(Doug Brent at 00:17:31) I think everything you're saying is right, and it's another attribute of that kind of situation is stopping is an entirely valid action. You know, if you get too confused, you can just stop, and that's true on a farm field. It's true on a building construction site. And if you think about this more as task automation, exactly like you're describing in that paving situation, I think that comes back to this physical to digital idea that, you know, we sort of start with digital models and a lot of, certainly for building a building, really building a road. Believe it or not, on farm fields, they have a digital model of the field, how they want to traverse the field, what they're planting on the field, how to irrigate it, what kind of seed and soil, everything.

(Doug Brent at 00:18:19) We have these digital models. And as much as possible, we want to automate the execution of those models, you know, essentially 3D print those models in the real world, collect data as you do it because different than manufacturing in these outdoor environments, bad things happen. You know, you find a tree stump or, you know, something didn't match your model, and you really want to send the data back. So you have a full closed loop of optimization for this sort of digital and physical idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:47) What are you most excited about, like, the projects that are happening at Trimble right now? You're making advancements in construction, both on the roads and in the buildings. Have you gotten into any of the medical stuff? And then what are you most excited about?

(Doug Brent at 00:19:02) No. We're not involved in medical at all. But I think, to me, you know, ultimately, when you talk about government money, all of these things, all of this kind of automation, in the end, uses less resources, you know, has less load on the environment, often as a safety of life issue. So, you know, my mind, this is one of the reasons why I like go to work every day is there's a very positive social impact of most of this technology. I'll just maybe tell you one thing that I think is interesting right now.

(Doug Brent at 00:19:30) Everybody's talking about machine learning applications. And I think, or data analytics, a lot of people, what they imagine they get out of that is some report or some answer. And in general, I think where this whole idea of machine learning really helps is if you have an existing system that's sort of helping people do their work, then you can make way better through the analysis of the data. So in the trucking industry in the U.S., there's a 100% annual turnover. So just, like, absorb that for a minute. Like, everybody you work with is gonna turn over in twelve months. That's a big, that's a big problem. And, actually, driver availability, you know, they're all bidding, all the trucking companies are bidding with each other to get drivers. We've done some analysis on what causes drivers to leave. You know, not surprising, there's many factors, but two of the factors are what routes they drive.

(Doug Brent at 00:20:24) So if you drive, you know, maybe in the Northeast and you're always in traffic and always in bad weather, that would be one reason to leave a trucking company. The other is how far and how often they send you away from home. So we've done some really nice machine learning models and all the data because we sell systems that actually task the drivers. So we, you know, we have this sort of dispatching part of that system. And without really impacting the way that the driver operates or the dispatch operates, we can just take that model and change what the tasking is for drivers to make it less likely that they'll leave.

(Doug Brent at 00:21:01) And in my mind, that's sort of behind the scenes application of technology. You know, we've talked about neural networks and blah blah blah. Nobody cares about that. It's, could I reduce the driver turnover? And we just say, hey. Yeah. Just sort of flip this switch, and all of a sudden, your tasking will be such that you'll lose fewer drivers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:18) That's brilliant. That's, like, one of

(Doug Brent at 00:21:20) the

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:20) best explanations I've had of a business case for machine learning.

(Doug Brent at 00:21:26) Right. And I think there's a bunch of those kind of things. But, you know, as technologists, I think sometimes we get so focused on the beauty of the tool that we lose sight of, like, what's the, how do you solve this in the customer context?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:40) I thought you were gonna say when you were listing the items, I thought you were gonna say the quality of truck stop food.

(Doug Brent at 00:21:46) Actually, but what I didn't say, and I can't believe I missed this, is how good the truck you're in is. So, like, modern long haul trucks are actually pretty amazing. You know, some of them are pretty nice. And so if you're in a, you know, crappy old truck, you're more likely to leave than if you're a brand new truck. So, you know, looking at, and, obviously, more factors than that. But, yeah, diner food would be one we don't yet have in our model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:12) I like that you mentioned the quality of the truck because I had a friend who, ag tech business. And we were at his cabin one time, and he was talking about tractors and, like, he had a tractor magazine. I was like, woah. Look at these things. They're crazy. They're interiors, and they're expensive, and, like, some of them are $500,000. And he says, yeah. Because you want, he goes, the smart business owners will buy the really expensive ones because then the people will spend a little extra time in there and finish, do some more crop.

(Doug Brent at 00:22:42) Right. You know? And planting or whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:45) Or whatever the task is. He goes, so when they cheap out and you get, they buy the cheaper ones or the older ones, and they're less comfortable and it's hot and all this. He goes, then they're gonna do less work. They're gonna rush the job. He goes, but if you make them comfortable, they're gonna do it right and work a good amount. And so I was like, yeah. That sounds like a smart thing. So you mentioned that. Right? You gotta have the quality vehicle.

(Doug Brent at 00:23:08) Right. So I think that whole the sort of application of, you know, modern AI models to sort of, you know, some really industrial problems, I think that's an interesting thing we're working on. We touched on this idea of augmented reality, which I'm very, you know, excited about it for many of our applications. And it can be as simple as just collaboration because people aren't very good at visualizing 3D. So, you know, if you're a customer of an architect, all of a sudden, you know, we could be walking around with a model sitting on a desktop that, you know, the cost of changing that model is essentially zero.

(Doug Brent at 00:23:42) These inspection oriented applications, the one you picked up on, where I can see in context of, you know, what I'm doing and if it's, you know, often, you'd think there wouldn't be problems like this, but every building construction problem has, you know, designed a duct to go through a steel beam. But you think that would never happen? It happens all the time. You know, a fun fact is that in building today, something between 20 to 40% of a construction project is waste. So if you're building a $100 million building, you're gonna waste 20 to $40 million in building that building. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:18) I had a friend of mine who's been on the show. His name's Ben O'Donnell, and he has a company called BIMobject, B-I-M object. And they're growing rapidly. They're publicly traded in Sweden. They've literally have just been exploding, multi-country. They do the storage of these BIM objects. They hook in with all the AutoCAD type programs and all this.

(Doug Brent at 00:24:38) Yep. Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:39) But it was brilliant in their business model because they found the companies that had the products. And you couldn't sell a product unless it was integrated into the Autodesk program. So you, right? If you're building a building, you have to put 40 toilets in the 40-story building or whatever. You have to just select that toilet and it has to be real. So they made their business by going to these companies and doing that and then innovating all around it. But he, when he came on the show and we developed our relationship, he said his whole purpose was he was an architect

(Doug Brent at 00:25:21) It's totally true. And, you know, it's interesting. I'm aware of BIMobject, and we've talked to them. And while you won't, again, you won't necessarily think about Trimble as a design software company, we actually have two incredibly popular design software products. One is called SketchUp, which you may know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:37) You guys have SketchUp?

(Doug Brent at 00:25:39) Yeah. Did

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:40) you buy it from Google? Or

(Doug Brent at 00:25:40) Well, so that's interesting. And that's what people say. We did buy it from Google. I think we were one of the few companies to ever acquire something from Google. They, you know, it was clearly a learning experience for them. But, actually, SketchUp started as an independent company, was an independent company for years and then was acquired by Google and actually did, I think Google did something, you know, tons of smart people. I have friends, lots of friends at Google, but they made a mistake that I call mistakes smart people make, which is they looked at SketchUp, and they said, this is, like, the easiest 3D design tool going. We'll use that. We'll be able to populate Google Earth. People will model their buildings, blah blah blah. 3D design is still, you know, SketchUp has 30 million users. It doesn't have 6 billion users. 3D design is still not for everyone.

(Doug Brent at 00:26:35) But yeah. So we bought SketchUp from Google and have had that, I think, six, seven years at this point. And it's been a very successful marriage with the SketchUp team who started in Boulder. They're still in Boulder. So we SketchUp. And then another one is for structural steel design, which is a much more specialized domain, but that's called Tekla Structures.

(Doug Brent at 00:27:01) And in both of those cases, similar to BIM objects, we have a SketchUp 3D warehouse that has something like 15 million models in it. So this idea of content-driven design that BIMobject is promoting, and we're certainly promoting that as well, is, I think, a critically important thing going forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:20) Oh, it's so cool that you know them. Yeah. The cofounder is Ben. He's awesome.

(Doug Brent at 00:27:25) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. And I think, ultimately, in this sort of, you know, I'll keep going back to this physical to digital or, you know, either way, digital to physical. To the extent that you can have 3D models that are what we call constructible. That is, again, can sort of go to the 3D printer to be made. That's a big part of how you reduce waste. So have content enabled, have, you know, constructible models, and really a connected world. That's a big part of this, you know, physical to digital thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:55) Can you explain real quick just the concept of the waste, how it occurs?

(Doug Brent at 00:28:01) Yeah. I mean, it's, I think if you compare this to manufacturing, manufacturing has no waste. Of course, it's not quite true, but, I mean, it's highly optimized indoor manufacturing. The problem is in building construction, a typical building, office building down the street from you, there'll be 200 companies, 200 independent companies working on building that building.

(Doug Brent at 00:28:25) There is a general contractor, and there is in the end a building owner, but the owner may not be that sophisticated about building construction. If you were, like, you know, if somehow you were building a brand new house,

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:38) I built a house. Yeah. I didn't know anything about it. Yeah.

(Doug Brent at 00:28:41) All right. But I guess a lot of us, you know, if we went to a general contractor to build a house, I don't know. You know, I don't really know the details about building a house and coordinating across all those guys. Changes happen. Those kind of clashes I talked about where, you know, ductwork is going through a steel beam. You had two different people designing that, and they just didn't communicate well with each other.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:06) I get what you mean.

(Doug Brent at 00:29:07) Yeah. So you're really coordinating, and a lot of people are trying to solve this. We're trying to solve this problem of sort of collaboration, coordination across all the different stakeholders. And buildings aren't product. Right? They're projects. So you're not, you're not gonna build exactly the same building next time. So it's a hard problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:28) I have the answer for you, though.

(Doug Brent at 00:29:30) Okay. Please, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:32) Slack for contractors.

(Doug Brent at 00:29:36) I actually heard that. Yeah. You know, we're a big Google tool shop, and we have some people use Slack. But we're actually pushing on this idea of sort of independent of what tool you're using, independent of, like, if you're using Autodesk or you're using SketchUp or Tekla. How can we make it easy for people to share models, share commentary?

(Doug Brent at 00:29:59) And, and by the way, making all that back to this augmented reality idea, how do I go out to the job site and actually visualize all that collaboration data as well?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:09) Wonder if you ever get inspiration from products like InVision. Have you come across InVision?

(Doug Brent at 00:30:14) I don't know InVision. Please tell me about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:16) So InVision is this unbelievable product that allows designers to work together. And so it started out as, like, you know, we're making web pages or interfaces or UIs for applications, and we need to get multiple people involved. It's evolved into something, like, way beyond that. And they're a pretty large company. But the way that they handle collaboration and iteration through design changes amongst groups of designers, just fascinating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:48) Like, when it came out, I was just so happy because at the time, my company was designing applications, mobile applications, iPhone and, right. And so it just, like, changed everything for us to just seamless collaboration where before you'd be sending each other files back and forth or just now you just look at the one file and everybody can just come into it. And it was, you know, the way that they executed it worked really well.

(Doug Brent at 00:31:18) So I'm going to definitely check that out. And I do think being aware of successful—you know, collaboration is hard. We talk about it like it's easy. And, you know, looking at successful examples, I think in this particular case, Slack isn't an answer, but I think it's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:34) No, I was joking.

(Doug Brent at 00:31:35) I know you were joking, but I'm just trying to say I think being inspired by where collaboration tools have been successful is really good. And it is sort of a building is like software in the sense that, you know, if you're a DevOps guy, you think about the software as the running instance of deployed software. If you're a designer, you might be thinking about the UI. Buildings actually have some—like, if you're a structural engineer, you think about the steel columns in the building. If you're an architect, you think about the surface. If you're an interior designer, you're thinking about the furniture and interior layout. So that's the hard part about collaboration—sort of getting all those different disciplines who have a different view to be working with each other. But I will definitely check—I appreciate that thought, and I will check out Envision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:21) Yeah, I think Slack did a really good job at communication, but if you want collaboration on vision in a visual world, that company Envision is the one to check out.

(Doug Brent at 00:32:35) So I'm curious—well, I would definitely take a look.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:37) Now that we're talking about vision, the organization you're with is large, you know, 5,000-plus people, correct?

(Doug Brent at 00:32:45) Actually, 13,000.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:47) 13,000. Okay. Well, I'm sorry. I apologize. 13,000-plus people. And you're the CTO, and so I want a little bit of insight on how you're picking where to apply yourself.

(Doug Brent at 00:33:02) Yeah, that's a really good question. And even more than being 13,000 people, we're 13,000 people really spread out around the world, you know, all over. And it is a hard problem, and I think, you know, it's funny—I think we have sort of common tools in the toolkit for dealing with complexity, but I think what's really most important is what's the specific problem you have to go solve, you know, sort of problem-led. Our problem at Trimble is we've grown a lot through acquisition. In the last ten years, we've done a hundred acquisitions, typically small acquisitions. And we have a culture that says you have to be close to the customer and you really make decentralized decisions. Every company says that, by the way. Trimble really does. So that is the challenge, particularly from a software point of view, which says if we have a portfolio of 30 different applications that make sense to building owners, which we do or more, how do you get commonality across those, and how do you get teams working around the world? That is my number one challenge and focus. And then you say, how do I determine how to spend my time? I look at either a glaring problem or a glaring opportunity to get groups A, B, and C working together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:29) Can you go into a little bit more about that, getting them working together, like smoothing the communication between them?

(Doug Brent at 00:34:36) You know, I don't have a ready-made answer that says it's always the same thing because it sort of depends on the situation. But often, you know, certainly Trimble did not start out as a cloud-native company, but more and more our solutions are moving to the cloud. So part of that means having sort of a common set of building blocks for cloud applications. So, you know, over a period of last two, three years, we've really gotten a cloud strategy that says, you know, we have a common identity system that manages millions of users, authorization, API management, you know, sort of data lake, data strategy. So we have sort of the core building blocks that any application will need to just sort of talk to each other. We have sort of data-level interoperability. We talked about collaboration. You know, how do I take a model from Autodesk and a model from Tekla and make those both models visualizable in my collaboration environment? So some of it has been just getting a cloud strategy in place that can work for the whole company and then getting people to adopt it. I think on new kind of work, something that's important to us, for example, is being able to visualize complex models, you know, often multi-hundred-megabyte models on something like a HoloLens or at least in a web browser. So we've done some core technology work in one place in Finland that we're then—it's sort of like, how do you seed that out everywhere and get that in everybody's product roadmaps? And it's a combination of encouragement, selling, and, you know, it's usually getting a stick out to make that happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:23) You sell—you start selling the idea, right? You always start with the best option: let's sell this idea and let's get buy-in. I understand—I've got a small example of buy-in today for me. We actually have a product at the company—like, the podcast ended up producing a product out of it because of people asking for it, coming on the podcast and asking for it. And so we ended up doing this leadership training product, and we're growing. We got about eight people now in the past, like, six months, so it's doing pretty well. And we just finished our first round of venture capital, so we'll probably be about 30 people by next year. But I was part of the user experience, joining some users and using the application for the first time, and I noticed, okay, when they hit this step after their onboarding process, everyone always has this question, which is answered in the screen before. But they go from that screen like, "Oh, cool. I unlocked the dashboard," then they hit the dashboard. And then it's just the dashboard, just the normal accessible dashboard. And so I said, "Well, what we need here is we need a notification to the user again that says, like, 'Congratulations. Here's what you do next,'" because everyone's like, "Alright, hit the dashboard. What now?" And so then we explained it. So then I submitted these changes to my engineering team, and they're like, "This doesn't make sense. It's not logical. You have the same message before. This is just bloat. You don't need it." And so I had to then get them to buy in through, you know, sharing some of the recorded user sessions, showing them that, "Look, people are legitimately confused." I could have taken the route of, like, just do what I say and don't ask questions, but that never works.

(Doug Brent at 00:37:57) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:58) That's not leadership.

(Doug Brent at 00:37:59) I mean, occasionally you have to go there, but a steady diet of that is certain to lose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:09) Yes. There's a balance.

(Doug Brent at 00:38:10) Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting. I think, you know, so I think another part of what I try to do, particularly given that we're a global, highly decentralized company, is stress exactly the opposite of that. Without trying to change that core pillar of our culture of being decentralized, what can we do to get a sense of who we are as a company as well? So I'm proudly wearing my Trimble Hack 2017—we just finished 2018. And we have about 3,500 product developers. We had a thousand people participate in a single 24-hour cycle around the world, heavily using Hangouts and Google Plus communities to, you know, post pictures and demos and samples, and, you know, a bunch of stuff like that to try to sort of give people a sense of being, you know, a common global sense that they're part of something bigger.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:07) And that's part of your responsibilities there?

(Doug Brent at 00:39:10) Yeah, yeah. So, and it's funny—I think when we first started this out five years ago, we've been doing it five years, people basically said, you know, "Who's going to want to do this at midnight in Finland?" And I think we had a 150 people participate, and it's just grown every year, and it's, you know, a fun event. And I think, you know, it's a way for people to exercise creativity and to sort of get this sort of global notion of who we are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:40) I have a question from the audience, if that's okay.

(Doug Brent at 00:39:44) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:45) Alright. So Eric Schrock, he's CTO—company, they have about, it looks like, 5,000 or 5,600 people, and they separated the SVP engineering and all of software engineering. And then he sort of sits in his office of CTO and just focuses on big-picture strategy and innovation. He wants to know, what are your thoughts on strategy and deploying it across the organization as your organization gets larger and larger? What have you learned? I'm out of my depths asking this question because I've never managed a company with over 5,000 people, so I'm assuming you'll know how to handle this.

(Doug Brent at 00:40:24) Yeah. I mean, I think it's a fundamentally hard problem. And I think it's both recognizing that, you know, no one person is going to have in their mind the strategy for a big complex beast. You know, we probably ship more than a thousand products, and I consider my job is getting paid to go around the world learning. You know, so I don't always have the answer, but I think it is this sort of art of, in most cases, the strategy should be led by the people who are closest to the customer, the business, that you really want. Like, when I talked about the transportation business earlier, we have sort of a key technology leader for that transportation business who's looking at things like blockchain that matters for them a lot, that kind of thing. But I do think at this bigger picture level, which it sounds like he's operating in—I would say that's where I'm operating as well—it's looking at what the cross-company strategy issues that matter for us. It's been this, you know, our cloud strategy and cloud onboarding strategy for our existing applications. And then I think, secondly, I think this idea of setting culture is very important. And I think that we—you know, it needs to be within a company culture, but there needs to be a technology culture of openness, of willingness to make mistakes as long as we learn from those mistakes, of, you know, I think high integrity, availability, technical excellence. I think you need a champion for those kinds of things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:06) And that comes down to, like, having the quality people that are those things and then having a quality leader to lead those people?

(Doug Brent at 00:42:15) I think that's right. And I think highlighting, you know, highlighting the best, you know, the best people and their successes and, frankly, not shying away from failure as long as you're learning from it. Because if you—you know, a mistake I've seen at many companies, you know, a million years ago I worked at Apple. If you made three mistakes, you're done. You know, you might as well quit if you're not fired. I make mistakes all the time, and, hopefully, they're not too big. And, hopefully, I can make a fast decision and learn from that and then do the right thing. But I think that that mindset of sort of, you know, make a decision, experiment, see what the right answer is, needs a supportive culture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:03) And what is your team—do you have, like, a direct team that works with you?

(Doug Brent at 00:43:07) Yeah, I do. I've been in—I started out as a team of one. I report to the CEO, and, actually, that's my preferred model, because in this highly decent—I have 400 people reporting to me directly now. I don't really prefer that model. I like the—especially in a decentralized company, I sort of wish I was back to having no one reporting to me. But, yeah, I do have a team now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:31) So what does that team look—so you don't have a team of, like, five that helps you manage those 400?

(Doug Brent at 00:43:36) No. I mean, there's a natural hierarchy. You know, there's sort of a natural hierarchy. But, basically, I ended up owning, you know, this whole cloud strategy that I was talking about. I ended up owning those pieces, and I own some of our core positioning technology for Trimble as well. But I really think the most powerful position I have is not the people who report to me, but my ability to influence the whole organization, you know, sort of through initially—the CEO hired me and said, "Hey, this is going to be the guy." But I think more and more just, you know, I've been there seven and a half years. I was developing trustful working relationships around the globe. I travel about 350,000 miles a year, and direct contact with people so I can influence the outcome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:24) Well, I don't think less of that. I think more of it. It's weird because as people transition from an individual contributor role doing details of a work to a leadership role where it's really about relationships, having enough space to vision, to have vision, and then being able to influence and bring that vision into reality—that is essentially, it's like the almost the opposite of the management of the metrics. It's very different. And so, yeah, like, when we say—when I was thinking a lot about—have you ever heard of John Maxwell?

(Doug Brent at 00:45:02) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:02) Okay. So I'm new. I was a big fan of Jim Rohn, and Tony—so I listened to some Tony Robbins. I was like, "That's kind of cool." But then I found his mentor was Jim Rohn. Then from there, I was introduced to John Maxwell, and I'm thinking, "Whoa. This guy is, like, really fantastic." So I've been listening to a lot of the leadership content, and it's becoming more clear. But you have to deal with a lot of intangibles. But the difference between leadership and management is becoming so incredibly clear, whereas, you know, the past decade of my experience, I kind of always meshed them together.

(Doug Brent at 00:45:38) Right. Yeah. No, I think that's a really good observation that, you know, management is extremely important. It matters, but that's not the primary purpose of my job. It really is more on the leadership side, and, you know, it's—I feel like I have the best job in the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:57) Yeah, me too. Yeah, yeah. There you go.

(Doug Brent at 00:45:57) Hey, actually, one thing—just a fun thing to tell you that we haven't talked about yet—is I'm also on the advisory board of something called Piaggio Fast Forward. I don't know if you've heard of Piaggio, but you would have heard of their brands. They make Vespa.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:13) Okay, yeah.

(Doug Brent at 00:46:14) So you know Vespa and Moto Guzzi, which is sort of the European Harley-Davidson. And they're looking to the future of transportation, sort of saying, "What's next?" So they have a company in Boston. I'm on the advisory board for it. Interesting. Back to this autonomy thing, the way that group is looking to solve the last mile of autonomy is to follow humans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:39) Oh, yeah.

(Doug Brent at 00:46:39) So think about an automated carrier that follows you around, and you're essentially acting as the guidance system, especially in urban environments where things are sort of complex. So that's a really fun one. In 2019, I think you're going to see some product come out from Piaggio.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:58) Is it that, like, neon or, like, blue or green backpack thing that, like, follows you in the grocery store and you can put stuff in it? That's not their product?

(Doug Brent at 00:47:07) No. This is something that's intended to go outdoors as well as indoors, and it's pretty cool. But the reason why I brought it up is I think it's interesting—just so that I can have a consistent point of view on my autonomy skepticism—it's really using the human to really be the last mile of guidance to solve those problems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:31) And does the human wear a bracelet so it knows who it is or from the app?

(Doug Brent at 00:47:37) It's vision based.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:38) It's vision based?

(Doug Brent at 00:47:39) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:41) What do you do with twins?

(Doug Brent at 00:47:42) No, I'm just kidding.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:44) I just...

(Doug Brent at 00:47:45) I don't know if we've solved that. I don't know if we've solved that problem. That's a good one. I had to be there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:51) Yeah. I'll bring that up at the board meeting.

(Doug Brent at 00:47:53) Yeah. But it is a fun thing, and I also get to tool around my hometown here in Silicon Valley in a bright red Vespa that the saddlebag, my wife tells me, is nicer than any purse she's ever had. So that's a fun one to be on too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:11) Is that the Italian upholstery? Is it the quality there?

(Doug Brent at 00:48:14) No. It's this one Vespa that's, you know, sort of the ultra luxury Vespa. It's called a 946 that has this beautiful red Italian leather, the whole... You know, it's just a thing of beauty. It's not necessarily that practical, but it's, you know, beautiful Italian product design.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:36) I love it. Yeah. Do you have to send me a picture of that, you rolling around town on your Vespa?

(Doug Brent at 00:48:41) I will. Yeah. No, it is really fun. And I almost always, you know, particularly from younger people, will get some comment like, "Man, that is a thing of beauty." You know, the motorcycle guys, you know, look down on me, but it's definitely fun. Yeah. So I, I'm just from a leadership point of view, I don't know why I went there, but I think, you know, you clearly do this with your podcast and your organization, but it's so easy to get inside your own head around the problems that you have at any company. And so for me, I think that this advisory board role has been a great opportunity to be in somebody else's problem set. And I would just recommend for people if they can, you know, find an opportunity. It doesn't always have to be, you don't have to be king of the world, but find some opportunity to engage on other people's problems. I think that can be really helpful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:33) Oh, yeah. First of all, the fact that we're humans and we're meant to help and contribute to each other. Second of all, the ability to iterate through various perspectives provides new insight. That actually sounds really good. I'm gonna write that down because I need to use that for the next book. But, yeah, it does, though. Like, when you start looking at and solving other problems and then you come back to your work, that's why, like, forest breaks are a great idea.

(Doug Brent at 00:50:01) Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So, and when you're doing your leadership practice...

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:08) Yeah.

(Doug Brent at 00:50:09) What do you think some of the... What are the key problems that people are looking to solve? Like, what problems have you been able to help people with?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:17) Oh, very simple. So, you know, you get a new product and you take it to market. You think it's gonna go one way. People see it another. You're not sure who your customer is, and you learn, you learn, you learn. Right? Just now, like, in the past, you know, month or two, have really figured it out and are starting to gain some steam now in the sense that, like, we are closing every other call that we have, which is way better than closing one out of 10.

(Doug Brent at 00:50:40) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:41) But the problems are two. One, when you move individual contributor into a first time leadership position, the large companies, they only will have, like, a generic training. And so we have training that's specifically made for technologists, where all the analogies and the people they're hearing from and all of that are specifically related to technology. So we're just a better version of first time leader training there. So that's the one product. People use this as, like, a rolling engagement. Every time new leader comes through, they do this thing. They like that. Their challenges. So, like, rather than traditional leadership is, hey, let's go put you through a day course or two week course or weekend thing, and we're just gonna pump you full of information for eight hours a day. Ours is a ten minute challenge once a week. So you just slowly, consistently do something every single week. And you actually do something in the real world. So you hear a challenge, and then you go do it, and then you can track your progress. So that's a little bit about the product, but the reasons are rolling engagement for new first time leaders and then analytics on your existing leaders. It's like the usually the SVP or the CTO will purchase it from us and say, "I have, you know, these 20 or 50 leaders, and they'll lead teams. And I believe that they should at least be doing one thing for ten minutes every week to improve as a leader. I wanna require this, and then I want analytics on what they did with their teams and how it went." And so now they have this accountability for their leaders. And so those are the two reasons why people use us.

(Doug Brent at 00:52:11) Yeah. That's very interesting. And I think that this sort of bite sized learning, whether it's just more human or whether we've been trained into that with YouTube and other things, that is the way people learn now. Like, I can't imagine sending somebody to a four day training course unless it's some deep technology subject that, you know, they need to do that. So that sounds very smart to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:33) Yeah. And we don't want people, like, learning. I know I said that. I want people doing it. Like, I want the leader going and doing a leader thing and then having that because we only remember what we experienced in real life. Right?

(Doug Brent at 00:52:44) I totally agree. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:46) I'll tell you how we were wrong.

(Doug Brent at 00:52:48) How were you wrong?

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:50) Well, the original idea is take these bits and distribute them to all the technologists at your company and then pay attention to who's engaging with them. Like, make it widely available and then watch who engages in how they think. Nobody wants to spend money on anything other than either training their existing leaders, which that's just it. That's the one thing. The two cases are they're just first time leader or they're senior leader. So nobody wants to just discover or have a leg up for everyone at the company. You know, it changes everything. It changes your business model, your pricing, everything.

(Doug Brent at 00:53:26) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:26) Everybody just wants... And that's okay. I didn't fight the market. I just said, okay. People wanna, let's just make the best version of what people want because that's our job in the market.

(Doug Brent at 00:53:37) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:38) So we did. Yeah.

(Doug Brent at 00:53:40) That's great. So what else?

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:44) Public speaking. Are you doing any public speaking in the near future?

(Doug Brent at 00:53:48) I do a lot of speaking on behalf of the company I work for and also this advisory board. I, just two weeks ago, we had our biggest user conference, about 5,000 people, and I was speaking at that conference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:05) Nice. What was the topic?

(Doug Brent at 00:54:07) So it was a little bit... It was actually, surprise, surprise, talking about autonomy and automation in the construction world, you know, this topic we talked about. And I think really pointing out for people that people get this problem difference that we talked about that really if you have an excavator out on a job site, moving the excavator is not the problem. That's not the automation problem. It's what does the excavator do when it gets there. And, you know, it's an area where there's a lot of technology investment by Trimble, by other companies right now. Just to give you one quick example of that. So, you know, an excavator is that thing that has the big bucket at the end of it. So there's two arms and a bucket. If you wanna dig a level trench, you actually, to do that, you have to change the angle of the bucket as you're moving, and you also have to change the, you know, the way, the angle of the two arms, sort of logical. So skilled operators to do that, they have joysticks, you know, sort of a complex video game, and it's nontrivial. It takes a while to learn how to do that. So if you outfit all this with sensors and control systems, you can just pull back on the joystick, basically say, you know, "I wanted a one foot trench dug here flat," and it does it for you. So, yeah, that was my most recent...

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:32) And that technology is here today?

(Doug Brent at 00:55:34) That technology is here today. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:36) Oh, that's exciting.

(Doug Brent at 00:55:37) Yeah. Yeah. And more. You know, it's in an era where around the world, I went to visit an Indian company, Indian construction company, that they said their number one problem is hiring skilled people. These outdoor jobs are dirty. They're dangerous. They're hard work. And so things you can do that make it easier to do those jobs are really well received around the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:04) Back to the farming. If it's easier to sit in there, it's gonna be well received. So as we wrap up, advice that you'd give to yourself ten years ago?

(Doug Brent at 00:56:14) That's a really good question because I've made a lot of mistakes in the last ten years, so I could have gotten advice. I think it's that, you know, maybe partly getting older as well that you hear people's life stories. And I could give you mine, a nice reverse engineered version of my life story. And it would sound very logical how I went from one thing to the next. But, basically, everything is just an opportunity that presents itself to you and you choose to do it or not. And that some of the most exciting things, the last two places I worked, I'd never heard of before I worked there. I'd never heard of Trimble. I was at this really strange and interesting thing called ICANN, the Internet sort of central control organization for domain names, addresses, things like that. And that was sort of by accident I got involved with that. Super interesting and impactful. So I think it's just, you know, as opposed to always trying to, you know, plan the future, look for the opportunities as they exist, and seize them and enjoy them. So that would be my advice to myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:22) That's some pretty good advice. I like that.

(Doug Brent at 00:57:24) Okay. Good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:25) Your past self thanks you, by the way.

(Doug Brent at 00:57:29) Good. Good to know. Thank you, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:31) Doug, this has been fantastic. We have made a podcast.

(Doug Brent at 00:57:37) Okay. Great. And I really enjoyed speaking with you. And, you know, I think, you know, just to share with you, I've, you know, as I said, I think you bring great energy to this. So, and good questions, and I felt like a very natural conversation. And I think it's great, you know, both I think it is a contribution just to make something like this available and a great way to get you and your brand out. So, you know, just congratulations for doing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:04) Aw. Thank you so much.

(Doug Brent at 00:58:06) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:07) Did you check out the episode with the CTO of NASA?

(Doug Brent at 00:58:11) It was on my list. I didn't get to that one. The ones I listened to yesterday were with this guy, was with the woman who is with the clothing Stitch Fix. Is that it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:24) Stitch Fix. Yes. Yes.

(Doug Brent at 00:58:26) Yep. And then another one I listened to was with a guy who he seemed like a really interesting guy in the Ruby world that, was it a cat print? Is that right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:38) A cat print. He did the physics for the mouse. Right? Did you... Yeah. So, like, with the acceleration, he did that with, like, a, not Adobe... Not Adobe. I'm blanking on the name. One of the original companies to do computers. Who made the first graphical user interface, but they didn't get...

(Doug Brent at 00:58:59) Maybe it was, oh, Xerox PARC.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:01) That's Xerox. He was...

(Doug Brent at 00:59:02) He worked at Xerox PARC. And yeah. You know, it's funny because I bet he and I are not that far apart in age. And I worked at Stanford Research when...

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:10) Oh, yeah.

(Doug Brent at 00:59:11) You know, Doug Engelbart first invented, they would say they first invented the computer mouse. Definitely, GUI was Xerox PARC. You're right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:19) Fantastic. Okay. Thank you so much. Jake is gonna reach out and get your address, and then we'll get the books off to you. And, yeah. I'll talk soon.

(Doug Brent at 00:59:26) Thanks, Joel. Nice meeting you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:34) Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]. If you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.