Ed Kuzemchak - CTO at Software Design Soloutions

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) It's difficult to be a technology leader. Here at the podcast, we spend our time making it easier for you, and we've gone even farther on this mission than just the podcast. Our goal this year is to help 100,000 technologists level up as leaders with Leaderbits. This could be as simple as you helping level someone else up on your team, you acting as the mentor, or maybe you're a team leader and you're looking to level up into a VP or director role. We are here for you at leaderbits.io to help you grow as a technology leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) Visit us and ask us all the questions that you have at leaderbits.io. Now get excited because today, we are talking to Ed, the CTO of Software Design Solutions, and we discuss finding people strong enough to tell you to step away, lessons learned going through the acquisition process, and creating an inviting culture where people want to come work. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:11) I like that you're a founder. I'm a founder as well. We're actually a company came out of the podcast. So it's tough though. It's not easy to do the founder thing.

(Ed at 00:01:20) No, no. And there are these levels where after you break over this level, now you kind of have free sailing until you get to that next level. And maybe that's, you know, certainly hiring your first full-time permanent employee. And then, of course, going to the whole benefits and HR and all of that. Then is another level of founder angst that you go through.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:45) Yeah. We tend to be getting on that. I think we have the latest hire starting today, actually, at like 3:00. And it's like people are starting to ask about benefits, and people are starting to ask about these other things where before we were just like, get someone on board who's super culture fit and who has the great skills, and like, let's just solve this tough problem together. It's like three or four of us sitting there at a table every day, and now we have like, offices.

(Ed at 00:02:10) Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We went through the same thing. And, you know, honestly, our first couple of hires were folks that we found that could manage to get their own benefits. Either they were provided by their spouse or they were able to go get their own private health insurance. But then once, you know, we actually lost a hire we really wanted to have because we didn't have a full benefit set. And they said, look, I just can't do this. I have to be at a real company.

(Ed at 00:02:36) And so I turned to my wife who was a co-founder and said, look, we're going to have to be a real company and go get these benefits. And, you know, she had the background so that she could come in and do all of the HR and everything. But, you know, we have a tech council here in Pittsburgh that we went through, and they were able to help us as a small, at the time, four or five person company—we're now 20—go get full up 401(k)s and health benefits and dental and vision and all these things that, you know, people with a real job expect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:11) Yeah. And it's amazing that now because your company—how old is it, 15 plus years old?

(Ed at 00:03:15) Yes. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:16) So you didn't have like, I've been looking at some of the HR softwares now. It's now like your HR person's like a SaaS app. There's like Gusto and—I don't know, that name just stuck with me for some reason. Have you heard of them?

(Ed at 00:03:32) I have not. I've not heard of them. I have to go look them up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:35) Yeah. I was searching for like, what do you do? I literally googled, "What are benefits?" Like, what a founder problem. Right?

(Ed at 00:03:44) It's exactly it. I mean, you get yourself into so many of these things where I was at two Fortune 500s before this. Oh, wow. Of course, there were entire departments to handle that sort of thing. Right? You know, you've got your benefits packet, and it was a shiny glossy packet, and it told you what your benefits were. Well, I realized now that behind all that, there's some people putting all that together, and now that has to be us. Right? But you're right. Nowadays, with all of this as web-based, SaaS-based, and you know, your employees can, if you want them to, they can work for that company and just report to you if you really want to do that.

(Ed at 00:04:23) You know, we've grown through all of that, and one of the most interesting things that I found was, you know, as we grew and got more and more people and more and more things, that starts to eat into your time about what are you going to do? What am I going to spend my time adding value? And you start to think, okay, where am I—what pieces of this do I have to be spending time on? What pieces shouldn't I be spending time on? I should trust someone else to go do. I guess as founders, we all have, you know, this little control issue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:59) Well, it's weird because we're constantly spinning up, we're creating new processes and then finding individuals to take them over. And if we're sticking around in a process too long, it's like, it's a problem. So, yeah, we're constantly detaching from our babies.

(Ed at 00:05:14) Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I have to find people who are strong enough to tell me to step away. Got this. You know, that they can say, look, I know that you started this, but now I've got this piece. Trust me to take this and do the right thing with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:32) The thing I'm not letting go of right now—and it's also, here, it's a dance too, because we'll sit, you and I will talk about this advice. We have a huge audience and everyone takes things differently. If you've ever written an article and posted it online, people get the weirdest things from what you write.

(Ed at 00:05:49) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:49) But when it's positive, it's great. So when we're talking about this, there's also a delicate balance between how much time you need to spend raising that process and refining it and hardening it prior to letting it go.

(Ed at 00:06:01) Right. Right. Absolutely. I mean, you know, perfect is the enemy of good there. You know, as you start down this path, you just have to say, look, you know, I have other things that have to get done. So I can develop the world's best mixture of healthcare, long-term disability, short-term, or I can just pick this package that everybody's going to be happy with and move on and focus on, you know, one of the biggest things that I'm sure that you folks focus on as well is culture, making sure that this is a place that people want to come to.

(Ed at 00:06:35) And, you know, as a small company, we're not going to have a coffee barista ready to serve you and a four-star chef, you know, carving up the roast beef for lunch. And down the street, there are companies that have that, and so we have to give something different. We have to say, look, we have a culture here. We start by, you know, people have fairly nice spacious offices and four monitors and things that they might not get at those other places. Whereas, you know, they might not have the barista, but they've got a 12 by 12 office, often private. You know, some nice space to call their own.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:13) That's amazing. Yeah. Because you don't want to leave your friends either. Right? If you make some cool friends at work, you don't want to—I remember some of the best projects I've had, I've built a lot of applications. So my background is actually building applications and software for companies, and then I would either get a part of it or just do contract work.

(Ed at 00:07:34) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:34) So I had an agency where we'd do that. And that's a lot of my background. Then here and there, I got actually paired off into the company. So I'd build it for them, and then I'd join it if it starts getting legs. But that explains why I was so bad with the HR stuff. All right. So, yeah. The best projects were the projects that I didn't want to leave the people. It was just so energizing when you're around great people. And last Friday, I was in Tampa, which is like an hour north of us, and I was listening to a guy named Tony Benedetto talk about how he grew his company from zero to $175 million.

(Ed at 00:08:14) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:15) Yeah. And it took him 18 years. So, like, it's, I believe it. Right? It's very believable. I don't like it when I hear, oh, $175 million in 18 months. Like, 18 years? Not only is that amazing, but it's like, look at that persistence. It's admirable. But he talked about, the whole talk was passion and culture. The thing that made all the difference, he accredits all his success to having great people.

(Ed at 00:08:42) It's absolutely the case. I mean, when people want to come in and they're excited about the next project and they're not looking to get off the project that they're on because they're like, oh, I just want to see this thing through. You know, I want to drive this thing to completion. I want to see it. We go out there, and I want to see customers using it, giving us feedback, good or bad. And let's go, you know, let's go make this happen with customers. You know, everything we do pretty much is contract for hire. It's deliverable to projects within another company. But at the same time, these people here have an ownership piece of that in terms of seeing it through and making the customer successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:26) So you're primarily embedded systems design. Right?

(Ed at 00:09:29) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:29) And then what field have you sort of gravitated towards? Like, do you do a lot of medical projects or automation? What?

(Ed at 00:09:37) So we do a lot of what used to be called machine-to-machine, but now is called Internet of Things. And so we're doing a lot of machine communication in the domains. We do a little bit of medical. We do a lot of industrial. And so that's, you know, industrial control. It might be sensing. It might be transportation industrial. We do some work in oil and gas and also in retail and restaurant. And so really anywhere where there's machinery that you can add sensors to and make the machinery more efficient, you know, is where we've taken the work that we used to know how to do in deep embedded and connected that to cloud.

(Ed at 00:10:22) And that really led to our acquisition two years ago. We were doing a lot of embedded work and a little bit of cloud work. And there was a company, Applied Visions, and their owner kind of looked at these two companies and said, oh, I've got a cloud-based company in Long Island, and here's an embedded system company in Pittsburgh. He was really excited about Pittsburgh because of the story that Pittsburgh has had over the last several years of its growth in tech. And he said, I was thinking about a Pittsburgh office, but here's a Pittsburgh company that might make a good synergistic match with my company. And so we brought those two companies together. And so now SDS and Applied Visions kind of join forces on a number of projects where we'll do the embedded side of it, they'll do the cloud side of it, mobile, all of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:07) That's amazing. So you have experience in this M&A space.

(Ed at 00:11:11) Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, this is the fourth acquisition I've been part of kind of on the buy or sell side. Two on the buy side, two on the sell side. And that's because I started at a little startup out of Carnegie Mellon University that was bought. And so I got to experience the sell side there, bought by Texas Instruments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:38) Oh, that's a nice buy.

(Ed at 00:11:40) So it's a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:41) That's a cool buy.

(Ed at 00:11:42) Yeah. It was a small group of 30, 40 engineers and some marketing folks building compilers for digital signal processors.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:53) I love it.

(Ed at 00:11:54) Those folks got scooped up by Texas Instruments who was huge into digital signal processing at the time. This was, you know, early nineties. Mid-nineties, I guess, that would be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:05) Mid, early nineties, you would see me sitting in an office at a computer programming some BASIC code, and my father is doing this to keep me busy, whether he's having me move items around in memory or showing me table—oh, what was that? I've lost it because it's been 2070—I'm in my early thirties now, but he would have me searching for things inside a disk partition. Like, it was crazy, this stuff. And he was embedded systems design. He got his experience in the Air Force, and then he came out and they invented these—he was like the number three hire at this company that ended up having thousands-plus people and going public, but they invented these screens that go inside golf carts. So they had GPS units in them. They were screens. They look like little—if you were to look at one and hold it, it looked, it felt like a tablet, but it was like a '92, you know, '93. And they had their own GPS chips in them with signals, and they would go to the satellite and pay for the satellite time or whatever it was. But it was just unbelievable how advanced that technology was then.

(Ed at 00:13:10) Right. Right. And nowadays, you know, you just pull up your phone and that's the same technology. But back then, that was a large leap at the time to do all of that in that kind of technology. That probably had some DSPs in it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:23) So what was your role during the first acquisition? Were you just a team member?

(Ed at 00:13:29) I was a technical lead during that acquisition. And then after joining TI, I went on the buy side because TI went on this buying binge. After buying us—our little company was called Tartan Laboratories—they were in this acquisition phase of buying small companies in the DSP software space. And so I joined a team of folks that went around and analyzed companies for acquisition. And so I was basically doing the technical due diligence. There were all kinds of business people doing the business side of due diligence. I was doing the technical due diligence of, let's say we went and bought this company, what would we do with the technology? How would we take it and bring it in and integrate it with the technology that we currently have?

(Ed at 00:14:19) And, of course, the business folks don't look at that side of the integration problem. They just look at the numbers or the dollars and say, oh, they have these customers and maybe we want those customers. But at the same time, you might have 30 engineers with a small company culture, and you're going to ask them to go join a Fortune 500 culture like we just had. You know, we had folks, you know, walking around the office pushing their bicycles to their cube and, you know, then we get the manual from Texas Instruments that said, well, if you're this level of pay grade, you should have these size walls and this size chair and you should have this computer and that monitor. And we're like, what? You know, this is not something—fortunately, we were, you know, 1,200 miles away from the main office, and so, you know, we had some leeway there to keep our local culture. Right? There was a large push at that time not to mess too much with local culture as we did these acquisitions.

(Ed at 00:15:22) So during that time, we acquired two more companies. And so I got to watch those folks go through the same transition process that we had just gone through two years earlier. And we learned some things. I mean, thinking back, I should have written a memoir during that time of the pluses and minuses of how to do those kind of acquisitions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:45) Okay. So let's talk back. Sorry. You're a technical lead and you get acquired. Okay? And this happens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:52) Companies get acquired all the time. I actually had a conversation about two or three months ago. I won't mention the person's name, but he was a team lead, a team of 40 to 60. Company got acquired by a foreign company so they could have a presence in the U.S. in the payments space. And, you know, they put a freeze on everything. And what happened was this talent got stripped because they were in, make quote unquote, maintenance mode, no building new projects.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:21) Everyone's on salary, but they can't do anything. It's like, you can't do anything, you can't approve my project. And so what happened was they instantly lost, you know, a third of their staff essentially overnight from the freeze, and they were still going to get paid. Right. But it was just the creativity loss and the feeling of getting acquired by the bigger company and getting shut down. So you didn't experience something like that though, did you?

(Ed at 00:16:49) We didn't because we were in, by this time, we're now into the late nineties, and this is the go-go late nineties. And I was—

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:59) Pre-crash.

(Ed at 00:16:59) I don't know if you remember. Yes. Pre-crash. So this is pre-crash. And so things are going crazy, and there's, you know, this is at the time when TI was very focused on these kinds of processors, these kinds of tools.

(Ed at 00:17:15) And, really, the challenge here was to bring people from multiple companies that had multiple road maps before. Each of these companies, by the way, were third party partners with the company previously. But they had their own road maps, their own product road maps about what they thought was the best thing to do next. And so my role, and one of the interesting things, little story about working for a large company, I was not allowed to put engineer on my business card because in Texas, to put engineer on your business card, you have to be a PE.

(Ed at 00:17:54) And so there are no software PEs. And so we were told to make up a title. At the time, Bill Gates had just turned chief software architect. So that's what I put on my business card. That's what people started calling me.

(Ed at 00:18:09) So I just started flying around to the different sites that we had acquired: one on the West Coast, one in Canada, here in Pittsburgh. And basically, trying to herd the cats, trying to organize, what are we doing with these road maps? You guys have this product road map here. It's great, but we need to mesh it with what people are doing on the hardware side. We need to mesh it with what other people are doing on their other software side. Let's get these meetings together.

(Ed at 00:18:36) And so that was the next four or five years of my life was making sure that those pieces got aligned. And that was, you know, that fit well with the title that I picked.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:49) Yeah. And it wasn't as easy as like Slacking back and forth with each other.

(Ed at 00:18:53) No. No. No. I love Slack. Slack would have been a great thing to have at that time.

(Ed at 00:18:59) But at least it wasn't so old company that it wasn't memos. And so, you know, we would often, once a month, we would try and get together face to face because, you know, you're still in this phase where these people are new to you, and you're trying to bring people together and get them to trust each other. And, you know, they're all very highly experienced, high energy people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:32) Right.

(Ed at 00:19:32) And you don't want them to stall. You know what I mean? You don't want them to say, you know, this is taking too long. I'm just gonna give up, or we're gonna go do this side thing and show them when it's done. Right.

(Ed at 00:19:44) You know? And you want to pull them together because, I mean, we had a, you know, we had a team prior to the acquisition. The team was probably counted in a couple dozen. All of a sudden, we have well over a hundred people that we can apply to a software problem. That's amazing.

(Ed at 00:19:59) And now we, you know, have a hundred people to apply to a software problem, which is a whole other set of organizational challenges. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:08) So if you were to take one, I guess, nugget from the first transition or acquisition when you were a technical lead at TI, what was the big shiny experience that you walked away? If you were saying, I learned one thing from this part of my life. Right? What advice is that?

(Ed at 00:20:30) Certainly, one of the biggest things I think is don't try and fix things that are already working. You know what I mean? When you, you know, and that means that sometimes you're gonna change your plans. I mean, you made this acquisition with some thought in mind about what you're going to do with this company you just acquired. It may not work out that way.

(Ed at 00:21:00) You have to be really, really flexible because quite honestly, the acquisition of my company wasn't that way. That was their first acquisition, and it was like, okay, we just hired basically 30 people. Let's have them follow our way. And we didn't get out of it as much as we could have.

(Ed at 00:21:20) And the second and third acquisitions that were made, we approached it in a much different way. We said, okay. Let's go there. Let's see what they have. Let's figure out what their road maps are. Let's figure out if we need to alter our plans to fit their road maps because, you know, you don't always get to see the full picture during acquisition. Right. Your due diligence is not a 100% process. So let's go see and maybe you only get to talk to the first layer of management. Let's go talk to the real working engineers and figure out what they're passionate about and get them involved in what we're passionate about or vice versa. Maybe we change, you know, change our perspective.

(Ed at 00:21:59) And that really worked well with the fourth acquisition, which is Applied Visions acquiring SDS, because we have a different kind of set of customers. You know, folks that purchase cloud applications are kind of in a different ballgame than your average industrial company that has never done software before, and they're moving from a non-programmable control system, maybe something that uses PLCs or ladder logic, and they're moving to a full-up program. Teaching them about software, teaching them about security, teaching them about the capabilities that they could have and an incremental approach in doing those kind of things. And, you know, certainly, we've got a lot of education about how to deal with larger customers. They've got a lot of education about how to deal with much smaller customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:59) So it worked well?

(Ed at 00:23:00) Yeah. It certainly has.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:02) How did you meet this individual?

(Ed at 00:23:05) So we were, we actually put the company on the market, and we were introduced. And so that, you know, it wasn't the kind of thing where I ran into them at a, you know, at a bar somewhere or something like that. It was, you know, we were brought together by a third party. And that, you know, that ended up working very well.

(Ed at 00:23:26) And it wasn't the first introduction that was made to us. I mean, we walked away from others because the fit just wasn't there. You know, it was about two and a half years ago, almost three years ago, where we decided, you know what? The growth here was good, and we were at a ten, twelve kind of person count, head count, for a long time. And, quite honestly, it wasn't till after the acquisition that I realized why we, over 15 years, bumped up against 12 people and went down, bumped up against 12 people and went down, bumped up against 12 people and went down.

(Ed at 00:24:04) It was—

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:04) You take some ownership of that. Yep. There you go. I love it. You got to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:09) You got to.

(Ed at 00:24:10) Because I had my fingers in every project, and I was the limiting factor. So I was the limiting factor having my fingers in every project.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:19) I love you so much right now because not only did you realize that you paid the experience cost of it. Right? So it's like, and then the fact that you're sharing this is just, it's amazingly genuine, and it'll keep other people from preventing the same mistake.

(Ed at 00:24:36) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't until, you know, I'd like to have said I realized the mistake and then corrected and did the—it wasn't until after the acquisition that I realized, wow. Why are we at 20 some people now, and how can that work? Well, it's because there are projects going on here that I know what they're doing, but I don't write any of that code.

(Ed at 00:24:57) Yeah. When we were at 12 people, I was in every project writing code. Oh. That's fun. I mean, it's fun. It's awful fun. But it does mean that now I have an engineering manager who's a certified agile coach and a certified security guy, and so he manages the day to day of these projects. And I can focus on things like understanding technology, things like presenting at conferences, things like talking with you where I can learn things. Just watching the several episodes on your side, I've already learned some things, and I can spend more time doing that and growing my ability to help this place more than writing code. I realized, you know, my wife who runs the accounting side of SDS is awesome with Excel and all of the surrounding tools, and she was able to point out to me, look, you're too expensive to write code.

(Ed at 00:25:53) You shouldn't be writing code. We have people that can write code, albeit better than you, but certainly less expensive than you. So you've gotta stop. And so you've gotta go do things like talk with customers. You have to be the guy that goes and sells our capabilities, not cold calling, which I'm no good at.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:13) No. I don't think anybody's good at cold calling.

(Ed at 00:26:17) Right? But that second meeting, that meeting where a customer is like, okay. Yeah. I wanna talk with you guys to figure out if you're for real.

(Ed at 00:26:24) Um, that's a meeting I love to do. And I used to do those, but after I got 12 people's worth of work here, I would be so consumed writing code in four or five different projects that I would stop going out and doing that new business development, that filling the pipeline that gets us from 12 to 14 to 16 to 20, which is where we're at now. So, I mean, if there's one piece of advice I would say for founders is figure out a way to get out of that. Figure out a way to take a few things that you do, even if you like doing them, and hand them off so that you can spread, you know, spread wider.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:06) I noticed that at the big companies, or at least, let's just say companies with like 30 people. Right? The individual that's going around speaking, right, that's going around doing these things, that's spending time with the customers, that's closing the big deals. They almost always have the craft of whatever the work is being done because they started out by doing the work, and then they did the work so well that they attracted enough people to them that they now have to spend time away from doing the work in order just to talk to the people that want their level of quality. And that, for me, when I realized that probably in my mid, about seven years ago, my early twenties, mid twenties, and I said, alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:53) I keep building these basic apps and then finding teams and then moving on. And then if I'm gonna do an agency, I have to, you know, be able to spend time with this person writing me a six-figure check.

(Ed at 00:28:05) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:05) And they wanna know how the project's going every week. And if I wrote someone a six-figure check, I would want the same thing.

(Ed at 00:28:11) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:11) And they wanted me, not a project manager. Right? So I found somebody that I trusted and that had enough of my quality that I could sign my name to it and then, you know, keep tabs on it. We had style guides and things like that. I'm sure you have that with your code now.

(Ed at 00:28:28) But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:29) Yeah. Now they've got amazing tools that even like you check it into GitHub or whatever, and it's like if it's not the style guide, it's kicking it back out.

(Ed at 00:28:35) Yep. Continuous integration is a wonderful thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:38) It's better than standing in line to run your punch card programming.

(Ed at 00:28:43) I'm not that old. Although, I have run those. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:46) I've seen a video of someone right now.

(Ed at 00:28:51) Yeah. I mean, I've been very fortunate that, you know, my career has spanned the level of technology that it has spanned. You know? My first computer, you said you were sitting down at a basic computer. Mine was in, you know, early high school, and that was 4K of memory.

(Ed at 00:29:11) And it was, you know, and I got a lot done in 4K of memory with BASIC, and I had a great time with that and fell in love with that. And, matter of fact, I still have the ad from the newsletter where I published my first advertisement for a program that I wanted to sell. Really? Yep. I sold one copy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:28) That's amazing. You gotta take a picture of that, post on LinkedIn, and then tag me in it.

(Ed at 00:29:33) I will. I will. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:34) I wanna see that. Are you speaking at any conferences this year?

(Ed at 00:29:38) Yeah. Actually, I'm getting on a plane this afternoon. Okay. I'm headed to IDTechEx.

(Ed at 00:29:45) This is a conference in Santa Clara. It seems like there is an IoT conference in Santa Clara pretty much every other week. And this is an interesting conference because it's a combination. It's IoT. It's also 3D design and flexible, wearable, basically, fabrics with the embedded electronics in them.

(Ed at 00:30:05) So it's a lot of that kind of broad coverage of all the technologies. I'm speaking there on the promise and practice of industrial IoT. And I do a lot of that kind of speaking about how to apply IoT, how to get ROI out of IoT. You know, basically, as people are, you know, we get a lot of, I think, a lot of C-level kind of managers saying, we gotta have some IoT in this product. We gotta have, you know, internet connectivity. And the mid-level, you know, engineering kind of managers are like, what does that mean? Where should we go with this?

(Ed at 00:30:44) And we're scared of the security aspects of this. And so we really want to be able to, you know, what I say to those folks is start small, pick some prototype kind of project, bring someone in to help you, and let's build a piece of this. Find some low-hanging fruit. You don't have to IoT every little piece of your system, but find something, whether it's predictive maintenance or whether it's efficiency or something that you think you can measure a little better if you had continuous measurement, and go for that.

(Ed at 00:31:13) I was, I was at Fog World Congress recently, Sensors Expo. And so we kind of go back and forth between very detailed, specific conferences like Sensors Expo, which is all about just sensors, or a specific technology like fog-based processing, which is processing not at the cloud and not down at the nodes, but somewhere in the middle, which we feel very passionate about, or these broad conferences like IDTechEx. This is the first time I've been to it. It should be interesting. It's a very large conference with a lot of different types of speakers there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:54) And then I like that when you mentioned all the different things that'll be there, the fabrics, the IoT, all that great stuff. I like that we're at a point in life right now where there can be so many advancements in so many different fields, it can't even be disseminated to all the people. We can't all know what's happening. Before, I remember driving to Tampa, right, in the probably late nineties. I was in the car with my parents, and every other week we'd go up there to see family or something, and there'd be a new Pentium billboard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:22) Right? We've got the three. We got the four. We got the five. It just kept going up and up and up and up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:28) And I was just like, wow. But that's the thing that the whole nation would be talking about.

(Ed at 00:32:33) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:34) Right? But now it's like we have 3D printing hearts, and we've got fabrics, and I just saw a foldable LED screen the other day.

(Ed at 00:32:42) I know. Yes. It is amazing that, and it used to be that very much like you said, when there was an innovation made, it was made in one domain, whether it was in industrial or automotive or whatever, and it wasn't easily transferred to another domain. Nowadays, you have a sensor and maybe you have the ability to imprint fabric, imprint electronics in a sensor, and it can go through the washing machine and that's great. Well, that has a lot of different kinds of uses.

(Ed at 00:33:14) A lot of uses that people aren't even thinking of yet. And I see so many interesting uses of those things, not just, of course, for health and wellness with exercise clothing and that kind of stuff, but also I saw recently in one of these conferences, someone was doing it to help people through their rehabilitation after surgery. It would guide them to say you're doing this exercise correctly, you're not doing this exercise correctly. Or compliance, are you doing the exercises at home that you said you were going to do, or do we need to send you to PT to do the exercises guided to get you better? Or fall detection with the elderly. I mean, I think there's so many of these things where our technology can be developed in one place and cost reduced, which is important because that used to be the goal.

(Ed at 00:34:05) That used to be the role of government and military and all of that, is to develop these advanced technologies that then you could cost reduce to consumers. But nowadays, you can get cost reduction out of other products in consumer electronics and then use them in other fields. So it's going the other direction. We're starting to see consumer level electronics getting used in medical instead of the other way around.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:30) And then how are you getting to these conferences? So I get a lot of people that ask me about that. Are you, do you have a team member of yours that's helping submit you? PR? How do you get yourself out there?

(Ed at 00:34:42) So we do have a marketing firm that we work with that kind of helps me, guides me toward which conferences might be useful based on the kind of hits we're getting on our website and these kinds of things. But generally, I do my own submissions in terms of abstracts. We have a fairly specific thing we like to talk about, which is IoT, fog-based processing. I like to talk about either a very detailed topic like MQTT and how it works, or a very high level topic, which is what the IDTechEx conference is. And that's about, you know, how do you justify the return on investment and how do you start an IoT project? Because I think that's a real stumbling block for a lot of companies. They want to do something in IoT.

(Ed at 00:35:36) They don't want to fail on a large project. So I say fail on a small project.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:41) That's what I say.

(Ed at 00:35:44) Fail on two or three until you get one right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:47) So the next step for you would be to record these. Do you record them and post clips of you saying really cool lines on social media?

(Ed at 00:35:56) That's a very good point. That's a very good point. You know, that's one of the things that our marketing agency is saying: Okay, we're getting a lot of effort put into these slide sets and presentations and all of these things. We need to reuse this content because that's what they're about.

(Ed at 00:36:12) I'm about reusing code. They're about reusing words. Right? Yes. So this is one opportunity, doing these kinds of discussions with folks like Joel.

(Ed at 00:36:24) Awesome. You know, where we can point people to them and say, look, we got this cool podcast, Modern CTO. Go view it, and go view all the others too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:34) It's crazy. I love the podcast, but I would say 99% of the time, I forget people are listening. I'm always like, Jake, we gotta cut some of the bad stuff. Because we'll do real talk too. Sometimes people will share stuff, and afterwards we'll be talking, we're like, yeah, we'll probably edit that out. You know? We've had acquisition mentions. The number of amazing blooper things that we've had to cut out are—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:01) It's a lot of fun.

(Ed at 00:37:03) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:03) Yeah. Definitely reusing the slide decks or, you know, getting—do you travel with a team member?

(Ed at 00:37:10) I sometimes travel with the owner because he likes to see where his money is being spent. But also, on top of that, wants to kind of figure out this space and figure out how best to position us. Right? Sometimes, another thing that we do is we send some of our team instead of me.

(Ed at 00:37:31) I mean, we send our agile, our certified agile coach who's my engineering manager, to an agile conference. We'll send him to a security conference. We send some of our embedded engineers to Embedded Systems East. And so, I mean, that's an opportunity for people to get up and get out of the office, go represent the company, learn something new, you know, put aside the code that you're working on for a day or two and go look at some really shiny cool stuff. Right?

(Ed at 00:37:59) Come back energized about using shiny cool stuff in my next project. You know? And I think that's important to have people have that opportunity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:07) Oh, it's very important. It also helps with recruiting because people are going to—they have the skill set. They're paying to learn from other smart people. That just takes 80% of the people out of the equation.

(Ed at 00:38:20) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:20) It's like now we found just the people who are willing to pay to learn and improve from other smart people, and then they'd have the opportunity after the talks to either share and provide your people with great insight or information and perspectives and then to build relationships for future growth hires.

(Ed at 00:38:36) Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, my goal would be to basically have folks recognize us first from one of these conferences or meet us. So either the best goal would be meet us and then say, oh, yeah.

(Ed at 00:38:54) I saw you at such and such a conference. Because that's the kind of instant credibility that really drives home: these folks are worth talking to. These aren't just folks that knocked on my door and said, hey, can we sell you some IoT stuff?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:09) I love it. It's like Girl Scouts but for IoT.

(Ed at 00:39:12) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:13) I'll buy some Thin Mints, though.

(Ed at 00:39:15) Yeah. That was nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:17) Ed, you know, we made a podcast, man.

(Ed at 00:39:21) Right. Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:22) I'm excited.

(Ed at 00:39:23) Yeah. This has been great. I mean, so I think that, you know, these kinds of discussions—I mean, like I said, I listened to three, four of the other podcasts, and it seems like they all go different places. I hope this one went a useful place for you. I certainly enjoyed talking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:41) Yeah. That's what it is. It's for us, for our relationship. Right? And then, inevitably, there's always value. It's just the universe has this weird way of working where the right person's going to hear this at the right time, and it'll provide them value.

(Ed at 00:39:54) Yeah. I hope it does. I hope it does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:57) And if it does, you're on LinkedIn. Right?

(Ed at 00:39:59) Yes. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:00) People can reach out to you on LinkedIn.

(Ed at 00:40:02) You'll find me on LinkedIn. You'll find my speaking events at our website, softwaredesignsolutions.com. There, you can see all of the slide decks from all the conferences that I attend and links to podcasts like this one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:15) Awesome. If you ever need anything from me at all, you have my contact information. Just reach out directly. Jake will be in touch about when we're going to deploy. We'll slice it up into these things called micro content clips of you saying great advice. You gave some amazing acquisition insights. That was—thank you so much for that.

(Ed at 00:40:34) Cool. And to my knowledge, there's nothing we have to cut. We're good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) Yeah. I know. There was no acquisition slips on this episode of the Modern CTO podcast.

(Ed at 00:40:44) No insider stock tips. None of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:47) And we'll begin that conversation right now.

(Ed at 00:40:50) Exactly. Let's talk. Yeah. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:54) Awesome. Well, have a safe travel, safe flight. And then if you need anything at all, you just reach out.

(Ed at 00:40:59) Great. Thank you so much, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:01) Talk soon, Ed.

(Ed at 00:41:02) Bye now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:07) Bye. 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.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:31) We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.