Aaron Suzuki - Increasing Return on IT Investments, and Balancing Tradeoffs in Management

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:02) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Aaron, the CEO and founder of SmartDeploy, and we discuss how SmartDeploy is reimagining desktop management, the challenges of balancing trade-offs as a management team, and why treating your employees with respect is the smartest business move in the long run. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:00:39) Hello, hello. Hi there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41) How are you?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:00:42) Doing alright. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:44) Fantastic. Looks like you have some graffiti back there.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:00:47) Yeah, yeah. I met a guy who was an old school LA writer, as they call themselves, and did some pieces for the office, did a big mural, and I had him do a little panel for me to take home. So kind of fun. Looks authentic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:09) It definitely does. What's the theme? Just creative inspiration, or was there a specific theme to it?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:01:15) Well, it actually says my last name, Suzuki, in kanji, right? Which is like the—so I don't understand this very well. I should because I'm half Japanese. But there's the Japanese characters that are based on Chinese characters, and then there are the actual invented Japanese characters, which is something called—something else, hiragana. I can't remember. And then there's this different combination, and they use them all. You know, and it's very complex. But the interesting thing is this is just—he doesn't use any special tips. He just uses the stock tip on the can and just has a technique and makes it perfect. You know, it's just amazing to me. It really is amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:56) It looks really cool.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:01:58) You know, you see the trains go by that are covered in this stuff, and it's like a rolling art museum these days. These guys do. It's just awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) I like it when they'll be improving, like, a part of our town, and they'll invite the people to come do some murals or something and make it look really cool. And I think that's—I like that. It gives a little—when it's done professionally and when it's welcomed and they have time to set up and do it right, it really can add some cool unique style to the community.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:02:28) I agree. I agree. And it gets more respect, right, from the writers too. They're not as inclined to do their own thing there because, you know, it's already nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:38) So do you have a creative background?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:02:40) Not really. I'm incredibly, you know, kind of math and science oriented. I've always—I've been into music and, you know, played trombone and baritone for years, been geek at heart, but, you know, not very creative myself. I appreciate it. I like the performing arts. I like visual art, but I like what I like, but I'm not—I don't know. You?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:11) Me? I play a little music. I play a little bit of piano, guitar. Growing up, I was in marching band. I played the alto saxophone all the way through middle school and into high school.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:03:22) Great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:22) And yeah. So that was quite the experience. And yeah. I like to geek out about everything. I love design. I'm not a designer, but when I see great design, I'm just like, I'm so enamored by it. Like, this is just beautiful.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:03:38) Yeah. I guess I would say that I am an observer, but I'm not a doer on the creative side, except for music where I still—I love jazz. I think it's just such an amazing art form. I love to cook. You know, I think there's a lot of artistry in the culinary arts as they call it, but I think that there's a lot to be said for, you know, the technical execution plus doing all the things with flavors. Quite a quite an undertaking. I don't have the palate for, you know, like, for that really detailed taste and getting that nuance. My wife can just taste every single note and say, oh, cardamom or something, you know, and I'm yeah, tastes good. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:25) I don't even know what that is. So that shows how much I know. Oh, man. No. That that's exciting. I'm—when I was doing the prep for talking with you and by the way, it's just real casual. We just kind of hang out. The team edits it up, makes us sound way smarter than we are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:41) Nice. But when I was doing the prep, I got to see your background. And, you know, I do a lot of these interviews, so I can kind of get a feel for different people. And when I saw your background with skiing and different outdoors activities, and I was just like, yep, I am super excited for this conversation because yeah, I've just found that people who have rounded out other parts of their lives, had filled up other parts of their lives, they just have this added flare of experience.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:05:08) Yeah. I definitely have lots of interest. You know, I think so much of the tech industry really idolizes the overachievers. You know, Elon and Gates and all these guys. They kind of only do one thing. They just work, which is cool. Good. I mean, they're super passionate. They're super focused. One of the things I always admired about Paul Allen is he'd lead with that discussion. Like, I have lots of interest, ripping guitar player. Right? I don't know if you ever heard him play. There was—I never heard him until I saw that Sixty Minutes interview, and the guy is amazing and knew all the guys that I really admired. You know, eighties rock stars and stuff. And so I think there's a lot to be said for having that in terms of the life you live and, you know, the good things that follow. But the guys that are super focused get a lot done. There's no doubt about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:04) Yeah. I think in Inside Bill's Brain on Netflix, that documentary, I think it was that one, but they briefly alluded to the fact that Paul Allen went to pursue music or something of this sort.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:06:16) Yeah. Yeah. I happen to live in the same town where he had his primary residence. And I know there's a lot of health stuff going on as well, but I think that was a big part of it. You know? He was always doing lots of different things. And after he left Microsoft, he started Vulcan, which is, of course, a nod to his sci-fi passion and all of that. And you can see in that as well that they did a lot of things. You know, they did some kind of classic venture investing. They did a ton of real estate stuff. You know, bought the Seahawks, the Trail Blazers. I mean, he was kind of all over the place, but in a good way, in my opinion. You know, really tried some new things and definitely left a positive mark, in my opinion, on Seattle. Really did a lot for the town in a good way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:13) Is that where you grew up?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:07:15) No. I'm a Midwest kid, you know, which is kind of funny to say because I was actually born in Honolulu, Hawaii, but all my formative years were in rural Minnesota. So here I was, this half Asian kid in what was then a very, you know, lily white, very rural setting. We were the big town. You know? So I grew up, and the norm was, you know, tractors going down the street regularly. It was not unusual. I grew up working summers doing farm jobs, and that was how I made money. You know? And that sort of is where some of the work ethic came from, I think, too, you know, and the respect for hard work and the respect for your time and others' time and just doing all the things that need to be done. There's a lot of jobs. I think it helps make you a better entrepreneur too for that matter, you know, when you've got to pull the rocks out of the field so it doesn't, you know, damage the machine that goes and harvests the crops. It's such a brutal manual labor job, but in order to see these beautiful crops grow that make these unbelievable yields happen, it just gives you a little bit of a connection to where stuff comes from and what it takes to get it done. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:35) Yeah. I agree with that a lot. I find that we lack a lot of that because we have such little manual labor these days in our everyday lives, especially professionals. But I noticed that I pick up this winning edge of discipline at the gym because it's like I have to put the weight up because I know if I put the weight up, I'll feel good. And so I go in there, I don't want to do it, but I know that I have to do it. And then once it's done, it feels great. And then you get better results and you're happier later when you're looking in the mirror and life is just better, and you feel better and you sleep better. And so you don't want to do it, but you have to do it. And so you get into this habit of you quit thinking about it. You just go in there and do it. You're just like, I'm over this forever internal monologue debate in my head. I'm just doing it.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:09:22) Totally agree. It's almost that decision of, you know, the best day to work out is the day you least want to work out. And when you kind of achieve that mental commitment or agreement or I don't know—you just resolve that that's the best way. Because when you see those results and positive things happen, then you have those kinds of outcomes and everyone's, you know, feeling better about themselves. All the positives flow out of that. Then on the easy days, it's even easier. You're super stoked. Now on the hard days, you know that's what you're up against. Right? I mean, that's a—I agree. That's a really rewarding thing. I don't think many people share that attitude. I think for a lot of people, it's really a struggle, you know, which is why the New Year's resolution and the big wave of enrollments in gyms the new year is such a thing. You know, it's funny to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:17) So I think they haven't crossed what I call the pain threshold. And that would be, like, most people live their lives to try to avoid pain, right? And they're not comfortable with it. They don't understand it. I'm very comfortable. I know exactly what maximum pain is, and it's just the duration at which I'm going to stay there. And then I decide to make sure I don't burn out because I know what happens if you stay at maximum pain too long. But, you know, you sort of yo-yo, and even in small decisions, I think a lot of people can understand this is you'll yo-yo back and forth until the pain of yo-yoing is greater than the pain of just actually doing it, and that's the threshold.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:10:51) Yeah. I think that's part of it. I think people who don't get to this, you know, kind of breakthrough of, you know, if you're a committed cyclist, sometimes you ride in the rain and you go out when the weather's lousy because you want to be strong on the bike. And if you haven't done that enough to see it come back in the form of results of either having better fitness or being able to ride faster and longer or up a hill or whatever that outcome is, the weight loss goal, whatever it might be, if you haven't had that achievement, boy, it can be really defeating. Right? I think that's maybe part of the breakthrough. And there's a great show, I think a highly underrated show on Amazon called Patriot. Not to be confused with the movie. I don't know if you've seen this, but they talk about the Van Tasner Danger Meridian or something like this, and it's this line you cross. And once you cross that line, all the rules change. And I think it's a little bit like that with this, the self-discipline and working out thing. And I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:58) Yeah. And I think it's important back to the entrepreneur concept as well or building a company or being a leader within a company, whether it's a mid-level manager or executive. The people that are around you will subsequently make that harder or easier to achieve.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:12:15) I agree. I completely agree. And this is partly maybe where culture starts to come to bear as well. If you have leadership that all has experienced and, you know, lives that a little bit, they bring that to their teams. You know? And not everyone's going to be that way, and that's okay. And there should be that kind of diversity of attitude and self-belief, I think, to have the best teams. But when you have sort of that top-down willingness to push through challenges, you have better outcomes invariably. Invariably. And so we've been fortunate in our business doings that initially, by luck, we had enough people who were that way. I was that way, fortunately, you know, to a point of where the discussion started, but that we happen to have. And for everyone, it's not all just sort of the physical challenge either. It's not all, I'm going to torture myself in the gym, I'm going to torture myself on the bike or on the run. You know, it can come in different fronts and in different ways. For some, it's parenting. Right? They're heroic parents, you know, or on the music side, right? Too. Just getting more and more complex execution of whatever, a run on the piano or, you know, there's—you can take it in any number of directions, but, you know, it all comes back to commitment, I think, too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:45) Yeah. I mean, I have found that one of the games of life, as I think about it, is finding the thing I don't want to do and making myself do it.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:13:57) You know, that's interesting, Joel, because I'm kind of going the other way these days. I'm trying to find more of the things I want to do and doing more of those, but I know what you're saying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:06) There's a time and a place. It's not like I'm, you know, I'm weird though. It's like when I'll eat my food, I'll say, all right, which is the piece of food on the plate I want to eat the most and I'll eat that last.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:14:18) Yeah. Save the best for last. I get that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:20) Yeah. I've just—it's, you know, life is long, right? And in one perspective, life is long. And so I play these little games to try to keep it interesting, and one of them is micro improvements at discipline.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:14:33) Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it goes back to the working out on the days you least want to, right? And always having that willingness and commitment to do it. And the more you do it, the less hard it is. And so you've got to find the next hardest thing that's going to get you what you want to achieve. Right? On some level, it's about goals and sounds like for you, maybe the goal is to have fewer boundaries or have fewer personal boundaries. You know, for me, it's become increasingly focused around the things I love. I've also found—and I don't know if you found this yourself—but my life is getting so full of these hobbies and interests that if I add another one, the journey of that is so disruptive to the other things that I really love. And it's the gear and the carving out the time and the, you know, going and getting to do it and still having time to do the other things and still being able to, you know, show up at work and do a good job and be a good parent and, you know, keep everything on track. There, you know, sometimes the trade-offs become challenging along with getting enough sleep that you don't show up at the gym and push yourself and then have an injury that sets you back, and now you're having to reset. Right? That's the other part of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:50) Oh, yeah. We all go. We all experience the recklessness and then we learn that that's not a good place to be. We learn that one real quick. Yeah. I fully agree, man. You're an absolutely fascinating person.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:16:04) Thanks, man. Yeah. It's—I think that it's—life has become, for me, what it is as a function of feeling motivated to not just follow the rules or not just follow the playbook. I guess I've always seen the goal line and thought, how do I get there faster? I tried—I was—I love Minnesota, and I have a lot of respect for Minnesotans.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:16:38) And I love Minnesotans and don't sound like one much anymore, but I graduated from high school a year early because I just felt like I didn't need to do that much more. And it was painful, and it probably was not the best idea, but I did it. And so then I started college early, and I started taking these 300, 400 level classes, like, my second year, which was kind of also a mistake. But there were all these secondary learnings that came along with that. One of which was they're in an order for a reason.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:17:11) Right? But as a result, it sort of just taught me that you can push and achieve what you want your own way. Do your own thing according to your own agenda. Very much the Dave Grohl school of music. Right? Never take a lesson. Don't take lessons. Teach yourself. Do it your way. I've never taken a ski lesson in my life. Aside from the odd ski guide saying, oh, you know, you should try, think about this. I've never taken a ski lesson. I've been skiing for thirty-five years. I've skied all over the world on the biggest stuff you see in the movies, and it's great, and I love it. It's my first passion and just did it my own way.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:17:55) And then, I mean, as a result though too, business has also suffered some of those challenges and setbacks doing it my own way, being so determined and emboldened, self-emboldened that, you know, I'm just charging ahead with my head down and not maybe slowing down enough to learn and see that the slow way might be the fast way. Right? As they say in avalanche recovery, go slow to go fast. And when you're rushing is when you make a mistake, and that's the moments that could save a life. So there certainly is a degree of that, but there's also evidence that pushing the way we have is translated into the success that we enjoy today in our business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:41) Yeah. Tell me a little bit about your current business.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:18:44) The business we have exists because we had a customer. And I think we almost lost track of that. So we started a consulting business in 2003 called Browse Consulting, and it thrives and flourishes to this day and is a great business. But we saw these trends emerging in technology, virtualization. The notion of the cloud was still sort of abstract. Computing wasn't catching up, but virtualization was there and tangible. We were well timed with it. We started thinking about automation. We're like, all these things we can do. We got seduced by just kind of the nerd geek aspect of it and started going crazy.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:19:31) Initially, it was to serve our services customers, which are mostly big tech, and then saw this ability to turn and do it for all computer users from the angle of IT. So what I mean is that in the same way that we were trying to distribute virtual machines in mass and automate their deployment, we saw we could do the same thing with any computer. And that IT, the need in IT was incredibly huge. And what we had to refine, and this is where we stubbed a toe, was matching our vision to the customer need. And this is the delicate art of product management, the dark art of product management, misunderstood art of product management.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:20:25) The imperative art of product management is saying, yes. Our thesis was absolutely correct. People need to do this job. It has never been done well, and we have an opportunity to do it better. But rather than saying, we could take it so far and make it so magical, and we should, in my classic fashion, look at what is possible and take it all the way to Mars when we haven't really been to the moon yet. Well, now we can think about Mars because we've been to the moon and we're going back to the moon, and then that'll help us get to Mars even better. Well, that's sort of what we had to dial back to is we did show that with our product, it's called SmartDeploy, you can much more efficiently and much more easily and reliably do this really fundamental old job of deploying computers. And that we did indeed have the right idea doing it the modern way using cloud delivery as the means of doing that. The seduction was believing that we had to do it all in this vision of doing it in layers and this really overcomplicated, fully hosted, extremely resource intensive way. Customers didn't want that.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:21:54) They don't want complex. They're okay with complexity if it makes their job easier. It's not good if it makes it less reliable and more expensive. So we scaled back and took the modern approach, which is to do lots of iterations and come at it really objectively from an evidence gathering validation perspective. The other noise that entered the picture in that process was media and analysts and pressure from the industry that said, oh, you straight to Mars. That's how it's done. Yeah. That's how it's done if you're big tech and you can afford to have these very, very, very large failures. Right? Repeated very large failures.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:22:46) In Microsoft's case, a great example is Windows and these Windows variants not working, and they've just announced that they're going to not be taking 10X all the way. And this is the third one. But they can afford to do it. Right? Little startups really can't.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:23:05) And so the way that we would do it is to take what we know and stick, stay, make it pay, stick to your guns. Believe in the evidence you have and the customers you have and what they're telling you, and make them extremely happy and extremely successful. And then take the insight you have and add that next ingredient and get their reaction. Add the next ingredient and get the reaction. And it very much aligns to the way that dev's done now and the way that marketing's done now. This is the way, right, in the words of the Mandalorian. So it really is an opportunity thinking about the audience that might be listening to this. This can be applied to enterprise IT. Not only, hopefully, that they get excited about our products and want to go check out SmartDeploy, but that there's an opportunity to change the way that IT is done by evaluating problems and looking for the best fitting solution and adding that and iterating with a team, a department, a division, a branch office, and opening that up. That's what we're seeing with our largest customers is the way that they're adopting.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:24:22) The most successful ones at that. It's been super, super fascinating on every level. And to see also how, you know and with respect, the analysts are wrong. They were wrong. We got bad guidance. We got encouraged the wrong way. And we initially believed them and charged full bore down this road that cost us a lot of time and money and was a great distraction when if we just stayed really, really focused on what we knew to be the truth, we would have been much farther ahead. And again, big tech can take that guidance, crochet it into all of their teams and doings, and make it work for them. And then the outcome is they get their mark in the leader quadrant on the magic quadrant or whatever the two by two is that the flavor of choice. And that really is a way for very large enterprise tech leaders to cover their butts and make sure that they don't jump off a cliff without kind of holding someone's hand.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:25:32) But that's not really how innovation is done. Innovation increasingly is happening from the bottom up. Right? And it's more kind of these groundswell things, someone with a really good idea. The risk, of course, is someone's got a good idea, they make a right turn and go the wrong way, and then you're attached, and what do you do? And now we're kind of settled to this cloud service. And so it's not as simple as maybe it seems, but I don't know. It's kind of complex.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:02) Yeah. I like one of the things I was pretty surprised about after this podcast started to grow and I started to get invited to speak at different companies and executive teams and technology teams and things like that. I was so surprised about the amount of fear that exists in the corporate enterprise space. Like, as you mentioned a little bit, you know, analyst is sort of like, you know, do some research, but also as another a crutch or someone to hold on to to revalidate the decision. I've never been at enterprise level IT. I've just built technologies up to about, you know, teams of about 30 people and then sold them off. And so that's my experience professionally. But, man, I just go with my gut and look for objective evidence along the way and stay really, really, really, really close to the customer and understand them. Like, I can pick up my phone and I can call my three top customers right now. And I know exactly what they're experiencing. I know their bosses' names. I know how they report. I know everything about them. And that helps me really stay connect. Now I have a sales team and everything, but this helps me stay connected to exactly where the product needs to go.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:27:16) Yeah. So what is the phenomenon in the enterprise that drives the distance between IT and the customer, which is going to be the employees, partners. You know what I mean? There's a whole universe that IT serves that introduces these problems. Right? That introduces such an efficiency, especially in the largest enterprises have the worst problem with this. They've got all kinds of legacy infrastructure baggage. They've got cultural problems. They've got massive political challenges. And so they're just clinging to a buddy for dear life, for career growth opportunities, for career protection, and so on.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:28:12) And so as a result, you know, there's more of a protectionist mentality. And so then the enterprise architect ends up building something sort of disconnected from that. And so then it goes off and it does all these iterations. And when it comes back, it lands, and it's so far from what the customer needs that it's not adopted. So then all this time, effort, energy is going to waste, and the customer ends up doing the shadow IT thing, and they got some off the shelf SaaS thing that they're going gangbusters with. It's working, but it's a huge no no for many, many good reasons, security, privacy, you know, runaway cost problems, etcetera. How do you reconcile this? And it's really a referendum. This is a really great lesson for the up and comers who might be listening is if you can be cognizant of and bridge this gap that exists, that exactly this thing that we're talking about between the body of you, let's, users is sort of a four letter word. Right?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:29:23) But it's generic enough that it applies to employees, partners, suppliers, and maybe your customers that you provide services for. Users. If you can drive some process that allows you to stay close enough to those people with your teams that are doing the creation of these tools and systems, you're going to get superior results. Those superior results will translate into personal results, whether it's career growth, big wins for your teams, for your organization, more stock options, growth in stock price, whatever it is. This is, IT is everything now, and it will increasingly be so.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:30:08) And this becomes the game of the CTO, CIO, VP of tech, you know, IT manager even, IT implementer. It goes all the way down, all the way down and all the way up. CEOs should heed this advice and say, what can I do from this role to bring these people together in this way that we don't have these things happening? Projects landing poorly, adoption failing, starting over. But we had the analyst tell us this was the way to go, so I'm cool. Yeah. Yeah. Your career is fine, but what's happening now? The organization's being hampered. And then what happens?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:30:42) Things get more tense and more tense and more tense, and you squeeze more and more efficiency out of it. And then quality problems. Quality problems on the manufacturing floor, quality problems in security. And then you've got a ransomware attack. I mean, it's just crazy now. Right? And that's what gives me anxiety and drives me to manage things the way that I do, down this way that we're talking about. Also, the failures, of course, were very instructive too. But the world being the way it is is making it even more absolute in the necessity of being prudent and having heed and respect for the people and the process. It's getting crazy, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:36) Yeah. I think you summed it up really well. He said IT is everything now. I mean, there's no business that it doesn't impact.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:31:45) And digital transformation, the much overused term, man. But it is so much the way of things. And even if you've done all the things, we have, you know, kind of done a lot of things rapidly, and we committed to a very tightly integrated platform. Trade offs, loosely coupled, tightly coupled, trade offs both ways. The potential of automation today is staggering. It's unbelievable. The risk of automation and sort of this house of cards is also daunting. Good process, good agile methodology, good scrum master, just heads up people who are all tuned in to what you're trying to do, make it sustainable. And what happens as a result of that sustainability is incredible speed. The risk in the middle of that is something going horribly wrong with one of your suppliers, with one of your vendors.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:32:46) If someone in the middle poses a risk to the way that you do things, that can be an unforeseen, you know, rug being pulled out from underneath you moment. So that's the other place and way to be poised. But I guess it all comes back to careful calculation of trade offs and what those trade offs are. Right? And how much you empower people with autonomy versus you manage very tightly and carefully. And there's so many human implications, system implications, security implications that have to be balanced, and the answer is going to be really different for everyone. And you just have to make a bunch of calculated bets at every turn. I mean, we're being very, very high level here, but I hope, I don't know. I hope this is—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:36) I like it. I'm fine with this.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:33:38) You know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:39) Yeah. I first of all, I love it because I get it. And when people can speak in an abstracted way, what it does is allows me to connect with them more because it gives me more flexibility to stick that to my personal experiences. I really, when I was looking at the product, one of the things that I couldn't answer for myself that I hope you could answer is, you know, what is the problem that people are experiencing or googling where they find you as the solution?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:34:10) You know, the running joke is that the PC died, I think, five times. Right? And we always have to stop and count again now, which, where are we? The smartphone transformative, so useful, we're all addicted and use it nonstop because it's the source of so much. It's awesome. There's a huge problem with the phone, and that is input, even with voice, is not accurate enough to be fast enough to move and do all the things with enough power that we expect when we are in front of our keyboard and mouse on a large display. Tablet, similar problem. Similar problem, different level. Bigger display, easier to consume more content, cool place to, you know, the content houses and big tech content players, great. Doesn't solve the work problem.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:35:08) The PC is still the best solution, and it's going to remain so until there's another major major breakthrough. But it just is so right. It's like a refrigerator or, like, you know, it's like an oven. It's like an oven. You have your microwave. Microwave is great. And I wrote a blog about this a while ago where I, I can't remember. I've talked about this a bunch. Microwave is great. We all use them in addition to this wonderful conventional oven, electric or gas, and you have your preference depending on how much baking you do and COVID, people are baking more.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:35:48) Awesome. Got a range on it. Maybe it's separate. You might have two ovens separate from your range. That's how important it is.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:35:56) Right? The PC is very, very similar. We address a very old job, and that is making PCs work the right way at work. Why is this challenging? It's challenging because of the configuration. It's challenging because of security. It's challenging because of big complex apps, even in the cloud age. It's made even more challenging because of the trends and phenomenon of mobile driving more sensors and ancillary devices and peripherals into that small package. So device diversity is multiplying, device complexity is increasing, but everyone turned their back on the poor PC to give attention to the rest of this kind of endpoint footprint, which is not imprudent. It was perfectly prudent.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:36:53) But this was a job that never got done right in the first place. And this goes back to what I was saying earlier about what we saw as a unique opportunity to address this problem. People want to do this job well, and they can't. And so they either mobilize a very large team of experts, which is what the large enterprises do, or they outsource it. They outsource it to value-added resellers, the large value-added resellers, or to a managed service provider.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:37:26) And so the question is they look for efficiencies, and especially post the Great Recession of '08-'09, the question is, how can we do more with less? I mean, the same fundamental value conversation to business. And why the heck can't we just do this job ourselves? There's gotta be a way. We're migrating to Windows 10. We're doing our every five-year hardware refresh approximately. We're moving to BYOD, adds new problems. Again, the multiplication of complexity. There's gotta be a way to do this, an efficient way, a proper way.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:38:04) Not unlike the modern, awesome European-style vacuum that is unbelievably powerful, requires no bags, has low maintenance, and looks awesome. Isn't there something like that for the PC? There's gotta be. That's where we came in. And that's where, once we understood the way to talk about it, that if it's an answer for endpoint imaging, PC migration, hardware migration, that's the keyword that then pops, and we go down this road that then reconverges on unified endpoint management, IT service management, all these other broader topics that we're growing into, but growing into what we believe is the right way. So we don't self-obviate or turn into the product that everyone already hates. And that's the other problem. There's so many things out there that IT has learned to hate or that enterprise IT has adopted and gotten so entrenched in their team of rarefied journeymen to master expert that anything new, these bottom-up solutions like we're talking about, are a huge threat to them in their career. Had a conversation with a very, very large global beverage manufacturer. They were terrified.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:39:37) They're like, we're as efficient as we can be. There's no way. Our teams are awesome, and they've got everything dialed. What if your team could be a fifth or a tenth its size? That's what's happening in education, especially for our customers. They're saying there's no way we can keep doing this. Now we have Windows and Chromebook and all this other stuff. We can't spend more on IT. How does this team, how are these guys gonna do it? And it's interesting because education's kind of decentralized enough that they're saying, go figure it out. Just make it go. We don't have time. I don't have time to tell you how to do this. We don't have money to spend on the analyst. Figure it out. And they're coming back and saying, this is an unbelievable thing.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:40:19) Had a situation, great example. COVID example. Hospital goes and says, oh my gosh, we gotta redo this. And so they go back to their old big box solution and hammering, hammering, hammering, hammering, hit a wall, hammering, hammering, hammering, can't work around the wall. What do we do? What the heck is this? Stood it up in four hours, you know, maxed out their trial, which, of course, you know, we don't give people that much because in the early days, people were finishing their job on the trial. Shame on us. They asked. We gave them a green light. They did the entire hospital in a weekend, in forty hours. Hundreds of endpoints, diverse platforms, you know, in a hospital environment where they're doing imaging equipment and, you know, the scheduling people's PCs and, you know, the exam room PCs and all this stuff got done in a weekend. And so there are all kinds of nice, awesome, nerdy things that we've done at a really low level. There's all kinds of things that we're doing from a cloud perspective while still giving people their kind of comfortable, I can install a local admin console.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:41:32) We're kind of the best of both worlds and heading into this brave new world of the cloud the right way, the way that people want it. And so that's sort of the detailed color on how this came to be and why it's working in the way that it's going is the old job is not going away. And in fact, current times, COVID, post-COVID times, are making it even more important, putting more light on the necessity of that. The job and the remote worker, the modern way of the remote worker and remote IT for that matter. Right?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:42:12) I would be very curious if listeners would generously give us some comments on how many of their teams are expecting to continue to work remotely part, or maybe most, or maybe all of the time post-COVID. And the feedback we're hearing is there is an increasing expectation. Internally, there's an expectation that they'll have more latitude to do that, that it won't be just buns in seats at work in the lab doing the thing. Yeah, you gotta keep showing up and doing stuff, but how much of this really can be done remotely?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:42:50) And our answer is a lot of it. In fact, we think all of it. There's no reason it can't really be done. Someone has to go and receive devices when they're shipped a lot. But we now have a technique where we can drop ship from a manufacturer and have you up and running, properly secured, fully updated work payload faster than your updates would take that come from your reseller or come from IT for that matter if it's being shipped to you. And it's just doing this the right elegant, modern way. It's really that simple. Using cloud technologies, using there's some pretty, actually pretty surprisingly old technologies for that matter that people just didn't take the rest of the way. They just didn't finish the job. People deprioritized this partly because of the same thing that I argued earlier. The analyst said, no, it's gonna die. The journalist said, no, it's dead. Of course, the manufacturers were putting all the attention on smartphones and tablets. And, understandably, they wanted—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:54) To, you know, embolden that market.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:43:56) And things. So it's just a super fascinating, it's vindicating. It feels good to be right, you know, for once on a thing where I was like, no, I'm pretty sure. For a long time, I was like, but all these people keep saying they gotta have this stuff. People keep showing up. Yeah, but it's gonna shrink and it's gonna go away. Yeah, you got customers today, but they're gonna go away. Man, our renewal rate's through the roof. We've got enviable awesome SaaS renewal rates. Our metrics are really, really strong. People love it. So it's comforting, I guess, Joel, is what I would say. It feels good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:31) I, hey, look, I've stood in front of how many investors and they've told me I'm crazy, and I'm like, my bank account keeps going up. It's been four years, and we double revenue every year. Well, yeah, but— And I'm like, you guys are just looking for reasons not to invest. Right?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:44:46) The market and, yeah, I mean, and that's their job. You know? The other thing about the investors is they have a model. Right? They're playing into a model, and if it's not a moonshot, you know, they're, they kinda have that jaded analyst streak to them too. Right? They've got a, the table that they're betting on has to be just so, you know, in order for them to go in and really go for it. And sometimes there are other mitigating factors: team, leadership, someone who's done it before.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:45:24) And now more than ever, I get that. Right? Having made my run down Sand Hill Road and done the rounds up here with all the organizations, I totally understand, and I have respect for what those groups do. I have a respect for what PE firms do kind of more broadly. But innovation shouldn't just be tethered exclusively to where you can get capital. And, unfortunately, it's become increasingly so. But there's room for this, and there's room inside the enterprise, I would argue as well. Our technology, part of our technology came from something that was assigned out of enterprise tech. And so there is opportunity again for our listeners to be exploring and feeling around for and experimenting and validating and growing internally these things that your organization will probably have a process for assigning intellectual property that you can decide, yeah, I'll just, I'll run this process, not necessarily expecting to do anything with it, but it's nice to have the option. Right?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:46:34) It's a nice card to be able to play. And that's a really powerful lever for maybe a director of operations who's eyeing a VP gig, who's working on some interesting stuff. There's a lot of interesting places and ways, especially right now, especially in environments where you're in the data swarm. There is so much to be done. There's much to be done on the endpoint. Right? A lot. There's so much room. There's so much room to take this and even take, and I would argue as well, to do not unlike we've done, which is what Clay Christensen adoringly coined the low-end disruption. Taking something, taking an old job that has been over-engineered and coming up with a simple solution that does the job better for the people who need to do the job most.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:47:34) And if you do that, you will have success, and we're a great example of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:39) Yeah. That's the feeling I get from the Clay Christensen example you just gave. That's the feeling I got when browsing your website, figuring out, you know, trying to wrap my mind around what you guys do. There were a couple other products, and I loved how you compared yourself to them. So for people who are listening, can you share what some of the other products are that they might be using? And if they're using these products, they should consider taking a look at SmartDeploy.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:48:02) Yeah, sure. So Altiris and Tivoli Endpoint Manager, lots of people who have System Center but use just a slice of it. We're a great answer for a bunch of the endpoint component of that. Even like BigFix customers and Tanium customers. There's a ton of that that we address, and we do so with tremendous efficiency in a way that I think will be very delightful. And part of that delight comes in the fact that we respect your existing infrastructure. Most people have tremendous investments into cloud storage. Why are you paying two and three and five times for more and more cloud storage when you have terabytes and terabytes of it available to you? We make the most of that as an example.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:48:53) So it's easy to get up and running. It's easy to crochet into your infrastructure, and it's easy to make less experienced people very, very successful and to execute the job that was tedious and unreliable and slow in a reliable and speedy fashion. That's sort of the breakthrough moment, I think, is like the health care example where the expectation there'd be a long spin-up, a ton of integration, and then a lot of babysitting turns into it's up, it's going, it works on that one. Yeah, it works on that one too. Looks like it's gonna work everywhere. Can we do them all? And you're done. And that's sort of the, I think, the reason that we're having the retention. And also, sort of the feedback of, this is unbelievable. Can you do this too? And so we're having now sort of this growth moment where we're having to grow our engineering team and grow support to be able to not just help people be successful in more sophisticated and larger environments, but respond to feedback faster and faster and give people more of what they want to capitalize on the market opportunity. Super fascinating point to be at.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:09) Yeah. It's exciting. And we're only going to get more endpoints. So being in the endpoint management business is a good business.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:50:15) That is a fact. Endpoint is hot again, and it's going faster. And I think there's more clarity. I think we're over the seduction of the smartphone and the tablet, and now things are normalizing. And now there are all these other wonderful things that we're doing with our time and energy on AI/ML and Internet of Things and however we're calling that universe.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:50:38) And the endpoint is becoming more generalized, and we're focusing on data and securing and privacy and wrangling the edge. And that's where we're starting to spend more of our time, is looking at all of the ingress and egress points and being attentive to that and helping people manage that at scale.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:02) Wrangling the edge sounds like an ad campaign.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:51:07) Right. Maybe you're a punk rock band.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:09) Oh, there you go. Either one works. Oh, man. This is great. I've got a leadership question for you. So as your tech teams grow and your business grows, I've been asking this fun hypothetical question this past week just to get some a variety of answers. But if you were to design, like, the perfect leadership program for your first-time tech managers, right, what would the most important concept in that program be?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:51:40) Astute and swift application of the scientific method in the fewest words is what I would say. In more words, it would be— Well, it would have to also, I would add one more adjective, the humane application of the swift and thorough scientific method. I think that so much of the modern way, removing the human element, the modern way to do things well in the world is quick iteration and validation of a hypothesis. It really, Agile Lean Agile Scrum is just a way of doing science fast. Here's what we think. Let's go prove it. Have your if-thens. If it works, next step. If it doesn't, here's the alternative we try. Cool.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:52:34) I think the failure today in technology is in believing that it is acceptable to abuse people and treat people inhumanely because of the promise of explosive IPO, moonshot share price, options vesting, you know, the halo over my resume from having done my two-year penance at marquee company name. I believe there is a way to have your cake and eat it too handily. It doesn't require shouting matches. It doesn't require over-the-top ego. It doesn't require the 996. You're familiar with this kind of TikTok culture, 996: nine to nine, six hours or six days a week. Um, so a seventy-two-hour work week being the norm. That is, in my belief, the opposite of what it should be. Right? It's really more about cultivating, people will work harder if you cultivate an environment of mutual respect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:52) Yes.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:53:52) And if they really understand the process well, they will get behind it and do what it takes, which means sometimes there will not only be seventy-two-hour weeks to probably hundred-hour weeks, but people will see that and get behind their colleagues and say, thanks for all this hard work. You know, you deserve this time off. I'll defend the inbox. Have fun in Hawaii. In fact, take three more days, and we'll see you in a week and a half.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:54:21) And that's very much what we've tried to create, and I think we've been remarkably successful. And now it's coming back with people volunteering that back to us without me saying, "Here's what we're trying to do." The flip side of that is there are abusers, and as you get larger, it's harder to kind of keep that going. But it is equal parts, in my opinion, humanity with high discipline and rigor and respect for this method that says, if we move with a great deal of urgency and a great deal of clarity on a clear problem, we will converge on a solution and a time frame that results in success, that we're not aiming for failure. Failure really is not acceptable.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:55:11) Failure is a natural byproduct of trying. Right? It goes back to our earlier conversation about working out on rainy days, working out when you least want to. You're going to have horrible days at the gym. You're going to have horrible days on the bike.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:55:26) You are going to fall very hard on the ski hill when you least expect it and probably hurt yourself really badly. And it's going to be embarrassing. And you need to get up and get back on it and do what you need to do to get yourself back in shape and go. And it's the speed in which that can happen. At business, of course, you're generally at a lot less physical risk and more at reputation risk, going back to the enterprise risk, and more at risk of things getting bogged down in a political mechanism that drags out the time frame, that makes the financial risk higher and puts you at existential risk.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:56:03) That's your bigger risk. If you're attentive to customer and you're attentive to the problem, the hypothesis is clear, your team is unified, there is—it is almost an unstoppable recipe for success in my experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:21) It's like a mic drop moment. Hey, just drop the mic. I love it. I want to be respectful of your time because we're coming up on the top of the hour.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:31) You did bring a little gift for people who are listening. They can get a free SmartDeploy Pro subscription. How do they do that?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:56:39) You bet. Go to smartdeploy.com. I think there'll be a link in the notes here for the podcast. And listeners, you may not be the people who do this, but your teams, I think, would be keenly interested. If you have computers, this is probably of interest to you is my message.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:57:01) Free forever, a great way to start, get a taste, see how it works. We have thousands of people who will tell you it is probably worth the half day to take a look. And, you know, take advantage of it now. Download. Get an account going.

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:57:19) Come back whenever. We'll be here and thrilled to take you on the ride and thrilled to engage. We've got a great team of people who are very similar to me in attitude and mentality and hopefully will be able to unwind your most complex problems, be they at the endpoint or somewhere between you and the endpoint, which is more often the case to make sure we get you going. But yeah, we're excited. We're super excited.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:45) I love it. We'll put the link in the show notes. Your team had sent over that they're going to make smartdeploy.com/moderncto work. Perfect. Man, we did it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:55) We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Aaron Suzuki at 00:57:57) I'm stoked. I'm so thrilled. Thanks a lot for putting this together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:03) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.