The Path To Increasing Your Companies Worth with Adam Fichman, Owner at Lifted Logic

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, we're talking to Adam, owner at Lifted Logic, and we discuss how Adam used failure as his greatest company building tool, why chasing happiness isn't the best way to structure your goals, and how gardening gave Adam a renewed perspective on building a platform. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Adam at 00:00:33) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) This is the Modern CTO podcast. The way I got introduced to you was my parents came up to visit because we just moved to Nashville, and so they said, oh, we were at this conference, and this guy gave an awesome talk, and you've gotta know him, and he did all this tech stuff. And they rattled off a bunch of cool things. So what were you talking about at a medical conference?

(Adam at 00:01:02) So I'm in Houston. I speak for them all over. They use me as a keynote speaker, and then they talk and teach about their medical device. So this weekend is actually one of the biggest events ever. They're launching a brand new platform, and so I'm down in Houston.

(Adam at 00:01:18) Starting tomorrow, it's like a black tie weekend.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) Now previously, did you get your start in medical devices? Tell me how you got started.

(Adam at 00:01:25) Yeah. Okay. So I grew up in the hood. I got diagnosed with autism when I was six.

(Adam at 00:01:31) And basically, so I'm almost 37 now. My parents basically said, we've gotta get him into something. You know, he's gonna have a super addictive personality, and we just wanna keep him. So I got into programming back on trash eighties, on Tandys, on the bulletin board systems, and just kept doing that. And then I ended up in special ed in high school. We ended up moving out of the hood, and so they kind of put me into things like photo and video, classes that you can't fail. In college in 2003, I started a company that grew to about 20 million users a month. So we were huge back in 2003. And we got our provisional patents in, and we created the software that put videos onto phones. It was a transcoding software and a transcoding platform, so I ended up licensing it to the carriers so they could sell data plans.

(Adam at 00:02:22) You know, before, RealPlayer was on every single device, got utilization of like 2%. And we said, why? You know, this plug-in-less environment is coming. Each phone technically has its own codec. If I know what your phone is, I can just convert it on demand to your phone format.

(Adam at 00:02:38) And that was really what the software was. And I thought that hundreds of millions of dollars was supposed to fix my life. You think that money, especially growing up where I grew up, is supposed to fix everything, and I never actually found purpose. You know, like, I mean, I was plenty happy, but I still felt pretty unfulfilled. In the meantime, during some of the early days, Mark was working on Facebook, and he reached out to us and said, hey, you know, I think there must have been nine people there. We're looking for some help with soft asset valuation, which I think later became part of their ad platform. Right? Like, how much are all of these assets worth? How much is a phone number worth?

(Adam at 00:03:13) How much is an email worth? How do we look at user values? Came back to Kansas City fifteen years ago and said, I wanna just start a company that I would wanna work at. And so I just kept my head down, and we started an invite-only digital agency, mostly focusing on web development at that time. And now, you know, we're still basically invite-only.

(Adam at 00:03:34) We just do a thousand projects a year, and we're closer to $100 million in annual revenue than a startup at this point. It's been a wild ride again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:43) Dude, that is awesome. You were able to apply lessons from your first company to your second. How did you do the second company better than the first company?

(Adam at 00:03:50) Oh man, that's a good question. You know, I felt so much guilt at the first company. It was really an early SaaS company. You know, SaaS was not a thing. People are like, what are you, crazy? You're not selling your company. You want people to pay you pennies every time they use it? I was like, yeah. But it was a very lonely company.

(Adam at 00:04:06) It was a tech-based startup, and most of it was in the tech. And I think the big difference of switching over is now it's in the people. So I think it was just a totally different thing. You know, I mean, most of what I learned, I feel like I learned from my failures. I don't know about you, but I feel like I fail way more than I succeed, and I just learn a lot from that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:28) I had an epiphany ten years ago where I started reading biographies about successful people, like Branson, Musk, and all this stuff. And I finished these three books: Bezos, Branson, and Musk. And I was like, oh my gosh, success is just a collection of failures.

(Adam at 00:04:43) I need

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:44) to go out there and get the failures out of the way because that's all it is. And so—

(Adam at 00:04:49) Growing up, my dad was always like, dude, if you hit three out of ten balls in baseball, you're in the Hall of Fame. You failed 70% of the time, so go fail. Right? You know, it's like, alright, I can do that. I can fail because I don't feel bad.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:01) So what did you learn? After you had a bunch of money, you realized that's not purpose, and how did you go about giving your life meaning or finding purpose?

(Adam at 00:05:10) Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's shifting, you know, as you welcome another baby into this world. Right? It's like, so okay. There was this concept. We were working with Docomo, and the true answer to how this kind of fell into place for me was they go, man, you guys—it's like, you know, I keep doing, what do you want? And I said, well, I'm chasing happiness. And they go, no. I was like, what do you mean, no?

(Adam at 00:05:31) They go, see, that's very American. I was like, well, yes. They go, what you're looking for is ikigai. I don't know if you've ever seen it before. If you Google it, it's like what you're good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, what gives you—you know, it's like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:46) Oh, yes, yes, yes. Purpose, right?

(Adam at 00:05:46) It's like, and that moves throughout life, you know? Like, after you have your first kid, right, your purpose shifts, but that doesn't mean you truly feel like you're a systemically different person. I mean, I guess you kind of are, but yeah, I think I just realized this is gonna be a pretty fluid journey through my life of trying to find purpose. I think I'm still searching every day. I like that.

(Adam at 00:06:09) You obviously have had so many accomplishments. Like, how are you chasing your purpose? You know? So, I mean, obviously, you just had another kid. Like, how's that work for you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:17) I could definitely say the end result is it's a constant work. So my background: did software development for many years because my dad, who you met, he was an engineer of both software and hardware, so he'd take me to work with him. And I learned that. And then I did some real estate software that did pretty well, not anywhere near—like, I think I made like a million dollars on it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:38) Right? Not the hospital even. Yeah, yeah. And I was still like 21 or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:43) And so I learned how to manage money and do all of that, and then I started trying to figure out happiness in my late twenties. Like, I started thinking about it and being more conscious. Like, I feel like my brain sort of actually turned on at like 25. Right?

(Adam at 00:06:59) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:59) So I realized that, oh, I'm not the only person in this world. There's other people, and they're going after other objectives, and we have to figure out how everything works. So then built some more software, and then I had this realization. So my mom died. So you met my stepmom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:14) And so out of nowhere, she had a stomachache, went to the hospital. They're like, you have cancer, but you've probably got like two years. She died like three weeks later. Wow. And so I got to be in the room and hold her hand with my brother and my sister as she passed away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:28) And at that moment, I was like, I don't know. Something just clicked for me. And so there was a book I'd wanted to write about what I learned building my first tech team and then teams of teams. And so I was like, I'm going to write that book. So I actually did it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:41) And I went and I did it after that day, and then I wanted to validate the book. So I was like, I need to start talking to other CTOs. So let's use this podcast as an excuse to talk about book content. And so we did, and then it sort of turned into this thing. I thought what would happen would be that the podcast would get me a lot of relationships, and I'd end up like CTO at AT&T or like VP of Engineering at like Brex.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:06) Like some, like, you know, big, awesome, cool job. But what ended up happening was, first, we started licensing the content for like leadership training. Like, companies are paying us to license our podcast content. That went away in the pandemic because leadership budgets got cut. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:21) And then people started paying because we had a six-month backlog of episodes. They started paying to come on right away. So they wanted to call us up, and they wanted to have someone on within two weeks and have it air. And they didn't wanna wait six months. And so we realized people would pay for it and that they have marketing budgets.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:37) So we created marketing packages, grew that business to a million dollars a year, and then we were like, oh crap, there's only so many episodes you can do. And then we ended up talking to our sponsors, and they said, well, we want you to make us a podcast. And so we started a podcast production company, and we just grew that, and we're at the end of the first year of growing that. So that's my journey for the context.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:59) My mom was a big milestone, and then when I had the creator of the Internet—or World Wide Web—

(Adam at 00:09:11) Tim Berners-Lee. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:11) Yeah, yeah. I thought maybe it was Al Gore or something. I don't, you know, I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:18) OSI, so many levels. So people ripped me apart, by the way, on that one. Which part of the Internet?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:18) I actually apologized for it, but he did the technology. So I had this big—I got depressed. It's like, I think it was like 300 episodes into the show or something because I realized that I had set out to accomplish to talk to all these people, and I talked to pretty much everybody I wanted to talk to. And then I had on some really brilliant self-help people and stuff. And I just started telling them my story, and I'm like, do your thing that you do that's real expensive, but for free with me in front of this audience.

(Adam at 00:09:50) So it's really interesting, you know, as you say that. Right? Like, I'm very open about my own mental health as well. And when I talk to kids, you know, they always call me. They're like, bro, you got hundreds of millions of dollars.

(Adam at 00:10:00) Tell me that can't make you happy. And it's crazy. On one podcast I did for this high school, this school collective, I literally used—I said, look, you won the lottery, you won $40 million. Are you happy? They said, yes. I go, one of your parents just passed away. Are you happy?

(Adam at 00:10:15) And they say, no. And I say, clearly that shows there's not a causational effect of money and happiness. And so, you know, I think it's—I've never met anybody that truly went through that in the same way, and I've used that example a lot. So kudos to you, you know. Those catastrophes in life and then, you know, having that—I know I'm gonna be on antidepressants the rest of my life. You know?

(Adam at 00:10:33) I know that. I know who I am, and I know what I'm gonna struggle with. But you're one of the few people I've ever met, the only one that has that story in the same way. So that's wild, man. I got goosebumps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:44) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:44) It's crazy. No, that's why I've been—Tracy's my stepmom. She's been with my dad for twenty years. She's amazing. And my dad, they were like, you've gotta meet this guy. And I was like, okay, cool.

(Adam at 00:10:53) That's awesome. It's crazy the people you meet just around the world. You know? Like, I remember talking to them. I did not make this connection. I remember them coming up and bragging, being like, my son's kind of a big deal in this CTO. You should be there. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. You're like, here's, you know, I'll take your card.

(Adam at 00:11:07) Hit me up. I can't believe it came full circle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:10) Yeah. Like, it's the same thing. People are always like, oh, you've gotta have so-and-so on. I'm like, okay. And they give me the card.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:15) And then I went to your website, and there was this picture of you dancing like a monkey with a gardening bucket. And I was like, this guy—this is—he's coming on. I was like, we're doing this episode.

(Adam at 00:11:26) That's awesome. Dude, you should check out—I just launched my own personal site. I'm very much like, you know, I don't want my face anywhere. I really don't want people knowing who I am. Like, I'm glad to get to do stuff like this and get to make a difference this way.

(Adam at 00:11:38) You know? Like, I feel like this is—obviously, for you too, finding your purpose through showcasing, I mean, even what you're going through and being vulnerable. I mean, you know, that's not common. It's a beautiful thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:50) Yeah. Well, it wasn't like one big moment. It was sort of very incremental. Like, day one, there's me and my wife listening to the podcast. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:57) There's like two listeners. And then I just made a decision early on to just—I don't know. I've always been a wear-it-on-my-sleeve type of person because I feel my philosophy is if I give you as much accurate and truthful information as possible, you can do the processing and bring me value. But if I'm giving you half information or putting a spin on it, then the result you're gonna come back with is less valuable to me because you don't have everything.

(Adam at 00:12:20) So if you had to get out of tech, if you were told somebody goes, alright, man, here's a check. You know, here's a couple hundred million dollars, whatever it is, but you gotta work forty hours a week, and it cannot be in tech. Yeah. What do you think—what would you pick?

(Adam at 00:12:31) Is podcasting tech? Let's say yes, only because that'd be an easy answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:37) Well, I would invite successful people to my castle to have conversations about life.

(Adam at 00:12:45) You still got a podcast out of it, didn't you? You just—

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:48) That's it. You're cute, man.

(Adam at 00:12:48) I mean, I think you still found a way to still have round tables and talk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:52) Dude, it's because it's addictive. Like, I'm very, very happy about the way that this turned out, but the reality is I get to talk to amazing people two or three times a week. And I just had a call before this that backed up with—I only have one venture capital company that invested in us when we were leadership training, and then it failed. But the entity stayed the same because I was like, I'm not collapsing the entity. You guys need to get your investment back.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:16) Let's pivot and do sponsorship and keep it going. And they were actually surprised. I was like, well, that's just what you've gotta do, man. You're just so—

(Adam at 00:13:25) You know, my dad went through bankruptcy. I'm pretty open, you know, and they are too, man. You know, my dad was an entrepreneur. He went through bankruptcy, and, you know, he hit fifty years in business this year. And I went to a trade show with him when I was a young, well, a young man, young kid, young boy, whatever, and these people came up to me and they said, you know what?

(Adam at 00:13:44) You have an amazing dad. And I said, yeah, I mean, I know that, but they go, you know, he went bankrupt. He paid every single one of his vendors back still. And I never, you know, I never thought twice about it.

(Adam at 00:13:55) Like, of course my dad would do something like that. You know? Like, he never told anybody. He didn't make it a thing. He just told them.

(Adam at 00:14:00) He was like, "Look, I can't pay you right now, and I have to do what I have to do. But I'm going to—my name is the only thing I really have." I think, you know, you obviously did a similar thing. Obviously, you didn't go through bankruptcy, but you still have a backbone.

(Adam at 00:14:14) Again, this is a little rare, man. I don't meet a lot—there's not a lot of people like you out there. I'm sure you know that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:19) I wish I could take credit for it. I think it might be genetic or something. This just—it's, you know, I learned really early in business that you have to have a contract. You can't just shake hands. But it was me being, I guess, naive. But I'm so interested in coming through on what I say I'm going to do that, you know, when I shake someone's hand and we make an agreement, I expect that to be carried out. But, you know, then the business stuff happens. But still, that's just—I don't know. I like being that person. It's easier to be that person because otherwise, you're the slippery, slimy salamander. You don't want to be the salamander.

(Adam at 00:14:56) I don't want any alliterations, right? I don't want any of it. What do you—so I have a question for you. I've been told, you know, as I went and looked for—how many of your CTOs that you kind of meet with? You know, for me, I have a—I mean, obviously, my background's in business. I mean, I've been a programmer for thirty years, and object-oriented programming is always a part of my life. And, you know, everybody jokes I'm the only IT person at the company as well. But that's only because back when we started programming, we had to make, you know, I had to make my own drivers. If I wanted to use something, you know, I'd make it. But how many of the CTOs that you interact with have that strong financial background versus, you know, the new CTO doesn't seem to be the CTO of old? How much of that do you kind of see as you're interfacing and meeting some of these CTOs now?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:41) So I see a couple things. The first thing that I see as a trend is that the superhero jerk—that persona is dying.

(Adam at 00:15:51) Like the god complex tech? I'm the only person that could ever know this. Do you respect me?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:55) Yeah. The one you walk in the room and they're expected to just be treated different. You get it. But, yeah, that being rude and being extraordinarily talented but not knowing how to interact with people—that became unpopular because the technology became more complicated, and you needed to rely on more people. So then your ability to interact with people became incredibly important to achieve an objective, right? So that whole thing is one trend I see. I see CTOs of all different shapes and sizes, all different skill sets. The trend line that I see of the ones that are most successful is self-awareness and then awareness of how the tech impacts the business. When they're in the company and they understand how the sales work and what people pay for and then what's being produced from the technology team, those two traits tend to be the most successful. There's a small subset of CTOs—and maybe this will answer it better—I'd say sub-5% that I talk to that are at a level of significance, right, and say that they still program. And what I've noticed that they do is they'll actually spin out—hire a senior vice president of engineering and have that person sort of play that role of traditional. And then they'll have an office of the CTO where they're experimenting, and they have a small team, maybe five to seven people, that are running experiments, figuring out things that they could do better. So when they've sort of got that—in the lab, hands-on type deal—and they don't want to let it go, then they sort of spin that office of the CTO out and make sure that the other stuff's covered. But I see a handful of people that want to do that but don't know that that's an option, and they're kind of depressed. Why? Because they had to stop programming to do all this other stuff.

(Adam at 00:17:39) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:39) They don't want to stop programming.

(Adam at 00:17:41) They were the best programmer. They got promoted to manager, and then—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:45) Yeah. Yes. So those are a couple—did I answer your question?

(Adam at 00:17:49) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know what? Well, so I was on a panel. You know, we get asked as technologists—I don't even know what the hell to call us, right? We get asked really ethical questions. You know, I was on a panel within a year—I'm trying to think of what I can disclose. It's for some government questions, right? They're still—I mean, you look at our politicians, right? They're old enough that none of us would actually ever hire them for our own companies. And I got this eighty-year-old that's looking for this tech job, and you'd be like, "Yeah, no." I mean, that's maybe illegal, but, you know what? Maybe it's not—maybe it's, you know, experience-wise a little far out. But they're setting our laws. And so I'm on this panel, and one of the questions came up about deepfakes. Should this be legal or illegal? And I'm looking around, I'm going, how in the hell? You have CTOs in this room and tech experts asking them ethical questions, not how do we create something like that or what do you think we should do? And I'm going, don't you think psychiatrists and psychologists should probably be the ones in here? You're asking tech people ethically and legally if we should be producing this? You know, they're asking things like, "Is there a victim?" How am I qualified? You know, what I saw kind of going around the table was misplaced understanding of technology in our roles, right? For me, you know, I kind of take on the—I mean, I am the CEO of the company, but I also am—obviously, it's a massive digital agency. So tech is in my everyday life, and so the lines are really blurred. I'm sitting next to somebody else that's been running CAT cables all day long with networking that probably is closer to an A+ certification, you know, answering ethical questions. And I just—I didn't know, you know, is that the perception of the misalignments of what a CTO is now, and that's how we all ended up here? You know? I thought for me—I'm here for video, and I've got a pretty good expertise on video and transcoding and distribution, and, you know, had a pretty deep relationship with Pirate Bay back in the day, totally different story. But, you know, is that how CTOs are also being viewed company-wide, industry-wide, corporate-wide? What is—when you kind of have those interfaces? Yeah. I mean, it sounds like, you know, there's obviously still a lot of working CTOs, though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:57) Yeah. So it would—definitely, specifically on the ethics question, I haven't seen that a lot. Where I have seen it a little is companies that have controversial—facial recognition companies and things of that nature. And typically, what they do is they have an ethicist on the team. It's somebody who studied—I mean, ethics is a field of study. It's a whole thing. So to ask somebody that has no—you know? I mean, we all have our human—and it's all valid—our human responses and everything like that. But if you're talking about, we're in the business world, and we're making some decisions on specific strategy, and we want the best information that's humanly available to us to make this decision, you're definitely going to want to go find the people that eat, sleep, and breathe it every day for their career, right?

(Adam at 00:20:47) Right. I mean, maybe so much of tech is posturing anyway, right, and hypothesizing. You know, it's like, "Hey, I know you don't really build mobile apps, but let's talk through this," right? And maybe it's that extrapolation out there of just saying, okay, we think in a maybe more procedural way about concepts we don't understand. So do you see the CTOs becoming less and less what we maybe would have described as traditional tech thinker?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:14) No. I think there's a certain portion of CTOs that are Harvard Business CTOs. I typically run into them when we're talking about companies that are owned by family offices or private capital, because they'll run in their networks, and then they need someone who's smart on tech. And then they'll be like, "Hey, you know how to formally run a business and, you know, tech. Can you come in and help me with my tech side of things?" You know, I see that more, but I'd say the vast majority is creative people trying to solve a problem and really loving the problem solving. For me, for the better part of seventeen years every day, I wrote code until year two of this podcast when it really started making money, and then I just kind of stopped because I found that the thing that helps me, the thing that satisfies me is getting to talk and think through problems and talking to other people like you that have solved problems and how you did it. So, you know, I talked to this guy the other day that put an electrode stent through the jugular up through the brain vessels so that you get the brain-computer interface without having to drill through the skull, and you can go home the same day, right? And he's got this embedded in people. It's having people come on, explain how they solve problems, and then, of course, the audience is always at the center of everything, and it's, how do we bring value? So—

(Adam at 00:22:30) Well, you know, we just did a big company retreat. This has been—it's really hitting an interesting place. We sat down. We took everybody down to a ranch down in Texas. And, you know, we were talking, and everybody was talking so—in-house, we have photo, video, design, dev, content—you know, it's a heavy creative thing. And so we were talking, we said, "Hey, we're a large group of creatives." And one of my lead devs comes over and he goes, "Adam, you know, is it bad I don't think of myself as a creative?" I hadn't really processed that before. You know, he was like—so I go, "What do you think of yourself as?" He goes, "Well, I mean, I take the designs and make them something, and I have to come up with creative solutions, but I would not call myself a creative." And for me, you know, I mean, I was a developer just like him, right? I was a web developer. I mean, I've been PHP, JavaScript, MySQL most of my life. I mean, that's still the backbone of most of the internet. I still view myself as a creative, and I hadn't really—I had to take a step back from him. And I looked at the rest of the developers, and I'm like, "Do you guys feel like creatives?" And they were all like, "No." And I think, you know, it was jarring for me to step back and look at that and go, "Man. Wow. Okay. Has that changed? Is that industry-wide?" You know, I mean, if I ask most of the developers out there in the world, "Are you creative?" I would have assumed yes. But everybody at my camp, they're like, "No. I mean, we love our jobs. We feel creative, but we're not creatives."

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:50) Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I actually, to be—I haven't asked that question. You feel like they're creative?

(Adam at 00:23:55) You feel like they're creative?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:56) Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. And I project myself onto other people all the time. So I just assume that they're all—I assume that they're all creative. But you're right. I actually don't have data points. I haven't actually asked CTOs.

(Adam at 00:24:08) Dude, there's a great book. So we've got Hallmark here in town, and there's a book called "Orbiting the Giant Hairball." And this guy basically talks about how corporate bureaucracy ends up spooling this web of building. You know, it's like you set one rule because something happens, and then you set rules because things happen, right? It's like, "Man, I wouldn't have thought somebody's going to walk out with a server. Okay. There's a rule." You know? And that's how big corporate infrastructure gets built. And he said, you know, he went to a group at kindergarten, and he said, "Everybody in this room, raise your hand if you're a creative. You're an artist." He said, actually, "If you're an artist." Every kid raised their hand in that room, right? Every single one of them. He goes back in third grade. He goes, "Everybody raise your hand if you're an artist." Everybody but five people raise their hand. And he follows these kids all the way through, right? Middle school, half the class raises their hand. High school, he only has three artists left. And he looks at the room and he goes, "Where the hell did all the artists go? You guys were artists, but now you're not? How did this happen? Because every single one of you identified as an artist when I first met you." It's a really—I think it's "Orbiting the Giant Hairball." It's a great book. And, you know, you wonder if maybe in dev, we just got caught in a different part of that time period. You know? Maybe we just happened to be early on enough as developers where we still had to—I hate to even say it because they're still creative. I still view that as creative, but to where we self-identified as creatives.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:27) Well, I think one of the key distinctions between the group I'm a part of and, let's say, the other group, right, is that I wanted an outcome, and I found that programming stood in my way to achieve the outcome. So I learned programming. And I was getting the outcomes that I wanted by getting better at programming, and then I liked it a lot. It became a hobby. It was something I did for work. It was enjoyable. I enjoyed it until I found something that's more enjoyable, and that's coaching people, my team, and being able to achieve—you can achieve so much more with a group of engineers than one engineer yourself, right? And for me, that was more exciting. So then I was just programming hobby-wise, and then I would build teams and teams of teams, and then watching the people grow and sort of helping them through life things and just talking about stuff. That to me became my new favorite thing in life.

(Adam at 00:26:25) That's amazing. Do you think that code boot camps have had any source of shift in the mindset of programmers? Because it feels now like there's such a high density of the professional field of programming that have gone through some sort of boot camp or school. Do you think the way in which we learned programming shifted how we viewed ourselves as developers? The fact that—I mean, I was self-taught. It sounds like you were mostly self-taught and just—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:53) Oh, yeah. Yeah. You should see how happy I was when I figured out that there were books that taught you how to do this and you didn't have to read documentation. I was just guessing—check—like a monkey, sciencing it, and that's how I figured out how things worked. Yeah.

(Adam at 00:27:06) I mean, did you go to college? Did you study computer science?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:09) I did horrible in school. I woke up every day and figured out how I could sleep through class so I could work on the computer when I got home and play Call of Duty or some other—insert whatever video game was popular at the time. And so—and then in eleventh grade, I was making enough money online and through software projects that I did the same exit program that homeschool kids go through, and then I just left school. I was like, "See ya."

(Adam at 00:27:33) That's awesome. So did you even enroll in college then, or did you just say screw it? Good for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:38) I—dude, school is not—it is amazing for what it was designed for, but we've made it something other than what it was designed for. And it's not that great at doing those things, but it's amazing for what it was designed for. And I got what I needed out of it, which is basic mathematics, reading, writing, and basic social skills—how to interact and get things done with others.

(Adam at 00:28:03) So when you send your kids to school, will you send them to school, or are you going to homeschool or—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:07) Absolutely not.

(Adam at 00:28:08) Yeah. They're—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:08) They're already homeschooled, and my five-year-old's already into first-grade curriculum.

(Adam at 00:28:12) Whoa.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:12) And if she were to be going, like, normally, she would be starting kindergarten last month.

(Adam at 00:28:18) Will you recommend to your kids that they get into programming? Because I get this question a lot. You know, I get off stage and somebody's like, I want my kid to go into programming. I'm not gonna say what I say. I just—what are you—what is your kind of gut on that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:30) No. I mean, I see my responsibility as preparing these creatures for life. And I will interject, like, a minimal amount, like, as needed. Like, I read some psychology books, and they said some of the trends between kids who are most successful is that by the age of five, other kids wanna play with them, and that they're respectful of adults in conversation. And what that'll do is that'll make the parents wanna invite your kid over. Because if your kid's respectful, they'll have more opportunities, and so then they'll be around more respectful people, and it'll reinforce itself. So I focused on those two things.

(Adam at 00:29:07) Since you're young, my—I tried baseball, soccer. The things I end up sticking with were music and, you know, I'm glad I stuck with those, guitar and marching band and that stuff, but it was the same way. My parents never made me feel bad. You know, they were never like, you quitter. Oh, you know, it's—they said the same thing. You're gonna finish out your seasons. You're gonna—you know, if it's karate, you're doing the things, you know, until we pay for the classes are done. But I thought that was like an isolated experience. You know, I didn't know a lot of people that—so it's neat to see you doing the same thing for them. Failure's great. My parents made me stay up there and finish pitching out a season that, thank God, there was a six run rule because we didn't ever finish the game. I hit more players—I probably did long-term damage. I hit more players up at bat than—and so nobody wanted to go up. They're like, no. Let this idiot go up there and pitch. We're not going up. But they made me finish it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:54) So you must have donated some of that money to, like, people that had concussions from sports injuries as a child?

(Adam at 00:30:02) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:03) How did you get into gardening?

(Adam at 00:30:05) Oh, man. So, you know, growing up where I grew up, my parents, after we even after we got out, they were super particular. Like, I could never mow the lawn, and I couldn't really—if I was gonna get hurt, you know, it was like a very typical Jewish parent, just super paranoid about everything. I love them. I bought them the house across the street, so we're very close. They live literally right across the street. I planted a tomato for like a college class, and it grew, and I didn't really like tomatoes. But I was like, oh my God, I grew this thing. Like, I felt this connection, and all I did was water it with a hose. You know, it was like I put it in, watered it, remembered most of the time. But something changed for me, you know, this connection to something. I was like, man, this tomato has been around. I started doing research on, like, the seed, and I was like, this thing's been here thousands and thousands—I just experienced one of its life cycles. And it changed everything for me. I got into microbiology and started breeding mycorrhiza, and then ended up getting some consulting jobs with the DEA to help them grow at a big research institute here in town and get to brew mycorrhiza and fungal teas. And it literally just kinda kept growing, and, you know, I probably can't see too terribly much out back, but I got a bunch of land out back and got an orchard, and that's my happy spot. A lot of it kind of ended up tying back into what I saw on the digital side as well. You know, we use a lot of the same terms and a lot of the same thought process, like organic growth. You know, most of the time people are referring to SEO. It's the same kind of thing. Right? Like, you're creating and working and slowly building a base and a platform and, like, a lot of—I think the thing it was the right time. Like, I just saw so much similarities in these pieces that programming is a lot more similar for me to gardening in a lot of ways. And I know that sounds super weird. I'm—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:52) It doesn't. I'll share. So, like, you can create an environment where the tomato can grow, but you can't force the tomato to grow. And that's how life works. You can't just do the thing. You have to create an environment where that thing can happen and flourish.

(Adam at 00:32:06) Yep. Yeah. I think once I realized, like, plants—you know, plants, if you feed them chemical fertilizers, uptake basically what the chemical is. But in nature, you know, there's a bunch of basically parasites that live on the tomato's roots that convert the food into a digestible form for a plant. And so really what you're doing is you're treating the surrounding areas around it. And that was the same thing for me with, like, how I looked at the employees. You know? It's like, I could focus all this thing on this product, but what I wanna focus on is our environment. You know? I say, like, we don't have a mission statement on the wall. We don't even have a mission statement as a company. But if you asked every single employee, they know exactly what the mission of the company is because you create a good environment. And I think it was the same thing with the garden. It was, like, everything, even if I'm feeding dirt, it seems like you're doing nothing, but you're changing the entire environment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:58) I wish I had an environment, like, sponsor. I'd plug them right now.

(Adam at 00:33:03) You should talk to Acres magazine. They're one of the best gardening magazines in here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:08) Dude, that is awesome. So what does your company do, and who is your customer, and how can people reach out to you?

(Adam at 00:33:16) So Lifted Logic is a high-end digital agency. We specialize in organic content creation, lead generation, and a heavy, heavy focus on ROI through internet marketing and whatever delivery medium that it really needs. We do everything in-house, and we work with clients as small startups to H&R Block. We got to build their tax system. We work with Tesla, Allego. So we work with the large array, which is really what we look for is cool freaking people with cool ideas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:46) Nice. And how can people reach out to you and find out more?

(Adam at 00:33:49) You can get on liftedlogic.com, fill out a contact form, let everybody know that you saw us here on this show, and we'll connect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:56) I think this is one of my favorite interviews, Adam, because I think we successfully did not cover one topic of conversation in the topic outline.

(Adam at 00:34:04) Love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:05) So I love it.

(Adam at 00:34:06) I do too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:07) It feels great. 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'd 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.