How to Be a Great Tech CEO with Amiram Shachar, Founder of Spot.io

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Amiram, founder of Spot, and they discussed how the CEO's job is always changing, how to transfer culture to new hires, and how to embrace failure as a critical part of success. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:00:41) I was a student, a lazy student, trying to get the highest grade possible in my final project, running a project about something that the dean has no idea about what I'm doing. So I chose cloud infrastructure, and then it turned out to be a company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) Dude, that's pretty exciting. And then you recently sold it to NetApp?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:01:05) Correct. That was about eighteen, maybe twenty months ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:10) Through this pandemic, the time has gone by so fast.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:01:14) Yeah, you're kind of losing sight on was it last year, two years ago, three years ago?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:20) I know. I told my wife we're planning a company get-together, so we're bringing everyone into the same location. And I was like, oh, there's still a mask on planes requirement. Some places in Europe today are canceling that requirement, but in The United States today, it's still a thing. And I was like, how long has this been going on? We're in year three of this. It's crazy.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:01:41) I can tell you, at the beginning of the pandemic, I told my wife, look, I actually think that maybe it's doing a good thing to the world. Maybe people do need to wear masks, and maybe people do need to wash their hands. So this is a good thing, and I hope this is going to last for a long time, the whole hygiene thing. I think the US is about to get rid of masks probably very soon. I'm happy to see that the pandemic has become less worrisome because it's not about the health system going to collapse. It's more about maybe a more spicier cold.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:23) Yeah, 100%. And I'm all about the health. My brother and stepmom are both physicians, so I hear about it constantly. They teach you in med school how to wash your hands properly. And it's this whole—if you ever watch a doctor wash their hands, it's way different than a normal person washing their hands. So I was curious to know, did this term data fabric—did that exist before the pandemic? Did you guys make that up? Where did data fabric come from?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:02:51) Yeah, data fabric is something that goes with NetApp for a long time before the pandemic. It's about how NetApp connects and is in the center of data, either on-premise and the cloud, in file storage or block storage or object storage. So kind of being the fabric that connects between all these little things. And obviously, as you know, huge acceleration in the world of cloud computing has really pushed NetApp to be a pioneer of taking their on-prem storage to the cloud. So using that term data fabric really made sense internally and externally for NetApp. And actually, when we came to NetApp, we extended this data fabric with something that we call cloud ops, that we can talk a lot about. But data fabric goes a long way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:44) And so, what's—how do you define—I've got a couple of terms that I'm curious about. So we got data fabric, cloud native. To give you a background, seventeen years as a software engineer, the past seven to nine years mostly Ruby on Rails. So I've built large-scale enterprise applications, things of that nature. But I'm curious, what is the difference between a cloud native app and a non-cloud native app?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:04:10) So a great question. Cloud native is probably a very overused term that people don't really know what it means. So cloud native means that it's modern, built for the cloud, but it can also be used on different clouds. So two aspects here in cloud native. One, that it's modern and built for the cloud. And second, that it can actually not tie to a specific cloud. It can work on multiple clouds. That's why you see there is a foundation, the CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. When they accept new projects into their foundation, they need to really meet those requirements. That this is something that people can use on any cloud, so it has no tie to a single provider. And this is something modern that can actually use the elasticity of the cloud and the power that cloud gives you to support that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:07) Yeah. If I'm using an Amazon-specific web service that maybe is available at Microsoft but isn't available at the third provider, because I have that web service at Amazon, am I still—can I still be cloud native?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:05:25) So usually, you're not going to see the term cloud native being used by Amazon or Google. You're not going to see them saying, hey, our specific service is a cloud native service. They're not going to say that. But when you're going to use something like Kubernetes, so Kubernetes is a cloud native service. It can work on any service. Kafka is a cloud native service. Envoy proxy is a cloud native service. Lots of other projects in the Cloud Native Foundation can work on multiple clouds. So this is the term you would mostly hear from the open-source community and from independent software vendors, less from the cloud providers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:02) Got it. And so for Spot, my best understanding of it—because I got to talk to your CTO. So let's see how well we did. He was a funny guy too. You basically are this API. So instead of me API-ing directly maybe to Amazon or Microsoft, I API to you to build my server infrastructure. And you're going and you're figuring out where the best compute is, and so I write it once against your API, and then I don't have to maintain multiple APIs, and I'm always getting the best price. Is that what it is?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:06:32) Yes. This is how it works, but I don't want you to think of Spot as the Expedia of the cloud. So it's not that you want to book a flight ticket and you come to Expedia and you want to see all the providers and then go and choose a flight ticket, because this is not what we're doing. We're not referring you to a cloud or optimizing across different clouds or brokering across clouds. It's, no, we are—I would say, even before we provide optimization, we provide automation. We really founded a company to help companies automate how they use cloud compute. Because when you use compute infrastructure in the cloud, there are a lot of things you need to take care of. You need to take care of choosing the compute size, choosing the compute type, choosing the compute price, then seeing that it's not idle and you need to turn it off, or it's not underutilized, so you need to downgrade it or upgrade it. So there are a lot of things surrounding you as a DevOps person when you launch compute and manage compute, and we wanted to automate all of that. So we wanted to automate the provisioning. We wanted to automate how you select pricing and how you rightsize your compute. And then this automation ultimately yields optimization. So it's not an Expedia type of thing. It's more about having an automation software that I use, that the output of it is optimization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:59) Oh, awesome. So it will work within one specific provider. So if I have Amazon, it's going to find me the best price instance and adjust my instances accordingly in an automated way. The same way if I were just a cloud ops, DevOps engineer sitting in there and monitoring everything live, you just have automated that. Exactly. Got it. All right. Well, that makes a lot of sense. I like that. Now tell me a little bit about—I know you sold the company, but you're still the CEO there. Correct?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:08:32) Yeah. I lead everything Spot. So technically, not a lot has changed for me since selling the company and working under NetApp, because I still run the business the way I ran it before. Maybe I get a little bit more help from other functions at NetApp, and I have a bigger finance, bigger HR, bigger pockets. But in terms of—I think six months or ten months into the acquisition, I had an interview and I said, I don't even feel like I sold the company. I'm doing the very same thing. I'm waking up in the morning. The only thing I don't do is I don't talk to investors anymore. I just do the very same thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:13) Oh, that's cool. Yeah. That's got to be—well, I mean, and there was, you sold it for several hundred million dollars. So there is some difference. Right?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:09:22) Yeah. And no, everything is relative in life, and you take it into proportions. But yeah, definitely, I felt like the acquisition is on a financial aspect. I felt like I was reborn to the world, obviously. I wasn't rich before, and I'm not coming from a rich family or something. And definitely, that has changed my life and probably my the next generations. But technically, it's not changing anything in my life. I'm not going to buy more expensive clothes or more expensive shoes or something like this. It's just you have the comfort to operate, and you have the comfort to raise your family in a better way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:03) No, I totally understand the security aspect of it. I thought that—I grew up poor as well, not well off. And I thought that when you get more money, you're going to buy—I still buy my shirts at Target, man. It's way more fun to have money in the bank and just know that you can wake up and choose how you want to spend your time than it is buying stuff. Buying stuff gets boring. Sometimes we had to do a remodel here of the house that we bought, and I had to spend money, right? Because you have to buy all the materials and stuff. And I was like, I am so sick of buying things. I hate buying things. I only like to spend money on things that make me more money.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:10:50) Like you, like me, I absolutely feel the same. Target—my wife really likes Target. This is where we buy our daughter's clothes and stuff. And you see, I think it's really about knowing the fact that you can remodel your house. It's a good thing to go to sleep with and wake up in the morning. But the buying process, it's not fun. Actually, the building process is much, much better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:18) Oh, yeah. I was trying to tell the contractors, I'm like, I build stuff, but just on the computer. And they look at me like, nerd. I'm like, it's all right. You guys keep going. Oh, man. This is fun. So, hey, when did you move from Israel to The United States?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:11:33) I moved—the company started in 2015, mid-2015, about May, June, something like this. I moved around early 2016, but basically the way I moved was, I told my wife to quit her job. She was working for a different tech company in Israel, and I told her, I must go to the US. And the funny story behind it is we had a board meeting, one of the first board meetings for Spot, and I told the board, hey, I think I should go to the US because I want to bring US-based customers, and I feel like I should be there in order to get those customers. And they told me, don't sweat. Don't do it. It's probably just going to be a waste of your resources and time right now. Just stay here until we have a hundred customers or something and then move to the US. So on that night, I actually booked my flight ticket to go to the US. Everyone said no, and I said, no, that's the right thing to do right now. And so my wife quit her job and followed me. We just took two suitcases and came to San Francisco and, you know, would not—like a very clear plan on what to do. So that was an amazing experience, I can say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:47) Yeah. Yeah. You're an adventurer. So I'm curious to know about—so you're from Israel. You were born there. Correct?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:12:54) Born in Israel. Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:55) And so I have a lot of friends over there, and there's—it's homogeneous. A lot of the people have similar views. It's a really tight country. There's a lot of pride. There's people do the serving in the defense force. And I was curious, what was it like going from a society that's close like that to a country that has recently become divided pretty significantly?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:13:25) I think it really depends on your close circles. Right? When you come to San Francisco, it's a different United States than if you go to New York, and it's a different United States than if you go to Tennessee. It's a different United States than you go to Seattle. So I felt like that I'm just getting into a tech industry where we live by standard rules and culture. And so I didn't feel much of a change. Maybe in restaurants or in shopping, we were really experiencing the different culture between the Israeli way and the US way. But at work, I think it was a pretty smooth and easy transition. But a big thing I did notice between US-based companies and Israeli-based companies, and I'm actually seeing it every day working for a US company right now and running an Israeli company before, is that in Israeli companies, usually they work in small teams, work really fast, very biased for action, very biased for, yeah, let's do it. Maybe fix. Let's just make a decision. And bigger companies, US companies, it's more about—it's not about one decision. It's about the process, and it's about having a lot of people saying what they think, and you can debate it for much longer. And things can take longer. And I don't think that one method versus the other is good or bad, but it's just a fundamental change that I see between these two companies' types. And it was just for me, it was a little bit hard to adopt and adjust for this new model. And knowing that, yeah, it's going to take more time, more process to get something done. But this is a big thing between companies that I can tell you that I see every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:26) Yeah. I think it's also relative to size. Right? Because when you're a small company and you have to make payroll and cash flow is critical, you make incredible actions. But when you're a multi-billion dollar company and you're thinking about the direction of the future, you could sort of have imagination and mull that over and debate that for a little bit. But when you have to make payroll, there's very little debating and there's a whole lot of action. One of the things that really impressed me when I was reading and researching you was there was a lot of press around the fact that the acquisition was really successful, post-acquisition. So usually I do a lot of these interviews, right? And so people get their company acquired, I research it, and you've got all the articles about, oh, so-and-so acquired so-and-so, right? But I never see articles that talk about the success months later after the acquisition and how well it's doing. It seems like your company, as far as NetApp's portfolio, was doing super well. Is it actually true?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:16:29) I'm very happy about it. I did not say it, but officials at NetApp said that this is the best acquisition NetApp has ever made, both on the technology side, revenue side, people side. It really added a lot of value to NetApp. It took NetApp from—it accelerated the migration to the cloud and what NetApp is bringing to the cloud. But also, when we were acquired, we were just on revenue of maybe tens of millions of dollars of revenue, and this grew four or five times in the course of twenty months.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:17:10) So there was a huge acceleration on the revenue. There was huge acceleration on the people because all the people of Spot kept their position, including me, including my staff, including all the engineering, all the product, everyone who is part of Spot. Usually also in acquisitions, you see there is an acquisition and then all the management is churning very, very fast. But it didn't happen here at the beginning. It was really fundamental to keep the growth going.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:17:39) And also, I must give very positive feedback here to the NetApp folks that just kept Spot executing on the path of execution and did not steer us from that execution path. After acquisition, you want to make a lot of changes and you want to operationalize a lot of areas in the company, but they just let us run. They didn't change anything. And I think this is what let us thrive inside this process, which can be a very, very tough, harsh, exhausting process of integration. It was pretty easy, smooth, fast, welcoming, and I think the output is that revenue is growing, people are staying.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:18:23) That's what every acquirer wants at the end of the day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:27) Absolutely. And they're smart, right? Because if it's working, rarely do I go tinker with systems that are my best systems that are mostly fit and they're working the best and providing—my time is spent fixing the broken things or figuring out what the new things are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:43) This is great. So overall, a super positive experience with the acquisition?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:18:47) Very positive experience. I think right now, I always said that as a CEO, you actually need to apply for your job every three months again and again because your job is always changing. So the fact that I've hired myself—or the board that hired me chose to invest in me when I was a five-people company, and then I'm a twenty-people company, I'm a hundred-people company, I'm a two hundred-people company—and then, do am I the right person still to lead it? Am I doing the right things?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:19:20) Do I know to run a company that is growing from twenty to a hundred people, from a hundred to five hundred people? Because everything changes and things are—when you stretch the company, so lots of things are stretching, and you need to build a lot of the engines, fix existing engines. And for me, it was quite an experience to see the company growing from twenty million, forty million, sixty million, eighty million of annual recurring revenue. And right now, taking it to the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue—this is a completely different scale, completely different thinking, completely different way to build the go-to-market machine.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:20:01) Lots of new challenges for me that I really like, but also for the teams and the way we hire. So definitely was quite a journey for me so far.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:13) Yeah. And you seem really bright. You'll know yourself and have good self-awareness to know if you want to solve this next level of challenges or you want to let someone else do it or have someone help you with it. You can't get as far as you've gotten without having a good amount of self-awareness.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:20:30) But I can tell you, Joel, that the North Star was always setting company culture and high standard—and I'll talk about culture in a bit. And the second thing is about really always mentoring—keep mentoring yourself with people. Because if you don't read books, if you don't listen to people who already did that and been there, you probably don't have tools to be successful. So the culture of setting people—and we can talk about why it's so important—and second, it's always learning from people and reading books.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:21:04) This is what just keeps you above water.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:07) Absolutely. How do you do culture at Spot?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:21:12) First of all, you need to look at other companies and how they do culture and see what worked well for them, what didn't. One of the companies that I really liked watching on how they keep their culture—not liked watching, I would say amazed or shocked or sometimes just looking at them and being super jealous, like, how do they do that? Because I talk with people there and everyone is talking the same language. Everyone is knowing exactly what to do.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:21:40) It doesn't matter if it's a VP or someone who is in a really junior role. Everyone is just talking the same talk and doing the same work. And this is Amazon. And I was fascinated by how Amazon is taking their leadership principles and applying it in every little step of the way of their company's journey. This is how they hire.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:22:02) This is how they fire. This is how they promote. This is how they give feedback to each other. And this is how they pretty much break the ego and break the mafia, if you will, and break the hierarchy with what is the right thing to do. And setting a company culture is you're basically telling the company, "Hey, this is what we believe in." There's five, ten things. And everything you do and everyone you hire or every feedback that you give—you always need to look at this and know that you're doing the right thing. And it doesn't matter who said it, how senior is this person, how long is this person in the company. As long as you're going with that culture in mind, you'll probably do the right thing. And this has worked amazingly for us because I've seen people who are super new to the company executing and leading and taking on themselves, saying, "Hey, we want to do it because it's really important for our customers," and "We want to do this because we care about this value." And I was not in the room when they said that. And only when you're not in the room and good things are happening, you know that you have a machine that is progressing towards the goal you want to set.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:15) Absolutely. They have a fantastic book too, where they write about—it's pretty short—where they write about the Amazon principles. How did you originally tell people? Is it in the orientation where you say, "These are the things that we value and this is how we operate"? How do you get that information to new employees?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:23:41) So it starts with hiring, actually. Before the person joins your team, the first thing they do in an interview process is—there are two folds into that: the candidate and the hiring manager. So the candidate looks at the leadership principles that we have, our culture, our values. And then the hiring manager always sets for that specific position, "These are the top three values I really care about, and I'm going to rate that candidate based on these three values."

(Amiram Shachar at 00:24:15) And something I saw Elon Musk talking about a lot when he interviews people is always really digging in: "Tell me a story about a problem you solved." Because people who really solve the problem can really go five, seven layers down—peel all the layers and really tell you how they solve the problem. People who didn't solve the problem can barely go one layer down, two layers down. And then when you talk about specific examples and stories from their past experience and they talk specifically about these areas of values, of culture you like, so you know who you're talking to. They also know what they're signing up for. And it starts there and continues in a very tedious, continuous effort of every week, every process, every call—always talk about culture because it's something that doesn't leave you.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:25:06) And if you stop talking about it for two weeks, people will forget about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:11) Absolutely. And this information is easy, but doing it tends to be hard. Why do you think people fail at actually executing this?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:25:19) Because when people are busy with surviving, it's hard to apply culture. But when you understand that—I read it in Hard Things About Hard Things of Ben Horowitz, amazing book. Just recommend it to everyone who listens now. Ben is actually—there's a lot of talking points about culture, but Ben, in one of the chapters, says, "Why is culture important at all?"

(Amiram Shachar at 00:25:47) If you have a great product and—to my point—some companies are really busy surviving, building a product or surviving getting revenue, surviving doing this, surviving. So why do you really care about culture if your product is amazing? Uber is such a great product, Google has such a great product, Amazon—why do you care about culture? Things can work.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:26:08) And obviously you can be nice to each other, but why do you really care about culture? And he says there that culture is important when things go wrong, and there is a law that things will always go wrong. So when things will go wrong and you lost the customer, you didn't deliver on the deadline, you failed to do something—okay, what do you do now? How do you fix it?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:26:32) This is where, really, culture is measured. And I see it every day that when we fix things, if we don't go according to the culture, it can break you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:44) I had an amazing moment today where something went wrong in the sense that somebody didn't—I had a client email me, right, asking me for a status update on their project. And I'm like, "Uh-oh. Why aren't they in the know?" They should be the client. They should always be informed and know when the next time they're going to talk. And that's our level of quality.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:08) And someone who was out sick had dropped the ball, but they messaged me on Slack and they're like, "You know, very sorry. I take 100% responsibility for this. It's never going to happen again. I'm going to put this system in place to ensure it." And because we're a newer company—we only have about eleven people—so our systems are still pretty fluid.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:25) But the fact that—I've been going at this company for about four or five years now—but the fact that that was a response from one of my employees, I was like, "Yes. We're on the right path."

(Amiram Shachar at 00:27:38) Yeah. That's exactly—you want that people will speak to people in your organization and feel like they are the CEOs. And if that's what's happening, so you know you did your job right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:48) Oh, yeah. For sure. I tell people it's like at a restaurant—the way I want to operate my company is like at a—there are different types of restaurants. You order crab legs at some restaurants. They bring you a bunch of crab legs, give you a cracker and say, "Good luck," right? Other restaurants, the high-end restaurants, it comes to you—beautiful melted butter. It's already completely cracked open. You just grab it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:09) It's so strange that people would consciously choose to not have that company. That's the company you want to have, right?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:28:20) That is so funny, Joel. I remember when Spot was one year old, it was my birthday. And my wife took me to Mexico for a short weekend in Los Cabos. It was San Francisco to Los Cabos, a two-hour flight. So we go there and we go into the hotel, a high-end hotel.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:28:41) And there is this personal concierge comes to me and asks, "Hey, do you guys have allergies to food? Do you guys have any things you would like us to know?" And I said, "Yeah. I hate mayo." It's like, "Okay." And then I go to dinner, and the server comes to me and says, "Hey. We are aware that you don't like mayo, so we just want you to know that in this one, two, three entrees, there is some sort of aioli that you want to avoid." And I actually told this story in a whole-hands meeting when it was a twenty-people company. And I told them, "I want to be this company that a customer tells us something, and we use this thing for the entire customer's lifetime."

(Amiram Shachar at 00:29:25) And then you feel so special as a customer. You feel like these guys are professional, and I'm getting what I want. So your restaurant story—

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:36) Absolutely. That's one of the reasons why my entire stock portfolio, every company that I'm investing in, the founder is still there. Because it's up to us—we are literally where it stops as far as what we will allow. And so we get to choose how far from the standard we'll let the company deviate before we step in. And that's something that I've been—I'm still learning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:00) I'm just continuously learning and growing at it. But it gave me a whole new look of businesses now. Because now I can tell, like, "Oh, wow. If there's a company with this culture, I know what their CEO or their founder's like."

(Amiram Shachar at 00:30:15) Yeah. And Ben Horowitz also says something really important: that a company's culture should be a culture that the CEO can live by. So if you're asking your team to do something you're not doing, you're in trouble.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:28) Absolutely. That's why, man, discipline has been such a factor in this entrepreneurial journey: working out, fitness, eating healthy. Basically, I tell people that I train like an athlete to survive entrepreneurship.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:30:44) So true, man. I've never really thought about it like this, but this is so true. And we have this sentence that we didn't invent that sentence, but we always say it internally: that we don't trust motivation. We trust discipline. Because you're not going to have motivation every day to wake up in the morning and be the next big thing, but you will have discipline to wake up every morning and answer customers and do this and do that.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:31:13) And motivation is on top of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:16) Yes. And whenever I'm struggling, I put on Jocko or David Goggins, and I just listen to them speak because, man, they are hard people. And so I'm like, "Yep. I just need to tap into my inner Goggins. I'll go outside and run until my legs hurt or whatnot."

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:34) But I'm curious to know, is Leaders.vc an investment fund, or is that a place where you're sharing knowledge with other entrepreneurs, or is it a little bit of both? Can you explain what Leaders.vc is?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:31:46) So Leaders.vc is an investor at Spot that invested in Spot in Series A, Series B, sat on the board of Spot, been very helpful to the Spot journey and acquisition, and actually continuing to add a lot of value even post-acquisition with mentoring, with connecting us with customers, with helping us in anything that we need. I think that it is not only important to build your product, but also see how other people build their products and what's happening in the industry. So through being very close to Leaders VC, I'm able to really understand the ecosystem better. So I'm sharing knowledge, helping, seeing how one plus one can become five, or sometimes one plus one maybe is not even two.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:32:38) So really using the connections and the reach that Leaders has to other companies to help those companies, help us, help Leaders to have the triangle of success.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:52) Do you have any other entrepreneurs that are younger that reach out to you for insight or help with problems?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:33:02) Yes, and I love to take these calls all the time. I like going and speaking at accelerators and startups hubs and stuff like this, just talking about it because we didn't have an easy start in the company. It was hard for me to raise money.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:33:19) It was hard for me to go on each step. You know, when I look back, everything looks amazing, up to the right. We always grew. We always did the right thing. But man, I struggled. I struggled a lot.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:33:32) I had lots of sleepless nights. I was sweating a lot. I was, you know, going through a lot of horror stories. And I want to help people who are going through this journey. And if I can help someone and help him avoid three, five mistakes, that's going to make me super happy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:54) Absolutely. Yes. When I get to do a lot of these conversations, you know, the story is the highlight reel. But the realness is concerned about payroll, standing in the kitchen with your wife at two in the morning, not able to sleep. You know, the real moments are, I started my business the month my child was born, my first child. And so I had no income. I was spending my savings, and I just had a baby that I have to take care of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:23) And, you know, as a dad, your instincts just change and kick in. And it's scary and it's hard. But when you tell the story, that stuff isn't in it. That stuff's not in my story really. And so whenever I see other entrepreneurs, I'm always like, man, I know they've seen a lot of pain. And I don't necessarily want everybody to share it constantly and have to rip it up. But I do think it's important to help out the next generation of people so that they don't feel so alone with it, you know?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:34:55) That's true. And, you know, this is a tip I always give to every entrepreneur just starting their way: try to learn from failure, not only from success. So usually people go and ask all these people who made all these impressive exits and stuff, but they tell you exactly what you're saying, Joel. They'll tell you the highlights of the story.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:35:18) They're not going to tell you about the bad stuff. When you're going to talk with someone who failed and actually shut down a company or shut down a product, they're going to tell you, that's what we did, that's what happened. And there is an Israeli show called Silicon Valley, about three or four Israeli companies that are going through fundraising and stuff, and they're not making it. And, you know, to me, it was much nicer to watch this than reading the news about this unicorn and this unicorn and this unicorn.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:35:52) You really want to hear about horses and what went wrong for the horses and what can I do to avoid not doing their mistakes?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:00) 100%. When I started this—not the podcast, when I started my entrepreneurial journey—I was looking at different companies. And I started going to hang around the venture capital funds and the hubs and things like that in my town. And one of the things that you'll see is you'll see a lot of failure, right? Because those people are trying, they're doing the incubator thing, it fails.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:26) And one of the things that I picked up on after a couple months of hanging around that crowd was they'll always ask you, what's the reason you failed? Was it money? Was it people, talent? Why did you fail? The market wasn't there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:41) And everybody had an excuse, and it was always categorized neatly into these 20 different things. And what I realized, looking at the trend across all of them, is the reason why they failed is because they quit. Because I'll be at Walmart cleaning toilets making this thing work, and I decided that from the beginning, and I will never give up. And so that mindset, I think—I don't know how to have success without that mindset. I have not done it.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:37:09) Couldn't agree more. And, you know, a few things about failure and looking at failure. I absolutely agree that quitting is the main reason for failure. And I've read an article that really changed a lot in my thinking. You know these moments when you always believe in something, but when you read that somebody else thinks about exactly the same thing as you, you're saying, man, I'm not the only crazy guy. And this thing I read is, you know, when you look at companies who fail—for example, let's go to a random company that's not doing well on marketing. So what the CEO will do is he'll replace the VP of marketing, hire a new VP of marketing, right? Create a new plan.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:37:59) Or they're not doing well on sales, so they'll hire a new VP of sales, new CRO. Not doing well on product, going to hire a new product manager. Fine. But when the company is failing and they shut down the company, so you ask the CEO, hey dude, what went wrong? So he'll tell you, look, the market was not ready. We were too early, and this and that. No.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:38:26) It's you. You are to blame. It's, you did not do your job. And it's really about the person who navigates to—okay, if you're early to market, pivot. If you're entering into a market with too many competitors, find your claim to fame.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:38:43) And it's really about you, and it's about, to your point, about quitting. So if you quit and you're not seeing what you need to do, so that's the biggest thing to watch out for. And the last thing to say about failure is something that Jeff Bezos said in a lot of interviews, and I took with me in my backpack as CEO: failure is part of success. If you don't fail, you can't succeed. If you don't try, if you don't have a high risk-reward, you won't be able to—if you always do singles and doubles, fine.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:39:16) But you need to take huge risks to make it big time. And sometimes these risks won't work, and you don't need to fall in love with your ideas, and you always need to change. But failure is part of success. And I told the team—Jeff Bezos said, he said about himself, I've made a billion dollars' worth of mistakes in Amazon, over a billion dollars. And that's fine because at the end of the day, we want to grow Amazon.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:39:42) And that's what I told my team the entire time. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Don't be afraid to invest. Don't be afraid to change. Don't be afraid. This is a culture that we want to have in a company. Now this is just, again, culture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:55) I like that you keep referencing Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos interviews because I intentionally seek out every interview they do and listen to them because they're two of the richest people on the planet and, you know, they both came from nothing, essentially. They came from at best middle class, right? And they've become the richest people on the planet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:15) One of the things that I learned from Jeff Bezos was don't make bet-the-company bets. So investments where you could lose the company. So that was something that I had to learn, where you have to keep enough cash to be intelligent, you know, but you also have to invest. So you sort of have to be really, really good about asset allocation in order to take risk, but also not die. This is great, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:44) We have a few minutes left before we wrap up. Was there any topics that you wanted to cover that we didn't get to? We should probably tell people to go sign up for Spot, right? How do they do that? How do people sign up or learn about Spot?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:40:58) You know, I really enjoy—this conversation is far more educational, adding value, than just going over the Spot product portfolio and register and the value proposition we add. I think Spot has proven to be a great company, not because of our technology, but because of how we treat customers and our customer success and our customer support. That's—you know, I just welcome everyone to try our products just so you try our customer success and support. You'll have a problem? You can reach out to me over phone in 30 seconds if you need.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:41:40) That's the mechanisms that we have internally, so I can ensure customer satisfaction. So I really welcome everyone. Go to spot.io and try it. And, yeah, I've enjoyed—because these things help people build companies, and I'm happy that we can share some stories, and I'm super glad for your success. And, you know, it's great to see you also talking about your experience.

(Amiram Shachar at 00:42:06) So it's—I had a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:08) Yes. No, me too. And then for people that like your culture and they might be interested to come work at Spot, you guys have a career page as well on spot.io?

(Amiram Shachar at 00:42:17) We do. Career page with, I think, over maybe 100 open positions. So just go and look whatever works for you, and then I'm sure you can find something there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:28) 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.