Using Moonshot Goals to Vitalize your Business with Christine Wolff, Sales Vice President at PTC

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, we're talking to Chris Wolf, Sales Vice President at PTC, about moonshot visions, women in technology, and more. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Chris Wolf at 00:00:18) Hey, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:19) Look at that studio.

(Chris Wolf at 00:00:21) Fancy, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:23) Is this your personal office?

(Chris Wolf at 00:00:25) No, I'm in the PTC headquarters building in Boston. It's a signature building right on the Seaport of Boston, which is amazing because we're a 30-year-old company. And if you walked in here, you would think you're working for a startup.

(Chris Wolf at 00:00:40) Very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) How did you get into podcasting?

(Chris Wolf at 00:00:43) I just got invited to host our Speaking of Service podcast, which has been a blast. I had never been in a studio before. I had never used any of this equipment, but I love talking with people, and one thing led to another. So we're about 18 episodes in. We've got a ways to hit your 700.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:05) You've got to go at least past 25. I think 99% of podcasts don't make it past that number. Have you been enjoying it, though?

(Chris Wolf at 00:01:12) Oh, yeah. It's a lot of fun. And the team makes it easy. They make it fun for me, and I get to feel like a big shot. I know my mom watches the podcast, so I have at least one regular viewer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:25) What's the most memorable episode so far?

(Chris Wolf at 00:01:27) It's a great question. We recorded one with a guy whose company is called Sanimatic, and they bring industrial cleaning equipment to places that need industrial equipment cleaned. Imagine a pharmaceutical facility, also imagine someplace producing dairy products, milking cows. And literally, they clean everything from pharmacy equipment, syringe makers all the way down to milk trucks. And it's an amazing smart and connected business. In the past, they made their money on selling these cleaning pieces, and now they deliver cleaning as a service. So the servitization that's happened there, of all places, in the dairy farmland.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:16) That is interesting. And so what's the name of the podcast? Let's give it a shout out.

(Chris Wolf at 00:02:20) It's called Speaking of Service. And when you go to that page, you'll see this Sanimatic episode linked there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:27) All right. So you're doing the show. You're enjoying it. Do you have control over it? Do you get to pick the editorial calendar? How does that all work?

(Chris Wolf at 00:02:35) I'm just the face and the voice, but I get to ask questions. And I challenge my audience and not just the audience, but the presenters. Anyone who can get the word "bumblebee" conversationally into the conversation we have, for every one of those bumblebee instances, I give $10 to Girls Who Code.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:54) Okay. So if we can say "bumblebee" a bunch, we'll get $10.

(Chris Wolf at 00:02:57) Bumblebee a bunch, $10 to Girls Who Code, or in the comments or in the questions. And that's because I have a passion for trying to get women and girls into tech. And unlike you, who's a software developer, I tell them you don't need to be a techie to be in the tech world. We need people who can translate very arcane topics into languages that mere mortals can understand. They need to be bolder about coming into our industry. So "be bold" was the original hashtag, and now it's "bumblebee."

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:27) I like that. You know, I haven't heard that perspective before. Typically, it's just "make all the girls programmers," but I like this idea that you're showing that there's a lot of different areas you can be in inside of the tech industry. Tell me more about that.

(Chris Wolf at 00:03:39) Like our customers, today, just about everything ships with a screen included. In the old days, you would order those things separately or as an add-on product. But now if you're buying a tractor from John Deere or you're buying a piece of medical equipment from Carl Zeiss, they're all coming with a screen and a keyboard. Everything's smart and connected. So that means people who are using those machines—farmers, med techs, doctors, hospital administrators—need to understand cybersecurity. They need to understand the business benefits of connecting things that weren't previously connected, the pros and cons of that, and then the systems that will feed data upstream from the design of those machines down into the way the machine operates and how we can collect data off of those complex machines and send the learnings from those data bits back up to the designers to improve their designs. The ability for non-technical people to explain that in English as opposed to a programmer who might get into a lot of the weeds means that we can help executives make decisions differently.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:45) And so what do you get to do all day?

(Chris Wolf at 00:04:48) I work with our partners. PTC doesn't make anything come to life. We make software. But it's implementation partners who help our customers understand their business opportunity, where our software can fit in. They help get it deployed, up and running. I call that the surgical insertion of the technology, the surgery piece. But after any surgery you've had, you rely on the occupational therapist to help you use your new technology safely. Then you have a physical therapist who makes you use it until it hurts, until you get used to that pain, the pain goes away, and you may have a new lease on life after that where you join a gym or run a marathon. Our partners span that whole eventuality of deciding you need a fix, having the fix inserted, learning to use it safely, and then giving a new lease on life to whatever business process you're using. So these are large companies like Accenture. There are also boutique companies that have expertise in CAD, computer-aided design, for example.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:48) That's pretty neat. And how did you—

(Chris Wolf at 00:05:51) How did I end up here?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:52) Yeah.

(Chris Wolf at 00:05:53) I had spent 18 years working for a networking company headquartered in Johannesburg. If you think about the Hewlett-Packard of South Africa, 35 years ago, when apartheid was happening, all the tech companies pulled out of South Africa for all the right reasons. And this local company grew to fill that void and provide the large corporates infrastructure. Went on to make a lot of money, very successful, and expanded into the U.S. And I spent 18 years working for this company where we went from a thousand people in South Africa to almost 18,000 people around the world. And in the course of doing that, we were acquired and headquarters moved to London. I wasn't going to leave Boston to live in London, and I started looking at companies that had a real interest in the Internet of Things, headquartered close to Boston with great people and great offices, close, easy commute. And PTC was all of those things at the time, headquartered in the sleepy suburb of Boston called Needham. Tried very hard to get a job there, did not succeed, was recruited to Dell, but I sent my 21-year-old daughter to work for PTC as a result of that interview process. She's still here, and she recruited me to come back. Now we're in this beautiful signature Seaport office, and I'm loving it. It's kind of a fun story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:15) So I just have to wait for my kids to get a little older.

(Chris Wolf at 00:07:18) Right, and be interested in following in your footsteps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:22) I'm interested. My thoughts on my kids are I want them—the requirement is they have to find something that they're really, really good at, and they have to do it very well. And then aside from that, I have to teach them how to make money and how a business deal—I want them to see everything from how a pitch deck happens to contracting, all of that, so at least they have the skill. It's like taking your kids out in the 1700s and teaching them how to hunt. They might find somebody that hunts. They might do it differently or go to the grocery store eventually, but at least they know how to hunt. Right? So that's my job. Teach them how to hunt and then have them find something they're interested in and then making them stick with it when they want to quit.

(Chris Wolf at 00:08:02) Do you have boys or girls or both?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:05) Both. Yeah. I've got one girl. She's the leader of the tribe right now. She's six. And then I've got a four-year-old boy and a one-year-old boy.

(Chris Wolf at 00:08:14) So when you sit down for a family meal somewhere, who's floppy fish all over the floor and who's eating carefully and using their knife and fork correctly?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:25) If you were to take an average of all times going out to eat, because it depends on their moods, but more often than not, Lachlan, the boy, he's floppy fish guy. And then Arya will sit still better. Like, when we—we homeschool them. So we'll take that example. Homeschooling, I could say, Arya will wake up and ask me, "Hey, can I do work? Can I do school work? Can I have my workbook?" I'm like, "Yeah, here you go." Some days she doesn't, but some days she does. Lachlan wakes up and it's like the movie Gladiator at 300 where he's cannonballing on me at four in the morning, wanting to fight Daddy. "Can we fight?" "No, no. It's 4:30 in the morning." And then all day, I get attacked, surprise attacked.

(Chris Wolf at 00:09:06) There's a great podcast. A lady named Dr. Heidi Halvorson out of Columbia University, she spoke about how girls learn quickly how to please people and how to be good, and they're congratulated for being good. "Look at what a good job you're doing, working on your schoolwork, sitting quietly." Boys are taught to just try and be a little bit better. "Please, Lachlan, could you just try and use stillness in your body just this once? Go for two minutes." So girls learn very quickly to be good, and that becomes binary. You're either good or you're not good, and they become risk-averse. Whereas boys are taught, doesn't matter how bad I am as long as I'm just a little bit better, no matter how hard I fail, if I get better every time, I can improve. That's a growth mindset. You'll find that girls are often socialized into that narrow-minded "be good" mindset. Boys are raised with, socialized with a growth mindset. And I see that limiting women's interest in joining the technology world. They say, "If I don't know how to code, I won't be good at that job." I said, "Now you don't have to know how to code. You don't even have to be good at this job. Just come and get in the water and just get a little bit better every time." And I think that also applies to users of emerging technology. We have mixed generations working with our software, and the self-consciousness about being good, particularly for executives, very high. If you've ever seen somebody try and turn on a video conference piece of equipment and they're an executive, they invariably have somebody come in and do it for them because they don't want to look like they don't know what they're doing. That's funny. It's true. And junior people, though, they can try as many times as they need to until they get it right. So I think the more and more senior we get, making big decisions, the more afraid we are to make the wrong decision, that we don't have the confidence to lean into some of these new technologies. And that's where people at PTC really help our customers connect what the technology can do with the business requirement and give them the confidence to lean in and make a decision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:12) You know, I've never heard that argument, that explanation, that discussion that you just said. It sounds incredibly logical. And I'm going to say stuff and then you correct me so that way I can better understand it. So would you say that girls, they naturally want to please people more, therefore fall into that "good or not good" trap? And then boys just don't care and just want to fight, so we're just like, "As long as they improve or whatever." Is that something that's happening or no? Did I get that wrong?

(Chris Wolf at 00:11:45) I'm probably applying all kinds of gender normative models to this, right? And that's not what I'm intending. But there are people who learn to be pleasers early. And if you want to be a pleaser regardless of your gender, you will learn how to please people and learn how to be good. And the desire to be good can lead you to narrow your focus so you only do the things you know you'll be good at. You become less risk-seeking, less experiment-seeking, and you may learn less. You may grow less, and you limit your choices for fear. Whereas people who don't have that concern and are taught, "Look, just try and be a little bit better today," are raised with that affirmation for experimentation, risk-taking, and just trying. And if you fail, so what? Just try again next time. And those people broaden their horizons as they grow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:39) Yeah. No, you're 100% right. I'm one of the people that I look for the best arguments. I've got—somebody told me way long ago, he goes, "You want to have strong views that are loosely held." So you want to be passionate and believe in what you believe. But when better information comes along, you want to be able to switch your views and change. So I'm always curious because you've said a number of things that are kind of interesting. And you're right, the conversation so quickly diverges from gender-specific to just personality because I know boys who are quieter, and I know girls who are louder. And so, but there is the 80/20 situation. But Arya, she is a wild monkey too. It's just that when I'm looking at them, I'm not sitting there trying to shape them or be intentional. What I'm trying to figure out is, okay, I have an app. They're my little AI algorithm. They ship with some default capabilities. Because I see how—what a nerd I am. All right. What type of AI—what's the default capabilities, and then how can I help that thing mature in the way that's easy for her? Well, since Arya is really cool about sitting down and doing work, awesome. I'm going to keep feeding her education materials. I'm going to help her grow that way. Lachlan wants to fight and punch, so I enroll him into—he takes ninja class. He's going into ninja class. And you could just as easily have a girl who's more physical and doesn't want to sit. And you could just as easily have a boy who doesn't want to be physical and he wants to sit. But I just look at them for the individuals that they are, and I'm like, all right. How do I help develop this person? Because I see my job as a parent, not to make this the parenting podcast, but I see my job as the parent as to get them to self-sufficiency. I'm supposed to get them to self-sufficiency and instill positive family values. And, ultimately, the goal is to get them out on their own, right?

(Chris Wolf at 00:14:28) Or to get them to use their powers for good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:30) Oh, there you go. That's a good one. Yeah.

(Chris Wolf at 00:14:32) There's a great book called Bedtime Stories for Rebel Girls.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:37) Oh, I'm writing that one down.

(Chris Wolf at 00:14:39) Two women in Europe went to the library, and they had their daughter remove all the books where there was no female character, or if there was a female character, she didn't speak, or if she spoke, she was supported with a merry cast of rabbits and birds and mice. And when they looked at the number of books left on the shelf, it was embarrassingly thin. They started writing bedtime stories for rebel girls about girls and women who'd done badass things and been successful. And they have a series of, I think, 90 stories in this first edition, and they've had several other editions since. So it's my favorite gift to give to people who have new babies, boys and girls.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:20) That is interesting. Yeah. You know, I like when people see the world and they do that experiment, and then they think, "Okay, I'm drawn to this. I'm passionate about this. Here's a deficit. I'm going to fill it." I don't like people who say they do all of that work, and then they're just like, "Well, now I'm going to complain about it."

(Chris Wolf at 00:15:39) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:40) I like people who do things. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, you're a wealth of knowledge. What other type of brilliant insight do you have?

(Chris Wolf at 00:15:48) Gosh, well, we should be thinking a little bit about technology, shouldn't we? I mean, that's—yeah. Are you familiar with PTC or the category of software that we make? I couldn't spell PTC before I joined the company.

(Chris Wolf at 00:16:00) So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:01) No. Why don't you help me understand? There's a lot of acronyms out there, and they all have 100,000 employees and make billions of dollars. Why don't you help me understand exactly what they do?

(Chris Wolf at 00:16:09) So I'll give $10 to Girls Who Code if you can define without looking it up what parametric means as it relates to parametric geometry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:18) What does parametric mean?

(Chris Wolf at 00:16:20) Yes. Well, wait. So you understand parameters, yeah, right? Let's say that we're gonna build a treehouse for your kids.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:27) Yeah.

(Chris Wolf at 00:16:28) What are the parameters of that treehouse? What should the geometry of that treehouse look like?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:32) Okay.

(Chris Wolf at 00:16:33) What are the attributes of the components that go into that treehouse? Some of them need to be strong. Some of them need to be soft. Some of them need to be flexible. There are different parameters that apply to the design of anything. Now, instead of a treehouse, let's say it's the Blue Origin space shuttle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:54) Uh-huh.

(Chris Wolf at 00:16:55) And all of the components that go into that, and then all the very particular parameters for each component that goes into that rocket ship. Being able to design something complex and collaborate with other people around the parameters that may be changing is the use of parametric technology in computer-aided design. Our company was called Parametric Technologies Corporation because thirty years ago, we created or really revolutionized the category of designing 3D equipment using parametric geometry. And I'm a history degree—I had never heard of what parametric technology was until our CEO started telling stories like this where it makes sense.

(Chris Wolf at 00:17:38) So now you think about, instead of building a treehouse, I'm gonna build a blender. Let's pretend your dream blender. What would the characteristics of that blender be?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:48) It would be sleek. I like the MacBook-style exterior feel. And then, of course, that would be from the aesthetics perspective. And I would argue that that is the most important. I am a heavily visual person, so I'd say that that matters first and foremost. I'll look for something I like, and then I'll work backwards from that for functionality. And then it would have all the functionality, be able to blend stuff. I personally don't use blenders, but I see my kids—they make homemade ice cream from time to time, and I think they use the blender for that.

(Chris Wolf at 00:18:26) Okay. So it'd need to be child-safe. It would need to be sleek. Would you want the ability to turn it on or off, put it in safe mode or open mode remotely, maybe with software?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:37) No. Okay, not remotely. I actually—we had a lightning strike and lost all the electronics in our house, and I had to replace them all. It's actually kinda difficult to find fridges or ovens or washing machines that aren't paired Bluetooth and digital over the Internet.

(Chris Wolf at 00:18:55) So perfect. We make yours a hand crank, maybe with some rock song.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:59) Yes. There we go. I'm liking it.

(Chris Wolf at 00:19:02) So we've designed this, and we've given you a 3D sketch pad, if you will, and you've created the look and feel and functionality of this design as an engineer. Now you need to send it off to be manufactured. How are you gonna take what's in your mind's eye and make sure that what comes out of a factory resembles what you had initially intended?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:21) So that's what you guys do? You'll take that and make it reality?

(Chris Wolf at 00:19:24) We do. We take that gleam in the eye of an engineer, and then think about every variation. Instead of a hand-cranked ice cream machine, maybe next year you turn it into an electric machine, or maybe you have one that's got special powers. All of the information, kind of birth certificate information and the medical record of that machine over its entire lifetime, is captured in a big database so that if you need to repair that machine sometime in the future, you would know where to source the parts, what types of materials are involved. You could even provide instructions from the designer on things you should be aware of if you're going to put hands on this machine to repair it. We provide a digital thread that connects the gleam in the eye of the designer to the manufacturer of the particular unit, or even individual of that unit, all the way out into the field where it needs to be repaired by somebody with smart hands but the ear of God talking to them over the microphone or their sketching on their screen to enable them to provide that repair in an informed way. We call that the digital thread. So connecting that data from the gleam in the eye to the guy with the wrench out in the middle of nowhere providing a repair.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:38) Wow. So tell me a little bit more. It's like, let's say you take AutoCAD and then you put it into your PTC proprietary system, and it's basically a giant Git repo tracking everything and communicating with everyone?

(Chris Wolf at 00:20:51) Kind of. But we're open systems-based, standards-based, so people write to and draw data from our systems. We are in the categories of CAD, as you mentioned. Like AutoCAD would be an easy—it'd be a consumer-grade version of what we build for industrial engineers. We have a product lifecycle management system, which is that mega database of everything that goes into and out of every iteration of these machines that are reflected from the designs. Then we have an Internet of Things platform where people develop applications to run smart and connected devices, whether it's in a factory or once they're out in the real world, and an augmented reality system that allows a user with the screen to look at a camera image and snap on the CAD diagrams or snap on expert advice from somebody who's worked on that machine before to perform complex tasks like putting a bicycle together. Imagine if you could hold—you had all the bicycle parts and you could hold your iPhone up and see the parts in front of you and had something on the screen that would say, take this part and put it here. Check—you did it correctly. Oh, nope. You did it incorrectly. Try again. That kind of coaching and inspection for quality as well as for compliance, hugely valuable. Now think it's a medical device. You're going out to repair a plasma machine. The technician goes out to work on that machine. They wanna perform the task for repair, and whoever's using it needs to know that repair was done properly. The technician is given instructions on their screen, but their work is also captured to demonstrate compliance if that's ever necessary.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:29) That is so cool. I had no idea that's what you guys did. I did not get that from your home page.

(Chris Wolf at 00:22:34) That's why we're the round cool building next to the square building.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:37) Yeah. And how big is PTC?

(Chris Wolf at 00:22:41) We have just under 7,000 employees around the world. In terms of financially, we just announced our third quarter earnings. We are on target for about $2 billion in annual recurring revenue growing at 16%, which is kinda twice the category rate of companies like us. So we're big, strong, and profitable. One thing that's cool, our CEO said to us just this morning, when we get out of bed, the beginning of the new year, 90% of our number will have been made because so many of our customers buy every year and renew every year on multiple-year contracts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:17) That is really awesome. You know, I think one of the undertones of this conversation that I haven't explicitly addressed so far—how are you so good at storytelling? More specifically, how do you practice?

(Chris Wolf at 00:23:30) I don't know how to communicate and not use storytelling. Maybe I need to be a better listener.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:36) No. How do you build your stories? Like, you have these stories. They come out well. I know because I'll go around and give talks, and I'll polish out a specific story. But when if you're not on a talk circuit, are you just doing that throughout your meetings? Like, how do you refine your explanations and analogies and all of that?

(Chris Wolf at 00:23:54) Well, I try to take a look at who I'm talking with. So you're a dad in Nashville with three young kids, and I was gonna guess you had a mix of two and one. You probably are in that mode of building treehouses. You have to think, what is something that's gonna be accessible and gonna become a visual for my listener? If I'm talking to my mother, I use a different set of analogies. If I'm talking to a street audience, I use a different set. But I try and really think about what's gonna be in the mind of the listener and where are they gonna see the light and where are they gonna see the dark and get confused.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:32) Mm-hmm.

(Chris Wolf at 00:24:33) And it's organic. It's not something that's scripted. You know, you have to think organically about what would spark the curiosity of your listener, and you can see when they go off on a mental bike ride right away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:46) That's interesting.

(Chris Wolf at 00:24:47) I have a story that I've been using at work effectively, and it's gotten a little bit viral. Maybe I can share that with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:54) Yes, please.

(Chris Wolf at 00:24:55) I'm gonna guess you were not alive in 1961.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:59) Correct.

(Chris Wolf at 00:24:59) Do you know who the president was in 1961?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:03) No.

(Chris Wolf at 00:25:04) Kennedy. Okay. Do you know who preceded Kennedy?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:07) Nope.

(Chris Wolf at 00:25:08) Eisenhower. We all got—you know, we knew Washington, Jefferson. We kinda got to that last chapter of the book, and we went to summer vacation. We never finished it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:16) Yeah.

(Chris Wolf at 00:25:16) Do you know what the mood of the country was like when the transition happened from Eisenhower to Kennedy?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:21) No, I did not.

(Chris Wolf at 00:25:22) Well, in 1957, Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and the Soviets were out in space, and we were flat-footed on the ground. People were building bomb shelters in their backyards because they were afraid of nuclear fallout. Kids were taught to duck and cover not for active shooter, but because the Russians were coming. Kennedy came into office, and most of the conventional wisdom in politics was we need to spend every dime we have on our national defense. And Eisenhower was known for highways in the military-industrial complex. Kennedy said, we're gonna spend what it takes to put a man on the moon. People said that's crazy. You're taking away resources from our most precious mission, which is national safety, on some crazy tilting at windmills idea to put somebody on the moon. And he said that famous speech in 1961, we choose to go to the moon not because it's easy, but because it's hard. And if you think back, we didn't get to the moon during Kennedy's lifetime. We got to the moon shortly thereafter, but he was assassinated before we got to the moon. And yet if you look at all the byproducts of those NASA investments that he catalyzed—I have a son who's Type 1 diabetes, so, you know, the insulin pump, Velcro, never mind Tang, if you've heard of Tang.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:46) Oh, yeah.

(Chris Wolf at 00:26:47) Scratch-proof lenses, Tempur-Pedic mattresses. All of those were byproducts of the space race. And so by challenging our thinkers to think big and dream big, he was able to catalyze some incredible burst of innovation with this moonshot mission. I was talking to our partners and to our sellers and said, we need to think big as well. We've been really looking small at the different pieces of software that we can provide to our clients, and we're forgetting that they need to think big about how they're gonna transform their businesses to remain competitive and all the new technologies that are available to them, whether they're in our category or not. How could we define some moonshot ideas? And then if our client has their moonshot ideas, how are they gonna fund and afford to advance those? It turns out we make a little piece of software that's not very expensive that a factory can use to identify where there are slowdowns in the factory production line. And factories care a lot about this because it's very hard to spot surgically where things slow down and cause delays that may take the line down. It's very hard to understand that at scale. When we run this equivalent of an MRI machine across a factory line, rather than telling them here's your blood pressure, we can say, here's where you need to put a stent. And we give them back throughput between 15–30% in their factory. So for an organization that makes missile casings for bombs going to Ukraine, they're able to produce four more units a year than they did before off a single line. That's about $2 billion worth of improvement for them by putting a surgical insertion of a little piece of technology. For a contract manufacturer, we can help them free up 3 to $4 million per factory that was trapped in inefficient operations by spotting very simple things that recurred and giving them a surgical fix. So by pinpointing a problem and providing a fix, we release a ton of value that our customer can then redeploy on their own moonshots. So for some of our customers, how am I gonna use generative AI to transform the way I produce these products as a contract manufacturer? There's no secret pot of money under the president's desk to fund experimentation in AI. But if our little piece of software can release that value back for them to redeploy in other ways, that's a massive piece of value that we bring independent of the kind of day-in and day-out work we do. Called this our moonshot, and I went and spoke with our partners, particularly the former Ernst and Young, and most recently with Accenture. They love this idea of a moonshot. Dell got involved. Microsoft got involved. And now we're offering solutions together that we call manufacturing throughput as a service, and it's specifically to free up value that's trapped in inefficient operations and creative teams can use to fund their own moonshots.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:49) That is brilliant. Throughput as a service.

(Chris Wolf at 00:29:54) The key thing, though, is thinking about the moonshot. We're so used to talking as techies with our customers about the specifics of how data flows from the CAD system into the PLM system, into the factory, and out to service. We forget that our clients care about the livelihoods of their people and their businesses and how they're gonna serve their customers better with these incredible opportunities, but also incredibly threatening technologies like generative AI.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:18) Have you been messing around with Midjourney at all?

(Chris Wolf at 00:30:21) I have not. Midjourney?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:24) Yeah. Midjourney, M-I-D-J-O-U-R-N-E-Y. You actually communicate to it through Discord, and then it's like a bot you talk to. Well, rather than me just telling you, why don't I just show you? So I said to it—here's what I said to it. I said, 2023 Ford F-150, 3-inch lift, custom wrap, modern digital camo, American flag, muted green, and look what it came up with.

(Chris Wolf at 00:30:51) Oh, wow. That is cool. That's a great-looking truck too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:55) And it looks legit. It looks like it actually exists, and that was in like thirty seconds. That is going to completely change the game for copy on our GPT stuff that we use or image generation. It's bonkers.

(Chris Wolf at 00:31:10) Well, I was really inspired when Peter Diamandis published that Bold book. Do you read that book?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:17) No.

(Chris Wolf at 00:31:18) Fifteen years ago? He argued that the democratization of technology with the ubiquitous access to Internet and broadband access and almost limitless compute in the cloud would allow people to collaborate on big problems in ways that they'd never collaborated with before. And he invented the XPRIZE and said, I wanna get out into space. The team that can get a machine with people into space, back down safely, and up again in two weeks' time will win a million dollars. And I have applied that same bold thinking. How can we crowdsource ideas? How can we get people who are nontraditional experts to collaborate on big problems and come up with ideas you might never have thought of? And I believe in that abundance.

(Chris Wolf at 00:32:04) And you look at the way these generative AI systems are allowing people to unlock creativity that was trapped behind traditional learning models or traditional ways of thinking or expressing yourself with a keyboard or in math and in science, all these kind of limiting things that got in the way of being able to really express the ideas that you have. It's just taking those barriers away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:29) Exactly the case. So I have these visions in my head, and I can see it. But there's about a decade of designer experience between me and making that thing I see in my head, just like with music. Yeah, I've been playing for seven, ten years now actively.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:42) And so my whole goal when learning music was to make the things I hear in my head be able to come out of my hands. That was my goal. And because once you do that, it's this weird freedom of creating in real time. It's beautiful. And so now the fact that I can go write a paper and sound like an amazing author and hit all the key points, that's wonderful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:05) And I can go make a design that looks beautiful. It's just gonna enable, it's gonna put a premium on the people that do. I think it's people who have discipline and who can take action, they're gonna be the real winners because it's gonna amplify them. And also the people who are hungry but don't have the skills yet, it's gonna just shove those people up. It's gonna reduce the time for them to become an expert.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:26) And then once they are expert, it's just gonna be lethal in their hands. And then it's gonna leave the thing we have to consider and think about is the group of people that will just be sitting around twiddling their thumbs and how that's going to respond. How we're gonna deal with that.

(Chris Wolf at 00:33:42) Well, you know, if we had enough time, we'd talk about the relevance of the nation state in this age of accessible technology and penetrable borders. And it's, I think there is, I think you're right there. We have this crazy economic divide, right, where the two ends are stretching out to such far extremes, and yet you see the same thing with knowledge work. Right? You have people who are total brain workers and people who are hands-on workers, and then you have people who are left out entirely because they don't operate in the traditional ways or they don't have the same abilities that other people have.

(Chris Wolf at 00:34:17) But if these technologies can help not just change who wins, but also keep people from losing, it should democratize things much differently. It's gonna shake up a lot of politics. That's for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:29) 100%. I'm an optimist when it comes to this, but I'm also a realist. So when I think about all of the change happening with AI and these jobs and all this stuff coming and going, what I think about is, well, first of all, it's been happening since the beginning of time where industries come in. The difference now is it's compressed the scale of how quickly it'll happen. Like, we can wake up tomorrow and watch a whole industry die overnight, whereas when cars and horses did their flip, that took some time. You could kind of see it coming, all of that good stuff.

(Chris Wolf at 00:34:59) So it's just gonna—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:00) Speed up.

(Chris Wolf at 00:35:01) The stone chisels are still pretty upset about Gutenberg and the printing press.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:06) Yeah. Well—

(Chris Wolf at 00:35:07) I have a call to action I'd love to put in and plug.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:10) What's the call to action?

(Chris Wolf at 00:35:11) You know, let's talk moonshots. What does your company wanna do? Have you thought about some moonshot thinking? We have this very cool office that inspires creativity. We've got all kinds of cool equipment literally on the shop floor up on the 17th floor.

(Chris Wolf at 00:35:26) Come to my house. I'll pay for the catering. We'll do some moonshot thinking and then find a way to fund it through some of our software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:32) That's brilliant. And how can people go about that? They track you down on LinkedIn? They just type in Wolfie in the search bar?

(Chris Wolf at 00:35:39) I hope I'm the only Wolfie on LinkedIn, but you never know. I've got a lot of bar T-shirts that say Wolfie people have sent me over the years. I am Chris Wolf, C-H-R-I-S W-O-L-F-F, no E. But [email protected] is my email.

(Chris Wolf at 00:35:56) I'm at chris underscore wolf on Twitter. Would love to connect up with anybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:02) 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.