Don Pezet - Reimagining Online IT Education & Being Comfortable Making Mistakes

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Don, the co-founder of ITProTV and CTO of ACI Learning. And they discuss how ITProTV has been reimagining online IT education, why it's important that people are comfortable making mistakes at a company, and how to train your leaders to become mentors. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:28) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast. So tell me about your background. How did you get into technology?

(Don Pezet at 00:00:43) Well, you know, I actually went to school planning to become an attorney. I wanted to go to law school and didn't have a lot of money or scholarship. So I was building and selling computers on the side to pay for school, you know, just to cover the tuition. And it was my senior year in college that I decided that I didn't want to be an attorney, and I wanted to be in IT instead. I was having so much fun doing this thing on the side that I decided I wanted to make a career out of it.

(Don Pezet at 00:01:10) So I ended up getting a degree in political science and CIS, which has turned out to be unusually useful. You know, it turns out politics are involved in everything. But IT was my passion, and so I got out in the industry. And when I first got started, I didn't have my CIS degree yet. So I wanted to get into IT, and I needed to find a way to do that.

(Don Pezet at 00:01:33) And I learned about certifications, an easy way to demonstrate knowledge you already had, to validate your skills, to get your resume noticed, to get a job. And I started looking for training opportunities to be able to learn what I needed to pass those certification tests. And as a college student, it was really expensive. You know, a lot of the training that's out there, the courses, even the exams themselves—like back then to get your MCSE, it took six exams and they all add up. So it ends up being expensive.

(Don Pezet at 00:02:04) And that's something that stuck with me over the years. I did get my certifications, and I went out and worked in the field. I was a field engineer for several years, traveled a lot, and kind of stumbled into teaching not too far into that career. So I was learning a lot of amazing things out in the field, and I found where I could share those real-world experiences with people. And they found a lot of value in it.

(Don Pezet at 00:02:26) You know, reading a textbook is one thing, but hearing a real-life story really teaches you something. So I started teaching while I was working. I worked for an insurance company for several years. I worked in the financial sector for a bank out in Seattle for several years and kind of settled back into teaching because there was a great new opportunity, which was teaching via the internet, actually reaching out to people all over the globe, helping people get into IT as a career because it's been great for me.

(Don Pezet at 00:02:55) It can be great for them. But also helping people already in IT to advance and move forward in their career, and to do it in a cost-effective manner. That's something that just not a lot of people were doing. So that's what kind of caused my career to evolve. And throughout that whole process, I started as a field engineer, became a network engineer, worked in the sys admin space, transitioned into management, started managing teams and people, started dealing with cybersecurity—you know, all the things that fall under IT leadership now. A nice broad base of knowledge to work from.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:31) And so what was the day like when you decided to found this company?

(Don Pezet at 00:03:35) You know, at the time, I was working for an insurance company, and my business partner, Tim, he ran a brick-and-mortar in-person training organization, so classroom training. And we were talking about the amount of sales calls that our salespeople would make. And that a good salesperson, somebody who, you know, is really dedicated and a hard worker, would make 100 calls or talk to 100 different people in a day. And if they sold even one, then that was a great day for them. You know, because training was expensive.

(Don Pezet at 00:04:14) So it was a good sales day for them. But we were talking about it, and I said, "What happens to the other 99 people? Did the other 99 people just say, 'No, IT stinks. I don't want to be in it?'" And so we started breaking it down. We're like, "All right. Well, for some people, it's too expensive—actually, a lot of people.

(Don Pezet at 00:04:30) For some people, no, they don't want to get into IT. For other people, they just didn't have the time. They couldn't take five days out of their work week to go and do eight hours a day of training or whatever that was. They had a family. They had two jobs.

(Don Pezet at 00:04:42) Some people just didn't have the confidence. They didn't think they could do it, and they weren't ready for that commitment. But the majority of them were people who did want to get into IT. There was just some kind of barrier to it. And so we had a very frank conversation about it. We were thinking, "What can we do to remove those barriers, remove those obstacles, make it where these people could get into IT? What would be the perfect world? What's the best of what we do right now, but ways that we can make it affordable, convenient, easy?" And it started out as what seemed like an insurmountable task.

(Don Pezet at 00:05:18) But when we started looking at the individual pieces, we said, "You know, I think we can do this. I think we can make the training product that we wish we had when we got started, the training product that helped people actually get into IT, be successful, be more successful at what they're already doing." It just takes a little ingenuity, creativity, and willingness to take a risk. And so we decided to take that risk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:42) Was it just smooth sailing the whole way?

(Don Pezet at 00:05:46) No. No. In fact, the early years were really hard because for me, you know, I had worked in the field. I have a great technology skill set. I've done the work. I've done the leadership. So in the technology space, I'm very talented, but I don't know anything about studio lighting, cameras.

(Don Pezet at 00:05:57) I was just telling a story earlier today to somebody. Our first 4K camera that we bought—so this would have been seven years ago—we paid, I think it was like $5,000 for this camera, which was a lot of money for us at the time. You know, you're a startup. You're scrappy. But we buy this camera because we knew we wanted the best video. And there were switches on the thing that we had no idea what they meant.

(Don Pezet at 00:06:25) You know, there'd be some term written on the switch with an on and off. And you looked in the manual, and it would just have that same term again. It would say, "If you flip the switch, it turns it on. Flip the switch again, it turns it off." Well, that doesn't teach us anything.

(Don Pezet at 00:06:37) And so we recognized real early that there was a lot we didn't know, but we didn't know what we didn't know. And so it came down to a challenge for us finding the right people. And it took about two years. Right away, we had great talent on camera. So our edutainers, or our people that actually do the training, we already knew who we wanted for that.

(Don Pezet at 00:06:59) We'd lined them up. We started creating content. But all the things that go on behind the scenes—you run a podcast. You know that there's the work you do that is what most listeners hear. But behind the scenes, there's a production team, there's editors, there's marketing. There's a whole world that's super important and it's hard to find the right people for those positions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:21) Oh, it absolutely is. It's, you know, the leadership poster you see where it's like the tip of the iceberg. The conversation is the tip of the iceberg. Everything else—there's, like I said, there's about just under 15 people that make this whole thing happen. You know?

(Don Pezet at 00:07:35) Yeah. And, you know, when you find the right people, you're really fortunate. We have been extra fortunate, and more than once, we found the right person. So finding the right person to lead our production team, the right person to lead our engineering team, our developers. We never even thought we would need developers.

(Don Pezet at 00:07:47) Day one, we had a WordPress site. We used WordPress and some plugins, and that was how we did it. We outgrew that really fast. You know, fast forward to today where we have 10 full-time developers. That's all they do is work on the custom delivery of our content. That took a long time. Now, we've been in business seven years now. So it's taken a while to evolve to that point. But we were hiring engineers pretty early on.

(Don Pezet at 00:08:14) Salespeople—we were a little bit naive in the beginning. We didn't think we necessarily needed salespeople, that web SEO or SEO would lead people to find our site and purchase, and that worked. But once you start bringing in sales and marketing, those numbers start to go up a lot faster. And so that made a big difference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:32) You start off with that like, "Oh, I can run some ads. I can do some content. We'll get some customers." And then you realize that things happen because of relationships. And even if it looks great and it says it can do everything I want to do, if there's a price point where I want to pick up the phone and talk to somebody—

(Don Pezet at 00:08:47) Yeah. Now, you know, for all the rough spots, there were plenty of smooth spots. There were things that went really well. The nice thing about starting a company from scratch, at least from a CTO perspective, is you get to set all the policy from day one. So for a lot of people, their biggest nightmare is dealing with legacy systems. We didn't have any. We were starting from scratch.

(Don Pezet at 00:09:05) I made a rule on day one. I said, "We will not have any servers in our building. I don't want any servers in the building. Everything has to be in the cloud or in a colocation facility somewhere else. This building should be able to be destroyed, and our website's still operational. People are able to watch training and so on." And so that was a policy we had that we've stuck to to this day, and we've really benefited. We didn't have a mainframe we had to migrate away from or something of that nature that a lot of people get as an albatross around their neck.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:38) I was curious how you actually find the edutainers, because I like the word too. I heard it for the first time in the prep for the show. I said, "That's a great word," because you don't want an educator who's boring. You want an educator who's entertaining, and you can definitely tell the difference between the two. Where do you recruit from? Do you find really cool teachers who just are really great people, or—?

(Don Pezet at 00:10:00) So I would love to tell you there's a secret sauce, like one method for finding these people, but there isn't. And so we follow some interesting strategies on it. So first off, nobody wants to hear a lecture. We all went to high school. Most people went to college. You've been in that environment where you get the boring lecture that just puts you to sleep. So nobody wants that. But you also don't want to be PowerPointed to death either, right?

(Don Pezet at 00:10:16) If you stare at 100 PowerPoint slides—I used to be an authorized trainer from Microsoft, a Microsoft Certified Trainer. And when you dealt with their official curriculum, it was hundreds of slides spread across a couple of days. It's just distracting. The students are reading the slides, not listening to you. It's not a good experience. So we wanted to have people that were a little more personality, a little more personable on camera, that were somebody you build a connection with.

(Don Pezet at 00:10:53) And you don't get that with a lecture. And the problem with recording one person on camera is it's not a conversation, right? It's them talking to the camera. It is a lecture no matter what they say. They can tell as many jokes as they want. It's still a lecture. So we took the stance of bringing in two people on camera. Let's get two people up there and have a conversation. So instead of one person lecturing, now it's two people talking.

(Don Pezet at 00:11:17) It just naturally removes the feeling of being in a lecture. But it also helps take people that might otherwise be kind of stiff. You know, in IT, people are generally not as social as in other industries.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:30) What? This is news for me. No, I'm kidding.

(Don Pezet at 00:11:34) And it helps to break that up and create that casual conversation just like what we're doing right now. It makes a big difference. But even with all that, you still have a challenge with getting people talking about highly technical subjects to sound entertaining. And so I try and meet as many people as I can on podcasts, at conferences, as I travel for various reasons. I always try and meet as many people as I can to find that rare unicorn, that person who really knows whatever their expert area of expertise is.

(Don Pezet at 00:12:08) So if they're a subject matter expert on something, they really know it, and they can tell stories and have a conversation. We actually call them purple unicorns here. They're not as rare as unicorns, or as rare as purple unicorns—very specific. And so I put in my budget every year—even if I'm not planning on hiring an edutainer, I put in the budget at least two positions.

(Don Pezet at 00:12:30) And that way, if I just randomly encounter somebody who's a good fit, I don't have to worry about dealing with budget. I've already got it there. I'll hire them on the spot and bring them in. Or a lot of times, we will contract somebody, have them come out and create content for us over a couple of months to get an idea of whether they'll be a good fit, and then we just hire them that way. So we have a few different methods.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:51) I like that. Have you ever come across like the No Fluff Just Stuff conferences?

(Don Pezet at 00:12:58) I haven't, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:58) Oh, man. They're really cool. But they have great people. Like, entertain—like, I've been around to a lot of the different conferences, right? But I came across theirs and they had some really entertaining people that were really, really smart subject matter experts.

(Don Pezet at 00:13:13) The one I've had the best luck with are the Security BSides. You know, the BSides are a little bit more independent. And if you've not heard of BSides, it's like an open-source framework for running a conference. And so they're all over the country, and they do the regular BSides, but then there's an infosec-focused Security BSides. And when you travel to Atlanta or Denver or Boston, even smaller cities, you'll run into these BSides and meet local people that are really talented that nobody's ever heard of. And they're usually really passionate. They're giving these talks for free, and that's a great way to find people too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:53) This is great. So like with some of the questions I had, as an entrepreneur and thinking about, you know, I, of course, knew your product. I'd seen some of your people at conferences. They were doing interviews. I think you guys do some fun stuff, right?

(Don Pezet at 00:14:05) We do a lot of different things. We—when I go to a conference, to me, a conference is a chance to learn about what's new, to find new products, things I might not have heard. You know, so I really enjoy the talks are all right, but I really enjoy going to the vendor booths and talking to the other people. And it's really something I've missed with the pandemic shutting these conferences down. But a few years back, actually, probably five or six years ago, we had the idea of taking our camera crew and our microphones and actually doing interviews out on the floor of the conferences.

(Don Pezet at 00:14:36) And so that led to some neat, interesting content for people that, you know, maybe you weren't able to go to the conference, but here's a chance for you to explore some of the stuff that's out there. And I get to act as our viewers' representative, I guess. You know, ask the questions that they might ask, because I'm the one who's actually there to kind of extend that experience out to them. But even inside of ITProTV, we don't just do certification training. We also do—we have our Technado podcast that's been going on for a long time.

(Don Pezet at 00:15:06) I think we just did our 203rd episode.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:10) Spell that for us so we can give a shout-out for it.

(Don Pezet at 00:15:13) Oh, sure. Technado is T-E-C-H-N-A-D-O. And we have technado.com, but our fun domain is technay.do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:26) Oh, man. And what's the topics that you discuss on that podcast?

(Don Pezet at 00:15:31) So what we normally do is we have our first segment is we have some kind of guest. And so there'll be a guest from any number of technology companies that are out there, and they'll either talk about some new product they've created or some industry trends they're aware of. And so we'll talk about that. We do a little interview around it. And the second half of the podcast is tech news. So we'll take just breaking topics in cloud, sysadmin, Linux, Windows, whatever, cybersecurity. We almost always have at least three cybersecurity articles that we discuss. And then there's usually one kind of goofy or fun article at the end.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:11) Do you host the podcast? Are you the host?

(Don Pezet at 00:16:13) So the full title is actually Technado with Don Pezet. I'm on it as the technology expert, and then Peter Van Rysdijk acts as the host. So he does the open and the close and all that. And then we have Daniel Lowry. He's our security expert, so he's on there with us. So the three of us are always on, and then we have kind of rotating guests.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:38) Oh, that is so cool. I love it. All right, so we'll definitely promote that, and I'm going to take a listen. And I think you just got a new subscriber because I think that'd be really interesting to listen to. But back to my entrepreneurial questions. I was looking at your site and you guys had a lot of comparison, like you versus other companies. And it seems, you know, I happen to know some of the CEOs of the companies on your website that you compare against just because, through friendships or relationships or whatnot. And everybody seems really friendly in this education space, by the way. I haven't gotten rude people yet that run these companies. But they also seem to be moving really fast and there's a lot of capital being pushed around. How have you guys experienced that whole growth of this entire explosion of this market, multiple competitors popping up, some being more funded than others? How have you differentiated yourself through all of that?

(Don Pezet at 00:17:31) So it's interesting you mentioned it. A lot of the IT training companies are on good terms. A lot of us will cross-license content. So for many years, if you went to Pluralsight, the Mac training that was on there was me. I used to be content over on Pluralsight. So you do see a lot of shared resources. Also, the IT training community, just the trainers themselves, will oftentimes create content for more than one provider. Anthony Sequeira comes to mind where he creates content for, I think, just about everybody. So there's a number of people like that. But when it comes to competition, I think that's probably the number one reason why the IT training market is so friendly, because worldwide enterprises will spend tens of billions of dollars on IT training every single year. Well, if we could get 1% of that, that's a lot of money. We'd be a very successful company. So it's a big pie for everybody to take a slice out of. And so it's not like we have to defeat the competition. And as long as you're priced right, many people will use more than one training resource. When you buy a car, you only go and buy one car. But if you're studying for a certification, you might buy books from two or three different publishers, and that's how people do their IT training. So it's not a dog-eat-dog, high competition world. There's plenty of room in the market, and I think it makes things really civil, and it gives people a chance to innovate a little bit. Our biggest innovation was trying to make things a little more casual, a little more friendly, have a conversation, but still cover the topics, keep things in twenty-minute episodes, a little bit longer than the micro-learning you see on some sites and a little bit shorter than the lecture learning you see other places. Not trying to be right for everybody, but trying to be right for a particular demographic that wasn't being served. So that's what we've done. That's been our approach. Other companies focus maybe just on business and not on consumer clients. Others focus just on consumer, not business. Some focus on an individual technology, like just Linux versus us where we cover a lot. So everybody has a different way to specialize, and there's enough room for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:52) Do you guys get into the leadership and management training at all?

(Don Pezet at 00:19:56) You know, we've dabbled in it. For a little while, we had worked on a product called BizProTV that we were working on launching, but there just wasn't a lot of traction there. And the main reason, if I had to theorize why there wasn't a lot, it's that leadership is actually a somewhat generic skill. The way that you lead people is actually the same in most industries. And there's little variations of the actual application. Once you get into, like, service management, that's where things really get different. But on the leadership side, listening to people is a skill that's necessary in every industry. So while it was something that we easily could have gotten into, there is a lot of competition there. There's a lot of big names that are really well known in the industry. And we felt, you know, let's let those experts do what they do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:44) Oh, it's super hard. I'll tell you that. So this podcast, we started taking insight from the leaders that came on that were willing to share it. Right? Like, CTO of NASA gives some good advice, and we bundled those into leadership training and went to market with it. Yeah, we failed pretty fast. It's really, really tough to sell it right, because the learning and development team, they want to buy something for everybody for the whole company and just make one purchase. Then there's the people that they have to have data on it. So now you're building custom tools just for leadership insights. And so the sale is really complex. The content is not complex. Like, here's what good leadership looks like. Here's what people do. It's the actual go-to-market. So we ultimately figured it out and, you know, it's turned into a line of business and it's pretty great. But it was not an easy battle by any means.

(Don Pezet at 00:21:42) Yeah. I've got a stack of books back here on my desk, like Simon Sinek and other people. Some of them are really useful, like Five Dysfunctions of a Team. That book really applies to anybody that deals with teams and is really useful inside of the IT world. There's very few true IT leadership books, in my opinion. And there's The Phoenix Project and a couple others like that that you hear people talk about. But by and large, I think for those books to be successful, they need to have a broader audience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:15) Have you ever written a book?

(Don Pezet at 00:22:19) No. I've thought about it, but it is a huge amount of effort and dedication. And I don't think of myself as a business person because, you know, my business partner, Tim, he usually handles the majority of that side. But as a founder of a business, I'm responsible for a lot of people. And so my extra time is usually dedicated to making sure everybody's happy where they're at and they have the resources they need. And so I just have not been able to allocate time to support that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:46) You're spending time with your people.

(Don Pezet at 00:22:49) You have to, especially with the pandemic, where you've got people who are remote now. I prided myself, as the company grew, that when we hit about 60 or 65 people, I knew everyone's name and everyone's spouse's name. And in many cases, I knew their children's names too. And that was important to me because we're a family. We built this company together. We're growing this company together. You need to know your people and listen to them to be able to hear their concerns and make sure that you're making adjustments while you can. You never want to lose employees because they were unhappy and you didn't even realize they were unhappy, and it was something you could have prevented. Now, obviously, we've grown significantly larger. We have over 200 people. And with the pandemic, people are remote. There have been people hired in the company that I haven't even met yet. And that stings a little bit. I wish it wasn't like that. I wish I had a chance to reach out and meet as many of these people as I can. So that's an effort that I actually dedicate time each week to doing, is reaching out and talking to as many people like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:55) Was your growth due to the merger with ACI?

(Don Pezet at 00:24:00) A big part of it, yes. Yep. So we were at about 75 employees when the merger happened, and ACI was at about 100 employees at the time. And then once we came together, we did a rapid spurt of growth. You know, sometimes when companies merge, they eliminate positions, but here it was a huge opportunity. So we ended up hiring 30 to 40 people right after the acquisition and just rapidly growing. And for me, as the CTO of ACI Learning, I'm responsible for the technology. Well, I knew the needs of all of the ITProTV personnel, but with ACI Learning and the extra people, people that are in the UK or in some of the other locations here in the US, I didn't know their needs, and I didn't know the people. So I had to reach out and talk to them and communicate. It's one of the reasons why communication is such an important skill for people in technology, even though a lot of people ignore it or hate Toastmasters and other things where, you know, you learn about how to talk and communicate. But it's so important because you need to understand people's needs. And I'll give you a great example. I met one of the groups of salespeople that were out in our Denver office, and they were wearing these headsets for their phones. And they were the cheap $15 headset you buy at Target. And, hey, that's fine if you're twelve years old and you're going on a road trip. But if your job is to use this headset eight hours a day, five days a week, you need to splurge a little bit. You need that $200 Jabra headset that other people might balk at. But this is a tool of your job, and it's technology that provides it. You've got to understand your people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:36) How did you meet the team over at ACI to even allow this merger to take place?

(Don Pezet at 00:25:44) So we actually met them several years ago at a conference called InfoSec World. So there was an organization called MISTI, the MIS Training Institute, and they did audit and some cybersecurity training, and they ran the InfoSec World Conference. And there was another organization called LeaderQuest that did classroom training. And if I remember the whole story right, LeaderQuest acquired MISTI and became ACI Learning. You know, companies change hands quite a bit these days. And so we had actually known them for several years under different names. And it was all in just operating in the same world. When they were doing a conference, we asked if we could come out and shoot video out there, and they said they'd love for us to come and shoot video. And so, you know, we got out there and helped out, provided them all the video that we shot. It was kind of a win-win for both organizations. And so we recognized pretty early on that, as separate companies, we played well together. I bet we could play even better if we were one company. And that's where we are now, and it's really been an exciting ride.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:48) That's amazing. I love it. I love when the cultures match and everything comes together. And I was reading the site too, and I saw MISTI and LeaderQuest and ACI and then ITProTV all coming together. There's a blog post about them all coming together. And I was like, oh, there you go. You get some people working together, and then now you can create an even larger change faster.

(Don Pezet at 00:27:12) Absolutely. And we've started expanding into different areas. So with ITProTV, we always focused on sysadmins and technology. Well, now we're expanding out a little bit more to cover things like the audit space and more focus in cybersecurity. You could still say that's kind of sysadmin world if you think of blue teams. But we're also looking at healthcare professionals and just general skills, things like communication skills, that in the past we didn't really dabble in. But now that we've got a larger market and larger resources, we can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:45) What do you think the future is? Like, when you imagine what it's going to be like, e-learning in ten years, you obviously had some intelligence and a vision for it because you got in early, right, in your career. But what do you think ten years forward is going to look like?

(Don Pezet at 00:28:01) You know, it's interesting because, in my opinion, the best learning experience you can have is being in a physical classroom with a teacher right there. You know, a one-on-one tutor is even better. Like, that's really the true best way to learn something. You ask whatever questions, you move at the right pace for that one student. But that's hard to recreate. It's hard to recreate in a large class. Like, I remember when I was in college, there were a few courses that might have three or 400 students in there. There was no way the teacher even knew your name, better yet understood how well you were doing in the course. So, you know, that's not something that scales well. And when you do recorded training, how do people ask questions? What do they do if they get confused? Right? And so when we built up ITProTV, our real vision was, let's try and recreate the best things in the classroom into online. And so we look for features that would provide that. So streaming video, pre-recorded, that was for scalability. Right? We need to be able to scale to handle thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in time zones all around the world. Once we had that licked, it was then how do we bring all this other experience into play without breaking the scalability? So things like virtual labs so you can get hands-on experience, or a Q&A forum so you can ask questions to the trainer. Even though you might be watching a video that was filmed six months ago, you can still send a question to that edutainer, build that connection with that person. Doing outreach at conferences to be able to physically get out into the geographies where these people are and meet them. That was all stuff that helped to recreate that classroom experience but in our online format. So that was a big part of the vision that led us up to where we are now. But looking at it going forward, I think there were a lot of people that were hesitant to do online training in the past, that they grew up doing in-person training, that they've paid for in-person training for years, and they just didn't want to go online. Well, with the pandemic, they were forced to do online training if they did training at all. Otherwise, they're learning what it's like not to be trained. So that's a whole different lesson. But these are people learning that the online experience is not bad. In a lot of ways, it can be just as good as an in-person experience. And so they're starting to embrace that, the reduced cost, the access to more training, the different—if you go out and you find a course and you don't like the trainer, being able to easily just pivot and find it with a different trainer. You know, those are resources that are available to people now going forward that may not have been available in the past. And so it really opens up the world to a lot more training options.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:51) Did you say that if you're not training to learn, you're learning not to train? Is that a common phrase?

(Don Pezet at 00:30:58) The phrase I always heard was, if you think training's expensive, you should try the opposite. And it's true, especially—I have a friend who is a consultant. He helps companies build their BRP, their business continuity plans, and business resumption plans. So if a company has a catastrophic failure, they help them recover, right?

(Don Pezet at 00:31:20) Well, if you've taken training on that and you build up a good BRP and your company has a disaster, it makes a huge difference. You recover very quickly. You're back online with minimal impact. But if you don't do that training and you don't know what to plan for and you just fly by the seat of your pants and you have a ransomware attack or a massive power outage or, God forbid, like a terrorist attack, and then you're trying to figure out how to recover on the fly, your recovery time is going to be way longer, which means you're going to lose money way longer. It's a huge impact.

(Don Pezet at 00:31:53) It's very expensive. So training is kind of like security software. You know, it helps if you have it before you need it, not after you need it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:03) If you could—I'm going to ask you a leadership question about leadership training programs. Because you make training programs all day, and you're a leader, and you're an entrepreneur, and you've been through all of the difficulties of building a successful business. But if you could design the perfect leadership training program for your direct reports, what would the most important concept in that program be?

(Don Pezet at 00:32:25) Mentorship. Understanding that when you're a leader, your people are looking to learn from you, but you have an opportunity to learn from them, right? So it's always a learning. We're always learning one way or another.

(Don Pezet at 00:32:39) But there's only so much you can learn from managing people without turning them into guinea pigs, right? Like, I'm going to try this out and see if it works. And then, oh, I just lost that employee. I'll replace them and I won't do that this time with a new employee. That's not a great model. So you need to have some kind of mentor, somebody who's been in the field, somebody who maybe they've worked in your industry, maybe they haven't. Sometimes a whole different perspective is useful. But somebody that you can bounce questions off of, somebody that you can be frank and honest with.

(Don Pezet at 00:33:08) You know, when you present things to your team, we have a phrase that we use a lot here. It's called disagree and commit. So when we have a leadership meeting, it's rare that we make a unanimous decision, right? So there's always going to be at least one person who has a different opinion or disagrees with something.

(Don Pezet at 00:33:28) But we all have that one tenant, disagree and commit. We might disagree, but we're going to commit and go forward with it. And so if you're that person who disagreed, but you've got to move forward, you have to have a way to present that and be able to communicate that to your team that maintains a nice, stable, you know, one stance from leadership. You've got to be that person. You have to lead with confidence.

(Don Pezet at 00:33:52) Meanwhile, you might have a ton of doubt in your mind, but you can't let that out, right? You've got to be able to lead with confidence. But with a mentor, that's a person who you can voice your doubts to, who you can share your concerns, your weaknesses, kind of focus on that and become a better person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:07) I like that. That's good. That's good. Has your role changed much going from, you know, cofounder IT Pro TV to CTO of ACI Learning? Has it changed a lot or no?

(Don Pezet at 00:34:18) It has. You know, in good ways and in—I don't want to call them bad ways, but just ways that make me nervous, I guess. With ITProTV, when we started, Tim and I, we have different skill sets. So I'm a technology guy. I understand technology, but I've also been a trainer for over twenty years.

(Don Pezet at 00:34:39) So I know how people learn, and I know how to take a technology topic and convert it into words that people understand to help them learn, right? So that's what I do. He knows how to run a business. He knows accounts receivable, accounts payable, and that side. So he put us together, and we're a good team, right? So we cover the aspects that we need to lead a company. Well, it also meant that we both wore more hats than we should have, right?

(Don Pezet at 00:35:04) So in addition to being the head edutainer, the person building the road map and the training architecture for organization, I was also the CTO and CSO and having to deal with all these different things that really should have been broken out into more people. But when you're a small company, when you're a startup, you don't have those resources. Everybody wears a lot of hats. So after the merger with ACI Learning, we really increased in size. So our company had 75 people. Theirs had a hundred people, both fairly small companies. But when you stick them together, now you're at 175. And then we hired 30 or 40 more people to jump over 200. Well, GDPR has that magic number, 250 employees. When you hit that number, there's a whole set of regulations that all kick in and your life gets harder.

(Don Pezet at 00:35:55) So you've got to plan for that. So now we were at the right scale where I could split off some of those hats and entrust them to other people. Now we've been fortunate to surround ourselves with great leaders here. And so I'm confident that each person that I've tasked with roles that I used to perform are going to do a phenomenal job, and I make sure that they have the resources to be successful. So those are the things that make me nervous.

(Don Pezet at 00:36:18) You know, something that I had direct control over before that I've now handed off, I've delegated. And as a leader, that's a tricky spot. That's probably one of my biggest failures was not delegating soon enough and recognizing that I needed to do it. We are better off now that I've delegated some of those things off. But it also means that I get to focus more on certain things.

(Don Pezet at 00:36:41) So my role as CTO is to make sure that our company has the right technology in place to be successful. And the way I phrase it is I want to make sure that the employees have the right tools they need to be successful. I don't care what the tools are. I just want to make sure that the tools make them successful. If an employee tells me I can work better if I'm on a Mac, I don't want to tell them, well, too bad. Here's your Windows machine.

(Don Pezet at 00:37:04) I want to look at it and say, okay, what can we do to support Macs on our network? And, you know, what can we do to make sure they meet the regulations and requirements of the organization to provide so this employee can be successful? And that's the way I approach every problem and try and make sure that we've got the right tools to be the best at what we do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:25) Yeah. You mentioned a couple things about your culture, like, you know, you could disagree and commit. What are some of the other culture items over there?

(Don Pezet at 00:37:34) So we have a number of things. It's really important that a company has values, that the employees know the values, and that everybody is kind of in line and working the same way. We've always said that it's important to work with honor, that you should, you know, be accountable for the things that you do. Personally, I've got some individual things that I follow, rules that I have. It's really important to me that people are comfortable making mistakes.

(Don Pezet at 00:38:04) If you make people uncomfortable with making mistakes, you know, if you're going to just read them the riot act when they make a mistake, when they have some kind of failure, then the next time they have a failure, they're likely not to tell you about it. And then you can kind of suffer and end up with challenges down the road. And so it's always an opportunity for people to learn that in IT, we're always learning. Things are changing fast. Mistakes are going to happen.

(Don Pezet at 00:38:27) You need to be able to react to them. But a personal mantra that I have is simply make decisions that you don't want to hem and haw. You don't want to delay. You don't want to continue gathering information and not making a decision. Indecision is in its way its own decision.

(Don Pezet at 00:38:43) So make a decision, right or wrong, make one, move forward. By doing that, if you make the wrong decision, you'll probably have time to fix it. But if you delay too much, there does come a point where you've missed the amount of time you need to be able to fix a bad decision. You can't be right all the time. You're going to make mistakes, and you just need to be ready to accept it and move forward.

(Don Pezet at 00:39:05) So that's an important lesson that I've learned in the past, and I always try and impart on other people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:10) You got me thinking there because I've never thought about it from that perspective. Like, obviously, you need, you know, the concepts or the principles of making quick decisions. Pretty popular. They've been around for a while, but you just added a new layer to it for me, which is there's this opportunity window that's closing, and you can decision within that window. And so you can make multiple decisions, you know, reverse them, change them, edit them, modify them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:36) But that window eventually does close. It's like two things happening at once. I never thought of it like that.

(Don Pezet at 00:39:41) Yeah. Think about people who have on-premises data centers, right? And they hear about the cloud. They know, well, I should probably be in the cloud by now. It's 2021. It's time to be in the cloud. But I don't know. Do I go with Amazon? Do I go with Microsoft?

(Don Pezet at 00:39:56) Do I go with Google? And you start gathering research and you get consultants and plans. And after a while, enough time has passed that you've already lost so much money—not lost necessarily, but wasted so much money that it wouldn't have mattered which provider you picked. Any one of them would've saved you money by that point. And that's probably a best case scenario.

(Don Pezet at 00:40:15) There's other situations where maybe your competitor comes in and makes the decision first. You are still in a deciding stage, and now you lose your market. You're out of business. That's a worst case.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:25) Yeah. Because they can provide a better experience with their cloud infrastructure.

(Don Pezet at 00:40:30) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:31) What are you excited about right now? You just did this merger. You've got all this going on. The company's growing. What are you excited about in your personal life, your nonprofessional life?

(Don Pezet at 00:40:39) Oh, nonprofessional. Well, that one's a hard one. So technology is my hobby. And that's one of the reasons why I love working in this field so much. So when people ask me, like, you know, you work with technology all day. When you go home, what do you do? And I say, well, I kind of work with technology.

(Don Pezet at 00:40:59) I will say that right now, working with technology is a whole new thing that in the past, it was really hard for people to dabble in it as a hobby because a lot of times it required specialized hardware or it was expensive. You were lucky if you could buy old hardware that was used to be able to experiment with. But today, thanks to progressive web applications or just any kind of cloud hosted web-based software, people are able to experiment and learn, try new things, and do it in home labs, do it on raspberry pies, and do it for next to nothing. So, really, there's no limit. You can try—you want to learn Kubernetes?

(Don Pezet at 00:41:42) Great. You don't need a whole server farm. You can get three raspberry pies, four, and stand them up, and now you've got a whole little farm you could experiment with. So that excites me. That makes me kind of jealous of people that are growing up and getting into IT right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:56) Do you have any other, like, of your family that's in IT as well?

(Don Pezet at 00:42:00) Not really. No. You know, my family—I'm from a military family. So my father was in the Air Force. My grandfather was in the Navy.

(Don Pezet at 00:42:10) My other grandfather was in the Air Force. So, you know, mostly military. I was one of the few in the family that didn't go that route and ended up in IT. I've got a brother who's a minister, which is a whole different type of networking. And so, it's interesting.

(Don Pezet at 00:42:27) I guess the closest would be my little brother. He does quality control and quality assurance for a medical technology company. So they make devices that monitor—you hear about people doing sleep surveys

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:41) Oh, yeah.

(Don Pezet at 00:42:42) Or sleep apnea machines. They make the machines that do those tests.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:45) Oh, that's pretty neat.

(Don Pezet at 00:42:46) Yeah. But it's kind of a good thing because when we get together at the holidays or whatever, it's not like we sit down and talk shop. But there is a bit of a negative side to it, which is they don't necessarily understand what I do. And so at Christmas time, it's, hey, can you set up this iPhone for me?

(Don Pezet at 00:43:04) And it's hard to communicate that sometimes. Like, well, I don't really set up iPhones. I mean, I guess I could.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:13) You are customer support at the telecom. Yeah. Yep. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:19) I love it. Early on, when I was much younger, my family would send—every time there was a computer problem when, you know, when they got their first computer in their houses, they're like, oh, send Joel over. And then eventually I figured out how to decline politely. And that was a new skill because otherwise I could have just turned it into a business, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:40) That's something I could have done but, you know, your family and friends asking you to help every time there's a piece of technology. It's like that's not what I do. I write software but I guess I can help you with your printer.

(Don Pezet at 00:43:51) Family and friends are tough, right? For people outside, it's different because you just raise your price. You get to a point where they're not willing to pay. When you say, oh, yeah, I can set up that iPhone for you for $1,200 an hour. And then they're not going to do it, right? But you don't want to do that to your mom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:08) Are you a person of faith? I know you said your brother's a minister.

(Don Pezet at 00:44:11) You know, so funny story. My father was raised Catholic. My mother was raised Baptist. And so when they got married, they switched to Methodist. And there's four kids, so my two brothers and my sister.

(Don Pezet at 00:44:27) And my sister and I are Catholic. My older brother is a Methodist minister, and my younger brother, I think he is just not very religious. So we kind of ended up all over the place. It's interesting, but my wife and I are Catholic. Our kids go to Catholic school.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:44) Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. I was doing an interview with a guy that was building rockets and shooting rockets into space. Really cool guy. And he brought up his faith towards the end of the episode.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:54) And I was a little bit taken aback. I was like, man, because, you know, I go to church. I'm involved in the community, but it never really comes up on the podcast. Most time I'm leadership, advanced technology, things like that. And he had brought up how that played into the growth of his company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:08) And I said, you know what? I have no concept of how to talk about faith in the workplace. And so I actually went to—I went around and I talked to some CTOs that I knew were also ministers or pastor-type people, right? And then I also talked to my pastor, and we recorded a couple of these different episodes to really understand how faith presents itself in the workplace.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:31) It's interesting.

(Don Pezet at 00:45:33) And in IT, I think maybe it doesn't impact us as much, but there are some interesting sides to it. I mentioned the BSides conferences. For BSides Las Vegas, they actually do—there's a side conference. I can't remember the name of it, but it's a security conference for Jewish people. And they have a meal that is kosher, and, you know, they get together.

(Don Pezet at 00:45:57) So it's all people of the same faith having a conversation. And I think maybe that helps to build trust and confidence, a little camaraderie. It's nice to have something in common when you get together to talk, especially about security issues, because no company wants to air out their dirty laundry. If you can get a trustworthy group of people together, that can be very valuable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:18) Yes. Community is incredibly valuable. Have you ever built community components into your business?

(Don Pezet at 00:46:24) We have to an extent. We've tried a few different things. I don't know that we've been largely successful with it. You know, there's communities like when you look at the Spiceworks community that there are tens of thousands of people that log into the Spiceworks forums every day, and they identify that as a part of who they are. You know, it's a big deal.

(Don Pezet at 00:46:46) We have worked hard to do that with several organizations. We actually did an IT productivity roadshow a few years ago where we got one of those big tour buses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:00) Mhmm.

(Don Pezet at 00:47:01) And drove all the way across the country on our way out to a conference that was in Vegas. We went all the way up to Chicago and down, and we stopped at all these schools and places along the way where people are learning IT and used it as a chance to talk and get to know people and treat them as individuals, not just some ARR subscription number on a website. It was, here's a person I could shake their hand. It was great. I stay in communication with a lot of those people.

(Don Pezet at 00:47:29) A lot of people that have subscribed to ITProTV over the years have stayed in communication with all of us edutainers. You know, it does build a bit of a community, but it's not like a formalized thing. And I really think there could be one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:41) I love it. I love it. That sounds so cool. You guys got a tour bus, and you went across the United States. That's amazing.

(Don Pezet at 00:47:47) Yeah. I mean, do you know how many listeners you're up to each week?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:51) Over 70,000.

(Don Pezet at 00:47:53) So that's a lot of people. And you probably get emails and chats from people, but not even 1%.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:00) Oh, yeah.

(Don Pezet at 00:48:01) So, you know, getting out and meeting people in person, that builds a fan for life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:06) Oh, man. It was so cool. The year—so I hadn't done much public speaking at all. So I started the podcast, you know, it got popular over a couple years. And then I started getting invitations to come speak at companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:17) And I said, oh, that's so cool. I did it a couple times, and I was like, okay. Now I'm charging. And then, so from there, the cool thing was getting to go out and meet these people, and then, inevitably, there would be a line of people that happen to listen to the podcast, and I'd get to meet them in person. Like, you are the type of people who are listening. We have the best listeners in the world. This is so, so cool. I did 50-something cities, and then COVID happened. So I haven't—and then it was just stop. But going out there and getting to meet those people and those real—there's people I could text right now on my phone. It's a cool thing.

(Don Pezet at 00:48:53) You know, that was an interesting thing for all of our edutainers. So our edutainers, they're very good speakers, but they're just normal people. And they're normal people that you could walk up to and have a conversation with. And none of them think of themselves as famous or celebrities or whatever. But if I go to the airport with any one of them or if we go to a conference, there's people that walk up and, like, "Daniel, I love your CEH show" or "Don, you taught me VMware" or whatever.

(Don Pezet at 00:49:19) And it's eye-opening. I'm like, wow. I made a difference in this person's life, and I have no idea who they are. And so it's nice to be able to talk to them and learn their story and what they've been through.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:31) Oh, it feels—honestly, we take screenshots. You know, a lot of the love comes to me directly because people will find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. So what I do is I take screenshots and I post it into our team Slack because it's because of all of them on the team that this is even possible. And that feeling though of getting those, I have an album in my phone, it's called Love or Favorites or something like that. But I just take screenshots and add to that album constantly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:57) There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these in there because this content can go on forever, and people will find useful stuff. Have you ever gotten recognized at not at a conference or anything like that? Like, maybe at a wedding or a restaurant or something?

(Don Pezet at 00:50:15) I was buying some wood pellets for my smoker at an Ace Hardware, and the cashier—I was trying to do Apple Pay on the little credit card thing, and it wasn't taking it at first, and then it took it. And I said, "Boy, I'm glad I could figure that out." And the cashier said, "Well, you're the host of ITProTV. I assume you should be able to figure that out." I was shocked.

(Don Pezet at 00:50:39) I was like, wow, this guy knows me. So we had a great conversation. And, yep, it's interesting. Ronnie, one of our edutainers, he had a run-in at a gas station where he was just pumping gas, and somebody came by and said, "Hey, I loved your Network Plus."

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:53) That is so neat. I love stories like that too. The first time I really got recognized in public, I was at a wedding. And this girl walked up to me. She goes, "Hey, this is gonna sound weird, but do you host a podcast?" And I was like, "Yeah, I do." She's like, "Oh, you interviewed me last year." And it was this girl that I had interviewed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:11) She was awesome. And I was at the wedding of one of my employees. Right? And she was at the wedding of her nephew or something. And so I was like, this is what a small world, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:25) What a small, small world. It's—I don't know, stuff like that makes me feel really good about life. I don't know why, but it does.

(Don Pezet at 00:51:31) Yeah. It's amazing. And having a platform like a podcast gives you a chance to reach out to people all over the world. And what really kind of touches my heart is when you make an actual difference in somebody's life. And I love hearing those stories where somebody says, "Hey, I was working in a gas station trying to figure out how to pay my bills, and I used your training. I learned. I got into IT. I got my first certifications, and now I'm making $50,000 a year or something, and my life has changed. You know?"

(Don Pezet at 00:52:07) I'm finally able to not have to worry about how I'm gonna pay my rent this month. And that to me is what this is all about—teaching, helping people get into IT, providing services like these, and just feedback from the customers that are out there is really, really valuable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:23) So you have that line of business helping people level up from maybe service industry into some IT if they want to. And then you have the line of business where you help companies actually—preparedness. If I want, you know, my team to be organized on a specific security or some module? How do you sell that? I'm not explaining it well.

(Don Pezet at 00:52:42) Sure. So you've probably heard of the Peter principle that a lot of people will get promoted right up to the point where they're outside of their abilities and no longer capable to do their job. So imagine you're a network engineer, and you know everything about networking. You've got your dynamic routing protocols in place. You've got redundant links everywhere, automatic failover—everything you could ask for. Quality of service is configured, your network runs great. Well, now you get promoted and you're the CTO. Or, "Hey, we've now recognized that we need security people, so you're now the CISO." Well, alright.

(Don Pezet at 00:53:16) You know maybe the security side of networking, but what about the security side of Linux or Windows or these other areas? What about building a BRP? These are all skills that are outside of your skill set, and now you're responsible for it. You need to learn that, and you need to learn it fast. You need to have a resource that's able to teach you that. Or maybe it's not that you've already gotten promoted, but you want to be promoted. Hey, you're a network engineer. You've reached the pinnacle of your career. Now you're thinking, "I'd like to get into management. I'd like to become a CTO," or "I'd like to become a CIO, CSO, or whatever it is."

(Don Pezet at 00:53:46) Well, you're probably missing some skills. There's probably something you need to be able to validate that you've got the skills to make you worthy of being in that position. And that's where training comes in. Now that type of training is normally more fringe based. And when I say fringe based, I don't mean it's weird. I just mean that there's not as many people in that role. So it's harder to find. Back in the classroom days, we used to put on courses for things like CISSP, and we'd only have three or four students that were ready for it, so we had to cancel the class. There wasn't enough demand. But when you're doing online streaming all across the world, there's always demand.

(Don Pezet at 00:54:22) And so having access to a resource like ours, well, that makes it where you can jump in and take that higher-end training, the stuff that's more managerial or higher skill level, train up to show you've got those skills, and then move into that position that you want to be in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:40) I love it. I love what you guys are doing. I want to support you in any way possible. If people want to try out the product or learn more about it, how would they do that?

(Don Pezet at 00:54:48) The easiest way to learn is to go to our website at itpro.tv. You can sign up for a free subscription, and we have, I believe, it's a little over 80 hours of free training that just anybody can watch. If you want to get your CompTIA IT Fundamentals certification, you can watch that entire show and then go and be exam ready. So it's a great way to just see the product and whether or not you like it. If you do like it, you can sign up for a subscription.

(Don Pezet at 00:55:15) We have subscriptions that start at a very reasonable price for our video, and then you can pay a little extra if you want to get virtual labs and practice exams and check that out. But we also have a number of free webinars. If you go to itpro.tv/webinars, you can see things that are coming up. We do at least two a month, and those are free of charge. We cover all sorts of topics. We bring in a lot of experts and cover interesting things. And we've got the Technado podcast, which is also free. So lots of really cool things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:43) Excellent. And we'll run a free—thank you so much for listening. After this, 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].

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:02) Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.

(Don Pezet at 00:56:15) So, you know, normally when we hunt for articles to report on here on Technado, we are looking for amazing technological advances. I did push the limits of our rules a little bit for this article, but I thought it was so awesome.

(Daniel Lowry at 00:56:27) So now you can't get away with it because you're exposing it.

(Don Pezet at 00:56:30) Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, people are reporting that they're having Zoom fatigue. Right? More of us are working from home. I know I am in Zoom meetings every single day.

(Daniel Lowry at 00:56:38) You just came from a Zoom meeting before we started this.

(Don Pezet at 00:56:40) Well, there you go. Yeah. My Mondays are literally meetings from morning until evening. That's how I spend my Mondays, and it sucks. And so somebody else thought the same thing, and they created a neat little tool that you can run on your desktop that allows you to simulate any number of reasons to get out of a Zoom call, including crying babies, bad Internet connections.

(Don Pezet at 00:57:00) It can actually degrade your audio. It can create an echo.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:05) I'm sorry. I gotta run. There's a prison being attacked. Yeah. They're finding the one for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:11) Yeah.

(Don Pezet at 00:57:11) The echo one is kind of my favorite. Like, "Oh, something's wrong with my microphone. It's fading back." If you want to check it out, just go to zoomescaper.com.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:20) Oh, I love it.

(Don Pezet at 00:57:20) And it's a web application. You don't have to install it or anything. You can run it right from there. It does need access to your microphone in order for some of the effects to work. So, again, standard privacy concerns are involved. But otherwise, it's pretty neat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:33) So if I could make a custom one, that would be accidental amputation.

(Daniel Lowry at 00:57:34) Yeah.

(Don Pezet at 00:57:38) Oh my goodness. The neighbor just cut his hand off with a chainsaw.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:40) Yeah. So, asking for a friend, but this would work on Teams then because it—it just looks like a microphone or is it a soundboard?

(Don Pezet at 00:57:50) So it uses—there's a program called VB Cable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:53) Yeah.

(Don Pezet at 00:57:53) That creates a virtual audio device, like a virtual sound card on your computer. I know that works under Windows. I don't know about other operating systems, but it taps into that to create a virtual microphone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:02) Nice.

(Don Pezet at 00:58:03) And so that's what you use. So it should work on Teams. I haven't tried it, but it should.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:06) I'll let you know tomorrow.

(Don Pezet at 00:58:07) I can't.

(Daniel Lowry at 00:58:08) It feels like the person that made this is a huge fan of Sub Seven or something. You know? Like, do all these crazy things to people's computer.

(Don Pezet at 00:58:15) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:16) It's fantastic.