Crack the Code of Success in Tech with Eric Crane, Co-Founder of Flatfile

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Eric from Flatfile about going deep on your tech stack, responding to no-code with a yes-code mentality, and more. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) So were you always into technology?

(Eric at 00:00:20) No. Actually, it's kind of funny. I'd probably refer to myself as an accidental technologist. When I was an undergrad, I was a finance major. I was like, oh, I'm gonna go work for a bank. I'll do investment banking. This will be great. That was the summer before the entire market crashed. So I remember my senior year of college, you know, banks would come in and present at their career day and say, like, hey, you know, check out how awesome Goldman Sachs is and how awesome, you know, at that time, Lehman Brothers is. And then, you know, some kid would raise his hand and go, hey, so what about job opportunities? You didn't mention any of those. And they'd say, oh, well, we don't have anything open right now, but we just had the budget to come down here. And at that moment in time, I was like, I should probably figure out what I'm gonna do with my life because it's probably not gonna be this with my 3.3 GPA. And what that turned into was me just looking around and seeing where are people hiring, and it just so happened to be health tech at that point in time. You know, the whole accountable care organization thing was just taking off. And so I said, cool. There's this company called Epic and Cerner. Let me just go apply to them. And they were all really, really eager for technical talent, technical abilities that I just did not have.

(Eric at 00:01:33) So I basically spent the next three months learning whatever I could about programming and coding and, you know, anything related to software. And then took some tests, and they said, cool, you can come work here. So my first job out of school was at Epic doing technical services that I was in no way qualified to do. But it taught me how awesome software can be and technology just in general can be to advance—in that particular case, it was the outcomes for patients or the way healthcare systems are run. But it also taught me that, like, I probably shouldn't be writing code every day either.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:08) And then how did you go from that to, hey, I'm gonna embark on this journey of entrepreneurship?

(Eric at 00:02:15) Oh, man. So it's actually really interesting because I don't think I ever had an intent on starting my own business, but I've always been motivated to solve problems. Like, whenever I see a problem that's out there that's just lingering, I wanna solve it in some way or another. And whether that's by, you know, working as a product manager at a growing startup, whether it's working in customer success at an established business, whatever it might be, it was just like, I see there's a problem here. Let's figure out how to solve it. And what is the way that my skill set can best match with that solution? And for Flatfile, it just so happened to be that. It was, hey, I've seen this problem throughout my career. It's a challenge of getting data exchanged between two different parties, especially when there's a human involved. Let's solve this. And then what's the best way to solve it? And at first, I thought, well, let me go see if there's a vendor that I can work with that has, you know, already started thinking about this. And when the answer was no one has really thought about this that much, you know, David and I got our heads together and said, let's go start a company to solve this problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:18) How did you know him?

(Eric at 00:03:20) Oh, it's funny. We actually worked together at Envoy. So I was leading a product at the time. He was leading up engineering. And one of the things that we were trying to do was to solve problems that existed around a connected workplace. We said, hey, we have all this great consumer tech, funny enough, around the workplace that people already have in their pockets. Like, how do we pull that into the workplace environment more so to help the company provide someone a consumer-like experience when they come to work? And so he and I were working together on lots of new products, new solutions. We're working on our integrations platform. And there was this, you know, little problem that just kept coming up over and over again. And one day, I kind of had enough and said, hey, David. Like, can you go just get something that solves this problem of receptionists uploading CSVs of their employees? And a couple weeks later, he came back to me and said, well, so I couldn't find anything, but I just built it myself, and you should check it out. And, basically, that moment, we kind of knew at some point this was gonna be a company, whether it was in three months or in three years. And previously, I'd already earmarked each other as folks we would start a company with, and it just took off from there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:35) I love it. Yeah. Right when I heard about what the product does, and I'll have you describe it a little bit.

(Eric at 00:04:40) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:40) But I had built that, the base version of it, into my own applications before, you know, obviously not as robust as your commercial product. But that's what everybody would do, and they would just roll their own the best that they could. And then, eventually, a commercial product comes out that is really great, and then you can trust it as an engineer, and then you just integrate it right in. The only stuff that I had seen at all was, like, address import books for marketing companies. There was one really janky one. I'm not gonna say names, but I remember trying to use it, and it just was not quite there. And it was, I think it was for one very specific company or very specific use case. But when I saw Flatfile, I was like, this is awesome.

(Eric at 00:05:26) Yeah. It does potentially take us on a tangent. It's kind of funny you mentioned that—after we started the company, you know, this is like category creation was all in vogue, right? Like, you had these companies like Gong and Drift who were trying to create their own categories and crown themselves king. And we said, what's our category? And we talked to a lot of our customers, and they're like, well, it's data, and we gotta onboard it. So why don't you just call it data onboarding? And that marketing tech you talked about was exactly called that. It was data onboarding. And so we kind of stole the term for the category from this legacy marketing tech that was doing the same type of thing as you described.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:05) Oh, wow. That is so cool. And then where is the product at today? So you described that you met with David. You had this idea. He went and rolled something his own really quickly, and then you went out. Did you raise money? Did you do cash on your own? How did you get the business started?

(Eric at 00:06:22) Yeah. So to start the business, really, we just bootstrapped until we had confirmation that this was, you know, a market that deserved venture backing. So for the first, let's say, probably year, it was bootstrapped. We were—I don't know if David talked about this before, but we had a really cool way of paying employees with equity ahead of time. Like, we paid employees with SAFE notes. So that way we could get contributions from folks who had a promise of future equity in the company, presuming it becomes a real company. So it kind of kept our cash burn low until we said, hey, this market is significant. And we got that from our first, you know, 25 customers, a couple of which happened to be public and Fortune 500 companies. And they weren't paying us that much money, but we said, okay, if these folks are signing up for our dinky little importer, then what's it gonna look like when we have a whole team working on this entire data exchange platform that we envision in the future? And that's exactly where the product is sort of going now, is that we have this data exchange platform that allows you to design for any type of data exchange flow that exists between a third party that's out of your control and whatever normalized data set you wanna get that data into. That's a very academic way of saying data import. But in a lot of cases, you know, there's cobbled together systems and tools or legacy homebuilt products that are trying to solve for that particular problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:47) Can you give me a specific example?

(Eric at 00:07:49) Oh, yeah. Great example would be, actually, this notebook I've got here, funny enough. So, Workday. So whenever a company is deciding, hey, we wanna use Workday for all of our HRIS, you know, all of our employee management, they've gotta get all of their data about their employees and, you know, their pay structures and jobs and titling all into the Workday system. It's not just configure the Workday system and you're done. And this is kind of a core premise of Flatfile's business, is that most software is an empty box, and you have to fill it with data to do something. It might do awesome things with that data, but without it, then you're gonna be struggling to provide value to your customers because they're gonna have to either create all that data from scratch, or worse, they're not really gonna see value until it takes a while for them to build up all the data that they need to see what they should see out of your application. So for a Workday customer, it would be, hey, we gotta get all of our data from a legacy system like a PeopleSoft into Workday. And how do we do that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:52) So tell me about the no-code, yes-code thing.

(Eric at 00:08:55) Yeah. So I think there's been a long-running trend probably over the last ten years or so that said, like, hey, we need to get more folks who don't know coding into software, right? So there's this whole idea of, like, okay, let's find a way to take all of our software and make it accessible to someone who can actually build with it without writing a lick of code. And it's awesome for so many different types of applications and businesses. Because what that does is you get these, you know, quote-unquote citizen developers who are out there and they're the subject matter expert, right? They know, like, oh, this is how the charges should be routed through my billing system. And so they're in the best position to make decisions about how that should work. And oftentimes, that is the right decision for a business. For us, we tried that route actually. So one of the biggest probably strategic blunders we made as a business was we said, oh, yeah, we want those citizen developers involved in this. We know that when data is being exchanged between multiple businesses, oftentimes, it's not the developer who's the first line working with the customer on how that data gets exchanged. It's gonna be someone from a support team or a success team who may not know how to code. Let's get them involved in building out the definition of this system. But the reason that failed for us was because at the end of the day, whatever data came in and went through the rule system that was designed in Flatfile had to go out into a technical system that was owned by a development team. And further, we realized that it was taking us forever to ship new ways to actually engage or interact with that low-code system. And so we kind of made it a mantra internally later last year. We said, hey, we made this mistake. We're gonna actually lean more towards the yes-code and take away a lot of the low-code configuration. But in providing a yes-code type of solution, we also let our customers choose whether they wanna have that no-code offering available to their customers as well. So by saying, hey, we're just gonna focus on making sure that you can do the most powerful possible things and be able to cover every edge case and be able to effectively process data through Flatfile, you can design a workflow that says, hey, the first thing I'm gonna present to my business stakeholder is a drop-down, which will then dynamically define whatever target data model and validation rules will go live in here, and then they can take it from there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:22) That's pretty cool. Yeah. You have both options.

(Eric at 00:11:24) I think by taking that yes-code approach, we actually do get both options, right? And we can be less opinionated about how the software actually works, right? We can give our customers the opportunity to be opinionated about how the software works, which is, at the end of the day, way better because then it's gonna feel like it's a perfect fit with whatever their use case actually is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:48) And then is this something where I have to call sales and do a whole dance, or is it self-serve? How does that work?

(Eric at 00:11:55) Yeah. So it's entirely self-service. I mean, I think this is related to the, you know, no-code solution that we had built out in our previous version of the product. You did have to call sales, right? We ended up having just like endless sales cycles where we did all this configuration with people who didn't really understand what was happening with the data behind the scenes. They could tell us what the input looked like and what the output should look like. But when it came to actually thinking about systems design and, like, how we actually run this validation and in what order, it just took forever to actually scope that out and assess that with those folks. So now we're leaning more towards the direction, which is really back in our roots of, hey, here's an SDK on top of a well-documented API. These are all the things that you can do. Here's a bunch of end-to-end examples to inspire you. Go get it. And as long as you then understand what Flatfile does, which is we exchange data between businesses, then you can be off to the races and building pretty much anything you want.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:56) So if I'm a business and I wanna get data into my application rather than building it on my own, I just buy it, and my life's easier.

(Eric at 00:13:04) I wouldn't even say just that, actually. So I think that's a question oftentimes that I probably already misused in this conversation before. But there's this question we ask, which is, like, should we build it or should we buy it? And I don't think that's the right question to ask. I think the right question to ask is what should we build with? Because at the end of the day, even if you're, quote-unquote, building it yourself, you're still gonna be leveraging open-source libraries, a programming framework. You're gonna be leveraging potentially services that are involved in whatever delivery of that product or solution looks like. And so it's not really this—if you say build versus buy, it sort of sets it up as like, oh, we're either doing one or the other. Like, more often than not, you're just choosing what you're going to build with across whatever stack you need for that particular solution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:55) I get that. That's a good argument. You can still—I'll argue that you could still do build versus buy at a higher level. But in the context of importing data into your application, it's definitely what tool am I gonna use to help me do this faster.

(Eric at 00:14:09) Well, I think it's also, you know, across software, you're starting to see this blending, right? Salesforce is a great example of this, right? Like Salesforce traditionally was a buy argument. Oh, we're gonna buy Salesforce for our CRM. But now more and more you're seeing how companies are actually building with Salesforce as sort of like a source of truth on the front end of the house where you're talking to customers and prospects, and it's actually serving as your production database for all of your marketing data. And people are building apps on top of it too in order to extend Salesforce to work better for their particular business. So I think more and more of these software solutions aren't just ones where it's like, cool, I'm gonna buy it. I'm gonna click a couple buttons, and then we're good to go. It's more like, how do I build with this in order to create the business model and ultimately type of outcome and value that I want for my customer base?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:03) You win. I like that. That's good. That's where I think the future is going. Yeah. Definitely. It's a completely valid argument. I'm trying to think of ways that we can invalidate it, and I guess people are gonna have to email me if they have one. But if you even if you go back ten or fifteen years, right, before the APIs and everything were household names, then you're still buying it and then fitting it into the workflow of how you want to work as a company. So I do like this concept of build versus buy being the wrong question.

(Eric at 00:15:36) Yeah. And I think that also means that you can effectively evaluate what all of your potential solutions are. Right? Like, at the end of the day, what is a business doing? Right?

(Eric at 00:15:46) It's an optimization of resources on input to create more value than the individual resources had beforehand. Right? And that's the same true with any individual software solution or with an entire tech stack. Right? It's all about making decisions that fit with your business model and the customer experience that you want to drive.

(Eric at 00:16:08) And ultimately, when you're making that decision, right, like, sure, you might be paying some amount for something here, but you're gonna pay for that in another way. Right? That's gonna show up. So my easy-to-use example — I didn't want to use this as the first one — like hosting. Right?

(Eric at 00:16:28) Who's gonna build their own hosting these days?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:30) Heroku. Yeah. If you're building a small Rails app, that's my go-to. You don't have to do anything. You just push it to Heroku, and it does the slug and figures itself out.

(Eric at 00:16:40) And so we say that's a no-brainer. Right? It's a no-brainer. There is a no-brainer for literally every specific business problem that you have out there. Right?

(Eric at 00:16:50) There is some piece of software out there. Like, I would love to go to this exercise maybe after we're done recording and try to find a place where there's not software that could at least be part of a solution for a particular problem. And so there's almost always going to be an opportunity to engage with someone who has built something that you'll pay for, but you'll pay way less for than if you were to try and do it yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:19) Yeah. And then for the tech stack, making decisions on that impacting your business, did we cover that pretty well already, or do you have separate unique thoughts over there?

(Eric at 00:17:30) Well, I think the interesting thing about the tech stack side of things is more about how it relates to your business model. Right? Like, a lot of times when you're thinking about your tech stack, oftentimes we'll think about like, oh, well, AWS is the same as Azure. Right? And, like, swap them out, whatever.

(Eric at 00:17:51) We need hosting. That's true to an extent. Right? Like it's providing you a lot of optionality as a business. But when you make decisions about what you want to pull into your tech stack, that can affect your business model.

(Eric at 00:18:04) I'll give you a good example from our business. So because of the nature of our product and what we do, a lot of times we're working with customers who have sensitive data. And they say, hey, we actually don't want, you know, Flatfile getting access to this data. We say, that's fine. Like, our job is to process it.

(Eric at 00:18:20) We don't need to have access to the data. You can self-host all of the data yourself. And so we need a way to deploy to those customers our application, and they need a way to host that application. And that all has an inherent cost to their business. Right?

(Eric at 00:18:38) So it might be like, okay, cool. We have to show you how much it's gonna cost you to host Flatfile given this certain amount of usage or this estimated usage of the product alongside how much it costs us to — or how much you're paying us to actually use that software, get a license to it. And so that can affect how you operate your business because, hey, we're choosing to, you know, host this ourselves. Cool.

(Eric at 00:19:06) This is a business-critical flow. Every time we get a new customer, they're coming in with this data. But then, I don't know, Flatfile, we're not perfect. We have a bug. Right?

(Eric at 00:19:14) Well, all of a sudden, instead of getting access to the cloud version that gets an immediate, you know, hot fix for that bug, you have to wait around for another deploy that then gets sent out to all of the different systems that you're using. Right? There is a cost to making that decision. Right? It doesn't seem like there's a cost because you're not paying dollars for it, but you might be paying in customer experience or implementation teammates who are waiting around doing nothing or customers who are just frustrated and wondering, like, why this isn't working.

(Eric at 00:19:41) So I think all of those decisions have an impact on your company business model and ultimately financial outcomes in the business too. I think oftentimes we view, you know, the CTO's office is just purely a cost center, and that myth should absolutely be dispelled. Right? Like, a lot of the decisions we make will affect our customer experience and our customer churn. And so I think when we're evaluating decisions about the tech stack, they should be evaluated not just from a technical capability perspective or a cost perspective, but also like a revenue-driving perspective.

(Eric at 00:20:18) How is this gonna help our margins, not just, you know, not just the costs?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:23) We've got a lot of CTO education to do. Maybe Josh can help me with this. Who was the lovely lady that Brad Sosa introduced us to? Rachel Lockett. Rachel Lockett.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:32) Yeah. I had her on, and she was talking with me about how they're seen as the cost center, how they're not a part of executive conversations, and all of these things. And I was like, I don't think so, Rachel. I got so many emails and so many LinkedIn messages from people that are like, Rachel nailed it. She, 100%, that's exactly how it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:51) And so what I've come to the conclusion is I just surround myself with people that don't really have that experience that much. Maybe it's just the nature of the topics I'm interested in or who's coming on. Yeah. But knowing that now that the thing I thought was the 80% seems to now be the 20%, I think there's a lot of responsibility on the CTOs to figure out how to become more valuable from a business perspective because the only reason that would be happening is not because they're, quote-unquote —

(Eric at 00:21:33) Traditionally challenging to make an ROI argument for how the tools and systems that run your business can help you produce more revenue or produce better margins. But I've got, like, a great example. Hopefully, Rachel's listening here. So one thing we use at Flatfile, this is, you know, squarely in office of the CTO type decision, is for our front end, we use Tailwind. Tailwind's just basically like a way to create and manage front-end UI components faster and easier.

(Eric at 00:22:07) And, you know, if you're just like, I don't know, VP of Finance goes looks at it and, like, why are we paying $10,000 for Tailwind? Right? And it's hard to argue, well, that's actually getting us back, you know, $20,000 in revenue because of our customer satisfaction. So I think there is this missing gap between, like, how do we measure not just the cost-effectiveness of all these things, but also how they're positively affecting our customer experience and how that customer experience translates into dollars. I think it's like one step too many oftentimes for a traditional business model where you kind of view it as like profit center, cost center, you know, and that's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:45) I guess I'm young enough in business to where I never really experienced people being so binary about it. Because starting my businesses, it's just so important, each specific part. You know, you start with downtime. That's an easy one. That one's been around for a while, how they quantify downtime.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) Customer experience, same thing. It's rage. There's literally rage metrics in some analytics software from people rage-clicking, and they'll tell you where it's happening. I think it's this software called FullStory. But when I saw that, I thought it was hilarious because to find out that people have been clicking on your site, they're not a sponsor or anything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:21) I'm just really interested —

(Eric at 00:23:22) It's so funny you're mentioning. I was actually in the room when we invented rage-clicking at FullStory. I worked at FullStory.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:29) You were at FullStory?

(Eric at 00:23:29) I was a marketing intern for about eight months in the second year of grad school. Basically, I just stopped going to grad school and started going over to the FullStory office and working. But I remember we were sitting around — there was, like, a little kitchenette area in that office we had in West Atlanta. And we're talking about how to describe, like, how do we describe this point of emphasis where, like, we know the user's frustrated because they're just clicking all over the place.

(Eric at 00:24:01) We did all these studies around, like, what are the things that people do the most when they are frustrated or when they're stuck? And far and away, it was just clicking over and over again. And I want to say, hopefully I'm not taking credit away, but I think it was Jamie on the team who said, like, well, they're just rage-clicking. And that was it. So —

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:22) Thank you, Jamie and the team. That's a good example. First of all, I didn't know that. I don't know if you put that in the prep, but I came across them a long time ago, and it was very much — I'm assuming now a lot of your customers find you where I was rolling my own because I did a real estate software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:38) Yep. And what would happen is they would call up and say, hey, I've got this problem. Well, they don't know how to find out what version of the browser they're on. They don't know how to find out, you know, what were their last six steps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:47) So I just wrote this basic monitoring JavaScript thing that would collect all the actions and then dump them, you know, into their profile so that we could have a better starting position to help this person. And then I saw things like FullStory, and there was a couple other ones out there too. And I just immediately I was like, not building this anymore. I'm gonna go pay some money every month and get my life back.

(Eric at 00:25:11) I'll make sure to get an intro to Jamie after the show here so that way you can get him on. But, like, absolutely. I think a lot of it, you know, again, it's just about, like, solving a customer problem and solving it in a way that's valuable. And, you know, again, like, probably my MBA is probably showing through, so I apologize to your listeners. But, like, again, it's just about resources in for more value out than those resources in, and that's it.

(Eric at 00:25:36) It's just as simple as that. So I think for something like FullStory, it's a great example where it says, hey, you can buy this. Right? But, like, buying it's not enough. Right?

(Eric at 00:25:48) Like, I learned a lot of this at FullStory was our first customers were not using FullStory in the way we thought they would. Like, we thought there would be, like, oh, there's these product designers and engineers who want to, like, really understand the customer experience and optimize their products around them. It was a bunch of support people and marketing people.

(Eric at 00:26:09) Marketing people want to know, like, where do people drop off in the funnel? Right? Like, I'm trying to get them to buy something on my website. Like, what's happening here? And the support people were like, yeah, people don't know how to describe what they're doing.

(Eric at 00:26:17) And so basically, what we did was we said, like, okay, let's lean into that, and let's give people the tools to design their support model and their marketing model around FullStory as one part of that stack. And, again, that's more of this mentality of building that we come back to time and time again, which is how do we make sure that our customers can effectively use our product in the context of their business?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:44) That is awesome. I love what you guys are doing. I'm curious to know more about how you and David — correct me if I'm wrong. You live out in California. Right?

(Eric at 00:26:52) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:53) And he lives in Washington, DC.

(Eric at 00:26:55) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:55) And you run a business together. How did you learn how to do that from opposite sides of the country?

(Eric at 00:27:01) Well, it's funny because we've actually never lived in the same city or even time zone at the same time. So when we worked together at Envoy, I was in California at the time. He was in Colorado. And so we just figured out how to work really well together by saying like, hey, let's, you know, hold each other to these standards and let's say what we're responsible for.

(Eric at 00:27:23) And then we'll keep each other accountable as we go through and work on these things. And so I think naturally, we got educated on how to work with each other remotely. And then I guess the other thing too is that both of us like to go places too. I mean, I loved coming here. I'm really excited to check out, you know, Broadway a little after this, but, you know, David's the same type of way.

(Eric at 00:27:46) We're very different people for sure, but we like to go places together. And I think that's let us — given us the opportunity to treat the times we have working together as, like, you know, almost sacrosanct. Like, is that the right word?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:02) I don't —

(Eric at 00:28:03) They're gonna say it is. Josh can edit it if it's not.

(Eric at 00:28:07) Yeah. So, like, we treat our time together as, you know, like, very precious time. Sacred time. There we go. Very sacred time.

(Eric at 00:28:15) And that time also lets us work better together remotely too because then we know, like, okay, cool, you're off doing this and you're off doing this, and then we'll come back together, and then we'll go off do this and go off do this and come back together. So I think it's led to, like, a very efficient business. The challenge from that perspective is that, like, sometimes it's not always best to have a very efficient business.

(Eric at 00:28:39) Like, you want people to feel like they're a part of something bigger too. And I'll say that, like, no company has really exactly figured out how to solve that problem, but there's a lot of things you can do that you kind of just have to intentionally do that you wouldn't do if you were in person. So things like, hey, during this type of conversation, camera's gonna be on. Or during this type of conversation, you know, we want to make sure that you are actively participating.

(Eric at 00:29:04) And if you're not actively participating, you're gonna get booted out of the conversation. So some of those things you just kind of have to intentionally bake it into the culture. But I would say that we just kind of came naturally after working remotely together. And like I said, we always meet up at least, you know, once a quarter in real life too, just to do a level set there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:25) Yeah. I get exactly what you're saying. I was actually incredibly surprised because I do these interviews and talk to people I know constantly and catch up. And then when I'll join a sales call for the production company, I'd say 35% of the time, you know, they just have their camera off.

(Eric at 00:29:44) And they're —

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:44) And I'm like, what are you doing? We're at work. Like, we're trying to figure out if, like, we should be doing something together, if this is gonna be useful for you or not. And so the idea that your people feel that it's okay to do these calls with their camera off, to me, is foreign. I'm not saying it's right or wrong as, like, an arbitrator of how you should do video calls, but they are called video calls.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:10) But it definitely, for me, was foreign because I could totally believe that back in, you know, the early 2000s or when people first started doing it. But now, I mean, camera's expected to be on.

(Eric at 00:30:24) Yeah. I think, again, it just all goes back. It's like, I'm not gonna make a judgment call as to whether camera's on or off —

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:31) We want you to be for the show. Culture. Right? Yeah.

(Eric at 00:30:34) I want you to take official position. But, no, my official position is that you need to be intentional about it. Okay. You need to be intentional about, like, what your culture is when you are distributed because if you don't be intentional about it, there's nothing else you can really attach to, and especially for a company like ours.

(Eric at 00:30:50) Like, our mission is in the mission of all of our customers. Right? You think about what we're doing. Like, it's exchanging data between businesses. Right?

(Eric at 00:30:58) We're agnostic to the industry. It's not like we're out, you know, curing cancer, helping with COVID relief, making sure that underprivileged children are able to get the right medical care. But we have customers that do all three of those things. And so a lot of what needs to drive us together is in our mission to see our customers be successful. And so one of the things that we've done quite intentionally is pull a lot of our customers into the ethos of the culture of our business.

(Eric at 00:31:27) Right? It's all about them, and that really humanizes things. But as you mentioned, you gotta have your face showing. You gotta be present in order for that to really connect with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:40) And we established guidelines early on. So we did sponsorships for the first several years, then some of our sponsors asked us to start making shows, and that was about thirteen, fourteen months ago. And when we started doing these shows, we had to learn. And I was transparent with everyone that it's like, hey, you're the third show we're doing, and we're still figuring out our processes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:01) But one of the most important things was, you know, we're joining their marketing team essentially to produce this show. And we're, first of all, video. Second of all, well dressed, and what that means is loosely defined, but we know it when we see it and it's in the culture. And then, you know, you're just expected to be bright eyed and bushy tailed and looking professional when you're joining these calls with this other team. And so figuring out how to do that was an interesting thing, but we've got it down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:33) And I get what you're saying about being efficient. You can get efficient, and then things start to get quiet. You know, how do I build this? I love that you have customers that are doing amazing things like that, and you figured out how to pull their stories and connect them with your employees.

(Eric at 00:32:47) Yeah. I think the other benefit too of being remote as founders is it really encourages hiring all across the country, which by itself gets you a lot of diversity and thought and background of folks in the business. And we haven't perfected this by any means, but trying to systematize that. I mean, I'm from Atlanta, Georgia. Right? Get a couple beers with me, and this accent's going way off. But I love, you know, I was sharing with people about barbecue, and I would post a picture, like, hey, I just smoked a couple pork butts this weekend. And then someone else will come in and all of a sudden will start talking about, like, what's our favorite rubs that we wanna put on them. And then you might have someone who's like, I've never even seen a barbecue before because I live in this part of Europe and this isn't a thing for us.

(Eric at 00:33:37) It's really cool to be able to have that type of cultural exchange happen naturally in the business. But like I said, you still have to be intentional about it. Right? You still have to give people forums and give people rituals within which they can exchange this type of thing and build that connection up over time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:54) And then the vegetarian comments, and you just boot them out of the Slack channel.

(Eric at 00:33:57) Oh, boy. Yeah. I mean, there's actually a secret barbecue channel that we keep pretty locked down so that—no, I'm just kidding. It's called Barbecue Masters. But yeah, and that's the other thing too is I think when you have a business like that where it's pulling people from all walks of life, right, like you mentioned, there's some people who have particular sensitivities and there's other folks who might have things that they don't want you to know about in their life. And that's totally okay too. Right? It sort of lets people engage in areas of an interest or professional strength, but only if you design it that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:38) Absolutely. Now David has horses instead of kids currently.

(Eric at 00:34:42) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:44) Do you have horses or kids or neither?

(Eric at 00:34:46) I have an almost two year old toddler.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:49) Boy, girl?

(Eric at 00:34:50) Girl. Yeah. She is getting to that phase where she's just opinionated about everything, including things where I feel like she shouldn't need to have an opinion on. But you know what? That's okay. I mean, it's part of the adventure, and I love her to death. She's getting into ABCs now. You know, the alphabet goes A, B, C, D, H, I, J, K. So we'll see how long I can ride that wave. She also thinks that orange is red, so I might just see if we can get all the way to kindergarten with that before she gets scolded by the teacher, more likely me. Yeah. But no, we have a lot of fun together. It's really great, I think, having a kid. And, you know, they say nothing prepares you for having kids. But I'll say that the closest thing you can probably get is being a startup founder.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:36) Right.

(Eric at 00:35:37) Lots of nights without sleep, worrying about what's gonna happen. You know, how are we gonna make ends meet, getting really frustrated and not being able to understand what's going wrong. A lot of things are fairly similar. But I really love having her. And, yeah, we moved out to California last year from Atlanta just to be close to my wife's family. They're all from the Bay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:02) Okay.

(Eric at 00:36:02) We moved back out there, and she gets to see her grandparents every day, which is great for her and great for us too because we can both keep working.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:10) That is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing that'll prepare you. But if you were to pick something, entrepreneurship's a good place to start. And if you really, really wanna have fun, become an entrepreneur and have a kid at the same time.

(Eric at 00:36:22) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:23) Because that's tough. You did that. How long has Flatfile been around?

(Eric at 00:36:26) So we've been around—what year is it? 2023?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:29) 2023.

(Eric at 00:36:31) When you have a kid and a company, I guess you ask questions like that. Right? I guess we've been around for five years, but actually incorporated and running as a business for four. So it's been about half the time the company has been around that I've had her. And one thing that we try to do with our business, and I think a lot of this comes from me, is just try to be really family friendly as a business. I think almost half of our, if not more than half of our employees, have at least one kid. We talk about our kids all the time. They get invited to certain meetings if they wanna sit in. And I think it's just especially because we're all apart from each other. Right? Feeling like we can be part of each other's families. I can name the kids' names for almost everyone in the company even though I've never met 99% of them. I'd say there might be one or two kids I've met, but that's it. So it's really nice to be able to have that.

(Eric at 00:37:32) And I think the parenting journey also teaches me a lot about leadership. Right? Leadership journey and the startup journey, whether it's, you know, working with someone who disagrees with you. Right? If you as an executive are trying to set strategy, sometimes you'll have people in the business who decide that they don't agree. And how do you build this culture of alignment. Like, no, I don't wanna play with the crayons. I wanna play with the markers. Right? How am I gonna convince this, you know, not even two year old to say, no, we're gonna play with the crayons. Right? And a lot of those lessons that you learn in patience and understanding and coming from their perspective really get dialed in when you're a parent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:17) Yeah. You figure out that you have to put yourself in their shoes and figure out what the carrot is. 100%. I have three. And what goes through my mind as a mental image is back in the, I don't know, fifties to seventies, whenever the computers were so big that you would walk into the room, and the computer would be a room where you could physically grab large parts of it and replace them. And it's so easy to understand how a computer works when it's so big and right in front of you. Now it's all compressed down, and if you came across it, you would be like, I don't know what this alien technology is. Right? But when you're raising kids, it's all the human things, but really big. Just, like, really, really big and obvious. So it actually helps you understand the interpersonal relationships that you have at work and in your life by having to raise the kids.

(Eric at 00:39:10) Oh, yeah. And also to engage and explain concepts to people. Our head of platform was actually doing a session with our team internally yesterday, and he started off the session talking about a port, a shipping port. We're talking about the event driven nature of the Flatfile platform, but he started talking about ships. Like, literally, the first agenda item was Steven talks about boats. And I love that because I know that comes from him having a couple kids and him having to really be able to understand and explain these complex concepts in the world, whether it's computers or whether it's, you know, why does the sun go down at night to his kids. So it's a really great opportunity. It's a lot of work, but I think that work is more than repaid in the joy you get of seeing this other person really come into their own and understand this world they're in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:03) Oh, 100%. It's the best and worst thing. It's super incredibly hard, and it's also beautiful and amazing. Yeah. And you know what I've been thinking about it now, because two was really hard. The third wasn't that hard, but the second one felt like a five, you know? But the perspective I took to convince myself and sell myself on this path is that I've seen pictures of old people dying in a hospital bed alone, and I've seen pictures of old people dying at their house surrounded by the 72 grandkids and extended family that came from their four or five kids. And when I have to pick an option, I'm like, this is me doing the difficult—we're entrepreneurs. Yeah. We do that incredibly scary difficult thing constantly because we want a better life. Right? That's one of the drivers, and it's hard. So that's the difficult thing is having the kids and raising them is the price that you pay to be able to die well.

(Eric at 00:40:58) Yeah. Or not even just die well. I mean, gosh, when are we releasing this? In April? Okay. So I can say this. My dad's birthday is coming up next week. Right? And I'm gonna fly into town and take him to the home opener for the Braves. He don't know that just yet, but by the time this comes out, he'll know that because it'll be a week away. It's a big deal for him. And so, yeah, I think it's just something that pays off dividends. Being able to have a family and also to have people who can relate to what it is that you're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:32) One of the good things too, though, is with all the difficulty and all the good, one of the things that I have figured out and why I don't encourage a workaholic culture at my company is when you're not spending time with your family or the people that are in your life or in your community and those relationships aren't maintained and have energy to put into them, then the work you're doing—if your wife is upset at you, right, you're not as good at work. You're just not. Because I've had a great relationship with my wife, and I've had an average—you know, it's just an up and down. That's how life goes. Luckily, it's been steady on the up since we both decided—I think we're eight years, nine, ten years into our relationship. But we both made this point that, okay, you get married, and you realize, oh, I'm gonna get the ring, and we're gonna stay forever. But then you live out seven or eight years, and then you realize, wow, this is forever. And now you understand on a larger scale what forever is. And so we made the decision to get married probably six years after we got married, essentially, in our minds. We didn't do another ceremony or anything, but the past two or three years have been fantastic because I've been not one foot out the door. I've just been completely investing, and that took a lot for me to get there.

(Eric at 00:42:53) Yeah. And I think that's, you know, kinda harkening back to earlier when we were talking about bringing humanity and serving human beings back into this. Serving human beings also means serving yourself as a human being. Right? And also treating all your employees like human beings. We actually—we can't make this official, but we have an unofficial official minimum vacation policy at work. And it basically says, like, hey, you have to take off four weeks every year. Right? We need you to take time off to be with your family, be with your friends, and do the things that you love and wanna do. And also just to pull inspiration from other parts of your life, except for the fact that we made exceptions for myself and for David. And this is kinda hitting me a little bit last year because we chose to move to California kind of for the same reason. It was so hard with just us and the kid, and we were both working. And I'm an entrepreneur, and we don't know what's gonna happen with our startups.

(Eric at 00:43:53) And we just said, hey, let's move back to California and cut out some of that uncertainty. But I did the same type of reevaluation when it came to how I was treating myself and taking time off and my health. I was in great shape, but I remember the first couple years of business, I was at the gym every day. I was going out to play golf. I was going to watch baseball games, and that just kinda fell off. And I realized, I need to do something that feels really hard to me, which is take real time off from this business. It's so hard. But you have to be that good example to the rest of your team if that's what we're saying. You can't just say that and not do it. I had someone literally say, Eric, I have not seen you take a vacation since I joined two and a half years ago. Go take vacation. I was having people in the business telling me to go take time off, and it was partially, you know, for me, but it also was partially for them. They're like, I feel like I can't go do all these things you say I should do because I don't see you doing the same thing.

(Eric at 00:44:56) And so now I've got a home gym. You know, we're taking a couple week vacation in a few months. We're actually doing the things and investing in the life that we wanna have, which actually makes me better at business, better at work. Right? I can't remember the last time I stayed up after midnight working, which maybe is sacrilege to say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:18) Oh, no. No. No. There are some companies that require your employees chew Adderall all day and stay up for twenty three hours. That culture does exist. I'd say it's the 20%. It's not the 80%, but that culture does exist. And when I found out it exists, I was like, well, I also used to work a ton. Right? Because when you're starting your business, you don't know how much work is enough work. You haven't figured out the system to actually make money, so you're just constantly going and going and going. And then I got it to the point where, okay, we're making money. It's going. And then at that point, that was about three years ago, is when I started taking weekends off. And then I stopped, and then I did that for a while, and then I stopped at five in holidays. And so now I had only worked till five, and now it's even easier because they can just walk over here and—

(Eric at 00:46:08) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:09) And say, "Hey, Daddy." But doing that is so hard, and it reminds me of when I was in software engineering full-time because when you're trying to solve a problem and it's all in your head and you're working hard on it, you don't want to stop. But if you get up and go take that walk, your brain does this thing or whatever it is—it resets and it gives you a fresh perspective. So almost every time that we have a holiday season around, like the New Year, it's scary, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:39) But you can rethink everything about your business from the outside in a way that you can't do on a weekend. You know, you have to get bored. That's actually something hard to do.

(Eric at 00:46:47) I was going to say, I think the hardest part about this is when you really care about what it is that you're doing. If you're really engaged with your work or whatever it is that you're doing, it's so hard to take time away from that, right? Because it feels like, this is my hobby. I want to do more. I have the energy. But when you have that, you're still neglecting other parts of what make you a whole human. I mean, unless you're Jeff Bezos. But basically, you have to absolutely treat yourself like the holistic human that you are and not forget about those things once you find that problem that's really engaging. Otherwise, that problem consumes you. And like you said, you actually become less effective at solving that problem when you aren't treating yourself like a real person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:36) Absolutely. I got into woodworking three or four months ago just because I needed a hobby. And the mistake I was making was every hobby I would pick would be a hobby that required a screen in some sort. Learning guitar—you can watch videos on guitar, YouTube. You're playing video games, so that's obvious. That's video games. But so many things required internet, computer interface connection.

(Eric at 00:48:03) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:04) And yeah, I still need to watch some YouTube videos as I'm learning to do certain things, but 90% of it is just music on in the background, cutting wood, sketching stuff out on my notebook, and figuring out how to do it. And after picking up that hobby, that has helped a lot because it's essentially a fun activity that doesn't require technology.

(Eric at 00:48:27) And that sounds like a dream to me. I mean, I love fishing, right? And again, you can have fishing without technology. You can have fishing with a little bit of technology. That's fine. The challenge is just giving yourself the mental space to feel like you can do that. I hadn't been in a couple years because I have a kid, but I can't wait till she's old enough to go fishing. And there's so many other things like this out there that are just great opportunities to disconnect. And I guess I said this is a dream because to say what I said at the beginning, right? I'm a laggard—or at least an early majority—when it comes to technology adoption. Personally, I just enjoy being able to connect with humans. And I think most of us deep down really just want to do that. We want to connect with humans in whatever way our personality—Myers-Briggs personality test—tells us we do. But it's absolutely important, and it's important when you come to think about crafting a business, too. I want the people in my business to be able to go say, "Oh yeah, we went out to dinner the other night. Awesome." Or, "We went to go see a concert." There's a guy on my team, Colin—I'll give him a shout-out. So he did this challenge last year where he listened to a music album every day, like a whole album every single day, and he posted the album every single day.

(Eric at 00:49:48) And by the time we hit, I want to say like March, there were like a dozen people in the business who were listening to a whole album every single day. And then they started like a music club and all this. And it was just like, this is the type of thing that we need to encourage and do as a business, not just sort of the production of the output. And it's a hard thing for me to say because I love the efficiency of a business, but I think as long as you can effectively find the balance between that focused and non-focused time, then you're going to get a better outcome no matter what.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:19) Well, you know you're doing something right when that emerged from your garden and it wasn't something you went out and did. Because for me, that's the most rewarding thing, and that's how I monitor if I'm on the right track and have the right people. Because as you know, I mean, you have over 50, 70 people, 100 people now. How many people do you have?

(Eric at 00:50:36) We have close to 70, actually. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:38) So you figured out what type of person works well and then how to get them involved in the culture and all of that. And it takes a while for a business to figure that out.

(Eric at 00:50:47) Yeah. Yeah, it definitely does take a while to figure it out. But, you know, I'll tell you also, being a founder, it's important to participate in that too. I feel like a founder for everything related to what we do at Flatfile. And then we have this Slack channel called Parenting. And then immediately, I feel like an entry-level employee because we've got a ton of other parents. We have kids who are way older, sometimes multiple kids. My good buddy Nick, who's focused on platform and partnerships, but he was one of our first investors and now an executive of the company—he has three girls. And I was like, "I'm struggling with one. How do you do it, man?" So it's really great to be able to have that and to be able to show that, like, "Hey, I'm a part of this group of humans who have this thing that's brought them together as a shared goal, but we all have our different areas of expertise and skill, and we want to learn from each other and exchange." And I think that just keeps people interested and engaged when I go into the Parenting channel and I say, "Hey, you know, Elena decided she wanted to poop in the bathtub. What do I do about that?" And I'm going to get a dozen answers from people who are like, "Oh, let's try this," or "I ran into this," or "Maybe you should think about adjusting the order of what you do here." And it also helps them feel like they're contributing to that society, essentially, that we've built.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:08) Yes. We could talk for like a hundred hours about parenting.

(Eric at 00:52:12) Yes, probably.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:14) Great podcast, man.

(Eric at 00:52:15) Thank you. Appreciate you having me. This is awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:18) 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.