Maximizing Efficiency in the Supply Chain with George Lewis, VP of Strategic Business Development for Arena, a PTC business

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to George from PTC about the state of the supply chain, design work in the cloud, and more. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:15) I've got tons of questions for you because I am legitimately curious about what you do. Your title was fairly ambiguous. Right? You hear market disruption. Are you causing the disruption? Are you helping people with the disruption? Can you tell me what you do?

(George at 00:00:32) Yeah, happy to help. It's one of those business cards that—not that we have business cards anymore, but if you did have one—it's like you could tell any story that you could dream up with that business card. So what I do is largely product strategy and partnership strategy for my employer, PTC, inside the business unit called the Velocity business unit, which are all cloud-native technologies. So, you know, how do those technologies work together to help customers be more successful? What third-party technology should we partner with or talk about that could connect to make a more compelling story for our customers?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:06) And PTC, they're huge. Right?

(George at 00:01:09) Pretty big. I think we employ six or 7,000 employees. You know, so it's no Tesla or anything like that, but it's a large organization. And in our space, we're one of the giants in mechanical CAD and, you know, product lifecycle management software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:24) Oh, very cool. Now the Velocity business unit, those cloud-native technologies, those are first-party tools that you're building?

(George at 00:01:32) Yes. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:34) What are those tools like?

(George at 00:01:35) Yeah. Well, there's two of them. Primarily one is called Onshape, which is mechanical CAD done in the cloud. And for that, that's pretty groundbreaking because, you know, normally you need a massive graphics card or something like that in your PC in order to create these 3D solid models that you spin around and build out. So it's groundbreaking because it's in the cloud, and what that actually does for companies is it gives you better collaboration options. So, you know, if you're—you know, wherever you're at Joel, you know, what part of the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:05) Nashville.

(George at 00:02:06) So we could open up a session right now, and I could share a design with you, and you could pull it up in your browser and see it, and then we could talk about it peer to peer. So that's Onshape. And then Arena is a product lifecycle management tool. And so that tool is when you've actually finished your design and you say, "Hey, I want to go build this thing, and I want to be able to communicate with somebody who's going to build it for me"—typically a supplier or what you'd call a contract manufacturer overseas. It enables that communication after your design is complete and you want to share it out with everybody else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:34) Oh, very cool. My dad did some government work where they were manufacturing physical things, and the document trails and audits and change orders and all of that is something he talked a lot with me about because he had done his own thing, and then he went and worked in some defense contractor. And he's like, "It's crazy how these changes come through when you're manufacturing physical goods." It's, you know, fairly different from software, at least my perspective.

(George at 00:03:01) Yeah. Yeah, it is crazy. Especially when you see a company in full-blown production trying to deal with the fact they need to make changes and react to things that are happening, you know, potentially on the supply chain, for example. It's controlled chaos. And if you don't have a tool to help you do it, good luck to you, because email is not well suited to deal with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:20) So are you mainly talking about disruption in the CAD space?

(George at 00:03:24) It's CAD and also supply chain, you know, by virtue of the fact that you need to go build, you know, whatever it is you've designed. So yeah, it begins with engineering and goes all the way out to when you're building it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:34) What's happening over there right now?

(George at 00:03:36) Supply chain side? Yeah. It's still a mess. Yeah. It's been that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:42) My microchips. Yeah.

(George at 00:03:44) Yeah. Well, that's actually one area that our customers are constantly dealing with. So one of the huge markets that we serve are high-tech electronics manufacturers. That is to say, all the stuff you see when you went to Best Buy or LIDAR systems for autonomous vehicles. Those are all typically customers. Those guys are all heavily impacted by the chip supply shortage. And so they actually do things inside these tools early on in design to try and make the design more flexible. So when a supply chain problem happens later, you've got a way to deal with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:18) Oh, nice. Do you rate the reliability of different potential components? Like, this one might be out of stock?

(George at 00:04:25) Yeah. That's exactly right, Joel. It's one of the things you might do. The other thing that these companies are commonly doing now is speccing alternate chipsets early on in design. You know, so if you think about like your computer, it could have an AMD processor or an Intel processor. Well, if you build the design early to accommodate either one, now if one of them becomes unavailable, like AMD goes away, well, you can still use the Intel without any sort of delay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:52) That sounds like it's making the supply chain more resilient. What's disrupting the supply chain?

(George at 00:04:57) Right now, just logistics and, you know, leftover from the pandemic and certain facilities can't manufacture. A lot of these chipmakers are in Taiwan or China. And so all the restrictions there, you know, from the government, has really slowed down their ability to manufacture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:12) And have you always been inside of manufacturing, or is this something newer for you?

(George at 00:05:18) No. No. We've always been inside manufacturing. You know, as far as the business goes—

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:23) You as an individual.

(George at 00:05:25) Yeah. So my background is I'm a mechanical engineer. Okay. And so, yeah, very much engineering-focused. Although I've been away from engineering specifically for quite a while, I did a little bit of work as a project engineer for BFGoodrich for a little while and then ended up in the CAD industry. And then once I ended up in the CAD industry, that blossomed into, you know, PLM and all those other things. And so now it's a much bigger scope for what we do. The tool we have that does PLM is called Arena. That's what's on my shirt here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:56) Oh, very cool. Very cool. Now did you build any of these products from the ground up, or were they already there?

(George at 00:06:02) Arena started in 2001. It was built from the ground up. I joined Arena in 2005. And so it's been an evolution because it's cloud-native. You're effectively always making it better. You know, we release three or four releases every year, you know, potentially fixing bugs every weekend. So it's always getting better, so to say. Onshape started much later. I don't know the exact year, but somewhere around 2010 or 2012, somewhere in there. And again, it was all built from the ground up from scratch, although it's based upon Amazon Web Services. But yeah, both from the ground up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:42) Very cool. Very cool. And you love what you do?

(George at 00:06:45) Oh, yeah. Oh, it's fantastic. The best part about what I do is we have these cloud-native tools, which everybody wants to talk about these days. And then I get to talk about people where we think this is going to go in two or three years' time and, you know, get them excited about it, which is the best thing ever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:00) Well, tell me about that. What's going to change in your world in the next two or three years?

(George at 00:07:05) Well, hopefully more resilient supply chains. And we're working on that right now. Yeah. The other big one that comes up is agile product development. And so, Joel, you're familiar with agile software development methodologies?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:17) Yep.

(George at 00:07:17) You know, you've got scrums and daily standup meetings and all those sorts of things that's been done in the software industry for at least over 20 years now, I think since the Agile Manifesto was written. Cloud-native design tools enable you to do similar things with hardware. And so we're talking to companies now that are using some of the agile methodologies, applying it to hardware and producing products more quickly. That's what I think the big advantage is, is, you know, once we tie these solutions together and companies are able to leverage that, they'll actually see reduced product development times.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:52) So I'm curious when these things are being disrupted and everyone's going crazy, specifically—I mean, you guys were in the supply chain industry when all of this was rolling out, and there's a lot of chaos happening, a lot of stress. How do you lead your team through that, or how do you help your clients through that?

(George at 00:08:11) Yeah. It's been interesting because there's been different eras of supply chain disruption. You know, the one that we're in right now is different than what it looked like in, you know, 2018 or so. You know, that's when chip shortage discussions began. There were some issues around that in particular. And so that's where using a cloud-native tool, right, you just need your web browser, gave these organizations more flexibility to be able to, number one, communicate with their supplier directly just like we're talking here, but also source other suppliers. And so I think people actually learned a lesson in that era of how they could better communicate with suppliers as part of that. And then you move on into pandemic and all those other sorts of things. They just simply applied what they had learned previously to the new situation, which was, "Oh my gosh, everybody's working from home now. I still need to work with my suppliers. I need to try and find a way to build product." And those that were able to figure it out, I think, came out of the pandemic in a much better situation than anybody else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:16) Can you share any specific stories, like actual products or companies?

(George at 00:09:21) Well, I can tell you about—I can't use their name—but a smart home speaker company. You can connect all these little devices and have them all play the same music and all that good stuff. Now they had actually, like I said with the chip example, they had actually designed in alternate chip options early on in design, which actually meant that slowed them down a little bit at that stage, but they were willing to sacrifice that because if there was going to be a problem in the supply chain, which they thought there would be, you know, when you looked at things circa 2020, you'd have more flexibility. And so that paid big dividends where they never really had any shortages of speakers to be able to sell at Best Buy or other places like that because of that flexibility. Where other organizations, if you didn't have that flexibility designed in, it's going to take you a while to catch up, and that was the problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:13) And so they were able to have success there?

(George at 00:10:16) Yes. Exactly. Okay. They found a lot of success. That's a common one. Publicly, they talk about even Tesla did that for a while, and probably they're still doing it, where they've got alternate chips designed in, and so technically the software onboard that car has to be different to support the different chipsets that you could put into it. And so the amount of variability in the product configuration of a car or a home speaker or what have you is immense because all these things a consumer doesn't even really know about, but they're actually going on behind the scenes just so they can keep producing cars or speakers, for example.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:50) Nice. So they got some smart engineers over there. They're doing cars. They're doing satellites. It's crazy. Have you gotten a Starlink yet?

(George at 00:10:56) I have one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:57) Yeah. Yeah. I just got one. It's in its box over there. I haven't unboxed it yet because I have three kids, and I'm busy.

(George at 00:11:05) Hey. I've got the exact same problem, actually. Yeah. Mine's in the box right over here out of the picture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:12) Do you have three kids too?

(George at 00:11:13) I have three kids.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:15) What ages?

(George at 00:11:16) 11, nine, and seven.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:20) I'm five, three, and three months. Four months.

(George at 00:11:25) Oh, yeah. You're in a different stage than me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:28) Different stage. Are you in Tennessee?

(George at 00:11:31) No. No. I'm in Metruchie, California.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:34) Oh, okay. Where is that?

(George at 00:11:35) Lake Tahoe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:36) Okay. I didn't recognize that. Man, California is such a big place, and it's so vastly different. You got San Diego, San Francisco, all of that. Were you always out there? Did you migrate out, you know, to the West for the technology scene?

(George at 00:11:51) Yeah. That's a funny story. Yes, to answer your question. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and completed college, wanted to do something new and different. And when I was a kid, you know, all the magazines I'd get were for things like dirt bikes and stuff like that. And they were all produced in California. So California always had this impact on my psyche because if you followed that scene, that's what you'd read about is the dunes and all this stuff out in California. And so I told my employer, "Yeah, send me out there. I know we have an opening in the San Francisco Bay Area." And he said, "Well, while you're out there just looking around, why don't you look at some apartments too?" And then literally three weeks later, I was moving to California with just myself. 9/11 had just happened, so nobody could come with me or anything like that. And I just hopped in my pickup truck and drove to California, and I've been here for 20 years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:45) Nice. Nice. You enjoy it?

(George at 00:12:47) Yeah. Yeah. Generally speaking, I enjoy it a lot. There's a lot of variety here. It's nice to get out of California too, though, and just get out, like backcountry stuff, but there's a lot of options here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:57) Yeah. There is. You can be in the desert. You can be in the water. You've got fairly cool weather year-round. Well, at least it's somewhat dry. I don't know. California is a very unique place for weather.

(George at 00:13:09) Yeah. It's just unique in general. You know what I mean? Like, coming from the East Coast and what you're taught in school is very East Coast-focused. When you start to learn what the story of California is and how it evolved, and it actually was Mexico at one point in time, it's like, "Wow. I had no idea."

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:25) So I want you to take me from your journey headed out to California after 9/11, and then walk me through your journey from that point in time to becoming the VP of, you know, business strategic development and innovation and all of that at PTC.

(George at 00:13:44) Yeah. Well, so I'd say after I moved on from the pure engineering work at BFGoodrich, I stepped into roles that were more customer-facing that would—it was CAD. And so it'd all be about telling a customer how this CAD tool can help them be more productive or produce a higher-quality product, that sort of thing. And so my entire career, effectively, other than the part before that, has been in customer-facing roles. And so initially helping to deploy technology, but then to actually convince companies to buy the technology in sales engagements. And so, you know, with me and some of my peers, I mean, over 20 years, we've probably talked to thousands of companies that, you know, are facing the same challenges. And so you start to hear the same themes between them. "Hey, I've got a unique problem." And you're thinking that it's actually not unique. I talked to 20 guys about that same problem last week, but it gives you a very unique perspective in the space because now you do have all those data points.

(George at 00:14:49) And so what ended up happening was I left my current company, and then the CEO called back like two years later and said, "Hey, I really need you to come back because we have a more strategic role. And you having seen all these different companies and customers and knowing our products so well, why don't you come back and do that for us?" And so that's what brought me into the strategy side of things.

(George at 00:15:14) And so it was kind of a natural progression, really, but it took many years to really build up the experience to be able to do what I do now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:22) Did you have management responsibilities as far as direct reports?

(George at 00:15:26) Yeah, I did for many years. I don't currently have any, but when I led the team of, they're called solution consultants, you know, those are the engineers who would talk to customers about, "Hey, what's your technical problem, and how do we help?" I ran a team of solution consultants.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:42) What was the most difficult thing about that type of role?

(George at 00:15:46) Oh, boy, trying to balance the needs of the company to close business, meaning you've got salespeople that want to close deals and their income is dependent upon it, balancing that with what the customer needs. Because with what we do, I can't sell you a bill of goods because you won't renew your subscription. And so the business model of cloud is actually better for customers because, you know, look, I need you to renew year after year or otherwise, you know, it's not profitable for me. And so the hard part to answer your question was balancing those two things.

(George at 00:16:26) You know, you want to be able to do the best you can for the customer. You also really want to be able to close that deal, but there are certain situations where you would just say, "We have to walk away from this. And we need to be okay with that as a business."

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:38) You're preaching to the choir, my friend. We just, our evolution went me and software development, podcasts, and then we started making shows for other companies. So we started that about a year ago. We do about fifteen, sixteen shows. And because it's such a new business line for us, that first year, which was last year, we figured out what a good customer looks like.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:58) And it's really hard to say to not take money. It's really hard to not take money. But we decided that we're going to think long term. To say goodbye, I mean, that's like, you know, that's a lot of revenue. It's a lot of money. But if we kept them, how much would it cost us to try to have to support them versus putting all of our energy on doubling down on making the best possible process and product for the customers who are easiest for us to work with? So we had to balance that trade, and that was tough, man.

(George at 00:17:36) I think there's a lot of synergy with what you're talking about and, you know, what we do. There was a point in time where we at Arena actually decided that we weren't going to try and pursue very small organizations because it was just too difficult to make them successful because they had so many distractions to try and run as fast as they could to get their idea to market. We were better off in organizations that were a little bit more mature, maybe just past that stage. And they're starting to realize, "Oh my gosh, I've got to get control of all this information." That became the sweet spot for us. And we found a lot of success after we made that change.

(George at 00:18:14) It's like, you want to be able to help the small guy, but business-wise, it just didn't make sense. And, you know, there's a similar story to what you're saying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:22) So who's your target customer there? What size company and what are they doing?

(George at 00:18:26) Target size, I would say, is going to be, I mean, it can start around like 10 users is probably the small size. Most organizations are probably in the 250 to 350 range. Although we do have customers with as many users as 25,000. So hugely variable, but I would say the sweet spot is somewhere, you know, like around the 200-employee mark. And it's an organization making a high-tech product of some sort, like something you'd see in Best Buy or on Amazon.

(George at 00:19:01) So iPhone would be a good example of the kind of technology, but everything really. I mean, on my shelf back here, you know, you've got like, this is a customer. This is a typical one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:12) Oh, okay.

(George at 00:19:12) Kinsa. It's a smart home thermometer that reports data up into the cloud and helps you keep track of what's going on in your neighborhood. Like it'll actually do trends of like, "Oh, hey, there's an outbreak going on in this part of the country," kind of thing. This stuff is the kind of stuff that we typically help organizations build.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:31) And so you're doing the document management and the CAD management of the files as they go through the whole entire product lifecycle from ideation to it coming out of the manufacturing line?

(George at 00:19:42) Yeah. You got it. It's exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:45) So what happens after it comes out of the manufacturing line, product defects and things like that? Is that still in the lifecycle management, or is that something else?

(George at 00:19:54) It very much is. It definitely is. I mean, usually what happens is, yeah, you've got defect management. You probably also have sustaining engineering, which would say, "Great. I got the product out, but now let me look at my manufacturing process and see how I can reduce the cost of it."

(George at 00:20:10) Because initially you just want to beat the competition to market, but then after you've got to market, you're probably going to do some iterations that, you know, maybe use less expensive components inside or do a different manufacturing process that can produce more volume or something like that. And so that's typically the next step would be like sustaining engineering. What you mentioned, I even get into things like quality as well. And so we also have quality solutions that bolt on to the PLM, the product lifecycle management tool, that allow you to really track things like supplier quality and, "Hey. We had this problem occur at a customer. We need to do a root cause analysis." It'll help you investigate what's going on. Those are also typical post-production.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:52) I was just talking about this recently. I say I don't have any experience, but for some reason, I've talked to a lot of people in manufacturing. One of them was Adam Barrett, but he's been on a couple times. I got to know him through a friend, and he writes books on reliability engineering.

(George at 00:21:09) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:09) And have you heard of this guy yet?

(George at 00:21:11) No. I have not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:12) Oh, I'll send you some of his stuff. Yeah. He's definitely, like, incredibly brilliant. You know, sometimes when you see people and you're like, "Oh, they make me feel like a monkey because they're so smart."

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:23) He's like one of those guys, but he's super cool and humble and nice and everything. And, yeah, he writes books on reliability engineering. And I've learned a lot because he writes them for manufacturing, but you can adapt them for software principles as well.

(George at 00:21:38) Yeah. I'd be interested. Definitely. Send it along.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:41) And I only bring that up because when we were talking about sort of the changes on the defects and all of that, he was saying that most of the manufacturers focus on time to deploy the product, like, time to market.

(George at 00:21:54) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:54) And he's got this whole framework for time to reliability.

(George at 00:21:59) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:59) Because if you think about it in terms of reliability of the product, then you just go about it differently. You probably understand this better than me, but he said it can get real expensive if you push to go to market quickly and then have to deal with more issues post-production than if you focus on reliability as a goal from the beginning.

(George at 00:22:19) Yeah. Similar subject comes up at PTC all the time in that we have different types of customers. You know, so I said I'm in Velocity, and the Velocity business unit are companies that really try to move fast to get products to market. Usually they're startup companies that are trying to disrupt the industry and get an idea out there really fast. The other side of the business is called Digital Thread, and Digital Thread is more of the longer lifecycle products that really need to last for a long time and maybe have a bunch of reusable components.

(George at 00:22:49) Think like a John Deere tractor or a Volvo engine. Well, you want to build that engine right. You want to build it well, and hopefully that engine is useful in, you know, future designs for as many as ten or twenty years. Whereas if you are trying to build a smart home speaker, for example, how long does that product really need to last for? Five years?

(George at 00:23:10) Probably somewhere in that range. So it's like, depending upon what organization you're talking to, their goals are different.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:18) And that's why you split them out into separate products?

(George at 00:23:21) Yes. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:22) So it's all in the details. The intricacies of reusable components versus just building a product, there's a big difference there.

(George at 00:23:32) Yeah. Exactly. It's funny. I was actually doing a, preparing a presentation for next week, and I was looking at the characteristics of some of the customers. And you could say, "Well, hey. You know, these guys all look the same. Like, we could both help them." But I did like a word count on a couple of slides that describe the customers. And it was actually rather telling because the ones that are building these big, large platform-type products, you know, would often be describing products, variations, manufacturing, what terms they would use. Whereas when I did the same thing on our own internal presentation for Velocity, supply chain was number one. Innovation was number two.

(George at 00:24:14) And so the characteristics that they use to describe themselves are vastly different.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:18) And have you ever seen anybody do anything really cool with GPT in your software space?

(George at 00:24:25) You know, there's an organization based in Sweden that was trying to use GPT for some capabilities. I don't know how far they made it. We just brought them on board like a month ago. So I haven't interviewed them yet, but a similar thing was being done, not with ChatGPT, but out of Stanford, there's a like aeronautics design map module. It's like you can feed in parameters into this thing and it'll spit out like, "Hey, if you want to do a drone, well, then you need to think about this package. If it needs to go this fast, the batteries will have to be this big." And it actually spits out like a design that's not complete, but it's a rough draft. And then you take that and you put it into Onshape, for example, and then you tweak it from there and use that to drive the design. So not quite the same thing as what you're asking, but still like cutting-edge stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:16) Similar. That's really close. Yeah.

(George at 00:25:18) And...

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:19) Are you guys going to buy them? Buy them out of there, out of Stanford?

(George at 00:25:23) Yeah. Right? Something to look at.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:25) Yeah. That'd be a smart move, man. That sounds like it's the future.

(George at 00:25:29) Yeah. I mean, anything that comes out of there would be a target customer. Like, most drone makers use our technology of some sort. So interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:37) When you buy them, just send me a finder's fee. It's cool.

(George at 00:25:43) ChatGPT, on the other hand, that's pretty crazy stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:46) It is 100% crazy.

(George at 00:25:48) I've only just started playing with it, but every time I do, like, I have some idea that, it could be personal or it could be work-related. And anytime I enter it in there and it rolls out content, I'm like, "How does that happen?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:00) Well, the good news is, you know, the medical community will get it and start piping in all the data and then asking it. I was talking with my wife this morning, and I said the innovation's going to compound so heavily in the near future because if you take some of the hardest jobs, like engineering, right, or science, you have to, what I call, like, you have to build up this cache in your mind and somebody interrupts you and it clears out, and then you have to spend another hour because I did software development, so there was some similarities there in solving problems.

(George at 00:26:29) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:29) But now you'll be able to just pipe a bunch of information into GPT, and you'll still have to think about it, but your cycle time and productivity will go up significantly. I mean, you're designing a new medicine or something. That's stuff so complicated, so detailed, and to be able to have an assistant that knows everything that's ever been produced on the subject as a whole, and you can just start asking it questions back and forth to help you work your ideas out, we're going to get some amazing advancements.

(George at 00:26:58) Yeah. No. I totally agree, Joel. Yeah. The first time I used it, like, you log in there and you're thinking, "Oh, well, this AI thing is going to, you know, take people's jobs away." And my first reaction was the same thing as yours where it's like, "Holy cow. This makes you so much more effective at what you do because it puts all the information right at your fingertips." And, yeah, you still have work to do, but you're 80% of the way done, or you have 50% more options than you even had on your radar before you started your research project, and all of a sudden you got a, you know, wider purview of the problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:30) And you're exactly right. I mean, let's say we get some biomedical companies that have some breakthroughs, and now we can have wings. Right? We can fly. That's a whole industry. That's an entire industry. And it definitely will crush some jobs, but I believe it'll crush jobs at a rate that's equal to or, you know, the innovation of new jobs. Right?

(George at 00:27:54) Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Different skill sets to take advantage of what it's able to do.

(George at 00:28:01) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:01) And it lets us be real efficient. Right? You can take your top person who's already producing 80% of the quality and double up their effectiveness. That is beautiful news for pushing things forward in the world.

(George at 00:28:16) Yeah. Exactly. No. I agree. It's fun stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) I'll ask you a deeper question. So I want you to imagine that you are on Mars and you're not a human, you're an alien, and you're looking down at Earth and you're watching over the past. You see that they started building, you know, pyramids and then they started building, you know, different things, and then they got electricity and computing and all of, you've watched the progress of all of this. If you were to guess, you run it to the end. Everything's been invented essentially. If you were to look back and you were to look at your alien friend and say, "Oh, the humans are building this." What would this be?

(George at 00:28:53) That's a really good question. I'll give you my first reaction. And if I'm the alien, I'm probably looking at it like a bunch of ants creating an ant hill. And they're, you know, busy with their food. They're busy creating their home. You know, they've got some defensive bands that they're setting up and there's a different ant pile right next to it, doing the exact same thing. I think that's the bigger analogy to perhaps what it's been. I think with some of the more modern technologies, I'd like to believe we're headed to a place where people do better understand the needs of the whole, right, for what's good for all of humankind.

(George at 00:29:31) Although you can certainly question that with a lot of what you read in the newspaper these days, but, you know, achieving a situation where there's probably better equality for everybody, better sustainability for the planet, all those sorts of things. I mean, right now, I think that really is the big one. That is sustainability. And we see it in our industry. It's becoming immensely important for our customers.

(George at 00:29:54) You know, what are you doing? What's your carbon footprint? But also not just what's your carbon footprint. It's, show me your path to better sustainability. So that's great that you reported, whatever, a hundred tons of carbon this year.

(George at 00:30:08) I want to see your plan for next year. It's going to be 90, and then it's going to be 80, and 70, 60. And actually, organizations are asking their suppliers to provide that kind of information now. I think that's particularly compelling, at least for working in an industry that does produce a lot of carbon manufacturing. It's encouraging to see things move in that direction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:31) Energy is incredibly important. Wars are fought over that even today. I saw in the news they were making some progress on the fusion. Did you see that as well?

(George at 00:30:42) I did. Yeah. I think out here in Lawrence Livermore National Lab, they succeeded in creating a net positive fusion reaction for the first time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:52) Yep. I loved when I watched that press conference because the dude was such a scientist. Right? You would think that they would have some talker guy, but just the way that they describe things was just so sciency and void of hype, but it was beautiful. It was beautiful at the same time.

(George at 00:31:09) Yeah. No. That's amazing. I mean, wasn't that machine, like, the size of a football stadium, basically? Something crazy in the way of how big it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:17) I did not know that. The largest one I know about is CERN, and that's about it.

(George at 00:31:22) Yeah. Yeah. No. The cool thing on that whole net positive fusion reaction is that all that hardware that was designed, that was designed with PTC tech, which is pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:34) Really? Yep. Yo. George, we got to start with that.

(George at 00:31:38) Right? We could have gone so much further than started here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:41) Very cool. Very cool. And then last question's about fatherhood. You're obviously incredibly successful and have grown in your career tremendously while having a family and wife and kids and dogs and travel trailers and all of that. Right? How do you think about, I don't like the work-life balance thing. I'm just curious about how you think about your position and your family and your ability to both provide and do your work at work, but also be present for your kids when you are there.

(George at 00:32:22) Yeah. I guess the first thing that comes to mind is the most rewarding thing in, you know, kind of putting work aside, but it's connected, is my 11-year-old daughter is very curious about how things work. She wants to know what I do. And so I'm literally able to open up a web browser and show her Onshape, the CAD system. Like, here's how this works. And look, here we can create a hockey puck or we can build things with it. You want to play around with it? It's like, yeah, great. I'll get in there and start mucking around. And it's seeing youth get excited about what it is we all do in the world. That's the best thing ever. So I'm looking forward to the boys getting older. You know, right now they're busy beating up on each other, but once they get to the age where they have more mechanical interest, maybe. I'm not going to push them in that direction, but it's super cool to see that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:20) Yeah. Mine, oldest is a girl, and then the younger two are boys. So they're not beating up on each other yet. The girl and the boy are beating up on each other, but the other one's only three or four months old. Yeah. So yeah.

(George at 00:33:32) They'll get there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:33) We'll get there. Well, man, this was great. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(George at 00:33:38) That was fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:39) 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.