Greg Keller - 3 Archetypes of Entrepreneurial Thinking, & Scaling Without Making a Sales Call

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Greg, the CTO at JumpCloud, and they discuss why Greg places more importance on an employee's critical thinking and collaboration skills than their aptitude for a specific tool, how JumpCloud has scaled to more than 300 plus employees without ever making an outbound sales call, and three different archetypes of entrepreneurial thinking. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. Can you give me a little bit of your background and origin story?

(Greg at 00:00:47) Yeah, for sure. I mean, I would state this. I am almost thirty years. It'll be thirty years here in about a year, year and a half in product engineering data. I didn't even know. Let's go to the way back machine. I went to Syracuse University, and I studied foreign languages and foreign diplomacy. So I was a total international relations nerd. I wanted to swivel my head and speak in different languages and, you know, be that person. Right? But I was also the person on my floor that had, you know, one of the original Macintoshes. And I didn't know how to program that well, but you could hop around these machines. And it was sort of like the mythical object that people in my dorm room would come and clutter around or at least otherwise get time on the machine so they could write papers and things. So I've always been sort of close to compute or computers. Right? Get out of school, this is 1992, '93, and the economy of the United States is a junk show. We're sort of in a recession. No one can get jobs through a very long and sordid series of friends and relationships. A friend of mine had a job opening at a company, and I sold my way in. I used some of that international relations, you know, diplomatic speaking into the recruiting person at this company in New York City that was writing software. So being in New York City in the early nineties, this is pre, you know, Silicon, or not Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, you know, like it's known now New York City, the hotbed in Brooklyn in particular for software engineering. That didn't exist there. And there were, you know, Wall Street mainframe developers building trading systems, and there was that kind of software development. But I think I found the only company or was introduced to the only company that was building software development tools, specifically model-driven software engineering tools. So predating UML, so in a relationship diagram, you would move boxes around on these primitive Windows 3 or prior screens. OS/2, we had an installable version for OS/2. So again, dating myself. And not only did I enter the software world, I entered the most extreme corner of the software world, which was, you know, model-driven software engineering and design. It was big, big, big deal back then. Texas Instruments was the leader in CASE, CSSE, if you understand that acronym, Computer Aided Software Engineering. And it was the dawn of, you know, laying down boxes and the machinery that would generate the code. So I was able to, you know, talk my way into a job I was woefully underqualified for, which was technical pre-sales engineering. But quite literally, they threw me, I was 20, selling this software to what were mathematicians, gray-bearded, beard-stroking, cerebral thinking, abstract thinking, you know, luminaries of the software engineering space. So who were really the operators of these tools? So I got smart really, really quickly. I read a lot. I asked a ton of questions. I pissed a lot of people off because I was insatiable. I just got it. I could visually understand what was going on. And that really started my entry point into software engineering and technology was DDL, was data definition languages and DML, data manipulation languages, which is the structure of how you build objects in a relational database. Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, DB2, like, that was my entry point. In all the programmatic languages like Transact SQL or PL/SQL or in the world of Oracle that you really need to get smart. Well, what I learned was measure three times and cut once before you build data architectures because that is the foundation, at least in the day, of how you build client-server computing. You don't want to change that stuff often because it could recap a different business processes. So that was it, Joel. Like, it was I was hooked on the mechanics, on the way software was built. And you have to remember, like, you're with you and me now. Like, I can't even, when I'm speaking with a 22, specially minted CS grad and they want to do their first job, and they want to write Golang and build microservices and, you know, have their pedigree in Amazon architecture and all that stuff. I hold my tongue, but it's, you know, when I rewind the clock, building software was such a delicate process because guess what? You can't just hot fix things. Right? You were producing software in a life cycle that got printed on media, typically DVDs or floppy disks. And if you screw that up before it went to press, you're blowing potentially millions of dollars of distribution, which then gets sent to customers and then they have blackout periods to install the software. Oh my god. Way different look and feel. And I do not want to go back to those times. But you asked me a simple question, which was, what's the background? Those, that is it. Those were the hardened lessons being taught by extraordinarily rigid, if not mean, VPs of engineering because they knew the delicacy of, the delicate nature by which you had to go about identifying the problem, creating a solution for that problem, coding the solution to that problem, then test, test, test, test, test, test, test. So that was like the school of hard knocks was really being in those environments in the early days in the nineties. And that led me into product management and being the person that defined. I was more, you know, in my earliest days, I was more fascinated with the widget, the thing. You know, it was my precious little baby. Like, I could feel empowered, not because I'm a control freak, but because I love to communicate to anyone who will listen to me about this cool thing, about this thing that I'm proud of, this thing that I know you're going to love too. And it was easy for me to kind of do that. And I loved being able to, more or less than software engineering, I loved product management because in any given day, I could be interfacing with the CEO, a customer, my lead of engineering, an engineering team, my QA teams, my sales teams, and you sort of are like a chameleon. You have to switch your talk track within the blink of an eye to be able to express clarity and precision in any of those moments. And that's really what product management is in its purest form. At least high-functioning product managers are able to do that. And then I was more deeply hooked. You know? The thing became less of an attraction. So what I mean by that is I was more fascinated with the next level of abstraction, which is, how does the business that is responsible for sell, marketing, and selling this particular thing, how did those things get built? So, you know, I began a whole run at creating startups, and some worked, and some completely failed, quite honestly. But those were more lessons. And now it's about, you know, to wrap up, sorry for my long diatribe, but this is all background. And now in this current life, building JumpCloud, the last seven years of my life and being, you know, yes, the, you know, sort of the person who launched the product with this team and sort of helping envision it and accept it and got back to those sort of youthful roots of putting my hands into the ball of clay and pressing it. And I quickly shuttle that off to people who are going to take and run with it. And my love for people creation is sort of like my new future. Like, what is it like to engage a soul totally uninitiated, and you need them to support the mission, and you want them to be here, and learning how to interview, learning how to mentor, learning how to understand their motivations. And if those things are discontinuous or not in line or, that's when you get toxicity or you just don't get high-performing employees, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:01) I love it. I want to hear more. Right?

(Greg at 00:10:04) No. I...

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:05) I like when I get to meet people that have had similar experiences. And I have found the same thing to be true. At first, it was like a caveman who made fire for the first time writing that code, and I was obsessed with the thing. And then what's the other tools, and then let's just, I was finding excuses to use tools. And then I realized that, okay, this is fun, but I could just spend the rest of my life spinning in these circles playing with the tools. Let's go build a skyscraper. And well, wouldn't you know, you need to have money to build a skyscraper. So now my new job is to take all of my smarts on figuring out how things worked, the tools worked, and figure out, apply those learning and problem-solving skills to figure out how these business models work and how revenue generation works and how customers work. And then you realize pretty quickly that, yep, the prerequisites are revenue, great people. Those are like, yep.

(Greg at 00:11:00) And you got it. And everything beneath that are the scaffolding to create those realities, those outcomes that you actually need. You know, I find that, to your point about tools and then my prior point about people development, one of my interrogation tactics as I'm speaking with candidates, and I'll speak with very senior people to, you know, folks that some engineering managers or product leaders need sort of a, need a help tie-break and dig into these people. One of the characteristics that I'll dig into sort of orthogonally, sometimes they realize it, sometimes they don't, the candidate, is how willing are they to release the death grip on their former way of doing things? So to your point about tools, I really don't give a shit about tools. That's, you know, you have a motion of swinging a hammer, you know, and you probably know the current weight of it, but can I get you to adapt? Can I get you to swing a new type of hammer or use a saw? Bad analogy or crappy analogy, but it's about the fact that the best-performing companies don't repeat the playbooks of anyone else. And that's operationally how you should be thinking right down to the individual contributor. And before they even get in the front door, you should do them a service and adjust this by saying, your, lots of things may change, and most notably is your evolution. And because if you're going to stay ensconced in your comfort zone, like your nook on the way you use current tools or the way you do planning or the way you do, you know, your own leadership style, it probably won't work here at my company. Right? So it's just tactics. It is the most critical thing to not waste any time. Startups and growth-scale startups in particular, there is no time to waste. And a lot of that time wasted is ill productivity or people who just don't understand the mission and how they integrate with it. Right? Because they can't let go of their past.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:17) Yes. I'm a little speechless because it's just all of the instances of me experiencing that just running through my mind right now.

(Greg at 00:13:24) Yeah. Trust me. I didn't make, like, I had to learn by getting my teeth kicked in. And I've had great mentors too. You know? So it just, it helps to just reset. I'd look at job, the, if you have people listening who are looking for new jobs or, you know? You have to think of this as a holistic opportunity. You know, what does this mean for you, and what are you prepared to do? You know? What are you willing to do for yourself? And some of that is, again, it's this, engineers in particular, I've seen this with, but it really, it's categorically it's just a human trait. It's like, but my skills, my skills, like, this is what my value. And if I break the chain or the sort of progression, and, you know, my value isn't quite realized. Right? And a lot of people get hung up on that. You know? And I don't know. I think growing a set of cojones and just trying new things is quite liberating. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:31) Yeah. Persistently just go after it, and the universe will put you in the right direction pretty quickly.

(Greg at 00:14:37) I definitely believe that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:39) One thing as you were talking, people definitely write job descriptions tool-based often. Yeah. Right? At least in the technology world. It's like a list of 75 tools. So when people are going to get into like, let's say I'm a high school graduate. Right? And I want to go get a job. So I go on Indeed or, you know, Hired or whatever the job site is, is list of tools. Like I'm looking forward to it when I see a job description that starts talking about like their behaviors and patterns and the things that we actually want that we screen for in the interview. And then we could also say, yeah. And we happen to write some code. It's this type of code in general. But we're building these types of systems. And because the reality of it is, is when we have a project, we pick the best tool for the project.

(Greg at 00:15:27) A hundred percent. Yeah. We kind of take that philosophy, I think, from a, you know, of course, we have to put out there the stack and what we're working on, you know. And that does, you know, at the expense of sounding self-serving, we're working on some cool stuff. I mean, it's mega progressive, microservices driven, big, big global distributed platform at Amazon, all the bells and whistles. We're writing Golang, you know? And which in and of itself is new to a lot of people. It's, I think it's more of a thing now, but we were early adopters of it about six years ago, almost seven years ago. So it's a little less intimidating. But if you know C++ or Java even, you know, it's approachable. But very quickly, we kind of dismiss that stuff because you have to get through the assignment, which really is about critical thinking and thoroughness. And we're more interested in those traits and then putting you as part of our interview process in a panel interview to watch how you collaborate with the panel of, with your potential fellow engineers. Right? That you're going to be working with. And what we're looking at is, yeah, quality means stuff, but thoroughness and your ability when we make them explain their reasonings and they'll do whiteboard sessions. Like, when we actually had in-person interviews, they would be on the whiteboard walking us through their assignment. And it's, like, you will find some folks dig their heels in and boom, instantly we know, uh-oh, you know, this isn't a person that is going to collaborate and want to listen to reason. Right? Or if they have a strong assertion about how they want to, you know, they have a lot of passion behind the way they've implemented a pattern or something like that. Right? It's the approach. It's the style that we're interested in. That creates a much better culture rather than, you know, armies of just siloed clone soldiers cranking out code. Right? It's not what we want. And in any event, yeah. We, tools are tools, but it's really about the collaboration that we find critical.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:42) Tell me a little bit about JumpCloud and its mission.

(Greg at 00:17:45) Yeah. Thank you for asking. So JumpCloud is, by category, we are a security software company. So there's billions of those. Right? We are in the identity and access management space. And very specifically, we have created a sort of an abstract platform, an independent platform, and I'll explain what that means, for directory services. So if I pause there and I said to, it's probably more of your seasoned audience members. If I said to you, do you know what LDAP and Active Directory are? And if people are like, yep. Those are directories. They're the source of authoritative identity and credentials in organizations that typically use Microsoft solutions. That is what we have reimagined, rebuilt in a cloud-based, cloud-forward, independent neutral way. So JumpCloud's directory-as-a-service is for our customers the source of credentials and multifactor authentication. But the cool thing that we did was made it protocol-driven.

(Greg at 00:18:58) So regardless of the corporate resource, it could be a SaaS-based application or an on-premise server or a machine or a server like your MacBook or an employee's MacBook or a Windows 10 box or a Windows Server up in Amazon or a Linux host up in Google Cloud. It doesn't matter to us what those resources are or where they are. We are protocol-driven to connect our authentication mechanisms to those resources. So what this looks like when implemented is an employee at a company gets a single set of credentials, their JumpCloud credentials, and it is responsible for everything, for logging into anything that they need. So starting with their laptop, their MacBook, it could be a Linux laptop, a Windows 10 laptop, or a server or anything. It starts with where that employee is working. One of the sort of differentiating features that we built into this platform, because there's lots of identity players—there's Okta and there's Duo, who do multi-factor, and all these things—we've kind of merged those concepts into this platform. But the secret sauce is the mechanism by which we treat devices.

(Greg at 00:20:17) So we're sort of the party that manages the device as well and all the security controls that go on. So we control the authentication into the endpoint, so your session, your user account, and then getting you into your MacBook. I'm speaking to you from my MacBook. It's a JumpCloud-managed MacBook. So I logged into it. After that, I don't really have to enter my password into anything anymore because JumpCloud knows who you are on that protected host. So firing up the browser, we use FIDO's WebAuthn in getting you into the browser session. Then we know what application you're going out to. We use the SAML protocol to connect to web-based applications, or, "Oh, I need now to go and log into my Jira account that uses an LDAP-based authentication." So we support that. Right? So it doesn't matter. We've abstracted all of the complexity of these protocols into a much more approachable, again, what we call a directory-as-a-service. And that's what we've been up to over the last seven years.

(Greg at 00:21:24) Business, just to give your folks a sense, is, you know, we're a growth-stage company. The team and I have raised about $200 million from very notable investors. Principally, we just closed a Series E this year, which we weren't even in the market to raise money, but the company's progression got to the point where people wanted in on it. And those included General Atlantic, BlackRock, and HIG, which are not the typical venture firms who would invest in a growth-stage company. They're typically very late-stage, pre-IPO types of companies. And so to date, $200 million investment, generating substantial revenue. We have 100,000 active organizations around the globe using the platform, and, you know, we're now a company—pre-COVID, this is an interesting statistic—we were about 175 people, let's say, right when the pandemic started to hit. We had just raised money. We were hiring. Boom. Well, all those employees were literally in Colorado in two offices that we had, these beautiful offices we just built and opened. Then boom, the pandemic hits. The business actually accelerated because, funny enough, we built software to help people work remotely. We weren't planning on pandemics, but it helped a lot of companies out.

(Greg at 00:22:48) So the business accelerated. So we went from Colorado and 175 employees to now 21 states of our great union, and we went talent hunting. And now we're just about 350 employees, so we've almost doubled in size and now in 21 states. So this company now has really embraced the remote model. We've figured out how to manage remotely, how to learn and integrate remotely. It's been not easy, but we've cracked many codes on trying to make that a success. So now we don't care where you live. We're gonna ensure you're a great person, super smart, super hungry, and pick and choose where you want to live, and you'll have great, effective role here at JumpCloud.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:38) Are you currently hiring?

(Greg at 00:23:40) Yes. Please send me your peoples.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:45) Yeah. What's—is it just like if I Google JumpCloud hiring, I'd probably find the page?

(Greg at 00:23:50) JumpCloud.com/careers. Yeah. There's principally one very interesting part about this company. This is pretty different than most. If you look at JumpCloud, we sell to businesses. We are mission-critical security software. So people automatically think, "Oh, god, enterprise, you know, enterprise sales." We focus on the small and medium enterprise. So let's say 50 employees to the low thousands, and we are outright owning that market. But the way we got there is by never in seven years making an outbound sales call. 100% of this revenue has been generated by inbound, programmatic, digital marketing. So of 350 employees, under 20 are in our sales operation. So that shows the dynamic. The majority of this company are product and engineering, and it's created a way different look at enterprise, quote, "enterprise tool." Just the way we go to market is way different, and it's operationally crazy efficient to run a company like this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:04) Yeah. I remember, so we raised some money when we started and we were talking with them about our sales, and they were, like, surprised that we just send emails out and have Zoom calls and close business. They're like, "You guys aren't with your customers in person?" We're like, "No, we just do Zoom calls." And we've doubled revenue every year for the past four years. I wanted to get your advice on this. So because you've done multiple startups, figuring out the value prop is the hardest part. So for you guys, like, you're—what I've learned more recently as my company has grown and I've started to meet with other executives and talk to their sales leaders and things like that, the conversations that you have with your customer, you're having that same conversation with hundreds of people. They're pretty similar, right? And they're all interested in this specific value prop. And so I wanted to know, what's the value prop for JumpCloud? I know what you do. You're this cloud directory platform for authentication. But what's the reason in the sales call that they're buying?

(Greg at 00:26:04) It's one directory to rule them all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:08) So ease of use.

(Greg at 00:26:09) Yeah, well, no. You know what I would say? I mean, that term, while real, it should be easy to use. That should be table stakes. If you're not creating a wonderful experience through highly progressive user experience and growth engineering tactics, which we deploy, you're doing it wrong. If you're a SaaS company and you need training and all this crazy implementation, paid-for services, and—it's just, you know, face palm. That ship has sailed. You better have a growth engineering team and a user experience team that is just delighting the hell out of your customers. But I want to do two things. I will answer your question about value with JumpCloud, but then I want to go and address something that is often overlooked for young entrepreneurs. Let me answer your question first. The real value of JumpCloud beyond, you know, usability and all that stuff, I would say is something we call vendor consolidation. So there's, I swear to god, like, well, there's 5 billion tools that are out there that all need to be painstakingly integrated together to create an effective chained identity strategy. So, for example, you need a source of identity. Some people use Google. Some people use Active Directory. Some people use whatever. Right? It's where the identity and the passwords are basically stored and managed.

(Greg at 00:27:43) Then you need a single sign-on tool that sort of looks at that identity and will know what to do with it when it logs into Salesforce or whatever. Then you need a device management tool like Jamf or, you know, the same for Windows, like Sophos or any of these. You gotta pick and choose what tools you're gonna manage your devices with. Then you need privileged access management tools to securely get people into servers. Then you need a multifactor tool. And, Joel, I could keep going and going and going and going. There's sort of the history is just building blocks. But what we did is blew up all the building blocks and put them into one platform: multifactor, SSO, MDM, you know, Wi-Fi RADIUS services, the core directory itself, obviously. And so the value is consolidation. Why the hell are you, as an overworked system administrator, you know, spending your time on vendor management? You know, "Oh, I got my call with Okta today. Oh, in an hour, I have my call with Duo. And then, oh man, on Thursday, I've gotta call this MDM vendor and try and get that deal done." Right? So consolidation. The point I wanted to make, though, is there's some, you know, common—they're not clichés; they're not at all. I don't want to trivialize it like that. They're foundational things. You often hear, "You should strive for product-market fit." Right? You hear tons of venture capitalists, and absolutely, no duh. That's the spark. It's how the flywheel starts to turn, and your MRR is—you learn how to do it systematically and repeatedly. But the problem is you can do all that, and you don't know what will hit you, because why is my business not accelerating? Why is it I'm generating revenue, I may or may not be profitable or throwing off the type of cash that I want. And I think often, and this is the hardest thing to do, is the entrepreneur is—this is my filtration process. It's sort of challenged. They're either in one of these three boxes. They're super myopic on, "Yeah, here's my new company, my brand new shiny company, and I'm the founder. And I'm gonna raise some money." And what I am effectively building is a feature of some other big, you know, Goliath, and they feel with their heart that they're gonna dent the universe, you know, by creating this solution, which generally is a feature of something else. Right? And maybe they have aspirations to get acquired, which is in and of itself the wrong way to start thinking about things, but I digress. So you have class one of entrepreneur. They're building a feature, and they're dead before they know it.

(Greg at 00:30:40) Then you get to the other, wider thinker, and they're thinking, you know, product and/or platform, which is cool. Right? It's a broader think. There's value behind it. They may be thinking consolidation like I am, like these value propositions. And it in and of itself can stand the test of time as a viable—not only the product or a platform, but it will generate a viable business behind it. Viable. Then there's the third class, which is those that are—they're not unicorns, but I think these are the types of thinkers who actually aren't scared and won't blink when they want to change a category. So you look—there's plenty of categories, you know, in any market. Right? And many of these categories are historic. They've had a specific pattern for time ad infinitum on the vendors that serve that category and the way the analysts think about that category, and it's sort of a nice little cute family, and god forbid anyone disrupts it. Those are the eternal businesses. There's a reason why Microsoft or Oracle or, now, the sort of the new players of the world—Amazon, I would say, in particular—have created platform-as-a-service or IaaS, infrastructure-as-a-service. That's a category. I mean, look at what's going on. Amazon is at the top of the hill with very little chance in the next decade for Azure, for Microsoft, or Google through its cloud to even make a dent, so much so that Google's already conceded. Thomas Kurian, I think, and he—I'd probably get punched in the face by him if he heard me say this, but I think their tactics are to concede. And Anthos and other things that provide portability of containers and things between platforms, it's absolutely a good thing to do. I don't get me wrong. It gives independence for, "Hey, I want to switch this container from Azure into Amazon or whatever, or Google into Azure." But my god. Those are probably the biggest examples of folks that wanted to change a category, but, you know, they went big. Right? But I don't know. What am I saying here? The entrepreneur has to have wide open eyes. What do they really want to do? You know? Do you want to create an evergreen business, you know, a long-standing business? Or is the operating thesis to build it just to a point where it gets acquired and then you screw all your employees? Right? So, again, I'll cease to talk anymore.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:31) Yeah. I'll tell you a little bit about my journey.

(Greg at 00:33:33) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:33) So I think I went through all of those stages as you described them. So at first, you know, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and wanted to change the world with a feature. Then I got into it and I realized really quick, "Okay, nope. I do not know what I'm doing." But you have to figure it out. You know, you take money from other people, you gotta get them their money back. You have to figure out how to make it successful. So you just kind of—trial by fire situation. And it's, I think, baked into my DNA and my childhood. I'm just the type of person that doesn't give up. You know, I just—I mean, I remember my earliest memory of this is my older brother pushing me down when his friends were over. And at first they were like, "Don't get back up," and then I'd get back up and they'd push me down. And then I was, you know, Mortal Kombat, "Finish him." I'd still get back up. And then they started to laugh and respect me. And that's one of my earliest memories of persistence because then they just thought I was cool. And all of a sudden they never messed with me again because they were just like, "There's no point in pushing him down. He's just gonna get back up." And so that's kind of how I approach a lot of things. But going through these motions of learning about, you know, am I developing a product or a feature, and then the platform, and these different types of thinking—that really resonated with me how you explained that because I think you can mature through those stages. They're not just buckets where people become fixed. Obviously, you can identify where someone's at in their journey by having a conversation with them. But they can definitely grow through these different stages. Like for me, I know what you guys are doing is super exciting because you're completely taking over, disrupting this world of all these different products, and now people can just come to JumpCloud and then have more time and things will just work more seamlessly for the users. And that's great. You guys are feeling it right now because you just doubled your employees. Right? And all the credentialing and device endpoint management and deployment of endpoints or computers, whatever we want to call them—it's gotta be a lot easier when you have that authentication set up and you have your own product and you have to use it. Right?

(Greg at 00:35:37) That's exactly right. I think, thank you. That was—I like the way you articulated that. I just have to put a note in my head: Joel, slash the product marketer whisperer. That was awesome. I kind of, in the spirit of building these long-standing businesses—if your audience would hear me—what we sort of felt from the beginning of JumpCloud, and we didn't quite say these words back then, but we knew we wanted to build something substantial. And I'll give you a sense of what we were thinking. Let me parenthetically state, what we wanted to build, we have built, and we've never deviated from that original thesis of what the directory-as-a-service was supposed to do and its feature set. And seven years—you know, these other companies that I helped build, all, even the ones that were successful—you pivot left, right, you know, you kind of learn as you go.

(Greg at 00:36:42) JumpCloud was a lot different. It was, nope, this is it. Like, this is what we want to build, and let's—we've got to pour gas on this and go. But what that looked like was when Raj Pargavi is the CEO and the guy who brought me in to work with him to craft this company and this product, along with another third guy, Larry Middle, whom I've known in the Boulder, Denver startup community for a long time.

(Greg at 00:37:12) We wanted to build this thing. This is what I said to these guys. I'm like, if we do our job right, when a company like an entrepreneur wants to go and build a company—forget their idea for a second—they need some basic principles to build the company. And it used to be like, where's our office going to be? That's gone. Forget that, right? Because you can live anywhere you want to now. So for me, it's like, it's the tools. Like, to use your term before, Joel, it's like, alright, we're going to get bulk rate discount on MacBook, so our employees are going to use Macs. And if we want Linux for our devs, that's fine. We're going to compute in Amazon.

(Greg at 00:37:55) You know, I'm going to build a platform. By the way, I've only worked on SaaS companies for the last fifteen years, so I'm hyper internet with Amazon. You'd be hard pressed to find me deviate from that platform. But anyways, so I'm going to choose Amazon. How are we going to collaborate? I mean, call it easy, drop a credit card in. We're going to use Google Workspace. So, G Suite, Gmail. I'm going to use all that. And what are my set of SaaS applications we're going to need?

(Greg at 00:38:23) Right? So I'm going to need Jira. I'm going to need Confluence. I'm going to need GitHub. I'm going to need other project management tools, blah blah blah blah blah, right? And JumpCloud. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We need that too because everything is going to sit on top of that.

(Greg at 00:38:41) Right? And if we ever want to change Amazon to Azure later, like, I go into the desert and take some peyote and suddenly realize that I'm going to build everything on .NET and Azure, then, yes, I can make that change because JumpCloud's got my identity. It's got the access control. As of late, that thesis now has become—well, JumpCloud desires to be the platform for the platforms. So if you're building a company, we just want to be like that. You don't even think about it. Right? It's like, you know, engineers now, they don't think about using Amazon. Right? It's like, oh, yeah. I can get in. I got EC2 set up. I've got a Red Hat Linux server set up. I'm already—boom. I'm building Lambda jobs and all this kind of crap. They just—it's like reflexive. So we want to become that sort of reflexive decision that is made when you're building a company. Does that make sense?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:46) Yes. A hundred percent. So two thoughts come to my mind. First, have you ever done any integrations with, like, a Gusto? Because that's the first place I put my employees' information.

(Greg at 00:39:56) Funny you say that. We know Gusto people real well. And the answer is yes. We haven't done it with Gusto yet, but we've done it with Bamboo, with Workday, and others. Perfect. Gusto definitely is on our roadmap.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:07) Perfect. Yeah. So you already have a relationship with them and everything?

(Greg at 00:40:11) I've been to their offices a number of times.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:13) Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah. I got to interview their founder, I think, like, last year. He was a really cool guy. Great culture. Great origin story.

(Greg at 00:40:20) We agree. We agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:21) Yes. What's the call to action? How can people experience JumpCloud? How do they learn more?

(Greg at 00:40:27) Thank you for even giving me the opportunity to say that. So for your audience who are obviously technical, modern CTO, here's the cool part. The product is free. All of what we talked about is free. The only thing we cap is the number of employees. So the thesis was we want every small company on earth to start their life with very solid enterprise grade identity services. So that's why we gave it away. That's why we have over a hundred thousand active organizations banging away with JumpCloud every day. You can go to jumpcloud.com and you just sign up, literally, and then you're in the product and starting to operate. Drop agents on servers, you know, start to learn how to do SSH key transactions with us, user accounts, you know, all kinds of cool, nerdy, low level things.

(Greg at 00:41:22) Plus, the whole product is RESTful. We build to the API and then the UIs and everything are built above that. So it's microservices driven. So if you have any aspirations for integrating our platform to trigger workflow for identity services, it's all API driven too. So we love the feedback from especially this audience, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:48) Brilliant. And is it just jumpcloud.com?

(Greg at 00:41:50) Jumpcloud.com. That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:52) Perfect. 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.