Exploring Leadership, Growth Strategies, and the ChatGPT Disruption with Jason Dobbs, CTO at PKWARE

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Jason from PKWARE about having parallel routes of growth in your company, ChatGPT, and more. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:16) I typically like to start with, what is PKWARE? I've got somewhat of an idea, but I was hoping you could explain it to me.

(Jason at 00:00:23) Sure. So PKWARE, we started in 1986, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The early claim to fame was the invention of the zip file format by the founder, Phil Katz. So that debuted in 1989. As an organization, the company has always been about data and at the time, obviously, data compression.

(Jason at 00:00:44) As the company grew, Phil Katz passed away in 2000 or 2001. So the company has gone through a couple of iterations since then. And as the company grew, they got more and more data security minded, right? So the first step into that was strong encryption on top of the zip file format. And then through the 2010s, that's where they really start to move into more of an enterprise play as it relates to encryption.

(Jason at 00:01:11) And customers started asking, okay, we know that we want to encrypt, but how do we find the data, right? So a lot of investments are made into data discovery, obviously, the key management behind encryption and encryption policies. And, you know, at the end of the day, for the enterprises, a lot of automation around everything, a lot of orchestration around that. So at that time, though, it was still really file centric, unstructured files. So finding sensitive information in files and then being able to protect it.

(Jason at 00:01:41) In 2020, we acquired a company called DataGUYS. And DataGUYS, their strength was more in those data stores. So databases, big data, cloud data stores. So by putting the two companies together, you know, we've got right now what I consider to be the only end-to-end solution that can find data anywhere it exists in the enterprise and then offer a variety of protection options once that sensitive information is found.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:08) Is it mostly protection centered, not search centered?

(Jason at 00:02:12) Yeah. Definitely not search centered. Right? So when we talk about encryption, when I talk about encryption anyways, I mean, encryption really, by definition, breaks two things. One, it breaks collaboration and it breaks search, right?

(Jason at 00:02:26) Because if the information is encrypted, you shouldn't be able to search over it, right? So a lot of our efforts are how do we actually take those deficits, because companies need to encrypt their most sensitive information. I mean, it's just a given. But how do we make that into a more usable experience for the end user who really all they care about is getting their job done, right? They don't care about encryption.

(Jason at 00:02:49) Right? They just want to make sure that they can do their jobs, and the company's concerned they want them to do their jobs safely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:56) Yeah. And if it's not, then you get that whole shadow IT thing happening. They'll do what they need to do.

(Jason at 00:03:01) Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:02) Yeah. I've gotten to do, I won't name any names, but I've gotten to do some projects with some, you know, larger companies that had sensitive information, and their processes to interface with us were so difficult. They're like, yeah, we just grab a Google Doc account so that you and I can work together because we need to collaborate on a document. And I'm like, oh, and then later, I found out that that's called shadow IT.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:24) I was like, oh, interesting.

(Jason at 00:03:26) Right. Right. And I think, you know, one of the problems that we actually solve, and it's not a well-known problem is, you know, if you and I wanted to share something encrypted, right, and I send something to you and now my IT department goes and tries to figure out what I sent to you, they can't figure it out, right, because if I meant to encrypt it, by definition, you and I are the only two people that can see it, right? So part of our solution is we give those IT departments the opportunity to kind of insert a contingency key in so that in the event that the company needs to decrypt the data, because at the end of the day, the company owns the data, right?

(Jason at 00:04:04) They should be able to decrypt it. So that's the capability that we give versus, you know, two people just going off the shelf and finding something to do that end-to-end encryption.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:14) And how did you get involved with this company?

(Jason at 00:04:17) That's a little bit of an interesting story. I was actually brought on in 2019 to form a new product team around an email security product. And the company actually transacted. We got a new private equity firm in early 2020. The overall philosophy of growth was a little bit different with the new private equity firm, very acquisitive, go through acquisition and combined strengths of companies.

(Jason at 00:04:46) So the strategy changed. And, you know, about a year later, I found myself in the CTO seat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:54) Oh, nice. You went from coming in, build some product to now you're, you understand M&A.

(Jason at 00:05:00) Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. It was a wild ride early on.

(Jason at 00:05:04) And honestly, I think I learned a lot in the process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:08) What was the most important thing that you learned from your first M&A experience?

(Jason at 00:05:14) That's a great question. Most important thing. You know, I think the first learning is that it's really, really challenging to take two different kind of corporate cultures and put them together. And it's not something that you can do overnight. And it's not necessarily something that you want to do at all in some situations.

(Jason at 00:05:35) Our product lines and our product teams are different enough where you don't want to water them down by forcing them all to do the same thing. So I feel what was really important was to kind of identify that next layer of leaders, engineering leaders over each product, so that they could kind of define that culture for those teams independently and really kind of foster that teamwork amongst those teams.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:00) How did you do that? How did you find these leaders and grow them?

(Jason at 00:06:04) That's a great question. Most of them, most of our promotion has been done internally. So what we've had is I was really lucky. We had a couple of individuals on the team that were really focused more on growing and developing their people than I've historically encountered. Usually, when you meet an engineering leader, it's because that engineering leader was the best engineer.

(Jason at 00:06:29) Right? And we definitely had people who had very strong engineering talent, but they also had a strong focus on their people. And they took interest in their people's careers and gave them opportunities to learn and grow. And then as PKWARE has been growing, there's been more and more opportunities for leaders to step up and it's really just those people that have demonstrated the interest and the capability through either other small projects, or we start them off small, right? We'll start them off with a smaller team, maybe not direct management responsibilities, but you're responsible for technical leadership.

(Jason at 00:07:07) And once you've demonstrated that you've got the ability to lead technically, you know, start kind of layering in some of those HR responsibilities. And, yeah, so all but one of my engineering product line leaders was internal promotion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:22) Oh, nice. Do you ever make mistakes, promote people, and then they end up hating it?

(Jason at 00:07:29) You know, I think there's a perception in tech where the real way to get ahead is to become a manager, become a director, you know, become a CTO or whatever. And people have a drive towards that without kind of understanding what that means. So what we've tried to do is, you know, as you get those initial leadership experiences, we try to get that initial leadership experience to be kind of a junction point to, hey, do I want to go down that personnel management route or do I really want to stick with the technology and technology leadership? And we've had people that have expressed interest in both directions. So giving people the ability to continue to lead, to continue to influence the organization without being a manager or director, I mean, that's been important.

(Jason at 00:08:15) So it's a long-winded answer to say that I don't think we've necessarily made mistakes, but we give people the opportunity to kind of try before they buy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:24) Oh, nice. Yeah. I've found that to be true as well, what you said about people thinking that that's the way. And they're not wrong. There's definitely a way to get ahead, but there's the asterisk, but you might not enjoy how you spend your time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:39) And so you can also get ahead on a technical level. So if you want to spend your time like that, figure out, you know, that self-awareness of how you want to spend your time and then look for a path that allows you to do that more. And that's where I find a lot of the CTOs are good at coaching people through this. I have a lot of people tell me that they actively try to discourage highly talented technical people from wanting to go into management unless they really, really want to, because it's an entirely different job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:07) It's an entirely different job with a whole different set of skills than just being a good engineer.

(Jason at 00:09:13) Yeah. I completely agree. I think, you know, I've been in a lot of organizations where really the only way to get ahead was to become the manager, become the director, and they kind of combined that technical leadership and that people leadership roles together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:28) Mhmm.

(Jason at 00:09:29) And there are people that can handle that. I mean, don't get me wrong. There's a lot of people that are good at both. And I think as a technical leader, you still have to have those technical capabilities so that you can call BS on the team and not just rely on what the team is telling you to be true. But at the end of the day, some people, when they get into it, they realize that, hey, I really want to go more kind of like that architect route versus going into people management because the higher you go in people management, the more it focuses on the people and the less it is on the technology.

(Jason at 00:10:01) You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:02) Yeah. And I have seen companies that are intentional about creating those multiple, those parallel routes on how they can advance as a technical individual and then how they can advance through management. One of the things that I noticed was when they don't have those, well, you have less success with the people growing. But what you'll find, or what I've noticed a little bit as a trend, is that the engineers that have a lot of success on the single path are the ones that figure out that if they write and produce content, then they become a person inside of their space, inside of their niche, and they're speaking at conferences and doing different things, and then they become significantly more valuable and usually end up in a consultative type role where they're bouncing around with some of the bigger companies. I bring this up because it's almost like if you've got this motivated, driven person and you don't have parallel paths and they want to improve and they don't want to go into management, if you don't have that path, they will often figure out this other way, which the net result is them leaving your company.

(Jason at 00:11:07) Sure. Sure. You know, and honestly, you know, I think one of the things that, you know, at least in my worldview, I don't think necessarily somebody leaving the organization to find the next step, I don't think it's a bad thing necessarily. I mean, especially if there was some intentionality behind that of, hey, I know what you're looking for next in your career.

(Jason at 00:11:28) We're going to give you some experiences here so that you can kind of build on what you learn to move in that direction. But, ultimately, if that opportunity exists outside the organization, I mean, I'm sure everybody you talk to and yourself included, you probably experienced, you know, hey, the best move for somebody was for them to get promoted out of the organization. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:47) Sometimes it is. Yeah. And if you see that happening a lot and you're unsatisfied with it as the leader of that organization, you can start asking the question of why is this happening. Maybe I need to structure the system that has a path for high performers. And that way, you know, not under the context of you keeping them forever, but in the sense that at least you can have a more clear, direct path for them to just hang out with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:11) That's why I think I've seen a lot of the companies that are, you know, have a hundred-plus people. They'll do that thing where they let you hop around on teams and take different missions and projects.

(Jason at 00:12:20) Yeah. Yeah. Totally. We got a fairly large team over in India, and I'm actually going to visit them tomorrow when we get off this call. I'm going to be driving up to Minneapolis. The feedback that I got the first time that I visited those teams was they just wanted more experiences, right?

(Jason at 00:12:36) They're like, this is exciting. Now we have more products. We want the opportunity to work on different products or we want the opportunity to work with different technologies. And we're lucky because of the nature of what we do, which is searching for data and all these different systems that you can work with a bunch of different technologies. You can work with AWS, you can work with Azure.

(Jason at 00:12:55) You can work with Hadoop. You can work with Teradata. Like, you name it. We're out there, and we need to gain some level of expertise in it. So if people have an interest and a passion in a specific technology, we can usually find a road for them, which is a little bit, I think, more unique at PKWARE than other places I've been.

(Jason at 00:13:14) But at the same time, yeah, you're 100% right. You know, giving people those different experiences to try to find what they're passionate about. I mean, that's absolutely important, and it's harder to do the smaller you are. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:26) Yes. And were you guys largely in India prior to the acquisition with DataGUYS?

(Jason at 00:13:32) No. So that was new with DataGUYS. DataGUYS had the bulk of their engineering over in India. So that was a new experience for me as well. I think for us, the biggest challenge is just time zones, right?

(Jason at 00:13:45) Was it ten and a half hours, eleven and a half hours right now? And finding times that everybody can meet, you're infringing on somebody's evening, right? Yeah. I think the way that we've managed that was early on, there was this attitude of let's have a lot of cross time zone teams so we can get to know each other, get to know their strengths and way of working and stuff. But now that we're over two years in, we've kind of gone back to let's have teams that are all in the same time zone because they're a lot more effective and they get a lot more done because they can have all of those conversations in real time.

(Jason at 00:14:21) So, yeah, that's, from a learnings, key learnings of my experiences at PKWARE, that's been a big one is just how do you deal with kind of a more global workforce. And we've got people all over. I mean, I've got a guy down in Ecuador. I've got someone right now who's working and I believe is in Italy right now, but, you know, likes to travel the world. So,

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:40) No ChatGPT for them.

(Jason at 00:14:44) That's true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:46) So one of the other questions I had for you about the acquisition was when you gave me a rough timeline earlier about, you know, you joining, private equity and acquisitions and all of that. Were you a part of the process picking DataGUYS?

(Jason at 00:15:01) Yeah. Yeah. So as we're going through diligence, you know, they involved pretty much every team inside of the company. And obviously, in the engineering space, we're heavily involved in not just evaluating the technology, you know, from does it fit into our overall story perspective, but, you know, is it something that we can work with, and is it something that we want to take on and maintain?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:27) How did it work with you interacting or your organization interacting with your customers, figuring out what their needs are, and then resulting in acquisition? Or is that not how it happens? It's just you guys needed something. You knew you needed it, and you went and got it.

(Jason at 00:15:45) It's a little bit of both, right? You know, I know that for a number of years there was a lot of conversation about, hey, you can do what you can do with files. It'd be really great if you could do that with databases.

(Jason at 00:15:57) And there was talk about, you know, what it would take to build that out. So when this opportunity came along, it was a little bit of a no-brainer in terms of, yes, this is very complementary. This is something that we can work with. Right? I will say that in a lot of cases, especially when you're working for private equity, they bring you a lot of opportunities and say, hey, on the surface, does this look like a good fit?

(Jason at 00:16:20) So even before you get into really digging deep, it's like, do you see a path towards complementary products? Do you see a path towards being able to sell to the same person inside the organization that we're already selling to? So you kind of factor all of those things in. So by the time you're actually evaluating the tech, you've kind of solidified that, yes, this is going to be complementary at a business perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:45) I love it. No, thanks for sharing that. I try not to dig too deep with the M&A stuff to get to the sensitive stuff. I try to get, like, right to the surface.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:54) Right to the edge. Yeah. AI was listed as something that you like to talk about. Are you guys using it, or is it just in your personal life?

(Jason at 00:17:05) So for me, it's just in my personal life. I mean, we do use machine learning from a sensitive data detection perspective. I mean, there's only so much that you can do with regular expressions. But I mean, we're kind of evaluating it across the business and where can it have impact. I mean, I think ChatGPT was a little bit of a bomb that went off in the industry that, I mean, to say we didn't see it coming, I think we'd be fooling ourselves.

(Jason at 00:17:33) But to see it come that fast, I think that was the shock to everybody's system, right? So I think from our perspective, it's like, okay, how can this help make our developers more efficient, right, without doing what Samsung did, right? How can it make our marketing teams more efficient? You know? How can it make support more efficient?

(Jason at 00:17:56) You know? I mean, I've already seen tools out there that you can ingest an entire support case and say, all right, generate the knowledge base article. Well, that sounds great to me. You know?

(Jason at 00:18:07) So I don't look at this like we—I don't look at this as this is going to eat all of our jobs. It's just going to take all of our jobs and make them that much more productive and help us get to a lot of those things that we couldn't get to historically. I mean, I'm not completely naive. I mean, I know there's probably going to be some learnings. But, you know, I tend to focus on the positives that it can bring.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:30) I'm an optimist, and I just believe that this has been happening since the beginning of time. The only difference now is the rate at which it'll happen. So, you know, when we went from horses to cars, that was a relatively slow process. You could see that coming. I've seen the, you know, people at the checkout at the grocery store.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:48) First they had two self-checkouts, then they took one eye out. Now it's, like, 80% self-checkouts, and I was like, you definitely saw that coming over the past five years. You just saw it growing. But GPT and its ability to decimate an industry overnight is not far-fetched. And so I've been thinking a lot personally about not whether if it'll happen, but just how it will come about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:15) Right? Like, let's say you wake up tomorrow and there's no need for, like, this very specific role that employs millions of people or hundreds of thousands of people, and it—well, it's going to take some time for buyers to figure it out, but helping those people transition to something else is going to be the thing that we're going to want to pay attention to. Like, how quickly we can get them back into something else, because you don't want a situation where everyone's sitting around, sitting on their hands, because that's when, like, social unrest happens.

(Jason at 00:19:47) Yeah, I know. And I've been listening to a couple of your episodes, you know, where you've been discussing this, and, you know, I think that's a real concern. I believe that while the technology itself is pretty far along, it's still very prone to like these hallucinations, and that's going to get better. I mean, GPT-6 is probably going to be like this amazing thing that I can't even fathom right now.

(Jason at 00:20:09) But I think that's why we have to stay close to it and we have to understand its capabilities. We have to understand its limitations. And as a business, right, you want to make sure that you're taking full advantage of everything that it has to offer, because if you don't, your competitors will, right? So I mean, yeah, I think the one truth, the big truth in there, is just the pace—the pace of change. You know, I think social, we're still kind of recovering from that wave.

(Jason at 00:20:34) You know? And now, like, the AI wave is going to come a lot faster than the social wave did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:40) Oh, yeah. 100%. It's happening fast. Have you seen—have you played with any of the apps now that OpenAI now has their app store, integration store? Have you played with any of those?

(Jason at 00:20:53) Haven't had the opportunity to do that yet. Do you have a favorite or anything exciting that you've seen in there?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:58) I did see one example of somebody hooking it up to essentially, like, the Google API or live search API. So you can say, hey, go research this, and it will actually go pull live results and then come back to you with information. Like, Bing already does that, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:15) But you can—it does it in a different way. So I've seen, who was it? Expedia did it. You could say, hey, book me a trip to this place, and then it'll ask you a couple questions back and forth, and then it books the trip for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:29) That was kind of neat. But that's just, you know, 101. Give it a year of people figuring out creative stuff with this app store, and there'll be a lot of things that the ChatGPT will be able to do for you. I mean, have you seen the GitHub code assistant?

(Jason at 00:21:46) Yeah, yes, I have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:48) That's bonkers, dude.

(Jason at 00:21:49) Yeah, I know. It's incredible. I think you kind of hit on something that's key, right? So ChatGPT and what it can provide in that scenario and Expedia and what they can provide in that scenario, right? So really, Expedia is still there. We still need all of that code. We still need the booking engine behind it.

(Jason at 00:22:08) And sure, maybe their developers are actually interacting with AI to make their code better. Who knows, right? But at the end of the day, it's like I always look at, like, the—especially the conversation of the language learning models—I look at that as like a better entry point into this just vast knowledge base that exists in the world.

(Jason at 00:22:27) Right? And you're still going to need those specific developers out there that are, you know, creating those domain-specific solutions. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:34) Yeah. It's definitely just a condensing, right? And because you did hear other episodes, you probably heard me say it puts the premium on people that have drive, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:45) Because now if you have drive, you have so much more ability to do things without needing a bunch of other people and a lot of money. You can make more change, and then you'll just—I think it's like anything. You'll just see those people rise to the top. Right? The cream rises to the top.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) So—

(Jason at 00:23:04) Right. And you'll see those people that are really good at interrogating AI get ahead a lot faster. You know? I always felt like some of the best engineers out there were, like, the ones that had the most, like, Google fu at one point in time.

(Jason at 00:23:17) And now I think you're going to see, like, the people that really understand language and how to interrogate these models. They're going to do very, very well for themselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:27) Prompting is a legitimate skill, and I am very happy that I'm decent at it, because I interact with all sorts of people in my life, right, from non-technical people who have tried GPT and they're like, I tried it. I said, you know, have it write, like, a three-page research paper on this, and it didn't really come back with anything, like, too good. And I was like, well, let me talk to you. Like, if you're going to write this research paper, like, let's break it down into different thoughts you're going to have, and then you can have it act like somebody who's knowledgeable in that area and give you some opinion on some things that you want to discuss, or ask it for some topics for the paper. And I was showing them really quickly on my phone, like, the different ways you can, as you said, interrogate or prompt the AI so that you can get what you want from it.

(Jason at 00:24:12) Yeah, right. I mean, I'm the type of person, like, I'm afraid of a blank piece of paper. Right? There's nothing more terrifying to me than, you know, a blank whiteboard, blank presentation, whatever. What I found with ChatGPT is I can actually use it as almost like a sounding board to give me some ideas. I'm going to flush them out on my own, you know, and it's still going to be me. It's not going to be ChatGPT, but, like, just to get kind of that starting point and get my thoughts organized. It's, you know, it's that whole adage, you know, developer runs into a problem, and the best thing you can do as an engineer is grab another engineer, start talking to them about your problem.

(Jason at 00:24:47) And in the middle of it, you're like, never mind, I've got it. You know, I figured it out. Right?

(Jason at 00:24:51) And it's kind of the same thing with this AI. You can start having the conversation, be like, all right, yeah. Okay, now I'm on the right track. It's just another form of getting your ideas out there and getting some immediate feedback on them. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:04) 100%. I have found myself—I just have it as, you know, it's a tab that's always open on my iPhone, and I use it regularly. I'll ask my wife something. She'd be like, I don't know. And rather than doing a Google search, I'll just go ask GPT, because it is essentially the concept of read all the Google results and then tell me the answer, which is the thing I'm going to do anyways.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:27) So nine times out of ten, it has that information it needs to give me the answer I want. And if it doesn't, then I go old school, as we will now say, and actually do a Google search and—

(Jason at 00:25:37) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:38) And read through and figure out my own—that's what we're doing as humans. We're reading the information. We're condensing it. We're trying to figure out what's valid, and then we come up with some basic assumption to move forward. And I think it's great that this technology does it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:51) I think we'll solve amazing types of problems, and maybe Ray Kurzweil's dream will come true.

(Jason at 00:25:58) Yeah, maybe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:59) Maybe we'll get inside those machines.

(Jason at 00:26:01) Right, right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:02) Yeah. What's the call to action? What problems are people experiencing? And they're listening to this show, and they're like, oh, I'm experiencing this thing at work, and PKWARE's the solution. I need to go to their website and check it out.

(Jason at 00:26:12) Sure. Great question. I think the problem that people are experiencing is right now data generation is at a pace that is just unparalleled. I mean, I think I was reading something that we're going to generate more data in this year than in the past, like, 50 combined, something like that. So I think for a lot of companies, they don't even know what they have, where it is.

(Jason at 00:26:35) And users are so enabled now that they can grab contents out of Salesforce or, you know, out of the ERP system, and then you're going to slap that into an Excel document. And then also that finds its way into a PowerPoint presentation. And then all of a sudden, you have this potentially sensitive information, like, pretty much everywhere, you know, that gets uploaded into Dropbox, whatever, right? So our solution helps these enterprises get a good understanding of where their sensitive information is at. Once they figure that out, then they can reason over it and say, like, okay.

(Jason at 00:27:14) Based on where this is, what should I do to protect it? Should I be looking at encryption? Should I be automatically redacting the information anytime a credit card hits a user's desktop? Should I just redact it? And obviously, the company itself has to decide what policy is best, and that's usually based on user types.

(Jason at 00:27:30) So we can tackle some pretty complicated problems as it relates to sensitive data. The other thing that I would say along with that is that we have a pretty unique capability in that we can reason across different data stores that other places stay away from. I mean, my number one example of that is mainframes, right? You would think that here in 2023, we wouldn't be talking about mainframe computing, but there's over 14,000 mainframes in the United States. And that number has been pretty steady for the past 20 years, so they're not going anywhere.

(Jason at 00:28:05) And a lot of organizations have a lot of engineers that are kind of aging out of that mainframe environment, so they don't know what they have there. You know? And we're positioned to be able to help those organizations understand what they have, make sure that the data that they have out there hasn't been corrupted. So, you know, there's a lot of different use cases that we can solve, but at the core of it is helping these organizations understand their data and where it is throughout the organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:30) And what's the website?

(Jason at 00:28:32) PKWARE.com.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:35) There you go. We'll put a link in the show notes. And then are you guys hiring now, or are you kind of standing still? Where are you guys at?

(Jason at 00:28:41) I would say we're—I feel like we're always hiring. Right now, honestly, it's a little bit slower than it has been. I think you're probably hearing that from a lot—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:48) Saying that.

(Jason at 00:28:50) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Part of the reason is we don't have a ton of attrition. You know?

(Jason at 00:28:55) Our employees definitely stick around for quite some time. And we've got some people who have been here 25, 30 years, which is incredible to me. But, you know, we always have senior software engineer posted on our website because, you know, when you run across that great software engineer, you want to take advantage of it kind of regardless. You'll usually find a space for it. So if we found somebody who is passionate about data security, passionate about encryption and had all of the technical skills—and we work across pretty much every stack from .NET to Java to everything in between, which I mentioned before, mainframes.

(Jason at 00:29:32) So we usually have a spot for an engineer that's passionate about our space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:37) Very smart, right? You never know when that—I call them magic people—when that magic person is going to run across your life and you're like, I need to grab that person now. So—

(Jason at 00:29:47) Right. And we've all worked with them, right? It's just, you know, you always got to have the door open so that they can just walk right through, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:54) Yes. I have definitely hired a handful of people, like, on the spot, first interview, just because I was like, this is the person. And I'm a smaller company, right? We're less than 20 people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:05) But sometimes you just know. Sometimes you're just like, this is that person. And you know that they're sitting there chaining job interviews day after day after day, and you want to grab them. You know?

(Jason at 00:30:18) Yeah. I actually had that experience this morning, talked to somebody, immediately called the hiring manager, and was like, we got to get this person in. So they actually accepted right before this call. So it was pretty quick. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:32) Nice. That's a good feeling when you got to go out of town and you get something done like this right away. So—

(Jason at 00:30:37) Oh, totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:38) Yeah. You're having a good day then, Jason.

(Jason at 00:30:40) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:42) 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.