Computing Where It’s Hot, Freezing, and Impossible with Lisa Groeneveld, Co-Founder of OnLogic

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to co-founder of OnLogic, Lisa Groeneveld, about the current state and future of edge computing. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:16) How are you doing, Lisa?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:00:17) I am good, Joel. It's nice to meet you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) Nice to meet you. Where are you calling in from?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:00:23) We are in snowy Vermont. I am a Vermonter. I grew up here, which is why OnLogic is headquartered in Vermont. Sort of a long story, but my husband Roland and I, we've been married twenty-one or twenty-two years, which once you get to that point, you don't even really know anymore. But we relocated to Vermont after my dad died, just to be close to my mom, and she lives with me. And yeah, that's why we're here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:50) Yeah, I'm at ten years.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:00:52) I'm not at twenty-one, but I can start to see how you start losing track of time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:57) Yeah. It's seven, ten, it's like, oh, it's eleven, ten years, eleven years. Like, wow, that's going by fast.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:01:02) Yeah, we're both awful at remembering each other's anniversary too. We kind of compete on who remembers first.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:11) That sounds like a healthy relationship.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:01:13) Yeah, it works great. Like, when neither of you care about dates, it kind of does work out pretty good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:19) It does. And are you co-founders? Did you start this together?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:01:22) We started OnLogic together in 2003. So, yeah, 2003, about a year after my dad died and we had moved back to Vermont, and then we decided to start the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:37) How did it—what was the moment where the company actually got started for you?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:01:42) So are you wondering, like, when we came up with the idea or when we just sort of opened the doors?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:46) You know, Josh had put in the prep, he said they wrote an $80,000 check to a supplier that they had never met.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:01:51) Oh my gosh, I need to hear that story.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:01:54) Yeah, that was certainly a moment in time. Well, so actually, right after Dad died, we came back to Vermont. We built a house. We're like, oh yeah, building a house, that's what you say. Let's build a house. The big thing about Roland and I is we are too dumb to know that stuff is hard. So that's actually the secret of our success. Like, if you're too stupid to know you shouldn't try it, then you give it a shot and see how it goes. But yeah, so we decided that we just wanted to be in IT. We wanted to continue our careers in IT, and we ran out of money because we were building a house. So I went down to Boston where I'd gone to school at Northeastern and I started my career there. And I met up with colleagues that I met down there, and they're like, yeah, come work for us. So while I was working in Boston, Roland was trying to decide what he wanted to do. And one day I came home from work and he's like, "Leese, I really, you know, I don't want to start up a new resume. I don't want to go look for a job. What I really think I want to do is set up our house and automate our house in Vermont where when we leave Boston, we're able to turn the heat on." And this was twenty-one or twenty-two years ago. And I was like, okay. He goes, "And I found these mini ITX motherboards in Asia. I want to import them to the United States and I want to sell them online." And I was like, right on, let's go do that. Just again, not really realizing what we would be getting into. And at a certain point, we started importing these mini ITX motherboards and other computer peripherals. We started building computers. We sold it all online to business people like yourself and your dad and your mom. And our computers just started selling and selling and selling, and we were selling so fast that we had to buy a large shipment of computer cases. So, like, you look at the chassis on our AX 300 here, the outside chassis we design and manufacture now, twenty-one years later. But in the beginning, we bought those all from companies in Asia, and Roland came to me one day when I came home from work. And he said, "Listen, Lisa, we need to send a purchase order to Taiwan, to this guy named TC. He seems nice." I was like, all right, well, okay, how much? I'm thinking $2,000. Roland's like, "$80,000." I said, okay, well that's basically the bank account right there. And I said, what if he doesn't send us the cases? And Roland said, "Well, I asked him that. I said, TC, what if you don't send us the cases?" And TC said, "If I didn't send $80,000 worth of cases to you, how long do you think I'd stay in business here in Taiwan?" And I was like, all right, he's not wrong. And so we sent a check for $80,000, and $80,000 of computer equipment arrived beautifully packaged. He sent us some tea, for him to take one. He's like, "Congratulations. You just made your first order with us. Welcome to our family, too." And that was the beginning of probably one of the most meaningful supplier partnerships we had in Asia early on. That's when we realized, oh, we can really make this business work. We gave this guy our entire life savings and he sends us everything he told us he was going to send. This is great. So that's the $80,000 PO story, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:17) Well, you had faith, right? You've got a lot of—

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:05:19) You've got to sometimes just have faith and confidence in people. And actually, I will say, over the years, twenty-one years of business, I can't even remember any time I've really been let down by anybody. We've sold probably over 800,000 or 900,000 computers, and no one's ever really let us down. I've been a little disappointed that a few customers not pay us, but by and large, trusting people and just holding to our core values—open, fair, independent, and innovative—it has really, really paid off.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:59) You know, I'm learning as I get older that as humans, we are pretty good lie detectors.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:06:06) We are. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:06) Even if I don't know what they're lying about, sometimes I'm just like, that is not the right—there's something off there. And so I might not know what it is, but surrounding yourself with good people.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:06:18) I've got to say, most people are good people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:21) They are. They really are.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:06:23) There's some crappy folks out there, but really, most people are good people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:27) I grew up fairly lower middle class, and there was just a general cultural thing that, especially from church, like, money is evil, and that was just running around in the back of my mind as a 12, 13, 15-year-old kid. Right? It wasn't until I started meeting these other people because I wanted to talk with intelligent people, and I thought that the problems that they were solving were cool. And then they had money. And then I started meeting a lot of people that had money. And then I realized, oh my goodness, the function of society is to reward those who contribute and who bring the most value, and having money is a function of being valuable to other people. So now if you see somebody in a Lambo, I don't think, oh cool, he's got a Lamborghini. I think, what is that person doing that's so valuable to other human beings that he gets rewarded with that?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:07:17) Yeah, someone's done something valuable for him to have a Lambo. Maybe his mom and dad, but at least somebody out there has made a contribution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:25) Yes. A little Bitcoin money. Oh, he's playing the ponies. I don't know.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:07:31) Playing the ponies, I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:32) There you go. So I like that you said that you're stupid enough to try it.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:07:36) Yeah, too dumb to know it's difficult.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:39) But you were smart enough to commit. So I see people all the time that they don't know it's difficult, go into it, and then they quit. That's, like, 80%.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:07:51) Right, but there's a special something inside of people that are just like, we're going to figure this out. We're going to get through.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:07:58) Yeah, and I also—I am also amazed. You know, I do make that joke, too dumb to know it's difficult or impossible. But also, you know, I like to encourage people who ask me my opinion on matters like this to remember that they get to define their own success. So, you know, too dumb to know it's difficult. Well, if you kind of have a predetermined outcome of what success is and it's really, really narrow, then yeah, you're probably more likely to quit or give up. But if you see success as sort of the incremental process that success is iterative—fail, succeed, fail, succeed, feel really bad, succeed really good—then you're more willing to stick to things. So I also see, I have always seen things as a journey, as a process. And I tell my kids, like, over, under, around, or through. Right? There is a way around pretty much every issue you'll ever face. So just don't give up. And if you are willing to define success incrementally and include the failures as part of the success, you're less likely to quit. And that actually is the basis of resiliency and tenacity in my mind.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:09) You describe yourself as innovators, not inventors. Tell me about that.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:09:14) Yeah, that might be a little bit of a controversial statement. People are like, oh, well, wouldn't you be proud to be inventors? Being inventive is really important, but being inventive, if you really look at it from a business sense, can also be very expensive. And if you're really new to the market, you have to create the model around what you're trying to accomplish. You're trying to create and perhaps even a completely new go-to-market process. You're trying to figure out who the customers are. Sometimes you're the answer looking for a question with your inventive ideas. Roland and I started OnLogic. It was just the two of us in our apartment in Boston. And like I said, I think I had $80,000 and I spent it all to TC in Taiwan. We weren't going to be able to invent new technology or really new solutions. We were going to have to take ideas that were already existing and make sure they were better and more useful in our industry and in our market. So when we talk about being not inventive, more innovative, we look at innovation as more than just technology. It's also how our business runs, our approach to interfacing with our customers, how we reach them. Twenty-one years ago, there were not a lot of people selling on the internet. We were probably the first of handfuls of e-commerce companies back then, probably some of Google's very first Google AdWords customers. And so we just had to figure out how to do stuff differently. We just couldn't be the people who were going to hire 50 salespeople and sell our product. We had to figure out how to get our product out to our customers in other ways. And in that sense, we were very innovative at the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:02) And it's working, right? The company's north of $100 million in revenue now.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:11:06) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:06) You are the leader in the space. What's your plan for the company long term?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:11:11) A billion dollars. I'm just kidding. Yeah, because you're right. Shoot for the stars. You know, when I get asked that question, I've been asked that question, what sort of revenues are you hoping for? How many employees do you want to be? What's really meaningful is, are we meeting our customers' needs? And not only are we meeting our customers' needs, are we contributing to our industry? Are we meaningful in industrial PCs? Are we actually bringing answers and bringing relationships with partners and other members of our business community to our customers in a way that resonates with our customers? So how big are we going to be? We should only be big enough that we meet our customers' needs and that we're able to keep growing our team's skill set and really continue to innovate in our industry. Does that mean we need to be a billion-dollar company? I'm not necessarily sure about that. But because I always need an answer to that question, I always say billion dollars.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:16) Well, that's a good answer. That's a great answer.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:12:18) We are certainly in an industry that could support another large industrial PC company. You know, with the advent of artificial intelligence and some of the fast-moving technologies associated with AI, but even more, I don't know, consider it mundane—Internet of Things and factory automation, warehouse automation. There's just so much to be done that there's room for everybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:47) Yeah. Have you guys made any Bitcoin mining machines? Like, right now, the big thing in Bitcoin is putting it—you'll have disconnected energy, like maybe a gas flare out in Texas on an oil site. And they want to put a shipping container full of Bitcoin miners. So they're always trying to find out how to get these Bitcoin miners to run cooler and to deal with these random environments that they're being put into.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:13:08) Oh my goodness.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:09) When I think about that and how much money—like, we're building a $25 million mine right here in Tennessee. And so when I'm thinking about how much money we're spending on equipment, I was like, man, I wonder if there's any places that have this disparate energy that have crazy heat stuff. I wonder if OnLogic makes any computers that do that.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:13:26) We absolutely sell computers with wide temperature ranges. So depending on the temperatures that your computers are facing, one of our computers probably very well could help. Yeah, trying to think—I think some of our computers go up to 70 degrees centigrade.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:41) I'll find some excuse to get one piece of OnLogic tech into that project.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:13:46) You need an orange computer. I can tell.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:48) Honestly, I feel like we do.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:13:50) I feel like you do too. But everybody needs an orange computer if you ask me. There's a nice one right there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:56) There it is. It's a good color too.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:13:58) Yes. Thank you. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:00) I like it. I like it.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:14:01) Yeah. No, I would definitely have you give a member of the sales team a call and just ask what the temperature ranges are because that is basically the heart of what an industrial and rugged computer is. Wide temperature, solid state, just able to perform in all the environments you wouldn't want a laptop or just a regular computer in. So as we design, we're always designing for the anticipation of an extreme environment, but we also design to anticipate less extreme environments, even office environments. Because even in an office environment, you don't want your computers breaking down. So the goal is just to make sure that the right-fit computer is in the right spot. And that's what we've been doing for twenty-one years is helping our customers put the correct computer in the right spot. Because in the world of computer hardware, also in the world of AI, every piece of that puzzle has its correct space. And you can't fit the wrong piece into the wrong space. And that's what our sales team does, and our sales engineers and our technical and our field application engineers—they talk to our customers and they just figure out what are you trying to accomplish and what's the correct puzzle piece that fits into your space. Because we are not going to shove a square peg into a round hole. That's not good for anybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:25) Not for long-term reputation either.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:15:27) No. You know, there's no fun in getting the wrong solution to the wrong customer. No. And we have a really interesting ecosystem of partners that we work with who, as well, have the right piece for the puzzle, depending on what's trying to be accomplished.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:42) Edge computing is such a buzzword for me. So I'm not deep into the physical hardware space. I kind of graze it and explore it as needed. But tell me about what's going on with edge computing.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:15:54) Yeah. And let's make edge physical for you, because I hear from a lot of people, like, what does that mean? Like, where is the edge? The edge is a place. Like, the chair you're sitting on is a place, and that chair belongs in the spot you're in right now. Right? You wouldn't probably want a dump truck in that spot. You want a chair in that spot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:13) You don't want to be sitting on the dump truck.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:16:14) I think you should.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:15) I think you should. Next time I see you, I want to see you on the dump truck, dude.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:16:16) But yeah, the edge is a place. It's a physical location. And in that, it's a physical location. Every location where you could put a computer has a different need. And so at the edge, the need at that physical location is driven by the environment in that location. So an example of the edge, we have a customer who puts computers at the base of windmills. That's their spot. And you don't want just an expensive laptop there, right? It's going to freeze. It's going to break. It's not going to work. Someone's going to steal it. It's just that physical location, that edge really needs a computer that probably looks like an appliance, is not going to create a lot of attention, is not going to grow legs and walk away, is not going to break down, can really perform well in the wide temperature range that you find at the base of a windmill. So the edge is a physical space, and the choices of what you put at the edge is completely driven by the environment and the amount of compute that needs to happen at the edge. So if you look over—well, I'm not sure how it would look. I believe this is my left shoulder. Yes, it's my left shoulder. That's the L. If you look over my left shoulder, that's an example of an edge server. So this is a rugged server. And you think, well, server spaces, right? They're air conditioned and, you know, they have raised floors and they're in security protected environments. You know, you're thinking of your insurance company, John Hancock, right? Their servers are there. It's in this beautiful server center somewhere in Boston, I'm sure. But we have customers who need server level compute in extreme places. So let's say you're a car rental company and you have locations all over the United States, and the place you're putting your server is also where you put your brooms and your buckets. And you might have air conditioning in that spot. You might not have air conditioning in that spot. Might get really hot. Might actually get really cold. That physical environment of that space, that edge is best served by the massive compute of this edge server. So the edge is a place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:37) Yeah. Like, my parents, they have the medical complex or whatever, right? The doctor's office stuff that they do. And they were giving—we took the kids to see grandma and grandpa. So they were showing, this is how we make money. This is where they check out. This is the exam rooms. And my dad opened this room, and he goes, this is the server room. And it was half brooms and mops and then a bunch of stuff bolted to the wall and just a little light. It was basically a small closet.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:19:06) Yeah. And probably brooms that—like you just said, like, trays of water and someone's jacket was in there. Absolutely. So, you know, when you think about what the edge accomplishes for businesses, it is the recognition that every physical spot has its use. And so if you kind of compare that up to the cloud, you know, many of your listeners are highly technical, so I might be talking about things...

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:32) Oh, we don't really give them that much credit.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:19:34) Oh, I don't give those guys any credit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:36) They're smart. They're nice people.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:19:38) Yeah. Yeah. When you think about the cloud, you know, that's also its physical space, right? Those are the large server farms where they're protected environments. They're heated. They're cooled appropriately. And the computers that go into that are the servers that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are perfect fit for that particular physical environment. And so everything in between, it all has its physical spot. Does that help with the edge? Because I get that question a lot. Like, what's the edge?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:06) That does help with it because I did a whole string of IoT episodes, and everybody kind of had a slightly different explanation of edge.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:20:15) And our conversations I have with some business partners, they'll—where things get a little fuzzy is where they talk about the near edge and the far edge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:23) Oh, I haven't heard this yet.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:20:24) Yeah. So this is a good one because I was like, oh, near edge, far edge. What does that mean? I was talking with a fellow named Joel Moses at F5 Networks. He's a genius. And we were looking at each other, and we were like, what's the near edge? What's the far edge? And he said to me, I consider us, you know, and companies like us, like Juniper and whatever, the near edge. We are the servers that are in server rooms at companies and, you know, physically safe locations, and we see you guys as the far edge. You're in the more extreme environment. And I thought, oh, yeah. That makes sense to me. So I've kind of adopted that in my head when people say, well, what is the far edge? And you could get further and further out physically to the point where basically all you might have are sensors. And those are the furthest, furthest edge. But when you think about the edge as being an actual physical location, that makes perfect sense. Like, what's closest to a cloud versus what's probably closest to the environment of the thing that is happening? You know, are you measuring temperature in a factory floor where you're producing food, and it's just sensors feeding into a centralized computer, like an OnLogic computer, feeding up to maybe this large server in a more centralized location where, you know, data is being processed, still sort of on premises. And the data is processed, and the real key stuff is kind of gleaned out of that, and that's sent up to the cloud. Because you also don't want to send all your data in a giant bucket up to the cloud. You kind of want to be a little more selective about what's going on with the cloud.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:02) All the time. You can process some stuff local.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:22:04) Tons of stuff locally. And that's why when we work with our partners at AWS, you know, a fantastic partner, and they always come to us and they say, remember, everything has its place. And when you're talking to your customers, we're talking to our customers. Our job in this environment is to help our customers understand where compute should physically be and to help guide them so that their compute is cost effective. And that's really what this is all about, right? Keeping it cost effective so that, you know, every customer's needs are being met from a business, financial, and technical perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:41) You had a white paper. I don't know if you wrote it or if you were a part of writing it, but it was a white paper on the economics of repatriation. What does that mean?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:22:50) I know. I looked at that title. I was like, I got to Google repatriation. Actually, that was my smart team wrote that paper, really helping our—helping readers of our blog understand what it means to kind of locate compute in the correct spot. Because again, the edge is a place, right? And it's not the termination of what's important to our customers. The edge is sort of the beginning of what's important to our customers. Data gets to where our customers need the data to be or is collected at the place our customers need the data to be. And I think over the years and what that paper is really driving at is there was a feeling that everything was going to go to the cloud. And I don't know if you remember this as well, but everything was going to go to the cloud. It was going to be very expensive to keep everything in the cloud. It was going to be more cost affordable or more cost effective rather than having it on-site and having on-premise data. Now, I won't say that the pendulum has swung back in the other position. What I will say is the pendulum has found its right spot. And what we were talking about earlier is this concept that data has to be in the correct place and compute has to be where the data needs to be. And so when they talk about the repatriation of data, they're talking about the ability to pull data to where customers need it for their applications and the reality that it doesn't have to be at the cloud. And the reality that the cloud providers like Amazon, AWS, they don't want all the data there, right? They want the data that needs to be there as well, because your AWS, your OnLogic, your Intel, your AMD, you're part of a full ecosystem. And your overriding goal is the success of your customers' and your partners' projects. And so you don't want to prejudice where things should be because you can inadvertently make something way too expensive and make it impossible for your customer to roll out their solution. So our partnership with AWS has been AWS very, very effectively supporting our value in the market to our customers and to their customers by saying, hey. Yes. We are a cloud services provider. What you need to have in the cloud should be up here, but make sure what you're bringing up to us makes sense. It's super expensive. You know, energy is very expensive. It's very expensive to power the cloud, and there's some latency. You know, it's got to get from where it is. There's the cost of moving it in between. They're slowing down the business decisions. And so when we talk about repatriating data, we talk about bringing it back to where it needs to be, the correct spot for the perfect customer use, because the edge is a place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:48) Yeah. Because I can totally see the instinct of just put everything in a bucket and take it to the cloud.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:25:53) That's what we're at. Everybody—yeah. Ten years ago, put it in the cloud, put it in the cloud, put it in the cloud. Now everyone's like, oh, wow. There's not a lot of room in the cloud. The cloud actually is not an actual cloud. It's its own place, and it is discrete and it has its limitations, and it needs to be used wisely. And AWS is a good steward of their own infrastructure. And they've been a really positive influence on OnLogic, and we've worked really closely with them now for years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:25) And I don't know if this is popular or talked about, but I think one of the greatest things that cloud gave us was the new modern way to provision stuff, like, on demand. You know? Because before—like, in cloud native companies, you need something, you go spin it up, you have it, it's instantly there. But at the older companies, you fill out a form, you wait for an IT team to process the order, they provision it, they give you the credentials. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so just this idea of being able to digitally provision stuff quickly and self-serve, that I think was a benefit of the explosion of cloud that I've then since seen people adopt that type of provisioning interfaces into their local stuff, their on-prem solutions.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:27:11) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:12) Absolutely. It's giving people the ability to stop and think or click about what they're trying to accomplish, the time frames under which they want to accomplish in it, and the availability of infrastructure. Because infrastructure is finite. And we saw that during COVID when it was extremely finite. It's a little less finite than it was during COVID, but we're still—our supply chains are still impacted by that to a certain extent. So it gives business people like your listeners opportunity to say, okay. Let's take a beat. Where should data be? Where should infrastructure be? Who's responsible for the infrastructure? And how can we as an ecosystem of providers, whether it's the telecom companies or hardware providers or networking providers, who is the best steward of what needs to happen now, and how are we all working together? And there is a ton of cooperation between us, even those of us who are sometimes competitors.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:08) Well, you have to be for the marketplace to work, right?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:28:12) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:13) Now GenAI obviously is data exploding. I've got some friends over at, like, QTS Data Centers. I love those guys. He showed me this graph, and he's like, here's the increase in data. And he goes, on this graph, show me where GenAI popped off. And it was like a hockey stick to a hockey stick. And he's like, we cannot—he's like, we're trying to buy and build nuclear facilities to build data centers around because it's a power game. Like, we can't build them fast enough. We can't get the land fast enough. We can't get the compute fast enough. Just this huge backlog of us just trying to build more data centers.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:28:50) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:51) And I was like, wow. Because that's what GenAI was doing. Is GenAI having an impact with you at all?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:28:56) Well, I admit I don't know as much about generative AI as I probably should, though I probably know more than maybe the average person on the street. But to your point of the explosion in the need for processing for AI, it has been interesting and it's just recently come out in the news. DeepSeek has figured out a way to maybe do that more efficiently and to do it in an open source fashion. You know, I have a lot of friends who have come and said, oh boy, that's, you know, that's the Chinese. And I don't really have a political opinion one way or another. But what I will say is if humans are able to conceive of it, any one of the six to eight billion people on the planet, right, is able to conceive of a better, more efficient way to do artificial intelligence, to do AI, then that means other people can figure it out too. And so when you're talking about the data needs associated with AI, the growth in AI, you know, some of the early moves that American companies have made in the development of AI solutions and large language models—there, and the Chinese have proved it with DeepSeek. There are better ways to do it. There appear to be more technologically efficient ways to do it, more cost-effective ways to do it. And so let's all just keep putting our massive brains to this idea and make it better and better. Because your friend makes a really good point. What's the point at which we can no longer produce enough energy just for the needs of AI? We also need energy to power our cars and to turn the heat on in our houses. We need energy for a lot of different uses. So what's the point at which energy usage just for AI, you know, exceeds what we're capable of producing and exceeds what we really want to produce?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:49) To your point about DeepSeek, you know, you're right. Like, all of the major inventions, electricity, all of these things that we have, they all almost come about at different parts in the world at the same time. It's like who do we attribute credit to, right? But to your point of DeepSeek, it's like, yeah, they found a more efficient way to do something. That doesn't mean that that's the only option. There's almost immediately going to be someone that turns around and says, oh, that's more efficient. Let's redirect it, and you can get an American company if you wanted. But yeah.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:31:01) Yeah.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:31:15) You know, the next brilliant people to come up with a more efficient way to do it might be in Norway. Like, you literally don't know. It happened to be this team in China. And, in fact, I'm very proud of them and really excited that they brought this to market, and hopefully it'll be a net positive for everybody. But you're absolutely right.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:31:34) Knowing that it doesn't have to be as difficult as it appears. And most excitingly in my mind, and I really have to admit, I don't know near enough about this to be even remotely—I'm barely knowledgeable, much less an expert—but I will say one of the coolest things about it is that it came out open source. So in that sense, people were able to really dig into it and see what the legitimate function of it is. And it seems pretty impressive.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:32:05) And it's just a matter of time before someone comes out with something that's even more impressive. That is the human spirit. We're constantly iterating and making things better and being innovative. Some of us have to be inventive and some of us, we just live the life of making someone's inventions better, easier, more cost effective, more localized, more meaningful, and just making it better. And that's what the calling is for other people.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:32:34) And that's OnLogic. That's our calling is just making great ideas better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:39) And I am a, like, in general macro level, I'm a fan of open source because when I was—

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:32:44) Us too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:45) When I was 13, I didn't have any money or credit cards online or anything like that. And so for me to learn the stuff I learned, I learned it because there were open source projects. I could see them operating and then go look at how their inner workings actually happen, and that's how I learned programming. Right?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:33:02) Our first website, in fact, actually our current website and our ERP system, it's all open source. Yeah. Yep. We're kind of DIY sort of people here at OnLogic. So, yeah, we have a sizable software development team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:17) So we have a lot of CTOs, CIOs, VPs of engineering, those types. What do we want the takeaway to be for them for OnLogic? Like, when should they reach out to OnLogic and why?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:33:28) I would say, you know, again, when we talk about the edge as a place, if they look at their environment and they say, you know, where does compute need to be? And where does it really need to be reliable? That's when they should give us a call. And we're not going to be the perfect fit for everything. If they have a thousand employees who sit at a desk in an air conditioned office and just need computers on their desktops, you know, maybe we're not the perfect fit. But I will say, we have at least one bank that mounts our computers underneath their desks.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:34:02) So, you know, a solid state computer can be mounted upside down. And so we wouldn't have expected to hear from this bank on the West Coast, but we don't sell a lot of computers to banks. But they looked at it and said, we need to put these computers underneath the desk. We don't have a lot of space. We don't want a lot of cables, and we need a computer that's going to work.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:34:22) So for your listeners, I urge them to ask themselves what they're trying to accomplish with their compute. Where does the data need to be? How do they use the data? How does the data drive their business, financial and technical decisions within their organization? And then once they know how they use their data, where do they want their data to physically reside? And what's that environment?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:34:50) And can they afford the hardware in that environment to break down? If the answer is no, then they need to reach out to a company like OnLogic for an industrial PC.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:00) And then what's the website, onlogic.com?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:35:03) www.onlogic.com.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:06) Awesome. And then we'll put links too in the show notes as well. And I just got, like, two leadership questions for you as we wrap up. Is that okay?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:35:13) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:14) Okay. Twenty two years you've been running this company. What's the one leadership lesson that stuck with you the longest?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:35:21) I wrote it down, and I can't remember.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:24) Is it the Toy Story one? I was looking at your notes. I was like, this girl is awesome.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:35:28) It's the Toy Story one. Is it? It's the Toy Story one. And I'm going to have to explain Toy Story for any of your listeners who haven't seen that most epic cartoon, which I think is a Pixar cartoon. It's Toy Story, and I think Tim Allen was in it. It was such an amazing cartoon. Your kids are young enough. Have you seen Toy Story?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:45) I've seen it a hundred times.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:35:47) Yes. You know the scene. The toys are in the bedroom and they're playing, and there's Woody and there's Buzz Lightyear. And Woody is yelling at Buzz, you cannot fly. You cannot fly. You are a toy. You are a plastic toy. You can't fly. He pushes a button on Buzz's thing and his fake plastic wings go up and he says, see, these are fake wings. And Buzz Lightyear says, I can fly and I will fly with my eyes closed.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:36:13) And Buzz Lightyear jumps off the bed, flies to the ground, ricochets off like a balloon on the ground, into the air, gets stuck in a fan, gets spun around the room, gets released from the fan, flies down, lands on one of those, like those toys where you run your car, flies up into the air, does a loop-de-loop and lands perfectly on the bed and just nails the landing and looks over at Woody and says, I can fly. And Woody said, that's not flying. That's falling with style. And I remember that from when I watched that with my kids and I literally looked at my kids and I said, he's basically telling you to define your own success. Do not be put off by failure.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:37:04) Do not be put off what people tell you will go wrong. Do not believe. If you define what success is to you, then it is true. And it's what we said earlier in this podcast today, you are able to go over, under, around, or through as long as you know what success looks like to you, and you will continue to fight and push and be resilient and be tenacious as long as you are defining your success. And when I think of that cartoon, that's one of the biggest things I like to tell people.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:37:36) You have not failed until you have said you failed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:39) That's like a mic drop moment. The mic's not on a stand though, so I can't. There's no dropping.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:37:45) I'm wearing a headset, and it's so—there we go, just slip it on the ground.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:48) Oh my goodness.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:37:53) And I love that cartoon for that moment, and I love all the Pixar cartoons because I think every time I watch a Pixar cartoon, I take a life lesson from it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:01) They're good. They're good for that.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:38:02) They are. They are meaningful. And that moment where he said, that's not flying, that's falling with style, I was like, yes. I think I can confidently say I've fallen with style for 35 years of my career. Yeah. For sure. Because I never knew I was going to stick the landing. But we have fairly well stuck the landing here at OnLogic.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:38:24) I also want to make sure, you know, the other thing I want to say to listeners, because I'd like to leave people with really practical advice. One of the things I wish I had done earlier on at OnLogic that we didn't do until about 2008 or 2009. Tell your listeners or if your listeners are near their computer, I wish we had set up a one page operating strategy from the day we started the business.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:38:49) There's one thing Roland and I really did well is we sat down with each other and we said, you know, what is our culture and who are we? And what is permission to play here at OnLogic? And our culture is open, fair, independent, and innovative. And I can't remember the brilliant business thinker who said, hey, culture eats strategy for breakfast. That is true. That is 100% true. Have a culture you can believe in. And then as soon as you've got that, go straight for your one page operating strategy and Google that one page operating strategy. Because I get asked all the time, like, what is one of the secrets of your success? That is probably the most practical secret of our success was when we finally sat down and said, who are we?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:39:35) Why do we matter? What do we need to do in three years? What do we need to do in one year? And what do we have to do in the next 90 days? And that has been probably one of the most meaningful mechanisms for making sure all the noses at OnLogic are pointed in the same direction.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:39:53) So those two pieces of advice, I think I'd leave your listeners. You haven't failed till you say you failed, and set up a one page operating strategy for your business early on. And before I forget, I'll be back on your show—OnLogic will be back on your show—with one of our business partners, Cedeta. So I really hope your listeners will join us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:12) Yes. Yeah. They will.

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:40:13) That'll be Roland, my husband, and you'll see he's way smarter than me. He's talking about the technology and the importance of, you know, the correct computer hardware along with the correct business partner. In this case, Cedeta, they do orchestration layer software. And your listeners are going to be in for a much more technical conversation, and I think it'll be really interesting to them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:35) Awesome. Well, thank you so much for doing this, Lisa. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Lisa Groeneveld at 00:40:39) I feel awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:41) 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.