True No-Code: Building Enterprise-Grade Software with Nick Gamble, VP Solutions at Unqork

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Nick, the VP of Solutions at Unqork. And we discuss how Unqork's no-code platform allows you to build complex applications without coding, how MongoDB makes their platform possible, and why leaders should be driven by the success of their employees. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Nick at 00:00:44) I originally went to school for political science. I knew I wanted the sciences. I picked the wrong of the sciences at first, only to quickly find out that I do not want to spend my life arguing with people. You know, we can go in and you can debate the merits of a number of political policies, but you can't debate with me that two plus two equals four. So I quickly transferred over into technology and studying computer science. But always keeping those passions for things outside. And I didn't want to go purely into technology in fear of getting inundated with all of the struggles that come with building great technology, and instead use the inputs from outside of technology and be able to interface to folks outside of directly, you know, a technology team and kind of bring that all together. So that's what got me into technology to begin with. And then from there, I'd always been attracted to startups. I like, again, I have a passion about everything.

(Nick at 00:01:45) So I think you really get to unlock your passions by working in that kind of environment. So, you know, tried my hand in a number of them. I started my own at one point, but also worked in the enterprise. And that's experience that has been extremely valuable for me now in my current role with Unqork, understanding the pains that come with enterprise software development and everything around it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:13) So would you categorize Unqork as a startup today?

(Nick at 00:02:18) You know, it's a really good question. So I joined Unqork actually a little over three years ago when we were 25, 30 people. Right? So you couldn't be more startup than we were back then. In those three years, we have grown 20x in almost every metric of growth that you can imagine.

(Nick at 00:02:36) So when you look now at our employees-only channel in Slack, it's over 600 people. And depending on where you look to see what defines a startup, a small, a mid-size, a large company, we could fall into a number of different buckets. So I think our growth may start to put us in certain different categories, but I think it's really important that we continue to embody the spirit of a startup, particularly because this no-code market is growing faster and faster by the day. More and more players are entering the space as the projections are showing what the total addressable market is going to be and the percentage of enterprises that are going to be building applications with low-code, no-code.

(Nick at 00:03:20) So in order for us to continue our leadership position and evolve, we need to retain as much of the startup culture and as much of the mentality that comes along with that—the willingness to go above and beyond, the willingness to wear the hats and things like that—but also maturing our processes and everything that comes with enterprise to really establish ourselves even more so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:42) Yeah. You're in a really big transitionary period right now. That's got to be really exciting in its own way.

(Nick at 00:03:49) Yeah. It's been so cool to see that, again, from all angles in terms of the number of people, the growth of our technology, the growth of our customers, and the use cases and problems that they bring to us. It's just been really interesting to watch and be a part of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:04) Well, let's take a step back first. Tell me about what Unqork is. What do you do?

(Nick at 00:04:10) Sure. So Unqork is a no-code enterprise development platform. Now again—

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:16) You're no-code or low-code?

(Nick at 00:04:18) No-code. No-code, and we are very, very particular about that distinction because it is a really important distinction in the benefits that we feel come with using a no-code or low-code, particularly with no-code. So when it comes to pure no-code, we're one of the few. And when it comes to pure no-code for the enterprise, we're kind of alone in that world. So, you know, particularly exacerbated by remote work and everything that's come with the pandemic, software and digitization of your operations are more important really than ever. And I'm sure many companies have tons of ideas of the kind of software they need to create that they need to bring to market, but they're very resource-constrained to do that, right? You know, whether it's developers and budgets that are necessary to do that. So what Unqork really does is it gives you that platform to enable both your engineers and your technology people, as well as your folks tangential to that core team that is thought of as your primary creator of software within your organization, and really unlocking them to deliver that value and create that business logic rapidly, but also to be able to govern everything that's happening in there. And I think that governance piece is huge when it comes to the difference between—you can look at Squarespace as no-code, but they're not building enterprise and there's not governance there, right? Versus Unqork's no-code, which is enterprise-focused and we're allowing you to, more or less, no-code the entire architecture, no-code the entire SDLC to deliver those secure, compliant, scalable, maintainable, performant applications that you need in that kind of a world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:09) So what kind of applications are being built on the no-code platform?

(Nick at 00:06:14) Sure. So, you know, Unqork started in primarily insurance and financial services. Those two industries were near and dear to the hearts of a number of our founders. So it was a great way for us to, one, they've seen the pains that come with building software for those industries and the ways in which we can improve upon that, and then also we had a rich network of people that we could reach out to to bring the value to.

(Nick at 00:06:38) So we started again with that insurance, financial services. And it was a lot of onboarding applications. It was a lot of raters for insurance and onboarding for financial services and things like that. Liberty Mutual was actually our first client, and that was one of the things that really struck me when I was looking at Unqork and looking to join them was, you know, out of the gate, they're getting a Fortune 500 company as their client. We weren't starting small. We were starting right at the top. So that was a lot of the beginning days. But over time, and something that I've really kept an eye to in my time at Unqork, is we're not an industry solution. We really are a general-purpose development platform and we're seeing that come into being in a number of different industries and a number of different use cases and problems since then. One of the biggest differences that I can talk about from that birth of financial services and insurance was what we were doing for New York City when COVID hit everybody.

(Nick at 00:07:41) You know, that was our first real foray into the public enterprise world and very large consumer-facing applications. And in, you know, in a matter of days, we had applications running through New York City that were allowing people to check in with their COVID status, were allowing people to have meals delivered to them. I mean, through our system, 60 million meals were delivered to vulnerable people, citizens of New York City, that needed, you know, that couldn't leave their house to put food in their mouth. We digitized the marriage license process for New York City shortly after that. The city clerk's office had closed. Nobody can get married. There was a backlog of thousands of people who wanted to bring some ray of sunshine into a very dark time, and they had no way to do it. And we enabled New York City to continue to serve their loved ones in their city and enable them to move forward with their process. So that's some examples. The list can go on because, again, it really is general-purpose, and it's always fun to find that next thing that you can do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:46) That's crazy. That's such a feel-good thing, helping people get married.

(Nick at 00:08:51) It really was. I mean, especially like I said, it's such a tough time. Everything was kind of thrown up in the air. To be able to wake up every morning and know that that's what you were doing, it just adds so much more to the experience of developing software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:05) Yeah. That's awesome. So with these use cases, are you guys building the applications on Unqork and then delivering the applications to the City of New York, or are you giving them the platform and then the people at the clerk's office are building the applications?

(Nick at 00:09:22) It's a blend of the two. So we do have a professional services organization that are the SMEs right now of developing the best quality software on Unqork. But we have an extremely rich training program and boot camp and academy where we guide you through what you need to be successful and leave that in your hand. So it is a blend today. We're very excited about the idea of the self-service model and allowing these companies to just unlock their own resources, and we're doing everything in our power to ensure that you're successful in doing so. But, absolutely, we also offer our professional services to help you get started. Even if it's a combination of the both of us to get going, we'll help you with that first use case, set the framework for you, and then allow you to kind of run wild on top. So it's a little bit of both.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:14) That's cool. So you and I were originally introduced through mutual friends over at MongoDB because I got to interview their CTO, Mark, who was just fantastic. Gotta listen to that episode. But can you tell me a little bit about your relationship with MongoDB and how that fits in with the Unqork platform?

(Nick at 00:10:34) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is so critical to everything we do here, both from a technology perspective and just as well as the things we look at when we see that growth that I was talking about a little bit earlier and how we were able to get there. So really, Mongo and Mongo Atlas specifically is the database, is the backend for Unqork, and effectively becomes where we really store our representation of code. Right?

(Nick at 00:11:04) So we have decided to rather than represent your business logic in the form of code, which is going to be variable and change by the office and there's going to be the next hot thing and it's a very steep learning curve, we represent that business logic in JSON. And Mongo allows us to easily deploy many variations of business logic within their data store and pull out extremely rich insights on top of a structured representation of your business logic. So in terms of Unqork's platform itself, we wouldn't have been able to get that up and running without what they, you know, with some of the capabilities they provide. And now as we're running at higher and higher scale, you know, a lot of the things that Mongo and Atlas are going to provide you in terms of auto-scaling and patching and performance insights helps our technology team continue to enrich the product.

(Nick at 00:11:56) But the beautiful thing about Mongo and the way that we've been using it on Unqork is it's not only paying dividends for us as a company and how we're able to evolve our platform, but it also unlocks our customers and what they're able to do with the platform. So, you know, as I talk about how we started in financial services and insurance and when we got into all these other verticals and, again, I'm always trying to find that next cool thing, that document schema and the flexibility to their schemas and their modeling allows us to meet those use cases and allow that flexibility so we can have one platform that supports a number of different industries and verticals and use cases. And then the fact that that flexibility is very change-friendly—I think that's a term that they use that I couldn't think is more appropriate—to talk about not just your technology but also your business processes and everything else is to be change-friendly, and they afford you the ability to make those changes as the world is rapidly changing, as technology is rapidly changing. Being able to change your data models, change your processes within that system has been just tremendous for seeing how our clients can evolve their applications iteratively and quickly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:16) Okay. So can I try to articulate and horribly oversimplify the tech stack that's going on on the platform?

(Nick at 00:13:25) Please. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:26) Okay. So on the UX level, you have your no-code platform where you can drag and drop to create code, and these boxes and lines that you draw relationships, and it makes a lot of sense looking at it. And to the user, it's in plain English, really easy to understand. And then under that, you have to translate all of that into actual code to run in, like, some kind of virtual IDE that you have under that. And the code is stored with help from MongoDB in a way that allows you to constantly be changing those meanings and do really hard calculations with it and draw the code out fast from your kind of word bank of code that you have stored there. Is that kind of what you're saying?

(Nick at 00:14:25) Yeah. Yeah. I would say the one thing that I would just pick out there is translate it to code, you know? So I would say there's a JSON representation, but, you know, is JSON code? Then we could probably have a conversation about that. But it's a representation, and then it's more or less like an interpreted language where it's going to be rendered. That JSON and the logic that's represented within that JSON is going to be rendered on the fly. So whether that's in your browser or whether that's on the server if you want to use Unqork to no-code build APIs. So you have the UI thing down completely. Whatever you're dragging and dropping is creating that JSON structure under the covers, which then gets dynamically interpreted at runtime when necessary.

(Nick at 00:15:12) So, and what that really allows us to do is, again, with all the problems that come with code, by having it just really be representing your business logic, we also afford so much flexibility and extensibility within Unqork. You know, thinking about Unqork is kind of that no-code runtime. And while we have an extremely powerful application that allows you to drag and drop and build that JSON structure, there are many other ways that you might want to go about that. There might be—there are many integrations where we might say, "Oh, you've mocked up some architecture in Lucid. We can easily translate that into Unqork's JSON," and, effectively, that becomes your drag and drop. And now Unqork is that architecture layer that processes that logic that's encapsulated in some defined JSON rather than some code.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:05) That's really—so if you wanted to reuse code that you'd already written in, like, hard code, you can translate that into Unqork no-code to continue working on it in the Unqork platform?

(Nick at 00:16:18) So right now, you'd effectively kind of reverse-engineer your code into a JSON structure using either some process that you've written to do so or through our no-code interface. But you actually bring up something that, you know, we're hearing more and more throughout our sales processes around some folks who love the concept of no-code, love the concept of low-code, but also don't hate code. And it's not that we hate code. Right? We still love code. We obviously hire folks who do that. But they're like, "Hey, look, I've invested time and money into a design system, into micro front ends and things of that nature or into services that I've created that I want to reuse. You know, how does that work with no-code?" So, you know, we're constantly exploring more ways to effectively say that, yes, you have written code and that's wonderful and that's great. We want you to continue to get advantages out of the great software that you're still able to build. How do we bring that into Unqork and expose it in a no-code manner for you?

(Nick at 00:17:26) So not only are you still allowing people to rapidly develop against that, but you also have to worry less about the maintenance because Unqork is kind of handling the infrastructure that's around that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:40) So how complex of applications can you get with Unqork? Are there limitations just by nature of it being low code? I mean, no code. God, I don't want to mess that up.

(Nick at 00:17:51) Yeah. Thank you for catching yourself. But I think that's another question that comes up and another common myth that we try to dispel about no code in general is the lack of complexity.

(Nick at 00:18:03) And I would say we can build very, very complex things inside of Unqork. I mean, number one, you look at some of the industries that we're talking about. In my experience now working in the insurance industry since I started at Unqork, it might be one of the most complex industries in the world. Some of the algorithms that are used to determine how risky you are, what your premiums should be, and then the variances and changes to your life insurance or whatever type of insurance over time is extremely, extremely difficult to manage no matter how you're building the software. And we've built a number of policy admin systems and have some templates for policy admin systems that solve some of those really complex problems.

(Nick at 00:18:45) If I step away from our industries for a second, we built a video game in Unqork. And this is something that I love to talk about. And not only was it a video game, but also a video game with payout. So we took a—I don't know if you ever remember this game from when we were younger called Don't Break the Ice, where basically you have like a grid of blocks of ice and a little hammer where you have to knock blocks away without having a penguin fall down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:12) Right. You're talking about a real physical game?

(Nick at 00:19:14) Yeah. This is a real physical game. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:16) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Nick at 00:19:16) Yeah. So we took a crack at reproducing that within Unqork in a pure no-code manner and not only built the logic of how the game works with tapping blocks and what's going to fall when one piece of ice falls, how many other pieces of ice fall based on the pressure that's coming in on the sides of them, but also built AI for it so that you can play against the computer. So we have a game in Unqork where you can play the computer at a childhood favorite game, Don't Break the Ice. So just an example of how you can get complex with AI and architecting things with microservices in mind and some of the other popular trends that are going on in all of technology. They have representations in Unqork and can be achieved in Unqork.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:02) Yeah. That's really cool. I didn't even think about when you said that you started in insurance, like, what kind of an accomplishment that is because of how complex it is. And I mean, I think insurance and finance in general are probably encountering a lot of the same technological challenges in terms of those extremely complex models. Like, just recently, we had on the show this company called Groq that makes these super advanced AI chips, and they basically just have a different approach to chip manufacturing that because of a lot of really cool technical stuff that their people from Google X and other really smart people at the company have come up with, they're able to process so much more efficiently than like a traditional GPU. And yeah, they were saying that they're used really heavily in the finance space. And I mean, it makes sense, like, all the crazy predictions that they've got to do there.

(Nick at 00:21:08) Yeah. Yeah. And I just also, when I think about complexity, what we try not to focus on is just the complexity of the build, right? Because in any SDLC, the building is going to be hard and a lot of times you're going to solve complex problems. But everything else is pretty complex too. Like, how do you maintain this thing once it's out there in the wild? How do you report against it? Those are all very complex things as well. And that's why we look at the entire SDLC, or sometimes we call it the UDLC, to help you not just build these complex solutions but also maintain these complex solutions and support them over time and really just integrate as much of the SDLC process into Unqork, giving you extremely rich different capabilities to understand how your models have changed over time or even how your UIs have changed over time, help you to be able to deploy multiple versions and easily roll back your versions if anything goes off the rails, the ability to monitor that and get alerted upon any variances to how your application is performing. And also tests. We have a unit testing application in Unqork now as well. So the moment you've changed some business logic and maybe inadvertently, you're going to be notified right away. So the complexity we find in software development isn't only in the use case, but it's also everything else that goes into ensuring that you have the best quality product. And so we're really trying to hit on all of those.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:42) Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Well, so I want to hear a little bit more about Mongo just because I love them and Mark. But so were you always partnered with Mongo from the start, or was there a dark period at the beginning when you were trying to figure it out alone?

(Nick at 00:23:03) Yeah. No. No. We were Mongo right out of the gate. I mean, the benefits that they provide were so apparent to us, just even when you think outside of what we were trying to do with Unqork and just look at what other folks are able to do with Mongo and just the general trends and changes to database software over time. It was pretty clear that there was a great opportunity there, and that was what we were going to need. And also to future proof us for some of the enhancements that we expected to come over time. So yeah, Mongo was the choice right out of the gate. And again, we wouldn't probably be sitting here if we hadn't made that correct choice off the bat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:43) That's awesome. So do you find that you are introducing your customers to MongoDB and then they're using them for other stuff too?

(Nick at 00:23:55) So I think what we try to abstract away as much as possible the underlying data store. Now we're very open to the fact that we use Mongo, and I think a lot of our clients are also very happy to hear that, particularly using their Atlas product and all the benefits that come with that. Just to add in terms of making that decision upfront, one of the things that we started with at Unqork was compliance and security first. We hired a CISO right out of the gate, and Mongo allowed us to get there faster because just as Unqork is trying to abstract away a lot of those complexities for you, Mongo's abstracted away a lot of it in terms of what you need from a database perspective to achieve the type of compliance that is expected in the world today. So yeah, it was right out of the gate.

(Nick at 00:24:44) But again, we try to abstract it away and provide you even a cleaner interface than Mongo already provides to engineers and folks like that. But then both in terms of how you get your data into Mongo is very much abstracted. How you pull it out within the context of your application when it's running in a browser or wherever you're going to be running it, that is that abstraction layer. But then we also use tools like Mongo's BI Connector to allow clients to connect directly to some read-only copy of their data when they want to do maybe more advanced analytics within tools that they already have within their ecosystem. So we definitely, again, are open with it. We want them to get the data in, but when it comes to your experience within Unqork, that is going to be an abstraction. Because, again, this is no code. And while it's always complex, we want to hide it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:42) Yeah. That totally makes sense. Just the nature of no code. But so I'm interested. Is Unqork used by a lot of developers? Or I mean, I know that a lot of people that aren't developers are able to use it. That's like the point. But do developers also use it?

(Nick at 00:26:01) Yeah. And that's actually where we've seen tremendous, tremendous success and excitement too is with the developer community and the engineering community. And, you know, why I'm talking to you probably a little bit in the sense and where we want to really start talking more to the developers out there who aren't using us to tell them that no code doesn't mean no developers. No code doesn't mean no engineers. It literally just means no code. But the concepts that come with building software and those principles of what is sound design are still represented within our no-code experience. And that's where I think it gets—like, because again, I was an engineer and I was, you know, even when I started leading engineering teams versus just writing the code myself, I was always kind of hands on with it. And since joining Unqork, I haven't written code, right? And I have a lot of fun doing the same things I used to do in code in Unqork. And I think, you know, so not only are they going to be extremely successful, but they're going to see the value to them because we're abstracting away a lot of the things that they don't want to have to cope with.

(Nick at 00:27:11) You know, I think you look back at MVC frameworks however long ago, Rails took over the web development world. They were like, look, you don't want to do routing anymore. You don't want to do user management anymore. Like, we'll take care of that stuff for you. We're going even that step further and saying, you know, you don't want to write reusable date components and have to pick and choose your date libraries and things like that. So even abstracting away a lot more of the stuff that probably doesn't excite the engineer and allows them to focus on representing that really exciting business logic as performant and as slick as they can. So we've seen, again, yeah, to answer your question, tons of success and value and have a lot of former engineers or current engineers using it. It doesn't mean we're throwing out the citizen developer and it doesn't mean that we're saying that this is no code for engineers and you citizen developer can't use it. There's a value proposition on both sides of it. But we're not just trying to say everyone in the world should be able to build software. We're also trying to say more people should be able to build software, and the folks who are doing it today are going to be 10x better than they are in traditional means.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:21) That's awesome. Yeah. It's like the same talk track as AI in general. Like, it's not coming to take your job. It's coming to let you do a cooler thing rather than this repetitive task. This is just applying that logic to coding in general.

(Nick at 00:28:41) Yeah. Yeah. And you know, going back to that kind of evolution—because like when you're writing the code, there are going to be smaller incremental evolutions that are going to make your life maybe a little bit better. I call them more of a revolution than an evolution. So I look at JavaScript, for example, and when jQuery came out, everyone was super excited because it abstracted away getting—selecting from the DOM and things like that. Then Angular kind of came out. Now, all right. Well, I've got to take all my jQuery and turn it into Angular, and it's giving me more than jQuery did, but I still got to do a lot more than I don't want to do, and I also have to go replatform. And then React came out and said, sorry, Angular, and then it does more for you. But I had to replatform, and I had to—but I still don't have everything. And now I'm seeing that Svelte might be even cooler than React. So at what point is everyone going to replatform again? And Unqork being an evolution versus a revolution on that in that format says you don't need to worry about the fear that as soon as you write this platform, someone's going to come out with a better framework that you're going to have to go over to. You're really just focusing on your business logic and the algorithm, so to speak, rather than all of that other stuff that sometimes comes with those smaller revolutions along the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:07) Right. Yeah. That's just—replatforming is just so much work that's not directly productive.

(Nick at 00:30:13) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:15) But so what's something that if this was widespread to everyone's able to use it, what's something that would be really exciting for you in the future with no code everywhere?

(Nick at 00:30:32) Well, I think it's more about—so we talked about, you asked earlier on, like, what are some of the use cases that we build? What are some of the things that you build in Unqork? And I answered it with a lot of industries and certain specific applications that we built. Where a ton of the excitement is is more and more people are starting to use it, especially more and more of those engineers who are starting to use it. They're starting to look at—and a lot of us have, and not just again the business use case, but also the technology, the underlying solutions that technologists will use to solve any given use case. So, you know, I mentioned microservices before, API gateways, CI/CD, AI, all of these kinds of things that are just—it doesn't matter what you're building through your end user. This is going to be a part of it. And finding and representing that within a no-code platform, some of which is our capabilities of the platform itself, but some of it is those building blocks that we create when you're developing with Unqork. So what I love to see every time another engineering-minded person building in Unqork creates the next, you know, hey, this is what an API gateway looks like in Unqork. Hey, this is what a service mesh looks like in Unqork. Hey, this is what CI/CD looks like in Unqork. That's the really exciting stuff. So I think as more and more people start using it and when more and more of those engineering-minded people see the value that it can give to them, like you said, it's not taking their jobs, it's making it better, then we're going to start seeing a lot more no-code solutions that are purely technical solutions. Because as much as I, yeah, love what we did for New York City, maybe—sometimes it's hard to always be in love with what the end user product is, but a lot of technologists are going to be in love with the technology that gets them there. So as more and more folks really start to create some of those technical solutions that are reusable across anything, that's just exciting to see how much more you could say, hey, you used to have to code microservices and service mesh. Now you don't. That's just real.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:48) So is CI/CD possible in Unqork today?

(Nick at 00:32:53) So we have—yeah. So basically, every kind of promotion that you can do or deployment that you can do is fully auto—could be fully automated via API connections to external systems. We have effectively a pub-sub system that runs in Unqork. So you could, in theory, say, hey, every time I save a change in this application, you know, continuous integration is possible.

(Nick at 00:33:22) And then when you're doing that, also versioning and snapshotting those changes that you're making and running those tests—those automated tests. So right now within Unqork, you could build something, the moment you hit save, execute any test that you've created against it, and if those tests pass, deploy it to your higher environment and then run maybe any functional tests that you've automated as well. And also hook that in to any external applications that you have within your ecosystem. So Unqork has a very strong integration framework that allows you to both call anything that you build with no-code as an API to integrate Unqork in.

(Nick at 00:34:04) But conversely, also very easily call out to any APIs that you've created or that may exist in certain processes that you have. So why not also kick off some pipeline that you have set up to build something that you're working together with with Unqork? Because while certainly Unqork wants to be your entire stack and run everything that you can imagine, we realize that a lot of our customers, if not all, have invested a lot of time and energy into some great products that they already have. And while yes, you could probably rebuild it in Unqork—we just talked about why replatforming isn't always great—why not integrate with it? So it's both contained within the Unqork experience.

(Nick at 00:34:45) You have a lot of the CI/CD, but also how does that interface with some of your other applications in your business?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:52) So can I ask you a couple leadership questions before we wrap up?

(Nick at 00:34:56) Yeah, totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:57) Cool. So recently we had on the show this guy named Jay who's the CTO of a company called Odessa, and they do really awesome software solutions for equipment leasing companies, which I had no idea was such a huge industry. But this software solutions company for this industry I had never spent any time on had like hundreds of employees. Like, they're a big company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:23) But anyway, he started the company like twenty years ago, and he told me when he was first starting the business, money was really hard. And some advice that his dad gave him really stuck with him and has throughout his entire career, which was, don't cut costs, focus on growing revenue. Like, cutting costs is just not a productive task as an entrepreneur. Just focus on growing revenue, and that'll get you to truly successful. And that served him really well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:54) And so—

(Nick at 00:35:57) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:57) That was just the answer to one of my favorite questions to ask everyone, which is, what's some advice that you got early on that really stuck with you and has served you well throughout your career?

(Nick at 00:36:09) Yeah. I think the one thing—a few things come to mind, but the one that I've really carried forward—I'll say two things. One is, as a leader, your primary focus aside from your company's success is the folks below you and their success. You want to make everybody around you better, right? And you're a successful leader if the folks below you are becoming leaders, if the folks below you are succeeding, if they're happy, if they're contributing to the overall growth of your organization and to the value that you're providing.

(Nick at 00:36:45) So I think, as much as you have to focus on things like growing revenue, I mean, you're not gonna get to those revenue numbers without a very motivated, happy workforce that wants to go not just to 100%, that wants to go above and beyond that. Particularly in startups, you need that mentality that you sometimes have to do a little more because you want to. You wanna maybe go home at night or stay home at night in today's world and continue doing the things that you're doing because you just really love it and you love the people that you're working for. So I think always focusing on growing the folks that work for you is extremely important. And I find one of the best ways that I have found doing that is really to allow folks time for exploration.

(Nick at 00:37:36) And, you know, Google did it with 20% time, so you can just point to that and say it's that. But I think giving your employees that opportunity to explore things related to your business, but that also interests them, and looking for folks who have that natural curiosity that when given that opportunity are going to want to seize that opportunity—when you get those curious people, there's no telling what they're going to come to you one day and say, "You know, hey, boss, look what I have to show you. How freaking cool is this thing?"

(Nick at 00:38:08) And then, you know, next thing you know, it's a reality because, as I was talking earlier with the growth of the no-code market, in order to kind of stay ahead and not get complacent, that needs to be the mentality that you go through and never expect that you're sure that you're the best and have that curious mindset of, how can we improve, how can we do better, what else could change the rules around what we're doing? I know that was kind of a bit of a loaded answer. Wasn't as clear and concise, I think, as the example you had given me, but I hope it makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:46) No, that was awesome, man. So do you have programs at Unqork for bringing up the next generation of leaders?

(Nick at 00:38:53) Yeah, yeah. So within our technology department specifically, we do give our technologists here that time to focus on exploration and bringing new things to the table, and then providing them folks on the leadership to work through those things with. And even, you know, we were fortunate enough to be backed by CapitalG. Google is one of our large investors, and they have a mentorship program as well that we're able to connect some of our engineers to, to learn from some of the greats who obviously work over there.

(Nick at 00:39:30) And then, you know, diversity and inclusion is huge at Unqork and making sure that those impacts aren't just for certain folks within the organization, but that everybody has a fair opportunity to take advantage of that and to make their mark on our organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:47) That's really cool. Do you guys have like an internship program? How far into development do you go?

(Nick at 00:39:53) Yeah. So we have an internship—I think this summer might have been our third year doing it. And we have thousands and thousands of applicants every year, and many of those, the ones that we end up giving the internship opportunity to, many of which become employees once they finish university.

(Nick at 00:40:13) But then even prior to that, we also have an apprenticeship program where we're actually reaching out to high school kids and working with local high schools to give their folks—and a lot of times in some underprivileged areas, you may not have a lot of opportunities off the bat—to give them an opportunity to come work for us and learn about that next evolution of software and give them even more skills that they can take to university and then beyond. So, you know, really starting to train those next generation of no-coders and giving them the opportunities that we hope to give everybody out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:51) Yeah, that's awesome. That was a lot more than I expected asking about.

(Nick at 00:40:55) Cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:58) So how do you encourage open communication between different parts of your organization?

(Nick at 00:41:04) Yeah, you know, I had transparency also in the mindset about some of those leadership things. So I think, look, it's almost second nature for us starting—having had such tremendous growth so quickly where when it's small, it's very easy to keep that communication because they're all sitting in one room a few desks apart. And I think because we started there, we are so close to when that was, it's just ingrained into a lot of what we're doing.

(Nick at 00:41:36) But we also have weekly all-hands meetings at the company where you have the CEO presenting his weekly updates. You have other members of our senior leadership team doing the same thing. And then you have each and every department doing their own presentations on a pretty frequent basis to the entire company, hundreds of people. So every employee has that finger on the pulse, the general pulse of the company, but then you need that obviously to trickle down and to be on the day-to-day as well. So, you know, using collaboration tools, obviously, communication, collaboration tools like Slack, using, you know, centralizing a lot of our documentation and all that and just making it available is key.

(Nick at 00:42:25) So again, I think it was always second nature for us and we want to keep that transparency always from the leadership down and encourage that across because you need to build that two-way trust whether it's a lateral two-way trust or a reverse two-way trust between parties. Because, again, going back to wanting folks who want to explore and have that curiosity, that's feeling attached and feeling like your voice is heard and you understand where you're going, which is really gonna help to motivate folks to do what they're doing when they feel like they really understand it completely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:01) So but you've been there from like 25 employees to now you said like 600, right? So I'm sure you've had to change like how intentional you are about facilitating open communication, right? Like, what are some ways that it's changed in like practical applications you've had to do to accommodate for that growth coming into your shoes as an enterprise?

(Nick at 00:43:29) Sure. So from a product development perspective, leveraging other platforms that more consistently and publicly, or at least publicly within the four walls of Unqork, share roadmap and assist, allow people to submit ideas into that roadmap and upvote and downvote some of those ideas. So not only can you see what we're working on, but you also have a way where you can provide that feedback and then have your colleagues vote on the thing. So everyone kind of feels like they have at least some say, maybe not in the overall direction, but a lot of the incremental steps that we're gonna take to get there.

(Nick at 00:44:08) So we started that from a platform perspective, really sharing and also accepting that feedback in a systematic way. But now we're seeing that happen with other functions in the organization, even like documentation. So our enablement team who manages our docs and our training courses and things like that, running a very similar program where you can share ideas to change documentation, document something that doesn't exist, and then again have that voting mechanism to support it. So I think having those systems in place—and those two examples give someone somewhere they can go at any point in time in order to share the feedback and see the things that other folks are doing. Because, you know, oddly enough, I thought when everybody went remote that there would be less meetings and more time, but it's been the complete opposite. I feel like there's so much more meetings.

(Nick at 00:45:01) So sometimes it's hard to find that time. So having the systems and having the processes and the platforms to facilitate it at any point in time, I think, has been really helpful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:11) That's awesome. Yeah. So before we wrap up, is there anything that we didn't get to touch on that we wanna make sure we get out to the world today in this conversation?

(Nick at 00:45:21) Yes, absolutely. We are hiring tremendously. We have been hiring tremendously since even the world changed dramatically. I mean, we've had more growth even during, since the pandemic started, than we were having prior to that.

(Nick at 00:45:39) So we have a very strong remote culture. We afford people the ability to work remotely and then we have a very strong remote culture we feel to support what has obviously been a big change for a lot of people. And I think that you can see that evidenced itself in how we've grown since all these things happened. So, you know, unqork.com has our postings on it, looking across the board, everything from engineers to sales. You name it, we're looking for it. And, you know, I don't think there could be a better time to get involved.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:14) 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.