Ep. 191 Andrew Lindsey, Chief Executive Officer at Flexnode | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast

Speaker A: Love this, because I actually just went through this yesterday and it was a clear reminder that this is still in the space. And I'm not saying that this is an impossible go to market strategy, but I wouldn't take it on anytime soon. Um, it's the retrofit and the adaptive reuse go to market strategy. Um, so, you know, a big focus right now is, hey, are there buildings out there that have stranded power capacity? Or better yet, even legacy data centers that have stranded power capacity that can be adaptive for, upgraded for AI infrastructure. Um, and again, it's not impossible, um, but the economics can oftentimes be horrid. Um, and I'll give three specific reasons why, uh, it can go sideways. Hi, this is Andrew Lindsey, CEO from Flexnode, and you are watching the Data Center Go to Market podcast.

Speaker B: Hi, it's Joshua Feinberg, host of the Data Center Go to Market podcast. Today I'm welcoming a very special guest. Joining me is Andrew Lindsey, who is CEO of, uh, Flexnode, based in the Orlando, Florida area. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me. M. Joshua.

Speaker B: Oh, it's my pleasure. What's super interesting about all of this is the AI infrastructure boom has created a lot of demand for compute, for power, for cooling and deployment speed. Many buyers, regardless of whether they're on the IT side, the engineering side, the facility side, construction, real estate, feel they have a reasonably good grasp on AI. But a lot don't really understand what kind of, um, infrastructure is required to support AI. And that's what I'm really looking forward to talking with you about today. Andrew, can you give me a little bit of background on what brought you to want to see start Flexnode and what your problem, what the big problems are that you're working on within the data center industry?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so, uh, I was sort of born into the construction industry, if you will. I come from a construction family. My dad started and developed out a construction company of his own starting in the 1970s. Um, and I grew up watching, uh, the large infrastructure projects grow and build out that he was supporting throughout their life cycle. Um, and it became really interesting to me, um, especially about 10, 15 years ago, uh, unfortunately, as a result of his passing, where I was sort of thrusted into the, uh, industry to sort of take the reins, um, after I developed out a couple companies of my own, um, and uh, in that process I learned pretty quickly that, uh, technology in the construction industry is almost oxymoronic. Um, and coming from a technology background, both software and hardware, it seemed Like a great window of opportunity to be able to get my hands dirty. And so I uh, quickly adjusted into the position of applied research and development for the family construction firm Alpha Corporation, which in Northern Virginia immediately became oriented in a lot of our heavy infrastructure projects surrounding data centers where the projects were getting bigger and bigger, the schedules were getting tighter, um, and the needs of those projects were getting more complex. Um, and as a result of that the big question that came to me in that sort of research portion of applied research and development was um, where is this market going? Um, where is AI infrastructure? Actually this is pre AI infrastructure. So is data center infrastructure more broadly going, um, because the demand curve was exponential. And again pre AI infrastructure, um, we're talking about billions of square feet that needed to get delivered within the 20, 20, 2030 decade just to keep up with cloud. Um, and so it became very apparent that the construction industry specifically would struggle to keep up um, both on the design side and the build side. Especially on the build side where workforce is um, getting smaller, people are leaving the construction industry and it's getting harder and harder to convince people to come into the construction industry when it's not as seemingly call it sexy as some other uh, spaces. And so um, where uh, we started to focus was how we could alleviate the pain point for uh, that construction workforce issue. Um, and what we landed on was using uh, a modular approach, um, taking the construction off site, which would allow for us to uh, reduce the amount of people that we needed on site but also reduce the likelihood of errors with inexperienced people that would be on site. As this industry grew exponentially and newer people came onto those sites, um, trying to be backed with a resume of say a single individual who'd been in the industry for 10, 20 years. And so uh, in that modular focus, um, and sorry for the sort of long winded background but in that modular focus we found that there were a lot of uh, challenging points uh, of taking the construction process off site while at the same time offering a level of configurability and adaptability, uh, that a customer really needs to make use of that product as a real estate product rather than an appliance. Um, and containers are oftentimes m delivered as appliances. Something that, that's not designed to be upgraded and designed to be delivered as a plug and play solution. And to that value it's great when it's quick, but if you need something that's slightly different from the uh, options that are initially offered, um, or you need to change it three to five years later, we found that that was a prohibitively difficult process for a number of reason, reasons that were rooted in the design and construction space. And so I decided to pull actually lessons learned from, uh, high secure facilities, um, high security facilities that my family's construction firm was doing around, uh, Department of State and embassies and actually pushing, uh, a industrialized, almost modular 2.0 approach where you can diversify builders, diversify suppliers, and create a level of configurability and adaptability that you just can't do with containers. Um, so with that, that was the aha moment for us to really get, get into it. And my co founder Bob and I immediately realized that the, the, the area that would really break the industry was the arrival of liquid cooling. At the time, that was focused on sustainability, um, but we were focused on sustainability at the intersection of that and reducing the footprint of these data centers, which in Northern Virginia can kind of be an eyesore. Um, and so we wanted to reduce that footprint, reduce that energy consumption. And then 2022 arrived and all of a sudden we became one of three, four players that have an integrated modular product that even thinks about doing liquid cooling, where ours was truly designed originally to enable liquid cooling and be that integration layer. So with that we threw everything out, um, and dove right in. And it's been quite a journey since. Yeah, sorry for the long background, but had to get a little nostalgic there.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's super interesting to see how much AI adoption 22, late 2022, early 2023 to present has completely changed the game with all this. I remember being out visiting, uh, a modular factory in Phoenix in 2016 and seeing its usage in a hyperscale facility at the time. And we're talking about liquid cooling, but it was all sustainability. Like a lot of these seemed like nice to haves 10 years ago. And then all of a sudden like, whoa, wait a second. This is what's going to drive the entire industry in order to make AI infrastructure reality.

Speaker A: Oh, uh, nobody, I mean, nobody believed, you know, call it four years ago, nobody believed that racks would get higher than 50 kilowatts per rack. Like we would like, be actively pitching, we promise like the value the rack will get higher in density and it's just like it's not going to happen. And then all of a sudden it did, right? It shifted from I think it was 35 kilowatts of rack to I think it was 70 kilowatts of rack when we jumped into the H100. Um, and then it just kind of blew all the, you know, the expectations out of the water. So it's been, no pun intended I guess. Um, so it's been interesting to watch.

Speaker C: Andrea, I get the sense when you

Speaker B: mentioned that talking about technology with construction you mentioned is kind of oxymoronic that they just the two of them don't go together and I sense that a lot of the challenges that you're working on aren't limited to just technology. With all of that in mind, what do you think is the biggest go to market challenge facing most companies in the data center industry right now?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great question. Um, I'd say that the biggest challenge today is that first sale. Um, when looking at an infrastructure project, especially a mission critical project, um, being a startup is the last thing that you want to be. Right. Um, and in that um, we're dealing with infrastructure that's millions of dollars in value and that's actually conservative. It's more along the lines of tens of or hundreds of millions of dollars of value in the case of our, our modular systems. And as a result of that ah, somebody needs to be willing to risk their job for that first sale. Somebody really needs to be saying that this value add is so significant that it's going to allow me to kick the door in on which is why I'm going to take this risk. Um, and you know our ability to do that um, really rests in our ability to one tell an understandable story but two, um, build the trust of that individual who um is putting their job, sometimes their career in your hands. The other side related to this, especially in the case of uh, you know, AI factories is the value of GPU infrastructure. Um, it's oftentimes forgotten that GPUs if filling out a full AI factory facility, the GPUs themselves are worth two to three times the value of the facility. So it's a little different than you know a conventional cloud facility um, or the other where you know a co location facility where you know it's, it's not you know, that kind of value that's being deployed inside, especially not that value stacked as densely as you possibly can. So um, with that right, it's that first sale, it's without a doubt and

Speaker B: getting enough trust for your internal champion to feel comfortable getting to the moment of. I remember early on in my career, actually my first job in college was with IBM and at the time nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. I, I think you would truly have to be at least over 40 to know that expression because it doesn't seem stuck deep into the 20s. It's still a well respected company but it doesn't quite have the same oh,

Speaker A: I've used that line in, in board meetings, right? Like I've had investors where they're like hey, like what's, you know, early on, what's going on, you know, what's the next step with the sale and what's your greatest challenge? I'm like our greatest challenge is nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM. Uh, it's a great, great point.

Speaker B: And in the data center industry, fill in the blank with Digital Realty, Equinix, Vertiv, Schneider Electric, Nvidia, Microsoft, like all of the above. So coming in, it's an interesting place to be as a startup and a scale up as well because there's a lot on the go to market side that you can get away with with being a little rough around the edges because they know they're getting something that's so innovative that it's a couple of years away from making it into mainstream with the, the perceived safer choices. It's that mid size up level where they're like okay, you're big enough that it's not charming anymore.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Um, but how do we close that gap? So with all of that in mind, how has AI infrastructure and the density requirements fundamentally changed how you're growing Flexnode?

Speaker A: That also a really great question and it has been pretty drastic even, yeah, within the last 12 to 18 months. Um, the thing that we recognized with liquid cooling early on, um, as a business, um, and also as a solution was that ah, the uh, the IT infrastructure and the building infrastructure would get connected directly um, as a result of liquid cooling. Right. The process for commissioning a facility um, would almost be done twice. You'd commission the facility and then you'd have to commission the IT and basically recommission the facility next to it. Um, and so what we realized then was that we could no longer in the age of AI where um, liquid cooling is a standard, right. We're no longer thinking about the facility as independent of the IT stack. Right now the facility is part of the IT stack, which also means that any change to the IT stack is very likely amounting to a change uh, in the facility design. Um, and so we originally we had structured our sales and solutions teams independent of one another frankly to maximize economics. Because you know, solutions can be a lot more costly than sales. Um, I mean we're certainly incentivizing sales, but no baseline, it's just much more costly and so with that though, with the advent of uh, this connection between facility design and IT infrastructure, we collapsed our sales organization into entire seller doers. So everybody that works within our growth organization has a background rooted in the architecture, engineering, construction industry, manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, but also knows how to tell the Flexnode story and the value that we're offering to our customers. That is a major departure from where we started. Um, and now it's really changed the philosophy of the company to deepen our roots in the architecture, engineering and construction community which is truly where we come from and where we see us adding the greatest amount of value to our sales. Um, so yeah, I would say that's it.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, we're seeing that across the board, industry wide as we move more into this self driven journey where so much research happens before the first sales conversation. Traditional decision committee members and stakeholders and companies don't want to spend time having someone read the website to them anymore, read slide decks to them anymore. And because of that we saw this a couple of years ago starting with the like colocation operators where the salespeople were being kind of forced to, but in most cases wanted to get the same kind of certification credentials as a lot of the accounts they were selling into. And then we saw a lot more companies where the CC where the chief commercial Chief revenue officer started hiring IT professionals and engineers onto sales teams even if they'd never sold before in their careers because this peer to peer credibility was like massively important to getting back in the room for the self driven journey. So yeah, it's really fascinating to see Flexnode apply the same idea except apply it in aec.

Speaker A: Yeah, and that's the thing, right is you know we had originally oriented in that philosophy of uh, pulling in IT people and people with IT experience into those sales roles. But it was the aec, the absence of that AEC experience that was actually becoming a major issue for us because of that, that connection between IT stack and facility, facility design where we would see customers saying hey, um, you know, there's been an efficiency in our design so we're going to, you know, add this or adjust this, you know, add more compute, adjust storage and change the network design, whatever it may be. And it was a true facility overhaul that we didn't want to be in the process of handing over into our product team to then redesign the product when the product is actually the platform that is supposed to be configured by groups that aren't completely changing it from the ground up.

Speaker B: It's really interesting not only the Staffing and the product management and design philosophy that you're growing Flexnode with. But at the same time you mentioned the trust is incredibly important with getting the initial momentum going. How do you educate buyers before they ever get to a sales conversation?

Speaker A: I love that because it's something that we've been so heavily focused on, um, because it's such a complex subject. Right. You know, coming from the AEC space, a lot of the value that Flexnode delivers as a product, as a business is rooted in the challenges that you have, uh, in the AEC space that then amount to issues that happen to the tenant or the end user. Right. And so we have to basically do a two step jump of, you know, translating what the building value is and again then what the IT and AI infrastructure value is, um, which can, can be a process. And so, you know, I would say there are two, uh, major ways that we tell that story or you know, we, we, you know, educate before sale. Which is the first is visual storytelling. Um, so you know, one of the major strong suits that we have as a company born out of the design and construction space is our ability to manage and control our virtual assets to a place where we can actually tell a customer exactly, you know, what they can experience with a flex node, what it looks like, what it feels like, um, and that call it multi sensory experience. And our ability to, you know, on one side visually, but also, you know, touch and feel in, you know, places where we feature our products, um, can be a huge benefit for a customer that is, you know, can sometimes run into a difficult understanding uh, of what it might be or what it might look like, especially in the context of these 100, 200,000 square foot facilities where it's like, is it anything like that? And then on the other side they're wondering if it's a shipping container or something close to it. And so for us being able to visually Storyteller is an edge, uh, for, for the business. The second is, um, it's through our partners. Um, so one of the big things that we've been focused on since the very start of the company is uh, bringing together, cultivating, nurturing, close partnerships in the industry that are, with these lighthouse industry leaders that everybody else looks to for their standards in the architecture engineering space, in the supply chain space, um, in the real real estate space. Um, and that, that's been a core focus for us and, and in part because we wanted to create Flexnode to be a standard for a lot of groups that are constantly trying to Play catch up with things that are changing in the industry constantly. And so with that we, you know, with our partners, we're talking about, uh, groups like Eaton, which invested in, uh, us, Stoltz Cooling, which invested in us, uh, JE Dunn Construction, DPR Hensel Phelps, Consigli Construction, shifting into, uh, engineering and architecture. We're talking Air Up Engineering, Thornton Tomasetti Shop architects. Groups that when they win an award, it's like, uh, oh, they won another award, right? Like, it's like they, they set the standard for the incredible work that's delivered in the industry. And it also set the bar for us and how hard it was for us to gain their trust in this process. But as a result, you know, one of the benefits that we have is that they tell our story and sometimes better than we do. So it's great.

Speaker B: So to a large extent, by partnering with companies that are much, much larger than where Flexnode is right now, you're able to borrow a lot of that, uh, trust in the marketplace. Trust, social proof. And it's making a big difference to help how you tell your story be more easily accepted.

Speaker A: Absolutely. In addition to the visual storytelling. Without a doubt.

Speaker B: Andrew, when you look at other parts of the data center industry, do you see any go to market strategies that are starting to fail right now that a lot of people are in denial about, where they're just continuing to run the same playbook that they did ten years ago?

Speaker A: Uh, I love this because I actually just went through this yesterday and it was a clear reminder that this is still in the space. And I'm not saying that this is an impossible go to market strategy, but I wouldn't take it on anytime anytime soon. Um, it's the retrofit and the adaptive reuse go to market strategy. Um, so, you know, a big focus right now is, hey, are there buildings out there that have stranded power capacity? Or better yet, even legacy data centers that have stranded power capacity that can be adapted for, upgraded for AI infrastructure? Um, and again, it's not impossible, but the economics can oftentimes be horrid. Um, and I'll give three specific reasons why it, uh, can go sideways. The first is understanding the power and the feasibility of delivering that power to that building. Right. So just because a building has a, uh, substation access and a line or multiple lines to, uh, power doesn't necessarily mean that that building has the ability to take advantage of that power appropriately or put that power where it needs to be to effectively deliver the, effectively activate the, and operate the infrastructure. The second Thing is, uh, related to then what happens if you've confirmed at a high level that you have power, but you don't necessarily know how you're going to go about delivering that process of, um, adapting the building. The first thing that you'll find is that in the discovery process for many buildings that were delivered pre five years ago, like no joke, five, ten years ago, you'll find that there's very, either siloed information or isolated information about the facility, the operations and maintenance of the facility, all of the services, repairs, replacements that have been done to that facility. Um, and as a result there may be either one set of documents that has never been touched, or there are several different set of documents that have different iterations. So there's, you know, 10 different sets with five different versions and they're hard to keep track of. What that means though, is that that discovery process takes months. Months. And unless you want to start peeling back walls in a building that you might not own yet, uh, to verify that a pipe might be there or uh, that that structural load has actually been displaced as a result of the upgrade that happened two years ago or five years ago or 30 years ago. Right. And then going from there, though, it's about then taking that information to a design build team and saying, okay, we have an understanding of what's in the facility. We verified that everything's in the facility. This way, this way, that way, the other. Here's how we want to go about doing the project. Project. Oftentimes those teams will be like, great, love that you did your homework. We're going to do the exact same thing because we don't want anybody to die on this job. So now you're starting again in something that you've already gone about as a result of buying the building. Now you're going to do it for the project. That's the second major issue of that adaptive reuse or upgrade. The third is who owns those upgrades at the end of the day, especially if you've upgraded the facility for liquid cooling, where the customer requirements, if you don't own those GPUs, may have a unique set of technical requirements, uh, to effectively operate as an interface between the building and the it. But that realistically means though, is that there's a pretty significant tenant improvement budget that needs to be accounted for. Where if you're the tenant and you're asking the owner, right, they're basically saying that's entirely yours and when you leave it's entirely mine. If you're the building owner, you're thinking in the exact same way from a flip perspective. So major lesson learned. Go to market. Retrofit, adaptive reuse. Huge headache. I, um, wouldn't do it again in the near term.

Speaker B: What's interesting about that old habit, die hard kind of thing is I personally experienced that with a huge amount of the colo operators that I was working with in the 2010s where there was this hand me down kind of idea where, like, the hyperscalers would build something, they'd use it for two or three years, they would tire of it, they'd sell it to a national colo provider, they would use it for two or three years, they would sell it to a regional, and then by the time it got done with the regional, then the kind of clients that I work with, with a couple dozen employees, they would end up with this or an enterprise would buy it. Enterprise, uh, would use it for longer, maybe five or six years and it would go on the market and somebody would pick that up. Those companies typically had a combination of, I guess you would call it third tier, fourth tier assets and renting space in like digital realty, aquatics or something like that.

Speaker A: It was like capital risk potato.

Speaker B: Yeah, it was super, super interesting. So it's not much of a stretch for me to see why adaptive reuse has been so sticky. Because for so long it was. And then there was the whole idea that the failing corporate headquarters and strip malls and, uh, shopping malls could be turned into data. And some of the big developers actually.

Speaker A: Oh, that's coming back. That's definitely coming back. We get approached a lot about, you know, like, we own a mall or something like that. And it's just like, yeah, like this is going to be a headache. Just demolish it and call us. That's like a year and a half.

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Speaker B: G. So, uh, Andrew, given all of this, that you're trying to get multiple stakeholders from different kinds of disciplines that will weigh in this kind of decision to understand what the real decisions look like the natural investment that a lot of people gravitate towards to is content and events. But a lot of salespeople are finding that technical content just doesn't get it done and doesn't get revenue. Um, what do you feel is the biggest reason why a lot of times these efforts at content marketing and events and especially broad kind of conferences just are not terribly effective for a lot of different kinds of pipeline contexts in this industry?

Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's uh, it's a good question. And you know, we, we've seen this firsthand. Uh, you know, when, you know, when delivering technical content, I feel oftentimes it focuses on uh, products, features, uh, uh, processes. But it definitely does not really focus on the outcomes or at least easy to understand outcomes that allow for a technical discussion to move into uh, a much more sort of sales and close type discussion. Um, beyond that though, uh, I'd say that um, today in this world of AI factories, everything sounds like a science project, right? So when we focus on a lot of these technical features, right, even if it's something that's 30 years old, like liquid cooling, right, People are like, oh no, no, that's too risky. Like, and like there's nothing we could do about it except for, you know, reorient the story to something that's much more uh, outcome oriented and easy to understand when it comes to say, energy consumption and real estate density rather than liquid cooling. Um, and the same goes for even closed uh, loop cooling systems, right? When we start talking about the fact that we don't consume water, um, people are like that, that's a science project. And we say anything close to closed loop unless we're talking to an engineering team as well. It's, it's, it sounds like a joke. And then I'd say the last part is uh, something that I don't believe we, we talk enough about in the industry. But there are some people on LinkedIn, gotta love them, um, that, that call BS regularly, which is just completely inaccurate technical information that leaves people, leaves uh, a lot to the imagination on one side or it's just completely misleading on the other. And you know, that can be anything from uh, the performance of your system and the performance based on specific standards that are misaligned with industry standards to not accounting for similarly like redundancy, um, and resiliency factors within a specific performance of a system. Right? And so I say that because, uh, you know, people have been let down by that, right? And it's not like people let down, uh, you know, halfway through the sales process, it's people who are delivering systems and they're like, wait, this doesn't perform the way that I expected it to. And that's because they didn't read the quote unquote fine print on, you know, how to apples and apples that product with another product. Um, so, you know, we're, we're very much oriented in being able to tell that story clearly, um, because it's a clear gap.

Speaker B: So a lot of this is managing expectations and being in early enough to be the one that's shaping these beliefs as opposed to only getting looped in near the end of their journey, the end of the process, totally for sure. Because that, what we see is that doesn't just have implications on being able to set expectations properly as assuming that you're going to end up with a sales outcome. But in a lot of cases we're seeing companies that are not in early enough are being forced to discount very, very aggressively in order to get the deal over the finish line. And it doesn't end up becoming a win, win outcome. It's not scalable, it's not sustainable. So a lot of these problems start with unrealistic expectations just, and just not understanding how much of following the default playbook is putting people immediately treading water. I often use sports analogies. You can pick whether you want the, the basketball version, the football version, the baseball version. But like it's imagine you're being locked out of the stadium for the first three quarters of the game, first seven or eight innings, and the other team is on the field and they're scoring all these points and you have like the, the little leaguers there.

Speaker A: I, I love that. And it's true, right? Like not too long ago, this is probably four or six weeks ago now, um, we met with a group that was frankly just trying to compare prices, right? They were just trying to do an apples and apples comparison of our product versus other products out there. And one of the major challenges that we were running into is that the figure that they had in mind was not accounting for the true deployment of the infrastructure. At the end of the day, it was, here's our box. Nothing really comes with that box. And when you have it, you're good to go. You can deploy your fine. We presented our budget and that was the end to end budget. What is it going to take to configure your system? What is it going to take to cite this for the requirements and regulations on that site, coordinate with the developer? If it's not Us, uh, and then hand this into an appropriate execution of a project which is integrating into whatever broader infrastructure you have, electrical, mechanical, so forth, or if we're bringing the whole thing, um, which is what we prefer to do. So you know, when we're talking about, you know, apples to apples comparisons, that is extremely important because, you know, you, you just put it perfectly like it, it becomes a battle in the, you know, in the fourth period.

Speaker B: What do you think is the biggest challenge for a company like Flexnode when it comes to reaching the actual economic buyer?

Speaker A: Um, I mean, I think the big focus is coming up with a story that's easy to understand, as I mentioned earlier, um, that allows for somebody who is a technical champion within their business or you know, an sales executive, somebody who's trying to solve a problem, you know, not necessarily at that executive level, that's using us as a way to uh, you know, solve that problem and demonstrate the ability to solve that problem to that executive leader who may not know us from Adam. Right. And so the focus is really creating an easy to understand story that that champion can go to their boss with and be comfortable telling, especially when that boss starts asking them a number of questions that, you know, also have to have easy to understand answers. Um, so that's been our biggest focus is equipping those champions with um, those, you know, easy to understand explanations, but also as I mentioned earlier, those visual assets that may help them to convey that message more appropriately, especially as ah, details start to get critiqued.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a really interesting leadership, not so philosophical, but very pragmatic kind of decision to make is in a world where so many of your internal champions are now very self sufficient, a lot of the role of, in these enterprise deals is equipping the internal champion to drive alignment across their team and other teams in the company. And a lot of people that have traditionally only worked in larger organizations feel that there's always some way for them to get to the real decision maker. It's a golf tournament, it's a cabana party, it's a bigger booth, it's a conference. They'll get to that person. The reality is there are uh, for sure silent stakeholders on the decision committees that no matter what you do, they'll get a vote and you may never get 15 minutes with that person. So what do you do? Given that your best shot a lot of times is a piece of content, whether it's written content, visual content, a video clip, like. Yeah, it's a big challenge for a lot of old school Companies.

Speaker A: It absolutely is. And being able to create that, you know, not to use blockchain vernacular, but that single source of truth, right, that allows for that champion to be able to convey that information very appropriately, uh, is, I mean, it's critical to that ability to carry a conversation oftentimes with something that may not be fully understood. And the underlying value of how it all works is almost guaranteed not understood. Um, and so being able to package that into that single source of truth, again, all blockchain world aside, um, is huge for us.

Speaker B: Who's your favorite kind of internal champion to work with and who's kind of a nightmare?

Speaker A: Oh yeah, um, my favorite internal champion to work with and who's a nightmare? So, um, I would say that my, uh, favorite internal champion to work with is somebody who has that building expertise, who frankly knows what it is that they're looking at, um, where they have themselves confronted the challenges of, um, something previously, especially in the world of modular. And they recognize that having a lot of the, um, features and configurability things that allow for that builder's job to be easier, um, we love interfacing with them because they become instant champions. Like, I'm talking, you know, people from the AEC space who are on the other side of the table. It takes five, ten minutes for them to be like, okay, I'm in. Like, where do we need to go next? Um, on the flip side though, I would say that, um, some of the most challenging people to work with are the IT experts, right? That uh, really are looking at us and they're like, okay, cool, so you're a container against a number of other containers. Tell me why you're a better container. And m. I'm like, well, uh, let's start off with the first part, which is we're not a container. Um, and that can go down a rabbit hole pretty quickly because the second that you start a conversation off with you're not right, or like, you're incorrect in your thinking, it's like, this is not going to be good. Especially if this person is an IT infrastructure leader in the heyday of AI infrastructure, where the last thing they want to be learning about is how modular data centers are built.

Speaker B: When you express that idea that it's just a container, it reminded me of this debate that I've had with a bunch of revenue leaders in the industry over the last couple of months on, is the Expo floor where it's happening? Is it the suites off of the Expo floor with these private meetings where it's happening? And they assure me that yes, the decision makers are in the suites with us and this is where the deals are being done. Um, but what I typically find is that if a decision maker is actually at the conference, it's for the purpose of meeting with five or six vendors that are being pit against each other so they can go from room to room. Spending 15 minutes in this beauty pageant. It's almost like a reality TV show. And by the time you get done, the person who wins is putting the CFO into cardiac arrest over the margin. So they just gave away to make this happen.

Speaker A: Absolutely. My co founder Bob said early on, you know, in part just to remind me that just because, you know, to stay humble is, uh, the best solutions don't always win and the worst solutions don't always lose. Um, and that's something that I frankly am seeing in real time in the industry. Um, and we're, we're working on that. Right. Where there is a level of trial and error that is happening in the space where people are just starting to understand how facilities are designed and built and especially how these mission critical facilities are designed and built. Right. And you know, given that it's a major challenge, uh, you know, I think we really need to get ahead of that as something that is a learning curve for all of us. Um, but you know, especially those that don't come out of, of the AEC space. And so being able to convey that appropriately, um, is key, um, to be able to level set with a group that, you know, may be looking at not the right solution for their needs. And they may be looking at it more seriously than they should because whoever's selling it to them is telling them everything they want to hear.

Speaker B: Yeah. So that's again where education is the first cousin of trust building. Totally one without the other. It's like the uh, this, the three legged stool.

Speaker A: It totally is. And related to that is, you know, being in 3D can also help as well. Right. Like, you know, going from zoom call to zoom call to zoom call is oftentimes a challenge when trying to build the trust of uh, you know, a business partner or you know, potential customer. And so now one of the big things that we do in the, you know, post Covid age is I get on a flight like every week to go meet with people in person because it's just, it helps a lot.

Speaker B: Yeah. Given all of this, Andrew, as you're growing your business, what have you found that's super core to keep in house and what have you tried to outsource that didn't work, that you would never outsource again.

Speaker A: Um, I would say what's core to keep in house is our uh, brand identity and our visual storytelling, our capability to visually storytelling. Um, as a company that really is in the building space, um, we really need to be able to tell the story ourselves with a level of control over our digital assets, our architecture and engineering digital assets that um, it's extremely difficult for a third party to do. Um, and in part because it's so heavily real time and reactive, uh, that trying to ask a third party, even a contractor at a moment's notice to drop everything and reshape something related to that visual identity and brand, um, to help a customer understand, help a partner understand is, is a lot to ask. And it's, it's actually, you know, it's, it's setting a bar that is impossible to meet, especially if you have a third party group, you know, an outsourced group that you know, is constantly trying to get up to speed in a space that is constantly moving at like a thousand miles an hour. So you know, we're, we're really focused on that which is that, that brand identity, visual identity, um, and we've learned the hard way that it can slow us down immensely when we don't have full control over that.

Speaker B: So it sounds like in many ways these brand assets are part of the sales team.

Speaker A: Absolutely, they totally are.

Speaker B: When you look into the crystal ball and you think about what's going to change over the next 12, 18, 24 months for growing a company like Flexnode, what do you envision changing with your brand? Weekly monthly routines where you spend a lot of your time?

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, so it's a good question and I've been thinking about this a lot. My, you know, chief of staff, uh, helps me to, to stay grounded in where those phases are, especially these days as our team is expanding. But also, um, you know, we're m continuing to move just so fast. Um, so on one side it's um, on the education and storytelling side of things, um, you know, I've recognized that I have sort of kept my head down internally grinding away, trying to build together with the team when frankly I also need to be out much more, uh, helping people understand who we are, what Flexnode is, and why there's such a drastic and generational impact to what we're doing in the design and construction space, to put it lightly. Um, and so that's a big, big focus for me. Um, and I think that also helps people to Understand that we're a trustworthy business. Right. Like I'm not some random person trying to sell you a GPU stack or something. We're trying to build you a reliable facility. And every single person from our team comes from this space and is a trustworthy leader in that space. And that's something that I want to help to convey to the public that I don't believe most people know right now. Um, in addition to that though, um, I would say a lot more travel. Ah so. And related to that, not domestic travel, God knows, can't really be as much as I've done last year, um, but international travel. We're uh, getting pulled into international markets a lot these days, especially in the world of sovereign AI. Ah. Um, and frankly a lot of just groups economically, investors, builders, uh, real estate companies globally that want to capitalize on this opportunity which is front and center. And it's a once in a lifetime, once in multiple lifetime generation, once in multiple generation opportunity. Um, so getting out there, um, be it Europe, uh, be it in Asia, um, we're really orienting and expanding over the course of the next 12 to 18 months globally and we have some really incredible partners helping us to do that. Um, and then lastly I'd say is um, real estate meetings. Um, so without spending too much time on it, although there will be a lot more announced here pretty soon, um, we're starting to develop out our own projects and sites together with um, partner real estate developers that have come to us and said we can move faster if we move together rather than flexnode selling us a solution and us going to the part, deploy that solution. So um, that has been exciting for us and being able to see um, some rapid scale opportunities that we're taking advantage of. Um, so I will be doing a lot more real estate meetings here in the next 12 to 18 months.

Speaker B: That makes a lot of sense. The way we segment the industry is we have the operators, we have the technology companies, the facilities companies and we for a long time have had construction sitting next to real estate and sitting next to investors for a lot of the reasons that you've articulated, whether it's site selection, whether it's design build, whether it's aec. There's such a tight synergy needed to really make the wheels turn as efficiently as possible, especially with how capital intensive these projects are now.

Speaker A: Yeah, that is such a great point and I'm really glad that you said that Joshua. So the way that we talk about it with partners and also internally especially is that there's three legs of the stool. Um, and only two of the legs really were considered closely before jumping headfirst into this AI factory. Boom. And the third leg is clearly absent. Um, and the three legs are. IT Network, I would say, is 1, 2 is power and LAN and 3 is design and build. And you could probably package supply chain into that as well. But I'd say design build specifically because that's the piece that I think a lot of people are forgot and thought that it was just an inherent truism that we would be able to build efficiently. Right. When ironically. Right. 70% of projects are either delayed or above budget or both. Right. And so, like, the idea that we just were like, well, we have the power land and we have the GPUs, so what could go wrong? Right? And the construction team is like, and I have blinker fluid that I want to sell you asap, Right? So, you know, we. It's a really great point that you have to have those three legs of the stool and they have to be carefully considered early on.

Speaker B: And even the whole idea of the power and the land is changing rapidly as a lot of these projects now are using behind the meter, off grid, whatever you want to call it, alternate energy to make them a reality where I imagine Flexnode is really, really positioned well because of speed, flexibility of being able to deliver the data centers wherever the source, the energy source is going to be.

Speaker A: Uh, absolutely. I think that's where we're seeing a lot of value show itself to our customers, just on the front line, which is the fact that we can redesign and reconfigure in real time, um, based on those alternative energy sources that are being provided on site and where they're being provided on site and at what point they're being provided during the project program. Right. So, you know, we're. We're in this really exciting position because people are asking our competitors to do things that are three steps outside of their wheelhouse because they don't come from the design and build space. Um, and so they have to go back and convey to their manufacturers, to their designer builders, everything that they heard on that call, or they have to pull those partners into the project meeting who. Which then becomes one of those, like, well, if they're here and they're helping us to do all of this, can we just circle back with you guys when we have this all worked out? Because, like, your boxes is a box is a box, right? So we find that that has become, um, a huge advantage for Flexnode and having meaningful conversations with our customers is the ability to respond to those infrastructure related requirements, especially when it comes to energy and energy generation on site.

Speaker B: Andrew, this has really been fascinating to learn about how you've structured the company to be so focused on education and visually being able to explain the story and the narrative and empowering your internal champions and how AEC is a huge, huge enabler of what you're looking to do and the ecosystem relationships that you're growing. If someone wants to follow what you're up to, learn more About Flexnode, is LinkedIn a good place to start?

Speaker A: That's a great place to start.

Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. We'll include links to your profile and the company page and your website as well for anyone that wants to learn more. Really appreciate you joining me today. I've been speaking with Andrew Lindsey, CEO of Flexnode, based in Orlando, now working all over the globe.

Speaker A: Thanks so much. I appreciate you having me.

Speaker B: You're very welcome.

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Speaker B: I N M G.