Inside Leadership: Vadim Vladimirskiy, CEO, Nerdio

Speaker A: Today's guest on the Node podcast emigrated from Ukraine back in the early 1990s with his family and landed in Chicago, USA as, uh, something of a nerd. During high school, he didn't join a retail outlet, he didn't flip burgers. He made a good amount of pocket money climbing under the desks of neighbors, friends and family and getting them connected to this newfangled Internet thing. It turned out he had a good technology skill set. And fast forward 30 years and he is now the founder and CEO of a company that has just been named Microsoft Partner of the, uh, year 2024 for the Americas. Today's guest is Vadim Vladimirsky, and he's got a lot to tell us about the main impetus that drives him to work in technology to help de stress it guys and what it is to be an entrepreneur and, um, to build a company with a culture that lasts. Vadim, welcome to the Node podcast. Now, Nerdio has been on a journey. Um, I'm going to ask you about why it's called Nerdio in a minute, but, um, as of today, Nerdio is a Microsoft Partner of the Year for the Americas, and you can tell us a bit about that as well. But, um, before we get into your backstory, which is quite interesting, and the company's backstory, which is also interesting, give us the elevator pitch. What's Nerdio?

Speaker B: Sure, sure. So Nerdio is a software company, and our mission is to simplify the lives of IT professionals when it comes to managing their Microsoft cloud investments. Uh, so we create software that acts as a control panel or management portal or a single pane of glass, whatever term you want to use, that allows our customers to automate, simplify and, uh, optimize their Microsoft environments and just make their lives easier.

Speaker A: Right, and making lives easier. And I know this because we've already had a conversation. Um, making lives easier is kind of your mission statement personally and I think for the company as well. Right? Yes, it is. Take us back, Take us back away to when you were a mere m. A mere nipper, a whipper snapper, a, a, ah, nerd in the making, as it were. Um, back to high school. I think that's where we can trace the origins of all of this. So tell us about how you ended up getting involved in, let's call it, IT management. What did that look like?

Speaker B: Sure, sure. So, so without aging myself, but by aging myself in, in the mid to late 90s when I was in high school, um, I started being sort of the guy that Everyone came to for IT help, you know, whether it was setting up the new Wind computer, whether it was installing this brand new thing called DSL for Internet home, setting up printing, home networking. I was the guy running around helping people after school after all my homework was done, getting their technology working. And uh, at some point I realized, you know what, there's so much demand, I can actually make money doing this. Not only did I love the work and helping people, but it actually became quite profitable. So I was this know 16, 17 year old making $25 an hour, which was way more than any of my friends were making. You know, even those that were working at some job. Uh, and, and that's really how I fell in love with it and you know, doing it personally and doing it for people I knew. The quality of the service that I provided has always been very important to me back then. Just making sure that the experience people had working with me that I was, you know, very honest with them, that I delivered value. If I didn't, I wouldn't charge them.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker B: So uh, it was sort of the start of my career in IT services initially, which then eventually transformed uh, into IT software, which is what uh, Nerdeo is about today.

Speaker A: Right. And so you're literally in the faces of your customers for a while. And that kind of was a formative education I suppose.

Speaker B: Um, in the faces part of the time and under their desk plugging stuff in the other 50%.

Speaker A: Right. And baffling people with obviously the incredible sophistication of Windows 95 which was and still is really, um, advanced stuff. Anyway, I remember those days very well, which is talk. You know, I think we're in the same kind of age category here. The sound of that modem.

Speaker B: Fun times.

Speaker A: Fun times.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: That's my alarm sound in the morning, that sound. Um, anyway, so after that obviously you learned what it was to actually deliver value through it to people. And I'm guessing this included family and friends. Right. And they're the kinds of people that are really going to hold you to account and make you feel guilty about stuff if you don't deliver. Um, but after that you went on to go and get ah, a proper education and things, I assume. Um, this was all in the States by the way. Obviously you're from Ukraine originally, but um, uh, immigrated. Emigrated into the US at a young age. So this is a long time ago. Right. Um, and uh, what did college and after college look like for you? Yeah, so.

Speaker B: So I'm, I'm based in Chicago. I've Been you know, in Chicago since uh, I moved here from, from Ukraine, uh, in, in the early 90s. Uh, and I did my degree in undergraduate was computer engineering and, and an MBA for my graduate school at a local university here called Northwestern University. Uh, and I think my first job uh, in college, I think my freshman year or something, I decided that uh, full load classwork wasn't challenging enough so I needed to earn some money at the same time. And lo and behold I had a skill that was in demand. Uh, so I started working for an IT consulting company in the Chicagoland area around my classes and assignments that I was doing at school. Uh, and that was sort of my first professional job that I was working for someone uh, helping with IT issues for small and mid sized businesses or SMBs in the Chicagoland area. Uh, and the skill set I've already had some of it obviously learned a lot on the job and from training and certifications but I was able to apply what I learned in high school in helping with networking specifically and with uh, Internet and security and servers and things like that, uh, which was my first job while I was in college. Uh, eventually I partnered up with my bosses at the time for whom I was working. Few years later we started a company together which became an MSP and managed services provider. Uh, that was the beginnings of Nerdio, uh, that had a unique business model of trying to deliver it from a data center using desktop virtualization. At that time it was terminal Services in Windows 2000 and Windows 2003. So for some of you listeners that may be ancient technology. Uh, for some maybe not, but that's what we started with. Uh, and it was a uh, unique concept back then. To be able to not have any equipment in your office, especially for a small business was kind of unheard of. And uh, that's how we got started.

Speaker A: And what kind actually, I mean so we're going back mid 2000s. Ish.

Speaker B: Mid 2000s, yes.

Speaker A: Delivering services into small, medium sized businesses, but services of that type. How many customers did you have? Uh, how easy was it to find customers who were kind of alive to that whole concept at that point?

Speaker B: Yeah, it was the biggest challenge uh, in selling this, right. It was all about convincing them that not having a server closet is a way of doing it. No one's heard of that before. So you know, for the first five to seven years of that business's existence when we were selling it, it wasn't about making the price work, it wasn't about making them confident that we are the right company. To help them. It was about the model. Did they believe in this hosted infrastructure model that we were pitching? Uh, and because we had quite a bit of experience doing the traditional on prem server, doing a server refresh every three to four years, we could very quick, quickly show a side by side spreadsheet of hey, here's what it's going to cost you to go the traditional route and we're happy to do that for you. Or here's this new model where we take all the risk, you don't pay us anything up front. Everything is on a subscription basis. Uh, and we're going to deliver the entire thing for you. Right, the file services and line of business apps and the desktops. Uh, the only thing you needed was Internet connection power and a thin client on your desk. And printers? Printers were still physical and I needed to print on paper that was local. But other than that we handle everything for them through the data center. You know, nowadays that seems like a very obvious way to deliver it, but back then it was anything but.

Speaker A: Yeah, well it's still not obvious to some people actually. I suggest it's true. Um, maybe that's another topic, but. So when did Nerdio fully emerge? You know, you say gestated if you like, within the MSP that you had founded, uh, or were part of the founding of. Um, where did that come from? What was it? Presumably it was built as something that was going to be helpful for you internally in doing what you do, but it's now productized. So tell us about that.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So as I mentioned, we uh, started the predecessor company, the MSP in 2005 I believe it was, had a lot of technical challenges. We had to work around just with what was available on the market for us to use off the shelf. So it, it took probably good several years to get to a stable and, and sort of repeatable business model that was very profitable. Uh, and by, I would call it 2013, 2014, we had a very successful business that had hundreds of customers, you know, mostly in the us, even some international customers and in the UK specifically that was our first out of, oh, you know, off continent customer was in London. Uh, I came to visit them and I remember in 2013 to get them all set up. So, so that was, that was an interesting experience. And then I met a local vc, a venture capitalist who, whose session I attended somewhere and I introduced myself, I told him what we're doing and he said are you looking to raise capital? I'm like no, we're profitable. We've been in business for a few years. We're doing great. I just wanted to sort of introduce myself and learn more about what you do. And he said, you have a very fascinating model. Let's partner up and see if we can productize this thing. Um, so I started thinking, well, what does it look like if you take all of this technology enabled services that we were delivering and create technology that's able to abstract all of the labor and removal of the labor. I'll give you a specific example to go and pitch a customer on this new type of IT model. Uh, and if they say yes, this sounds great, but can I try it before I buy it? Which is obviously something every customer should be asking. It would take about 40 to 60 hours for an engineer to build an environment for them for the very first user to log in and experience what it even looks like. So if you can imagine, that was an expensive investment to get someone to just try your product. So my vision and aspiration has always been, what if we can automate that process? What if we can create some software that can provision this environment, build it completely automatically without any engineering involvement, and give someone the chance to try it. So when I partnered up with MK Capital, that was the goal. The goal was to build software that would automate the provisioning process first, then the ongoing management process, and then add some auto scaling and optimization to it. Uh, and that's how Nerdy was born. Nerdio was just a project inside of the MSP that was designed to automate our services. Uh, and that was the starting point.

Speaker A: Right. But now it's its own thing. Now. At what point did Nerdio kind of emerge fully as a commercial kind of.

Speaker B: Yeah, so a couple more steps in that journey. So we built Nerdio. It was meant to be a provisioning platform for our private cloud, using our data Centers, using the VMware technology stack at the time. And some of my peers in the MSP space saw what we were doing and they're like, that's a great business model. And our profitability was really high. Retention was amazing. Customers were happy. They're like, I want to do the same thing. Can I license your software to kind of do it for us? And I said, we haven't considered it, but sure, let's try it out. So we started selling it to other MSPs and they said, we love everything about it. We just don't like putting customers in your data center because you're kind of a competitor. So what we really would want is to do the same exact Thing, but putting customers in Azure, which is a public cloud that, you know, nobody owns other than Microsoft, uh, so they didn't feel that competitive pressure. So we built a version of the Nerdio product called Nerdio for Azure, which was, as the name implies, our first public cloud version. We had to go a little bit back in a desktop virtualization tech stack because VMware wasn't supported. We were using RDS or remote, uh, desktop services. That was part of the Windows Server operating system and that was our first public cloud product. And that really took off. There was a tremendous amount receptivity from the MSPs who really liked what it was doing, what it was enabling them to do, because nobody could really do desktop virtualization for SMB, excuse me, for SMBs, in the public cloud in a profitable way before we came on the scene with this nerdy for Azure. So my partner and I decided like, hey, this is really where our opportunity is. Let's sell the services business and let's go out and make Nerdio kind of the standalone software, uh, company, which we did. Uh, and we sold the services business at uh, I think January of 2020 or you know, several years ago, sometime in 2020. And Nerdio became, instead of being just a project within the msp, it became a standalone, you know, pure software company helping MSPS build successful cloud practices with desktop virtualization.

Speaker A: Right. So the opportunity and uh, everything else is obviously pretty clear. You've got customers queuing up already before you've even made the thing. And then it seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong, but fortune stepped in in a weird sort of way and said now you're ready to go to market with this thing properly. We're going to have a global pandemic that forces everybody to do everything virtually. Um, I'm obviously painting with a very broad brush there, but you launched uh, mid Pandemic by the sounds of it.

Speaker B: Yeah, so, so we had this MSP product which was designed for service providers to service many small customers. Multi tenant service provider targeted product. Um, Microsoft launched a new version of desktop virtualization called WVD or Windows Virtual Desktop in September of 2019. So towards the end of that year and we were kind of the one ui, the user interface to manage WVD at that time. And we started getting a lot of customers who didn't look like msps coming to us. Right. So until now I built an msp. I knew what the business model is. I know the problems were we were working with other MSPs who were peers of mine. Now we started getting very big global large enterprises coming to us saying, we'd like to use wvd. It's kind of hard to do on your own. There's no automation, there's no ui, you know, can we use your platform, uh, to do that? And we said, you know, it's not really designed for an enterprise. It's built for service providers. So instead of trying to retrofit the product, we built a new product, uh, that, that came to be known as Nerdium Manager for Enterprise. And we launched that product in March of 2020, uh, I think the week that the lockdowns happened. So, uh, we very quickly became busy, uh, because thousands of customers around the world started coming to us because they needed to send their employees to work from home and be as productive as possible, uh, while they couldn't work in the office. So Fortune or not Fortune, however you want to call it, there was definitely some tailwinds, uh, for what we were doing in the market and what Microsoft introduced, which is desktop virtualization as part of Azure.

Speaker A: Yeah, and this, uh, this reminds me of our previous conversation where, where I was sort of asking you fairly rudimentary questions like well, you know, what is ultimately the point of all of this and what is it that you would single out as your kind of central mission? And, and you said, I think, well, look, we're trying to make, we're trying to de. Stress IT guys. We're trying to, we're trying to make, uh, managing it. Being an IT person, I shouldn't say guy, that's a little bit misogynistic. You know what I mean?

Speaker B: IT professionals.

Speaker A: IT professionals. Yeah, we're trying to remove some stress from those, from those folks because they've got plenty. Um, and mid pandemic with an enormous surge of new customers, potentially, it sounds like. Sounds quite stressful. And this is a journey that I'm quite interested in asking you about because what you've ended up doing is working out how to manage, meet that demand quickly by being extremely agile and ending up with a company culture that I think a lot of, uh, people, especially entrepreneurs, um, near the beginning of their journey, would kind of envy by the sounds of it. So tell us a bit about that. First of all, how did you meet all of that demand and manage to keep the product developing to make sure that you could satisfy them, but do so in a way that ultimately didn't undermine your focus on de stressing people? And how do you do that without burning yourself out, without burning all your people? Out, uh, and ending up with a place that people still want to work in.

Speaker B: Man, that's a great question. I mean to answer your question of how did we meet all that demand, the answer would be by putting in a lot of hours. We were putting in 18 hour days. We just sold the services business. We now wanted to be a software company, not a services company. But uh, and all of a sudden we got pulled back into services. I was on team screen shares with customers going from us to Australia to Europe, back to us literally around the clock. Our team, small team at that time, uh, was doing this. Now we worked a lot of hours. Now if you think back to that time, most of us will remember there wasn't a lot else going on. So that was not necessarily a bad thing. Putting in long hours, building a company, helping people around the world was by far not the worst thing you could do. So it was very fulfilling and rewarding. So I would say that that's part one of it. Uh, but the other part is because we were involved in so many deployments with so many customers and different use cases, we learned a lot that normally would have taken years, right? Just imagine learning from customers who are obviously very risk averse. They don't want to try new things, they don't want to experiment, they want to go through testing before production. Here everybody needed to go to production all at the same time. And they just as soon as you can get us live would be when we want to go live. So we learned a lot about what the market needed and we also created this muscle within our organization, our uh, product and engineering team of taking that feedback we were getting from customers and very rapidly converting it into software, converting it into features and sort of delivering on that mission that we wanted to make their life simpler with software, not with other people doing their work for them. Uh, so that created this virtuous cycle of getting feedback, implementing it, deploying it, getting more feedback, implementing it. And we were releasing probably every two weeks with a dozen or two dozen of features every two weeks, which was obviously very rapidly and to this day it's five years later. We uh, are a much bigger organization now with a much larger team, but we still have a very rapid release cycle and a very amazing feedback loop with our customers, learning what their needs are, how they're using our software, what can be improved, where is the next area where they need us to help them and converting it into software and uh, building that out. Now to answer your question about how do we sort of maintain the culture and make sure that I know the people are not burnt out. So as I mentioned during COVID wasn't really an issue. Um, eventually obviously people's lives came back and they needed to be able to, to kind of focus on that as well. Uh, and allowing people the flexibility, uh, with clarity of mission and clarity of what they need to do. Giving them the flexibility to do their job from wherever and whenever they want from the start. That's how we build the company, I think really creates a lot of autonomy, a lot of satisfaction in the job and ah, a very positive uh, culture within Nerdio, uh, that I believe we have and we work hard to maintain.

Speaker A: Yeah. And do you find that you're able to kind of almost export that culture towards your customers as well? Because it must be if you, if I was one of your customers and maybe I will be one day. Um, and I saw how rapidly you were able to move and how uh, agile and connected and engaged you were, uh, that would probably inspire me as an IT leader as well. It's uh, it's a common challenge because we're living in an age where there's, there are kind of IT skills shortages everywhere where everyone's grappling with emerging um, technologies all the time and trying to figure out where on the curve they are and how to be ahead of it and then the curve changes and they're all um. How collaborative do you find that you are able to be with your customers? How direct and conversational with you in that kind of cultural sense are you?

Speaker B: I think we're very direct, probably m, you know, more direct than most and we're deliberate about it. We, we do uh, what we call customer advisory boards all around the world. Our product team flies around to, you know, to, to Europe, uh, and to Australia and, and to India and to all various places around the world. To meet our customers where they are. We host, you know, these multi day events where we learn from them, we keep, we tell them what's coming up, get their feedback. So we have a very amazing feedback loop with customers. Um, so I think that's really important. And our internal culture I think is exported, like you said, to the customer relationship and vice versa. I think the two are a feedback loop for each other. Uh, because customers, when you treat your employees well, they treat your customers well, as they say. Ah, and I find that to be very true in practice.

Speaker A: So working in close partnership with your customers and making sure you're listening to them all of the time is probably one of those lessons that you might share with Other, uh, entrepreneurs, other people who are on a rapid kind of business, uh, development journey if you like, but any other lessons that you might share with people in your, in your spot who have seized an opportunity and want to successfully grow not just a business, but a culture in that business as well to grab that opportunity? Mhm.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, I think I probably have a couple things I would share. One thing that I've realized in my career in starting a couple of businesses and growing them is a lot of times the limiting factor in what you can achieve are your own expectations. Um, and I've sort of stumbled onto this by being young and even stubborn and not having expectations or maybe having unrealistic expectations and actually being able to achieve them and looking back and saying like, how do we do that? Well, we did that because we didn't believe that was a limit, that wasn't something that was going to constrain us. So you know, whether it's in terms of uh, growth or in terms of margins or in terms of, um, you know, rapid pace of innovation, I think I see a lot of peers, um, get very much focused on benchmarks, industry standards, best practices, and they drill into their mind that like, you know, this is what good looks like, this is what great looks like. Uh, and oftentimes that may not be great or good for them, that actually may be below what they're able to achieve. And I've stumbled onto not doing that, not intentionally, I did not know, uh, again just being young and naive, uh, I've always had very high expectations and I tried to deliver relative to high expectations. And then looking back I'm like, wow, we've surpassed what a reasonable expectation would have been and actually achieved something relatively close to what my high expectations were. And ah, that's sort of a policy or that's the way I think about entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs can really achieve a lot. Uh, and what limits them is what they expect is possible. So I think the higher you set that bar, uh, the further you can go. Now that has to be balanced with setting a bar on others. Because if you set an unrealistic expectations of others, uh, that could be a recipe for disaster. So it needs to be balanced properly. Uh, but ultimately I would say that's one of my bigger takeaways from my experience of, you know, 20 years, um, being an entrepreneur.

Speaker A: Yeah. If I may be so bold, it seems to me that the balancing uh, factor may be what appears to be to me when I'm speaking to you, an intuitive grasp of how important real time feedback from your Customers is. And you've been doing it since you were crawling under the desks of your own family. Um, your expectations can be super high when you start meeting those expectations early on. Um, but if they're talking to you constantly, you know how not to stretch that too far or take risks that are just going to be a bit crazy or expect too much from them. Um, and it seems like that's worked out really well for you. Maybe everybody should start out by climbing under desks and listening to um, modems. Anyway, um, just to wrap up, um, Nerdio is going great places. It's not a small thing to be a Microsoft Partner of the Year for the Americas. That's uh, maybe you could tell us a bit more about that actually. Um, that would have been quite recently.

Speaker B: Yeah. So we've been a Microsoft partner, um, not the Partner of the Year winner, uh since the start of the company. We're focused very much in the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft is our closest uh, partner that we have in our business. Uh, we help Microsoft customers be more efficient with their Microsoft technology. So we're very uh, very much connected to Microsoft and Microsoft ecosystem. And for years we've been uh, submitting our name and nomination uh, and reports in order to win the award. For the prior two years we were actually the finalists, uh, but haven't actually won the award. And then this year we uh, were actually selected as the Partner of the Year which is great validation for us that everything we've been doing, the rate at which we've been growing and the value we've delivered to our joint customers in a Microsoft's and Earlios customer. So um, it's a great feeling to be able to be validated by someone like Microsoft, um, to be a Partner of the Year for them.

Speaker A: Yeah, I know that there's ah, not a small amount of work that goes into um, working with Microsoft on the Partner of the Year, um, stuff. Anyway, um, what's next? What do the next five years look like for Nerdio? Apart from obviously rapid expansion until you're operating in every, all of that stuff, uh, what are you aiming for?

Speaker B: So I always struggle with the what's next in five years question because we're in technology and if you asked me five years ago what's next five years gonna look like, I would have absolutely no idea and anything I would have answered would have been totally wrong. So um, all I can tell you is uh, it's going to be different. Right? I mean technology evolves extremely rapidly. We embrace the fact that it evolves extremely rapidly because that's our opportunity. Nerdio's opportunity is the complexity that results from rapid growth and change in technology. And we strive to abstract that growth and make it pros lives easier. Uh, so I think it's going to be bigger, better. Uh, but how bigger and better, I can't tell you. I can't tell you what it's going to be like in five years. I mean, I think AI will have something to do with it, but probably. I can't tell you.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's going to be interesting to find out. Seems like you've built an organization that's quite ready to be nimble enough in responding to those challenges anyway, as they emerge, and hopefully to be entertained by them. Because in the end, what's the point, uh, if you're not? So, uh, I'll wrap up there now. If anybody's interested in, uh, hassling you, uh, on LinkedIn, we'll share your LinkedIn profile.

Speaker B: Great.

Speaker A: Lots and lots of people can come along and try and sell you lots and lots of things, um, which is always good fun, uh, but also, um, we are hoping that you might be able to contribute a little bit of extra content for our website as well. And when that comes along, um, we will be sure to link to that and share that as well. But, uh, until then, Vadim, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today. Um, you're quite an inspirational chap, um, which is, uh, I think that's a phrase that you use quite commonly in both the United States and Ukraine. Um, it's been a jolly entertaining chat and I, uh, hope we get to see you again one time.

Speaker B: Pleasure, Pleasure being here. Thank you so much for having me. It was, it, uh, was a great chat. Talk soon.

Speaker A: Thank you very much.