Episode 16 - Jon Hyman, Co-founder and CTO at Braze

Speaker A: Foreign. Thank you for joining the SaaS Ops leaders podcast with David Pleides. And today my guest is John Hyman. John is the founder and CTO at Braze, newly minted public company. First of all, congrats, John. And second of all, thank you very much for joining today.

Speaker B: Thank you so much. It's good to be here on the podcast.

Speaker A: Can we just start, just maybe quickly introduce yourself and Braze. I have a feeling for our audience specifically. Probably a lot of people know Braze, but if you could just introduce yourself and the company, um, and then we'll jump into it.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So I'm John Hyman. I'm the co founder and CTO at Braze, as David mentioned. And what Braze is, is that we are a modern, comprehensive customer engagement platform. We help consumer brands use data to deliver relevant and memorable customer experiences through personalized messaging. So when I talk about things like personalized messaging, what I mean is that we help them deliver great customer journeys that incorporate personalized emails, push notifications in app messages, text messages, or really any other communication that they're having, one to one with their direct customer. We want to help make sure that it's relevant, it's friendly, it's timely, and then ultimately that it adds value and strengthens the customer relationship.

Speaker A: Like I mentioned, you're co founder and cto. I have only interviewed a couple of other people so far on the podcast that are both CTO and essentially serving the role of CIO or running IT under that organization. Um, can you tell us a little bit about your career though? And where did you start your career? It looks like you got right into it in terms of from an IT perspective. Can you just share a little bit about how you got into it originally and maybe just even how you got to the point of starting Braze?

Speaker B: Sure. So I've been involved with technology ever since I was a young child. I actually started programming when I was, um, about 11 years old and very fortunate to be programming on a Windows 3.1, uh, computer, building things in Visual Basic 3. So for anyone who's listening, if any of that makes sense to you, then, um, we have to be good companions. And so I just got very interested in this. And this was in the mid to late 90s and kind of right when the web was starting to also take off. So I started playing around with building web pages and, and even as a preteen and teenager, just thinking that this was going to be where the future was and building web pages for folks in my community, for my school, by the time I got to high school, I was making webpages for our musical, for our uh, other, uh, extracurricular groups, and for other small businesses in my neighborhood. And so then knew that I really wanted to get into computers and started to learn a lot about how to service them, maintain them, um, even working in my high school at the time in the volunteer technology honor society in terms of helping teachers out with troubleshooting and whatnot. So from a very early age I just took a great passion to technology, to computers, to building. Kind of knew from there that I wanted to be working in the technology industry. So I ended up in college majoring in computer science. And through that, uh, through my years in school, um, also then kind of continuing to work and try to build what would now be called startups, but at the time were just really called, I guess, small businesses. Startups, I feel like, became a great lingo kind um, of right after, uh, Mark Zuckerberg. And then everything kind of took off from there. But um, what I did is I ended up working as an engineer at a finance company. And I originally never thought that I would end up working in finance, thought that I would end up probably going to Google, because again at the time, uh, when this was, they were kind of the hottest company around. But I found that this was a place that could have really interesting technology challenges and problems. And I joined a very small team called Core Technology. So I was working at a place called Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund at the time. And what we were responsible for was any cross cutting departmental technology concern, uh, across the business that we would maintain that. And this had two factors. One of them was we were helping with core Technology for the financial services. So there is a department that needed to manipulate and pull and transform financial data that was done by multiple departments and multiple groups. We'd be responsible for it, but we also were the technology department for smaller organizations that didn't have their own IT teams, their own technology teams. So I'm talking about things like the finance team, our compliance and legal teams, and um, kind of other groups like that, our HR team. And so what was good about this experience is that it helped me really talk to internal stakeholders as customers, both building on the technology side to build the software that they needed, um, say when we were doing the things for like manipulating financial data, but also then to just understand the needs of the business when it came to talking about the, you know, what does the people team need? What is the um, the finance team need? What does the Legal team need. And so really kind of just, you know, built those relationships, kind of learn those needs. And it, uh, was after a couple of years that I was at that company when I just wanted and yearned for being closer to a product. And what I mean by that is when you're at a financial company, there's a daily P and L, and it's great to feel, you know, that you're connected to it. But it's separate from what I call like celebrating the wins of releasing something that your users are using. When you have something that even if you're fixing a bug in a big application like Google Maps or something, you can point to that and say, like, I made this better. I built this. And I really had enjoyed that kind of creativity that I had, um, throughout my life up to that point. And I wanted to kind of get it again. I thought that either joining or starting a technology company would be the way in which to do it. So I ended up quitting my job and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Uh, one day about a month after I quit my job, I called up my friend Bill Magnuson, who had worked with me at Bridgewater, and invited him to this TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon programming competition that was going on. And Bill joined me for it. And we ended up winning, uh, the top honors at that competition and essentially got introduced to a bunch of folks who ultimately would spur us to, uh, meet someone named Mark, who wanted to start a company called App Boy at the time to help mobile app publishers better, um, engage their mobile audiences. So this was 2011, and it may be hard to remember back to 2011, what the mobile landscape was like when you had the most popular app on Android, was essentially a flashlight app, and most popular app on iOS was, um, angry Birds. And, um, there weren't that many apps at the time. And we were projecting that the apps would grow. It's like a million apps in the app stores. There wasn't good app store search, there wasn't Instagram ads. Facebook had no mobile strategy. Hard to imagine that that was only about 10, 10, 11 years ago. And so it was a really exciting opportunity that we decided to take and start the company. And so then we're now kind of the three of us starting this business and, uh, in terms of getting set up with all of the technology needs that we need as a young company, ah, was essentially up to me and Bill, um, and, you know, both, again, one on one pillar is building the product and the engineering of coding and the other side is the kind of, I'll say, the corporate. It. What the funny part is, when we were just three people in the corporate, it was very, very basic. As a bit of a fun fact, we were, um, kind of borrowing office space, and we didn't have any WI fi in the office space. And we bought these WiMax radio controllers, and Bill had actually, like, climbed a ladder to hang them up because we didn't have perception with the devices, uh, kind of at ground level. And, um, we just kind of had it hanging from a ladder providing Internet connectivity to our office back in 2011. And then we. Then after that, we moved into a WeWork and we had a lot better Internet. And then from there it's just been on the up and up. So that's kind of how the start of our company began. Can delve into any number of directions from there.

Speaker A: That's amazing. Yeah, I love, by the way, those stories of the early days. You know, I was talking to our CIO actually, earlier today, and we, uh, were talking about something about our Salesforce environment. I said, you know, I set up Salesforce, you know, please don't. Don't speak badly about my configuration, you know, from 10 years ago. I missed some of that, you know, just the, uh, sticks and glue to put it together, you know, for the WI Fi, like you talked about or. Anyway, you know, when we think about Bridgewater and you made a comment there about aligning with internal stakeholders, and I think that that is one of the. At least in the interviews I've done so far, in the hundreds and hundreds of IT professionals I've worked with, it feels like that alignment and like, truly understanding that is one of the biggest differentiators for people who are successful in IT and not successful or, you know, I guess the. The level of their success. How did you. I know that was a while ago, but how did you go about doing that then? How have you done that? You know, in your role? Of course, you know, you co founder, cto, you have a seat at the table, but how do you. How do you make sure that. That you are aligned, uh, with those internal stakeholders?

Speaker B: One of the things I'd say is to talk to them a lot and form good relationships with them. In particular, they're your coworkers, and so they're happy to kind of share any of the ideas that they have. And so I remember just sitting with them at lunch or pulling them aside and actually pointing at things I was working on and saying, like, is this your idea of what you're looking for in uh, order to just make sure that we were on the same page. Nowadays though, we're a lot more formal in the sense that we want to have a roadmap. For example, we've got an IT roadmap in JIRA and we can kind of plan things a lot farther out. Um, but still we need to be talking to our customers, which are our coworkers, on what they need. And so now when we look at things like office build outs, um, for example, Braze just announced about a week ago that we're going to be expanding into Canada, into Paris, to understand what are the office requirements there. Are we going to be building an office? Is it going to be a wework like space where we don't really have to do very much or is it going to be our own space? Or we're going to need to have a server rack and a UPS and we need to manage the ISP ourself and we need to do a full build out. We need AV monitors and all these things. Um, and so that still just comes from talking and then just trying to write down now what a longer term roadmap looks like.

Speaker A: And one of the things that I again now take the other direction and the end users that I talk to, friends of mine and people here and other companies, you hear a lot that it is kind of uh, they're the no people or it's going to be done, or at least historically that it's going to be done this way, it's going to be done the way that we want it to be done. How do you handle that reputation? I don't know how it was at Bridgewater, but to your point about having those conversations with your coworkers, how do you then prove to them you're going to do, you know, you're going to enable them.

Speaker B: So one of the first things I would just say is that ultimately we're a service organization and we need to think about how we can help power the needs of the business and how the business be successful and build great technology to allow them to do that. So the no really needs to be more of like, uh, how can I best have you achieve your goal? Not a no to your goal, but maybe there might be a no to the implementation of what you want to do, but regardless to make sure that, that we have that bridge there to say, look, I'm totally committed to help you do that. But there's constraints, there's other constraints on timeline, there's constraints on implementation, there's constraints on cost or something like that that we just need to essentially get in sync on. So that's just one of those things, is just really the mindset of how to be. If you have a no, it's got to follow up with a. But just that way we can make sure that we're still helping them do their things.

Speaker A: I like that. I like that a lot. You mentioned the office build out and you know, that's a topic that, of course, in Covid, you know, it really. It changed the dynamic of physical spaces and what those. Well, uh, even having physical spaces or not, you know, what is. What is Braze's stance? What is your stance on that? Obviously you're opening offices. How have you managed that over the last two years? Which is crazy to say, but how have you managed it over the two years? And how do you see that going forward? Uh, for Braze? And I would ask broadly, how do you see that going forward for companies?

Speaker B: Yeah, there's an interesting view on this in that you can look at articles all the time that say that the future of work is going to be more people just getting together and socializing. And is the office a place to get work done? And I look at it as the office is an optimized place to get work done. It is literally built to do work. And we can help make it that way, though. Of course you can help make it that way with collaboration. For us, we had always been a very office forward culture. We help our customers build great relationships with our consumers. And so we want to help ensure that we're building great relationships and strong bonds between our own employees together. And so facets of that include bonding by eating together, we provide lunch to provide a community of our teammates together. And we host a lot of events. And when we went remote, it was actually one of the first times that we had ever really done anything like that. People had worked from home in the past, uh, every now and then, but it really wasn't the majority of our folks. And, um, now we've kind of been thrust into it and we've been able to. We found, like many companies, that our teams are able to flourish. There's still different employees who have. Who hate it or some people who really love it. And we need to balance that. Ultimately, what we want is we want to provide a space for people to still have those bonds. I think that there's some things that you can't get remotely. That connection, that camaraderie, that companionship. I even look at it with just myself that I Used to know all of the engineers in engineering and meet all the people who are joining all the teams that report up to me. And it was easy to remember, know who they are because you just even look at where they sit, say they're sitting with this particular team, um, I can go talk to them about something they're working on. Now it's all slack based and so it's become much harder to. It's much easier to like hit the Dunbar number that 150. I think on remote it's like actually a lot less than that because it's, you know, you don't, you don't get reinforced by all the physical surroundings, um, or see people all the time. So we want to have people be able to come to the offices in order to get work done. Though we are a remote friendly organization. Um, there's, there's been um, people have been able to work remotely since March of 2020 and there's no um, signs of that stopping anywhere. But we want to make the offices a great place for people to come to work. What that means though is that we need to have offices where we have big presences of our employees. For example, we opened up Austin uh, which a couple months um, ago I think we made an announcement around that. And that really came out about from just. Austin is a great city that a lot of our employees wanted to go to. And Covid we saw a number of them uh, enjoyed being there. And it was also one of the areas that we had thought about moving into for a long time. And it just now turned into the fact that we have a cross functional group of people across many different departments who found themselves in Austin made great sense for us to open it up. So because we're there, we want to have an office to make sure that the people who are there, um, can come together and um, have great community. Even though people move to Austin with no expectation we would ever open an office there. But just part of our culture is that we want to make sure that our people are building strong relationships with each other.

Speaker A: I love that. I love that. I, I'm with you on that too. You know, I, I've been pre Covid I was in office every day for every employee in either New York, Atlanta or San Francisco. I mean that was our, those were our three physical locations and our offices and you know it was, that's what we were about. And I, I think we went through a similar journey where we said when we went remote, of course we were able to go remote very quickly. But I have been convinced, let's say that great work can be done from anywhere. I am convinced of that. You said something that I couldn't agree with more, which is great. Relationships need to be built in person over zoom. It's more transactional I think is the best way that I can describe it. Because someone is on zoom and you know, you're not going to just pass them. Sit down at lunch. I mean that was my favorite time of the day is to sit down at lunch and see all the people in the, in the kitchen. So I'm with you. You know, so that, that's interesting that you continue to open offices in this with the long term view of what you just said.

Speaker B: Right. And we're, and we're following all government regulations around code in every jurisdiction that we're in. But the offices are available as a resource and we're going to make them places where you can come and get focused. And there are also people who want that separation that they come to work saying, look, I want to be in an office and do my work. If I want to go home and be, you know, be my uh, you know, my home self there and not, not be working from home. And um, I totally respect and understand that and I think that we can provide that to folks.

Speaker A: Yeah. So let's go to the next part of this distributed work and I. What I know of Braze and your team, I think you've always provided an amazing technology stack to your users and, and uh, but let me ask you in this, in this time, like how what's your philosophy, your mindse. It relates to the technologies you bring to your users. Is it kind of a. I don't want to say homogenous because of course you have a bunch of SaaS apps. But I'm just saying are you really focused on like one, two or three platforms or is it a truly best of breed environment? Like how do you think about the technologies you bring to your users?

Speaker B: So think about it in two different ways. One is there's the organic growth of the applications that we use and then they'll say the inorganic growth which is driven primarily by our IT vision. The organic growth is one that's very easy to understand. Where it's that now that we live in this SaaS based world where there's just so many different specific SaaS companies managing any aspect. People discover SaaS businesses and then start to use them for their teams. You have salespeople who find these recording tools or sales tools that they find very exciting and interesting. And that they think is going to improve their productivity. You find people in marketing who want to do their project management with certain things. So they want to use these online spreadsheets or online databases in order to keep track of their leads or something that they're working on. People won't organically find these SaaS companies that they're starting to work with. And what we then try to do in it is identify what are the popular things that people are doing and think about, should we be bringing that across the entirety of the organization? If we find that there's 100 people who have a license to one particular, I wouldn't say license, but have logged into through Google, a particular SaaS software, we can then look at and say, okay, should we be offering this up to the company? And so that's the organic growth, the inorganic growth then comes from us thinking about how we can make, uh, the lives of our employees better. And one of the things, one of the directions we look at just, that's easiest to understand just in that remote world is the fact that everyone's remote now. And like we have a thousand different WI FI networks that everyone is connecting to. So when we think about security, it used to be a lot easier in the sense that we had our access points or offices. Those are the ones that we're securing. And of course people would travel, but now everyone's working full time essentially from their home, WI fi, a coffee shop, a hotel, an Airbnb, et cetera. And so we need to secure all of those. And so then we think about what are the network security tools that we need to bring to the company? What about how we can improve single sign on, um, you know, from Google and make sure that we are able to enforce two factor auth for everything. How do we understand that, like what all the SaaS products are that our employees are using? And then how do we bring single sign on to things like laptop logins and uh, employee provisioning such that everything is now unified together, you don't have different accounts. And so we work on those two parallel tracks essentially to bring the technology into organization at the IT level.

Speaker A: So you said, you said something there about the inorganic growth is to make the lives of our employees better. Uh, what my question to you is, is that something you've always believed, Is that a more recent. I feel like I've seen a surge of that in, in Covid in distributed, where I, the number of people talking about that and IT leaders is more than I've ever heard. Is that something that's kind of always been a philosophy of yours is that, you know, moved up the list I guess of priorities for you.

Speaker B: It's always been a philosophy and a lot of that has been driven by individual recommendations. So I'm very open to things that people in the IT department or people with IT knowledge, you know, bring to us as ideas of things that we should be experimenting with. And one of those examples is for example bringing the single sign into the laptop, um, logins essentially that people had two different logins. Then someone said look, did you know we can buy a connector, uh, and we can now uh, just be using our single sign in service to log into our laptops. And that's something where it's like great. I'm really excited about that and happy to bring that forward. So we definitely have always been open to people kind of bringing these new ideas that are going to improve productivity. The thing about this that I'll just kind of comment on since I mentioned the word productivity is we're a tech company that has a lot of very highly paid employees. If we can improve their productivity by a, uh, small percentage, it's tremendously worth it. Bill and I have never nickel and dimed around say getting better laptops for engineering or uh, spending some money in order to get a service because you're paying people a lot of money and you want to get an extra 2% productivity because they have a software on their laptop that lets them do window management better or environment management and use keyboard shortcuts in a better way or you're doing something that allows them to use some SaaS products so they can whiteboard better. It's just a no brainer.

Speaker A: The philosophy and having that philosophy for this whole time that you've been in it I think speaks to the forward thinking, cutting edge way you've operated. Because to me I have seen that move up people's list in the last two years in a way that every IT person I speak to recently, they tell me if I ask them their top three priorities, one of them is employee experience. I mean it is on everyone's mind. And I look at us too, your company, most companies at this point, people are the biggest expense. And also we're in a market that is obviously very hot from an uh, employment perspective. And when you put those two things together, I believe that over time employees are going to be, will select the companies they go to. It's already starting but I think it's going to be a top thing. It's going to be culture, it's going to be vision and it's going to be what is the technology stack that I'm going to get delivered as an employee I've already had you think about. My kids are six and eight now. Two boys. They're in school because of COVID They got laptop. Well the older one got a laptop. He's using Google Slides and Google this thing and Gmail. He is going to come into the work world in 10 years, you know 15 or whatever it is, 13 years and he's going to say do I get to use Gmail? Do I get to use a Chromebook? Do I get to like you know, do I get to use uh, whatever the devices are? Obviously it's going to be very different then. But my point is that I believe that the technology stack for end users becomes a differentiator for companies in recruiting. Uh and the mindset that you're talking about, people want to come work somewhere like that.

Speaker B: I think that's absolutely right. I used to joke saying that when I was um, seeing the huge increase in Apple computers go this uh, was when I was in college Macs became just extremely popular and I was running a Linux machine in college which wouldn't surprise you based on the background I gave of myself. I took an IBM Lenovo laptop and I formatted it and put Linux on it. But I saw this big rise in Macs and I was just then when I got to work at Bridgewater I, we were using um, Windows started on Windows XP and I kind of joke that like all of these, these college students are going to be reloading on Apple devices their whole life and now with the iPhone and the iPad and X and they'll get to, they'll get to work and then they'll be on the Windows machine or something like that and they're m going to have to get used to that. But, but the reason I also kind of say that is I think that you're right in that businesses that say things like we give you whatever setup you want are going to have a competitive advantage. Uh, we have a uh, it's not really a joke but um, a pitch in our security team that we don't have any Windows endpoints at braze and that's a sales pitch to someone in this security professional and, and so I think that, but it is to be able to say to someone like we're going to get you a ah, great top end MacBook Pro M1 chip to do your work on and you're going to be able to work from Home. And that is going to be a big competitive advantage, um, that you're going to see kind of go up there. Uh, another coworker of mine joked that not doing work from home on Mondays and Fridays in the future will ultimately be like not offering dental insurance. That it's really going to be a competitive baseline to be table stakes.

Speaker A: Well, I think when you see banks and financial institutions starting to talk about that exact thing, come back to the office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, then to your point, then it's a necessity, uh, for everyone to do. What do you think is the biggest change? You talked about some of it here, but that got me thinking about the biggest change you've seen in your career in corporate IT either in the role in the technologies, just what's the biggest change change you've seen?

Speaker B: The immediate thing that it just pops into my mind as you say, that is just the importance of video conferencing. And what falls from that is the rapid evolution you need to support a good video conferencing and AV setup in your office. There's a few different dimensions to it. One is even when before COVID happened, the challenge of getting our AV set up for corporate all hands once we started having offices in other locations was a big enough challenge as it was because for us, we would had our New York headquarters and that was where our AV room was set up. But we then tried to do an event in our London office and I remember streaming it to all of our other offices and they literally had a laptop on a table, it was on a chair by a table in a corner angle to try to, um, stream that out to our other offices. It was just an internal event. Fortunately, it wasn't the webinar or anything. And it really just kind of came to. We said, gosh, we need AV everywhere, don't we? Because we're now going to want, as we're growing, and we weren't just 10 people in London now, it was 50, 60 people. We're likely be doing more of these events and we need a space in order to do it. So AV became. But then with the COVID kind of setup, you know, we're thinking we're just hybrid forever now. And every meeting is a video conferencing meeting. And every meeting that needs to have great cameras, it needs to have good audio equipment and good angles and a way for you to see the presenters, see the presentation, and also see your remote staff. So that way you can provide, uh, an equitable experience to your remote attendees. And for us, that's been where the bulk of our of physical IT work has been besides the office build that. So I mean obviously every office building out, we're trying to plan for great conference room experiences and great virtual experiences. But like we have been ordering new cameras, new sound bars, new TVs and new audio equipment. And this also, this landscape's changing very rapidly. So the hardware that we bought three years ago is now out of date because there's all this great sound isolation things that are coming out. There's intelligent cameras that move and pan and zoom and so um, this is a space where we need to wrangle it better and just kind of stay on top of it to deliver just a ultimate kind of best in class corporate experience for folks who are at the office but then corresponding and meeting with their remote coworkers, maybe taking that

Speaker A: piece or looking at other technologies. Where do you see things going over the next 10 years? 50. What do you think is going to happen? What are you most excited about as it relates to the technology that we're bringing to our users?

Speaker B: Well, one thing I think is that collaboration is just going to continue to increase. We have tried doing things like the Google jamboards, but haven't kind of found that sweet spot of them actually being very viable.

Speaker A: We've also been, I have one in

Speaker B: the background, Dave used to use it

Speaker A: a lot for myself. But we've tried to do it to your point, cross office and it never happened.

Speaker B: One of the things that essentially has died for me has been whiteboarding since COVID started and I've tried a lot of things. I got an iPad and Apple pencil and I started trying to whiteboard, um, with that. Um, I've tried some SaaS software, there's a lot of online whiteboard. You can just Google that. There's some big names that raise a lot of money and it hasn't kind of worked out for me. I think that it's worked out for some teams. I've definitely been in some meetings where people have referenced their boards and it's been useful. But that collaboration I still like maybe hasn't cracked it for everyone versus in the pre Covid world we literally go to the whiteboard 30 times a day. Almost, uh, half the conversations I'd say you'd be talking to someone about a problem and we had whiteboards everywhere. So we just start talking about it and drawing it. I think that that's something that is going to allow us to get more productivity out of folks that we just kind of need to improve. So I don't know if that's like 10, 15 years from now, but something is going to solve that problem, I feel like in a better way than it's working right now. Maybe it's the metaverse, maybe that's what it's.

Speaker A: I was just going to ask you, uh, what you think about the metaverse. I was just going to ask.

Speaker B: The challenge of us being in offices isn't going away. The office is not dead. Um, people want to come together and people who think the office is dead. I feel like already had the social and political and work authoritative capital to be able to work anywhere and still have the relationships, don't have the opportunity, uh, and still be able to operate and execute as well. I think it's a lot harder for folks who didn't have that. So the office is still going to be very, very key. Uh, improving that hybrid collaboration, I think is, uh, a big challenge.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think the whiteboarding, I mean, I would say 80% of my meetings included a whiteboard pre Covid and now zero do. Uh, and I feel less collaborative, less productive. I don't, you know, I feel like the whiteboard really more creative, frankly, with the whiteboard. I don't know. You know, it definitely is the thing that I'm missing. We have tried, to your point, every imaginable software and every imaginable setup and nothing, it seems cool. And then you use it like this is really not what it's made out to be. I like the products. It doesn't work for me. Um, and I agree that has to get solved. Uh, I think that has to because it's part of the working through the questions and the answers and just is doing that together. The couple meetings I've had in my office since COVID and we get on this jamboard just one sided and you know, and write on the whiteboard in the room. I'm like, man, I feel like we just did that in five minutes. It would have taken a, uh, one hour zoom, um, call. So I find myself drawing on paper and holding it to the, to the, to the camera. You know, when you think about your career and very successful career at that, and you go back to that person who's, you know, starting their first job out of school and has chosen the path that you chose. What advice would you give yourself back then from what you've learned?

Speaker B: I think I would have both social and technical advice to give. The social side would be to ensure that you're always listening to your consumers and users and building great relationships with them. I Think that that's something that is hard to replicate and hard to catch up to if you kind of don't, don't kind of get that from the beginning. And just what I mean by that is that, like, you know, a lot of people know the person that, like, everyone kind of goes to to kind of get advice and talk to. Like, yeah, I don't want to say, like, you need to be that person, but just those people kind of get set. And you want to make sure that, like, you're able to, you, uh, know, have the relationships where people know what your level of expertise is, that you're viewed as an authority on something, and that you're able to then credibly talk to people about what their needs are. Because if they're coming to you when you go to them, that's going to mean that they're going to give you a lot of great, honest feedback and they're going to be, uh, just kind of your best, um, people to hear from and they're going to give you just really good opinions. So, um, I think it's reciprocal on the technical side, I would say to ensure that all the things you're doing are, are, to the best of your knowledge, going to be what will ultimately add a lot of business value. The way I relate this the most is not so much on the it side, maybe some on the engineering side, where it's very easy to work on something and get excited and build something, only to either have customers not use it, um, or to realize that it's not going to work, throw it away. That happens often. And all of that time could be spent doing things that can be a little more productive. So it's very easy to spin your wheels, uh, getting excited and trying to work on something if you aren't exactly sure that it's gonna work out. But you can just have high conviction sometimes you're gonna have high conviction, you're gonna try and it's gonna fail anyway, and that's fine. But just asking yourself, is what I'm doing the best thing I should be doing right now at this point in time? Because I think that my younger self spends a lot of time and energy doing things that ultimately didn't work out and aren't here, uh, in the company that we are today?

Speaker A: I ask everyone this question and, uh, I have not heard that piece of advice yet. And I appreciate that even though I am not technical, even though I haven't gone through that part of it. What you just said, I think is I could even use that for my own. The business, Anyone. It's relevant to anyone. Because actually understanding what actually moves the needle, what actually is going to be impactful, what's critical. That skill took me a really, really long time to learn. And I think about that where I would work until midnight. I had no family. I would work until midnight doing something where, when I reflect, it was useless work. I mean, it was just. I thought it was an important project, but in real life, it was. If I had spent one hour doing something else, it would have been much better than the six hours I spent working on that project and trying to really make sure you understand that and, and understand to your point what's critical, what's important, what's going to move the needle, what's going to be critic. And that takes time, but that's great advice. Well, listen, John, this was awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today. Any final thoughts? Anything else you want to add in?

Speaker B: Uh, no, I think that is, uh, a great conversation. I appreciate you having me here and, uh, look forward to talking again.

Speaker A: Great. Thank you. Thanks again to John for joining me on today's episode. And huge thanks to you for listening to the entire episode all the way through. If you liked what you heard, you can subscribe to SAASOPS leaders with David Politis on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. And if you want to learn more about SASOPS, please visit sasops.com thank you.