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Welcome to "Visionary Voices" the podcast where we dive into the minds of business owners, founders, executives, and everyone in between.
Each episode brings you face-to-face with the leading lights of industry and innovation.
Join us as we uncover the stories behind the success and the lessons learned along the way.
Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder or just starting your business journey, these are the conversations you need to hear - packed with visionary voices and insights.
Let's begin.
So welcome on today's episode of Visionary Voices.
Can you give us a top level view about what it is that you do right now and your journey
so far?
Yeah, for sure and nice being with you today.
I'm happy to spend the next, you know, little bit about a little amount of amount of time
with you.
Yeah, I'm part of a boutique advisory firm called True North Advisory.
We're five partners have all been at the CXO level and have built startups from scratch
all the way to going public and being acquired.
So we're trying to bring a little bit of that knowledge to
A lot of the clients that we deal with, usually I'd say on the startup phase of their
journey as they want to get their product market fit, get their messaging, fundraise, and
then build out the company.
What is it like to go from five people in a garage to really start growing the company and
next thing you know, you're in now a thousand folks.
You've got a whole HR department and you're trying to build that out.
So we really try and take that wisdom out to our clients, but in a real hands-on like
environment at True North.
Amazing.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a lot we can definitely dive into from there.
I would love to zoom a little bit more into, into your journey to begin with.
So, I mean, why did you get into the business world at the very beginning?
Why decide to work in a startup and go down that route rather maybe than the traditional
corporate route?
And also what projects did you work on during that time as being an entrepreneur?
Yeah, no, that's a great question.
So, you know, I've had an interesting journey.
I actually was born in Montreal, Quebec or Montreal, Canada.
And I spent most of my formative years there, went to college and for the first 24, 25
years, that's where I thought I'd have the rest of my career.
I actually worked in politics and we lost the election.
And when you lose the election, guess what?
You lose your job.
That's kind of the way it works.
And long story short, I had a friend that I met in the Boston area who was going to
Harvard and they were building out a company and they said, can you come and join us?
It's a hot new startup.
It's unified communications before it existed.
You could have your one number that could bring multiple devices.
It could be the same number for your fax when we had that to create conferencing.
It was basically an office on the go.
And I came in, I actually got in on a TN visa, which was a visa for a year minus a day,
across the border, came to work, started off as a systems engineer on the tech side and
quickly moved to the go-to-market side, which I really loved.
I managed emerging markets for them, Asia and Latin America.
And then that same crew that had built this company called Priority Comm Management, we
started a company called Acme Packet, which in the early days of voiceover IP,
There were real issues around security and quality of service.
And we built a network element that didn't even exist called the session border
controller.
And I was there from the ground up.
Actually, we started in our CEO's kitchen.
It was kind of crazy.
And in fact, my dad's passed, but had he been still alive, he would have gotten to see
what a great journey it was.
you know, my dad said, you're crazy.
Like you have a great job.
Finally, you finally making progress.
You're going to.
Hold on, because let me understand this.
You're to quit your job, give any money you've made back to your friend as an investment
and make half of what you're currently making.
It doesn't really sound like a good idea when you put it that way.
But we went through a 14-year journey.
I was a chief operating officer there.
We built a company that ultimately went public, built it out to about 1,000 people, over
$500 million in revenue.
ultimately sold it to Oracle for about 2.1 billion.
So it was a real incredible 14 years and then went on to be CEO of a couple of mid-size
companies and held executive roles at companies like Brotsoft and Avaya and others.
And so that's been the journey for, call it close to 30 years, but Acme Packet was really
what allowed me to.
understand what a true startup is like from its infancy all the way through the high
growth phases.
That is just incredible.
think, you as most entrepreneurs listen to this, that's what they want to aim for, right?
Is where they have that startup, they scale it up, you know, maybe they exit as well to a
very high degree, right?
It's not like a small company.
You actually grew this to a big company.
So, I mean, I'd love to dive into a few different facets of kind of the startup life, I
guess you could say.
So the first one you mentioned earlier was product market fit.
So in those early times when you were building out these startups, how does one go about
firstly,
at the getting product market fit and testing that thesis and iterating that product.
Because I think the biggest thing I see a lot of the time, especially with young
entrepreneurs, is we always build something that we think the market needs, but rarely is
it what the market actually needs.
So how do you go ahead and actually identify that and build out properly?
And what does that structure look like?
Yeah, I have a view on this.
pretty strong.
And one is, you you have to obviously build a product that's solving a major problem, at
least in the tech world and the network that people are going to want.
But then what you can't do is think that you're smarter than the market.
And I see a lot of companies do that where they build it and they're like, no, we have the
right solution here.
The market will finally adopt.
It's not really the way it works.
And to give you a real example,
At Acme packet, we built a session border controller.
And early on, we believe that certain protocols were going to be the way of the future.
And the protocol we adopted was SIP.
And so what I did is I went out to the market and I met with some of the top players like
Telecom, Italia, AT &T, Verizon.
And I did this on a global basis.
And what I came back with was SIP will eventually be where the world is going.
with voiceover IP protocols.
But for the immediate future, there's a need to adopt the legacy protocols that included
at the time, not the more people with acronyms, but with H3323 and MGCP.
And our ability to understand that nuance and put that into our product really gave us
early wins that no one else had.
The other thing we figured out as we went to the market is for sure they wanted to have a
solution that scaled to
you know, millions and millions of calls, but it was the early days.
What people really wanted was a lot of feature functionality that could mimic the
telephony world and give us a rich product and scale could come later.
And so we did those two things and it put us in a position to win key accounts before
competition.
and how do you know that?
Will you adapt to the market?
How do you adapt to the market is you actually go out.
Sounds trivial, but you
or easy, you go out and meet with clients.
Like you go spend the time with them, right?
Like go see them, go sit down with the, you know, CTO or the director of engineering at
Verizon or AT &T or Telecom Italia or British Telecom and you know, invest that time.
Now that being said, that's where fundraising comes into play because you need to have
money to go see these clients and spend time with them.
You know, we're now at the days of, you know, we can do a little better with, uh,
with unified communications like Zoom or different platforms.
But in the day, you really had to be out there.
And I still think to some extent, being out, meeting with the clients, you get a lot more
when you're breaking bread with them than trying to do it virtually only.
Yeah, no, completely agree.
I mean, you just need to ask the questions.
And I think in the early stages as well, when you're trying to build things out, it's
always, you know, just think you know what's right overall, but ultimately you do need to
go ahead and actually ask those questions to get the things moving forward in the right
direction.
Okay, so product market fit, that's one element of it.
And then I guess moving on to building out a team.
So, I mean, you mentioned that you kind of had a team of just a few people and you scaled
all the way to like a thousand.
So.
What was that process like?
And I guess what challenges did you have along the way and what advice do you have for
people looking to scale their company?
Do they hire fast, write in high early, or do they wait as long as possible?
What tips do you have in that realm?
Well, first, think culture becomes one of the most important things.
So you need to hire a team, especially initially that ideas are flowing, disagreements are
welcome in a positive way, right?
Not negative, in that you can really build a team that wants to work together.
The other thing is build a team that where your weaknesses are someone else, it's their
strengths.
Often I do a lot of pitch competitions that I judge, whether it's in school, I went to
back home at McGill or around here in the Boston area.
And just because you're the founder and have a great idea, doesn't mean that you have to
be the one presenting at a pitch competition if you're not the best public speaker.
It's okay.
And I think that ability to figure out how your team matches.
And if you look at the big companies that we look at that are successful, we only need to
the top names like the Steve Jobs and others.
But if you actually dig a little deeper, like even at the sales forces of the world, like,
or the Facebook's like there's three or four core people that have an expertise that can
build out and, and, really make the company successful.
So, you know, you really need a good operational person.
You need someone who's really good at go to market and sales, someone who's a great
technologist and someone who's really good at fundraising.
Sometimes someone could do two, three of these roles, but very often they're broken down
in at least two or three.
And if you do that and find the right folks, you could build on.
And then I think it's, you when you build a team out, it's figuring out people who are
willing to do the impossible, right?
With startups, it's do it now and do the impossible because it's not easy and most people
fail.
So do you have, find people with that energy?
And then, you know, a hard lesson learned is when to let people go.
And when you do a startup, everyone feels like family.
And at times, you know, it's
The journey has ended for both folks and you can't do it.
So you just keep them and keep them and keep them.
And you keep people way too long.
And I won't, remember one of my former mentors and God rest his soul.
And, and, you know, he, he put it to me this way.
He's like, you're not, you're doing the rest of the company of this, this favor.
You're doing the board and the shareholders of this favor by keeping people who are no
longer, able to do what you need them to do.
And when you started thinking about it,
It's time like and what we usually do.
My advice is wait way too long.
We you always wait too long.
Once you know it, you know it.
It's just time to move on.
Yeah, no, no, definitely.
And I think my biggest takeaway from what you were just saying there is that initial team
that you build, that executive team is making sure that's a well balanced team, I guess
you could say, and making sure you have the top talent in those arenas, which can pick up
from everyone's weaknesses in a way.
And so you have, you have that balanced team rather than just charging in, you know, by
yourself.
I mean, how does one go about and actually find that first, first few team members, right?
And people that are at the top of the game that
you can trust as well throughout this whole process.
Like how do you go about and form that team?
No, I think that's a tough one.
My experience has been, you know, just having worked and been friends with some of these
folks since I was 19, 20 years old.
So it's a long trusted relationship in many cases.
But, but I bring it back to culture.
You have to have that culture where there's a healthy environment where you could debate,
you know, critical ideas early on, like our CTO at Acme Packet.
You know, if he does listen to this, I think he'll get a chuckle.
Him and I would go at it very often.
We saw the world at times.
really differently, but we usually ended up at the right place.
And that environment is critical.
How you find them.
I think that's where the leadership comes into play, right?
Where the CEO of the company and I've had both roles has to know who, know, what the core
team is going to look like.
And that's really your job and not get too influenced by folks from the outside on, you
know, this person is, you know, a friend, like.
make sure you hire them because you have the success of the company and the shareholders
as your priority at all times.
Yeah, I know that that makes so much sense.
And what you said about culture as well, again, makes so much sense.
I guess as you scale that company though, how did you maintain that culture or how did
that culture shift over time?
But how did you still maintain that positive culture within it?
Because obviously, A Thousand People is such a large company, the scaling problems you
might have with the team members is, you know, there's quite a lot of things that could
pop up.
So how did you figure that one out?
Well, there's no question it became more difficult, but I think some of the things that we
did were very hands-on work.
We continued to ensure that we would go visit the local offices.
Simple stuff like when it came to holiday parties, if we couldn't bring everyone from all
over the globe, we had three or four.
We had our holiday party in Asia, in Europe, in Latin America, because maybe we couldn't
bring all.
because we were global, couldn't bring everyone in, but we would have quarterly all
hands-on meetings where the executive team would present to the company and answer
questions.
We had office hours that anyone could come to any of the executives and say, hey, what's
going on?
And they were real, like, you know, no one felt like that they were gonna be, you know.
punished by asking difficult questions if they didn't want to ask it in person.
There was always one individual at our company at Acme and others who was always willing
to ask questions out loud.
Well, that's great, but that's not meant for everybody.
But really making people feeling included and also included in the wins.
So at Acme, we tried to make sure that everyone had equity, for example, everyone had
stock options.
as culturally, when you were going to have an exit and you were going to win,
There's no question that the senior management was going to make more.
I don't think that's a secret.
It's out in the public domain to see today.
So not much you can hide.
But everyone felt they had a part in the success.
And I think then it's treating people fairly and giving people an opportunity to be
successful, not only financially, but in their careers and seeing growth.
And we tried to hire and promote.
you know, internally as best as we could when it came to promotions.
You can't always, but we would look there first.
And I think people see that and culturally it motivates people to be a part of the team.
But, but, but the hands-on part of creating events, I mean, to give you one example, you
know, at Acme Packet, we had the Acme Packet band.
I was a drummer.
We played frankly all over the world where we had sales training and everyone like would
ask us when you
When are you gonna play?
I'm not even sure we were that good, to be honest with you.
But you know, that was part of the culture.
That's what we built in.
Yeah, that's incredible that you managed to still do that even after the company was
scaling and was really big, you still maintain those core principles of that culture that
you created within the team members.
So I think that's really cool as well.
And then looking into the work you do here when you're working with all these startups and
everything and the startups that you've been involved in, I guess, how can someone improve
the odds of their startup succeeding?
because obviously the odds are very much stacked against people when they start a
business.
So from your experience, what have been the common traits of the successful startups?
And is there any lessons that people can take away from that if they're looking to get
into entrepreneurship or they currently have a company of their own?
funny you mentioned that because I actually do a presentation that I do at a couple of
classes at colleges and it's titled improving the odds because that's all you can do,
right?
You know, there's more failures than there are successes.
So what can you do to improve the odds?
And I think you touched on some of these, right?
The ability to like, do you have a product or a solution or an offering that people are
willing to buy?
If no one is willing to buy it at any level, then you probably have an issue.
Hmm.
my first test.
You know, the other part of it is you want to be in a market where there's some
competition and high growth, right?
That there's a lot of potential.
You know, if you're by yourself and it's a small little market, probably question what's
going on.
And then have a sense of what type of company you're looking to build.
Are you looking to build a family like practice?
That's okay.
Are you really looking to build
a true startup because if you are then you're going to need funding.
You're going to need to go fundraise and get the money to be able to build the business in
a way that enables you to grow.
always see some CEOs are really proud that they haven't raised money.
I'm like, well, let's think about this.
If you don't raise money and you build a company that's worth a million, that's okay.
But how about if you raise 10 million and you build a company that's worth three billion?
mean, let's figure out what
And it's, there's some judgment here, but if you're really trying to build that, like
think of what is meant, what you need for growth.
And you're always going to need more money than you think if you want to build a
successful startup, it's just, it just is.
And, and the other we touched on on improving the odds to me is really building a good
team.
Like that team, you know, and that culture, the ability to communicate effectively, to
have healthy debates and to be smart enough to.
to listen to your clients and pivot when you need to.
Like that example I gave you with protocol, that's like, if we hadn't had that ability to
pivot and had been like headstrong, most of the companies in our space went belly up, you
know, three years in, because they didn't adapt.
I think improving the odds and we try and work that, you know, with the startups that we
work with today is, and have a sense of urgency, be out there.
Like when you're a startup, it's do it now and leave your ego at the door.
as well, right?
Because you might have the title of CEO or COO, but you've got to be able to do anything
that's called for.
it's travel or whatever it is, just get out there and do it.
Yeah, yeah.
Do what you need to do to make it a success, right?
Yeah.
It's interesting what you mentioned about the funding point of view, because I've been
hearing so many mixed opinions on this, especially recently with technology being like AI,
Is well, you can have a team of five developers, right?
For the price of one, because you can have more guides programming an AI, for example.
So a lot of startup entrepreneurs now, they're saying about just bootstrapping it.
And I'm seeing it lot of it on LinkedIn.
And I even had some guests on here who...
mean, it scaled his new software company to about 4 million a year, completely
bootstrapped right now.
And obviously he's trying to take it further.
So is your opinion on it more like, if you wanna really go far and go far as quick as you
can, then you just need that cash, right?
You need to be able to build out the systems or operations, the people to get to that
point.
But does that all just depend on the end goal that you've set for yourself?
Yeah.
And that's where I gave the sort of the two bookends, right?
Of the family business.
Maybe it's not a family business, but you're happy with, know, if it's 4 million bucks a
year and it goes to six the next year and 6.5 the year after that, there's truly nothing
wrong with that.
But I think if you want hyper growth, like I'm on an independent board of a company called
Clerk Chat that's doing conversational messaging, leveraging AI.
They just raise capital funds from a company called Race Capital.
They raise about seven and a half million dollars.
know, the ability, what do you do with that money?
Well, you can hire more developers due to growth.
They're dealing with tier one carriers all over the world and large enterprises.
You know, that takes travel.
That takes going out to see the executives.
That's, know, building new AI functionality into the product at a rapid pace.
Yes, AI is out there, but everyone has access to AI as well.
So, you know, how do you manage that growth?
if you want to, you know, the other thing, and this is a personal opinion, like the world
has gotten smaller.
Like, why should you limit your market to only one particular market?
You should be able to go global pretty quickly.
Well, if you do, then you probably, depending on your technology, do you need data centers
somewhere else?
You know, all of that comes into play.
That comes with needing some capital to accelerate your business.
Yeah, and that does make sense, especially if you want to expand as you said, right, into
different countries, into different areas, you just need the capital.
And you're completely right is, well, everyone does have access to AI.
So the differentiator could still be the cash, right?
The cash that people have to inject into the team and the systems or whatever that they're
trying to do.
So I guess zooming into the work that you do now from the consultancy point of view, like,
what does that look like?
What do you work on on the day to day?
And what type of startups do you work with as well?
Yeah, I mean, we mainly work with tech startups in what I call the customer experience
space.
You know, one company like company called Journey, they're doing work around improving the
experience that you'd have at a contact center by leveraging biometrics.
There's another company that we're dealing with called that right now is doing work around
how to improve your
contract management as your company and you have like tons of contracts, everything comes
in, comes in, you do, you know, an upgrade.
What does that look like contractually, the obligations you have, how do you streamline
all of that?
So we're doing work in all those different areas of tech and what, you know, what we
usually start off with, and in fact, just before I was getting on this call, work with one
of the companies on their messaging.
What does the messaging look like?
Can we make it more crisp?
Is it really answering the questions that the clients have?
Some easy stuff, which is like, I'm a big believer that people listen at the beginning,
they don't listen in the middle and they listen at the end.
is everything popping at the beginning to really gain their interest and get them to
understand why they need to do it now, then move to outreach.
So we're old, so we have executive relationships across the board, right?
If you wanna get.
to the executives of a company like Avaya, Genesis, or Verizon, we just finished a call
with Verizon today, like we know these execs, we can help bridge the gap.
But that being said, you know, there has to be value.
Like I'm not gonna go to a tier one carrier like Verizon or AT &T or Lumen without having
value.
So what we bring to these companies is we help them on the messaging on how they should
grow the business.
We're happy to bring it to the execs of these companies as long as we think there's a need
there.
Like we're just not making intros for the sake of intros.
There's got to be like relevancy to one of these carriers.
Yeah, I mean, I guess you can't just turn up to a meeting with some brand new startup with
no tested product and whatever and just be like, hey, let's connect these people together.
It doesn't make sense.
No, but that's really cool to know.
I know you mentioned earlier, you know, when you started getting into the startup world,
you're working around the go-to-market space a lot more.
And I guess from the sounds of things as well with the startups you're working with now,
it's also around that space of like, how do they get go-to-market?
So I guess what shifts have you seen over time within the go-to-market space itself?
Like what's different?
What's different from launching back then versus now?
Especially when, as I said, in the go-to-market arena itself.
Well, one of the major differences is although I think, and I said this before that,
breaking bread, having in-person meetings are critical.
The ability to leverage unified communications in a meaningful way has changed the way you
could do outreach.
So maybe your first meeting is in person where you really want to get to know the team or
maybe your second, but after you've developed a cadence and a relationship, you can
leverage, you you see in a way, regardless of what platform and do a lot more
collaborative work that you could do before.
In the past, that collaboration didn't happen.
Leveraging technology, you really have to be in person and having a whiteboard.
Now I'm old style.
I want my whiteboard every once in a while.
where I think I do my best work.
But that's been a major change, I think, on the go to market side.
You know, and then frankly, messaging it, you know, using AI and a
in a productive way, right?
How do you test your messaging, right?
You could, you know, have chat GPT and you can bounce ideas back and forth even on
proposals and see what you get back.
Now, you don't want it writing the proposal for you, but you could potentially, you know,
save a few hours in how you accelerate that work by leveraging that.
Hmm.
Yeah.
I think that's one of the common use cases of AI right now is where companies that I'm
speaking to, they're not replacing huge departments or anything with AI.
It's more of just those little, little things here and there, right?
As you said, you can save a few hours here, a couple hours here, and then they're just
using that tech in that way, just for those little efficiencies to stack up overall.
Is that what you're seeing as well by the sounds of things?
one of the things I coach the teams on is like, you know, the idea of having like AI just
for the sake of AI.
So one company, you know, as I said, I'm on the board at Clark chat, like they're doing a
lot of good work and, and leveraging AI into the tech.
I'm like, let's talk about how it improves the use cases.
So can it improve sales productivity?
Can improve your customer success productivity by X percent?
Can it take it that where you have a customer service or customer success department that
now could answer questions, leveraging AI 40 % faster, like make it like tangible.
Like, you the idea of just like putting AI in any sentence, like how are you using it?
You know, are you using it to make your messaging more productive?
Are you using it to maybe make the sales organization 25 % more productive, whatever that
number is.
I'm a big believer in making a tangible look.
If you're on the tech side and engineer, I'm sure there's some very innovative ways you
could leverage that.
But for companies, think make it tangible for yourself and start with departments.
How are you improving maybe something simple like your customer service department and use
it internally and start to move the ball forward that way with AI?
think people would also
see a lot more of the value than just trying to put in every second slide that they have.
Yeah, just trying to stick it anywhere basically just because it's like a thing to do.
Yeah.
Really ask the question of do you actually need to implement this with AI itself or can we
keep things the same?
I mean, I know I've fallen guilty to that because I'm very technical minded.
So I love building automations and systems, but at same time, it got to a point where I
was building up some systems for the sake of just having some systems that didn't really
actually do anything apart from maybe save five minutes every couple of months, which
doesn't make sense to invest a bunch of time to actually build it out in the first place.
So I think that's a really cool point there as well.
So I guess with these startups that you're seeing that are coming through right now, are
lot of them weighted towards AI within the tech space as well, or are some of just kind of
regular like software SaaS?
Because I know we've seen a big uptick in AI startups overall, but a lot of them, it'll be
interesting see how many of them can actually survive, you know, overall.
Yeah, I'm seeing both.
And what I'm seeing is some that come on the SAS tech model and start to implement AI into
their solution and figure out which parts of the technology where AI can fit.
And some others where, you know, AI is top of the model on how they're doing analytics
work.
And I've seen both.
And I don't necessarily have an opinion on which one's going to be more successful yet.
I still think it comes back to, you solving the problem that needs to be solved?
And if you could do that, if you do it with AI from the get-go, that's great.
If you're not, and you could then implement AI offerings or solutions into it that make
that solution a lot more graceful, lack of better word, then sure, I think that that's
great.
But I'm seeing both today.
the companies that I see that come in and are all, call it, you know,
very transactional and have no AI, we coached them on where AI could fit.
Because I think that is important.
I don't think you could be walking into a company and having like, none of it.
It's funny because I had a conversation with a college professors not too long ago who
were very anxious about AI.
And I'm like, well, it's coming.
like if you didn't want the wheel to come, the wheel still like, you know, or you didn't
want the internet to come like it came, like if you didn't follow it, like you were left
behind and we can't let our students like just be less than left in the dust.
have to have like some practical knowledge because they're going to go in the workforce
and, and, and, you know, if you can't even use the basics of Chad GPT, it's like not being
able to do a web search, you know, like today, like where are you going to be?
So I think that coaching and that learning
It will be also interesting as I have a 15 year old daughter, how that gets taught into
the schools and integrated into the curriculums.
Yeah, definitely.
I I've had some, you know, leadership coaches and company culture coaches kind of throw on
the podcast as well.
And one of the biggest topics was, you know, within a company, when you have multiple
different generations of people, how they're all going to react to things like AI being
introduced.
Cause obviously you would have some people at the very top end, right?
Some of the older people who might really reject using AI itself, but then you have some
younger people, maybe even younger than me kind of coming up now.
And all they've grown up with is going to be AI.
So they're gonna be using it everywhere.
So how they're gonna be able to maintain a company culture with two different generations
within the company itself, gonna be very interesting to see unfold, I think, over as AI
especially develops as well.
So I guess as well, what I wanted to touch on was, because I know you helped make that
company very valuable and then you guys sold it as well.
So what went into selling a company for...
for a good number, right?
What do have to look at when it comes down to the variables of building the company up and
make sure it's built in the right way to begin with?
Because obviously there's some people that might build a company up and get to a point
where actually it's not valuable at all and they can't actually sell it.
So what goes into making a company valuable to sell and what can people think about when
they're starting to shape their company right now?
Well, mean, it's a question.
And I would say one is, can you become a leader in your space?
So a lot of the tech companies that come and acquire smaller tech companies, why do they
acquire them?
A, because they're probably ahead technology wise, five, seven, eight years.
All these large companies couldn't do it.
They had the dollars, but it doesn't make sense for them to do it because the amount of
money they would have to put in is crazy.
You know, they will often buy not the number two and number three, but the number one in
the space.
So as you're building that startup, can you become that vital number one in a new space?
And what does it mean?
You know, now that's easier said than done, right?
Like, how do you do that?
You know, two companies that I've been a part of that were required for large numbers,
Acme, Packet and Bronsoft became the number one players in the space.
And that's why Oracle and Cisco at the end of the day, you know, wanted to...
to come in and acquire these companies.
So I think that's easier said than done, as I said, but that is what it comes down to is
how can you build an offering that is unique, number one, and that means you continue to
innovate.
Now we talked about AI, that's one way to innovate, but how do you stay ahead of the curve
on the features and functionalities?
that your market's gonna want, that you're always ahead five, six plus years ahead of not
only the competition, but the largest players in the market that could build your own
product.
And that means you have to be out there.
You have to understand what the market needs.
to be visiting your clients.
You have to do work around having customer advisory boards, for example, to understand
where the market is going and what they possibly need, not only this year, but next year
and the year after.
Um, and it's all that combination.
So it's not an easy answer.
It's all of that put together that I think gives you a chance.
And it doesn't mean you can do all that and it still doesn't happen because you have the
wrong timing.
I mean, trust me, like there's a little bit, you you have to, wouldn't call it lucky, but
you have to be fortunate.
Um, right.
If you don't think you have to be fortunate to have, you're just not being honest, right?
Like that comes with it.
But if you don't do all of these things together,
it doesn't matter.
You'll never get that luck train to come by your way.
Even if does, you just won't be ready.
So can you do everything you can?
And then when it does come by, hey, it happens to be my ticket, I'll jump on it and we all
win.
So it's a long-winded answer, but that's the way I think about it.
No, I think that makes so much sense.
And what one of those points there was essentially creating those feedback loops within
the company to make sure you're always understanding what the customer feedback is on the
product and what you can then improve as well.
I know my business, it wasn't until actually the last kind of 12 to 18 months, we actually
started implementing these feedback loops in every part of the process of what we do,
because we do a lot of kind of service delivery within the agency stuff.
And so within there, there's so many processes.
And so each step of the process is getting that feedback loop of
friction points that they had, what they might want to see in the future, that type of
thing.
I've managed to increase the kind of service that we do in terms of quality to such a high
level now because of those feedback loops.
But I guess if all companies is thinking about, you what are those feedback loops we can
bake into the business that we have to make sure we're always one step ahead of what the
customers need, right?
And always innovating to get to that number one place, which then will, of course, he
said, make the company very, very valuable.
And if everything lines up, then you can, of course, exit for a...
for a nice sum.
Awesome.
So one of the final questions we always ask guests on the show is if you can go back to
your 18 year old self and you can only take three lessons with you, whether it's a mindset
piece, philosophical piece, and technical knowledge, whatever, what those three lessons be
and why would it be those three things?
I love those questions.
My 18 year old self, wow, that's a long time ago.
One would be to kind of live a little bit more in the moment and not worry as much about
everything.
You spend so much time worrying and you can only solve the problems when you solve them.
And you spend a lot of time.
just worrying and it's all consuming.
Number two is do your best to enjoy the moments when they come, especially when it comes
to travel.
You do a world where you travel all over the globe, make sure you spend the time to visit.
And I got that coaching from someone early on in my career and I'm so happy I did because
the idea of visiting places like China and not seeing the Great Wall would have been such
a tragedy or the Forbidden City.
So I look at that part of it.
And third is, which I didn't always do is find a way to have a better balance.
And I understand that startups are all consuming, but there was no balance.
So a little balance and it eventually catches up with you in the end at some point in
time.
So those are the three things.
But that being said, when you're at the startup level, it does have to be for a little
while.
all consuming and you have to, asked me a question earlier and I think you have to commit
100%.
But, know, as you do that, make sure that, you know, things are also, you know, a priority
that's outside of just the work.
Amazing.
mean, thank you so much for joining me on today's episode.
I've really enjoyed this conversation and learned a lot myself.
I'm sure the listeners as well have taken a lot of notes on top of it
I enjoyed it.
I always learn as well.
It's feelings mutual and it's great to spend some time with you.
Thank you.