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🎙 Welcome to Rarified Air: Stories of Inspired Service, a podcast that takes you on a journey into the DNA of InterSystems. I will be your guide as we explore how our unparalleled commitment to customer service fuels limitless human potential.
🤝 Join us as we dive into the culture of InterSystems and share the stories of the people who make it all possible - our customers, partners, and employees. From helping healthcare providers improve patient outcomes to powering the world’s most important institutions, we’ll show you how our dedication to customer service excellence is in rarified air.
Lou LaRocca [00:00:00]:
In order to feel okay, I had to make myself comfortable with a worst case scenario. And that's the advice that I would give to anyone, is I had to really fully imagine a worst case of what happens if we really aren't able to pay ourselves for a while. What happens if money is extraordinarily tight for an extended period of time? What am I going to do? And it made me rack my brains for every avenue that was available to me in that scenario and how we would survive it. Welcome to rarefied air stories of inspired service. Our host, John Paladino, head of client services at Inner Systems, will use his 40 years of experience to show you how to build a successful customer service program and highlight stories of innovation with customers. Join us as we explore the past, present, and future of service, from AI's promise to the enduring power of the human touch.
John Paladino [00:00:56]:
Welcome to Rarified Air. Here with me is another great inspiration, Lou LaRocca. I've known Lou for more than 20 years, and he inspires me in so many ways. And you're going to hear why Lou started a company called J2. And I think the startups in our audience, Lou, would be interested in hearing your story. Let's start with a little bit of background about you again.
Lou LaRocca [00:01:18]:
Lou LaRocca. I'm one of two founders of J2 interactive, along with my partner Mickey Yelan, and I. Yes, it's been a 20 year journey. We're celebrating our 20th year of partnership with inner systems. And I've known of inner systems for almost 30 years. And there's a little story to that as well, because we'll get into, I'm sure. But yeah, in terms of background, I went to school at a well known school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And when I came out of that school, not the other one, not the Terry Reagan one, and all the MIT guys that you have at inner systems, but the other one on the other end of Cambridge.
Lou LaRocca [00:01:48]:
And I immediately got a job in Kendall Square. So my start was at Kenan Systems, right across the street from where you are at one memorial drive, you know, the long time headquarters of inner systems. So Keenan was right there across the train tracks. And I was very fortunate. I was hired in to a company that was willing to give a lot of responsibility to young people. And I remember I was 24 years old in a position that was a bit of a leadership position, and I got a lot of mentoring, and it set me up for what came later. It was a wonderful experience.
John Paladino [00:02:19]:
So fast forward, you decided to start J2.
Lou LaRocca [00:02:22]:
Yes.
John Paladino [00:02:23]:
What led to that decision, because you're having a child, you probably need an income, and you decide you're going to start a company, so.
Lou LaRocca [00:02:31]:
Right. So 1999 was our first child, and joining Junior net, and 2001 was when Juniornet had the.com boom and the.com bust. So it was one of those stories. And again, this is very formative in terms of understanding my philosophy or the things that we learned, I should say mine and Mickey's, because it was@junior.net that I met Mickey and met other people from J2 that Steve Heard and Matt McGregor and others, there was a major change. The company started to be in trouble. There was new management to try to lead it through this wilderness period. And then the mission started to change. Where the mission started to become, finding an exit for the investors, or finding.
Lou LaRocca [00:03:08]:
And the exit became more of like a fire sale. Right. So when the company went through that cycle, very formative, learned unbelievable amount of lessons. In the end, there was a point, we called it the St. Valentine's Day massacre, because on February 14, 2001, we were told that we were all laid off, and that was a Wednesday. We were told Friday was our last day. And then I was pulled aside by management, and I was told, we want to put together a skeleton crew, and we want you to basically assemble your crew, is that kind of thing, right. We want five people, and we know one of your five has to be the accountant.
Lou LaRocca [00:03:41]:
We need somebody who can keep the books, and one of them had to be customer service. We needed one person to answer the phones, and then there were going to be three others on the team. And so Mickey was the absolute obvious choice. Like, the place literally couldn't survive without Mickey. And then we had one other person that stayed around, and that was our little team of five. And our job was to help management keep it running and maintain it as a valuable asset so that it can be sold. In the end, after not finding a suitable buyer, Mickey and I decided to do something really crazy and be the buyer. We ended up with the help of a friend, not even a friend, I should say someone we had just met whose own company had been bought out by the company that owned junior net and was an entrepreneur type and wanted to take another stab at something cool.
Lou LaRocca [00:04:25]:
He and his partner backed us as angel investors, and we became the management team of J2. And for three years, we really ran the junior net business under this new banner of J2.
John Paladino [00:04:36]:
Lou, I know you're a very principled person, and you have an ethos about your company. You're very proud of your company, as every founder should be, share with us your ethos. And then I'd like to talk about how you support. We actually have mutual customers, so there's a lot to talk about there. But to get started and set the context, how do you view your business?
Lou LaRocca [00:04:59]:
Trey, I talked for a moment about wanting to do our thing. We knew we wanted to do it different. We wanted it to be a company that we would enjoy working at. And we didn't want to be hypocrites about that. We didn't want it to be enjoyable for myself and Mickey at the expense of everyone else not enjoying their job. Create an environment in which the rest of those employees and their hard work makes our lives easy. That could never be the way it could be. And we wanted it to feel like everyone had a stake in what we were doing from the beginning.
Lou LaRocca [00:05:27]:
So that gets into every aspect of what we try to do. And it also gets to the partnership with inner systems, which came a bit later because we founded our company in 2001. And like I said, this is 20 years with inner systems. That came in 2004, three years later, but rewinding a little bit to 1995, when I was still at Kenan. And I think the reason why were in this partnership for 20 years is because theres so much compatibility in the values between the two companies. Every company has a certain set of stakeholders in the company. I think in our society, especially among publicly traded companies and especially among companies that take on outside investors, great emphasis is placed on serving the needs of those investors at the expense of other shareholders. Very often, or I should say stakeholders, and that would be the customer and the employees.
Lou LaRocca [00:06:14]:
So when we see companies that maybe are losing their way with respect to how they treat their customers and how they treat their employees, its very often driven by the fact that, first and foremost, theyre serving shareholders who are demanding of them, that they squeeze out every inch of every drop of profit that they can to serve that narrow interest. And then who suffers are the other stakeholders in that enterprise? So this is really a question for you, John. I think that theres a lot of ways in which the things that are special about inner systems might not be possible if it weren't that it is a privately held company, and it's privately held by a founder who has certain values and has made sure those values remain intact through all that growth. And I've always emulated that. And so our growth curve is not as long as your 46 year growth curve, but nonetheless, it's a similar story of trying to remain who we are no matter how big we get, no matter how complex our story becomes, not losing who we are.
John Paladino [00:07:10]:
Yeah. And I think along the way, the key word is trust. Trust by our customers, our employee trust, our trust working together. That's why j two and inner systems have been successful, because we've worked together. But underneath, trust is professionalism. I think you have a highly professional company.
Lou LaRocca [00:07:29]:
Thank you.
John Paladino [00:07:30]:
And empathy because things go wrong.
Lou LaRocca [00:07:33]:
Yes, for sure.
John Paladino [00:07:34]:
And there are definitely challenges that we both face individually, sometimes together working with a customer, and we get through it. And it's by having compassion, empathy, transparency.
Lou LaRocca [00:07:46]:
Correct.
John Paladino [00:07:47]:
And professionalism.
Lou LaRocca [00:07:48]:
I agree completely.
John Paladino [00:07:49]:
You and I used to talk almost every single day back in the early days.
Lou LaRocca [00:07:53]:
That's true.
John Paladino [00:07:53]:
And one of the reasons why is we're a software company. We focus on developing great software and helping customers use it. And I don't want to spend the whole time talking about that. But we didn't offer implementation services, per se, or consulting services, professional services. And that's where we found the opportunity to work together, because that's what your company was doing at the time.
Lou LaRocca [00:08:16]:
I remember one specific use case that was really powerful, where they were able to use ensemble to achieve syndromic surveillance across New York City. And there was something actually made the newspapers. There was a case where there had been patient encounters, often with children, although there might have been a couple of adult cases where there was salmonella poisoning, and there were a couple of them scattered throughout the city. And with ensemble, they were able to identify that pattern, and then they were able to kind of reach back into the source data, because ensemble did a great job of maintaining all those linkages and then identify those specific patients and try to figure out what they had in common. And then they actually contacted those families, and they were able to trace it to, I won't name it, but a specific brand of a snack food that had some contamination in a batch that had been in grocery stores in the city, and they were able to basically pull that product off the shelves within that neighborhood that was being affected. And then they were able to prevent further cases. And this happened in very. Not quite real time and measured in seconds, but measured in just a couple of days, and being able to jump on something like that and have that impact.
Lou LaRocca [00:09:23]:
And it's a safety issue for the community. It was amazing. So that was this immediate feeling of the work that we do having this ultimate impact on real people's lives and patients. And that became a big motivator for us. And ever since then, we just really got that love of healthcare that's a.
John Paladino [00:09:40]:
Great customer impact story. And since then, you have hundreds of people, you have thousands of projects you've been through.
Lou LaRocca [00:09:47]:
Yeah. Yeah.
John Paladino [00:09:48]:
What are some of the best moments?
Lou LaRocca [00:09:50]:
Jeff, that's one that felt very wonderful and kind of personal. Coming back to this thing that I said about what really inspires us about healthcare and working in healthcare, and coming back to the themes that you talked about, empathy, and also, which is motivates and gets us excited. And coming back to your theme of service, we have to recognize that typically, when you're selling software or we're selling professional services, our client is the it department, or in some form or fashion, it's it people who make that investment in us and place their trust in us, they're our customer. But I think the thing that when we're serving those customers, we have to always be empathetic to the fact that they, in turn, serve customers. And those customers are often business owners and end users within their organization that depend on the technology they're building. It very often is outside organizations, partners, stakeholders. If it's a health information exchange, it'll be hospitals that are connected to the exchange and so on and so forth that all depend on the technology that's being built. And then ultimately, that gets to real patients and the real care teams that are providing care to those patients.
Lou LaRocca [00:10:57]:
We want to make those people's jobs easier so that their patient's outcome can be the best it can be, and also the patient experience. So it's an indirect thing. We don't get often the chance to really interact with that patient, but we get to interact with the people who are doing everything they can to ensure that that care team has a good experience and the patient has a good experience. So it's very inspiring when we get those stories of something that we did having that sort of impact and impacting real lives.
John Paladino [00:11:25]:
That's so true. We get excited about technology.
Lou LaRocca [00:11:27]:
Right.
John Paladino [00:11:27]:
We love talking about technology and new features and what we can accomplish, and we talk about partnership. We talk about how we work together in a very effective way and a respectful way. Those are okay. The real impact is name of the game. The impact it has on a community, an organization, a business. That's what counts.
Lou LaRocca [00:11:49]:
Yeah.
John Paladino [00:11:49]:
That's customer success.
Lou LaRocca [00:11:51]:
Agree 100%.
John Paladino [00:11:52]:
You just threw up your arms and you get really excited. And I know for people listening, you can't really see it. You're smiling. You're thinking about that time you had this passion to be successful. Where does that passion come from?
Lou LaRocca [00:12:04]:
Well, John, you're in the vowel at the end of your last name club. I can't talk with my hands. I mean, like, that's the whole, I mean, that's a big part of who I am. But in terms of where the passion comes from, it comes from a place of gratitude. I actually kept a chinese fortune cookie fortune that came out of the restaurant, and it just said on it, the days we work are the best days. I remember keeping that and taping it up on my monitor because I just was very aware that anytime we had work to do, it was something to be grateful for. It meant that we were earning a living. It meant that we were.
Lou LaRocca [00:12:37]:
I think work is where dignity comes from. I think that work that is meaningful and genuinely impactful and work that you can be proud of, that you think actually makes people's lives better is very important. So that place of gratitude, of just feeling grateful for the opportunity to still be going at it and working is where it comes from.
John Paladino [00:12:56]:
Clearly, you have a good heart.
Lou LaRocca [00:12:58]:
Thank you, Lou.
John Paladino [00:12:59]:
Weve been on a close partnership journey with technology changing regulations, changing customers, wanting to do more, growing, both businesses growing. So leadership becomes more important as you grow. And weve accomplished a lot on this journey, but there are a couple of areas I want to touch on.
Lou LaRocca [00:13:19]:
Sure.
John Paladino [00:13:19]:
Let's start with leadership, and then I'd like to switch to non healthcare. So maybe you could think about a non healthcare.
Lou LaRocca [00:13:26]:
Yeah, for sure. When it comes to leadership, I think that's a very important aspect of how you design an organization. Certainly when you're in that seat where you are in a leadership role, people are looking to you for that leadership. But you can't succeed alone, and you can't succeed unless you entrust leadership responsibility to others. John, I know you're a football fan, and I know that certain aspects of sports fandom are almost part of the inner systems culture. Let's put it that way. There is a certain very, very well accomplished team that is very well loved by many of the people in the C suite at inner systems, as well as the other folks that come to work in Cambridge.
John Paladino [00:14:01]:
So we have many passions.
Lou LaRocca [00:14:02]:
There are many passions. So have you ever heard of the concept of a coaching tree? You ever hear about that?
John Paladino [00:14:08]:
Tell us.
Lou LaRocca [00:14:08]:
Yeah. Okay, so they'll say things like, okay, let's talk about Bill Parcells, a coach who's long since retired, but they'll talk about his coaching tree. They'll talk about the fact that at one point, Bill Belichick was an assistant coach, and therefore he mentored Bill Belichick. And eventually Bill Belichick became head coach of the Patriots. You have Bill Parcells being a mentor to Bill Belichick as well as Sean Payton as well as others. And then in turn, you have Bill Belichick being a mentor to Romeo Cornell or others down the line, Nick Saban, or whatever it may be. So I think that somebody ought to do the coaching tree for John Paladino. And the reason I say that is just off the top of my head.
Lou LaRocca [00:14:46]:
I can think of so many leaders that got their start working for you in what may have even been entry level positions, but working in your support organization. And there's a couple of things I want to say about that. First of all, from the very beginning, I was always amazed that you actually did support out of one memorial drive. I mean, I was like, okay, that doesn't happen. Everybody offshores this. Everybody. Everybody takes that support responsibility and they give it to someone else. They delegate it.
Lou LaRocca [00:15:11]:
They might even, like I said, offshore and have it done out of a call center on the other side of the world. And inner systems, very noticeably was hiring extremely capable people, the kind of people that absolutely are qualified to do a developer's job. And they had jobs in support, and they had jobs in quality development, they had jobs in learning services. And these were incredible, incredibly bright people doing all of these jobs. And I was always impressed by that. And the other thing that impressed me from the earliest days was that your leadership style was so unselfish, meaning you had a lot of talent in your organization. You cultivated that talent. You spent years helping somebody climb that learning curve.
Lou LaRocca [00:15:49]:
A lot of people are selfish about that. It's like, hey, I took years to get you to the point where you're actually useful to me, so why would I give you away? I need to you in my department. I'm not letting go of you. And there are so many examples just off the top of my head, whether it's Kim Humby or it's Alex McCloud or it's Randy Pilata or it's Bill McCormick, who I know has been a guest on your show. All of these people and many more, they're part of your coaching tree. These are people that rose to leadership positions and in turn mentored others, and in turn, you've got a wonderful legacy. I really appreciate that about you. It's something that I've always admired and tried to emulate.
John Paladino [00:16:22]:
You really zeroed in on what we mean by rarefied air. So the support organization in particular, it applies to other departments, too, is really head and shoulders. Above other support organizations. And I don't want to spend too much time in this, but a big reason for that is we give the people the opportunity to take on more responsibility to do things that they're passionate about. They want to learn about something. We give them a chance to go off and do that. That's really part of the DNA of who we are. So by taking care of our people, we're taking care of our customers.
John Paladino [00:16:55]:
So let's talk about one more story, a non healthcare story.
Lou LaRocca [00:17:00]:
Sure. We do plenty of work that is outside of healthcare and that uses multiple technologies, including inner systems technology. One story that we're really excited about right now is actually one that we're doing with our international team in Ireland. The name of the company is Chadwicks. I know an organization that has done some really great things with the technology and dating back decades. Right. So this would be an example of a cache application thats been around for some time. Chadwicks is for Americans.
Lou LaRocca [00:17:27]:
You can think of it like a Home Depot, but not so much catering to the end consumer, but more like where a contractor would shop for lumber and construction supplies and that kind of thing. So this is a retail chain in Ireland, and they use a cache based application for their entire back office, their point of sale in those retail locations and so on. And very complex application with many modules, but also a legacy application with a green screen user experience and serious need for modernization. They asked us to come in and help them to preserve all of that data and all of that business logic that resides within cache. Now, Iris, we helped them do an upgrade to the Iris platform, which really modernized right there, you're getting a lot of benefits in modernization. But then on top of that, using Iris's capability to create, create an abstraction layer, an API layer, and then build an entirely new front end, an entirely new user experience for both the back office and the point of sale and to roll that out. So we're in stages. We're going bit by bit and marching through that, and we've had a lot of success so far.
Lou LaRocca [00:18:31]:
And it's really gratifying to be able to help an organization maintain what's good about their investment and then be able to swap out the parts that have truly aged out. And that theme carries forward coming a little bit full circle back to healthcare. That's a big theme in the work that we're doing at Veterans affairs right now. Right? So when we think in terms of the Vista application, which runs on an inner systems backbone, and we think about what modernization might be in that context, there's an enormously valuable investment that's been made in Vista that is serving veterans across the entire country to the tune of over 130 instances. And we don't want to lose all that. There are ways for us to not lose that while still being able to think differently about how we expose that data through APIs, how we create new user experiences on top of that data, and how we make that data more valuable for other applications that need to consume it.
John Paladino [00:19:26]:
Great example.
Lou LaRocca [00:19:27]:
Yeah.
John Paladino [00:19:28]:
So, since we're in a podcast in 2024, I have to talk about AI, right?
Lou LaRocca [00:19:33]:
Of course. Yeah.
John Paladino [00:19:34]:
Everybody wants to know what people are doing with generative AI. What are your thoughts?
Lou LaRocca [00:19:38]:
So we're talking about very large volumes of data, and the concern has always been data quality, because if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. So I think of generative AI as introducing a new set of data quality questions. Ill say three things. The first one is the same problem weve always had. Its the garbage in, garbage out question. If you have a large language model and you train it on data that isnt normalized, isnt accurate, isnt complete, is defective in some way, then youre essentially training it badly, and you're going to potentially get really bad results from that. So in some ways, that's the same thing that we've always been dealing with. Right.
Lou LaRocca [00:20:19]:
And the second thing that I would say is that we know, and Doctor Briggs from UCLA, who is one of your speakers, did a wonderful job addressing this. We know that generative AI, those models, can potentially reveal inherent bias in the data sets or in the way in which we train the models to interpret those data sets. And that can have really strong negative impacts on health equity outcomes within certain communities and so on. And that's something that is a real concern. And then the third thing is, we have to remember that the algorithms are, by their nature, what the algorithms do is they interpolate and extrapolate when the data is incomplete, which it always is. So we have to be mindful of the fact that when generative AI is doing that, all the fancy words that interpolate and extrapolate, that's just fancy language for it, makes stuff up. So when generative AI is making something up, we have to understand that you can't take generative AI, have it produce something, and just insert it into, let's say, a patient record and treat it as though something factual is now in the record. But what you can do and where the potential is, I think, is think of it as generating hypotheses that then an expert human being, whether that's a care team member or whether it's a researcher, whoever it might be, can take that hypothesis and do further analysis and testing to see where that leads them.
Lou LaRocca [00:21:45]:
So if we're talking about an individual patient, if generative AI is able to suggest potential paths of inquiry for that care team, it might notice something about the patient's history that they hadn't thought of. But it's still up to them to pursue that, to rule it out or to identify that that is, in fact the core issue. And if we're talking about population health, the same is true. Generative AI might detect patterns that were otherwise invisible to us. But it's only a hypothesis. Until somebody who really knows what they're talking about and knows what they're doing then does further analysis, research, testing to prove it out one way or another, whether that is a genuine insight.
John Paladino [00:22:23]:
So we're using generative AI kind of in a step by step approach with the hope of being able to be more responsive to customers. You can always bring things up to a new level.
Lou LaRocca [00:22:33]:
Yeah.
John Paladino [00:22:34]:
And we've. We're passionate about serving our customers. I know you are, too.
Lou LaRocca [00:22:39]:
Yeah.
John Paladino [00:22:39]:
And our standards for how we treat customers is extremely high. J2 has been at that level for the entire 20 years I've known you, Lou.
Lou LaRocca [00:22:48]:
Thank you.
John Paladino [00:22:48]:
And I really appreciate you being here. I think we've covered a lot of ground.
Lou LaRocca [00:22:53]:
Yeah. Yeah.
John Paladino [00:22:54]:
And we've had a lot of fun.
Lou LaRocca [00:22:55]:
Yep.
John Paladino [00:22:55]:
And keep up the great work. You inspire me, man.
Lou LaRocca [00:22:58]:
Thank you. This is an absolute honor and a privilege, and I'm just so glad to be here. Thank you for this opportunity, John.
John Paladino [00:23:03]:
Thanks, Lou. Thank you, everybody, for listening. I hope this was interesting to you. Please give us feedback. We really want to make this as much fun for you as it has been for us. As I've said before, it's great to have a past, but it's even better to have a future. Thank you for listening.