#44: Matt Wensing, Founder & CEO | Summit - In The Thick of It

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
I don'tthink you get the best work out of people
if they don't have that why figured out,because
maybe you would not be disappointedif you have really set expectations.
Like do you ever be disappointed?
Also, you'll never be delighted, right?
Because how can somebody go aboveand beyond the call of duty if they don't
have that extra context to.

(00:22):
Welcome to In the Thick of It.
I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.
Matt Wensing, Founder and CEO of summit, a cutting edgeknow code automation platform,
joins the show to share what got him intothe business of helping other businesses
at an early age.

(00:43):
Matt always wondered what his futurecareer would look like in college.
He began studying political sciencebefore realizing computer science
was much more of his thing.
His first gig after collegesparked his curiosity
with a hands on softwaredevelopment experience.
In 2007, Matt started his entrepreneurialjourney with a weather data startup.
That experience shined a lighton the power of teamwork and understanding

(01:06):
customers needs.
Tune in to hear more about Matt's latestventure with the software company summit.
All right.
Joining me today coming from Austin,Texas, is Matt
Wensing, founder and CEO of summit.
I'm excited to get in the story.
Matt, you started summitthis is your second
after a successful exitfrom your first venture.

(01:27):
You're currently down in Austin,but if memory serves, you grew up
in Florida, West Palm Beach area,something like that.
So let's actually start there.
What was growing up like in in Florida?
First of all, Scott, thanks for having me.
Growing up in Florida,
as the internet has taughtmany of us, Florida is a endless source
of inspiration, jokes, amazing thingsthat don't seem to happen anywhere else.

(01:49):
But that's where I was born and raised.
I lived there for 19 years,so I definitely have a love.
A love hate with it.
I was an 80s kid and a 90s kid.
So youngest of three siblings.
And that meant that I distinctlyremember life
growing up there in the suburbswith not a lot to do.
Definitely was one of those. Ridethe bike around

(02:09):
until the streetlightscome on kids, and did that a lot.
I was curious about all kinds of stuff,so we got into some trouble.
We also played a lot of video gamesand nerd it out and did things
that led me to my career. Today.
Probably life was pretty.
I'd say typical for a, 80s or 90s kid
in the suburbs at the time,which is to say, a lot of downtime.

(02:30):
And then I remember the internetcoming on the scene and being a big deal.
But, you know,I think I could relate to a lot of the
maybe the, the Gen Xersthat would listen to this even more
so than the millennials.
I'm technically on the cusp,but my siblings were both older than me,
so I was the one riding around with themwhile they listened to the cool stuff
for that generation. Yeah,so that was my childhood, basically.
I'm right there.

(02:51):
I was born in 81,so I'm right on the cusp of.
Yeah.
Okay, so I think we're technically xenialis, is what they call us.
And, I think I identify more
on the Gen-X sidethan the millennial side as well.
Which is great because it makes you it'ssome serious difference,
and even moreso these days looking at our kids.
But, yeah. That's me.

(03:11):
What was school like?What kind of student were you?
School,for me, was something that I chose.
This is funny.
I was the I was thewhat do I want to be when I grow up, kid?
Constantly.
I think from the time I learned,you know, there's a
there's a newspaper articlethat came out again dating myself, but
like, newspaper came, dad would open it upand put it on the table and like,

(03:34):
you got to read it and stuff.
And there was an articlethat came out once upon a time
that was like
the salaries that people made fortheir jobs that they were in or whatever,
and I remember that one articlehad like a little chart in it.
And I remembereven as an elementary school kids
poring over that being like,what do I want to be when I grew up?
And I was like looking at the words,I didn't know what
all that meant,but I was like looking at the salaries.

(03:55):
And I was like,oh, ooh, that one's interesting. All this.
And so I was always living ahead of my agein that sense.
I wanted to be the next thing,do the next thing, go to the next level.
I was done with elementary schoolat the time
I was in kindergarten kind of thing.
So it was hard for me in one sensebecause I was like constantly wishing
I was already donewith whatever I was doing.

(04:16):
My parents were pretty hands offin terms of academics and all that,
but I was very self-motivated and driven.
For some reason, I, I don't know,I just decided at some point, you know,
this was going to be my thing.
I was like, all right, I'mI love sports, don't get me wrong.
But I'm like, that's not going to behow I stand out in this world.
What am I going to do? I'm just like,you know what?
MaybeI could just do this academics thing.

(04:37):
So pour myself intothat was definitely the geeky type
growing up, but I just embraced it.
I just accepted it and, ended up just.
Yeah, being very studious, frankly,
studying a lot, learning a lot,that sort of thing.
I think today
it's kind of become cool to be a nerd,but back then it was not at all.
Yeah, that's a deep cut.

(04:59):
And you're you're right.
I mean, it wasn'tand I think that partly explains probably
why I love the Gen X vibe so much,is that maybe in that
I found a little bit of you, like bewhoever you want to be kind of thing.
There's a little bit of an outcast culturekind of in that of, like, you could be
a geek or a nerd and you could still lovealternative music or what?

(05:22):
Like they didn't seem to care.
Come as you are kind of thing.
They didn'tseem to care what you were like.
It was like a backlashagainst the popular.
So I fell in love with that era of music,I think in part
because these outcasts in Seattle,somehow I'm relating to them,
not because we're the same at all inone sense, but probably just like a shared
feeling of I don't really fit in, butoh well, on to the next thing.

(05:42):
All right.
Favorite grunge band.
Stone Temple Pilots?
Okay, I'm a Pearl jam fan.
That's great.
I remember buying the vitality albumand listening to it and like, it
definitely got into some of it, but,STP was my thing for some reason.
I love that.
I think vitality was their last
really good album, although I'm told thatthe newest one is awesome.

(06:03):
I haven't listened to it yet.I jumped on late. Yeah.
All right.
Tell me about your parents.Were they entrepreneurial?
What kind of work did they do?
They were.
So, And actually,I'll go back even farther.
So my my great grandfatherwas an electrician up in Detroit area,
actually, I think he was more of,like a mechanical engineering,
like mechanical stuff.
And then his son,my grandfather was an electrician,

(06:24):
started his own electrical firm.
Contractors started that, ranthat in Michigan area, Detroit area.
And then they moved to Florida.
My dad following in their footsteps,
like, okay, I'm going to be,you know, being an engineer, an architect.
I think he worked at a firmfor maybe a couple of years at a school
just to, like,get his legs under him, figure out things.
Then he started his own businessright away.

(06:46):
Pretty much.
And that man could never have workedfor anyone.
I don't think it's just he was,probably unemployable.
Now, that said,he was also, an ROTC kid, college student.
So he was very disciplined.
So it wasn't to say that he's a rebel,but he had his own opinions
and ideas about how work should be done,

(07:07):
what quality meant,how to not cut corners, all of that.
So I don't think he could have toleratedsomeone else.
Setting the bar in terms ofthis is good enough.
This is how we're going to do this.
Like he had to be the chef in the kitchen.
So that's what he did all growing up.
And so I watched him stars on business.
My mom worked with him. For him.
It was kind of a tough relationship.

(07:29):
And that sense of work,home dynamics like, man, they just
they saw each other 24/7. Right.
And it was like also the good in the bad.
Things were tight at work.
And then my mom drove a bus.
My mom was a whateverI need to do to support this business
and to support this family.
So we went to a private school, but notbecause we had a lot of money necessarily.
My dad was self-employed,but because it was like the best school.

(07:51):
It was the only school in the areamy parents and they could imagine sending
us to because sadly, a lot of the SouthFlorida schools just aren't well-funded,
not like where I'm in Austin right now.
So she drove a school bus for many yearsbecause we got a discount on tuition.
So very hard working, self-employed.
And I grew up basically

(08:11):
walking around,
a businessthat had my last name on the door.
And I think that had an impact on me.
I don't think it impact my siblings in thesame way. So like, we're all different.
But for me, definitely,I was like, okay, this is this could work.
This is this is a thing.
And so I didn't grow upin that big company culture
I grew up in, like the small firm,but call your own shots kind of world.

(08:35):
We've had a number of guests,who have been the kids of entrepreneurs
and their stories very some just kind ofknew that mom or dad went to their job.
That was the business that they started.
But others were like deep, deeply involvedin the organization.
Where were you on that continuum for youhelping on the weekends,

(08:56):
or was it more just like you knewdad had his own business?
We were very involved, and I think we alsoblurred the lines between work and home.
Like my dad brought his work homeevery day.
He even brought it on vacation.
And you always like to say like,hey, if I do a couple
hours of work in the morning,it pays for the day.
Kind of thing. So he brought it home.
But also there
are three of us kids and my mom,and if the office needed to relocate,

(09:16):
we were there on a Saturdayand Sunday moving things into storage.
He was an architect, so you're talkingabout physical blueprints,
machines,computers, files, crazy numbers of files.
I mean, everything was paper beforeit was digital, right?
So there was a lot of
literally moving things aroundto move that business from place to place.
So as things ebbed and flowed,we helped out.
But then in the day to day

(09:36):
operations of the business,so I remember my sister and brother and I,
we all ran blueprints at some pointor another, and I think it was like,
probably would costmy dad $0.15 a sheet or something to have
some local printer print off his prints,because of course, you don't need that.
But he's like, I got three kids.
I can put him in that blueprint room, runthat machine, prop, open the windows

(09:57):
for the ammonia so it's not completelytoxic in there, right?
Prop open the window and you can run this.
We call Diags a machine. Basically hugeprints.
And I remember
learning how to feed the 24, 36 printsand the mylar through the machine.
It's called the dialysis machine.
And it was emittingammonia at the back. Right.
Because that's how the stain, the blue.
If I reached over the back of the machine,the ammonia was so intense

(10:19):
that it would burn,your finger would burn the cut.
Oh my gosh.
All I knew is I was making $0.10 a sheet,and if I did 43 of them,
which was the average size of a job set,I could crimp them with the thing.
And then he could sign them alland I could line
up, sign up,but I could staple everything else.
I was making $4and something an hour, you know, as a
I don't know what I wasten, 11, 12 year old and I felt awesome.

(10:41):
This is cool.
That's like a G.I. Joe. Totally.
But then later I get to do more fancythings like, hey, my mom's not working
today. It's whatever. It's the summertime.
I'd answer the phones, learn how to answera phone, be a professional, work,
sort of the clerical stuff,type up an invoice, that kind of thing.
So I made a little bitmore than four, 25 an hour at that point.

(11:02):
So yeah, I had some skill.
Just enoughskill to say, he's on the other line.
Can I take a message?
So yeah, you mentioned that academics wasmore your path than sports were.
Were you involved in in thingsoutside of the classroom?
I was, although it was, a group of friendsthat I would say we had a crew.
It was like six of usthat were just super tight knit.

(11:25):
And we just did everything together.
So hung out together.
Video games together, got in trouble,go play
paintball together, went camping together.
We did a lot of stuff out and aboutand it was Florida.
And so like I said, in those early 80sdays, like there were golf course ponds
and and canals to swim in
and just random stuff that like,there's no way I would let my kids do now.

(11:45):
Right?
But when you're bored andyou don't have a cell phone, we did stuff.
I'm glad that I had that childhood.
The other thing that I didand my parents were a sponsor
for this, is they would send us offfor a couple weeks in the summer.
Every summer,
my brother and I would get quoteunquote, shipped off to our grandparents.
Both of them had large gardenswith tractors and stuff up in Georgia,

(12:05):
in North Carolina.
And so for weeks in the summer, we'd havenothing but literally barnyard animals.
Hey, some gardening to do,some very dirty hands kind of summers.
Which was also really nice because itit made me more well-rounded person
in that sense.
Like academics, yes,but spent the summers more
traditionally outdoors having fun.

(12:28):
I was I was getting in trouble,
like just having a lot of fun outdoors,building forts, that kind of thing. So.
So that's the stuff we did.
And then extracurriculars, played
instruments, did a little bitof extracurricular activities at school,
that kind of thing.But that was being a kid.
This is the thing that differentiate mefrom a lot of my friends
who I felt like any time they got out,maybe their parents would take them,
like to Disney Worldonce or something like that.
For me, it was likeI'd come home after the summer.

(12:50):
I'd be like, yeah, the summerI was in A4H club and I.
I wrestled the greasepig and I learned how beehives work
and all this stuff,and I was just like, wow.
It gave me confidence, I think. Yeah.
Which was also rare for like, again,otherwise, just like that
sleepy bedroom community
thing of there's just nothing to do hereother than connect the internet.
I got just enough of that.
I had grandfathers on both sides, werevery handy at a dad that was very handy,

(13:14):
and I did become handy, unfortunately,but I was exposed to enough of it
to be likeyou could actually take things apart.
You can build thingsand you can do things.
There's more to life than justbeing in your room, staring at a screen.
That's awesome.
I think everybody these daysneeds to spend more time outside.
And this past weekendI was at I'm on a hunting lease
and it's out there with my boys and menjust riding in the bed of a pickup truck

(13:40):
around a whole bunch of landand jumping out
to open this gate and close itand go do this and that.
Like it's just good.
It's just good for the soul. So,
you talked about swimming in these canals.
Were there gators in there?
Yeah. Yeah, definitely gators.
Water moccasin, snappingturtles, that kind of thing.
I mean, we lived in a gulf.
I lived a middle class life,and my dad had some good years.

(14:02):
So he built the house we grew up in.But anyway, I was on a golf course.
So pond in the backyard,we wake up occasionally.
There'd be a big snakeor a snapping turtle in the pool.
We'd have to go fish it out kind of thing.
But there again, you know,it's like how you get a fish out
where you're not going to call the policeto get this thing.
So grab a laundry basket.
Did this, get this critter out of park,get the critter out of our pool.
It was a DIY kind of thing.

(14:23):
The gator thing is funny though.
I remember going,they call it rivers, but basically it's
a Saint Johns Riverand some of these other places in Florida.
Basically, you're connecting freshwaterto to the ocean, right?
It's just flowing west to east.
And we go on canoe trips and stuff,but we get really hot
and you jump in the water,
and then you get back in your canoeand you go down 100 yards.
There's a gator on the bank. Wait.But I was in the.

(14:46):
So it's just like the ultimateexample of ignorance is bliss.
And then like safety in numbers,there's just this weird element of, well,
when you're with a bunch of people, right?
And what, like your guard comes down,you feel you feel kind of safe.
And so, yeah, we would do that.I would never do that.
Now, don't get me wrong.
But like when you're 14and you're invincible
and you're with friends,why not? You're just in an altered state.

(15:08):
Yeah. Exactly, man. Yeah, yeah.
Going back to the hunting lease,
we're walking through tall grassand this is Texas.
And, man, I my head is on a swivellooking for snakes everywhere today.
That would freak me out.
Yeah, could do that. Yeah.
What did you doright after you finished high school?
Which got college to go off to work?
Yeah. Went to college.

(15:29):
Worked that one summer.
I actually thoughtI was going to join the military.
So funny enough, as a part of college,like to pay for school.
Kind of frugal mindset in mind of,like, wow, school's really expensive.
My sister went to Florida State.I saw that.
So I was pretty practicalin terms of costs.
And, I applied a couple schools.
University of Miami, on the onehand was my dad's alma mater.

(15:49):
Private school gave me a scholarshipkind of thing.
But then University of Chicago wasthe other option, and that was up north.
They let me in very expensive.
And I remember calling up Army ROTC.
I was like,I'm gonna do my dad did when join that.
And then like right before this,right before 911.
Actually, this is the summer of 2001.
I was thinkingI was going to join the, military to help

(16:11):
pay for college, get the GI Billand everything to help pay for school.
It was the weirdest thing, but, like,I just couldn't make it happen.
Like, I kept leaving messagesand they wouldn't respond to my email.
And this wasn't the day er,where you'd like text somebody quite yet.
So a one.
So it was a little bit differentand I remember getting to school
and the guy was like,I just want to do this.
And by then I was like, you know,I kind of changed my mind.
I think I'm just going to borrow the moneyor something.

(16:32):
I basically changed my compasshad changed, and then 9/11 happened.
I did college,I entered with enough credit.
I took some summer classes to graduatein three years instead of four.
Like I said the beginning,I was always in a hurry
to do the next thing,so I did save some money that way.
So I graduated in three years ofbachelor's degree, and then I got a job.
And you did go to school in Chicago?Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah.

(16:53):
And what did you study?I couldn't figure that out.
So I started out thinkingI was going to study.
Like I said, it was kind of
in the mind of, like, political science,me military, that sort of thing.
So I actually was going to studypolitical science,
and then I got to campus and I was like,wow, there's so much more to know.
I was like,super curious about all these subjects.
And, I ended up, weirdly enough,my best friend in college

(17:15):
was into computer science.
I love computers growing up,
and I never thought of computer scienceas like a field.
I started taking some classesin pure science.
I was like, okay, I'mnot not like the best,
not the best programmer in this class.
But I feel like I can make some cool stuffand took enough computer science classes
to end up graduating in three yearswith like a minor in computer science.
I think my major was in the humanities,funny enough.

(17:37):
So I kind of had a leg in both worlds.
I was like a little bit like my dad.He was an architect.
What that meant was he had ahe was artistic.
He had that artistic flair.
He could design things, buthe was an engineer kind of at his core.
And that's kind of what I ended up doing.It just what?
There was no design degree at Chicago,
so I ended upkind of making up my own design degree.
I was like, well, computer sciencefor the engineering part.

(17:57):
And then I took a bunch of like, artdesign classes to round myself out now.
All right.
Florida, Chicago.
What was your first winter like?
Was that, like eye opening?
Yeah, it was eye opening.
I remember having the thermometer openopen on my computer, a little monitor app.
And I rememberwhen it hit like one degree,
I remember tell my parents, guys,it's like one degree outside right now.

(18:19):
It's like I'm hungry, but like,I really got to go to the dining hall.
So I put on like the one Columbia jacket.
I had scarf, hat, gloves,everything just trudged out
to go like 300 yards to the dining hall.
And, but yeah, it was it was crazy.
I remember thinking like, this is anotherlevel of cold, but I liked it.

(18:40):
I was like, ready for change.
I was so sick of, like I said,19 years of no seasons in Florida.
It's like someone's
adjusting thermostat between like 70and 90 basically all year long.
And I know people who have to deal withthe winters are like, that's what I what
humans always want,what they don't have, though.
So I was like, I want seasons.
I love the city, I love the people.
Super fun.

(19:00):
I was just going to sayChicago is just a fantastic city.
In fact,I was there for a couple days last week
and I wouldn't want to live there.
But I will go visitevery every chance I get.
Yeah, there was always something to do
is actually, at the time, at least now,about as much now, but like super clean.
Fell in love with the Cubs.
I had some fun times there and I was like,it's a great city, so no complaints.
And yeah, for three years was totallytolerable and I just love that.

(19:23):
The other thing I loved about it
is that compared to where I grew up,you could walk places, walked to grocery
stores, walked to fun things to do,walk to the lake.
That was cool to me.
Not used to be able to walk, playedand public transportation.
What is this thing you could like get ona subway and like go places is super cool.
So I love that.
We don't do public transportationvery well here in Texas, in Texas, Dallas,

(19:47):
not just Austin.
Like everywhere.
I agree, it's sad, I miss it.
That's that's
if I could upgrade Texas in one way, man,it would be the public transportation.
Yeah.
All right.
So what was your first job?
Post-college. Yeah. First job.
So I first job post-college.
So I graduate, graduated this degreeand wasn't sure what I was going to do.
Went to some career fairsand I was working my student job still,

(20:12):
I had a couple student jobs,so I was figured I could make 12 bucks
an hour, ten bucks an hour work.These student jobs on the side.
That felt good,bringing in a little bit of money.
And I had those until kind of the winterafter I graduated.
So I graduated in the spring kind of work.
Those jobs for about nine months.
And I was like, I got toI got to find something that's more real.
Like with that, like, yeah,I'm on salary with benefits or something.

(20:35):
And I applied to the same company
a friend of mine workedat was called McMaster Car Supply Company.
It's an industrial parts
distributor in Chicago, of all things,like a Granger competitor.
And they've been in business for 100plus years, though, and fantastic
privately owned, familyowned business out of Chicago.
Headquarters.

(20:55):
And I cut my teeth therein terms of business, learned a lot,
ended up working there as like a softwaredeveloper didn't make very much.
You know, they took advantage of the factthat recent college
grads are willing to workvery hard for not a lot of money,
but I did work really hard andthey rewarded me for it, which was nice.
But working
there was awesome.They took really good care
of their employeesand it was a smartly run business.

(21:17):
Not bureaucratic in that sense,just it was cool.
It was very flat work.
I felt like they listened to me.It was cool.
What kind of software developmentwere you doing there?
Yeah,so they wrote a lot of their own systems,
in fact, departmentsin what was called systems.
So we wrote inventory management
software warehouse,sort of warehouse SKUs packing.

(21:38):
You know, when a shipment comesin, what do you put in the box?
So logistics optimizationalgorithms, order taking stuff.
And then there was a whole web groupthat was responsible for building.
So it was basically e-commerce
for industrial parts of it, 600,000SKUs at the time.
All of those were available onlinefor ordering.
So and they built those systems in-house.
So all of the online e-commerceweb software was written by them,

(22:02):
you know, for them ones.
Yeah, it was pretty cool. Man.
And this is like mid 2000.
Is that right?
Yeah.
This was oh four throughoh seven that I was there.
So e-commerce was still
I mean it had been aroundbut it was still kind of the early days.
Oh yeah. Yeah they were very early to it.
So they like I said 100 yearsand just visionary ownership frankly.

(22:24):
I mean everyone'svision is off by a little bit.
But somehow they saw itlike in the late 90s
when the internet came on and thingscame online, they started saying like,
we got to get our catalog,which was like the Holy grail for them.
We got to get this online somehow.
And Jeff Bezos, when he was startingAmazon, actually came to that company
to tour their facilities and go,how do you do this?

(22:47):
Right?
They were like pioneering that onlineordering
experience, clicking the buynow, having a shopping cart.
No Shopify existed yet.
Amazon was really the Amazon.We know it now for sure.
Like they were right there with Amazonsort of building out that early scaled
e-commerce experience.
So if you were there early enough,like I was,

(23:07):
I was thereright after they kind of got on the web
and I got to see them kind of taketheir first systems and like, rewrite them
a little bit to make them lastanother ten years.
I just finished a biography on Bezos.
I'm curious,did he poach anybody from that company?
He did a lot of that.
So people did leave our companyand end up at Amazon.

(23:29):
I'll put it that way.That was not uncommon.
And I think a lot of times, too,
just interviewing at Amazon, after workingwhere we were, it was like,
you kind of ask the interviewin some cases because like,
we need a person who understands systemsand blah blah
and has written their own whatever.
And you're not like, oh yeah, I've dabbledwith the Shopify API.
You're like,no, we've built the databases to do this.
I'm sure a DBA or 2 or 5 has migrated

(23:52):
to Amazon from that companyfor that reason. So.
Well, man, I think about developingan e-commerce system back then,
like we take for granted how easy it isto go spin up a Shopify store.
I mean, in the matter of an hour,you could go from an idea to having
a website where you could actually sellsomething or on Shopify.

(24:13):
And back then you had to build everysingle one of those components, I'm sure.
Yeah.
Like there
probably weren't any or many off the shelfthings you could just drop in.
No, we had a databasethat was DB2 and they had a mainframe,
IBM mainframe that basically the warehousephone ordering.
They had their own sort of mainframescreen thing that they could bring up.

(24:36):
Just like Costco.
You go to a Costcoand you see those screens
the guys are punching in
to see if they have your, you know, whythe 80 pound bag of nuts isn't in stock.
Like that's the screen that they had.
And anyway, they had that.
And to make the web workyou're talking about,
I need to see a part on this web page.
That part needs tothat hyperlink needs to know

(24:57):
is this an inventory right now or not.
Because we got to puta shipping estimate on here.
And if it's not an inventoryit's going to take 24 hours longer
because we got to get it from whoever.
Now very lean in terms of how they manageinventory and supply chain and all that.
But you talking about a web serversmainframe
and 1,000,000 square foot warehouseall on one property.
And so we all had to talk to be great.

(25:18):
But that was also the really coolopportunity.
Was the vertically
or having one thing like, integrateall of that really tightly and say,
our freaking website knows if that partis in that bin right now or not.
Right?
Which was a huge advantagebecause it meant that the Chicago Gary,
Indiana industrial belt from,you know, Janesville,
Wisconsin down to Gary, Indiana,meant anybody that was in that area

(25:41):
could call up McMaster Car SupplyCompany at 7 a.m.
and say, hey, we're out of this
one widget that we need for this airconditioning unit to work.
They could know within three ringsof the phone if they had that in stock,
and then they could go meet them at will,call in an hour if they wanted to pick it
up, which was sick efficiency, right?
But it made raving fansout of all of these, you know,

(26:03):
people that work with their hands.
They're like, this is freaking greatbecause this company has my back.
Like,I can literally it's like a Home Depot,
but I can call them on my cell phoneon the way to work, order
some stuff, pick it up,and then go into the shop and fix that,
you know, unit or whatever it is. Right?
It was amazing.
And again, like today we take for granted,like I can go on the Best
Buy app or whatever, and I can do in-storepickup in an hour, right.

(26:26):
But back then like that didn't exist.
Yeah, that was bleedingedge. Bleeding edge.
Yeah.
You want that, you better make everythingtalk and then sync it back.
And there's no frameworks for that.
Like you were writingthe framework for it.
Right.
So you got your education.
You learned how to write software.
But I'm guessing they didn't just, like,stick you in a room and say, here,

(26:48):
go build this.
Like it sounds like you really had to
you had to learn a lot beyondjust learning how to write software.
Yeah. What was that like?
So they were goodin that sense of small teams.
The manager to, you know, manager to ICratio was really I'd say low or high.
But you know, one manager might manage 2or 3 people max sometimes five.

(27:10):
But that was like a big squad right.
So I had I was on a team of sometimesme and another guy and then one manager.
And so a lot of osmosis of knowledge,you know, a lot of time for that person
to invest in teaching us anythingand everything about all the impacts,
the systems.
Also, you know, low cubicle walls,open door policies, a lot of like
it wasn't the open floor planbecause it was like,

(27:32):
you know, maybe they were yay high,but it's pretty much an open floor plan
before those were in vogue.
And and I know they're not in vogueanymore, but like it had that
lots of serendipityand lots of conversations would happen.
And so you would learn a lotif you needed to understand
how this part would movefrom this bean to this thing, you could go
ask the person that just really walkedacross the hall and ask them and learn.

(27:52):
And then if you didn't, if neither of youknew the answer, you could let it go.
Walk into the warehouse and find out.
So there's a very
there's a Japanese phrase
which I won't butcher now,but it says, go and see for yourself.
And that was very much their attitude.
Like if you're sitting there at your deskand you're writing the software
and you're getting a responsefrom the database,
it says, whatever,you don't understand it.
You literally stand up

(28:12):
and you have full permissionto stand up and go out to the warehouse
right now with your little badgeand go check and see
why is the saying this,but I'm getting this like it was very
if you were curiouswhat a great space to be in, right?
Because they're basically saying like,just solve the problem
and let your curiosity be your guide.
And so go ask the coder glasses.

(28:35):
So it was veryI would say you had to be curious yourself
like they weren't going to give it to you,
but everything was kind of open to youas long as you had that drive.
And I was naturally curious.
I want to understand everything. So I wasI love that part about it.
It's like I could map out anythingI wanted to at any time and figure out why
the system, if the plumbingwasn't working, go figure it out.

(28:56):
We're not going to createsome artificial wall
that's like, well, you know,
as long as the water goesthrough the pipe,
through this wall, you don't get to seewhat's on the other side.
No, man, you could follow it all the way.
Right.
And then we would go visit customersand we would literally go to the US.
So we would do onsite visits to customers.
I actually spent my first two weeks there.
They rotated usfrom department, department.
So I spent a dayunpacking parts at the loading doors.

(29:18):
I spent a day taking orders, slips,and filling those up for customers.
I spent a day listening to phone calls,so they actually had me do the job
of the entire customer experience,if you will.
From the time the orders placedor like the websites browse
to fulfillmentbefore I ever sat down and wrote any code.
That's really, really smart.

(29:38):
An amazing to be able to experienceit firsthand and not just have to
imagine or take someone's word for it.
Like you get that hands on.
Okay, I remember when I was unloadingthat box off the dock,
what a pain in the buttit was to check this in or.
Yeah.
So all those internal improvementprojects, right
when there would be an internal sponsorfor, you know,
hey, repack wants us to change the waythe algorithm works for X.

(30:02):
Like, you had empathy.
You at least had empathy for the role,if not for the exact problem.
You're like, oh yeah, that was a pain.
That's a priority now. Cool.
Like I want to solve thatbecause I understand.
Like that sucks, right?
Or maybe you're like, well,I don't really understand that.
But exactly.
It turned everybodyinto like a consultant, not a dumb waiter.
If you will, of like, well, okay,they want me to do this thing.

(30:23):
It's like, no,you know why we're doing this, right?
You understand the businessbenefit of doing this?
Do you doubt the business benefit?
Let's talk this through as opposed toas was not obviously,
the longer you were there,the more your opinion mattered.
I think early onyou are on the receiving end,
but as you mature,your opinion counts more.
I remembergetting invited in my first meetings
where there was a VP in the roomand a director in the room,

(30:45):
and they cared what I saidbecause I did the research right.
And so it was super coolfeeling of like, oh, okay,
that's how things work around here.
It's awesome.
It's the way it should.
I think it's the way it should be.
Here in Texas, we have a grocery storechain that everybody loves, H-e-b,
and I rememberthey recruited a lot on campus
where I went to at Texas A&M,and I knew people that had kind of gone

(31:07):
through their trackand their management training program.
They were going to stick you in a store.
They're going to rotate youthrough multiple stores,
but you were going to spenda couple of months working in produce,
and you're going to spend a couple monthsworking in the bakery,
and you're going to spend a couple months,you know, stock in.
And they had you get firsthand frontline
exposure to every aspect of the store

(31:30):
so that when you came back to the office,maybe you were crunching numbers
and finance whatever, like itgave you a much greater understanding
and appreciationfor not just what you're doing,
but why you need to do it,or why you need to do it a certain way.
I don't think you get the best workout of people if they don't have that.
Why figured out?
Because you can only ever get.

(31:51):
Maybe you will never be disappointed
if you have really,you know, set expectations. Be clear.
You'll never be disappointed.
You also,you'll never be delighted, right?
Because how can somebody go above
and beyond the call of dutyif they don't have that extra context?
Right? They're like,well, I did what you told me. Like,
but like, now the bread's all moldy.
It's like, well,I didn't know that, right?
I could have done thisif I had known that.

(32:12):
And in some ways, even as you said, that,I've thought about this way before.
But as you said that out loud, therekind of recreating the founder
level of 360 foundersor the only other people who have that
not because of out of necessity. Right.
Like once you get to a certain scale,nobody needs to do that anymore.
You could just count beans, right?
But companies, you go, no,we want everybody

(32:33):
to be like a little bit of a founderin that sense.
Like have that 360 degree view.It's just hard, right.
Because short term thinking you're like,but we really need the finances done now.
Like you can do training laterand then you never get there.
Right?
Yeah.
Going back to rightwhen you were coming out of college,
I know like University of Illinois hasa really killer computer science program.

(32:55):
And there's people from Silicon Valleythat are coming out there
to recruit all the time.
And did you look at going out to SiliconValley after college or were you like, no,
I think I'll just stay herein the cold suburbs of Chicago.
So yeah, I did,and actually quit clarification.
So I went to the University of Chicago.Right?
Urbana-Champaign is where a lot of peopleUIC is also like very Marc Andreessen.

(33:16):
And actually my
first manager at the company I workedat was a Urbana-Champaign grad,
so at University of Chicago,and we were very theoretical approach
to computer science, I would say, likewe prided ourselves on teaching everybody
the fundamentals of computingand computing, science, mathematics.
I remember taking a math course there,

(33:36):
and I took honors algebra theremy first year.
I started to and I rememberI was like, okay, welcome to class.
The first chapter you're going to learn
why does A equals a?
Why does A not equal B,and also why you can't divide by zero.
And that's just what you're going to studyfor like the first however many weeks.
And you're like

(33:57):
So the reason I say that is
that they were very focusedon the theoretical.
And so when you produce engineers whohave that bent, who are attracted to that,
you tend to produce researchersand I would say kind of more
of the principal engineers of a companynow at the time. And.
Oh 405 and oh six so I graduated inoh three.

(34:19):
Web 2.0 was just coming out in vogue.
And I remember asking a friend of minewho worked in the lab that I was in,
so how does that Google Maps thingwork? Man, that's the cool thing.
I was loading everything like,oh, it's this thing called Ajax.
I was like, what's that?
And so I ended up learning,you know, kind of those parallel skills,
like the practical skillsI learned by dabbling with this stuff.
And then as friends graduated.

(34:41):
So one of them went to a couple of themwent to work at Yahoo.
One of them went to work at Google.
Yahoo was way cooler back then, actually,
because Yahoo had likeit was just the brand name, right?
They went to work at Yahoo,and I was on a startup team back then.
And so I remember I applied toY Combinator as part of the startup team.
I went and it was the coolest thing.
So I remember going in oh seven out thereand Y Combinator was brand new.

(35:06):
And I remember hanging out at the startof school, which is like the night before.
They have thewhat they call like the Y C program.
Basically, they have like this hangoutat the investor place at Y C itself.
Anyway, I'm like, walk around, there'sthis guy with like this video camera
attached to him in a backpack or whatever.
Well, that was just in con who ended upstarting Justin.tv, which became Twitch,

(35:27):
which sold for $90 million to to Amazonlive streaming.
Now, all the video game stuff.
I remember standing in this laband they were building,
like the self rocking robot that TrevorBlackwell was building for anybody.
But this guy next to me was like,hey, what are you doing, man?
He's like, oh, I'm working on this.And I was like, what? It's too.
He's like, oh wait.
Well, you know how like when you'reworking on some files and like,
you need to move themto the other computer
because like, working on two computers,one's like, oh, yeah, that's a pain.

(35:49):
Like, you know, it's like, yeah.
So I made this thingand basically you save the file
and like,
if I make some changes to this imageand I hit save, like immediately,
those changes will show upon the other computer.
I was like,I was like, whoa, that's amazing.
Like, what is like,yeah, it's like called Dropbox.
It's like,oh, well, I'll try that out, man.
Like, good luck with that.
Like,you know, hope that works out for you.

(36:11):
It's likeand I remember getting a flier that night
and I folded up and put in my pocketand was like, we're looking for, like,
our first engineers basically for that.
So it was a cool time.
I, like my dad, couldn'timagine working for anyone.
So I started my own freaking thing,dodged that golden bullet.
But, but, but it was a cool timeto be in that area for sure.

(36:32):
And so I would go visit.
I had friends that were thereand so I was like plugged in,
but I was living either in Chicagoor eventually back in Florida, now Texas.
But I never made the jumpfor various personal reasons.
But I've had an eye on that,and there were definitely moments for us
like, I could go join what they're doing,but I was also like,
I can start my own companyand I can do it from anywhere.

(36:52):
And a little tooindependently minded in that sense.
So did you start your first businessright after you left McMaster?
Oh, I.
Did, yeah, we founded that company inoh seven with basically no revenue
and a tiny bit of funding,like I think basically my co-founder,
like he lent the companylike $40,000 to start that business.

(37:13):
So. Wow.
Yeah. And you're mid 20s at this point.
Yeah.
I was 20, 25 when that happened.
Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
So when you made that jump,did you feel like you had learned enough
in your first jobto be a successful cofounder?

(37:35):
So because of ignorance. Yes.
And the reason I say it that wayis that I had picked up a book
called Hackersand Painters by Paul Graham.
All these essays on, like,all you really need to do is have an idea
and know how to write web softwareand like, you can build a startup.
So that was likethe Kool-Aid that everyone was drinking.
And I had my ideaI was writing that web software

(37:56):
and I was like, this could be a startup,you know, this could be its own thing.
And I don't think I thought of itas a insurmountable challenge at all.
I thought of it as like,if I make something
that people really loveand they can find it on the internet,
you know,there you go. That's all it takes.
I was wrong, but that's what I thought.
So how did you meet your co-founder?

(38:18):
He was my manager, actually.
Oh, wow. Yeah.
How did that go over when you both,I presume, left at the same time?
I left first and I left for.
I just said I want to move backto Florida, where I was from.
I got tired of the cold,actually had gotten married by that time,
and we were looking for a place whereI had some relatives in town, family,

(38:40):
like that sort of thing.
So I just didn't want to live as isolated.
So I told the companyI was moving for those reasons.
Obviously, I happen to be startingthe company at the same time company.
I was launching a web appat the same time,
and actually my co-founder stayed for,I think, for another year.
So I remember correctly, maybe two, a yearand a half could have been.
Yeah.
So he put the money in.

(39:01):
You made the jump. Yeah.
And he was kind of managing it, working iton the side while he did his day job.
Exactly.
Okay.
What wasthat dynamic like for the two of you?
So we are I'd say we're kindred spiritscreatively.
In a lot of ways.
We were oppositesat that point in our life
in terms of like hours and lifestyleand everything.

(39:23):
I was getting up early. I'ma morning person.
He's never been. He never will be.
So I would get up really early,work on this stuff, hacking this stuff,
and then somewhere around 3
or 4:00 in the afternoon,you know, he'd be like off of work.
He'd come home brew pot of coffeeor whatever, and he would start
kind of working on the thing.
And so we kind of had this relay race,basically this baton we would hand off.

(39:43):
And then sometimes he would be wrapping upwork at five in the morning,
six in the morning,and I would be starting to work.
And so we would literally just tradeplaces, you know? Wow.
For months like that.
So it's not like one of youis putting in more effort than the other.
Oh no. You were both really,really grinding.
Yeah,we were both working many, many hours.

(40:04):
And I wasn't sleeping muchbecause we had had our first kid by then.
So I was basically trading sleepfor working on a startup at the time.
Yeah.
Out of curiosity, what was the agedifference between the two of you?
Yeah, I think he's about.
So that's funny.
I think he's at least four years older.
Yeah, we'll say four years older.
Like not great I think.
Yeah, I think he was born in the same yearas my brother actually.

(40:26):
So yeah. Four years. Okay.
And like at the time,did you feel like he was
this wise sage that could really guide youthrough getting this startup
off the ground,or was it naivete on his part as well?
I think we had a mutual respectfor one another in our differences.
So I think he looked at me.
So I had worked directly for himfor 18 months by that time,

(40:49):
and we had donesome of the best work of his career.
And, you know, my career was basicallythose 18 months, right, or two years.
So I can't really say.
But he saw that he's like,okay, speaking for him.
And I think he was just like,this guy's good.
This guy's really good.
This is somebody I could kind of hitcha wagon to probably as well.
And I would be okay.
And then vice versa.
I was like, he's more seasonedwhen it comes to engineering.

(41:11):
I love his practicality.
He thinks the same way I do about systems.
We've architected some stuff together.
When we did have friction, it was resolvedin a way that created actually
a better outcome than either of usmaybe would have done independently,
which I think to me is like thatis the hallmark of a good yes, exactly.
Of a good team.
It's like if you done this by yourself

(41:32):
writing this self,both of those would have been more flawed.
But we're listening to each otherand even though I hate it,
like each of us kind of hates itbecause we're both pretty stubborn, right?
And that's okay too, but not so stubbornthat we couldn't surrender the point.
But when we would surrenderthe point, we'd end up with this thing
that was like,oh my gosh, this is really good, you know?

(41:53):
And that was a testament to like,okay, this is rare error here
in terms of teamwork.
I think that's what we looked at.
The age and all that other stuffdidn't nearly matter as much as like
we create amazing stuffwhen we work together.
So let's do that again.
But like, let's own that
instead of giving it to some companywith sort of more of the ethos.
I think I know it has something to dowith whether.

(42:13):
But tell us more about like,what did it do?
What was this web app?
When we first started lookingat whether data on the internet was
you would punch in your zipcode on weather.com, you would get a map.
It was a static graphic,like MapQuest style, not even MapQuest.
I was a static graphic of some raindropscoming over Dallas,
and they would have the temperature
in a big number or whatever,and it was like, there's the weather,

(42:35):
no interactivity.
There was no data on a sidethat you could like, copy or save.
There was no APIs to this stuff.
It was TV graphics
saved into images and put on the internet.
That's where weather on the internetstarted, right?
It was like we have TV graphics,
let's just save those graphicsand put on the internet.
So there was no web.

(42:55):
There were no web systems that had weatherdata in them other than the government.
So the government was the first onesto put weather data
on the internet with their web serversof saying, like National Weather Service,
National Hurricane Center, here'sthese public APIs.
If you want weather data,you can come and get it.
But nobody was doing that yet.
So we were one of the first companies,literally a team of two people.

(43:18):
I was emailing the webmasterat the National Weather Service,
having one on one chats with himabout these government web servers
because we're like,how do we get this data?
How do we get that data?
Because we're like, we're just goingto suck all this data up, right?
It's public domain.
No one's taking advantage of that yet.
I felt like we had founda kind of a goldmine and nobody was there
except for us.
We're like, why is nobody want this?

(43:39):
Like,this is real time weather information
that'saffecting millions of businesses and lives
and everyone'skind of selling for TV graphics, right?
So we saw an opportunity to digitize,but basically turn
all of that government data into an API,into interactive maps, into a data service
that companies couldthen license for business purposes.

(44:01):
We were likeand we ended up having thousands.
And so and that worked out.
It was a grind,but that worked out where we ended up
having thousands of customerswho use either.
Our interactive weather maps alertsgive you an example.
We had companies that were working outin the Gulf of Mexico
who were doing helicoptertravel for people on oil rigs, right?

(44:22):
They don't need TV graphics.
They need like, I've got this flightplan and it's 2007, right?
What's the easiest, most accurate wayto figure out if this flight plan
is going to be where the storm front'scoming through? Right.
And that's incredibly important questionto answer.
But backthen, Google Earth had just come out.
Google maps wasn't a thing,
and weather was not mergedwith any of that geospatial information.

(44:44):
So we were the first ones to nownobody knew it when we got started.
But as of 2006, actually,I remember the moment adjusted
for where we first made it work,
but it took us from
04207 for anybody else to knowthat we had kind of cracked the code.
Like we literally figured outhow to run those questions
through our service and get answers.

(45:07):
And because we were doingall the dirty work of sinking
back to the government,you didn't have to worry about that part.
All you had to do was say,
I've got a store, I've got a warehouse,I've got this, I've got it.
That here's what I care about.
Do I need to evacuate these people?
Do I need to do this?Do I need to do that?
And that end up being worth a lot of money
to a lot of companies because, yes, lives,but also a lot of money is at stake
when it comes to justdealing with severe weather.

(45:29):
And then obviously that extends througha lot of, you know, the United States.
So that's what we did.
We were one of the pioneers of weatherdata and maps on the air.
I literally can say, like
the first interactive maps on the internetthat had weather on them, like where
there was a layer that said radar.
That was us basically like, yeah,what if you could, you could turn up.
We were like the first maps onthe internet where you could turn on radar

(45:50):
and pan around and see it, basically.
But we were crazy at the timebecause nobody else was doing
that was like, why would you do that?
Well,
we've talked about like at least 4or 5 different things already
that have been like,we totally take this for granted.
Like you talked about Dropbox,
we talked about getting e-commercestood up and so forth.
This morningwhen I was driving my son to school,

(46:11):
he flipped on the weather andhe pulled up the map and he's watching.
We've got some rain coming in today,and he's moving the map around,
and we totally take that for granted.
And I, I can't believe that in 2007,
weather wasn't overlaid into flight plans.
That's my systems that were doing that.
So I think you can say there wereindustrial systems that were doing that.

(46:33):
So Unisys and IBMand there were, you know,
sort ofgo to the Oracle side of things and say,
Did American Airlines have some radar tool
that they could overlay a flight plan onand see some radar?
Yes, but it was on some terminalat the Dallas-Fort
worth airport or something,or more likely in some hub of theirs.

(46:55):
Right.
It wasn't consumer ized.
It wasn't productized.It wasn't an app. Right.
So yes, there were tools like thatthat like a pilot would probably pay
a mint for his company,would pay a mint for,
but like general availabilityor an iPad in the cockpit
that you can knowthat wasn't a thing. Right?
So it got basically consumer ized andturned into apps right around that time.

(47:17):
Right.
And until then, it was a bunch of actionsystems generating images
that are probably static.
And if he wanted to zoom out,
he would hit a button,it would crunch a bunch of data,
and it would literally redraw this imagefor him.
Right. Or her. And he's like, oh, okay.
Like that was state of it.
All right.
I think he said that
when you made the jump to start this,you already married at that point

(47:40):
and you're relatively fresh out of school.
What did your wife say about
doing this risky startup you want to put
whether maps on the internet,like what was her take?
Yeah.
I think she would have an even betteranswer than me for this,
but it was a more support than I deserved.

(48:00):
Sort of thing in termsof being willing to take that risk.
Didn't have to really understand it,just a ton of trust in that sense.
Definitely some skepticism,
I would say, in a good way,kind of anchoring my balloon.
Right. Which is always good.
But unlike people, I tried to recruita couple friends to join me

(48:21):
and they would hit that wall
where they're just like,I can't get so-and-so behind this, right?
And I'm like, gladthey didn't go against that.
Don't get me wrong.
But I never had that problem.
I did have thehow is this going to work? How whatever.
But I think there was just a faith,a trust and naivety on both of our parts.
Like this was going to work outand we were similar in that sense,

(48:43):
a willingnessto just run into a lot of risk.
And I think we both were very fortunateto have like a safety net
in terms of family, friends,our upbringings.
Like,I don't think we ever worried that, like,
we're going to be out of the streetsor destitute, something like that.
Like it might have been bad,but we weren't worried about ending up
in a dire situation. Right.
And I think that's fundamentalto a lot of that.

(49:06):
So did you and your co-founder,did you eventually start hiring
and expanding the team, or was thisa two man operation all the way through?
It was a two man operationfor a long time.
We eventually figured outhow to make enough money to hire,
and then we raised some money.
It took us four yearsbefore we were able to raise any money.
When we we made enough money,
you know, we made a profitfor the first time in 2012.

(49:27):
So our first profitable year was 12and we started hiring folks.
Basically, the company was somewherebetween 15 and 20 people
as of 2018 when the company was acquiredand I left,
it didn't take a lot ofpeople, was a very tech heavy business
in that sense to people in sales, customersupport, that kind of thing.
But mostly engineers.
And with the engineering we were doing,my co-founder was

(49:50):
my co-founderwent to this meeting in Chicago in 2007,
and he comes back, well, comes back,but he calls me up and he's like,
hey, man, I just went to this, meetup,this tech meetup here in Chicago.
I was like, yeah.
So yeah, I know we've been usinglike the servers that your friend
has, but like, I learned about thisnew service that's coming out.
Amazon's going to have it actually.
Second it was he's like it'sa little risky because it's a new service.

(50:11):
But like I think it's going to be bigI think we should use that.
I like if you say so.
So we started using AWS 2000.
In the fall of 2007,we switched over to AWS
and wow, freaking great call. Right.
Because thenwe had this advantage of like,
whereas others might have been hiringa lot of engineers
to speed things up, we're like,oh yeah, we need like five more servers.

(50:34):
Like, let's go.
You know,I think we serve 4 million web requests
a day in 2008 with a team of two people.
Yeah. Wow.
So it worked.
He was right.
But that was the advantage of being on AWS
in 2008, when everyone else is like,what's you got to name it?
You got to call it something for?

(50:55):
I don't think people are going to call itthe cloud yet. Right? Like,
yeah.
All right.
So it's one
thing to build an app, but at some pointyou've got to generate revenue.
Who did the selling for this app?
Was it youyour partner was a both. We both tried.
I had more of a knack for it.
I think him being more of a CTO type,cantankerous type,

(51:17):
I think self-proclaimed skepticin that sense of like, yeah, people,
you know, it was like,
okay, well, one of us has to bethe optimist on the corner,
you know, spinning the arrow that says,come on in.
You know, we've got fresh pizzaor something like that.
So who's that? Kind of like, okay,I probably gonna have to be me.
We tried every business model in somebecause back then, SAS,
I talked to a salespersonat Salesforce in 2010.

(51:39):
I'm like, I've got some businesscards from a conference.
What are you guys doing?
Oh, yeah.
Well, we have this thingcalled contacts in the cloud or something.
You basically put your com like, well,that sounds neat.
Like I want to do that.
So like SAS sales insights, sales, CRM,all that stuff like so what was I doing?
I'm talking to people who want to usesoftware that's on the internet.
And that was my jobdescription at that point.

(52:01):
So like so
we had to experiment with business modelsthat weren't even figured out yet.
And it was like,well, what is Salesforce doing?
What are they doing? Okay.
We can we can have tiers,we can put prices on it.
We tried that.
I sold ads.
So like I said, we had 4 millionweb requests that one day because in 2008,
I think we ended up serving somethinglike 25 million requests

(52:22):
or something of thatthroughout the year were very spiky.
Traffic was like having an e-commercesite.
It was like Christmas is a big day.
So with weather, hurricanes,and hurricane season,
as those are Christmases,if you will, for in terms of traffic.
And then everything else is verypretty common point being, I did ad sales.
People would call me up and say,hey, we're selling supplies.
We sell flashlights and disasterrecovery supplies.
I was like, cool, I'll take your order.

(52:43):
So, you know, for 2000 bucks,we'll put your banner on the site.
You know, it'll cost this like I lit,I was getting first hand experience
selling every form of monetizationyou could imagine, right?
And then eventually in 2012,we realized, okay,
ad sales aren't going to do itbecause the CPMs are brutal.
Even with tens of millions of page views,you'll make a lot of money.

(53:05):
I think we made like $120,000that year, which was enough for two people
that we're making probably the equivalentat their day jobs each to say 6060.
But we're like,how do we turn this into a real business?
And we're like, we got to sell thisSaaS stuff, this data stuff somehow.
And so we added alertingas a feature in 2009.
That was a big turning pointbecause when we added alerting

(53:27):
now businesses,we put that on the web, say, hey,
upload your locationsand we'll send you a weather alert.
I remember the first time and we're like,here's a place to put your CSV file
upload your CSV file, latitude, longitude.
Here's the format.
It was great back then.
First taste of self-service is likeliterally just going to get the mail.
We had like a virtual box to go mailcome back.

(53:48):
I'm like, wait, what is this now?
I hit refresh and somebody had uploadedlike 8000 locations and I'm like, okay.
And I looked him up and it was like everyI want to say circle K or something
in the United States, someone had uploadedand I'm like, who the heck is this?
Well, it turns out whether it's circleK or 7-Eleven or whoever,

(54:09):
I mean, there's people whose entire jobs
it is to be the facilities managerfor these giant brands, right?
And it's like, why do you care?
Well, I need to know if I need to tellthe franchisee to board up the windows
and get the heck out of there, like,because if they don't,
we're gonna have broken windowsto deal with and flooding and all this.
So there's allthis operational stuff is happening.
We didn't even know that.
We just literally put this featureon the internet and we're like,

(54:31):
do you need weather alerts for locations?
And then people just started buying.
It was like,we do and we don't have this yet.
And sure,you could go on weather.gov or weather.com
and put in like 78717 Austin but
no no, no,I need like 8000 locations uploaded
and then I need like an interfaceto choose like, well, I need a text

(54:53):
to go to Jerry and an email to go to Dianeand add this to go to this.
So we built out all that alertingkind of infrastructure.
And so we were able to send alertsthanks to AWS as well.
Like we would send tens of thousandsof emails and text messages, whatever
per minute when there was like a literallya tornado coming kind of stuff.
But not surprisingly,people were willing to pay for that.
So we had this business offeringthat basically saved the day.

(55:16):
That was one thing.
The other thing I have to share iswe were a free site for a long time
just to get all that attentionand traffic.
We read about freemium and we're like,oh, freeze,
Chris Anderson, the future of everything,we'll make it free.
That was cool because everybody coulduse it, but we didn't make any money.
So there was a fateful day in 2012 wherewe actually turned off the free plan,

(55:36):
and suddenly millions of peoplehit this paywall and they were so mad.
I was going to say, what was the backlash?
It was terrific.
So here I am, like taking our kids to swimlessons.
It's me and Brad's name, my co-founder.
Me and Brad are like,starting this company.
I get a call my cell phone because that'sthe number on the support line, right?
If you're whatever, call this number.

(55:56):
This person starts chewing me out, saying,we sold out.
Whoever our bosses areshould be ashamed of themselves
for turning off the free plan becauseit's the best thing ever, blah blah blah,
rip me to pieces.
And I had to basically pretendlike I was PR at some big company, right?
Because I didn't want to, like,let on the fact
that, like, it's literally like,thanks for your donation kind of thing.

(56:16):
But like, no, I don't want to let on this.
I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry, ma'am.
Yes, I'll definitely tell our supervisorwhatever, like thing.
I'm like, Brad, get a load of this.
Like, this is, this is crazy.
People emailed us death threats.
It was oh my God.Oh yeah. It was horrific.
At the same time,the fact that people were so hateful
and angrytold you how much they loved the product

(56:38):
because we basically were like,you can't have that anymore, right?
And I remember we were pretty gutsyabout it and we said, like, you know what,
it's $500 a year and you can't pay monthly
and it's $500,which is a real amount of money.
And that cut off a lot of consumerswho are just using it for like
their soccer teams or whatever,where suddenly, like, I lost this tool.
But the high net worth people, the stocktraders, the commodities traders, the US

(57:02):
steel corporations that were using it,they all emailed us and were like, hey,
guess the free ride's over,
We're like, yeah, feel like,all right, here's our credit card number.
I was like,
unbelievable.
So our customer countwent through the roof like in one summer,
we five revenue in one yearbecause we figured out

(57:23):
that these giant companieswere using us for nothing.
And we had to.
Unfortunately,say goodbye to a million consumers.
But we turned it into 2000 business
subscriptions,which we had to survive somehow.
Right?
I can remember backin the early days of my career
getting hooked on some free service,and eventually

(57:43):
they said, hey,we got to generate some revenue.
And I remember having some of thosereally angry, fresh worst moments.
But when you're a business owner,like at some point
you got to pay your mortgage,you got to put food on the table.
I tried so you can try.
Unless you're Google, youcan't make things exactly like I tried.
I wanted to say so badly.

(58:04):
I tried like I put it out there foreverfor you, like, and you didn't upgrade.
We had an upgraded pass.
It's just there like, yeah, you know thephrase good enough for whatever I'm like.
So, you know,you didn't put money in the donation box.
I don't know what to do.So it ended up going great for us.
Unfortunately for those consumers,it went badly for them.
And we did end up doingsome licensing deals with media companies
where they were able to pay us to licenseour maps to put on their websites.

(58:27):
So we could always say, like,
if you love our maps,you can still go to USA today or CNN.
Like some big brand nameshad us on their sites at the time
and you can still go see them.They're like, oh, it's not the same.
It's not as good.But I'm like, well, appreciate it.
But like you'realso not willing to pay them back.
So it is what it is. Right? Right.
Let's kind of go towards the
end of that time, you said down the roada buyer came calling.

(58:50):
What was that experience like.
So that experience required us unlock.
I would say two things.
One is bigger dealsand the other one is a whole new market.
So we sold to the fortune 1000.
But the Joe kind ofis like there's only a thousand of those.
And at some pointI could drive down the street.
And just because of how companieswork in United States, like,
you know, you ever get a gift cardslike a restaurant.

(59:11):
There's like, it works at any of these16 locations, right?
It's like, oh, I didn't knowTaco Bell was owned by whatever.
Like at some point there's only like
a thousand companies that ownso many of these brands and names.
And so we kind of maxed out our marketin that sense of like,
which meant we maxed out our revenue.
Like there's only so many subscriptions
you can sell to a thousand companiesthat all need the same thing.

(59:32):
We needed to do somethingdifferent, bigger, better.
So we were like, okay,what if we add a twist?
No longer are we just tracking assets.
What if we told you thatif you've got a ship,
if you're shipping somethingfrom here to there,
we can tell you if the weatheris going to impact that shipment in route.
And we'll basically simulate the weatherand simulate your shipments,
and we'll tell you to what degree dothey intersect and how badly.

(59:56):
Right.
Well, that's your 2014
the polar vortex hit,which basically turned Dallas and Chicago.
I don't know if it's fromas far as Dallas.
I know it was pretty far south, likeit was like hot out there, right?
It's like nothing was moving.
Everything was an igloo.
It was a nightmare.
Well, all logistics in the United Statespretty much came to a grinding halt
that winter. And

(01:00:19):
a couple of
giant companies that were small customersor free customers before were like,
how the heck are we goingto deal with the.
And they were like, oh,so one day I get this email
and it's like John Smith at Anheuser-Busch
dot com and it's like, hey,
I heard that you guys knowhow to solve this weather thing.

(01:00:42):
If we say, for example,had a shipment of beer
that was going from, for example,like Saint Louis, Missouri, to
some place in Colorado, would you be ableto tell us if or whatever?
And I remember leaning over my desk
and he's like,but I need to know that you're all in.
I was like, sir, it's like if you becomea customer, we are all in.
And so we went all in on logistical,

(01:01:05):
basically analytics,and we became a company who again was like
the first that could take millionsof shipments a day into our systems
and reliably producea score that would tell these companies,
oh, you care about temperaturebecause you're a food company.
Oh, you care about thisbecause you sell hard drives, right?
We could tell every companybased on their exact profiles, like what

(01:01:28):
the risks were
to their logistical operationsand that the contract values, basically,
because now you're solving
a very hard problem at scale for companiesthat are like,
okay, we do 21 million shipments a year,we do 5000 shipments a year.
Whatever it is, it doesn't matter.
They will pay $0.50 a dollar, $2 pershipments, almost like insurance.
To know that we're not sendingthis shipment of extremely valuable stuff

(01:01:52):
into the face of an ice storm,because if it flips over, they lose that.
They lose$50,000 worth of products. Right?
So we give you guys to how.
Much of your logistical knowledgecame from working at McMaster,
or was it something you kind ofhad to go reinvent for yourself?
I think it right in that sense.
Like it gave me confidence to say, like,

(01:02:12):
I know what it looks like when a truck,I mean, literally
going back to my early days there, like,I know what you're talking about.
Like there's a truck,it backs up, it unloads,
and then you put some other sideand then it goes away.
Like just even demystifyingthat stuff was a huge confidence boost
as a sales personon those calls to say, like, I roughly
get the idea and I could ask questionsthen about the rest to be curious.

(01:02:33):
So I think that helps.
The other thing that happenedwas when I was starting the company,
I had to go get a day job for a bitjust to fun things,
and I ended up working at a companythat had me build a real estate site,
and that real estate sitewas all geospatial on the back end.
So I learned about geospatial databasesand queries and all that stuff.
So I was like,I know how to put a line into a database

(01:02:53):
and then take an intersection of itand say,
you know,break it up into chunks and stuff.
So like from an engineering standpoint,I had this confidence.
It did still come down to like, okay,but we have to do this millions of times.
And but that timewe had an engineering team.
They had confidence too,that they could take it on.
And we did those first demos.
We're like, how this look?
And I remember them going like,there's nothing else like it.

(01:03:15):
That's amazing. We need this.
It still took us nine monthsto close those deals
because they're giant companies, right.
Got to go. Procurementand everything else.
The reason I share
all that is that's kind ofgot the attention of the acquirer level,
if you will, if like
we might be looking at a few companieswho work with people from like a weather
data space or learning or whatever,but like you are now integrating with

(01:03:37):
their SAP installationor their Oracle database
at companies of around for 100 years,you're not going anywhere, right?
That's hard work.
We know that's hardwork from a business standpoint,
not just like an engineering standpoint,
like giving those companiesthat trust you and everything else.
So I'd say our enterprise valuewent up a lot by landing those logos.
And that's sort of how that came about.

(01:03:59):
So then ultimatelythe acquisition interest was private
equity and DHL, the yellow and redlogistics company, they were kind of
looking at who they could partnerwith in terms of risks to supply chains.
And they'd kind of figured outone part of the equation.
We had figured out the stuffthat's in flight part.

(01:04:21):
And actually even be more nerdy about itfor a second.
It's one thing to have,oh, I'm driving down the road and like,
I heard that there's a bad storm.
Let me bring up like nav techor Google Maps or whatever.
Like there's all these apps that tell youit's another thing to say, no,
we're going to produce an analyticthat hits the desk of the planner,
who's even deciding three days,four days a week ahead of time,

(01:04:43):
that that truck's going to leave on Mondayor Tuesday or Wednesday at 8 a.m.
or 9 a.m. or 10 a.m.
and go run that route. Right.
And so we had solvedlike a planning problem.
Whereas most of the companies in the space
were focusedon the execution stage of like.
But at that point,like the truck was driving down the road,
the train is literally left the station.
Literally.There's not a lot you can do, right?

(01:05:04):
So we had introducedthis much better value prop of, well,
we tell the planner three days in advance,four days in advance.
You might be able to choosea different route.
You might be able toyou have way more options.
And that was just a harder problem.
But it required having a seven dayforecast, ten day forecast
baked into your logistical software.
And like people didn't have that again,

(01:05:26):
kind of on that bleeding edge,for better or worse.
It was hardbecause it made the sales hard.
It was a new product category,
but once we established it, it was like,okay, well, no one else is doing this.
So it's a good place to be.
One of the things that strikes meabout your story with this business is
when you started off,
it sounds like you didn't really havethe revenue model figured out
and was free for a long time,and then it became a nominal subscription.

(01:05:50):
And then little by little,you figured out where to unlock
additional value for the customer,and you figured out how to monetize that.
And I think business is all we alwayswe have to be pivoting, right?
We have to be looking at the market.
We have to be listening to our customersand figure out
what do they need,how can we add more value?
And I don't know, it'sjust a great reminder

(01:06:11):
that you don't have to have everythingfigured out.
Day one.
Sometimesyou're going to change plans in flight.
Yeah, I think it's actually impossible.
Okay, I like to run the socks. Sure.
And in the interest of time,I'll leave it as a homework exercise.
But like,imagine that you were at Anheuser-Busch
and you saw that problemfirsthand and you went to solve it.

(01:06:31):
I would actually argue that
the product you build,the solution you build will be different
than the one that we built coming at itfrom the outside.
And so two thingswhich I think are both true.
One is, yes, it's beneficial to startwith the end of view of I know the problem
we're solving though,
and I know what it's worth,and I think I know how to solve it.
But if you don't have that,

(01:06:53):
just admitting you don't have thatand staying open minded and curious about
where is the higher value,I think you can still get there.
It's going to be a longer road,
but you might actually have the benefitof being built differently.
When you arrive on the scene,you're like, oh,
but we don't just dologistical shipments out of Oracle.
We can also do that brewery over there.

(01:07:14):
That's a static asset. We can do that too.
Oh, we have a mobile app. Oh, we have it.
You just can't help but end up.
You can never end upat the same place. Right?
So it shouldn't be discouraging that like,
oh well we don't understandthe whole problem.
It's like that's great.
But sometimes those people end upstuck too because they're like,
we have one customer,
it's just one giant enterprise,and they want an exclusivity and an end.

(01:07:34):
And like,
you don't get room to breathe in a sense,to figure out the bigger opportunity.
Yes, there's downsidesthe other part, too,
which is like you're just sort of fumblingthrough the
through the darkness, going like,I don't know where I live.
Marco Polo. Right. Basically.
But you know, that's the path we ended upgoing down and it is what it is.
You got to learn by doing though.And that's the thing too.
You can't just stand there and go like,would that company raise your hand?

(01:07:57):
They're not going tothey've never heard of you.
You got to just build on your own success.
So late 20 tens you exit that business.
Did you have to stick aroundfor a little while or were you free to go?
Day one?
I was free to go day one because I hadalready stepped away from being a CEO.
I hired somebody else to work with me.

(01:08:18):
And then probably about a year into thatengagement, we made him CEO instead of me.
That was nice, because then
I could just speak at conferencesand do kind of that stuff,
be the founder in the room,but not have to carry the load of like
managing things day to day.And we were still very flat work.
So it was just
a lot of people reporting to me,and it was very stressful in that sense.
Not necessary even in the like, just waytoo many meetings every single day,

(01:08:42):
just like it gets.
It got a little old after a while.
Plus I felt like my best gifts of like
discovering the marketand being on the cutting edge and doing
new product were just kind ofwither on the vine to some extent.
So everybody understood thatI got to move off and do that instead.
But then when the company acquired it,
it was like,we don't need that role anymore.
We have this new vision.

(01:09:02):
It's owned by this person over here.
It's a joint company visionor it's merged vision.
I got to kind of just exit stage leftwithout really any.
There was no use for me. In a way.
I think there was one more thingI went to after that of like a conference
or something just to show face,but that was basically it.
And then I was kind of free to go and I.
Yeah, still running to this dayand doing great things, by the way.
That's got to feel good. Yeah.

(01:09:24):
So what led to summit.
Answeringwhat is summit now is sort of like
asking me at the end of that thing,what was that company?
It's a different answer now.
That would have been in 2019when I started it.
Today.
I'd say if you've ever used Zapier or makeand you've gotten
either blocked or frustratedor fed up or hit a wall in terms of,

(01:09:44):
I want to do this thing, but I can't,
we are a tool to work in place of that.
So a lot of automations and workflows,car sales, no code, low code platform,
and we help businessesbasically move workflows into APIs.
And the reason that's beneficial is
I think that a lot of those toolsare great
for moving datafrom one place to the other.
I think today, the reason that we existand the reason

(01:10:06):
I thinkit's a bit of a different category, is
a lot of times it's not just about moving
data from, oh, I've got data in Salesforceor I got data in a form better example.
It's in a type formand I want to get it in Salesforce.
That's a very solve problem.
It's been solved since somewherethe 20 tens or whatever.
Somewhere along there, Zapier solvedthat really well.
I think the really interesting stuffthese days
with automationsis more of what happens in between.

(01:10:27):
It's like, got this data?
I eventually want to get some alteredversion of it into this other system.
I need to do a bunch of workalong the way.
We are helping people buildthese more, I'd say enriched workflows,
resilient workflowswhere doing more things along
the way is importantand just different era, different toolset.
So it's called summit.
It connects to CRM,it connects to pretty much

(01:10:50):
anything that has an API,and it lets you run these automations.
And what gave you the idea for this?
What was the inspiration?
The inspiration was working.
I started out in a different place.Not surprising given the last story.
The inspiration was workingwith a lot of spreadsheets and data
in the last business and going,
okay, I'm a developer, an engineer,and here I am, the spreadsheet,
and I'm like trying to add datato rows and columns and working with data.

(01:11:13):
A spreadsheet felt very slow and tedious.
This should be automatable in that sense.
And so I wasn't trying to solvean integration problem necessarily of,
oh, I'm trying to get data from QuickBooksinto something else, right?
I was like, I got the data in Excel.
I've got this consistent way.
I want to like it or work with itor add to it or whatever.
How am I supposed to do that?

(01:11:34):
And it always just end up coming downto this manual process of like, well,
do this, click this and then scrape thisand then add this.
And I'm like, that's.
So I started building a toolthat would make it a lot easier to work
with spreadsheet like data, basically datathat was either a CSV format
or you wanted to generate a bunch of datato add to a spreadsheet.
And that was the genesis of it.
And I would say start outthinking more about rev ops.

(01:11:56):
I'd say like rev ops and finance opstend to work with spreadsheet data a lot.
The most they're sitting in therelike doing accounting and cruel
based stuff, revenue recognition,all those things.
Like they just spend a lot of timein spreadsheets suffering, I would say.
But over time,we realized those folks at the same time,
Excel is like their second language.
They they kind of live to be in there.

(01:12:17):
We end up finding more marketpull from folks who are like,
I'm only in G sheets or Excelbecause I have to be.
Really, I'm just trying to get the datainto this other system.
There's this offshootwhere I have to spend this time.
They're like, oh, okay,why don't we help you?
You guys can keep having fun and exceland all that stuff.
Like, we're not going to automate awayyour pals and pro forma and all that,

(01:12:37):
but you could probably helpyou do your job more efficiently.
And that's where we ended up.
You had the successful exit.
And I'll go back to thewhat was the conversation
like with your wife when you said,
hey, I'm going to go do thiswhole startup thing all over again?
You know that sceneat the end of interstellar?
I was banging on the
back of the bookshelf, yelling at himself,saying like, don't leave, don't go.

(01:13:02):
That's what I wish I had.
I joke, but like, there was no voicein my head that said, don't do it again.
It was more, hey, you know whatyou're doing, you can do this again.
I think both of us were pretty happywith things, pretty confident
in having the timeand the ability to run this again.
And there's a certain levelof just comfort and credibility

(01:13:24):
that you have where you're like,now you want to take more risk, right?
It it's almost the
why would I want to not deploy the skillsthat I supposedly have?
Now, what I've learned and I laughbecause you learn along the way.
Oh my gosh,there's so much to learn, right?
This is not something where you're like,oh, well, I fought in one war.
I can fight in another.
You're like, dude,I mean, it is good experience.

(01:13:46):
Don't get me wrong.
Like if I'm going to go somewherewith somebody,
I love that you've climbed a mountain.
But I've also learned, like,apparently mountains are all different.
It's only so much translates.
And so I think it was alet's give it a shot.
I don't think it was ever a
this is permanent kind of thing,but I think it was a why not try.
And so that's what I did.
And so far I've been able to extend thattimeline mean we haven't gotten there yet.

(01:14:10):
But I think it wasa very similar conversation
where we had a lot less naivete,
I think a little bit more internalwrestling or groaning around really.
And I thought about.
So I did talk to a few companies
afterwards, and there was a few momentswhere I thought about
because I think companiesare looking for entrepreneurs to hire.
If you can find somebody who's beenan entrepreneur, self-starter, autonomous,

(01:14:31):
you just point them at a problemand say, solve this.
That's great. Right?
And so I talked to a couple of companieswhere I felt like I could do that
if I could live in the multiverse. Right.
I would love to know what wouldhave happened if I had chosen that.
I think I'd be more comfortablein some ways right now,
but I also wouldn't have the experienceand everything I've done this time around.
So there's a storyI'm going to tell myself.

(01:14:55):
You used a word earlier.
You talked about your dadbeing unemployable.
Free spirit kind of has his own mindsetabout how work should get done.
Are you unemployable at this point?
I think I'm employable for a period.
I think that there's alwaysa period of time where
I'm flexible and adaptable enough, where,

(01:15:15):
yeah, I mean, if I'm working in a contextwhere it's not
my call, there's a lot of reliefthat comes from it not being your calls.
Like you get on the field,you're not calling the play.
You just run your route and you're like,okay, I mean, kind of nice.
I mean, that was actually the last yearof my, work at my last company
didn't have the final say,but I also didn't have the stress.
That was really nice, honestly.
Like, it's a partbecause I could do that for a while.

(01:15:36):
But you also get to the pointwhere you're like,
Unless I'm super contentor satisfied in terms of
I checked all the other boxes,I am where I want to be.
This like the other thing,like if I feel like
by not being able to call the shotsor have the final say, if I feel like I'm
not achieving my goals,I like bigger picture goals.
That is hard to sacrificebecause then you're like, well,

(01:15:57):
I have this comfort and I'mI hate making this argument
because I feel likeI should be the last one to make it
because I'm like,what experience do I speak from?
But like plenty of friendswho have worked those jobs, who
I asked them like, how's it gone?
And they're just like their soul has leftthe building, sort of just like
because they're untapped.
Their whole skill setis kind of checked out to some extent.

(01:16:20):
And I think it's a shamebecause I think their employer
could probably get way more out of them.
But if you think about what a companyreally is, a company at some point
is about re executing a sure fire process.
Right.
And that meanswe have to mute the upside to some extent
and not let people just come in herewith knew I knew his risk right.

(01:16:43):
Knew his risk.
And we don't need newunfortunately I'm new.
I always end up coming back to new.
And I think that makes that makes mea problem in most environments.
At some point, eventually it's a problem.
You used an analogy a minute ago.
You talked aboutwhen you were talking about starting this.
Yeah, I've climbed a mountain before,but you quickly realized

(01:17:05):
that this mountain is differentthan the last one.
What things did you takefrom your prior startup
that you've brought over,and what are things that you brought over
that didn't quite worklike you expected them to?
A lot of actions are reactions, really.
And so my reactions to that experiencewas I'm going to charge from day one.

(01:17:25):
I'm going to buildkind of more of a lifestyle business.
I'm going to focus on revenuefrom the beginning, etc.
I definitely did that to start,
but I ultimately found myself
hitting a plateau along the way,and I kind of had to rediscover the
let me just try.
I, I had to be more openthan I wanted to be in a sense of.

(01:17:49):
I'd seen that movie before and I'm like,I want to give those five years
of suffering about peopleto monetize correctly.
So let me just go ahead and chargefor the beginning.
Well, sure, I was able to get some moneyout of some people, but that doesn't
necessarily mean you've got the businessmodel of your dreams either, right?
I like to use the example of a good salesperson entrepreneur.
Probably go down your street today
and sell a glass of lemonadeto someone, right?

(01:18:10):
Is it a great business? No.
Did you monetize from day one? Yes.
Suddenly you realize, oh,that wasn't the goal either.
That's good.
But my goal was to learn enough to build
this business that I'm really excitedabout and proud of.
And I was so eagerto charge something at the beginning.
I think I might have dampenedsome of my ambition around

(01:18:31):
think a little bit bigger, though.What if you didn't?
What if that didn'thave to be the business, right?
And what you know,that's a tough thing to answer.
I think for anyone it is good
to get that feedback from the marketif I'm willing to pay for this.
But how many people also struggle?
Businesses that hit a plateauand they're like,
how come I can't get more growth?
And it's like, well, the business modelyou have is just kind of a V4.

(01:18:53):
You're going to have to break it apartand do it over again.
And so I think I was overly optimistic
that the answerwas just charging money from day one.
And it's not
probably isn't.
It wasn't for me.I still had to rebuild the engine.
So if you have you reverse course on that,like are you offering a free or

(01:19:13):
or doing a freemium thing
or have you kind of really stuck with thenow we're we're monetizing this again?
I've tried on a lot of shoes here,if you will.
The first version was pay somethingthat was a free trial.
We did the free trial for a long time.
Seven days, 14 days, that kind of thing.
Free month had a free, entirelyfree tier for a while.
Where we are at right now,kind of where I'm happy

(01:19:35):
at is credit card to sign upand it's pay as you go.
So you have a pay as you go tier.
I feel like that's a nice balance of like,
look, if you're not willingto put in a credit card,
you could be a spam bot or you justmight not have any interest at all.
If you're not willing to run the riskof getting charged $0.02,
then probably just spend more timelooking at the shop window,

(01:19:55):
if you will, or looking at the homepageand like, come back when you're ready.
I feel like that's nice. I'mhappy with that.
At the moment of like,
okay, people are willing to put on thecard, there's a trust transaction there,
and then it's pay as you go,which means, yeah, you could run up
a dollar bill to find outif this tool really works for you.
But again, I feel like that's a little bitmore fair in terms of
if it doesn't work out for you,then you burn $0.57, right?

(01:20:18):
And putting in a credit card number,and I feel like that's
a lot of the challenge in SAS is like,we're all trying to find that balance.
If no one wants somebody who's completelyno intention
of ever paying anything right,that doesn't help.
At the same time,
I want to put like a $300 hurdlein front of somebody who's like, dude,
I don't even knowif this is going to work yet.
For better or worse,I think it's the right model for us.

(01:20:39):
We've landed on pay as you go.
It's a common model for a lot of developerlike platforms
or build things, platformswhere you're like more I use it.
The more value
I get, the more I pay you,but I get a lot more value than I pay you.
Everybody kind of wins, right?
And that's where I'm at now.And we'll see.
I mean, my hope is that it'skind of like an Amazon or Heroku or Twilio

(01:20:59):
play in that sense, where it's like, sure,your first bill is $0.53,
but if you love it,maybe your next bill is 50 bucks.
But like, everyone's still happy.
It's interestinghow SAS has really evolved.
I mean, it early daysit was X amount per user and then it was,
hey, you can upgrade here
and get these additional featuresand it's Y amount per user.

(01:21:20):
And we're seeing more
and more things shift to having at leastsome consumption pricing.
And it'll be interestingto watch over the years and years ahead
to see if that sticksor if there's yet another evolution.
I think it will inevitably stick.
There's still just a lot of dancing
that people have to do around things,because you're just not sure.

(01:21:41):
Like the most commoditized productstend to be usage based.
Anyway.
If you think about our own lives,I pay for kilowatt hours of electricity.
I pay for whateverBTUs or something of natural gas. Why?
Because I'm completely
confident in the valueone sip of this thing allows me to do x.
I think with SAS and a lot of softwareproducts,
there's just not a lot of confidence yetin terms of

(01:22:03):
what am I really getting for this?
And so it's hard for the buyer
and the seller to arrive atlike a clearing price of, well, each seat.
Is this or each record in HubSpot?
Is this like,what's a record house HubSpot worth?
I don't think we figured that out yet.
Still, if you're going to enterprise,100 records could be worth a lot more.
But if you're Netflix, 100 customersis like, that's really not much value.

(01:22:25):
So I think we're still figuring it out.
Some people claim usagebased is the future.
I think it isfor some commoditized products.
But I think on the cutting edge,you're always going to have
people who are saying, hey,you must be this tall to ride this ride.
You had a co-founderin your previous business.
Are you a solo founder this time aroundor do you have a co-founder?
I am a solo founder.
This time aroundI started the company solo, not solo

(01:22:48):
anymore in the senseof working with business partner.
I would say not a founder,but he joined a couple years in.
So there's a lot of responsibilityin that sense.
And we have investorswho financial partners in that sense, but
only founder in terms of those wrestlingmatches over the phone around this.
I mean, I still have those debates

(01:23:08):
with my business partner,but from an equity,
I mean, I will
honestlyjust say from an equity standpoint,
I think the lesson I learned
the first time around as a co-founderis probably the most expensive
sort of dilution event or tax you're evergoing to have in terms of your outcome.
So if you can start without it,if you can't, you can't.
Right.
But I think the challenge I had tomyself was like, let me see if I can,

(01:23:30):
just because that preserves the upsidejust that much longer.
You've obviously got the technical chops,and you wrote the first lines of code
of your first product, and you wrotethe first lines of Code of Summit.
As you are hiring people,
what are the skills that you're hiring forso that you don't have to do
or maybe said slightly different?
What are the things that you you arelooking to offload in your current role?

(01:23:55):
I'm trying to level up the companyin terms of hiring.
To me, it's always the companyneeds to be leveled up in an area
and that could mean offloading things.
I think sometimesthose are end up being overlapped,
but I like the leveled up partbecause I am a product builder
and I did cobbled togetherfirst three versions of our products.
But at some point you realizethis company is the bottleneck.

(01:24:15):
Here is my ability to do thiswell, and I need to find somebody
better than meat this thing to take this over.
And so when I look to hire people,
especially in the early days,
I'm always looking for somebodywho I would say is extremely autonomous
and can work very independently.
And I try to trust them.
I test them out early.

(01:24:36):
How much responsibilitycan I give them and
just keep kind of moving it up the stack?
Because ideally I just say,look, customers right now when they sign
up, they're not getting the valueout of the product that they want to get.
Wouldn't it be niceif I could just say, solve that
and kind of walk away like that?
I think too often when peoplewant to offload things, what do they do?
They look very far down the stackat the dirtiest, most menial

(01:24:59):
tasks and work and go, look,I don't want to do that part.
And so they give that part away,
but then they still have to dolike everything above that.
Right? And it's a tall stack.
It's like, well, how did you decidewhat lines of code to write?
How do you decide what feature to build?
How do you decide what technology to use.
And you know, soso it's like this really tall stack.

(01:25:19):
But what I'm interested in in the earlydays is like, I don't want a coder.
I want somebody who can decide,help, decide, prioritization, ideally.
But then given any as high as possible go,I think I know what to build.
I think I can think of 2 or 3 waysto build it.
I think I know how to build a firstversion that's very quick to market,
so we can learn what we don't know,and I know how to code it to.

(01:25:43):
And if I don't know how to code it,I know how to get help to code it. Right.
Like this is a much morenot just like senior developer,
but this is somebody who can ownjust so much more of the product
stack, right, than just coding.
That helps me a lot, becausethen I don't have to be mama bird here.
Break everything apartinto tiny little tasks, if you like.

(01:26:04):
Now code this button. Nowcode this feature.
Now do this.
If I have to do all that,I might as well code it two.
That's like parenting.
I think that a lot.
And I think my dads struggle with thisand love him to death.
But like it was always the let me hiresomebody to do X,
but then he'd see them do it.
And if you don't hire the right person,you the temptation to jump in

(01:26:25):
and take the reins and be like,not like that.
Do it like this.
It's just so strong,so I think I want to avoid that trap
of finding somebodythat does the menial stuff only
and go, can I find somebody who can just,hey, he's got it, and he's here,
or she's going to run with it,and I don't even have to worry about it.

(01:26:46):
It's going to get done.
And if they get stuck,they're going to raise their hand
and tell me they're stuck.
These are justvery independently minded people.
And so that's been my approach.
So I will say product is one areawhere I've looked to level the company up,
even though in product personit helps that I know what I'm looking for.
But that's been great.
The kind of person that does all that.
And then on the other side,frankly, this is even easier.

(01:27:07):
But business, finance, ops,legal, accounting,
taxes, corporate H.R, all that stufflike office manager, kind of stuff.
I can do that stuff if I have to.
But again, even there, I don't wantsomebody who's just going to run payroll.
I want somebody who I can say, here'sthe log in to the company bank account,
make sure there's enough in thereto cover payroll.

(01:27:28):
If you have to transfer money around,do that kind of thing.
Because again, if I have to do that part
and I have to remember
to do that on a Monday afternoonbecause payrolls on Thursday or whatever,
if all they do is come in and click
the button on Wednesday,like that really hasn't freed me up.
Right.
And so this means I need to hire very,very trustworthy people.
But I actually don't think peoplewho are ten times more trustworthy cost

(01:27:50):
ten times more.
In general,they probably cost ten, 20, 30, 40,
50% more, which is a lot,but they can do ten times more.
That's what I try for it.
It's an expensive endeavor in that sensebecause you're like, well, Max,
you still said your budget 50% more.
Well, it is, but that meansI don't even have to think about it.
Right?
Which then lets me focus on productslike the way I do it

(01:28:13):
12 hours a day, whatever it is very,very liberating, right?
And I know that liberating, like that freefeeling is like that's what we all want
is that feeling of like, I don't have toremember to remember that thing, right.
It's okay.
Take care ofso there's my hiring philosophy.
What I look for not always perfect.
I think hiring for salesis kind of the one area that I think is

(01:28:36):
almost impossible in the
early days to get right, and I think trialand error is almost what you have to do.
I don't knowwhat you've experienced there,
but finding somebody who can sell in theearly days especially is just super hard.
I don't know the answer there yet.
But if you figure it out, let me know.
I used to think that hiring consultants,which is a big part of what we do,
was the hardest thing.
And sales is far and awaythe hardest thing to hire for.

(01:28:59):
Really is yeah, that's the one where I go,
oh, I made a mistake again.
And I think they're great sales.
You out there occasionally I found them,but I think it's founders.
The last thing I want to free myself from.
The final thing that's even more clear.
The final thing,
Final Frontier, is freeing myselffrom those sales calls, if you will.
But then I realize
what's happening on those sales calls,and I'm like, this isn't sales, dude.

(01:29:22):
This is this is customer discovery.
This is support.
This is marketing, messaging, feedback.
I'm just not there yet.
I'm still learning so much.
It's notsales I'm trying to hire for sales
when I really amtrying to hire for a founder.
And I'm like, okay, I get it.
Not the same.

(01:29:42):
Well, Matt, what's next?
Oh man.
For me, in the short term,I'll start short term and I'll go long.
Short term is, workingsuper hard to have successful Q4.
That means continuing to onboardcustomers,
focus more of my timeon marketing than I have been in sales.
I think the product is more readyfor Prime time than it's been.

(01:30:03):
We go through phases where like,that's true and it's not true.
You're never there. Like, oh,the product's not where it needs to be.
So you work really hard on itand then it is, and then you focus on this
and then you're like,oh, I've learned so much.
Like the productisn't where it needs to be again.
And then you fix that.
At the moment we have a productis ahead of marketing situation.
It's like my favorite momentthough to be in

(01:30:24):
because then you can be aggressive,not mean you could lean forward
and tell people like this thingworks, solves
your problems,give me a chance kind of thing.
So that's what I'm focused on.
The short term, medium and longer term.
I would say the biggest challenge we haveas a business is, it's distribution.
I mean, the part of the storythat we skipped over
the last one was we figured outhow to get in front of millions of people.

(01:30:44):
That was hard.That was really, really hard.
Ended up taking a lot of we were sort oflanguishing in obscurity for a long time.
We had the best technology on the webfor what we had, but nobody knew about it.
I've told all 43 of my friends.
I still don't feel likeeveryone in the world knows about it.
That problem, that's still an issue todaywith what we have,
and I don't think it'sjust telling one person at a time.

(01:31:05):
I think there are all these
watershed momentswhere you get a partnership deal done,
you get some kind of distributiondeal done, and suddenly you're like, oh,
a thousand peoplejust found out about our thing.
You could feel that raise the tide.
So I need to solve that in the medium termand then long term.
Yeah, I think summit has a really awesomeopportunity
to be a alternative in this Low-codeno code platform space.

(01:31:27):
I don't think it's a winnertake all market.
So I think it's the kind of market
where some people can like one tool,some people can like another.
I think the market is enormous.
So that's okay too.
It's not like we'reall fighting over the same sort of scraps.
I think there's millions of businessesthat need this automation.
And I like tell people like, look, yeah,if you can figure out
how to do this in a different tooland you like that better, great.

(01:31:48):
But we think that our tool,the way it feels, the way it works,
is a good fit for others.
So I think we can build a
I think we built a strong businessfrom a revenue standpoint
and kind of want to run this thingas long as possible.
I guess I don't have a long term desire
to necessarily selllike I did that already,
and I think that was the right timefor that business.

(01:32:09):
I think with this one,
if I could get on that steady growth path,I'd love to do that as long as possible.
Matt, thanks so much for coming onand sharing your story.
Scott, thanks for having me.
You askgreat questions and I really enjoyed it.

(01:32:30):
That was Matt Wensing, founder and CEO of summit.
To learn more, visit usesummit.com.
If you or a founder you know would liketo be a guest on In the Thick of It.
Email us at intro@founderstory.us

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#44: Matt Wensing, Founder & CEO | Summit

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}#44: Matt Wensing, Founder & CEO | Summit