June 14, 2024 • 25 mins
In this episode, we talk to serial entrepreneur Ryan Matonis about his journey from multiple startup attempts to a successful acquisition. We explore the challenges and opportunities that come with integrating into a larger organization, the future of AI in tech development, and the evolving landscape of software and business automation. Ryan shares valuable insights on the importance of being close to the transaction in business, leveraging existing tools to build innovative solutions, and the potential future where AI handles much of what humans do today.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate theintersection of technology and business,
uncovering innovations that redefine our world.
Ryan Matonis, welcome to it's fantastic.
It is lovely to have you here.
Thank you.
It's great be here.
So you've been a repeat founder.
(00:21):
Well, actually, your previous company has beenacquired, and now you're taking on an expanded
role within the new organization sounds like.
I'm also, I guess, I would say serial founder.
Yeah.
Is,
Oh, so you got both going for you.
You're you're now living in a life of postacquisition.
But
your first one, the, I mean, the first coupledidn't get there.
And then the last one did, and then now we're,like, rolling up.
(00:41):
But, yeah.
I mean, a actual pretty typical story is veryfew people are successful in their first try.
That would be, incredibly lucky fortuitousthing.
Right?
And later on, you figured out a couple the themisses you made along the way that got you to
the opportunity that you eventually wereacquired for.
And now you find yourself at a largerorganization post acquisition, and it's it's a
(01:02):
fundamentally different world you live in,generally speaking.
Right?
Same industry, maybe even a lot of the samepeople, but at a much larger scale than the
previous.
Yeah.
Even the things that do feel the same, likethey're just part of they're just completely
more broken apart, and they're just like littlebits and pieces part of the bigger thing.
I'm always curious about the post acquisitionthe technical integration side of it.
(01:25):
Now that might be because of what my companydoes.
But I, I often found that, you have 2 differentcultures hitting And then going back way, way,
way back, we were, you know, emax versus themor, tabs versus spaces.
Like, there was holy wars about some very basicthings in the tech space.
Like, if you were an engineer, you were e maxor you were VI VIN world, or your tabs or your
(01:47):
spaces, there was no meshing of those 2.
And whenever 2 tech organizations would cometogether, that battle will get thought all over
again.
And it's worse when you're also talking nowabout, like, cloud vendors, if if you're AWS
focused or you're, Google cloud focused or allthe language choices you have.
There's so many different ways for that clashto happen.
(02:10):
So the the first question I really have for youin that is Did you run into that?
Is this something you're still fightingthrough?
If so, and, like, what has that been like as afounder and your but your baby being acquired
by a bigger company.
So maybe not in that exact way, because therewas no technology department at lead force
before the lead engines.
(02:31):
Acquisition.
And there was really just a lack of, like,sales and marketing and everything else, and it
was just like, they almost were kind of justmade for each other.
And
that even goes back to the way that, like, leadengines was created and lead force was created.
But there was still just, like, different waysof thinking about, like, whether or not you
need systems for things, or, like, oh my gosh,you're using all these tools that aren't
(02:51):
integrated or, like, you don't even have a,like, Google analytics tracking pixel yet.
It just seemed crazy to me, like, as the techperson.
Right?
But then I, of course, I knew that I wasmissing so many other things that I just I
hadn't built out sentence because I had doneit, like, through contractors, and I had relied
on partners in, like, channel marketing andthings like that.
And it was still, like, mostly a solo operationwhen this happened.
(03:13):
Lead Edge is what?
It's not lead force.
Yeah.
That's an interesting point.
So you you were a solo entrepreneur buildingout room, and and then you were acquired, and
now you're part of a team.
Yeah.
Do you have, like, do you have founders andearly entrepreneurs in your market?
Who is your market?
Or in your in your in your audience?
Oh, yeah.
I know.
People hear that wanna hear story.
Oh, yeah.
Very much so.
Like, that that tends to be the the theprincipal people are their founders, or they're
(03:36):
very early in startup.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, so the way I started lead managers, I'lltell this story.
I think this is probably more interesting onefor them, is I was just doing freelance
development services.
Because I just knew that I wanted to be anentrepreneur, and I wanted to meet people and,
like, founders that were doing these things.
And my buddy came to me with an idea where hewas like, Hey, I need to automate this process
inside of my business.
Basically following this blog article goingthrough these different tools.
(03:58):
And it sounded really easy, and I was like,okay.
Like, I could build that.
Like, what's your budget for And you only had,like, $1500 for me to come build this in this
dashboard.
And then I, you know, so I was like, well, wecan do this for you.
You don't really have enough budget.
And then also, like, if you wanna upgrade it?
What if you need to maintain it?
What if it breaks?
Right?
He's like, so, hey, so how about this?
How about I build it?
And I own it, and I give you a lifetimelicense, and I charge you exactly what you're
(04:20):
can spend, but then I'll maintain it.
If it breaks, I'll upgrade it.
I'll go sell it to other people.
They'll pay me for upgrades.
You'll have usage of it.
It's the exact same thing that you wereexpecting without all these other light.
Hidden things.
So we did that, and it worked.
Right?
And so it was like, I had my first customer whopaid 1500 bucks for it.
So that was like market validation because hehad to go do his research to if there was like
a competing tool, something like that.
Then I started selling at other companies thatdid more or less the same thing.
(04:42):
And then I found really big reseller who endedup becoming an acquirer.
So I think like there's And the conversationthere was kind of just like, why are you guys
even reselling my products?
And they were just running cold emails ofservice for their clients.
And they didn't really have a lot of IP.
Right?
They were just buying a bunch of differenttools and charging a fee and running it.
And when you kinda do the numbers on, like,here's how it's worth when you sell an agency
(05:06):
based on its earnings, and here's how much aSaaS company is worth.
Like, here's how much equity you're creatinginside your business, and then here's inside
your vendors, right, and it was like, well,Mine's kind of like a old one that does your
thing, you're selling way more of it than I am.
It's like if we kind of just put these thingstogether, like, you know, It's a very different
story.
It's a better story, right?
Yeah.
It's like we're building this really valuablebusiness together now, right?
(05:28):
And so we did that.
And it was a little slow going at first.
It just wasn't quite the perfect fit, and ittook probably like a year to get it, like,
locked in.
That's actually still pretty fast.
Yeah.
I guess it is.
Yes.
And it's still getting better, right?
It's still constantly getting better, and it'smore niche, it's more dialed in.
It looks completely different now.
It is completely different it's even more of,like, an internal location now.
(05:49):
Like, I think the lesson here for, like, techfounders, like, we think so much about, like,
the products.
Like, my story actually was more of just, like,the moves that I made.
And it was, like, getting big channel partners.
It was, like, reaching out to companies that,like so I made a tool that built lead lists so
I reached out to companies that did calledOutreach automation.
And I was like, Hey, what happens if somebodyhas a great experience with your product and
(06:11):
they run out of leads?
Like, they cancel, right?
Like, so why not feature us in your marketing.
Right?
So you got leads from that, or they put us ontheir website, got leads from that.
And that was actually how we met Leadforce, wasthey found us through one of those channel
partners
It's smart on some of my fronts.
One piece of advice that I've repeatedly givento people is the closer you can be to the
transaction, the better.
(06:31):
And in the case of what you were doing and whatLeapforce is doing as a whole is you're helping
your customer go towards the money.
And get closer to it.
And that's always a win.
Like, if you can help them sell even if they'reonly making a penny every time they do it,
they'll just do it more often.
Yeah.
And as a startup to be at the earliest portionof the discovery outreach of a, like, SAS
(06:53):
vendor, it's a great space to be in.
But I also find, though, I was in AppTek forquite a while.
I was at AppNexus AppNexus acquired by AT and Tthat whole mess.
And it's gotten a lot more competitive, andthere's a lot.
You have spent a lot of money now in ways thatyou didn't use to.
Like, if you could build the technology 20years ago to manage it for self.
It was far more cost effective to do that thanit was to go find a vendor or buy somebody
(07:16):
else's tool.
But now you couldn't possibly build a toolyourself that was competitive because there's
so much already in market, and it's alreadybuying up the cheap advertising.
It's already buying the, you know, where thedata's cheap.
So your only option is to pay for it.
Yeah.
Honestly, what's the best example of that chat,GPT 4 is $20, and there's a freemium version
that's Right.
(07:37):
Yeah.
Why would I pay $20?
Oh, wait.
It's terrifying.
That's gonna be 25 $20.20.
All the all the SAS people out there.
Yeah.
Exactly that.
Like, you you are now paying $25 for a bunch ofexperts effectively.
How do you compete with that?
Yeah.
No.
I I've been I've been preaching this for years.
I call it technical equity, and it's just likethe idea that, like, you can either acquire a
(08:00):
ton of technical debt, and it's probably thewrong word.
Equity probably just perfectly the wrong word.
You could get a bunch of technical debt bybuilding a bunch of custom stuff, right, or you
could just, like, build things on top of otherthings.
So I'll give you an example.
Maybe 6 years ago, I built a phone number.
You could call it.
You could start talking to it in any language.
It would come out on my side in English, andthen I could talk back to you in English.
(08:20):
It would come back out on your side in whateverlanguage you were speaking.
And it was really simple.
It's like Twilio has, like, languagerecognition, and it has voice to text.
And then Google can translate it, and thenTwilio can turn it back to speech, and it
wasn't particularly fast.
And I didn't commercialize this.
I didn't make a product out of I'm sure if Iwent back and I revived this and I tried it
again, I'm sure it'd be faster, it'd be moreaccurate.
(08:40):
It would sound more human like, right, becauseTwilio Google have been pouring a
$1,000,000,000, whatever a week or somethinginto this.
Perfect.
The last, you know, 5 or 6 years.
Right?
And I'm not even paying it except for theusage, and I'm not using it.
Right?
So it's like there's a lot of just these littlethings that you can do.
It's like you leverage this, you leverage this,you leverage this, you leverage this, you
leverage this, especially, like, with what Iwas doing, I was a data aggregator it was like,
(09:03):
I was gonna go build on top of all these otherdata products and I just trusted they would get
better and they did, because that's your corebusiness, right?
They're gonna get better.
Well, it's interesting because one of the bigproblems that a large enterprise runs into is
they've got a bunch of integrations thatthey've done in their whole world.
It's just integrations.
Right?
But then they glued it together with customsystems.
Yeah.
And they're spending a massive amount of moneyjust maintaining the status quo.
(09:28):
Yeah.
It's weird because, like, the earlier phaseyou're at, the the better the SaaS products
tend to be for your use case.
And then staying up to date.
There there are a lot more frequent releases.
They're, I don't know, less breaking changes, Iguess.
But when you get into the enterprise space,you're talking like, I have to integrate with
SAP.
Well, great.
So now you've got a $200,000,000 change anytimeanything happens.
(09:49):
Yep.
Right?
I've never figured out how to bridge those 2worlds.
How do you get more of the startup size, SMEtype tool set up to the enterprise to work with
those systems that that that they have nochoice but to continue to rely on.
And if you can solve that, you know, you'retalking about $2,000,000,000,000 company.
Yeah.
(10:10):
I don't know.
I, think the GPT stuff is gonna be kind of likethe solution here because it's gonna become
more and more able to understand what the heckpeople cobbled together.
Like, I've noticed whenever I've put stuff intoGPT 4, like, it's able to even pick out enough
from the way that I've named my variables andwhat I've written to, like, kinda understand
what I'm doing.
(10:30):
Like, you can copy a code snippet in, and thenyou can be, like, make a website for this
service, and it, like, kind of is good enough,and it, like, knows you're doing lead gen, and
it's kind of scary.
It's like, oh, I would've had to
explain that to a person.
So I think there's, like, an element of that.
I think there's also just, like, rip andreplace.
Like, once there's enough technical debt, youjust kinda, like, you know, wipe your hands of
it.
I think a lot of these, companies are creeping.
(10:52):
They're feature creeping into each other atthis point.
I think the thing that I was talking aboutearlier where you go out to your people who
are, like, adjacent to you in the productecosystem, like, the person who creates your
customer, they're trying to sell your corefeature now is, like, one of their features
because either GPT made it easier to crank outnew features during your development sprints or
(11:13):
just, you can just add some feature now.
It's like, oh, this just look at this thing anddecide if it's a good lead, like, okay, it's a
GPT prompt.
Like, it's just things that are trivially easythat weren't before.
So there's a there's it's
all oh, sorry.
I was just saying there's a huge amount ofthat, but the the the bleed into each other.
And as they bleed into each other, it getseasier to rip and replace them.
Right?
So if you have legacy systems that are cobbledtogether and that now, like, the new guys on
(11:37):
the block or, you know, new version of HubSpotor something handles that, like, in a cohesive
way, because they're just able to load morefeatures in there, it's gonna be much more easy
to just do that rip in their place.
Yeah.
I talk about tech in a very similar way.
I the sunk cost fallacy code is absurd to me.
Yeah.
Right?
It's ephemeral.
It's it's temporary magnetic positions on adisk to start with.
(11:58):
Yeah.
Why do I think that my code has any intrinsicvalue?
It doesn't.
And so, my own way of approaching that hasalways been like, I don't enhance.
I just replace I just rewrite it.
Usually, because it'll take me longer to rereadwhat I wrote a year ago and figure out the hell
I was thinking that it will just write the newthing anyway.
And this guy's a lunatic problem.
(12:18):
Yeah.
That's exactly how my team thinks of me.
He just goes in and erases everything andstarts over and like, it's just easier.
That should be taken right at the comments now.
Honestly, I love that.
That's my favorite.
Yeah.
God.
The the code assisting tools like, Copilot andall those.
I don't personally use them.
I have tried a couple times, but it's justeasier for me to just write than it is for me
(12:42):
to, like, have some thing, making suggestions,because the suggestion just pulls me out of my
flow.
So I look over and I'm like, wait, what?
Crap.
What was I doing?
Yeah.
I mean, I, I think the best way to use it is,like, just little utility functions, like, I'm
gonna say is in US business hours and, like,put it in this little file, and it's gonna crap
this thing out or, like, a reformatter that'sjust some regex I personally don't have the
(13:06):
time where it's the cheetah right.
Yeah.
No.
You're right, though.
Like, at a certain point, like, in a 1000, 2000lines, it just, like, starts making things up.
I mean, like, I don't know if you've gone downthe rabbit hole of, like, telling it to define
everything inside of files and then importthose files and then reference back to the that
you defined earlier and now define each file.
You know, like, you're copy pasting it all in.
You're like, does this really work?
(13:27):
But
No, it doesn't.
Doesn't.
It gets close.
It gets like really scary close, and then youdon't have like that knowledge of the code to
go debug it, you know.
You're just like, I don't know why it's broken.
It all looks really I just wrote it and it'sall tech ed already.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It scares me.
It's like, because it's, is it gonna getexponentially better?
(13:48):
Is it gonna cap out?
Is it
we'll see.
I think it's perfect for MVPs.
Like, if you want to spin up a thousand linesof code, and then you just you get killed on
the feature creep because just making it blueis, you know, oh, that's 2 hundred miles.
Not not really, but, right?
Just anything kind of like that, you know, oh,can you, can you have it send me this
notification and, you know, run this alert andsave this thing here.
(14:09):
And it's like, okay, well, that's, that's 10%of GPT's coding budget.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The the feature creep piece is what stops itfor being useful right now, but it's definitely
a solvable problem.
It's just that everybody was so focused on theIt writes code and, like, I don't care about
that.
That's the easy part.
Like, the hard part really is understandingwhat to write and how it connects to other
(14:32):
things.
That's it.
So, what you've been doing though with gluingtogether other tools is largely that.
Not like you wrote the core functionality forthis tool or that tool.
You just made them communicate to each other,which arguably is all modern software
development is.
Yeah.
It's just libraries on libraries, and it's allmaintained.
There's this what is that x KCD comic wherethere's that little sliver that's maintained by
(14:56):
one guy in Ohio that makes less than minimumwage and does this full time.
And the entirety of the internet runs on thislibrary that solely he maintains, yeah, or JS
guy.
I think he's in Russia, there's
It's a fascinating moment in time because we'retransitioning from a one way, one paradigm of
technology and, like, the wizards technologyworld being, like, you know, the people that
(15:17):
could code, but more so, it was that about theywere able to understand how things would talk
to each other into, like, well, $25 a month.
I have a tool that can do it for me, and it canreplace a 100 of you on the coating part.
We're still missing the context part.
So you have something more like a promptengineer that's going to be the the modern
equivalent of a software engineer, but that'salso just a moment The transition to the next
(15:41):
thing, which is in all kind of self, what's thebusiness for criteria, and what's the business
need old that thing upgraded.
I got upgraded.
I, you know, and patched and it broke somethingelse.
I've gotta fix that, like, that self healingversion of it.
That can't be that far away.
Oh, I think it just at the end game here isthat your buddy that has an app idea just goes
to a website and just tells it his app idea andthe website just makes his app.
(16:04):
And,
What would even be a point of the app, though?
Because at that point Wait.
It's it's software because then AI can just doanything at that point.
Like, it's backed, what its capabilities are,and you don't need websites.
Well, I've actually kind of thought about thata lot too.
And like that, even going back to your previousquestion about SAS, Like, I guess Microsoft,
you can just have its AI query, all of yourdata.
(16:25):
If you give it API access, us to everything,and it can go, you know, hey, did somebody from
our com company talk to these people?
And, like, it just goes and finds, like, oh,here's this transcription from this Google Meet
or not Google Meet teams meet is what it wouldbe.
And, it's it's scary.
Yeah.
And it's, like, you could have just on demandOkay.
Make me a widget so that I can do that, but whywould you even what would you do with the
(16:46):
widget?
Right?
Like Right.
What would be the point?
Well, what would be the point if you doing it?
Either.
Hey.
Yeah.
Jacob solved this thing.
Like, go.
Like, at some point, it's like the market setsthe requirements for the business.
You need to grow at 10%.
The the discovery of what you need to do togrow at 10% over the 18 months that that market
demand is going to put pressure on your stockis something that's quantifiable.
(17:09):
Right?
So you you could sit down and say, okay.
Well, I can actually build a tool that figuresout what the roadmap for our company is.
And then I could build another tool that takesthat and breaks it down into discrete
requirements for the business.
If I get the requirements for the differentparts of the business, then I can write
discrete little systems that could do the samething with that and break that down further.
And so it got to the point where it's, like,The market wants your company to grow at 10%.
(17:33):
This is what you do, and it's a self fulfillingmachine that just sits and runs itself.
Like, there's no need for humans.
The the reason I say it that way or at the wayI think about it is when we're writing
software, all we're doing is automatingsomething that used to be done by humans in
some form.
You know, in some places, we're automating theautomation of another automation.
(17:53):
But down that rabbit hole, there was a personat one point, The end state of AI where we're
going with it is that AI is just a much betterinterface to the technology for needs And if
you can take the human out of it, which abusiness doesn't really have a need for humans,
the humans are just there, then what's thepoint?
Like, what what do we do?
(18:14):
What's What is the future of human work if thatis even possible?
Because that's gonna be the most efficientbusiness to run, which gives it absolute
ability to drive down cost.
Yep.
There's a there's an end game there thatdoesn't look good for people unless we figure
something out.
No.
I mean, I think it's pretty obvious what'sgonna happen.
(18:34):
You've got a bunch of people.
Their job is basically using Google Sheets,PowerPoints, you know, there's things like
that, right, that are all owned by thecompanies that make the super AI.
Right?
You see what I'm you see what I'm bringing inhere?
Yeah.
Are we just batteries?
Like
We're just batteries.
Yeah.
No.
There'll be a time where it's like ourdexterity, and it's like there's some
(18:55):
calculation where it's like, we couldn't make aspecialized robot to do this thing, you know,
but, you know, then they, you know, that'sthere's gonna be some curve there.
What is it called?
The transistors keep getting smaller andsmaller.
More as law.
More as law for just like what robots are gonnabe able to do for labor.
Like, that'll probably be a thing.
I think I think that's another one's comingvery rapidly too.
(19:16):
Some of the demonstration bots I've seen in thelast week are, like, I don't understand the
need for the human.
In a whole bunch of manual jobs today.
Yeah.
And it's not that I don't value the people.
I'm not suggesting that at all.
I'm saying that, like, in the in the case of abusiness need, it is cheaper to pay for new
robots than it is to continue to pay salariesfor a human already.
(19:38):
In a lot of places.
McDonald's doesn't have people filling drinksand hasn't for a long time because it's much
cheaper to automate that.
Well, what happens when also true of flippingthe burger and putting it on the bun and doing
all those.
There won't be people doing that.
Self driving vehicles.
It's been true for a little while that thereare, you know, for certain routes with trucks,
(19:59):
you can have the vehicle drive it.
You don't need a person there.
Yeah.
How many jobs is that?
Like, as you go down it and look at a lot ofthe stuff that people do construction, a lot of
the role in construction, I can actually thereare robots already that'll do a better job than
the human would.
Yep.
So the the dexterity part is true for now insome cases, but it's it's I mean, I the the one
(20:22):
that I just saw yesterday, the bot was able todo the the cup stacking thing.
Yeah.
Than any human can.
Yeah.
That's pretty scary, actually.
Or no.
Maybe it'll be something we just completelyaren't expecting.
Like, maybe somebody will give GPT 5 a Bitcoinwallet and, and, like, act as to, like, the
financial exchange or something.
And it's just like, it won't be like a laborthing.
It'll be like, AI just sucked all the money outof the economy and just is gone.
(20:46):
There's like the South park bankers.
It's all it's gone.
It's like AI has, you know, 10,000,000Bitcoins, and there's like a 1,000,000 left
that are shared by people.
Nobody even knows who owns the AI.
Like, just if we're throwing crazy predictionsout here.
Well, but that's I I think it's interesting toplay out the in your head rata hold because
then you you can say, okay.
What am I doing to prepare for it?
I don't mean building a bunker.
(21:07):
Right?
So one of the questions I've asked repeatedlyis if chat GPT was to replace Google as the
font of all knowledge, the oracle of wisdom,and where I get information, which arguably,
it's already rapidly accelerating on that path.
Yeah.
What happens to advertising?
Most advertising today is Google based.
I mean, there's, yeah.
We, we mostly do outbound, but thisadvertising, just running ads.
(21:31):
Yeah.
That's true.
But the purpose of advertising doesn't go away.
As a business, I need customers to find outabout my brand.
If I'm trying to increase the, you know, like,with Nike, I always said that, like, Nike
doesn't make better shoes, they just make youfeel better about buying their brand.
Yeah.
Right?
That's true of most brands.
What happens when I can just ask who makes thebest shoe and I get the response of the the
(21:55):
actual quality or the thing I'm asking for.
You get, you get idiocracies of what.
You have people just neuralink in it, juststraight into there, just thinking, you know,
they think what is the best shoe.
Great Nikes.
Yeah.
Hey.
It's already on your feet.
You already bought them.
(22:15):
You bought them a month ago because we knew youneeded them or want them.
We knew you needed them.
You got Nike's and Amazon.
It's like cash on demand.
And you're like, I guess, I, I guess.
There was a joke at a while back on don'tremember what the heck it was, but it was,
instead of next day delivery, it was prior daydelivery.
Your day delivery.
Middleby cold COD, Just unsolicited.
(22:38):
They'll show up at your door with cash ondemand sales.
And they're just like, okay, I guess I reallydo need this.
That's not a bad idea.
You know, that's a terrible idea, butsomebody's gonna do it.
Don't worry.
Yeah.
So, Ryan, I I sorry.
I've I've gone down a weird rabbit hole withyou and asked you a bunch of questions that
have nothing to do with your business and whatyour, what you're out there doing.
(23:01):
Maybe it should, but, yeah, no.
Go on.
I was gonna say, like, I I I find lead gen andspace that you're in to be very like, it's very
important to my business to be able to get,like, how do we get the right audience looking
and seeing what we're offering and how do weget it them.
And I think that everybody listened to thiscares about that too because most of them are
startups in SaaS or in technology offerings.
(23:24):
So if they wanted to know more about what youdo or they wanted to reach out to you, how
would they do that?
Yeah.
Reach out to me on LinkedIn.
Just look me up, Brian Matonis.
Mentioned that you saw me in a podcast orsomething because the AI bots are also reaching
out.
Test for them.
They'll all ask them about, like, some ancientbattles if they respond in 20 seconds or less
with a paragraph or 2 about it, their bots.
(23:47):
If they're really confused, their people.
Why are you asking that question?
Thank you for responding as a human being.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Or go, you know, leave force360.com.
You can reach out there if you want some helpwith outbound marketing.
Get more people smashing the phones, wanna getbetter smashing the phones yourself, something
like that.
Yeah.
Ryan, it was a pleasure having you on, man.
(24:09):
And chatting with you.
Sorry that I I took it down a weird path.
No.
You're good.
I had a good time.
Maybe we could, go down the weird path againsometime.
And that's a wrap for this episode ofTectastic.
Wanna thank you personally for joining us, andwe'll see you next time.
Until then, keep exploring and stay curious.
(24:31):
Thank you for listening.
If you are new here and enjoyed the content,please subscribe.
It really helps us out.
And if you are a regular listener, thanks somuch for your continued support.
Overwhelmed by tech debt.
Discover Vala AI the solution to techchallenges with the simplicity of a click.
No engineering background?
No problem.
(24:51):
Vala AI enables anyone to effortlessly tackletech issues, freeing up your time from tech
headaches.
Make tech debt vanish with Vala AI, where yourtech solutions are just a click away
Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate theintersection of technology and business,
uncovering innovations that redefine our world.
Ryan Matonis, welcome to it's fantastic.
It is lovely to have you here.
Thank you.
It's great be here.
So you've been a repeat founder.
(00:21):
Well, actually, your previous company has beenacquired, and now you're taking on an expanded
role within the new organization sounds like.
I'm also, I guess, I would say serial founder.
Yeah.
Is,
Oh, so you got both going for you.
You're you're now living in a life of postacquisition.
But
your first one, the, I mean, the first coupledidn't get there.
And then the last one did, and then now we're,like, rolling up.
(00:41):
But, yeah.
I mean, a actual pretty typical story is veryfew people are successful in their first try.
That would be, incredibly lucky fortuitousthing.
Right?
And later on, you figured out a couple the themisses you made along the way that got you to
the opportunity that you eventually wereacquired for.
And now you find yourself at a largerorganization post acquisition, and it's it's a
(01:02):
fundamentally different world you live in,generally speaking.
Right?
Same industry, maybe even a lot of the samepeople, but at a much larger scale than the
previous.
Yeah.
Even the things that do feel the same, likethey're just part of they're just completely
more broken apart, and they're just like littlebits and pieces part of the bigger thing.
I'm always curious about the post acquisitionthe technical integration side of it.
(01:25):
Now that might be because of what my companydoes.
But I, I often found that, you have 2 differentcultures hitting And then going back way, way,
way back, we were, you know, emax versus themor, tabs versus spaces.
Like, there was holy wars about some very basicthings in the tech space.
Like, if you were an engineer, you were e maxor you were VI VIN world, or your tabs or your
(01:47):
spaces, there was no meshing of those 2.
And whenever 2 tech organizations would cometogether, that battle will get thought all over
again.
And it's worse when you're also talking nowabout, like, cloud vendors, if if you're AWS
focused or you're, Google cloud focused or allthe language choices you have.
There's so many different ways for that clashto happen.
(02:10):
So the the first question I really have for youin that is Did you run into that?
Is this something you're still fightingthrough?
If so, and, like, what has that been like as afounder and your but your baby being acquired
by a bigger company.
So maybe not in that exact way, because therewas no technology department at lead force
before the lead engines.
(02:31):
Acquisition.
And there was really just a lack of, like,sales and marketing and everything else, and it
was just like, they almost were kind of justmade for each other.
And
that even goes back to the way that, like, leadengines was created and lead force was created.
But there was still just, like, different waysof thinking about, like, whether or not you
need systems for things, or, like, oh my gosh,you're using all these tools that aren't
(02:51):
integrated or, like, you don't even have a,like, Google analytics tracking pixel yet.
It just seemed crazy to me, like, as the techperson.
Right?
But then I, of course, I knew that I wasmissing so many other things that I just I
hadn't built out sentence because I had doneit, like, through contractors, and I had relied
on partners in, like, channel marketing andthings like that.
And it was still, like, mostly a solo operationwhen this happened.
(03:13):
Lead Edge is what?
It's not lead force.
Yeah.
That's an interesting point.
So you you were a solo entrepreneur buildingout room, and and then you were acquired, and
now you're part of a team.
Yeah.
Do you have, like, do you have founders andearly entrepreneurs in your market?
Who is your market?
Or in your in your in your audience?
Oh, yeah.
I know.
People hear that wanna hear story.
Oh, yeah.
Very much so.
Like, that that tends to be the the theprincipal people are their founders, or they're
(03:36):
very early in startup.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, so the way I started lead managers, I'lltell this story.
I think this is probably more interesting onefor them, is I was just doing freelance
development services.
Because I just knew that I wanted to be anentrepreneur, and I wanted to meet people and,
like, founders that were doing these things.
And my buddy came to me with an idea where hewas like, Hey, I need to automate this process
inside of my business.
Basically following this blog article goingthrough these different tools.
(03:58):
And it sounded really easy, and I was like,okay.
Like, I could build that.
Like, what's your budget for And you only had,like, $1500 for me to come build this in this
dashboard.
And then I, you know, so I was like, well, wecan do this for you.
You don't really have enough budget.
And then also, like, if you wanna upgrade it?
What if you need to maintain it?
What if it breaks?
Right?
He's like, so, hey, so how about this?
How about I build it?
And I own it, and I give you a lifetimelicense, and I charge you exactly what you're
(04:20):
can spend, but then I'll maintain it.
If it breaks, I'll upgrade it.
I'll go sell it to other people.
They'll pay me for upgrades.
You'll have usage of it.
It's the exact same thing that you wereexpecting without all these other light.
Hidden things.
So we did that, and it worked.
Right?
And so it was like, I had my first customer whopaid 1500 bucks for it.
So that was like market validation because hehad to go do his research to if there was like
a competing tool, something like that.
Then I started selling at other companies thatdid more or less the same thing.
(04:42):
And then I found really big reseller who endedup becoming an acquirer.
So I think like there's And the conversationthere was kind of just like, why are you guys
even reselling my products?
And they were just running cold emails ofservice for their clients.
And they didn't really have a lot of IP.
Right?
They were just buying a bunch of differenttools and charging a fee and running it.
And when you kinda do the numbers on, like,here's how it's worth when you sell an agency
(05:06):
based on its earnings, and here's how much aSaaS company is worth.
Like, here's how much equity you're creatinginside your business, and then here's inside
your vendors, right, and it was like, well,Mine's kind of like a old one that does your
thing, you're selling way more of it than I am.
It's like if we kind of just put these thingstogether, like, you know, It's a very different
story.
It's a better story, right?
Yeah.
It's like we're building this really valuablebusiness together now, right?
(05:28):
And so we did that.
And it was a little slow going at first.
It just wasn't quite the perfect fit, and ittook probably like a year to get it, like,
locked in.
That's actually still pretty fast.
Yeah.
I guess it is.
Yes.
And it's still getting better, right?
It's still constantly getting better, and it'smore niche, it's more dialed in.
It looks completely different now.
It is completely different it's even more of,like, an internal location now.
(05:49):
Like, I think the lesson here for, like, techfounders, like, we think so much about, like,
the products.
Like, my story actually was more of just, like,the moves that I made.
And it was, like, getting big channel partners.
It was, like, reaching out to companies that,like so I made a tool that built lead lists so
I reached out to companies that did calledOutreach automation.
And I was like, Hey, what happens if somebodyhas a great experience with your product and
(06:11):
they run out of leads?
Like, they cancel, right?
Like, so why not feature us in your marketing.
Right?
So you got leads from that, or they put us ontheir website, got leads from that.
And that was actually how we met Leadforce, wasthey found us through one of those channel
partners
It's smart on some of my fronts.
One piece of advice that I've repeatedly givento people is the closer you can be to the
transaction, the better.
(06:31):
And in the case of what you were doing and whatLeapforce is doing as a whole is you're helping
your customer go towards the money.
And get closer to it.
And that's always a win.
Like, if you can help them sell even if they'reonly making a penny every time they do it,
they'll just do it more often.
Yeah.
And as a startup to be at the earliest portionof the discovery outreach of a, like, SAS
(06:53):
vendor, it's a great space to be in.
But I also find, though, I was in AppTek forquite a while.
I was at AppNexus AppNexus acquired by AT and Tthat whole mess.
And it's gotten a lot more competitive, andthere's a lot.
You have spent a lot of money now in ways thatyou didn't use to.
Like, if you could build the technology 20years ago to manage it for self.
It was far more cost effective to do that thanit was to go find a vendor or buy somebody
(07:16):
else's tool.
But now you couldn't possibly build a toolyourself that was competitive because there's
so much already in market, and it's alreadybuying up the cheap advertising.
It's already buying the, you know, where thedata's cheap.
So your only option is to pay for it.
Yeah.
Honestly, what's the best example of that chat,GPT 4 is $20, and there's a freemium version
that's Right.
(07:37):
Yeah.
Why would I pay $20?
Oh, wait.
It's terrifying.
That's gonna be 25 $20.20.
All the all the SAS people out there.
Yeah.
Exactly that.
Like, you you are now paying $25 for a bunch ofexperts effectively.
How do you compete with that?
Yeah.
No.
I I've been I've been preaching this for years.
I call it technical equity, and it's just likethe idea that, like, you can either acquire a
(08:00):
ton of technical debt, and it's probably thewrong word.
Equity probably just perfectly the wrong word.
You could get a bunch of technical debt bybuilding a bunch of custom stuff, right, or you
could just, like, build things on top of otherthings.
So I'll give you an example.
Maybe 6 years ago, I built a phone number.
You could call it.
You could start talking to it in any language.
It would come out on my side in English, andthen I could talk back to you in English.
(08:20):
It would come back out on your side in whateverlanguage you were speaking.
And it was really simple.
It's like Twilio has, like, languagerecognition, and it has voice to text.
And then Google can translate it, and thenTwilio can turn it back to speech, and it
wasn't particularly fast.
And I didn't commercialize this.
I didn't make a product out of I'm sure if Iwent back and I revived this and I tried it
again, I'm sure it'd be faster, it'd be moreaccurate.
(08:40):
It would sound more human like, right, becauseTwilio Google have been pouring a
$1,000,000,000, whatever a week or somethinginto this.
Perfect.
The last, you know, 5 or 6 years.
Right?
And I'm not even paying it except for theusage, and I'm not using it.
Right?
So it's like there's a lot of just these littlethings that you can do.
It's like you leverage this, you leverage this,you leverage this, you leverage this, you
leverage this, especially, like, with what Iwas doing, I was a data aggregator it was like,
(09:03):
I was gonna go build on top of all these otherdata products and I just trusted they would get
better and they did, because that's your corebusiness, right?
They're gonna get better.
Well, it's interesting because one of the bigproblems that a large enterprise runs into is
they've got a bunch of integrations thatthey've done in their whole world.
It's just integrations.
Right?
But then they glued it together with customsystems.
Yeah.
And they're spending a massive amount of moneyjust maintaining the status quo.
(09:28):
Yeah.
It's weird because, like, the earlier phaseyou're at, the the better the SaaS products
tend to be for your use case.
And then staying up to date.
There there are a lot more frequent releases.
They're, I don't know, less breaking changes, Iguess.
But when you get into the enterprise space,you're talking like, I have to integrate with
SAP.
Well, great.
So now you've got a $200,000,000 change anytimeanything happens.
(09:49):
Yep.
Right?
I've never figured out how to bridge those 2worlds.
How do you get more of the startup size, SMEtype tool set up to the enterprise to work with
those systems that that that they have nochoice but to continue to rely on.
And if you can solve that, you know, you'retalking about $2,000,000,000,000 company.
Yeah.
(10:10):
I don't know.
I, think the GPT stuff is gonna be kind of likethe solution here because it's gonna become
more and more able to understand what the heckpeople cobbled together.
Like, I've noticed whenever I've put stuff intoGPT 4, like, it's able to even pick out enough
from the way that I've named my variables andwhat I've written to, like, kinda understand
what I'm doing.
(10:30):
Like, you can copy a code snippet in, and thenyou can be, like, make a website for this
service, and it, like, kind of is good enough,and it, like, knows you're doing lead gen, and
it's kind of scary.
It's like, oh, I would've had to
explain that to a person.
So I think there's, like, an element of that.
I think there's also just, like, rip andreplace.
Like, once there's enough technical debt, youjust kinda, like, you know, wipe your hands of
it.
I think a lot of these, companies are creeping.
(10:52):
They're feature creeping into each other atthis point.
I think the thing that I was talking aboutearlier where you go out to your people who
are, like, adjacent to you in the productecosystem, like, the person who creates your
customer, they're trying to sell your corefeature now is, like, one of their features
because either GPT made it easier to crank outnew features during your development sprints or
(11:13):
just, you can just add some feature now.
It's like, oh, this just look at this thing anddecide if it's a good lead, like, okay, it's a
GPT prompt.
Like, it's just things that are trivially easythat weren't before.
So there's a there's it's
all oh, sorry.
I was just saying there's a huge amount ofthat, but the the the bleed into each other.
And as they bleed into each other, it getseasier to rip and replace them.
Right?
So if you have legacy systems that are cobbledtogether and that now, like, the new guys on
(11:37):
the block or, you know, new version of HubSpotor something handles that, like, in a cohesive
way, because they're just able to load morefeatures in there, it's gonna be much more easy
to just do that rip in their place.
Yeah.
I talk about tech in a very similar way.
I the sunk cost fallacy code is absurd to me.
Yeah.
Right?
It's ephemeral.
It's it's temporary magnetic positions on adisk to start with.
(11:58):
Yeah.
Why do I think that my code has any intrinsicvalue?
It doesn't.
And so, my own way of approaching that hasalways been like, I don't enhance.
I just replace I just rewrite it.
Usually, because it'll take me longer to rereadwhat I wrote a year ago and figure out the hell
I was thinking that it will just write the newthing anyway.
And this guy's a lunatic problem.
(12:18):
Yeah.
That's exactly how my team thinks of me.
He just goes in and erases everything andstarts over and like, it's just easier.
That should be taken right at the comments now.
Honestly, I love that.
That's my favorite.
Yeah.
God.
The the code assisting tools like, Copilot andall those.
I don't personally use them.
I have tried a couple times, but it's justeasier for me to just write than it is for me
(12:42):
to, like, have some thing, making suggestions,because the suggestion just pulls me out of my
flow.
So I look over and I'm like, wait, what?
Crap.
What was I doing?
Yeah.
I mean, I, I think the best way to use it is,like, just little utility functions, like, I'm
gonna say is in US business hours and, like,put it in this little file, and it's gonna crap
this thing out or, like, a reformatter that'sjust some regex I personally don't have the
(13:06):
time where it's the cheetah right.
Yeah.
No.
You're right, though.
Like, at a certain point, like, in a 1000, 2000lines, it just, like, starts making things up.
I mean, like, I don't know if you've gone downthe rabbit hole of, like, telling it to define
everything inside of files and then importthose files and then reference back to the that
you defined earlier and now define each file.
You know, like, you're copy pasting it all in.
You're like, does this really work?
(13:27):
But
No, it doesn't.
Doesn't.
It gets close.
It gets like really scary close, and then youdon't have like that knowledge of the code to
go debug it, you know.
You're just like, I don't know why it's broken.
It all looks really I just wrote it and it'sall tech ed already.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It scares me.
It's like, because it's, is it gonna getexponentially better?
(13:48):
Is it gonna cap out?
Is it
we'll see.
I think it's perfect for MVPs.
Like, if you want to spin up a thousand linesof code, and then you just you get killed on
the feature creep because just making it blueis, you know, oh, that's 2 hundred miles.
Not not really, but, right?
Just anything kind of like that, you know, oh,can you, can you have it send me this
notification and, you know, run this alert andsave this thing here.
(14:09):
And it's like, okay, well, that's, that's 10%of GPT's coding budget.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The the feature creep piece is what stops itfor being useful right now, but it's definitely
a solvable problem.
It's just that everybody was so focused on theIt writes code and, like, I don't care about
that.
That's the easy part.
Like, the hard part really is understandingwhat to write and how it connects to other
(14:32):
things.
That's it.
So, what you've been doing though with gluingtogether other tools is largely that.
Not like you wrote the core functionality forthis tool or that tool.
You just made them communicate to each other,which arguably is all modern software
development is.
Yeah.
It's just libraries on libraries, and it's allmaintained.
There's this what is that x KCD comic wherethere's that little sliver that's maintained by
(14:56):
one guy in Ohio that makes less than minimumwage and does this full time.
And the entirety of the internet runs on thislibrary that solely he maintains, yeah, or JS
guy.
I think he's in Russia, there's
It's a fascinating moment in time because we'retransitioning from a one way, one paradigm of
technology and, like, the wizards technologyworld being, like, you know, the people that
(15:17):
could code, but more so, it was that about theywere able to understand how things would talk
to each other into, like, well, $25 a month.
I have a tool that can do it for me, and it canreplace a 100 of you on the coating part.
We're still missing the context part.
So you have something more like a promptengineer that's going to be the the modern
equivalent of a software engineer, but that'salso just a moment The transition to the next
(15:41):
thing, which is in all kind of self, what's thebusiness for criteria, and what's the business
need old that thing upgraded.
I got upgraded.
I, you know, and patched and it broke somethingelse.
I've gotta fix that, like, that self healingversion of it.
That can't be that far away.
Oh, I think it just at the end game here isthat your buddy that has an app idea just goes
to a website and just tells it his app idea andthe website just makes his app.
(16:04):
And,
What would even be a point of the app, though?
Because at that point Wait.
It's it's software because then AI can just doanything at that point.
Like, it's backed, what its capabilities are,and you don't need websites.
Well, I've actually kind of thought about thata lot too.
And like that, even going back to your previousquestion about SAS, Like, I guess Microsoft,
you can just have its AI query, all of yourdata.
(16:25):
If you give it API access, us to everything,and it can go, you know, hey, did somebody from
our com company talk to these people?
And, like, it just goes and finds, like, oh,here's this transcription from this Google Meet
or not Google Meet teams meet is what it wouldbe.
And, it's it's scary.
Yeah.
And it's, like, you could have just on demandOkay.
Make me a widget so that I can do that, but whywould you even what would you do with the
(16:46):
widget?
Right?
Like Right.
What would be the point?
Well, what would be the point if you doing it?
Either.
Hey.
Yeah.
Jacob solved this thing.
Like, go.
Like, at some point, it's like the market setsthe requirements for the business.
You need to grow at 10%.
The the discovery of what you need to do togrow at 10% over the 18 months that that market
demand is going to put pressure on your stockis something that's quantifiable.
(17:09):
Right?
So you you could sit down and say, okay.
Well, I can actually build a tool that figuresout what the roadmap for our company is.
And then I could build another tool that takesthat and breaks it down into discrete
requirements for the business.
If I get the requirements for the differentparts of the business, then I can write
discrete little systems that could do the samething with that and break that down further.
And so it got to the point where it's, like,The market wants your company to grow at 10%.
(17:33):
This is what you do, and it's a self fulfillingmachine that just sits and runs itself.
Like, there's no need for humans.
The the reason I say it that way or at the wayI think about it is when we're writing
software, all we're doing is automatingsomething that used to be done by humans in
some form.
You know, in some places, we're automating theautomation of another automation.
(17:53):
But down that rabbit hole, there was a personat one point, The end state of AI where we're
going with it is that AI is just a much betterinterface to the technology for needs And if
you can take the human out of it, which abusiness doesn't really have a need for humans,
the humans are just there, then what's thepoint?
Like, what what do we do?
(18:14):
What's What is the future of human work if thatis even possible?
Because that's gonna be the most efficientbusiness to run, which gives it absolute
ability to drive down cost.
Yep.
There's a there's an end game there thatdoesn't look good for people unless we figure
something out.
No.
I mean, I think it's pretty obvious what'sgonna happen.
(18:34):
You've got a bunch of people.
Their job is basically using Google Sheets,PowerPoints, you know, there's things like
that, right, that are all owned by thecompanies that make the super AI.
Right?
You see what I'm you see what I'm bringing inhere?
Yeah.
Are we just batteries?
Like
We're just batteries.
Yeah.
No.
There'll be a time where it's like ourdexterity, and it's like there's some
(18:55):
calculation where it's like, we couldn't make aspecialized robot to do this thing, you know,
but, you know, then they, you know, that'sthere's gonna be some curve there.
What is it called?
The transistors keep getting smaller andsmaller.
More as law.
More as law for just like what robots are gonnabe able to do for labor.
Like, that'll probably be a thing.
I think I think that's another one's comingvery rapidly too.
(19:16):
Some of the demonstration bots I've seen in thelast week are, like, I don't understand the
need for the human.
In a whole bunch of manual jobs today.
Yeah.
And it's not that I don't value the people.
I'm not suggesting that at all.
I'm saying that, like, in the in the case of abusiness need, it is cheaper to pay for new
robots than it is to continue to pay salariesfor a human already.
(19:38):
In a lot of places.
McDonald's doesn't have people filling drinksand hasn't for a long time because it's much
cheaper to automate that.
Well, what happens when also true of flippingthe burger and putting it on the bun and doing
all those.
There won't be people doing that.
Self driving vehicles.
It's been true for a little while that thereare, you know, for certain routes with trucks,
(19:59):
you can have the vehicle drive it.
You don't need a person there.
Yeah.
How many jobs is that?
Like, as you go down it and look at a lot ofthe stuff that people do construction, a lot of
the role in construction, I can actually thereare robots already that'll do a better job than
the human would.
Yep.
So the the dexterity part is true for now insome cases, but it's it's I mean, I the the one
(20:22):
that I just saw yesterday, the bot was able todo the the cup stacking thing.
Yeah.
Than any human can.
Yeah.
That's pretty scary, actually.
Or no.
Maybe it'll be something we just completelyaren't expecting.
Like, maybe somebody will give GPT 5 a Bitcoinwallet and, and, like, act as to, like, the
financial exchange or something.
And it's just like, it won't be like a laborthing.
It'll be like, AI just sucked all the money outof the economy and just is gone.
(20:46):
There's like the South park bankers.
It's all it's gone.
It's like AI has, you know, 10,000,000Bitcoins, and there's like a 1,000,000 left
that are shared by people.
Nobody even knows who owns the AI.
Like, just if we're throwing crazy predictionsout here.
Well, but that's I I think it's interesting toplay out the in your head rata hold because
then you you can say, okay.
What am I doing to prepare for it?
I don't mean building a bunker.
(21:07):
Right?
So one of the questions I've asked repeatedlyis if chat GPT was to replace Google as the
font of all knowledge, the oracle of wisdom,and where I get information, which arguably,
it's already rapidly accelerating on that path.
Yeah.
What happens to advertising?
Most advertising today is Google based.
I mean, there's, yeah.
We, we mostly do outbound, but thisadvertising, just running ads.
(21:31):
Yeah.
That's true.
But the purpose of advertising doesn't go away.
As a business, I need customers to find outabout my brand.
If I'm trying to increase the, you know, like,with Nike, I always said that, like, Nike
doesn't make better shoes, they just make youfeel better about buying their brand.
Yeah.
Right?
That's true of most brands.
What happens when I can just ask who makes thebest shoe and I get the response of the the
(21:55):
actual quality or the thing I'm asking for.
You get, you get idiocracies of what.
You have people just neuralink in it, juststraight into there, just thinking, you know,
they think what is the best shoe.
Great Nikes.
Yeah.
Hey.
It's already on your feet.
You already bought them.
(22:15):
You bought them a month ago because we knew youneeded them or want them.
We knew you needed them.
You got Nike's and Amazon.
It's like cash on demand.
And you're like, I guess, I, I guess.
There was a joke at a while back on don'tremember what the heck it was, but it was,
instead of next day delivery, it was prior daydelivery.
Your day delivery.
Middleby cold COD, Just unsolicited.
(22:38):
They'll show up at your door with cash ondemand sales.
And they're just like, okay, I guess I reallydo need this.
That's not a bad idea.
You know, that's a terrible idea, butsomebody's gonna do it.
Don't worry.
Yeah.
So, Ryan, I I sorry.
I've I've gone down a weird rabbit hole withyou and asked you a bunch of questions that
have nothing to do with your business and whatyour, what you're out there doing.
(23:01):
Maybe it should, but, yeah, no.
Go on.
I was gonna say, like, I I I find lead gen andspace that you're in to be very like, it's very
important to my business to be able to get,like, how do we get the right audience looking
and seeing what we're offering and how do weget it them.
And I think that everybody listened to thiscares about that too because most of them are
startups in SaaS or in technology offerings.
(23:24):
So if they wanted to know more about what youdo or they wanted to reach out to you, how
would they do that?
Yeah.
Reach out to me on LinkedIn.
Just look me up, Brian Matonis.
Mentioned that you saw me in a podcast orsomething because the AI bots are also reaching
out.
Test for them.
They'll all ask them about, like, some ancientbattles if they respond in 20 seconds or less
with a paragraph or 2 about it, their bots.
(23:47):
If they're really confused, their people.
Why are you asking that question?
Thank you for responding as a human being.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Or go, you know, leave force360.com.
You can reach out there if you want some helpwith outbound marketing.
Get more people smashing the phones, wanna getbetter smashing the phones yourself, something
like that.
Yeah.
Ryan, it was a pleasure having you on, man.
(24:09):
And chatting with you.
Sorry that I I took it down a weird path.
No.
You're good.
I had a good time.
Maybe we could, go down the weird path againsometime.
And that's a wrap for this episode ofTectastic.
Wanna thank you personally for joining us, andwe'll see you next time.
Until then, keep exploring and stay curious.
(24:31):
Thank you for listening.
If you are new here and enjoyed the content,please subscribe.
It really helps us out.
And if you are a regular listener, thanks somuch for your continued support.
Overwhelmed by tech debt.
Discover Vala AI the solution to techchallenges with the simplicity of a click.
No engineering background?
No problem.
(24:51):
Vala AI enables anyone to effortlessly tackletech issues, freeing up your time from tech
headaches.
Make tech debt vanish with Vala AI, where yourtech solutions are just a click away
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.