October 23, 2024 • 57 mins
In the latest Hidden Chasm episode, Chris Avenick and David Perini dive into the tech debt challenges companies face as they grow from startup to enterprise. It’s easy to get stuck catering to early customers, but that focus can create long-term obstacles. Decoupling solutions from specific needs and thinking multi-tenant is key to avoiding future roadblocks.
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Episode Transcript
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Bo Motlagh (00:12):
You're listening to The Hidden Chasm where we
explore unforeseen growthchallenges that surprise SaaS
Enterprise. The Hidden Chasm isbrought to you by United Effects
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David Perini (00:31):
Yours is a is is it real? It is real. Right?
Josh Smith (00:34):
Yes. It's real.
David Perini (00:35):
Or is it green screen?
Josh Smith (00:37):
Does it look like
David Perini (00:39):
I'm gonna spend It looks so well positioned that I
would have believed it if it wasif it was fake.
Josh Smith (00:45):
Yeah. My cat will probably jump up over. Actually,
it's really bright outside, soI'm gonna close these.
Bo Motlagh (00:56):
Well, we are recording.
Josh Smith (00:57):
Oh.
Bo Motlagh (00:57):
So that's a fantastic introduction. I love
it. While Josh is closing thecurtains there. Welcome. Welcome
to our friends, Chris Avnick andDavid Braney.
And to the viewers here orlisteners. Super excited to have
you guys here. As you know,we've been chatting about this
(01:18):
concept of the hidden chasm fora long time now. We've chatted
with different perspectives,some product perspectives and M
and A and sales and people andculture. We haven't really had
the full package of design andtechnology together.
So I'm super excited to have youguys here to chat about that
with us and really thinkingthrough exactly how these things
(01:40):
kind of work together and someof the experiences that we've
had together as we've builtthese. For listeners, all 4 of
us actually worked together atone point at a company called
Frontline Education, and it wasa really fun experience. I'm
sure we'll get into that alittle bit as well. So on the
call here, we've got, and Ialways read these, but to make
sure I get it right, it'simportant. We've got Chris
(02:00):
Avnick.
Chris is currently the vicepresident and head of technology
at InfiniteBlue, which was justacquired by Everbridge. So super
congrats on that. With over 2decades of experience, Chris's
career spans from successfulfounder to influential
enterprise leader. He has aproven track record of driving
innovation and orchestratinglarge scale development
initiatives that generatesignificant growth and market
(02:21):
impact. And David Perini.
David is currently head ofproduct at the rapidly growing
startup Red Rover. Across his 2plus decades of experience in
product design and engineering,David has driven innovation and
strategy for both startups andlarge enterprises. He has led
teams to create impactful weband mobile experiences across
ecommerce, edtech, and fintechsectors continuously, advancing
(02:44):
the field with his expertise andleadership. Gentlemen, welcome.
Thanks for being here.
Chris Avenick (02:49):
Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Bo Motlagh (02:51):
That was a a mouthful of an intro. Sorry. We
don't usually have 2 at a time.What I think would be a cool
place to start is maybe to getto know you guys. Obviously, we
know you well, but helping ourlisteners get to know a little
bit about each of you.
So maybe let's start with you,Chris. I mean, tell us, you
know, how you got in got towhere you are today, hobbies,
passions, and and sort of, thecareer that sort of brought you
(03:14):
to maybe us. And then and thensince since then, right now
Josh Smith (03:16):
your favorite Chappell Roan song.
Bo Motlagh (03:19):
There you go.
Chris Avenick (03:20):
I do not know. I feel like I just blindly just
stumbled to where no. That'sI've been on a so I've been on a
unique journey within my career,going back and forth between
larger corporations to more, Iwould say, entrepreneur
ventures. Both giving me the theexperience. It's kind of just
(03:43):
helped me to thrive right nowwhere I'm at.
So I've been at larger placeslike Frontline, Infinite Blue
now, and Everbridge. Had my ownboutique development shop for
some time. Spent some time witha startup gaming developer,
which was very interesting. Justto date myself, we were building
(04:05):
apps on Facebook at the timewhen that was a thing. So, yeah,
I've been kind of all over interms of technology.
I started out as a dot netdeveloper, made my way into more
front end technologies, landedin more architect roles where I
was more just agnostic. Therewas a common theme throughout
(04:25):
all, which was the waytechnology was trending and the
way, you know, in in in all mystops we were at, there was this
large monolithic code base. Andso it was just screaming to this
this needs to get broken up. Andeach one of the ventures, I feel
like I've I've come into a placewhere we're figuring out how do
(04:49):
we break up this monolithicapplication, and I think that
kind of, puts us in a goodposition as we start to talk
about SaaS and what that meansand whatnot. But that that's
kind of been my my background,and it's more, you know, ending
up in more of a platform spacewhere we're looking at SaaS
solutions.
Bo Motlagh (05:10):
The p word. We're we're gonna get into that too
because it
Chris Avenick (05:13):
means I know I know you don't like that word,
by the way. That's why
Bo Motlagh (05:15):
I said I love the word. I just think it means
something different toeverybody. And, you know, so
it's it's fun to dig into that.David, same question, man. You
know, tell us about yourbackground and, you know, the
journey that you've been on,passions, hobbies, career, that
kind of thing.
David Perini (05:30):
Sure. Well, so my journey in this industry really
began back when I was a teenagerin the nineties. I have an older
brother who got into, designingwebsites and while he was busy
designing his Mariah Carey fanpage, I would sneak onto his
computer when he was out of thehouse and learn and start
(05:52):
building my own fan websites andthings along those lines, and
turn that into a career rightout of high school without,
like, even anticipating it. Itwas just a hobby And people were
looking for web designers, latenineties. And so they were like,
sure.
You don't have a high schooldegree. You don't have a college
(06:13):
degree. That just means you're acheaper labor. So happy to,
bring you on board. And, fromthere, I was able to turn one
job into another into another.
A lot of work at agencies,design agencies, until I kinda
landed a big break at GSICommerce, which was acquired by
eBay, and built the ecommercewebsites for companies like Toys
(06:34):
R Us and Ace Hardware and, themajor, like, NFL, MLS, that kind
of thing. And then that was myreally first experience with
large web applicationdevelopment at a huge scale and
the challenges that come withthat. And then, from there, I
(06:59):
was able to work at multipleentities where they were trying
to make that transition intothat space from the first space,
so to speak. Like, from the,hey. We've been working with an
agency or we've worked in astartup environment to we wanna
get to where GSI was.
We wanna get to where eBay was.So it's been really interesting
to start super duper small whereyou're wearing multiple hats to
(07:23):
being 1 of 2,000 people on anengineering organization or
within an engineeringorganization, and try to figure
out, you know, how to connectthose two dots.
Bo Motlagh (07:33):
So where were you before you came to Frontline?
David Perini (07:36):
Before Frontline was GSI. Yep.
Bo Motlagh (07:38):
GSI. Okay. Cool. That had to be an interesting
transition.
David Perini (07:41):
Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was a step it it was a much
smaller company at the time thatI joined and then grew rapidly
over the next 6 years.
Josh Smith (07:49):
So you 2 likely have experience then tell me if, if
I'm wrong. Perspective aroundwhat are the decisions that are
often made to get from the toget from the point of start up
to mid market or enterprise, thechallenges there. But what are
the decisions that are madethere that end up biting you or
(08:14):
having repercussions Once youget to the point of enterprise
and you need to you need toeither you need to scale
further, suddenly you look backand say, those were great
decisions back then, but nowthey're causing us significant
significant problems.
Chris Avenick (08:30):
Yeah. I mean, I I guess I can start just because
the the what comes top of mindas you say that is as a start up
smaller company in the, youknow, and and more into the b to
b space of ecommerce, solutions.It's all about satisfying that
(08:50):
first customer or the first twocustomers and getting the
revenue generation. And whenwhen you're wearing that hat,
you know, all bets are offabout, you know, how are we how
are we gonna scale? How are wegonna grow this?
It's what we have to do rightnow for this customer. And, you
know, and and a lot of peoplewho go through this and they get
(09:12):
into their second one, they'llsay, hey. Listen. We can't make
decisions specifically for thiscustomer. We gotta we gotta make
sure we're not boxing ourselvesin.
And and, you know, in one way oranother, it ends up happening in
some capacity. So one of thebiggest challenges from a tech
perspective as you grow is,decoupling your solution from
(09:35):
being so specific to what thatthose early customers wanted so
that you can you can scale itand grow it into a more a more
of a multi tenant type offashion, which isn't always as
nice as you would want it to be.It doesn't always happen. I
worked at places where if youlook in the code base, you'll
(09:57):
definitely see code that has alogical code that says, if this
customer do this, if else dothis. And those are things, you
know, the that's the baggagethat you have to determine from
a technical debt.
Do you carry it? Do you changeit? You know, how do we actually
grow this and scale it?
Bo Motlagh (10:15):
I think you're you're tapping sort of from a
from a very technicalperspective. You're tapping into
some of the indicators that, youknow, when we talk about the
hidden chasm, you're gonna hearme say the word chasm a lot in
this conversation. You know, wewe listen for it. So tech debt
and scalability, and those thosetypes of things. Real world
(10:36):
impact on the business.
And I think you're hitting onthose. I'm curious. Maybe,
David, from your perspective,how do you interpret I mean,
unless you think about it thesame way. I'm I'm guessing that
that you may have a slightlydifferent perspective on the
same issues.
David Perini (10:49):
Yeah. I I've experienced a lot of what, Chris
described. I think, when youlook at it from the design
perspective, whether that becompany brand and identity
design or whether that is theuser interface of the software
that you're interacting with, Ithink I think a lot of the root
(11:10):
causes or a lot of the a lot ofthe initial decisions in when
you're in startup mode aresimilar to what Chris described,
that you are moving fast. Youare getting your brand
developed, at low cost becauseyou don't have a lot of money to
invest. Your brand really isyou.
It's the very first few peoplewho are part of the company and
(11:34):
the culture that they bring tothe table and their perspective
on the problems that they'resolving. But as you scale and as
you grow, you tend to get to apoint where now your culture is
representing 50 people, a 100people, 200 people, and they all
have different backgrounds,different perspectives on the
problems that you're solving atthe same time that you're
solving more and more problemsfor more and more customers. And
(11:56):
so the assumptions that youdidn't even have to question day
1, the brand identity that youhad day 1, that just came
naturally because it was who youwere and what you individually
viewed your company as. All ofthat now has to scale and
represent what your entireorganization is doing and the
(12:18):
new direction that you are goingon. And to double tap on on on
what Chris was saying too,there's the there's the survival
mechanism that you have at thebeginning of your startup
journey where you're just tryingto survive.
You're just trying to pay thebills. You need to keep those
customers as happy as possible,the first few that pay your
bills. And it's very easy if youbecome successful. If you do
(12:43):
survive, it's easy to get stuckon those first few days, those
first few weeks, those first fewmonths. How you define the
company, how you frame thecompany, these these are the
problems that we're solving.
You're like, we've alreadysolved those. Like, now to
acquire new business, you needto solve new problems. You need
to have a new message. You needto have a new narrative. But
that narrative needs to connectwith where you started from, if
(13:07):
that makes sense.
So from I I think I lean more onthe brand and identity side than
on, like, the, like, thesoftware design side. Yeah. But,
yeah, that that would kinda behow I first approach that that
problem.
Bo Motlagh (13:20):
That's kinda the beauty of these conversations
and looking at the chasmholistically is that it has a
brand and identity side. It'sjust as much as it has a very
technical side that needs to beaccounted for as well. Chris, I
saw you nodding along, you know,as as, David was kinda talking
about that. Anything about thatwas was jumping out at you?
Chris Avenick (13:41):
No. It was actually, like, reminiscing
because I I feel like David andI kinda, like, feed off of each
other. Yeah. Coming from the thethe more the design user
experience side as he does and,me from the technical side. But
we've had a lot of, interestingconversations along the way.
So that was just a reminiscentmoment.
Josh Smith (14:01):
On that brand identity side, I'll be
interested in that perspective,David. When when an organization
hits when an organization getstheir way to, you know, to the
enterprise stage and they arelooking to increase their
offerings within the same marketor within or for the same ICP.
(14:24):
How often have you seencompanies prepared for
introspecting on the uniquenessof the identity or brand of
their single product offeringand realizing that that's now
getting in the way. The largerthe larger identity that needs
to be crafted in order to inorder to bring the other
(14:44):
offerings in the fold for thatsame ICP?
David Perini (14:47):
Yeah. Well, I think most, if not all of us,
saw this at Frontline. Right?That when you start out with a
single product, with a singleoffering, your brand is
synonymous with that product.And when you start to grow that
into 2, 3, 4 different productsor solutions or functional
areas, now you've got achallenge because you need to
(15:11):
distinguish between the companyand the individual products that
you are offering.
And I I think you need to reallythink carefully about what makes
you unique and what what dopeople recognize you as. So if
(15:31):
they recognize you as theproduct, you may need to realize
that that is currently yourcompany branding, and you may
lean into that and insteaddefine different flavor,
different sub brands underneaththat rather than, say, for
example, trying to create a newcompany brand and treat the
product brand that everybodyknows you buy as just that one
(15:56):
product. I think we've seen thatas potentially a there's a huge
risk there because people aren'tthinking of, you know, this
particular widget as, you know,the company name, as the company
reputation. They're thinking ofthe entire company and everybody
that they've interacted with asthat name, as that reputation.
Yeah.
I'm not sure if I addressedthat.
Bo Motlagh (16:16):
You know, thinking back, I mean, you guys were all
there before I got there. I Isort of joined the team. And and
I remember I mean, you were wellon your way toward thinking
through what you're talkingabout at Frontline, David. But
Chris, you were, I mean, youwere basically running, you
know, the helm at, at figuringout that first core divergence
from from the brand in terms ofa technical new solution that
(16:39):
would ultimately be, the centerof this next thing. And, you
know, we we called it that wasthe platform.
I think we called it employeecenter or something. And it was
an interesting sort of thingbecause you had this you had
this legacy solution. An amazingsolution. I think it's still
there, and it's and it's donereally well for the company. But
(17:00):
it it was already, I think, 20years old at that point.
Mhmm. And here you were comingalong the side of this, trying
to keep up with both of youkeeping up with these
conversations of what are webuilding? What's the brand? How
are we selling this? And by theway, let's start building this
new thing alongside of it.
Tell us about that because Ithink what was accomplished
(17:23):
there, even in getting started,is kind of unique. The politics
involved in saying we're goingto start something new is in and
of itself intense. And ithappened. And that doesn't
usually happen. And it paid off.
I mean, it's a huge gamble whena company does that. Love to
kinda hear maybe a little bitmore from from your from your
perspective, on the technologyside of the things, Chris. And
(17:44):
then maybe we can kinda dig intothat a little bit more more
holistically as well with you,David.
Chris Avenick (17:49):
I feel like one of the biggest challenges from a
a tech perspective is trying toconvince stakeholders that we
need to tear everything down andbuild it back up in a new tech
stack. Yeah. That never goesover well in a conversation.
(18:10):
But, you know and and that mightbe due to limitations like we
talked about before with how aproduct was built to support the
initial customers. It wasn'tnecessarily looked at to scale
up or grow, or it could be justa change in direction, which was
sort of where we were at withwith frontline where we had a
(18:31):
product.
The product was succeeding. Wehad a second product, and that
was starting to gain traction.We wanted to bring the products
together. But because of thetech stack that we use, the
architecture was made, it didn'tlend itself to do that. So when
we started proposing, we need torewrite this in a different way
(18:55):
so that we can integrate.
Obviously, that didn't go overwell. And, you know, when you're
working with product managementand they have their own
priorities and backlogs and timeframes and whatnot, it it's a
hard sell. So we had the luxuryof just going through an
acquisition, which was bringingover this this third product,
(19:18):
I'll say, which we knew theconcept behind this product was
more of our central core of whatwe wanted to to to do for this
solution. So it was an easiersell to say, hey. Listen.
We're going to rewrite this coreinto this newer technology
that's going to support growthand scalability from this this
(19:43):
platform side, and that willallow us to take our 2 existing
products and tie them in. So wewe had a it was kind of a sweet
spot there where we got to sellwhat needed to be done in terms
of updating the tech on thisacquired product, and we
leveraged that to build out ourplatform. And and really when I
(20:05):
say platform, I'm talking aboutour shared data model that
equated into an actual productoffering. Because that's the
other thing, you know, is if yougo and you try to sell to the
stakeholders, to the business,that, listen. We need x number
of resources and dollars becausewe want to build this really
(20:28):
cool, integrated tech datasolution that's gonna support
everything else we're currentlydoing.
But trust us. It's gonna make itbetter. That never, really goes
that far. So if you can put thatbehind some type of product
value that your users areactually gonna see added value
to what they're experiencing, itmakes that sell a lot easier.
(20:51):
And that's what we do with thatthird product is, hey.
We wanna build out this platformbecause we know we need to
integrate, but let's do it sothat we can actually, bring to
market this product that weacquired in our in our suite of
solutions.
David Perini (21:06):
Yeah. The return on investment conversation
underpins any type of technicaldebt resolution. As engineers,
as designers, we can get sopassionate about the products
that we are creating. Right? Theexperiences that we are creating
for customers, and that'sawesome.
That is a good thing. That'swhat hopefully makes us good at
our jobs. But sometimes, we'renot so good about translating
(21:28):
that into the business concerns.Yep. And every single hour we
spend at a company, to somedegree, somebody somewhere wants
to know what's the return oninvestment of that.
And I think that those who aremore successful at
transformation, within, whetherthat's, again, resolving Ted
debt, building a platform likeChris is just describing here,
(21:50):
expanding your brand, expandingthe quality of experience that
you're providing customers, Yougotta be able to translate that
to the executive, team in termsof what's the return on
investment here. What am what isthe business getting out of the
time and effort that we'respending there?
Bo Motlagh (22:05):
It was interesting because when when I got there,
there was already sort of twodefinitions of the word
platform. And that's why Ialways laugh when I hear that
word now. And you just calledone out, Chris. It was, employee
center. I mean, that from atechnology perspective was the
platform.
There wasn't like an underlyingmesh or anything beyond that
yet. And it was this shared datamodel that we we were still
(22:29):
trying to figure out how doesthat even work. And then there
was this commercial definition,which I gather, David, was was
probably an attempt to reconcilethe ROI of this in a way that
made that would make more sense.Can can you tell us about that?
Because I suspect the technicalwell, you tell me and Josh,
maybe maybe, you know, you wereprobably part of this
(22:49):
conversations too before mytime, but I suspect the
technical conversation happenedfirst and then a reconciling
product conversation maybehappened afterwards, or or was
it the other way around?
David Perini (23:00):
I would suggest that I think there were 2
parallel conversations happeningindependently of each other.
Because at the time at the timethat this was all happening,
Frontline had gotten acquired,right, by an investment company
and was looking to significantlyand rapidly grow the valuation
of the company. And on themarketing side, there was a
(23:22):
strong push to create a cohesivenarrative about not just where
we were, but where we were goingthat was platform focused, that
we want to be all things to ktwelve school administrators. At
the same time that that washappening on the engineering
side, we were havingconversations about how do we
(23:45):
get these products to speak toone another? How do we get them
to communicate to one another?
And everything that Chrisoutlined and, Chris, I know you
can speak to that in betterdepth than I can, but that was
being driven organically fromthe engineering team saying, we
are gonna get killed in themarket if we cannot figure out
how to get these things tocommunicate efficiently with one
(24:06):
another, and speak the samelanguage.
Bo Motlagh (24:09):
Okay. Yeah. And then and then I think after I got
there, we we kind of invented athird kind of concept, and it
was the sort of the data meshstreaming solution to lay
underneath all of this. And sofor a very long time while I was
there, I remember anytimesomebody said platform, I'd be
like, which platform are youtalking about? And it's all the
(24:32):
same, but it's it had differentperspectives and different
connotations.
And then, you know, I rememberone of the most challenging
elements that you you 2, Davidand Josh, really, I enjoyed
watching you guys thinkingthrough it and talk and working
on was, okay. What the heck doesthis even mean from an
experience perspective? Like,what are we talking about? How
does that even become together,and and and how do we even begin
(24:55):
to think about it? And therewere parts of it where I don't
know that we ever fully figuredout, but at least we got clever
about, you know, in terms of it.
So love to hear more about that.
David Perini (25:03):
Yeah. I remember some of those whiteboard
conversations, Chris, you and I,and another colleague of ours,
Matt Hildenbrand's office. I Ijust remember countless times
that we would be at thatwhiteboard talking about, like,
well, hold on. If we if wemodel, what an employee at a
school district is, if we modelit this way, these are the
(25:25):
implications in all of thesesystems that now frontline has
either built or acquired. Howare we gonna reconcile those?
And what does that mean to thecustomers who came only from
this portion of the of theecosystem or have only purchased
this product? So, yeah, it was asignificant challenge. And I
(25:49):
think how we tended to try tobreak it down, I cared very
strongly about the real humanbeing at the end of the line
that is interacting with thesystem, that's interacting with
whether it's a mobile app,whether it's a web user
interface, whether it's an API.But the in the end user of the
system in any given context isthe experience that we are
(26:11):
creating for them. Does it makesense given their mental model
and given the type of job thatthey are trying to do or set of
jobs that they are trying toaccomplish.
Right? And start there, which issomewhat of a purist mentality.
Right? A pure user experience oflike, okay. Ideally, if this
user if we could design thesystem around what this user
(26:31):
understands, what does that looklike?
How does that make sense? Andthen work backwards to, well,
our data model doesn't align upwith that. You know, the
technology stack that we havebuilt off of would need to be
significantly extended orrefactored. What can we afford?
And then let that start toimpose some challenges or
(26:54):
negotiation points on the userexperience to say, okay.
Are there ways that we can workwork around that? Are there ways
that we can compromise? And wedon't have to, you know, give
the customer a Rolls Royce, butat least we can generally, with
1 or 2 clicks, get them to wherethey would expect to be within
the ecosystem.
Bo Motlagh (27:11):
We could talk about Frontline all day. It was such
an amazing experience in a lotof ways. You know, they did a
lot of things right. They werevery they were lucky in some
ways, and they have an amazingstory, of their own as well that
went beyond all of us. Butcoming back, I think so these
conversations happen everywhere.
(27:31):
You know? And I'm curious as youguys moved on from from
frontline, these notions ofthese things that we're
describing now, these were areaction to I need to integrate
a bunch of stuff. And I havelegacy technology and I have,
you know, tech debt that I wannaavoid. How's that conversation
typically for you now? And, youknow, I know David you're in a
(27:53):
smaller earlier company.
Maybe you guys are thinkingabout this, though, to avoid
some of those challenges. And,Chris, I'm I'm guessing, you
know, you just went through anacquisition. I'm guessing some
of these things are kinda freshand popping up, you know, in
real time for you as well. Loveto understand maybe from both
your perspectives, the chasm andhow you're experiencing this in
(28:14):
your life, you know, since then.
David Perini (28:17):
I guess on my side, the last two companies
that I've been with sinceFrontline have both been smaller
startup stages that have beenlooking to grow and grow fairly
rapidly. At Red Rover,particularly, we've been the
company's been in business forjust under 5 years, and we just
launched our 3rd product. So weare building out our portfolio
(28:40):
pretty steadily. And I thinkbecause of the experience that
many of the product team hadwith platforms in the past, At
Red Rover, we've tried from day1 to cast a slightly broader
vision than you often do whenyou have a startup environment
where you've where you're tryingto solve one problem. We said,
(29:04):
this is the playground that wewanna play within, this whole k
twelve administrative ecosystem.
And we know that there aredifferent parts of the
playground that we eventuallywant to get to. So having that
knowledge in the back of ourminds has allowed us from
scratch to start building, coreservices and functions that cut
(29:25):
across the entire suite even asthe first product is getting
built or the second product isgetting built. So in that way,
having that knowledge, likeanticipating it before you go
in, has been really, reallyhelpful. And having a vision
that goes beyond one product,not necessarily as grand as,
like, 10 or 20, you know,something along those lines. But
having a general sense of, like,these are the problems that I'm
(29:46):
solving now.
These are the problems that Iplan on solving next. And if
we're successful, if we survive,these are probably some examples
of the areas that we're gonna gobeyond that has really helped to
frame and give us a strategy forhow to build out the ecosystem.
There's definitely gaps in that.But that's one way that kind of
from scratch, we've been able tomitigate some of the challenges
(30:09):
that are hidden in that chasmwhen you kind of just inherit a
product or through acquisition.You now have to figure out how
to put 2 and 2 together.
Bo Motlagh (30:18):
Can you, tell everybody what Red Rover does?
That might be
David Perini (30:21):
helpful. Sure. Yeah. So similar to frontline
education, Red Rover builds,software for school districts,
specifically for districtadministrators to manage things
like educator time off and andleave, time tracking for
especially classified staff at,school districts. And now just
(30:41):
in the past year, we released ahiring solution that allows
school districts to create jobpostings and hire candidates
and, interview them, the wholekit and kaboo.
Josh Smith (30:52):
So what you're saying, David, is if if you had
to give tell me if this isaccurate. If you had to give
advice to anyone who's, like,operating in a start up who
assumes or believes verystrongly that their long long
term vision, is to to grow andscale, whose vision is isn't
(31:12):
whose vision isn't that. If youdo start with a very specific
problem with a specific marketand you say, I am at at my stage
as an early start up and I havethe capacity and ability to
directly sell to this, thatthose organizations should
(31:38):
likely be understanding thatproblem in the context more
broadly of that specificcustomer and everything they're
dealing with within that space.Because more likely than not, a
common path to growth and toscale, whether it's organic or
inorganic through serialacquisition, is to fill out the
(32:00):
problem spaces before and afterthe one you're trying to solve.
And if you're not looking atthat and not looking at the
larger picture, you might Yeah.
Not only from a technologyperspective, but from an
experience and brandingperspective, set yourself up to
be so constrained that when yousuddenly want to expand, you
(32:21):
have to completely as you are asyou both were saying, reimagine,
rethink everything you weredoing.
David Perini (32:28):
Yeah. Yeah. I think sometimes when you are in
that survival mode, you can fallinto 1 of 2 pits and you kinda
wanna bridge the 2. You can fallonto one side where because
you're just trying to survive,you get too narrow in your focus
and your strategy. And then whenyou actually succeed, there's a
little bit of the dog who caughtthe car of, like, what?
(32:50):
Now where are we going? Now Ihave an idea. The whole chase
was like the thing I was focusedon for 2 years or 5 years or
whatever, and now the chase isover. So you you wanna make sure
that you've given yourselfrunway, that you continue to
anticipate or project out whereyou see yourself going. On the
flip side, there's also the samepitfall of over engineering,
(33:12):
over stressing.
Like, this is where we're gonnabe in 5 years, 10 years, 15
years. And you're not servicingthe customers today, and you're
not building the system tohandle it today. So I really
think that, like, you arewalking this fine line of of
balance of just enough insightand direction and context for
where you're headed, but notgetting lost in the future
(33:34):
either.
Bo Motlagh (33:35):
So, Chris, I I think Infinite Blue is is probably 6
or 7 years ahead of a Red Roverin terms of just life cycle.
Maybe well, first, maybe tellpeople what what Infinite Blue
does, and then, curious aboutyour perspective about how
things have have been movingforward there. Obviously,
neither of you need to air anyanything weird, but just just
(33:57):
your perspective and keeping aneye on these things because I
think you probably have beenthinking about it.
Chris Avenick (34:04):
Yeah. So InfiniteBlue, we are in the
business continuity and disasterrecovery space. And very similar
to, frontline and and when Ijoined InfiniteBlue, there were
2 well, there was there was oneproduct, which was the flagship
project, product, which dealtwith business continuity,
(34:26):
helping organizations createbusiness continuity plans, which
would ultimately benefit them ineducating the business on how to
respond in times of crisis. WhenI started at InfiniteBlue about
years ago, I was brought on tobuild and run the teams that
(34:47):
were gonna develop our nextproduct, which dealt more into
the response of critical eventsthat would happen to a company.
And we wanted to leverage ourdomain knowledge and all the
data that we had from ourbusiness continuity product and
leverage that to helpcorporations respond in those
(35:08):
times of crisises.
So the stuff that they wereplanning for, whether it be, you
know, some type of weather eventlike a tornado or a hurricane or
even, something like a cyberattack, They have a plan for
that. If one of those thingswould unfortunately impact your
business, how do you respond,and how can you manage that that
(35:30):
response in real time? So themajority of my time has been
building this new product andthen integrating it with our
existing flagship product.Going, I guess, back to one of
the initial questions you hadabout, you know, what have we
taken from our experience from,you know, in our case, frontline
(35:52):
and moving forward. It'sinteresting because I I've had a
few different conversations withpeople and and especially now
with with Everbridge and whatwe're looking to do as we as we
move forward, from a productstandpoint.
And, a lot of companies I won'tsay everyone, but a lot of
companies that are in this spaceof trying to integrate products
(36:15):
together are faced with the sametype of challenges, especially
when they are disparate,products and trying to bring
them all together. And I reallydo feel like the value that I
bring to the table is not that Ihave the golden solution that's
gonna solve the problem that'sahead of us. But I have the
(36:40):
1,000 times that we failed, andI can bring that to the table.
Because that's that's the theconsistency between different
companies, different solutionsthat you're trying to build is
the the roadblocks that you hitalong the way. And, you know,
having someone that's goingthrough that in any type in any
(37:01):
scenario is always valuablebecause you could bring what
those failures are so that youcan get ahead of them.
And, you know, maybe thesolution that you came up with
at another product or a previouscompany will be the solution you
use for this situation or it maynot. Because at the end of the
day, it's software. There's, youknow, a million ways to solve
(37:21):
one problem. Yeah. But I thinkwhat is invaluable is
understanding what did you tryin the past that actually
failed.
No slight on any of us, but Ifeel like we were all going
through this whole integrationplay maybe for the first time. I
know for myself it was for thefirst time, and so there was a
lot of failures along the way.I'm thankful that, you know, we
(37:46):
had at least the foresight tobuild this in a microservice
way, which made us able to teardown and rebuild as we got to
that next hurdle that werealized that this isn't gonna
work type of thing. But gettingahead of that definitely has
been beneficial, especially atInfiniteBlue.
David Perini (38:07):
I was just thinking. So one key takeaway
there, Chris, is when you findyourself faced with this hidden
chasm challenge, recruit teammembers who have probably gone
through this once or twicebefore because the problems will
probably be very, very similar,and you may be able to leverage
some of those same solutions.
Chris Avenick (38:29):
Exactly. Yeah. And it empowers everyone. You
know, this isn't just about, youknow, whether it's an ivory
tower approach to come up withsolutions or, you know, just on
one person. The more we advancein technology and go down this
path, there's more people thathave been a part of these type
of situations.
So, I I truly believe it's verypowerful to leverage everyone on
(38:55):
the team of helping solve,solutions because everyone
brings their own uniqueexperiences and, you know, in my
case, failures to to help solvethese issues.
Bo Motlagh (39:05):
I'm a firm believer that failing is important as
well. I want to shift gears alittle bit here because I think
there's a perspective that I'dbe super curious what you guys
think, especially because atyour companies, I'm guessing it
has been an an extremelyimportant one and it's the, and
again, connecting to what you'resaying here. It's probably super
(39:26):
important to have people in thisposition that have gone through
it from this perspective aswell, but it's the sales
perspective. Right? We had agreat sales conversation with an
advisor of UnitedFX, actually,Jenna Watson Braun, a little
while back.
That episode will be coming outsoon, so keep keep an eye out.
But the dynamic, especially inthe early days of what are you
(39:48):
trying to sell and really thecompeting incentives because
sales is compensated differentlythan engineers and product. And
that dynamic of them pushingforward and product and
engineering either trying tokeep up or even maybe pulling
them back, It's a healthytension or it can be, or it can
(40:09):
really devolve into a, you know,
David Perini (40:13):
well,
Bo Motlagh (40:13):
really debt. So super curious about, that
experience from both of yourperspectives. I'll pick somebody
to go first. Chris.
Chris Avenick (40:27):
If you look at your corporation through the
lens of a specific department oror focus area, like sales or
support or even tech, you'remissing the bigger picture of
how your your business reallycan succeed. And I I'm a firm
believer in, product ledorganizations where the the
(40:51):
product team organization drivesall the other areas. And it's
it's not just about what thatsolution is. It's about the
user, the customer. What is theproblem that we're solving?
And I think that is key to bethe central focus. Specifically,
(41:14):
when we were looking at productled technology companies is that
that one question of what is theproblem we are solving needs to
be understood by all thedifferent departments. Because
if you know what the problem isand what the problem is solving,
then, yeah, it's easy for themtech to go off and build the
(41:37):
solution that's meeting thatneed of solving that problem.
But, likewise, it's easy forsales then to go and start
selling that solution to thatproblem. You know, and I've been
in different circumstances wheresales maybe isn't on the same
page as as product.
(41:57):
And there's always that tensionthat starts to build between,
you know, why why aren't youfurther along with the product?
Or how come, how come it doesn'thave this? Or we need this in
the product. And, you know, andmaybe text on the side of
saying, well, wait a minute.That's not even what we're
looking to build type of thing.
(42:18):
And it gets more focused on adeliverable and less focused on
the problem that needs to besolved. Because I think even the
solution that product and techcome up with on what that
solution to that problem isfirst needs to be rooted on what
has to be solved. And that allgets, in my opinion, rooted back
(42:39):
to who is the user, what is theproblem we're solving for these
users. And I really think that'show you keep sales. You keep
support.
I mean, support's a huge part ofthis, not just from a a
standpoint of of supporting thecurrent customers and helping
them with their issues that comeup, but also just the upsell
(43:00):
capabilities and what we can dofrom managing these
relationships. If theyunderstand that problem, the
central problem that we'resolving, it makes it easier for
them to go and build theserelationships and let them know
where we're going, and salesgoing out to potential customers
or new customers. So that's I Ithink that's the, in my opinion,
(43:24):
the root of just solving theproblem of keeping the whole
organization connected and onthe same mission.
David Perini (43:32):
Yeah. Yeah. Chris and I see the world through very
similar eyes. I think that tokeep your organization aligned,
having a really compellingproblem that you are solving
that reflects your market, thatreflects your heart and
character as an organizationreally helps everybody to stay
(43:56):
on the same page. And and Imight frame that as customer
empathy.
If the product organizationdepending on how how you're
organized as a company. But ifas your as a company, you are
building products that meet avery clear need to your market,
(44:17):
that makes it so much easier tosell. That makes it easier to
support. It makes it easier foreverybody to be on the same
page. And I think that what canoften happen you know, you were
you were asking Bo initiallyabout sales organizations and
and the impact there.
I think what can often happen onthe sales side is as a company
is growing, what they're sellingis changing. And the narrative
(44:39):
that they're trying to craft,the narrative that the marketing
and sales organization is tryingto craft to be able to find
leads and generate leads, andthen be able to close deals,
that narrative is changing. Andthey need clear guidance and
communication internally to say,here's how this connects to what
(44:59):
we've always been as a company.You know, if you if you make a
certain type of widget forfarmers, for example, if you
suddenly start making medicalutensils or something along
those lines, you're gonna needto explain to your sales
organization how those twothings connect Because it
doesn't feel immediately likethose are those are part of the
same market. They might be, butsomebody somewhere internal to
(45:22):
the organization needs to beable to craft that narrative and
say, this is why, you know,farmers have animals.
And I'm gonna real reallyspitball terribly here. But, you
know, farmers have animals thatthey need to take care of and
there are medical concerns forthose animals. And so therefore,
yes, these things connecttogether. If you can't find a
(45:42):
compelling narrative for whyyou're building both product a
and product b or why you'reacquiring another company or
something like that other than,oh, it just makes us more money,
you're gonna be in a world ofhurt, the sales organization,
the support organization, thetechnology organization. But if
you are making strategicdecisions, to Chris's point,
product led of, like, this isthe change we want to be in this
(46:04):
market.
These are the customers that wehave empathy and we care about
and we're listening to. Andthese are the problems that we
opportunistically areidentifying and saying, we can
make money solving that problem,but we also can win the support
of our market, our customers,then it makes the job of
(46:25):
evolving the narrative on thesales side, or evolving our
practices on the support side,or evolving our technical
architecture on the engineeringside. It makes that job so much
easier because people have aclear sense of, like, why are we
doing what we're doing, and howdoes it connect to what made us
successful when we were instartup mode?
Bo Motlagh (46:45):
I had to learn, in my in my sort of journey is as
as important as the problemyou're solving and that that
market story, that marketnarrative is. The other side of
that, which is surprisinglyimportant, is also what problem
you're not solving and whatmarket you're not in. And and
(47:09):
having that be a consciouschoice and an actual
conversation to make sure thatthings stay. And honestly,
having that conversation, Ithink obviously, you know, sales
is an important group to havethat conversation with. But tech
is a really important group tohave that conversation with in
product because, I know my forme personally, I'm I'm a, you
(47:32):
know, systems minded growth sortof minded person.
And so I'm always like, oh, ifwe take this, we could do that.
You know, and it becomesimportant to know. But we
actively don't want to do thatand help guide an organization.
And I think that that's missinga lot of the time. Right?
I think there's a lot of focuson the positive. Like, we want
to do x and we're going to bethe market leader in this. And,
(47:55):
it's often not said that we'reactively not doing that, at
least not right now. So pleasedon't do that. Yeah.
And I think that would behelpful. I don't know what you
guys think.
David Perini (48:04):
1 100% completely agree. I and maybe it's a
difference between kind of likean entrepreneurial mindset
versus or even a growth orientedmindset versus, like, a a
scaling mindset. Your eyes gettoo big for your stomach. You
opportunistically you don'twanna you don't wanna leave
(48:25):
anything on the table. Ifcustomers are saying, hey, I've
got this problem and thisproblem and this problem, it's
your inclination.
Even when you are having strongcustomer empathy, your
inclination is to say, well,maybe eventually we can do all
of that for you. We can solveall of that for you. And yet
that's extremely scary toarchitect for. And you're gonna
get into analysis paralysisreal, real fast because you are
(48:48):
trying to go too broad andyou're not going deep enough on
one key problem or one set ofproblems. So, yeah, I think
saying no is is just asimportant as saying this is this
is where we're saying yes.
This is where we want to focusour strategy. By saying we are
focusing our strategy here, weneed to sometimes explicitly
(49:11):
tell everybody on the team andeven sometimes externally, that
means we're not doing all theseother things because we need to
make sure that we solve thisproblem well. Right.
Chris Avenick (49:22):
One of my favorite questions that comes
down to the tech side is, isthis possible?
Bo Motlagh (49:29):
Sure.
Chris Avenick (49:32):
Which in a, you know, in a a smirky type of way,
I usually answer, of course,it's software. Everything's
possible.
David Perini (49:38):
Everything anything's possible. How much do
you wanna spend?
Chris Avenick (49:41):
But it comes back to, you know, Dave, what you're
saying. You know, what what isour focus? What is our problem
that we're solving? Not justwhat can we build type of thing.
Bo Motlagh (49:52):
My other favorite tech question is, can't we just
insert something there?
Josh Smith (49:57):
I'm I'm hearing I'm hearing they're not
contradictory, but I'm hearingseveral things. You're saying
there's a level of focus that'srequired in terms of value found
in the market. There's a levelof flexibility needed by the
folks you hire having experienceof all of the ways in which you
(50:23):
can support that value to scale.I say that because I think we've
all hit scenarios where we hirein the wrong we hire in folks
who are really good at onething, who've been very
successful at one thing, andthey try and take those
operations in that playbook andimplement it without any
consideration for where theorganization's at. But to be
(50:48):
flexible and curious enough tounderstand that that the
specific ways in which thatorganization can scale that
value, but to make sure thatthat focus on that value is not
only myopic, but it it is thenthe knowledge of that and that
why because we've been havingconversations about this.
(51:11):
Do the knowledge of that andthat why is consistently
understood from the top of theorganization all the way to the
bottom because we've also hadconversations where when when
organization scales, whathappens is the bottom the bot
the bottom of the organization.The the boots on the ground are
(51:31):
the there's a lot of ignoringthem, at least, forgetting that
they need to understand whatthat value is, in every every
piece of work that they'redoing.
David Perini (51:44):
Yeah. There's a couple of things there. I
absolutely think it's a balancebetween multiple concerns. It's
there's a couple of analogiesthat pop into my head, and all
of them are terrible. But I'mgonna use the worst one just for
fun.
Why not? Nice. When you'redating when when you're dating,
(52:08):
you need a certain amount ofself confidence. Right? Like,
you you need to be able toproject confidence, and it needs
to be sincere.
You you need to know who youare. You also kinda need to have
a sense of what your goals arefrom a dating perspective. You
know, if where you livegeographically, what your
(52:29):
interests are, what you bring tothe table relationship wise, All
of these things are factors thatmatter. In the same sense,
within an organization, at anygiven moment, whether you're
small or large, you need to beself aware about what your
strengths and weaknesses are.And you need to be confident
about your strengths, but youalso need to be defining
strategies that don't requireyou to be really, really strong
(52:53):
in an area that you know you areweak in.
If you just did a little bit ofintrospective introspection, you
know that you don't have theteam. You don't have the
experience to solve a given typeof problem. So you need to have
confidence about the problemsthat you can solve in this day
or, you know, in the next yearto 2 years. These are the
problems that reasonably you cansolve with the team that you
have or are capable of acquiringwith the budget that you have
(53:15):
and the return on investmentthat your investors are looking
for. You know, all of thosefactors balance it.
You have to have thatintrospective self awareness.
But then you also have to beable to project confidence and
believe in yourself that youwill be able to achieve those
goals that you're setting out.If you if you're overconfident
and you're overly opportunistic,you're gonna be a hot mess. If
(53:36):
you are insecure and you are tooconservative, and you focus only
on solving the problems thatyou've already been solving for
the past couple of years overand over again, you're gonna
have myopic growth. You knowwhat I mean?
It's gonna stagnate. And andyou're gonna be just resting on
your laurels until somebody elsecomes in and takes your
customers. So it is this fineline of making sure you are
(54:02):
being thoughtful and beingintrospective. And within an
organization, you can't send theentire organization to therapy
to figure out what yourchallenges or weaknesses are.
You have to be proactive inlistening to your boots on the
ground, listening to the teamunderneath you if you're in a
leadership position, becausethey are the ones that are going
to capture and identify andcommunicate the indicators that
(54:25):
are telling you we're weak inthis area or we're strong in
this area.
They may not have the wholecontext to put the entire
picture together, but they canat least tell you guys our our
tech stack is woefully lackingfrom a performance standpoint.
If we suddenly throw a 1000customers on this, it's just
going to crap out. Or, hey,guys. I'm telling you the market
(54:45):
doesn't understand and is notresponding to the messaging that
we're putting out to how wesolve this problem.
Chris Avenick (54:51):
Love
Bo Motlagh (54:51):
it. I think well, I think that this has been an
amazing conversation. And youguys have laid out some really
good advice actually for anybodyfacing these types of issues. We
are at a full hour here, so it'sprobably a good time to wrap it
up. But I wanna put thespotlight on you guys.
(55:13):
Let the people know what, youknow, anything that you think is
worth chatting about and how toget in touch with you in terms
of these concepts, the projectsyou're working on, dating
advice. And, yeah, go for it.Why don't we start with you,
David?
David Perini (55:29):
Sure. So the company that I work for is, Red
Rover, red rover k12 dot com. Ifyou're in the school of software
business, come check us out.Most likely you are not though.
So more broadly, I would justsay we are a rapidly growing
team.
Every year we are hiring andlooking for new talented team
members across the board, butfrom my perspective, especially
(55:51):
the engineering team. So if whatwe're talking about here sounds
interesting to you, these typesof challenges, you know, check
us out.
Bo Motlagh (55:58):
Thanks. Chris?
Chris Avenick (56:00):
Yeah. So from the the Everbridge side,
InfiniteBlue side, we deal, likeI said, with business
continuity, disaster recovery,critical event management as a
whole suite of solutions. So wedeal with some of the the larger
Fortune 50 companies in theworld right now. If that is
(56:21):
something that you are, a partof at your organization in terms
of business continuity or partof a GSOC, definitely reach out
to us either ateverbridge.comorinfinitblue.com
as we're in the the transitionperiod right now. For myself,
you know, from a from a techstandpoint, I'm always open to
(56:43):
networking and chatting abouttech.
Probably not dating advice.That's probably more Burini's
skill set. But anything dealingwith tech, you know, platforms,
SaaS, always open for talkingand connecting with anyone. I'm
just kidding, Dave.
Bo Motlagh (57:01):
Awesome. Well, thank you both of you. This was really
cool. You've been listening toThe Hidden Chasm, where we
explore these topics around thechasm, around things that hold
enterprises back. Stay tuned.
We'll have more perspectivescoming soon. Thank you for
listening to this episode of TheHidden Chasm. If you'd like to
share your story or if you haveany questions, you can reach us
via email atpodcast@unitedeffects.com or by
(57:24):
visiting thehiddenchasm.com.
You're listening to The Hidden Chasm where we
explore unforeseen growthchallenges that surprise SaaS
Enterprise. The Hidden Chasm isbrought to you by United Effects
Inc in partnership withBluenilla LLC. For more
information on either visitunitedeffects.com
or bluenilla.com, respectively.
David Perini (00:31):
Yours is a is is it real? It is real. Right?
Josh Smith (00:34):
Yes. It's real.
David Perini (00:35):
Or is it green screen?
Josh Smith (00:37):
Does it look like
David Perini (00:39):
I'm gonna spend It looks so well positioned that I
would have believed it if it wasif it was fake.
Josh Smith (00:45):
Yeah. My cat will probably jump up over. Actually,
it's really bright outside, soI'm gonna close these.
Bo Motlagh (00:56):
Well, we are recording.
Josh Smith (00:57):
Oh.
Bo Motlagh (00:57):
So that's a fantastic introduction. I love
it. While Josh is closing thecurtains there. Welcome. Welcome
to our friends, Chris Avnick andDavid Braney.
And to the viewers here orlisteners. Super excited to have
you guys here. As you know,we've been chatting about this
(01:18):
concept of the hidden chasm fora long time now. We've chatted
with different perspectives,some product perspectives and M
and A and sales and people andculture. We haven't really had
the full package of design andtechnology together.
So I'm super excited to have youguys here to chat about that
with us and really thinkingthrough exactly how these things
(01:40):
kind of work together and someof the experiences that we've
had together as we've builtthese. For listeners, all 4 of
us actually worked together atone point at a company called
Frontline Education, and it wasa really fun experience. I'm
sure we'll get into that alittle bit as well. So on the
call here, we've got, and Ialways read these, but to make
sure I get it right, it'simportant. We've got Chris
(02:00):
Avnick.
Chris is currently the vicepresident and head of technology
at InfiniteBlue, which was justacquired by Everbridge. So super
congrats on that. With over 2decades of experience, Chris's
career spans from successfulfounder to influential
enterprise leader. He has aproven track record of driving
innovation and orchestratinglarge scale development
initiatives that generatesignificant growth and market
(02:21):
impact. And David Perini.
David is currently head ofproduct at the rapidly growing
startup Red Rover. Across his 2plus decades of experience in
product design and engineering,David has driven innovation and
strategy for both startups andlarge enterprises. He has led
teams to create impactful weband mobile experiences across
ecommerce, edtech, and fintechsectors continuously, advancing
(02:44):
the field with his expertise andleadership. Gentlemen, welcome.
Thanks for being here.
Chris Avenick (02:49):
Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Bo Motlagh (02:51):
That was a a mouthful of an intro. Sorry. We
don't usually have 2 at a time.What I think would be a cool
place to start is maybe to getto know you guys. Obviously, we
know you well, but helping ourlisteners get to know a little
bit about each of you.
So maybe let's start with you,Chris. I mean, tell us, you
know, how you got in got towhere you are today, hobbies,
passions, and and sort of, thecareer that sort of brought you
(03:14):
to maybe us. And then and thensince since then, right now
Josh Smith (03:16):
your favorite Chappell Roan song.
Bo Motlagh (03:19):
There you go.
Chris Avenick (03:20):
I do not know. I feel like I just blindly just
stumbled to where no. That'sI've been on a so I've been on a
unique journey within my career,going back and forth between
larger corporations to more, Iwould say, entrepreneur
ventures. Both giving me the theexperience. It's kind of just
(03:43):
helped me to thrive right nowwhere I'm at.
So I've been at larger placeslike Frontline, Infinite Blue
now, and Everbridge. Had my ownboutique development shop for
some time. Spent some time witha startup gaming developer,
which was very interesting. Justto date myself, we were building
(04:05):
apps on Facebook at the timewhen that was a thing. So, yeah,
I've been kind of all over interms of technology.
I started out as a dot netdeveloper, made my way into more
front end technologies, landedin more architect roles where I
was more just agnostic. Therewas a common theme throughout
(04:25):
all, which was the waytechnology was trending and the
way, you know, in in in all mystops we were at, there was this
large monolithic code base. Andso it was just screaming to this
this needs to get broken up. Andeach one of the ventures, I feel
like I've I've come into a placewhere we're figuring out how do
(04:49):
we break up this monolithicapplication, and I think that
kind of, puts us in a goodposition as we start to talk
about SaaS and what that meansand whatnot. But that that's
kind of been my my background,and it's more, you know, ending
up in more of a platform spacewhere we're looking at SaaS
solutions.
Bo Motlagh (05:10):
The p word. We're we're gonna get into that too
because it
Chris Avenick (05:13):
means I know I know you don't like that word,
by the way. That's why
Bo Motlagh (05:15):
I said I love the word. I just think it means
something different toeverybody. And, you know, so
it's it's fun to dig into that.David, same question, man. You
know, tell us about yourbackground and, you know, the
journey that you've been on,passions, hobbies, career, that
kind of thing.
David Perini (05:30):
Sure. Well, so my journey in this industry really
began back when I was a teenagerin the nineties. I have an older
brother who got into, designingwebsites and while he was busy
designing his Mariah Carey fanpage, I would sneak onto his
computer when he was out of thehouse and learn and start
(05:52):
building my own fan websites andthings along those lines, and
turn that into a career rightout of high school without,
like, even anticipating it. Itwas just a hobby And people were
looking for web designers, latenineties. And so they were like,
sure.
You don't have a high schooldegree. You don't have a college
(06:13):
degree. That just means you're acheaper labor. So happy to,
bring you on board. And, fromthere, I was able to turn one
job into another into another.
A lot of work at agencies,design agencies, until I kinda
landed a big break at GSICommerce, which was acquired by
eBay, and built the ecommercewebsites for companies like Toys
(06:34):
R Us and Ace Hardware and, themajor, like, NFL, MLS, that kind
of thing. And then that was myreally first experience with
large web applicationdevelopment at a huge scale and
the challenges that come withthat. And then, from there, I
(06:59):
was able to work at multipleentities where they were trying
to make that transition intothat space from the first space,
so to speak. Like, from the,hey. We've been working with an
agency or we've worked in astartup environment to we wanna
get to where GSI was.
We wanna get to where eBay was.So it's been really interesting
to start super duper small whereyou're wearing multiple hats to
(07:23):
being 1 of 2,000 people on anengineering organization or
within an engineeringorganization, and try to figure
out, you know, how to connectthose two dots.
Bo Motlagh (07:33):
So where were you before you came to Frontline?
David Perini (07:36):
Before Frontline was GSI. Yep.
Bo Motlagh (07:38):
GSI. Okay. Cool. That had to be an interesting
transition.
David Perini (07:41):
Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was a step it it was a much
smaller company at the time thatI joined and then grew rapidly
over the next 6 years.
Josh Smith (07:49):
So you 2 likely have experience then tell me if, if
I'm wrong. Perspective aroundwhat are the decisions that are
often made to get from the toget from the point of start up
to mid market or enterprise, thechallenges there. But what are
the decisions that are madethere that end up biting you or
(08:14):
having repercussions Once youget to the point of enterprise
and you need to you need toeither you need to scale
further, suddenly you look backand say, those were great
decisions back then, but nowthey're causing us significant
significant problems.
Chris Avenick (08:30):
Yeah. I mean, I I guess I can start just because
the the what comes top of mindas you say that is as a start up
smaller company in the, youknow, and and more into the b to
b space of ecommerce, solutions.It's all about satisfying that
(08:50):
first customer or the first twocustomers and getting the
revenue generation. And whenwhen you're wearing that hat,
you know, all bets are offabout, you know, how are we how
are we gonna scale? How are wegonna grow this?
It's what we have to do rightnow for this customer. And, you
know, and and a lot of peoplewho go through this and they get
(09:12):
into their second one, they'llsay, hey. Listen. We can't make
decisions specifically for thiscustomer. We gotta we gotta make
sure we're not boxing ourselvesin.
And and, you know, in one way oranother, it ends up happening in
some capacity. So one of thebiggest challenges from a tech
perspective as you grow is,decoupling your solution from
(09:35):
being so specific to what thatthose early customers wanted so
that you can you can scale itand grow it into a more a more
of a multi tenant type offashion, which isn't always as
nice as you would want it to be.It doesn't always happen. I
worked at places where if youlook in the code base, you'll
(09:57):
definitely see code that has alogical code that says, if this
customer do this, if else dothis. And those are things, you
know, the that's the baggagethat you have to determine from
a technical debt.
Do you carry it? Do you changeit? You know, how do we actually
grow this and scale it?
Bo Motlagh (10:15):
I think you're you're tapping sort of from a
from a very technicalperspective. You're tapping into
some of the indicators that, youknow, when we talk about the
hidden chasm, you're gonna hearme say the word chasm a lot in
this conversation. You know, wewe listen for it. So tech debt
and scalability, and those thosetypes of things. Real world
(10:36):
impact on the business.
And I think you're hitting onthose. I'm curious. Maybe,
David, from your perspective,how do you interpret I mean,
unless you think about it thesame way. I'm I'm guessing that
that you may have a slightlydifferent perspective on the
same issues.
David Perini (10:49):
Yeah. I I've experienced a lot of what, Chris
described. I think, when youlook at it from the design
perspective, whether that becompany brand and identity
design or whether that is theuser interface of the software
that you're interacting with, Ithink I think a lot of the root
(11:10):
causes or a lot of the a lot ofthe initial decisions in when
you're in startup mode aresimilar to what Chris described,
that you are moving fast. Youare getting your brand
developed, at low cost becauseyou don't have a lot of money to
invest. Your brand really isyou.
It's the very first few peoplewho are part of the company and
(11:34):
the culture that they bring tothe table and their perspective
on the problems that they'resolving. But as you scale and as
you grow, you tend to get to apoint where now your culture is
representing 50 people, a 100people, 200 people, and they all
have different backgrounds,different perspectives on the
problems that you're solving atthe same time that you're
solving more and more problemsfor more and more customers. And
(11:56):
so the assumptions that youdidn't even have to question day
1, the brand identity that youhad day 1, that just came
naturally because it was who youwere and what you individually
viewed your company as. All ofthat now has to scale and
represent what your entireorganization is doing and the
(12:18):
new direction that you are goingon. And to double tap on on on
what Chris was saying too,there's the there's the survival
mechanism that you have at thebeginning of your startup
journey where you're just tryingto survive.
You're just trying to pay thebills. You need to keep those
customers as happy as possible,the first few that pay your
bills. And it's very easy if youbecome successful. If you do
(12:43):
survive, it's easy to get stuckon those first few days, those
first few weeks, those first fewmonths. How you define the
company, how you frame thecompany, these these are the
problems that we're solving.
You're like, we've alreadysolved those. Like, now to
acquire new business, you needto solve new problems. You need
to have a new message. You needto have a new narrative. But
that narrative needs to connectwith where you started from, if
(13:07):
that makes sense.
So from I I think I lean more onthe brand and identity side than
on, like, the, like, thesoftware design side. Yeah. But,
yeah, that that would kinda behow I first approach that that
problem.
Bo Motlagh (13:20):
That's kinda the beauty of these conversations
and looking at the chasmholistically is that it has a
brand and identity side. It'sjust as much as it has a very
technical side that needs to beaccounted for as well. Chris, I
saw you nodding along, you know,as as, David was kinda talking
about that. Anything about thatwas was jumping out at you?
Chris Avenick (13:41):
No. It was actually, like, reminiscing
because I I feel like David andI kinda, like, feed off of each
other. Yeah. Coming from the thethe more the design user
experience side as he does and,me from the technical side. But
we've had a lot of, interestingconversations along the way.
So that was just a reminiscentmoment.
Josh Smith (14:01):
On that brand identity side, I'll be
interested in that perspective,David. When when an organization
hits when an organization getstheir way to, you know, to the
enterprise stage and they arelooking to increase their
offerings within the same marketor within or for the same ICP.
(14:24):
How often have you seencompanies prepared for
introspecting on the uniquenessof the identity or brand of
their single product offeringand realizing that that's now
getting in the way. The largerthe larger identity that needs
to be crafted in order to inorder to bring the other
(14:44):
offerings in the fold for thatsame ICP?
David Perini (14:47):
Yeah. Well, I think most, if not all of us,
saw this at Frontline. Right?That when you start out with a
single product, with a singleoffering, your brand is
synonymous with that product.And when you start to grow that
into 2, 3, 4 different productsor solutions or functional
areas, now you've got achallenge because you need to
(15:11):
distinguish between the companyand the individual products that
you are offering.
And I I think you need to reallythink carefully about what makes
you unique and what what dopeople recognize you as. So if
(15:31):
they recognize you as theproduct, you may need to realize
that that is currently yourcompany branding, and you may
lean into that and insteaddefine different flavor,
different sub brands underneaththat rather than, say, for
example, trying to create a newcompany brand and treat the
product brand that everybodyknows you buy as just that one
(15:56):
product. I think we've seen thatas potentially a there's a huge
risk there because people aren'tthinking of, you know, this
particular widget as, you know,the company name, as the company
reputation. They're thinking ofthe entire company and everybody
that they've interacted with asthat name, as that reputation.
Yeah.
I'm not sure if I addressedthat.
Bo Motlagh (16:16):
You know, thinking back, I mean, you guys were all
there before I got there. I Isort of joined the team. And and
I remember I mean, you were wellon your way toward thinking
through what you're talkingabout at Frontline, David. But
Chris, you were, I mean, youwere basically running, you
know, the helm at, at figuringout that first core divergence
from from the brand in terms ofa technical new solution that
(16:39):
would ultimately be, the centerof this next thing. And, you
know, we we called it that wasthe platform.
I think we called it employeecenter or something. And it was
an interesting sort of thingbecause you had this you had
this legacy solution. An amazingsolution. I think it's still
there, and it's and it's donereally well for the company. But
(17:00):
it it was already, I think, 20years old at that point.
Mhmm. And here you were comingalong the side of this, trying
to keep up with both of youkeeping up with these
conversations of what are webuilding? What's the brand? How
are we selling this? And by theway, let's start building this
new thing alongside of it.
Tell us about that because Ithink what was accomplished
(17:23):
there, even in getting started,is kind of unique. The politics
involved in saying we're goingto start something new is in and
of itself intense. And ithappened. And that doesn't
usually happen. And it paid off.
I mean, it's a huge gamble whena company does that. Love to
kinda hear maybe a little bitmore from from your from your
perspective, on the technologyside of the things, Chris. And
(17:44):
then maybe we can kinda dig intothat a little bit more more
holistically as well with you,David.
Chris Avenick (17:49):
I feel like one of the biggest challenges from a
a tech perspective is trying toconvince stakeholders that we
need to tear everything down andbuild it back up in a new tech
stack. Yeah. That never goesover well in a conversation.
(18:10):
But, you know and and that mightbe due to limitations like we
talked about before with how aproduct was built to support the
initial customers. It wasn'tnecessarily looked at to scale
up or grow, or it could be justa change in direction, which was
sort of where we were at withwith frontline where we had a
(18:31):
product.
The product was succeeding. Wehad a second product, and that
was starting to gain traction.We wanted to bring the products
together. But because of thetech stack that we use, the
architecture was made, it didn'tlend itself to do that. So when
we started proposing, we need torewrite this in a different way
(18:55):
so that we can integrate.
Obviously, that didn't go overwell. And, you know, when you're
working with product managementand they have their own
priorities and backlogs and timeframes and whatnot, it it's a
hard sell. So we had the luxuryof just going through an
acquisition, which was bringingover this this third product,
(19:18):
I'll say, which we knew theconcept behind this product was
more of our central core of whatwe wanted to to to do for this
solution. So it was an easiersell to say, hey. Listen.
We're going to rewrite this coreinto this newer technology
that's going to support growthand scalability from this this
(19:43):
platform side, and that willallow us to take our 2 existing
products and tie them in. So wewe had a it was kind of a sweet
spot there where we got to sellwhat needed to be done in terms
of updating the tech on thisacquired product, and we
leveraged that to build out ourplatform. And and really when I
(20:05):
say platform, I'm talking aboutour shared data model that
equated into an actual productoffering. Because that's the
other thing, you know, is if yougo and you try to sell to the
stakeholders, to the business,that, listen. We need x number
of resources and dollars becausewe want to build this really
(20:28):
cool, integrated tech datasolution that's gonna support
everything else we're currentlydoing.
But trust us. It's gonna make itbetter. That never, really goes
that far. So if you can put thatbehind some type of product
value that your users areactually gonna see added value
to what they're experiencing, itmakes that sell a lot easier.
(20:51):
And that's what we do with thatthird product is, hey.
We wanna build out this platformbecause we know we need to
integrate, but let's do it sothat we can actually, bring to
market this product that weacquired in our in our suite of
solutions.
David Perini (21:06):
Yeah. The return on investment conversation
underpins any type of technicaldebt resolution. As engineers,
as designers, we can get sopassionate about the products
that we are creating. Right? Theexperiences that we are creating
for customers, and that'sawesome.
That is a good thing. That'swhat hopefully makes us good at
our jobs. But sometimes, we'renot so good about translating
(21:28):
that into the business concerns.Yep. And every single hour we
spend at a company, to somedegree, somebody somewhere wants
to know what's the return oninvestment of that.
And I think that those who aremore successful at
transformation, within, whetherthat's, again, resolving Ted
debt, building a platform likeChris is just describing here,
(21:50):
expanding your brand, expandingthe quality of experience that
you're providing customers, Yougotta be able to translate that
to the executive, team in termsof what's the return on
investment here. What am what isthe business getting out of the
time and effort that we'respending there?
Bo Motlagh (22:05):
It was interesting because when when I got there,
there was already sort of twodefinitions of the word
platform. And that's why Ialways laugh when I hear that
word now. And you just calledone out, Chris. It was, employee
center. I mean, that from atechnology perspective was the
platform.
There wasn't like an underlyingmesh or anything beyond that
yet. And it was this shared datamodel that we we were still
(22:29):
trying to figure out how doesthat even work. And then there
was this commercial definition,which I gather, David, was was
probably an attempt to reconcilethe ROI of this in a way that
made that would make more sense.Can can you tell us about that?
Because I suspect the technicalwell, you tell me and Josh,
maybe maybe, you know, you wereprobably part of this
(22:49):
conversations too before mytime, but I suspect the
technical conversation happenedfirst and then a reconciling
product conversation maybehappened afterwards, or or was
it the other way around?
David Perini (23:00):
I would suggest that I think there were 2
parallel conversations happeningindependently of each other.
Because at the time at the timethat this was all happening,
Frontline had gotten acquired,right, by an investment company
and was looking to significantlyand rapidly grow the valuation
of the company. And on themarketing side, there was a
(23:22):
strong push to create a cohesivenarrative about not just where
we were, but where we were goingthat was platform focused, that
we want to be all things to ktwelve school administrators. At
the same time that that washappening on the engineering
side, we were havingconversations about how do we
(23:45):
get these products to speak toone another? How do we get them
to communicate to one another?
And everything that Chrisoutlined and, Chris, I know you
can speak to that in betterdepth than I can, but that was
being driven organically fromthe engineering team saying, we
are gonna get killed in themarket if we cannot figure out
how to get these things tocommunicate efficiently with one
(24:06):
another, and speak the samelanguage.
Bo Motlagh (24:09):
Okay. Yeah. And then and then I think after I got
there, we we kind of invented athird kind of concept, and it
was the sort of the data meshstreaming solution to lay
underneath all of this. And sofor a very long time while I was
there, I remember anytimesomebody said platform, I'd be
like, which platform are youtalking about? And it's all the
(24:32):
same, but it's it had differentperspectives and different
connotations.
And then, you know, I rememberone of the most challenging
elements that you you 2, Davidand Josh, really, I enjoyed
watching you guys thinkingthrough it and talk and working
on was, okay. What the heck doesthis even mean from an
experience perspective? Like,what are we talking about? How
does that even become together,and and and how do we even begin
(24:55):
to think about it? And therewere parts of it where I don't
know that we ever fully figuredout, but at least we got clever
about, you know, in terms of it.
So love to hear more about that.
David Perini (25:03):
Yeah. I remember some of those whiteboard
conversations, Chris, you and I,and another colleague of ours,
Matt Hildenbrand's office. I Ijust remember countless times
that we would be at thatwhiteboard talking about, like,
well, hold on. If we if wemodel, what an employee at a
school district is, if we modelit this way, these are the
(25:25):
implications in all of thesesystems that now frontline has
either built or acquired. Howare we gonna reconcile those?
And what does that mean to thecustomers who came only from
this portion of the of theecosystem or have only purchased
this product? So, yeah, it was asignificant challenge. And I
(25:49):
think how we tended to try tobreak it down, I cared very
strongly about the real humanbeing at the end of the line
that is interacting with thesystem, that's interacting with
whether it's a mobile app,whether it's a web user
interface, whether it's an API.But the in the end user of the
system in any given context isthe experience that we are
(26:11):
creating for them. Does it makesense given their mental model
and given the type of job thatthey are trying to do or set of
jobs that they are trying toaccomplish.
Right? And start there, which issomewhat of a purist mentality.
Right? A pure user experience oflike, okay. Ideally, if this
user if we could design thesystem around what this user
(26:31):
understands, what does that looklike?
How does that make sense? Andthen work backwards to, well,
our data model doesn't align upwith that. You know, the
technology stack that we havebuilt off of would need to be
significantly extended orrefactored. What can we afford?
And then let that start toimpose some challenges or
(26:54):
negotiation points on the userexperience to say, okay.
Are there ways that we can workwork around that? Are there ways
that we can compromise? And wedon't have to, you know, give
the customer a Rolls Royce, butat least we can generally, with
1 or 2 clicks, get them to wherethey would expect to be within
the ecosystem.
Bo Motlagh (27:11):
We could talk about Frontline all day. It was such
an amazing experience in a lotof ways. You know, they did a
lot of things right. They werevery they were lucky in some
ways, and they have an amazingstory, of their own as well that
went beyond all of us. Butcoming back, I think so these
conversations happen everywhere.
(27:31):
You know? And I'm curious as youguys moved on from from
frontline, these notions ofthese things that we're
describing now, these were areaction to I need to integrate
a bunch of stuff. And I havelegacy technology and I have,
you know, tech debt that I wannaavoid. How's that conversation
typically for you now? And, youknow, I know David you're in a
(27:53):
smaller earlier company.
Maybe you guys are thinkingabout this, though, to avoid
some of those challenges. And,Chris, I'm I'm guessing, you
know, you just went through anacquisition. I'm guessing some
of these things are kinda freshand popping up, you know, in
real time for you as well. Loveto understand maybe from both
your perspectives, the chasm andhow you're experiencing this in
(28:14):
your life, you know, since then.
David Perini (28:17):
I guess on my side, the last two companies
that I've been with sinceFrontline have both been smaller
startup stages that have beenlooking to grow and grow fairly
rapidly. At Red Rover,particularly, we've been the
company's been in business forjust under 5 years, and we just
launched our 3rd product. So weare building out our portfolio
(28:40):
pretty steadily. And I thinkbecause of the experience that
many of the product team hadwith platforms in the past, At
Red Rover, we've tried from day1 to cast a slightly broader
vision than you often do whenyou have a startup environment
where you've where you're tryingto solve one problem. We said,
(29:04):
this is the playground that wewanna play within, this whole k
twelve administrative ecosystem.
And we know that there aredifferent parts of the
playground that we eventuallywant to get to. So having that
knowledge in the back of ourminds has allowed us from
scratch to start building, coreservices and functions that cut
(29:25):
across the entire suite even asthe first product is getting
built or the second product isgetting built. So in that way,
having that knowledge, likeanticipating it before you go
in, has been really, reallyhelpful. And having a vision
that goes beyond one product,not necessarily as grand as,
like, 10 or 20, you know,something along those lines. But
having a general sense of, like,these are the problems that I'm
(29:46):
solving now.
These are the problems that Iplan on solving next. And if
we're successful, if we survive,these are probably some examples
of the areas that we're gonna gobeyond that has really helped to
frame and give us a strategy forhow to build out the ecosystem.
There's definitely gaps in that.But that's one way that kind of
from scratch, we've been able tomitigate some of the challenges
(30:09):
that are hidden in that chasmwhen you kind of just inherit a
product or through acquisition.You now have to figure out how
to put 2 and 2 together.
Bo Motlagh (30:18):
Can you, tell everybody what Red Rover does?
That might be
David Perini (30:21):
helpful. Sure. Yeah. So similar to frontline
education, Red Rover builds,software for school districts,
specifically for districtadministrators to manage things
like educator time off and andleave, time tracking for
especially classified staff at,school districts. And now just
(30:41):
in the past year, we released ahiring solution that allows
school districts to create jobpostings and hire candidates
and, interview them, the wholekit and kaboo.
Josh Smith (30:52):
So what you're saying, David, is if if you had
to give tell me if this isaccurate. If you had to give
advice to anyone who's, like,operating in a start up who
assumes or believes verystrongly that their long long
term vision, is to to grow andscale, whose vision is isn't
(31:12):
whose vision isn't that. If youdo start with a very specific
problem with a specific marketand you say, I am at at my stage
as an early start up and I havethe capacity and ability to
directly sell to this, thatthose organizations should
(31:38):
likely be understanding thatproblem in the context more
broadly of that specificcustomer and everything they're
dealing with within that space.Because more likely than not, a
common path to growth and toscale, whether it's organic or
inorganic through serialacquisition, is to fill out the
(32:00):
problem spaces before and afterthe one you're trying to solve.
And if you're not looking atthat and not looking at the
larger picture, you might Yeah.
Not only from a technologyperspective, but from an
experience and brandingperspective, set yourself up to
be so constrained that when yousuddenly want to expand, you
(32:21):
have to completely as you are asyou both were saying, reimagine,
rethink everything you weredoing.
David Perini (32:28):
Yeah. Yeah. I think sometimes when you are in
that survival mode, you can fallinto 1 of 2 pits and you kinda
wanna bridge the 2. You can fallonto one side where because
you're just trying to survive,you get too narrow in your focus
and your strategy. And then whenyou actually succeed, there's a
little bit of the dog who caughtthe car of, like, what?
(32:50):
Now where are we going? Now Ihave an idea. The whole chase
was like the thing I was focusedon for 2 years or 5 years or
whatever, and now the chase isover. So you you wanna make sure
that you've given yourselfrunway, that you continue to
anticipate or project out whereyou see yourself going. On the
flip side, there's also the samepitfall of over engineering,
(33:12):
over stressing.
Like, this is where we're gonnabe in 5 years, 10 years, 15
years. And you're not servicingthe customers today, and you're
not building the system tohandle it today. So I really
think that, like, you arewalking this fine line of of
balance of just enough insightand direction and context for
where you're headed, but notgetting lost in the future
(33:34):
either.
Bo Motlagh (33:35):
So, Chris, I I think Infinite Blue is is probably 6
or 7 years ahead of a Red Roverin terms of just life cycle.
Maybe well, first, maybe tellpeople what what Infinite Blue
does, and then, curious aboutyour perspective about how
things have have been movingforward there. Obviously,
neither of you need to air anyanything weird, but just just
(33:57):
your perspective and keeping aneye on these things because I
think you probably have beenthinking about it.
Chris Avenick (34:04):
Yeah. So InfiniteBlue, we are in the
business continuity and disasterrecovery space. And very similar
to, frontline and and when Ijoined InfiniteBlue, there were
2 well, there was there was oneproduct, which was the flagship
project, product, which dealtwith business continuity,
(34:26):
helping organizations createbusiness continuity plans, which
would ultimately benefit them ineducating the business on how to
respond in times of crisis. WhenI started at InfiniteBlue about
years ago, I was brought on tobuild and run the teams that
(34:47):
were gonna develop our nextproduct, which dealt more into
the response of critical eventsthat would happen to a company.
And we wanted to leverage ourdomain knowledge and all the
data that we had from ourbusiness continuity product and
leverage that to helpcorporations respond in those
(35:08):
times of crisises.
So the stuff that they wereplanning for, whether it be, you
know, some type of weather eventlike a tornado or a hurricane or
even, something like a cyberattack, They have a plan for
that. If one of those thingswould unfortunately impact your
business, how do you respond,and how can you manage that that
(35:30):
response in real time? So themajority of my time has been
building this new product andthen integrating it with our
existing flagship product.Going, I guess, back to one of
the initial questions you hadabout, you know, what have we
taken from our experience from,you know, in our case, frontline
(35:52):
and moving forward. It'sinteresting because I I've had a
few different conversations withpeople and and especially now
with with Everbridge and whatwe're looking to do as we as we
move forward, from a productstandpoint.
And, a lot of companies I won'tsay everyone, but a lot of
companies that are in this spaceof trying to integrate products
(36:15):
together are faced with the sametype of challenges, especially
when they are disparate,products and trying to bring
them all together. And I reallydo feel like the value that I
bring to the table is not that Ihave the golden solution that's
gonna solve the problem that'sahead of us. But I have the
(36:40):
1,000 times that we failed, andI can bring that to the table.
Because that's that's the theconsistency between different
companies, different solutionsthat you're trying to build is
the the roadblocks that you hitalong the way. And, you know,
having someone that's goingthrough that in any type in any
(37:01):
scenario is always valuablebecause you could bring what
those failures are so that youcan get ahead of them.
And, you know, maybe thesolution that you came up with
at another product or a previouscompany will be the solution you
use for this situation or it maynot. Because at the end of the
day, it's software. There's, youknow, a million ways to solve
(37:21):
one problem. Yeah. But I thinkwhat is invaluable is
understanding what did you tryin the past that actually
failed.
No slight on any of us, but Ifeel like we were all going
through this whole integrationplay maybe for the first time. I
know for myself it was for thefirst time, and so there was a
lot of failures along the way.I'm thankful that, you know, we
(37:46):
had at least the foresight tobuild this in a microservice
way, which made us able to teardown and rebuild as we got to
that next hurdle that werealized that this isn't gonna
work type of thing. But gettingahead of that definitely has
been beneficial, especially atInfiniteBlue.
David Perini (38:07):
I was just thinking. So one key takeaway
there, Chris, is when you findyourself faced with this hidden
chasm challenge, recruit teammembers who have probably gone
through this once or twicebefore because the problems will
probably be very, very similar,and you may be able to leverage
some of those same solutions.
Chris Avenick (38:29):
Exactly. Yeah. And it empowers everyone. You
know, this isn't just about, youknow, whether it's an ivory
tower approach to come up withsolutions or, you know, just on
one person. The more we advancein technology and go down this
path, there's more people thathave been a part of these type
of situations.
So, I I truly believe it's verypowerful to leverage everyone on
(38:55):
the team of helping solve,solutions because everyone
brings their own uniqueexperiences and, you know, in my
case, failures to to help solvethese issues.
Bo Motlagh (39:05):
I'm a firm believer that failing is important as
well. I want to shift gears alittle bit here because I think
there's a perspective that I'dbe super curious what you guys
think, especially because atyour companies, I'm guessing it
has been an an extremelyimportant one and it's the, and
again, connecting to what you'resaying here. It's probably super
(39:26):
important to have people in thisposition that have gone through
it from this perspective aswell, but it's the sales
perspective. Right? We had agreat sales conversation with an
advisor of UnitedFX, actually,Jenna Watson Braun, a little
while back.
That episode will be coming outsoon, so keep keep an eye out.
But the dynamic, especially inthe early days of what are you
(39:48):
trying to sell and really thecompeting incentives because
sales is compensated differentlythan engineers and product. And
that dynamic of them pushingforward and product and
engineering either trying tokeep up or even maybe pulling
them back, It's a healthytension or it can be, or it can
(40:09):
really devolve into a, you know,
David Perini (40:13):
well,
Bo Motlagh (40:13):
really debt. So super curious about, that
experience from both of yourperspectives. I'll pick somebody
to go first. Chris.
Chris Avenick (40:27):
If you look at your corporation through the
lens of a specific department oror focus area, like sales or
support or even tech, you'remissing the bigger picture of
how your your business reallycan succeed. And I I'm a firm
believer in, product ledorganizations where the the
(40:51):
product team organization drivesall the other areas. And it's
it's not just about what thatsolution is. It's about the
user, the customer. What is theproblem that we're solving?
And I think that is key to bethe central focus. Specifically,
(41:14):
when we were looking at productled technology companies is that
that one question of what is theproblem we are solving needs to
be understood by all thedifferent departments. Because
if you know what the problem isand what the problem is solving,
then, yeah, it's easy for themtech to go off and build the
(41:37):
solution that's meeting thatneed of solving that problem.
But, likewise, it's easy forsales then to go and start
selling that solution to thatproblem. You know, and I've been
in different circumstances wheresales maybe isn't on the same
page as as product.
(41:57):
And there's always that tensionthat starts to build between,
you know, why why aren't youfurther along with the product?
Or how come, how come it doesn'thave this? Or we need this in
the product. And, you know, andmaybe text on the side of
saying, well, wait a minute.That's not even what we're
looking to build type of thing.
(42:18):
And it gets more focused on adeliverable and less focused on
the problem that needs to besolved. Because I think even the
solution that product and techcome up with on what that
solution to that problem isfirst needs to be rooted on what
has to be solved. And that allgets, in my opinion, rooted back
(42:39):
to who is the user, what is theproblem we're solving for these
users. And I really think that'show you keep sales. You keep
support.
I mean, support's a huge part ofthis, not just from a a
standpoint of of supporting thecurrent customers and helping
them with their issues that comeup, but also just the upsell
(43:00):
capabilities and what we can dofrom managing these
relationships. If theyunderstand that problem, the
central problem that we'resolving, it makes it easier for
them to go and build theserelationships and let them know
where we're going, and salesgoing out to potential customers
or new customers. So that's I Ithink that's the, in my opinion,
(43:24):
the root of just solving theproblem of keeping the whole
organization connected and onthe same mission.
David Perini (43:32):
Yeah. Yeah. Chris and I see the world through very
similar eyes. I think that tokeep your organization aligned,
having a really compellingproblem that you are solving
that reflects your market, thatreflects your heart and
character as an organizationreally helps everybody to stay
(43:56):
on the same page. And and Imight frame that as customer
empathy.
If the product organizationdepending on how how you're
organized as a company. But ifas your as a company, you are
building products that meet avery clear need to your market,
(44:17):
that makes it so much easier tosell. That makes it easier to
support. It makes it easier foreverybody to be on the same
page. And I think that what canoften happen you know, you were
you were asking Bo initiallyabout sales organizations and
and the impact there.
I think what can often happen onthe sales side is as a company
is growing, what they're sellingis changing. And the narrative
(44:39):
that they're trying to craft,the narrative that the marketing
and sales organization is tryingto craft to be able to find
leads and generate leads, andthen be able to close deals,
that narrative is changing. Andthey need clear guidance and
communication internally to say,here's how this connects to what
(44:59):
we've always been as a company.You know, if you if you make a
certain type of widget forfarmers, for example, if you
suddenly start making medicalutensils or something along
those lines, you're gonna needto explain to your sales
organization how those twothings connect Because it
doesn't feel immediately likethose are those are part of the
same market. They might be, butsomebody somewhere internal to
(45:22):
the organization needs to beable to craft that narrative and
say, this is why, you know,farmers have animals.
And I'm gonna real reallyspitball terribly here. But, you
know, farmers have animals thatthey need to take care of and
there are medical concerns forthose animals. And so therefore,
yes, these things connecttogether. If you can't find a
(45:42):
compelling narrative for whyyou're building both product a
and product b or why you'reacquiring another company or
something like that other than,oh, it just makes us more money,
you're gonna be in a world ofhurt, the sales organization,
the support organization, thetechnology organization. But if
you are making strategicdecisions, to Chris's point,
product led of, like, this isthe change we want to be in this
(46:04):
market.
These are the customers that wehave empathy and we care about
and we're listening to. Andthese are the problems that we
opportunistically areidentifying and saying, we can
make money solving that problem,but we also can win the support
of our market, our customers,then it makes the job of
(46:25):
evolving the narrative on thesales side, or evolving our
practices on the support side,or evolving our technical
architecture on the engineeringside. It makes that job so much
easier because people have aclear sense of, like, why are we
doing what we're doing, and howdoes it connect to what made us
successful when we were instartup mode?
Bo Motlagh (46:45):
I had to learn, in my in my sort of journey is as
as important as the problemyou're solving and that that
market story, that marketnarrative is. The other side of
that, which is surprisinglyimportant, is also what problem
you're not solving and whatmarket you're not in. And and
(47:09):
having that be a consciouschoice and an actual
conversation to make sure thatthings stay. And honestly,
having that conversation, Ithink obviously, you know, sales
is an important group to havethat conversation with. But tech
is a really important group tohave that conversation with in
product because, I know my forme personally, I'm I'm a, you
(47:32):
know, systems minded growth sortof minded person.
And so I'm always like, oh, ifwe take this, we could do that.
You know, and it becomesimportant to know. But we
actively don't want to do thatand help guide an organization.
And I think that that's missinga lot of the time. Right?
I think there's a lot of focuson the positive. Like, we want
to do x and we're going to bethe market leader in this. And,
(47:55):
it's often not said that we'reactively not doing that, at
least not right now. So pleasedon't do that. Yeah.
And I think that would behelpful. I don't know what you
guys think.
David Perini (48:04):
1 100% completely agree. I and maybe it's a
difference between kind of likean entrepreneurial mindset
versus or even a growth orientedmindset versus, like, a a
scaling mindset. Your eyes gettoo big for your stomach. You
opportunistically you don'twanna you don't wanna leave
(48:25):
anything on the table. Ifcustomers are saying, hey, I've
got this problem and thisproblem and this problem, it's
your inclination.
Even when you are having strongcustomer empathy, your
inclination is to say, well,maybe eventually we can do all
of that for you. We can solveall of that for you. And yet
that's extremely scary toarchitect for. And you're gonna
get into analysis paralysisreal, real fast because you are
(48:48):
trying to go too broad andyou're not going deep enough on
one key problem or one set ofproblems. So, yeah, I think
saying no is is just asimportant as saying this is this
is where we're saying yes.
This is where we want to focusour strategy. By saying we are
focusing our strategy here, weneed to sometimes explicitly
(49:11):
tell everybody on the team andeven sometimes externally, that
means we're not doing all theseother things because we need to
make sure that we solve thisproblem well. Right.
Chris Avenick (49:22):
One of my favorite questions that comes
down to the tech side is, isthis possible?
Bo Motlagh (49:29):
Sure.
Chris Avenick (49:32):
Which in a, you know, in a a smirky type of way,
I usually answer, of course,it's software. Everything's
possible.
David Perini (49:38):
Everything anything's possible. How much do
you wanna spend?
Chris Avenick (49:41):
But it comes back to, you know, Dave, what you're
saying. You know, what what isour focus? What is our problem
that we're solving? Not justwhat can we build type of thing.
Bo Motlagh (49:52):
My other favorite tech question is, can't we just
insert something there?
Josh Smith (49:57):
I'm I'm hearing I'm hearing they're not
contradictory, but I'm hearingseveral things. You're saying
there's a level of focus that'srequired in terms of value found
in the market. There's a levelof flexibility needed by the
folks you hire having experienceof all of the ways in which you
(50:23):
can support that value to scale.I say that because I think we've
all hit scenarios where we hirein the wrong we hire in folks
who are really good at onething, who've been very
successful at one thing, andthey try and take those
operations in that playbook andimplement it without any
consideration for where theorganization's at. But to be
(50:48):
flexible and curious enough tounderstand that that the
specific ways in which thatorganization can scale that
value, but to make sure thatthat focus on that value is not
only myopic, but it it is thenthe knowledge of that and that
why because we've been havingconversations about this.
(51:11):
Do the knowledge of that andthat why is consistently
understood from the top of theorganization all the way to the
bottom because we've also hadconversations where when when
organization scales, whathappens is the bottom the bot
the bottom of the organization.The the boots on the ground are
(51:31):
the there's a lot of ignoringthem, at least, forgetting that
they need to understand whatthat value is, in every every
piece of work that they'redoing.
David Perini (51:44):
Yeah. There's a couple of things there. I
absolutely think it's a balancebetween multiple concerns. It's
there's a couple of analogiesthat pop into my head, and all
of them are terrible. But I'mgonna use the worst one just for
fun.
Why not? Nice. When you'redating when when you're dating,
(52:08):
you need a certain amount ofself confidence. Right? Like,
you you need to be able toproject confidence, and it needs
to be sincere.
You you need to know who youare. You also kinda need to have
a sense of what your goals arefrom a dating perspective. You
know, if where you livegeographically, what your
(52:29):
interests are, what you bring tothe table relationship wise, All
of these things are factors thatmatter. In the same sense,
within an organization, at anygiven moment, whether you're
small or large, you need to beself aware about what your
strengths and weaknesses are.And you need to be confident
about your strengths, but youalso need to be defining
strategies that don't requireyou to be really, really strong
(52:53):
in an area that you know you areweak in.
If you just did a little bit ofintrospective introspection, you
know that you don't have theteam. You don't have the
experience to solve a given typeof problem. So you need to have
confidence about the problemsthat you can solve in this day
or, you know, in the next yearto 2 years. These are the
problems that reasonably you cansolve with the team that you
have or are capable of acquiringwith the budget that you have
(53:15):
and the return on investmentthat your investors are looking
for. You know, all of thosefactors balance it.
You have to have thatintrospective self awareness.
But then you also have to beable to project confidence and
believe in yourself that youwill be able to achieve those
goals that you're setting out.If you if you're overconfident
and you're overly opportunistic,you're gonna be a hot mess. If
(53:36):
you are insecure and you are tooconservative, and you focus only
on solving the problems thatyou've already been solving for
the past couple of years overand over again, you're gonna
have myopic growth. You knowwhat I mean?
It's gonna stagnate. And andyou're gonna be just resting on
your laurels until somebody elsecomes in and takes your
customers. So it is this fineline of making sure you are
(54:02):
being thoughtful and beingintrospective. And within an
organization, you can't send theentire organization to therapy
to figure out what yourchallenges or weaknesses are.
You have to be proactive inlistening to your boots on the
ground, listening to the teamunderneath you if you're in a
leadership position, becausethey are the ones that are going
to capture and identify andcommunicate the indicators that
(54:25):
are telling you we're weak inthis area or we're strong in
this area.
They may not have the wholecontext to put the entire
picture together, but they canat least tell you guys our our
tech stack is woefully lackingfrom a performance standpoint.
If we suddenly throw a 1000customers on this, it's just
going to crap out. Or, hey,guys. I'm telling you the market
(54:45):
doesn't understand and is notresponding to the messaging that
we're putting out to how wesolve this problem.
Chris Avenick (54:51):
Love
Bo Motlagh (54:51):
it. I think well, I think that this has been an
amazing conversation. And youguys have laid out some really
good advice actually for anybodyfacing these types of issues. We
are at a full hour here, so it'sprobably a good time to wrap it
up. But I wanna put thespotlight on you guys.
(55:13):
Let the people know what, youknow, anything that you think is
worth chatting about and how toget in touch with you in terms
of these concepts, the projectsyou're working on, dating
advice. And, yeah, go for it.Why don't we start with you,
David?
David Perini (55:29):
Sure. So the company that I work for is, Red
Rover, red rover k12 dot com. Ifyou're in the school of software
business, come check us out.Most likely you are not though.
So more broadly, I would justsay we are a rapidly growing
team.
Every year we are hiring andlooking for new talented team
members across the board, butfrom my perspective, especially
(55:51):
the engineering team. So if whatwe're talking about here sounds
interesting to you, these typesof challenges, you know, check
us out.
Bo Motlagh (55:58):
Thanks. Chris?
Chris Avenick (56:00):
Yeah. So from the the Everbridge side,
InfiniteBlue side, we deal, likeI said, with business
continuity, disaster recovery,critical event management as a
whole suite of solutions. So wedeal with some of the the larger
Fortune 50 companies in theworld right now. If that is
(56:21):
something that you are, a partof at your organization in terms
of business continuity or partof a GSOC, definitely reach out
to us either ateverbridge.comorinfinitblue.com
as we're in the the transitionperiod right now. For myself,
you know, from a from a techstandpoint, I'm always open to
(56:43):
networking and chatting abouttech.
Probably not dating advice.That's probably more Burini's
skill set. But anything dealingwith tech, you know, platforms,
SaaS, always open for talkingand connecting with anyone. I'm
just kidding, Dave.
Bo Motlagh (57:01):
Awesome. Well, thank you both of you. This was really
cool. You've been listening toThe Hidden Chasm, where we
explore these topics around thechasm, around things that hold
enterprises back. Stay tuned.
We'll have more perspectivescoming soon. Thank you for
listening to this episode of TheHidden Chasm. If you'd like to
share your story or if you haveany questions, you can reach us
via email atpodcast@unitedeffects.com or by
(57:24):
visiting thehiddenchasm.com.
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