In The Thick of It

I wanted to see how to deal with

business and sell stuff using technical conversation.

But I had no clue.

I never sold anything before.

And then I got the flavor of how

amazing it is when you really understand a

complicated subject, you know, programming why it's happening, and explain

to someone that has no clue.

The feeling of being able to understand a

problem and explain how we're going to be

solving it technically, to me, was so empowering.

Welcome to In The Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

In this episode, we hear from Joni Girardi

Founder and CEO of DataSelf, a

business helping midsized organizations use data and

analytics to gain a competitive edge.

Joni discovered his passion for

technology at an early age.

He remembers the excitement he felt when he first learned

that a diode is a one way street for electrons.

After first pursuing a career in electrical engineering,

he turned to programming and joined a web

development company in the late nineties.

While working in Silicon Valley during the.com movement,

he learned about gaps businesses were facing due

to a lack of insight into their data.

Eager to share his knowledge of business intelligence,

he launched DataSelf to offer affordable data

resources for growing small to medium sized businesses.

Joining us today on In The Thick of It

is Joni Girardi, founder and CEO of DataSelf.

Joni, thanks so much for joining us today.

Great pleasure to be here, Scott.

All right, so you're in the US

now, but you didn't start here.

Talk to us about growing up. Yep.

So I'm originally from Brazil.

I'm from a small town in the

south of Brazil called Tape Jarrah.

Probably can find on the map

nowadays if you search for it.

But back then, it was pretty obscure place, dirt roads,

you know, very hard to get to modern society.

We're very recluded from the rest of the world.

In 7th grade, I bought a science magazine.

I was already really kind of a geek early

on in my life, kind of books and whatnot.

So I bought a science magazine, and I

learned that one article about diodes, which are

electronic components that can only allow electricity go

one way, not the other way.

You know, if you reverse the

poll, there's no electricity reverse. Electricity goes.

I was like, oh, my God, this is amazing.

Something that controls, like a gate to electrons.

Me was mind boggling.

And that magazine put me on a path

that today took me to the Silicon Valley. Right.

So 7th grade, I pretty much found my

passion in a way, and I started to

just dive into electronics related stuff.

I stayed in that small city until the

end of the high school, but my mind

was already into technology, something related to electricity.

Computers back then were not yet in

Brazil, especially in my small town. Tvs.

Yes, in Brazil.

Back then, Brazil was like no, 15 years behind the US.

Color tv in the US was in the fifties when it started.

In Brazil hit in the late sixties. Wow.

Brazil was very behind technology

wise, what was happening here.

So me in the small town, completely attached to the

world, I got this idea of technology with my future.

So when I finished high school, I went to

the kind of, you know, applied for the best

college in my state, and then I was able

to get into a electric engineer course.

So back then, there's no programming classes, was just electrical

engineering was the thing you could learn if you want

to go into technology, as we knew back then.

So there was like one path. That was it. Yeah.

You know, back then, choosing a career was

not many options, you know, primarily when be

a physician, a lawyer, lawyer, an accountant.

I mean, like we have like 2030 classes

that course you could pick from, maybe more.

But the main class were very limited.

And electrical engineering was the one

for technology around electricity things.

So I didn't know exactly what my future would

be, but I thought that would be the future.

Electricity, tvs back then, calculators was already something

you could do with a little device.

So I was fascinated by all those things.

And since my 7th grade, and I started to

read a lot of magazines and books around electricity,

electronics, how calculators work, and things of that nature.

So when I went to college, which was electricity focused,

in the fifth semester, I got into a programming class,

basic, which was back then very simple language and all

using those computers that were all black screen.

Well, actually my first class, yeah, no, that class was

a computer, a very basic computer, but a computer.

And I remember that in that

class I got even more fascinated.

Oh my God, computers.

And you can tell the computer what

to do and you can say hello.

Write a program to say hello.

Just put the word hello in the screen.

And I was amazed by then, back

then, everything was very difficult to do.

And I remember that at the end of the class,

the professor gave us an assignment which was impress me.

You know, you study for six months, impress me.

Just wide open, no direction. Write something.

Write something to impress me. Right.

And as a geek that I already was,

I started to think about what can I

do with basic now, this very basic computer.

And then I learned in some of the books

that I read that I could actually know.

It was all text based back then, right?

Program was all text based, but you could actually design

pixel by pixel, like a little line in one text.

In one word, you can make another line.

In other words, you could actually write a

line, just a straight line on the computer.

And I could not do that without programming.

Like, oh my God, I can write a line on the computer.

So, ah, this is the path.

Wait, if I can write a line, horizontal

line, I can make a vertical line.

Wow, I can make a square.

So I design a square.

Anyhow, eventually using just pixels, one by one,

I was able to design a cube, right?

So eventually make a square, another square, join the

cubes, and eventually use math to rotate the cube.

When I showed this to the professor, was

thinking, I didn't know that was even possible.

So impress me.

I think you accomplished that.

Yes, it was so fun because it was all text based.

But you know, when you learn the basics of

the pixels and you know how to make a

line, another line, you make a square, then you

know how to rotate using math, a dot.

And you coordinate them through math.

You know, it's just the foundation of all the things that

computer do is just moving bits around in a way.

So I remember that pretty much that class

took me from electric engineering hardware future into

programming, which eventually my career was all mostly

focused on software side of technology.

And then that was another kind of

taking from technology into specific programming.

I continued to do electric engineering.

I completed.

But then when I went to work in Brazil,

my first job was already focused on software engineering.

So I joined very successful local company in the

south of Brazil called Altus Systema D Informatica.

They do programmable logical controllers, equipment

to control machineries in manufacturing installations

to control automatically production.

But it was a company that developed

hardware and software to do industrial automation.

And for three years I was brushing

bits and bytes doing heavy duty programming.

Back then, the language was circumental, which even

today the foundation of a lot of hardcore

computing is based on the c language.

So it's not an easy language, but it's very powerful.

And that company, because you were doing

best practice overall, was very enlightening for

me to learn programming from that perspective.

The whole object language programming

was novelty back then.

There's no tools, was just a concept.

And we, we heard about it from the US

that there's this new technique to program and we

kind of developed a whole framework around this.

From a programming standpoint, that job gave me an

amazing insight into how programming works, how database works,

how data works, how to connect to multiple systems,

how like no Internet of things nowadays back then

was like the beginning of Internet of things was

what we were doing in that company. Anyhow.

In my last year of college, just going back

a little bit, in my last year of college,

I did an internship in a company as an

electric engineer programmer, but in a sales engineer role.

Somehow I don't know even why I got into a sales role.

Technical, I think was just thinking, let me see what

happens was that someone that fits your personality, I'm very

geeky, but I'm also not those that are recruited and

don't want to fuck with people, right?

I like the social side of things and I

think I probably went into this opportunity because I

thought it was fun, it was different.

I want to see how to deal with

business and sell stuff using technical conversation.

But I had no clue.

I never sold anything before.

And then I got the flavor of how amazing

it is when you really understand a complicated subject.

You know, programming hardware is very complicated, very

freaking to open the hood, look and understand

what's happening, why it's happening, and explain to

someone that has no clue.

The feeling of being able to understand a problem

and explain how we're going to be solving technically

to me was so empowering, you know, thinking, oh

my God, I think my future is become as

technical as possible, but I want to be in

the business side because conveying technical things to non

technical people, boy, is complicated.

And I thought that, you know, being between these

two universes, the technical and the business is very

hard because most techies, they like to be there.

Most business on the other side and in

the middle, it's a very difficult place to

be and there aren't a lot of people.

So I thought, I think there's a place that I can

add a lot of value by being between these two universes.

So I thought, you know, let me just first

dive, you know, head first into the technical side,

learn as much as I can, complicated things, and

eventually when I transition to business.

So I went to that company that I told you

about, the Altus company, the programming for three years.

In the fourth year, I decided to do an MBA in

Brazil to get now started education around on the business side.

And about the same time the company saw that I

had the skill, the soft skill on the business side

and they put me on the, on the sales engineering

side of the company and to start a department around

selling those systems for their clients.

And then it was also a fun, amazing

opportunity to start using the technical side, the

business side, and get better mixing the both

of them in parallel to this whole universe.

The company started to expand internationally.

They already had an office in Germany and

they were considering an office in the US.

And to me, Silicon Valley as a data, was

not a data geek yet, was still just a

geek, was already like, wow, Silicon Valley.

I was just looking the news and what's happening

with, you know, that back then was early nineties.

So a lot of, you know, the computers,

you know, the Microsofts, the Apples, all of

those big companies, HP's, IBM, the most successful

technology companies, harder and softer.

They were primarily, mostly, I mean, a lot of

them, they were here in the Silicon Valley.

So I already have a thinking.

I wish I could eventually go in that direction.

At what age did that, like, start?

Was that in college? Was that post college?

Or like, even as a kid, were

you kind of dreaming about Silicon Valley?

Been a few years to remember the details, but if

I would think when I got that perspective in the

7th grade, I think, you know, I couldn't yet even

understand where this technology was coming from.

I was too young, you know, 7th grade, you

are like, I don't know, 1213 years old.

I was in this very obscure place

away from modern life back then.

I think high school is when you start

to become a little more self aware of

the world around you, but you're still not

sophisticated to understand exactly the details.

And I think Silicon Valley was

still not a known place globally.

I think college was definitely, you know,

I started to have english classes with,

you know, english teachers down in Brazil.

Then, you know, in college, you usually know

you're opening your mind, right, you know, what's

out there, what I can do.

So I would expect, I don't remember specifically, but I think

in college was when I really had a perspective of the

bigger world out there in the US being such a US

in specifically Silicon Valley senior being such a mecca of the

technology, you know, in the whole universe.

In my interest in coming to the US became prominent, and

then later I just slowly but surely got to here. Yeah.

Before we get too much deeper in the career,

let's go back to, like, being a kid.

The fact that you were like so interested in science at a

young age, like, were you like a really dialed in straight, a

kind of a student or were you just kind of. No.

Yeah, you know, I think that was

my geek side from the beginning.

I didn't know where to put that energy,

but I was very anal about studying.

I believe that studying was a way

to many of my peers back then.

They were fine with the lives

that they had in that place.

It was mostly agriculture based

and some commerce around.

You could be working for a bank,

could be working for agriculture, or maybe

in the church, maybe in the hospital.

The options locally were very limited.

And I think through books, I was seeing a bigger

world out there, even if I didn't knew the world,

but I could see it by magazines, whatnot.

And I thought that the education was

my way to go out and experiment.

All of this thing that I was reading

about from early age, you know, I was

always getting straight A's and working hard and.

Yeah, so it came early.

And apart from your studies,

did you have, like, hobbies? Did you.

I mean, when I think of South America, I

mean, I think I assume that everybody plays soccer.

Like, were you into soccer?

Were you into sports?

Yeah, I was into sports, but I was

more likely into running into some interesting stories.

I remember, I think one of my

frustrations with soccer, Brazil is very popular.

I think was in fourth or fifth grade.

When we're playing soccer, we're

already behind the ball.

Everyone goes where the ball is,

so there's no strategies, just running.

And I was the goalkeeper, and we had this

championship, and then the game went to the finals.

And we have penalty kicks, and a guy, you

know, kicked the ball, which was very heavy.

You know, you have those heavy balls.

They're not just full of air, they have

something side, and they hit my private parts.

Was that your last game as a goalie?

That was pretty much, no, I

don't like this sport anymore.

I was so freaking hurt by that that it

took my interest in soccer as playing soccer.

Now I don't want to do this anymore.

And it was fairly common also back then for

people to get hurt playing soccer, either breaking a

foot or breaking a knee or some kind of.

It was very common to get hurt and not just bruising.

No, you can get bone broken because

people are very kind of aggressive.

So that penalty was pretty much took me out

of the soccer interest, and I pretty much went

to running long distance and tennis and whatnot.

Just one fun comment about sports.

So tennis in my hometown, there's nothing at all.

It was just on tv that we could see that tennis exists.

And my father used to travel.

He was a truck driver, so he would travel

every week to the capital of the state to

bring goods for the company he worked for.

And then a friend of mine and I was middle school, we

got into know we need to find a way to play tennis.

So eventually got my dad to buy for the two of

us one racket for each one of us and one ball.

And then we got, oh, my God, we can play tennis,

but we had no place to play because there's no court.

Tennis court.

We only had volleyball courts.

In volleyball courts, you know, we kind of

took the net down to the height, but,

you know, the holes are pretty big.

So when we play with the volleyball, we'll go through

the net with, you know, there's no net for it.

So, like, no, we need to come

up with a tennis court net.

And eventually, we asked my dad to buy

the things to do this from scratch.

And eventually, he and I, in the course of two

months, we kind of, you know, created a freaking net.

Wow.

So it was fun that there's no resources.

I came from a low, middle class family,

so we didn't have money to buy expensive

stuff, and everything was a struggle.

But when you sweat to get things done, you learn the

value of what you put into it, and you make a

difference, because sometimes if you don't do it, you just.

If you don't take it, the initiative to

go through the hard way to get something

done, you just don't enjoy the benefit of.

You were very resourceful. Yes.

Back then, you had to.

So growing up, obviously, you had tv, but, like,

did you have other electronics in the house?

So going toward electronics, my first gadget,

I would say, would be a typewriter.

So back then in my hometown, there's no computers,

but typewriter was the first way that you can

put this handwriting into something like a book. Right?

Something into, like, a book format typewriter. So I.

My dad decided to buy for us a typewriter, and then

he bought a typewriter that was about almost 80 years old.

Oh, my gosh.

Was that the kind of, like, really, you had to,

like, mash down on those keys to get the ink

onto the paper and, wow, it was solid.

It was heavy.

You know, it was like 80 pounds.

I mean, it was a beast.

I remember when he brought, you know, he was,

you know, brought in a, like, wow, okay.

And, you know, when you press it.

No, it was a, you know, really well built, very strong.

It was working perfectly.

And then to me, in a way, the

typewriter, you know, when I was looking at

book, book is on paper, professionally written stuff.

So to me, it was like, yeah, you know,

the book is the way that I can get

out of this place into a bigger world.

And I've seen that learning typewriting is probably part

of the skill set that I need to evolve. Right.

So that was a little bit of the motivation to.

To get into typewriter by the way, I

was the youngest of six, and eventually I

kind of learned to use a typewriter.

So through high school, the only digital device that

I had access to in my small town was

mostly tvs, radios, the LP's, you know, the.

To play music with the LP. Right.

FM music was something that appeared in my life

when I was, you know, in high school.

So FM was super novelty.

I remember I was, oh, my God,

I can see the sounds different. Two boxes.

Oh, my God, this is amazing.

Computers really start to appear in Brazil in my life.

I think my older brother, he got a computer when

he went to college, so I was exposed to, I

think was actually an Atari game, but I think it

was a computer when I was late in high school.

So I started to see, you know, there's

a lot more beyond calculators and real computers,

really, that I use was in college.

And by the way, after my basic class,

which was using regular computers, I also took,

I think was a Fortran class.

Back then, Fortran was already old language.

Using the cards, you know, you have

to make punch, or the cards. Wow. Yeah.

I touched a little bit of that technology where you

have to write a code, go to machine, punch the

cards, send the cards to a data center, and then

in a few days, they come back with the output.

And that Fortran class, the funniest. Not back then.

The moment was in our final project.

Each one of us had to write

a code to submit to the professor.

So you write the code, you go, you punch the cards,

and we're like, you know, dozens, three, four dozen cards.

Then you go to the place you

put the cards, the cards are red.

And then eventually you got the machine

returning the result of the code.

So when we're going towards myself and my

friend, each one of us with a little

box with our cards already perforated, my friend

tripped, dropped the box, and the cards.

Oh, no.

And then when they're out of order.

Yeah, you know, there's no.

There's no sequence of the cards.

Oh, my gosh.

Back then, you know, it was before thinking, well,

what if, you know, you lose the order?

Put a number one. We didn't. It was.

Was a nightmare for him.

I remember in college having three and a half inch floppies,

and I was a ta for a professor in the business

school, and he had a class that was like 450 students.

It was huge, huge class.

And I kept the gradebook on this floppy,

and I remember that floppy getting corrupted one

time, and I was freaking out.

Thankfully, we were able to.

Somebody was able to come in and

run some application and do some recovery.

But man, you drop all those cards,

there is no putting that back together.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

And keep in mind, again, this was late eighties

in Brazil being like, you know, 1015 years behind.

You know, there's still quite a bit of the

computing resources in Brazil back then, available in colleges,

was still for trend and all of those things.

So it was interesting for me to get a

little bit of the flavor of how far we

came, technology wise, from that old world.

And eventually today, which is just all over

the place, you don't even know it's there.

Computer just a little ahead of back then. Yeah.

All right, so you're working for this company,

you're doing connected device kind of work, and

that led you to the states, right?

Right, yeah.

So in the fifth year that I was

working for this company, they decided to open

a subsidiary in Florida, in Fort Lauderdale.

And as they were announcing this

move, I raised my hand.

They said, hey, you know, if you guys need

to send someone, I would definitely be interested.

I'm super excited.

I think it's an amazing opportunity.

And eventually they sent me over to start from scratch.

The business here was in Florida, and

the business has two main purposes.

One was, well, three main purposes.

One was try to sell our technology worldwide, especially

in the Americas, North America and Central America.

So there's like an outbound effort.

The second effort was just source

technology in the US to Brazil.

In Brazil, we were

building computer industrial computers.

So we have to buy components,

electronic components like chips and whatnot.

So that was the second, that is with

sourcing of raw materials for production, Brazil.

And the third was just being aware of

the latest and greatest, whatever novelties what happened

in the US to tell Brazil.

So there's some new trends, let's invest in this to

learn and hopefully absorb as part of the technology.

So we had this three different efforts.

I stayed with that business for

five years, 95 to year 2000.

Late nineties was when the

Internet bubble was going crazy.

Here in the Silicon Valley.

People are making, you know, becoming rich

by selling pineapples over the Internet.

And I started to become really feeling the

pull to actually come to the Silicon Valley.

So towards the end of this, you know, 1999,

I made a deal with the company owners where

I would help the second person that was in

the office in Florida to take over my position.

And then once she would take over, I

would quit and then move to the Silicon

Valley to experiment the Internet, crazy world.

And that happened pretty much in the year

2000, early 2000, I left the company, came

to the Silicon Valley and back then, Washington.

Job trades, you know, you go to trade shows

where the main goal is just hire people.

They're not selling, they're not.

The only purpose is to hire people.

It was to me was fascinating to see 100 plus companies

in a big convention center showing why you should work for

them and giving all the perks and all the big.

I mean it was.

And were they primarily looking for developers

or were they looking for anything?

The inflow of money, you know, investors money

to this, all of these startups was crazy.

So many business models that were really made no sense.

But because it was the crazy fad,

people were getting a lot of money.

And then if you had.com in your

name, people would write you a check. It was insane.

And then they just need technical

people and there's no, not enough.

So they, you know, do you know anything technical?

And then if you do, they would say, well, maybe here.

I mean, I interviewed several companies, I got

an offer from a few of them.

To me it didn't seem a reality,

you know, especially coming from Brazil, where? Brazil.

Until from my early, you know, I started to

work in high school, second year, started to work

part time, got my money, got my savings, buy

my little things, do my own stuff.

As I was going through education in Brazil

back then, in the late, well, the whole

eighties and early nineties, inflation was crazy.

At the top, I think it was in January

1990, the monthly inflation was like, no, 80%.

So if you had $100 in day one and you keep in

your pocket at the end of the month, you'd have 20.

So you couldn't keep the money in the

pocket, put in a bank, put in an

investment account that would keep up with inflation.

It was insane.

It was very challenging economically to live in Brazil.

And because of this financial situation in the country,

business in Brazil was very up and down.

There's always up and down, there's always,

you're doing great, then next six months

later, you are almost breaking.

So feeling that the world was very unstable was that

all the time was part of my growing up.

When it came to the Silicon Valley and started seeing

all of this Internet bubble craziness, to me it was

like, I don't think this is real, but sounds fun.

So I joined.

One of the companies was

a web development company primarily.

This company was, there are so many startups needing

development, they couldn't hire people fast enough, so they

would outsource to a company like ours.

Our goal was just to have a bunch of engineers

and business people, whatever you needed to be the development

branch for startups, meaning like they come to you with

the idea and say, here's my idea, we're going to

pay you to bring it to life. Right.

Instead of you come with it as an

entrepreneur, you come with the idea, with the

money from the investor, with the business plan.

Now I need someone to create this

product instead of me going through it.

You start hiring people and train people.

It's a lot of process.

No, let's accelerate by outsourcing the whole technical side to

a company like the one that I was working for.

Pretty much outsourcing, right?

Yeah, but really focus here

on the Silicon Valley market.

Okay, so this was, you said early 2000, right?

So it wouldn't be but a

few months before the.com bust happened.

So what was that like for

you, going through that transition?

Yeah, in a way.

When they arrived in the Silicon

Valley was in March 2020.

And if you look at the stock market, March was

pretty much when they started to, it took a few

months to really get busted, but March was the pick.

Sometimes I was joking, I think

I stepped on the bubble.

Blame it on Johnny.

So I joined this company and

the company was also fairly new.

I was the employee number 56.

And in six months the company doubled in size.

And it was coming from a place where you

work your ass off to get things done, to

earn your next month and grow a little bit.

I was in this company where a bunch

of perks, you have ping pong, you have

scooters, you have all of these things.

It looked like it was everything

you think about silicon Valley.

Yeah, but back then it was novelty.

Nowadays we have seen it, we have seen the social

media, they've been around for a long time doing this.

Many of us probably already have

experienced this kind of thing.

And nowadays it's much more common

to have a work balance.

And we have companies who give a bunch of perks.

I mean, we give a bunch of perks to our own employees.

But back then was not normal.

And I was thinking, I don't think this is sustainable.

It's too much fun to be like, it's just, I mean,

not too much fun is stop in the middle of the

day to go play ping pong and stay for 2 hours.

A few of us to me back then was like, you

know, this is too good to be true in a way. Right.

Of course there was a reason why there

were so, I mean, many companies became so

successful because we didn't leave the work.

You know, sometimes you go early in the

morning, would leave at like 10:00 p.m.

because you eat, you play, and you just keep on

working for many more hours than you would otherwise.

So there's a value that works

for many companies, that whole thing.

But back then, to me, Washington, I was thinking,

this is not sustainable real quick at this point.

Are you married?

Do you have kids?

Yes, I got married in 98, and my first kid was in 2002.

So, no, I didn't have kids yet, just married.

Okay, so working till 10:00 at night like

that wasn't too much of a problem. Yes.

Yeah, I was more on the business side.

I was on the business side.

So business side, you don't stay much longer

because a lot of your work is working

with the businesses, which usually would have more

than nine to six kind of schedule.

So I wasn't, my work was

more regular schedule with that company.

But when it was looking the way that the

engineers were working, compared to the prior experience where,

you know, it was, they have a schedule, but

they were really working hard, and they were usually

very push, you know, pushed to.

And the perks, usually there's no perks, you know, you

just work, and if you need to get a coke,

you have to go out and buy a Coke.

Only during the break, not anytime, right?

Yeah.

So I stay with this company.

So six months, it doubled in size, but

then the whole market was crashing, and then

a bunch of these startups start to fail,

and then the company starts to have difficulties.

And then to me, it was obvious that that

model that took the Silicon Valley from whatever it

was before until the peak, which was pretty much

March 2020, a lot of companies would not survive.

And I was hoping that at least our business model,

it was a good business model, as long as the

money didn't dry out too much too fast, there are

still many good business models that would eventually succeed.

So I thought that company was one of

them that would be able to survive.

But eventually, within the next six months, the company

fired first, laid off 20% of the people.

I was not affected.

But then the next round, two months later, was

80% of the people, and pretty much only the

founders and the very close programmers stayed.

And then all of us were laid off.

And then in a few extra months, they just closed.

Because it was just automating.

It was a good idea.

I think if it wasn't too hard, too

bad, the whole crisis, that business model would

sustain, because nowadays there's a lot of companies

doing outsourcing and they're successful.

So that was mid 2001.

So what'd you do after that?

So a company here actually was from

Brazil, from Recife, north of Brazil.

They started a business here

in the business intelligence area.

And then one of the owners, I got to

be introduced through the brazilian friends here, and he

was telling about his vision, what you're doing.

And I was out of job, so looking for

a job, and he was actually hiring people.

And then at first, I was like, you know,

I didn't understand what business intelligence was back there.

And then he said, well, you know,

it's pretty much to help people analyze

their data, building reports, making it easy.

And I said, but that makes no sense.

I mean, it's so easy to build a report. He laughed.

Well, you are a programmer.

You were a programmer.

Of course, for you, you can go to the

database and do things because you are a programmer.

But most business people are not like you.

They have no clue what even a database or a table is.

So for them, they need the insight, but the data

is in a place that only the techies know.

And to me, like the light bulb poof.

That's exactly my vision.

15 whatever years ago, when I thought about

business problems and solutions in the tech world,

there's a big gap between these two.

You know, when I'm in the

middle connecting these two complicated worlds.

And I thought, wow, it makes sense.

I mean, business people, usually they have

the money, are the people that make

decisions that really move the needle.

And if they cannot make the informed decisions

because the data is stuck in a place

where only the freaking techie people know, it's

very inefficient to actually have that insight.

I think I can help this universe.

And then I decided to take the offer

from my friend and got into the business

intelligence world, which is mostly no table databases,

data, and converted data into actual insights.

In my career, it was an electric engineer.

I was harder, completely harder.

Eventually, I got into programming,

but just plain programming.

And my education in programming was not computer

science, and I was not studying programming.

It was just a specialty

inside of the electronic engineering.

But I got enough exposure that when I

decided to really understand in more detail the

business intelligence that is mostly databases, that I

had little exposure to databases.

I again put my tech hat, even though I

was hired as the sales director of the company.

But I put my tech hat, and I need to understand

databases, data, and how to convert this raw data that is

usually in format that is good for the data to get

in and the data to get out for the transactions.

How can get that raw data to help

decision making, which is a big problem.

Data problems are complicated for decision making.

That was the beginning of my data geek

career, and since then it's been my passion.

So at that firm, what size, what

kind of companies were you working with?

So their vision was, which is the

same vision that eventually I started.

DataSelf is the continuation of that business.

So that business, the vision was back in

the early two thousands, big companies, they already

had money, people and resources to do business

intelligence, data warehousing, reporting tools and analytics.

Back then, big companies already had

their own business intelligence initiatives.

So no problem.

Small companies, they don't need business

intelligence because they are small enough

to know their customers, their products.

They just know stuff because it's so small.

The vision of the company

was, well, mid sized companies.

They already no longer mom and pop.

They already have a lot of people where

management is no longer doing things, they have

other people to do for them.

There's a detachment between what happens

in the business from management.

These companies, they need better access to the insights,

but they struggle because they don't have the money

and resources to buy the big, expensive bi technology.

So the vision of the company was exactly,

let's build an amazing bi solution for SMBs

for small and medium sized businesses.

And their focus was initially in Sage, the Sage

100, which was called Mass 90, mass 200.

Back then, the ackbac, that eventually became Sage 300.

So it's mostly around sage because geographically, here in

the Silicon Valley, I think they were exposed to

those vendors ERP systems that were targeted to SMBs.

And then they were designing this monolithic solution

that would do the whole bi for SMBs.

And just make a long story short, I

worked for them from 2001 through late 2004.

They folded.

They also investor funded.

And because the market was crashing, in many senses

because of the bust of the Internet, I think

that business, they had the right vision.

The implementation didn't pan out for whatever reason.

Maybe was timing, maybe was, you know, whatever, but

they folded and they thought, this vision has lags.

I think the amount of companies that need

this kind of technology support is a lot.

But I think I can come with my own spin of

what they were doing and take my own direction and hopefully

succeed in taking the vision of providing small and mid sized

business with high NBI technology without breaking the bank and without

having to hire a team of data geeks.

And that was how I founded DataSelf.

So your experience there led you to start DataSelf.

It's really interesting you said

something that jumped out.

The vision that the founders

of your previous company had.

It sounds like you were totally bought in.

You saw it and you carried that forward.

How different is your vision now

than what their vision was then?

I think the foundation of the vision is

the same, because it's the idea that even

today we are almost 25 years.

Well, yeah, 23 years after I

was exposed to initial vision.

The problem between the data being in places where

are not easy to get and decision making needing

that insight, they don't want the raw data.

They want the insights on the raw data.

This problem is much more complicated

than it was back then.

So the problem continues worse today

than it was 20 years ago.

There's a lot more data silos back then, you

had three, four different systems to run your business.

Nowadays, my business, we have almost three dozen,

and we are a 35 people operation.

We have to go to multiple systems to get the job done.

So today is a lot more complicated data wise.

And if you are a small, medium sized business and you

need this kind of insight back then and today, it continues

to be a nightmare if you don't have the people, the

money and the resource to get it done.

So the foundation of the vision is

still the same, just the tool set.

The journey to get to where

we are today has changed dramatically. Yeah.

So tell me if I'm way off here, but

the what and the why really haven't changed, but

the how has is that a fair statement?

And back then, cloud was just barely becoming a thing.

It would probably be cloud was water in the sky.

Cloud pretty much started in 2008 and nine as

a concept, I usually tell 2010 is when cloud

was established, like, you know, really mainstream.

A buzzword until then was just

people putting servers in data centers. It was not a.

Cloud was just a data center. Right. Yeah.

Well, so let's talk about those early days.

So you start this in, what, 2004, 2005?

Five. Okay.

And what was that conversation like with your wife

when you said, hey, I think I want to.

This thing that didn't work for somebody else,

I want to try my hand at it.

Yeah, it was scary, right?

Because the company folded.

I could be out of job.

And where he had a.

He was two years old.

My first son, my wife, she was working

in a kind of low paying job.

She wouldn't be able to sustain us, you know,

if we had to be only on her salary.

And I'm a very focused person and assertive,

even though sometimes, many times I shouldn't.

But when I put something in my mind, you know,

I usually go all in, you know, either I go

where I don't, there's no maybe, no, no.

I use either I go or nothing.

And when I put something in my mind, I have a vision.

I believe until I get my all, I

believe I need to just go deeper.

So I'm very assertive in that sense.

And again, many times I failed.

But that's the way that I go.

I go deep into things that I decide to go.

When that company folded, we had a small

number of customers that were still using the

old technology, the product companies technology.

And I thought that I made a deal with the

owners that I would take over the client base, I

would spin off DataSelf company, I would take on

the ownership of these customers, I would keep their system

alive, and it would eventually transition them into a new

solution that would start from scratch.

In exchange for that, I would be paying their bills.

They had some debt they have carried over the years.

And then that was the exchange to I

got the client base with my own business,

and I think I can make it happen.

So when they told the story to my wife,

I put in an angle that I could continue.

I would struggle financially for some time

because the company was no more with

funds to pay actual salary, whatnot.

We had to fire most people, but I believed,

I strongly believed that I would be able to

actually take those small customer base and using the

old product, maintain them, make some money out of

the process, and eventually come up with something new

that would make real money out of it.

And she bought it into the idea.

And for quite a while, compensation wise, my

compensation went down significantly, but it was still

enough for us to keep on going.

Yeah, that was the main.

So it was somewhat of a soft transition.

You were able to start with

some revenue already built in.

Obviously, you already had an expense base,

though, that you were responsible for.

Did you go out and did you have to

go get additional funding, or did you just bootstrap

and operate from the cash flow that you had?

In my career at that point, I was involved

with two companies that ran out of money.

Was the first company and then the second

company here in Silicon Valley, that they ran

out of money because investors sorry out and

just, you got to kill the whole business.

And luckily or not, it's disputable thought.

My perception is to fix or to

address some very hard technology problems.

Quite often it's not a matter of throwing money at it,

it's really to finding the right angle to solve it.

And sometimes it can take a lot

of time to figure it out.

And if you put investor money in it and

you don't deliver in the timeframe, many times you

might have the right vision, the right path, but

you're going to have to kill the idea because

you're not returning quick enough for the investors.

And there's no way around that

process if you go with investors.

So I decided at that point that I don't want external

funding money until I figure out a model that can scale.

I don't want to be begging for money one

day if I'm going to be asking for money

from investors when they have to beg me, because

I can make your money go faster, much quicker.

I think the good side of this vision

is many problems really require time to fix.

So it's good to have this vision for

those problems and eventually you can fix it.

The downside is speed.

Without proper money, many times it takes much

longer to figure out how to solve it

because you have more people that you can

invest, you probably could fix, you know, faster.

Anyhow, I decided that, you know, I'm not

going to get investors money until I'm in

a position where I want investors money.

So it was no money, no external money.

Again, I come from a family and from a

world where I didn't have cash to help me.

Everything was self funded.

From the beginning it was self funded.

And I, we had a small number of customers that to

me, they helped us get enough paid to keep the basics

in place until eventually things start to get better.

But it was probably three years

of very tough financial journey.

But going back to your childhood, I'm

thinking about you building that tennis net.

Like you're scrappy and resourceful and you're just the

kind of person that a business like that needed

to be able to get that to go.

But you said something in there that its kind of like

almost a chicken and egg, like, whats the right path?

You talked about how the investors arent

patient enough, but theyll provide the funding.

But on the flip side, this was something that was

going to take a long time and its going to

take even longer without money to do it.

What gave you the courage to do it that way?

Sometimes I mentioned that am I stubborn or persistent?

Two sides of the same coin? Yeah.

When I mentioned that I'm very focused in

assertive in certain things and sometimes I'm wrong.

Right.

But until I don't try all the possible variation

and realize, yep, okay, give up sometimes takes me

too long to realize it's the wrong path.

I know that sometimes when I see some peers

that they are a lot less patients or they

give in quicker and move something else.

Some of them, they're much better than I am

now because they found better paths more quickly.

But you never know.

If you were to make different choices,

what would happen with your life?

So I don't regret today when I look at where I

am and where my business is today, even though it's taking

20 years to get to where I am from.

That vision, and I remember that

was, I think was 2000, 910.

Something like that was when I started to get

some vision of how big this problem is worldwide.

Back in 2009 or ten, we found out that

in US and Canada, about 250,000 companies they use.

When we look at how many companies use

mass, 90 back then was already Sage, 100.

How many companies use Sage?

300 they use back then Sage Pro.

There's a bunch of Microsoft.

Well I think it was not Microsoft yet, but

you know, the Great Plains and the vision, all

of these products, they were mid market URP systems.

When you put all of the client base together based

on what the vendors were claiming, how many users they

have in US and Canada alone was 250,000 companies.

So a massive market.

It's a huge market.

I mean a huge number of companies using those systems.

And when you think about management reporting out

of those systems, they all are complicated.

And if you think worldwide,

that number probably is millions.

If you go worldwide, the number of companies in

the whole world that does mid sized stuff with

the same challenges that we have in the US,

it's a huge number of companies.

And the successful bi companies, if you look

at nowadays, the Microsoft with Power Bi and

Tableau, with Salesforce and the domos, they don't

put much resource in the mid market.

They go to the big boys to make a lot of money.

So it's an underserved, very expensive framework.

And I thought when we find a model that we

can bring top notch technology that is usually only affordable

for big companies, make it cheaper, simple, faster for medium

sized companies, take advantage of this and make management making

from decisions without a sweat in a lot of money

and a lot of people.

When we scale this model internationally, there is probably

millions of companies that can benefit from it.

Finally now, through interactions and iterations of different

technology, different combinations in the cloud and APIs,

nowadays we have cracked the model.

Technically speaking, we already have found

a model that can scale dramatically.

Now we're more finding the business model.

You know, what is the business model?

That we can actually reach out a large number

of companies and get them to benefit from this.

And it's been a 20 year work in progress, but to

me now we are with the technology that now can scale.

If I go back, let me give an idea

that is interesting on why now is so different

than let's say, seven years ago, 2017.

We were in a pivotal moment of our company,

company SataSelf, that is starting in 2005.

We were working with cloud systems, but we were

using the technology that was designed in 2005 and

six, which was before the cloud, the real cloud

as a buzzword was about 2010 APIs and really

distributed environments in the cloud and whatnot.

So we realized that in 2017 that our technology that

was working the cloud, but it was just clunky.

It was using technology from 20 years ago

or plus, and it was a nightmare.

Sometimes we run into errors working with cloud system

that we couldn't figure out what was wrong in,

probably because we're using old technology in the new

technology and nobody knows what the error is.

There's just no way to figure it out.

It was unstable.

So we thought, should we keep on band

dating this Frankstein and keep on working with

this old technology and struggling, right?

Or should we just scratch it?

You know, let's design something from scratch using

the experience we learned in the last twelve

years doing this, but designing from scratch, everything

using modern technology with zero backwards compatibility.

So let's forget about the old, let's live behind not

forget, let's live behind the old code and write something

for the future, because our business growth is in the

future, not in the past, even though we have a

lot of clients that are using the old technology.

And that decision was a hard one.

And pretty much we started from scratch all

over in 2020 from a technology stack.

And why I started this whole thread.

Oh, back then, in 2017, every new deployment of

DataSelf was primarily a client would have to

invest 30 grand and wait for 30 days for

my team to get the basics in place.

And we thought, 30 grand, 30

days doesn't scale in this market.

If you tell someone you need

some reports, give me 30 days.

In 30 grand, you're going to say,

I mean, we're getting some money.

So we were in business, but most

businesses would say, are you crazy?

This is too much money, too much effort.

And then part of our discussion

that we decided to redesign Washington.

We need to find in this new

modern technology something that dramatically reduces the

time and money to get started.

Nowadays, the result of our deployment, which is way better

than in 2017, and we can deploy in 30 minutes

what was taking 30 days, and it's not zero minutes

because we don't have the bandwidth to automate the last

step, but 30 days to 30 minutes.

And right now, what we're seeking 30 grand

now we can do for free if we

see it's worth to do a free deployment.

And without this changing technology, it

would be impossible to do.

The vision, which is part of the vision to get this

technology all over the place is making super simple to deploy

it, which we are not far from making pretty much self

service and making the cost even free trial technology wise, let's

say if a company that uses Akumatica Netsuite or intact or

Salesforce, all of these cloud based systems, once they give us

the credential to deploy data set for their system, pretty much

in less than 30 minutes, we do what we have to

do on our side.

Once the system refreshes their data, clients

have thousands of reports and dashboards, amazing

insights into their data with that effort.

So its a huge improvement from 2017.

And without this ability, it would be impossible to

scale the way that we want to scale.

So theres something really interesting in there that

I want to dig into a little bit.

You went from a much higher price

point to a much lower price point.

Obviously, youre not giving it away for free forever.

Maybe theres a trial, but I assume its not 30

grand today, or maybe some of them larger customers are.

When youve built up a business where youre used to a

larger transaction size, how do you bridge that gap from a

cash flow standpoint of going from those big things to where

ive got to have much higher volume at a lower price

point in order to make the same amount of money?

The devil is in the details.

Im making an assumption here that

that was a challenge for you.

Maybe it wasnt a, but as we've evaluated certain models

in our company, like that's been, part of the calculus

is how do we go from an average sales price

of this to an average sales price of this and

bridge the cash flow until the volume picks up?

We probably will appreciate the answer.

So back then again, 30 days was the normal engagement.

So small volume, right.

What we have now, because things are

so fast to get the ball rolling,

we actually created a multi tier approach.

If you are a small company, you go with the

entry level solution and the entry level solution, the price

once the company starts to pay the lowest cost of

data, self is dollar 100 per month.

Most clients that go to the entry level, they actually

go for the dollar 400 per month, which is the

dollar 100 per month is just a tool.

You still need to do a bunch of things using the tool.

It's an amazing tool, but it's just a tool.

The $400 per month is actually plug

and play to plug and play. And you get a lot of

reports and dashboards ready to go.

You don't have to build anything, you just plug and

play, and you got managers to make better decisions.

So most of our entry level clients, they pay

dollar, 400 per month now because this technology has

multi tiered Lego block kind of approach.

Our biggest clients, they pay us

about 200 grand per year. Wow.

So in the past would be impossible. Well, I don't know.

But back in 2017, we didn't have any client

paying us more than 30 $40 per year recurring.

It was much smaller recurring revenues because

it was still perpetual back then.

You pay big at the beginning, then small after. Right.

Nowadays, because of this new model, our

volume has gone up dramatically since then.

But one of the best things is we still

have very large clients with very sophisticated data problems

that they pay us a ton of money.

There's a lot of consulting that goes

on to get them what they need. Yeah. Yes.

We have some clients that heavily rely on our data

geek wizardry and resources to complement their bi needs.

So we worked closely with many clients, but we also have

some clients that we just give them the tools, we give

them the credentials, and they just run with it, because what

we give them is really, I tell these clients, if you

know how to chat or Google for technical problems, a lot

of the support for DataSelf is out there.

Just learn how to google Chat, Chpt, and

it's SQL, it's the blob, RBI, excel.

And you can do a lot with little support from us. Man.

Do you ever think about how different your business

would be today if you hadn't made that decision

back in 2017 to make the change?

I think we'd have folded.

Really?

I really think back then, one of the drivers that, to

me, pushed us over the edge to make the change was

because the old platform was not stable in the new world.

Was just too many times the amount of time

we're spending debugging things that nobody had the answer.

It was insane.

It was just insane.

And to me, as I was looking, the kind

of problem that we're solving, data analysis, there is

always a ton of companies with a ton of

money, throwing money at it, trying to solve it.

If you don't improve, you die.

There's no way around if you don't improve,

if you don't stay current or ahead of

the competition, you're going to die.

And to me was that old product is going to kill us.

We would not be able to keep

up with what would be happening.

I know many of our competitors, they have

not done that change in my opinion.

They are band aiding.

They continue to band aid more successful than

what we were band dating back then.

So credit to them doing really well.

I know many mid sized bi vendors that are

still with the technology design, I don't know, 2030

years ago, and they are doing well.

And to me, they're band aiding bandaid better than me.

I tell my clients and prospects that when they ask about

the competition, and I know fairly well many of the competitors

that are in my market, I usually tell my clients, ask

each one of us to open the hood and show how

we're going to be supporting the next 510 20.

Who knows how many years we're going to

be in the business with this technology.

And most likely, if you know what you're

looking when they open the hood, right?

Sometimes people open the hood, you have no clue.

It all looks pretty similar.

But if you know what you're looking at,

I think you're going to be running back

to me quickly because we completely redesigned all

our technology as industry standard.

It's clean, it's modernization.

Because it has been redesigned, it's

still new in a way.

We haven't been 20 years with this

code, so there are some missing features.

But usually the way we designed is there are complements

to our functionality that even today, if something is missing

in my framework because it's open, there's usually something Microsoft

or in AWS or some other tool we can plug

to it and then live with this add on until

eventually we can take it out.

So it's been a fun journey to since

we redesigned to be a fun journey.

And pricing.

Our pricing is super modular.

We usually can look at the clients pains and use a Lego

block approach to be sure we can come up with an offer

that if we're a good fit, I usually tell people, if we're

a good fit, it's hard to beat our offer.

At least know if you're being unbiased.

There's no bias decision towards this vendor because

I know the people, I trust them well.

We cannot beat that.

But if it's unbiased and looking technology wise, we

are in a very good position right now.

Thinking back to the customers that you had prior to

the big rewrite, did you guys tell them at some

point like, hey, there's an end of life, we're not

going to provide updates past this certain date.

We've got this new product if you want to move over.

How did that go with your existing customers?

Was that well received?

I can tell you've been around asking these questions.

Yeah.

No, the decision of not making

backwards compatible bite us, right?

Because many dear clients that have been partnered with us

for a long time and we've been helping each other,

we help their problems and they give us money. Right.

We strategically decided, no, sorry, we

cannot make this backwards compatible.

We have to be completely forward compatible.

And hopefully in the future at some point

we can find a technical pathway to move

you over to the new framework.

So we pretty much had to tell

people we don't have the bandwidth.

And strategically we decided to.

We will continue to support you with the old technology for

as long as you want to keep up with it.

We're going to keep it up, we're

going to keep on making work.

If it fails, you pay our support. We'll make it fix.

We'll make it happen, we'll fix it.

But in the old technology, with the new

one, it's so different than even today.

We still have some clients with the old

technology that we have to move them over

and it's still fairly time consuming.

And it sucks.

It sucks because the conversion of

the old technologies is so time.

If we were to be building a conversion tool, it

will be probably a couple of years of effort.

And to me so far, every time they think

about putting my programming resources towards developing, I want

to develop towards the future, not towards the past.

Especially because nowadays we have a very small number

of clients that are still with the OTEC.

Over time, either we found a way to migrate them

over through labor, or they left us most of them.

Well, I don't have the precise number, but many

of them, they kept with us for quite a

while and eventually found a way to move them

over to the new platform, slowly but surely, manually.

Eventually everything was turned over.

But it was painful for everyone.

And I'm sure that some of the dark clients, they

were very frustrated with our decision, but we had to

do it with the money that we had available.

We decided to make that way.

Yeah, sometimes, I mean, it stinks, but sometimes you

have to make the best decision for the business.

And we've been through one of those in the last couple

of years ourselves, and a lot of people got frustrated.

But had we not done that, there may not have

been a business to continue to support the customers.

And so it's unfortunate, but sometimes that happens.

Just a comment to close this topic we worked in

a way that the old product is officially supported.

The end of life is December this year.

In the end of life doesn't

mean, you know, it stops working.

From a professional service standpoint, we want them

to move away from it, either move to

the new one or move it out.

And we know that some clients will continue to go beyond

that because for them it makes no sense to change.

And we're not going to let them, you

know, run dry and be in trouble.

I mean, we will in a way do our

best, because again, even though financially we're not investing

any money at all in that product, as long

as the product works and we can, through reasonable

effort, fix when there are issues, we'll continue to

keep our clients, you know, moving forward.

You talked about the level of investment

required to build the tool to go

do the backwards compatible migration utility.

We were having a conversation about something just this

morning about how much effort this thing was going

to be to go reconfigure all this stuff that

we had built out for our internal use.

We had to ask ourselves, what do we get if we

invest all this time to go reconfigure and do all this?

What do we get?

And it came down to we were trying to save

one user license per year for this thing that was

going to take us probably 80 hours worth of work.

And it was the sort of thing that

it could unravel some critical business processes.

And we just said, you know what, it doesn't make

sense for us to spend two full weeks and run

the risk of something breaking to save $1,500 a year.

And so sometimes you got to go through those decisions.

And yeah, I'm going to be paying for this

license for who knows how long, but it's worth

doing that and not having this other potential cost

and problem that comes with it.

Yeah, in a way, this was also the rationale.

At the end of the day, even we

look today when we decide in what we're

going to be investing our program resources.

To me, as always know two things is

we have to always fix bugs, right?

We need to make the current

platform as stable as possible.

So fixing bugs is always top priority.

But then new features, what new features are the

most important to sustain to go moving forward, right?

And when you look at that perspective, usually things

from the past, you don't want to go back

to five years ago and fix something.

The old product, not at all.

Even something interesting, even the new product.

When we designed, we actually, we

took like in three waves.

We made a first wave, which was primarily

now, was just reallocating our programming resources from

this old platform to the new platform.

So the first wave, we pretty much would

trash it eventually, everything, because it was such

a experimentation from the old to the new,

the second wave was solidified.

And then it took us for about three years.

We have this platform with all

the system, everything modern, whatnot.

But then we realized that the second wave,

we also had a lot of design decisions

that were, that would be limiting our future.

So when we created the third wave,

primarily, we redesigned again from scratch.

But because we're using object or in programming and

architecture, we were able to pretty much go from

wave one, two, and three without client disruptions.

Client barely know that something

completely changed behind the scenes.

But decision around product development is always

difficult, without a doubt, whether it's product

or hiring or something else.

What were some of the other, like,

really pivotal or difficult decisions that you've

had to make over the years?

Pivotal.

On the business side, one of our focus from the

beginning is, let me give this vision, because to me,

it's an era where we're still spinning it, and we

might have a pivot as part of this life of

the vision going back to mid sized companies, right?

When a mid sized company today, any place

in the world, they're frustrated with their reports.

You know, it's complicated, and it's always expensive.

You gotta wait, blah, blah, blah.

Those issues, usually what they do is

either they search for a solution, right?

Or, and usually the or is usually part of

the path is they call their trust technology advisor,

how can we get this done better?

In the trust technology advisor is usually a

reseller of the software that they are using.

Like, you know, if it's an ERP, is an erpental reseller

or a CRM reseller or payroll, whatever it is, right?

In most of these companies, this ERP and CRM and

whatever, resellers, they make money out of services, right?

That's the main focus.

So typically nowadays, when someone calls them and tell, I

want this, and it sucks, usually they say, don't worry,

I can do it for you, I can fix it,

then just give me more money, and we'll keep on

doing, and we know how to do it. And then I.

They are successful that way because they

get the money from the clients, but

it's still slow, expensive, right.

So to me, part of my vision of going

and taking over the world mid market to get

that vision going is how to get mid market

ERP, CRM, payroll resellers to realize that when the

client is frustrated with reporting, don't write another report.

I mean, if it's just another report, sure.

But if the client is always frustrated because

it's always a pain, it's always low.

There is a better way for them, which is, you

know, using DataSelf now you can give them a

tool that they can be more independent, they can do

this faster, and they're going to grow faster, and they're

going to buy more of your software.

So don't worry, you're not going

to be running out of work.

There's going to actually accelerate more work.

But there is a hunt to get over.

The challenge is these ERP vendors.

As technology has evolved, if you look at the ERP

market, which you're very ingrained as well, for these ERP

vendors to be just keeping up with what their preferred

ERP publisher provides, it's a nightmare for them to just

to keep up with all of those tools evolving whatnot.

So they have a full plate, right?

So telling them to embrace a bi tool and be self

sufficient has proven to be a big friction in our business.

We want them to learn it, they have the

resources to learn it, but they're just too busy.

And there aren't many ERP, CRM whatnot vendors

out there that have a bi practice.

And to me, this is one of the things going to

feed into the whole pivoting thing for quite a while, I

was hoping and pushing in a way to train ERP and

CRM consultants to the Bi because they have the technical expertise,

the business knowledge to do the transition.

Yes, they do. They can.

The problem is they're too busy.

And especially now, we're having a problem that there's not

enough ERP and CRM consultants to do the job.

If you're one of them, you have a

full time job, guaranteed with what you know.

So you just run in that lane.

So it's been proven very difficult for us to actually,

in that vision that I told you, that if we

get these vars to bring DataSelf when the client

is frustrated, boy, we can fly very quickly.

The problem is these erps, they usually

too busy to actually open that initiative.

They can sell sideways, but it's not a focus yet.

So the last few years, we're starting to get

better talking with this Vars, getting more strategically.

Many of them are using internally, many of them,

at least internally, they are understanding the value of

Bi, but only a few are positioning DataSelf

the way that my vision is.

One of the things we started to think recently

for us to scale more quickly and eventually get

this part of the vision more properly fulfilled is

we have resisted to go after bivars.

We have just focused on ERP CRM and

other Vars to put behind in their portfolio.

But then recently we actually noticed that the Bi

vars, they have similar challenges, that when they're trying

to sell their BI offers, power bi tableau.

If you go the sisense domos and other companies, when

they go to a client that is looking for something

better than the reporting that they have, then there is

a competition with other vars of BI offers.

Maybe comes a tableau var and then comes

a power bi var, another power bi var.

And all of them are trying why their

offer is better and everyone is doing the

same thing is what are your problems?

Let's make an sow.

And they spend sometimes dozens of hours to come

back with an sow that eventually become usually sometimes

hundreds of hours to get the job done.

And then I thought, well, probably for us to

scale one side of our channel more quickly, as

let's start tell this Vars this bi Vars that

we can actually make their offer.

If you're working with taboor power bi, which is

the two tools that we provide the feed, very

quickly, we can make your offer significantly better than

the alternative, the other competitors, and then we can

scale our channel at least would be Ivars first.

So right now, we are actually the beginning

of this, I'm not going to say pivot,

getting out of ERP VARs, not at all.

To me, the ERP CRM Vars, they have the reach

to the majority of our client base, future client base.

But the bivar new initiative add on to our

channel, I believe has the potential to help us

grow more quickly in the bi universe.

And as we even get more funding, then

we can continue to push forward the vision

of refining the european CRM VAR eventually.

All right, you just mentioned funding, and that's something

I was actually wanting to jump back to.

So talking about those early days, and you didn't want

to go take the funding too quickly, you wanted to

really get your legs under you and actually have something.

So it sounds like at some point you

did go and look for that funding.

Is that accurate? Not yet.

I have been exposed to many companies interested in

investing DataSelf, but because the business side, we

haven't yet found a way to scale.

To me, let me give you the vision of when

funding will make sense, when our volume get to a

point x that we already have some ideas.

The idea is if a client or a VAR, let's say URP

varum Var decides to add DataSelf to a new company.

They go to our website, they go to that

page, let's say Netsuite, Akumatica, whatever it is.

They click order.

Now they go through like a menu process

that you can pick whatever you want.

You want to prepackage, plug and play everything.

You can select big packages that have everything, or

you can go, no, I want this module.

This module, you can just select what

you want and then you go.

At the end you put your credit cardinal and

then you put your credentials to your source systems.

Assuming it's cloud, let's say you

press finish and automatically everything happens.

This vision, technically we are probably a couple

of months from fulfilling the self service thing

on the web, maybe three months.

But to me, until we start to see that, it becomes

we have a self service drive for this kind of ordering.

Until we see self service drive,

we're not going to invest.

Right now, the majority of our sales people

knock on our door, through the channel or

directly, and they want to have a discussion.

They want to see us sow.

There's usually hours, you know, from one to 10 hours,

usually of, you know, back and forth until they sign

the contract and then we run with it.

And I believe that the way we have structured our

business and our technology is once we teach third parties

like VARs, you don't need to call us. This is it.

You just order now you got data warehousing, SQL,

you know SQL, you have your own SQL people.

You're using power, Bi or tableau or Excel as the UI.

You know how these tools work.

We just give you the automatic plumbing, the refresh,

the deltas, the templates, and you just send us

the money and call us if there's a problem.

So we'll fix it.

That's the dream, right?

Just send us the money. That's the dream. That's great.

I think we are getting closer, but the business

model of them third party is not my team

being able to do it without calling us.

We only have a very small number of

partners that they do this sometimes because they

already know how to do it.

It's not yet their main focus.

But to me, the pain of management

needing what we have is obvious.

I mean, when I was telling you that the conference that

we came back from where we resonated with a bunch of

clients and they told us, I don't know why the VaR

didn't tell about data, self is obvious that we need it.

The pain is there.

It's just, you know, you know that story that

you probably heard about it or something similar, that

in the nineties, a company decided to see what

is the market for sneakers in Africa.

So they sent this person to do that.

Have you heard about this story?

I haven't, no.

So they sent this person to the

market researching sneakers in Africa, and then

months later, the guy came back.

Nobody uses shoes, no market competitor had

the same idea and decides to do

the same research with another company.

A few months later came.

The other person came back.

Nobody's used it.

There's a huge market, right?

Two ways of looking at the same thing.

Same thing can be no market or huge market.

And I am in the belief that there's

a lot of management frustrated that they have

bought the new cloud based, whatever system is.

They show me the demo.

That is easy.

And boy, when I try to get my data

do that I want, it's not, call me.

I have the solution.

Talk me through your first few hires.

What was that like?

Did you bring people over from the other company, or were

you running it by yourself in those first few years?

People, yeah.

Until 2017, when we pivoted, we were a very small team.

We started with three people, three that were working for

the prior company, and then we started them DataSelf

business, and we kept the team fairly small.

We were about 15 people in 2017.

For most of my journey with data

self, until very recently, every new hire

was someone from our personal network.

Initially, we were all here in the Silicon Valley, in

the South Bay area, all physically, we were here.

We had an office and whatnot.

Bay Area has been a nightmare to drive.

So it didn't take much for some people

to start work remotely, which, by the way,

a funny story a little bit on this.

Working remotely in my DataSelf journey, Webex started

to the business, and they were the first main

vendor that would be able to do web based

conferences, right, or demos and whatnot.

And because I have an accent, as you

probably can tell, many times, people will not

understand my english over a phone call.

So I thought, well, if I do presentations using

the web camera where people can see me, hopefully

between my charm and my accent, it will help

a little bit to get the communication across.

And Webex was pretty expensive, so

we started to use Webex consistently.

I started to use Webex

consistently in my presentations.

And back then in early 2005 and so

forth, nobody was using web cameras, right.

I mean, was very rare in my industry.

And I remember two scenarios that

happened that were so funny.

The first one was the first event that I went,

after about a full year of doing presentations, I went

to this event, and then a bunch of people came

back to me, hey, Johnny, how are you?

Who are these people?

And remember who they were.

And what happened was, back then, when I was doing my

webex, I was looking at the camera when I was talking

to people, so they thought that I was looking at them.

And we humans, we make a much deeper connection when we

look eye to eye if we're only on the call.

So they had me as a close person because

they were seeing me looking at their eyes through

the camera, but they had no webcam on their

end, so we had no clue who they were. That's amazing.

Like, today, we've got kind of

a rule internally at our firm.

Like, hey, we're on camera for any remote

call, and I think most people are.

We'll get on some calls, and occasionally the person

on the other side won't have theirs on.

But now that's totally commonplace.

But you were kind of a pioneer in doing that,

and it sounds like it served you really, really well.

You were able to build that connection even

though you didn't know who they were.

They knew you, which is more important, probably.

Yeah, yeah, it was interesting.

Many times I had this kind of

situation, and I would say, no problem.

Then I would usually tell people, no,

hey, I'm sorry, who are you?

Because probably, no, you have seen me looking

eye twice, but I have not seen you.

And then it becomes a funny story to talk about.

So it has served me really well.

In the second story, that was also funny, with a similar

angle, I called this lady, which was one of our clients,

and the first time that I called her with the webcam,

back then, I just called, look at the camera, talking with

her for about half an hour, blah, blah, blah.

Anyhow, all good.

Next day, one of my consultants called me.

Johnny, did you talk with that lady? Yep.

Did you tell her that you could not see her? No.

I mean, why should I say so?

Well, you know, the consultant told me.

She called me.

She was so embarrassed that you call her, and

for half an hour, you talk with her with

a poker face, and she had something.

Maybe she was self conscious about something, right?

Maybe she was without make. I don't know.

You know, she was very uncomfortable because

I was looking at her, talking with

her, and she felt very embarrassed.

So, Mike, remember to tell people beforehand that they

can see you, but you cannot see them.

You know, we've got a peloton.

And I think about, like, it would be really weird if

the instructor could see me while I'm riding the bike.

But I get why somebody years ago might think that

going back to those early days, you were able to

have that soft transition with a few customers.

Man, what was that like?

Do you remember the first few customers

that you landed on your own?

Yeah, what was that like? The first one?

We never forgot the first.

Right, right.

The first one with the new product.

You know, to me, we already had a certain reputation

because back then, bi was not known at all.

In this market, it was really novelty.

And there's always the early adopters, you know, people

that see something new, and sometimes it's crazy new,

sometimes it's good new, and they go for it.

And I remember the first client

that bought our new product.

I was kind of scared because it was new.

And, you know, I'm, as I told you, I'm very.

By the way, I don't sell smoke.

Sometimes it's not, you know, nowadays, I mean, we

have evolved a lot, but, you know, I remember

in the past, sometimes I would sell, I wouldn't

say half baked, you know, 80% baked.

And because I know the last 20%, I can do it.

And actually, in 2017, when we made the whole

thing, I remember that my first in road into

the cloud with the new cloud, that I sold

two, three different systems in December.

And then when I told my team that I did it.

You're crazy.

We're not ready for production.

And I knew in my confidence, you know, know we are.

They just don't know.

My team doesn't know yet.

What I know is just, you know,

some effort and we'll get it done.

And remember that was December.

And then I went to Brazil for a couple of weeks.

There was, you know, many times I go

for New Year's and Christmas for Brazil.

Then I was thinking, should I go

back and get it done or not?

Can I actually do it?

So just going back to the first client,

I remember that because it was my real

first time with my business, right.

It was completing my business.

And failure or success would be

now is a watershed, right.

If this customer just fails, all of my

self consciousness might go down there downhill.

It might just fall apart.

So I remember I was excited because I got someone

to buy into the vision and what we're selling.

But I was also concerned, will this really

pan out as I believe it will?

I was very confident.

I'm very conservative in the sense of until I

feel very confident that either it's being done what

I already have done, all the pieces that now

is just a few extra steps.

I don't move forward selling what

I don't have in my hands.

We live and we learn.

A lot of owners that I've talked to over the

years, they shed more and more of their responsibilities.

They delegate things.

How different does your job, how different does your

day to day look today than it did five

years ago, ten years ago, 15 years ago?

Have there been these significant moments where you've

experienced a big change, or does today look

a lot like it did back in 2005? No, thank God.

It doesn't look like the same.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's an interesting question.

Until I feel. Yeah.

That someone is ready enough to take over, I

tend to look over the shoulder, and some people

say that I kind of know, don't trust. I micromanage.

And to me is, no, no, I

don't until I feel that you can.

But once you do, oh, my God, I just give it to you.

And don't just call me when you need me.

Otherwise, I don't want to be in the middle

because you already have crossed the hump that I

already know that you can take care of yourself.

So there are the people that we've been

with me from the beginning, I trust them.

You know, it's always give to them, get back.

And I was very trust from the beginning.

People that I've been hiring over the years, many times

it took them a while for me to build a

trust for eventually not looking over the shoulder all the

time, you know, I'm kind of perfectionist.

And over time, I kind of have to learn

to be less, because usually good is enough.

Perfect sometimes is too much effort, and

nobody sees the difference, which sucks.

But, you know, many times, perfect is not good.

Good is great.

And nowadays there is a lot

of functions, a lot of function.

The company that I barely touch, that I have

people that are completely capable and do a great

job, and without them, I wouldn't be able to

be what I am today without them.

Many people nowadays, I interact very little

because we are about 35 people.

So there's already like a structure that, you

know, many people reach out to others.

And a big challenge in our industry is you

need to hire people that have knowledge in whatever

that you need, technical business, whatever it is, and

people that are willing to learn.

Because every business nowadays, even us, that we use

a lot of industries and technology, it's amazing.

We hire people.

And usually the beginning, many people, they drown because

we're in a different pace, in a different.

They have all the checkboxes, if you look at

technically they should be hitting the ground running.

They don't.

It takes a while for people to go into new business.

And if you are innovating like we are,

right, we're not just doing the same thing

as someone else, just with different data. No, no, no.

The data is different as well.

But we have processes and

technology that make things better.

And it always takes a while for people to

learn how to get the novelties that you have

added to the process for them to also succeed.

So it is very challenging.

And, and recently we've been hiring very fast

and hiring now has become a challenge with

the whole AI AI on both sides.

When you're hiring, it's faster

to write the job description. Awesome.

But then let me tell a story that

to me it was amazingly frustrating at first.

In one of these processes, we have an interview

process first that is very high level just to,

without people that are not a good fit.

And once people pass the first high level, then we ask

a bunch of questions to see how they articulate tech, let's

say if it's a technical job, right, to see how they

articulate to, again, without people that are not going to give

us some checkboxes that we want to throw a question that

is not, have you have experience? No, no, no.

That's just some example of problems to see how they articulate,

to weed out people that are not ready for us.

So one of these candidates in this, the

second wave, the answer was like, was perfect.

I was thinking, oh my God, this

person, like me, they know everything and

exactly and articulated amazingly well each question.

And I thought, I need to talk to this

person now because if this person is like this,

we need to have it right away.

So eventually I called the person

I said to call myself.

Usually go to multiple people

to interview before I interview.

I'm usually the last one, at least

in the, the sequence of people.

No, no, I called this person right away.

So I scheduled the call.

The call was like with someone else.

It was completely not what the answer.

That was a sheet that she gave me.

And I hung up, like, you know, after,

I don't know, 15 minutes, like, no, just

disconnect, you know, like, no, what the heck?

And then it's like, wait, wait.

I took my questions, I dropped into chat

GPT, and her answer almost verbatim, what I,

what she wrote, you know, like, wow.

I talked to somebody recently, another business owner who had hired

a guy, seemed like he was just going to be absolutely

amazing and he was on vacation, like the first week or

second week that this guy worked for him.

And when he got back, he just

kind of knew something was, was off.

And they have monitoring software on their computers and

they can keep track of what's going on.

And come to find out this guy actually had multiple people

offshore that he was farming his work out to paying them

pennies on the dollar and he's then taking what they've got

and then just going and dumping it in.

And he said the code that we

got in his interview was incredible.

And then what we got, once he

started working, it didn't match up.

It's a different world today with

those kind of offshore nearshore things.

You hear people about having, you hear stories

regularly about people having multiple full time jobs.

And now with these AI tools, people can represent themselves

one way, but in reality be very, very different.

Yeah, I'm an optimistic with AI, I think there

is, especially my specific market, there are so many

things that AI is going to help us become

significantly more productive and help a lot more companies.

So there's a lot of value, but there's also a lot of

noise that's going to come with it, a lot of friction in.

One of the things that I'm very optimistic is I

think as a business, our business as a whole, and

our more senior people that really know the problems and

how difficult data problems are, many problems are to solve.

I think the wisdom that you kind of, you grow over

time of seeing problems, solutions, challenges, friction, you need to know

so many things in so many different areas to actually get

the magic done, that my bet is as we learn how

to use and incorporate AI into our way of our vision

as we learn how to properly put it, not too fast,

not too slow, the right pace, which is tricky.

But I think the amount of people we're going to

be able to help, it's to me is mind boggling.

I mean, we started already an AI initiative very

slowly in an area that the current AI wave

has a high level probability that's going to help.

And I've been looking at AI

for already, for a year plus.

When is the right time?

No, not yet, maybe 2025.

But then we hit a certain part of our

vision where apparently AI can help our client base

now in future, probably even this year.

But it's not about the marketing, it's

not about putting your brochure now.

You have AI. Yes. No.

I don't want to go for the fluff.

I don't want to go for the fluff.

If it has a tangible benefit for

us or for them or for both?

For us or for the clients and varsity.

Unless there's this obvious business benefit, I

don't want to do the marketing.

I want to really find solution to problems.

And boy, there's a lot of things

that can be helping in this.

One of my employees that is going

to affect his job in a way.

He called me, know, John, you know, I'm thinking about buying

a house, but are you going to be firing me because

you're going to be putting AI in my place?

And I laughed.

I said, no, no, I actually think

it's going to be the opposite.

This is going to actually going to

grow our client base even more.

And when I need more of you, so I don't see AI.

There's so many companies that need our

product that the problem is we're having

a hard time finding people to hire.

If you think I'm going to be firing

people that I love, that are trustworthy, and

that are already trained, absolutely not.

Your future here to me is bright.

So he was relieved. Sure.

Well, you may have already answered it.

Our closing question is, what's next?

What's next?

That's so many things to answer.

It's not only one.

What's next?

I'm going to split the answer in

two or three buckets, technology wise.

To me, when they look at the data problems that

we're trying to solve, in how hard they are, the

next is a never ending investment in technology and people

to find ways to gather freaking raw data from whatever

it is, clean it, push it through, and find a

way to get people that need insights out of it.

So technically, there's a lot of investment, a

lot of partnership with companies that can help

us make this vision more successful.

So technology wise, to me,

it's a never ending evolution.

So that's, you know, it's, what's next is

a big journey that would be helping a

lot of companies on the business side.

To me, part of our future is, I think the

whole thing that I told you about, the bi vendors,

the bi professional services companies, is a big way for

us to grow more quickly and eventually feed back into

the other vars that are not data geek focus, which

I believe those VArs, they reach most clients where most

of the bi vendors, they only reach the 5% of

the clients that really need our technology.

So I think on the business side, my main

what's next is focusing some effort on the bihe

vars to eventually feed more the other vars.

And third, to me, is people, even though technology is

all of these amazing things and blah blah blah.

But in the enterprise software, mostly people

buy from people that they trust.

So being able to hire more people, the

right people, build relationship with the proper companies,

being trust advisor, education, how people can understand

where they are and how they can solve

problems is a lot of people, connections, networking,

partnerships, friendships and ultimately, hopefully AI will never

take over our position as people, right?

We'll always be just like the spark, right?

Give you the answer to your questions, but hopefully

humans will have our future guaranteed in life.

Well said.

Johnny, thanks so much for joining us.

Scott was a great pleasure.

Thank you for all the insightful questions and

I was looking forward to this interview.

Even though we canceled a few times. We made it.

That means business is good for you.

Absolutely.

That was Joni Girardi, founder and CEO of DataSelf.

To learn more, visit dataself.com.

If you or a founder you know would like

to be a guest on In The Thick of It

email us at intro@founderstory.us