In The Thick of It

I don't
think you get the best work out of people

if they don't have that why figured out,
because

maybe you would not be disappointed
if you have really set expectations.

Like do you ever be disappointed?

Also, you'll never be delighted, right?

Because how can somebody go above
and beyond the call of duty if they don't

have that extra context to.

Welcome to In the Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

Matt Wensing, Founder and CEO of summit, a cutting edge
know code automation platform,

joins the show to share what got him into
the business of helping other businesses

at an early age.

Matt always wondered what his future
career would look like in college.

He began studying political science
before realizing computer science

was much more of his thing.

His first gig after college
sparked his curiosity

with a hands on software
development experience.

In 2007, Matt started his entrepreneurial
journey with a weather data startup.

That experience shined a light
on the power of teamwork and understanding

customers needs.

Tune in to hear more about Matt's latest
venture with the software company summit.

All right.

Joining me today coming from Austin,
Texas, is Matt

Wensing, founder and CEO of summit.

I'm excited to get in the story.

Matt, you started summit
this is your second

after a successful exit
from your first venture.

You're currently down in Austin,
but if memory serves, you grew up

in Florida, West Palm Beach area,
something like that.

So let's actually start there.

What was growing up like in in Florida?

First of all, Scott, thanks for having me.

Growing up in Florida,

as the internet has taught
many of us, Florida is a endless source

of inspiration, jokes, amazing things
that don't seem to happen anywhere else.

But that's where I was born and raised.

I lived there for 19 years,
so I definitely have a love.

A love hate with it.

I was an 80s kid and a 90s kid.

So youngest of three siblings.

And that meant that I distinctly
remember life

growing up there in the suburbs
with not a lot to do.

Definitely was one of those. Ride
the bike around

until the streetlights
come on kids, and did that a lot.

I was curious about all kinds of stuff,
so we got into some trouble.

We also played a lot of video games
and nerd it out and did things

that led me to my career. Today.

Probably life was pretty.

I'd say typical for a, 80s or 90s kid

in the suburbs at the time,
which is to say, a lot of downtime.

And then I remember the internet
coming on the scene and being a big deal.

But, you know,
I think I could relate to a lot of the

maybe the, the Gen Xers
that would listen to this even more

so than the millennials.

I'm technically on the cusp,
but my siblings were both older than me,

so I was the one riding around with them
while they listened to the cool stuff

for that generation. Yeah,
so that was my childhood, basically.

I'm right there.

I was born in 81,
so I'm right on the cusp of.

Yeah.

Okay, so I think we're technically xenial
is, is what they call us.

And, I think I identify more

on the Gen-X side
than the millennial side as well.

Which is great because it makes you it's
some serious difference,

and even more
so these days looking at our kids.

But, yeah. That's me.

What was school like?
What kind of student were you?

School,
for me, was something that I chose.

This is funny.

I was the I was the
what do I want to be when I grow up, kid?

Constantly.

I think from the time I learned,
you know, there's a

there's a newspaper article
that came out again dating myself, but

like, newspaper came, dad would open it up
and put it on the table and like,

you got to read it and stuff.

And there was an article
that came out once upon a time

that was like

the salaries that people made for
their jobs that they were in or whatever,

and I remember that one article
had like a little chart in it.

And I remember
even as an elementary school kids

poring over that being like,
what do I want to be when I grew up?

And I was like looking at the words,
I didn't know what

all that meant,
but I was like looking at the salaries.

And I was like,
oh, ooh, that one's interesting. All this.

And so I was always living ahead of my age
in that sense.

I wanted to be the next thing,
do the next thing, go to the next level.

I was done with elementary school
at the time

I was in kindergarten kind of thing.

So it was hard for me in one sense
because I was like constantly wishing

I was already done
with whatever I was doing.

My parents were pretty hands off
in terms of academics and all that,

but I was very self-motivated and driven.

For some reason, I, I don't know,
I just decided at some point, you know,

this was going to be my thing.

I was like, all right, I'm
I love sports, don't get me wrong.

But I'm like, that's not going to be
how I stand out in this world.

What am I going to do? I'm just like,
you know what?

Maybe
I could just do this academics thing.

So pour myself into
that was definitely the geeky type

growing up, but I just embraced it.

I just accepted it and, ended up just.

Yeah, being very studious, frankly,

studying a lot, learning a lot,
that sort of thing.

I think today

it's kind of become cool to be a nerd,
but back then it was not at all.

Yeah, that's a deep cut.

And you're you're right.

I mean, it wasn't
and I think that partly explains probably

why I love the Gen X vibe so much,
is that maybe in that

I found a little bit of you, like be
whoever you want to be kind of thing.

There's a little bit of an outcast culture
kind of in that of, like, you could be

a geek or a nerd and you could still love
alternative music or what?

Like they didn't seem to care.

Come as you are kind of thing.

They didn't
seem to care what you were like.

It was like a backlash
against the popular.

So I fell in love with that era of music,
I think in part

because these outcasts in Seattle,
somehow I'm relating to them,

not because we're the same at all in
one sense, but probably just like a shared

feeling of I don't really fit in, but
oh well, on to the next thing.

All right.

Favorite grunge band.

Stone Temple Pilots?

Okay, I'm a Pearl jam fan.

That's great.

I remember buying the vitality album
and listening to it and like, it

definitely got into some of it, but,
STP was my thing for some reason.

I love that.

I think vitality was their last

really good album, although I'm told that
the newest one is awesome.

I haven't listened to it yet.
I jumped on late. Yeah.

All right.

Tell me about your parents.
Were they entrepreneurial?

What kind of work did they do?

They were.

So, And actually,
I'll go back even farther.

So my my great grandfather
was an electrician up in Detroit area,

actually, I think he was more of,
like a mechanical engineering,

like mechanical stuff.

And then his son,
my grandfather was an electrician,

started his own electrical firm.

Contractors started that, ran
that in Michigan area, Detroit area.

And then they moved to Florida.

My dad following in their footsteps,

like, okay, I'm going to be,
you know, being an engineer, an architect.

I think he worked at a firm
for maybe a couple of years at a school

just to, like,
get his legs under him, figure out things.

Then he started his own business
right away.

Pretty much.

And that man could never have worked
for anyone.

I don't think it's just he was,
probably unemployable.

Now, that said,
he was also, an ROTC kid, college student.

So he was very disciplined.

So it wasn't to say that he's a rebel,
but he had his own opinions

and ideas about how work should be done,

what quality meant,
how to not cut corners, all of that.

So I don't think he could have tolerated
someone else.

Setting the bar in terms of
this is good enough.

This is how we're going to do this.

Like he had to be the chef in the kitchen.

So that's what he did all growing up.

And so I watched him stars on business.

My mom worked with him. For him.

It was kind of a tough relationship.

And that sense of work,
home dynamics like, man, they just

they saw each other 24/7. Right.

And it was like also the good in the bad.

Things were tight at work.

And then my mom drove a bus.

My mom was a whatever
I need to do to support this business

and to support this family.

So we went to a private school, but not
because we had a lot of money necessarily.

My dad was self-employed,
but because it was like the best school.

It was the only school in the area
my parents and they could imagine sending

us to because sadly, a lot of the South
Florida schools just aren't well-funded,

not like where I'm in Austin right now.

So she drove a school bus for many years
because we got a discount on tuition.

So very hard working, self-employed.

And I grew up basically

walking around,

a business
that had my last name on the door.

And I think that had an impact on me.

I don't think it impact my siblings in the
same way. So like, we're all different.

But for me, definitely,
I was like, okay, this is this could work.

This is this is a thing.

And so I didn't grow up
in that big company culture

I grew up in, like the small firm,
but call your own shots kind of world.

We've had a number of guests,
who have been the kids of entrepreneurs

and their stories very some just kind of
knew that mom or dad went to their job.

That was the business that they started.

But others were like deep, deeply involved
in the organization.

Where were you on that continuum for you
helping on the weekends,

or was it more just like you knew
dad had his own business?

We were very involved, and I think we also
blurred the lines between work and home.

Like my dad brought his work home
every day.

He even brought it on vacation.

And you always like to say like,
hey, if I do a couple

hours of work in the morning,
it pays for the day.

Kind of thing. So he brought it home.

But also there

are three of us kids and my mom,
and if the office needed to relocate,

we were there on a Saturday
and Sunday moving things into storage.

He was an architect, so you're talking
about physical blueprints,

machines,
computers, files, crazy numbers of files.

I mean, everything was paper before
it was digital, right?

So there was a lot of

literally moving things around
to move that business from place to place.

So as things ebbed and flowed,
we helped out.

But then in the day to day

operations of the business,
so I remember my sister and brother and I,

we all ran blueprints at some point
or another, and I think it was like,

probably would cost
my dad $0.15 a sheet or something to have

some local printer print off his prints,
because of course, you don't need that.

But he's like, I got three kids.

I can put him in that blueprint room, run
that machine, prop, open the windows

for the ammonia so it's not completely
toxic in there, right?

Prop open the window and you can run this.

We call Diags a machine. Basically huge
prints.

And I remember

learning how to feed the 24, 36 prints
and the mylar through the machine.

It's called the dialysis machine.

And it was emitting
ammonia at the back. Right.

Because that's how the stain, the blue.

If I reached over the back of the machine,
the ammonia was so intense

that it would burn,
your finger would burn the cut.

Oh my gosh.

All I knew is I was making $0.10 a sheet,
and if I did 43 of them,

which was the average size of a job set,
I could crimp them with the thing.

And then he could sign them all
and I could line

up, sign up,
but I could staple everything else.

I was making $4
and something an hour, you know, as a

I don't know what I was
ten, 11, 12 year old and I felt awesome.

This is cool.

That's like a G.I. Joe. Totally.

But then later I get to do more fancy
things like, hey, my mom's not working

today. It's whatever. It's the summertime.

I'd answer the phones, learn how to answer
a phone, be a professional, work,

sort of the clerical stuff,
type up an invoice, that kind of thing.

So I made a little bit
more than four, 25 an hour at that point.

So yeah, I had some skill.

Just enough
skill to say, he's on the other line.

Can I take a message?

So yeah, you mentioned that academics was
more your path than sports were.

Were you involved in in things
outside of the classroom?

I was, although it was, a group of friends
that I would say we had a crew.

It was like six of us
that were just super tight knit.

And we just did everything together.

So hung out together.

Video games together, got in trouble,
go play

paintball together, went camping together.

We did a lot of stuff out and about
and it was Florida.

And so like I said, in those early 80s
days, like there were golf course ponds

and and canals to swim in

and just random stuff that like,
there's no way I would let my kids do now.

Right?

But when you're bored and
you don't have a cell phone, we did stuff.

I'm glad that I had that childhood.

The other thing that I did
and my parents were a sponsor

for this, is they would send us off
for a couple weeks in the summer.

Every summer,

my brother and I would get quote
unquote, shipped off to our grandparents.

Both of them had large gardens
with tractors and stuff up in Georgia,

in North Carolina.

And so for weeks in the summer, we'd have
nothing but literally barnyard animals.

Hey, some gardening to do,
some very dirty hands kind of summers.

Which was also really nice because it
it made me more well-rounded person

in that sense.

Like academics, yes,
but spent the summers more

traditionally outdoors having fun.

I was I was getting in trouble,

like just having a lot of fun outdoors,
building forts, that kind of thing. So.

So that's the stuff we did.

And then extracurriculars, played

instruments, did a little bit
of extracurricular activities at school,

that kind of thing.
But that was being a kid.

This is the thing that differentiate me
from a lot of my friends

who I felt like any time they got out,
maybe their parents would take them,

like to Disney World
once or something like that.

For me, it was like
I'd come home after the summer.

I'd be like, yeah, the summer
I was in A4H club and I.

I wrestled the grease
pig and I learned how beehives work

and all this stuff,
and I was just like, wow.

It gave me confidence, I think. Yeah.

Which was also rare for like, again,
otherwise, just like that

sleepy bedroom community

thing of there's just nothing to do here
other than connect the internet.

I got just enough of that.

I had grandfathers on both sides, were
very handy at a dad that was very handy,

and I did become handy, unfortunately,
but I was exposed to enough of it

to be like
you could actually take things apart.

You can build things
and you can do things.

There's more to life than just
being in your room, staring at a screen.

That's awesome.

I think everybody these days
needs to spend more time outside.

And this past weekend
I was at I'm on a hunting lease

and it's out there with my boys and men
just riding in the bed of a pickup truck

around a whole bunch of land
and jumping out

to open this gate and close it
and go do this and that.

Like it's just good.

It's just good for the soul. So,

you talked about swimming in these canals.

Were there gators in there?

Yeah. Yeah, definitely gators.

Water moccasin, snapping
turtles, that kind of thing.

I mean, we lived in a gulf.

I lived a middle class life,
and my dad had some good years.

So he built the house we grew up in.
But anyway, I was on a golf course.

So pond in the backyard,
we wake up occasionally.

There'd be a big snake
or a snapping turtle in the pool.

We'd have to go fish it out kind of thing.

But there again, you know,
it's like how you get a fish out

where you're not going to call the police
to get this thing.

So grab a laundry basket.

Did this, get this critter out of park,
get the critter out of our pool.

It was a DIY kind of thing.

The gator thing is funny though.

I remember going,
they call it rivers, but basically it's

a Saint Johns River
and some of these other places in Florida.

Basically, you're connecting freshwater
to to the ocean, right?

It's just flowing west to east.

And we go on canoe trips and stuff,
but we get really hot

and you jump in the water,

and then you get back in your canoe
and you go down 100 yards.

There's a gator on the bank. Wait.
But I was in the.

So it's just like the ultimate
example of ignorance is bliss.

And then like safety in numbers,
there's just this weird element of, well,

when you're with a bunch of people, right?

And what, like your guard comes down,
you feel you feel kind of safe.

And so, yeah, we would do that.
I would never do that.

Now, don't get me wrong.

But like when you're 14
and you're invincible

and you're with friends,
why not? You're just in an altered state.

Yeah. Exactly, man. Yeah, yeah.

Going back to the hunting lease,

we're walking through tall grass
and this is Texas.

And, man, I my head is on a swivel
looking for snakes everywhere today.

That would freak me out.

Yeah, could do that. Yeah.

What did you do
right after you finished high school?

Which got college to go off to work?

Yeah. Went to college.

Worked that one summer.

I actually thought
I was going to join the military.

So funny enough, as a part of college,
like to pay for school.

Kind of frugal mindset in mind of,
like, wow, school's really expensive.

My sister went to Florida State.
I saw that.

So I was pretty practical
in terms of costs.

And, I applied a couple schools.

University of Miami, on the one
hand was my dad's alma mater.

Private school gave me a scholarship
kind of thing.

But then University of Chicago was
the other option, and that was up north.

They let me in very expensive.

And I remember calling up Army ROTC.

I was like,
I'm gonna do my dad did when join that.

And then like right before this,
right before 911.

Actually, this is the summer of 2001.

I was thinking
I was going to join the, military to help

pay for college, get the GI Bill
and everything to help pay for school.

It was the weirdest thing, but, like,
I just couldn't make it happen.

Like, I kept leaving messages
and they wouldn't respond to my email.

And this wasn't the day er,
where you'd like text somebody quite yet.

So a one.

So it was a little bit different
and I remember getting to school

and the guy was like,
I just want to do this.

And by then I was like, you know,
I kind of changed my mind.

I think I'm just going to borrow the money
or something.

I basically changed my compass
had changed, and then 9/11 happened.

I did college,
I entered with enough credit.

I took some summer classes to graduate
in three years instead of four.

Like I said the beginning,
I was always in a hurry

to do the next thing,
so I did save some money that way.

So I graduated in three years of
bachelor's degree, and then I got a job.

And you did go to school in Chicago?
Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

And what did you study?
I couldn't figure that out.

So I started out thinking
I was going to study.

Like I said, it was kind of

in the mind of, like, political science,
me military, that sort of thing.

So I actually was going to study
political science,

and then I got to campus and I was like,
wow, there's so much more to know.

I was like,
super curious about all these subjects.

And, I ended up, weirdly enough,
my best friend in college

was into computer science.

I love computers growing up,

and I never thought of computer science
as like a field.

I started taking some classes
in pure science.

I was like, okay, I'm
not not like the best,

not the best programmer in this class.

But I feel like I can make some cool stuff
and took enough computer science classes

to end up graduating in three years
with like a minor in computer science.

I think my major was in the humanities,
funny enough.

So I kind of had a leg in both worlds.

I was like a little bit like my dad.
He was an architect.

What that meant was he had a
he was artistic.

He had that artistic flair.

He could design things, but
he was an engineer kind of at his core.

And that's kind of what I ended up doing.
It just what?

There was no design degree at Chicago,

so I ended up
kind of making up my own design degree.

I was like, well, computer science
for the engineering part.

And then I took a bunch of like, art
design classes to round myself out now.

All right.

Florida, Chicago.

What was your first winter like?

Was that, like eye opening?

Yeah, it was eye opening.

I remember having the thermometer open
open on my computer, a little monitor app.

And I remember
when it hit like one degree,

I remember tell my parents, guys,
it's like one degree outside right now.

It's like I'm hungry, but like,
I really got to go to the dining hall.

So I put on like the one Columbia jacket.

I had scarf, hat, gloves,
everything just trudged out

to go like 300 yards to the dining hall.

And, but yeah, it was it was crazy.

I remember thinking like, this is another
level of cold, but I liked it.

I was like, ready for change.

I was so sick of, like I said,
19 years of no seasons in Florida.

It's like someone's

adjusting thermostat between like 70
and 90 basically all year long.

And I know people who have to deal with
the winters are like, that's what I what

humans always want,
what they don't have, though.

So I was like, I want seasons.

I love the city, I love the people.

Super fun.

I was just going to say
Chicago is just a fantastic city.

In fact,
I was there for a couple days last week

and I wouldn't want to live there.

But I will go visit
every every chance I get.

Yeah, there was always something to do

is actually, at the time, at least now,
about as much now, but like super clean.

Fell in love with the Cubs.

I had some fun times there and I was like,
it's a great city, so no complaints.

And yeah, for three years was totally
tolerable and I just love that.

The other thing I loved about it

is that compared to where I grew up,
you could walk places, walked to grocery

stores, walked to fun things to do,
walk to the lake.

That was cool to me.

Not used to be able to walk, played
and public transportation.

What is this thing you could like get on
a subway and like go places is super cool.

So I love that.

We don't do public transportation
very well here in Texas, in Texas, Dallas,

not just Austin.

Like everywhere.

I agree, it's sad, I miss it.

That's that's

if I could upgrade Texas in one way, man,
it would be the public transportation.

Yeah.

All right.

So what was your first job?

Post-college. Yeah. First job.

So I first job post-college.

So I graduate, graduated this degree
and wasn't sure what I was going to do.

Went to some career fairs
and I was working my student job still,

I had a couple student jobs,
so I was figured I could make 12 bucks

an hour, ten bucks an hour work.
These student jobs on the side.

That felt good,
bringing in a little bit of money.

And I had those until kind of the winter
after I graduated.

So I graduated in the spring kind of work.

Those jobs for about nine months.

And I was like, I got to
I got to find something that's more real.

Like with that, like, yeah,
I'm on salary with benefits or something.

And I applied to the same company

a friend of mine worked
at was called McMaster Car Supply Company.

It's an industrial parts

distributor in Chicago, of all things,
like a Granger competitor.

And they've been in business for 100
plus years, though, and fantastic

privately owned, family
owned business out of Chicago.

Headquarters.

And I cut my teeth there
in terms of business, learned a lot,

ended up working there as like a software
developer didn't make very much.

You know, they took advantage of the fact
that recent college

grads are willing to work
very hard for not a lot of money,

but I did work really hard and
they rewarded me for it, which was nice.

But working

there was awesome.
They took really good care

of their employees
and it was a smartly run business.

Not bureaucratic in that sense,
just it was cool.

It was very flat work.

I felt like they listened to me.
It was cool.

What kind of software development
were you doing there?

Yeah,
so they wrote a lot of their own systems,

in fact, departments
in what was called systems.

So we wrote inventory management

software warehouse,
sort of warehouse SKUs packing.

You know, when a shipment comes
in, what do you put in the box?

So logistics optimization
algorithms, order taking stuff.

And then there was a whole web group
that was responsible for building.

So it was basically e-commerce

for industrial parts of it, 600,000
SKUs at the time.

All of those were available online
for ordering.

So and they built those systems in-house.

So all of the online e-commerce
web software was written by them,

you know, for them ones.

Yeah, it was pretty cool. Man.

And this is like mid 2000.

Is that right?

Yeah.

This was oh four through
oh seven that I was there.

So e-commerce was still

I mean it had been around
but it was still kind of the early days.

Oh yeah. Yeah they were very early to it.

So they like I said 100 years
and just visionary ownership frankly.

I mean everyone's
vision is off by a little bit.

But somehow they saw it
like in the late 90s

when the internet came on and things
came online, they started saying like,

we got to get our catalog,
which was like the Holy grail for them.

We got to get this online somehow.

And Jeff Bezos, when he was starting
Amazon, actually came to that company

to tour their facilities and go,
how do you do this?

Right?

They were like pioneering that online
ordering

experience, clicking the buy
now, having a shopping cart.

No Shopify existed yet.

Amazon was really the Amazon.
We know it now for sure.

Like they were right there with Amazon
sort of building out that early scaled

e-commerce experience.

So if you were there early enough,
like I was,

I was there
right after they kind of got on the web

and I got to see them kind of take
their first systems and like, rewrite them

a little bit to make them last
another ten years.

I just finished a biography on Bezos.

I'm curious,
did he poach anybody from that company?

He did a lot of that.

So people did leave our company
and end up at Amazon.

I'll put it that way.
That was not uncommon.

And I think a lot of times, too,

just interviewing at Amazon, after working
where we were, it was like,

you kind of ask the interview
in some cases because like,

we need a person who understands systems
and blah blah

and has written their own whatever.

And you're not like, oh yeah, I've dabbled
with the Shopify API.

You're like,
no, we've built the databases to do this.

I'm sure a DBA or 2 or 5 has migrated

to Amazon from that company
for that reason. So.

Well, man, I think about developing
an e-commerce system back then,

like we take for granted how easy it is
to go spin up a Shopify store.

I mean, in the matter of an hour,
you could go from an idea to having

a website where you could actually sell
something or on Shopify.

And back then you had to build every
single one of those components, I'm sure.

Yeah.

Like there

probably weren't any or many off the shelf
things you could just drop in.

No, we had a database
that was DB2 and they had a mainframe,

IBM mainframe that basically the warehouse
phone ordering.

They had their own sort of mainframe
screen thing that they could bring up.

Just like Costco.

You go to a Costco
and you see those screens

the guys are punching in

to see if they have your, you know, why
the 80 pound bag of nuts isn't in stock.

Like that's the screen that they had.

And anyway, they had that.

And to make the web work
you're talking about,

I need to see a part on this web page.

That part needs to
that hyperlink needs to know

is this an inventory right now or not.

Because we got to put
a shipping estimate on here.

And if it's not an inventory
it's going to take 24 hours longer

because we got to get it from whoever.

Now very lean in terms of how they manage
inventory and supply chain and all that.

But you talking about a web servers
mainframe

and 1,000,000 square foot warehouse
all on one property.

And so we all had to talk to be great.

But that was also the really cool
opportunity.

Was the vertically

or having one thing like, integrate
all of that really tightly and say,

our freaking website knows if that part
is in that bin right now or not.

Right?

Which was a huge advantage
because it meant that the Chicago Gary,

Indiana industrial belt from,
you know, Janesville,

Wisconsin down to Gary, Indiana,
meant anybody that was in that area

could call up McMaster Car Supply
Company at 7 a.m.

and say, hey, we're out of this

one widget that we need for this air
conditioning unit to work.

They could know within three rings
of the phone if they had that in stock,

and then they could go meet them at will,
call in an hour if they wanted to pick it

up, which was sick efficiency, right?

But it made raving fans
out of all of these, you know,

people that work with their hands.

They're like, this is freaking great
because this company has my back.

Like,
I can literally it's like a Home Depot,

but I can call them on my cell phone
on the way to work, order

some stuff, pick it up,
and then go into the shop and fix that,

you know, unit or whatever it is. Right?

It was amazing.

And again, like today we take for granted,
like I can go on the Best

Buy app or whatever, and I can do in-store
pickup in an hour, right.

But back then like that didn't exist.

Yeah, that was bleeding
edge. Bleeding edge.

Yeah.

You want that, you better make everything
talk and then sync it back.

And there's no frameworks for that.

Like you were writing
the framework for it.

Right.

So you got your education.

You learned how to write software.

But I'm guessing they didn't just, like,
stick you in a room and say, here,

go build this.

Like it sounds like you really had to

you had to learn a lot beyond
just learning how to write software.

Yeah. What was that like?

So they were good
in that sense of small teams.

The manager to, you know, manager to IC
ratio was really I'd say low or high.

But you know, one manager might manage 2
or 3 people max sometimes five.

But that was like a big squad right.

So I had I was on a team of sometimes
me and another guy and then one manager.

And so a lot of osmosis of knowledge,
you know, a lot of time for that person

to invest in teaching us anything
and everything about all the impacts,

the systems.

Also, you know, low cubicle walls,
open door policies, a lot of like

it wasn't the open floor plan
because it was like,

you know, maybe they were yay high,
but it's pretty much an open floor plan

before those were in vogue.

And and I know they're not in vogue
anymore, but like it had that

lots of serendipity
and lots of conversations would happen.

And so you would learn a lot
if you needed to understand

how this part would move
from this bean to this thing, you could go

ask the person that just really walked
across the hall and ask them and learn.

And then if you didn't, if neither of you
knew the answer, you could let it go.

Walk into the warehouse and find out.

So there's a very

there's a Japanese phrase

which I won't butcher now,
but it says, go and see for yourself.

And that was very much their attitude.

Like if you're sitting there at your desk
and you're writing the software

and you're getting a response
from the database,

it says, whatever,
you don't understand it.

You literally stand up

and you have full permission
to stand up and go out to the warehouse

right now with your little badge
and go check and see

why is the saying this,
but I'm getting this like it was very

if you were curious
what a great space to be in, right?

Because they're basically saying like,
just solve the problem

and let your curiosity be your guide.

And so go ask the coder glasses.

So it was very
I would say you had to be curious yourself

like they weren't going to give it to you,

but everything was kind of open to you
as long as you had that drive.

And I was naturally curious.

I want to understand everything. So I was
I love that part about it.

It's like I could map out anything
I wanted to at any time and figure out why

the system, if the plumbing
wasn't working, go figure it out.

We're not going to create
some artificial wall

that's like, well, you know,

as long as the water goes
through the pipe,

through this wall, you don't get to see
what's on the other side.

No, man, you could follow it all the way.

Right.

And then we would go visit customers
and we would literally go to the US.

So we would do onsite visits to customers.

I actually spent my first two weeks there.

They rotated us
from department, department.

So I spent a day
unpacking parts at the loading doors.

I spent a day taking orders, slips,
and filling those up for customers.

I spent a day listening to phone calls,
so they actually had me do the job

of the entire customer experience,
if you will.

From the time the orders placed
or like the websites browse

to fulfillment
before I ever sat down and wrote any code.

That's really, really smart.

An amazing to be able to experience
it firsthand and not just have to

imagine or take someone's word for it.

Like you get that hands on.

Okay, I remember when I was unloading
that box off the dock,

what a pain in the butt
it was to check this in or.

Yeah.

So all those internal improvement
projects, right

when there would be an internal sponsor
for, you know,

hey, repack wants us to change the way
the algorithm works for X.

Like, you had empathy.

You at least had empathy for the role,
if not for the exact problem.

You're like, oh yeah, that was a pain.

That's a priority now. Cool.

Like I want to solve that
because I understand.

Like that sucks, right?

Or maybe you're like, well,
I don't really understand that.

But exactly.

It turned everybody
into like a consultant, not a dumb waiter.

If you will, of like, well, okay,
they want me to do this thing.

It's like, no,
you know why we're doing this, right?

You understand the business
benefit of doing this?

Do you doubt the business benefit?

Let's talk this through as opposed to
as was not obviously,

the longer you were there,
the more your opinion mattered.

I think early on
you are on the receiving end,

but as you mature,
your opinion counts more.

I remember
getting invited in my first meetings

where there was a VP in the room
and a director in the room,

and they cared what I said
because I did the research right.

And so it was super cool
feeling of like, oh, okay,

that's how things work around here.

It's awesome.

It's the way it should.

I think it's the way it should be.

Here in Texas, we have a grocery store
chain that everybody loves, H-e-b,

and I remember
they recruited a lot on campus

where I went to at Texas A&M,
and I knew people that had kind of gone

through their track
and their management training program.

They were going to stick you in a store.

They're going to rotate you
through multiple stores,

but you were going to spend
a couple of months working in produce,

and you're going to spend a couple months
working in the bakery,

and you're going to spend a couple months,
you know, stock in.

And they had you get firsthand frontline

exposure to every aspect of the store

so that when you came back to the office,
maybe you were crunching numbers

and finance whatever, like it
gave you a much greater understanding

and appreciation
for not just what you're doing,

but why you need to do it,
or why you need to do it a certain way.

I don't think you get the best work
out of people if they don't have that.

Why figured out?

Because you can only ever get.

Maybe you will never be disappointed

if you have really,
you know, set expectations. Be clear.

You'll never be disappointed.

You also,
you'll never be delighted, right?

Because how can somebody go above

and beyond the call of duty
if they don't have that extra context?

Right? They're like,
well, I did what you told me. Like,

but like, now the bread's all moldy.

It's like, well,
I didn't know that, right?

I could have done this
if I had known that.

And in some ways, even as you said, that,
I've thought about this way before.

But as you said that out loud, there
kind of recreating the founder

level of 360 founders
or the only other people who have that

not because of out of necessity. Right.

Like once you get to a certain scale,
nobody needs to do that anymore.

You could just count beans, right?

But companies, you go, no,
we want everybody

to be like a little bit of a founder
in that sense.

Like have that 360 degree view.
It's just hard, right.

Because short term thinking you're like,
but we really need the finances done now.

Like you can do training later
and then you never get there.

Right?

Yeah.

Going back to right
when you were coming out of college,

I know like University of Illinois has
a really killer computer science program.

And there's people from Silicon Valley
that are coming out there

to recruit all the time.

And did you look at going out to Silicon
Valley after college or were you like, no,

I think I'll just stay here
in the cold suburbs of Chicago.

So yeah, I did,
and actually quit clarification.

So I went to the University of Chicago.
Right?

Urbana-Champaign is where a lot of people
UIC is also like very Marc Andreessen.

And actually my

first manager at the company I worked
at was a Urbana-Champaign grad,

so at University of Chicago,
and we were very theoretical approach

to computer science, I would say, like
we prided ourselves on teaching everybody

the fundamentals of computing
and computing, science, mathematics.

I remember taking a math course there,

and I took honors algebra there
my first year.

I started to and I remember
I was like, okay, welcome to class.

The first chapter you're going to learn

why does A equals a?

Why does A not equal B,
and also why you can't divide by zero.

And that's just what you're going to study
for like the first however many weeks.

And you're like

So the reason I say that is

that they were very focused
on the theoretical.

And so when you produce engineers who
have that bent, who are attracted to that,

you tend to produce researchers
and I would say kind of more

of the principal engineers of a company
now at the time. And.

Oh 405 and oh six so I graduated in
oh three.

Web 2.0 was just coming out in vogue.

And I remember asking a friend of mine
who worked in the lab that I was in,

so how does that Google Maps thing
work? Man, that's the cool thing.

I was loading everything like,
oh, it's this thing called Ajax.

I was like, what's that?

And so I ended up learning,
you know, kind of those parallel skills,

like the practical skills
I learned by dabbling with this stuff.

And then as friends graduated.

So one of them went to a couple of them
went to work at Yahoo.

One of them went to work at Google.

Yahoo was way cooler back then, actually,

because Yahoo had like
it was just the brand name, right?

They went to work at Yahoo,
and I was on a startup team back then.

And so I remember I applied to
Y Combinator as part of the startup team.

I went and it was the coolest thing.

So I remember going in oh seven out there
and Y Combinator was brand new.

And I remember hanging out at the start
of school, which is like the night before.

They have the
what they call like the Y C program.

Basically, they have like this hangout
at the investor place at Y C itself.

Anyway, I'm like, walk around, there's
this guy with like this video camera

attached to him in a backpack or whatever.

Well, that was just in con who ended up
starting Justin.tv, which became Twitch,

which sold for $90 million to to Amazon
live streaming.

Now, all the video game stuff.

I remember standing in this lab
and they were building,

like the self rocking robot that Trevor
Blackwell was building for anybody.

But this guy next to me was like,
hey, what are you doing, man?

He's like, oh, I'm working on this.
And I was like, what? It's too.

He's like, oh wait.

Well, you know how like when you're
working on some files and like,

you need to move them
to the other computer

because like, working on two computers,
one's like, oh, yeah, that's a pain.

Like, you know, it's like, yeah.

So I made this thing
and basically you save the file

and like,

if I make some changes to this image
and I hit save, like immediately,

those changes will show up
on the other computer.

I was like,
I was like, whoa, that's amazing.

Like, what is like,
yeah, it's like called Dropbox.

It's like,
oh, well, I'll try that out, man.

Like, good luck with that.

Like,
you know, hope that works out for you.

It's like
and I remember getting a flier that night

and I folded up and put in my pocket
and was like, we're looking for, like,

our first engineers basically for that.

So it was a cool time.

I, like my dad, couldn't
imagine working for anyone.

So I started my own freaking thing,
dodged that golden bullet.

But, but, but it was a cool time
to be in that area for sure.

And so I would go visit.

I had friends that were there
and so I was like plugged in,

but I was living either in Chicago
or eventually back in Florida, now Texas.

But I never made the jump
for various personal reasons.

But I've had an eye on that,
and there were definitely moments for us

like, I could go join what they're doing,
but I was also like,

I can start my own company
and I can do it from anywhere.

And a little too
independently minded in that sense.

So did you start your first business
right after you left McMaster?

Oh, I.

Did, yeah, we founded that company in
oh seven with basically no revenue

and a tiny bit of funding,
like I think basically my co-founder,

like he lent the company
like $40,000 to start that business.

So. Wow.

Yeah. And you're mid 20s at this point.

Yeah.

I was 20, 25 when that happened.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

So when you made that jump,
did you feel like you had learned enough

in your first job
to be a successful cofounder?

So because of ignorance. Yes.

And the reason I say it that way
is that I had picked up a book

called Hackers
and Painters by Paul Graham.

All these essays on, like,
all you really need to do is have an idea

and know how to write web software
and like, you can build a startup.

So that was like
the Kool-Aid that everyone was drinking.

And I had my idea
I was writing that web software

and I was like, this could be a startup,
you know, this could be its own thing.

And I don't think I thought of it
as a insurmountable challenge at all.

I thought of it as like,
if I make something

that people really love
and they can find it on the internet,

you know,
there you go. That's all it takes.

I was wrong, but that's what I thought.

So how did you meet your co-founder?

He was my manager, actually.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

How did that go over when you both,
I presume, left at the same time?

I left first and I left for.

I just said I want to move back
to Florida, where I was from.

I got tired of the cold,
actually had gotten married by that time,

and we were looking for a place where
I had some relatives in town, family,

like that sort of thing.

So I just didn't want to live as isolated.

So I told the company
I was moving for those reasons.

Obviously, I happen to be starting
the company at the same time company.

I was launching a web app
at the same time,

and actually my co-founder stayed for,
I think, for another year.

So I remember correctly, maybe two, a year
and a half could have been.

Yeah.

So he put the money in.

You made the jump. Yeah.

And he was kind of managing it, working it
on the side while he did his day job.

Exactly.

Okay.

What was
that dynamic like for the two of you?

So we are I'd say we're kindred spirits
creatively.

In a lot of ways.

We were opposites
at that point in our life

in terms of like hours and lifestyle
and everything.

I was getting up early. I'm
a morning person.

He's never been. He never will be.

So I would get up really early,
work on this stuff, hacking this stuff,

and then somewhere around 3

or 4:00 in the afternoon,
you know, he'd be like off of work.

He'd come home brew pot of coffee
or whatever, and he would start

kind of working on the thing.

And so we kind of had this relay race,
basically this baton we would hand off.

And then sometimes he would be wrapping up
work at five in the morning,

six in the morning,
and I would be starting to work.

And so we would literally just trade
places, you know? Wow.

For months like that.

So it's not like one of you
is putting in more effort than the other.

Oh no. You were both really,
really grinding.

Yeah,
we were both working many, many hours.

And I wasn't sleeping much
because we had had our first kid by then.

So I was basically trading sleep
for working on a startup at the time.

Yeah.

Out of curiosity, what was the age
difference between the two of you?

Yeah, I think he's about.

So that's funny.

I think he's at least four years older.

Yeah, we'll say four years older.

Like not great I think.

Yeah, I think he was born in the same year
as my brother actually.

So yeah. Four years. Okay.

And like at the time,
did you feel like he was

this wise sage that could really guide you
through getting this startup

off the ground,
or was it naivete on his part as well?

I think we had a mutual respect
for one another in our differences.

So I think he looked at me.

So I had worked directly for him
for 18 months by that time,

and we had done
some of the best work of his career.

And, you know, my career was basically
those 18 months, right, or two years.

So I can't really say.

But he saw that he's like,
okay, speaking for him.

And I think he was just like,
this guy's good.

This guy's really good.

This is somebody I could kind of hitch
a wagon to probably as well.

And I would be okay.

And then vice versa.

I was like, he's more seasoned
when it comes to engineering.

I love his practicality.

He thinks the same way I do about systems.

We've architected some stuff together.

When we did have friction, it was resolved
in a way that created actually

a better outcome than either of us
maybe would have done independently,

which I think to me is like that
is the hallmark of a good yes, exactly.

Of a good team.

It's like if you done this by yourself

writing this self,
both of those would have been more flawed.

But we're listening to each other
and even though I hate it,

like each of us kind of hates it
because we're both pretty stubborn, right?

And that's okay too, but not so stubborn
that we couldn't surrender the point.

But when we would surrender
the point, we'd end up with this thing

that was like,
oh my gosh, this is really good, you know?

And that was a testament to like,
okay, this is rare error here

in terms of teamwork.

I think that's what we looked at.

The age and all that other stuff
didn't nearly matter as much as like

we create amazing stuff
when we work together.

So let's do that again.

But like, let's own that

instead of giving it to some company
with sort of more of the ethos.

I think I know it has something to do
with whether.

But tell us more about like,
what did it do?

What was this web app?

When we first started looking
at whether data on the internet was

you would punch in your zip
code on weather.com, you would get a map.

It was a static graphic,
like MapQuest style, not even MapQuest.

I was a static graphic of some raindrops
coming over Dallas,

and they would have the temperature

in a big number or whatever,
and it was like, there's the weather,

no interactivity.

There was no data on a side
that you could like, copy or save.

There was no APIs to this stuff.

It was TV graphics

saved into images and put on the internet.

That's where weather on the internet
started, right?

It was like we have TV graphics,

let's just save those graphics
and put on the internet.

So there was no web.

There were no web systems that had weather
data in them other than the government.

So the government was the first ones
to put weather data

on the internet with their web servers
of saying, like National Weather Service,

National Hurricane Center, here's
these public APIs.

If you want weather data,
you can come and get it.

But nobody was doing that yet.

So we were one of the first companies,
literally a team of two people.

I was emailing the webmaster
at the National Weather Service,

having one on one chats with him
about these government web servers

because we're like,
how do we get this data?

How do we get that data?

Because we're like, we're just going
to suck all this data up, right?

It's public domain.

No one's taking advantage of that yet.

I felt like we had found
a kind of a goldmine and nobody was there

except for us.

We're like, why is nobody want this?

Like,
this is real time weather information

that's
affecting millions of businesses and lives

and everyone's
kind of selling for TV graphics, right?

So we saw an opportunity to digitize,
but basically turn

all of that government data into an API,
into interactive maps, into a data service

that companies could
then license for business purposes.

We were like
and we ended up having thousands.

And so and that worked out.

It was a grind,
but that worked out where we ended up

having thousands of customers
who use either.

Our interactive weather maps alerts
give you an example.

We had companies that were working out
in the Gulf of Mexico

who were doing helicopter
travel for people on oil rigs, right?

They don't need TV graphics.

They need like, I've got this flight
plan and it's 2007, right?

What's the easiest, most accurate way
to figure out if this flight plan

is going to be where the storm front's
coming through? Right.

And that's incredibly important question
to answer.

But back
then, Google Earth had just come out.

Google maps wasn't a thing,

and weather was not merged
with any of that geospatial information.

So we were the first ones to now
nobody knew it when we got started.

But as of 2006, actually,
I remember the moment adjusted

for where we first made it work,

but it took us from

04207 for anybody else to know
that we had kind of cracked the code.

Like we literally figured out
how to run those questions

through our service and get answers.

And because we were doing
all the dirty work of sinking

back to the government,
you didn't have to worry about that part.

All you had to do was say,

I've got a store, I've got a warehouse,
I've got this, I've got it.

That here's what I care about.

Do I need to evacuate these people?

Do I need to do this?
Do I need to do that?

And that end up being worth a lot of money

to a lot of companies because, yes, lives,
but also a lot of money is at stake

when it comes to just
dealing with severe weather.

And then obviously that extends through
a lot of, you know, the United States.

So that's what we did.

We were one of the pioneers of weather
data and maps on the air.

I literally can say, like

the first interactive maps on the internet
that had weather on them, like where

there was a layer that said radar.

That was us basically like, yeah,
what if you could, you could turn up.

We were like the first maps on
the internet where you could turn on radar

and pan around and see it, basically.

But we were crazy at the time
because nobody else was doing

that was like, why would you do that?

Well,

we've talked about like at least 4
or 5 different things already

that have been like,
we totally take this for granted.

Like you talked about Dropbox,

we talked about getting e-commerce
stood up and so forth.

This morning
when I was driving my son to school,

he flipped on the weather and
he pulled up the map and he's watching.

We've got some rain coming in today,
and he's moving the map around,

and we totally take that for granted.

And I, I can't believe that in 2007,

weather wasn't overlaid into flight plans.

That's my systems that were doing that.

So I think you can say there were
industrial systems that were doing that.

So Unisys and IBM
and there were, you know,

sort of
go to the Oracle side of things and say,

Did American Airlines have some radar tool

that they could overlay a flight plan on
and see some radar?

Yes, but it was on some terminal
at the Dallas-Fort

worth airport or something,
or more likely in some hub of theirs.

Right.

It wasn't consumer ized.

It wasn't productized.
It wasn't an app. Right.

So yes, there were tools like that
that like a pilot would probably pay

a mint for his company,
would pay a mint for,

but like general availability
or an iPad in the cockpit

that you can know
that wasn't a thing. Right?

So it got basically consumer ized and
turned into apps right around that time.

Right.

And until then, it was a bunch of action
systems generating images

that are probably static.

And if he wanted to zoom out,

he would hit a button,
it would crunch a bunch of data,

and it would literally redraw this image
for him.

Right. Or her. And he's like, oh, okay.

Like that was state of it.

All right.

I think he said that

when you made the jump to start this,
you already married at that point

and you're relatively fresh out of school.

What did your wife say about

doing this risky startup you want to put

whether maps on the internet,
like what was her take?

Yeah.

I think she would have an even better
answer than me for this,

but it was a more support than I deserved.

Sort of thing in terms
of being willing to take that risk.

Didn't have to really understand it,
just a ton of trust in that sense.

Definitely some skepticism,

I would say, in a good way,
kind of anchoring my balloon.

Right. Which is always good.

But unlike people, I tried to recruit
a couple friends to join me

and they would hit that wall

where they're just like,
I can't get so-and-so behind this, right?

And I'm like, glad
they didn't go against that.

Don't get me wrong.

But I never had that problem.

I did have the
how is this going to work? How whatever.

But I think there was just a faith,
a trust and naivety on both of our parts.

Like this was going to work out
and we were similar in that sense,

a willingness
to just run into a lot of risk.

And I think we both were very fortunate
to have like a safety net

in terms of family, friends,
our upbringings.

Like,
I don't think we ever worried that, like,

we're going to be out of the streets
or destitute, something like that.

Like it might have been bad,
but we weren't worried about ending up

in a dire situation. Right.

And I think that's fundamental
to a lot of that.

So did you and your co-founder,
did you eventually start hiring

and expanding the team, or was this
a two man operation all the way through?

It was a two man operation
for a long time.

We eventually figured out
how to make enough money to hire,

and then we raised some money.

It took us four years
before we were able to raise any money.

When we we made enough money,

you know, we made a profit
for the first time in 2012.

So our first profitable year was 12
and we started hiring folks.

Basically, the company was somewhere
between 15 and 20 people

as of 2018 when the company was acquired
and I left,

it didn't take a lot of
people, was a very tech heavy business

in that sense to people in sales, customer
support, that kind of thing.

But mostly engineers.

And with the engineering we were doing,
my co-founder was

my co-founder
went to this meeting in Chicago in 2007,

and he comes back, well, comes back,
but he calls me up and he's like,

hey, man, I just went to this, meetup,
this tech meetup here in Chicago.

I was like, yeah.

So yeah, I know we've been using
like the servers that your friend

has, but like, I learned about this
new service that's coming out.

Amazon's going to have it actually.

Second it was he's like it's
a little risky because it's a new service.

But like I think it's going to be big
I think we should use that.

I like if you say so.

So we started using AWS 2000.

In the fall of 2007,
we switched over to AWS

and wow, freaking great call. Right.

Because then
we had this advantage of like,

whereas others might have been hiring
a lot of engineers

to speed things up, we're like,
oh yeah, we need like five more servers.

Like, let's go.

You know,
I think we serve 4 million web requests

a day in 2008 with a team of two people.

Yeah. Wow.

So it worked.

He was right.

But that was the advantage of being on AWS

in 2008, when everyone else is like,
what's you got to name it?

You got to call it something for?

I don't think people are going to call it
the cloud yet. Right? Like,

yeah.

All right.

So it's one

thing to build an app, but at some point
you've got to generate revenue.

Who did the selling for this app?

Was it you
your partner was a both. We both tried.

I had more of a knack for it.

I think him being more of a CTO type,
cantankerous type,

I think self-proclaimed skeptic
in that sense of like, yeah, people,

you know, it was like,

okay, well, one of us has to be
the optimist on the corner,

you know, spinning the arrow that says,
come on in.

You know, we've got fresh pizza
or something like that.

So who's that? Kind of like, okay,
I probably gonna have to be me.

We tried every business model in some
because back then, SAS,

I talked to a salesperson
at Salesforce in 2010.

I'm like, I've got some business
cards from a conference.

What are you guys doing?

Oh, yeah.

Well, we have this thing
called contacts in the cloud or something.

You basically put your com like, well,
that sounds neat.

Like I want to do that.

So like SAS sales insights, sales, CRM,
all that stuff like so what was I doing?

I'm talking to people who want to use
software that's on the internet.

And that was my job
description at that point.

So like so

we had to experiment with business models
that weren't even figured out yet.

And it was like,
well, what is Salesforce doing?

What are they doing? Okay.

We can we can have tiers,
we can put prices on it.

We tried that.

I sold ads.

So like I said, we had 4 million
web requests that one day because in 2008,

I think we ended up serving something
like 25 million requests

or something of that
throughout the year were very spiky.

Traffic was like having an e-commerce
site.

It was like Christmas is a big day.

So with weather, hurricanes,
and hurricane season,

as those are Christmases,
if you will, for in terms of traffic.

And then everything else is very
pretty common point being, I did ad sales.

People would call me up and say,
hey, we're selling supplies.

We sell flashlights and disaster
recovery supplies.

I was like, cool, I'll take your order.

So, you know, for 2000 bucks,
we'll put your banner on the site.

You know, it'll cost this like I lit,
I was getting first hand experience

selling every form of monetization
you could imagine, right?

And then eventually in 2012,
we realized, okay,

ad sales aren't going to do it
because the CPMs are brutal.

Even with tens of millions of page views,
you'll make a lot of money.

I think we made like $120,000
that year, which was enough for two people

that we're making probably the equivalent
at their day jobs each to say 6060.

But we're like,
how do we turn this into a real business?

And we're like, we got to sell this
SaaS stuff, this data stuff somehow.

And so we added alerting
as a feature in 2009.

That was a big turning point
because when we added alerting

now businesses,
we put that on the web, say, hey,

upload your locations
and we'll send you a weather alert.

I remember the first time and we're like,
here's a place to put your CSV file

upload your CSV file, latitude, longitude.

Here's the format.

It was great back then.

First taste of self-service is like
literally just going to get the mail.

We had like a virtual box to go mail
come back.

I'm like, wait, what is this now?

I hit refresh and somebody had uploaded
like 8000 locations and I'm like, okay.

And I looked him up and it was like every
I want to say circle K or something

in the United States, someone had uploaded
and I'm like, who the heck is this?

Well, it turns out whether it's circle
K or 7-Eleven or whoever,

I mean, there's people whose entire jobs

it is to be the facilities manager
for these giant brands, right?

And it's like, why do you care?

Well, I need to know if I need to tell
the franchisee to board up the windows

and get the heck out of there, like,
because if they don't,

we're gonna have broken windows
to deal with and flooding and all this.

So there's all
this operational stuff is happening.

We didn't even know that.

We just literally put this feature
on the internet and we're like,

do you need weather alerts for locations?

And then people just started buying.

It was like,
we do and we don't have this yet.

And sure,
you could go on weather.gov or weather.com

and put in like 78717 Austin but

no no, no,
I need like 8000 locations uploaded

and then I need like an interface
to choose like, well, I need a text

to go to Jerry and an email to go to Diane
and add this to go to this.

So we built out all that alerting
kind of infrastructure.

And so we were able to send alerts
thanks to AWS as well.

Like we would send tens of thousands
of emails and text messages, whatever

per minute when there was like a literally
a tornado coming kind of stuff.

But not surprisingly,
people were willing to pay for that.

So we had this business offering
that basically saved the day.

That was one thing.

The other thing I have to share is
we were a free site for a long time

just to get all that attention
and traffic.

We read about freemium and we're like,
oh, freeze,

Chris Anderson, the future of everything,
we'll make it free.

That was cool because everybody could
use it, but we didn't make any money.

So there was a fateful day in 2012 where
we actually turned off the free plan,

and suddenly millions of people
hit this paywall and they were so mad.

I was going to say, what was the backlash?

It was terrific.

So here I am, like taking our kids to swim
lessons.

It's me and Brad's name, my co-founder.

Me and Brad are like,
starting this company.

I get a call my cell phone because that's
the number on the support line, right?

If you're whatever, call this number.

This person starts chewing me out, saying,
we sold out.

Whoever our bosses are
should be ashamed of themselves

for turning off the free plan because
it's the best thing ever, blah blah blah,

rip me to pieces.

And I had to basically pretend
like I was PR at some big company, right?

Because I didn't want to, like,
let on the fact

that, like, it's literally like,
thanks for your donation kind of thing.

But like, no, I don't want to let on this.

I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry, ma'am.

Yes, I'll definitely tell our supervisor
whatever, like thing.

I'm like, Brad, get a load of this.

Like, this is, this is crazy.

People emailed us death threats.

It was oh my God.
Oh yeah. It was horrific.

At the same time,
the fact that people were so hateful

and angry
told you how much they loved the product

because we basically were like,
you can't have that anymore, right?

And I remember we were pretty gutsy
about it and we said, like, you know what,

it's $500 a year and you can't pay monthly

and it's $500,
which is a real amount of money.

And that cut off a lot of consumers
who are just using it for like

their soccer teams or whatever,
where suddenly, like, I lost this tool.

But the high net worth people, the stock
traders, the commodities traders, the US

steel corporations that were using it,
they all emailed us and were like, hey,

guess the free ride's over,

We're like, yeah, feel like,
all right, here's our credit card number.

I was like,

unbelievable.

So our customer count
went through the roof like in one summer,

we five revenue in one year
because we figured out

that these giant companies
were using us for nothing.

And we had to.

Unfortunately,
say goodbye to a million consumers.

But we turned it into 2000 business

subscriptions,
which we had to survive somehow.

Right?

I can remember back
in the early days of my career

getting hooked on some free service,
and eventually

they said, hey,
we got to generate some revenue.

And I remember having some of those
really angry, fresh worst moments.

But when you're a business owner,
like at some point

you got to pay your mortgage,
you got to put food on the table.

I tried so you can try.

Unless you're Google, you
can't make things exactly like I tried.

I wanted to say so badly.

I tried like I put it out there forever
for you, like, and you didn't upgrade.

We had an upgraded pass.

It's just there like, yeah, you know the
phrase good enough for whatever I'm like.

So, you know,
you didn't put money in the donation box.

I don't know what to do.
So it ended up going great for us.

Unfortunately for those consumers,
it went badly for them.

And we did end up doing
some licensing deals with media companies

where they were able to pay us to license
our maps to put on their websites.

So we could always say, like,

if you love our maps,
you can still go to USA today or CNN.

Like some big brand names
had us on their sites at the time

and you can still go see them.
They're like, oh, it's not the same.

It's not as good.
But I'm like, well, appreciate it.

But like you're
also not willing to pay them back.

So it is what it is. Right? Right.

Let's kind of go towards the

end of that time, you said down the road
a buyer came calling.

What was that experience like.

So that experience required us unlock.

I would say two things.

One is bigger deals
and the other one is a whole new market.

So we sold to the fortune 1000.

But the Joe kind of
is like there's only a thousand of those.

And at some point
I could drive down the street.

And just because of how companies
work in United States, like,

you know, you ever get a gift cards
like a restaurant.

There's like, it works at any of these
16 locations, right?

It's like, oh, I didn't know
Taco Bell was owned by whatever.

Like at some point there's only like

a thousand companies that own
so many of these brands and names.

And so we kind of maxed out our market
in that sense of like,

which meant we maxed out our revenue.

Like there's only so many subscriptions

you can sell to a thousand companies
that all need the same thing.

We needed to do something
different, bigger, better.

So we were like, okay,
what if we add a twist?

No longer are we just tracking assets.

What if we told you that
if you've got a ship,

if you're shipping something
from here to there,

we can tell you if the weather
is going to impact that shipment in route.

And we'll basically simulate the weather
and simulate your shipments,

and we'll tell you to what degree do
they intersect and how badly.

Right.

Well, that's your 2014

the polar vortex hit,
which basically turned Dallas and Chicago.

I don't know if it's from
as far as Dallas.

I know it was pretty far south, like
it was like hot out there, right?

It's like nothing was moving.

Everything was an igloo.

It was a nightmare.

Well, all logistics in the United States
pretty much came to a grinding halt

that winter. And

a couple of

giant companies that were small customers
or free customers before were like,

how the heck are we going
to deal with the.

And they were like, oh,
so one day I get this email

and it's like John Smith at Anheuser-Busch

dot com and it's like, hey,

I heard that you guys know
how to solve this weather thing.

If we say, for example,
had a shipment of beer

that was going from, for example,
like Saint Louis, Missouri, to

some place in Colorado, would you be able
to tell us if or whatever?

And I remember leaning over my desk

and he's like,
but I need to know that you're all in.

I was like, sir, it's like if you become
a customer, we are all in.

And so we went all in on logistical,

basically analytics,
and we became a company who again was like

the first that could take millions
of shipments a day into our systems

and reliably produce
a score that would tell these companies,

oh, you care about temperature
because you're a food company.

Oh, you care about this
because you sell hard drives, right?

We could tell every company
based on their exact profiles, like what

the risks were

to their logistical operations
and that the contract values, basically,

because now you're solving

a very hard problem at scale for companies
that are like,

okay, we do 21 million shipments a year,
we do 5000 shipments a year.

Whatever it is, it doesn't matter.

They will pay $0.50 a dollar, $2 per
shipments, almost like insurance.

To know that we're not sending
this shipment of extremely valuable stuff

into the face of an ice storm,
because if it flips over, they lose that.

They lose
$50,000 worth of products. Right?

So we give you guys to how.

Much of your logistical knowledge
came from working at McMaster,

or was it something you kind of
had to go reinvent for yourself?

I think it right in that sense.

Like it gave me confidence to say, like,

I know what it looks like when a truck,
I mean, literally

going back to my early days there, like,
I know what you're talking about.

Like there's a truck,
it backs up, it unloads,

and then you put some other side
and then it goes away.

Like just even demystifying
that stuff was a huge confidence boost

as a sales person
on those calls to say, like, I roughly

get the idea and I could ask questions
then about the rest to be curious.

So I think that helps.

The other thing that happened
was when I was starting the company,

I had to go get a day job for a bit
just to fun things,

and I ended up working at a company
that had me build a real estate site,

and that real estate site
was all geospatial on the back end.

So I learned about geospatial databases
and queries and all that stuff.

So I was like,
I know how to put a line into a database

and then take an intersection of it
and say,

you know,
break it up into chunks and stuff.

So like from an engineering standpoint,
I had this confidence.

It did still come down to like, okay,
but we have to do this millions of times.

And but that time
we had an engineering team.

They had confidence too,
that they could take it on.

And we did those first demos.

We're like, how this look?

And I remember them going like,
there's nothing else like it.

That's amazing. We need this.

It still took us nine months
to close those deals

because they're giant companies, right.

Got to go. Procurement
and everything else.

The reason I share

all that is that's kind of
got the attention of the acquirer level,

if you will, if like

we might be looking at a few companies
who work with people from like a weather

data space or learning or whatever,
but like you are now integrating with

their SAP installation
or their Oracle database

at companies of around for 100 years,
you're not going anywhere, right?

That's hard work.

We know that's hard
work from a business standpoint,

not just like an engineering standpoint,

like giving those companies
that trust you and everything else.

So I'd say our enterprise value
went up a lot by landing those logos.

And that's sort of how that came about.

So then ultimately
the acquisition interest was private

equity and DHL, the yellow and red
logistics company, they were kind of

looking at who they could partner
with in terms of risks to supply chains.

And they'd kind of figured out
one part of the equation.

We had figured out the stuff
that's in flight part.

And actually even be more nerdy about it
for a second.

It's one thing to have,
oh, I'm driving down the road and like,

I heard that there's a bad storm.

Let me bring up like nav tech
or Google Maps or whatever.

Like there's all these apps that tell you
it's another thing to say, no,

we're going to produce an analytic
that hits the desk of the planner,

who's even deciding three days,
four days a week ahead of time,

that that truck's going to leave on Monday
or Tuesday or Wednesday at 8 a.m.

or 9 a.m. or 10 a.m.

and go run that route. Right.

And so we had solved
like a planning problem.

Whereas most of the companies in the space

were focused
on the execution stage of like.

But at that point,
like the truck was driving down the road,

the train is literally left the station.

Literally.
There's not a lot you can do, right?

So we had introduced
this much better value prop of, well,

we tell the planner three days in advance,
four days in advance.

You might be able to choose
a different route.

You might be able to
you have way more options.

And that was just a harder problem.

But it required having a seven day
forecast, ten day forecast

baked into your logistical software.

And like people didn't have that again,

kind of on that bleeding edge,
for better or worse.

It was hard
because it made the sales hard.

It was a new product category,

but once we established it, it was like,
okay, well, no one else is doing this.

So it's a good place to be.

One of the things that strikes me
about your story with this business is

when you started off,

it sounds like you didn't really have
the revenue model figured out

and was free for a long time,
and then it became a nominal subscription.

And then little by little,
you figured out where to unlock

additional value for the customer,
and you figured out how to monetize that.

And I think business is all we always
we have to be pivoting, right?

We have to be looking at the market.

We have to be listening to our customers
and figure out

what do they need,
how can we add more value?

And I don't know, it's
just a great reminder

that you don't have to have everything
figured out.

Day one.

Sometimes
you're going to change plans in flight.

Yeah, I think it's actually impossible.

Okay, I like to run the socks. Sure.

And in the interest of time,
I'll leave it as a homework exercise.

But like,
imagine that you were at Anheuser-Busch

and you saw that problem
firsthand and you went to solve it.

I would actually argue that

the product you build,
the solution you build will be different

than the one that we built coming at it
from the outside.

And so two things
which I think are both true.

One is, yes, it's beneficial to start
with the end of view of I know the problem

we're solving though,

and I know what it's worth,
and I think I know how to solve it.

But if you don't have that,

just admitting you don't have that
and staying open minded and curious about

where is the higher value,
I think you can still get there.

It's going to be a longer road,

but you might actually have the benefit
of being built differently.

When you arrive on the scene,
you're like, oh,

but we don't just do
logistical shipments out of Oracle.

We can also do that brewery over there.

That's a static asset. We can do that too.

Oh, we have a mobile app. Oh, we have it.

You just can't help but end up.

You can never end up
at the same place. Right?

So it shouldn't be discouraging that like,

oh well we don't understand
the whole problem.

It's like that's great.

But sometimes those people end up
stuck too because they're like,

we have one customer,

it's just one giant enterprise,
and they want an exclusivity and an end.

And like,

you don't get room to breathe in a sense,
to figure out the bigger opportunity.

Yes, there's downsides
the other part, too,

which is like you're just sort of fumbling
through the

through the darkness, going like,
I don't know where I live.

Marco Polo. Right. Basically.

But you know, that's the path we ended up
going down and it is what it is.

You got to learn by doing though.
And that's the thing too.

You can't just stand there and go like,
would that company raise your hand?

They're not going to
they've never heard of you.

You got to just build on your own success.

So late 20 tens you exit that business.

Did you have to stick around
for a little while or were you free to go?

Day one?

I was free to go day one because I had
already stepped away from being a CEO.

I hired somebody else to work with me.

And then probably about a year into that
engagement, we made him CEO instead of me.

That was nice, because then

I could just speak at conferences
and do kind of that stuff,

be the founder in the room,
but not have to carry the load of like

managing things day to day.
And we were still very flat work.

So it was just

a lot of people reporting to me,
and it was very stressful in that sense.

Not necessary even in the like, just way
too many meetings every single day,

just like it gets.

It got a little old after a while.

Plus I felt like my best gifts of like

discovering the market
and being on the cutting edge and doing

new product were just kind of
wither on the vine to some extent.

So everybody understood that
I got to move off and do that instead.

But then when the company acquired it,

it was like,
we don't need that role anymore.

We have this new vision.

It's owned by this person over here.

It's a joint company vision
or it's merged vision.

I got to kind of just exit stage left
without really any.

There was no use for me. In a way.

I think there was one more thing
I went to after that of like a conference

or something just to show face,
but that was basically it.

And then I was kind of free to go and I.

Yeah, still running to this day
and doing great things, by the way.

That's got to feel good. Yeah.

So what led to summit.

Answering
what is summit now is sort of like

asking me at the end of that thing,
what was that company?

It's a different answer now.

That would have been in 2019
when I started it.

Today.

I'd say if you've ever used Zapier or make
and you've gotten

either blocked or frustrated
or fed up or hit a wall in terms of,

I want to do this thing, but I can't,

we are a tool to work in place of that.

So a lot of automations and workflows,
car sales, no code, low code platform,

and we help businesses
basically move workflows into APIs.

And the reason that's beneficial is

I think that a lot of those tools
are great

for moving data
from one place to the other.

I think today, the reason that we exist
and the reason

I think
it's a bit of a different category, is

a lot of times it's not just about moving

data from, oh, I've got data in Salesforce
or I got data in a form better example.

It's in a type form
and I want to get it in Salesforce.

That's a very solve problem.

It's been solved since somewhere
the 20 tens or whatever.

Somewhere along there, Zapier solved
that really well.

I think the really interesting stuff
these days

with automations
is more of what happens in between.

It's like, got this data?

I eventually want to get some altered
version of it into this other system.

I need to do a bunch of work
along the way.

We are helping people build
these more, I'd say enriched workflows,

resilient workflows
where doing more things along

the way is important
and just different era, different toolset.

So it's called summit.

It connects to CRM,
it connects to pretty much

anything that has an API,
and it lets you run these automations.

And what gave you the idea for this?

What was the inspiration?

The inspiration was working.

I started out in a different place.
Not surprising given the last story.

The inspiration was working
with a lot of spreadsheets and data

in the last business and going,

okay, I'm a developer, an engineer,
and here I am, the spreadsheet,

and I'm like trying to add data
to rows and columns and working with data.

A spreadsheet felt very slow and tedious.

This should be automatable in that sense.

And so I wasn't trying to solve
an integration problem necessarily of,

oh, I'm trying to get data from QuickBooks
into something else, right?

I was like, I got the data in Excel.

I've got this consistent way.

I want to like it or work with it
or add to it or whatever.

How am I supposed to do that?

And it always just end up coming down
to this manual process of like, well,

do this, click this and then scrape this
and then add this.

And I'm like, that's.

So I started building a tool
that would make it a lot easier to work

with spreadsheet like data, basically data
that was either a CSV format

or you wanted to generate a bunch of data
to add to a spreadsheet.

And that was the genesis of it.

And I would say start out
thinking more about rev ops.

I'd say like rev ops and finance ops
tend to work with spreadsheet data a lot.

The most they're sitting in there
like doing accounting and cruel

based stuff, revenue recognition,
all those things.

Like they just spend a lot of time
in spreadsheets suffering, I would say.

But over time,
we realized those folks at the same time,

Excel is like their second language.

They they kind of live to be in there.

We end up finding more market
pull from folks who are like,

I'm only in G sheets or Excel
because I have to be.

Really, I'm just trying to get the data
into this other system.

There's this offshoot
where I have to spend this time.

They're like, oh, okay,
why don't we help you?

You guys can keep having fun and excel
and all that stuff.

Like, we're not going to automate away
your pals and pro forma and all that,

but you could probably help
you do your job more efficiently.

And that's where we ended up.

You had the successful exit.

And I'll go back to the
what was the conversation

like with your wife when you said,

hey, I'm going to go do this
whole startup thing all over again?

You know that scene
at the end of interstellar?

I was banging on the

back of the bookshelf, yelling at himself,
saying like, don't leave, don't go.

That's what I wish I had.

I joke, but like, there was no voice
in my head that said, don't do it again.

It was more, hey, you know what
you're doing, you can do this again.

I think both of us were pretty happy
with things, pretty confident

in having the time
and the ability to run this again.

And there's a certain level
of just comfort and credibility

that you have where you're like,
now you want to take more risk, right?

It it's almost the

why would I want to not deploy the skills
that I supposedly have?

Now, what I've learned and I laugh
because you learn along the way.

Oh my gosh,
there's so much to learn, right?

This is not something where you're like,
oh, well, I fought in one war.

I can fight in another.

You're like, dude,
I mean, it is good experience.

Don't get me wrong.

Like if I'm going to go somewhere
with somebody,

I love that you've climbed a mountain.

But I've also learned, like,
apparently mountains are all different.

It's only so much translates.

And so I think it was a
let's give it a shot.

I don't think it was ever a

this is permanent kind of thing,
but I think it was a why not try.

And so that's what I did.

And so far I've been able to extend that
timeline mean we haven't gotten there yet.

But I think it was
a very similar conversation

where we had a lot less naivete,

I think a little bit more internal
wrestling or groaning around really.

And I thought about.

So I did talk to a few companies

afterwards, and there was a few moments
where I thought about

because I think companies
are looking for entrepreneurs to hire.

If you can find somebody who's been
an entrepreneur, self-starter, autonomous,

you just point them at a problem
and say, solve this.

That's great. Right?

And so I talked to a couple of companies
where I felt like I could do that

if I could live in the multiverse. Right.

I would love to know what would
have happened if I had chosen that.

I think I'd be more comfortable
in some ways right now,

but I also wouldn't have the experience
and everything I've done this time around.

So there's a story
I'm going to tell myself.

You used a word earlier.

You talked about your dad
being unemployable.

Free spirit kind of has his own mindset
about how work should get done.

Are you unemployable at this point?

I think I'm employable for a period.

I think that there's always
a period of time where

I'm flexible and adaptable enough, where,

yeah, I mean, if I'm working in a context
where it's not

my call, there's a lot of relief
that comes from it not being your calls.

Like you get on the field,
you're not calling the play.

You just run your route and you're like,
okay, I mean, kind of nice.

I mean, that was actually the last year
of my, work at my last company

didn't have the final say,
but I also didn't have the stress.

That was really nice, honestly.

Like, it's a part
because I could do that for a while.

But you also get to the point
where you're like,

Unless I'm super content
or satisfied in terms of

I checked all the other boxes,
I am where I want to be.

This like the other thing,
like if I feel like

by not being able to call the shots
or have the final say, if I feel like I'm

not achieving my goals,
I like bigger picture goals.

That is hard to sacrifice
because then you're like, well,

I have this comfort and I'm
I hate making this argument

because I feel like
I should be the last one to make it

because I'm like,
what experience do I speak from?

But like plenty of friends
who have worked those jobs, who

I asked them like, how's it gone?

And they're just like their soul has left
the building, sort of just like

because they're untapped.

Their whole skill set
is kind of checked out to some extent.

And I think it's a shame
because I think their employer

could probably get way more out of them.

But if you think about what a company
really is, a company at some point

is about re executing a sure fire process.

Right.

And that means
we have to mute the upside to some extent

and not let people just come in here
with knew I knew his risk right.

Knew his risk.

And we don't need new
unfortunately I'm new.

I always end up coming back to new.

And I think that makes that makes me
a problem in most environments.

At some point, eventually it's a problem.

You used an analogy a minute ago.

You talked about
when you were talking about starting this.

Yeah, I've climbed a mountain before,
but you quickly realized

that this mountain is different
than the last one.

What things did you take
from your prior startup

that you've brought over,
and what are things that you brought over

that didn't quite work
like you expected them to?

A lot of actions are reactions, really.

And so my reactions to that experience
was I'm going to charge from day one.

I'm going to build
kind of more of a lifestyle business.

I'm going to focus on revenue
from the beginning, etc.

I definitely did that to start,

but I ultimately found myself

hitting a plateau along the way,
and I kind of had to rediscover the

let me just try.

I, I had to be more open
than I wanted to be in a sense of.

I'd seen that movie before and I'm like,
I want to give those five years

of suffering about people
to monetize correctly.

So let me just go ahead and charge
for the beginning.

Well, sure, I was able to get some money
out of some people, but that doesn't

necessarily mean you've got the business
model of your dreams either, right?

I like to use the example of a good sales
person entrepreneur.

Probably go down your street today

and sell a glass of lemonade
to someone, right?

Is it a great business? No.

Did you monetize from day one? Yes.

Suddenly you realize, oh,
that wasn't the goal either.

That's good.

But my goal was to learn enough to build

this business that I'm really excited
about and proud of.

And I was so eager
to charge something at the beginning.

I think I might have dampened
some of my ambition around

think a little bit bigger, though.
What if you didn't?

What if that didn't
have to be the business, right?

And what you know,
that's a tough thing to answer.

I think for anyone it is good

to get that feedback from the market
if I'm willing to pay for this.

But how many people also struggle?

Businesses that hit a plateau
and they're like,

how come I can't get more growth?

And it's like, well, the business model
you have is just kind of a V4.

You're going to have to break it apart
and do it over again.

And so I think I was overly optimistic

that the answer
was just charging money from day one.

And it's not

probably isn't.

It wasn't for me.
I still had to rebuild the engine.

So if you have you reverse course on that,
like are you offering a free or

or doing a freemium thing

or have you kind of really stuck with the
now we're we're monetizing this again?

I've tried on a lot of shoes here,
if you will.

The first version was pay something
that was a free trial.

We did the free trial for a long time.

Seven days, 14 days, that kind of thing.

Free month had a free, entirely
free tier for a while.

Where we are at right now,
kind of where I'm happy

at is credit card to sign up
and it's pay as you go.

So you have a pay as you go tier.

I feel like that's a nice balance of like,

look, if you're not willing
to put in a credit card,

you could be a spam bot or you just
might not have any interest at all.

If you're not willing to run the risk
of getting charged $0.02,

then probably just spend more time
looking at the shop window,

if you will, or looking at the homepage
and like, come back when you're ready.

I feel like that's nice. I'm
happy with that.

At the moment of like,

okay, people are willing to put on the
card, there's a trust transaction there,

and then it's pay as you go,
which means, yeah, you could run up

a dollar bill to find out
if this tool really works for you.

But again, I feel like that's a little bit
more fair in terms of

if it doesn't work out for you,
then you burn $0.57, right?

And putting in a credit card number,
and I feel like that's

a lot of the challenge in SAS is like,
we're all trying to find that balance.

If no one wants somebody who's completely
no intention

of ever paying anything right,
that doesn't help.

At the same time,

I want to put like a $300 hurdle
in front of somebody who's like, dude,

I don't even know
if this is going to work yet.

For better or worse,
I think it's the right model for us.

We've landed on pay as you go.

It's a common model for a lot of developer
like platforms

or build things, platforms
where you're like more I use it.

The more value

I get, the more I pay you,
but I get a lot more value than I pay you.

Everybody kind of wins, right?

And that's where I'm at now.
And we'll see.

I mean, my hope is that it's
kind of like an Amazon or Heroku or Twilio

play in that sense, where it's like, sure,
your first bill is $0.53,

but if you love it,
maybe your next bill is 50 bucks.

But like, everyone's still happy.

It's interesting
how SAS has really evolved.

I mean, it early days
it was X amount per user and then it was,

hey, you can upgrade here

and get these additional features
and it's Y amount per user.

And we're seeing more

and more things shift to having at least
some consumption pricing.

And it'll be interesting
to watch over the years and years ahead

to see if that sticks
or if there's yet another evolution.

I think it will inevitably stick.

There's still just a lot of dancing

that people have to do around things,
because you're just not sure.

Like the most commoditized products
tend to be usage based.

Anyway.

If you think about our own lives,
I pay for kilowatt hours of electricity.

I pay for whatever
BTUs or something of natural gas. Why?

Because I'm completely

confident in the value
one sip of this thing allows me to do x.

I think with SAS and a lot of software
products,

there's just not a lot of confidence yet
in terms of

what am I really getting for this?

And so it's hard for the buyer

and the seller to arrive at
like a clearing price of, well, each seat.

Is this or each record in HubSpot?

Is this like,
what's a record house HubSpot worth?

I don't think we figured that out yet.

Still, if you're going to enterprise,
100 records could be worth a lot more.

But if you're Netflix, 100 customers
is like, that's really not much value.

So I think we're still figuring it out.

Some people claim usage
based is the future.

I think it is
for some commoditized products.

But I think on the cutting edge,
you're always going to have

people who are saying, hey,
you must be this tall to ride this ride.

You had a co-founder
in your previous business.

Are you a solo founder this time around
or do you have a co-founder?

I am a solo founder.

This time around
I started the company solo, not solo

anymore in the sense
of working with business partner.

I would say not a founder,
but he joined a couple years in.

So there's a lot of responsibility
in that sense.

And we have investors
who financial partners in that sense, but

only founder in terms of those wrestling
matches over the phone around this.

I mean, I still have those debates

with my business partner,
but from an equity,

I mean, I will

honestly
just say from an equity standpoint,

I think the lesson I learned

the first time around as a co-founder
is probably the most expensive

sort of dilution event or tax you're ever
going to have in terms of your outcome.

So if you can start without it,
if you can't, you can't.

Right.

But I think the challenge I had to
myself was like, let me see if I can,

just because that preserves the upside
just that much longer.

You've obviously got the technical chops,
and you wrote the first lines of code

of your first product, and you wrote
the first lines of Code of Summit.

As you are hiring people,

what are the skills that you're hiring for
so that you don't have to do

or maybe said slightly different?

What are the things that you you are
looking to offload in your current role?

I'm trying to level up the company
in terms of hiring.

To me, it's always the company
needs to be leveled up in an area

and that could mean offloading things.

I think sometimes
those are end up being overlapped,

but I like the leveled up part
because I am a product builder

and I did cobbled together
first three versions of our products.

But at some point you realize
this company is the bottleneck.

Here is my ability to do this
well, and I need to find somebody

better than me
at this thing to take this over.

And so when I look to hire people,

especially in the early days,

I'm always looking for somebody
who I would say is extremely autonomous

and can work very independently.

And I try to trust them.

I test them out early.

How much responsibility
can I give them and

just keep kind of moving it up the stack?

Because ideally I just say,
look, customers right now when they sign

up, they're not getting the value
out of the product that they want to get.

Wouldn't it be nice
if I could just say, solve that

and kind of walk away like that?

I think too often when people
want to offload things, what do they do?

They look very far down the stack
at the dirtiest, most menial

tasks and work and go, look,
I don't want to do that part.

And so they give that part away,

but then they still have to do
like everything above that.

Right? And it's a tall stack.

It's like, well, how did you decide
what lines of code to write?

How do you decide what feature to build?

How do you decide what technology to use.

And you know, so
so it's like this really tall stack.

But what I'm interested in in the early
days is like, I don't want a coder.

I want somebody who can decide,
help, decide, prioritization, ideally.

But then given any as high as possible go,
I think I know what to build.

I think I can think of 2 or 3 ways
to build it.

I think I know how to build a first
version that's very quick to market,

so we can learn what we don't know,
and I know how to code it to.

And if I don't know how to code it,
I know how to get help to code it. Right.

Like this is a much more
not just like senior developer,

but this is somebody who can own
just so much more of the product

stack, right, than just coding.

That helps me a lot, because
then I don't have to be mama bird here.

Break everything apart
into tiny little tasks, if you like.

Now code this button. Now
code this feature.

Now do this.

If I have to do all that,
I might as well code it two.

That's like parenting.

I think that a lot.

And I think my dads struggle with this
and love him to death.

But like it was always the let me hire
somebody to do X,

but then he'd see them do it.

And if you don't hire the right person,
you the temptation to jump in

and take the reins and be like,
not like that.

Do it like this.

It's just so strong,
so I think I want to avoid that trap

of finding somebody
that does the menial stuff only

and go, can I find somebody who can just,
hey, he's got it, and he's here,

or she's going to run with it,
and I don't even have to worry about it.

It's going to get done.

And if they get stuck,
they're going to raise their hand

and tell me they're stuck.

These are just
very independently minded people.

And so that's been my approach.

So I will say product is one area
where I've looked to level the company up,

even though in product person
it helps that I know what I'm looking for.

But that's been great.

The kind of person that does all that.

And then on the other side,
frankly, this is even easier.

But business, finance, ops,
legal, accounting,

taxes, corporate H.R, all that stuff
like office manager, kind of stuff.

I can do that stuff if I have to.

But again, even there, I don't want
somebody who's just going to run payroll.

I want somebody who I can say, here's
the log in to the company bank account,

make sure there's enough in there
to cover payroll.

If you have to transfer money around,
do that kind of thing.

Because again, if I have to do that part

and I have to remember

to do that on a Monday afternoon
because payrolls on Thursday or whatever,

if all they do is come in and click

the button on Wednesday,
like that really hasn't freed me up.

Right.

And so this means I need to hire very,
very trustworthy people.

But I actually don't think people
who are ten times more trustworthy cost

ten times more.

In general,
they probably cost ten, 20, 30, 40,

50% more, which is a lot,
but they can do ten times more.

That's what I try for it.

It's an expensive endeavor in that sense
because you're like, well, Max,

you still said your budget 50% more.

Well, it is, but that means
I don't even have to think about it.

Right?

Which then lets me focus on products
like the way I do it

12 hours a day, whatever it is very,
very liberating, right?

And I know that liberating, like that free
feeling is like that's what we all want

is that feeling of like, I don't have to
remember to remember that thing, right.

It's okay.

Take care of
so there's my hiring philosophy.

What I look for not always perfect.

I think hiring for sales
is kind of the one area that I think is

almost impossible in the

early days to get right, and I think trial
and error is almost what you have to do.

I don't know
what you've experienced there,

but finding somebody who can sell in the
early days especially is just super hard.

I don't know the answer there yet.

But if you figure it out, let me know.

I used to think that hiring consultants,
which is a big part of what we do,

was the hardest thing.

And sales is far and away
the hardest thing to hire for.

Really is yeah, that's the one where I go,

oh, I made a mistake again.

And I think they're great sales.

You out there occasionally I found them,
but I think it's founders.

The last thing I want to free myself from.

The final thing that's even more clear.

The final thing,

Final Frontier, is freeing myself
from those sales calls, if you will.

But then I realize

what's happening on those sales calls,
and I'm like, this isn't sales, dude.

This is this is customer discovery.

This is support.

This is marketing, messaging, feedback.

I'm just not there yet.

I'm still learning so much.

It's not
sales I'm trying to hire for sales

when I really am
trying to hire for a founder.

And I'm like, okay, I get it.

Not the same.

Well, Matt, what's next?

Oh man.

For me, in the short term,
I'll start short term and I'll go long.

Short term is, working
super hard to have successful Q4.

That means continuing to onboard
customers,

focus more of my time
on marketing than I have been in sales.

I think the product is more ready
for Prime time than it's been.

We go through phases where like,
that's true and it's not true.

You're never there. Like, oh,
the product's not where it needs to be.

So you work really hard on it
and then it is, and then you focus on this

and then you're like,
oh, I've learned so much.

Like the product
isn't where it needs to be again.

And then you fix that.

At the moment we have a product
is ahead of marketing situation.

It's like my favorite moment
though to be in

because then you can be aggressive,
not mean you could lean forward

and tell people like this thing
works, solves

your problems,
give me a chance kind of thing.

So that's what I'm focused on.

The short term, medium and longer term.

I would say the biggest challenge we have
as a business is, it's distribution.

I mean, the part of the story
that we skipped over

the last one was we figured out
how to get in front of millions of people.

That was hard.
That was really, really hard.

Ended up taking a lot of we were sort of
languishing in obscurity for a long time.

We had the best technology on the web
for what we had, but nobody knew about it.

I've told all 43 of my friends.

I still don't feel like
everyone in the world knows about it.

That problem, that's still an issue today
with what we have,

and I don't think it's
just telling one person at a time.

I think there are all these

watershed moments
where you get a partnership deal done,

you get some kind of distribution
deal done, and suddenly you're like, oh,

a thousand people
just found out about our thing.

You could feel that raise the tide.

So I need to solve that in the medium term
and then long term.

Yeah, I think summit has a really awesome
opportunity

to be a alternative in this Low-code
no code platform space.

I don't think it's a winner
take all market.

So I think it's the kind of market

where some people can like one tool,
some people can like another.

I think the market is enormous.

So that's okay too.

It's not like we're
all fighting over the same sort of scraps.

I think there's millions of businesses
that need this automation.

And I like tell people like, look, yeah,
if you can figure out

how to do this in a different tool
and you like that better, great.

But we think that our tool,
the way it feels, the way it works,

is a good fit for others.

So I think we can build a

I think we built a strong business
from a revenue standpoint

and kind of want to run this thing
as long as possible.

I guess I don't have a long term desire

to necessarily sell
like I did that already,

and I think that was the right time
for that business.

I think with this one,

if I could get on that steady growth path,
I'd love to do that as long as possible.

Matt, thanks so much for coming on
and sharing your story.

Scott, thanks for having me.

You ask
great questions and I really enjoyed it.

That was Matt Wensing, founder and CEO of summit.

To learn more, visit usesummit.com.

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