Gary Brotman: leveraging AI experience gained in the music industry to build better cars, faster.

Get set for a roller-coaster ride through the captivating career of Gary Brotman, CEO of Secondmind. Prepare to be hooked as we journey from the dancefloor to the driver's seat, mapping how this former professional DJ and PR whizz now uses his skills to help automotive engineers make cars smarter and faster. It’s a story of art and architecture, of music, tech and machines, and ultimately, of mastering the art of storytelling in a rapidly digitizing world.

Gary spills the beans on his teenage love affair with a Datsun 280ZX, his battle with imposter syndrome, and how a passion for storytelling played a pivotal role in his transition from PR to product. Listen closely as we wind our way through the digital music ecosystem, with pitstops at Qualcomm, Yahoo, and Musicmatch. You'll hear tales of pitching digital jukeboxes, the launch of the Neural Processing Unit (NPU), and how a knack for telling stories helped Gary to shape the narrative around AI and mobile technology.

Finally, we park up at Secondmind, where Gary uses his wealth of experiences to revolutionize the automotive industry. You'll learn how this cloud-based optimization engine is helping engineers to design better cars, faster, and how Gary's unique approach to team-building - rooted in authenticity and diversity - is driving success. So buckle up and join us for an unforgettable ride through the intersection of tech, music, and the automotive world. Be prepared, we're going to change gears and accelerate swiftly into the future!

Reach out to Gary:

LinkedIn: Gary Brotman

Website: Secondmind

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Episode recorded on 29 June, 2023

Transcript

Gary Brotman: 0:00

I ended up being asked to run the company and I've never been a CEO, but okay, I'll do it. It's the silver lining to COVID and bringing my family here, and what a great challenge. I wish I'd done it 10 years ago.

Andy Follows: 0:12

Welcome to Career View Mirror, the automotive podcast that goes behind the scenes with key players in the industry looking back over their careers to share insights, to help you with your own journey. Here's your host.

Gary Brotman: 0:25

Andy Follows.

Andy Follows: 0:44

Hello listeners, andy here, as always, thank you for tuning in. We really appreciate that you do and we love hearing from you when you give us feedback. In this episode, we're celebrating the career to date of Gary Brotman, ceo of Secondm ind. Gary is a passionate product and technology leader with a successful track record of building and commercializing products and services for leading Fortune 500 companies and startups, including Qualcomm, yahoo and Music Match. As CEO of Secondm ind, Gary is leveraging this experience to transform automotive engineering by leading a team that exists to help automotive engineers design better cars faster, accelerate the transition to carbon-neutral mobility and deliver on the promise of the software-defined vehicle.

Andy Follows: 1:30

I had a lot of fun learning about Gary's life and career journey, from starting out as a professional DJ to becoming a PR expert with connections across the digital music ecosystem. He's navigated a path through some of the most interesting developments in the digitization of music, which have affected us all as consumers. Now he's using experience gained working with AI for many years already to help automotive engineers. I'm delighted to be able to introduce Gary to you in this episode and I look forward to hearing what resonates with you. Hello, gary, and welcome, and where are you coming to us from today?

Gary Brotman: 2:09

Hi Andy, I am coming to you from sunny Cambridge, England.

Andy Follows: 2:14

And you're very welcome. Thank you for joining me. I can detect a little bit of an accent there and I have done some research, so I'm going to suggest you weren't born in Cambridge. Can you tell us where you were born and where you grew up?

Gary Brotman: 2:27

I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on the East Coast of the United States.

Andy Follows: 2:32

Okay, this is where I scrabble around desperately for some kind of personal link, because I'm obsessed with connections. I have seen the Baltimore Orioles play, so that's my connection with Baltimore. Tell me about growing up, then. Brothers and sisters, do you have brothers and sisters.

Gary Brotman: 2:46

I have a brother that is three and a half years my junior and I have to say that one of my fondest memories of Baltimore was the Orioles. Like I don't think, I was a bigger baseball fan than when I lived in Baltimore between birth and 11 years old.

Andy Follows: 3:01

Right, and what jobs did your mom and dad have?

Gary Brotman: 3:05

My dad was a lifelong architect and my mom was a ceramic artist, a painter, a bodybuilder and a great stay-at-home mom.

Andy Follows: 3:16

Wow, she sounds fascinating. So not that your dad doesn't, but that was a nice blend, a bit of creativity. Ceramic artist, bodybuilder what were the others?

Gary Brotman: 3:29

Painter, Painter and really a great all-around stay-at-home mom. I think the one area of the ceramic art was her craft where she made some money, but it was mostly just doing that because she liked to get a workout. Painting was a hobby, bodybuilding was a hobby. Yeah, pretty dynamic woman.

Andy Follows: 3:47

Yeah, and who do you take after?

Gary Brotman: 3:51

Ooh, you'd have to ask others, but I think I'm a struggling mix of the two.

Andy Follows: 3:58

I guess we all are to the next day. We are, we are.

Gary Brotman: 4:01

And I tried to keep the best of both. But you know, you were what you were from a variety of different influences. But I'd say that I think I'm the best of both.

Andy Follows: 4:11

And when you were at school, what sort of a student were you? Did you lean towards the outside or the sciences?

Gary Brotman: 4:18

Actitude-wise, I did well in math, but I really gravitated to English and writing. And when I was young I liked art, but I can't really say until I hit what would be high school, middle school, high school when I was in my mid-teens. I think that's when interest took root. That's where math was something that it was clear I could do well, but I didn't really enjoy it. But I liked to write and I ended up being a writer for my editor for my high school paper, went on to writing in college as well, and around the time of the Gulf War, when the US invaded Iraq, I was quite prolific. I made my feelings known through the written word and that led me to getting a degree in journalism.

Andy Follows: 5:07

Ah, so I love and I'm always at school. I'm always super excited when people start to find a direction they want to go in. So it sounds like you found during school time. You're already starting to think no, I enjoy writing. Give you a bit of direction.

Gary Brotman: 5:22

Yeah. So I'd say that that was a thread, a strong thread, but I really didn't know what it was. I knew I wanted to do something in the arts or in media. I was not cut out to be I didn't think I was cut out to be just straightforward business. My brother's different than I am my brother is very business. He's MBA works for a commercial bank. He's more on the business side, just straight up business.

Gary Brotman: 5:46

I didn't really set out for anything in particular. Music was always a thread, journalism was. It was kind of an end result. It was a consistent thread. But I was doing advertising art, I did film and TV and industrial film, extra stuff and acting and tried to major in radio, television and film and so I did play around a bit in college. I have enough hours for a master's degree but I only have a bachelor's degree coming out of it. I spent a fair amount of time just experimenting but where I ended up was in journalism with a degree. But journalism was on one side of the fence. And then there was advertising. That was still over here and there was this really interesting blend of the two in public relations where you could get, you could blend the credibility of news with creativity of advertising, and it was an interesting blend, at least for my interest, and I ended up moving into PR and working for the Hyatt Regency Hotels in Dallas and then, after that, a major PR firm in Los Angeles.

Andy Follows: 6:50

Wow. Were there any expectations on you, or what were the expectations on you from your family growing up?

Gary Brotman: 6:59

I think when you went back to the parents like my mom just wanted us to be happy and to enjoy life and my father was a little bit more rigid. He had a certain way about him and certain expectations and when I was younger I didn't take it too well as I got. When I got older I understood. I heard this you have a lot of potential. You're not meeting your potential. I heard this in school a lot. I mean I would just made it through. I didn't. Grades weren't that important to me, like standardized tests, I'd kill it and then homework and day to day it was just, I was average, like nothing remarkable. And my dad, I think as I got older and I was more independent and I booked his system, his frustration with my not meeting the potential that he thought I had was visible and some of the restriction that resulted from that and it was all well intended. But at the time you know teenage danks and battling it with your parents is it creates uncomfortable friction and when you get older you realize, okay, that's kind of part of the drill. But yeah, I think the expectations were different. But he was an architect. I really didn't have a desire to be an architect.

Gary Brotman: 8:06

The things about architecture that I liked we were going up to his office and making foam core models, like doing that creative part of it was really cool. But back then the apprenticeship and the draftsmanship and having to do the road, blueprinting and vellum and you know pen and ink and all the stuff that you must do this before you can do the fun stuff right, it literally is apprenticeship. I never understood that and that's why I didn't stay in journalism too, because it wasn't enough creativity. I was going to be writing obituaries and sports scores and the stuff. That's just, you know, vanilla stuff.

Gary Brotman: 8:40

And until you do the apprenticeship do you get the opportunity to express your voice and if you're fortunate to express your voice, right To have your own flavor and filter of the world infused in what you say and what you do. So same thing with architecture. And it was so bad at a job internship at my dad's job that his secretary had to fire me, like I was that uninterested, I can't build the model I don't want to build a desk. It's like that was an interesting one to have my dad's secretary fire me. So I was the first job as fired it, my first real job. I had fired my dad secretary. That made it extra special that it was your dad's secretary that fired you.

Andy Follows: 9:21

Yeah, he had to let her do it and she was my boss anyway.

Gary Brotman: 9:24

He couldn't be my boss, no.

Andy Follows: 9:27

And do you now? It sounds like now you get why he was so focused on it.

Gary Brotman: 9:33

You've sort of reckoned, so I do, and I see that in me there was a drive. The common thread is that there's this need and a feeling of having an impact and producing, and I definitely got that from him. I think he was very driven and his there was quite a bit of distance when he traveled and I think there was an impact on the family. He took it pretty far. I said I wasn't going to do that. I ended up doing that for a bit, but I had that in the back of my mind that there has to be a grounding and the grounding in things that are going to be there. And if you distance yourself from the things that are going to be there as you're rocking your foundation too much, then they won't be there. So I can't say that. It's kind of an ongoing thing. You practice it. But yeah, I think he set the example what not to do in that respect and I didn't want to repeat that. Yeah, that's probably the best way to frame it. Yeah, what it's making me think?

Andy Follows: 10:31

is that he wanted you to lean into something, and what he knew was architecture. You clearly have leaned in. You've said you've got drive. So there's this element, though, of finding the thing that is a good fit, and architecture, for I don't know a lot about it, but what I have picked up is that it's one of the really hard things To do. It's up there with sort of veterinary and medicine and so on.

Andy Follows: 10:56

Yeah, you've got to really do the hard yards before you, as you said, get to do the fun stuff. So OK. So when you were doing, when you're at college and you're touching all these broad areas that were connected, is it starting to come together then for you? Were you enjoying that time? Was this feeling like good use of your time? Yeah, it's a good question. One thing I should clarify too.

Gary Brotman: 11:18

I was not pushed in architecture, so one thing my father didn't do was I don't think he expected me to follow in his footsteps, but I think what he desired was for me to embrace and be successful in what I do, and don't do it half-baked, you're going to do it, do it right. That was his ultimate motivation for me to be successful and thrive. But I don't think he would care whether I was a painter or wouldn't have mattered. So is he proud of what you're doing?

Gary Brotman: 11:45

I think he is and I think more so than I think he is. I think more so in the past couple of years. But things happen over time and you demonstrate more and you grow up. I think I finally grew up.

Andy Follows: 11:58

Excellent. I think that's excellent. It's this thing we aspire to, isn't it? I think so.

Gary Brotman: 12:02

I don't feel it. I don't feel it sometimes, I think. I think it is.

Andy Follows: 12:07

I'm just checking myself whether excellent is the right response to the fact that he's growing up.

Gary Brotman: 12:12

I say it to myself, my wife says it.

Andy Follows: 12:15

And now I'm really curious about what not being grown up might have looked like.

Gary Brotman: 12:19

I don't know, that's probably another two hours, but I will say so. When I got out of college I didn't know what I wanted to do. In fact, when I graduated I had already married my wife. And then I graduated a year later. I met my wife back in the time when raves were a thing in the late 80s, early 90s here in the UK and they were the same thing in Dallas, texas, believe it or not. There was a scene and it attracted all kinds of DJs and producers from around the globe. And yeah, we met in that scene and we kind of enjoyed having a good time. We liked enjoying life and at the time the economy wasn't all that great and I didn't really jump right into leveraging my degree and forging on in my career. So I took a hobby of spinning records and I became a professional DJ and I get booked around and I had a few residencies in Dallas and I get flown around the country, mostly in the Southwest, and I was pretty good at it.

Gary Brotman: 13:21

But the lifestyle killed you and it's not conducive to a relationship, especially when you're there, you meet your partner and you're there, it's all about fun, it's all about carefree and just doing your thing. And then one side decides you know what? I think I'm going to settle a bit and then I'm spinning records and little divergence and I think that it wasn't like this really keen focus that I'm going to go out and I'm going to take my degree and I'm going to become a PR guy or a journalist. Those are things I still like to do. But I was also a little bit nervous about going into the workforce.

Gary Brotman: 13:59

I had lots of hangups Every step in my career. Imposter syndrome would set in and I'd have to cope with that and I learned to embrace that and recognize it for what it was. But I had. I was like I really want to do good at what I am and sometimes I didn't feel confident and that back then there was a fair amount of there's lack of confidence. But where I did well was entertaining and, you know, spinning records and taking people on a journey, just like I like to write stories and tell stories, and all that was great for PR too. So it all kind of works together, but I can't say I planned it that way.

Andy Follows: 14:35

No, I've got this vision now of you up there with your decks and lights flashing and a crowd of people having a really amazing time and want to rush. That must have been. How addictive that must be.

Gary Brotman: 14:49

Oh, extremely. Yeah, there's very few things that compare to having a couple of thousand people relying on you to take them for a ride. Yeah, I did a three hour set live online on Saturday night just for the fun of it and had a bunch of friends from Dallas and Germany and all over the place just listening in. And I do that rarely these days, but I still have the, I still have the rig and I still like to do it. But yeah, back then that was a hard one to let go, that's. There was one other thing too that I didn't mention, and I had the high school period.

Gary Brotman: 15:25

For me that my I let my teenage years, the angst with my and the relationship with my father was one thing, but I think I also. That was a time for me to explore interests, and I was new wave. Before new wave was a thing where I lived, in Dallas. In fact, when I started wearing parachute pants and you know sleeveless shirts with Japanese rising sun on them, I was like who the hell is this guy? I got kids sitting next to me with a belt buckle and you know rope or boots, and so I didn't really like, didn't follow the same, I didn't follow the same path.

Gary Brotman: 15:57

I like to be individual and I also dug cars like I was a. I wasn't a motorhead, I wasn't a gearhead, I wasn't under the hood working on the working on the engine, but I had an appreciation for cars I had. My first car was a avocado green 1968 Mustang with a brand new black vinyl top that clashed with the oxidized paint. But it was a classic car. Unfortunately, I didn't appreciate it for what it was then. I mean, it was cool but I really didn't take care of it. I think it lasted for like a year and a half two years and then I just jumped it. People that love those cars hate me for telling the story Right that I didn't really appreciate what I had.

Gary Brotman: 16:40

And my second car was a 1983 Datsun 280ZX with teatops and louvers and it was just like this kickass, like it was a completely different car, but it was like a powerful statement. And that period of time was like really great for me because driving was part of my independence. I go wherever the hell I want to, and that let me explore a whole bunch of other things. But I realized we were bringing up the automotive side of this and I still enjoy it. I enjoy driving now more than I did the past three decades and I had a different affinity for it. But yeah, I think, growing up and having the muscle car and then the really sleek 280ZX, I still want to get one of those. In fact, I like to get a refurb on the electric, for the electric motor.

Andy Follows: 17:26

Yeah, I can picture that. I think I had a small toy, one of those but don't feel we have to talk about cars. We are an automated podcast.

Gary Brotman: 17:34

But I'm like you have brought. You have brought stuff to the fore that I haven't thought about in a while.

Andy Follows: 17:39

That's what we like to do. It's fun to do that, and then I have to try and keep all these plates spinning and think where should we go next? So I'm getting the sense, though, of you as, yeah, quite a cool individual guy who went his own way, whether that's musical taste or car taste, or you had a look, wasn't afraid to look. You didn't need to blend in with anyone else. You're comfortable with being a little bit different and individual.

Gary Brotman: 18:04

Yeah, I'd like to explore, I like to do stuff that people would turn away. In fact, many of the bigger steps in the later part of my career were just that. Like when I graduated, did the DJ thing realize that you know what the marriage and my wife are more important than watching the sun come up with a bunch of people who are blanked out of their mind and don't know who they are? There was great parts of the creativity, but the stuff that mattered was at home and we, like, we picked up and we moved from Dallas to Los Angeles and I got a job with an international PR firm as a entry level PR guy. A gentleman by the name of Fred Cook, who to this day is like the mentor of all mentors, gave me a job when he didn't have one.

Gary Brotman: 18:50

I had done an internship in Dallas as we were getting ready to go and trying to get out of my vampire DJ mode and into a professional mode. So I did an internship with a subsidiary of DDB Needham in Dallas working on Pepsi and Starbucks accounts, and during that time the internet was just becoming something. I even did some work as an internet customer support rep. I did a lot of work on AOL and Prodigy and all this like walled garden stuff. But there was a company in Dallas that gave you unfettered access to the internet and I learned HTML in 96 and I was doing all that and when I realized what I had, there was like this encyclopedia of information and I went at the internship I started printing out websites of all the PR firms that I wanted to go hunt down in Los Angeles and I was doing my interviews with this big binder that had all the profiles of the firms and I showed it to Fred in my interview with him and he's like where'd you get this?

Gary Brotman: 19:53

And I'm not just 96, right, it's like it's the beginning and nobody really knows what these things are. And I was showing him him, I say his bio and his picture and his company he didn't even know it existed. And hour or two after the interview he called me and said like I don't have a role, but I want you to come work for me because I'm just going to pick you up and that kind of set my professional career off NPR doing business to business stuff with like Deloitte and Touche's Human Resources Strategies Group and, mind you, I was DJ and Rave three months earlier.

Andy Follows: 20:25

I love it. You got sensible in a real heart rate.

Gary Brotman: 20:28

Oh yeah, it was like you know, you go to the second largest market in the United States and I was like insecure as hell in Dallas and all of a sudden it's like throw care to the wind, like go big or go home, like this is your opportunity. And my parents were living out there too. My dad was in LA, they were out there, so it was a support base. But here's this opportunity to really like do something. And somebody says we want you, and I didn't care what it was, so working on business to business stuff didn't matter to me. But within a year I started landing music accounts.

Andy Follows: 20:59

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Andy Follows: 22:52

Ok, let's get back to our episode. I was really grateful that you brought up imposter syndrome or imposterism, and you also said that you maybe didn't get. You didn't do your college courses and think right now I'm going to get straight into PR. You hesitated after college and maybe that was because you were nervous about getting into. You didn't know if you were going to be good, didn't know if you're going to succeed. I'm curious how you overcome imposterism and do you still have it, or how did you talk yourself out of it? And yeah, how did you make that switch when you went to LA? How did you go from being nervous about these things to just smashing it in three months?

Gary Brotman: 23:35

Each run-in with my friend the imposter has been different and each step along the way I've had more experience bringing to the table to have the battle. I think the time when I, you know, in LA and going into the professional world, I think that was survival, because I wanted my marriage to work, I wanted to, you know, closer to my dad again, and it was an opportunity to prove that, yeah, I'm going to do something. I'm going to do something real and I'm going to make an impact. That whole potential thing, yeah, it's there and we'll see it happen. So I think there was more of a you've got to do it Like this, is it? If you don't do it now, you're screwed.

Andy Follows: 24:19

There was some resolve. It sounds like there was some real resolve, yeah.

Gary Brotman: 24:23

But I can't tell you where it came from other than it required. There were a confluence of things that led that to happen, and allow me to kind of face it.

Andy Follows: 24:33

Yeah, and what I also love is that circumstantial you're being in those offices in Dallas with the internet, all the access to that, and putting that dossier together, and then how that blew the mind of Fred and then he created an opportunity for you and away you go from there.

Gary Brotman: 24:54

I think part of it was also acceptance by him yeah, by him, and like something that I did was accepted and it's accepted in a very important place by someone of stature, like when you're in LA and you're in, you know, literally the market is a cutthroat business. You got to have a thick skin and I'm going in there. So there's a book he wrote. It was I forgot the name it was something about unconventional CEO. He wrote this much later in life and there's a chapter in there about me.

Gary Brotman: 25:27

He related this story about. It was called know, your interviewer and he's giving guidance to people on how to get jobs and whatever. It was very non-traditional and how he did things. He even hired a barista at the coffee shop downstairs because he thought she would be good at something. Sure, not to be right. He would just take all these crazy chances. And he wrote the story about me coming in with my you know geeky self and my you know, not comfortable in my new suit, sort of thing, and he, you know, taught him things that he didn't know and I had this insatiable desire to learn things and knowledge information. And you know he laments the fact that three years later he lost me to a client, but it was like he had this huge impact on me and he still did this data. I haven't talked to him in a couple of months but, yeah, that was the biggest pivotal point in my existence not just my career, but in my life.

Andy Follows: 26:20

Wow. He believed in you. He gave you that boost of confidence and something to go and knock things over for if you like to really prove that you could do this. You mentioned and stop me if I go too far with this, but you mentioned the run-ins you've had with this guy about the imposter my friend around the imposter. Is it always the same friend, if you like? Is it always the same character internally that comes up and starts challenging what you're doing?

Gary Brotman: 26:48

Yeah, he's a faceless individual and I've tried. It's funny, I've never personified it before and it's not a demon either. It is a foe, but a foe creating friction and what I think at the end of the day is probably healthy. I think people that jump into things with about a care and they don't really question and they don't really size it up, you can make some big mistakes. Right, being too confident is not a good thing.

Andy Follows: 27:12

No, he's got your best interests at heart. I mean, we know he's not, he's not helpful, but he's only trying to protect you from getting found out. That's right. Yeah, that's his mentality on this, so you've learned to notice it. Yes, I have.

Gary Brotman: 27:27

It's kind of obvious, it's not subtle, but it's usually when there are these tectonic shifts in my career or my life, but mostly they've been career related, I think, when I was a DJ, I was a hobbyist and then I was playing out live and there were people around me that were just masters and I never thought I was that great. I was pretty good. I look back I'm like I'm pretty good, but there's people that I was just like how do you do that, like such an art? And I later was thinking I wasn't good enough. So even back then it was still. I want to be better at this and there are other people that are better. And can I really like rank there? Am I good enough? Nine times out of 10.? Yeah, of course.

Andy Follows: 28:08

It's interesting. You're making me think about how sometimes these things are helpful up to a point. So to the extent that it causes you to work hard at your craft and upscale and assess yourself objectively and measure yourself objectively against where you could become in terms of your talent and developing that, versus when it goes too far and it stops you actually from doing the thing that you could be progressing.

Gary Brotman: 28:35

So, yes, interesting I have. I have a good I'll say the best imposter syndrome story for the pivot that got me to into this technology domain. But there's maybe a few more before that.

Andy Follows: 28:49

Okay. So then, before I asked you if we could pause, you were just about to say which was music to my ears that you got into music, because you know what I'm seeing now is great. You know my hero, the DJ. He's got all sensible and he's going to go and knock the doors down in LA, but in the story it's awesome because he gets to get back into music three years down the track. So please pick it up from there.

Gary Brotman: 29:16

Yeah, so I think we left Dallas in 96. I joined Golden Harris Thanks to Fred. So while I was there I think the first year it was Deloitte and Tush and City National Bank and business to business stuff. I was in Dane. But even with doing human resources strategy stuff for Deloitte and Tush I found interesting things, like I learned about 401ks and that was a personal benefit for me because that was something I could take forward in life. So I would, even if it wasn't the subject matter, I would find something interesting to sink my teeth into. But it would have been maybe a year and a half later.

Gary Brotman: 29:54

The first three movement was starting and I had already started to move into taking on consumer technology accounts and one of those accounts was creative labs. Who folks don't know? Creative labs today. But if you had a computer back then all the sound was from creative labs in the computer, in the PC brand called Sound Blaster. They had sound cards and they had all kinds of great stuff. So all like the pinnacle of PC sound and digital audio for PCs was creative.

Gary Brotman: 30:25

Their arch rival was Diamond, rio or Diamond. Diamond made graphics cards, creative made sound cards but Diamond decided they wouldn't get an audio and they were pretty close to each other. In Fremont, california, diamond decides that they're going to become the pirate company, pirate audio company. The MP3 thing is happening. They see it. They build this Diamond Rio. They launch it knowing that it's going to drive a lot of attention and potentially litigation.

Gary Brotman: 30:52

And it did, and that one device became this thing that everybody was looking at and why the recording industry decided digital music is the devil, when the background creative, wasn't sure where to get in. But they should have led it. They're the leaders in audio and I was their account lead at the time and they decided to OEM a unit. They called it the Nomad. So I got to launch the first Creative Labs MP3 player and then that just turned into building a digital music practice in the next 12 to 16 months. That had Creative Labs music match. They made the digital software, the jukebox software that you could rip your CDs and then put the MP3s on your MP3 player.

Gary Brotman: 31:32

Forrester Research had a digital music practice. They were covering the whole domain, so I had their analyst as a client and then I ended up with Texas Instruments. They made the solid state memory and these things, and I think the biggest win for me was Amazon and Amazon came to Golan. Jeff Bezos came to Golan. I remember the day he came in with his Power Blue shirt and his khakis and his goofy laugh and balding in the back and he's a total nerve then. But he was building something really interesting a big bookstore online.

Gary Brotman: 32:04

They wanted us to be their first PR firm and launch the video store and they already had music or CDs but I helped plan that video account, the movies account, and with that I got to then take the music account. So I got to take their editors and their head of music around Hollywood and go to, you know, hollywood Reporter and do all the music stuff. So I was like a Kidney Candy Store. I had clients in every corner of the digital music spectrum and I got written up for building the first digital music practice in any major PR firm and I wanted to keep it that way. But I was kind of a rainmaker and my other boss at the time wanted me to bring in business and it didn't matter where it came from and like just bringing the money and like I kind of like what I'm doing here and it drove me away to one of my clients or one of my clients.

Andy Follows: 32:50

Why was that? Why were you a rainmaker?

Gary Brotman: 32:52

So this probably leads to where I am today too, being interested in writing and journalism and having a quest for knowledge and understanding of things. I think that that may be a very good communicator. That's why I was really good at PR. You wouldn't ever catch me talking or pitching about anything that I didn't really know, and if I didn't believe in it, forget it. All bets are off. I wanted to know everything about the product, the people behind it, the business plan, the strategy. It's the only way you're really going to communicate. Something is to know as much as you can about the thing, whether it's the people or the product. And that desire for information and the ability to turn that into a story and tell a story that was. It was a crystallization of a thing that I enjoyed, a talent that actually has gotten me. That's the direct line. That's how I got to where I am, because you still have to tell stories. Like telling stories is how you build products and how you motivate people and how you get funding for your startup. It's all about stories.

Andy Follows: 33:56

I love that, how that's come from, that journalistic interest, that writing interest at the very beginning. And then there was a clue. We can look back and we can say, hang on. You just said you really like to know the ins and outs of the people involved in the product. So that dossier you had where you decided right, if I'm going to embark on these meetings, I need to know the industry, I need to know all the. You've done your due diligence, you've done your research. It's all stacking up here, so that makes sense. But by this time you've created this incredible role for yourself where, as you say, all aspects of the digital music ecosystem you're talking to the people and then unfortunately victim of your own success, if you like, in the sense that that's not good enough for the corporate, that's not good enough for the shareholders or whatever they were. Yeah, we got to take this guy and we got to milk him elsewhere in the business or use him to generate extra business. Yeah, it was really interesting.

Gary Brotman: 34:48

That's when I was really met with like business reality, Like there's a role to play and if you're an agency, there's billable time and you need to bring in more billable time and if you can grow the business and you're good at it, they put you. On that. I like being an SME. I was personally. I was interested in music. I was now part of what is the next wave of music discovery and distribution, and it was. It was going to change the way we experience the world. Right, we're going to have the celestial jukebox at our fingertips. It's an interesting thing. I'll tell this story because I haven't had an opportunity to tell it.

Gary Brotman: 35:23

I was very good at actually landing my clients in big publications like USA Today and Wall Street Journal and it was rare for even in an agency to get that sort of thing. Usually the client did that stuff directly. The agency never really helped out because they usually just flack. The agency is just a buffer and no offense to those who may be listening on this call but some clients don't know how to leverage the talent that they pay for and I'm guilty of it sometimes. But I'd say that the thing that got me the next step was there was a journalist by the name of Walt Mossberg, who you may or may not know. He's not as active as used to be, but he had a column in the Wall Street Journal and he was the consumer tech guy and if you're, if he featured your product, you were golden. Like going to Walt's office in Washington DC was mecca for anybody that was in consumer electronics or digital anything. And I got to meet him through Kara Swisher, another journalist from Wall Street Journal. I think he was still more active.

Gary Brotman: 36:21

I pitched my client music match. I pitched the jukebox that they were building. She's like I think you got to talk to Walt, Introduce me to Walt, and Walt invites me and the CEO of Music Match to come to Washington. So that's like having.

Gary Brotman: 36:34

I don't like Moses asking you to come to the mountain at the time and I was like scare, shitless. Oh, excuse me, but like how am I doing this? I'm like three years out of DJing and now I'm sitting at Walt Mossberg's office pitching him this thing and I spent the next three or four weeks helping him understand it and everything else and we landed this great article where we beat real networks and with these big behemoths, these big companies, we're just little scrappy, San Diego based, you know two bucks software company and Walt picks us because he likes what we were doing, he likes the software, he likes the spirit of the thing. And then Dennis, the Dennis Mudd, the CEO, asked me to come run PR for him. It's like I like that, I want more of that. And then I left the agency and I went with Orbit for Dennis.

Andy Follows: 37:23

And how much just before we go to Dennis how much storytelling were you consciously doing in that period when you were pitching that digital jukebox?

Gary Brotman: 37:33

I think it was all storytelling. Back then I wouldn't even call it storytelling. It's like this thing does some amazing stuff, like you have the world's music at your fingertips and you just choke down. You choke on it Like it's a fire hose of just stuff which is also. It's a problem, but the opportunity has never been greater and you lean into how that sort of thing could become a promotional tool and at the time the labels just wanted to shut it down and throw you in jail. But all that stuff just turned out to be promotional stuff to sell other stuff, and it became another copy of a record that they had sold in cassette, vinyl, cd, picture disc, whatever. And now it's digital right, because how many times can you sell the same record to the same people?

Andy Follows: 38:16

Right, I can imagine you being very excited, very authentic, very good music credentials and passionate about this next wave that was happening.

Gary Brotman: 38:28

Technology, changing the way we experience the world.

Andy Follows: 38:31

Yeah, you just didn't want to be a highest billing guy in the agency.

Gary Brotman: 38:37

Well, if I could have built the digital music practice further. Yeah, let me play my sandbox.

Andy Follows: 38:42

As a byproduct, though not as the goal. If by doing that you happen to become the highest billing agent, then a guy in the agency. But there's a sense that a little bit I'm thinking they kind of killed the goose that was laying a golden egg there by not recognizing we've got something happening here, but hey, that's who knows how big it would have been at the time.

Gary Brotman: 39:04

You know, these companies didn't really have a lot to spend on this stuff. It was still early. Amazon was a fine account, but we had all parts of their business. But the others, like music match, they had very little budgets. So you need a lot of those to bring together meaningful revenue. And the Nintendo is sitting in the pod next to you. That's a multi-million dollar account. That's like where the real money was. So how do you find more of that?

Andy Follows: 39:28

So say, who is Dennis? What was the opportunity there?

Gary Brotman: 39:31

Dennis Smaud was the founder of Music Match. He and his wife and another guy named Jim Smith founded Music Match. It was a family founded and run business. We hit it off. Dennis is like the consummate product guy, like, really like into it. He would make interfaces for the jukebox in his own time. The designers weren't too happy about that but it was his way of doing this thing, but he was really in it, like, way in it. He had an interesting transition too because he was an HP all-in-one printer guy. He and Jim and Pam are like you know what we're going to do? Something fun they did like completely orthogonal to what he was doing in his prior world, but they launched this thing.

Gary Brotman: 40:10

I joined them. They already had some footing. They were selling upgraded versions of this jukebox software. That led to personalized radio. They had really cool algorithm. They had these guys who built algorithms to detect fraud and ATM machines.

Gary Brotman: 40:27

We're now applying the same sort of filtering, the same sort of collaborative filtering around music recommendations. This is my first real contact with what you would consider machine learning. You have these services like Pandora today. That you go thumbs up or thumbs down, you stars. I like five stars, this real, explicit, brute force way of expressing your desire or your interest in something. This algorithm is different. If you would just let us observe what you do and I was the guy responsible after doing PR when, in e-commerce, I was responsible for compelling people to opt in to allow us to observe what they do If you did, we would watch what you do like, what you listen to, what you skip, what you listen to full length, the relationships between the files If you didn't care about genre or artist or all these things that are metadata to help you organize stuff in a library, sort of card catalogs sort of way none of that mattered to the algorithm.

Gary Brotman: 41:27

The algorithm just looked for relationships between the things that you were playing and then comparing those relationships to the community. It's your interests, what you do and what you do. That's important. What you say you do or what you say you like is not what you like and not all the time. The one thing we absolutely didn't do is let you say you never want to listen to an artist again because that artist may one day do something that changes the topology of your soundscape. There was no explicit anything. Just let us watch you and we'll come back to you with. Like we'll be the college, your best friend in college who recommended all the great music to you and more. That was the most impactful thing for me, having been a DJ. I'm a taste maker, but to see something that could give you a selection of music that was so eclectic and it wasn't a train record things, but things that you would never imagine worked together, would work really well together. To this day there's nothing out there from a music recommendation engine that I could say came close. It was outstanding.

Gary Brotman: 42:29

We was to take that and we blend that with radio science, like radio clocks. I don't know if you're familiar with how radio works, but top 40 radio or any programmatic radio, there's a formula and there's certain songs that you'll play in certain rotation and there's a certain number of songs in the entire library. But that formula is designed for familiarity and exposure and it's just all science behind it. We would infuse that with the algorithm too. We had real radio programmers and then the algorithm. It was just so much fun. It was like the craziest music experience ever. And then we went on to sell digital downloads and a streaming service and then Yahoo bought us for like $160 million and I started working for Yahoo.

Andy Follows: 43:13

Right, this is fantastic. So before we get to Yahoo, which is super exciting as well I'm getting this sense in by the way you tell this story that did you feel you were at work or was this just feeling so good? Was this so you were in such the right place and it was? I'm sure it was hard work, but were you just feeling, no, this is what I should be doing.

Gary Brotman: 43:37

I have to say that I feel fortunate that I don't think that anything that I've done outside of my personal life has ever felt like work or a burden. Sometimes it's not fun and sometimes you're stuck with really mundane pablam and stuff that you just want to stick a poker in your eye, but I don't think in any of my roles I've ever felt like it's work Everything that I've done. A I love the complex stuff, I like to dig in, but it's the impact that you have going back to me and my dad, having an impact, making a difference, being able to, regardless of what you do, make this time that each of us, this brief time we have on a planet whether it's you directly, the company you work for and the things that you do for that company make it better, make it delightful, if you can Like. I use delight today and I'm in B2B machine learning, but every human wants to be delighted, and delighted just about a smile. It's about being surprised, it's being. You want delight. Like care, how stoic and boring you may come across, everybody wants to like and I think that's for me. That was my motivation If I was at the down to the metal, at the bottom of the stack at Qualcomm, or I'm like up in application space touching somebody with a music recommendation.

Gary Brotman: 44:56

It didn't matter. Somewhere there's a connection.

Andy Follows: 44:59

Yeah, I love that sense of having a purpose, being clear about the purpose and how it's making the life better for people. It's meaningful and that allows you to get through the inevitable challenging stuff you have to go through where you want to stick something in your eye that those days, those tasks, those experiences, you can persevere when you're clear on why you're doing it.

Gary Brotman: 45:25

They help you when you have to dig deep. Dennis was brilliant, by the way, and I think the company would not have been successful it wasn't for Dennis and his drive and his passion To Dennis's credit, that focus, that relentless focus of his and what he believed is what made the company what it was. He also because that was this very keen focus if things changed or you as an individual wanted to do something different, it wasn't really something he would be comfortable with. In fact, I signal that I wanted to move into product management at Music Match and the guy who, the VP of product, said I'd like to do that, but I got to ask Dennis. Dennis is like now he's a PR guy and that became what led me down a more than a decade journey of becoming a product guy.

Gary Brotman: 46:11

Communicating is one thing, but I want to conceive of it. I know how the whole thing works. I had to research it because I had to communicate it. That's the whole methodology and I didn't want to just be the bolt on at the end where companies say marketing is just going to get it out there. Marketing is just as integral to the concept and the conception of the idea and the thing that you're going to build, and I wanted to do that. Back in my mind, I wanted to prove Dennis wrong, and I never really got to say that to him. But when I became a product lead at Qualcomm, I ran into him on a plane and I was like, yeah, this is what I'm doing, but that was a big challenge for me. And that was like, OK, we're going to make that transition, I'm going to get there at some point in time.

Andy Follows: 46:57

So this is the second time at least in this conversation where you've been owning this. You've chosen the direction you want to go in. You've had the vision of where you want to be and then, whether it was at the agency, whether they wanted to exploit your rainmaker capabilities on less exciting accounts, or whether it's now when you want to get into product, you've sort of hit a wall and had to navigate away through it Because you had a clear enough idea, enough self-awareness of what you enjoy doing what you wanted to do and enough determination to find the way to do it.

Gary Brotman: 47:32

Yeah, and, by the way, that was early in joining the company. Like they gave me a great position as the head of corporate communications. I had a great spot, but I saw what was going on there and I saw the creativity and the discovery and the really understanding, the people, the personas and that method of how you build something. That is delightful as an aside, like Tony Fidel, that sort of principle that he has as a product, just Maven, that's the kind of thing that you know. He's like the godfather of the iPod and Nest thermostats.

Gary Brotman: 48:09

And there's a whole music match tie in there too. He was trying to tell Steve Jobs background music match that they needed to get the second generation iPod to work on Windows and Steve's like hell, no, there's no way that we're going to deal with Windows. And it took Tony, using Walt Mossberg as a influencer, to get Steve to embrace Windows and ended up putting music match jukebox in the box, a virtual like a Mac version of it in the box with the second gen iPod, like all these things that really wind together. And Tony Fidel is actually an advisor to the company here today, like so many things that like it wasn't a plan, it felt good, but I marvel at it they having this opportunity. I don't remember the last time I had an opportunity to have this like conversation to remind me of the threading of all this stuff.

Andy Follows: 49:03

And it was Steve Jobs who said that we can make sense of it. Looking back, we can join the dots, can't we?

Andy Follows: 49:09

But you can't do it going forward, so that's really cool. And then it sounds like Dennis wasn't just there to build a business to one day sell for multi millions to Yahoo. He was doing something you really cared about. Even though he might have had some limitations in terms of how he saw your career developing or your direction, he was not just in it to flip it. He was doing something that he cared about. Have I got that right? Or is that to?

Gary Brotman: 49:31

you? No, I think you're partially right. It was very clear what the vision was between Dennis, Jim and Pam. They had an objective, right Okay, and they're living that objective right now. I see their pictures on Instagram and the travels around the world, all kinds of stuff, but it wasn't like a flip it sort of thing. It was we're going to maximize value and we're going to have as big of an impact as we possibly can, and it was the most amazing ride to take this thing to 160 million registered users and a turning down Yahoo the first time they came to the door, so didn't take the first one.

Gary Brotman: 50:08

One of the main reasons why Yahoo went away was because the head of Yahoo Music, this guy named Dave Goldberg. Dave Goldberg had founded Launch Music and they had a music service and they had built this like they had a magazine that was a physical magazine with a CD in it that had music samples that they would distribute on an online website, and Yahoo bought them and they left it alone on the side to just do its thing. It never became a Yahoo property. It was just launch media. That was just. It stayed that way. So Dave had his kingdom and he has great journalists from Cream Magazine from back in the day in the music business and it was a really cool little group of people. And then he decided no, we're going to build it, we're going to build a jukebox, we're going to build a streaming music service, we're going to get the licenses and all that. And it wasn't as easy, Like it's not difficult and we had done some of the hard work that others were struggling, some as big as Yahoo and then they finally came in and Rosensweig, who was the CFO at the time, says we're going to buy that now and you're going to take it.

Gary Brotman: 51:12

And that started a three and a half year journey of me working for Yahoo and learning about big corporation working with a small property that had to assimilate, and a guy like Dave Goldberg, who went on to be the CEO of SurveyMonkey his wife is Cheryl Goldberg, from Google and Facebook fame was Mark Zuckerberg's right hand person. They're very strong, creative, influential networks here at play doing some very powerful things, but big ideas around acquiring a property like this. They didn't know what to do with the asset and Yahoo had this audience and they had cultivated audiences and different demographics for different things like online dating and casual gaming, and they saw this digital music thing coming up as another way to reestablish or strengthen relationships with the teen audience. So like, hey, we're going to do this, the jukebox, and we're going to brand it. But on the side, Dave's ego has already wedded to this other open source thing that he had bought previously. So it was a battle between the incumbent that wants to launch that is really rough around the edges and not ready for prime time, and the thing they just acquired that's ready, a little bit bloated because it's been around for a while but it works. And then marketing gets involved and then all bets are off because marketing's idea of marketing to this demographic.

Gary Brotman: 52:37

At the time you needed a credit card to stream subscription music and buy digital downloads and teenagers don't have credit cards. So how are you gonna do that? And it just didn't work. All the great marketing campaigns in the world and like the cool little animated figures that were like eight-bit animation, but a marketing strategy that was executed poorly. And then the ego and launching a competing thing that was inferior and the whole thing. Just it was unfortunate. But hey, Yahoo spent a lot of money and they can afford to do that and it was a great experiment and I learned a lot. Yeah, that was another imposter syndrome thing, by the way. I was doing product marketing for this thing and dealing with Yahoo CMO can be done away the most amazing woman in the world from a marketing perspective and I learned a ton, yeah. And then I left and went to another startup.

Andy Follows: 53:32

It sounds like incredible case study and you've been exposed to you mentioned a lot of high profile figures in the industry. How much has that rubbed off on you? Are you able to identify behaviors that you've adopted or think specifics you've learned from just operating at that level or in the vicinity of people who are at that level?

Gary Brotman: 53:55

Yeah, I just was thinking about that. And so some people stayed in San Diego, where the engineering stayed in San Diego, and I moved up to LA, santa Monica, which is where Yahoo Media was. So I had to assimilate with the business and their engineers and I didn't really establish a relationship with Dave from a business perspective, but I found common ground at the poker table. So they had a house game at the Yahoo, at the launch music office, the Yahoo music office, and I just I ingratiated myself to some of the guys and I got invited to play poker and it became like I became friends and they're friends to this day, like John Lenack and others who I will still call my friends and I haven't talked to them years. But if I did, we could pick up where we left off. Poker was the great equalizer and nobody cared. You just you're playing poker. Jerry Yang, the CEO, who founder, then Terry Sammel became CEO and then Jerry stepped back into BC, he came down, he played poker, so he played poker with everybody. But that's like the relationships in those situations you just have to find a way to get away from the hierarchy and the job and you gotta find some sort of common ground.

Gary Brotman: 55:14

There was another point and I think this has helped me in my role today as a CEO and I never thought about it until just now. I was in Yahoo. I'm dealing with these very big Sunnyvale, silicon Valley marketing and product marketing people who have been planted in LA to make sure that this thing goes off without a hitch with their big marketing campaign to teens, and I at the time I knew I was right about what we should do and I didn't agree with the strategy around trying to target this audience, the way we were doing it and my approach to my colleagues and they were, I can't remember, with the same title or slightly higher, but I went to them with my ideas and I went to them with this tone of authority and didn't realize how that would be received. And it ended up being received negatively because they knew what they were doing and they had their own insecurities too and I was like who's this guy? And no, I'm right, and I've been working for Cami for years and I really handled it so ham-handedly I didn't recognize how to share an idea.

Gary Brotman: 56:23

So today it's a different ball game. When you try to explain somebody something that can be beneficial, you just have to find the right way to do it, and nine times out of 10, it should be their idea. But it's a different type of selling. It's not about authority and I know best. It's about coaxing and trying to get them to find the benefit on their own. But back then I really screwed it up and it made my life difficult with that team for a very big period of my time there. In fact, there was a point where my director said to me you know, do you think you should work here? Do you really want to work here? Because she was seeing the.

Andy Follows: 57:03

She was seeing how tough you were having it as a result of that.

Gary Brotman: 57:08

Yeah, it was a pretty interesting time.

Andy Follows: 57:11

Yeah, what a lesson to learn and to now know how to do it differently and for other people to think about that.

Gary Brotman: 57:17

But there are literally people from that time in my life who I still see to this day I went to Burning man with for five years and way later in our lives that I never would have imagined Like I would have sort of gone to Burning man with friends that I DJed with back in the 90s, not people that I worked at Yahoo and how we all got together that later in our life through networks that didn't exist but we knew each other in some way. It was so weird.

Andy Follows: 57:48

Anyway, I wouldn't have traded that thing for the world, wouldn't have traded that thing for the world, that thing being what the Yahoo experience, or the Burning, yeah, the Yahoo experience.

Gary Brotman: 57:57

Yeah, that experience, because it was that's when I really understood the power of your network and people. The music match was like that, but it was more familial. It was like a family. This was different. This is like multi-dimensional chess with very bright people and then turning into lifelong relationships. It was a different one, more sophisticated, I guess.

Andy Follows: 58:18

So you got lifelong relationships out of what was at the time quite a complicated, didn't necessarily feel that smooth some of the stuff that was going on and you said it was noticeable to your boss that you were having a time of it. Fascinating case study that you've got. You're launching a product to a demographic who actually haven't got any means of paying for the product. I love that. That's easy to smile at when I have it explained to me like that. At the same time you've got Dave who's got his own horse. He's betting that he's more interested in and what that does to the dynamic. So super.

Gary Brotman: 58:53

And then the way that all works out is so the music luster, the sheen on the whole thing kind of wanes and music becomes part of Yahoo media and it kind of aggregates a little bit and it's less about the specialization. Dave and Rob, the founders leave, my superiors leave and I'd get take that position. And a guy by the name of Ian Rogers, who was one of the guys that was acquired when they bought this open source jukebox software. He became the head of Yahoo music and he was a webmaster for the Beastie Boys definitely not your corporate type in a longer hair, tattoos on the knuckles and a skater, and that's he. And I started to talk.

Gary Brotman: 59:40

And in the background, at the tail end of all this, there was a gentleman by the name of Peter Gohter who was the co-founder of DigiDesign, which built this platform called Pro Tools, and I don't know if you know that, but that was the when the recording industry, music industry, transitioned from analog to digital. The digital was at Pro Tools, so this guy had like total credibility in the music business. He was an investor at a company I'm sorry, blanking on the VC that invested in music match, so he had influence back at music match. He had a guy by the name of Shamal Rana Sinha, like a salt of the earth guy who I haven't seen in years but I consider a very good friend. Shamal became a product manager at music match. Peter and Shamal had an idea for this thing where artists could take the data that we had at music match and turn it into a powerful tool to establish direct relationships with their fans and establish businesses that were direct to fan. And this was during the music match days and we tried to do it. But it didn't fit the business strategy because we were a consumer, we were not artists, so that idea disappeared.

Gary Brotman: 1:00:50

Well, at Yahoo, Shamal got a skunkworks budget to start doing the thing. At Yahoo they called it APOL and Shamal was brewing this thing in the background and then he leaves the company to start this company called Topspin with Peter Gocher funding it. Peter then went on to become a board member at Dolby and this guy's got a lot of credibility in music. But he decides to bootstrap this idea from back at music match. That kind of started to germinate at Yahoo.

Gary Brotman: 1:01:22

Now it was going to be taken out and I started talking to them about a VP of marketing role and just before we were going to do the deal. They stopped and I'm in an all hands meeting at Yahoo. Ian's running it actually it was his direct report, so he's running it in his office and he drops this bomb that he's going to be leaving Yahoo music. And he says he's going to this company called Topspin and he looks at me and winks and he said stick around. And after everybody left he said look, I know you're up for this position, just sit tight. I got to get in there and then give it a couple of weeks and then two weeks later I love Yahoo and I went to go work for Shamal, peter and Ian.

Andy Follows: 1:02:00

That's fantastic and I'm thinking I'm not sure, have you applied for a job? Yeah, since you took your dossier at log. Yeah, I did. Yeah, I've applied for one. Yeah, well, there weren't many. I didn't notice many jobs being applied for, which is very common in these conversations. There's not a lot of people applying for jobs. When I talk to them in their careers, there's a lot of getting to know people, building a good reputation, getting tapped on the shoulder or spotting an opportunity and going for it and people saying, yeah, sure, why not? That's a good fit, you do that. So, yeah, I just want people to know that. I want younger people listening to know that the sort of people we're interviewing here and it's not unusual you don't apply for a lot of jobs.

Gary Brotman: 1:02:47

No, I was never one to jump around either. Like the shortest period of time that I worked anywhere was a topspin. It was a very early stage start. Like Music Match was a successful mid-stage series B funded, I think, c maybe, and topspin was Angel a handful of people it doesn't. I left Yawing for that. That was a high risk but it was totally working in the music business. Like I worked with Eminem's manager, I worked with David Byrne and Peter Gabriel. I launched one of Eminem's records and it was all about helping these guys break from the Apple control of digital downloads and sell other stuff, like sell fan experiences, like go ride on roller coasters with the artists for some fee right, or get a whole music package with posters and t-shirts and vinyl records and superfan sort of stuff.

Andy Follows: 1:03:37

Yeah, so giving some control back to the artists for that. They created this fan base through the creative work they've done and wrestling some of it back into their controls so they can benefit from it.

Gary Brotman: 1:03:48

Yes, the purpose was we were there to help the middle class musician thrive, somebody who can manage their business and they don't have to go busking on the street corner and they can make a healthy living out of their craft and give them a tool platform that they can manage that stuff with and get analytics from it and trade digital downloads for emails and cultivate a fan base that way, and the concept was great. But this was a case study that I also took forward when I became a CEO. Was you really need to have a strong set of values and purpose that you live by? And if you are for the middle class musician and you spend your time, your every waking hour, making sure that the service you provide or the product that you build do it in pursuit of that vision and focus as intently as you can? And we were in the belly of the music business in Santa Monica, with universal records just right down the street and the attraction of working with the bigger artists and the labels who knew that they were gonna have to do some of this stuff and they had budget. It became kind of like heroin and it was kind of a kick too, because you're working with all these great artists, not the middle class musicians, but you're not gonna have a sudden. You're like working with all these artists, these big artists and the product didn't deliver the promise. It was very difficult to use and we were taking money and doing these big programs with the record labels and the big artists and that wasn't what it was supposed to be about.

Gary Brotman: 1:05:16

So confluence of things led it to be very difficult and two years later and I left and yeah, that ended up getting sliced and diced and Ian actually went on to be the CEO of Beats Music, which got bought by Apple, and he went on to other things and I did my first applying for a job or I'd say when I interviewed with Fred, I think I was applying for a job, right, but this one was I'm gonna put my resume into a website and try that out, and I was like, what am I gonna do? And I went all over the place and I ended up. Qualcomm was in San Diego. I knew Qualcomm.

Gary Brotman: 1:05:53

They're a chip company, not at all where I was Like what the hell would I think about? But they had this really cool idea and the job description was about media and somebody who had consumer background. It was a really clever little ad. I said what the hell? And I just submitted the resume and 72 hours later I got a call from recruiting and that led to a number of conversations over the next few weeks and I got the job as a product marketing lead for an incubator arm of Qualcomm, helping them with applications that would deliver value on top of the chips so they could fend off downward price pressure from the OEMs who are buying the chips.

Andy Follows: 1:06:36

Right, so not music, not really close to music now.

Gary Brotman: 1:06:40

Well, actually it was. It was music, but it was actually media. So there's a standard at the time. I don't think it's a standard anymore. It's called DLNA Digital Living Network Alliance, and it was a protocol on top of the UPMP connectivity protocol that allowed you to stream photos and music and videos to devices that were DLNA compliant in the house.

Gary Brotman: 1:07:05

So Qualcomm had bought a company in Poole here in England that had I forgot what the original premise was. It was probably it was an advertising or something, but the head of engineering for this company and the product guy had created this application. They called it SKIFTA, s-k-i-f-t-a. I didn't know what the name was, but I didn't really care what they were doing with something kind of cool Android application. Take your photos and sling them up to a television or music to a Sonos device. It's like, yeah, I dig that, I like that stuff that works for me and I didn't really think twice about it, all kinds of stuff. I look back and say this whole thing was doomed to fail as the way it was going, but I had an opportunity to learn something and get into a big company and get a little bit more security and I could do something. I enjoyed.

Andy Follows: 1:07:58

So it was definitely. It was a positive move as far as you were concerned. You were still excited. You were something you're curious about, Yep.

Gary Brotman: 1:08:05

And it was still music and media related, not music. There that project turned into a real product. It got picked up by a business unit. There's a company called Atheros that makes Wi-Fi chips that Qualcomm had just purchased, and they had some smart people, one from Apple that understood Apple's AirPlay and their Wi-Fi distribution. He was a Wi-Fi guy for Apple and they're like this is like we need something like this, like we could build a Wi-Fi audio module that competes with AirPlay and have the music services and the application and everything else. We should do this. So they internally acquired this and I moved into that team and I learned all kinds of stuff about Wi-Fi and we built this, built a spec module that had a Wi-Fi chip on it.

Gary Brotman: 1:08:48

We were trying to get music services like Rhapsody and Spotify to play ball with us, but we couldn't get the synchronization of the audio in the house to work, trying to build it ourselves, and we ended up buying a company called Orb. They had a fantastic sync algorithm and they had this APK, this little application plugin thing that would allow companies like Rhapsody and Spotify to basically control our devices, if we did it right. So we branded this thing All Play. It was an anchor tenant in Qualcomm's IoT strategy. They had a protocol called All Join and All Play was the lighthouse for this connected home and that support all the way up to the CEO. And we built this module, this thing that worked as good as Sonos and we were even selling the Wi-Fi chips to Sonos and we're building the platform that competes with them, and they were none too happy about that. They kind of you're poking us in the eye, why are you doing this? But we were kind of small, experimental, but we ended up selling this thing to Panasonic. They launched All Play Speakers.

Gary Brotman: 1:09:54

Monster, the music company they did the same thing and you can mix all these different brands together and synchronize them using the All Play protocol. So it was brand agnostic, do whatever you want. And we had Rhapsody. In the Rhapsody app, the All Play icon would show up and you could use that icon to then open up in group speakers in the house and stream directly from Rhapsody. Spotify ended up making that part of their strategy. They did their own called Spotify Connect, which today, if you use Spotify in the house, they do the same sort of thing, but we were making that possible for any music service. I think we had 14, so different music services that were part of that, and maybe 10 OEMs that shipped the Wi-Fi, the All Play module, and so that was me like the music thing, and that was the first half of my career at Qualcomm. And there was another pivot. I don't know if I should stop for a commercial. No, I'm just talking.

Andy Follows: 1:10:54

No, sorry, I'm just on the edge of my seat and I can't believe I said my question about not music this time, then Clearly.

Gary Brotman: 1:11:03

I can't bury a lot of music and I even use that.

Andy Follows: 1:11:05

I mean, I go on Spotify, I got Sonos by also go on the Spotify thing and I didn't even know what I'm doing, but it's there, so that's.

Gary Brotman: 1:11:11

Sonos. Sonos is great, great user experience. The guys at Spotify were great partners. They had the muscle, but they were great partners and I worked with them for a year and a half to get them to play ball and somehow we managed to do it. Are you familiar with CSR? I don't know what was that. Csr is a Bluetooth company that Qualcomm acquired back in 2014. So if you have Bluetooth in your phone, in your car, chances are it's got a CSR Bluetooth radio and their Aptex software.

Gary Brotman: 1:11:42

When I was doing the Wi-Fi audio stuff at the tail end of it, the company was in. It was on shaky ground. They were being sued by the SEC. Then the Chinese government was calling the monopoly and demanding a billion dollars in ransom and the fundamentals weren't all that great. And if you're on a fringe on the fringe in something that is not core to their business, which their business is all about 5G or, at the time, 4g but connectivity they knew modems and they had an application processor called Snapdragon that had a modem built in. If you weren't really close to that business, you're probably on the bubble or you're going to be cut out if the company has to contract. But they had bought CSR and CSR had their own Wi-Fi audio platform and I had the opportunity to either stick with the company in the audio space, working for one of two SVPs who are one's an incumbent, one's from CSR totally different strategies, offering me two different positions Like I'm not going to do this.

Gary Brotman: 1:12:43

I've been on the road for 60% of my time selling the all-play stuff and the last thing I'm going to do is come here to Cambridge and deal with this politics. It's not going to be fun, but it did come once in 2014. One day I spoke in London, did a music thing, and then I came out here and stayed one night in Cambridge and it was cold and it was dreary and it was wet and it was kind of depressing for me. It's like I wasn't familiar with how this all worked here and I went back home. I'm like, yeah, I was there for a day and I'm glad I'm not going to stick with this. I gave these guys the all-play stuff and they can add it to their Bluetooth portfolio Done. And then I ended up jumping into the Snapdragon chipset group with my old boss to pivot, to start looking at deep learning Right.

Andy Follows: 1:13:33

So there was then Snapdragon. First time we've mentioned deep learning, so I'm going to buckle up now as we get into the complicated AI stuff. That, to me, is still. I'm fighting it, I guess.

Gary Brotman: 1:13:50

Don't fight it. So this is when the imposter showed back up. I don't think about application processors. I learned about Wi-Fi audio and Wi-Fi hardware and that sort of frequency band, but I still didn't really know that inside and out. I wasn't like at the technology level. I was at the benefit level and that's where I've always been. But this is a different animal and my boss says, hey, look, you can stay with the all-play stuff or you can come with me.

Gary Brotman: 1:14:16

I'm going into the Snapdragon chipset group to go work for this guy, keith Gresson, who was the SVP of application processor technologies. So two different product groups. For Snapdragon One is the technology guys who manage the different processor cores and all the assets, the technology, and then another one that just builds the SOC, the system on a chip, the actual Snapdragon, and they package it and they sell it. So Keith was the innovation guy and I had not met him. But side Chowdhury, who was my boss, also another Burning man fan, we all have the same affinity for electronic music. There's like that thread still was there regardless, even in the most cooperative environments. He vouched for me. He told Keith, I want to bring somebody with me and I just I have to bring somebody that I trust that he and I built all play together. So he brought me in and never met Keith, and Keith told me later that I was the first guy that he ever brought on his team that he'd never talked to, but Keith had a knack for looking at things that were going to be differentiated. He was a really good marketer too.

Gary Brotman: 1:15:17

Chips up and down understood math in the ways that I could never imagine, which AI is just all about math, by the way. Don't let anybody tell you any different. Like every algorithm, it's just math. It's an equation to do something and it's just new software. Don't think about the robots and the Armageddon and all that stuff. That is great for our headlines and it's great for controlling people who are fearful. It can do some heavy-duty stuff, but humans actually make it to heavy-duty stuff. It doesn't do it on its own. Anyway, keith had this. He was seeing this movement in the background. He was a math guy and he had done AI stuff in computer science when he was in uni.

Gary Brotman: 1:15:56

Qualcomm was sitting on a mountain of really interesting AI technology. So software ways to take neural networks, the deep learning stuff, and have them run on a phone to where they can do things like help you become a better photographer or identify text and stuff like with math. There's all this stuff is here and it's been here for years and we just don't think about it. But taking deep learning and putting it on a phone, well, that's the thing that would kill a battery. The guys who did the old computer vision at Qualcomm they're like that's never going to work. That's terrible stuff. Then Keith's like I don't think so. My job was to work with the corporate R&D team, who is fighting the battle with the commercial side, and help bring some of the stuff out of R&D and operationalize it and put it on Snapdragon chip so that the Snapdragon chip can offer these experiences that couldn't be offered before. So this is 2014. Back then, I have an app that was trained.

Gary Brotman: 1:17:02

The deep learning model was trained to identify different types of things. It was actually trained around food, so it could identify pizza and sushi and hamburgers. I would demonstrate this to analysts and to press and show them. I didn't even have real food. I had pictures of food. It's like camera just to show you. Hey, it recognizes that it's food. Back then that was really amazing stuff. This is the early days where you could do some of this stuff and the performance was really great and you have the data and the compute powers there. All these algorithms have been around since the 80s. The guys had built all this stuff or the Godfathers of deep learning or AI. They built this stuff but they really wasn't unleashed until that time period where the algorithms are ready to go.

Andy Follows: 1:17:50

This might get cut out for being too stupid. Yeah, no, go ahead. What maths is happening? You point your phone at a picture of a pizza. What maths is helping me make the connections?

Gary Brotman: 1:18:06

There's a big threat of linear algebra in all of this. But what the algorithm is doing? The algorithm is trained. It's trained to identify pixels and then relationships of pixels with edges and shapes. It expands out to then colors. Does it do colors? There's color involved, but it's a combination of that. There's RGB, there is color, but it doesn't know what it sees.

Andy Follows: 1:18:33

No, it just knows that it looks very similar to this set of numbers over here.

Gary Brotman: 1:18:38

Yes, and there's these different weights and activations inside the algorithm where it'll go from layer to layer, from pixel to edge, to shape, and at each stage, the math that says we should go to this node versus that node and you get another layer, and it's math that's telling you to do this, so it discards whole chunks of possibilities.

Andy Follows: 1:18:58

It says, right, it's definitely not a cauliflower, it's definitely not a dog.

Gary Brotman: 1:19:04

Yes, and you could see the way we instrumented it. You could see the numbers. The term is inference. So there's two sides of machine learning. There's the training of the model and then there's the inference. And inference is just the model doing its job of trying to find the pattern.

Gary Brotman: 1:19:19

It carries in deep learning and the stuff that we do here with the type of machine learning. It's not a common term but it's the same principle, Like it's trying to decide how confident it is, that it is something that it sees and you would see the different things that it would guess and the scores, the percentage of accuracy or the confidence level would be at the top and it would move because every time it does these inferences and the faster you can do inference, the closer you're going to get, and there's a whole separate part of that, but you could see that if it was going to be pizza, pizza would be 98% and then the next thing, the rest of it would all move every time it do an inference pass, because it just kind of makes sense of shapes and shading and all this stuff. But the thing that it knew and that was trained against and it knew really well that usually ranked pretty high.

Andy Follows: 1:20:08

Thank you for indulging that rather basic question. What kind of phone do you have? Iphone, whatever the latest iPhone 14.

Gary Brotman: 1:20:16

I was loaded with this stuff. Yeah, you do these night shots where you take a picture at night and all of a sudden it creates pixels that didn't see. It's an upres process and that's just that's. That's AI, that's deep learning, that is stuff on the device that's been doing this for a while.

Andy Follows: 1:20:32

I love how it makes the pictures so good. Oh, I agree. So I didn't mean to take as too far off the career track and I'm not going to be the guy who champions helping the world to understand deep learning Someone else can do that but I appreciate you indulging me there. So 2014,. You were showing people this chip, pointing at pizzas and wowing them with what could be done, and it was all happening, but it wasn't ready to go mainstream, like we're seeing now.

Gary Brotman: 1:21:00

Well, it hadn't shipped on the chip yet, it hadn't shipped in Snapdragon yet, and so I didn't have any background in AI, obviously like other than the music recommendation algorithm, which was more of experiential thing than it was like technology, and I also didn't understand much at all about building a chip, and this was the one of the more prominent times the imposter came to the table. Because here I am in this new group of these hardware engineers, these electrical engineers who are the blue angels of the Air Force in the United States, and I forgot what the version is.

Gary Brotman: 1:21:34

The red arrows, yeah, the red arrows. So these are like the red arrows of hardware, like these guys know the stuff that you just so that was to me coming into this world. I could never understand this world of routing and transfer on a chip and gates and all the stuff that go into it. It's like this crazy, crazy thing. So I'm in this environment where I know nothing about that. But what I did know is that you had these user experiences that were going to be impactful and that there were competitors to Qualcomm and suppliers to competitors who were already working on the stuff. They were already trying to find ways to wall off processing capability and certain levels of precision to support in the chips so that these algorithms could run well, and you knew what applications were coming. You knew what was happening. My job was to convince folks that you need to have this software, at the very least support it on the chip. Don't ship it with the chip because you want it to be a side loaded APK. You want it to be something that is not stuck with the three year timeline of the hardware, that can be transformed, portable, updated and everything else. But you had to have this capability. So we started off with just the application and the SDK, just software, and they asked me to be the spokesperson for it. So I would go to the press events every year singing the praises of the Snapdragon chip and the great stuff you can do with it. And then there was hardware, this little processing element, this technology that could process these deep learning algorithms far more efficiently than a CPU or a graphics processing unit or a digital signal processor, which were the primary processors on the chip. This is completely different. It was designed to do the math for the deep learning algorithms more efficiently than all the rest, and my job was to try to figure out how to sell this IP to these amazing, brilliant people that I do. It was in a totally different league and I couldn't speak their language, but I had to convince them to carve out a one square millimeter space on the premium chip. Mind you, this is like beachfront property on the chip right. Nobody gives you a square mill for something that is sight unseen and you already have problems with the computer vision guys saying this is BS. But I'm trying to convince the folks that this is why they need to do it and, like the head of chipset engineering and even the CTO. Like who's this guy? He doesn't speak the same language as us, but he's telling us this stuff. Should we listen? Fortunately, keith was you know, he was the guy championing it and there was enough support, but that hardware didn't get into the generation that it should have gotten in because they had some other stuff that did okay.

Gary Brotman: 1:24:16

And then we call the software the Snapdragon neural processing engine. I was like this is the engine that makes all these processors work together. And then the chip piece, the processing component. We called it the neural processing unit, an NPU. Well, that got out. And then Huawei launched their NPU and they called it an NPU that year and we ended up coming out the next year. We didn't call it an NPU. China is a great place to learn about all kinds of competitive stuff, so, yeah, so we launched that thing and then I did, for we called it the AI engine and I was responsible for four generations of that and the spokesmanship and the storytelling and being up on these big stages with massive screens and talking to the press and telling them the story. I got to do that in a different way than I've done before. I love it. It was like so much fun.

Andy Follows: 1:25:07

Okay, I'm thinking you're taking people on a journey. A few years ago it was 2000 people taking them on a journey at a Raven ballast. You're now taking people on a journey about this NPU or whatever the new name.

Gary Brotman: 1:25:21

Yeah, it's like this is your world. This is how a mobile phone is going to be more of an experiential thing and less about a phone. And it was a lot of fun. I was empowered to do a lot. I was the head of AI strategy for product planning when I left there and I was the AI guy I guess that's what it put it. It was a great pivot. I didn't know if it was going to be the right thing. It turned out to be the best thing and I've been doing it since 2014.

Gary Brotman: 1:25:45

But with anything, everybody else wants a piece of that and I'm not a hardware guy. I want things to move faster and being down at the metal and enabling user experiences that are up in the stratosphere. I was too far away for me when I've been at the consumer base, so I was looking around and then the guy who taught me everything I knew about deep learning at Qualcomm and R&D went on to Microsoft to be the head of their AI fund at the M12 venture group at Microsoft and he turned me on to this. Oh, he was also an electronic music guy. He turned me on.

Gary Brotman: 1:26:21

His name is Samir Kumar, the most brilliant strategic technologist I've ever met in my life ever Like amazing how he can thread all of that together stuff that still makes my head spin. The guy is amazing. Every time I have a chance to talk to him, he's a friend, but being in his presence and talking to him is like it fills my bucket. I feel so energized and he turned me on to this startup that I'm currently at, and it was under a different name. The people were great. They're Ex-Nokia guys, people at Qualcomm knew him and I found backchannel ways to validate great investors like Amadeus Capital, herman Housers, our board of directors. He was a founder of ARM, like the crown jewel of the Cambridge Texan or maybe in the UK, one of them. Great investors, great story. It was anti-deep learning. It was like we're like the little data guys, we're not the big data guys, and it was compelling enough for me to move my family here from San.

Andy Follows: 1:27:19

Diego, and we know what you already thought about Cambridge, so that needed to be compelling.

Gary Brotman: 1:27:25

I mean, I had to eat so much pro. We came out here literally. We came out here on June 28th of 2019, like almost four years to the day for the interview and for them to see it here and it was great, Like the sun was out and it was warm. It wasn't what it was like when I came here and we had very serious conversations. Could this work for us? And the political and social dynamics in the United States, like stuff going on there. I didn't want my son to really have like this myopic worldview, If you could have the opportunity to have a broader one here. So there was a lot. There were a lot of factors that made it worth uprooting, giving up a perfectly good job, RSU's, a nice house for the pool and coming here to Cambridge and trying it out. It's supposed to be a two year adventure Four years ago. Yeah, it's like six months before COVID. Oh, you don't bank on that sort of no.

Andy Follows: 1:28:18

So tell us about Secondm Mind ind I know you haven't mentioned it. I know it's called Secondm ind now. So what do you do?

Gary Brotman: 1:28:25

If you're familiar with the term software defined vehicle. What the car is today and becoming more of, it's a vehicle that's more about software and agile development principles and the experiences that the car can deliver versus the hardware and waterfall development and powertrain centric, you know, like 10, seven to 10 year monolithic platforms that are inflexible. Our job is we're the optimization engine for the software defined vehicle. We are today our cloud based platform.

Gary Brotman: 1:28:56

I vacillate between talking to investors about a platform and talking to customers about this optimization engine, but its first deployment is helping engineers at the prototype phase for first prototypes of hardware in the loop calibrate the control systems for engines and motors, brakes and transmissions. It's a general parameter optimizer in the cloud so it can scale very well and it doesn't know what's on the bench. It just knows that there's parameters and constraints and it has to find the relationships between them with a whole lot less data normally 80% less data than what the tools do today and that data savings reduces the amount of time that you have to experiment to meet the objective for the performance of that system and at the end of it, the optimization engine provides values that get flashed into the lookup table that is in the firmware of the chip that tells the system what to do. So the motor has to operate different modes depending on conditions and we basically help that motor operate in those modes more efficiently.

Andy Follows: 1:29:59

What's the motor, Gary? Like an electric motor.

Gary Brotman: 1:30:02

Like an electric motor in a vehicle yeah, like the motor in a vehicle. So the motor and inverter, which the responsibility is to utilize the energy from the battery as effectively as possible and make that battery last. So our job is to calibrate and help the OEMs calibrate the control system for the motor and inverter for that utilization. And there's different objectives that the OEM might want, the carmaker might want, but that's a clean cut. Use case of battery is 30% of the vehicle's weight, 30% of the cost and it's like precious metals and extracted from the ground that should not go back in any time soon. So if we can help optimize that, then we've done our job and we're also helping those who are still making petrol engines, like Mazda or the customer, minimize the thrash and the investment in calibrating those components as well. Like internal combustion engines, as much as we want them to be gone, they will be around in hybrid vehicles for the next 15, 20 years and we're not shying away from that. We wanna help minimize the impact and help maximize emissions control and fuel efficiency and try to reduce the investment in that so that, like Mazda and others, can shift that investment to all the electrification, connectivity, the services that are gonna be over the top that are delivered to the vehicle, like what you delivered to your phone today. Like your phone and your listeners can't see it. But your phone put wheels on it and that's your car, but it has a billion lines of code running in it and it has precious cargo me and you and our families and also people, humans on the road. So it has to do a lot of things with a billion lines of code and 25 gigabytes of data an hour that it produces. The complexity in that environment is off the charts and what we're about is to minimize that complexity.

Gary Brotman: 1:31:51

We love complexity, like we complexity for lunch, I like to say, and it's a hard job, but it's an engineering specific job. It's a very technical job, but even the most technical engineers want to have something that is more efficient and something that they understand. Like AI is not something you understand, it's a threat, it's complex and confusing. So you have to make it easy, understandable. It has to explain itself and it has to respect your intelligence as an engineer, because there's years of domain expertise built up in the minds of engineers and automotive and in other industries but you have to be a way to leverage that and it's not captured in the data that's used to train these algorithms and do the math. So part of adoption and part of efficacy and finding your optimal result is to blend those two things together, which is really at the core of what Secondm ind's about Like we're the second mind of the engineer. There's a reason why we're branded that way.

Andy Follows: 1:32:45

Yeah, I like that. It all fell into place then when you said that. So helping the OEMs make decisions faster bring efficiency to what they're doing, reducing the cost of what they're doing, recognizing that we are on a shift, although it's gonna take some time, as you say. So at least let's make the most of the decisions they're making now, help them to get to those decisions more quickly and more efficiently, but don't lose sight of the domain expertise that's in the heads of the engineers you have. Let's make this a joint initiative, if you like. So.

Gary Brotman: 1:33:22

Today, whether it's early stage concept of the vehicle with very coarse level simulations that we can optimize With less data. Yeah, with less data, the engineer has more and better choices to play with at that early stage design and subsequent stages. We think we can compress two years down to a matter of months from design and development and the first prototype and then what should happen is that there's no errors they have to deal with, so no rework, which is cost and time is why it takes so long to build a car. We can virtualize all that and minimize that investment in the old and help to shift investment to the new. We actually are doing that today. But ultimately it's a concept, vehicle concept to customer enable it, like when we can help the OEMs continuously optimize things like the electric motor and utilization of energy from the battery. If we have the data from the vehicle and it can be software of the updated, like Tesla is today, like it is a virtuous cycle from data in design, calibration and rinse, repeat. It's pretty fascinating. It's great time to be an automotive.

Andy Follows: 1:34:30

It is. It is and great to have had AI in your job title in 2014 and to have that level of experience behind you now and to be able to drop in at any point from concept to consumer, eat complexity, deliver, efficiency and speed. Thank you, love it. Yeah, yeah, my pleasure. Wish you all the best with it, gary, is there anything I haven't asked you that means I've missed out on something that you think, oh, he should have asked me that.

Gary Brotman: 1:34:59

I think it's just the last chapter of the imposter, the visit from the imposter, although I don't think that it was as prevalent this time. But when I joined the company, different brand name focused on three different industries lots of exploration, very little exploitation, very little focus and discipline around product development. And I was hired as a VP of product and marketing and that first year was very difficult to change the dynamics of research I mean real academic research, leading edge stuff like stuff that I still to this day makes my brain hurt, and a consulting sort of mindset where we go out and see what problems it can solve in supply chain and finance. And then automotive came in later.

Gary Brotman: 1:35:40

But my first year here, covid was one thing that was certainly wow, but you never know what you're gonna get with a startup and there's so many different great ingredients. But it was difficult to find footing for the company, to build something, something of value and something that you could show delivered results. And, long story short, after a year of that there was a shift and a relationship between the board and the prior founder where a leadership change was something that made sense for the company and try to find another CEO that could take it to the next stage and in startups that's the way, like founder CEOs have very good talents and like you could be an evangelist and you can get it to a certain point and raise money and then somebody else might come in and scale it or take it in a different direction. It's hard when you're the prior founder actually brought me here and to this day, I still have this really weird feeling because we haven't really talked.

Gary Brotman: 1:36:33

But I ended up being asked to run the company and I've never been a CEO. But okay, I'll do it. It's the silver lining to COVID and bringing my family here and what a great challenge. I wish I'd done it 10 years ago and I'm not an engineer and I'm dealing with AI and I wasn't set out to being a CEO. But all the stuff that I was talking about, like working with people and understanding that side of it and the leadership angle versus management, like all these things came crashing down and this like Blitzkrieg of, like cramming for a test, like you're studying on the job and would you like to do this, like yeah, and the first person I called was Fred Cook, love it. And he said do it. He said do it, yes.

Andy Follows: 1:37:14

Mic drop, mic drop. Oh, so you're there. You're storytelling a phrase you used, I love, earlier in the conversation operate. You've always operated at the level of the benefits. I think you can't go wrong if you're doing that in terms of taking people with you, whether they're customers or team members, and it's all come together. And Fred Cook was the first person you phoned and he said do it, you're ready.

Gary Brotman: 1:37:42

My boy From one unconventional CEO to another. That was literally as like I couldn't think of anybody else to call and I, yes, we'll leave it at that Because it'll just it'll turn into like another 25 minutes or 30 minutes. It's like. Andy, I gotta say like this has been a great conversation. I cannot thank you enough. It has been rewarding.

Andy Follows: 1:38:06

Thank you, gary. It's been immense for me. You've taken me on a whistle stop whirlwind tour of an industry the music industry, the music tech industry that I have no real experience of. I've heard some amazing things on the way and you've shared openly about the challenges you faced as well. You know this imposter thing which is so prevalent, and you know risks potentially holding people back who could be making great contributions. So thank you for being authentic about that and for everything. I'm pleased to have met you and I wish you all the best, with second mind and for the rest of your time in the UK enjoying. We have fantastic weather, don't we?

Gary Brotman: 1:38:45

It's sunny today. It's like there's plenty of it. That's just not enough. So thank you so much. Thank you, andy. I look forward to chatting with you again. I'd love to keep the conversation going. We will Thank you. ["the Story of Andy"].

Andy Follows: 1:39:03

You've been listening to Career View Mirror with me, andy Follows. I hope you enjoyed hearing Gary's story as much as I did and found some helpful points to reflect on. Some key moments that stood out for me were him starting out as a professional music DJ and when he had the meeting with Fred Cook and he took the dossier of information and Fred was impressed and gave him a job and, like many guests, he was not applying for many jobs along the way. After that, when he headed out to LA and was serious about making it work. Then he built a position for himself with connections across the digital music ecosystem. I found it exciting to meet someone who's navigated a path through some of the most interesting developments in the digitization of music that have affected all of us as consumers of music, and I love how music is a thread throughout the story and he told me that he still does occasional DJ sets and how he's now bringing all his experience with AI from the music industry to help engineers in our own automotive industry. And when he got the CEO job, the first person he called was Fred Cook. Love that. You'll find Gary's contact details in our show notes to this episode If you enjoy listening to my guest stories.

Andy Follows: 1:40:13

Please could you do me a favor and share an episode with someone you lead parent or mentor or a friend you think might also benefit? Thank you to Gary for joining me for our conversation, thank you to our sponsors for this episode Ask Consulting and Aqual Eye and thank you to the Career View Mirror team, without whom we wouldn't be able to share our guest life and career stories. And, above all, thank you to you for listening. ["your Everything Got Neat"].