[00:00:28] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to the First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner.

Today I am lucky enough to be joined by Terence Bennett. He is the CEO of Dream Factory. One of my favorite names for any company. Terence. my friend. How are you?

[00:00:39] Terence: Hey Jay. Really good to be here. I always joke, either we sell pillows or sleeping pills, a dream factory. Not really sure which one.

[00:00:47] Jay: I like either one. where did the name come from? Let's start there. I.

[00:00:51] Terence: It was actually, it was inherited. So, dream Factory was inherited from, the original team who built the product. and it was actually used for a number of different products over the course of years. If you go on archive.org on the way back machine, you can find some of the old websites in there.

They're definitely a blast in the past, like, you know, circa 1998. but yeah.

[00:01:12] Jay: I love that. I love that it wasn't Dream Factory, the name of some band too, or some,

[00:01:17] Terence: Oh man, it pops up everywhere. It's a blue company in New Jersey that, called Dream Factory. There's, yeah.

[00:01:24] Jay: All right. So I mean, it's a great name. I love it. Well, tell me about you. Where did you grow up and did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur? I.

[00:01:30] Terence: yeah. I, so I grew up originally outside New York and then Florida. and my parents were actually. Kind of in their own right. I think of them as sort of entrepreneurs. they were artists ended up,in the sort of jewelry manufacturing space and then, and then started their own business.

that's when we moved to Florida. and I always joke that when your parents are hippies, my mom literally went to Woodstock in 69. how do you rebel? Well, you become, you join the military and become an intelligence officer, which is exactly what I did. but you know, the military. You don't think of as a place that, where entrepreneurs would thrive, but they kind of do in their own right.

And I'm happy to get into that later. But, there's definitely an entrepreneurial aspect to being a junior officer and just, you know, having to get things done, figure things, how to get things done, you know.

[00:02:13] Jay: a little more about that. I mean, you don't, I mean, I would definitely not Military with creativity or like the ability to express oneself or build something or whatever. How do you kind of connect those two?

[00:02:26] Terence: So as a junior officer, specifically in the Navy, right at a high level. In the Navy, the tradition is right. You would, the commanding officer would be given a task, a mission, and you know, off go the lines, the ropes, if you will, and the ship sails away. There's no satellite comms, there's no, like, you're, here's a task, go get it done.

Right. Which in many ways isn't that different than business like. go grow a company, right? Go find customers. and that's where a lot of the kinda the navy culture comes from. But, I mean, here's just a story I was tasked with. I was the embarked intelligence officer on a small ship off the west of, off, off the coast of West Africa.

We had a bunch of equipment on board. We'll get into specifics. and a bunch of it got seawater in it. And electronics don't like seawater. And I had a mission, which was to be able to collect a bunch of intelligence and my systems were down. So go to the team and I say, well, what, like, what are our workarounds?

I have some back and forth. One of the guys says, you know, I, I have an s connect, SS cable connector on this, transceiver. If we could run that down to the laptop. I think we might be in business. So we went and got essentially, you know, borrowed a van, a from base and drove out into a village in rural Ghana.

And, and drove around until we found a, audio supply store about 200 feet of, of SS cable, like audio cable brought back to the ship and we rigged the whole thing up and we were live, we were go, we were, it all worked. So. you know, there's, if you ask people in the service, you'll hear these kinds of stories and that's the kind of just get it done however, way is necessary of attitude.

Often technically, 'cause we live in a technical world, right? Technical equipment,that the military, that's kind of attitude and mentality. The military, especially the Navy, I think can be.

[00:04:17] Jay: Well, thank you for your service, by the way. and, yeah, no, you think of the military as kind of just like doing it all right the first time. You know? And I think that there's like, like you're saying, there's this whole I. Just like anything, you know, like everything from the surface looks like it's great and they're executing and everything, and it's just like, you're right.

I mean, the same thing with every business, right On the surface it looks and then underneath everything is just like absolute chaos. So I love that connection. So talk to me about your first business that you ever started. Did you ever own? Did you ever did, is it, I mean, is it dream factor or is there something before this?

[00:04:49] Terence: So, I did run a small business in high school. I was, I was a kid going door to door doing tech support. This is back before, I mean, I aged myself back before, geek Squad. but it was,it was actually very good money. you know, for what it's worth. I don't think really, I don't think that really counts.

when I was in DC actually, still in service, couldn't really start a business on my own, not in the traditional sense, but I, I was bored. I ended up at a hackathon, focused on schools in dc. Inadvertently starting a nonprofit, with a bunch of teachers. I was kinda the techie. this is like around 2015, it was called Capital Experience Lab.

I helped sort of run the, kind of the backend system stuff and, you know, we meet up like a few times a year and do like. kind of deep dives like brainstorming sessions and whatnot. But ultimately, you know, it was, I moved away and I was busy with a lot of other stuff. Started a family.

capital Experience Lab has actually turned into a charter school in DC so it, it lives on, in, in a very cool way. but, yeah, it was, it felt like a business at the time, you know, I was super excited. We're trying to figure out how to go from zero to one around this idea of, creating experiential.

Sort of learning activities for public school students in DC and and you know, we got off and running first of the summer program, then after school program, and then a charter school.

[00:06:03] Jay: Wow. Love that. So, so what was the fast forward to the, to dream factory? I mean, you mentioned it was a product company and now I know you got just gotta do a lot in the enterprise API space. Like how,

[00:06:14] Terence: Yeah.

[00:06:14] Jay: what, how did you get to that point?

[00:06:17] Terence: So when I got out, I joined, Google, first in the cloud team and then on the cybersecurity kind of red teaming side. I thought I wanted to go into cybersecurity, and I quickly realized that, cybersecurity is largely around, either you're deeply technical and you're like a sm around like hunting hackers.

Or red teaming being a hacker, or you're kind of in the program management, like auditing space. And I, it just didn't feel like a fit for me and my personality. and so I really had the itch to go to the startup side. And so I left and I first joined a small company called Team Password, kind of on the op side.

and that went really well and I sort of pivoted from that into Dream Factory. So, Yeah, first in ops role, and then into,I took over leadership.

[00:06:57] Jay: What? What about your personality? Didn't align with cybersecurity, like with those couple things.

[00:07:06] Terence: Yeah, for sure. so I am, I'm quite dyslexic. dyslexia is a poorly understood, un unfortunately, condition. You know, I think. There's a bit of a spectrum on, with anything around dyslexia, but, the way I sort of explain dyslexia is, is that most of the world kind of operates in a very kinda linear thinking approach.

think of like the rules to like a card game, versus I think dyslexia, and dyslexic thinking is largely, a set of strengths around lateral thinking. and a lot of dyslexic people, seem to thrive in a lot of, kind of non-traditional, in intelligence areas, right. one of the, one of the models of intelligence is there's like nine types of intelligence.

You've got, like, when you think of sort of traditional, kinda like reading, writing, there's like mathematical intelligence, there's spatial reasoning, there's, storytelling. and I am not. Great with sort of strict systems and adhering to systems and applying systems. So actually, frankly, this stuff AI is phenomenal at are the things I am horrible at and I really dislike and

[00:08:08] Jay: you learn, how did you know that? Like how did you learn that about yourself enough to kind of shape your career around it? Like, how did you, I mean, how did

[00:08:15] Terence: yeah.

[00:08:15] Jay: identify like, I'm better at this than this?

[00:08:18] Terence: It's a phenomenal question. So I'm really thankful that Google has a huge network of what they call employee resource groups. And for me, joining Dyslexia Group ended up being this like huge kind of opportunity for self exploration and. Self discovery around dyslexia and like, what does that really mean?

And it all started 'cause I was trying to get access to Grammarly, right? Like I knew I was dyslexic and I knew I'm really bad at grammar and I need this tool. Like I use this tool all the time, every day, and I couldn't get access to it. And so then turned into this like, advocacy thing where like, I need Grammarly to function, right?

and I got really involved with the group. And then, outta that, you know, I ended up. Researching a ton about dyslexia to try and kind of build the argument back. That was unsuccessful, but I ended up learning a lot about myself and there's a phenomenal amount of research out there. You just, it's like highly academic and you wouldn't discover it unless you were like really looking for it.

So.

[00:09:10] Jay: I'm sensing like a community network kind of theme with you. you know, it seems like, you know, the nonprofit and, you know, the Grammarly, the dyslexic group. Like, it seems like you understand the power of these collective groups and like the networking and the ecosystem that's kind of around it.

How have you, or do you apply that to your business today?

[00:09:36] Terence: that's an interesting question. Yeah. I, you know, we're a small team, you know, 10 employees, So I do really work hard to build a comradery, a team, work based kinda mentality and almost like a family kind of dynamic. I think a lot of it for me around trust, no one wakes up first thing in the morning saying like, I'm gonna be a dirt bag.

I'm gonna get by doing absolutely as little as possible. No.

[00:09:59] Jay: people do. I think some people do. I know enough people that I think there's no way that they act the way they act if they don't think that in the morning. But anyway, yeah, you're probably right.

[00:10:07] Terence: well, you know, everyone's operating on, on this sort of spectrum of capabilities right? In different ways. but I think a lot of people are just kind of beat down by life and they end up just kind of like reducing themselves to this kind of minimum level of functionality that they can get away with.

And they don't wake up with the intent of doing the bare minimum. but they also don't wake up with the intent of trying their hardest perhaps. Right. and being a winner. And I think it comes down to leadership in a lot of ways, right? Getting to know your people. Getting to a place where you can inspire them, that you know them in a level and a depth where you can find the projects that you know are gonna inspire them to show up and put in their all.

And you're not gonna give 'em the projects that beat 'em down. Right? Like my point about cybersecurity, like the last thing on earth I want is to run a checklist. It's just soul crushing to me. There's some people out there who love checklists. My wife's in compliance. That's essentially checklists, right?

she's often writing them. so, you know, that's leadership is like knowing your people. Understanding your people and their strengths and un and their personalities so you can get the best outta them every single day. And, I mean that, that to me is like, that's about, that's really like leadership and people, and ultimately community.

It's all kind of the same conversation.

[00:11:26] Jay: I love that. me about Dream Factory, man. Where did you come into the mix? What

[00:11:31] Terence: Yeah.

[00:11:31] Jay: today? You know, where, what's the dream? The dream factory story?

[00:11:35] Terence: yeah, so Dream Factory is, the repo is actually coming up on 10 years old. It's a really cool product. that's kind of been through a lot of different iterations 'cause it's a, just a very different way of thinking about API integrations. if for those out there that are kind of familiar with APIs and how you'd go about building them, right?

You typically kind of work with requirements of like, what do I need this thing to do? And I'm gonna work my way backwards through like building open API specs and, and then ultimately to the data, right? we do the opposite. We kind of assume that organizations have a data model that they like and it works, and they've got a schema that works.

And so we're gonna actually expose all of those tables, user stored procedures as potential endpoints, and then the administrator, the user can go in and identify exactly what they want to expose, what kind of access, read only, or full crut or whatever. Then, and then like layer on the necessary security around auth or keys or, you know, rate limiting logging, auditing, monitoring, that kind of stuff.

And, this, you know, as a tool just got me really excited because it's such a, it's such a radically different way of thinking about integrations and soft software integration specifically. and coming from the military, actually I worked sort of IT systems. For large parts of my time in the Navy, like this is exactly what they need.

Right? Integrations are often a long pole in the tent and are this huge barrier to getting data where it needs to be. As an intelligence officer specifically,getting all the data in one place in real time so you can start to inform the models and inform systems is huge, right? And so a lot of the work we're doing is around public sector defense, because it's just, it's a huge opportunity.

[00:13:12] Jay: Love it. well, who was your first customer?

[00:13:16] Terence: So, so we inherited a, a fair amount of customers, right. But,

[00:13:21] Jay: buy the company? Sorry, lemme take one step back. Did you

[00:13:24] Terence: yeah. Yeah.

[00:13:24] Jay: Did you, how did you kind of take over at the helm?

[00:13:27] Terence: So, so we're actually owned by a parent company called Xenon. And so I was brought in by them to, to run it for, you know, first on the op side. Then as leadership, Xenon is sort of what you call like a micro cap, firm that buys specifically B2B developer tools. And so there's a huge kind of knowledge base within that group around how to do this and how to do it well, and a, all of our best ideas are coming from.

Those folks and those advisors around, you know, where the opportunities are, where we should focus our attention. but yeah. to answer your question, my first customer, this is sort of the point, and I didn't actually, I should have gone back and actually looked at the data, but one of the ones that's really memorable is a company called Saint-Gobain.

It's actually a French manufacturer. They made, some of the mirrors, in, Louis the 14th, like palace, right? These company's been around for like. Absurd amount of time, like 14 hundreds. And, and they have a huge footprint across Europe. They own a ton of, you know, product companies themselves.

And it's a huge integration challenge. 'cause at decades and decades worth of technology and being able to, you know, work them through the discovery process and seeing their eyes light up as they saw the potential and possibility was, really kind of made me fall in love with Dream Factory and the product because it's a, It is such a broadly powerful and flexible tool. the limiter is often the imagination of customers, right? Of people you know. By the way, Dream Factory is open source. So if you're out there and you wanna play around with it,the Postgres connectors open source, and there's a bunch of sort of additional connectors that are on the commercial license.

[00:15:02] Jay: Why make your stuff open source? I mean, maybe that decision was made before you or whatever, but just in general terms where people don't know, why would you, are you giving away the farm with that or you, is it some altruistic kind of thing? Like what is, why make something open source?

[00:15:18] Terence: You know, altruism isn't necessarily the way to think about it, but there's a paying it forward attitude with open source software. 'cause the fact is sort of everything's built on the top of something else. so there's definitely a side of that, you know, I. I don't necessarily believe all software should be free, but I think,a internet and software ecosystem built on open source software is more powerful than an internet built on proprietary software, right?

Stay open. Standards have to be open by nature, and no one would be able, the internet wouldn't be what it is if we didn't have. A set of open standards, right? And someone has to build that and maintain that. And inherently there's an, open source software there, but it's also like the ultimate freemium play.

It's the ultimate sort of free trial kind of play. So there's a huge business reason to being open source as well, or open core as people kind of refer to it, which is that. You know, you got some indie hackers playing with his stuff on the weekends and he's spinning up Dream Factory servers and building out a bunch of tooling.

Maybe it's for a friend or maybe it's just for a fun project. And and then he sees a problem at work and he is like, oh, you know what? You know what would work here? So that happens all the time. Right. And it's just kinda the nature of the beast.

[00:16:32] Jay: Love it. who is your customer today versus when you kind of took over his leadership role and like, how has that changed since then?

[00:16:41] Terence: Yeah. th that actually ties in some ways to open source, right? I think a lot of businesses have aggressively moved towards the open source model in the hope of trying to do as much as they possibly can for free. and then they'll sort of spend the money on consultants. specifically kind of the, I think the small medium sector.

So we've actually. Inadvertently kind of moved up market, because developers in large companies wanna work with open source software. They're more likely to come across open source software, but they also recognize the need to buy software. In many cases, it's kind of like a CYA sort of thing. Right.

Whereas I think the software market for a lot of small medium has kind of collapsed into like very inexpensive SAS tools. Think of your, like, you know, 1999 a month, 39, 99 a month kind of type tools. Right. And a lot of those are also strictly, strictly sort of hosted, you know, SaaS offerings, not sort of on-prem.

So, I've actually, maybe this is kind of why I love saying Cobain as a customer, is we've moved up market and largely towards legacy industries. So manufacturing, oil and gas to a certain degree. And government. Right? And so that was, you know, it makes me actually wonder now how much of that's like the things I was passionate about and focused on.

But nonetheless, it's sort of where we've found it more and more of a niche.

[00:17:59] Jay: Yeah, I mean, I. the more I sit in this seat as the business owner of our business to keep me engaged purposefully, we've had to kind of try to figure out who we're gonna align ourselves towards, right? And it's like

[00:18:16] Terence: Yep.

[00:18:17] Jay: you don't always get to do the things that you love or you're passionate about or you're excited about, but if you can or you can get closer to that space, you know, by providing services, it's a pretty powerful. Motivation tool for yourself to just continue to, because we've all been in jobs that we just kind of, our eyes glaze over, or even as a CEO, like you can be doing stuff for so long, you're just like, all right, here's another one. Here's another. And it's just not like fulfilling this like need that you have and whether. For us, we've been leaning more on region lately, so instead of just like picking some vertical that we think we want to go after that we might be interested in, you know, 'cause I mean, no offense to anyone, but I'm gonna say it out loud, like FinTech healthcare e-com, they're all boring as shit, right? I mean, they're all the same.

I mean, there's some stuff and they're, you know, they're great product and they're whatever, but like. So we didn't really have a vertical that we felt passionate about, but we can work in most verticals because for the most part, we have experience in just about everything. So instead of just picking a vertical to say we picked a vertical, we're starting to lean towards more region based where it's like, we're gonna serve the city of Philadelphia and be the QA company of Philadelphia instead of just being like an automotive testing software company or so the automotive software testing company or you know, a healthcare or like whatever, and just picking something we're kind of interested in.

[00:19:31] Terence: Yeah.

[00:19:31] Jay: able to. Connect with the people that you're close to physically. And also by the way, I always call it the hometown discount. Like talking to somebody from where you're from is so much easier than talking to somebody even in a city over, right? Because like the same sports teams are here, you know, all the museums and the, you know, the things and you talk about kids and school and there's just so much of this like free. Sales collateral that comes from like being in the same location. So we've, you know, I think there's a lot to be said around like, you've kind of wrapped your way back around to, you know, serving those government orgs that maybe you felt the pain point in, that you really feel like you're passionate about fixing.

'cause you're like, I was that guy sitting in that boat trying to collect that data. So it's cool that you've kind of wrapped back around to maybe something that you're passionate about. So, How do you manage personal brand at all? Do you care about it? Do you think about it? Is there like a Terence that's not Dream Factory Terence?

Is it all tied together? Like what's your thought on like how you promote yourself and who you are versus the company? I.

[00:20:31] Terence: Yeah, I, I like to say I made a deliberate decision that it's all on myself, but I don't think I've got the bandwidth to try and play multiple characters. I. It's just not, it's just not who I am. I am pretty careful to not get into politics on social platforms. As an intelligence officer, I never had Instagram or Facebook for, through a lot of my sort of core years, right?

Like I, I'd sort of Facebook in college and then I deleted it. never spent time on Twitter or TikTok. so LinkedIn's kind of where I've invested a lot of time and energy and I just, for me, it's, I. I talk a lot, we talk a lot about, you know, I talk a lot about work. I say we, you know, I, we try and, you know, use the factory account as much as possible as well.

you know, technology, ai, stuff across sort of industries, stuff that's like work adjacent perhaps like work from home stuff. But, yeah, I just, I try and kind of leave like personal politics off of the internet 'cause. I think we've all seen how that doesn't age well and it's kind of irrelevant, right?

you know, like I'm working with public sector, like I, it just like in the military, like it doesn't actually make a big difference to me. I'm gonna try, I'm gonna sell to government, federal government in this case, you know, regardless. so, but yeah, just me. That's just one version.

[00:21:45] Jay: I, you're bound to piss off 50% of the people. If you say anything about politics, why anybody says anything on social media that has a facing. Company, I don't understand. Like I get being passionate and I get like, whatever. But good lord, man, like you're gonna piss people off. Like, why would you discount or lose business before you even get it?

you know, just to some opinion out about, you know, whatever it is that you're, you know, you're trying to put out in the world. So, I totally agree with that. Keep the fucking politics off your social media, please. Anybody who has a business, it just doesn't make sense. You're gonna piss somebody off.

[00:22:23] Terence: Also like where's the ROI like.

[00:22:26] Jay: I mean, I guess you're thinking like if you speak to your fellow political. Agreement. People that are like, oh yeah, like totally, I believe, and maybe that's like a thing where you're gaining people who are also on your side. I don't, I'm in the same boat as you. I don't get it. I don't, it doesn't make any sense to me to alienate anybody.

Even if you're winning over some percentage, that means you're inherently losing a percentage of business because you want to put some opinions out there in the ether. So I'm very much on the same page. Alright. I have one more question for you. This is just about you. This is not about Dream Factory.

It's not about anything. if you could do anything on Earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:23:05] Terence: Oh man. I could do anything on Earth and I knew I wouldn't fail. 

I'm gonna go kind of altruistic and I'd say I would,I'd try and feed the world.

[00:23:14] Jay: There you go.

[00:23:16] Terence: I just.

[00:23:17] Jay: scenario.

Well, well also like you, what are the negative, like secondary, tertiary effects of feeding, feeding people, feeding kids, you know what I mean? I mean, I guess potential overpopulation, but they're already here, so, Bad about every, I mean, Americans eat like enough for like four people, so I don't know why we're, I don't know that it's like we're not proven or dis, I mean, we're throwing away half the food now. If you fed people with it, would it be that big of a problem? I don't know.

[00:23:45] Terence: It's.

[00:23:46] Jay: all right. Well, we talked. We talked about it.

I love that answer. We talked about it before the show, but you know, there's some quick reads you can get on people and you can go, that person's a good person or that person's a shitty person. And I definitely got the good person vibe from you. I connected you with a couple of my really close friends and partners and they felt the same way.

So, thank you for just being a good guy. One of the good guys, and, I love what you got going on. If people wanna reach out to you 'cause of something they heard today, what's the easiest way for them to do that?

[00:24:15] Terence: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate that, Jay. like I said, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. You can find me at Terence Bennett or, Terence can be hard for some folks to spell. If you just look up Dream Factory, you'll find me there as well.

[00:24:24] Jay: Okay. Beautiful. All right, man, well, thank you for being on. Keep kicking ass. Have a happy spring and hopefully we get to catch up again soon. All right,

[00:24:32] Terence: Absolutely. Thanks Jay.

[00:24:33] Jay: thanks Terence. Have a good one,

[00:24:34] Terence: Bye.

[00:24:34] Jay: you. 

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