Masters of Technology Happy Hour
Conversations with masters of technology, those who produce it or those who use it.
Masters of Technology Happy Hour
S1 Ep 9: Greg Jankowski's 15-Year Journey with SolidWorks
Greg Jankowski shares his 15-year journey at SolidWorks, from early adoption as user #1401 to becoming a key contributor who helped build one of the most passionate communities in CAD history. His perspective on the evolution from drawing boards to digital design reveals how SolidWorks democratized 3D modeling by bringing professional tools to Windows PCs.
• Started career on drawing boards before discovering SolidWorks through a vague Design News advertisement
• Became one of the first Certified SolidWorks Experts (CSWE) and authored the SolidWorks hardware benchmark
• Created the popular CAD Admin Bootcamp at SolidWorks World to help users optimize hardware for complex modeling
• Authored "SolidWorks for Dummies" in just three months while maintaining his regular job
• Emphasized the unique camaraderie of SolidWorks users compared to other software communities
• Worked extensively with SolidWorks founder Scott Harris, who advised always maintaining the customer perspective
• Recently retired after spending his post-SolidWorks career working with Salesforce Experience Cloud
Hello everyone and welcome to the Masters of Technology Happy Hour, where once a week, I have a drink with someone I meet in the course of business, but someone I'd like to get to know better as a person.
Roopinder:Greg, thanks for joining me. We're on Masters of Technology Happy Hour and I have as a guest today Greg Jankowski. Greg has been forever at SolidWorks Maybe not quite forever, but how many years.
Greg:Well, I was at SolidWorks for about 15 years Before I was a user and I was involved with resellers, and then I joined the company in 2001.
Roopinder:That's a long career, one company. We've met over the course of the years and many times, probably trying to remember we might even have met at Concord. I think we've met also at SolidWorks World, many times at SolidWorks World.
Greg:That's still my best old, including my years. Now, the last 10 years I've spent in the Salesforce SolidWorks World is still my favorite conference.
Roopinder:Yes, no question, and you still go by the old name. You don't 3DEXPERIENCE Worl. Is that just habit, or is that
Greg:Well, when it became 3DEXPERIENCE World, I was just leaving the SolidWorks ecosystem.
Roopinder:I remember when you signed off, as it were, you mentioned in your thanks to SolidWorks and all its Dassault systems and all that's done for you that you mentioned Scott Harris. Scott Harris was one of the guys you thanked. Scott's been on the show. He was just on the show recently. Tell me more about that.
Greg:We had a reunion for one of the SolidWorks alumni. Probably six months ago or so I got a chance to see Scott again. I probably six months ago or so I got a chance to see Scott again. So when I first began my mechanical career, I started my career in mechanical design, moved more into the software side of things. I started on the board. Then I was using computer vision in about the time and including personal designer at that point and I was getting phased out.
Greg:I was looking for something that was true 3D solid modeling, not just 3D wireframes. And I saw an ad in Design News it was very vague, about a company in Comfort that was coming out with a 3D CAD application for Windows and I was very interested. I dug around and I found the office number for Solbergs, talked to someone there John Meckley, do you think called me back and within about probably a quarter I was a partner and did a lot of training materials and dealt a lot with Sky, a lot about the product definition. I'd used the product. I gave a lot of feedback and as I transitioned into an employee five, six years later, I think that was lot of feedback and as I transitioned into an employee five, six years later I think that was at that point.
Greg:Scouting was always that. He's one of the founders. We talked a lot up to that point about the product, about CAD, about usability, about the things that SOLIDWORKS need to do. But if I look back, he gave me a lot of advice, great manager, and I think one thing always stuck with me SolidWorks is, he said you better customer, always keep that, that viewpoint and that perspective with you.
Greg:One thing when I was at SolidWorks I always thought about customer first. A lot of times I took a little bit different viewpoint of things I wasn't in development and marketing to a little bit different viewpoint of things. I wasn't in development and marketing. I actually was in subscription at first and then reported through the support organization. I was really looking fairly independent. I had a lot of projects I worked on over the years. Think about the forums. In fact, the first SOLIDWORKS community Copdeck had SOLIDWORKS was on Usenet, if you go far enough to remember what Usenet is. I think Scott was always one of those people. That great perspective really helped me with my mindset, one of those people that really helped me thrift around, especially early in my career.
Roopinder:He's a part of the CAD history, no question.
Roopinder:You are too.
Roopinder:You brought along the user perspective. You always were how far into the program usage did you actually get? Did you get to the CSWE?
Greg:I took it very early on. I believe I took the first CSWE exam. It was in Palm Springs and at that point I was modeling full-time and I really couldn't fly. They thought that exam was pretty straightforward for me. I was one of the first groups of CSWEs.
Roopinder:on. Professional is a harder one. I admire you guys that could do that Model mania thing at that time. Or did that come later, model mania?
Greg:I don't know if I ever did it. I did one of them with Joe Dunn at one point in the back, but I never did that. But that is something I did. A couple like at resellers. We had some additions when I was modeling a lot of my early days in mechanical design I was more of a hired gun contractor, so it was about getting things done quickly. I mean, my first solid modeling was early days Pro/Engineer. I think it made me a much better modeler because I had to think through things. When you got to SolidWorks I remember Premise if you remember John Hirschtick's company before SolidWorks, which was a 3D constraint, I saw the vision at that point and SOLIDWORKS was just a godsend. I could do solid modeling. I could do assembly design. There's so much I could do.
Roopinder:I've heard that from people who are coming in from, let's say, the more challenging programs Computerv ision they said this is like a breath of fresh air. I remember Scott, when I had him on I was kind of trying to get from him. How robust was it. When it first came out and I ventured he could do 80% of what Pro/E could do. He just laughed. He said, oh no, we were lucky to have 30% at that time.
Greg:If it was less, if you were an early customer I was very early. I think my serial number was 1401. I was looking for the disc the other day, the Weetop. Initially I came upon my Cellworks 95 CD. I actually have a disc that was pre the full set.
Roopinder:Oh really, I'm sure you haven't thrown it out, it's just.
Greg:I'm going to have to find that one.
Roopinder:Somebody will have to start a CAD museum. Some of this memorabilia I've tried to keep some of those things over the years that go back.
Greg:I was just looking through an area. I had some of that, yeah, but we had this today, cad was done, it's just entangled.
Roopinder:You mentioned SolidWorks World. How much of your life was SolidWorks World?
Greg:I was involved quite a bit. I spoke numerous times during the convention and actually something I started after Boston on Sunday. I don't know if you remember the SolidWorks World that was in Boston. It was the middle of winter, people were trapped, there was no place to go, it was freezing, it was actually snowing and a lot of people on Sunday, unless you signed up for some of the UX workshops or those sorts of things, didn't have anything to do. So I started the CAD admin book camp Because one of the things, if you think about that point in CAD is very, very, very hardware dependent, very hardware hungry. One of the other things I know I was thinking about some of the other things I've done over the years is I don't know if you remember the SOLWorks benchmark, hardware benchmark, so that was actually something I did.
Greg:That was you. I used to bring in equipment into my office and I would test things. This is before I was at SOLWorks as an employee. That was a big thing how you set up hardware, keeping it maintained. All of that was so, so, so important to making bigger models, very complex models, injection molding, assemblies.
Greg:They did a wide range of plastic injection molding, motorcycle design, all kinds of things on SOLIDWORKS in those early years and it was a lot about hardware and I think, one of the things your IT department just couldn't. So on some days I would run a four-hour bootcamp at Saltworks World. So they took a lot of planning, a lot of work. Once they stopped the first one they'd have to start thinking about the other. They'd have to have that venue already selected. We went through a lot of things with getting speakers, all those sort of things. It really paid off. Those events were just outstanding. I can't say enough to all the people that contributed to those Employees, resellers, customers that came in and talked A lot of really good discussions and talks, especially early on when we're trying to figure out how to do large assembly, which was a great topic. That was one of the first breakout sessions I did at a SOLWorks world. You know that one was how I did large assembly designs, cause you're pushing hardware and the software beyond where it was meant to go at that point.
Roopinder:Was that your favorite course or lab that you taught? Was it the hardware lab?
Greg:I think the hardware one was just important because, again at that point we were so reliant on making sure hardware was optimal. These days, between running things on your laptop and CAD in the cloud, all those things have helped just. And CAD in the cloud All those things have helped just significantly where in the past we had big, really expensive port stations. Pretty much a thing of the past in a lot of respects.
Roopinder:SolidWorks managed to shut them down and running on fairly well on a PC it took Windows 95 and it took the first computer NT PC. Was it the NT IBM?
Greg:I ran my first PC CAD personal designer, dos Go back far back the DOS. And the other thing I enjoyed the most was the user groups. I used to travel a lot to user groups. Definitely probably one of my favorite parts of the job is we go and talk to a customer, get a plant tour all kinds of plant tours worldwide and seeing what they do and that was very rewarding and talking to the users during the user groups.
Roopinder:I got the most sense that people felt a sense of camaraderie, that they were in amongst people of their own and there was a lot of brotherhood, like. They felt like everybody was together doing this. Everybody was an ME or a designer mechanical, all the way from the user, the low re-users, the first year user to the head of the company. They're all like, they're all in designing software, designing products. I never got a sense of that at any other conference.
Greg:It was like all for one and one for all it really was like a family reunion, but it was a family reunion. You get not the one that you were born with that term. Family community is really bantered around but, like you said, there was definitely different with SolidWorks. CAD users were always passionate, but if you look at some of the other applications you just never got this. I think it was a fact that really we run CAD on PCs. You're not doing this on Unix workstations. This enabled a whole ecosystem of those consultants, a lot of take a look. There's a very large user base of those independent or small shops who really couldn't afford a couple of seats on Pro/ENGINEER or NX. Those things were just out of reach and the fact is it gained such popularity that again you had a good base of customers you could deal with. We had a lot of our real advocates. The people that were active not only in our online forums but in our user groups were quite often those smaller consulting type individuals.
Roopinder:I've never seen a CAD software program take off so fast. I was coming at this from the Autodesk and AutoCAD site and that had already been in use for, let's say, 10 years. By that time, and I remember my first time I ever met John Hrstic and John McEleney I had reviewed SOLIDWORKS and found it not terribly useful for the AutoCAD user, which I still maintain couldn't transition to it as well going from AutoCAD to SOLIDWORKS as you could from AutoCAD to the same mechanical desktop. So that was a stance I took. But I remember having to try to explain that to Harish. He was not guessing, and it's not the first time I got on the wrong horse, by the way. SolidWorks just took off. This was 1995. And by the next time I met them at the next SolidWorks World it was already established as a leader.
Greg:It happened so quick Thinking about some of the other things I did. I wrote two books. One was SolidWorks for AutoCAD users. Speaking of that topic and probably my favorite project of all time is when I did the SolidWorks for Dummies book. Oh yes, that's right, you did that. That was a three-month project, Start to finish.
Roopinder:Three months, that's really not bad. Takes me three months to write an article.
Greg:Yes, he's working a regular job. Their style is very unique. That's actually, I think. One of the things I found very interesting about the process is you had to write in that dummy style.
Roopinder:You didn't have any problem with that writing book, that dummy of the title.
Greg:It is something I enjoyed. Earlier in my career I did more writing. That's something I might get back to again.
Roopinder:I guess you were in a way competing with Matt Lombard, who also wrote the SolidWorks Bible.
Greg:It was a very different approach. Both served a very good purpose.
Roopinder:I'm sure you guys met each other a number of times Dueling books Like mine's better, yours is better, you did, you did. You'd probably say you didn't cover surfaces, I didn't cover surfaces, and you were like you were probably saying, well, you don't know anything about AutoCAD, you can't help anybody who's transitioning. So it's probably a lot of competitive, little bit of competitiveness going on maybe.
Greg:Well, I don't think so. The purpose on both of those was very different. It served different purposes for different people. Everyone learns differently. You look at those two comparisons they have a little more conducive to their style. My style may be a little bit different. And then you had regular training manuals that what resellers would do were very different.
Roopinder:Yeah, I thought three of those books were very, very popular. That was a different time, though. Huh, it wasn't there, not nowadays. I don't think people learn from reading books.
Greg:I don't, yeah, I don't think enough people do. I also dabbled in computer-based training. I did have a CD meant for training. I actually leveraged Windows Help System and had videos and table content and all those different things in there. So if some people wanted to learn that style, that that was just another tool.
Roopinder:Greg, you said you didn't work in product development, but did you have any influence over what got in the products? I'm sure you heard from all these users.
Greg:That's one of the advantages I had Early on, before I joined SOLWorks. I talked extensively with Scott and some of the other PMs that were there. Jim Wilkinson yeah, Wilkie. Wilkie is great. I just saw Wilkie again at the reunion. Great to see him. You only gone to these reunions. Yeah, we had our first official reunion. It was earlier this year. 80 people show up or so, Some people I haven't seen for years, Some people I still keep up with. So it was awesome because we were a very tight neck group. We were a very small group at first and I was more on the outside at first as a partner, as a customer. I definitely communicated a lot with the product team about what I thought, other usability things and that's one reason why I mentioned Scott is that's awesome. He'd always listen. I've always had that knack for looking at software and thinking about how that could be implemented, Sometimes not in the way that was necessarily intended to be implemented. It's always been something that's come very natural to me.
Roopinder:So you saw probably the development team get bigger and bigger as a company grew.
Greg:When I joined, if I remember correctly, 25 million dollar companies from around the area I lost it was outed in the buildings. It grew a lot. We were always a very lean crew. We worked together and worked very efficiently. It grew a lot of times I was done. Then the merger and then we started working more with the cell. Everything got just much better.
Roopinder:Looking back on that, how do you feel about when SolidWorks got more with Dassault, everything got just much better. Looking back on that, how do you feel about when SolidWorks got sold to Dassault Systèmes? First of all, was that a surprise that happened I don't think it's ever a surprise.
Greg:As a startup, you're always looking for how you end it. I think it was a very good fit for Dassault and for SolidWorks. As you look at that, I think very conversely, just like you look at Onshape today and PTC that was an excellent fit. In those first number of years, the really, we were very separate and then we started working more together as time went.
Roopinder:Do you ever think about going to Onshape? Like a lot of people did, go from SolidWorks to Onshape.
Greg:I've used Onshape, so I used it very early on. I've kept track of the technology. I think if you take a look at what they've done from a true collaboration online, pdm built in some new stuff with a model-based definition it's called a release software and they did a really, really good job. They kind of modernized it, didn't they? They did. And then that's the advantage you'd have if you start over is you can, and especially when how you built it before they kept that in mind through that whole process and the number of releases they'd come up with just how everything works together very sub-seamless. I think they did a great job. I mean, I definitely hats off the Onshape team of how they've launched that product.
Roopinder:Sounds like you respect that. The old team, new team of us, onshape, which was really the old team of SolidWorks, got together. I still have respect for them but I was how did that feel? Did it feel like when they started, when Hirschtick and gang started on shape? What was the feeling at SolidWorks? Similar to PTC, looking at like SolidWorks coming along Like, was there dread? Was there like a feeling these guys will never amount to anything?
Greg:Some parallels there. Same kind of scenario. I'm going to do something very different. I was actually right at that point, transitioning from the SOLIDWORKS ecosystem and moved into the Salesforce. So I did a lot with online communities and it was pretty natural for me to move into Salesforce and their experience cloud products I also was involved with SolidWorks was the customer portal, the support site, those sorts of things, and that's really what I went and spent more time with when I left SolidWorks. They just needed to get through those first couple of years and gain traction. They were doing all the right things. You'd take a look at where they are now.
Roopinder:We talked a lot about. We went down memory lane quite a bit. I want you to tell me, though I heard a lot of the user parties got I don't know how to use the wrong words here. Like user parties, I usually left early, I went to bed early, but I heard there were some good parties at SolidWorks.
Greg:World, the night out at SolidWorks World that's what you're referring to the Wednesday night, that in-between night where they'd go off-site. Off-sites were just amazing, starting at when we were in the desert all the way through all the years at Disney, Las Vegas, Texas, Boston. I would say you didn't like Boston cause you didn't get the one and done in the winter.
Roopinder:Yeah, I would say, well, that's cause you would probably that'd be like me going to user meeting in San Francisco. It's like I just that's not really a trip, it's just work, it's just a commute.
Greg:I bet that's the thing with with we talked about that user community and that camaraderie is you'd see a lot of people, You'd see a lot of old friends and I would spend all night just walking around, visiting, walking, seeing people you haven't seen for a while. It was just big enough that you could get around and know a lot of people. I've also been to Dreamforce, but that's just so big it's so hard to find anybody. What's your favorite location? My favorite location was always Orlando. That, that was great. I liked Texas also. What's your guess?
Roopinder:And your least favorite was Boston.
Greg:huh, Probably cause it's the backyard being in Boston in the winter it's a difficult competence.
Roopinder:No tales of wild parties. You can change the names if you want, I think everyone very much enjoyed themselves at all the soul workshop events. You would find that some of them didn't show up the next day.
Greg:Oh, yes, I definitely have seen that over the years. Definitely it took me off Well, and so what are you doing now? I started working in the Salesforce system.
Greg:So I started working in my communities and support and the CRM side of Salesforce, both as customer. Then I did some ISD work and did a product for Experience Cloud and did some consulting and then ended up working the last four and a half years as an engineer for Experience Cloud at Salesforce and just recently a couple weeks back retired. Yeah, yeah, and now now I'm having some fun relaxing, doing some things I want to do and then deciding what else do I want to?
Roopinder:Like what. What is what's in the office? What's the possibilities?
Greg:Definitely some, some spending more personal time, working out, golfing those sort of things. I've started reading a little. I've been reading more outside of technical stuff. First time in a long, long time I may start writing again, whether I get involved back with technology again. I love making things and I also found throughout my career that, whether it's mechanical or software, I get that same satisfaction from that or sites. So I may end up doing some things. I'm doing some volunteer work, both locally here or what's called no Labels, which is trying to get our congressmen and senators all over people in Washington to actually work together. So I've been doing some poking around with a couple of things.
Roopinder:Yeah we have a little have to stay in touch. You'll have to let me know what you've been up to. It's been great Thanks for joining me and I wanted to congratulate you on a job well done. From what I, from everything I saw, and I always think that people that spend a lot of time with a lot of company and give it their all, they should get some, some kind of recognition. You got a gold watch or something like that. Did you get a bourbon?
Roopinder:Yeah, it's perfect for this. The show is actually called. We call it the Technology Happy Hour. I think only once has anybody actually joined me for a drink. We always end up talking about work, so I've got to break that cycle now. Next time we meet, I'll have a bourbon. Okay, that sounds great. Perfect, all right, greg. Great meeting you. Great luck. Good luck retiring. All right, greg. Great talking to you. All right, have a good rest of the day.
Roopinder:Hello everyone and welcome to the Masters of Technology Happy Hour, where once a week, I have a drink with someone I meet in the course of business, but someone I'd like to get to know better as a person.