The World's Greatest (Licensing) Podcast
The World's Greatest (Licensing) Podcast is a technology-focused podcast hosted by Craig Guarente, President and Founder of Palisade Compliance. From software licensing to emerging innovation, we bring together leading experts to give you the most up-to-date knowledge and expertise around what's happening with technology vendors around the world.
The World's Greatest (Licensing) Podcast
Big Tech to Boutique Insight with Steven Dickens
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In this episode, we welcome Steven Dickens, founder of HyperFRAME Research and former IBM leader to unpack the rise of boutique analyst firms, the AI wave changing their playbooks, and the simple operating principles behind building a seven-figure practice in a year.
We explore why budgets are shifting away from the "Big Four" toward independent analyst firms and how credibility compounds when you’re fast, available, and honest.
Steven also shares pragmatic advice for early professionals, plus the operating system behind HyperFRAME's growth: be easy to work with, move quickly, and choose helping over monetizing in the moment. It’s a playbook for leaders who want sharper decisions, faster cycles, and fewer hurdles.
Learn more about HyperFRAME Research at: https://hyperframeresearch.com
Connect with Steven on social platforms: @StevenDickens3
Setting The Bar And Intros
SPEAKER_00Hello, everybody. My name is Craig Renty and welcome to the world's greatest podcast. Uh, today is literally going to be the world's greatest podcast episode because we have the world's greatest podcast guest today, and Mr. Stephen Dickens. Stephen, uh, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_02I don't know where to go from that introduction, Craig. It's only going to be down, I think. But thank you for the kind words, as always, my friend.
SPEAKER_00We set very high expectations and then we fail to meet them all the time. So that's why I'm always going to be.
SPEAKER_02You gotta bring my A game now for after that.
Stephen’s 30-Year Career Arc
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So so for those few people out there who don't know Steven, uh, he is um got a varied background. And this always depresses me a little bit when I go on someone's LinkedIn and I see like 25 things that they've been successful at. And then I look at my LinkedIn and it's like two things. So, founder at Hyperframe Research. Um you've been involved in the open mainframe project for years. I want to talk a little bit about that. You were uh an analyst, uh uh chief uh technology analyst with Futurum. And before that, where we met was when you were at IBM. So you have uh big organization experience, smaller organizational experience, and then oh my god, I gotta do everything on my own experience because you did something really crazy and founded your own company.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yeah. So I mean, if I look back, I've got my birthday next weekend. I think this actually airs on the day of my birthday. So uh I look back and it's it's coming up on 30 years now, which is kind of crazy in the industry. Everything from sort of selling photocopiers, carrying a bag for a lot of the time, so a lot of kind of front-end sales, um, software, hardware, services, then kind of did a pivot into product management with IBM, then sort of, as you say, had the pleasure of um working with the Linux Foundation to start an open source project, which was a career highlight. Um, and then the last sort of four and a half years have been in the analyst community. So I think probably three careers in there sales, product management, and and analyst. But uh yeah, there's too much white in the beard now, Craig. I'm getting old.
SPEAKER_00Well, so next week is your birthday. Are you are you older than me? I'm trying to figure this out.
SPEAKER_02I'm like do we really want to go there on a podcast? We're both we're both we're both older, both older than uh than we look or younger than we look, whichever way around the audience wants to go there.
SPEAKER_00Well, um, because I hit my 30 year, like it was 30 years ago in September when I started at Oracle. So when I think about sort of my work career, it is literally 30 years now.
SPEAKER_02And you know, what about that doing two jobs thing? If you looked at at uh Jensen, the CEO of NVIDIA, he's literally got two jobs on his LinkedIn. His LinkedIn is hilarious. I think he was I think he was at Denny's or Chick-fil-A, and then CEO of NVIDIA. Literally he's got two. It's well worth it. If you haven't looked at it, I recommend it. So don't be don't be upset about two companies on your LinkedIn.
SPEAKER_00So me and him, we've both had two jobs, right?
SPEAKER_02You're in vaulted company already, Chris.
Why Launch Hyperframe Research
SPEAKER_00Yes, yes. So so Steven, what um what made you decide to start your own company? Because I'm you know, I did the same thing, right? So one day I was like, I need money and I want to do something without having to listen to somebody else. So who's gonna give me money?
SPEAKER_02It goes back a little bit before um that you mentioned I was at Future and you know Daniel as well. So I left IBM in May of 2021 to work for Daniel, and the primary reason to go for work for Daniel Newman is because he's a once-in-a-generation talent. Uh you know him as well as I do, great guy. Uh, the joke I often tell about him that's there's three Daniels that work eight-hour shifts because no one person can be do that much work, but that's also coupled with kind of his work ethics, coupled with just his um drive and intelligence. So I went there to really kind of learn. That was the reason to go there. I thought every minute I spend with this guy, I'm gonna get smarter, I'm gonna get better networked, I'm gonna get better connected, and and I'm gonna sort of really level up my career. That proved to be the case. I think I probably had 10 years of experience in three and a half years. Um so then it was okay, maybe my ego kicks in and thinks, hey, I I can do what Daniel's done, probably only 50% as good, but if I do it 50% as good, probably it's better than better than most and and will get us to where we need to be. So that was really the the sort of driver. I the other piece is the analyst relations community is changing. So maybe your audience doesn't know this, but it's about a 10 to 12 billion dollar TAM, I think. We don't have data on that, but obviously you've got the likes of Gartner, IDC, Forrester, Omdia as kind of the four big players in the space. There's some mid-tier companies below that, but what we're seeing is AI is disrupting that space. The just in general, that community is changing. Um, and what we've seen over the the last sort of five probably 10 years is the rise of the independent and boutique analyst firm.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_02So there's there's a number of players. Daniel would have been one of those, Patrick Moorhead, Ray Wang, Maribel Lopez, Bob O'Donnell. I'm building on the shoulders of some people who've really broken the seal on a new segment. So previously, an analyst relations person would have spent 100% of their budget with four firms. Now they're spending 70% of their budget with four firms, and then spending the remainder with boutiques and independence. And when you look at the big, big vendors, the AWS's, the the Googles, the Microsoft's, the IBM's, the Oracles, that's significant dollars are moving out to the boutique and independence. So it was kind of a combination of a bit of ego, a bit of having learned what I needed to learn, and a bit of leaning into a market trend. And it's been a fantastic 12 months so far. We've built a seven-figure business in 12 months with me just running around. Yeah, it's been a year. Yeah, it's crazy.
SPEAKER_00Goes by fast.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it does.
SPEAKER_00Wow, it's been a year. Like I looked up, it's been 14 years. I did this 14 years ago. This is crazy.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I think the life of an entrepreneur is measured like dog years. I know you're a big dog guy like me. I see the dogs in the background. I think it's like dog years, so it feels like it's been seven this last year.
SPEAKER_00Oh my gosh. As a matter of fact, we have, I know you're a rescue dog guy, but uh, I am babysitter.
SPEAKER_02Tell your audience about how lovely I am and how I rescue dogs and just make me sound great great.
SPEAKER_00We have like 20 dogs. Steven has rescued 113 dogs.
SPEAKER_02We've got three. And I caught speaking to my wife yesterday, and she's like, This is fantastic boxer puppy. Can we pick it up this weekend? I'm like, which one are we trading? Silence. So we've maybe four this weekend.
SPEAKER_00Well, we are doing, we're dipping our toes in the water. We are babysitting a dog. I've got an 18-year-old dog sitting right here with me, uh, named Teddy, that uh uh Shelly's dog. She went away for a couple of weeks. So uh I've got Teddy here, and I've renamed it to Ted Bundy because he's so vicious. And he's I don't know, I don't know if Shelly will like that, but um but uh you know, going going back to work for for a second, um for for the benefit of our audience, what does an analyst do all day? Because I remember when you told me you were doing this, I was like, What? What are you doing? What do you what are you analyzing? And then and now you know I watch you and and you mentioned Daniel and and Patrick and some of those other guys, you know, I follow them on LinkedIn, so I see what they do, so now I know what you guys do. But before I wasn't sort of aware, you know, it's like the analysts are there, but you don't even see, you don't notice that they're there until you notice that they're there.
What Technology Analysts Actually Do
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I do a I do a podcast on this space because it is a fascinating space. I I kind of knew it existed, but once you get into it, it's really a quite bizarre part of the market. So let's kind of parse it out. There's equities analysts, these are the guys you might see on bit CNBC. Dan Ives is probably the biggest of that kind of cohort. You see him on with his colourful jackets on CNBC all the time. Those guys are analyzing stocks, then make they're looking at SEC filings, they're listening to um the sort of financial leadership, the CFOs and the CEOs of these big companies, and giving buy and sell rate, buy, sell and hold ratings basically, and they're at their equities analysts. You'll see them if you've ever come across a um an earnings, a quarterly earnings, they're typically on the TV talking about it. We're not that, but we do the same thing, but for technology. So there's equities analysts, and then there's technology analysts. So I'm a technology analyst, so what does that mean? I'm getting briefed by vendors. I've been out this week at KubeCon, which is a big Kubernetes show, spending time with um AWS and Oracle and SUSE and Red Hat and all these vendors. And what they're doing is they're briefing me on their technology, they're telling me about what's coming, what they're seeing in the market, what their product's doing, any announcements they've got coming, and they're giving me that information because they want me to be able to write about it and be able to inform. So the structure of an anal technology analyst, as I mentioned when I was talking about the structure of the market, you've got some really big firms, Gartner, IDC, and Forrester, they do subtly different things to the boutiques and independence. So Gartner would inform customers. So you'd have a say your um Walmart and you want to look at a big piece of technology, you'd have a subscription to Gartner and you'd ring them up and go, Hey, I'm looking to buy PCs. Who should I buy? And there'd be a Gartner analyst who covers PCs. You would say, based on our recommendations, you should buy this. IDC tends to do a lot of market share. Forrester tends to do a bit of both. Um boutiques and independence, we're either doing comparative research, we don't do that at Hyperframe, but some of the boutiques and independence do. But what we're using that knowledge and insight into the market is to really advise and guide leadership teams. So I'll be doing message testing, helping um senior leaders get a perspective. Typically, what we find is they're this close to their market, they're this close to their product, they live it and breathe it every day. We're just able to give them some some perspective and step them back and go, this is what's happening in the wider market, this is what's happening in adjacent markets, this is what's happening with your competition. And then the sort of final thing we do is we often get paid to do uh what thought leadership or literally just writing an uh report for your former employer, Oracle, um, on their lake house strategy. You're gonna call it say something nice. I saw the flicker say me.
SPEAKER_00Come on. Listen, I've been uh I've been feeding off the Oracle uh for many years. So uh people love their technology. Yeah, so is that nice?
SPEAKER_02That's that's about as nice as I can expect from you, my friend. Um, but no, all joking aside, so they need us to look at what they're doing and then provide a third-party lens on that and say, hey, we've looked at the market and we we think these are the pros and cons. And they'll typically commission a report from us. We stay independent, we don't chill, but we'll we'll go in in on a particular topic and give our perspective on it. I think probably the way to describe it is kind of wired for positivity there, but we're not gonna be shilling for a particular vendor. So that's what we do. It means going to a lot of conferences.
SPEAKER_00So if you form me on the yes, you're yeah now it's you know, as you're describing that, because one of the things that we do for our customers, um, I wouldn't say we're an analyst, but they'll come to us and and say, you know, what what is Oracle going to do here? What is Broadcom gonna do here? What is Micro? So we're we're giving them, you know, from a from a practical standpoint, these are how these uh technology companies behave, right? Because we, you know, we see sort of the the other side of it. Um and so it's not like we're not advising on is this good technology or bad technology or the strategy, just like you have this contract, and here's what this business is going to do to you. So it's almost like an analyst role.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean it's a little piece of it.
SPEAKER_02I mean, I think there's some analogies with what you do because you're not consulting, there's not a particular d deliverable in in what we do, it's advice and counsel. So it's almost a kind of an advisor role than a consultant role. A consultant for me, although there's not this formula definition, I don't think the diff difference for me is a consultant works on a project and there's a deliverable of that project. An advisor is kind of tapped into when they need advice. Those are two subtly different things.
SPEAKER_00We call ourselves therapists for clients because they're often a therapy element to it.
SPEAKER_02I've got to admit, there is a therapy element to it.
SPEAKER_00They they don't come to us when things are going well, they come to us when they have a problem. And they're like, tell me what that company did to you. Here, lie on the couch, I'll get my notepad, and and I'll see. I didn't say Oracle, I was being nice, I said that company. Yes, so um you mentioned the AI word before, and it's 2025.
SPEAKER_02We can't do a podcast and not mention it.
AI’s Disruption Of Analyst Firms
SPEAKER_00Exactly. We can't do that. And um I know that AI has had an impact on our business as people go out and look for information and try to find, you know, how do I do this, how do I license that, what's the best contract for this, uh, whatever the issue might be. So it's definitely, you know, had an impact. I'm not gonna say a positive or a negative impact, uh, something we've definitely had to adjust to, how we promote, how we market, how we produce content, sort of how we stay relevant. Uh, when people do uh uh any type of research, whether it's a Google search or a Grok query or something like that, you know, we need to do that. Um, I would imagine, and I this is sort of a loaded question because I think I know the answer already, that AI is impacting companies like Gartner quite heavily. And the like I'll call them the legacy analyst firms. Um, as uh I know there's been some bad press for like Deloitte, for example, going over to the consulting side in Australia, where they were creating deliverables using AI and and you know had to give some money back.
SPEAKER_02Crazy story that it go down that rabbit hole because I did. That is a crazy story.
SPEAKER_00What do you got? Would you spill the tea?
SPEAKER_02I mean, then it comes into the I think where you were going with the wider point. Human in the loop. We've had Google search for a while, and yes, you can go, you know, you can go watch a YouTube video on how to fix your carburetor in your old sort of classic car.
SPEAKER_00I literally just did that last week. How do I fix my generator? And I watched the 20-minute video, and then I go and went and fixed it.
Small Models, Big Use Cases
SPEAKER_02So I think there's an analogy. I uh sort of little fancy story that I that I like. So uh an engineer gets called to fix uh an engine on a boat, and two or three engineers have been before him, and they sort of ask him to go fix this engine, and he spends a couple of minutes looking at it, and then just taps it and he fixes it and it and it starts working. And then he submits his bill for like twenty thousand dollars to fix the engine, and they're like, You did one thing, you just tapped it, and it's the experience to know where to tap that you pay for, not the action. So I think as you look at AI more generally across the way I look at it in specifically in our space, is it's imagine you've got a really smart intern or a really junior exec, uh, a really junior hire on your team, you go give them a task. Can you go do this? Can you go research this? Can you go look at this? And you would have emailed them that task. That's the prompt that you would put into an LLM. But in the same way that if you've got a sort of 23-year-old person, kind of a year out of college, looking at a really sort of interesting topic and coming back to somebody of the sort of our age or experience, you're gonna review that with some skepticism, and you're gonna look at it, and you're gonna go, I need to spend some time digging into this to review the work. It might be a great start, it might have got you there way faster than you looking at it from a blank page, but you need that human in the loop. You know, you've got how many years of experience looking at Oracle contracts, I've got how many years of experience looking at technology and sort of doing various things in product management. You can get started faster, and yes, it might get from zero to 50% in a in five minutes, but the f the value is in that last sort of hour, two hours, three hours, however long it takes you to complete the task. So I think for me it's you know, the doll that we've been turning, we've had spell checkers, we've had grammar checkers, we've now got you know, nobody's writing with a quill pen. Well, maybe people still are, but may writing with a quill pen and then sort of sealing a letter and sending that as over to their clients, they're using email, they're using a spell checker, they're running fast. These we're just on a continual trend of this is the latest set of things to sort of augment us in our job and make us more successful, in my opinion. So that's kind of where I am on it. When you then look at buyers of research, that's a challenge, and that's where Gartner and IDC and those guys, you know, their model is you buy access to a pay uh a paywall that's got a lot of data written behind it. That's more of a challenge, and I think Gartner's down, it's the worst performing stock on the US indices this year.
SPEAKER_00Is that true? I didn't know that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, it's kind of down 50%. I mean, so there there's there's there's some struggles there for sure. And I think I mean Gartner's a fantastic business, it will re-pivot, it will do, it will re-transform, but it's it's an inflection point in the history of that business for sure.
SPEAKER_00Well, I and I've seen um we work with Gartner, so uh like we've done their conferences and talked to their analysts and do things like that because people who need our services, one of the hey, we're already a subscriber to Gartner, let me go call Gartner first, right? So we they we need to them to know about us, uh, so that if those people need experts uh beyond what Gartner can do, um they can send them more away. But um, I've seen, I remember you, you know, you brought up Daniel Newman and you know a few years ago when I was uh speaking to him more frequently, uh he was telling me about his sort of vision of you know how the analyst community was going to work. And then I saw some announcements from from Gartner, and then I was at another conference, different organization. They're called the World Uh Commercial Contract, the World C C and they have a model. There's a guy there who started that named Tim Cummins. Um and so I've known Tim for 30 years, and they they have a because he's written so much and they've done so much research. They have this uh thing that they're doing called Ask Tim. Just ask Tim. So instead of calling up Tim and asking Tim, you ask him a question, and obviously the better your question, and it's pulling from 30 years of research and knowledge of everything that Tim has ever done and said over the I remember Daniel telling me that oh, we're gonna be doing this thing. I'm like, hey, he's doing what ask Tim is, and I see Gartner has sort of you know asked Gartner.
SPEAKER_02Gartner is exactly the same.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. I don't have enough content to ask Craig, it would be just like very little, and it would all be around Oracle.
SPEAKER_02Uh I mean creating these small language models curated at on a uh sort of corpus of data that is hyper-specific, I think, is where we're gonna go. I mean, obviously, the big large language models have been out doing a web crawl and ingesting everything, and in some cases getting into trouble with the New York Times sort of crawling stuff that they don't have access to, but and books that they haven't bought, and but parking that those large language models are one thing, the small language model, the SLM, focused on a really tight curated set of data. We're starting to see that vendors now putting all their manuals and all their support calls and all their sort of knowledge of data into an into a language model that then their customers can go and ask questions. And if you've got 20 years of support tickets, that's a really great source of data of how your engineers have fixed the problems for clients for 20 years. Being able to go and interrogate that in a chat interface, that's really valuable.
SPEAKER_00Now, one of the you know challenges or worries is AI is gonna take everybody's job, right? Soon will there'll be no work. Now, from our perspective, uh small companies, you know, although I've been doing it longer, you know, it's we we face I think you and I face some of the same challenges in growing and scaling and and and doing all that. Is do you think AI has uh enabled you to uh keep your hiring down? Like you don't have to hire people because you're like so forget taking jobs away. Like, is it is it making you so productive in some areas that you don't have to go out and pay someone else to do that? Because I for me it has.
AI As A Small-Business Leveler
SPEAKER_02So I think I think I probably frame it a little differently. It levels the playing field. So for 20 bucks a month, I've got access to the smartest kind of knowledge base in the the world has ever created, and Walmart has the same access that I have. So as a seven or eight person business, I've got access to this kind of wonderful resource and this capability that the biggest names in the world have got the same access. So my I we're we're a Gemini sort of pro user. I'd imagine they're selling that to Citibank and to Wells Fargo and to Barclays and to Target and the biggest names in the world are using the same technology I'm using. So I just look at it as a way to kind of previously, if you go back kind of 30 years, maybe before the sort of as a small business competing against some of the mega businesses, you were just fundamentally disadvantaged. You didn't have the same depot, you didn't have the same resources, you didn't have the same ability to kind of get a job done. Maybe you were super scrappy, and maybe you could get something done quicker and kind of be a small boat kind of nipping around rather than a super tanker. But I look at AI as just giving small businesses the ability to operate at and be able to be as efficient and operate with as much access to data as the biggest businesses in the on the planet. You know, that I listen to a bunch of startup podcasts and they're talking about when are we gonna have the first, you know, billion-dollar valued business that's literally one person with a bunch of AI, you know. So I don't think we're there yet, but some of the agentic capabilities, the ability to kind of do things agentically, and kind of that's what we're leaning into. We're we're sort of running a project at the moment to uh create content agentically. Um, and that's gonna be you know, that would take a production team of four or five people, not if we'd have been doing it five years ago, right? And we're gonna be able to do so. Yes, I'm not hiring, but I just wouldn't have done it. So it's not would I have hired. I just we looked with the project team of chatting about, we just wouldn't have done that thing because the marginal cost wouldn't have paid for itself, but because the marginal cost of doing it via uh via AI is so small, it's like it's built into our 20 buck a month kind of subscription.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_02We're gonna go do it. So I I see it as an enabler for small businesses to compete on a on a bigger scale. I mean the the scale of growth is what is it? Garner's a six billion dollar business. My ability to compete with them is just powered by AI for me, is how I see it, rather than does it stop me h hiring.
SPEAKER_00Right. Well, you know, the the it sort of you know turn back the clock when when I started this company, if it wasn't for the internet, I couldn't compete. You know, people can find me, you know, palisadecompliance.com as easily as they can find Oracle.com. So I am able to sort of put myself and as long as you do it right, and I would imagine the same thing will be with content that is produced using AI, as long as you do it the right way and it looks clean and polished and sharp and the information is accurate, um, and you've got all your channels there, you'll be successful doing that. I mean, I could put up a really horrible website and and people look at it and and go away. And I've seen people put up really horrible AI created content, and I'm like, ooh, like that is really I'm gonna keep doing it.
SPEAKER_02AI slop because it's being called AI slop.
Beyond AI: Security And Cloud
SPEAKER_00I like that. I like that. Providing So besides AI, what's what's big out there in technology? What's what's what's what are people talking about? What are you writing about? What are people what are people spending money on? Um if we if we take AI out of the equation, because we always talk about AI, and I think you've got a much broader reach than just AI.
SPEAKER_02It's it's been hard for people to not talk about that AI for the last year, to be fair. So I think some of those are the big trends, people are still spending money on security. You know, I think that landscape just continues to get more scary on a geo geopolitical level. And you know, I look at the couple of big shows that are in that space, RSA and Black Hat, there's like five, six hundred vendors that go to those shows. So those are kind of that's a big sort of area of sort of capability that I think we're always gonna spend money on. Um, I think in that space, consolidation, it's a very frag fragmented space. There's lots of little companies. I think we're gonna see some platform work there. Um people are still spending money on the cloud. What are we 18, 19 years into AWS? We're still not end of job with moving everything to the cloud. I sort of hold the opinion that two truths can be true at the same time, though. We can have cloud expanding and still those companies are spending it seeing sort of 30 to 50 percent growth year on year. But we're also investing on premises with sovereign infrastructures, you know, going back to the security point, we're still seeing a lot of growth from the cloud. Classics, HPs, Lenovo, Cisco's, Dells, IBM's of this world do a selling infrastructure that goes on premises. So I don't subscribe to that it's a zero-sum game that cloud grows and this declines. I see that it's a two truths can be true at the same time, and that both of those can be growing. Um what else do I see? I mean, we're fundamentally just changing the kind of way we work, collaboration tools, kind of there's still a lot going on in that space. I think post-COVID we still haven't cracked the do we work in the office, do we work remotely? And what does that mean from a collaboration point of view? We've all got better at doing Zoom. I don't think it's really hard.
Remote Work, Mentorship, And Growth
SPEAKER_00We've we've definitely noticed um when we have an onboard a client and we want to have a meeting, and and years ago, I would be like, this is a really good opportunity for all of us to sit in a room together for a couple of hours and whiteboard things out. And now you make that suggestion, especially the larger of the company. This one's in Tampa, this one's in New York, this one's in Denver. They're like, Craig, we all are in the same team, but I've never met that person you know, face to face. So so for us, using tools like like Zoom or Teams or whatever is is is critical. Um, but I I it I think it's holding us back a little, like it enables instant communication, like you said, level level the play. I can have a call with someone in Australia using Zoom when they get into the office at you know eight, nine in the morning at 6 p.m. for me, works out perfect. Something I never would have been able to do, you know, 20 years ago. Um, but the fact that everybody's so remote is it, I think it it challenges, you know. So, you know, I'm not in favor of everyone's gonna be in the office every single day, but there's a benefit to that. There is definitely a benefit. You know, all the technology, everything we talk about, you know, just having humans in the same room talking about an issue. I I think there's some real value there that we seem to be missing. And I think you know, that that hurts companies, right? Again, companies come to us when we have problems. And sometimes I think, boy, if they were all in together and you could just sit down, I I think they could figure this out, but they're not.
SPEAKER_02The one that worries me, and I've had this conversation a lot over the last couple of years, is is kind of the the mentorship that happens around the water cooler, or somebody just say, Hey, let's go grab a cup of coffee or somebody pops into your office. I remember my mentor at IBM. I used to just put I'd look into his office. If he wasn't on the phone, I'd just knock and go, Can I come in? I've got a question. I'd go in for sort of five minutes. Mark would give me some sage, wise advice, and I'd go back to my day, sort of having leveled up. That doesn't happen when your day is ten hours of Zoom meetings back to back to back to back. So so I kind of I kind of worry. You also don't get the kind of personal connections with your team, you know, that you you're going for a beer after work, or let's go grab a coffee, or grab a lot. I think for guys like us at our stage in our career, that's probably less of a problem. Because we've got our networks and we've got it, and we're maybe the mentor, not the mentee. I really worry about those newer people who are coming into the workplace probably two years into their job and they've not met anybody in person from their job. They're maybe in a team and working on a team, but have they got any real personal connections with the people they work with? That to me is the challenge. I think I think we're okay because we've got those networks, and you mentioned somebody you've known for 30 years. You can go grab a beer, and we've done this at events, we've grabbed a beer together. That's harder if you've not made those connections in person, I think. Yeah. So that that's what I'm worried about. I'm I'm kind of I've got my daughter who's 21, 22, just turned 22, and she's gonna be entering the workplace when she graduates next summer. That's the piece that worries me most.
SPEAKER_00Right, right. And same, you know, my son's a little bit younger. Uh he'll be going off to college next year. And uh I'm I'm excited about that. Um, I'm excited about him, you know, being out of the house, sort of living a life away from his parents, where he's got to figure stuff out. And I sort of think about like your first job, right? You know, I would hate to see him in his first real job where he's doing this. Like he's just doing like I think that would just stunt uh a young person's growth or anybody, you know, if if you're if you're and it's just uh I don't know if that's I I I guess you can be very specific. I want to work for these companies because they've got a big office somewhere with but as people shed data centers and they're shedding office space and they're just and they're just you know, because you know, folks uh I want to keep this person so they don't have to be at their headquarters anymore. They're gonna move to Arizona, so let them move to Arizona and they open up their teams, and they're it's like they're in the office, like you said, because they've been doing this for years, they don't need that uh interaction.
SPEAKER_02So um I think it's there's downsides to being remote, and those downsides are greater if you're earlier in your career. And I see so many people online on LinkedIn whenever the return to office topic comes. I don't want to go into the office. Be aware of what you're missing, I think is I think it's a trade-off. It is definitely it's a trade-off, it's not a nirvana to be sitting at your desk at home, you know, with your PJs on, kind of, and something presentable above it 40 hours a week for the rest of your career. I don't think that is a net positive.
SPEAKER_00You want I gotta, it's just you and me, so I can share this. I do have I do have my PJs on.
SPEAKER_02See, I rumbled I rumbled you. I rumbled you. I've got jeans on, so I'm not gonna share mine, but I just but I mean I think this I mean uh not to pick on there's something in the putting your game face on and going into the office and interacting with humans. Yes.
SPEAKER_00And even, you know, um when you're remote, and it doesn't have to be all the time, put your camera on. Let people see who you you know. Oh hundred percent. Put it on. I mean it doesn't have to be all I understand. Hey, listen, sometimes I have a hat on. I haven't, you know, gotten as presentable as I want to be, but uh it it definitely that uh you know again, you and I are so focused in this world of technology, and then I think we just uh you know, and and having younger kids, you you're like like no, you need to get out of the house. Like I want you to. My son had this job where he was um making money, he was he was uh detailing cars. And I was like, that's a good like you're making money, you're entrepreneurial, you're finding business. But I want you in an I want you in a place with other people because he was sitting in people's driveways all day by himself, and I was like, that's great. So now he's got another gig that he's doing where he actually has to interact with people. I'm like, he's like, Dad, I'm making less money. I'm like, I I don't worry about the money. This is the experience you need in your life right now, is to be with other humans.
SPEAKER_02I mean the biggest sort of we're turning into a sort of career podcast here, but no, I think if you can interact with humans kind of in real life, get your voice heard, drive an outcome, sort of do those things be whatever context that is, whether it's you know, financial services, retail, those are core skills that you can take anywhere. You know, my first job was working in a supermarket, working on a till at age 16. I spent all day, every day chatting to people, you know, scanning their shopping. You don't you can't be shy of interacting with people. Did that experience help me five, six, seven years later when I'm in sales? Absolutely, it did, because that there's there's no embarrassment talking to complete strangers because I had no idea of who was going to put their shopping on my on my sort of uh counter. Those are those are always good skills, I think, being able to interact with other people.
SPEAKER_00Now, flipping the script, I get so excited when I start my day and I bring up Outlook and I see I have no meetings today. I have nothing. I don't have to talk to anyone unless I really need to or want to, and I can get real work done. So there is a benefit sometimes to just taking your phone off the hook uh and just getting to work, or just thinking about or writing or thinking or creating, or just you know, so so I don't I don't want to get the impression that you know I want to talk to people all day long.
SPEAKER_02There's a risk that yeah, I'm looking forward to not but not being on the road next week and not having to talk to people and being able to decide.
Year One Lessons And Frictionless AR
SPEAKER_00Right. So what um what what's next for for hyperframe?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so it's been a it's been a deeply humbling 12 months. You kind of go out on your own, and it I if for uh for your sort of older listeners, the Sally Field Oscar acceptance speech kind of has been has been in my mind a lot. If you haven't watched that clip, go back and watch it on YouTube. It's kind of Sally Field sort of I suppose towards the middle of end of her career going, you know, you you do really love me. You kind of in the you set up this business and you kind of put yourself out there, you hang your shingle, and you kind of cross your fingers that you're gonna get business, but you don't know. Um, you do the work, you put the effort in, you go to the events, you do all the things. So I I think year one for me has been really humbling. We're probably 3x where I thought we would be. Which I did the planning. Um we've probably jumped to year three in year one, which just blows my mind. Um, you know, support from our uh vendor customers, and and sort of 20 of those customers has been just as I say very humbling for me. I think we've now got the scaffolding of a business in place. Um so I think it's for me just doubling down. We've found a business model that works, we're leaning into this concept of frictionless AR, so just removing some of those friction points that some of the other vendors have just sort of grown up to and put in the market. So being easier to work with. The sort of tagline I use with a lot of our clients is I just want to be the easiest to work with analyst firm that you engage with.
SPEAKER_00That if you can do that, that is such a benefit. Like we try to do the same thing, uh, you know, taking out contracts where we don't need them and and and sort of, you know, like you like love the frictionless AR. But um, and I can tell when we onboard a new client, I can tell how the delivery and the work is gonna go based on how they onboarded us. Like if it was easy on their side, like and I had one vendor, one client, they came to me and they said, Hey Craig, we've we've got this change and it it and here's why it's gonna help you. His name is Greg. And I was like, Greg, why are you like this? Is great and I really appreciate it, but I just want to know like this is sort of not good for you, and it's better for me, and you're proactively doing this. And they're like, We we want to be the customer of choice. We want when you are really busy and there's two customers who need your attention, we want you to do our stuff first. Like, so we're gonna make life easy for you. And I just thought that was I had never had a client tell me that before in that forum, and what you just described is is the same thing, it's just being really easy to do business with.
SPEAKER_02There's a lady I watch online called Cody Sanchez, and she talks about kind of how her portfolio of businesses and she'll buy laundromats and sort of main street businesses, not so much in tech, and she talks about kind of why her business is successful, speed of execution, and being easy to do business with. Everybody's got a choice, and if I know I can call you and I'm it's gonna be easy to get the job done and you'll get it done, and the products as good a quality as the other company, and they're just hard to work with and difficult, who are you gonna get more business from? So we're kind of leaning into that, you know, just being easy to do business with. I like to have fun when I do work, you know, just trying to lighten people's day, and the people on our team have got that sort of uh ethos as well. So being enjoyable to work with, easy to work with, you know. I just if there's a situation of can I help versus monetize, it'll be can I help? The money will come. Um so you know, though those are just some philosophical things that'll underpin the business always, I think. But yeah, for me, it's kind of almost take a breath. I'm looking forward, I've got one more show to go, and then I'm looking forward to taking a breath. Um, because it's been breathless the last 12 months.
SPEAKER_00You are always on the road. I'm always seeing your posts on LinkedIn or hearing from you, and like I'm in Vegas, I'm in LA, I'm in New York. It's you're like, that's a lot of travel. I hope you're like a 1K super duper flyer now.
Travel Grind And Work Styles
SPEAKER_02I do get looked after by United, I've got to admit. They did they and and Hilton and you do get dialed in of how to travel, but it's brutal. It's brutal.
SPEAKER_00It's the worst. Traveling. It used to be so much fun.
SPEAKER_02They've taken all the joy out of it. They've taken all the joy out of it, I think, and it's it'd be interesting to see. We're just talking about that when you just sparked a thought of is there an airline where you can bring some joy back to the equation? Would people pay extra for a bit more joy? I don't know.
SPEAKER_00This used and it never happens anymore. Um the empty seat next to you. Like, you just don't get that anymore. Just you used to have someone on the aisle, someone in or you had the whole row to yourself. Like you could book a uh red-eye home. I'll book the flight, the the row with nobody in there, and you just lie down and go to sleep. And uh little things like that. Um but um yeah, it's just tough. There's just so many people traveling, and obviously we've got the political stuff going on now with the shutdowns and um and just cancellations, but it just seems like it's just it's just hard to get around. It's and and for someone like you who travels all the time, uh, I can pick and choose my spots. I'm gonna do a tour in Europe this week and or that week and go to Australia and meet with some clients. So um you you're sort of locked into other people's schedules, they're not gonna move uh, you know, ignite to fit your schedule, right? You just sort of have to fit. I wish I'm not kind of there yet, but you know Monday, they'll be like we can schedule Ignite. What's Steve?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean travel is time and time's the most precious commodity. That's the that's the you know. But I can't grumble. It I can't and nobody would listen, and nobody would give me any sympathy if I did. It's just baked into the job, so you just gotta get it done.
SPEAKER_00Well, tech not listen, there's another area where tech. Um I would get on a plane, download all my emails, and then be working on the plane, land, drive to the hotel, connect to the hotel, and then everyone who worked for me would get like 35 emails. Okay, but now good and bad, I get on the plane, I turn on my computer, I'm already connected and I'm working and I'm I'm texting with people, and we're not doing this. Thank God, we're not doing video calls on planes.
SPEAKER_02Starlink, Starlink's coming to United.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I can't imagine someone next to me on a phone call. I'll be like, shut the hell up, please.
SPEAKER_02It's coming though. It's coming.
SPEAKER_00But I've decided if someone next to me starts on a phone call, I'm just gonna start talking. Like, I'm gonna talk loud to annoy them, then they'll shut up. I'm just like, it's all I'm gonna do. So I don't work on planes, I just watch movies and chill out. Really? Mm-hmm. People hate when I travel because I'm so work-focused and they're getting.
SPEAKER_02I mean, you know me, we've worked together in the past. I I'm always on and I'm always responsive. But I do look at flights as my time to just catch movies and decompress and think. So I was I just did it yesterday. I spend a bunch of time on a plane watching movies, watching TV shows, listening to podcasts.
SPEAKER_00You see, the people at Pell say they want me to be like you. They're just like, What is he still on the plane? Because he can't I thought you were traveling. Like you're in Singapore. Can you go away? Like, I had that day blocked off that you wouldn't be calling me. So, Steven, how if uh if there's someone out there who wants to talk to you, connect with you, learn about what you do, or needs your help, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?
How To Reach Stephen & Closing
SPEAKER_02I think I'm on every social media platform that's out there, Stephen Dickens3, Stephen with a V, Dickens ENS DM me on LinkedIn, DM me on X, um, the hyperframe research.com website. I'm not a hard person to get hold of. Um, so you know, you'll tag me when you promote this, hit me up in the DMs. That happens a lot, and that's probably LinkedIn direct message. Excellent.
SPEAKER_00And if if for some reason you can't find Steven, you can always connect with me and I'll hook you guys up.
SPEAKER_02Always an excuse to chat with you, Craig, is always a good thing.
SPEAKER_00So listen, I think uh you you you hit the mark. You were the world's greatest podcast guest today.
SPEAKER_02On the world's greatest podcast. I love the title of this podcast, it's it's fantastic.
SPEAKER_00It is the world's greatest title for a podcast. I just I was trying to.
SPEAKER_02If somebody's gonna Google search world's greatest podcast, this is gonna come up.
SPEAKER_00Come on. Oh, you're not on the world's greatest podcast? Yes. Uh and and check your mail because one day you're gonna have a mug that says Oh, look at that.
SPEAKER_02I was a guest on the world's greatest podcast. Have you trademarked that?
SPEAKER_00I don't know. Marissa's there. No, we have not. There's other ones out there that that have that. Um, we should look at that.
SPEAKER_02I think you need to trademark it. I imagine uh there's some people I know who know about sort of contracts and that type of stuff. Maybe maybe I can connect you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I should probably test myself. I have a little experience there.
SPEAKER_02I was being flippant.
SPEAKER_00Uh, but listen, thank you so much for for joining us. Uh, and I definitely, you know, I have worked with Steven uh as as a partner and as a vendor and as a client of his. So if you if you need some help, if you need some promotion, if you need some analyst work, please reach out uh to Steven. If he can't do it, he has a huge network of people within his organization that can do it. So uh thank you everybody for uh joining us today, and we'll see you next time on the world's greatest podcast.
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