How to MSP
The How to MSP podcast is where smart MSP owners and IT leaders come to laugh, learn, and level up. We unpack the chaos of running a Managed Services Provider—from service delivery to scaling strategies—with expert tips, real talk, and just enough sarcasm to keep it real (and fun).
How to MSP
Stop Failing at EOS: Why Your "Chaos OS" is Killing Your MSP Growth
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Are you running your business on a "Chaos Operating System"? In this episode of the How to MSP podcast, host Andrew Moore sits down with Larry Garcia, President and founding member of Strety (and former BrightGauge veteran), to discuss the hidden mental "calorie burn" that keeps MSP owners stuck.
Larry breaks down why managing a business in a state of reactive chaos actually takes the same amount of mental energy as running a high-performance accountability framework. They dive deep into the functional shift from traditional org charts to Accountability Charts, the "grace to miss" your initial goals, and Larry’s industry-shaking "hot take" on why the next big movement for MSPs might actually be a return to on-premise servers.
Whether you are struggling with "ride or die" employees who no longer fit or trying to upskill your team for the AI era, this conversation provides the blueprint for moving from accidental management to intentional scale.
"The chaos operating system in your head... is burning the same amount of calories as an accountable framework where you're on task. You're already spending the energy—you might as well spend it on being on task." — Larry Garcia.
Questions Answered in This Episode:
- Why does "Chaos Mode" burn the same mental energy as a structured system?
- How do you define a role by function instead of the person currently sitting in the seat?
- What is the "Grace to Miss" and why is it vital for your first 90-day goals?
- How will AI shift the requirements for entry-level "busy work" into high-level business intelligence?
- Why are major firms like Basecamp ditching the cloud to save millions on on-premise infrastructure?
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How to MSP is brough to you by Ridgeview Advisors and Andrew Moore.
– Introduction & The "Grace to Miss"
SPEAKER_00This is the How to MSP podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Moore.
SPEAKER_02You know, giving yourself the grace to let things change as you get more data. Um, I think people, you know, they they they tend to be try to be perfectionist, or they think if they do something, it's gonna be a big winner off the bat. But I think again, if you give yourself the grace to miss, uh, I think that can be really fruitful for for your business.
SPEAKER_00All right. Welcome to the How to MSP podcast. I am your host, Andrew Moore, with Ridgeview Advisors. And today I'm very excited to have a friend of mine from the channel. We have partied together, we have hung out at conferences together, we have talked about the channel together. This is Larry Garcia, formerly with Brightcage, but now with Strati. He is a founding member of the organization and president. And I am super excited that he's here with us on the podcast today.
SPEAKER_02Hello, Larry. Andrew, how are you doing? Uh, great to be here.
SPEAKER_00It's awesome to have you here, sir. So um physically, where does the podcast find you today? Where are you located, sir?
SPEAKER_02I'm in Arlington, Virginia. So I'm just across the river from DC. So it's a real, real quiet time of uh last eight years here. Uh I actually just moved here four years ago. So moved in 2021, but in Arlington, Virginia, but I hail from Miami, Florida.
SPEAKER_00Well, right on. Did you guys get hit with all the Snow McGeddon stuff too? Or is that you too far south for that?
SPEAKER_02No, we did. It was wild. There was this mixture of uh, you know, four or five inches of snow, but then it was like another five inches of sleet. Uh so it made what they, you know, snow creed is what they called it. So like the plows, plows were getting stuck. I actually saw a plow slide down a hill and it was it was a wild week and a half, essentially.
SPEAKER_00That's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. Well, I I hope I mean you seem like you're nowhere for where.
SPEAKER_02No, yeah, everything melted finally, but it was again, it was a weird 10 days, you know. It's like the salt could hold hardly melt anything. And it was, it was uh it was crazy here for sure.
– From Teaching to Big Data: The BrightGauge Story
SPEAKER_00Uh living in in Texas, it's not really something that we I mean, I got we got some ice, and then I got stuck like I'm in a brand, I'm in my new house in Austin and I'm not used to it because I'm from Houston where it's all flat. And so when it got ice in my driveway, my driveway is got a pretty good angle on it. And so I was just like, I was like, yeah, I'm just gonna put my truck in four low and I'm gonna get out of here. Yeah, no. I did that did not happen. And my truck was like, no, we're not going up this hill. And so I was just like, well, I'm just gonna be stuck here for a couple of days. So lesson learned. Lesson learned. Um, so why don't you tell everybody about uh your background, a little bit about what you've done in the space, why people should uh listen to you, like where's your experience at? Kind of what your background is is it in our in our in our fair channel here, sir.
– Traction, EOS, and the Origin of Strety
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I it like the the sort of TLDR for me was, you know, out of college in the finance world. Um I had a stint actually being a public school middle school teacher, which is a whole whole other grade story. But I almost went back into finance. But at the last second, my now co-founder Brian, he had uh he had just started Bright Gauge in 2012 or 2011 really. In 2012, they were growing a little bit. Uh, and he's like, Look, I'd love for you to join me. And uh, you know, I had asked him about tech advice because he had previously worked at IBM, then he was working in his family's MSP. And I said, you know, I'm I'm interested in tech, you know, but I might go back to Deutsche Bank. And uh he's like, hey, let's have a conversation. And he's like, Look, I started this startup, I can pay you a teacher's salary, which was$38,000 in Miami, Florida. Uh, and I was like, okay, and he's like, I don't know if this is gonna work out, but it would be a lot of fun working together and you have sales experience from your finance days. And so I was like, yeah, what the hell? Like, I'm I'm making a salary now, no, no, no inflation, right? It wasn't like I was in debt or anything. And and so I took a shot and I was interested because it was, you know, back then, no one says the word big data anymore, but back then that was like the hot thing, right? Like whatever AI was and now, whatever crypto was three years ago, big data was like that 2010s, 2011. Like everyone was saying it, no one knew what it was. And Bright Gage was sort of in that space. So I was like, ah, you know, worst case scenario, I learned something interesting for a year. And so joined and man, we really grinded it out, ended up surviving. You know, we went from, you know, losing 23 customers a month and gaining 20, where that math doesn't make sense, to, you know, growing to 4,000 plus customers. So and a successful exit. So yeah, it was a it was a great journey. And then we during that journey, we we had someone give us the traction book, which quite a bit of you know, MSP owners have either read it or they've got it behind them in their bookshelf. Because that that book is a pretty popular thing to see it at a lot of MSP owners' uh house. I remember you know chatting with them in the breakage days or even in the study now. Um they're like, yeah, I have the book. I've never read it. You know, someone gave it to me five years ago, a friend, a colleague, somebody at the chamber of commerce, etc. And so we started doing it at Break Age. It was pretty transformational. We we did what would be called self-implementing, which is we read the book and we just said, all right, let's just do this. And it went really well. It it was a really solid structure for us. And and then, yeah, we were like, man, we need a tool for this. And and back then, you know, there was no real software. So we just built it as an internal tool, right? We we had some devs on it and built it as an internal tool. We we gave it a project name and and we ran our meetings. And everybody who remembers the Microsoft DOS terminal, that's what it looked like. It was pretty simple. You know, it's like you have an issue. If not, it just rolls over to the next meeting, but that was pretty much it. Um, and then we, you know, we ended up commercializing it, right? We had a lot of MSP owners that were using our competitors and they were like, ah, we think you can build something better. We we've always enjoyed the breakage experience. Like, can you bring that sort of user interface, that sort of that, and you're in your knowledge of you know, the data space? And so we commercialized it in earnest uh three years ago, just about. And uh, and then yeah, we we grinding it out, we we got a license from EOS worldwide, and we've been steadily growing in that space. And you know, MSPs are our biggest vertical. Uh, but now we've got you know companies like Duracell or Equinix and and stuff like that on the platform. So pretty excited to pretty excited journey here the past you know decade and a half.
SPEAKER_00That's that's awesome. And I and I do remember Breakage because I just remember at the time when we were very early on trying to figure out like where all of our stuff was, whether it was, I think originally I used it with ConnectWise, but then we tried to use some component of her, or we used a graphic display system for Kaseya, and then we were trying to integrate. And it it was really, really hard back then to take the data structure that you would get out of ConnectWise and get anything really meaningful out of it so that you could display what was going on. So it was a lot of just hunting and pecking and using their reports to try to look at data kind of in the past. And so the the big data element of it, I remember because everything was, you know, at that time we were moving to the cloud and data was becoming easier and easier to keep lots and lots and lots of. So um, I really, really liked what Bright Gauge did in order to create that graphically. And I can see how now that you talk about the bridge, taking information that is disparate and mostly unactionable and turning it into something graphical and potentially forecastable and actionable was a very easy transition to get to where you guys are today. Well, I oversimplify, you make it look easy. Uh but to get it into Strati and to make it look like something that people would would understand. Is is that more or less kind of the the thought process around creating something like like Strati? Is it to take like information that's kind of unstructured and give it some sort of life or accountability? Or where where do you guys really kind of see where you what you bring to the market and and what does what does that look like for MSPs for your product?
SPEAKER_02For sure. Yeah. I mean, it's it's our algorithm is always to be on the cutting edge, but not the bleeding edge, right? So even in the MSP breakage days, like we were second or third or fourth to the market. But we were late enough that we could bet on cloud back then, right? And so we we ended up wiping out our competitors because of that. Uh because back then I remember I gosh, I still remember this 2013, beginning 2013. And I had people who was like, I'm not moving my data to the cloud, which was like, oh, well, are you sure? Like everybody, you know, American Airlines is on the cloud. Like, but yeah, the the um, you know, and that stuff, it and that's really helped us here too, right? So same thing, like you said, there's there's all these various tool sets, meetings, OKR slash rocks, uh, KPIs, all these things are all over the place. And if you can centralize them and relate them to each other, uh, that's really been a huge success for us, both at Breakage, but here at Stretti as well.
SPEAKER_00That's that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on today was because when I work with my one-on-one coaching companies, I often find that some of them are already using like 90, some of them are using Strati, some of them have got a spreadsheet that they use. Um and what I really find fascinating is even if they're able to start putting the information in one spot, a lot of the times they really lack the understanding. You talked about self-implementation of how to create any accountability out of that information. Um and I feel like there's a real disconnect between we're using a tool and we're actually taking advantage of what the tool provides us in a way that we can impact our business. You you brought up a good point. People are like, oh, I've got the book, I've just never read it. Where where do you where are you seeing people that are more successful with using Stretti? Where are you seeing people that are actually transforming their businesses when it comes to accountability? How do you, how do you coach them through that with your user groups? Like, what does that look like in your world, like with your product?
– The "Chaos Operating System" vs. Accountability
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think a lot of it is like we always tell people the first thing you gotta do is go get it, make it raw, right? Like go go try something and go get a bunch of nos or reds or missed rocks or missed goals. Like go get that. Like that, the the first goal should be to go miss, right? Like, but to just get and start doing something, right? Because I think a lot of times the the traction book sitting there is just uh like ah, I'll just I'll just continue doing what I'm doing now. It's worked for so long, right? What's interesting to me though is like it's like the same calorie burn, right? Like the chaos operating system in your head of running your business is almost burning the same amount of calories as like an accountable framework where you're like on task, you're reporting your numbers to someone, doing all that stuff. Cause you're still kind of thinking about it. Like it's something good or bad, right? Like maybe you're not writing down the number, and there's like a little bit of more effort spent on like finding the number and reporting it back. But it's not a lot more, right? Um, it's kind of like one of those crazy things where like someone is like a a 5k runner, right? Like you're really just burning like 20, 30% more calories than if you just sat all day, right? So it's like not that much. So it's very same sort of analogy to business. You think it's like double the effort, but it's really like 15% more effort. So once we talk to people and say, we we kind of give them the story, we're like, look, just go get some numbers, go pick two goals for this quarter. Like we'll get to the EOS three to five per person across the company. You'll get there in a year. But for this, like, go protect two goals for this quarter and let's just try to hit one, right? Like, and you might whiff three weeks in, you might be like, ah, this doesn't make sense. I mean, I'll I'll frankly, I just came off of an annual meeting where we I had this goal for the quarter. And I was like, all right, I've got, you know, Larry's got his three goals. Three weeks in, two have already dropped. I'm like, I'm not gonna hit this goal. And I just got some data back from the market where I'm like, but this one goal is super important. Like it's more important than I thought it was. And so I've been ultra focused on that goal. That one's super healthy. I'm definitely gonna hit it by this quarter end. And again, I dropped 66% of my goals. And things, you know, giving yourself the grace to let things change as you get more data. Um, I think people, you know, they they they tend to be try to be perfectionist or they think if they do something, it's gonna be a big winner off the bat. But I think again, if you give yourself the grace to miss, uh, I think that could be really fruitful for for your business.
– Right People, Right Seats: Managing "Ride or Die" Loyalty
SPEAKER_00I agree with that. I I had a conversation with um a couple of my clients over the last few months and specifically with their service delivery team, and one of them said, that data looks really, really bad. And I was like, that's great. Because that means you have a place to improve. Yeah. Like your SLAs are trash. Let's fix that. Right. Yeah. Like it, like if every if you wait to report on everything until it's green, then there's no I in my opinion, I don't think there's a reason that you need to report on it because it's green. Like if you're waiting to fix everything before you start looking at it, then how are you gonna know where you can make improvements? I I don't like it. Exactly. Exactly. And one of the things that I find too is when people really get into EOS and they they start with the executive leadership group, I have found sometimes in and that there's a lot that goes into as they begin to work through that process, like right seats, right people. Is there anything to people I guess being hesitant to start that process because they're afraid they're afraid that if they start looking under those rocks, uh, and no no pun intended towards the actual rock, but if they start looking in places where they're just like, I think there's some smoke over there, and there's this person that's on my leadership group or in a like a lead position. And I'm just worried that I may have to make a change there. Do you have any sort of philosophy around that? Like what where where do you start to look when it comes to how to assemble that group and if they know that there may be some issues, like pulling off band-aids. What does that look like when you all talk to people? Or what do you what experience have you had in your own businesses where you've had to deal with that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, that that's tough. I mean, we've we've had a part ways with employees in the breakage days, and uh and there were some people that were super early on. And and what's funny is things change and evolve, right? Like what they fit perfectly two years prior, right? Like didn't exist anymore. That world didn't exist and it just weren't a fit anymore, right? As the way the company has evolved, because that's the company itself is an organism. So I think one thing that's interesting is like if you start asking yourself the question, all right, there's kind of a smoke, and you know, that that someone's kind of like always negative and and and they don't fit the core values of the company and and all this stuff. But they've been, they've been on for, you know, for lack of a little return, or what they call a ride or die, right? Like they they were early with you, they were they were great, they were hustlers, they kind of got you to where you were, and you've got a lot a big sense of loyalty, right? If you ask yourself the question, hey, if I go into the future and they're at a company where they're super happy, they're super aligned with that values of that company, right? Like, why would you stop them, right? If they came to you and said, hey, I found another company where all that stuff. So I think one sense is have the conversation, but work with them. Work with them on like, hey, like, these is this is what we need. This is what you need. It kind of doesn't mesh right now, but let's have a conversation. And maybe we can't get there, but like doesn't mean you have to fire someone the first conversation. But you can say, hey, let's let's work towards something. And it becomes very evident. You know, some people are a little bit more aggressive. Some people are like, hey, this is wrong person, wrong seat. Let them go, free them, all that stuff. Um, me, it's like, just be open and honest, right? Just be open and honest of what we need. Uh, be open and honest about what they need. Where does it fit? Can changes be made either at the organizational level or at the personal level? Uh and if it fits, just build a roadmap. Like, what does that look like? Maybe they become a consultant, right? Like maybe they're not on the books as a W-2, but like they sort of some function that they really appreciate of their job. They just don't like the new thing. And maybe they're just a contractor for a while while they figure out that next, you know, journey. So that's something that we said, hey, just start start having the conversations, identify it, have the conversations. And there's multiple ways to get to that same door, right? It's it's the more aggressive way and then the more thought-out, you know, time being patient way.
SPEAKER_00I think one of the areas that I see happen when it comes to right seat, right person, well, two different things. One is I feel like a lot of the times owners in various businesses, whether it's an MSP or not, or people in leadership positions assume that everyone at at or above their level at the leadership level has the same uh toolbox, right? They have the same abilities to do things where they figure things out quickly and they're self-motivated and they don't need a roadmap and new and interesting ideas don't scare them. And um, and they're just like, I don't understand why this is hard. Why is this person not being successful? And and you're and you and I think it takes a lot of scar tissue as a leader to realize everybody when you say it out loud, people are like, well, yeah, that sounds stupid, Captain Obvious. But like everybody's different, right? Everybody's got different skills and inventory. So how do you recommend organizations using these frameworks start to to have those conversations? You said, hey, you need to start creating roadmaps, talk to them about stuff. What does it actually look like when you say that? Like how do you start the process of saying, here's what your job role is and this is what we need out of you? And um, you know, where do you start? Do you start with the job description? Do you start with daily tasks? Do you start with KPIs or okay? Where do you start when it comes to having those conversations with people so you can show them a baseline of what good looks like and help them to understand what fit and function is in a role?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, for sure. I mean, we we definitely leverage the accountability chart in in our thing, which is you know the way of doing the org chart where you kind of do it by the roles and not by the person, right? The traditional org chart is here's a person who reports to them and cascading down, right, to the male, you know, male clerk at the bottom, right? In the accountability chart, you just say, all right, what are the roles that help this company function, right? And and I think we you build that out first without even a reference to the person. You say, all right, in this role, what do they need to do? And it is that what does it need to do? Is it job description? What are the deliverables of the KPI for that role? Like, hey, in this role, you know, a sales development rep, like what do we need? We need 80 dials, we need, you know, 20 conversations, we need two meetings booked, right? And so there might be some KPIs there, right? Job description is you show up, you have a positive attitude, um, you you you make the dials, right? That there's some will, you know, skill you can teach. Uh, so we might put that in the description, and then we say, hey, do you know where you fit? And we do a pretty good job too in hiring of using that as well. So that's a little bit um comprehensive to do, but it's helpful both to having current conversations with people in the right seat that's been around a long time. It's also helpful for recruiting, right? Of really aligning of what our expectation is. Um, but yeah, we'll do the whole holistic thing. The what are our KPI deliverables? What are the daily tasks? What's the description and what type of person are we looking for for this role?
SPEAKER_00And as you go through that process, I have a hard time, just me personally. So I'd love for you to dig into this just a little bit. Talk about the accountability chart. I honestly get really kind of frustrated and confused about accountability versus org chart. And I'm just like, ah, like, can you give educate me? Talk to me a little bit about the difference between accountability and org chart and why you prefer accountability and where org chart works better. Like, give us a rundown on this because I've tried to explain it to my clients in the past, and I finally honestly, I just give up and I'm like, org chart, just use an org chart. Where do you what do you what's your thought on that? How does that work?
SPEAKER_02Well, at some point you probably need to definitely have uh an EOS implementer in here for sure that that would give you a real great answer to this. But you know, it starts at the top where you say every company has a visionary and an integrator, right? There's someone who is at the top of the crow's nest is like, hey, this is where we're going, right? But then someone's got to make the trains run on time. And that's the COO role that Andrew, you're very familiar with, right? So who's gonna make the trains run on time? Who's gonna make sure operations are running well? And that's that they call the integrator, right? They they kind of have their hands in in a lot of different places and definitely at the leadership level. And they're leading, they're managing, they're seeing if people are accountable, which is are you gonna do what you're gonna do? Right. And what you do is after those people, then you're structuring functions, right? Like who's the sales leader, who's the marketing leader, who's the technology leader, who is the CFO, right? Who's doing the finances? And multiple people can sit uh and not multiple people, multiple people can sit in the each individual seat, and you can be in multiple seats. So for example, um, you know, I I right now am in transitioning from integrator to the visionary role, right? It's just that that season of Straty is I it makes more sense for me to be in that role. And my co-founder and I are swapping, right? But I also lead marketing and he leads the CFO function, right? So he handles finances and I handle sort of the marketing season. And so you can be your face could be on kind of all these multiple things in here. And it is like who reports to who, but as a function, as of, you know, if you imagine that this company was just on sims and it wasn't people, it was just, you know, some you know, mechanical thing, like this reports to this, reports to this, uh, is how you would structure it. Like, and then you say, all right, fills with leaders. Now, another thing about the accountability chart, why it's interesting, is you can fill it with contractors, right? You can fill it with contractors, you can fill it with consultants, right? You can fill it with uh, you know, fractional bookkeeper, for example. And so that tends to be a little bit cleaner than the traditional org chart that has all the W-2s on there. And then on some box on the side says, hey, we pay for some third-party services. Like, no, and in this accountability chart, you say, hey, we've got a bookkeeper and they're accountable for keeping our books clean and you know, accounts receivable and accounts payable up to date.
SPEAKER_00That's super helpful. Um when you talk you just mentioned getting an EOS implementer uh to go deep into some of this stuff. Um why'd you guys land on EOS? Like what other frameworks are out there or what what do what do people need to focus on when it comes to accountability? I know you guys, I guess, uh prefer EOS, you like EOS, you're accredited there, but are there other things that companies use to drive forward with accountability?
– Business Religions: EOS, Scaling Up, and Pinnacle
SPEAKER_02And you know, yeah. Yeah, there's a there's a good amount of them. So so um a couple that come to mind are uh scaling up is one. Uh there's uh a gentleman named Bern Hart who he he wrote The Rockefeller Habits, which is a great book. And uh I think he was actually the founder of EO, uh, which is a pretty popular sort of peer group in in the MSP space or MS SMBs at large in in the US. Um so scaling up is one, pinnacle is another one. Uh some people do racy, some people do just OKRs, right? So it's it's you know the objectives and the key results, and and you're you manage the whole company off of OKR essentially goals across the organization. Um so there's a couple of different ones, but it's it's kind of like some people do jazz or size, some people do CrossFit, some people do, you know, uh bar class, some people do just weight training, stuff like that. It's it's the ultimate goal is just to be healthy, right? And there's just a bunch of different ways to do it. Um and there's some clean overlap, right? There's nothing new under the sun. A lot of this stuff is about, you know, having healthy meetings, having good goals, having a good vision for the company, and everything in the middle.
SPEAKER_00So I found that EOS, I remember when I read Traction. So I've read, well, back in the day, I have probably read every business process book on the planet. And it felt like this, whoever it felt like the the the founder of uh the guy who wrote traction. Um, he's like, I'm just gonna pull from every single one of these different processes. And it's what to your point, it's like it wasn't anything new. And whatever EOS had come out of felt like it came out of Rockefeller Habits and Good to Great and like all these other different books. So I to your point, it's almost like a new it's like a new business religion that was compiled from all these other ideas of of you know where people go. And I think you and I were talking earlier where, you know, from my perspective, when I work with a client, I used to think in, I think it's Buddhism, they say that all like all attempts for at enlightenment are you know are heading towards the same goal. But I don't feel like that's the way it is when it comes to uh accountability. Just because you have a weekly meeting doesn't necessarily mean that that's moving in the right direction towards accountability. Like it, you're you're not heading towards nirvana. You actually might be moving in the wrong direction because you just you're not using a process or a tool. Can you just touch base a little bit on like where you've seen in your own work or where you're seeing your clients? Why is having a process or a system, why is picking a religion and creating a dogma and using some sort of a tool in order to structure that? Why is that so important to a small business? And and why, why are people failing to actually do that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you know, I think it's it's interesting because it's like it's what you don't know is like the effect of one thing in the business affecting something else, right? The ripple effect across, right? Like, hey, this meeting goes poorly because there's a problem, right? But that problem could be solved by a really good 90-day goal, right? And that's kind of a different component, right, outside the meeting. And so I think having that framework is what's super helpful because if not, you're just gonna have the chaos operating system running the chaos operating meetings, the chaos operating goals, the chaos operating accountability chart, the chaos operating 10-year vision, right? The 10-year vision is kind of like a uh I'm gonna do something, right? We're gonna grow, right? We will be bigger than we were today. We'll be bigger 10 years from now. And it's easy, right? It's the default, you know, it it's it's the inertia. What this stuff uh does is it like it kind of makes you, you know, like when someone goes to work out, like they go get a trainer. Like if you can imagine, there's this study where it's like, hey, if someone gets a tutor, like they tend to outperform the mean, like some crazy number, right? The only problem is that you can't get a teacher for every single student in the US. But if you do, and and that's a possibility of AI, and I'm sure we'll dive into AI here in a second, is the fact that you know, getting that framework is almost like that tutor, right? It's like this is what you do here then, right? And I had a, I remember I had a I went to the all-boys Catholic school in Miami and I had this priest who always be like, you know, Larry, everybody wants the resurrection, but they don't want the crucifixion. And so that's the the key thing of the framework. Putting the framework in is is it's gonna be different than what you're doing, right? But it's having that sort of sustained effort and following a recipe, right? Is always gonna be better than not, right? Regardless if it's EOS, regardless if it's some other, you know, framework, regardless if it's something that, you know, Andrew, you just say, look, I've had experience, and here's here's the 10 things you should do. Like if someone follows those 10 things, they're probably gonna be a lot better than if they are kind of just haphazardly doing things.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I've I found that a lot uh I have a home gym. I'm really excited about I'm just like, I can't wait to have this home gym when I moved into my new house. It was really hard to go in there. Like, like I wake up early, you know, and I'm like, I'm gonna go get some coffee and I'm gonna go work out. But I know if I don't put up my clothes the night before and I'm not focused, or maybe I I had a beer, like it's just it's not something I do. And I think that that comes back to anything worth doing. It's just the momentum of it and the process of starting something from scratch, especially starting something that you might suck at, right? Like you're not gonna be great at building an accountability system the first couple of months. It it's just not. And I think the overwhelmingness of it, coming back to what we had talked about earlier, which is don't go in and try to eat the elephant whole, right? Start with one KPI, start measuring something, start with one rock per person that's achievable. Um when we talk to our clients about those sort of things, I feel like everybody gets lost in the sauce about I'm gonna try to implement this new system to run my business. And I guess it's just not that complicated, right? I mean, I know at some point, if you use it long enough, it gets fairly in-depth. But I mean, people shouldn't make this into something it's not. You're just picking a path and choosing to make an effort and organize yourself in some way. And you don't have to make it up from scratch, right? Like it's not magic. So, from that perspective, um, you know, where do you start to tell people, like, hey, when you go in, like, do you do the whole VTO thing first? Like, what do you recommend to people who are just starting down this path? Like, where do y'all set the the bar to start saying, look, when you get into the systems, just do the minimum like four or five things. And then if you're doing that week over week, let's move on to the next thing. Like, what does that look like in your space with your clients? How do you guys handle that?
SPEAKER_02You know what's funny is my answer is evolved, right? Because we we self-implemented in the breakage days. So from 2016 to 2020, when we're at the business, it was, you know, reading the book and implementing it. And I would have answered this up until probably January. I would have said, you know, the most important thing is just get the weekly meetings right, you know, like just run your weekly meetings, have a place to communicate, dump your issues throughout the week, right? Like the fires you have to fight that day, like you just fight them that day, but the fires that can wait a little bit or at least until the next weekly meeting, like that, that's gonna give you some savings there. And that's what I would have told you before January. We finally decided, hey, you know what? Like it's it's really time for us to start using an implementer, like stuff, a third party who's kind of like spot checking us and you know, teaching us, facilitating the annual meetings and all that stuff. And and so we contracted with uh a lady by Lisa Gonzalez, and she actually wrote the process book for EOS Worldwide. And gosh, now I want to tell you is like really what you should do is the key stakeholders in the business should sit and say, all right, what do we want? Like, what do we want to do? Like, can we all agree? And I think what that does about starting sort of further out, as opposed to what I originally would tell you about the weekly meeting, is like it kind of helps everybody align to, okay, when what are we gonna do in three years? What are we gonna do in a year? What are we gonna do this month? Well, all right, how does it align up to 10 years? Does, you know, we want to grow. Does cutting our SLA down this this quarter align up with us growing? Probably. Like if our SLA is better, our customers are happier, and they're probably referring us business. Let's do that, right? Hey, should we go start um uh an AI consultancy? Uh maybe, maybe not. That has a little bit more risk. Like there isn't a straight path to growing the MSP business there. Maybe there is, like you can have a debate around it, but always at that north star of what do we want to be in 10 years? And so now I would tell you, yeah, I think starting with that, what's what do you where do you want to be in 10 years? You know, chunking it down to three years in one year, what are the core values of this company? Like who do you want to, what type of person do you want to work with? What's important to them? You know, ours at as Strady is we want humble people, we want passionate people, and we want good people, right? You know, hey, would I would I trust them? You know, if I if a wallet got left behind, would I trust them? Are they good people at heart? Yeah. You know? Are they humble, right? Like they work hard, but like it's not all, it's not, oh, everybody loves me. I I do everything perfect. Like, you know, we don't want to work with people like that. It's just exhausting to us, right? And, you know, are they passionate? And the passionate thing is interesting. We we always hired us and we had the same um, the same people or the same core values at at Breakage, which was are you passionate about something else? Right? We always thought, like, if you're passionate about playing guitar, the railroad tracks are there to go be passionate about like providing good service, right? Like, you know what it's like to put your head down and be a master of your craft because you played incredible guitar. You know that when you got to go serve a customer and customer success or sales, you've got those railroad tracks. So you know what that looks like. So you've got that muscle memory. And so we wanted passionate people. They didn't have to necessarily be passionate about the MSP industry.
SPEAKER_00I love that you talked about getting everybody aligned at the leadership level. I've had a couple of coaching engagements and some things that have happened in my prior life with other MSPs where there was a conversation where there were two owners or partners in some way with the business. And when the conversation was we want to grow, one of them wanted to grow into a more profitable lifestyle business, and the other one wanted to grow into a platform-based MSP, right? Like so sometimes these things happen where you realize if you don't look at the five-year, 10-year plan, when you say we want to grow, everybody in the moment is like, well, hell yeah, we all want to grow. Yeah. But maybe we don't want to grow to make$20 million because that just seems hard and a lot of work. Maybe, maybe we want to grow to do three. And that uncovers a lot of dissonance between what what's going on in the leadership group, which I think is really important because I believe that manifests itself in that the the chaos meetings, because people are at odds with what they coreally want to see out of the business and what they want from themselves personally. And if that isn't aligned very early in the process, it doesn't matter how much agreement happens on what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. There's always gonna be an underlying frustration about what the actual goal is to achieve what you're trying to get down on paper, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and the ripple effect on hiring, you know, do we hire that additional person? That's gonna hurt your profit margins. And so one person's gonna not want to hire someone, the other person's gonna be like, well, we kind of need that person on mergers and acquisitions. Like, hey, do we go hire, you know, acquire a smaller competitor if you're a platform play? Yes. If you're a margin play, then the number's gonna be really tight, right? It may be that you can't acquire them. And so, yeah, that rippled down to a ton of decisions down the road if the the two are aligned, right? Or if the company is not aligned.
– AI in the Channel: The Death of "Task-Level" Work
SPEAKER_00So you brought up AI. I was watching CNBC a couple of days ago when the market was doing weird stuff. And I guess recently they've coined, not them, but the markets have coined SaaSpocalypse. Yeah. So everything's changing. Um, and everybody in the MSP space is scrambling to try to figure out what to do with AI within their own business, how to help their clients with it. What are you seeing with your business? What are you seeing when it comes to coaching and accountability? What are you seeing when it comes to how people are running their business when it when it comes to using AI? What does that look like for y'all? And, you know, what advice do you have for the folks out in the channel about what to start thinking about?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think it's always wise to dedicate, you know, one, two, three percent of your resources to learning about it. It's it's not gonna go away, right? And then it just depends on your philosophy of do you think it's gonna end the world or not? Personally, I don't. Um I think it'll be a very useful tool. I think it'll be transformational, like the internet was transformational. Um, but I'm I'm less of like a doom and gloom person. Um just because at the end of the day, it's like I know I don't want another spam call. I already get those, right? Like, I'm already getting them. Like, is is an AI claw bot styling for someone and me getting 10x more spam calls gonna make me buy something for some like no, like kind of doesn't matter, right? And so somewhere to definitely research, be interested in, do little experiments. There's a lot of great vendors in the space space. Like, I know Thread is super into that AI, you know, trying to resolve taking stuff like that. There's others, P is another one that's fantastic in that that space. So I think it's something to research, be on top of. Uh, definitely not be uh, I think it's I don't know if I pronounce it right, but ludite or luddite, whatever it is, like you don't like technology. I forget. The Luddite, yeah. Yeah, I definitely not be that. Obviously, like you don't want to, because your customers are gonna ask you those questions. So be educated in it, be using, you know, the paid version, the$20 version of these things, test things out. But I I don't, you know, I don't think if you think of like uh, you know, I I I heard this was like Salesforce.com, right? Like people have a weird relationship with Salesforce.com. They're like, ah, it's a CRM, it's expensive, all this stuff. That thing has had probably this year, 130 or 40 bugs that have been reported and fixed, right? Can you imagine someone in uh with a a lovable account creating a Salesforce and then putting your customer data on it and be like, oh, it's been published to everybody or you know, it's accessible. So there's a lot more to SaaS than just simple, you know, making a wireframe and doing these things. If the eventuality, yes, there's a future that, you know, someone can just say, hey, I want a fitness app and it's gonna be created. Yeah, at the end of the day, like uh, I just think it's further out than we think.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I've been what I've been trying to figure out how to do personally is create a way that you can actually expand your knowledge within your organization so that other people can get very similar advice or information that they could get without bothering you, right? So, like, yeah, as an example, if there's some way of being able to go ask the Larry Bot, like, tell me about this within Strati, it would be really great that it would use a source of information within the organization with files or whatever, and just say, this is what, this is what our core values are, and this is what we want you to do with it. And, you know, here's how I would, you know, tell you to solve that problem. I I think there's something there to taking, you talked about big data, certain levels of unstructured information, trying to create a way, in my opinion, that you can you can build better processes and explanation for how things work. Because I heard a guy on, I'm gonna vamp for a second. So I heard a guy the other day on a podcast, and what he said was he's an AI expert. And he said there was a path that people have taken for like 4,000 years on learning. And the learning is you go, you know very little about something, and you work with a mentor, and that mentor helps you to understand it and you get better at it over time. Right. And what we've seen lately is if you take an intern, which is very much in that vein, and you put them at a company, well, what they're gonna be doing is using AI to help them with what they're up to, even if they've got somebody who's been assigned to them as a mentor. That mentor at some point is gonna realize, well, that person's just using a bunch of AI to interface with me. So I'm just gonna use AI. Right. And so what that's gonna wind up doing is people who are now managing and are being given responsibilities within a company, they're gonna have to understand how these different AIs will interface with them to help them do their job. But it also eliminates a lot of the task level work that these interns and other folks did. So now that person is responsible for having to understand at a higher level how their business works, how processes should be managed, what that looks like. And so the requirements of these managers and people that are going to be moving into business, this is this guy's opinion, which I kind of like, requires them to be smarter about the company, smarter about the business processes. So it doesn't actually eliminate jobs in a certain capacity. It just requires that those jobs have to be upskilled in a very different way. And the level of accountability for what those people do is gonna look much different today than it does in three years. That was an interesting opinion. I don't know if you have a thought about that, but I look at what you guys are doing with Stretti and I look at what I'm doing on the education side. It's I feel like there's a movement towards smarter, more accountable people in the business space. And that's not gonna go away. I think that's gonna become exacerbated over the next five years where people are like, oh, everybody's gonna lose their jobs. I don't know that that's true. I don't know what you think about that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I think it's gonna be this weird pivot back to face-to-face, human-to-human contact, you know, being at live events, being out there, you know, imagine, you know, if you're documenting things really well and there's a spot that's taking care of all the level one tickets for you, like you can get into more complex things, right? You can make into, you know, computer transformation, into coaching them on AI. There's just more interesting things you could do. So yeah, I agree with that. It's just like what are what are the higher level things we can do, and especially in person, right? I think that's where it's been most helpful of like, hey, um, the more we can have people on meetings and not necessarily like filling out RFPs or filling out, you know, we get asked for like security questionnaires all the time. Right. We had one of our engineers, a high-level engineer, you know, six-figure salary plus, uh, filling out a 90 question, security questionnaire, right? And it was, it was taking two and a half hours. That gets done in 30 seconds. Now, did we let the engineer go? No, like the engineer is now building features inside of Stready. So, like, that's what's more important. And, you know, if they need a security call, then yeah, the engineer gets on the call and discusses like the vision for security, where are we going, all that stuff. Like, that's the high value stuff. So I feel like there'll be more of those and less of like security questionnaires and things like that.
SPEAKER_00I I agree. I do think that it's really interesting in the SaaS space, though, that you have the opportunity of being able to kind of test run your idea a little bit. I'd love I'd love the idea of being able to because I think that's gonna give I don't I agree with you. I don't think SaaS is going away. I think that you may wind up flooding the market with incomplete product too too fast, which kind of sucks. But I also think the opportunity to do test driving on whether you think you've got you've got this idea. Well, you don't have to have$100,000 to MVP your idea. Like you can vibe code it, see if you think it works, go take it to some friends, run it through its paces, and then go out and look for opportunity for investment or bootstrapping or whatever you want to do to get it off the ground. That stuff is super important.
SPEAKER_02And and I will say the software world is littered with shitty software. And what what there hasn't been is that quick capitalist mechanism of cleaning up shitty software, right? You know, people are like, uh, it's built, it's a hassle to move my data, stuff like that. Like we hear it all the time. Hey, I don't want to move from ex competitor because it's super. Hard to move. I mean, I will tell you, we move 500 employee companies, we move all their data, we take care of everything. It's super, but what do they have? They've got 20 years of muscle memory of like an ERP change they did 10 years ago, and it was a huge hassle. People jumped off bridges, like all this stuff, right? And they're like, I'm not doing that, right? It's like, we're literally just moving your like meeting data from one place. You're just going to a different website. Like, that's all we, that's the effort, right? Just log in through a different website. You'll see all your old meeting stuff, all that stuff. I think that's what's going to provide. It's going to level up all this, you know, cloud software of like, you can't provide shitty software because there's going to be a better one. And they can move your data off very quickly because you've got these, you know, AI or agents pulling your data and and migrating it very easily. But that's good. That's a good thing. That's a good thing for capitalism. Of, you know, I I still remember our HOA at our apartment in Miami was on like a you know,$8,000 a year like contract, just monitoring like the HOA bills and who paid and didn't pay. And I remember like I was in Bright Gauge, I was like, you guys pay$8,000 a year for this? Like it was like a simple could have been done on an Excel sheet, but they cornered the market in the HOA business. People on the HOA board are typically sometimes kind of unpaid, so they don't care, like just get the same HOA software everybody has. So these people have like regulatory capture of like they're gonna get every HOA board because it's no competitors on those were the ones that'll die, right? And they'd be like, that's that's probably a good thing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I I, to your point, we see it in our space too is you know, legacy vendors and stuff like that. If people aren't moving towards uh more flexible software solutions for the market, bloated PSAs or, you know, expensive all-in-one tools for XDR, whatever those things are. I'm not, you know, I'm not poking at anybody or naming names, but you know, there's software out there that's been around for far too long. And there are other softwares out there that are more flexible, that have APIs that allow you to get better bang for your buck. And I think the market at some point, I feel really strongly that the MSP space is at an inflection point right now. Yeah. I can't explain it. It's my spider sense. I've been in it for 20-something years. But there's an old guard bunch of people that are starting to age out and retire this year that came in that big wave, right, you know, in the ear late 90s, early 2000s, where all that stuff was new and exciting, and we were becoming MSPs and moving away from, you know, hourly rates and all that stuff. And now I think there's this new group of people that are coming in in their late 30s, early 40s. They're new, they've got different ideas. And I feel like there's a change coming, and especially with the AI and the ability to quickly iterate on SaaS delivery, watch out. I think the MSP space is about to get poked a little bit in a good way. Not like I I think the complacency of the past is over. And I also believe that the fiefdoms that have been created by the giant MSP providing companies, people are kind of over it. I think people are looking for other avenues to explore without being told you will use this ecosystem of products. I think there's something to it. I really do.
SPEAKER_02Oh, 100%. I you know, I think, and here's my hot take. I know, I know one of the things, Andrew, you said, like, hey, don't, don't shop something that isn't out there. But this has been in my mind for a bit.
SPEAKER_00Go for it.
– Hot Take: The On-Premise Movement (The $5M Basecamp Exit)
SPEAKER_02I if I had a guess, I bet you there's gonna be a big movement to on-premise soon. I I think that there is, I think because things have gotten so much better and quicker, and you know, we're we're what a gig of of speed. So if you needed to update software on a server, you could probably update it. I bet you we're gonna move to this, like people will have these like home servers and run their LLMs there or run some apps and stuff like that. Um, I I know for a fact, like Basecamp, for example, like they're they're a big firm. Um we actually use the coding language that they're the CTO of Basecamp created called Ruby on Rails. So they just moved off of Amazon, they're saving five million dollars a year from their Amazon bill. And they just moved on premise, right? Now, they're paying someone to host it, so it's like in a server environment, but it's their servers, right? So it's like they're they they pay for the physical boxes. And so I think that that's something that's interesting, and that's really timely for the MSP industry, right? If that is a movement that starts picking pace, because these people are definitely cutting edge people, but like at some point, someone's gonna say, hey, like your business has like these five, you know, these, these 25 different SaaS things. Why don't you just use this like securitized open source model inside of your server and run it all there, and I'll handle it for you. Like that could be a really interesting MSP uh thing to happen.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I think they also that comes back to if you look at what the broader technology market is doing. MSP is always, you know, five years of low because we're foc mostly focused on the SMB space. So it's it's really like we're not gonna do stuff unless it makes sense for us to s to sell it. So but you look at that and you know, everybody, you know, 10 years ago, I remember talking to a data center person, and I was like, why are you still doing this? Like this seems like a really bad idea. Like you should probably think about doing something else. Like I was completely ignorant as to what was coming.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, and so you know, now you've got you know people trying to look for the least most expensive power to push to these data centers, high redundancy, you know, uh opportunity where they're being subsidized by the government, so you can bring come in at a at a much lower cost point. Other than the fact that, you know, RAM is$20,000 a stick because of AI, I mean, running your own compute doesn't seem like a terrible way to start trying to cut back. Because I I know plenty of my clients are like, I'm spending how much a month on servers? They just it just keeps ticking up and they don't really look at it. One day they complain about the bill in your MSP and you're like, Yeah, you're spending four grand a month on two servers in Azure. And they're like, what are we doing? Like, what why is that a thing? Like, because you wanted redundancy and you just keep adding space to it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So it's it's crazy. So um, well, I wanted to let you know that I really appreciate you coming on the show today and talking about what you guys do and how you see accountability in the MSP space and what you're seeing in the channel. And so it's just been an honor to to get a chance to talk with you and and to pick your brain on some of this stuff. So thank you for that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. No, thanks for having me, blast. We'll definitely uh hopefully see each other in in vivo sometime soon at the MSP uh or yeah, all the Evolve IT Nation Casey events or something like that.
– Rapid Fire: The Hard Thing About Hard Things & Tribe Called Quest
SPEAKER_00So I'm sure we will run into each other. It is the biggest small world on the planet. The channel is, and so we always get to see each other, which is great. Um before before we chat uh check out, I'm gonna ask you five questions. We're gonna make this quick because I know you've got things that you need to get done. So uh we will start with what is the best book that you ever read that helped you in business?
SPEAKER_02Uh there's a book called the The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It was about starting a technology business and I think in the 2012, 2013, Ben Horowitz from Andreas and Horowitz. And uh that was a really good, phenomenal book of just like how hard it is to run a business and you know all the problems that that you know come across your, you know, people, process, all that stuff. So that that's probably my favorite business book.
SPEAKER_00All right. And for those listening, I will put those in show notes so you will have a chance to go look them up and and grab it from the internet. All right. Again, you don't have to say it if you don't want to. What's your favorite curse word? What do you like to what's your super I yeah, I have a I have a couple, right?
SPEAKER_02So I'm I'm Colombian, so there's there's some couple ones in there, but I'm gonna leave those out for now. I would, you know, bullshit's a good one. It's it's got a it's good, it's it's it's got a good, you know, you stub your toe, you stub your toe, you can say bullshit, and you call someone bluff or a lie, bullshit. So I'm a big fan of that one.
SPEAKER_00Love that. That's a good one. That's a new one that has not been said yet. So you're in you're in your your own space there. That's awesome. Okay, so if you have a band or a musical artist that you dig, you're on a desert island, and that's the only catalog that you get is that person's music. Who are you going to? What is your what is your go-to band or artist?
SPEAKER_02So many. You know, I'm I'm I'm a I'm a born in 80, I'm a uh graduated high school in '99. I mean, just the the that like 95 to 2000, 2000, just the most incredible, all genres, rap, rock, grunge, like, you know, you have Metallica, Nirvana. It's so hard to pick one. But if I was picking two or three, I would go Pat Green on the countryside. I'd go Tribe Call Quest, kind of on the hip hop RB side. Nice. And I'd go Smashing Pumpkins. I I mean, I was just listening to Siamese Dream, and I was like, Wow, that's such a good album, just listening front to back. So I would pick those three. Though I mean I I love Pearl Jam and Romana, a bunch of different bands, but don't be the top three.
SPEAKER_00That's that's fantastic. I love that you went Pat Green, because that is like Texas country 100%. Dig that. Uh that's not one that I've heard yet. Tropical quest is great. I am I am strangely not a pumpkins guy. Like I am Pearl Jam, I am Nirvana Soundgarden, I'm all things, Alice and Chains.
SPEAKER_02But I just can't, like, there's something about his voice that I just Yeah, he did he uh he disappeared on me a little bit, but he's been in like a ton of podcasts recently because apparently like he's secretly some comedians, like he's Bill Burr's like brother, like half-brother. Yeah, like they figured out like in the middle of the podcast, they're like, we're related. Like, this is my dad. He's like, that's my dad. It's like, oh god. So I don't know, but so many revived that and I was listening to the album. I was like, this is such a great album.
SPEAKER_00I I respect, I respect the the music. Like I do, like, listen, I respect Rush, I respect Sticks, I respect Stimp Mashing Pumpkins. Do I like their lead singers? No. Like, I mean, yeah, I get it. I get it. Again, just I'm not gonna do it. Um but I I dig where you're coming from. So those are great. Um, okay. We're sales call, client meeting, business meeting, HR meeting. You don't have to name names. What is one where you walked in and it was just a fucking train wreck? Like you just oh my God, this was terrible.
SPEAKER_02Oh my God. It was, it was not that long ago either. It was just one of these busy days where it's like, I don't know, five demos on the book, right? And I I couldn't find notes on this person. And so like I walked into this demo and I was like, hey, you know, thanks for giving us look. How did you hear about us? How can I help you? All this stuff. And it was some some person who I had been outbounding and like connected via cold email, but they responded to me through like LinkedIn or something like that. So I didn't remember that. And so I start, you know, he started this like, hey, this person's outbounding me, like, prove something to me. But then he's like questioning me about like what are my intentions for Stradio. That he's like, I don't know, you're the one that reached out to me. I was like, I reached out to you. Like, I couldn't remember. I'm like looking through notes. I can't find anything in the CRM. Like, Jesus, what am I doing? Anyways, it it went off to a rough start. And the guy just in the middle of it was like, this is such a waste of my time. Like, yeah, you know, you're right. It's it's it's too late. It's too late. Like, well, we're good.
SPEAKER_00I love that y'all were both like, yeah, this is this is not gonna work.
SPEAKER_02We shouldn't. Yeah, uh, yeah. I was yeah, I was like, yeah, sorry about that.
SPEAKER_00Oh my God, that's that's amazing. I uh it just reminds me of like when I would interview folks. If y'all ever hear me interview somebody, um if you're in an interview with me, when I say, Do you have any questions for me? That means the interview is over. And sometimes sometimes that was so that would happen. Like the I would be on a joint interview with somebody in our company and I would be talking and we would get five minutes in and I would interrupt whoever was on my team. I was like, Yeah, that's great. Yeah, do you have any questions for us? And that was everybody's cue for like this meeting is Yeah, we're good. We're not gonna talk anymore. So that's funny. Um, okay. Well, and last question if there's somebody that you would recommend that you could put me in touch with, or somebody that we might know mutually that you're like, hey, have you thought about having this person on? Who's somebody that you think I should have on the podcast that would be worth having a conversation with?
SPEAKER_02I had these two like upstart young UVA, like computer science kids just reach out blindly and were like, hey, we need some advice. We're trying to get into the thing. And they're they're like anti-phishing email, some sort of AI thing. I I really like them. Like they were super sharp kids. They've known each other since they were like, I don't know, 10 years old. Like they've got the entrepreneurial gene, but they're both computer science guys from UVA, it's a good school. And so they're trying to bring it to the market. I think it'd be an interesting conversation just on them of like, hey, what made you go to the MSP market? Where did you get this idea? What's what's on the horizon on phishing and stuff like that? So that could be interesting. Cambrian's AI, C A M, B-R-I-E-N-T dot AI. Hopefully they get some traction.
SPEAKER_00For sure. I will definitely reach out to them once you once you set me up and we'll see if we can't do something to pick their brain and figure out why they because it'd be interesting to find out from the completely third party, because I think, you know, we all kind of grew up. I say grew up, but we all wound up in this space at some point and we're here now after 20-something years. It'd be great to see where somebody fresh out of college is like there. Like, I I want to go figure out how to get into that space. Like, super interesting. I feel like most people who got into this space kind of stumbled into it for the most part. Now people are choosing to get into it, and I'd be interested to know why too. Well, again, Larry, thank you for being on the pod. I really cannot tell you enough what it means to me that you took time out of your day to hang out and chat with me and allow me to pick your brain on this stuff. So, you know, thank you again, and I look forward to seeing you uh soon in at some event. We we've got to get together and and share a beverage and catch up.
SPEAKER_02For sure. Andrew, always a pleasure. Good to see you. Thank you.
