Speaker 0 | 00:09.946
And we’ll go ahead and get started. Where are you calling from?
Speaker 1 | 00:15.030
I’m currently in northern Italy, right off of Lake Garda. I’m from Houston, Texas, but I’m playing and working from here for three weeks.
Speaker 0 | 00:24.756
Oh, wow. Well, appreciate you taking the time then to meet up. Um, tell me a little bit about your role. What are you currently doing? What’s happening?
Speaker 1 | 00:36.491
I’m the CTO for CPAP.com. We’re a durable medical equipment company that, uh, we sell more CPAP machines online than anybody else in the world. And, uh, we are branching out into sleeping.com, which is, uh, will be our largest property in the next 18 months or so. Cause it’s a much bigger market.
Speaker 0 | 00:57.143
What is it? Sleep.
Speaker 1 | 00:58.748
Sleeping.com.
Speaker 0 | 01:00.629
Sleeping?
Speaker 1 | 01:02.090
Yes, like getting a good night’s sleep. So, sleep apnea machines, the machines that you use to help you breathe better at night if you have sleep apnea. Oh, okay. Air pressure. Yep. That’s about a $30 billion industry. And sleeping is about a $230 billion industry. So, we figured we’re going to go get a bigger piece of the pie. to pursue as opposed to just that smaller market.
Speaker 0 | 01:31.345
Wow. Okay. Sleeping.com. You already get that domain?
Speaker 1 | 01:35.886
We do. We have it. We have a site running there now. We’re focusing on content right now. And we’ve got a Q3 list of goals to add and extend to the site. Eventually we’ll sell products there. But right now we really just want to be a source of information for people, provide sleep coaching and articles on how to get a good night’s sleep and just cover everything related to just getting a good night’s sleep.
Speaker 0 | 02:04.194
Interesting. So then what is your role as CTO, right? Did you say? What is your role as CTO rolling that out?
Speaker 1 | 02:19.038
I love my role because as a smaller company, I get to play a lot of different roles. I get to wear a lot of different hats. So one day I might be strategizing with the team on what we’re going to do with the new site. Other times I might be working with my developers on architecture, having an architecture summit to kind of talk through how we’ll work through some of our technical issues, recruiting, growing the team. Budget and finance stuff, of course, is always there to do. We’re working with a group of people on sleeping.com to write articles. And so making sure that we have the right architecture in place to grow that, making sure that it’s performant, that we have scalability, redundancy. And as that site grows, that we’ll be able to handle it. So we’re a hybrid environment. We do cloud and we have a colo facility as well. So being able to adjust the knobs up or down. So we can handle the traffic, but then also manage the costs and so forth.
Speaker 0 | 03:25.610
That makes sense. What has been one of the challenges? And I’m curious, what platform is it like building on AWS? But what kind of, you know, what’s the stack? Blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1 | 03:36.895
Yeah, it is AWS. And our legacy stuff is in PHP, MySQL, some WordPress. We are… doing more and more of our work, building out a lot of APIs. So some of our systems on cpap.com were built by our CEO at the time when they first started because he was in college and his dad was running the business. And he started that up and wrote it all out. And some fairly tightly coupled things. I tease them and say, you’re not allowed to write code on the team anymore. You stick with strategy and your CEO responsibilities. We have a fun time with kind of teasing them about that stuff. That’s me right there. Yeah. It’s tightly coupled. So one of the first things we’re doing is we’re using .NET Core to replace some of that tight coupling with some APIs. We need some flexibility to either look at buying or building solutions. We want to build where it’s our secret sauce and it makes sense and where there’s a good solution in place we want to be able to buy. But because so much of some of our legacy stuff. is tightly coupled, it’s hard to replace a piece. So the first step is to make it more modular by breaking out the components. And then we’ll have a better opportunity to decide where we want to pick areas to replace or rewrite or purchase a solution for it. We have a new platform that we just built out on Magento, which was acquired by Adobe. So it’s their e-commerce platform. We went with them because we needed PHI compliance for healthcare. And they saw that if we did it in our colo facility. So we have a new e-commerce platform and it’s pretty flexible. So we have the ability to spin up new sites now using that platform. Our back office pieces are the pieces where we want to focus some refactoring to make ourselves more scalable.
Speaker 0 | 05:34.860
Gotcha. Gotcha. What does your team consist of? Who do you have working for you and who do you rely on?
Speaker 1 | 05:42.927
It’s a small team. We have 25 people in the IT department. We have three agile teams, which are cross-functional teams that consist of QA developers, a product donor from the product team. a UX person from the marketing team. And there’s three of those teams. So one of the teams focuses on up funnel kind of pre-sale product pages, product listing pages, and then the cart and checkout, and then the back office team, fulfillment, shipping, and so forth.
Speaker 0 | 06:17.038
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 06:17.158
And then we have an infrastructure group, which is… It consists of both managing the colo and the Amazon services. And that’s about it. We have a small team. I have one person that is a special projects person that’s been with the company for about 12 years, knows the ins and outs of all the technology in the business. So he kind of floats around as needed. And then we also have an application architect that looks over those three teams and make sure that we have consistency. across the teams and that teams are communicating. And one other group, we have a person that’s worked with me for many years who is my QA manager, but he also serves the role of scrum master. We’re an agile shop. We’re on two-week sprints and the whole company is engaged in the agile process.
Speaker 0 | 07:09.944
Oh, that’s awesome. And when is sleeping.com going to be rolling out?
Speaker 1 | 07:14.407
So it’s available now. You can find it online now. It’s mostly content at this point. And we’re going to be adding quizzes. Our goal is to really get more engaged with the people that come to the site and connect them with doctors and the different networks and to each other, depending on the various challenges or issues that they face in getting sleep. So yeah, really focused on content and… getting people talking together.
Speaker 0 | 07:45.479
Gotcha. So are you then, um, I’m just curious, you know, from the revenue model or business model, is that something you represent, um, providers out there or, uh, solutions products type of thing? Uh, or are you selling them direct on the site? I’m just kind of curious how that works.
Speaker 1 | 08:06.106
Yeah. We’re exploring all of those options at the time. One is an affiliate model where we’re linking customers to affiliate partners and so forth. We’ve discussed advertising on the site. Eventually, we may sell products. We have the platform for that. But you really try and understand some of the changes that Google has made recently and the importance on content. Originally, we brought up sleeping.com to really be an exercise to learn how good of rankings we could get if we just focused on content. And then based on that knowledge we gained, what principles could we apply to CPAP.com? One thing we learned is that we’re being dinged on our natural search optimization because we’re not providing as much content as we could be, educational content. So we want to focus more there on CPAP. Sleeping.com is all content, which will eventually go to some e-commerce. CPAP.com is all commerce, which we’re going to move more and more to content.
Speaker 0 | 09:13.766
Wow. You know, it’s interesting that it’s not all just about technology. You’re a CTO, but you have to completely have your eyes set on what’s happening with sales and marketing, search engine optimization. I mean, because it all plays into this moving target. And you’re the ringleader. It’s got to be. You’ve got to be.
Speaker 1 | 09:40.137
We’ve got a really strong leadership team. And it’s nice that we have different people on the leadership team that can pick up roles. So, you know, some of the technology projects are sponsored and led by some other members on the leadership team. And we work really well together as a closely knit group. And it’s been a lot of fun. We’ve recently been acquired actually by Cathay Capital. And so we have an opportunity to really grow the business more and have some strong backing. And the knowledge that they bring to us that we can take advantage of because they’ve got a whole portfolio of companies. And we can interact with those companies. We can learn from them. We can exchange ideas. We can leverage our larger. community of companies for purchasing power and so forth as well.
Speaker 0 | 10:33.240
Interesting. So I’ll get into your background here a little bit, but I was also curious, still curious about kind of the CEO being a technologist and how, how do you cross bridges safely with, with the CEO? What kind of guardrails have you had to put into place is my, is my question.
Speaker 1 | 11:01.589
He’s been really great to work with, and he really has entrusted the technology to me and moved on to focusing more on the CEO role. I did invite him to our latest architecture summit, and he attended, and he’s still a geek at heart. So, you know, he loved hearing about all the technology and expressing some of his historical knowledge and how that applied to things that we do today. So he’s fun to have involved because I typically haven’t. reported to a CEO that was very technical. But it hasn’t been a problem where I considered when I took the job that it might be, that he might be too much into my business and want to say how things should be done. But he hasn’t. He’s let me have a lot of freedom to go about it in the way that I want. And I ping him for advice because he knows a lot of the internals of the site. He’s got a lot of history. And so there’s certainly a lot of valuable information. that we can get from him, but it’s nice knowing that ultimately the ball’s in my court.
Speaker 0 | 12:02.342
That’s good. That’s good to have. So, okay. So then let’s go back and kind of in your background, I’m guessing, and again, having you fill me in on some of these things, I have a feeling you come from software.
Speaker 1 | 12:20.758
I do.
Speaker 0 | 12:22.239
Tell me a little bit about that.
Speaker 1 | 12:25.361
Oh man, it’s got to go way back because my dad bought a Commodore 64 business machine when I was about 12 years old and we sold paint remover, refinishing products. And we were actually one of the top 10 infomercials in the country back in 1998. But prior to us getting on television shows, I used to travel around the country and do television shows teaching people how to refinish furniture. And, you know, the business was small and my dad started a business out of a a building that was next to the house. He went to the dump and got furniture and learned how to reupholster, figured out how to make a paint remover product. He went to the university where my mom was going to school and he was dating her. And he went to one of the professors to learn about chemicals and so forth. And he invented this product. And as we grew, we needed to do automation and we were doing everything very manually. So my dad was not very technical, but he taught himself how to write this simple program so that we could enter a UPS manifest. and the orders that we are handling 30, 40 orders a day at the time. And, uh, I was using that system. And then I got interested in writing software. I became very passionate about it. I’d stay up all night long, reading manuals and writing code. I wrote some code for, for runners or runners log, which I sold online and made a bit of money. And that was a lot of fun. I said, this is what I want to do. So I wrote, I rewrote our manifest shipping program, uh, to automate everything. I joined a Clipper user group. That’ll date me. That was back in the day to automate or Clipper. Yes, that was a compiler for Dbase. Dbase 3 plus is what we started on. And then we were able to compile that. So I joined a user group community around Clipper. And the person running the user group community was a manager at a software company that wrote mortgage banking software. They were just starting to write software on the PC. They had a collection of mainframe software. And he saw some potential in me as a developer and so asked me to join them. My dad was a little disappointed that I left the company. He thought I would take over the family business, but I was so passionate about software. And I was getting married and I wanted a career and I wanted benefits and health plan and so forth. And I just couldn’t believe that this company would pay me this money to come in and just write software every day as opposed to mixing dirty chemicals in a factory. And I just loved it. So my career really just kind of took off from that early start that I got.
Speaker 0 | 14:58.153
Okay. So what’s some of the neatest projects that you’ve been on?
Speaker 1 | 15:03.039
So I wrote a kid’s talking machine when I worked for Bank United. And we were opening a bunch of grocery store branches. And we wanted something that would bring people into the bank branch at the Kroger grocery store. We had about 250 stores that we were deploying to. So my boss and I came up with the idea of writing a kiosk that the kids could come up to, have a touchscreen. And for the password, we had pictures like a bike, a car. a dog and some other piece. And then we would print them out a little card and we would number the pictures to be their password. And then they would use their phone number and that’s how they logged in and they would set up a bank account. And then we partnered with eToys so we could have a collection of toys that they sold and what the prices were. And it would sort the toys by preference to boys or girls, but they could see all of the toys and then they could see how much money they had in their bank account. And they could use a calculator to see how much money would they have to save each week in order to afford that toy. And I wanted to be able to actually have them be able to purchase the toy on the kiosk. But the bank manager was like, no, we want the children to put the money in their savings account and never, ever take it out. But we had a story about banking. We had a birthday countdown. uh just a lot of fun stuff that the kids were able to come in and use uh there was a story written up in pc world for that uh about the and my kids were were beta testers so my kids were very young at the time so they were kind of beta testers of the system and they wrote a nice article and that was a lot of fun another one we did same bank was a uh a retinal eye scan to log into the ATM. It was a whole bunch of news groups picked up on it. It was a big press release. We had twins come to the branch and one of them had his eye registered and the other one wasn’t registered. And it showed he could take $20 out of the ATM just by simply looking at the camera and being able to get the money out. So another fun one. And he was, yeah, his brother wasn’t able to get money out because even though they were identical twins, there’s 255 unique points on the eye. And even though they’re twins, that’s a unique print that we were able to harness. So it was with a third party company that provided the technology, but we were the first to release that technology. And that was that was a lot of fun. Even Jay Leno made a joke about it on his show the day we released it.
Speaker 0 | 17:48.365
Interesting. That’s awesome. So did you get some good publicity from that?
Speaker 1 | 17:54.488
We did a ton of publicity.
Speaker 0 | 17:57.889
Like, did it break the site? Did you have to deal with that kind of thing? So I was back in the day, and I was managing a pet website, and they sold all different kinds of product. The name of the company was Planet Urine. They had this logo. Well, this dog going over a world, peeing. Well, it was just going over the world and all this kind of stuff. But anyway, they showed that ad on Jay Leno. And luckily, we were with a good hosting company. And they freaking picked up all of the traffic. They could handle it, no problem. But that was back in the day, you know, like the late 90s when those things happened, when sites crashed. So. So tell me some of the things that, you know, with your current rollout, what are some new things that you’re exploring that you hadn’t before? What are some challenges maybe? You know, I’m kind of curious where technology has come that’s…
Speaker 1 | 19:09.047
Yeah, we wanted to explore the ability to host things both on AWS, but in our colo facility, really wanted a shared environment. looking in at Kubernetes and Docker. So containerizing our code within Docker, which is nice not only for deployment and for organizing it, but also from a security standpoint to isolate it a bit. So we’re looking at using the Docker technology more on some of our legacy systems while we rewrite them to kind of put a wrapper around them to protect them and have the ability to move. Whether we want to stay at Amazon or whether we decide to go to another cloud provider or whether they get crazy with their costs and we want to run more in-house, we want that flexibility. Kubernetes is running really well in the AWS environment. There is a version for VMware. We’ve struggled a bit to get that to work. We were hoping that would be a bit more plug and play. We’re still sorting through some of those issues, but that will give us the flexibility to run, say, our dev and testing and so forth in our local environment and save some money, but run it in the Kubernetes environment that we’ll feel confident when we deploy it to AWS that it will work well. So that’s one of the big things. Of course, security is always a concern. We’ve actually outsourced our security to a company, eSentire, which they provide partial CISO service, fractional CISO service. So if we need someone to help us with policy and procedure, they give us someone who’s an expert with that. If we’re working on maybe securing our firewalls or we want to do an intrusion detection test. They can provide the right resources. So they’ve got several different modules that cover different things. We’ve purchased five of those modules. A lot less expensive than hiring a CISO, which we spent many months looking for one and wasn’t able to find one within our price range. The price was going higher and higher. So we’re experimenting with the fractional service. And so far, that seems to be working real well, and we’re happy with it.
Speaker 0 | 21:26.015
Okay. And what’s… You could rename that or not rename, but mention that company again or the firm you’re using that you’ve looked at.
Speaker 1 | 21:34.255
East Entire.
Speaker 0 | 21:35.676
East Entire. Okay. Wonderful. That sounds like a really cool. I mean, I’ve obviously known about Fractional, but you’re pretty much the first person I’ve heard of that’s actually doing it.
Speaker 1 | 21:48.383
Yeah. We’ve been real impressed with the company. We talked to a lot of different companies. There’s one service that we’re not taking advantage of that I think will likely get, well, they’ll do threat assessment and monitor everything that’s going on within the site. And they’re connected with the government and a lot of databases. And so they’re always up to date on what’s happening and they will proactively interact with us if they see any sort of threat. They also offer a service for unlimited event management. So if you have a security incident, they manage the communication with the federal government, with the FBI, with the police, and have all of the right contacts to make an incident, if it does occur, go as smoothly as possible.
Speaker 0 | 22:37.640
Okay. All right. On that note, besides a CISO becoming and really being raised in the level of… authority, basically, in the industry. What other roles have you seen in your purview where it’s changed so much and it’s become way more important?
Speaker 1 | 23:01.300
Well, this whole concept of fractional work has become big. And I don’t know if it was pre-COVID or COVID drove some of it, but I actually got my job at CPAP.com doing fractional CTO work, helping them out with… some planning. And, you know, my boss said, well, why don’t you just come and help us do it? And so I joined the company. And I see more of that. I really like to take advantage of outside resources. For instance, if we were going to say we need to load balance our MySQL servers, instead of sending a couple engineers to class for three or four days, and then maybe a month later, they take on the project, I would rather bring in A fractional person who’s done that two dozen times knows several different ways to do it, what the pros and the cons are, and not necessarily do the work for us, but to sit there, look over the shoulder of my team, tell them, you know, okay, move the mouse here, type this onto the keyboard, and they learn much better than going to a class. And we have that expertise and really being able to harness. people outside of just the Houston area. Like I’m starting to hire more people on the team. You know, I have people from Atlanta. I have people in Michigan, people in Texas, of course, in Dallas and Austin, and really broadens our ability to get staff, the best staff from all over. We currently don’t have any intention of going back into the office. We’re going to be remote from here on out.
Speaker 0 | 24:36.721
Yeah. Yeah. And is this fractional thing, something that You’ve been kind of exploring on your own or is your, are you hearing it a lot from your peers? Like, I’m curious, really, what’s the growth of the fractional thing out there? I got my start four or five years ago. No, six years ago, doing fractional CTO type work, CIO work. People didn’t really know what it was and they still don’t know. A lot of companies and people don’t. But curious, what’s your view on that?
Speaker 1 | 25:10.608
I was introduced to it probably about three years ago from a friend of mine who was doing a fair amount of fractional CTO work, and he turned me on to a client that I did my first work for. I’ve done fractional CTO work for three companies. The company CPAP, when they hired me, was also doing the same thing with a CMO, chief marketing officer. We think we’ve… We’re interviewing people right now, but for several months, we were using a fractional service. We’ve done the same thing for some project management, for finances. We’re currently using a fractional finance person, which we’re planning to bring on board. He moves off his client base that he’s had, and he’s going to join the company. As a company, we’ve harnessed it quite a bit, and it’s been really beneficial for us.
Speaker 0 | 26:06.884
That is a very great way to grow without having to commit to, you know, expensive executives, that kind of a thing. What have you learned by doing that? How do you know how to get good people?
Speaker 1 | 26:23.428
You know, we’ve really harnessed our network and taking advantage of friends that we know, colleagues, a lot, mostly word of mouth. We do use some services for recruiting. it’s typically more for staff positions and for the leadership positions. You know, they found me because I had been at blinds.com. We had been bought by Home Depot. Our CEO really liked the story of blinds.com, admired the company and so forth. And so that’s how he had reached out to me because he had seen that things had gone well at blinds.com. And that’s really how it’s been with each of the people that we’ve worked with. It’s been through word of mouth.
Speaker 0 | 27:07.000
Gotcha. Gotcha. So as you grow in your role as CTO, is there anything that you see down the horizon that you’d like to accomplish?
Speaker 1 | 27:21.726
I love learning from all the different places I go. When I joined Blinds.com, I told Jay Steinfeld, the CEO there, that I was really looking forward to learning more about e-commerce. I had done some of that, but being really focused on e-commerce. And it’s turned out to be so, so beneficial for me having that experience. Joining CPAP.com, I had never worked in the medical field. And I had always been concerned about, for instance, PCI compliance, credit card, and so forth, and general security. But it’s a whole new level when you look at protecting the information of customers’ medical information, that PHI, personal health information, and so forth. And so learning more about that industry and the things that are involved in protecting it and so forth has been really good. For me, the sweet spot is I really like joining a small to medium company that’s growing fast and helping it mature. I think the sweet spot for me is finding that right balance on the leadership team and within technology. When you’re small, there’s a certain amount of fly by the seat of your pants and go really fast. But as you grow and mature and you’re looking at either going public or being acquired, you’ve got to provide some more consistency. You’ve got to have separation of responsibility. You have to have more controls. You’ve got to have things well documented. And being able to prepare a small to medium-sized company to go public or to be acquired is, I think, really, really fun to get to that point. It can certainly be financially beneficial as well to take a smaller company and have that occur. When I get into a company that’s too large and it starts to get bureaucratic or I feel like I have to go through all kinds of committees before I can make any kind of decision, it’s not as fun. So I don’t enjoy that space. So I really like the process of starting, growing, and then moving on to another similar project. I did work for a billion dollar logistics company, Jim Crane’s company. He’s the owner of the Houston Astros. That was a lot of fun. Okay. For me, that sweet spot is being able to move really fast.
Speaker 0 | 29:37.795
Right, right. All right. So how long have you been listening to Dissecting IT Nerds?
Speaker 1 | 29:46.938
You know, I was introduced to it actually fairly recently.
Speaker 0 | 29:50.259
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 29:50.879
All right. So I don’t have a lot of experience with it.
Speaker 0 | 29:54.616
You know, I don’t either. I mean, prior to me meeting Phil several months ago and him asking me to help out with the show. And just so everyone knows, I started a company called CIO Mastermind. What we do is we help geeks with executive tendencies be more effective in the C-suite through peer advisory groups, training, executive coaching, if there’s anything that you need or anyone in the audience that needs. So. you know, reach out to me, CIO mastermind.com got a lot of articles out there too. So, um, what, what’s next, uh, with tech? No, what’s what, no, no, no. Here’s the way I want to ask it. What’s the technology that you think is a game changer. That’s coming up something that you’re keeping your eyes on, maybe playing around with a little bit, might have an application here or there, but for sure, it’s going to change. what we’re doing.
Speaker 1 | 30:54.013
Yeah, I think AI is going to play a huge role in everything that we do. You know, there’s the typical data analytics that you do where the technology team is trying to answer questions that the business has and really turning that around and being able to take advantage of AI to look at the data and tell you things that you might not be thinking of. There’s the classic example and there’s a debate whether it’s folklore or real, but the the diapers and beer analogy. Did you, have you heard that one?
Speaker 0 | 31:24.874
I haven’t, I don’t know that I’ve heard.
Speaker 1 | 31:27.435
So the idea was that a store was finding that men were coming in late at night and buying beer and diapers at the same time. The data showed that from the analysis that they were doing, there was no executive that said, Hey, I wonder if guys are coming in late at night and buying diapers and beer, but they found that correlation in the data and it was revealed to them. And then they were able to realign their store to put a beer and diaper up close to the register and so forth. And that, you know, helped improve sales and finding those kinds of things where we’re letting the data tell us things that we’re not looking for. I was at a show in Chicago recently on e-commerce, the innovation conference, and I saw some amazing technology that You know, chatbots have been around for a while, but what they’ve done is you build out your chatbot first and you can use Amazon or Google or a variety of different ones to build it out and train it. But then they had very lifelike looking people, very, very detailed, and they would interact with you using that chatbot engine. To me, that’s some pretty amazing technology. It was very impressive to see how accurate it was. Wow. You know, there’s the touring test, so you can ask questions and see how well it understands. Of course, that’s based on how well it’s trained and so forth. But asking it questions, I tend to ask questions. I’m into extreme sports, so I’ll ask it questions about cave diving or wingsuit-based jumping to see if it can communicate like that. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that’s huge. And some of the machine learning, the machine learning, I think, has been challenging because I don’t think people understand the amount of data that you have to feed through a system before it can really take advantage of that and learn from it. You know, it’s not just a matter of sending it thousands of instances, but you’re really getting into the millions of pieces of data. We tried to automate it at Crane using some of the machine learning to. be able to read all the different file formats that come in and be able to interpret what the data was and pull it out automatically. And we felt like we were spending more time teaching it as opposed to it really learning from the data. So everybody wants to throw these terms around AI and machine learning and some of the vendors that you talk to if you really drill into the details. They’re using those terms. I don’t really think they’re technologies based or really harnessing that technology. But I think the power is certainly there and it’s going to get more and more powerful. And, yeah, I think that’s definitely one to look for and to follow.
Speaker 0 | 34:22.607
How do we how do we prevent it from taking over humankind? You know.
Speaker 1 | 34:32.332
You know, you look at iRobot and the rules that they set up and how it was overridden and so forth. It’s scary. I know Elon Musk talks about it as being one of the biggest threats to society is this getting out of control. And it seems crazy. You know, it’s fun to talk about. And in some ways you think, oh, nothing like that would ever happen. But, you know, you’ve seen these robots that they put into the streets that are acting in the form of police and kind of directing people and so forth. And there was one incident where one of the robots fell over and hurt someone. And I heard another story about one of the shows in Vegas where there was an autonomous car and one of the Teslas and some autonomous robots that. I had walking down the street. One of them stepped out into the road and got hit by the Tesla car several years ago. I’m joking about how the robot must have committed suicide or something. I don’t know, crazy stuff, but I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to see it get out of control. I think there’s the potential. I mean, you start putting drones that have the ability to shoot and so forth and do crowd control, and you can certainly see how that… someone hacking into systems like that could do some damage.
Speaker 0 | 35:50.113
Yes. Yes, absolutely. I mean, what a crazy concept. There’s this book I read. People got to read it. It’s a short one too. And it’s one of the best fiction AI machine learning type books, Summer Frost. And just a quick thing on that. It starts out where the setting is in a game, like you’re playing this game. It’s for a high-end, you know, So simulation game. And it’s a story bound game. So you pay to get into this game. Well, there’s this character in this game that’s a woman. And this woman in the game is supposed to be killed by this other character. But what happens is, is that this this woman and she’s a secondary character in this thing, she all of a sudden stops showing up when she’s supposed to be showing up to get killed in this game. She ends up going off and she’s traveling and trying to get to the end of the world in this whole game. They find out that they accidentally wrote some artificial intelligence on this person. They took it too far with this one character. And then all of a sudden the whole story becomes about real life, how this developer is trying to communicate with this artificial intelligence. This story is crazy. Summer Frost is the name of it. And I’ll get the name of the author. But. talking about technology um i don’t know why this come came up in my head but there was this great technology a number of years ago that came along great potential but it just hasn’t ever gone across this finish line and it’s virtual reality it seems like i don’t know why but i’m curious what what you’ve played around with it have you you found any business applications for virtual reality personally? I mean, have you seen it?
Speaker 1 | 37:49.255
I have, I have. So, um, I have a pair of Oculus goggles and I’ve done some, some stuff where, so I’m, I’m a wingsuit base jumper. So I went to Norway and I had a 360 camera on my head and I jumped and filmed it. And then I was able to put that into the Oculus goggles. When I was with crane and we had the logistics show, uh, I was, the MC for the event and I was talking about technology. And so we had the Oculus, couple pair of Oculus goggles out that people could kind of see the things that were there. And I did two things. One, they could experience what it was like to do a wings and base jump and stand on the edge of the cliff, which they thought was really cool. But then I also took the same camera and I went into the warehouse and a lot of the people that come to the show are salespeople and they don’t get to see the warehouse or how it operates and so forth. So I put the camera on one of the boxes. And the forklift operator drove it through the warehouse, took it over to its spot, raised it way up onto the spot and set it on there. And so they were able to get that virtual tour of the warehouse. Nice. There are plugins that you can use to then augment that virtual reality and have decisions that they can make. So you have the film and say you’re standing in the warehouse and you can look at a section and you get this little handheld device. It kind of acts like your hand and you can click on things and it’s like your hand does stuff. So you could click and then have the virtual reality show you that video in that location, kind of move through a space virtually. The warehouse is very noisy and it’s a harsh environment. The idea of being able to have some virtual reality where you would be able to look at a box and there’s what they call a license plate, which is on the block. box which contains the contents and where it came from and where it’s supposed to go and contents and so forth. Wouldn’t it be cool if you were able to use some virtual reality glasses where you were looking at that and it was able to scan that barcode? and be able to bring up the contents of it as opposed to walking around with a tablet or using a handheld device or walking over to a station and using a PC. So I think those are some real good opportunities to provide that information in harsh environments.
Speaker 0 | 40:11.273
That’s fantastic. I love that. It’s been a while since I’ve even talked about VR. I have some Oculus as well. Thought it would be good for peer groups and things like that. I think it could be, but We’re talking CIOs here, not CTOs here. They’re not as technical. So I guess my concern would be having to support CIOs too much. So tell me a little bit about mentors that you’ve relied on to help grow in your leadership. Where did you find the best information or advice?
Speaker 1 | 40:53.750
When I was at my first software job, we had a CIO that joined us that had moved up from Dallas. And his name was Wayne Satan, very, very talented guy, one of the smartest men I’ve ever met. And I claimed him as my mentor. I was a young kid. I was like 23, 24 years old. I walked into his office and they just said, you know, you know so much about so much. I’m new to this field. I really want to learn technology. And, you know, would you be my mentor? And he embraced that. And we have worked together in several jobs through our careers together. And I just learned from that experience, like this is the way to go. Like go find someone who’s the best at what they do and learn from that. So I took up cave diving. I dive in underwater caves, go way back. And I found Ed Sorensen, who’s a very famous cave diver, became friends with him. He’s taken me on all sorts of dives and mentored me and just. you know, learning from the best. I’m here in Italy, the world’s fastest wingsuiter. Chris Burns has been my mentor for the last two weeks. He’s showing me around the mountains. He’s giving me tips on how to fly my wingsuit better, how to exit from the mountain properly. And it’s just amazing how much faster you can learn anything when you have the right person that can guide you along the way.
Speaker 0 | 42:18.729
I’m blown away that you’re wingsuit. I’m sure you hear this from everyone you talk to. The cave diving is especially crazy. Are you still doing that? Do you do a lot of cave diving?
Speaker 1 | 42:30.746
I do. I do a lot of cave diving. Actually, part of a team that holds the record for the deepest U.S. cave dive in Del Rio, Texas, in a cave called Good Enough Springs. It was 515 feet deep. Our lead diver went down and took six hours before he came out. Actually, I have a presentation that I finished recently. presented it once so far and similarities I’ve discovered between managing IT and extreme sports. And I go into managing risk, having redundancy, how important having the right skills, managing the risk, managing the costs. And it’s a fun presentation where I’ve got video and pictures of all kinds of crazy stunts we’ve done. We’ve thrown cars out of the back of a plane. blew up a hot air balloon recently while we jumped out of it and uh you know it looks stupid and scary and and yet it’s actually very manageable if you work with the right people you get the right people involved in the project and you you know do you do these stupid crazy things in a safe way so uh where can people find that online this video yeah so the the um the balloon one we haven’t revealed yet but uh if you do a search on on youtube for uh car jump uh will probably show up first we had 50 million views in the first three days of the release we actually threw two different cars out of a sky van in arizona uh in 2018 and it was it was very very popular and got shown and we licensed the information so we had a lot of uh content providers that purchased the license rights from us to show the video. It was a really fun project.
Speaker 0 | 44:23.248
So I’m going to remind the viewers here that, well, I didn’t even say it up front, but we’re talking to Larry Hack, right? Larry Hack, did you change your name to Hack?
Speaker 1 | 44:35.778
No, but you know, when I first started, the internet really wasn’t a big thing yet. It was all, you know, CompuServe and bulletin boards. And I’d get booted off of bulletin boards all the time when I’d log in as Larry Hack because they’d say only real names are allowed and drop me. So I started logging in as Larry Cruz because Cruz was my wife’s maiden name. And that’s how I got into bulletin board systems.
Speaker 0 | 45:00.898
Interesting. Interesting. So are you still pursuing any type of programming? Do you do any of that? Do you get your hands dirty in your role now?
Speaker 1 | 45:12.662
I do. So we have a collection of metrics that we track. and report on in Power BI. And every week we tell the company about where we’re at around security vulnerabilities, uptime, velocity for our development team. And I developed the database to store all of that information kind of very generically and did the reports. And then I built out an API in .NET Core so that the team can update the metrics by making an API call because they want them to automate. I tell the team, if you’re in technology, you’re in the job of automation. So anything that you’re doing is manual. It needs to be automated. I try to turn a lot of my work over to my team. And then initially the concern is, is like, well, how can I take on more responsibility? It’s like, well, you need to turn more of your responsibility over to your team. And they’re like, well, how can I do that? Because they’re working long hours. Like, well, we need to automate the things that they do. And once we automate those things, then they can grow and take on more. And you need to have a certain percentage of your time reserved to be open so that as things come up, as new initiatives come up, that you’re able to jump on them and get involved. And so I think it’s really critical that we’re constantly growing the team and always automating and giving people more responsibility. One of my favorite things that I was ever able to do is when I was at… blinds.com. We were acquired by Home Depot. They wanted to start another software group. And so they pursued my director of software development to fill that role. And when he moved to that new role, I took the dev manager and I promoted them into that director role. I took one of the team leads and was able to promote them into the dev manager role. One of the senior programmers. became the team lead, and we ended up hiring a programmer. And I loved telling the director who had left, like, yeah, we replaced you with a junior developer because we had been able to move everybody up. But at the same time, as we promoted them, we gave them the salary of the person that had left that position. So we were really able to keep… Instead of going outside to go find a new director of software development, which comes in with a philosophy, maybe their own team that they want to bring in, really being able to grow the team to take on those new roles and give them growth opportunity.
Speaker 0 | 47:44.738
Okay. What kind of role is getting out of hand? What kind of work is getting out of hand, becoming too much? Is it DevOps? Is it some other roles within the organization that just seem, wow, man, there needs to be solutions to this?
Speaker 1 | 48:04.632
I have some interesting ideas around DevOps, but I’ll go with, for now, some of the BI that we do. There’s a lot of value in having data, and it’s very, very popular to be pursuing data. Getting data scientists can be very expensive, and you have to have a return on investment. So I’ve seen in a couple of places now where it’s great to have the data. but are companies really factoring in the cost of getting that data? And are we really offsetting that cost? When we first started at Blinds, I said, you know, we should really hire a couple of people and that’s going to grow. We’ll hire a consultant to help us build out the initial data warehouse, but we’re going to need full-time staff. And the idea was, well, we’ll build the data warehouse and then we’ll be done. All we’ll have to do is the ETL to populate. Like, well, you know, you’re going to get. a lot of good data and you’re going to get answers, but it’s going to generate a lot more questions. And the team grew to a large size. And I think some companies take that too far. And I think that has to be balanced. You have to make sure you have the ROI, even though it’s great to have the data. And also sometimes the data that you’re collecting, especially if it’s from your team members, there’s… There’s… They don’t necessarily want to provide some of that data. They don’t want to account for every 15 minutes of their day and what they’re doing. It’s great to have that data to know exactly what they’re working on and exactly what a project is going to cost. But it’s also very time consuming to collect some of that data some of the time and for people having to provide it. So I think that has to be balanced. I am a big proponent of data. I really built my whole career around data. But I think you have to be careful to not let that get out of control and make sure you have the ROI.
Speaker 0 | 49:58.374
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 49:59.914
On DevOps, I think a lot of people are confused around what DevOps should be. And maybe I’m confused, but here’s how I take it. It’s kind of like Agile. It’s not, you don’t go hire a DevOps person, just like you don’t go hire an Agile person. You have a mentality within the company that’s Agile, and that needs to be embraced by everybody in the company. DevOps is supposed to be an amalgamation between the development and the operation. operations. And so it’s not that one person is going to come in and automate things, but that everybody’s involved in the automation and the integration. And I think it also ties in with exception handling. So you want to automate things. And Google’s done some interesting things here. I think it’s in the book, How Google Works, where they shut down systems routinely at different times of the week so that people who are writing code have to handle that those systems are going to be down. So instead of assuming that a database server is going to be up, write your code so that if the database isn’t available, how can you gracefully handle that without the system crashing and blowing up in the user’s face? Maybe you can take advantage of some message queuing to store that data. When the system comes back up, it gets fed into the system and things continue to run. What if someone was in the middle of… purchasing something on your site and it blew up on them. Yeah. Wouldn’t it at least be nice to be able to gracefully recover to send the information around who the customer was, what their email was, what their phone number was that they had entered in before it blew up on them and have a salesperson call them a minute after it failed on them and said, hey, I see you were just on the site trying to buy this and you had some problems. Would you like me to help you finish up that order? I think that’s the kind of DevOps culture that needs to take place so that we’re automating everything, we’re handling exceptions, and that everybody in the company is involved in that integration.
Speaker 0 | 51:57.245
Got it. Got it. Interesting. So some other questions. We’re kind of getting close to our time here. One kind of question as a CTO specifically, a technical type of leader that you are, where do you go to sharpen your saw? and what you do. Not just, not leadership side of things, but let’s just talk from the technical side of things, CTO things.
Speaker 1 | 52:28.024
Sure. So I love Pluralsight. I have a license for that and many of the members on my team. The thing I like about that is the content is vetted by the number of users that access the content and how they rate it. So you can go other places for good content, but it… It might be hard to find good content. There’s great stuff and there’s poor stuff and you got to sort through it. Pluralsight’s able to provide pretty much all good content and they have a lot of executive summary level stuff. So if I want to learn about a particular technology, I can watch an hour and a half video training session. Maybe I watch that at 1.5 or 1.6 speed so I can get through it even faster. And I can then dive into additional detail if I want to. I also like user groups, peer groups where I can, you know, throw out questions and have a variety of answers come back. There’s in-person groups that I attend where we’ll meet for lunch and discuss the challenges that we’re having. I also love going to conferences. A lot of what I do in the conferences is speak with vendors and talk with my peers that are there. I do attend the sessions as well, but I feel like I really get a lot of information out of the birds of a feather type sessions where they get people that are dealing with similar issues together to talk through it and talking with all the vendors that are there. I think those are great ways to learn.
Speaker 0 | 53:59.345
Do you feel like you’re in kind of a unique situation because you’re with your CTO of a company that’s growing out web-based sales websites, still kind of the traditional. Well, it’s not traditional, but compared to the other business, what you’re doing, do you have a harder time finding people in the same type of role as you?
Speaker 1 | 54:24.458
Not really. The tech innovation conference that I went to in Chicago was a pretty large conference. And that was all people that were involved in the e-commerce world. And so there was a wide variety of CEOs, technical people. So that was a good show. A lot of great people to interact with.
Speaker 0 | 54:46.878
Okay. All right. Well, we’re coming up kind of on our time limit here, maybe four or five more minutes. What haven’t I asked you yet? that’s been on your mind while we’re talking?
Speaker 1 | 55:02.815
I mean, I love the connection to extreme sports just because I’m passionate about that. And I’m here in Italy to wingsuit base jump. And I started this as just kind of something for myself. Like, you know what? This is a lot of similarities. Like I can take things that I do in cave diving and I can apply that to… managing IT systems. And I started creating a list. And then I said, you know, I want to create a presentation out of this. And I started creating content. And the presentation I did was over an hour long, and I did get through everything. And, you know, it’s just surprising, you look at, you want to reduce single points of failure. And a lot of the times people think about that as being the infrastructure, well, we’re going to go into the data center, and we’re going to make sure that there’s no single server router switch. But it goes beyond the systems. It goes to the people that are involved, the vendors that you work with. You know, what happens if you have a key vendor go out of business? You know, maybe you have code in escrow. Can you really manage that? Building your systems around redundancy in the people, your staff, the vendors that you use, the hardware that you have, the software systems that you use. Having that redundancy is so critical. When I go cave diving, I have at minimum three lights, usually more like four or five, so that if a light goes out, I’ve still got other lights that I can use to get out. We use two tanks, and I’ll often take additional tanks so that I can go further, and multiple regulators that are independent of each other, and multiple computer systems. diving with a person so that you have a second brain and you can help work through problems that you might encounter while you’re on the dive. Uh, there’s just so many similarities and it’s a, it’s a fun discussion. And, uh, I think it’s entertaining because, you know, extreme sports is kind of fun and, and seeing that related to technology is kind of a unique perspective.
Speaker 0 | 57:07.140
So besides real quick, besides, um, cave diving and diving, What was it? What’s the job?
Speaker 1 | 57:15.310
The wingsuit? Yeah, wingsuiting. So you become a skydiver first and then you become a base jumper and then, you know, you can become a wingsuiter. And then you combine all of those disciplines into using your wingsuit with a base rig to jump off of a stationary object like an antenna or the earth or a bridge and so forth.
Speaker 0 | 57:40.324
How long did it take for you to do that? till you’re a wingsuit?
Speaker 1 | 57:45.488
Well, I set a four-year goal when I started. And in the first year and a half, I went to Norway in what you call a tracking suit, which kind of blows up like a doughboy, but doesn’t have the wings like a wingsuit. And I jumped in Norway. And then the second year, I went to Italy and did it in a wingsuit. And this is my sixth season in Europe to base jump. And I’ve been skydiving for 10 years. Gotcha. And cave diving for since 1998. So 24 years or so.
Speaker 0 | 58:21.859
That is amazing. So that is really interesting. Obviously, you probably have lots of things you can talk about with that. I’ll just end on this. This is our last question. What’s the most important thing about actually being a leader to you if you’re mentoring somebody else? Not just the technical, you got the technical capabilities, you get that. What is it about being a leader?
Speaker 1 | 58:47.076
I’ve accomplished what I want to do in my career. I love having the opportunity to help other people on my team or even outside of my team grow and get to where they want to be. I think it’s always important that when someone in the company applies for an internal role, that if they’re not ready for that role, You know, you tell them why you sit down and you have a conversation like, look, if this is something you want to do, let me help you get there. Here’s here’s why we can’t put you in that position now. But here’s the steps that you can take. And we’ll help you along the way if you want to do this so that the next time this opportunity comes around, you are able to to take advantage of it. Yeah, really helping people with their career growth. And that’s the most rewarding thing for me. I had a list of things that were. that I had written down many, many years ago about how I wanted to manage my life and my relationship with my family and how I wanted to learn. And about a decade ago, one of my mentors said, you’re missing something from this list. I’m like, what am I missing? He said, really helping other people reach their optimal potential as well. And I agreed. So I added that and I’ve really tried to make that a part of my life to help people now reach the goals that they have. And I think it’s the most rewarding part of the job now. So much more rewarding than growing yourself.
Speaker 0 | 60:12.518
Well, that is a great way to end right there. That’s fantastic. So we’re going to end with that. Larry, hang on with me for just a minute. Again, everyone, this is Larry Hack with
Speaker 1 | 60:26.289
CPAC. C-P-A-P-S.
Speaker 0 | 60:30.229
Terrible. CPAP. And going to be, what’s the next? Sleeping.com. So, well, this has been awesome. Thank you for taking the time, Larry. And we will be broadcasting this. Can’t wait to get this one produced and sharing it with the world. So, thank you very much.
Speaker 1 | 60:50.688
Thanks a lot. Thank you
