Speaker 0 | 00:09.602
Good morning, everybody. My name is Scott Smeester. I’m here with Dissecting IT Nerds. We got a really good, really good program for you today with Carlos Joffrey. Real quick, I am the founder of CIO Mastermind. We are geeks with executive tendencies. Helping other geeks with executive tendencies become established in their role, in the industry, in their leadership. We help CIOs, CTOs, IT directors, anybody who is reporting into the C-suite. Check us out at ciomastermind.com. All right, let’s get started.
Speaker 1 | 00:51.307
Thank you, Scott. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 0 | 00:53.029
Absolutely. I looked up your profile and I want to bring it up again. because I was on a different machine. Are you in Miami?
Speaker 1 | 01:02.360
I am in Fort Lauderdale, just north of Miami.
Speaker 0 | 01:05.322
Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. And let me just, there we go. You’re the executive director of IT at, what’s the name of the company? I was there too.
Speaker 1 | 01:18.393
Biotissue.
Speaker 0 | 01:19.453
Biotissue. Oh yeah, right. That’s interesting. I was looking forward to this one because it’s an interesting field.
Speaker 1 | 01:27.744
It is, indeed. It’s quite unique.
Speaker 0 | 01:30.946
Yeah. Have you been in this field a long time or have you been more in just technology and then found your way here?
Speaker 1 | 01:38.571
Yeah, technology for over 30 years now. Oh, boy. I can’t believe it. It’s, yeah, yeah, a little bit over 31 years to be exact. But in the life sciences, only five and a half. It’s the current role that I have, which is head of IT. for this life sciences firm that really helped me get acquainted with this industry, which is quite unique. And even the product that this company creates, it’s unique. I mean, I think there’s only one other player in the world that lives in this space.
Speaker 0 | 02:14.109
Okay. All right. And what is the most fascinating thing about what you guys do as a company?
Speaker 1 | 02:22.631
So our… goal is to create products that help the body regenerate cells okay the idea here is to repurpose human tissue uh human tissue that would otherwise be discarded because this is human tissue that comes from the afterbirth this is the specifically the amnion layer or the amniotic layer of the uh wound uh and the um umbilical cord layer of amnion that is found in the umbilical cord. For your accident, which is usually how some of these breakthrough products are found in science, the doctors found it very interesting that in the early 80s, late 80s, early 90s, when in utero… And ciches were being made for babies in the womb when they had conditions like spina bifida. When the babies were born, the doctors were just surprised to see that the wound healing was done almost perfectly. There was very little scarring. And they started scratching their heads thinking, well, there’s got to be something in the environment that allows for the regeneration of cells in a more moderated way. This is the… basically magic behind this particular complex that is natively found in the amnion. The complex is called ACHA-PTX3. ACHA stands for heavy chain hyaluronic acid, and PTX3, I’m not sure what it stands for, but that whole complex, it’s a protein complex, allows for our own bodies or cells to regenerate themselves in a moderated way. So Usually scarring is a condition of overreaction by our regenerative process. And this whole tissue acts like an orchestra conductor to make sure all the cells are regenerating in a more moderated way, easier way. And scarring is almost minimal when you use our products.
Speaker 0 | 04:37.288
Okay, so here’s the holy grail, it sounds like to me. I don’t have a bad knee. If I did. And thankfully, I don’t. You know, I’ve never had problems with my knees. Thank God.
Speaker 1 | 04:50.281
I hope you don’t have any.
Speaker 0 | 04:51.963
Yeah. Or or whatever. As we get older. Right. I am getting older. We all are. Is this. The Holy Grail is to help regenerate maybe organs or like, you know, the joints, things like that, so that we can maybe live longer.
Speaker 1 | 05:13.679
Is that this? The goal is, so we actually have five clinical trials in process right now. The first one is to focus particularly on diabetic foot ulcers or DFU. These are wounds that are… typically found on the extremities of diabetic patients that don’t heal. So our product basically, once you apply it, it helps the regeneration of cells around the wound and covers the wound completely. In some cases, some of the trials that we’ve seen, even hair starts regrowing. So there you go. There’s an application for hair growth as well.
Speaker 0 | 05:52.117
Yeah, you’re looking at me here, aren’t you?
Speaker 1 | 05:54.319
I am. All right. But the main driver of our organization is that we’re a clinical product, meaning that we need to have clinical trials behind the claims that we make. So it’s not like we’re just going to bottle up this in some sort of snake oil and sell it to everyone and say, hey, this is going to work. We have to make sure that we follow the rigor behind clinical trials and show the FDA good enough evidence for them to give us. the ability to sell the product with those claims. So we go after specific ailments.
Speaker 0 | 06:33.843
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 06:34.724
And by the way, one of them is its knee, is OA, which is orthoarthritic knee conditions.
Speaker 0 | 06:41.530
Okay, got it. So I would sign up for that clinical trial for the hair thing, but you know what? I don’t know what I would look like anymore with hair. I don’t know that it would be- You look great.
Speaker 1 | 06:52.459
You look great the way you are. You’re welcome.
Speaker 0 | 06:56.410
All right, well, let’s get to the geek part of this thing. I want to hear, or nerds, IT nerds, right? So you said 31 years in technology?
Speaker 1 | 07:06.496
Yes,
Speaker 0 | 07:07.177
31 years. How’d you get your start? What was your first?
Speaker 1 | 07:10.479
So straight out of college, I graduated with a computer science degree, which back in the day, in the early 90s, most of the professors back then were all math majors. They had, in their generation, we’re talking about 50s and 60s when they graduated. There really wasn’t a computer science degree. So most of our professors were really just math teachers teaching us concepts and programming and so forth. And I do remember that curriculum being just so loaded with mathematics that, you know, I never really used those equations after I graduated. But I got lucky enough to find employment at Motorola, which was at the time, as you know, in the early 90s, they were basically the Google of the time. So. We began writing a lot of software for real-time systems. I began my career really focusing primarily on Unix operating systems and programs that are written in C language, C++. We wrote primarily applications that would support 24 by 7 factories that were deployed around the world. It was very stressful. It was a lot of quality assurance involved. Every one change required, you know, multiple meetings, code reviews and… making sure that there was plenty of regression testing before we introduced these changes to a live factory. We got involved in messaging, which now it’s like a, it was a predecessor to APIs, you know, web services. Oh, yeah. But a lot of that stuff, we actually code, we had to code from the ground up. So we even got into coding drivers for particular devices that we would connect to the factory. It was quite… Quite elaborate. A lot of engineers that we worked alongside, a lot of, like I said, whiteboard discussions, quality assurance discussions, code reviews, and just architectural designs and so forth. So I did that for about five years. And then the stress got to me and I decided just to do consulting. And consulting basically took me around the world. I started traveling. I went to England for a year. I worked in Ireland also. And then… I came back to the States because frankly, I got homesick. I’m being away from the family and the friends, so I decided to come back to South Florida. And I did more consulting, focusing on Oracle technology. And then eventually I landed at Norwegian Cruise Line, where I was the IT director for about 11 years. I did work there for data warehousing and BI solutions. And then now I’m here at Biotissue, heading a life sciences firm, doing everything. Soup to nuts, you know, telephone. Systems, infrastructure, security, ERP support. Of course, I don’t do it all myself. I have folks that I depend on and partners and vendors. But it has been a really interesting journey. I really do like to focus on the technology, especially the technology that is available to us today. It’s just amazing what type of products are being born almost every year, cloud-based, that allow us to really abstract some of the lower level. components like the network management and the SAN, the storage, all that stuff is now just you click and you spin a new VM or you spin new storage and then of course you have to pay for it. Sure. The part that most organizations probably are struggling with is just managing the cost of a cloud service.
Speaker 0 | 10:45.881
And piggybacking onto that then, what Of all the kind of the technology things that you work with right now, what’s one of the bigger frustrations? Like if the IT industry, if the technology industry, whoever’s out there, whatever’s frustrating you most could fix this one thing, what would that be?
Speaker 1 | 11:11.214
I have to say if there was some sort of, I think a lot of providers need to harmonize their integrations. It seems like every good SaaS product out there doesn’t always have the right integration infrastructure in place. Because it’s one thing for you to spin up a service and you go to a website, you put your username, log in, and boom, you’re in. You have all the functions, everything. But then you start realizing, wait a minute, how am I going to manage my identity management? How am I going to make sure that the right people have the right access to the right areas of that application? Let’s see. Take Salesforce, that’s CRM. That’s the most ubiquitous. Actually, Salesforce is really not a good example because they actually are very mature with their APIs. But the question here is that as soon as a line of business starts thriving on this platform, then inevitably they’re going to want to need some reference information from another system. And so how do you get them that information? Do you… Do you FTP that information up there? Do you just shove it into a table and then they reference it? Are there APIs that are readily available? So some providers do come up with a great menu of APIs that you can consume, but they’re not all up to speed, especially in the life sciences, because the life sciences has been kind of slow to pick up the digital evolution. So even, I mean, I think, you know, the most common issue that we find ourselves in is sometimes there are great products out there that are cloud-based, but they don’t do any type of authentication back to either Azure or any type of, you know, like Okta. And you start wondering, well, do I now have to create another set of username passwords? And typically they’ll say yes, but we’re working on the SSO piece. and three-factor authentication. You’re like, come on, guys, this should be right under the gate. Right. Yeah, yeah. So to answer your question, I think it’s a lengthy answer, but it’s the integration 42 that some of these platforms don’t have yet.
Speaker 0 | 13:28.163
Gotcha, gotcha. So then on the other side of things, what’s one of the more fun, and it could even be gaming or something like that, what’s one of the more fun things that you do in technology that you look forward to getting to?
Speaker 1 | 13:43.956
I know this is going to sound like a real geek, but I just love data. I love data. I love fixing data. I’m like whack-a-mole. You know how data, it’s like whack-a-mole, right? You think you fix it and then suddenly more misaligned information comes out. Perfect example is address. Oh my God, address or phone number feels like the worst. It’s like whenever you don’t have good standards on the front end. You got people putting like phone numbers with an error code or the country code without a country code altogether without parentheses. You know, there’s like a what, like 10 different formats for a phone number. So when you just get that data in raw format, you know, you write some really fancy functions to clean it up. And then lo and behold, that one variation that shows up later on and breaks everything. So it’s really it’s the data cleansing piece. I love it, which really goes along with integration as well. Although. some of the viewer integration tools because we recently launched three middlewares where I’m at. And it’s amazing how… they now accelerate some of that cleansing, right? You no longer have to code a lot of these things. They’re just, you know, you just, for example, just last week I was doing integration because I’m actually very hands-on. I love to play around. And partly it’s because I just, and I think, because I’ve heard your podcast before, and it’s a common theme is as you grow up in the organization and you become a senior leader, you know, you tend to not really code. You tend to not really. get your hands dirty. But every now and then, you know, you just, it’s so much fun to go in there and unravel a problem and trying to figure out with your team, not do their job, but get involved and get in the weeds because it’s super fun. So I really enjoy doing that. I enjoy, I know you mentioned gaming, but, you know, I do every now and then get my Angry Birds out and I’ll play that or one of those games. But from just a pure technology, I just love to,
Speaker 0 | 15:48.146
solve complex problems that are data driven or data well that’s awesome so now that is geek by the way that is thank you like what i mean i guess you probably well you know oracle obviously um other things you’re a command line guy right oh
Speaker 1 | 16:08.897
my god yes yeah but i i try to i try to use the the um um i guess they’re now code they’re called codeless or code? No, there’s something code-free. No code. No code, that’s it. The no code features of these platforms where you just drag and drop. It’s like, for example, so I’m using a platform called Jitterbit. And in this platform, I’m mapping a date field, for example, from system A to system B. And system B happens to be SQL Server. Actually, no, in this particular example, it was Salesforce. And then when I did the mapping, immediately it knew that you need to include a function to translate the date. So I knew. And I’m like, oh yeah, that’s where you got to translate the date fields, right? Because it takes some consideration. If it’s a time zone, if there’s, you know, some dates have a time zone in it, the time component, it will throw in the time zone component, which is like, oh my God, I forgot about that. And it just shows up and you’re like, oh yeah, that’s great. You have to code for that. So I do love that component. But every now and then you’ll find myself like writing, you know, PowerShells or, you know, something to automate something that, you know, could easily be done in clicks.
Speaker 0 | 17:16.922
Gotcha. So did you say you’re using a no-code platform?
Speaker 1 | 17:20.403
We are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a variety, quite a few, mostly on the integration side. So we got a platform called Workato, which is really short for work automation, which is great. I used to do a lot of that work early in my career with FTP processes, and I used to script all that stuff. And Workato says, hey, you don’t have to script the stuff anymore. We’ll do it for you. And oh, by the way, we’ll do the auditing and the alerting. And yeah. Yeah. It’s phenomenal. Of course, again, you have to pay for it,
Speaker 0 | 17:50.899
right? Yeah. And Workato, from what I understand, it can be expensive.
Speaker 1 | 17:55.960
It can,
Speaker 0 | 17:56.240
yeah. And minimum amounts of licenses and things like that.
Speaker 1 | 17:59.361
Yeah. Yeah. They’re based on a concept called a recipe, which is cool. It’s like you’re building a menu, right? So you’re building a dish, right? So you create a recipe and the recipe, even if it’s like two points in the recipe, two hops, that’s… one seat, right? So the way that it’s licensed, like we got the minimum footprint, which is, I think, 10 recipes. So 10 recipes could be any connection A to B, but you have up to 10. And then there’s other tiers above that. The other platform that we use is Jitterbit, which I mentioned. And then the other one is Apigee, which is akin to MuleSoft or Bell Del Bumi or API Gateway from AWS. It’s a way to basically hub and spoke your API. System A and System B, they don’t have to be connected directly. They go through a middle person. So it’s only one connection all the time for whatever system you got. And then that middleware does the routing. And it’s pretty cool. It’s a very common architecture to talk through a middle person.
Speaker 0 | 19:00.317
But like Workato, what was the other name? The one that you just mentioned?
Speaker 1 | 19:04.280
Apigee, which is API. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 19:05.901
yeah.
Speaker 1 | 19:06.862
Which is from Google. Yeah, that’s a Google platform.
Speaker 0 | 19:11.205
No, it’s not. actually, they’re not storing any data. Is that correct?
Speaker 1 | 19:16.487
Some of them do. Yeah, some metadata. That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 19:19.528
Some of them no code, but I would have guessed that Workato does not.
Speaker 1 | 19:24.729
I think the only thing that Workato stores is metadata around the orchestration, like when things run, how often they take, and depending on, also that’s another thing, depending on the licensing, the retention is very short. It’s like 14 days. After that, they clean it on their own. which is great because how many times have you written something and then you log something and then suddenly it’s like, oh yeah, I forgot to clean the log directory. Then suddenly you fill up the log directory because it’s been running for a year and a half and you don’t have a garbage collection process to clean it up. So again, these things just make it very simple right out of the box. You have retention on your logs and so on. So it’s really nice. So from that perspective, I love these low-code platforms that allow you to do… things and really focus more on the business rule aspect, not so much on the mechanics.
Speaker 0 | 20:14.812
Right, right. Now, I’m assuming that the platforms that you use are not really meant for. So, you know, what I’ve been working on a lot lately is exploration into citizen development, looking into what’s the PMI, the Project Management Institute. I wanted to say program, but that was as well as on that. Do you have citizen developers or are these more technical folks in your firm that are leveraging Workato? Because, you know, there’s the terms low-code and then there’s no-code. I’ve seen and I’ve played around with no-code platforms before and we just called Workato a no-code. I would think that Workato is more of a low-code.
Speaker 1 | 21:10.058
Yes, I agree with you because in Workato you can still introduce… things like JavaScripting and so forth, if you want, if you want to get a little fancier, if you want to take care of certain things. In fact, when you look at the mapping, there’s always a component or an area in there where you could say, hey, you could do your own mapping or translation without using any of our already existing formulas.
Speaker 0 | 21:30.471
So are you leveraging then, or do you have people in the organization who is working on no-code platforms too?
Speaker 1 | 21:45.424
Our organization is small. We have under 300 employees. IT is about 12. The only citizen coder is folks that support the Salesforce platform because Salesforce being that it’s really supporting a sales organization. The commercial officer has a team of IT. They used to be called Rogue IT, but in our case, it actually works perfectly because… They really do support only the sales organization, not the rest of the enterprise. So it just makes sense for them just to focus on the Salesforce platform. And the only touch points they have with us, IT, is on the integration side, which is the part that we own. Plus, they also in Salesforce, they are leveraging a product called Lightning, which allows for the UI to be enhanced a little more. And… And the other one we use is, oh my God, it has a really funny name. But you can tell I don’t support it because it would just roll up my tongue, but it’ll come to me. But it’s a great little add-on on Salesforce that allows you to really create a prettier UX, UI experience and also put in some business rules.
Speaker 0 | 23:02.913
Gotcha. Gotcha. I was looking at your company and I see that there is a CTO. Yes. In your company. And which is interesting because sometimes you see CIOs and CTOs. I read a, I read a post the other day. Somebody is like, we should just get rid of the CTO title because it does nothing. And I’m like, wait a minute. What? That doesn’t make sense.
Speaker 1 | 23:27.851
No, no, no, no. See the CTO, at least from, from how I’ve learned of that position is the person who is responsible for the technology direction of a. product that the company is establishing. So it makes sense for, for example, Facebook or Google or Samsung to have a CTO because they’re the ones that are, you know, the tip of the spear in terms of innovation of technology products that you’re producing as a commodity, right? Right. So in our case, we have a CTO because our product is the clinical product, right? So let’s go back to the conversation we had 10 minutes ago where we have all these different applications of our regenerative product. Well, our CTO, who is a very highly regarded scientist in this ophthalmic space, is the one that basically drives the direction of what new element we want to go into. And of course, someone in IT would have no business to be in that lane, right? So this is clinical technology. So in our case, we do need a CTO to drive the innovation of our products.
Speaker 0 | 24:38.228
And how do you support the CTO in his direction?
Speaker 1 | 24:43.492
So lucky for me, most of the products are clinical in nature. And they’re derived by the same raw products that we process. And when you say clinical,
Speaker 0 | 24:53.381
help me out with this phrase clinical. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 1 | 24:56.464
Clinical is a product that gets applied to a human being, either topical, right? Or injectable, or, you know, it could be consumable like a drug or could be, you know. Anything that you put in the human body or is of a nature to help treat an ailment. So that’s really at least my definition of a clinical. Our products are both for ophthalmic and wound care. So we ship our products. specifically for a particular surgery or a particular condition of the eye. We’re soon to launch a product that will treat dry eye, which we’re really excited about it. I think it’s going to be one of those… I don’t want to use the word game changer because that’s overused and it’s a marketing thing, but it’s really going to make a difference. And it’s really rewarding to be working the life sciences from the… perspective that what you’re producing is really improving the lives of people and lives of folks that would otherwise have no other options because we are focusing on unmet needs. I can even talk about a case that they showed us last year where a firefighter almost lost her toe through a chainsaw incident. And if she would have lost her toe… she probably would have lost her career as a firefighter because, as you know, your toe kind of helps you with your balance. And I’m going to spare you the pictures, but suffice it to say that our products miraculously helped this particular female firefighter recover her toe. And she was able to keep her job, basically.
Speaker 0 | 26:44.704
So the product helped her regrow tissue?
Speaker 1 | 26:49.032
Yes, it regenerated the tissue.
Speaker 0 | 26:50.873
And reattach that kind of a thing?
Speaker 1 | 26:52.914
Yes. Actually, if you want me to show the back, after this call, I can share the picture for you because it’s really phenomenal. It’s one of these things where you’re like, wow.
Speaker 0 | 27:02.621
You’ll email the pictures to me. I will. Any listeners out there have to come to me to get these pictures. Yes. The before and after or just after?
Speaker 1 | 27:12.007
This is the whole journey. It’s like from the moment that the patient was in the ER. to the point that they cleaned the wound and then they treated it with a product. And you see, and it’s weeks. We’re talking about, I think it was like 12 to 16 weeks, the whole journey. And you see how this toe starts regenerating. It’s amazing. So you see that and you’re like, wow.
Speaker 0 | 27:35.356
What does the final toe look like? Just a regular old toe?
Speaker 1 | 27:38.797
No, I mean, you can see that there’s some scarring in there, of course. But when you look at the original picture, like the type of damage she did with the chainsaw, you’re like, oh. wow, that’s it. She’s done. I mean, that’s got to be amputated. And then you look at the end result. You’re like, wow. Yeah. And there’s other cases like that too, that are a little less extreme, but we do, like I said, go after unmet needs. And our first product really was, we want to focus on DFUs because our diabetic foot ulcers, because if they go untreated, the next sort of treatment is amputation. And, um, Our products will help patients keep their limbs, both arms and I would say feet and hands.
Speaker 0 | 28:27.477
But you have to have access to the backup, which is the actual toe itself. It wouldn’t just regrow at this point.
Speaker 1 | 28:34.281
Correct. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 28:35.762
You have to attach it and regrow some of the tissues, specific tissues.
Speaker 1 | 28:40.825
Yeah. Our product really, if you think about it, our product really is almost like an organ. um, transfer from one body to the other. And the amnion, um, has this magical, uh, property that your body does not reject it no matter who the donor is, which is incredible. It’s, it’s almost like our bodies read, like, remember, Oh, this is the, uh, the complex that helped, you know, create me when I was in the womb. So I’m not going to reject it. I’m just going to, you know, accept and, and, and, and, and help. Like I said, this has this this property of moderating our own ability to, to regenerate on our own wounds.
Speaker 0 | 29:22.614
That is fascinating. How about like, um, psychological wounds? I’m just kidding. How do we go back in time? And you know, that thing that happened, that rejection from that girl or whatever, you know, that’d be great to recover.
Speaker 1 | 29:38.861
I don’t know. I don’t know if we can do much about that.
Speaker 0 | 29:40.902
Nah, probably not. Maybe someday. Right.
Speaker 1 | 29:43.843
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 29:44.243
So, um, Do you think then, here’s what I’ve been saying to people about that. I was always saying, you know, one of these rich billionaires is going to get involved in this stem cell industry, the regrowth industry, so that they can live longer. They’re going to have this self-preservation desire and motivation, and they’re going to really get involved in this. And I’m currently 52. And I say to people, if I can live till 70. I’m going to live till 110 because that’s another 18 years of research. And Elon or Jeff Bezos, I know Jeff is getting involved in this, isn’t he? Has he been investing in these in stem cell type businesses?
Speaker 1 | 30:40.061
I know Amazon is getting into the healthcare space. I remember hearing something about a pharmacy acquisition, but I’m not sure.
Speaker 0 | 30:50.356
And I know that about Amazon, but I actually have read that Jeff Bezos himself is actually getting into stem cells. Beside the point.
Speaker 1 | 30:58.999
Right,
Speaker 0 | 30:59.279
right. The point is that, what’s that?
Speaker 1 | 31:01.840
We generate our own stem cells. So our stem cells are the ones that help that regeneration. So our products actually moderate our own stem cells when they are in the process of converting themselves into a hair follicle or a skin cell and so forth. So it’s a very interesting space. So this whole space is called biologics, which is something that was started. Biologics. So that’s the space within life sciences. And it’s just basically treatment or any treatment that is derived from cells or cell-derived treatment. It’s not drug-based. So it’s typically safer. It has very less side effects than a drug. But it’s, yeah, it’s a space that’s been now, I think, around for, I want to say over 20 years.
Speaker 0 | 31:54.035
So today I learned the phrase for the industry is biologics. Now, is that?
Speaker 1 | 31:59.358
Biologics. Yes, correct.
Speaker 0 | 32:00.999
Ending in I-X? I hope it is.
Speaker 1 | 32:03.721
No, L-I-C-S.
Speaker 0 | 32:06.503
Okay. Actually, I think that’s more appropriate.
Speaker 1 | 32:08.984
Biologics. Yep.
Speaker 0 | 32:10.365
Biologics. And that’s this thing that I’ve been talking about. So. What do you think about my assessment? If I live till 70, I’ll live till 110.
Speaker 1 | 32:19.959
It’s quite possible that you are on the money because, and then not just so much for the treatment, but it’s the fact that we’re so much more aware of how to eat better, how to have better lifestyles than say our parents’ generation, where they just didn’t have the information. And they were loading up with steaks and burgers all the way up to when they were like 70. Nothing wrong with meat, but as you… As you age, I think your digestive needs are different and you just have to keep that in mind.
Speaker 0 | 32:55.201
But then that raises the question for me. Okay, so my body can live till 110. And what is that? Supporting your mind? What happens to the mind as it gets old?
Speaker 1 | 33:09.749
That’s a loaded question there, Scott. I mean, it’s… Yeah, there’s…
Speaker 0 | 33:14.780
Can you prevent that from happening? Or is that a STEM thing? Is that a cell thing?
Speaker 1 | 33:20.143
Yeah. I’m afraid you’re diving into an area where I’m just not the SME.
Speaker 0 | 33:26.588
We’ll find out one day, right?
Speaker 1 | 33:28.169
Subject matter expert.
Speaker 0 | 33:29.030
People will be living until 110, but they can’t freaking talk or something like that.
Speaker 1 | 33:33.413
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 33:34.434
I don’t want to say that. Most people I tell about this, they’re like, I don’t want to live that long. Geez, not in this world.
Speaker 1 | 33:42.984
Well, the other question you got to answer is, will your wallet be able to live that long?
Speaker 0 | 33:49.146
That’s a really good question. I would think that if you do live past 70, you would have figured out how to make money. Or your wisdom is worth so much. Maybe. I don’t know. That’s a really good question too.
Speaker 1 | 34:05.474
Yeah. You got to think about what you’re going to do for retirement.
Speaker 0 | 34:10.284
By the way, audience, audience, I’m not talking about living until 110 and from the day of 70 on up until 110. I’m old guy until I die. No, I mean, I see myself. I would love to regress my body back to even where I am now when I’m when I’m in my 70s, 80s, 90s. God, that sounds crazy to me. But. Hopefully the body can be strengthened and regret. Well, that’s the Holy grail. Is that the Holy grail in your industry? Is that really literally, do you guys get together and talk like, okay, someday our industry is going to be make allowing people allow this problem with this population are all of our, you know, our, our, our population is going down. We’re not having children like we did. So we’re going to have to make up for it. We might just have to live longer.
Speaker 1 | 35:09.096
Yeah, I think, so I mentioned earlier about how we’re focusing on unmet needs. I think the whole vision of our company is to be the leader in the regenerative space so we can. enhance and help people with their quality of life.
Speaker 0 | 35:31.023
And what’s that look like? Quality of life? No pain?
Speaker 1 | 35:36.405
Right. No pain. One of the products that we’re, which I mentioned earlier is the knee or OA, which is orthoarthritic conditions of the knee and joints. As you may know, we’re in the midst of a… um drug uh pandemic with the opioids and of course opioids are taken because people for the most part are suffering pain like back pain and so forth so our products are hopefully going to address the the pain issue you know the root cause of why people are taking opioids oh that
Speaker 0 | 36:10.507
would be big that would be great and again that well there’s that psychological thing again what about addiction you That’s a tough road to cross. You let that other industry, what’s that called? Psychologics.
Speaker 1 | 36:29.791
Yeah. Well, you know, prior to that, I was at Norwegian Cruise Line for 11 years. So we were, you know, providing dreams to people so they can forget about their problems and their pain. So there’s another industry that you can focus on too.
Speaker 0 | 36:44.597
Okay. So I’ll shift gears here a little bit and we’ll talk about what… besides biologics, what’s the most intriguing technology thing that’s coming about that you’re excited about?
Speaker 1 | 37:05.329
Yeah, I think hands down is the AI and how AI is going to be used for business applications. Because I think for the most part, we do see AI in consumer goods like Alexa and so on. But I… Really would like to start investigating how AI is going to play into just basic business flows, like PO management and just order-to-cash or procure-to-pay processes. Maybe suggesting possible features or services to customers, current customers, helping in the sales cycle, regardless of what industry you’re in. There are probably already features that I am personally unaware of, like a Salesforce platform, for example. But I’m really curious to see how AI is going to play a role in just basic business workflows and business workflows.
Speaker 0 | 38:05.573
How do you even jump in the pool to AI? Like, what does that look like? What is a project? Okay. hey, this project looks like it’s an AI project. We need to get some artificial intelligence looking at this, helping us make these decisions or these, I mean, you can automate things now. You can automate payments and a lot of that stuff. But when do you know you need to jump into AI?
Speaker 1 | 38:30.180
I think one of the areas there’s opportunities, and there may already be technologies around it, is how you interact with HR, right? So as an employee, especially think of a very large organization with thousands of… employees. And then suddenly now has somebody has a question about their 401k, their benefits or insurance questions. You know, I think now you can possibly introduce AI for a quick chatbot, you know, where people just, you know, talk to HR, you’ll have like a chatbot called ask HR, ask HR, and then, Hey, I have a question. Okay. What’s your question? You know, that type of back and forth that you see now with travel sites where they can guide you to a product or even some of the support. I think it was my bank. I was really interacting with my bank about a question I had, and it was just really a bot. So the idea here is that now you can customize a bot that can interact with an employee, and based on your own policies and procedures and work instructions, then the bot can actually just guide an employee on internal policies and ask very succinct questions. uh questions like uh travel and entertainment uh policies like maybe you have somebody that just joined and he’s like well i’m gonna take you know business trip to the northeast you know what do i how do i do this you know and then just you know pop a bot and that makes a more efficient use of the hr stuff you don’t have to man somebody to you know monitor an inbox or or or worse you know pick up a phone and start talking you know wasting 15 minutes of someone’s time to really understand what it is that they’re looking for So there’s a good AI opportunity for an enterprise solution. And then, of course, it’s the other aspect on, you know, being that I was at 11 years at a cruise line, one of the main focus of a cruise line or any… the travel and leisure industry that has a commodity that expires over time is yield management, right? It’s being able to manage this pricing elasticity in a more optimal way so you can maximize your revenues, right? So that really requires a lot of data, a lot of data analysis. So in a lot of that stuff, I don’t think I’m giving up any secrets here, but a lot of stuff was really done very manually. I mean, yes, we have processes to do ETL and crunch through all those. those reservations and figure out what was relevant changes versus changes that we don’t like and so forth. But the idea here is that to be able to create more of a human interaction with the data and be able to answer questions like, what should I really price this itinerary next week versus two weeks from now or three weeks from now? And oh, by the way, do I throw in a discount for people that are doing an inside cabin versus an outside cabin? And then… have this thing just basically talk to you and interact and then not just spit the price out, but actually do the change at the reservation system, which is where the magic has to happen because that’s usually another system and its integrations. But you get software engineers like myself get all worried. It’s like, oh, wait a minute. Now we’re giving the control to an end user to go change something in the system without us taking a look and figuring out it doesn’t break anything. So it’s this complex. simplistic you make an experience, the more complexity that you have to add in the backside. And then you create this algorithm, right? That then no one really knows what it’s doing and how it’s behaving.
Speaker 0 | 42:07.283
Right, exactly. That’s a pretty crazy thoughts behind that AI. It’s not just a bunch of if statements.
Speaker 1 | 42:17.832
It’s non-deterministic. Yeah. It’s code that… Today, it’ll say if this condition, then that, but then tomorrow be this, if this other condition, then that. And the conditions change depending on, you know, how it learns the, you know, the data or, yeah, it’s really neat.
Speaker 0 | 42:35.225
It’s basically writing its own if-then statements. Exactly. Finding other conditions, finding other. whatever, variables or situation.
Speaker 1 | 42:48.781
I remember when I was in college, we used to call that fuzzy logic. That’s when it’s not really true or false. It’s like a maybe. It’s like maybe, but it depends on this, it depends on that. And the dependencies vary over time. And that time is, that’s the learning, right? That machine is doing and recalculating. But I think it’s, I’m more of an optimistic. I know perhaps some people get scared, like AI is going to take over the world and so forth. And there are some dark sides to it. And then you can see that in social media when it’s just feeding you what you like and suddenly you continue to go down the spiral of just believing your own thoughts and so forth. But AI, I think, does have a positive side to it. It just… We just got to make sure that there’s enough ethics behind it and regulation, of course.
Speaker 0 | 43:43.798
Which there isn’t, but that’s another story. And there won’t be for a long time.
Speaker 1 | 43:49.702
Yeah, it’s the same to be said about digital currency, right? And these commodities out there like Bitcoin and Ethereum, where they’re really not currencies, they’re just security. They’re security objects that you’re trading back and forth. They’re like baseball cards. At this point, no one’s really buying anything with Bitcoin.
Speaker 0 | 44:11.624
Isn’t it great that we get to be the test case and bring this stuff up as the generations that are… I think future generations are going to look back and be like, oh my God, I would not have wanted to live in that time. That social media thing, are you crazy? Yes,
Speaker 1 | 44:30.750
yes, yeah. Like, oh my God, that guy bought a Bored Monkey NFT for how much?
Speaker 0 | 44:37.731
Yeah. What? And they used to drive, they used to ride around in these little metal boxes at 60, 80 miles an hour.
Speaker 1 | 44:46.575
And they drove it themselves.
Speaker 0 | 44:47.615
They did it themselves. So,
Speaker 1 | 44:49.556
yeah, yeah, yeah. I tell you, one of the things I’m really looking forward to is for my kids and their generation to not have to drive, not have to have control of the vehicle. And I have to depend, you know, because your life actually depends. Believe it or not, when you hit the road, your life depends on the person next to you not doing something crazy. and hitting you out of the blue because they’re mad at their ex, you know, or they’re, you know, they’re running away from some, from a cop. So the idea here is that at some point technology will hopefully focus in on life-saving self-preservation. And so I’m really looking forward to vehicles to have, you know, hardwired self-preservation logic that will never allow a driver to like, you know, jam their, you know, drive off a cliff, drive the vehicle into a wall or into another. Another vehicle. I mean, you’re already seeing that. right, with Tesla and some of the other newer vehicles. But I truly believe that we’ll be in a world where, you know, all that stuff will be totally automated and we’re going to be saving, you know, 30,000, 40,000 lives a year in accidents.
Speaker 0 | 45:53.831
So just in this conversation alone, this is exciting for you, audience. Check this out. The rest of your life is going to be spent navigating all our bio, what was it, biologics? Biologics. What’s going to happen ethically, all the different things. Okay, that’s biologics. AI, social media, and what did we just talk about again? We just talked about driving. Driving, just to navigate through automation into driving. Good luck with your…
Speaker 1 | 46:31.217
Usually, it’s not the end result. I think the end result will see it. It’s just a transition, how you get there. And oh, by the way, how do those emerging economies get there? Because typically, when we focus about the future and technology, we always think about, you know, North America, Europe. But what about India? What about Africa? What about those? You know, we can’t forget them either. I think technology needs to also come up to speed for them as well and make their lives better.
Speaker 0 | 46:58.690
Interesting. So I’ll shift gears again, as I normally do. So you’re currently executive director. director of IT, I’m curious what might be next for you and what you have to do to kind of stay relevant moving forward.
Speaker 1 | 47:19.460
Yeah, I actually ask that question all the time. I’m asking that question. So the only thing I’m never going to stop is learn. I’m learning. I’m never going to stop learning. And one of the advents of now of so many SaaS platforms is that you have such an unprecedented access to information and tools and the ability to understand everything. I mean, just last week, someone introduced a new device to our ecosystem, which I had never heard of before. And now I’m fully up to date with it. And the product is called Remarkable 2. Have you ever heard of it?
Speaker 0 | 48:01.437
I have not.
Speaker 1 | 48:02.578
Me either. So it turns out Remarkable is a tablet where you can… Right. Almost like a Kindle, but it’s a little larger where you can draw and put architects, you know, sort of like a whiteboard. But you’re it’s portable, but that’s all it is. It’s just a device. And you can just, you know, create a PDF and send it off and share your thoughts and ideas pretty quickly with some collaboration tool. It’s like a collaboration tool, but it’s its own appliance. It’s really a tablet, but it’s super lightweight. It looks it almost looks like a notepad. So we’re looking at. figuring out how to get that integrated with our office 365. So, you know, there you go. It’s a new product, a new environment and something new, which was, and I’m actually very happy that this is happening, which is usually brought up by a line of business people, you know, people in the line of business. They’re like, Hey, we saw this. We think it’s really going to be good for our, for our team because, you know, they collaborate with other folks in that particular line of business with other industries, industries, and, you know, they talk and. Social media. I mean, it’s incredible. Some of these products that are up and coming are so quick and fast. And again, I go back to the integration and just make sure that some of these products have the right and proper integration so you can put the security controls in it and adequate data governance, right?
Speaker 0 | 49:25.918
Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1 | 49:27.459
So that’s the next challenge is just to learn more.
Speaker 0 | 49:30.321
Just to learn more. How about leadership? What kind of things are… And who do you kind of look for for leadership?
Speaker 1 | 49:40.477
Technically, from a leadership perspective, I like to look at folks that are in a similar industry to see what they’re doing. And in my case, obviously, other IT leaders. So I’m actually a member of a group called Norax. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, which is really, it’s a subscription-based product or service. But what I like about it is that you can connect with other CIOs or head of IT leaders, and they’ll talk about some really basic things like Office 365 licensing and how it’s different when you’re in Azure as opposed to AWS and how more complex it is. And how if you want to do this or if you want to do leveraged power apps, you’ve got to be in Azure. You can’t be in AWS. Or if you are in AWS. Those are the things, going back to learning. So, Norex is really a great resource for me. Also, most recently I’ve been doing an AV investigation. And AV, I mean the audiovisual technology that we have in our conference room because as the hybrid… So the hybrid situation is here to stay, but now we’ve got the challenge of people that are… Half people are in the office, the other half are still working from home, and we want to be able to have a very collaborative experience. And… in the boardroom. So if we have people in the boardroom and people are home, that if say the presenter is at home, that the whole experience is as collaborative in nature as possible. And people don’t have issues with microphone or, or the video feed or what, what they’re sharing and so forth. So I’m looking to simplify. I think we, we overdid our technology pre COVID. We were actually pretty ready for COVID by the way, almost everybody went, went to work from home and. It was pretty seamless. We had auto VPN from the get-go, so it really was very seamless. But I think we had too many ways of communicating, and that created a little bit of confusion. So Norox is a good resource for me to be able to learn more about leadership and also direction. For the most part, I’m one of those types of leaders that I like to get a general opinion on directions. Even with this AV refresh that I’m doing, I’m working with my head of infrastructure and giving him my… I actually didn’t give him the project because he’s got way too much on his plate. And I thought it would be better just for me to start researching new options. So we’re really, like I said, dumbing down our infrastructure. But I just reached… Actually, just yesterday, I sent him a very specific email with all the items that I wanted to work on and change to get his feedback. But yeah, I think for the most part, I like to really… I think… The other thing I like to throw it out there, and hopefully your listeners take heed of this advice, is Hostmasters. Hostmasters is an organization for public speaking. It’s one of the best, most close-effective clubs that you can belong to, where you can interact with other peers in different industries that help you basically put together your thoughts and be able to present. And not only present and speak, but also listen. And I think that’s one of the… Biggest eye-openers for me when I started Toastmasters is, wow, you actually, because you have to take these roles, and those roles are about you giving an update at the end of the meeting about what happened in the meeting, and you have to pay a lot of attention to what happens in the meeting in order for you to give some good, adequate feedback. And I think that’s really been a great resource for me in terms of building my leadership skills.
Speaker 0 | 53:28.279
So when you were talking about the collaboration. You’re going through AV right now. How far along on the road are you on that?
Speaker 1 | 53:40.504
I just finished my assessment. We have, I think, about seven different bullet items that we’re going to focus on. And primarily, it’s just like I said, dumbing down. Like, for example, we had these head mics that were dropping from the ceiling. And we had one of those cameras that kind of rotate and follow the speaker. So we decided to scratch that because that needed a local PC. And then people had to connect to the local PC. If they brought their laptops, they weren’t sure how did my laptop connect to that. So it was just that thing. And also we’re going to just standardize on Teams as opposed to WebEx and Zoom, which are the other two platforms that we had.
Speaker 0 | 54:19.493
Okay. I’m just kind of curious because I do think that there is a place for VR. And I think that VR is going to be the ultimate collaboration. But my gosh, how far does that have to go? Because you have to buy other equipment. You have to buy, I mean, everyone has to have a headset that’s working, that they know how to manage and run and log into. How far away is that?
Speaker 1 | 54:52.018
I don’t know. I hope we don’t get that soon enough, though. The metaverse. So we jokingly talked about it in the beginning. We were like, so why don’t we just carry the rooms all together and just get everybody those VR headsets. And then whenever we have a meeting, we’ll just go into like a virtual room and we have avatars of each other. And then we’re talking and we’re like, are you, you know, I mentioned that jokingly to my boss. I think that at some point, maybe we’ll get there.
Speaker 0 | 55:20.423
That’s a set of Oculus right there.
Speaker 1 | 55:22.424
There you are. Yeah, I see it.
Speaker 0 | 55:24.446
I bought it literally and I’ve used it maybe five times in the last. year, yeah, maybe a year and a half. More people have used it than me. And I bought it literally just to see what’s out there. Yeah. Just to see what’s happening now. Cause this is my second set. I bought some HTC ones a few years ago. Well, more like five or six years ago.
Speaker 1 | 55:48.782
Yep. Yep. Well, I have a family, family member, very close family member that works at Facebook. So he kind of gives me the insight of what’s going on with that. But I tell you, there’s, there’s an opportunity there. There’s been an opportunity. Down here in South Florida, we have a company called Magic Leap, which was in that space. Primarily, they wanted to, I believe, although I don’t have inside information on them, but I know that they were at some point focusing on medical applications where a doctor could put on these VRs and be able to do a practice run on a prospective client, let’s say heart surgery or whatever, where the heart or whatever… would actually be a rendition of that patient’s heart. So they could see where things were at and the tumor or whatever that they were dealing with before they actually, you know, treated the patient. So I think there’s certainly a possibility there in healthcare to improve the accuracy of surgeries. So I’m looking forward to that. But as far as like creating a virtual meeting room so that, you know, your co-workers are in there and avatars. And you’re talking to them like that. No, I don’t know. I just don’t see that any, anytime soon because of the equipment that you have to put on. It’s just too cumbersome.
Speaker 0 | 57:05.982
It’s too cumbersome. It costs too much to even take that step. It’s such a good, it’s so promising. It’s the most promising. I think one of the most promising. And by the way, I mean, not like the best, I’m just saying promising. It’s VR has been there for a long time. as a promise to business, but it’s just not delivered yet.
Speaker 1 | 57:33.861
That’s right. But, you know, you can’t, you can’t really, I think it’s unfair for us to sort of take shots at it. It’s sort of like taking shots at the Model 1 or the T1 when Ford first released that car and saying, oh, that’s not going to work. I mean, look at those tires and they’re, you know, they’re just very bumpy or, you know, I’d rather, you know, I like my horse and carriage is more efficient. Plus I love my horse. You know, it’s… It’s that you kind of, you know, you take shots at the newer technology, which is very rudimentary, very rustic in the beginning. But as long as you have the right amount of investment and the right vision or right or where you want to take this. Yeah. As long as it’s something to improve human life and improve our existence here as humans, I think, yeah, I think there’s definitely an opportunity there.
Speaker 0 | 58:22.779
I kind of predict. that VR won’t be in business until it’s like a keyboard or a mouse, which by the way, I think we got to get rid of keyboards and mouse. This is old ass technology right here.
Speaker 1 | 58:36.377
It is. And we were talking about that the other day. You know how the QWERTY, you know, the QWERTY keyboard, you know how that came to be? It’s because of the strikes of the hammers. They had to make sure that the most commonly English written words. Right. With the keys, the letters were as far away as possible so the hammers wouldn’t jam. I did not know. Yeah, that’s how we have the QWERTY. So now we all got trained on this keyboard and we got to live with it. So it’s legacy, right?
Speaker 0 | 59:04.259
Yep. All right. We’re coming to the end here. Just a couple minutes left. I want you to tell the audience what we’re going to see in five years, what you think we’re going to see in five years.
Speaker 1 | 59:17.009
Well, I hope that we see more automation on the roads. I hope we see more AI involved in our daily appliances and daily use. And in business, I hope that we roll out more integration solutions so that as you pick different SaaS applications, that there’s more of a plug and play as opposed to you having to hire integration engineers to decipher what’s going on in the backend.
Speaker 0 | 59:45.086
Well, there you have it. Carlos Joffrey, am I pronouncing the last name right? All right. Well, it’s been an awesome hour along with you, Carlos. I’ve been a lot of fun chatting with you, talking technology. We’re cut from the same cloth. I love checking, talking geek kind of stuff. And we’re both on about that. So it’s been fantastic. So everyone, if there’s anything, I told you to write me if you want to see those toe picks, but you might want to just reach out to Carlos Joffrey. His last name is J O F R E. You can find him on LinkedIn. Carlos is the first name. Thank you, Carlos. Appreciate you spending the time with us.
Speaker 1 | 60:27.848
You bet. Have a good weekend.
Speaker 0 | 60:30.030
Thanks a lot, my friend.
