Speaker 0 | 00:07.739
All right. Welcome back, everyone, to Dissecting Popular IT Dirts. I’m your host, Doug Kameen, and today I am talking with Lucas Heinrich. Hey, Lucas, how are you?
Speaker 1 | 00:18.565
I’m great. How are you?
Speaker 0 | 00:20.266
I’m doing fantastic. So, Lucas, we brought you on the show because you’re a really interesting guy and you’ve got a great background. Can you tell us, let’s just start off and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Speaker 1 | 00:36.954
Well, so I’m currently I’m a chief technology officer at the Forte Group. The Forte Group is a technology solution provider software outsourcing company based in the US, but with resources that are global, primarily in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Prior to this, I was CTO at a wealth management firm, and prior to that, I helped grow a very similar company called BuyerDesDev, which was primarily focused on the U.S. market, but with engineers in Latin America. I’m probably what you’d call a very non-traditional CTO, although the more people I talk to in the industry, the more I realize there’s some common themes. I did not get a technology degree. philosophy major and joined the job market at a time when technology was really leaps ahead of what you could learn in college and really learned how to program on the job when there was a lot of change going on. So I started working in a bank doing a lot of reporting and data analysis and utilizing a tool set. That was most of this was Microsoft products, but there was no way to study that. You just learn on the job. And then from there, I grew and tried a bunch of different things. I’ve worked on the product development side, building SaaS platforms, as well as on the services side, which is where I am right now.
Speaker 0 | 02:16.497
Nice. Nice. So, you know, it’s like you mentioned Bears Dev. I get a lot of calls from their salespeople right now,
Speaker 1 | 02:24.579
you know.
Speaker 0 | 02:26.840
You got my day job. You know, yeah, there’s definitely a lot of people from Bearstaff trying to track me down for different things. But that wasn’t your responsibility there.
Speaker 1 | 02:38.704
It wasn’t my responsibility, although I have to say their CEO is a dear friend of mine still. You know, they invested in building their own sales and marketing automation platform that’s tightly integrated with, you know. with their entire enterprise in a way that I think is novel. And now they’re injecting that model into companies that they’re funding as part of a venture capital company called Beta Ventures. So really interesting stuff. Really love those guys.
Speaker 0 | 03:13.708
Awesome. So just going back in time, I know you mentioned you kind of have a non-traditional background here coming into these types of IT leadership role. Let’s go way back in time. Where did you… Where did you start? So you said you didn’t start in technology. So how did you, what were you originally set out to do, I guess is what I want to ask you.
Speaker 1 | 03:35.366
Great question for the typical Gen Xer, you know, I really didn’t know.
Speaker 0 | 03:39.789
And Gen Xer here too, man.
Speaker 1 | 03:42.391
I will say like many Gen Xers, my dad bought me a Commodore VIC-20 when I hit the market. And I sat down writing, you know, basic programs, you know, building up. you know, programs to play tic-tac-toe or make things fly across the screen in big pixelated chunks.
Speaker 0 | 04:03.161
Yep. I was a TI-99 4A guy. That was mine.
Speaker 1 | 04:08.306
Hated you guys.
Speaker 0 | 04:11.748
We programmed a logo, man.
Speaker 1 | 04:13.850
Ah, right, right.
Speaker 0 | 04:16.072
So the Commodore. So you were a Commodore guy.
Speaker 1 | 04:18.374
I was a Commodore guy. Yeah, those are my roots. But I think in all seriousness, though. I think the first thing that I built was a program, just a print routine to write. I will not do something in class. When the teacher told me to write that a thousand times, I said, okay. I walked over to the computer, popped in my big floppy disk, and printed it out.
Speaker 0 | 04:43.352
You were hacking life at age 12 here.
Speaker 1 | 04:46.714
Well, that’s the roots of automation, right? You take something manual and you automate it. So I think I… kind of had a passion for technology as a way of you know, finding efficiencies. And later, you know, that would translate to a passion for DevOps when DevOps culture was really more of a grassroots movement than something that’s become standard and operational in many companies.
Speaker 0 | 05:17.735
That’s awesome. So you started, so you did have some technology background. You had this Gen X background, you had computers as a kid, but you went to school for philosophy.
Speaker 1 | 05:29.293
Well, I went to school not knowing what I was going to school for, which is absolutely horrible now that I have kids looking to go to college. It’s too expensive.
Speaker 0 | 05:41.016
The cycle continues of life, right? Parents telling their kids not to do what they did.
Speaker 1 | 05:46.858
But I do think that, you know, philosophy has kind of, and maybe, you know, humanities in general, I think has kind of a bad rap. You know, I keep meeting people. you know in different disciplines in technology and the common thread is that they have a bachelor in arts of arts and in some discipline that’s not necessarily technical um but has enabled them to quickly learn adapt and become very proficient in different areas of technology so um so philosophy for me um was uh more about a rigor around thought a discipline around thought and applying techniques of thinking to solve specific problems and I don’t think that’s a far stretch from solving engineering problems and I think that the people tend to think oh you’re you know it’s it’s very I don’t know you know people think philosophy and they think you’re sitting sitting out on a mountaintop and meditating and it’s really not that at all it’s it there’s a lot of rigor involved in critical thinking I think is a is a very first very hard to measure and second very under uh under uh maybe underestimated uh as uh as a as a discipline so absolutely with that yeah yeah no i i couldn’t agree more like the you have a lot of people who
Speaker 0 | 07:10.650
you know i i too have been in you know technology leadership for a number of years and there’s a there’s definitely a distinction in folks who have uh i guess they call it maybe clarity of thought because they’ve got this the more expansive background in terms of where they came from. I have a business degree as well as a computer science degree, which gave me a lot of additional insight into how other places and other aspects work, other than just, say, writing code all day or maintaining the servers of the network all day. So I think I had some fabulous insight to share with our listeners that you’ve got there. You don’t need a tech degree to be a tech leader. And that’s a real, you know, that’s a great nugget for people to walk away from.
Speaker 2 | 08:00.154
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Speaker 1 | 10:24.576
you you got that philosophy degree when did you make the transition into being in in the technology field maybe about two months after being hired to work at a bank straight out of college
Speaker 0 | 10:38.561
Was this one of those, like, I know, you know, Lucas does know his computer stuff, and we could ask him to help us with these things.
Speaker 1 | 10:47.025
And I was a very quick learner, said yes to a lot of things, and then figured it out later. But that’s basically how it works. So I started working in a small regional bank as a management trainee, and their management trainee program would cycle through different parts of the organization. And the area where they needed the most help was called MIS, Management Information Systems, where they had a lot of old legacy mainframe. Well, at that time, it wasn’t so legacy. Now we would say legacy mainframe that they did not have the connective tissue between that and the new Microsoft world of Excel and Access and all the benefits that you get from that. So I was. writing code Visual Basic and working with SQL Server and teaching the executive team how to use Excel and build macros. That was my introduction. And all of this was on the job, learning as I went, you know, a couple of courses. But now I do have to say that growing up into, you know, different roles, there is something very much to be said for a computer science background. And there are big gaps that I have worked to fill over time. Just, you know, concepts that that you really can’t skip over that easily. So so so I wouldn’t say it’s it’s in no way would I say it’s superfluous. I think it’s incredibly important to have that engineering fundamental. I think even more so, though, and this is something I have shared. You know, I’ve spoken with other people with similar backgrounds, is that. I think it also gives me a passion to learn those things that maybe were just basic coursework for me, but have become really interesting to learn and challenging to learn on my own. So it’s a different way of, I guess, getting the same kind of background.
Speaker 0 | 12:46.438
Okay. Yeah, there’s definitely, when you think about, I think, I’m sorry, I’m going to pause for a second, to think about the things that, you know, I’m a CIO too. And… When I work with staff and I think about who has what knowledge, you know, you’ve talked about the help desk staff and things like that and how they don’t necessarily understand the networking concepts and fundamentals. And then the programming staff may not understand the, you know, kind of what the help desk is doing and how to troubleshoot the applications and stuff like that. You know, a lot of that cross-functional knowledge. And I think that’s kind of what you’re alluding to is you don’t, you know, without that background, it could be, you have to find it in other ways. And you might have to put in that extra effort to get that. to get that in. But that can be really rewarding too, depending on the experiences that you have the opportunity to get yourself into. You know, like you were talking about your background here, where you were asked to help out the MIS department and coding up on Visual Basic and stuff like that. And you probably made, you know, probably some mistakes you made along the way, but fundamentally you picked up a ton because you were doing it as this practical application and having to pick up the coding aspects as you went.
Speaker 1 | 13:59.280
Just to expand on that for a bit, because I think it is really important. One of the smartest people I’ve hired as an architect never went to college, now has his own startup, CTO at a really successful growing startup. You know, it’s the credentials that people chase. You know, I understand you have to demonstrate that you’ve done some kind of work, right? You have to demonstrate that you’ve. put some time in and invested but um but really there are a lot of people out there that that just you know we’re lucky enough to be in a situation to get the practical application and you know that stuff is gold those people are cool so i i it’s a challenge as a father because i want my kids to go to college like like many parents do but you have to recognize that there is absolutely nothing like the the real world experience at the end of the day
Speaker 0 | 14:55.264
Yeah, absolutely. So it actually prompts the thought for me, what kind of things do you think people, leaders like us can do to open those doors for folks to give them that practical experience? Because there is a real problem in IT of, you know, we want people who have experience, but how do they get the experience that they need in order to get, you know, to get their foot in the door to start? So like, what steps have you done in your experience? I mean, you’ve got tons of experience being a leader of different types of organizations. So I think people would be really curious to hear some of your strategies for solving that conundrum.
Speaker 1 | 15:34.189
Well, so nothing works 100% across the board, right? But one thing that I’ve found to be very useful is I think motivation sometimes plays a much larger role than I think people undervalue what that can do. So what I mean by that is you may be 80%, 85% proficient in some language. You know the ins and outs. You’re great at it. You’ve done it for 20 years, but you’re about 15% motivated to actually do anything in it because you’re bored. And then you may have 15% knowledge in something, but 85% motivation to learn and improve. So finding people with that amount of motivation is key. And I found that having people stretch a bit. for the right personality can really unlock a lot of talent. So, you know, I mentioned, you know, someone I hired who didn’t have a college degree. The fact that he didn’t have a college degree maybe meant that he was going to work a little bit harder. I think people need to see that upside as opposed to thinking about it as a filter. And if you have a, you know, a junior to mid-level engineer who’s really hungry, and wants more responsibility, I’m more willing to take a risk on providing that responsibility with the right guardrails and mentorship than I am to kind of, you know, think, well, no, maybe I’ll go out to the market and find someone else. That’s one thing that I think is a little bit undervalued is understanding motivation. Another is just how important the domain knowledge, you know, within a specific business or vertical, you know, that knowledge can only be learned. working. It really, there’s no other way. Find technology for the business problem.
Speaker 0 | 17:28.627
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 | 17:29.728
That the most advanced technologist is still going to have to spend a lot of time getting up to speed to really understand the business problem. So people who have that deep business domain knowledge and need to practice up on the coding side, I think have a lot of upside potential. Whereas if you’re just, you know, amazing at
Speaker 0 | 17:53.121
you know choose your language and and um you know you’re a ninja but you don’t understand the business it’s going to be a long learning curve yeah and i’m gonna go back to something you mentioned just a minute ago here you were talking about giving uh like say somebody who might not have a college degree but has a ton of potential and you can see that they’ve got the the kind of the hunger to go for it uh and this applies maybe even to somebody who does but is changing their their positions too you know like you can have somebody who’s who’s coming up through you the support organization but wants to move into the development side of the organization for instance or something like that yeah but i think about in i.t so so frequently we’re we’re built around the idea of that you how to frame this you can fail our failure failing at something is is generally considered to not be good and what i mean by that is that like in a lot of tech startups and you probably can give some insight into this being from the development side of the house and being in some some consultative development businesses there’s a i think about like bigger companies alphabet uh um uh meta and places like that they they are very open and honest about where a failure has happened in a process and then they don’t they the accountability is to learn to not do it again as opposed to say punishment for doing it wrong the first time and And like, that’s a really important concept that gets in on the IT side, the IT and support side can oftentimes get lost because downtime is money and all these other things like that. But you still have to find the space for people to grow into. And that balancing those two can be a real, real challenge. So like, I’d be interested to hear some thoughts from you about that.
Speaker 1 | 19:41.887
So, yeah, it’s such a tricky one, right? You know, fail fast is great. But how many, you know, thousands of… shipwrecks out there, right? You don’t want to hear that from an airplane pilot, right? You don’t get any fucking chance.
Speaker 0 | 19:57.195
Like a far side, like, oh, we got a light out up here, and darn if that isn’t the big one, right?
Speaker 1 | 20:03.318
Evolution sorts out those bad pilots, right? They’re not around anymore. As a leader, I think you have to really understand what mistakes are within the realm of growth curve and what mistakes are true risk of ruin and existential. And where you are facing the latter, you just have to have redundancy and realize that humans are flawed by design. We’re not machines, so we are going to make mistakes. And the way that you put guardrails around that will define what happens when those… mistakes occur. So the best example of that would be you have the right processes in place such that if someone makes that mistake, it’s contained within a certain amount of time, and there’s only a certain amount of the impact radius is really small. And you can supplement that with, you know, a blameless postmortem to say, well, mistakes happen. This got around our framework. So how do we need to expand our framework now? Who do we need? But how do we change our processes and our framework? That’s key. The worst example of that is the blast radius is huge because someone pasted in something and missed the tail end of it, which I’ve seen many times, and they become the scapegoat. And that, to me, is tragic because who has never made a mistake like that? So how an organization responds and creates… creates the guardrails to protect people from their own potential for mistake is a really big part of that culture. And I try as much as I can to focus on that in building a truly blameless culture because we’re all going to make mistakes. And we could talk about this for days as it applies to security, right? I mean, everyone knows the human is the weakest link. Well, that applied to technology across the board.
Speaker 0 | 22:04.176
Yeah. I mean, yeah, IT security is a game of not if, but when, you know, you’re going to something’s going to happen. And it’s just when is it going to happen to you? Not if it’s going to happen to you.
Speaker 1 | 22:16.320
You could add how valuable is that to the actor, right? You know, it’s going to happen.
Speaker 0 | 22:22.002
Yeah, absolutely. Well, no, thanks for that insight. So changing gears a little bit. We talked a little. we talked about how, you know, kind of your early career and where you started off and how you, you know, your, your early Commodore computer and, and you, you’ve started doing visual basic development for a bank, but at some point you transitioned from being the person doing IT to being a leader in IT. What, what was that point for you? And when did, when did you realize that and why?
Speaker 1 | 22:50.776
Oh, what a great question. Um, so, um, I, I, Went on from doing that kind of work to being a database administrator and really working a lot in data. And then at some point was chosen as a de facto project manager, technical project manager to lead a project. A small project for the organization called Y2K.
Speaker 0 | 23:16.708
Nothing much.
Speaker 1 | 23:20.691
Really revealing my age there. We just lost more than half your audience. was born after that so um and i think what what um you know as as a really solid contributor in in any discipline but you know but in software development you can contribute only so much given the human constraints of the time you can be focused the knowledge that’s in your head your ability to learn etc um scaling that is a really interesting problem of us all. And scaling that means maybe being comfortable with not the same amount of quality, but you’re investing in bringing other people up and bringing other people along. So that’s something that combined that with the need to scale out a company, a startup. You just need to grow your teams and you need to increase your leverage and be able to produce more and faster. I just find that to be a very interesting problem solved and a fun one to solve. Now, as far as just the coordination aspect, I’m going to plug a book here that I read recently. And now I’m going to forget the name of the author, so maybe someone can check this. But I think it’s Claire Hughes Johnson, I believe, called Scaling People. And she worked at Google and at Stripe, I believe. And it’s like… the operating system of of running a company and um it’s it’s very kind of in a sense engineering oriented and how structured it is it’s like a template in a playbook but putting together the processes and communicating them across an organization and aligning an organization like an operating system is a fascinating challenge just in management in general. So that kind of orchestration is also interesting and a fun problem to solve. And then when you can combine the two, the orchestration with kind of helping people get to where they want to be and helping the company grow to where it wants to be, all of that together is just a lot of fun.
Speaker 0 | 25:38.895
Awesome. I did consult the internet, that series of tubes, and it did tell me that you were right. It is Claire Hughes Johnson is the author of that book. So, so, you know, gold star for you right now. You pulled that out of the hat and got it. So, so going back to, we started talking a little bit about how, or when did you know you, you realize you were a leader in, in, in IT space? Like, like what was the epiphany for you where you were like, oh my gosh, like. And I’m comfortable or confident in doing this.
Speaker 1 | 26:10.197
I don’t know exactly when this was. I don’t remember how old I was or any of those details other than I remember the conference room. I remember it was full of people that were kind of like stern looks in their faces and kind of frowning around a problem. And I just kind of got frustrated and said, well, wait a minute. I got up in front of a whiteboard and started drawing something. So that was the moment of. if I can just make this problem a bit more easy to digest and do something visual and bring people along with my thinking, or even, you know, not even having the answer, but just maybe creating the problem statement in a way that you could, you know, get people to understand and then really focus on a solution. That was probably the moment. That was probably, I don’t know, 20 years ago.
Speaker 0 | 27:03.808
So you felt that transition point. And from there, what did it make you want to do further? Like, I mean, you’ve had, you know, just going through, you know, I’m clicking real quick to make sure I get to your LinkedIn profile here on my computer. But, you know, you’ve got a great, you know, set of experience here. You know, you’ve worked at, you know, going back into way back in time, map life and, you know, Globot and Blackbot. at Bears Dev and, you know, Kestra Financial. You’re currently with the Forte Group. So you’ve clearly been moving into, I would say, roles that seem to be offering you new challenges at each step. And so what’s driving you to want to see that and be that kind of leader? What kind of leader are you trying to be, I guess, is maybe the question I’m driving at here.
Speaker 1 | 27:55.104
Well, there’s two answers, right? I mean, one is sort of what drives me forward. And, um… and the other is what kind of leader I want to be, which I think is a constant work in progress. It’s kind of like asking what kind of father I want to be. I see both as being constant projects of learning from mistakes and learning more. But as I’ve progressed in technology, my interest just continues to expand beyond technology in a lot of domains. I think learning about I didn’t get an MBA. I got a master’s in economics. I say instead because I feel like mathematically it was a bit tougher. So I found it to be more of a challenge. And very recently, though, I’ve been actually reading this great book on financial intelligence. I’m almost embarrassed to say it, but just to learn a better understanding of how to read financial statements. I’m always wanting to learn these things and I want to be able to add value across the organization. I guess that’s my. point is that um you know technology solves a bunch of discrete problems but it doesn’t uh it doesn’t necessarily increase your lead conversion right uh it doesn’t necessarily add more value to your customers or secure your market position or improve your ebitda it it should you know depending on what kind of business you’re running it should enable all of that but that alone doesn’t do it so understanding all of the components of a company beyond the technology side is just something I’m continuing to learn more and more about in different industries. You know, I think, you know, you can kind of stay in one area and become a deeper subject matter expert, you know, as a lifelong pursuit, or you can kind of try to expand and learn as much as possible. And I guess I fall on the latter camp.
Speaker 0 | 29:49.811
Yeah, I know, I think about my, you know, I’m mentally aligning some of my journey with yours as we talk and thinking about this. And, you know, I was talking to my, you know, my wife recently about the transition from one of my recent roles where I went from being, I guess you’d call a working leader into being more of an executive leader. You know, when, you know, where we were. uh you know much more focused on strategy as opposed to kind of like laying out the strategy and having to execute the strategy as well um you know in your in your current role like which where where are you positioned in your in your current role are you in have you moved into like an executive strategy role are you still doing are you doing both at the same time here uh where where you’re at i’d
Speaker 1 | 30:33.051
say i’m doing both at the same time um and i think that is more a function of um well it’s a function of of where the company is in its current trajectory. I often say I have a three to five year attention span. There’s a certain sweet spot where companies are going through a lot of growth and change, which I find really fun, which is getting to a certain level of process maturity, expanding, growing in a scalable way.
Speaker 0 | 31:04.643
You’re new at your current role, right? The Forte group is just pretty new. So, like…
Speaker 1 | 31:10.686
um can you tell us a little bit about like what what what the what the day in the life is for you there is that is the chief technology officer in that in that organization yeah and it’s it’s really specific to to i mean being a chief technology officer in in a more of us of a services professional services company is is totally different than a product company and and i’d say having insight in one gives you a ton of insight in the other so a lot of the time i’m you helping our sales force actively in our marketing helping them understand their buyer um you know if you’re in the business of selling something um that’s your specialty but if you haven’t bought that service then there’s there’s a little little bit of the world that you may not know about so having been on the buy side of the equation allows me to provide a lot of insight to those areas um If you’re not building your product, I mean, it’s not a traditional CTO role where you’re worried about keeping the lights on, making sure that servers are backed up. That’s less of a concern these days than 10, 15, 20 years ago. For sure. You don’t worry about email working or not.
Speaker 0 | 32:22.458
Now, as a chief technology officer, do you have that operational responsibility as well, or are you very much focused on technology leadership?
Speaker 1 | 32:33.590
Minimally, minimally. So just as the transition for enterprise, the enterprises are going through is the technology, is it a cost center or is it a revenue generator? Well, in services, it’s a 100% revenue generator. So it’s more like an external role than it is an internal role. So I lead a team that obviously delivers services, but also has to provide a certain amount of value add. That’s our competitive advantage. And leading that team means a whole bunch of things from, you know, architecting solutions for our clients to making sure that they have the right skills and capabilities to deliver. You know, in a services company, people are your chief asset, right? There’s a lot that goes into that.
Speaker 0 | 33:25.449
Yeah. So now, you know, you’re… You know, a lot of our listeners, they, I mean, they brought in the mix from, from all these organizations, but there’s a lot of it, you know, internal it support for organizations and you’re doing a little different where you’re, you’re, you know, you’re in it and service delivery, but that service delivery is, is for product support and those types of things. So what advice would you have for people listening to the podcast about, about like being a leader in the it space and what like. There’s some maxims that you like to follow, some ideas, some principles that you always take with you no matter where you go. What would those be?
Speaker 1 | 34:05.421
Oh, what a great question. So there is some blog posts out there. Well, there’s a couple out there. One I do remember is by Paul Graham, who was at Y Combinator, about maker time and meeting time. And he talks about when he was… you know starting his first startup and he would code at night and then do meetings during the day having a an acute sense of how people can be productive depending upon the task and scaling that productivity is important for i.t leaders to have do not take people out of their focus time if you expect them to be productive solving heavy cognitive lift tasks which is writing code um and that understanding that will form, how you do your meetings, how you transmit information across the organization, how you organize, how you do your office strategy. Have people sit in the same room coding next to each other with headphones on all day. Or, you know, have a more reasonable arrangement where they can have more control over their environment. Obviously, you can tell I favor the latter and you can see where I’m sitting.
Speaker 0 | 35:24.006
For those of us, we don’t have video at home, the podcast. But, you know, both Lucas and I are sitting in our homes doing this today. So, yeah, we are. pretty clearly proponents of at least a hybrid schedule. Sorry, go ahead. Continue. Well,
Speaker 1 | 35:42.376
that doesn’t mean that. What that means is that when you are in the same room with people, make the best use of it.
Speaker 0 | 35:49.401
Maximize it. Absolutely.
Speaker 1 | 35:51.482
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s one thing I learned, you know, leading remote teams is that you find a good spot, you know, book that hotel in a city that’s not too expensive, that has great food and spend two days together. And that’s going to. to pay dividends for the rest of your year you’ll be totally aligned so um so having that that it’s understanding of when to put pull people together and when to have them focus incredibly important i think that blog post is anyone could find it there’s another way of thinking and i read this blog post i don’t remember is um understanding how to communicate and there’s a kind of like a an engineering way of thinking about it is understanding the difference between tickets you uh log entries and alerts so tell me more i want to i want to i want to know this i want to well what what what’s what’s endemic of an organization that’s kind of in meeting paralysis all the time and people always bogged down and too busy to get things done too much is going into email casts go into email people you know write a long email or they create a big deck and set out a bunch of things that should be should happen don’t don’t get done if you have a system so that you understand why you’re communicating what and when you use chat the chat’s like an alert it’s totally ephemeral i’m just gonna fire something off i need someone to pay attention right then i don’t need to search for it later doesn’t matter but i need immediate action i go there i need to log something something forensic i need to send something to people so they’re aware but they don’t need to read it right now and they can search for it later that goes into an email but don’t expect anyone to take an immediate action because they’re not going to read it when you send it. Then if you have an action, put it in a backlog, create a ticket somewhere. It doesn’t matter if it’s in Asana, Jira, or whatever. Create a ticket that people can collaborate that will automatically tell you if you haven’t done something that you should have done on time. Really simple stuff. People mix those three things up and it’s not uniform across an organization. But if you follow that discipline, it’ll keep your inbox to almost zero. It will make sure that things get done on time. And when something bad happens, people know about it. They’re not, you know, they’re not getting an out of office reply. That I think is it’s an interesting paradigm to think in. And then finally, if you’re a leader in IT, it’s absolutely your responsibility to continuously learn. There’s no excuse not to. One of my best sources, I’m on the TLDR newsletter that points me at a lot of stuff every day. I’d say 80% of what I’m learning about these days, like many, is related to LLMs. I think the world’s still figuring out the best way to use that. And there’s lots of low-hanging fruit. No one really knows how to operationalize everything yet.
Speaker 0 | 38:44.715
We’ve been doing a lot of talk, even at my company. We had a whole executive meeting at one point where, along with my IT manager, he and I gave… just a high level rundown of some of the tools and the things that you could do. You know, here’s chat GPT, here’s this, here’s what LLMs are, and here’s some of the business functions. And like the very next thing was our CHRO was like, we should make a policy that makes sure that we tell people they can’t use this stuff until we have a policy. And so there’s a lot of like business considerations that come into this. And the thing is, I mean, just like a lot of shadow IT, this stuff’s already going on, right? I mean, like. Oh, yeah. People are using it. I know people are like, yeah, I use JetGP to write all my emails every day.
Speaker 1 | 39:27.630
Yeah. No, no. And you’re absolutely right. I mean, that’s kind of like the invisible hand of technology, right? It’s going to get adopted whether you like it or not. So the faster you are to operationalize it, the more advantages. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2 | 39:41.198
Hey guys, this is Phil Howard, founder of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I just want to take a few minutes to address something. It has become fairly apparent. I’m sure all of you will agree. over the years that slow vendor response, vendor response times, vendors in general, the average is mediocre. Support is mediocre. Mediocrity is the name of the game. Not only is this a risk to your network security, because I’ve seen vendors on numerous occasions share sensitive information. But there’s also a direct correlation to your budget and your company’s bottom line. Not to mention the sales reps that are trying to sell you and your CEO and your CFO on a daily basis. That causes a whole nother realm of problems that we don’t have time to address. Our back office program at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we’ve put together specifically for IT leadership, and it’s on a mission to eliminate this mediocrity. And the best part. is that we’re doing this in a way that will not cost your IT department a dime. So if you’d like us to help you out, get better pricing, better support, and jump on pressing issues in minutes, not days, then contact us now so we can get on a call with you and conduct a value discovery session where we find out what you have, why you have it, and where you want to go and how we can improve your… your life, your IT department, and your company’s bottom line. What you’re going to end up with is, number one, just faster support from partners who care about your organization’s uptime and bottom line. And because you’re going to be able to access our 1.2 billion in combined buying power, you’ll be able to benefit significantly from historical data. And on top of that, you’ll also benefit from the skills of hundreds of on-demand experts that we have working behind the scenes that are all attached to our back office support program. So, If you’d like, again, none of this is ever going to cost you a dime. At the very least, it’s going to open your eyes to what’s possible. Let our back office team provide you the high-touch solutions and support that your IT team deserves so that you can stop calling 1-800-GOLD-POUND-STAND for support. Now, if you’re wondering, what does this apply to? This applies to your ISPs, your telecom providers. All your application providers, whether you’re a Microsoft shop or a Google shop, what you might be paying for AWS, even Azure, co-location space, any of those vendors that you’re paying a monthly bill to, we can help you with.
Speaker 1 | 42:24.425
Hey, it’s Greg,
Speaker 2 | 42:25.446
the Frenchman secretly managing the podcast behind the curtain. To request your one-on-one call,
Speaker 0 | 42:30.390
contact us at internet at popularit.net. And remember, it will never cost you a dime.
Speaker 2 | 42:35.975
Awesome.
Speaker 0 | 42:37.696
Well, that’s some… That’s some great sage advice. Thank you for sharing that. So I’m going to divert here for just a second. So we always take a few minutes just to kind of like light questions and get a little background in everybody. So I’m going to ask you, the question I’m going to ask you today is, what about your background? And this is a non-technical thing. Would somebody… either be surprised or you somebody said tell me something really interesting or super you know super like crazy about you you know like like i i could share like for me like once i was in the macy’s day parade when i was a kid you know like what for you would be the
Speaker 1 | 43:21.294
kind of an interesting thing you would like to share oh the people might not expect from from you that people might not expect yeah there’s so many that people would expect right so i’m like an you know guy in technology living in Brooklyn, New York. So the fact that I have a guitar behind me and so, you know, the fact that I, you know, have a guitar behind me obviously means that, you know, I play it, but it’s not my day job. Right. There’s a lot of a lot of people doing that. No, I think that the thing that people may not know right off the bat is a lot of my career. I mean, I’ve spent more time working remote than than I ever spent going to any office. And part of that was that. I lived in Argentina for about 12 years. My wife from there, my children were born there. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 44:06.983
that’s amazing.
Speaker 1 | 44:07.583
For about 10 of those years, I was working remotely for a company that didn’t really have a remote work policy. I was just getting things done and it didn’t matter because I didn’t have to be there physically. I think I was early adopter of a Vonage device when it just came to market. So I was able to communicate that way. And I watched the maturity of a lot of tools. uh, over that time, you know, enable more of what I was doing, uh, sort of grassroots. So, um, so, you know, I could talk to you in Spanish with relative fluency. People don’t always know that about me. Um, they, they might question my accent a bit, but, uh, they’d understand me.
Speaker 0 | 44:48.833
They’re like, Oh, there’s the American gang. But so, so like, that’s it. And people often underestimate how exposure to different cultures than your own can really like, positively influence your viewpoints and broaden your understanding. So like what… You spent 10 years living in Argentina. So you’re in South America, 10 years. Your wife is from Argentina. You were totally immersed in this culture for so long. What big takeaways? And what maybe is different? We’ll wrap it back into how it relates to here. We were talking about leadership on the podcast. How did that help shape some of your thoughts on leadership?
Speaker 1 | 45:30.705
So I think right off the bat, I mean, empathy, right? So. if you’re from the United States, you come from, you know, a quality of, of a standard of living that is incredibly higher than the majority of the world. So, um, and I think it’s very, very valuable for me to have that experience, extremely valuable for my children to have that experience. Um, just gives you a lot of insight and empathy and, and kind of a sense of, of, of, um, you know, what we actually have and how grateful we should be to have it. Um, I’d say that’s a large part of it. The other is technology as an enabler. It’s kind of funny how something like cell phone adoption in a developing country happens so much faster. The way that people were using WhatsApp in Argentina 10 years ago, way beyond what people use it for in the United States. I mean, just to run businesses. And… It’s interesting how anachronistic it can be. You can be in a place where people might still be riding horses, but they’re using their cell phones to do more than what we’re doing in the U.S.
Speaker 0 | 46:49.819
On the horse, right? Talking on their cell phone.
Speaker 1 | 46:52.940
Exactly. So that’s something that’s a really interesting phenomenon. I’ve never been to, I’m sad to say I haven’t had time, but I’ve never traveled to an African continent. And that’s a problem. a place where I’d like to go. They do a lot of things with payments there over cell phones. That’s really interesting and doesn’t get a lot of press. So watching technology grow in those areas and how fast it grows and how it enables growth is really interesting. Something I think living in the United States, you just become accustomed to.
Speaker 0 | 47:25.313
Would you say that that kind of experience and that knowledge or that exposure has, I’m hearing that it sounds like it would influence your… thinking as a chief technology officer who is trying to put together products and other stuff like that i mean not that not that americans uh you know the american market that the market is very well developed but all of a sudden you have this background where you’re like i’ve seen what it looks like when it’s when it when it’s vastly different and maybe that’s going to change how i how i approach this right
Speaker 1 | 47:57.951
so so you could think about it this way in terms of top line growth that gives you a lot of inspiration for products but in terms of Bottom line, it also teaches you how you can get a lot of operational leverage with just a little bit of technology. So your margins can be huge if you can run your operations in a way that combines, let’s say, technology with a lot less of the conveniences that we are accustomed to.
Speaker 0 | 48:27.937
Nice. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. So, you know, you mentioned earlier about for remote workers, you could pick you could pick the city for them to meet in. You know, you could you could bring them all up to Binghamton, where I’m from, which is close. But for those of the podcast who don’t know the geography of New York State, I’m I we are about Lucas and I are about three hours apart from each other by by car. So, yeah, I’m in the rest of New York and you’re in New York. And everybody knows what they say, New York. So, Lucas, lastly, one thing I. We talked about your advice for current leaders. If you could go back in time yourself to your younger self and give yourself some advice about leadership, what would you share with yourself? A lot of us, I think, when we think about this, I don’t want to call it the easy answer, but the simple answer that some people say is like, well, geez, I’d change and I’d be more advanced or I’d do this stuff or anything else like that. But but. oftentimes the things that we build uh that you know those are the building blocks that made us the leader that we are today but if there was a piece of advice where you’d be like you went back and you’re like man if i just done knowing this thing or something like that it would have just i would have been saved a lot what
Speaker 1 | 49:43.888
do you think it would be yeah um i think people can spend a lot of time and energy worrying about whether or not this is i think it’s an engineering conceit right like no one wants to to look dumb i mean that’s across the board but especially in engineering And I had, I mean, I’m still learning. There’s tons of gaps in my knowledge, tons of areas that if I had more time, I would be spending time learning. Being sincere about those gaps from the start and, you know, without, you know, hiding it in any way and not feeling ashamed, just saying, look, this I’m out of, it’s out of, you know, out of what my current knowledge set. That can save a lot of time for a lot of people. And I think that applies to everybody, but especially my younger self. I may have been less reluctant to talk about my background, which wasn’t necessarily the traditional background. That there’s a virtue in that, not something to be ashamed of. Because people waste a lot of time just with shame in general. At the end of the day, no one really cares if you’re solving a problem and you’re working with people solving a problem. And where I’ve learned that the most is at the board level. The simple questions are the hardest ones to answer. And if you don’t know the answer, say you don’t know. Because if you pretend to know the answer, you’ll be found out very quickly. So being very honest, egoless, and saying I don’t know is a very important skill.
Speaker 0 | 51:20.395
Awesome. All right. Lucas, we appreciate you very much taking the time to come on the show and talk to us here on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. We’ll see everybody next time, and we look forward to talking to people again in the future.
Speaker 1 | 51:39.939
Thanks so much. Really been a pleasure.
