Speaker 0 | 00:07.041

Welcome back, everyone, to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m your host, Doug Kameen, and today I’m talking with Aaron Katsky, Vice President of Information Technology at Velo3D in Campbell, California, which I’m pretty sure is in Silicon Valley. Welcome to the show, Aaron.

Speaker 1 | 00:20.913

Hey, Doug. Nice to be with you. And yes, it is in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Speaker 0 | 00:25.276

Nice, nice. So before we started here, we were… struggling with Microsoft Teams. This is like the bane of our existence on some levels is trying to get Teams to work right because we have to use it everywhere.

Speaker 1 | 00:41.314

Yeah, it really is a kind of new phenomenon for every meeting that you have to allow a five to 10 minute window for everybody to get everything working. And Teams seems to be the one that troubles at least me the most. But yeah, it’s always a very interesting proposition of what… What can go wrong in a video and audio conferencing platform?

Speaker 0 | 01:01.890

Yeah, you know, for me, like, and I’ve adapted Teams just because that’s what we use at work. But when I think about the ones that do give me a challenge, it’s Google Meet that really drives me bonkers. Because it’s all web-based and there’s no way around that. So, like, you have to, you know, all these steps have to go kind of, like, correctly in order for it to function right. Of course, if you’re using Google Chrome, then everything works flawlessly. I think, you know, so I wonder, is that is that plan? Do they plan to plan that? I bet you.

Speaker 1 | 01:34.467

I mean, my guess is if I’m developing a video conferencing platform, I’m going to use my browser to do all the testing. So I’m Firefox or the or Opera gets a very, very far second. Never. They’re doing it. But yeah, I don’t know. The Google platform, they seem to work real great. So if you’re using Google email with Google.

Speaker 0 | 01:53.216

meet with google hangouts everything seems to go smoothly but after you venture off that path it gets a little wild yeah yeah it’s crazy but like and this is this is there was maybe like five six years ago before pre-covid times i saw i was at one of the conference uh for you know i i’ve been a cio of counties in the past before i was at my current role and in that role uh one of our vendors shows up and i think this is a video you can probably find on youtube but it’s like like how video conferencing works and you know so like if it were happening in the real world so like they show people walking into the room and they’ll be like beep john has joined the conversation and then he’ll show me like hi and then he’ll freeze in the room in real you know and like like that’s it’s still like that but now it’s just all over the place and it’s because we all have all these different apps that we’re trying to juggle and manage and this people want to meet in google meet and these people want to use zoom and these people want to use you know i don’t know blue genes network or some other you know

Speaker 1 | 02:50.788

crazy banana pants thing that we don’t really know that like nobody’s heard of but like you know these 27 people in like you know i don’t know around seattle because they were all microsoft alums or something like that so no it’s a very exciting time for all those new people to to make it people miserable right so they they have their cool new app which is a new way of doing it and then you know joe schmo the it guy gets stuck uh trying to support you know 700 video plots And it’s always a fun challenge. And I think that’s one of the things that makes IT awesome is you get to try new apps all the time, good or bad, as the case may be.

Speaker 0 | 03:24.856

Yeah, for sure. For sure. So enough talking about bashing on teams, I guess. Let’s get to the real reason we’re here, which is to talk to you about your leadership journey in IT. So we mentioned right at the beginning, you’re currently the vice president of IT. for a company in Silicon Valley. And, you know, you have a long history of being, you know, director of IT, IT manager. I think there was even a stint back in there where you were also the, you were also doing small, medium business IT support and things like that. So can you tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got to where you are today?

Speaker 1 | 04:07.201

Yeah, I think the most interesting part of IT is always that rapid. change. And I think my career in IT started when I was very young. I was born in the Silicon Valley. And so I basically learned how to work on a computer because people around me had computers. And so when my dad’s computer would break, I would jump on it and break it even worse until somebody professional had to come over and fix it. And then I could learn from them on how to repair things. And I think that journey when you’re really young, really gets you an appetite for it. And I think that really was the beginning of the calling for me to do technology and to be in a computer ecosystem. And then after I… you know did computers through high school and everything like that my own small company i decided i needed to change a venue and so i actually went to culinary school i have a culinary degree which is not the the average i.t person and i did that for about five years as a sous chef and then that’s interesting yeah it’s an interesting uh you know right turn at albuquerque if you will but i uh i did that for about five years and then i came back into i.t uh and my journey and i team you know, you can’t just jump back into working in IT. You have to kind of earn your spot back. So I did computer sales and selling at a tier two disty, you know, selling RAM and processors at scale to small companies in the Bay Area. And then I basically got to write my ticket a bit. And I went back into production management for IT and back into infrastructure. And I worked for a company that basically was a small ISP in the… um in the gilroy area and we had about i don’t know 2 000 customers and we had data centers that we managed and i got to really experience all of it infrastructure and networking and it was it was just a lot of fun technically and i think at at you know at some level i’m still that little kid messing up a computer and so i i really just enjoyed it and it was lots of fun um and then you know i i went into running it for a small trucking company you And at some point in that first kind of management job, management by title, not by kind of people reporting into you, you make like a call that, hey, look, I can do this and I can be a great engineer or I can start to manage and accomplish more than I could ever do by myself. And I basically took a step in that direction to kind of move into a management track instead of just engineering. And it was. It was lots of fun because I get to see a lot of new talents. And one of my big goals when it comes to recruiting is to getting people, trying to find those people that are just smarter than me and better at different aspects of IT that I may have never experienced even in my career and bringing them in to be the experts. And so I love it. And so I’ve been basically working my way up the corporate ladder. And now I sit, I guess, atop it at Velo3D and I report to the CEO. get to make the strategic technology decisions I dreamed of as a little computer kid.

Speaker 2 | 07:24.691

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 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 | 10:07.920

Hey, it’s Greg, the Frenchman secretly managing the podcast behind the curtain. To request your one-on-one call, contact us at internet at popularit.net.

Speaker 0 | 10:17.288

And remember,

Speaker 1 | 10:18.088

it will never cost you a dime.

Speaker 0 | 10:20.850

I am going to drill right down into, I’m going right back to you. You said you had five years as a sous chef. Yes. Now, tying this into how the lessons for leadership, a lot of people, and this is not an uncommon journey for the folks that we interview here on the podcast, to have some other thing. They have a background in finance or they have a background in… They started, you know, some other degree, if you will, and then ended up in I.T. through some way. But for you, there’s lessons. I would say that the restaurant industry is a really unique space. You know, it’s you know, we see the TV shows. If you watch, you know, is that the bear on right now, you know, and stuff like that. Like is what lessons on leadership or being, you know, whether it’s being led or leading. Did you learn that we’re different? in the restaurant world that you carry back in your IT space?

Speaker 1 | 11:19.753

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think when I kind of reflect back on my years in cooking, I think two core values stand out for me. So I think the first one is hard work. I think, you know, you got to have a lot of respect for people that work in a kitchen, work in a restaurant industry, because they have a different definition of hard work than we do. I like to think of like the way that I work real hard is I sit at a desk and I crunch numbers and I do spreadsheets and, you know, we do technical things and we follow install guides and things like that. And that’s tough work and you’re using your brain. I’m not taking anything away from it. But, you know, it’s a whole different thing to be on your feet for 16 hours in front of a, you know, 1400 degree rotating chicken rotisserie, right? Which was one of my job to stand up for a rotisserie oven. But I think so I learned really what hard work is and really what that can mean. And so I think that’s one core value. The other one I think is leading by example. I think one of the unique structures of a kitchen is that no chef that you ever meet, at least that I’ve ever met or even heard of, can’t or wasn’t a line cook at some point in their life, right? They didn’t do that journey. And they can, pretty much every sous chef or chef can jump in on the line at any point and cook better than the guy they have hired there. And it’s a big difference than a lot of management-only folks, especially in some of these higher-end IT places where they can’t do the technical job and they don’t understand the technical job. And being a CIO is really more about numbers and spreadsheets than it is the technical thing you’re asking of your team. So I like to think of myself in that way that I would never ask somebody on my team or a manager or even a director to do something that I wouldn’t do.

Speaker 0 | 13:02.481

Yeah, I think that’s great insight. Right. So, so many, so in, in the, in the cooking world, you know, like, like, yeah, people don’t just walk in and be like, I’m a chef today. You know, like, Hey, I went to school. Therefore I’m a chef. Therefore you’re going to hire me as the executive chef in your space. And, and having to learn how to be led, even though you’ve been trained to be a leader is, you know, that’s also a critical skill that people, it’s going to be hard sometimes to pick up when you’re in leadership.

Speaker 1 | 13:34.640

Yeah. And I would say that, you know, you can be the best chef in the world and you take a trip, you know, a few blocks down the street to a different type of culinary, to a different type of food. And all of a sudden you’re the beginner again, right? And there’s all these different verticals where you, you know, the basics still apply, but you’ve got to learn all brand new, you know, in France, in French cooking, they call it the mother sauces, right? Well, none of those mother exhaust sauces exist in. Chinese cooking, right? So you, you can only take those lessons so far until you are, you know, you’re doing fusion and things like that. But at the end of the day, you know, you are in a lot of ways, always learning continuously. And I think that that’s shared very, very widely with it. You know, there’s always something new to learn, always new vertical where you’re just a beginner.

Speaker 0 | 14:22.712

Nice. Nice. Thanks for sharing that. So in your current role at Velo3D, you’ve been here. I’m using LinkedIn as the cheat sheet here. It’s been here a little over a year. And you’ve mentioned that you’ve worked your way up the ladder. So what type of leadership are you executing right now in this new organization? Because there’s strategic leadership, there’s tactical leadership, and things like that. Where are you sitting in the space right now?

Speaker 1 | 14:52.541

Yeah, I think one of the challenges about this role that I’ve been really enjoying has been having to move up and down that ladder. I think I do, you know, in one meeting, I will be strategically planning, you know, the next 18, 24 months and budget numbers and trying to figure out exactly what technologies are our primary focus. And then the next meeting, we may be talking about, you know, an operations report about what happened with our servers over the weekend. And so I think… I’m having to do a lot of range finding in that respect and move up and down those different disciplines. But I think the vast majority and the big difference from my previous roles really have been that my, I would say like 60 to 75% of my day is really strategic and working with the executive team to educate my peers on what technology can do to push the business forward. And my leadership. And in IT really has to be about end results for a lot of those folks, right? They’re not really interested in sausage making and there’s no CIO that sits on top of me that wants to know the cool new technology. They want to know results, right? And they want to see, hey, what can this do for me? How can we get this to the bottom line right away? And so my job is to really push that strategic initiative about what our product can do and how security is more than just… a fashionable word right now and how it makes us a differentiator. And I think that is a big part of, of that leadership right now. And I don’t think that a lot of people get to do that at an IT. A lot of times IT doesn’t sit at the table necessarily. We’re, you know, kind of shielded behind a CFO or even a CTO that’s on the product side. And I’m really fortunate in this role to be sitting with those folks as my peers.

Speaker 0 | 16:45.431

And so what does…

Speaker 1 | 16:47.765

fellow 3d do i think it might be really helpful to understand for the context of the conversation here yeah absolutely so we make a metal additive 3d printer so basically we use lasers to 3d print metal and or some of the most demanding uh use cases on or off the planet and that’s one of our claim to fame is that we do a lot of space and hypersonic work and these are parts that just cannot be made any other way and so we’re using a very advanced uh welding uh technique to basically build these parts from nothing and metal powder um and it is an incredibly complex machine that i have just every time i work and see one of these things in the factory it’s just jaw-dropping just how amazing they are but in general we’re trying to change how metal manufacturing is done right you know trying to make that market which hasn’t existed before, the way that people are going to create metal parts going forward. And so I think our job is twofold. Not only do we have to make a great machine that can do things that other metal AMs can’t do, but also is to basically build up a whole industry that didn’t exist. We need to create something that for literally hundreds of years, metalurgists have been stamping things and… you know, welding things and we have to teach them a new way of, of being successful.

Speaker 0 | 18:18.197

So, and I mean, I’ve been in, in my roles in the past when I was an IT consultant in particular, I’ve been in metal fabrication facilities before, you know, and, and it’s, it’s, they’re, they’re pretty cool of their own right. You know, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that goes on, but this is, this is like, this is totally different where you’re saying that like the pieces you can do here. I mean, a metal fabrication plan is oftentimes things like, It has things like how we take these particular pieces, we’re going to chop them up certain ways, we’re going to bend them, then we’re going to put them together and weld them up and make this frame or this cage or whatever the case may be. But that won’t fit all applications. So what you’re doing is essentially using 3D printing to build these impossible-to-build shapes that you couldn’t do in a traditional fabrication shop.

Speaker 1 | 19:06.439

What the fabrication shop is that you could only do that to certain metals, right? Right. you know, they’re weak to weld or they, they have a composite that doesn’t, you know, when you do joints and things like that, they have to be mechanical joints, right? We make it all one solid piece, right? And so one of the coolest things that we have that sits on my desk is a rocket ship and in it is a floating dolphin made of metal. And so you can like jingle this dolphin inside of it. And we made it all with our machine in one piece. And it’s like, that’s the type of stuff that you just, you, you couldn’t make in a fabric. You couldn’t make a single frame. spaceship with something locked inside of it right it would have to be placed in or you’d have to stop the process and and that really is the challenge right and so it’s like when you’re making these parts that have to withstand literally space um and and the the different needs of the rocket at different stages of how hot it burns and things like that those pieces can’t they can’t afford to have you know welds that can be weak right they have to have them be solid of this very special metal that can never rust and things like that.

Speaker 0 | 20:13.466

That is some super cool stuff to be able to get your hands on and be able to support in an IT environment. So how big is your team right now that you have at this place?

Speaker 1 | 20:23.109

Yeah, so one of the challenges that we’re working on for the company is that I had to kind of take a crawl, walk, run. So when I joined, it wasn’t very much IT at all. And so we had to build out a user services team, and then we had to build out an IT infrastructure team and a security team. And now we’re in the process of building out an applications team to really kind of supercharge our data and really provide results. So we run a pretty lean team, about 12 folks. And I also am responsible for facilities. So we’ve got a handful of other folks that work in the facilities as well. But it’s good. It’s a good, small, scrappy team that are real experts. You can’t have room for B players when you have such a dedicated set of folks.

Speaker 0 | 21:09.998

So, and that’s, I’m glad you brought that up because when we, you know, a lot of our listeners on the podcast, we’re really targeting the mid-market, you know, like, like people like, you know, I, you know, I’m a CITO myself, my firm’s about 500 staff, your firm’s like, you know, about somewhere around the same size or maybe a little smaller, but in that range too. And that’s a lot of the folks who are leaders that are listening to the podcast. And so many of us struggle with small teams. you know, small budgets or having to ramp budgets. In your case, you’re having to ramp up as the organization is growing. Can you share with us some of the, the, like the, the lessons that you took about the, the most effective ways to grow into what you need, you know, so like you’ve, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve identified this problem, you see it’s there. How do you get your leadership, your administration, you know, those folks to, to buy into what you need to do and then what challenges have you been facing to get there?

Speaker 1 | 22:06.377

Yeah. I think that’s a really great set of questions. It’s a very complicated question. I mean, I think in general, at a high level, the process needs to be about the business. And I think that a lot of times IT folks get caught up in the technical challenges and the technical needs, and they don’t really consider value to the business. And I think that whenever I start a new role, or even when I press the reset on a department that I’m… or a new challenge, I like to kind of step back and think about it almost in a customer service type scenario and say, okay, well, what does the business need to be successful? So I think when I came to Velo3D, I sat down with the CEO and I said, hey, look, this is the vision that I have, but I’m not going to know the answers to the problems until I get a chance to see the business, right? So I spent the first 60, 90 days just listening. And there’s obvious problems, right? You have tactical, the Wi-Fi doesn’t work, or my laptop’s not ready when an employee starts. And there’s not a lot of change to that no matter where you go. You still need to have what I would call table stakes. But in general, after that kind of point, you are looking at what you can do as an IT person to move the business forward. I’ll just take an example from here is that we sat down and we’re building these very complex machines. for governments and space agencies. And it’s one of these situations that all of these people are governed by a huge amount of complexity when it comes to compliance and security and all the acronyms that the DOD- Your accuracy. Yeah, exactly. So one of my first steps, and I don’t think it’s the right step for every company, but for our company was to run out and get a head of security compliance that could really zoom in on making sure that- you know, security and compliance aren’t the reason that our machines aren’t chosen in a bid scenario, right? And so that’s an evaluation of the business saying, hey, we’re not big enough really for a hardcore CISO, but we need to have somebody along those lines because that’s an important step that’s going to take us, you know, from 150 million to 250 million or a billion, right? You’re not going anywhere. All those doors are closed without the right security. So kind of bringing it all back, I think a big part of that journey is to look at the business and figure out where technology can prop the business up, where it can support. I’m also a big fan of a term from a book called Good to Great that says, always put your best people on your worst performing. And so I always try out, and whenever I have a very poor performing portion of my organization, I go try and find the best people I can. I don’t try and get like a mid-range. I try and go to the highest that my budget is going to allow me for that to get the best people I can to stick on my- core performing pieces because it really is the difference, right? And at the end of the day, just like all organizations, you’re a group of people and you’re limited by what those people can do in your team. So if you have a business problem and you don’t have the right people on the bus to solve it, you’re going nowhere fast.

Speaker 0 | 25:17.202

Yeah. And good to great is, I mean, that’s one of those like seminal books in company, you know, leadership management. So it’s a great one to reference. I appreciate you bringing that up. So in your past roles that you’ve had, I mean, we talked a great conversation here about Velo3D, the things you’re doing, building from a startup. We also talked a little bit about how in the past when you had that ranch where you were a chef for a while. You had lessons from each of those. But going back in time, I’m also going to plumb back your older stuff here. You mentioned you were at an ISP for a while. You’ve done some just small, medium business consulting where you’ve just been an IT consultant at different intervals. What things did you take from those early roles that influenced how you show up in these roles now?

Speaker 1 | 26:12.788

Yeah. Oh, tough question. Yeah. Yeah, I think, again, the number one takeaway from all of my younger experiences had to be about the business. I think there is a real problem with a lot of how IT is not only run, but also presented to the business as this tack-on, this boat anchor that you kind of need. And more and more, it’s more important, but everybody kind of needs it as a checkbox. That’s one of the danger signs for an organization when I’m looking at it. But when I was growing up in the industry, I think a big part of it was really seeing how IT could transform the business. I worked at a trucking company, and it was my first real management job. I sat with the CEO and the CFO and the EVP of the company, and I sat down with them and I said, look, we need to get out of this green screen, and we need to get into the future.

Speaker 0 | 27:14.182

Was it

Speaker 1 | 27:15.042

AS400? Yeah, it wasn’t AS400, but we had the cheap knockoff, not AS400. Oh,

Speaker 0 | 27:22.165

it wasn’t even AS400?

Speaker 1 | 27:24.166

No, it was all hand-built by some guy. And that was one of these challenges is that that was the guy. And if that guy ever decided to go on vacation, we’re kind of up the creek, right? And so I think a big part of that journey was figuring out like, hey, if I talk to those people, They don’t care about, you know, hey, it costs less to run. I mean, that’s important. But really, at the end of the day, they want to know how it’s going to grow the business. They want to know, like, what do we get by investing in a new platform? And so, you know, for the finance people, those are, you know, ROI and TCO. And what does it actually mean in the long run? For the operations people, it’s about how can I run the business better? How can I add more trucks to our routes? How can I manage more drivers with the same amount of dispatchers, things like that? But the way to do that and the way to sell that and the way to impress upon people how important that is, is to know that. And so if I don’t know that they have a problem or that the operations team is looking to do more routes with the same amount of people in order to push profitability, there’s no way I can propose a solution that looks… you know, that looks like a good option for them. There’s no support from them if I’m throwing it in at them and saying, well, this is newer, but that doesn’t help, right? So I had to really go and learn the business. And I think each vertical that I jumped into from trucking and manufacturing and software, it’s all the same kind of process, which is understand the business, understand where their problems are, and try and solve them with technology instead of technology being the solution, if that makes sense.

Speaker 0 | 29:05.360

Yeah. And I’m thinking back on my experience as you’re sharing your story here. And I think about in different industries, there are different things that become important depending on the nature of the industry. So I spent a lot of time in government service as a public servant. And you mentioned about how in this case, you had this legacy system. It wasn’t even a real AS400, it was an AS400 adjacent. And… The claim to fame for that system was that it was cheap. And in a business whose goal is to make money, that’s probably not the best approach. But I think about my service in public sector, and not that that would be the way we would do it exactly, but that would be a large weight in the process. Because the goal of government is not to grow the government, if you will. It’s to figure out how to do things efficiently for the work that we have to do. You know, in in how to carry it through. So like having an inexpensive system might actually be an advantage that we would value, you know, more highly than, say, in a profit making business where that could be seen as an impediment to to future growth.

Speaker 1 | 30:17.387

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the. challenges with that statement though is that low cost means a lot of different things right and so it’s is something really low cost if you have to engage ibm you know four times a year just to make things work for sure no that could be more expensive but i think those are the type of questions that it people if they’re going to be leaders in an organization need to answer and show that right because it’s really easy to look at the the price of something on its face and be like oh well this is you know ten thousand dollars and this is nine thousand dollars it’s cheaper well if the ten thousand dollar system only costs you you know a thousand dollars to upkeep but the nine thousand dollar system costs you 50 to upkeep have you really saved money other than this so uh i i’m a big player on value and i think a lot of businesses and governments even for that matter will invest if the long-term numbers look better oh sure yeah i mean that’s that Also, a big difference in startup world. Startup is all about capability. And they’re like, we’ll just burn this money because we got to get where we need to get, right?

Speaker 0 | 31:26.412

Yeah. And I think that’s what I’m driving at. It’s like certain, you know, each one of these industries has different, like the mix of how they value those different things can be different. Going back to my government service, we absolutely, fortunately, I live in New York State. And at least in New York State, when we have… some of these types of technical contracts, we’re able to pursue them in the context of what they call best value. So we don’t just have to like, say, go to the lowest cost operations to accept that we can determine like a matrix of how, you know, what we perceive to be the value proposition of a particular solution. But, you know, the, the, the, the way to carry through whether something is, is, has high value is kind of noticeably different than in your situation where you’re in a startup and the thought you just alluded to like you’re there’s there’s money to be spent and the last thing anybody wants is for that the technology to be an impediment to the business’s growth because in the startup like like time time is money and time is death you know the longer you spend you’re doing something you know somebody will lap you somebody will do it better than you you will miss your your opportunity or something like that

Speaker 1 | 32:40.714

Yeah, I think the name of the game in startup world is capability and efficiency. I mean, I think one of the challenges that I see startups face all the time, they don’t even realize they have it until it’s too late, is that they don’t put the right people doing the right jobs. So the famous example of that is the software engineer who’s doing DevOps. And you look at that and you go, is that what you hired the software engineer to do? Oh, no, he’s doing it because he has to. Okay, well, you’re not using that. effectively because he may be a solid devops engineer but he’s a much better you know software engineer and developer so i think you know that those are the type of questions that a good it team can identify and solve right and that is is that i’m you know i’m trying to solve these problems for the business with technology and not let the technology be the reason you can’t move forward or that you’re being lapped by your competitor like you said now so

Speaker 0 | 33:38.370

One of the things that we like to do here on the podcast, too, is we like to have some more fun. I know we had a little bit of fun kind of bashing on teams at the beginning of our conversation. But there’s just some humorous things about your past or, well, I call them humorous, but just interesting things to understand where you came from as a leader. So, like, I love asking this question because it sort of reveals who what era of like technology somebody comes up in. But going back in time. What was your first computer? What was your first technology experience that you recall?

Speaker 1 | 34:11.593

Yeah, so it’s going to definitely be a 286 with a turbo button. That’s going to be my turbo button. That’s right. I’m still to this day questioning if it really actually did anything. But yeah, 286 with a turbo button. And I’m an Atari kid with an NES. And so it was like when we got that, it was amazing. So I can still hear the dial-up. bulletin board system echo of the uh 28.8 modem in my in my sleep so that is definitely my era now in that atari was the atari 2600 or

Speaker 0 | 34:47.911

7800 or what that’s 2600 with the rolling joysticks for your car rate oh yeah because we were fancy wait oh and so like uh let’s see pitfall pitfall of course gotta have pitfall gotta have pitfall um I feel like Choplifter was an Atari 7800 game. I don’t think that was for the 2600.

Speaker 1 | 35:07.844

Yeah, I don’t think so. We were big on the Pong and Pitfall. I think Pitfall got used until that cartridge didn’t work anymore. I’m pretty sure.

Speaker 0 | 35:18.190

Yeah, I know. Pitfall was such a classic. It was such a classic Atari game.

Speaker 1 | 35:22.232

Yeah, I feel old all of a sudden. Am I supposed to feel this old right now?

Speaker 0 | 35:25.994

You know, this is the nature of the podcast, right? So on your NES, what was your favorite? If you had to pick a game that you were like, this is what I love the most, what was it?

Speaker 1 | 35:41.362

Okay, well, I mean, there’s the obligatory combo Mario Brothers Duck Hunt that… is basically ingrained into my skull i can’t do it but um uh i would say that legend of zelda was my number one i think i definitely played that cartridge until i had to buy a new one but i played a lot of legend of zelda i i i can hear that music again in my sleep um and uh there will never be another legend of zelda that beats the original for me my uh my son my older son is uh he’s nine right now and he’s they just

Speaker 0 | 36:15.770

started playing on the nintendo switch the zelda um oh shoot whatever the newest one is i i’m gonna have to use the internet to look this up while i’m talking but uh there is the newest legend of zelda game and he is playing it but my younger son will play some of the old games on the switch and uh you know they’ll find he’ll find like because now you can get like the old nes comps you can get the old nes console and you can use that

Speaker 1 | 36:44.310

to play all the classic games as well so you can go kind of go get your fix without having to own an old an old console yeah i i think the uh legend of zelda a link to the past which was the second one was the reason it’s so infuriated with the nintendo and had to go get a super nintendo because it drove me i was just no good at it and it was not the zelda that i signed up for when

Speaker 0 | 37:05.862

i played the original so now did you get did you ever have like the gyro robot when you had your nintendo

Speaker 1 | 37:13.538

No, but I did have a power glove.

Speaker 0 | 37:15.518

That was my next question. Did you have a power glove? So you were, you had a power glove.

Speaker 1 | 37:19.660

I had a power glove with the, uh, with Mike Tyson’s punch out and it never worked well ever, but it was so much fun to look at. It was great.

Speaker 0 | 37:28.324

So the new, the new game is it’s tears of the kingdom. That’s what it is.

Speaker 1 | 37:31.745

Tears of the kingdom. The only other one I know is a Kanye of time.

Speaker 0 | 37:35.807

Karina. Excuse me. That one,

Speaker 1 | 37:38.668

that one, everyone tells me I should play, but it will never replace, uh, the original for me.

Speaker 0 | 37:45.023

so so you know so yeah 286 you’re using that as your first computer and how like like were there any computer games that you played at the time like did you play like king’s quest did you play king’s quest king’s quest no i didn’t play king’s quest i played a game called pirates okay

Speaker 1 | 38:02.493

so pirate basically like um i don’t know 2d pirate ship and forth um i did a um There was a lot of like these five and a half inch floppy adventures where you had like 17 disks. You had to kind of swap them in. One of them was called, oh, agent, special agent. Oh, I forget. That’s going to drive me nuts. But there was one. And I just remember having this box and like a stack of five and a half inch floppies. They had to keep swapping in and out of there. Load disk 22. And you’re like, oh, man. Yeah, I think that. Those are my two big ones. Yeah, definitely pirates. I played a lot of pirates.

Speaker 0 | 38:48.664

Nice, nice. We always focus on leadership here.

Speaker 2 | 38:53.345

At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, Few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never ending from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It’s like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try once patients even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team. and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you how we can manage away the mediocrity. and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes, and we use our $1.2 billion in combined customer buying power and massive economy of scale to map all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data, to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts so that you’re not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short, we are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So, we’re still human. but we are some of the best and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what’s on your roadmap. All you need to do is email internet at popularit.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier and we’ll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day.

Speaker 0 | 41:13.206

So when, you know, we talked a lot about all these different periods in your time. uh your journey i should say to you know getting to where you are today most of us can you know as a leader can often put our finger on the time when they felt you transitioned from being somebody was led to somebody who was leading and for you when when when

Speaker 1 | 41:35.520

do you think that was that’s a tough question to answer um i think when i when i was being led yeah so i was working at a company uh actually just not far from here, called Alam Technologies. And I was promoted from a senior manager to a director. And at that time, I had still been kind of like, I don’t know, the player coach where I was doing coaching of people, but I was also doing a lot of IC work. And at that point, when I transitioned director, unlike a lot of IT people who get promoted to IT director and they just get paid more, I actually had different responsibilities. and most of my day-to-day responsibilities fell by the wayside. And I think it was at that point where I realized that I was kind of in charge. And I had a boss and he was doing his thing and he was a really great boss. But at the end of the day, the buck kind of stopped with me when it came to IT. And I remember thinking at that point, this is what I’ve been working for for the last five or six years. But yeah, and I had a really great team and I was able to grow the folks that were working for me into managers and kind of give them my responsibility. And that I think I would say was the moment I knew that, one, that I loved leadership and two, that I was no longer being told what to do. I was being asked, what should we do?

Speaker 0 | 43:05.747

Yeah. So another related question here on that is, so. 45-year-old me versus 25-year-old me as a leader and my first or earliest leadership roles. And I think back about what was different between them, what I would do different now. And I’m like, oh, man, I was a jerk when I did that thing. Or there’s this lesson that I wish I had known or understood. And it took me a while to figure that out. And I’m sure you had some of those experiences, thinking back to that time you became the IT leader. What would you share with somebody who, like our listeners, what would you want to share with them about that time and what? you’ve learned or changed over time?

Speaker 1 | 43:43.047

Yeah. I think if I could go back in time and tell myself that one lesson, it would be probably to be aware that there are so many different ways of solving a problem. And I think that thinking outside of the box is one of these terms that gets thrown around a lot. But I think the more you do that and the more you, I don’t know, run scenarios of how to solve a problem, the better. better a solution you get. And I think when it comes to leading people, that is a huge differentiator between good leaders and mediocre leaders. And that is that a good leader won’t necessarily need it to be their way to get it done. And they can accept a result without it being the way they wanted it to be done in that process. And I think that was a huge maturing process for me was that… I knew I could always do it, but the difference between leading and doing is that you have to trust somebody else to do it, even if it’s not the way that you would have done it. So I think thinking outside the box and letting other perspectives permeate before you make that call, what the right way to proceed is, is key to really growing and maturing quickly.

Speaker 0 | 44:59.722

Nice. Nice. So as we come, you know, we’re kind of wrapping up here on today’s podcast episode. Those are some great tips and some really insightful advice. Is there any other advice? Like I’ll say today, Aaron, today’s Aaron, what to share with folks and with our listeners?

Speaker 1 | 45:17.269

Yeah, I, so I have this conversation, I think probably once a quarter with somebody, whether it’s in my organization or I’m just kind of helping out, um, mentoring somebody in a different organization. And I think. The biggest question that always comes up to me is how do I get promoted? And my feedback to everybody and to anybody who’s listening about how to get promoted is don’t wait to be promoted to do the job. Do the job you want to do. Be the way you want to be and perform in that role without having to have the title and the title and the money will follow. And I think it’s a big differentiator. And I, you know, One of the things that I love to do, and this is kind of a fun analogy, but I’m a scuba diver. I like to go scuba diving. And one of the things that you do when you’re learning to scuba dive is that you can’t see how your body is shaped in the water. So what you do is you visualize in your head what you want your body to look like when you’re diving, right? You want your back to be straight. You want your legs to be bent. You want to have your arms. you know, in a certain position. So you keep your warmth in, right? And the more you visualize that in your head and the more you behave that way, it just happens, even though you can’t see yourself doing it. And so I think that’s a lot of how it works in IT, right? So if you want to be that technology leader, be the technology leader with the IC title, and you’ll be surprised how fast all of a sudden that leadership decision and that ability to grow into that spot shows up at Nice.

Speaker 0 | 46:51.380

That’s awesome. All right, Aaron. Thank you so much for investing your time with us today on the podcast.

Speaker 1 | 46:58.316

My pleasure. This was fantastic, Doug. Really great. And I just I absolutely love what you guys are doing. And I can’t wait to hear more.

Speaker 0 | 47:06.520

All right. All right, everyone. That’s a wrap on today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m Doug Kameen, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.