Speaker 0 | 00:09.627
Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today we’re talking with Andrey. You have to pronounce your last name because I’ll butcher this in Russian. Can you pronounce this properly, please? Stryokhov. Stryokhov. Is this better? Can I really exaggerate it?
Speaker 1 | 00:28.260
If you drink vodka a lot, it’s probably going to be easy for you. Stryokov, Smirnoff, like all this stuff.
Speaker 0 | 00:34.726
It’s good that I don’t drink ever again. So we’re just going to get right into this because I really want to play on all of the… I’m going to put a new piece to the show that’s just stereotypes, I think. And we need to hit on Russian stereotypes. The other Russian IT director that I know, not that you’re in IT, well, you are in IT, but is also Andre. So, but I need to come up with some, you know, anytime someone gets hacked or we need some soundbites for the show, you know, we need, yeah, we need like, I think you got hacked or whatever you think. What would be the best Russian or like, you know, my name is Vladimir, you got hacked. Like, what can we do? Can you do that for me? I need to, I’m going to, I’m going to edit this soundbite out. I need a Russian you got hacked soundbite. How do we do that?
Speaker 1 | 01:30.733
So if you want to record just Я Владивер, я тебя взломал.
Speaker 0 | 01:34.394
I have no clue what that means. Does that mean you got hacked?
Speaker 1 | 01:40.076
Yes, it does mean you got hacked, but it’s probably not exactly how you say in Russian. You normally will not hear this. I’m not sure if you ever used Kaspersky anti-wires and it has such a horrible pig sound, you know, like weeing pigs when it detects the wires or malware on your system. So that always, to me, that’s the sound of you get hacked or you got your machine gun compromised. This is a pig sound by Kaspersky anti-wires.
Speaker 0 | 02:16.850
Okay, that’s probably copyrighted. I probably can’t use that. I’ll try to. Maybe I’ll just do it and ask for permission later. Ask for forgiveness later. But again, as loud and as clearly as possible, you got hacked in Russian.
Speaker 1 | 02:33.378
Тебя взломали.
Speaker 0 | 02:36.440
I love it.
Speaker 1 | 02:37.000
Or take two. Тебя взломали.
Speaker 0 | 02:40.642
And now just say it.
Speaker 1 | 02:41.363
When I hacked you, я тебя взломал.
Speaker 0 | 02:44.865
And now just say it in English with your most exaggerated Russian accent, which is just natural to you.
Speaker 1 | 02:51.664
You got hacked.
Speaker 0 | 02:56.607
And by the way, right before this episode, I had to respond to an automated telecom call because supposedly my Amazon account had been, I don’t know, somehow compromised. So I’m going to be calling that number back immediately after this because my Amazon account was compromised. So I must have to give them my new credit card number or something.
Speaker 1 | 03:18.022
Okay.
Speaker 0 | 03:21.308
So I wonder how many people get kicked.
Speaker 1 | 03:22.949
Or more if you have multiple cards attached, give them all.
Speaker 0 | 03:32.576
So let’s just start off here. Let’s start off here. What do you do on a daily basis? What’s your main job? What do you do?
Speaker 1 | 03:42.202
So I probably the past few years have been heavily involved in operations. and operations. This means you touch everything from accounting to maintenance to software development, IT department. So it’s kind of like Octopus hat, which has all his feats everywhere. Then you have authority to go everywhere in all company branches and kind of ask, hey guys, why do you do this way, this certain way? Especially this is useful when you come from the companies which is was facing explosive growth and you don’t have time to think through the things while you implement them because you have an explosive headcount growth being constantly added to your IT department to support. And if the company kind of exits from this explosive growth and enters to this a little bit more stable type of growth or mode. That’s actually the best time where you can kind of look around and ask yourself, why did we decide to do this this way?
Speaker 0 | 04:55.097
Because someone Googled something and they downloaded it. That’s why someone decided to do it.
Speaker 1 | 05:01.499
The reason was like, you mean not find the same person with the company anymore or it will be so like, because when you… in the explosive growth, like you just leave it like you, you, a fireman, you put down the fires, like this broke, this doesn’t work like this mind like, Oh, throw mining system to mind the system, then it becomes like a system. This black box, what it does, I don’t know, it just speeds the reports like on daily basis,
Speaker 0 | 05:31.212
where it takes me. why do I have all these applications? What’s this bill for? What’s this bill for? Oh, I signed up for this. Oh, because it did this one little thing. This is one little API. It connected this CRM with this other CRM that I was testing out. They went to this webpage that went to this landing page that did this. Is this what you’re talking about? Like, you know, just like we did everything we could to grow as fast as possible. And now we have this pile of crap.
Speaker 1 | 05:59.494
Yeah. Or you may find like a car on some beaches. You forgot to terminate the person along with it. company. One thing if it’s someone like the entry-level position body, another thing if it was someone like a developer or outsourced, like the guy who was responsible for this kind of operations. He’s known the company and then you find this. All those funds, it’s what I’ve faced in the past few years. just going over all those inefficiencies and i was surprised i actually not surprised but that’s actually a good time when you are especially in times like in 2020 2021 with covet where you’re looking where we can get extra money from uh that’s that’s the best answer like look around and you know because you can find something where you can um discover some i don’t know productivity uh Or optimization, and this is just your treasure, sitting and fighting somewhere in the corner. You just have not seen when you…
Speaker 0 | 07:09.872
It’s like money under the couch. It’s like money under the couch. I did this little cartoon years ago with just looking underneath the keyboard and there was money under this keyboard, and there’s the couch in the waiting area, and there’s money hidden in that couch. But I think what’s interesting is you’re taking on all of this, creating more efficiencies. I guess we could call it… Yeah, like you said, operations from a technical standpoint and making things more efficient. And it correlates very interesting with our conversation last time, which is you’re able to, you’re not really siloed into any one thing. And we kind of talked about the difference between America and Russia or just other just foreign. foreigners, we’ll just call it foreigners. Let’s be as politically incorrect as possible. You foreigners that come over here to America, which is all of us, we’re all foreigners. But we kind of talked last time about just general Russian business survival skills and how you can come in and be kind of a jack of all trades. You’re not going to just focus on one thing like, I don’t know, database or software development. or networking or I’ve got my Cisco cert and that’s what I do. There was kind of this, you know, survival skill. So let’s just kind of go back in time because you, you started out electrical engineering and you ended up here in this kind of, I guess we’d call it, you know, CTO, CIO role in, you know, slash operations. But you know, tell me the story. Like how’d you end up over here?
Speaker 1 | 08:59.811
Well, it’s not just me. If you will take a look around, even PMP certificate as of this year, they are implementing much more agile methodology in their project management. And the reason why agile is just winning around just like playing businesses, no longer IT thing, it’s not no longer developers thing. It’s just pretty much a lot of organizations take this. And I guess it’s coming back to business because agile came a lot of this, like I probably, you can go back all the way down to Toyota, which has introduced that Kanban principles and methodology and this kind of like then some agile things get kind of like intertwined with this thing. So basically, it’s just a new reality where IT cannot exist separately from the business. And the business cannot exist separately from IT. And this is what exactly CTO and CIO need to understand, that they are to serve and support business and at the same time provide to the business insights how they can provide efficiencies and uncover all the… all the potential, which is kind of just laying around. And the same thing, the business, they need to understand this. They need to, if they want to survive, I guess, they will have to use the technology to get around or ahead of their competitors. It’s a matter of do or die. That’s plain. And it’s just not just me. It’s just how the things should be done these days.
Speaker 0 | 10:49.380
I do need to hear how you got over here, though. I want to know. How did you, because there’s so, I mean, it’s such a great story. I mean, from you mentioning earning favoritism, you know, in graduating with electrical engineering and having experience in IT, you know, and, you know, how you started your personal company. You know, I mean, I just need to hear this. People need to hear this, you know, because we’re very, I think a lot of us are very.
Speaker 1 | 11:19.938
All right.
Speaker 0 | 11:20.919
I don’t know what the word is. I can’t think of it off the top of my head right now. Maybe privileged? Maybe privileged over here in the United States? More privileged than, say, someone coming over on the boat from Russia?
Speaker 1 | 11:32.128
You see here, in high school, my cousin, he was in a sports team. He was playing volleyball, and he was also getting some favor because he was doing sports for, effectively, just spreading the name of the school. in all those games and championships. Similar thing to me. I was in university, and my professor, who I was working with, they discovered my technology skills and computer literacy, and they started using this in their own profit, I guess. I was helping one professor co-author his book about thermodynamics, and it got published. It got my name there. credits. It’s all good. But to give you an example where by that time I was promoting technology to the people who was kind of far away from technology. And even in technology university, which was kind of around automobile industry or electrical engineering or chemistry, it’s not computer science or technology. technological institution. It’s just plain normal university with engineering sciences, but not computer science. And I was kind of weird in this school because I was kind of one of those kinds. You may call me a nerd, or I always use computers or something like that. But actually, I was able to produce a lot of wire to my teachers and my professors. In exchange, I was also getting some slacking. I could keep some lectures and maybe was helping to get some projects done for my teachers in exchange of helping me with the projects I need to complete for my coursework around electricity.
Speaker 0 | 13:34.358
Give me an example of how you promoted technology, though. What’s a real example of where you said, hey, we need to put technology in this hole here? Like where do we fill a gap?
Speaker 1 | 13:47.036
That’s actually a very interesting story because like I was to start bringing the technology even in my graduation coursework subject was it was around kind of like an electricity market or like an infant smart grid, if you say so. And this smart grid was like, well, Maybe you need to know a little bit more about history in Russia and how electrical greed is done in Russia. It’s like taxes. It’s their electrical system where their power system completely separated from other states. In Russia, it’s all unified system. In Russia have actually many different time zones. Like you can think of when people are going home from the office on the east, people on the west just getting to their work. This is how large the country is. It’s so huge. You have almost 12 hours time zones or 12 time zones. And their domestic flights are longer than transatlantic flights. Domestic flights are longer than transatlantic flights. Just imagine. And this gives you a lot of idea how this is actually variable and you can redistribute electrical energy between those different time zones. And in my university I proposed to write a software, effectively a software which will allow you to automate some reporting and understanding. Of course by that time there was no even AI or understanding how this can be done a little bit more smart way. So I was doing this a little bit more to automate it as much as possible using different meters, smart meters, sensors, and this is how you can distribute that electrical energy in a more smart way. So this graduation coursework was one of the kind in my university and I won a couple different prizes for this work. This truly actually became a collaboration of me and my teachers and professors, which was kind of like a gem in their normal graduation routine coursework, which was boring. Just like, I don’t know.
Speaker 0 | 16:13.463
If we could only do that with the internet and redistribute bandwidth over larger pipes during different times of day and stuff, it would help.
Speaker 1 | 16:21.218
But believe it or not, you know how the power line technology works or power over electrical lines?
Speaker 0 | 16:28.842
No clue.
Speaker 1 | 16:29.302
Do you know how that? So basically you can run your IP network over your electric clients in your house, right?
Speaker 0 | 16:36.506
Oh, yes, yes, yes. I’ve done that before. I’ve used like the, go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 16:41.889
No, believe it or not, our Russian electrical grid, they was using similar technology, of course, like in the older way. to send this information over the power lines across the entire Russia. And so you can utilize the effects of this data transport to… That was part of my coursework. You can use this transport to a little bit smarter to redistribute this electrical energy.
Speaker 0 | 17:11.272
Well, you’re definitely very frugal and think of many different ways to use I mean, just your SD-WAN deployment box on, you know what I mean, just that little SD-WAN box, which, you know, maybe we can talk about that later. But even that is so much more cost effective than the way a lot of people are doing things.
Speaker 1 | 17:32.849
Right. So instead of running all those fibers or whatever the IP transport you can think of, you just use this power line switch is already there. This is just a brilliant way to send the data. And it’s not something I invented. It just was a… They’re much more smart people than I did. I just reused certain things for this project. Basically, this illustrates how my professors and teachers realized the power of technology. It was kind of like a breakthrough at that moment when I had this accreditation work. Of course, because of my close collaboration with them, I was gaining some advantages, skipping some work. On my free time, I was working on a site at a minister’s provider firm. And this is where I started gaining more and more experience of working with the businesses and understanding that, yes, developers or CTOs may think about certain things that they think they are right. But from the business standpoint, it may not be the right answer for the business. Even this technology is beautiful. This is absolutely awesome technology. But if it doesn’t apply to your business, if it doesn’t bring value to the business, this is what probably my biggest understanding happened when I realized that. And I turned my career, be purely technical, started working a lot with the business side of things, of the IT. It helped me a lot when I was working as a managed service provider. Then later on, I founded my own managed service provider, which still operates. My brother still runs it. Believe it or not, it’s an over-a decade-old company in Russia that operates in a few different markets. It is a successful project. This is only possible to start with understanding that technology empowers business and power of the people. business actually gains the value from the technology and they cannot be separated. Maybe you have a myth or a stereotype where you think of the company and the IT department nerds sitting somewhere in the server room and never liked to see people, he hates to talk to people, and he thinks everybody is so silly, and he goes and does you a favor to push that button to fix that problem, but why do you bother him? He is so busy with technology, making servers to run and all that thing. This has got to change, this stereotype has to be gone forever. It’s ancient.
Speaker 0 | 20:26.422
I think it’s gone now. I think Jeff Bezos pretty much crushed that one. I think he’s the biggest nerd that there was in a garage now. Now he’s the richest, most popular guy in the world. It’s dying. It might be dying slowly. There’s certainly still many businesses that are going under because they have failed to latch on to or failed to, I guess, embrace. the technology curve, whatever that may be, or fail to invest properly in technology advancements. I’m curious, what do you think drives more? Because there’s a lot of technology out there that keeps getting sold, that keeps getting pushed, that is clearly not the most efficient or not the best, but it comes down to bureaucracy or politics or whatever it is that keeps driving the business. You could certainly say that in healthcare. But- And, you know, just from a network standpoint, you know, like, why aren’t we doing things in a more efficient way? Is it because we’ve already invested this and there’s a cash cow there and there’s people that are lobbying government, et cetera, to prevent this?
Speaker 1 | 21:38.640
Well, Phil, you’re touching on very interesting points. Like, I hate to see the companies, which is technology companies, which is they are trying to stretch their solution over your use case. And, you know, just trying to make a sale as opposed to understanding where they can bring the value to your company or to your business. And this is why probably a lot of vendors who are reaching out to me, they think I, and maybe I have to apologize to all salespeople. They all nice people. They, they, they just doing their job, but, but sometimes the, the methods they use for the company they work, it’s not their great company. And I, I was, I maybe have a little bit sad story when one girl, she’s in the sales, she was reaching out to me, trying to sell some check scanners. And I was telling her, hey, look, I can buy exactly the same check scanners on Amazon twice as cheap as you are selling me or offering me. Why should I buy from you? And she said, well, because we offer blah, blah, blah. You will get expedited delivery within five to six days. I said, listen, I can get it like a next day business, like next business day delivery from Amazon twice cheaper as yours. Like, but we will cover war and blah, blah, blah. But look, I can buy for the same price, two check scanners and leave one on a shelf to sit there in case if my first one dies. Why should I buy it? And we check the other items like IP phones and everything. Yeah. I found out next day she quit.
Speaker 0 | 23:24.284
Yeah, man. Think about it. You can’t sell something that you don’t believe in. You shouldn’t. I guess a lot of people do. I would say 80% of the people do just because I need a job or whatever it is. But it’s one of the reasons why I quit corporate America years ago and just decided to… provide kind of like an agnostic point of view or be a, you know, kind of more of a solution expert where you can have access to everything. So interesting. There is a lot of companies that are still doing that because someone just didn’t audit or they didn’t do it. Or like you said, they’re in the explosive growth phase or something got stuck in the growth phase and they don’t have an operations guy that’s gone back through and looked at, well, why are we still buying this way? I don’t know. We just always have. We’ve always bought from XYZ company, but Hey, you know, we can get this now on Amazon or order from Staples or whatever the heck it is. Um, interesting. Um,
Speaker 1 | 24:25.406
I’m telling you, it becomes a commodity. I mean, in, in the large sense,
Speaker 0 | 24:31.291
uh, what do you say to the IT guys that are overworked that don’t even have time to step back? and take a look because there might be, I know for a fact that there’s a lot of companies out there still with multiple legacy systems and legacy silos, and they’re dealing with this and they just don’t have time to migrate it. They’re just kind of dealing with the drinking from the fire hose on a daily basis. Their IT department might be a little bit underfunded. There’s only, you know, I think of it as the ratio of one IT guy to a hundred end users. So anyone within that ratio, you’re a one to a hundred, you’re kind of like. you know, overloaded? How do you manage that? How do you step back and, you know, like, hey, let’s eliminate this. Let’s eliminate this and get rid of this legacy silo. It’s going to eliminate, you know, these bottlenecks. But I don’t even have time. I don’t even have time. So I’m still ordering from whatever. I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 25:28.671
Yeah, I have my answer. This is actually a very awesome question because I was in this shoes before many, many times. And like if you say eight. listen, I don’t have time to look into possible efficiencies. I have to deal with legacy systems. This means you have to force yourself to find the time because otherwise it’s never end. But you have to force yourself and find the time and probably the answer will be already available because you need to ask yourself, where I spend most of my time? Where? And probably for most organizations, it’s going to be onboarding or offboarding people. This is most routine task and it’s not automated with ever increasing SaaS applications used in enterprise sector. This will only grow more and more. And understanding that you forgot to terminate account.
Speaker 0 | 26:23.918
So MACDs, we call those like MACDs or I call them a MAC attack, like move, add, change, delete, these type of things.
Speaker 1 | 26:31.620
Yes, yes. And those are actually sometimes may take up to 60 or 50%. like at least half a percent of your time onboarding or boarding users because it’s very hard to automate in a current IT landscape because not a lot of solutions offer like SAML or single sign-on solutions, things like that. So this is so easy to miss certain accounts being terminated. Or when you onboard a user, it’s going to create a bunch of follow-up tickets. Look, I got company email set up, but I’m missing access to this BI system where my level of access is not exactly where it should be. It’s not the problem for larger organizations because they have different problems, but for definitely small and medium-sized businesses, it’s the number one problem. Second thing about legacy problems is I have to face or deal with those problems myself. In this case, You have no other choice. Just go to the business or decision makers and tell them, look, guys, we are not able to support this. And this kind of session has to be prepared. So you have to understand what’s the… Basically, you have to have at least maybe two, three different solutions. Like one is on the lower end, someone somewhere mid-tier in the top tier solution to replace your legacy system. And you got to be prepared. and when I say prepared, it’s not only like cost to replace, but like total cost of ownership, like the full financial information got to be in your hand before you go and get your sponsorship buy-in. Because otherwise it’s going to be just a waste of time. You’re going to face the same conversation over and over, saying, hey, we have this legacy and we’ve got to get rid of this. And business will say, we don’t want to spend the… money and we have no idea what the cost is. So you got to be prepared first to get that buy-in. And then, if business still will be arguing and saying like, oh, we don’t want to spend this money or we don’t have such money, but just tell them, okay, if I will unplug this black box right now, what’s kind of productivity loss we will see or face? How much dollars will be sink into the toilet if I will unplug this box? This is the linear conversation where you will, it definitely will get hurt. People will start listening. Because if you don’t have any way to support this legacy system, and if it dies tomorrow, that’s exactly what you’re trying to show them. Like, I will pull this plug and this is it. That’s what we may face any moment of the time. And sponsors will be a little bit more inclined to have this dialogue because you have some information kind of features they can think of. And to… in their eyes, it will be just a totally business decision. It’s not going to be an IT decision. It’s not a technology decision. It just will be a business decision. Okay, so this black box, if we will lose it tomorrow, this is how much losses we will have. Or we can prevent this or avoid those losses with such an expense. And there is an old saying which kind of comes along. If the… problem can be solved with the money. It’s not a problem. It’s just an expense. That’s what it is. So basically to all those folks who just struggle with legacy systems, that’s the approach you probably can try. And I can guarantee in 80-90% case you’ll be successful. Or otherwise, if you still struggle, maybe it’s not the right company to work for. Maybe you want to look at a little bit different company. And then, or this company with this kind of uh a strategy even like business decisions not obvious to business people then it’s probably this business will go under um sometime soon so that’s that’s my answer to you so try that if not look for other company um if
Speaker 0 | 30:47.528
i unplug this box what will happen that’s pretty much the strategy right but
Speaker 1 | 30:54.414
I would add to the strategy, you got to be prepared with the answer. Prefer more than one answer. What to do if this box dies? Like what kind of other technology replacement you can bring and what it will cost to have it to replace this black box.
Speaker 0 | 31:13.862
In other words, a good, better, best. Like here’s our basic, what we got to do, like bare bones. Here’s what’s good and here’s what’s best. And then have different. bullet points along the way that would say, you know, well, if we go with the best, then we also will gain efficiencies. We’ll gain this, we’ll gain this. But if we just go with the bare minimum, okay.
Speaker 1 | 31:32.932
Absolutely. It depends who are you are like, which role you in. And let’s say if you are a team manager in a company, which is doesn’t have a positive, like a small or medium sized business, which don’t have a official CTO or CIO title. This is for you a career path where you effectively will get one of those projects in your resume where you accomplish replacing this legacy system. And this is for you a very valuable experience to move forward because as more and more legacy systems get replaced in the companies with more modern solutions, I like to think this is like how the serverless… approach revolutionized this siloed big monolith application style approach in microservices. This is the same thing here for your career. You can effectively modernize your career approach by facing those legacy systems and also realizing where your potential is, where you spend most of your time. Is it onboarding of users or maybe support something like a… very poor code and you have to support this. So you got to face those challenges, which is you spend most of your time in address those. This is how you can gain more time for yourself. And then once you have more time for yourself, you can start looking around what else you can improve, where you can bring more efficiencies to your company or your department. And with all this knowledge and the free time, we can use it. to maybe learn new technologies, which you can suggest to the business. And now think about this like a letter in your career. So first of all, you addressed inefficiencies in your company and try to solve this. Second, you are challenging business with replacing legacy systems. Third, you will have time to study and learn new technologies and kind of develop yourself. this is step number three, where you can even bring more efficiencies to the company. Or you will become, with all these three steps process, you’ll become more valuable in IT market. So basically, if you will be looking for the next chapter in your career, this is definitely going to be a big, big, big plus to your resume when you will be able to talk about those challenges and things you were able to fix for the company.
Speaker 0 | 34:14.741
I want to ask you… It’s brilliant. I want to ask you what you’re studying right now. But before we get to that, everyone out there listening, please, if you enjoy the show, please go to Apple Podcasts, search Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, scroll to the bottom and give us your honest review. For example, John DeBrit, he gave us five stars and he says, I appreciate the humor and the approach. Love to see this podcast is growing and developing. keep it up, Phil. We’ve got John Wadsworth. Good show. Phil does a good job digging into the lives and work of IT directors. And then TJStar15, nerds with a bunch of exclamation points. Always funny and to the point, but more importantly, relevant. Subscribe. You’ll be glad you did. So thank you, guys. You’re the last three that gave reviews. We need like 140 to actually become, I think, in like the top 10 technology podcasts. And And last week, somehow I made it onto the list of top 35 podcasts that you need to listen to, technology podcasts you need to listen to in 2021. So we got that going for us. Now, to move on, Andre, what… You’re already like partial genius came over, you know, electrical engineer. Like really, what are you studying right now? What’s your passion right now? What do you want to study? What’s the end game for you? Because you said growing your career. And quite frankly, I’d like to end my career and, you know, do whatever the heck I want to do. So what’s your end game or what are you studying right now? What are you passionate about? I guess I did end my career for everyone out there listening to. I kind of did end my career. I mean, I sit in my basement and talk on a microphone and I’ve got eight kids. What else could I do? Anyways, go.
Speaker 1 | 35:57.756
So, well, that’s a great question. I don’t know. I still get used to being like in startups and work for different companies and running my own gigs. So I definitely don’t see myself retiring, sitting in the basement doing nothing. But definitely, I always will be learning about the new technologies all the time, regardless of how old I will get, I will be learning this.
Speaker 0 | 36:29.271
What’s the best thing? What’s something at the top of your head right now? What’s the most exciting thing you see going on right now?
Speaker 1 | 36:36.434
I guess robots or supply chain robotization, like all those micro fulfillment centers. I With electrical engineering routes, I’m trying to build my own drones and kind of like understand from this perspective how all those robots may work, trying to program. And I found it interesting, like DJI, they introduced a little while their platform called RoboMaster, where you can start at least, like even your kids will have so much fun to try to program this robot. This is absolutely amazing. If you think about how the technology will be evolving, definitely the edge of biology and technology is going to be new breakthroughs in this field.
Speaker 0 | 37:30.136
So this rings home really deep with me. So I have got my son and all my kids, and they want to make money. because that’s just how they are. Like, dad, how can I make money? Dad, what can I do? Can I sell telecom? I’m like, yeah, I guess so. Here’s a list. Start calling these people. Dad, I want to do this. So my son, I helped him write a sales letter about, you know, sending out to the neighborhood for mowing people’s lawns. Right. And that sales letter, you know, whatever it is in the sales letter and the hundredth cut will be just as good as the first cut because everyone goes lame. Right. Like you hire a cleaning lady or a cleaning group, right. They clean your house. Awesome. Like the first two times by the time, by the time of year goes by, you’re like, Hey, why didn’t it just, you know, is it really worth paying for this anymore? Anyways, I’m really, uh, the coffee’s starting to kick in. Um, so at the end of his sales letter, it’s, it’s, uh, so do you want, you know, me, Gabriel Howard to cut your lawn? And he gives them two options. Like, yes, I would love Gabriel to cut my lawn or no. I’d prefer that the youth of today continue to do nothing and sit inside and play Xbox all day and waste their life. So I’m not going to support you in cutting me along. You know, like anyways, but he’s really, I told him, I was like, hey, you know, you should get into like drones. You know, why don’t you get into drones and robots or something? Because I don’t know, you could go find a bunch of real estate agents and I don’t know, do roof inspections or do flyovers for their properties or something. But for everyone out there listening that has kids, everyone cares about their kids. Everyone wants what’s best for them. RoboMaster and programming? I mean, where would you send your kids to do for fun or spend extra time to learn and play with technology? Where would you send them? There?
Speaker 1 | 39:13.264
That’s what I’m already doing at home. So we play with drones and build a program with RoboMaster. I was probably going to get the second one so we can start having a battle for robots. which you probably have seen some Japanese shows on YouTube where they have robots just fighting with each other. It’s like a real destruction derby of robots. This is absolutely amazing. And that actually got into real business use case or production. I use drones to inspect the roof or find the line of sight. when we were connecting buildings between two different buildings and Fixed buildings? Fixed buildings. Fixed wire or microwave mesh network between different buildings, which can be like a mile away or a few miles away from each other, but if you have a line of sight, so which you can control. Were you using
Speaker 0 | 40:11.817
Ubiquiti? Were you using Ubiquiti or what? Were you using for point and point?
Speaker 1 | 40:15.479
Yeah, Ubiquiti is normally my go-to gear. This is so inexpensive and the Lidia was evolving with… They’re a UISP platform where you can manage everything from a single pane of glass, all your networks. They smoked it.
Speaker 0 | 40:32.284
They did so good. They smoked the fixed wireless industry. I remember when they first came out, we were like, ah, Motorola gone. Like all the other ones, I was like, you know, they’re done. Ubiquity was just killing it. Okay. Anyways, sorry.
Speaker 1 | 40:45.415
And this is what we need to talk about. Like when you’re asking like where else we can find efficiencies, is that That’s exactly what I did. I found out that we can drop a lot of ISPs and just kind of become our own ISP. You just connect a bunch of buildings with two or three uplinks, redundant uplinks, where you can fail over between them if one of them fails. But all your buildings will stay connected. And now buildings have become more and more smart. You have smart boilers, you have IP intercom systems, you have all kinds of sensors. It’s still kind of a little bit expensive, but… You can think a little bit more of modern way to automate your lighting system because I was always mad when I was seeing the light is on in the buildings like in the middle of the day. I was calling our property manager saying like, dude, like what’s going on? Why are we wasting electrical power here? Like, it’s a timer broke. Like okay, good. All those flat sensors, if you think like how much damage first pipe can do to the building. All this connected technology I brought to the company a little bit over maybe like three years ago. And now on the roadmap to get all the buildings connected with different types of technology. It’s not always possible to do with microwave because there’s just been no line of sight. But you can do it utilizing SD-WAN technology at a very efficient and very good scale. And it will not take a bunch of time. tag people to run around and support this because effectively you are plug all those systems to your back office team we just can again manage everything from a single pane of glass and understand if there’s any issues with the buildings or creativity issues and things like that this is again we are speaking about efficiencies productivity gains and things like that so we’re talking back to those people who are uh challenged with the daily operations they have zero free time to do anything
Speaker 0 | 42:49.062
I’ve been trying to think of how to make this bridge throughout this entire show to, I think you’re seeing things in Russian. I think you’re seeing things in Russian. Maybe that should be the new segment of the show. Like, how do we see things in Russian? Okay. And what I really mean by that is, and I’ve been trying to pinpoint it as to like what it is. Like, why do people. Why would people listen to you? Why would you be successful doing what you’re doing so much? And I think the bottom line is you care. And I know it sounds a lot, but like just the fact that you would care that the lights are on in the building, most people are going to walk around. They’re not going to even notice that. They’re not going to even notice that. So how do you care? How do you get people to open up their eyes? Because they don’t, they show up, they collect a paycheck. This is my job. I get it. How much do we really care and get involved in the ultimate success and or failure of the company? And the American mentality a lot is like, what is my employer doing for me? Right. And how are they, you know, I’m going to interview, you know, I’m not going to interview for the company. That company should be interviewing me. That’s kind of like the new mentality is like the company should be interviewing me. And really, though, it should be. what can you provide? What kind of value can you come provide this company? I don’t know. It’s this, it’s this weird duality, right? You know, cause the Gary V’s of the world are going to be like, no, no, no, no. Like, you know, you know what I mean? It’s the opposite. It’s kind of this weird fake, this fake social media realm. That’s not real. But what is real is you were in how many classmates or how many people in Russia right now wish they were in your position over here in America. And I’m, and I’m just. and I don’t want to make it sound like, you know, like America’s better. I don’t really know. Cause I asked you this last time, how many inventions has America made? Like it seems like America invents everything and you’re like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. Like we made, we invented the COVID vaccine. Came up with the COVID vaccine.
Speaker 1 | 45:02.814
Phil, I don’t know. I don’t have the answer how many of my classmates wish to be where I’m at. But the United States was probably not purely my choice where to relocate. My grandparents, they immigrated from XUSR and there was a political reason why they immigrated. Okay. And it was getting older and it was like an idea. They get old, let’s just move there and kind of see around, learn new things and see new things. Cool. And that’s basically… Yeah, that’s basically my approach. Like, you don’t care what nationality you are, Russian or who. If you travel, if you are seeing different cultures, different opinions, different point of view, this will definitely help you to look into things under different angles. And this is how you can find.
Speaker 0 | 46:00.760
I feel like I’m part of a global community. I don’t see myself as, because I’ve traveled a lot and I’ve seen other parts of the world. And I’ve seen areas of the world that are stereotypically judged very highly from like a kind of Western standpoint. And it’s not like that. We’re all humans. You know what I mean? Like, we’re all, you know what I mean? Like you said, like this idea of Russia that sometimes people have this idea of like, no, we’re waiting in line for our tomato paste and, you know, rice. you know, our communist handout. You know what I mean? Like, there’s this kind of like, you know, that’s kind of the old school ideology. Now there’s, I’m just playing around with it because I want to throw that out there. But yeah, when you travel.
Speaker 1 | 46:39.801
Yes, the travel probably, it’s part of the answer. Why? Because like, I know so many Americans or local people, even my colleagues, they never been out of state sometimes. Like, not even from the country, like from the United States, they never been out of state. This is so crucial for you to get different views and opinions and things like you got to travel you got to You got to learn you you got to be very curious. You got to be Pioneering in the new areas for you.
Speaker 0 | 47:09.059
Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 47:09.259
just cover And my wife she always like laughs at me like uh, you you’re so broken like every time you go somewhere a new place I’m starting to look at what kind of Wi-Fi they use. Like, let me hack here. Like, let’s see what I can do. Like, let me scan network. Like, all those were like, or why are you guys doing this? Or what kind of gear are you using? Or like, I’m so curious, like, what kind of technology they use in their places. So I beat the hell out of people there, like, and asking them, like, why? What’s here? And things like that. And kind of sharing my view. But luckily in Russia… a lot of my friends or family, uh, like family friends or like classmates or who been in school together, they kind of, uh, I’m not sure. Is it just maybe my school or something like that? I totally think I was in average school. Um, actually I take that back. It was not average. I was in sports school. So, but imagine in my, uh, in my class,
Speaker 0 | 48:09.860
what kind of sports did you play? I mean, and first of all, there’s so many points here. There’s so many great points because I’m a sports person. I was in the supermarket the other day and they’re remodeling the supermarket and I’m looking up at the ceiling and I see all the cat six drops, cat five, cat five, whatever they’re running. I’m seeing all the drops along the ceiling. And then I’m start looking at it and I start seeing wifi access points everywhere. Like every, like, like every 20 feet, like, like way too close to get, I’m like, like, how did they map out? Like who did, who wired this and who mapped it out and who decided that this was a good idea? And then I asked the, The store guy was like, hey, do you guys have Wi-Fi in here or something? Do you guys have an app? Are you going to help me shop? I’m starting to ask all these questions. Is this so I can price things out? I’m thinking there’s some kind of app that’s going to know, start suggesting products that I bought from last time. I’m thinking all this advanced stuff that they should have. Why do you roll out this internal network in the store? He’s like, oh, well, you just got to have Wi-Fi. That was his answer. And I’m looking at it like, there’s no reason for them to have all these access points. And I’m thinking, maybe they’re using it for inventory, maybe barcoding inventory, maybe they’re using it to do counts.
Speaker 1 | 49:25.406
I have a feeling maybe this guy has no clue what he’s talking about. A lot of modern Wi-Fi access points, even like, maybe Mirake started this first, but… it kind of spread across all other vendors. Like even Ubiquiti, they have BLE built into their modern access points and they are trying to connect different sensors to them. It’s all in data, but you will see it’s coming. So basically, why do you need to have those BLE built in? Because it will help you to navigate in the store and provide analytics to the store operations about your products. customer journey paths in retail. So maybe this guy was totally wrong and he didn’t realize that all those Wi-Fi access points, they’re not all about Wi-Fi, it’s all about connectivity, efficiently manage a bunch of your BLE or Bluetooth. And you think about the iBeacons, for example, from Apple. Those are Those devices will help to push you certain coupons or discounts and things like that. So you were kind of right. And I think this guy just didn’t realize that that’s what they’re doing.
Speaker 0 | 50:45.044
It’s like when I pull into a Wendy’s parking lot and my McDonald’s app dings. Right. I pull into Wendy’s and a McDonald’s feeds me a coupon. I’ll think right away. It’s crazy. Of course, they’re controlling us. But yeah, for deployment and where they’re… the customer journey, like you’re saying, I shouldn’t walk from aisle 1 to aisle 5 to aisle 3 to 15. Yeah, it’s very problematic.
Speaker 1 | 51:15.565
You are the product now. Look, you getting spied on in all… Regardless of what the retail is saying, we will not look into your identity, we’re not spying you. It’s all… Modern companies, actually, as a matter of fact, all retailers are becoming tech companies now. They are no longer just pure retail companies. Moving boxes or like CPG, they are becoming tech companies. And they have to. They’ve been pushed to because otherwise, all you see around all these retail apocalypse happens to the companies. We just fail to adapt. They fail to transform and go through digital transformation. It’s all because of that. It’s all because all these people got caught in so much in the daily routine. They did not have probably boldness or courage to stop and look around what they can do, what they can do differently. People get lazy.
Speaker 0 | 52:23.575
In general, do you think people get lazy? Do you think companies get lazy? Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 52:28.557
I don’t know about that. Well, there are different types of laziness, Phil. I have to tell you. Like, I’m probably the most lazy person in the earth. And I keep telling, like, when I met my wife, like, hey, listen, I’m a sportsman. I’m a super lazy person. Like, I’m the most lazy person in the world. Why? Because I know the value of the time I can rest and do nothing. Because, like, I used to have, like, three workouts per day. Like, one in the morning,
Speaker 0 | 52:59.778
one… Doing what? Powerlifting? What?
Speaker 1 | 53:03.481
No, I had two in the morning and around noon time I was having a swimming because I went to school and I used to be in the Olympics sports team for swimming. Okay. Which has also influenced a lot. And in the evening I was taking martial arts classes doing Russian style wrestling. Sambo? No, not Sambo. I probably need to send you a couple of video clips or links how this works, but it’s Russian martial arts style. It goes to how you use your sword to run a bell for two days, for example, straight. Some Russian warriors have been known they can fight for days without stopping because they have certain techniques how to use this sword. In order to not get tired.
Speaker 0 | 54:10.140
I’m a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu addict. Habib is my favorite MMA fighter and he wears a t-shirt that says like if Sambo were easy they’d call it Jiu-Jitsu. But I still like him. He’s like, I still like him. Um, and, uh, so yeah, so Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, jujitsu. And in between that, if there’s waves, I’ll surf and I’m still trying to, to bang in some extra workouts, but the sleep is the biggest factor. This is recovering at 44 years old. The sleep is the biggest factor I need. Like I should be getting 10, 12 hours of sleep, but I’m getting seven, six.
Speaker 1 | 54:53.657
Right. And similar to technology, lazy people, like all those technology inventions come because people are lazy.
Speaker 0 | 55:01.480
Some of the best IT directors say to me, they’re like, Phil, look, here’s what I want you to do. I’m lazy. I want you to help me be more lazy. I’m doing this and I’m implementing this because I don’t want to deal with this. And that should be the mentality. That should be the mentality. Help you become more lazy. And it’s hard sometimes. I think it’s hard. We have this weird work ethic. I don’t know what it is about America. Why do we have to be constantly working? Why? And that’s another thing. When you travel, you realize that people take naps in the middle of the day for two, three hours. They might get up real early and work till 12, but they sleep from 12 to 3. And then they, you know, get up and work till 7 at night or something and then hang out at a coffee shop with friends and stuff. It’s quite refreshing in many cases. And yet at the same time, I asked you last time, like, why do you think people that come over in the boat from any country are more successful? And why do you think, like, are we going to, you know, the original OG Americans are going to lose the scene? And you’re like, well, I think we were just more hungry. and learned to do more with less or kind of wear multiple hats at one time, as opposed to just kind of focus on one particular thing. Is there anything to that?
Speaker 1 | 56:18.447
It’s the same effect where you see like a bigger city attracting a lot of people or immigrants where they come there, they work two or three different jobs at the same time compared to the people who were born there. They’re kind of taking everything for granted. Yeah. Yeah. they see like oh like look even in the corporate world this young hungry person comes and does twice more work done than you used to do and this is becomes apparent to your supervisors they will start thinking oh look this is the right guy to promote right and you start to think like oh these guys are taking our bread and butter like oh let’s kick them out and like but in reality is it’s uh It’s a matter of those people with high energy and hungry, they will be always kind of pushing to the limits of all other people who get used to be lazy and kind of sit back and relax.
Speaker 0 | 57:17.424
It’s like the endless cycle. So we need to learn to, somehow we need to like input that laziness in to make us look hungry. We need to implement some kind of technology that makes us look always hungry and working really hard.
Speaker 1 | 57:30.631
Yeah. Here in the sales features or demos, you’ll see, oh, like you push this button, this will do this for you. No, I am so lazy. I don’t even want to push this button. I want everything to happen automatically.
Speaker 0 | 57:43.422
Yeah. It has been a pleasure having you on this show. I got to ask you, what’s the dumbest thing you’ve seen lately? I’m trying to implement this new segment. It’s called It’s a Stupid Thing. Like, it’s a stupid thing. What’s the dumbest thing that you’ve seen in technology lately? Or the dumbest thing that people should avoid, don’t do this. This is like a really a stupid thing. This is what I noticed.
Speaker 1 | 58:06.157
Well, I don’t probably have such a great example right now, but what I have to deal with, you probably will ask yourself when you go sometimes to the field and you see low-skilled employees printing papers, filling it out and scan it back, you’ll ask yourself why? And sometimes the answer can be, listen, if we’ll give them iPad, we’ll train them. they will realize that they actually become a little bit more skilled and they’ll find the other job. And you kind of wasted your time and resources to train them and teach them. It’s probably not the best example, but printing something out, filling out the paper and scan it back. I just cannot stand with this.
Speaker 0 | 58:49.212
It’s a huge example because especially in like a lot of logistics and delivery companies, I see it in pharmaceuticals and delivering. I think the last example I saw was like some sort of… oxygen delivery company where they were doing that exact process. And the whole reason why they were holding back so much is because IT did not want to deal with the whole, the juggernaut was the holdup of having to train the drivers to use an iPad. That was the, the everything hinged on. Oh, we just don’t want to go through the training. We just don’t want to break the way that it’s always been done. But they did it and they forced it through and it created some ridiculously mass efficiency with, you know, prevention of missed deliveries and, you know, lost accounts and things not getting paid for. It was like, you know, like one little simple fix like that was. So that’s a good one. It’s a stupid thing. Printing papers and scanning, filling out forms. manually filling out forms and faxing them or scanning them is, I guess, what we should say. Now, in another scenario, just to play devil’s advocate, if you’re trying to prevent people from communicating with you, then make the only way they can communicate with you via fax. you will hide away from uh lawyers and like most legacy people are probably lawyers lawyers a doctor it would be doctors but they were forced but obama forced them to go digital digital medical records you know what i mean but yeah there’s this there’s this in marketing there’s this famous guy dan kennedy which a lot of people probably know but the only way to get a hold of him it’s like he’s like like you know like the like No one gets through to see the wizard type of guy. You know what I mean? The only way to get a hold of him is to fax him a request. And then you must fax him. It’s beautiful, actually. It’s quite amazing. I don’t know what’s going to happen when that breaks down. Thank you so much for being on the show. You have given plenty of advice. I do not even need to ask you what the best advice was because it already was. It’s if I unplug this box, what will happen? That’s probably the most genius question that anyone could ask. We might even title the show that. So thank you so much for being on the show.
Speaker 1 | 61:17.826
All right, Neil. Pleasure. Take care.
