The Long Game in Software Services with Alex Asianov and Jonathan Blessing

Hi, I'm Warren Zenna, founder and CEO of the CRO Collective and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This show is focused exclusively on the success of Chief Revenue Officers. Each week we have an open, frank and freeform conversation with top experts in the revenue space about the CRO role and its critical impact on B2B businesses. This podcast is the place to be for CROs, sales and marketing leaders who aspire to become CROs and founders who are looking to appoint a CRO or want to support their CRO to succeed. Thanks for listening. Now let's go mix it up. Hey everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Siero Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zen. I'm the founder of the Sierra Collective. Today I'm really excited to have two guests on. They're the co founders, CEO founders of a great company called Door 3. I've been around for like 22 years or something. I mean, you know, since there was such thing as a computer or something like that and you know, I, I.

It'S great because they were very big 22 years ago.

You know, there's a lot of, a lot of things that happen when companies around for that period of time, particularly technology companies and, and the evolution. As I mentioned in some of my LinkedIn posts, Door 3 was the company that participated in the CRO Accelerator course live case study. So we had a really cool opportunity to dig into their business and talk about a lot of things. And the conversations that we've had were fascinating. So I wanted to also have an opportunity to talk about them here. So without more further ado, I want to welcome Jonathan Blessing and Alex Asianoff who are the, I guess the CEO and co founders of Door 3.

Welcome. Yeah, we should clarify the co founder thing. I'm of course happy to take the compliment, but you're not. I'm not a co founder.

Okay. You're a fewer CEO. You were kind of brought in as the hired.

But I was around, I was around at the, like I was around a.

Year and a half after we started.

Yeah, you've been around. When we were still a toddler, you.

Were still exactly more than less than a year and a half.

You're still in diapers.

Zygote almost. You know.

That'S how I remember Jonathan as well.

Yeah.

So anyway, welcome. Really great to have both of you and appreciate the ongoing dialogues that we've been having. They've been really fun. You know, it'd be cool if you guys could individually introduce yourselves a little bit background and then segue that a Bit into your business and its evolution. Be really great.

Alex, why don't you go first? Because you, you are the founder. This whole thing came out of your mind.

Yeah. When I close my eyes, it all disappears. I know I disappear when you.

What's really scary for me is when you close your eyes at and you go to sleep, we all disappear.

Keep your eyes open. We got to keep this going, Alex.

Okay, so a little bit of an introduction. I've been programming since I was a kid just for the fun of it. I couldn't afford video game, coin operated video games. I was like, I'll just save up my money, buy a small computer and write my own video games. It was crazy time. And so when I got to college I went into biochemistry and I thought I was going to do research but I kept coming back to, to writing software no matter what happened. I worked with Sloan Kettering and wrote lab management software. It's always been fun to create. Then I discovered that creating with others, team play in software development was also fun and being able to deliver real business solutions became a real passion of mine. Like being able to transform businesses as a function of automation, information management and stuff like that. So I went into software development professionally, worked on Wall street, worked at a, at banks, then went into the financial services practice at Sapient Corporation where you know, as a, as a senior architect in the financial services practice I got to see a variety of different kinds of projects at the, at kind of the dawn of the web age. And then I decided to just found my own agency because I wanted, I loved Sapient and I loved the organization and the ethos and the intelligence of the people there and I just wanted to create a slightly more agile version of that. And that's what Dora3 became. It's a multidisciplinary organization that is based in kind of putting user experience, design and hardcore technology in the service of business strategy. It's been a long and interesting ride since then. Constant sort of percolating of various factors shaping and reshaping the organization over time and yeah, happy to, obviously happy to talk about it as long as you want me to talk about it.

Okay, great. Well, thanks. It was great. So Jonathan, how about you? How you, you've been here since you're a whippersnapper. What, what's your evolution?

How did I get here? Well, God, goodness gracious. So you know, in a, I mean my story in broad strokes isn't all that dissimilar from Alex's. Right. So it was the 1980s, we had an Apple Iigs and I think we had like a precious two or three games and I really liked playing those games. But we didn't have money for more games or at least so I was so was told. So I would borrow my friends games and that would solve the problem that I would copy my friends games. And then they started using something called copy protection which then necessitated that I learn how to program in order to get around the copy protection. So yeah, that's, that's really how I got into computer.

Isn't hacking sort of like the entry point to this whole business all the time?

Well, you have to have like just, you have to have just the right amount of kind of economic pressure.

Yeah.

Desire and then. Yeah, like a tool, like a computer, 100%. So that's really like, you know, that, that, that is what kind of brought me into software, the world of software. The idea that I could change things with keystrokes, make things with keystrokes kind of began, you know, with a childhood desire to copy, illegally copy my friends games in my basement. Okay, got it. Then like a lot of us took a non traditional path, went to, you know, college, did humanities stuff because really, you know, back in the day, back in the early 90s, computer science was logic programming. It was, you know, it was really, you were so close to the metal. It was not something I was very interested in at the time. And then I kind of came back that I graduated in the, you know, I left, Left University in 1998. And you'll remember what was going on then, which was the Internet. Yep, the Internet was kind of a big thing in the late 90s and I got swept up in that. And I have really professionally only ever done software development in a professional services capacity with a few, few years out for product development. Most of it's all been professional services.

Got it. I'm interested in something. We never talked about this, but you've been with the company a long time. Jonathan. What was the decision internally for you to become the CEO of the company? I'm just curious what sort of process that took place there that had that happen. Because I'm interested in, let me correct.

What I think is a just a subtle misunderstanding of history. So Alex and I have known each other since I think 05 06. Is that right? Got us. Yep. So in the early, in the very early days of Door three, I came on as a really as an engineer and like an account person to help with the like one of our foundational accounts back in the day. After that after that kind of ran its course, I left, started my own company, and Alex and I grew our companies in parallel. And we frequently, our companies would collaborate on projects. We had different strengths, different weaknesses, and so together we would, you know, I think, for instance, Deluxe. Alex, that was definitely a huge project where, you know, our combined strengths led to, I like to think, a successful outcome. And so then I sold off my company and, you know, I put my feet up for a minute and Alex called and asked if I would come and help. Help out at door three. And help I did.

Got it.

Okay, so that was about five years ago.

And Alex, what was the help you're looking for?

Well, originally the help I was looking for was managing marketing. Right. And so Jonathan came in and kind of straightened up a few things in the marketing organization. And to this day, that's something that he deals with as one of his areas of focus. But given that Jonathan and I have, by and large, very good communications. We're both language oriented people and there's, there's a lot of what the alternative to that be alignment on kind of the human values of running an organization. And Jonathan has a way of handling kind of divergent opinions that I thought was admirable and interesting that. And so I thought, you know, wouldn't it be nice if, like, if Jonathan did to the company what he did to the marketing, like straighten it up a little bit, like fix some of the disagreements and kind of, I would say, align the company better for success and just on a high level. Right. I know that that's not deeply informative, but it's as good as I can do on short notice. All right. And I also wanted to focus a little bit more on sales and on project delivery. And I was always torn between that and kind of executive management of the organization. And it was time for professional executive management.

Thanks again for listening to the Ciro Spotlight podcast. We're excited about all the great guests we have, and more importantly, we're excited mostly about you for being avid listeners and supporting the work that we do here. Feel free please to share the Sierra Spotlight podcast with any of your colleagues. We just think there's a great wealth of information here and want to get the word out to as many people as possible. And your. Your support of the show is really appreciated. I wanted to share information about a program that we offer called the CRO Masters Council. The CRO Masters Council is a bimonthly group of six seasoned chief Revenue officers who are looking for a chief revenue officer board of directors, so to speak. That they could share what's going on with them, collaborate with ideas, get some feedback on what's going on in their current role. And these are great conversations. I facilitate them. The CRO Master's Councils, again, they're twice a month and they last for at least six months to a year. So if you're interested in having your own CRO suite, your own Board of Directors of Chief Revenue Officers, it's a private, confidential conversation that we have. It's infinitely useful. Imagine having a room full of other Chief Revenue Officers you can talk to and say, hey, I'm working on this, or have you guys figured that out? Or I'm having this issue right now with my business or my results. These are just invaluable conversations with Chief Revenue Officers. Chief Revenue Officers have a very, very unique role. It's a very lonely job and only other CROs understand what you're going through. So that's why we created this program. So if you're interested in being a member of the next CRO Masters Council, which we have a number of them being put together right now, just go to my LinkedIn and DM me masters or master's Counsel, and I'll follow up with you and set up a call or send you some more information about it. Looking forward to seeing you there and thank you. Got it.

Clear.

So this is interesting. We last spoke, we were talking a lot about a lot of things. One of the things I think was interesting was this evolution of the product, right? You are ostensibly a service business at its core. You're, you're providing a service which in this case, you're, you're building products for companies. I want to make sure I'm clear. But that is the case predominantly anyway. Now, was that always the case or did you evolve into building products? Were you always a product building company?

I would say that there's always been an aspect of product, you know, when code reuse was kind of a more of a, you know, value than it is today. We had libraries and frameworks that we would create and those were we're products to a certain degree. Right. That we would kind of co sell with our software, with the software that we built for folks. And I've always had the aspiration of having kind of a product mentality within the organization because at the end of the day, we're helping clients build products. We're not helping them build code. Nobody cares about code. People care about the product and its function and its users. And so having some degree of product thinking in the organization is just healthy for our clients on the service side.

To be honest with you and Warren, I would kind of continue with what Alex was saying by adding, thinking about products is really just a way of thinking about outcomes at a business level in a very disciplined fashion. So like, like Alex said, our clients don't care about code by and large. What they care about are outcomes. They care that, you know, the thing they've come to us to build for them not just works at a functional level, but performs well in the market. So product level thinking is, it's really a way of getting our organization to concentrate on the outcome of our engagements.

Makes sense. So what your business? I've been in your business twice actually. I worked for two. Let's call them, you know, software companies or call them develop development companies. I love the business. In fact, one of them was building games, which we can talk about some other time. It's really, actually really cool story, but you know, I'm curious to know from a market differentiation standpoint, right? There's a lot of developers out there. I probably get like five emails a week from people writing me saying, hey, we'll handle all your development needs. You know, how many products you have to build this month. You know, it's insane and you know, most of these people are people I'd never call back again. And I feel bad for them in some respects because it's so crowded that they're just trying to get clients and you know, they lack any ability to create any differentiation or anything. It's, it's, it's really bad. So I'm curious how you solve that. I know you were brought in, Jonathan, initially to help in marketing, but what's the way that you've all formulated your own brand strategy and market strategy and thought leadership strategy and maybe a specialization strategy that helps you continue to grow the business.

You know, like those emails you get right from those developers and those dev shops, they're, they're talking to you maybe at a level that isn't all that interesting to you. It's not going to help CRO Collective. It's not going to move your needle anymore.

Well, I'm not their market. I don't need software built. Even if you were their market, begin with.

Yeah. So where, where we meet our clients is really at the level of their business. So I think something which, you know, part of our DNA, something that Alex put there in the, really like in the opening days of the organization is an enormous amount of humility and a desire to kind of walk the walk with our clients to understand their business, to not assume that we know it until we've really kind of walked the walk with them and so we can appreciate, okay, so you know, they want to commission the development of this system. Okay, but what's that system mean to them? Like at what, you know, what is it supposed to do for their business? How is it, Is it, is it scaling revenue? Is it driving down costs, bringing efficiency? So I would think, you know, really. And again, that's kind of goes back to the product level thinking. So for us, that's where we begin the discussion with our clients. That's what we try to show them. It's not just that we have, you know, fantastic kind of end to end delivery. It's that what we're building, what we're. The whole conception of an engagement is anchored in a shared understanding of some result in the business. For our clients, it's outcome driven. Yep.

But there's another part that I'm personally really proud of and it's harder to convey, but it's the fact that when we finally do understand the client's business, align on objectives and start the ball rolling getting something done, we get it done. And that is, I mean, we're really the best that I've seen in my career across a variety of organizations that I've dealt with in variety of ways at structuring projects for success and then walking that line all the way to the end. To the end and delivering a product. Right. Maintaining alignment with the client, managing expectations, dealing with feature quality and any kind of scope creep tendencies that may exist in the technical risks, design issues, like anything that, because anything that comes our way, we handle and we handle expeditiously. We elevate the conversation to a, to a solutioning discussion and we solve.

So did this, you didn't always have this. I, I don't know. But this was evolved.

Right?

You developed this acumen. I mean you had a. Most companies, they, they grow and they get smarter and they figure things out. So I'm looking at this question from the perspective of the people listening to this, whom are interested in insights like how companies succeed and, and how they learn and how they develop and how they evolve. Almost as like a case study for them to say, you know, what are some things we can learn from? How you've gotten to the point where you feel you've figured a lot of that stuff out, what did you encounter and how did that happen? What are some of the things that you iterated on and it would be good to get the insights on just that development.

Yeah, this, this part of it is definitely a story, it's definitely a journey. You know, when, when I started door three, we couldn't afford the best talent, frankly. People weren't paying us top dollar and we couldn't pay top dollar. So we had a couple of very smart people working within the organization trying kind of by main force to hold projects together. Right. We didn't have a project manager, we didn't have kind of a structure like I came out of sapient, having a lot of experience, having developed a lot of experience in fixed time, fixed price projects, right. So I knew how to estimate. I knew I was a hands on architect at the time. So a lot of things went right because I was holding it together. But as we all know, one person can't scale a business, right. So we came to a place fairly, I want to say within about six or seven years of the company start, where it became clear that the way that we were doing things was too reliant on a small number of superheroes. And we needed to create a scalable culture and a scalable distribution of skills that could reasonably be exercised by people we can hire off the street and with minimal additional ramp up deploy into our projects. And so the process of getting from that realization to getting there however, was several years. Right? Because you take a culture of doers who are excited to get things done but are not really easily manageable and you want to move them toward being a culture of people who do parts of things and are easily managed takes time. It took us time to find the right leadership for our project management group. It took time for the generational changes in staff to kind of bring in the people who knew how to collaborate very tightly in a managed environment. It took time for us to understand the interplay between the realities on the project and clients perceptions and motivations. And what I mean by that is, you know, if you have a project manager, even a very competent capable project manager on the project and, and then, but you've got an aggressive client who wants to get the most for the least and they're looking for every opportunity to, to kind of get you, so to speak. And this does happen, I mean I, I just want to be realistic, right, that there's a missing component there which we added over time which is kind of the, the, what might be called the, in other companies, the client partner or someone at an escalated level, right, who can deal with client escalations, who can play good guy or bad guy versus the pm, you know, in dealing with the client and really handle account level issues. So that's. We kind of decoupled the project management and account management role roles. Right. Because they were, they were conflated for a while. So all of these changes, each one of them caused tremendous upheaval. Right. A lot of process change. There's a lot of figuring out how to, you know, a lot of people stepping on, on other people's toes in the process that no one was yet comfortable with. And every time there was a change that happens. Right. So part of this was just learning.

To deal with that, Alex.

Just, you know, accepting the fact that some dishes will break but. But dinner will be served and it'll be delicious.

I would add one thing to that, Alex. I think the. In addition to everything you said in terms of kind of internalizing that and the structure of the organization, I think one of the things that we've accomplished in the last few years is an understanding broadly in the organization that it's never done, it's never perfect. And part of delivering excellence means acknowledging that the processes that we have in place today are not going to be the ones that are going to be working for us at this level in a year or two. So it's like it's kind of putting in place a discipline or a commitment for constant improvement, constant optimization. And sometimes those optimizations and those improvements and that evolution is more. There are certain steps in the evolution which are much more challenging than others, especially when we're kind of cutting across practice lines or integrating practices or changing out tool sets in our development work. But just kind of getting the leadership here at door three into a mindset of an evolutionary mindset at all times has been a real accomplishment at the organization.

Yeah. And I definitely agree with you that the job is never done. We're always, whether it be technological evolution that drives sort of personnel structural changes or just sort of uncovering new layers of the onion of like, we could do this better, we could do that better.

Right.

There's always change and being open to that, being aware of that and welcoming that change. That is probably kind of the meta capability that is most important in an organization from my perspective. Right. Because of what Jonathan just said.

Jonathan, just for a second, this is kind of an aside, but super cool. We've been around for more than 20 years in probably the fastest changing, most dynamic, most fraught industry. That's a remarkable accomplishment unto itself, you know, to not just, not just survive it, but thrive, to grow and to still be at the top of our game. After 20 plus years in one of the most dynamic industries out there. So it's, it's pretty cool.

So how would you then, if you were to maybe succinctly distill like a key theme that made that happen, like what's the, I don't know, secret sauce, if it were, or the thing. Because here's the way I look at it, because I speak to a lot of clients, as you can probably appreciate, like every day, about struggling through the various things you're talking about. These are all the very normal, common issues that people face. We don't have a lot of resources in the beginning. We don't have any funding. We don't have the hiring power to bring on the best talent.

Right.

All the things you're talking about. And then, you know, market shifts occur and you have to make changes and they create problems. Some companies just don't make it through that. They just quit or they're, they were wrong or they did. I mean, there's so many variables of why they don't, but then there are some that do.

Right?

So Jonathan, what you said is true. You're not only just a company that's lasted 22 years, but you're doing it in a really almost difficult places, verticals or segments, and you're doing it well. So if you were sort of say this, what we think was probably the thing that we could identify that got us there. Like, was it a commitment to excellence? Was it financial acumen? Was it good management? Was it a higher purpose? Was it communicate? I mean, I don't know, like, I think it's fascinating.

I can tell you for, for sure that it wasn't always good management.

Okay.

And I say this as, as the guy who was managing for a long time.

You know, I would say good management is sometimes what you do in of bad management.

Yeah, Alex, like, Alex, I think it's, you know, I know why you say that and it's funny and it's. But you know, to answer Warren's question, like, you know, something that you and I share in common and that is broadly found here at the organization especially, you know, you can just think of the names restless people, right? You know, like that old Steve Jobs story, you know, where, you know, he turns over the laptop, his, like the, you know, the, the Apple laptop, just to show, you know, how beautiful the other side of his laptop is and how it's much more attractive and beautiful than, you know, the tops of everyone else's laptops. I mean, that, that type of like dogged Restlessness is a defining feature of our culture and it was there long before I got here.

And I think grit, right? I mean like this kind of, like again, going to a kind of a meta place. It's, you know, Alfred Lord Tennyson's like to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield, right? Like at the end of the day, like if we're not seeking, if we're not and if we're not lucky enough to find in, in our tech in the technology space, we're nowhere two, three years down the line, right? So like these cycles are fast and they're getting faster and you can't be not restless in this industry.

Thank you so much again for listening to the Sierra Spotlight podcast. This podcast is an important plank in the Sierra Collective communication strategy and we're really thrilled to have such great guests on here. So listening and sharing the podcast with other people is really vital because we want to get as many people listening to this great stuff as possible. A couple things to note. If you're a aspiring Croat or a recently hired CRO, or even a old salty CRO and you're looking to either become a chief revenue officer or improve your chops and gain some more insights and improve your competencies as a chief revenue officer, we offer the CRO accelerator course. It's five years now. It's the first CRO focused course that was out there. It's a 15 week course that is populated by aspiring chief revenue officers. And Crosby, we're pretty selective in terms of who can be a member of the CRO Accelerator course. It's people who are probably like more like ready to be a CRO right now. They have number of years under their belt as a revenue leader, whether it be a sales leader or a marketing leader or even rev ops leader. And they either want to move into the C suite or they're CROs that want to just make sure that they win in the role. The CRO Accelerator course, we kick off the next one in May, mid May 2025. So if you are interested in being a member of the next cohort, please just write me a note on LinkedIn. Just DM me CRO accelerator and we'll set up a time to talk and then I can send you more information, give you a brochure of course. So again, CRO accelerator course, 15 week program for aspiring and newly hired CROs. Take advantage of it. It's been great and you'll see some more information about it on the website. Thanks. Yeah, I would submit maybe the Idea I'm hearing here is there's no question. I know this because I've had just too many experiences this, that the leadership and the quality of the leadership, the attitude of leadership, the work ethic of the leadership, all these things tends to be the cultural driver for the whole company, right? So if you've got people running the company that have a specific type of attitude, it's going to bleed down. And the rest of the company, it's no brainer. We know this, but it happens in different ways. It's not just like things like you're talking about, like perspicacity and, you know, like, whatever. It's also, you're also then going to hire people like that, whether it's good or bad, and then you're going to manage people like that, whether it's good or bad. And I do think I'm sort of leading the witness to a degree. It's a leadership thing, right? If you have the right people at the top of the ship that are running things a certain way, have a certain cultural drive or a perspective or a point of view or a personality type or a certain type of brain, you're going to create the world around you that reflects that because you want to. Want to make that happen. So you're naturally going to gravitate towards people in your organization that fit into that modality and that thinking they're going to survive there better. You have a good nose for those kind of people. I think this is a chemistry thing. When you say we do a chemistry test, it's not just that we like each other. It's like, do you think like we do? Do we think that your brain is a complement to our brains? And it sounds like you two have found a opportunity where you're good at what you do, but you also have a set of attitudes, beliefs and values that permeated and you hired people around you that were able to help execute that. And I think that's what I see is the line through.

So all the companies, I'd say this, there's another component to this. So there's really like a doggedness and a grit, for sure. And then there is another, I think the third component. So we can kind of talk about persistence, commitment. But the other part is every. I would trust anybody here at door three to watch my kids. There's like, there's a fundamental decency in place that is not absent anywhere. And so it's. It's just present throughout the whole business. And so what that means is, you know, As a. Is the leadership of the business, I can always trust that I'm surrounded by people who are bringing, you know, decency into the workplace, who are bringing kind of their best attitudes, who are always coming at things from, you know, of course, we all have our low moments. Sometimes we're grumpy. But for the most part, people are always kind of coming at their work from the right position. Right. They're from a position of kind of curiosity, charity and industry. And so that's also present here. And, you know, it's something I'd give a lot of credit to, Alex. Like, that was here before I got here, and I think so when we kind of step back and yes, we can. We can look very favorably on a lot of the very concrete processes that are in place. But at the end of the day, there's like a very deep commitment to a certain type of cultural chemistry. To use your word, Warren, that, yeah, I think is maybe the secret sauce might be.

I mean, I find that's usually the case. I've worked at companies. I worked on too many companies. I'm kind of ashamed of how many companies I work for, and there's only three of them that had that. You know, it's a very rare thing when it happens. It's wonderful. So great. So I want to switch gears a bit because there's something we wanted to talk about, and that is you are in this tech space. I mean, it's a really amazing dynamic space you're in right now, now. So I'm curious to know how you're navigating the incredible amount of changes that are happening right now in your air, in your world, and how you're adapting to the new demands that are on companies whom are looking for, let's call them, you know, engineered services and things like that. What's the. Your attitude about and maybe even your point of view on the. Where your industry, your sector, is headed and how are you responding to it right now?

I'll take a first stab at that. I think that this is a situation. It is a situation. The industry is going through rapid change. It's not quite as rapid as the pundits on TikTok will tell you.

I agree with that.

Rapid.

And so how credible could we be a year from now or six months, three months from now about some of the emerging tech if we're not eating our own dog food? So deploying, for example, AI within door three in every discipline, finding where it fits, where it fits less well, beginning to build products using AI as well. As AI products, those are different shades of the same thing. Right. Whether those products ever become wildfire commercial successes or not is less the point than the. The experience of touching these things and imagining what else it could be after you've done 1.0 and 1.1 of that. And that, that process of imagineering at, At. At warp speed, at the speed of the evolution of, of this space. Right. Is a fair, fantastic exercise. And it really separates the wheat from the chaff right there. There's organizations that don't have. You can have a lab. That's not the same thing. Right. A lab is important. We have a lab. Right. But a lab won't sort of pervasively flex the agility capabilities of the organization. It's going to be this thing in the corner. Right. So I think that those are some key ways of handling the current pace of change. Jonathan?

Yeah, I think about this from a couple different angles. So kind of coming back to the observation I made not too long ago, one of the things that's kind of remarkable about door three is our ability to, you know, is just our endurance, our ability to kind of endure in this very dynamic space. And part of that has meant over the last 22 years, 23 years, approaching things that are new with a bit of skepticism. Right. Because not everything is going to work out, and we don't want our clients to be caught on the cutting edge and then bleed out. So I think one of the things that we bring to our client engagements is one, it's a sense of history. We've been doing this for a while. We're really good at finding kind of where the safe middle is in emerging technologies and helping our clients and kind of understand our perspective on what's happening in. In industry and where they might want to locate themselves, how much risk they want to see in their project. So that's, I think, from, you know, so kind of like to not engage in it, to just not mention any specific technology. I just, I do want to say that, like, what we are, we really pride ourselves on is helping our clients, like helping to inform our clients in such a way that they're making informed decisions about how much technological risk they're wanting to see in their engagements.

It's a good point. I agree. I think that there's a tendency for everybody to want to buy the shiny new thing and.

Oh, dude, I remember. Do you remember the late 1990s?

Sure, of course I do.

Okay, so Sun Microsystems.

I remember exactly.

Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems was running advertisements. I Remember on primetime for Java, no one knew what it was. Advertisement.

Yep.

No one knew what it meant to.

See the coffee, the branding in my, in my brain right now. Those.

So 18 months later, 18 months later, I find myself as a pretty, you know, young guy in a, in a conference room on Madison Avenue. It's a boardroom on Madison Avenue. As a, as a, you know, as a consultant, part of a team and our counterparty on our client side, the CTO of this name brand organization, after our presentation, this is a company we all know, we all respect, raises his hand and says, is there Java in it? Now? My only, my only job at that moment was to not laugh, not roll my eyes or not smirk. All I had to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great stuff.

I, you know, here's the thing though, and I, I totally get your point. You're right about it. And, and I would say I hope you agree. I'm not sure you do. Maybe I'm wrong here, but I don't know if the AI wave is the same analogously to Sun Microsystems. I think it's, I just view. I understand your point and I think you're right that there is a. Oh.

I think, I think it is the same. I think it is. There is a ton of substance in what Sun Microsystems did. The way they shook up the engineering world. Okay, right. Once, run everywhere, they didn't quite get there, but they got so close. They really moved the needle. Everything that we know is like dot net, all of these engineering frameworks. None of them would exist had we not had Java. So Java meant a lot more on the engineering side than it did on say, like the consumer side.

And so did you say Java was more like Eddie Van Halen or Jimi Hendrix?

I don't claim to be very familiar with the work of Eddie Van Halen. Only a few of the big heads.

Sorry to hear that.

So I can't, you know, I mean.

Because you look at these iterative guitar players, right? One would say historically that there's like the Jimi Hendrix era where he kind of brought another whole thing and probably Paige and you know, Beck that followed that and then, and then Eddie. I mean, everyone after Eddie played completely differently, just like everybody after Jimmy played differently, but they were completely different styles. Like it's a different. It took the guitar to it in a different way. So I would say Java, you know, and I know what you mean. I understand this stuff enough to know maybe even HTML, you know, could be another thing. But five or something like that. But anyway, All I'm saying is that there was like a, a way that some of these things were that monumentally of a shift in the way we're going to look backward and say that this era started with something. And I do think that we're in because I'm already playing around with these things myself and I'm not even a wonk know, I just like playing around things. I like these things. And I, I could see, agreed with you both that I don't think it's going to happen as rapidly as people think. But you know the definition, Warren, I.

Want to be careful. I'm actually, I'm actually not saying that I think I'm, I, I think Java was a huge deal. I think just the, the entire like one of the first success, commercially successful encapsulations of a virtual machine was Java. That whole idea is one of the things that led to you know, cloud computing as we know it, containerization as we know it. I, I think Java was a massive like, it resulted in several sea changes in the way that software and computers all happen. And I think the same is true with LLMs. I think that, you know, a lot of us, you know, I first, I first got my, my first entry into the commercial world of AI was back in 2000, 2004, 2005. And back then a lot of us rolled our eyes at the idea that stochastic AI and we would never even used words like that. We would have just said, you know, stochastic neural networks would have ever been able to produce anything other than garbage. And we would have been wrong.

Yeah. And right now the near term projection in my mind is that AI transformation in business will be not quite as fast as people fear. However, the evolution of AI is potentially exponential. So at some point the velocity of back pressure pushing that change is going to cause that change to be very fast. It's just not in the next three months.

Yeah, I know. I've seen people play around this. I follow a lot of people in the space and I know that there are versions and iterations of these platforms that can build apps. Now do you see this happening quick enough that engineering teams won't be as needed anymore or do you think engineering teams will always be needed? I'm just curious what your thoughts on that.

I think engineering teams will always be needed, but they will be needed in a somewhat different capacity. I mean first of all, AI is not an application. So someone has to envision the application. Someone has to kind of decide what, what some of the technical integrations Are that are needed, the art of architecture. And I want to be careful here because there's really not a sphere of human cognition that AI will not be able to touch. But in terms of building things for people, I think we will, for a very long time trust people to build things for people, even if they're doing 10% of the work and the AI is doing 90. Right. And we're nowhere near that ratio right now. And so engineers will be needed, Engineers will be needed to make AI better and better and better. So there's, there's a, you know, there are ancillary technologies coming out that will require engineers to integrate them. I think that it's, we have maybe half a generation of engineering talent that that's left before we figure out what's after that.

Yeah, it's fascinating.

And I would also say that there's a hard limit, there's a very hard limit on this current generation of AI In a few, like, once you push past, once you push into any type of situation that requires novel consideration, novel thinking, creativity, these systems are not impressive. I mean, all you need to do is just watch, like a Tesla, you know, interact with a fallen tree in a, in a street. It's because it's a relatively novel situation. They don't, they don't, they don't react well. Eventually, you know, in years to come, they'll, the training set will be large enough that this is not so novel. But this is very true in the world of engineering. Yeah. So, yes, we can. Absolutely. Our engineers use AI to write what we would call just like bootstrap code, like simple code stuff that a lot of engineers just already have files on already, like copy paste. A lot of those template stuff. That AI there is very helpful and really does enhance our productivity without much risk.

My perspective is, I mean, I think I can kind of jump off of what you're saying, but I have a slightly different take on this. I think AI like LLMs, as we think of AI by and large these days, in its isolation, they're somewhat limited. But if you think of the human brain and how it generates the variety of capabilities that we have, it's not one homogeneous thing. It's a variety of subsystems. If a subsystem has a stroke, someone has trouble talking, but they can still recognize faces and so on and so forth. Likewise, decomposing what makes generalized, flexible, creative intelligence and building components that are specialized to that end. That's kind of the next step. So it's not going to be making bigger and bigger and bigger LLMs, although, you know, certainly data sets and number of nodes, all that stuff. That sounds great, right? But it's not the end all, be all. I think that at some point we're going to have to let go of the conceit that creativity is not going to be overridden by this new alien intelligence. I think that the last frontier is not creativity, it's initiative. It's initiative and will. Right. And that's potentially also the last bastion of safety for us as we deal with AI. If we build AI that does what we tell it to do, we're great. Amazing tools, transformative. Best teachers I've ever seen. Best executive assistant. Amazing. Right? You endow it with will and the ability to kind of generate its own goals and you know, with agentic AI you already are beginning to see little bits of that, but it's not, it's not yet there. That's where I think, you know, having human beings with will and intent and then the ability to structure plans to meet those intents is really kind of what an engineer is going to be 15 years from now. Right. And then beyond that, who knows?

Amazing. All right, well this is amazing. I figured it'd be this much. So I want to close this up a bit by just maybe providing a little bit more context around who your customers are, what types of projects you work on and who you serve most optimally in the marketplace today.

Jonathan?

Yeah, so we are, our current portfolio of clients is kind of like a, shaped like a barbell. So on one hand we work with Fortune 500 companies and usually for them we're, we're very often doing what I would call like front end design, front end development, reporting platforms, data visualization, mobile apps, the front end on broker systems, front end ERP systems. So stuff that usually requires a very high level of client engagement with a, you know, where we're, where it's necessary to really kind of hit it out of the park in terms of ux. So that's one side of the business. The other side of the business are VC backed startups. And so for them we're again it's same, often the same teams. It's product development with a very high level commitment to an extremely high level of fit and finish and often tight deadlines because we're expected to help get from zero to hero and launched in market on very tight deadlines. So that's kind of the shape of the portfolio and then there's a little bit of everything in between.

Okay, well great. And it's door3.com?

Yeah, last I checked.

Okay. Well, again, I appreciate this and all the help that you've provided us here and hope that we were able to help you and it was a blast, Warren.

It really was. We, Alex and I had a great time. We learned a lot, and I think we both found the quality of, you know, the caliber of folks that are in your program to be very high.

Well, thank you.

I've actually met some of them offline since I enjoy their company. They're smart, interesting people and you're bringing together some great folks for kind of a good kind of information sharing, learning experience and, and being part of that was really a lot of fun. So thank you, Warren.

Yeah, thank you. It's a key highlight of the program and I can't thank enough the companies like you who make the decision to devote the time to this. And it makes a big difference. So appreciation is mutual.

Our pleasure.

Yeah. Well, thank you guys, really appreciate it. And you know, I have some ideas of some people that I, I probably know that would like to work with you. So we'll, we're going to keep talking and I appreciate your help. So thank you very much for being here.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Take care.

Thank you for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. The CRO Collective's mission is to help CRO succeed and help founders and CEOs build CRO ready organizations. You can find out more information about our services@the crocollective.com that's the crocollective.com and we look forward to having you join us next time.