317 - Zooming into Trust: Can Virtual Meals Really Bring Us Together? with ControlUp's Jed Ayres

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Jed Ayers, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO of a company in the Bay Area, I think it's in the Bay Area, called ControlUp. And we're anxious to learn all about you today.

Great to be here, Doug. Thanks for having me. Yeah. And I am in San Francisco by myself, but the company is actually headquartered in Israel with pockets of people around the world, actually.

So yeah, it looked— when I looked at the website, it looked like you had a very strong Israeli background. So let's start off with your backstory. You've been— you've worked your way up in leadership over the years. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, I feel very blessed to have chosen a career in tech. I started in the early '90s in the Bay Area and lived through the dot-com era.

The best.

Special time in San Francisco. And I was very fortunate to always be focused on the end-user compute side of things. Initially, that was selling PCs and laptops to people and then DSL. And I had a little touch of that in the early part of my career. And then I was introduced to a technology technology called virtual desktop infrastructure, VDI. It's also called desktop as a service. In the sort of early 2000s, a company called Citrix delivering to highly regulated industries, government, healthcare, retail, finance, insurance, primarily a very secure Windows and Windows applications. And so that has, it's a bit of a niche, but it's a very important technology. And that served me very well for the last sort of 15 years of my career. I've been very focused on that space.

And tell us a little bit about ControlUp.

Yeah, so ControlUp actually was born out of that space. As you can imagine, delivering a like high-fidelity Windows desktop to anybody on any device anywhere in the world is actually a challenge. You've probably heard people that use Citrix say, oh, I hate it. And usually it's not actually Citrix's fault. It's something in the dimensions of delivering Citrix that become challenging. And so ControlUp actually was born out of creating the sort of observability and analytics and remediation of that product, built a very successful company in, out of Israel. And then in the COVID time, they expanded to cover laptops and all kinds of devices and other applications in a, a whole category has emerged actually called digital employee experience. And it's the idea of contextualizing all the dimensions that go into delivering a great experience digitally. Across any device, any application, anywhere someone might sit. And it is a disruptive technology in a way because it takes a lot of these older legacy tools that may have been focused on just looking at the network or servers or just the endpoints. And it does it in real time and it contextualizes it around a human experience.

So give me an example of how that might work.

Yeah. So you would go into a— let's just say we go into an insurance company who has people all over the world and they're working on laptops and they're working through Citrix and they're essentially the— it's the primary use case is actually born out of the help desk, right? The help desk troubleshooting tickets and trying to figure out where the problems are as tickets arrive. And so they have to be able to pull up Doug's Zoom call that he's having right now and figure out why is this call wobbly. And so we have the ability to look right into the call and also in your PC, see the CPU usage, see the network, see your home network, and really quickly troubleshoot where the issue is. That sounds pretty good, but really where the magic is, Doug, is like actually once we see that problem and it manifests itself potentially across a lot of Dougs in the company, we can, we can create automation, right? So that those issues don't surface anymore. And as you can imagine, there's an AI component because we're actually really a data company, right? We're collecting several thousand metrics every 3 seconds, holding that data for 30 to 12— 30 days to 12 months. And so we can start to see patterns and we can write scripts. And you can imagine AI against this data set can create really interesting insights and eventually just creates almost an autonomous endpoint management, if you will. And the real interesting thing is it reduces tools.

Right?

You take a whole bunch of tools today that are used to manage a lot of things. You reduce them. You create a lot of reduction of human friction, both the end user who's struggling to do their job, as well as the IT team that's trying to build and manage this infrastructure. It's a very interesting category. It was definitely born out of, hey, everybody went home and you have several hundred million, right? And there isn't a guy down the hallway that can come and quickly assess what's wrong with your product.

That's exactly right. I'm the sole practitioner, but when I have a problem, it's a pain in the, it's a pain in the butt to figure it out.

So it's an exciting category. Gartner's recognized it as like the centerpiece of how people are going to modern workspace, digital workspace management. Come out with a Quadra. And so that's really helped elevate the category.

And how did you get involved with ControlUp? You're not one of the founders. You were brought in?

Yeah, this is my 4th company working alongside a founder.

So, oh wow.

You study empathy and the dynamics of kind of human interactions quite a bit. And yeah, this is my 4th time coming in and intersecting a founder and working alongside a founder to what will hopefully be another great outcome. Uh, it found me, uh, because of it's the space I was telling you about in end-user compute is a small industry and I was working for a company called iGel for 7 years. That was a very unexpected success story. It was a German thin client company, probably the most boring technology you can imagine in this space. It's like a dumb terminal, essentially a modern-day dumb terminal that was out of Germany. And we flipped the company into a software company, brought it to the US, did about everything, the hardest thing you could do in tech, right? Working with German, Germans, bringing a product into the US. Hardware to software, perpetual to subscription. And so I did that for 7 years and, you know, I became more visible, I think, in this space. And yeah, I got a call one day from ControlUp.

So what have you learned through all of this as a leader?

A lot of things. One thing is it's never as easy as it might sound or look, right? It's a, it's a matter of getting up every day and doing the next right thing and Building a plan, building a team that's got the right focus and a step for step, always making the right, right decisions every time in that playbook, but having a vision of what you want to accomplish and building a team around you that's got the right skills from building a product to operations to HR to sales. It's definitely about surrounding yourself with a quality set of complementary and domain expertise.

Yeah. Every single leader I've ever interviewed on this show, I think you're in the 300s now, has said the same thing. The most important thing to building a business and scaling it is how it's the people around you. It's not you as the CEO.

Oh, wow.

It's making sure that you've got the right people around you and they know how to hire the right people around them.

Exactly. Exactly. And yeah, I always tell people like it's the 3 Ps, right? It's yeah, you gotta, it starts with the right people. You gotta have the right product. You gotta have the right plan. But then there's a fourth special P, which is the culture, and it's like the passion, right? The sort of underpinnings of the vision that you have to bring the culture and the right values to underpin those other 3 Ps.

So you're living in, in the Bay Area and the company founders are in Israel. How, how, obviously you, it's either hybrid or remote. Tell me about what it's like. Working with a company like that?

Yeah, the first year I spent just sort of, actually I should say 6 weeks after I took the job in August of '23, a war broke out.

Right.

In October. Interesting in terms of after October 7th, going back into the mothership. And so that created a new intricacy to solve for because I guess one thing I do believe is face-to-face interaction. Is always more meaningful and it's how you build trust and ultimately succeed with people. And yeah, luckily I had spent a lot of time leading up to October 7th with the founder and had built some of that rapport. And then he was able to get out of Israel quite a bit. And we, we met in New York and we met in London and had regular meetups. Yeah, it's been, it's been interesting. He's in his early 40s and still very passionate about the company. And so we've actually navigated a very clever role for him to stay involved because I always believe that's a better path. Typically, if you could keep that sort of founder fire in, in the building and, and, but not having it be a distraction or, or what have you. So we created a, a sub-entity called Controlled Labs and he's running that as the CEO of this sub-entity. And it is, he's focused on what his God-given talent is, which is innovation, right? So he wakes up every day without for the first time ever, actually, all the operational pressures of the company, and he gets to focus on building innovation.

He gets to play. Yeah.

He's very happy. And that's, I think it's best for the company in a way. We're in a space that is, it's a little bit of an arms race in terms of the functionality that needs to come into the platform, build this category leader. And so he's, it's a, it's been very good. There's two founders. He's doing that. And the other one is actually our global office of the CTO. Evangelist. And so they both are in really good places, but it took some time to navigate, you know, how that was going to work.

I bet you— what you're saying, this is the fourth time you walked into a situation like this. Relationships can be fraught.

And the culture is also a little different, right? Like, right, our previous company was German. The love language of Israeli culture is like getting a nice high volume, high emotion argument and then hug each other after that. The first time you see it, it's pretty astonishing where you're just like, wow, this, these people really are going to go at it. And then you realize that's just actually how they communicate. They're very passionate. And yeah, that's been an interesting dynamic to intersect with.

So the rest of your employees are, they're spread out all over the world or do you have a headquarters somewhere?

Yeah, we have the headquarters is in Israel still. San Francisco. We have an office in New York. We have a pretty big contingent in London. We have lots of developers in Canada, UK. Yeah, it's a pretty dispersed company. There's a little over 400 people and there are 180 of them are in Israel, but then the rest are all around the world. About 70% of the company is coming out of the US, which I think is really important, right? If you're going to build a category leader, you got to prove that yourself out with the, the US. Enterprises. And so we're doing a job there. We have almost 2,000 customers.

Wow.

At this point. So yeah.

So how do you keep track and manage this diverse workforce? It's really international in nature.

A lot of Zoom calls, right? I think last year I had about 100 segments on United.

So—

Wow. A lot of— I think as a CEO, the best place to be is either with your employees, your partners, or your customers. So a lot of face time interacting with them. Obviously, I also have religion around how I structure the week with, you know, our ELT huddles and just some of the muscle that we have in terms of the one-on-ones to keep a pulse on the team across a spectrum. Lots of town halls, lots of extended leadership team meetings. Then every 90 days, we're also together face-to-face as a leadership team.

Wow. So it takes a lot of effort.

It is.

What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to do all this?

I have a beautiful family and 4 kids, 2 of which are in college right now.

So that's, uh, that helps.

Uh, but no, to be honest, it's this company and this category. I've never been in a company where you actually had an opportunity to put a fingerprint on an entirely new category. I explained it to you earlier what it was, right? And to be the leader in this category. We're in a unique situation. It's a VC-backed company, the largest VC out of Israel. Uh, we have a lot of cash, almost $100 million in cash, and we're— nobody has a majority share of the company. And so we're in the world of tech and we're, we're, we're in this sort of rare space of crossing $100 million in ARR, being in a position where we can affect a, a category and kind of revolutionize how Windows devices are managed, secured, and patched around a human being as a construct. So it's revolutionary in a way. And yeah, the, these variables, there's a little bit of lightning in a bottle, right? I think less than 1% of software companies ever get to $100 million anymore.

Yeah.

Um, so yeah, we're, I'm excited. I get excited that, hey, I'm running a company that could go IPO. That's kind of the North Star for us. Really. Successful business into the sort of with the tailwinds of a category that we think could change the industry.

So how's AI play into the formula?

It's a big part of it actually, right? When you're collecting this much data and there's this sort of this opportunity to create autonomous actions with the data that take friction out, that's, it's the, the winner of this category, Doug, will be the one that can solve, that can see the anomalies in the data and is high enough trust that it can basically instinctually write the right, take the right remediation without destroying anything. And so we're still a few innings away from that, but we see companies that are running millions of scripts that they wrote themselves, and they're getting the benefit of this sort of reduction in friction and reduction in tools, reduction in humans that are doing this heavy troubleshooting and remediation. Yeah, one of our largest customers, we, I just had a QBR with them last week. They're, they've run 35 million automated actions. This year, a large financial institution. And so you can imagine as the models get bigger and better, this becomes a really interesting AI play.

Yeah, it sounds like it. Jed, what do you think is unique about you that you bring to the table that's made you so successful in all of this?

I started my career and I'm not actually the guy who's hands on keyboard coding a lot of things, right? I'm more of like a sales and marketing go-to-market leader. And I think a lot of actually my heart and love, first love and success in leadership was in marketing.

Hmm.

A lot of the success that I have, I think has been conceptualizing a technology and helping people understand, hey, this can change how you think about something, right? And so it's like this idea of being able to visualize it and get people to buy into that vision. So I think that's been an important part of it and storytelling. Factors into that, right? The ability to tell a story, bring that alive, help people conceptualize it. And I think ultimately you need great leaders. They need people to buy into that vision, right? Both the employees, the partners, the customers. I will say one other thing that's been important for me is in tech, a lot of tech is people think, oh, the greatest, biggest tech companies, they sell direct. I spent the first half of my career in the chan— what was called the channel, right? Companies that were solution providers that were putting tech together. And so there's a lot of intellect that I gained over the half, the first half of my career on how to build partnerships with the channel. And you think about, I have 30 sellers today, but I have 300 partners that have hundreds of sellers, right? And so how do you build partnerships with those channel partners that give you an elevation and a speed to market with your product that other companies just can't compete with? So that's That has been part of my success as a leader is building scale through channel partners.

Wow. And that takes a lot of trust.

Yes.

Because you can't screw up.

So I tell people it's a 4-part strategy. It starts with integrity as a kind of a core value, which means you do the right thing even when people aren't looking. And there is no kind of on and off button on integrity. And if you have that, you can build trust. And in the world of tech, if you have lots of trust, you can call it a partnership. And if you have a partnership in tech, you can actually unleash life-changing innovation. So it's, that's like the formula that I see. And we adopted integrity as a core value in this company. And, you know, I think it's something that's very important, right? Like it's easy to justify doing things maybe in a company that's growing quickly that may not be something that is reflective of integrity. Right. And so. We've tried to slow down and say, hey, we're building a durable company. We want to do the right thing with our partners and our employees, our customers. Everything starts with having integrity.

I completely agree with that. And we see so many companies that get sidetracked by quarterly reports, right? And so they compromise on integrity to satisfy analysts or JV shareholders, investors. And ultimately it leads to the destruction of the company.

Yeah. I've worked 30 years to build the network and the trust that I have. So yeah, you can destroy it in 3 minutes, right?

That's right.

Try to wake up and, you know, you don't always get it right every time, but you can say, hey, you're sorry and try to do the right thing if you can.

How do you make it right? Exactly. So I'm curious, the show's called Listening with Leaders and I teach deep listening. I'm curious, how important has listening been in your career and how did you learn how to listen?

I think I'm still learning how to listen and obviously as the toolset and the sort of attention span changes, the dynamics change, but I would just say, yeah, listening is fun. It's, it's just foundational, right? It drives everything. Collaboration, communication, decision-making, conflict resolution, morale.

You could be writing my book, my fifth book. That's exactly right. That's what I say too.

Yeah, I think it's just. Yeah, you can't really do anything if you can't ask. I think the people that I always feel like are the smartest people ask the right question. They ask the best questions.

But it's not only asking the best questions, it's truly listening to what's being said, what's being felt, and what's not being said.

Yeah, I agree with you. It's hard with all of the technology that surrounds us to be a good listener at times, right? To be that active listener and not be multitasking and Right. Have the right ground rules and the right techniques to repeat back what people have said and summarize them. And yeah, understand that it's more than just words too, right? There's emotion. Everybody, everyone's coming from like an emotional place is also what I would say. Right. So what's the, the empathy that's behind those words, right?

And understand. Exactly. Yeah.

Everyone's going through something.

You're one of the few people that I've talked to that sees that because what I teach my graduate students, I teach a course in decision-making under uncertainty and stress. And the first thing I teach is there's no such thing as rationality and that every human action is an emotional decision, emotional behaviors, and we can use critical thinking and logic to justify how we got to where we got. But at the end of the day, our brains are designed to make, is to weigh alternatives based on emotional factors, not logical factors.

Yeah, 100%.

So part of— part of that's why leadership empathy is so important is if human beings are emotional beings, not rational beings, then we need to be paying attention to people's emotions. And when we do that, the picture changes dramatically because what we looked at as being stupid, irrational, or incomprehensible, chaotic, is now very it's very predictable and it's very understandable.

Yeah, I think the question is always like, how do you get to the heart of what that emotion that someone's going through is? I would tell you, I often find like a meal is the ultimate connector. I'm sure on a blog right now around this, because I, I feel like it's almost— humans obviously need to eat 3 times a day, or at least twice a day, hopefully. And we've been doing this for thousands of years, and it just feels like it's the we're wired to, to—

we are.

And it is like a, it's a way to, to, I think earlier we talked about how you diffuse someone in 90 seconds. Getting to the emotions about what people care about is so much easier to do when you're having a meal with someone.

Absolutely. And that's because, and this is something that most people don't know, is that when we break bread together, oxytocin is released in our brains.

Yeah.

And Paul Zak's a friend of mine. He's a neuroeconomist down at Claremont, and he did a groundbreaking study, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago, modulating oxytocin levels in people and showed that when there's high oxytocin, there's high trust. And when you lower oxytocin, you lower trust. And one of the ways that humans release oxytocin is by eating meals together. Which is why, especially in cultures in the Middle East, you'll— I know you've experienced this. People will say, let's have a meal, and you'll spend 5 hours eating and talking about your kids and anything other than business, right? Until—

I was in probably the— some One of the longest patterns that I ever saw was in South Korea.

Oh, I bet. Yeah, same thing there.

Showed up and it was like, it felt like a day and a half of eating before we talked about business, right?

That's right. Because he, yeah, these cultures have figured out over thousands of years that you can't have a good business relationship without trust. And the only way to, only really effective way to be trusted is to be together and share food. So.

Well, I guess we have the next really exciting idea. How do you bring food into a Zoom call?

And that's the hard part. But I haven't seen the studies, but I suspect that there is some oxytocin that's developed just by talking to each other and seeing each other's faces. Because that's the other thing we found, the neuroscientists have found, is that when people are together in one form or another, they become, that oxytocin occurs and there's a bonding that occurs neurochemically. And you just got me really intrigued. I'm gonna make a note and do some research on that. Has anybody studied on Zoom calls? Oxytocin and Zoom.

I think this is probably a real reason to turn your camera on, right? Because it's a lot harder to probably make that oxytocin connection when I can't see the white of your eyes.

And that's right. Why is it that Zoom has done— it did really well during the pandemic. Its stock, of course, has gone down since then. But why is it that people are attracted to video conferencing as opposed to just the old telephone or audio? And I think it, I, I would not be surprised to find the studies out there that show that even though we're separate, you and I, we're 200 miles apart in Cali, here in California, we still build, we can still do some trust building just by being able to see each other. Yeah.

Body language matters, right?

There you go.

Understanding someone's actually listening to you.

Exactly. Jed, we're almost outta time. I have one more question for you and I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us.

I grew up in a little, uh, town called Mendocino.

I know where Mendocino is.

Would, because you're a Northern California boy. But it was a logging town that, uh, was saved by a lot of hippie artists. And both my parents were school teachers there, but they filmed a lot of movies there in the '70s and '80s when I was a kid. And so I was in a couple movies that were there. The town was somewhat made famous by Angela Lansbury and Murder, She Wrote.

Oh wow.

My dad was the music teacher, so was in a couple of those TV shows with the marching band in the town. I was also in Cujo, if you ever see this movie, the Stephen King horror.

Oh wow. Have you sag— you have your SAG card?

And I'm actually on the screen for about 60 seconds. I'm the paperboy. Uh, so yeah, as a 6th, I think I was in 6th grade. It was a pretty amazing experience to be immersed in the world of movies. And yeah, I've always enjoyed this sort of the power of video and good for you. I don't think most people don't know that.

Yeah. Their CEO was a movie star as a kid.

Yeah.

That's great. And Mendocino too, beautiful part of California.

It really is. A lot of people don't know about it, but I know the Cape Cod of the West Coast.

That's right. Just like where I live. It's drop-dead gorgeous here, but you've never heard of it, right? Jed, I've really enjoyed our conversation today. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to chat with us.

Super honor, Doug, and I hope to read your next book. And I guess I gotta go collect the first 4 before—

All right, take care.

Take care.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media, tell to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.