Riderflex Podcast - Guest Interview #193 - Greg Coticchia — The Riderflex Podcast: Inspiring & Hiring

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All right, sounds good. Uh, Greg Kotikia on the RiderFlex podcast. Welcome, Greg. Thank you for being here.

Thank you. Thanks for the invite. It's great to be here.

Yeah, well, before we get into the company and Sofian and all that good stuff— by the way, I like the background. I got the— got you rebranded. Looks good.

Like it, like it.

Uh, before we get into that though, um, talk to the listeners a little bit about you personally, just, you know, family, early life, where you grew up, mom, dad, siblings, you know, some of that type of stuff, if you don't mind.

I thank you for that opportunity again. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Uh, um, so I grew up in Pittsburgh, uh, in a classic, uh, middle-class working family. Dad was an engineer, came from a family of engineers. My uncle was an engineer, my brother is an engineer, a lot of engineers, civil engineers, electrical engineers, and grew up right outside of Pittsburgh in a little township called Brentwood. And I was a musician early on growing up, loved music, played clarinet, saxophone, flute. All kinds of bands, marching band, jazz band, any band, I was in it. Very, very, you know, a lot of people don't realize, I know most people think about athletics as very competitive. I think for those of us who were in, in different types of bands and orchestra don't realize just how competitive, may not be physically as competitive, but it's very competitive. And I was very dedicated. I wanted to go into music actually. And, and then my dad convinced me to be a An engineer.

Did you try to make— did you try to make the band at University of Pittsburgh? Did you try to get on, or did you— did you play?

Oh yeah, and, uh, I, I did, but, uh, you know, engineering is such a heavy course load that, um, I had to make that, uh, change between do I want to finish my studies or don't do that. I did end up though working— I worked in a music store in high school, and I stayed working in that music store all through college. It was called Spratz Music Store.

Spratz. All right, very good.

Does not exist anymore today, uh, but it was a guitar store. And being a woodwinds guy, I can tell you that's where I first got my taste of learning how to sell, uh, because I, I realized that, uh, you really didn't have to know— you didn't have to be an expert at being an expert guitar player to actually sell these guitars. It was a good experience. But I did say it to your earlier question, I did stay in music and I taught lessons, uh, at the music store and everything. And it was, uh, it was a great experience in my life. I still very much love music.

Very good. What a cool job to have during high school. I mean, I mean, you know, if you're gonna have to work in high school, it's a lot better than working at the Sonic Flipping burgers, right? I mean, that's pretty cool.

I'm telling you, when you're surrounded with— and we were, we were a really good high-end guitar store, so we had Martins and Fenders and Gibsons, and we had all really nice guitars. So you're sitting there and, you know, it's like, okay, it's downtime, which one do I want to pick up and just mess around?

Well, you got to know the product, right? You got to know the product to be able to sell it, so therefore you're justifying playing it a little bit. I like that. You're very good.

It was fun. That was my background.

Any siblings? You said how many?

I have a, I have a brother who's also an engineer, uh, and, uh, ended up in a similar space. Uh, he's in Florida now, uh, serving as an innovation officer for a major healthcare organization.

Okay, very good. Folks still, folks still in Pittsburgh, still alive? How are they doing?

My parents are deceased, but I have, I have 3 children. I have a son, Ethan, who's in his early 20s and lives just south of here. And I have an older son, Brendan, who works for the city of Pittsburgh as a budget analyst for the city of Pittsburgh. I have a daughter, Elizabeth, who is a nurse, works for a local university healthcare system.

You didn't mention wife. You're a single guy. You're on the market.

I am not on the market. My lovely wife is Kelly, who is also in high-tech marketing and product. And, uh, she is, uh, and we're both working at home. She has relegated me during COVID to the basement, and, uh, because I make too much noise and talk too loud and laugh too loud. And, uh, we've been together for a long time.

Uh, oh, very, very good. Very good. No grandchildren yet?

One grandchild. Thank you for asking. And her name is Lucienne, and she just joined us about 4 months ago.

Oh, have you decided what you're going to be called? Are you going to be like Papa, Grandpa? What, what's, what's your—

I, I don't care. I, I don't care what I'm called as long as I'm around to be called something. I'm just happy she's here and I'm here at the same time. That's all good, right?

Very cool, very cool. Uh, very good. Okay, Steelers fan, lifelong long Steelers fan, I'm guessing.

Uh, I, I am certainly, because you grow up in Pittsburgh, it's hard not to be. And when I grew up, of course, we had the Steelers in the '70s. Uh, but I have to be honest with you, when I, I was at that age where, where, um, you know, uh, the, the team right before the Steelers, people forget, was this team called the Minnesota Vikings. They were pretty, uh, they were pretty big. And so as a kid growing up, because the Steelers were you know, not what people think of them today. And so we grew up as kids, we wore Vikings stuff all the time. Is that right? Steelers got to be like, oh, they won 2 Super Bowls, I guess we should start liking the Steelers.

That's right. I remember those, the Vikings, the Purple People Eaters, and, uh, they had Alan Page, they had a bunch of Hall of Famers in there.

We used to wear— my brother had the Wally Hilgenberger, uh, uh, lineman jersey. We had, uh, Fran Tarkenton It was a quarterback because Ray was the mid-'70s. It really wasn't until '74, '75 that the Steelers really started to— they were the bottom of the barrel in terms of teams for 40 years. But my real love though is my beloved Pitt Panthers. So, I am a college football guy. I'm not sure I like all the changes that are happening right now in college football. It's kind of— but I do, I love college football. And I was blessed to be at the University of Pittsburgh when we had people like Tony Dorsett and Dan Marino and, you know, Hugh Green and many, many others. And so my first love is my Pitt Panthers, which it's been about 40 years since they did anything. So it's been—

Very cool. Well, thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it, Greg. Thanks a lot. So, okay, cool. Let's move. When you got out of school, you went right, you got your MBA right away. Did you know Did you have a certain goal in mind? Were you already thinking you wanted to be an executive? Were you thinking, no, I just want to run my own consulting firm. I want to be an entrepreneur.

Was there a plan? There was never a plan. I'm very opportunistic, to be honest with you. So, true story, I'll kind of fill in that gap that you just, uh, uh, okay. About, which is I was an engineer. I never wanted to be an engineer. I still remember drinking beers on my fraternity house roof with a bunch of other guys that got their engineering degree, saying, what the hell am I going to do with this engineering degree? I intentionally went for what I thought was the easiest engineering degree possible, which is industrial engineering, as my dad called it, imaginary engineering. And I went into sales and my mother cried for only about 6 months, you know, but I went into industrial sales. I was called a sales engineer. I went to work for a company called Cutler Hammer, which is now Eaton Corporation.

Okay.

So process controls and heavy mechanical equipment and things like that. I loved it. I loved it. And I love selling, but I found myself I found myself too much still, like, I wanted to be closer to the product. I didn't want to be the engineer of the product, but I wanted to define the strategy and what it did. I didn't want to necessarily sell the product, but I wanted to define, like, what the product did and how it fit the market.

Product manager.

Thank you. Sorry, I was like, okay, I'm not an engineer, I'm not a salesperson, what am I?

Right in between.

And I said, oh, I might guess I'm a product manager. I guess I should go do that. And when I went to go do that, people said to me, oh, you're a sales guy, you can't do that. And I said, well, what do you need to do? And they said, well, you at least have to have an MBA. In those days you had that. Oh my God, couldn't be a product manager. So I just said, I guess I got to get an MBA. Okay, got my MBA, still couldn't get hired as a product manager because I was a sales guy. So the only person that hired me was a startup. There was a startup in machine vision and robotics here in Pittsburgh called American Robot, and a guy named Bruce DaCosta, who I actually just heard from this last year. It's been so many years ago, but I owe Bruce DaCosta big time because Bruce gave me a chance when nobody else would. So Bruce said, you want to be a product manager? You can be the product manager here. I was like, great. I didn't even know what a startup was. But I was like, okay, I'll do this.

Very good. All right. That's okay. Go. And so that was your first venture into startup. That was an eye-opening experience. How many employees?

Oh my God. It was, you know what, just as you said, talk about eye-opening. I had no clue what I was doing or what I got into. I had no, I knew nothing about venture capital, raising money, all the, you know, the whole pace and let alone you're sitting in Pittsburgh You're not in Silicon Valley or Austin or Boston. It's like a whole different world, right? And yeah, we were at around 10 to 15 employees when I joined. We had been given $5 million by BMW Venture Capital. These were the days when major companies would have a venture capital arm. There's still a few vestiges of that left. BMW was very interested in improving their, you know, factories and manufacturing. So they had a venture capital arm. So we did machine vision for quality inspection. Production. Okay, this was supposed to put us, uh, I forget at the time, I think we were supposed to produce like 4 or 5 different products in machine vision, some attached to robots, some standalone inspection units, whatever. And I was the product manager for this, and I think we, we pretty much spent all that money and built one product after about 2 years. And I was like, okay, I guess that's what we did.

Then they ran out of cash.

We ran out of cash. We did.

Yeah, gotcha.

And that BMW got out of the VC business, and we had a mothership company called American Robot that was in the robotics business, and they— we were separately held, and they kind of just sucked us in.

I see, I see, I see. And that was, that was how you entered startup, and then life took off for you then, right? And then now all of a sudden you're a startup guy.

Well, I definitely got labeled that, but it was funny because there was a great hardware engineer. This is the mid to late '80s. Great hardware engineer, a guy named Russ Schwierz, who was a great friend of mine, who had more experience in startups. He actually had been in Boston startups and everything like that. And he said to me, Greg, if I were you, I would go into software. You've got to get out of hardware. Software is the future. And I was looking at Russ and thinking, Okay, where's there a software company in Pittsburgh? And he actually one day, well, looking through Wall Street Journal, he said, hey, IBM is introducing these new mainframes and there's a company in Pittsburgh called Duquesne Systems. You got to go interview there as a product manager.

And you didn't know how to write code. You didn't know how to write code or anything, right? You weren't— you weren't— no. Okay.

The last thing I knew how to do in terms of writing code was in college. I ran some Fortran 4.

I don't know what that means.

It's a very old, uh, language that was called Fortran. And, uh, but it was funny because they did ask me, and I remember on the interview with the HR person, do you know anything about MVS, which was the operating system of mainframes? And I'm like, yeah, sure. I went to the bookstore that night, I'm looking up what the hell is MVS. And that's how I got into software, to be honest with way. So I became the first product manager at a company here locally called Duquesne Systems. And that was the second startup, early-stage company I was in. And that really was— that was a huge success. It went from $5 million to, in the 6 years I was there, we were at $225 million.

Wow. How about— did you have equity?

Oh yeah. And And it was quite a ride. Uh, you know, we, uh, we grew both organically and through acquisition, uh, eventually merged with a couple other companies, became a $400 million company, and got bought by CA Technologies for, I think, $1.2 billion or $1.5 billion. I can't remember, but 1992. Wow. And that was just—

that was your first— that was your first successful exit where you had some vested equity?

Correct. And you know the problem with that? When you're young and you have that kind of success, you think that you, you, you have no humility. You haven't been kicked in the shorts yet.

Yeah, right. You're like, oh, this is so easy. Yeah, no problem, just do this. I'll do this a bunch of times.

Exactly. And that's, that's the lie I told myself. I was like, ah, okay, I must be really good. I'll just go do this again.

Uh, you made some money right there. Uh, hold on just a second, Greg. Hold on a minute. I'm gonna do something. I'm gonna get— I want to come back. So Greg, did you, did you make enough to— you didn't make enough to retire right there, right? Yeah, obviously you had— okay, but you made a little cash. So that's—

congratulations. I made some money. It was, it was a good ride. Uh, I did lose some money because I, I, I, I ended up getting divorced. And, uh, and, uh, so, um, you know, life takes its ups and downs. And, um, and, and mine was, uh, mine was like that as well. So I, um, I pretty much— I almost had to start all over again, pretty much.

Wow. You know, isn't— but isn't that how life hits you, right? Like, one minute you're out celebrating, you're like, wow, casting this equity, you got a little cash here, and the next thing you know, you're giving half of it away to your ex-wife.

Yeah. So it was, it was a, uh, it was a long journey. But, you know, it was a good— when you look back on, it's one of those things that you, um it was a good thing because not only you got humbled, right? And you lost everything. When you come around and you go through the wilderness, I think everybody has a career, part of their career in the wilderness, right? And I think about the next 8 years of my life or 10 years of my life, I was definitely in the wilderness of a variety of different startups and trying to find out where I fit and how to repeat that success and why didn't it work the same way again and blah, blah, blah. And then towards the end of the '90s, I found another company in Rockville, Maryland, called Accent, A-X-E-N-T, that I interviewed for. A friend of mine said, oh, why don't you meet this guy, Brett Jackson? And I said, oh, Brett Jackson, I met him 10 years ago. I'll never work for that guy. And I interviewed with him and I was like, I'm going to take this job. I can't believe this. And I ended up working for Brett and was one of the best relationships and one of one of the best, uh, uh, one of the best jobs I ever had. Uh, I ended up— Accent was a little larger than Duquesne Systems was. It was probably $25-30 million, but still small, right?

Okay. Yep, yep.

And we, we grew it to about $115— went public, uh, grew it down about $115 million and sold it to Symantec, the people that own Norton, or did at the time. And, uh, we sold it for a billion dollars, uh, right before the .com crash.

Oh, nice, nice. Your second exit with a little bit of equity for some cash payout for Greg.

That one was— that was beautiful. And I can tell you that I enjoyed it much better the second time and realized what I had.

Uh, very good. All right, what great learning experience, by the way. I mean, you know, fantastic experience to be able to go through that, and a couple of exits now, plus you hit some failures and failures in there. Now I'm starting to— now I'm starting to realize why you wrote the book, uh, you know. Now, because, yeah, I'm looking, you know, I look— I'm studying in your LinkedIn profile, I'm doing some history on you, and I'm like, well, I can't really tell. But now I see, right? By the way, for the listeners, Start Your Startup Right, uh, is the book, right? It can be found on Amazon and probably what, any other type of bookstore that you check?

It's distributed everywhere, both ebook as well as hard copy. You can get it at any Barnes Noble or, you know, Books-A-Million or whatever you want. Great.

Is there an audio edition so I can listen while I'm on my treadmill?

No? Just you and me. Okay.

You know, you're super entertaining with your personality. You have such a lively, energetic, positive personality. You should think about doing an audio. But anyway, another conversation. Well, thank you.

I appreciate that feedback. Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. Greg Kotick, Start Your Startup Right. You can check out the book on Amazon. Okay. So anyway, you're now, you're going through these experiences. Okay.

All right.

Now, when you exit that last one, made a little money, now you're taking some time off again or where are you at in life?

Yeah. You know what? I came back home. I ran a few other startups. I went back and forth between Pittsburgh and DC. I did a company called Logic Library, not exactly a home run. I did another company called Cloakware that we sold, um, uh, did a company called Approva that I sold, um, but these were not— these were kind of like either fire sales or kind of, you know, they weren't great. So my, my, my, my next one though that I really— and it's probably the most enjoyable experience I ever had in working, working period, was a company called eBillingHub. And, uh, yeah, so, you know, I was hired there because I had such deep experience in the law firm space, proving once again you don't need domain expertise to be successful.

All right, I hope, I hope all the hiring managers out there are listening because WriterFlex, as you know, we're a recruiting firm. I don't know how many times we put great candidates in front of people and they're like, well, he's never sold blue office chairs, so he probably can't sell Anyway, all I tell people when I hear that, by the way, is I remind them—

you mentioned the Steelers early on— Mike Tomlin never played a down of professional football in his life.

See, you know, right?

He was a college football player at William Mary, not exactly a powerhouse. He's done all right as a— he's done all right. Two Super Bowls, uh, you know, what great number two winning percentage. Sometimes it's all about, you know, it's not about the perfect resume match.

Next time I'm trying to get a candidate in front of a client and they won't listen to me because he hasn't sold blue chairs, I'm gonna be like, look, I want you to call my friend Greg and talk to him for a minute.

Here's eBillingHub, I'll tell you. So, I had a friend that was an attorney and he had another friend who was a CFO at a law firm. And he was working with the IT person and they noticed that they were getting more and more, this is like 2006, '07, somewhere around in there. And they said, getting lots and lots of big customers asking us to file everything electronically so that they can really manage the hours and see the hour and compare across all the law firms, all the hours and how much money they're spending. And it's really painful. They've got all these electronic formats and different pieces of software and it's complicated, blah, blah, blah. So they built this piece of software internally, right, at the local Pittsburgh law firm. And then they, they licensed it from that law firm and decided to build a company around it, right? Okay, sounds good. If we solve a problem here, maybe we can solve a problem at other law firms.

Great.

And they really struggled for a while. And, um, so I was in between gigs and the, the one guy calls me up and says, hey, would you just do some consulting for us, 6 months, see if this dog hunts, see if you can sell this thing? Great, fine.

Exactly what I said.

I said, okay, whatever, I'll, you know, I got nothing else to do. Get some product market fit here, you know. And long story short is, uh, literally this was a company founded by two immigrants, uh, one from Spain, another from Venezuela. Uh, the Venezuelan, uh, uh, individual, uh, was the person that ran IT at that law firm that they licensed us from. And we were started— this is, this is better than the man and dog story. I was literally in the second bedroom of their townhouse is where we started this business.

I love it.

Every day I ran sales, he ran engineering, and then we'd figure out how to do everything else.

And the company was bootstrapped by the business they were bringing in from the law firm, right? They were cash flowing it from that?

Took no money from anyone. Wow. All the money came from customers.

Oh, how about that? Okay.

All right.

Cash flow positive right up front. They had revenue right up front. Okay. Very good.

Well, they were starving for 2 years right up front. There was no cash flow. But I'll tell you what we did. We kind of figured out the marketplace and what, you know, what Eric Ries would talk about as Lean Startup, or Steve Blank would talk about, you know, or Ken Olsen would talk about product-market fit. We got out there, we got bloodied with the product. I asked lots of stupid questions because I didn't know the marketplace. I asked them how they solved the problem today, what the problem is, really focused on those issues. We kind of reoriented the product, reformed it, figured out a lot about the selling process as well as different personas. Long story short is we built that company up, bootstrapped, sold it to Thomson Reuters, an $11 billion company. And while it was not a billion-dollar sale, it was in the millions of dollars we sold this company. How about that? There were only 4 of us as owners. And it was the highlight of— it was a great small deal. Great SaaS deal. Today, that's a $100 million product for Thomson Reuters.

How about that? Congratulations. Well, plus, what, what an experience you're getting to go through all the M&A, all the deals, all the negotiations, all of that, right? Now you're, now you're, now you're getting super experienced. Congratulations. By the way, selling into law firms is not easy. It's not easy.

I used to tell people, I said, we sold We sold to CFOs and law firms. And I'd pause, I say, that's a double negative.

That is a double negative. That's a double negative. You're totally right. You're totally right for the listeners. And we could get into that more. But yeah, I mean, that is hard to get those meetings. It's hard to get them to change. It's hard to get them to try stuff that's new. Plus you got the CFO sitting there going, no, no, no, no, no.

They, they are the, uh, Representative of being technology laggards. I don't know how many conversations I would have that would start off of, can't— and it's just very, uh, uh, you know, uh, gender. It's a lot of gender issues, but they would literally say, can't we find a girl that we can hire that can do that for us for $30,000 a year? Uh, and I was like, oh my God, there's this no sense of building an automated process that can scale and save money. You know why?

You know, well, most of the time I think, I really think the reason why, then we can move on. But I think part of the reason is these guys are all making decent money, right? So they're already bringing in $250 grand a year. They live in a nice neighborhood. They're like, you know, I'm fine. We've been doing it this way for years, Greg. This is working. We've always done it this way. I brought home $300 grand last year. I don't know why we need this. You know, those kinds of—

You're exactly right. And you know what, last story on eBilling Hub. Where we unlocked the value of that product had nothing to do with actually solving the electronic billing problem, which was the primary value proposition of the product. It was actually selling the CFO on how they could do cash distribution and collections faster so that they could pay the partners more money at the end of the year on their distributions.

And bingo, bingo!

Then they were interested.

Yeah, you're like, look, you're like, look, I just have one slide for you. It's right here. Look at this. Okay, cool. I'm gonna send you an agreement.

That was it. I'm telling you. But that was the big aha moment with that product, was figuring out that, oh my God, these guys are— need— they need to— don't have the cash visibility for the partner distributions. That's what we can sell.

Love it, love it. Okay, cool. Now at this point That's your third exit with, uh, I mean, it's more, you've had more exits, but this is your third successful big exit. Now you made probably some really good money. Now can you retire? Now are you like, all right, I'm done. I'm going to chill for a little bit. I'm going to do some consulting.

I was, I was done. And I went to work for the University of Pittsburgh and I, my alma mater. And I went to work for what they call the Innovation Institute there. And I was teaching students, teaching, teaching. I still teach there, but teaching there. And, um, life is good. Doing accelerator, doing consulting, and having fun. And then I get a call from the small private school up the street called Carnegie Mellon University, and they say, hey, we're starting this master's degree program in product management. How would you like to help us launch, build it and launch it? I'm like, well, that would be fun. That would be cool. Yeah. So I moved up the street and changed in my blue and gold for my Tartan stuff, and, uh, and I went and I, and I started that program. We grew it from nothing. I got to be the product manager of the product management degree, which was— how about that?

That's pretty cool.

And, and I still got to teach, and I got to teach— I was the only guy teaching at Pitt in that CMU and doing all that stuff, right? And I, and it was a great gig. And then after 6, 7 years of just like, this is a great life, I, I— this company— I get invited to meet this company called Sofion because they're looking for an outside board member, and and they're in innovation and product management. And, and I— and, and a friend of mine introduced me to them. And, you know, hey, would you do some consulting for us? Sure, I do. Sure, happy to do that. And, you know, the next thing you know, I know how it happens. Back in the— I'm back in the race.

What happened?

I had a good life.

Well, what happened is— what happened was you went to a few meetings and then The leadership team sitting there listening to you going, holy shit, we need this guy on our team. Hey Greg, what are you doing? Hey, can you come, come help us, man? Come run this thing.

And then I became president and now I'm CEO succeeding the original CEO, Andy Machuta. And, uh, I love it. It's a great ride. It's very comfortable. It's a space I love. We're helping great brands like Merck and Procter Gamble and Honeywell and, and, and just wonderful worldwide brands. It's a great company and, um, really helping them innovate products. And it's got a great history, publicly held company, um, just, just doing great things.

Give us the 3-minute elevator pitch for the people that have no idea what Sofion does. Go for it.

Sure. Well, we're in the innovation marketplace. We help people with, uh, with, with their innovation efforts and new product development. Uh, we primarily focus on, uh, several verticals, uh, such as, uh consumer packaged goods and chemicals and, uh, and aerospace and defense, etc., uh, where we sell to, uh, those that are in R&D or in product management or in both, helping them actually define that next generation of products and selecting which bets to place in their portfolio on those products so that they can continue to grow profitably and be more relevant competitively. You know, years ago, the company started with a methodology you may have heard of called the Stage Gate methodology, where you make decisions about, you know, where you are with a product at various, various tranches or milestones in terms of investment. And it was a risk mitigation strategy. In today's world, you know, the world is all about agile and lean and how do we get products out faster that we can react to the marketplace. But we can help companies, and we do help companies, automate those processes to make better decisions and have better sources of information about those decisions. I like to think of what we do as a decision support system over a business process model. So you have a process of taking products to marketplace or making good decisions about portfolios, and we're helping you get the insights you need across your organization to make better decisions.

As a consulting firm or you're— it's a SaaS? You're selling us—

we are a, we are a SaaS software company. Now, certainly you can imagine, because we have some big companies, so they're worldwide global enterprise brands, uh, and we are, uh, there is expertise and consulting that is vital to success in this business, but we are solidly a product company.

Okay. And the product, uh, is it by— is it— I guess the packages vary. Is it like like per user? Is it by month? Is it annual contracts? How do you sell the pro— what's the business model?

The business model is a user, right? And there are different levels of users depending on your involvement in the process, whether you're a contributor or administrator or whatever it is. But it is also— we— is an annual SaaS contract or a 3-year SaaS contract.

Okay. All right, you know, and your leadership team— I'm thinking about your leadership team now that you're the CEO. You know who I wouldn't want to be if I was on your leadership team? The one position I wouldn't want is I wouldn't want to be the head sales guy because you could probably outsell anybody there. This is the sales guy. I can just see that the sales guy's coming into you and he's okay, he's trying to report on numbers or whatever, he's trying to report on his progress and you're just kind of like, okay, no, like, it can be better, you can close more?

Well, I, I am, I am really fortunate. I have a guy who runs EMEA for me and a guy that runs the US for me, so I got two heads of sales, and both of them are way better than I'll ever be. So they're really guys.

Uh, do you get to go on some of the meet— the big media? If you're trying to close a huge contract, do you tag along?

I do. You know, COVID has certainly made it challenging, but I, you know, I started this, uh, here at the company in October last year, and of course I hadn't really met anybody physically for quite some time. But I would say that one of the high points I've had in terms of customer visits is I went out to visit a number of our customers here in July when things kind of opened back up again for a brief while before Delta raised its ugly head. But I got to visit our customers, Ball. You probably know the operation. One company you probably never heard of, but I got to know a lot of it's called Luprino. And they are in Denver. They make— they are the world's largest mozzarella cheese company. And let me tell you, 2 billion pounds of mozzarella cheese go on your Papa John's pizza and your Domino's pizza. We help them with the innovation of, you know, what goes in that pizza, what goes in that cheese, the cut, the style, everything about that.

So nice, nice.

We're helping companies like that 3M is one of our customers. Now, how about that? It doesn't get any better than being in the innovation business and supplying your technology to a company that is all about innovation. Right?

Now, this is your first run, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the first time you've headed up a publicly traded company where you're dealing with stock price and things like that, right? That's a little bit new for you. Is that right?

Accent was a publicly held company. Uh, we were on NASDAQ. I was not the CEO. I was, uh, I led, uh, marketing and product development and business development there. Uh, so I've been in publicly held companies. It's been a while. Uh, and this is the first time actually in the seat as CEO running a publicly held company.

Biggest, big— yeah, biggest difference for you, biggest challenge for you so far doing that versus private, what would you say that is?

You know, you just have to be sensitive about information and what level of transparency you're allowed publicly and, you know, compliance-wise. You know, in some ways, you know, in a private company, even a startup, you're all— look, as Bob Dylan said, you got to work for somebody, right? You got to serve somebody. So, you know, in a small company, you're reporting back to the VCs all the time, right? In a small company, you've got a board of directors. In this case, you not only have a board of directors, but you've got outside investors and those that follow the company that you've got to continually inform and sell. And they're another constituency. And so you've got to be aware, and what they care about, how they view the company is different than how you, you know, how you're going to sell or talk to 3M, right? And you've got to understand what's important to them as a customer.

Yep, I noticed that the company had 4 or 5 major investors, right? Or major stockholders, I guess I should say, 4 or 5. So, you're dealing with those guys. I know your favorite thing is to prepare for those quarterly board meetings.

Is there such thing as a fun board meeting? I don't know. Right?

You know, yeah. I remember I never had to do it for a public company, but I remember coming out of those quarterly board meetings and I would just purposely whatever the afternoon or the evening was after board meeting, I would make sure it was totally blocked out because I would just be completely drained. I mean, I would come out of those going, okay, I can't do anything else the rest of the day except for maybe open up a glass of wine and sit here and veg out for, for 2 hours.

And that's pretty much what I do. It is stressful. You know what though, the older I get, the more I look at that process though as purposeful. Oh yeah, you know, that, that journey of getting prepared and, you know, it just makes you think what you're supposed to be doing. But it is, it is stressful, and, uh, you want to make sure that you don't get, you know, caught in the gotcha questions that, uh, always seem to pop up in a board meeting or an investor meeting. The best you can do is be prepared.

Uh, be prepared. I also suggest, uh, if you can, you get the quarterly board book ready for the listeners to I used to send the information to the challenging board members a day or two in advance where I'd be like, okay, this, this guy right here I know is gonna shoot holes in stuff. So I'm gonna drop this over here and be like, Fred, listen, hey, you wanna— here's the stuff. I thought maybe you might wanna call me one-on-one before the meeting. Let's just— you can beat me up like ahead of time, and then when we get to the meeting, it's all, you know, we'll have a lot more fun.

By the way, That is maybe one of the greatest pieces of advice I didn't learn until later on is, and I always tell people, have the meeting before the meeting.

Yes, especially with the challenging ones. Now, the other tip there for the listeners is the challenging board members who at the time you're thinking, God, this guy's an asshole, but really, like, a lot of times those are really the ones that provide the most value, the ones that push you a little bit. You know, the board members that just sit there and shake their head yes and don't really contribute, man, that doesn't do anything. That's a waste of time. So, you know, anyway.

No, and I agree with you. I think it's those that challenge you, but you always know that they're also on your side and they're also on the side of the business, right? They are the ones that are going to push you to think through your assumptions, your hypotheses, and they want to make the business better. So as long as it's not a, you know, personal ego trip, you end up with a few people in your life, as long as they're pushing you because they care about their investment, they care about their position, they care about the company. Those are great board members to have.

Yep, totally agree. Couldn't agree more. Yeah, that's great advice. Okay, let me ask you a few things here, you know, advice for the listeners on aspiring CEOs. Let's say there's somebody listening, they've been at the VP level, director level, whatever, they really want to make CEO, they want to be captain. Small to medium-sized company? I know you could do a whole podcast on that, but do you want to share 2 or 3 things, 2 or 3 pieces of advice? What would you tell them if they're listening right now?

Make sure you really know, you know, that you really know what you want, right? Some people end up as CEO and they go, you know what, I was happier as the VP of development. I'll never take that job again. Somebody else can have it. So be careful what you want, right? Because It is not a job for everybody, and it's okay. It's okay if you don't want it after you get it. You just say to yourself, okay, I did this ride once and I don't want to— there's no shame in that whatsoever. You can be the happiest VP of sales or whatever you want to do. I— it doesn't matter, right? Um, I would say the other thing is it is a lonely job. That has never changed about it because you, you know, you can— you have to be careful about you know, what you share, who you share with, etc. So you do need some friends and allies. You know, I have a group of people that I really trust that I still call and ask for advice and bounce things off of and say, what do you think about this situation? And so you need your kitchen cabinet, you need your group of people that are, you know, kind of been there, done that, that you trust their, you know, their thought process. They don't have to be a former CEO. But even if you just need someone with that you respect and has good judgment, right? Just to kind of walk through. I think that's really important. Um, and don't be afraid to not know, right? There's going to be a lot of things you don't know, right? And we're going to look for you to have all the answers. It's okay to not have all the answers.

It really is. Yeah, it's okay.

And you know what to say, I don't know. And you know what, you'll go figure it out and you get somebody's help, and maybe they want to help you with the the person asking the question or inquiring about it. Okay. That's good.

Yeah. No doubt about it. You're right. It is a very stressful, very lonely job. I say that to people all the time that have never been CEO. And I always kind of get this look and I have this look on their face like, okay, you don't really understand what I'm saying because until you live it, you don't really know. But it is great to have relationships with other CEOs that have lived it, that do understand the loneliness of it that you can talk to. I do think that's That's absolutely critical. One thing you mentioned I wanted to highlight for the listeners, you know, I interview— RiderFlex is a recruiting firm for— that's what we do for a living, right? So we interview candidates for a living. I do a lot of the higher-level stuff myself, even though the team's bigger now, which means I end up interviewing a lot of former C-level people that, like you said, they checked the box. They were a C-level person of some kind, maybe not CEO, but they were a sea level somewhere. And now they're, you know, 55, 60, 65, whatever. Their roller coaster is on the other end, right? On the other side, right? Some of them have a really hard time accepting that, you know, they're not going to be sea level forever. Like, the hell— like, hey, you— and I really just want to encourage the listeners, if you're listening to this podcast right now, like, don't beat yourself up about that. Don't have extra stress on your life. Don't beat yourself up. There's nothing wrong with you. You didn't do anything wrong. Most people crest like that at some point. We can't all be CEOs, right? There's only so many of those jobs. And so listen, if you were executive and now you're a director and you're a little bit older, you know, it's fine. It's totally fine. By the way, at that stage in your career, you don't want that stress anyway.

Well, I, to a point, you know, I was with a security startup that I started out of the University of Alabama called Malcovery, and we raised about $5 million, sold it off to a company called PhishMe. And then that's when I went and joined the University of Pittsburgh. And I think at the University of Pittsburgh, I was either executive or entrepreneur in residence for a while. And then I was, I don't know what the hell, I, something else. And even when I was at CMU, I was, I think I was executive director, executive director of the master. Who cares? Who cares? Who cares? Are you happy with the job? You know, and I was stuck in, you know, I was working for somebody that worked for somebody that worked for the dean.

Okay.

It doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter.

No, it really doesn't. Yeah. As long as you're happy and you got what you need in life. Yeah. It's all good. Yeah. Couldn't agree more. Okay, cool. I pre— thank you for that advice. Uh, how about this one now? Uh, I got a couple more questions. I know we're getting, you know, we're edging up towards the end of our time. How about this one? Uh, I got two buddies, we want to start a business, we all have regular jobs, we're married, we, we have a couple little kids at home. Couple of toddlers at home, uh, and we— but we want to quit our jobs because we have a, we have a SaaS business idea. We want to quit our jobs. Um, give me— and again, I know we could do a 2-hour podcast on it, but 2 or 3 things you want to share real quick.

Yeah, don't jump, don't jump too quickly, don't do it. Certainly, look, you know, the less obligations you have beyond yourself, the better it is to be an entrepreneur. And unless you have a wife, a partner, whatever, and money to last you for at least a year, at least a year, I would say, can you go for a year without a paycheck and the healthcare benefits of the US and all the other things? And can you as a family survive that without you being at the baseball games or, you know, babysitting or going to the movies or shopping or washing the clothes or whatever? Because that's what it's going to take. And someone that tells you you can do your day job and do this little moonlighting job and get serious about it in the evenings, uh, is lying to you, period. One of the things I do in Pittsburgh that I dearly love is I'm a co-director with my friend Randy Eager, who's also a serial entrepreneur, of an organization called the Founder Institute. The Founder Institute is a global organization. We happen to run it here in Pittsburgh, but not that Founder Institute has the corner on this, but it particularly is very good for the scenario that you just, you just mentioned, which is I have a side hustle, I have a gig that I have an idea I've always wanted to do. I know nothing about entrepreneurship. I don't know how to start a business. I've never done it. I have a day job. I have other obligations. What do I do with it? And Founder Institute and programs like it take you through the process of learning. First of all, do you really have a problem that you're solving? Is it a big enough market? Do you have something that has a real value proposition? Could you raise money? Do you need to raise money for it? And it educates you. And at the end of that, when we graduate people, a lot of people say, say, wow, I'm glad I didn't do that. I learned everything about it, but I'm not doing that, you know.

Right.

Or there's the other side. There's a handful of them that say, I can't wait, this is the greatest thing in the world. Yeah. And I'm ready to jump in. But, you know, you really have to— there's ways to educate yourself by mitigating the risk and understanding. That's what you need to do.

Great advice. Great advice. Couldn't agree more. Love that. Okay, to wrap up questions here, you have learned a lot in your young life. I know you're a little bit older than me because you got your year you graduated on the LinkedIn, so everybody knows how old you are, right?

I graduated in 2010.

Man, you got a lot. You got the energy of a 42-year-old, my friend.

So I love it.

You're in great shape, by the way. Great, great energy, great shape for your age. Great job. Great. Congrats. If you could look back and call your 21-year-old self coming out of the University of Pittsburgh and tell him anything, you know, and you could go back in time, what would you tell him?

First of all, relax. Chill out. It's gonna be okay. You know, I had this goal. I think a lot of people, you know, particularly from the '70s, '80s, you know, the Reagan years and all kinds of craziness that, you know, you had to be a vice president before you were 30 and make a lot of money and all that, you know. And I was definitely one of those guys on that track, like, oh my God, if I don't have this, if I don't have— and I set all those goals for myself. And you know what? I It was— that was good. I'm glad I, you know, in some ways I'm glad I did it, but it's okay if I hadn't done it either. It was gonna all work out, right? Um, you know, it's good to have that drive and competitiveness. Um, take, take a little bit more time though, because there, you know, it's okay. You know, there— you don't have to be in as big a hurry as you're in.

Um, yeah, I couldn't agree more. Same thing, I agree on that one too. By the way, You know, millennials get a hard time for a lot of things, right? Everybody likes to pick on the millennials. I do it as well. But I will tell you that in general, they are more balanced with their lives. It's not just about, okay, I gotta be VP and make $200 grand a year by the time I'm 30, or I'm a failure. Like, no, so many of them are like, hey, look, man, I gotta have my time for my hiking. Right, I gotta have my time for this. And if I have a job that allows me to do that and covers food and shelter and water, I'm good to go.

Good, right? There's nothing— I mean, you know what, that's okay, that's okay, it's okay.

I totally agree. Yeah, it's okay. I respect that to a large degree because that's not how we grew up. No, when I grew— no, when I grew up, my dad was born in '37, and you know, his attitude was you will wake up at dawn and you will work until you're so tired you can't move. And that's how life is.

Exactly. No, I mean, I, you know, so that was— and particularly then when you go into startups, I mean, startups, you're, you know, 7 days a week, and, you know, they throw the pizza underneath the door and get your, get your cola can and drink and keep going, man, you know. So, but yeah, I think that, um, it's important to have, uh, other interests. The other thing The other interest, and going back to my beginning here of music, for instance, about 10 years ago we, we ended up with a piano in the house and I ended up taking lessons because I always wanted to play piano. And it's hard to learn musical instruments the older you get, just like anything, right? But I'll tell you what, what, it's a gift. And I, I find myself just walking over to the piano and sitting sitting down. And it's really important to give yourself that space and you'll learn something about yourself or about— and I find myself a better thinker at work because I have that other interest. Yes. Yes. So I think it's a good thing.

Love it. Last question. If Greg had to put his core purpose in life right now into a sentence, and I I think our core purpose changes, you know, as we move through life depending on what's going on. But if you had to put your core purpose in life into a sentence, and let's separate your kids from it. So let's set your family aside for a minute and just, that's like the, you know, the primary core purpose. Beyond immediate family, what is Greg's core purpose in life?

Yeah. I've had, when I think about that, that's a great question, by the way. I think I've been on a journey when you talk about those you know, those days in the early '80s and our drive from a me person to a we person. And I, I think that the older I get, the more I get joy out of giving to others. So I think my purpose really is to make a difference in somebody else's life. And if I can make a difference helping somebody else, their career decision, a problem at home, a, a class they need to take, whatever it is, I'm always honored when someone asks me for advice. I had a student just before this call that actually was at my CMU program a couple years ago, and they're struggling in their job that they have right now. And they said, hey, can you take some time to— would you take a call? That was probably the highlight of my day today. It was making a difference in that young person's life. What an honor to be called by them, first of all, you know.

Yes. Yes.

And second of all, to feel like you can help them a little bit, right? And, um, that's— there's a lot of joy in that. There's a lot of joy.

Great stuff, Greg. Great stuff. It does feel good to help people, doesn't it?

Oh, the absolute best.

Thank you, sir. I appreciate you being on the RiderFlex podcast and sharing your story.

Yeah, I, I'm— it's a, it's a privilege to be here. Thank you, uh, for taking the time and inviting me, and I, I hope you enjoyed— I enjoyed our conversation. And I hope your listeners do too.